ggreer

I agree with those comments and my vehicles are a 1990 Mazda Miata that I fixed up[1] & and a Model 3 Performance. The Model 3 looks boring, but is ridiculously fast. The Miata has the stock engine, intake, & exhaust, so it's not loud. It's not fast, but it's very fun to drive.

I don't care about loud clothes because they don't wake me or my family up at night, or interrupt a conversation during a walk, or hurt my ears while I'm waiting to cross the street.

1. https://geoff.greer.fm/miata/

Are they fast DC chargers or level 2 chargers? If it's the former, then that is cheap. If it's latter, then that is some expensive electricity.

I'm in Washington where electricity is cheaper, so 29 cents per kWh is not much cheaper than Tesla's superchargers. The closest one to me is 31 cents in the middle of the day and goes as low as 20 cents per kWh at night. I pay 8 cents per kWh at home, which is where I charge (at much slower speeds) unless I'm on a road trip.

I can think of several practical uses. It would be very useful immediately after a disaster. Lighting up the night would make search & rescue much more effective. It would also allow for more solar power generation in an area, reducing pollution. Extra light at high latitudes in the winter would reduce seasonal depression.

Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs? I don’t know. But there is practical value to lighting up the night.

I picked 30mph because that's the current threshold for what is considered a motorcycle in the state of Washington. Until recently, e-bikes were exempt from this because the old law was made back when e-bikes were rare and couldn't go much faster than regular bicycles.

I've gone >50mph on a bicycle, 40mph on level ground. Yes it's possible, but it requires significant effort and you can't accelerate as quickly as an e-bike. That's why I said, "and has a motor". Heck, a fast runner can endanger people on the sidewalk. When I'm running, I often slow down in crowded areas so that if someone does randomly veer into my path, I'll have time to avoid them.

If lots of people (who I assume are very fit) were riding bicycles dangerously, maybe the legislature would make some laws about that. But until it becomes a problem, there's really no need.

The law doesn't ban them. It classifies fast e-bikes as motorcycles (which require registration, insurance, and a motorcycle endorsement).[1] This seems reasonable to me. The previous laws for e-bikes were based on outdated assumptions about battery & motor technology.

I do think it would make more sense to simplify (and future-proof) the law to just say, "If it can go >30mph on level ground and has a motor, it's a motorcycle." But similar to code, it's easier to add legislation than it is to modify existing rules.

1. https://apps.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=6110&Year=202... text: https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Se...

For sprints, shoes give additional traction for faster starts, but don't increase running efficiency. For distance events, shoes were just extra weight, and barefoot runners have won Olympic competitions.[1] Recently, springy "super shoe" designs have shown up.[2] They've been banned from most competitions, but it looks like less effective versions of the design are still allowed under current rules.

I would prefer that shoes be restricted to designs that don't allow for higher efficiency than barefoot running, but sport rules tend to lag technology advances.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abebe_Bikila

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Vaporfly_and_Tokyo_2020_O...

This quirk of competition is why swimmers can win a ridiculous number of medals. If swimming only had freestyle, Michael Phelps would have 7 gold medals instead of 23.

Allowing a bicycle would be like if swimming competitions allowed fins. A more accurate mapping to the swimming strokes would be race walking, which is widely ridiculed.

Space gets you 24/7 solar power. To run a data center for 12 hours without sunlight, you'd need massive batteries. Also oceans have weather and corrosion.

The issue with putting stuff in space isn't the kinetic energy required. In LEO that's about 30 megajoules per kilogram or $5 worth of propellant. The issue is that orbital launch vehicles are not reusable, so you must destroy an expensive rocket to get your payload to orbit. All of these space datacenter efforts are betting that Starship will be fully reusable.

Tesla's valuation is high because investors expect them to sell goods & services other than cars, such as autonomous vehicle rides and humanoid robots for domestic & industrial use.

Who knows if they'll be able to pull it off, but an analysis that treats Tesla as a car company misses why investors have priced so much growth into the company.

Rocket engines can’t throttle down very much. Raptor can go down to 40% of its rated thrust, which for V3 would be 100 tons. The ship’s mass is maybe 150 tons with remaining propellant at the start of the landing burn, and probably around 100 tons at the end of the burn. Even at the lowest throttle, three engines would give it a thrust to weight ratio of 2, making hovering impossible and a suicide burn tricky. Two engines gives them redundancy, roll control, and a lower thrust to weight ratio to help with landing precision.

I’m surprised they went down to one engine at the end, because that means they lose most of their roll control. The only way to roll with one engine is to use the cold gas thrusters, which aren’t nearly as powerful.

This is the third time in two days that you’ve made this exact same comment.[1][2]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215414

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220491

Just FYI the sizes of the planets, stars, and their orbits are not to scale at all. To get an idea of how empty space is, there are 63,360 inches in a mile, and 63,239 astronomical units in a light-year. So if you scaled everything down such that Earth was 1 inch from the Sun, Neptune would be 30 inches away and Alpha Centauri would be 4 miles away.

If you were using a 4k display and had the Sun and Alpha Centauri visible at opposite sides of the display, the orbit of Neptune would be in the same pixel as the Sun.

Only one of them is working right now. Their original tower needs to be overhauled to support Starship V3.

They can build new boosters pretty quickly. New launch/catch towers take a lot longer, and they don't have any redundancy yet. Also they weren't going to reuse their V2 boosters once V3 was ready, so they could learn more by testing things like intentionally disabling an engine during the landing burn or flying at a higher angle of attack.

They won't use barges because the booster has no landing legs (to save weight), and because the booster is massive compared to Falcon 9. Also Starship is meant for rapid reusability, and it can take days to return a barge to port and unload the booster. Getting barge landings to work would be a distraction from the goal of Starship, and SpaceX already has Falcon 9 for current payloads.

And they won't attempt a catch with the first V3 booster because it's not worth the risk. They can build a new booster every couple of months. It takes much longer to build the launch/catch tower, and they don't have any spare towers yet. A catastrophe during a booster/ship catch would set them back a year, so they'll only attempt a catch if they're confident it will succeed.

That's because they use other terms like "Falcon 9/Heavy", "Starship", "Super Heavy", "launch vehicle/system", "booster", "upper/lower stage", and "spacecraft".

The measured levels of arsenic, strontium, and vanadium are below the limits for drinking water, even in California. And 4% of drinking water sources in California have higher hexavalent chromium content than the water in that ditch.[1] Besides sodium from salt, the only metal that was particularly high was lithium, at 0.0714mg/L or 71 micrograms per liter. A significant fraction of drinking water in the US has higher concentrations than that.[2]

The level of salt shouldn't affect much. Adding up the chloride and sodium content gets you 684mg/L, which is on the low end of brackish water (500-30,000mg/L). The limit for agricultural irrigation is 2,000mg/L, and photos of the pipe show plenty of grass growing around and in the water.

The phosphorous could come from fertilizers, as there's plenty of farm land in the area. That would also explain the higher ammonium levels, as both anhydrous ammonia and ammonium phosphate are common fertilizers.

The article is really about how sensitive our scientific instruments are, not how dangerous the water is. It reminds me of articles like Vice's American Honey Is Radioactive from Decades of Nuclear Bomb Testing[3], where the most radioactive honey they could find was 10 times less radioactive than a banana.

1. https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinki...

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26906838

Hexavalent chromium can come from many industrial sources, including welding stainless steel. If you go to Tesla's lithium refinery in google maps[1] and follow the drainage ditch along highway 77 (to the northeast) about a half mile, you'll see a company called Tex-Isle Processing. They supply steel pipes and coating services for oil drilling.[2] It could be that one of their manufacturing processes creates hexavalent chromium.

In my opinion there isn't enough information to blame anyone for the slightly-above-drinking-water levels of hexavalent chromium. The drainage ditch goes along a highway and a rail line, so pollution could come from all kinds of places.

1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/7iNTbiPcs1sZ9CqP8

2. https://www.texisle.com/

Different states have different rules about what sort of things insurers are allowed to charge different rates for. In the states that allow it, Tesla does offer insurance discounts for FSD usage.[1] Lemonade also offers discounts for FSD usage.[2]

1. https://www.tesla.com/support/insurance/fsd-discount

2. https://www.lemonade.com/fsd

Your first link is for the bus budget in Portland, Maine. The system cost for busses in Portland, Oregon in 2025 was $453 million.[1]

1. https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf

The $812 million figure for 2025 did not include the cost to build the rail system. Nor did it include many other expenses. TriMet's expenditures for this year are $1.185 billion.[1]

If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.

And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.

I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.

1. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf

2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

In 2025, TriMet had 262 million passenger miles at a system cost of $812 million, for a cost of $3.09 per passenger mile.[1] Fares covered 7.8% of their costs. The other 92.2% came from payroll taxes and federal grants.

For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile.

1. https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf

Even when just looking at marginal costs, I doubt Waymo is half that of a human driven vehicle. If we assume a robotaxi lasts 200k miles before being retired, then the cost of the vehicle alone ($75k) is 37.5 cents per mile. If a vehicle drives 200 miles a day, that's $5 of electricity (250Wh/mile x 10 cents/kWh), maybe $15 of labor to clean, and the space to park it near downtown ($3/day). That's another 12 cents per mile for a running total of 50 cents per mile. Then factor in maintenance (tires, brakes, suspension, etc) and you're probably close to $1/mile. Then you also need support staff, remote operators (approximately 1 per 50 vehicles, but paid significantly more than Uber drivers), and plenty of compute and storage for the high resolution maps (which must be constantly updated as the environment changes). And none of that includes the R&D costs to improve the vehicles or the self-driving software. Yes many of these costs decrease as fleet size increases, but it'll be a while before it gets below $1/mile. (Nationwide, Uber's rates are $1-2/mile depending on the area.)

There are other considerations as well. For example, available ride shares can scale up/down with demand, while Waymo & competitors will need lots of spare vehicles to satisfy peak demand.

I'm certain autonomous vehicles will eat up the market currently held by Uber/Lyft/Taxis. It's just going to take longer than a lot of people expect.

It's not clear to me if their costs are lower yet. Waymo's vehicles are rather expensive (estimates for their newer Zeekrs are around $75k each), and they need to pay some number of remote monitors for exceptional situations (as noticed during the recent blackout in San Francisco). They also have to collect tons of data to build & maintain high resolution 3D maps of the areas they operate in. And they have to pay engineers to improve the self-driving software.

Waymo passed 200 million driverless miles in February. If we optimistically assume they're up to 300 million miles now, and every mile was paid for at $10 per mile, that's $3 billion in revenue since they launched. In that same time, Waymo has gotten $27 billion in funding. Of course they haven't spent anywhere close to that amount, and they are optimizing for faster rollout rather than profitability, but the finances aren't as gleaming as one might expect.

I'm sure Waymo will figure out ways to reduce their costs over time, but right now I think they're charging pretty close to what they need to break even.

Unless you think the video is faked, I'm not sure what your point is. It's an example of an unsupervised Robotaxi trip without any chase car. Of course you're going to get a selection effect where enthusiasts are mostly the ones posting these videos, especially in the case where they're recording behind the vehicle to prove there is no chase car. Normal people just take Waymo/Robotaxi/Zoox without recording and uploading their trip.

You can find videos of people taking Robotaxis without any chase car.[1] Though the use of chase cars shouldn't be surprising. Waymo did a similar thing with their self-driving rollout. They started with a small number of cars in suburbs in Arizona, with safety drivers. As they built up trust in the system, they gradually removed constraints and oversight. Now they have autonomous vehicles in complicated environments (such as San Francisco) with remote human assistance for when the software can't handle something. (Sometimes these remote operators are overwhelmed, such as when the power goes out in San Francisco and too many Waymos request human intervention.[2]) One should expect Tesla to follow the same path of gradually removing supervision as they build trust in their autonomous systems.

Will you take the bet or not?

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1qqlpgg/un...

2. https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r...

The reason I'm using a single example is because we don't have comparable statistics across manufacturers, and because it's enough to demonstrate my point about Tesla's autonomous capabilities versus other brands. I am saying the same thing you are: Examples exist of FSD being used for thousands of consecutive miles without intervention. But you cannot find such examples for any other consumer car brand today. If Blue Cruise, Super Cruise, Mercedes-Benz Driver Assistance, or any other technology went similar distances without any human intervention, then it would be accurate to claim that, "Other brands have had self driving features for years now. Some even operate at a higher level of automation." But we don't have such examples, so it's not accurate to make such claims.

Nowhere in this thread am I claiming that FSD is safe enough to be used without human oversight. I'm also not claiming that Tesla has delivered on their promises (they obviously haven't). I am comparing the capabilities of autonomous systems using evidence that is publicly available. Since we don't have comparable statistics across manufacturers or some sort of standardized road test, I think "miles between human interventions" is a useful measure of autonomous capabilities. That's what has been used to demonstrate safety of other autonomous systems, and I see no good reason why such a metric should be ignored in this case.

Tesla doesn't even have the permits to operate Robotaxis in California and probably never will because they are actually stricter vs Texas.

I'd like to note that in just a few months, the goalposts have moved from "Tesla will never get rid of their safety drivers in their Robotaxis" to "Tesla will never operate Robotaxis in California."

As before, would you like to bet on your prediction? I'm willing to wager you any amount up to $1,000 that before the end of 2028, Tesla will have Robotaxis in California, available to the public, without a safety driver. Note that this may not require a permit for deployment, just driverless testing, as that is how Waymo currently operates.[1]

December 31st, 2028 may seem like a long ways off, but it's much sooner than never.

1. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

If one person can do this then thousands should also be able to.

That’s not at all true. Very few people take the time to drive thousands of miles in a short period of time and document it while never intervening for any reason (not even accidentally bumping the wheel).

Anyways, I remember you. You claimed that Tesla would never remove safety drivers from their robotaxis.[1] I tried to get us to bet on this prediction but you never replied.

Well, Tesla has removed safety drivers from some of their robotaxis, meaning your prediction that their technology is “never going to be reliable enough” was falsified within a few months.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661368