Switzerland reinvents their passport. The design studio's website looks a bit broken when first loading but scrolling down presents a lot of really nice eye candy.
Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.
I don't know, government waste and most policy sucks. But there's no reason we can't do stuff or even try.
For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to third parties. But it didn't have to be that way. It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.
It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.
This is incredibly overstated. There are "incentives" for all sorts of activities. These incentives were available to all manufacturers. We should have "incentives" to produce electric vehicles and manufacturing in America. Insane not to. And these incentives are often "you would normally have to pay us X million in taxes, but we'll let you pay less". When the alternative is something not being built and no tax revenue, it makes sense. And a lot of subsidies were to buyers of EVs
> In 2019, the loss was $862 million, but for 2020 there is a huge profit of $721 million.
> However: A closer look at the figures published last week shows that Tesla is still making losses with actual sales of electric cars - around $500,000 in 2020.
> In 2020, carbon certificates brought in $1.6 billion, without this revenue the numbers would still be below red.
With a "profit" margin that jumpy and a history of unrentability, i think it's fair to say that Tesla only exists today because of subsidies. It's not just tax benefits, as you frame it, but in this case EU-CO2 certificates, a direct "revenue" stream.
Can you say point to any other industry that hasn't used subsidies/ selling to the gov? Oil and gas, semi conductors, compute... Everyone sells and gets loans from the gov... Tesla like the least.
The government should find ways to strategically invest in developing major industries. The market for them is global and China has/will have a bigger internal market than the US, so without intentional development we'll get a continued industrial consolidation that is bad for the US and the world. I have robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners made by Chinese companies partly because an intentional policy from China's government to grow these capabilities locally.
I think they're cutting strategic investments that they don't have personal investments in, as suggested in their banana republic handbook. They seem to be fine with fossil fuel investments for example.
I wouldn't be surprised if they start investing again once they destroy the competition and create rival companies in their stead.
Right now they seem to be swatting away wind and solar and propping up nuclear companies that are in their pocket.
The titles read like they're straight out of The Onion:
"Trump Media To Merge With Nuclear Fusion Startup"
wtf, I missed that one. I’m really sorry for anyone living in the US but the country you knew is dead, whatever the new country is, the old rules don’t apply. It’s now closer to a 3rd world country where literally everything all the time is corruption, as a core fundamental value of the administration
the way the us govt has behaved internationally i wouldnt be surprised if countries/people actively boycott made in america.. the market for us goods and services would definitely have shrunk.
The government should give incentives to do things that benefit the future of the country. All auto manufactures had the same incentives but instead of building actual good vehicles they instead shipped more production to Mexico and continue to build the absolute most dog shit vehicles in the world.
Not a single US auto manufacturer, outside of Tesla, has a good EV, nor FSD. Waymo is buying thousands of Chinese cars because of how shit US car manufacturer are.
They are the worst of the worst. They shouldn't even be in business they are that bad at building cars which they literally invented.
This is such a braindead take. Ford could have taken advantage of those same EV incentives. Any other new startup could have too. Tesla got nothing special.
Tesla would be nothing without Musk. That doesn't take away from Eberhard and Tarpenning; they started the company after all and are great engineers. But it would be nothing without Musk.
The people who tried something different and did the work on batteries weren’t Musk. That’s the comment I was responding to. Musk has been a good showman though, and he seems to be a genius financial engineer with a cult following
> Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't
...because Tesla sold luxury vehicles at relatively low volume. By the time Elon reneged his "$25,000 EV" promise, China was ready to export vehicles that actually hit that price point. The only thing preventing Americans from driving affordable EVs is Elon's federal protectionism. Is that really progress?
So you're technically correct, but IIUC Tesla is still the most delivered (customers taking delivery) EV brand in China. Draw what conclusions you will from that fun fact
Basically Model Y has been consistently in top 3 by monthly sales of EV in China so far in 2026. If you count by 3-month or 6-month periods, it is only next to Geely EX2 at 1/3 of its price as pointed out by another comment.
Part of the fluctuation is due to one month of every quarter the Tesla Shanghai factory is oriented at export, so domestic number drops dramatically.
HN is full of ppl claiming Chinese EV is superior in every way without realizing that Tesla is incredibly popular in Chinese domestic market.
You're talking brands, I'm talking car models. And your own source lists the Model Y as the #2 best selling model cumulatively for 2026, behind only the Geely EX2 (星愿), which is a third of the price.
Also, you seem to be implying it's somehow a bad thing to have a luxury brand image with mass-market sales, but that's a pretty rare thing to pull off and it's also the key to huge margins. See also: Apple.
Look, Musk is a despicable human being, but the Model 3/Y has been a ginormous hit and it transformed the global EV market. Does he deserves all the credit for pulling this off? Of course not. But you need to stick your head pretty deep in the sand to pretend that a) it was not a success, and b) that Musk had nothing at all to do with it.
I don't know, I'm sure you'd say Europe is a far more healthy, educated, engaged and safe place (by typical metrics), but they are not building anything like this and probably never will be able to approach anything close to it. In fact they have technologically stagnated in basically every way and are completely reliant on China and the US for technology.
SpaceX is 85% of all mass to orbit for the entire planet, then it's China, and Europe is <5%.
The next people to set foot on the moon will likely be Americans, and they will be put there by SpaceX rockets.
Yep, it's crazy that people can correctly recognize that corruption is responsible for the current situation but fail to recognize that adding more corruption will not deliver us from it.
In what way? There is nothing inherent about economic freedom that leads to a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population, in the same way there is nothing inherent about a healthy, smart, and safe population that leads to economic freedom.
The US is one of the most economically free places in the world, and always has been, yet obesity is at all time highs, gen Z is the first generation to score less on standardized tests than the generation before them, and civilians killed by law enforcement is at an all time high.
Economic freedom is a very important pillar to a healthy and thriving society, but acting like it is a panacea is wrong. Economic freedom at it's extreme will only lead to a weakening of the middle class and consolidation of wealth among those holding the most wealth.
Free markets mean the only way to make money legally is to provide a product or service that other people want to buy. And people want to be healthy, educated, engaged and safe. In other words, it takes advantage of the inherently selfish nature of people to make others better off.
> obesity is at all time highs
Obesity is a choice. I know people won't like me writing that. I know it is very hard to lose weight. It's still a choice, though. I don't see how making people less free would change that.
> gen Z is the first generation to score less on standardized tests than the generation before them
The government is the primary institution that provides education, not the free market.
> civilians killed by law enforcement is at an all time high
I don't see how that is a result of economic freedom.
> Economic freedom at it's extreme will only lead to a weakening of the middle class
The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now, and the middle class became the dominant class, by far.
> consolidation of wealth among those holding the most wealth.
Wealthy people get that way in a free market by creating products and services that other people want. In other words, they do not "consolidate" wealth, they create it.
> The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now
Not much economic freedom for slaves or for Indians forced off their land (e.g. illegal seizure of the Black Hills by the US government [0], the Cherokee in Georgia, etc).
Prior to 1900s-era state laws and the federal Securities acts, you could sell fraudulent investments backed by nothing but the blue skies of Kansas. I suppose that's an economic freedom that was lost, can't say I miss it.
Body weight is controllable, but is not the same thing as obesity, but scientific evidence does not suggest obesity is voluntary, but I'm not trying to talk about obesity. I was just merely using it as a proxy for societal health, because I hope you can agree that obesity is not healthy.
> The government is the primary institution that provides education
I thought there was a large section of free market libertarians that want to get rid of public schooling?
>I don't see how that is a result of economic freedom.
Again, i was using it as a proxy for safety, not economic freedom.
> The US was much more economically free in the 1800s than now
The middle class became the dominant class post-WWII. wtf are you talking about?
If I have one million people pay me $1000, I am creating value, but I not 'creating wealth' I would literally be consolidating the wealth of one million people into my bank account.
Owning desirable assets could be considered 'creating wealth' due to the price of those assets going up, but owning assets is not creating products and services that other people want.
I will go back to my original point, that economic freedom is not a panacea and does not solve for health, education, and safety, but rather creating things that people want to seperate them from their money. Health, education, and safety are all more effective when provided by the government.
> The middle class became the dominant class post-WWII.
I've heard that before, and it's simply not true. Pre-revolutionary colonial America had a thriving middle class.
Consider this. A couple of decades ago, a sunken Missisouppi river steamboat was found in the mud. It had foundered before the Civil War, I don't recall the date. And so it was dug out, and researchers went over its cargo.
They were shocked to find out what the cargo was.
It was everything needed for a general store. Pots, pans, jars, knives, forks, shoes, clothing, preserved meats and candies, tools, etc. Nothing in it was for rich people, it was all meant for the middle class. And it was packed to the gills with that cargo.
If you like, look at paintings and photographs of towns in the 1800s. Do you see a couple mansions, and a bunch of shacks? Nope. You see middle class homes, general stores, all signs of a prosperous middle class.
> all more effective when provided by the government
Government providing that has a pretty sorry history.
> due to the price of those assets going up
The price of the asset is a function of its ability to create value.
Do me a favor and point to an American history book that informed your point of view. But fair is fair, I submit:
More prosperity provides the surplus to afford being environmental. Unfree countries tend to be much more environmentally destructive, because the people are impoverished.
What's a bummer is that Walter is a smart and talented engineer, yet has a very stubborn and out of touch economic perspective that is at least half a century expired.
If he is a libertarian that perspective is more modern than socialism, technocracy, or pretty much any other political ideology. Modern libertarianism is from the mid 20th century.
And if you share the view that societies gradually shift from materialist values (economic stability, physical safety, law and order, and maintaining traditional group norms) towards post-materialist values (individual autonomy, freedom of speech, gender equality, environmental protection, and self-expression) as societies develop, then freedom of exchange is something you would expect from a more advanced perspective, not one which is outdated. What is outdated is authoritarian, statist, and technocratic rule.
>What is outdated is authoritarian, statist, and technocratic rule.
And yet the most popular model for freeing us from the horrors of capitalism is exactly that:
Authoritarian, static and technocratic rule. Yes, that's what communism and Marxist socialism are. You could even say that Marxism is basically this idea: The capitalists are rushing to the top, trying to own the entire world, why don't we accelerate this foregone conclusion with a violent revolution to institute a government that owns everything?
What was the original justification for this again? Oh, it's because capital that is scarce in relation to labor has power over labor, but there is no physical capital rule that says that the capital formation process has to stop right there. That's a monetary rule called the zero lower bound that actively prevents capital formation and guess who instated that rule? The very government that is supposed to save us by owning everything, including the workers.
It's like having the arsonist in charge of putting out the fire.
Just like Kyrie Irving is a talented basketball player but also a catastrophically-deluded flat-earther, it's just as possible for gifted software engineers to have flawed reasoning about the economy.
A truly free market is also free of regulation and embraces predatory actions by monopolists. Think being paid in company scrip instead of dollars. Think a single food supply monopoly with patented seeds you can be prosecuted for propagating, and harmful additives in food because it's cheaper. Think better education inaccessible for those nincompoops who weren't born into wealth. Serves them right for choosing to be born poor, amirite?
Some amount of regulation is required if you want a just, healthy, society, with economic mobility.
People say they want 100% free markets but they don't really comprehend what that looks like.
> A truly free market is also free of regulation and embraces predatory actions by monopolists.
This is a non sequitur and also makes no sense. A free market doesn’t “embrace” anything, it’s the sum of the decisions individuals make absent external coercion. That you might be unhappy with the decisions others make doesn’t necessarily make it a problem.
But every single economy is heavily controlled, regulated, and interfered with, and the so-called “free market” examples people use like healthcare in the States are examples of the most tightly controlled and regulated markets (if you can even call them that) on the planet. So when people complain about “free markets” they’re complaining about heavily controlled markets without even knowing it.
Did you know that paychecks are private money? They aren't legal tender. RSU's are company scrip, too. Besides, nobody can make you take a job you don't want.
> patented seeds
Patents are a government invention, and I'm on record opposing them.
> harmful additives
Harming and/or defrauding customers is against the law and is actionable.
> better education inaccessible
Government run schools are pretty much bottom of the barrel.
>Did you know that paychecks are private money? They aren't legal tender.
I did know this, actually. Thankfully your banks are not free market profiteers. They're subject to stringent regulations to ensure a more orderly and efficient market, and thus they'll dependably convert cheques to dollars. Another point against free market absolutism.
>Harming and/or defrauding customers is against the law and is actionable.
That's why Big Tobacco was dismantled and are no longer advertising and selling harmful, addictive products to teens, right?
Teenagers after all are well-known for their astute abilities to assess risk and make rational, informed decisions that are in their long-term best interests, right?
More regulation is needed here, not less.
>Government run schools are pretty much bottom of the barrel.
In the USA, certainly. That's not an indictment of public education as a whole, though, only of American society's "Fuck you, I got mine" values. If Americans were less selfish they could have the most highly-educated citizens on the planet, with global-elite schooling available to every American schoolchild.
In any case, free market absolutism is delusional for all but the billionaire class (for whom it's optimal) and I'm not interested in continuing this conversation further.
Oh, heavens no. I'm human, so I almost certainly make logic errors all the time, whether in terms of truth or validity.
However, one thing I am very careful about is that the definitions I use are falsifiable, which makes them minimally empirically testable. ("A hypothesis forbidding some observations means that hypothesis is testable.") In the best case, I can proceed a priori with my reasoning and entirely sidestep needing to approach a posteriori, but real life is very often not that nice.
I generally find capital-L Libertarian free markets less than useful for analysis because the syllogism tends to break down thus:
1. Free markets produce prosperity.
2. Prosperity indicates the presence of a free market.
3. Therefore, free markets are prosperous.
Like, that'd be a perfectly valid form of proving both directions of a biconditional if it were possible in this framework to show the presence of a free market that doesn't produce prosperity or that prosperity happens without a free market. Unfortunately, they're taken as axiomatic, so they don't admit the reasoning required for such a proof.
I want to be wrong though. Perhaps I'm missing something?
> Free markets correspond with prosperity, in case after case.
I'll caution that correspondence does not admit causal inferences.
All true but the kind of alignment problem you're talking about is only possible when the core of a society is directed at inspiring, bold, massive projects. There's not much on offer as an alternative to Muskism. It's worth remembering how insane everyone thought he was for claiming you could land the rocket upright and reuse it. And even more so, that you could catch one with chopsticks.
You need big billionaires to pull off huge projects, no one else can take those risks. It’s basically how America was built.
What you’re talking about is improving people’s quality of life which we desperately need but it takes money and that comes from the first capitalist part.
Don’t get too sucked into any of the nonsense on the far right (obviously) but also don’t get too sucked into what the progressives are saying. They don’t have a plan for how to fund their socialism.
> He was involved in DOGE, which did nothing but catch fraud and cut worthless spending.
Elon wasn't just involved with DOGE, he was responsible for it. And Elon said he would cut $2 TRILLION in federal spending before ultimately claiming just $110 billion in savings -- which the GAO found he lied about. Considering out budget deficit is about $2 trillion, even his inflated claims are a rounding error.
(To say nothing of the fact that a lot of it was NOT useless spending. For example, Elon ended a program to fund countries in Central America to stop the spread of screw worms. Now screw worms are projected to cost $1.8 billion in damage to Texas alone.)
> while Elon encourages reporting on X
Elon has a track record of banning journalists on Twitter / X, the everything app, when they criticize him. Literally the opposite of encouraging reporting on X.
> We need more "Elons", people like him are actually helping dig us out of this mess.
I would encourage you to start reading independent news sources and forming your own opinions, rather than uncritically believing everything people in power feed to you. Otherwise you end up saying things online that are trivially disprovable.
This is almost certainly false. The vast majority of government spending goes directly to people that need it or debt service. There is very little outright fraud as DOGE quickly learned. The only meaningful target for cuts is military. And the only solution to debt is higher taxes.
I really love CC and have been using it exclusively for a year now but reading Claude's verbose and semantically-obfuscated writing style is wearing me out and I'm planning to move to another provider.
Yes, but an alternative would be that if an organism is perfectly fit for its static environment (that hasn't changed in 5 million years) then there is no benefit to evolving novel features.
More likely a dynamic environment is most important for intelligence.
Quit being naive. It is a legitimate security issue. Imagine telling someone 50 years ago we would have a new peer adversary and we’d allow them to sell us robots that roam our homes and offices with microphones and cameras. You’d seem crazy.
I know it’s inconvenient and on a 1-pass thought pattern it seems oppressive, but in the long term it is better to rip this bandaid off. Same with the routers. This is the ONLY thing I can agree with this admin on.
I'd like to disagree but can't. Letting a foreign power "sell" internet connected microphones and cameras into "our" homes is totally asking for it. I wonder what the rules are around security cameras and similar?
Not sure I mind the routers so much. By the time the traffic is traversing the router it had better be encrypted. OTOH an army of domestic routers can at the very least be made into a quite astounding botnet and if we were to dig deeper I'm sure the data around which hardware address comes online and when could be made extremely useful.
In short: you're right. It's not protectionist bullshit, it's a wide variety of reasonable concerns. It also might be a horse that's bolted.
I agree it's an issue but maybe we are going at it from the wrong angle. Why just be scared of the Chinese? We should protect ourselves from both domestic & foreign adversaries.
Any electronic device with vision, sound, or radio communications capability should be required to be source-available or at least independently audited. Proprietary code must run in sandboxed black-boxes that can't directly communicate/interact with the outside world.
Sounds like an impossible ask? Well, banning Chinese robots/routers is also an impossible ask.
yes, it's the chinese you should be afraid of! No, not the people shooting it's own citizens under the guise of ethnic cleansing. It's those scary vacuum robots.
Yeah it's 100% bullshit. The biggest red flag here isn't the use of AI, it's the author thinking we're dumb enough not to be able to detect it easily. That itself is dumb and makes this whole article easy to disregard.
Sorry but I think you’re requirement that something only be “the art” if any arbitrary person can critique it is off.
The frontier labs are working on the state of the art but it’s just art that you aren’t allowed to see.
Unfortunately.
It is work using the principles of the art, obviously.
But "state of the art" implies the highest state of general availability, not just in terms of access to some product, but of use of the ideas, concepts, methodologies etc.
Anthropic and OpenAI have "cutting edge" models; the state of the art is behind the cutting edge.
The state of the art is the best open source, open weights model available. More or less by definition.
That's an interesting and possibly useful distinction , but it seems unique to you. Spreading it as "We should categorize the AIs this way" would be a good argument.
But the way SOTA is generally understood by other users of the language, it refers to exactly the team, technology, & techniques defining the cutting edge in any field, regardless of the whether the technology & techniques are available outside of that team...
The Stack Exchange poster seems to be confusing "State Of The Art" with "Best Practices".
Meanwhile, Wikipedia specifically calls out "Cutting Edge" as specifically synonymous with "SOTA" [0], Cambridge defines it as "the best and most modern of its type" with zero reference to general vs limited availability in the definition or any of it's numerous examples [1], and the same from Merriam-Webster [2].
Having studied and worked in multiple technology fields ranging from software to mechanical & aero engineering for four+ decades, your post is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone even try to make such a distinction between SOTA vs CE. I think it could be a very useful distinction if it were to get into common usage, but IME it is far closer to unique than common. The sibling comments to your assertions show pretty much the same thing - it would be useful, but it isn't common.
Promote it as common and you'll find pushback. Promote it as novel and useful, and it'll likely spread.
I appreciate this distinction. The are multiple senses of SOTA and one that has been taking on greater mindshare is as a synonym of “the best available”. By rebasing on SOTA as generally available and understood versus cutting edge, which has limited distribution and leads the way, we expand the vocabulary we have available to describe what’s going on. Thanks.
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