France could offer a free dozen eggs with every bottle of wine they buy? Oh no, wait, that’s fucked… 
And I know exactly what Polestar will be doing with all those traded in Teslas.
Polestar’s engineers will be told “dissect these cars, find the good stuff, and re-engineer it for our own cars”. Along with “Learn why the bad stuff is bad, and produce something better”.
Chances are the Chinese have already started doing this, and we’ll see BYD and Jaecoo suddenly pull out a whole bunch of cars that involve a substantial amount of Borg-style “assimilation” of Tesla features in the next couple of years.
Yesterday, I decided to watch this:
Now for those outside the UK, JayEmm is a YouTube car reviewer who has acquired a reputation for solidity, honesty and integrity, while still injecting some inspired touches of humour into his reviews. He decided to give a Tesla a go, and revealed to his viewers some interesting little details.
Among those details, were the fact that the central screen included a built in games console and karaoke machine, both of which work, but the indicators are utter shite, and the much-vaunted self-driving system will try to kill you on occasions, because it relies entirely upon cameras instead of supplementing the cameras with Lidar or similar.
This told me something important. Namely, that Tesla isn’t a real car company at all. It’s a games console developer that happens to put its products into a car shaped package. With the frivolity that this entails, much of which you’ll discover if you watch that video.
That same frivolity is now being used to dismantle the US government by his nappy shitting Doge Bois (plus the occasional Doge Gurl - more on this in a moment). Immature incels who only left mummy’s basement when the Apartheid emerald mine trust fund kid gave them jobs and salaries way beyond their abilities, are now running riot taking a wrecking ball to the very core of US civilisation, in a manner that makes the Miley Cyrus music video look like the works of Goethe.
Now, people would have put up with the essential naffness of Tesla cars, if the Muskrat had concentrated upon making them less naff over time, or provided some other compelling reason to buy them (the rocket like acceleration of the Plaid being one such reason for the terminal speed freaks).
But instead, in what UK citizens will recognise as Musk’s “Ratner moment”, fElon decided to tank his entire business empire by going full bore Nazi in front of global TV cameras. As a result, there are now spoof ads appearing all over London, going viral at Millennium Falcon speed, making such memes as “Swasticar - goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds” a source of amusement on a global scale.
For those unaware of the reference, Gerald Ratner ran what was, for a time, a reasonably successful high street jewellery business here in the UK. Then, he experienced some sort of brainfart, and during a business conference, thought it would be funny to tell the other suits there that he made his money by selling cheap tat at premium prices.
Unfortunately for him,there were TV cameras present, and his words were made public outside the business conference. Cue one company biting the dust.
Though Ratner’s faux pas, disastrous as it was for his company, was a minor ripple in the catastrophe pond. The utter Götterdämmerung that Musk has just unleashed for Tesla, is a tsunami by comparison. At least Ratner didn’t end up being the subject of a Banksy artwork depicting him as a modern day Himmler. Though I’m minded to note a certain aptness in that comparison, courtesy of Himmler’s meteoric rise from failed chicken farmer to globally reviled secret police leader - a career trajectory that some will hope ends for Musk in a similar fashion.
The Dutch have been selling Advocaat for a long time. 
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I’ve got a half dozen eggs that have passed their sell by date, if I still have them come Guy Fawkes night, I’ll swap them for a Tesla I can use as a bonfire? 
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention the Doge Gurl. Wonkette provides you with amusement with respect to this specimen. The “FLDS wife on her way to a funeral” remark about her attempt to be a “fashion influencer” was hilarious, though the kiss blow photo looks to me like the introduction to her imminent OnlyFans broadcast.
Meanwhile, the latest outrage …The Tangerine Harkkonen just trashed the website devoted to the Navajo Code Talkers.
Trump isn’t aiming for the gutter from the standpoint of moral turpitude, he transcended that a long time ago. He’s aiming for the mendacity Marianas Trench.
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He has all the charm of a mass grave, and is about as trustworthy as an egg mayonnaise sandwich you might find in the desert. He has the morals of a randy stoat, ethics that would make the Borgias blush, the integrity of a snake oil salesman on commission, and the demeanour of a sulking bullying bellicose child.
…and breathe…
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Although I hate Muskrat and all he does, I can’t let your comments about Tesla cars go unchallenged. I own a 2019 Tesla, and it’s been the most reliable, trouble-free car I’ve ever owned. It’s been more reliable than the BMWs, the VWs, the Hondas, and the Toyotas I’ve owned. In the nearly six years I’ve had it, it has required zero maintenance, apart from new tires and windshield wipers when they’ve worn out–nothing else.
Sure, it has silly features like video games and a silly coordinated headlight flashing function, but you don’t have to use those. As a car, it works well. It handles well and has acceleration that’ll blow anything less than a supercar off the road. About my only complaint is its overreliance on a touchscreen for basic controls versus physical buttons and knobs. I don’t use the self-driving feature, so can’t comment on that, but agree that a camera-only system not supplemented by active sensors isn’t going to perform well.
I have not had any fit and finish problems with my car that I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere–mine seems to have been put together tightly and correctly.
Would I buy one again? Probably not, but that’s based more on my distaste for Muskrat than my experience with my current Tesla. There are more alternatives now than there were six years ago, and most don’t come with the Muskrat’s baggage. I do have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “I bought this before Musk went full Nazi”.
I’ve been in the UK for the last month, and, regretfully, I missed a big protest at my local Tesla dealer, which I would have enthusiastically participated in had I been here.
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Meanwhile … with respect to the increasing descent into the fascist cesspit by the USA under the Tangerine Harkkonen and the Muskrat … I’m reminded here not only of Bonhoeffer, but of the chilling words of General Iberico Saint-Jean, military governor of Buenos Aires and part of the infamous Videla regime in Argentina, uttered on 26th May, 1977:
Wonder when we’ll see the Doge Bois own version of the Dirty War?
EDIT: forgot to mention this:
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I have heard this mostly from owners of older Teslas. More recent ones have had a lot more recalls and various “issues”. The CyberTruck appears to be almost unusably bad.
I used to think mildly positively about Musk and even his products, but what ended that for me was his calling the lead rescuer of the children trapped in the Thai cave flood a “pedo” for having the temerity to decline his offer of a submersible to save the kids. Not long after that he was defying the SEC over insider trading he’d done and things went downhill from there.
I think Musk always was an asshole but that he tamped it down for public consumption until he got full enough of himself that he flew his flag loud & proud and then realized he could get away with it.
His Mommy recently said he shouldn’t be thought of as the world’s richest man, but rather the world’s smartest. Being raised to think you’re a galaxy brain in a white supremacist setting will do bad things to you. Who knew!
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That I can believe. The CyberTruck is almost a caricature of a car it’s so bad. I can only assume the Tesla Board is made up of Muskrat yes-men and sycophants for letting him produce such an ugly piece of crap.
Muskrat has the temerity to claim to be a Tesla founder, but that’s a lie. He was one of the early investors, but two engineers are the true founders. I believe he even sued to be considered a founder.
I think Muskrat is far from being the world’s smartest man. He’s a good showman and con artist, but his companies have been successful because he hires good engineers (for the most part). I disagree with some of his practices, however, including how SpaceX does development. His philosophy seems to be design by trial and error, keeping that up until the rockets stop exploding. Contrast that approach to the Saturn rockets of the 1960s, which were carefully designed and tested (on the ground) and had a perfect launch record beginning over 60 years ago.
His buy-out of Twitter was an absolute disaster that negatively affected several of my friends who worked there.
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Everything Musk does is just so painful to watch. Trump trying to sell “Telsers” to the fan base he’s encouraged to pollute and ransack the planet with as much fossil fuel acquisition and use as possible doesn’t seem likely to secede. I also wish that someone would explain to Musk that contrary to what he believes continually using his children as props does not improve his image. It only makes him look worse when that didn’t seem possible.
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Is it like watching a car crash in slow motion?
Actually, it is more like watching it in reverse. They start with someone that are really fucked up economically. They might have a house, they might have a job, but they just don’t understand budgets and economics. They live off credit cards, without repaying their credit card debt. So the professional ecnonomists intervene, give them a good and strict talk to make sure they understand the situation, set up strict budgets, cancel their credit cards, and negotiate good deals with the banks to make the downpayments livable, like refinancing all their debt into one loan and convincing the banks to forgive some of the interest the clients owe. Most often it ends up with these persons living off a strict budget for a few year of years, repaying their loans totally or repaying them down to a manageable level. In short, it most often ends good. But yes, they are the proverbial car crashes when the episode starts.
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I agree, I had the exact same epiphany at that point. He was less benevolent tech genius, and more petulant spoiled rich twat, from that point on. I think the courts did the world a huge disservice when they threw out the defamation case the ex special forces diver and hero who helped plan and rescue all those children, brought against him. It so clearly was defamatory as well.
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Meanwhile, in Dumbfucktrumpistan, we have …
Republican senator arrested for soliciting a 16 year old girl for sex
Once again, not an “immigrant”, or a “DEI hire”, or a “drag queen” … nope, yet another white conservative Christian male.
What makes this episode particularly hilarious, is that he tried to introduce a bill making criticism of the Tangerine Harkkonen a criminal offence - pretty much the USA’s very own Enabling Act.
An event that almost became FAFO in a literal sense, had the police not intervened.
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Are you perhaps thinking of the “Trump derangement syndrome” bill proposal?
Eichorn also co-authored a bill to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness.
(Last sentence in the article you linked to)
In case it’s not clear from reading the linked article, this slimeball is a state senator in Minnesota, not a U.S. Senator. Anything he introduces would only apply to Minnesota if it ever became law, so not the equivalent of an enabling act for the whole U.S.
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Conor McGregor was invited to the White House to meet trump on St Patrick’s day and CNN’s headline about it was, “ Conor McGregor draws Irish leader’s ire after anti-immigration comments at White House,” instead of the more appropriate, “Man who so brutally raped a woman that a tampon had to be surgically removed was invited to the White House.”
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