A bit of an “L” for the antitrust folks - the company was shaky enough that it was either bankruptcy or merger.

I’m curious why Spirit in particular is doing bad. I assume all the Discount Airlines are really having to compete hard with the discount fares that the Regular Airlines have done, but only Spirit seems to be going bankrupt. Was it just very poorly managed? Too much debt compared to other airlines?

Musk could probably keep himself in Trump’s inner circle no matter how annoying he is, just by buying a couple billion dollars of Truth Social stock - but I bet he’s too cheap to do that. Which means eventually he’ll probably run afoul of Trump and get booted out of his inner circle, although he’ll still benefit from…

My guess is that this is probably less about steering contracts to SpaceX - they’re already overwhelmingly dominant in launch, and DoD contracts are less important than Starlink revenue - and more about having SpaceX fans in key positions for communication with the DoD. 

Water or other stuff, which includes your fuel if you’re using methane and oxygen for it.

The nice thing about being human is that we don’t need to evolve how to breath underwater (or to hold our breath for two hours). We can just build a submarine. 

Fortunately, we do have technical fixes for that sort of thing. You pile up dirt on Mars near your base (and preferably on top of it) for radiation, and rotate your spacecraft if you don’t want your astronauts living in weightlessness for months.

It’s wild that Ford somehow overbuilt capacity for an 86% (!) growth rate in F-150 EV sales.

So basically there’s no future for it in America, since no one is building out a change of hydrogen fueling stations.

Why is Spirit struggling so much compared to the other discount airlines? It seems like Frontier, Jet Blue, and Southwest are doing okay.

I figured this was an extension of his whining in 2023 about his posts not getting enough traffic. The engineers rigged the system so that they’ll constantly show up until you block him - would have been easier if they’d just falsified his view counts. 

They’re putting Starliner potentially up for sale, but not the Space Launch System stuff. Presumably because that stuff is profitable - it’s under a Cost-Plus Contract that lets them pass all their cost overruns on to NASA, and complain to a congressman to get their contract completion bonuses even when they fail to…

Just put some rope-lines in place, so that they have to get in line to get on board, and if they get to the front and are too early they have to get out and get back in line again. 

The profits came from regulatory credit sales and standalone battery/solar panel sales. They just have a big first-mover advantage in a lot of this tech, plus the Cyber-Trucks have big margins (same with all trucks - it’s why the automakers all sell a bunch of them and went for EV trucks first). 

Maybe I had that backwards, and he did a dogshit presentation on Self-Driving Taxis because the Q3 financial results would wash out the bad news anyways.

I suppose it’s a moot point, since they have a minimal market presence and nobody except Toyota is really pushing for them anymore.*

Hybrids are being aggressively pushed by Toyota basically as a form of wish-casting: they’re behind in the EV game and it’s going to be hard to catch up, and they really, really don’t want to have to have difficult conversations with their ICE car supply chain companies that might result in a ton of lost jobs and…

I’d be okay with 150 miles if I could get a home charger for it that works wirelessly like the one for my phone. I just want to be able to drive an EV on to the charger and not worry about plugs or anything.

They issued a recall for about 28,000 Cybertrucks in October, which I assume was all of them. So total number sold (since it started selling since last November) is probably . . . 30,000 to 40,000? Which would put gross revenue at $4 billion on the higher side.

I would not be surprised if whoever at Tesla had to design the robots and run it past Musk copied heavily from that movie. It’s a cool design.