That may be the wrong question, though that might help avoid the sunk cost fallacy ("It's better to burn out, than fade away!"). On the other hand, sticking with things has its benefits, with an eye towards a pivot. The right question may have more to do with speed than scale. Best to try and find partners in your endeavor. Then you can succeed or fail twice as fast, and try more things. And have more fun along the way.
I divested too, last May. I was really hoping there would be a "Fire Elon" movement to save the company and all the heroes that made it such a success. Nobody else in the world could get away with keeping their job while basically:
- Not showing up for work
- Working several other jobs simultaneously
- Rigging their pay through scandalous board manipulation (embezzlement)
- Alienating the core set of customers
- Threatening to move future innovations to competing companies
I love my two cars, and I'm sad for state of the company. They should fire Elon, then file suit to take back what he stole.
Great work! I'm sorry to be another jerk posting a link to something similar, but here is my solution, running in the browser (just drag and drop your PDF in):
Nice! My tool should be runnable in the browser thanks to wasm compatibility with Rust + egui :) Btw I've just tried it, and it's a little bit buggy in Safari with a 504kb PDF (lots of objects though). Apart from that, is there a way to export the raw stream? Is there any reason of do you print all the raw streams as a text?
I don’t remember much about the work - it was just a quick and dirty app to help me debug PDF for my ReportMill work (10 years ago). I remember thinking there probably weren’t more than 100 people on the planet who would even care about it.
This article paints a false image of EV life. We have owned a couple EVs for 6 years now and have only had to charge at charging station a few dozen times and never had to wait. I’m sure we spend dramatically less time refueling overall, since we refuel at home, overnight, once or twice a week.
Actually, we did have to wait once for charging in the middle of Oklahoma (at the time a bit of a charging desert). It was at a casino, and a fellow Tesla owner had shot the place up with an assault rifle. It took almost 2 hours for the crime scene techs to collect bullet casings and clear the chargers (no one was hurt - the shooter was on LSD and defending the rest of us from space aliens). Law enforcement offered the shooter a ride - so he didn’t even need the charge.
There are 82 million single-family homes in America, and this does not include parking spots available at employer parking lots where chargers are provided, nor condos where you can run an EV charger circuit to the parking spot. Airport parking and other long dwell parking can supply 120V 20A circuits, which is more than sufficient for more than a day of parking.
Everyone else can fast DC charge (~20 min 0-80%) at the grocery store or Walmart, or at traditional travel stops during road trips. Electricity is ubiquitous, chargers can be everywhere.
In the USA, in public areas where there are 120v 15a or 20a outlet -- I 100% guarantee that if you had more than one oaf with an EV charging from those plugs at the same time you'd pop a circuit breaker. Those plugs are almost always for convenient maintenance of the site and share several outlets to a single circuit breaker -- if 2 thieves tried to steal power at the same time they'd overload the circuit.
Public EV charging is going to need to be much better than it is currently; part of that means having lots of public EVSEs that properly share a common backhaul without popping their breakers, and it also means figuring out how to bill people for the power they need.
I've been able to get by solely with my EV for 6 years, and it's only occasionally been a minor inconvenience (mostly having to spend 20-30 minutes charging per 3ish hours driving on long distance trips); I've had to wait for charger capacity only when foolish enough to drive into or out of an eclipse totality path, and even then I was forced to wait a total of 20 minutes before getting a charging stall.
I'm lucky -- I also have access (10 months out of the year) to a parking place with a dedicated 240v/20a charger. For 2 months of the year I charge at a L3 station when I go grocery shopping; (in those 2 months I also have access to L1 charging and a dedicated parking spot but it's more convenient to charge at the grocery store.)
In North America, non-tesla L3 charging seems to be managed by organizations mostly dedicated to making people foolish enough to buy a non-tesla EVs miserable.
L3 charging, btw, is really exotic, or at least really heavy duty technology -- you can't trivially drop 8 stalls of 400v / 200a just anywhere; many of the tesla superchargers near where I live have local power generation facilities (big natural gas fuel cell setups) to do peak shaving.
Largely I agree with you -- electricity is everywhere, and it should be possible to make L2 evse plugs available to 20-30% of street parking spots and put L3 charging in lots more places than it is. It's not trivial but it also isn't insurmountable.
Just because you have a single family home does not mean you can install a charger circuit. Not every single family home has driveway. Half the houses on my street lack a driveway/ (The two houses on the east side of mine were built in 1898 and didn't need a driveway.) There is street parking only on one side of the street, as well; so, running a cord from the house could mean crossing the street with it.
> All in it is usually under $1k to get one installed.
Where I'm at (outside of Philly) $1K is the bottom end. Depending on the distance from the panel, access to the garage and the house service it can be lots more. I had mine done (panel on the other end of the house) and it was $2200
It's common but rarely necessary for people to get the largest circuit they can imagine rather than evaluate cost / benefit clearly.
I have a 240v / 20a plug next to my drive way. It cost $300 for the electrician work and $150 for the EVSE. It uses inexpensive romex, didn't require me to beef up my house's 100a service, and 95% of the time recharges the car overnight. On the rare situations where I get home from a long drive late in the evening, with the car under 10%, and drive it the very next morning, the car will have not gotten back to the "normal" charge level, but it's still perfectly usable for 99% of driving requirements... And if I'm in a rare situation where I need to charge it more than I'd get from an overnight drive I can L3 charge it.
Sure, if you're putting 200 miles a day on the car consistently, or if you've got several EVs, or if you've got a huge price difference in your "time of use" power metering contract, having a big pipe between the car and the grid is helpful.
But just as often, spending more than $500 for an EVSE hookup is just not going to be a good way to spend money. Do it if it makes you feel more comfortable, but it's rarely necessary.
That assumes the battery degradation number calculation is 1) accurate and 2) isn't lying as to not discourage people without access to regular slow charging from buying their cars.
You mean a third-party is giving you that number? How do they obtain/calculate it? Do they just read a data parameter via the car's diagnostics port? If so the lying argument applies just as well.
An ordinary 120v/15a household circuit can only provide about 2 miles of charge per hour. I run an unusually car-lite lifestyle for an American and that wouldn't do it even for me.
You need an electrician to run a new 240v circuit and, in many cases, a new main service for the house to accommodate it.
Depends on your car. If you have a particularly inefficient/large EV then maybe, but if your car can do 3mi/kwh then you’ll get a little over 3 miles of charge per hour. That doesn’t sound like much but it’ll get you 36 miles in 12 hours, so could work for short commutes or if you have a hybrid WFH position it’d almost certainly be fine.
I only ever charge on 120V personally and have no problem, though anyone who was going to buy an EV planning on charging that way should run the numbers with the EV they’re looking at. ABRP can do a pretty good job of it.
What puzzles me is how these people can stay and live with these conditions. Adding an extra outlet isn't hard to DIY and them owning the home means there isn't anything preventing them from doing so.
I have an EV. I always charge at home-- other than on longer trips or just at free chargers that happen to be at the right place.
When I got the EV I just installed the charger, it wasn't even a thing I thought much about: I saw it as just part of having an EV. The ability to charge overnight at home was a reason to have an EV or at least a reason that having an EV wouldn't stink.
And I am shocked by the fact that I can talk to a dozen EV owners and not encounter a single other one who charges at home.
Sometimes it's because the owner doesn't own their home and can't add an outlet. Other times they do but believe they are blocked by city permitting, or they abandoned the idea after an electrician quoted them thousands of dollars. Less often it's because they've tried using the 120v 12a or whatever charger thing that came with the car and found it unhelpfully slow and don't know that charging at 240v/40a would be oodles faster.
I think it's insane. But in my experience it is the vast majority.
Presumably the people selling EVs downplay the importance of charging at home since the extra requirement would cost some sales? No idea.
It’s interesting, because I admittedly don’t drive so consistently, I do 80 miles round trip a couple times a week and might not drive at all on off days, but I’ve found 120V 12A to be completely sufficient. That’s true even with the charge limit typically set to 85% SoC. Of course, if I drive a bunch and then drive again the next day it’s not full, but it’s no big problem once the initial range anxiety wears off.
I'd be less perplexed if I heard comments like yours from people: It's enough for me. But I've not encountered many (any?) other regular 120v charger users.
I only have L1 / 120V charging at home. Have never used any other charging method for my Nissan Leaf, which I've owned for two years. I have a 20 mile (total) commute, and really only charge every other day or so. I've never reset the efficiency calculator, and the average report is 4.3 miles/kwh. I don't think I really engage in any hyper-miling behavior, but I might drive more efficiently than most.
This is one of those "your experience differs from mine and therefore you're wrong".
I don't think the author was lying, that was the experience they had which seemed suboptimal and quite rightly pointed out a need to improve the charging experience.
I rented a Tesla for a short holiday and I have to admit I found the charging situation frustrating. Driving to a charging station only to find that its being used is a frustrating experience.
EV's are wonderful and the charging experience is cheaper or sometimes free compared to petrol, but it does need to improve.
One thing that would improve them immensely is to make the algorithm much more aggressive if I manually hit the wiper button. When I hit that button it should be a strong hint that conditions are rainy.
Having a corporate job is usually a 'mediocre success'. If you strike out on your own with something that involves your passion and you earn a comparable income, you are a stellar success. Don't let a nepo baby tell you otherwise.
I agree, but this blogpost is NOT about professional trajectory. It's about sales and GTM success criteria for startups
> That’s the danger of the mediocre success. The point of startup experimentation isn't the success itself; it’s the learning that comes with clear-cut success or failure. You don't really care about the sales revenue generated by your first two reps; you care about whether this is a strategy you can scale to dozens and then hundreds of reps, or whether you need to use a completely different strategy. It’s all about the learning. And mediocre successes don’t give you any learning.
Yes if you earn an income comparable to a corporate job, yeah that’s a big win. “Mediocre success” unfortunately isn’t well defined here, but I assumed the author wasn’t suggesting a corporate salary. It seemed like he was talking about a few early sales but not enough to sustain the business. Imagine starting a company with two other people and grossing $12k the first year and $22k the second year, and then running low on funding. Should you keep going? Should you seek investment, assuming you can even get it? What if the growth remains linear, and it will take at least 10 years to reach sustainability?
Wouldn’t “not enough to sustain the business” be failing? I’d think “mediocre success” would be doing well enough that you can’t just throw in the towel, but not well enough that you can escape the grind.
The author defined mediocre success to be the relative outcome of an experiment, such as an A-B test, he wasn’t talking about income levels or overall success. It might be assumed that, since we are talking about startups and experiments, that we are not discussing self-sustaining businesses? Either way, which interpretation makes the rest of the article make the most sense?
> Having a corporate job is usually a 'mediocre success'.
Eh, that is doing OK to me, which is better than some nebulous "mediocre success". If you are at least saving for retirement, and able to support a family, that's actual success in my book.
The typical startup outcome, where you try for a couple years, it fails, and then you move on to a corporate job is not terrible.
What's really bad is when you make enough to just barely get by, paying yourself a sub-market-rate salary, and keep limping along for a long while. Waiting for that "success", that big breakthrough, "just around the corner". You can be stuck doing this for years, out of a misguided sense of loyalty, determination or whatever. And then you are not saving for retirement, and letting the best family-creation years (if that is a life goal) pass you by.
That, to me is "mediocre success".
Ask me how I know. On second though, no, don't ask me how I know.
This new book explores the complete change we have made in how we raise our kids in the last 30 years:
The Anxious Generation: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com
It's really been one domino after another: Overprotection, helicoptering, immersive 3D games, 24 hour cartoon channels, internet, smartphones, social media. Our kids are no longer having the social interactions we evolved to need to properly train our brains. He calls it "the great rewiring".
It's a good book - lots of data and research, good analysis and a good plan of action (starting with getting phones out of schools).
I have only read an interview by the author and while I tend to agree with his analysis, I’m not so enthusiastic about his close ties with the likes of Google, and one of the solutions he offers, which has the undesirable side effect of ending anonymity on the web. Making schools phone-free seems like a great idea, on the other hand.
Of course all of these are subject to reproducibility problems and the other associated near-humanities science, but everything you described comes down to one phenomenon:
increasing levels of data flooding and saturation/thresholds
Radio -> TV -> PC/Gaming -> Early Internet -> Mobiles -> Social Media -> VR Headset (inprogress) -> AI-gen content (also in progress) -> Neuralink (cutting edge)
At some point it leads to paranoia and regression. Good intentions are beaten down with advertising and hostile UI patterns.
Stock buybacks are a great way for executives to further line their pockets inconspicuously and to allow shareholders to dodge corporate and dividend taxes. It does nothing for the health of the company.
There should be a cap on executive compensation - say 100 times the average employee salary. Barring that, there should be a millionaires and/or wealth tax, so that they at least pay the same tax rate as their secretary.
Stock buybacks look extra suspicious when majority of compensation for executives is based on stock value... So they can both manipulate the price of stock and also reap benefits from that manipulation. With dividends they have to actually hold the stock to benefit from them.
The "Wealth Tax" proposed currently by Sen Warren & a few others seems more like attention grabbing than a serious plan. They've been tried in other countries & failed miserably. They're hard to manage & imo seem like a poor choice.
If you want to increase taxes on the wealthy I would go after loopholes instead, which Sen Warren & others are also trying to do to be fair. You could also look closer at trying to slightly increase tax on sales transactions or taking loans against your equity. It would need to be a small enough amount that makes a difference to tax income but not enough that people try hard to avoid it.
reply