FWIW…Shell had a “profit” of $32 billion in 2023 and ended the year with less money in the bank than when the year started (too much booze and hookers, I guess). But I get it…that guy who’s banking all that money, should be ashamed of himself.
Shell is doing what it was built to do. The issue is that we allow them to do it.
As the saying goes: every billionaire is a policy failure.
Their cars look perfectly fine to me.
Not sexy in any way but inoffensive and not clunky either.
But that truck …
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Weird front end aside, I think the Model 3 and Y are decent looking cars. The S is very dated and the X is priced out of any market it may have had; they sell ones of each model these days. The stripped-down interior of the 3/Y was a cost-saving for Tesla and acceptable in the market in 2016 because EVs still had that design bent that they had to look space-age. Tesla’s charging network gave them a massive advantage - both in marketing and in the real world - over every other EV.
But the market that Tesla created, arguably, has evolved and left them behind. EVs now look like their ICE cousins; the non-Tesla charging infrastructure remains suspect, but buyers are starting to understand better that charging away from home is likely only a few times a year problem; and non-Teslas can charge at Tesla stations now anyway.
Against that backdrop, the only truly new product that Tesla has put out in nearly a decade is the biggest laughing stock since the Edsel. Even without Musk’s public image self-immolation, Tesla would be in trouble. Sales in China are down by half, and I doubt Chinese buyers are particularly concerned about the kudos - or lack thereof - of driving a Tesla.
Maybe if Musk hadn’t tried to be CEO of 4 fledgling companies simultaneously he might not have dropped this bollock so heavily.
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You realize “Shell” is not a single individual, it’s many many thousand millions of individuals, the majority being regular schmoes like you and me…well, me at least…
Of course. But Shell is a corporation and, like all corporations, it’s designed to do only one thing: make money for shareholders.
The issue is that we, as a society, choose to enable the baked in sociopathic behavior of corporations, rather than rein them in. See also billionaires.
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Yes. Businesses are in the business of making money. Including oil companies. We are not communists, and we do not find such a notion sociopathic.
Your ire is directed at some mythical bogeyman, a wizard behind a curtain pulling levers and sitting on a pile of gold. And it’s peculiarly specific.
No, my ire is directed at how we - as a society - have allowed the needs of business entities to grind up people in their gears.
As the adage goes:
In communism, no one can be rich
In Capitalism, anyone can be rich
In Socialism, anyone can be rich but no one should be poor
It’s no mistake that, in fiction, optimistic futures lean heavily towards socialism while dystopian nightmares are where capitalism has been allowed to run rampant.
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Coincidentally I have been watching “A Gentleman in Moscow” on Paramount+. It’s entertaining, which is unexpected given that it’s about what happens to people when you stretch society to breaking point in one direction such that the overcorrection catches everyone in it’s whiplash.
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I was thinking of Erik the Viking, a highly under appreciated film, and imagined you seeing Halfdan the Black and yelling “that’s Big Oil!”
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This is only marginally true anymore and will be largely untrue in the next 18-24 months. As an example, on my VT to DC route, the high-speed charging deserts have fully filled in in the last 12 months with 200kW charging plazas in place at least every 50 miles. And, most charge at speeds superior to Teslas best supercharger infrastructure. And at far lower cost and equal uptime. As an example, here’s a screenshot of my charge yesterday:
62kW delivered in 18 minutes. Good for 205 miles of range. My cost was $0 but if I was past my “first 3 years free” period, I would have paid $18. At the fastest Tesla supercharger, it would have taken 40 minutes to charge and cost me $30. As you stated, most of this is moot as 90+% of charging is done at home at even far cheaper rates.
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“peg boy?”
I love Erik the Viking.
I read Vaclav Havel’s How the World Really Works last year and it changed my life. To summarize: the global population has essentially quadrupled over the past 100 years, and that expansion was primarily achieved thanks to the extraction and deployment of fossil fuels.
There is no question that burning them is leading to a less hospitable planet, but you don’t get to 8 billion as fast as we have without having done what we’ve done.
I don’t think Limey’s villain is a specific bogeyman behind the strings—I think it is the general societal and regulatory infrastructure that has enabled that industry to flourish–a flourishing that giveth to us in the here and now and taketh from us in the here and then.
And I think he’s right that those systems need reforming, one way or the other, if long-term thinking is to be indulged as not entirely delusional.
Exactly. “Big Oil” is a bogeyman, not the bogeyman. It’s just that it’s an obvious example of how we let an industry operate like it’s in a free market when it isn’t. It’s the same as how De Beers controls the diamond market but, again, diamonds aren’t something that most people need every day.
Very good to hear. Also, the 50-mile spacing will allow CyberTrucks to make road trips.
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Meanwhile, at Tesla:
The IR VP announced his resignation at the end of the investor call yesterday. With other top level resignations (and plummeting sales and an unhinged CEO) you’d think the market would see an ocean of red flags, right?
But Elon said they were moving up the launch date of new models, so the stock price jumped 10% in after-hours trading. They never learn.
Remember Econ 101 where they say all models assume rational actors? Yeah.
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The first two were laid off in truth.
