Thoughts from a Quirky Llama

I've written down my predictions for the upcoming Tesla autonomy event.  Writing these things down helps codify your thinking.  Making it public helps keep you honest. Right or wrong, I'll learn something important come April 22rd. The TL;DR summary: No features will be tied to HW 3.0. They announce the HW3.0 switch over- probably starting in Q3. [Updated 4/7, H/T @ElmerFUDD] - it appears they may already be making some cars with HW3. Perhaps the 4/22 date gives them 3 weeks to clear out older cars before announcing the new HW? The game will be to announce L2 features and pretend like L4/L5 equivalents are coming soon. We will not see the legal disclosures. Elon will largely promise the world, but when things launch all liability will be on drivers. Tesla Network is back, but in the vaguest possible way. They will demo something every AV could do 4 years ago, except it's not reliable enough to actually do L4/L5. The State of Play Before we dive into the pred...

[Updated 2/6/2019 with fresh legal data. See below] If you're a Tesla bear and haven't read Bad Blood , well stop reading this and go get yourself a copy. It's a great read, but I suspect in a year or two when "Disorder of Magnitude- The Elon Musk Story" (h/t @ElonBachman ) comes out it'll make Theranos seem like Sesame Street. In the wake of the SEC & 35K announcement many bears think the end is nigh. I'm skeptical of that, but it's a good time to clarify my thoughts and put down my guesses as to what's really going on at Tesla. Hopefully in a year or two, we can look back and see how accurate or wildly inaccurate my inferences were.  I should add that my track record here on what's going with Tesla is not great, but you only hit the pitches you swing at. In this, the first of two posts, I'll explain the "VIN Gap", what it means, and why I think Tesla has acted as it has. The VIN Gap Source:  @TeslaCharts A gro...

***** NOTE: 12/25 ***** One more mistake to correct. I estimated 507 Dec deliveries in TMC, based on the number of undelivered configurations.  However, it appears I drastically underestimated how many of those were "ghost" entries that were abandoned before delivery.  It now appears that Dec deliveries in TMC will come in around 330 at most.  That makes total TMC deliveries 934.  NY sample rate was 2.38%, but assuming that's 20% higher than average, we get 1.9% sample rate.  That implies ~50K deliveries in Q4 . So my first estimate was high on Dec deliveries, but low on sample rate.  The final result is about 2K higher. ***** NOTE: 12/16 1PM PST***** After publishing this,  I did some more analysis that makes me question my conclusions here. 1) It's become more clear that 20% of Sept VINS are simply missing from NMVTIS. This has implications both for the NMVTIS-based predictions and for the NY registrations (if we assume 20% of NY regs are sim...

The only folks more prone to rants than myself are Tesla fans talking about neural nets. So I thought, why not combine the power of the rants? I'll rant about Tesla fans ranting about the power of neural nets! To get myself good and wound up, I listened to a recent Tesla Daily  Podcast  about Full Self Driving (FSD) and Neural Nets. Go ahead, listen to it.  I'll wait. It's actually not that bad. "Jimmy D" is the guest and he talks with some authority about neural nets. He doesn't get anything terribly wrong on the basic tech. Everything he says about how Tesla plans to exploit it seemed reasonable to me. If you are a Tesla skeptic, it's a good way to understand Tesla bull thinking. Of course, like everyone else who's familiar with the AV space, I think Jimmy is 100% wrong about Tesla's prospects. He's a typical Tesla fan- smart, technically savvy, and without any detailed domain knowledge. He's drawn in by the surface logic of Tes...

The only folks more prone to rants than myself are Tesla fans talking about neural nets. So I thought, why not combine the power of the rants? I'll rant about Tesla fans ranting about the power of neural nets! To get myself good and wound up, I listened to a recent Tesla Daily Podcast about Full Self Driving (FSD) and Neural Nets. Go ahead, listen to it.  I'll wait. It's actually not that bad. "Jimmy D" is the guest and he talks with some authority about neural nets. He doesn't get anything terribly wrong on the basic tech. Everything he says about how Tesla plans to exploit it seemed reasonable to me. If you are a Tesla skeptic, it's a good way to understand Tesla bull thinking. Of course, like everyone else who's familiar with the AV space and not named Elon, I think Jimmy is 100% wrong about Tesla's prospects. He's a typical Elon fan boy- smart, technically savvy, and without any important domain knowledge. He's drawn in by El...

Jean-Baptiste Queru  recently posted what I call the "Hydraulic Theory" of currency union.  Other than an overall theme of "Blame Germany", it's somewhat discombobulated, but I think the basic point is: The core mechanism that allows multiple states to share the same currency is pretty simple: since  the weaker states can't devalue their currency  to compensate for their trade deficit with the stronger ones,  money has to flow from the stronger economies to the weaker ones  in order to maintain the balance. Which is pointing out that balance of payments in an identity: your surplus + my deficit = 0 This identity doesn't cause the balance of payments, rather it merely identifies that if someone owes money, someone else must be OWED that money.  Consider if I told you that last year I racked up $20k in debt (credit card).  You could correctly infer that I spent $20K more than I made last year.  It would be ABSURD to say that the debt cau...

In covering the Greek tragedy that is the Greek tragedy , Kevin Drumm espouses what I like to call the "Crazy Uncle Ivan" theory of finance and trade.  It's a popular mix of Mercantilism and Keynesianism which explains how rather than being the villain of this tragedy, Greece is actually the tragic hero. Kevin quotes the German view of the situation: "In Germany especially, the fear is that providing new loans to Greece without extracting more spending cuts represents a fateful step toward a so-called transfer union, with wealthier nations providing handouts to Greece and other weaker countries." The facts on the ground are quite clear.  Greece does in fact want German money, and there is really no way for Kevin and the liberal intelligentsia to deny this.  But perhaps if we step back, we can still blame Germany: But so far Europe has done next to nothing for Greece. They've made lots of loans, but mainly so that Greece could pay back its debt to sha...

In his budget, Obama proposed increased spending on transportation funded largely by tax increases. This naturally raised the ire of Conservatives, who though generally in favor of infrastructure, oppose tax increases.  This also raised the Conservative talking point that welfare spending is consuming the entire budget, leaving very little left over for traditional government spending (also known as "discretionary spending"). The amounts proposed for transportation are relatively small.  As a small-government advocate, I find it mystifying that Obama's administration could not identify even small cuts to welfare spending to pay for this increased spending.  If they had proposed such an exchange, it would have been an easy sell in Congress- a welcomed bipartisan compromise.  So why didn't they propose such a deal? It's possible that the Administration recognized that a compromise would be welfare-enhancing, but felt that political considerations made it und...

Interesting WSJ article  on a new JAMA Obesity study. Long story short, BMIs of 25-30 and 30-35 show no increase in mortality vs BMI 20-25 (which is considered "normal" weight).  In fact they showed a slight decrease in mortality, but perhaps not statistically significant.  Note that these BMI classes are "overweight" and "obese" respectively.  This is actually great news for the vast majority of Americans that occupy these BMIs.  No doubt organizations  like CDC will still say "40% of US population is overweight or obese", but for the most part the data say there's *no health risk* associated with that statement! The article also talks about the "Obesity Paradox": The new report is the latest, and largest, to document what scientists call the "obesity paradox." Other studies have shown that people with heart disease, diabetes and other chronic health conditions tend to live longer if they carry excess pounds even th...

Matt Yglesias discusses Republican intransigency is his latest post .  I'm not particularly interested in the partisan implications here, but Matt makes a good point about one specific policy issue: Republicans have hammered away at the idea that Obama's environmental commitments are stifling the short-term job creating impact of investment in fossil fuel extraction and transportation. And precisely because  this isn't a crazy idea , over time Obama administration policy has evolved to become increasingly enthusiastic about the short-term economic impact of fossil fuel extraction and less and less focused on the long-term environmental problems involved.   Obama's willingness to make concessions on this point hasn't changed partisan politics, but has had impact in the real world. As expected, we have both more pollution  and more mining sector employment  than we would had this pivot not taken place.   But America's way too big a country f...