Unfortunately Tesla's great accomplishments do not lie in the car space, but in the getting investments space. In finance. Which means they will have the profitability right, exactly, guaranteed.
Take the Tesla metal casting advance (single-press casting, or as Tesla calls is "Gigacasting"): it is mostly the result of investment, more specifically all other carmakers deciding they weren't willing to risk it, no matter how many papers said the simulations were correct. Tesla risked it, it worked exactly like the (mostly German made) theory and simulations said it was going to work, and now everyone and their mother (ie. even non-car companies) are using it. Result: Tesla has a patent on it, that nobody has licensed since they were working on it decades before the first Tesla engineer thought of it. The idea was literally available in CAD software before Tesla started to work on it (not that I want to claim there wasn't a LOT of design + validation + testing + integrating + ... work left to be done)
This principle is generally true for all Elon Musk companies, and most of their accomplishments/vision. SpaceX is not even close to the first to land a rocket, for example (that was McDonnel-Douglas). Nor were they the second, or the fifth. Oh and only one of the companies that attempted it before SpaceX needed 2 tries, all others succeeded immediately, or the company died, some succeeded, and the company still died. SpaceX, by contrast, needed 7 crashes before succeeding for the first time (one of their rockets never tried to land on account of blowing up during ascent, I'm counting that one), and 17 tries before they first tried to move it to production.
I'm not to say integrating everything, massively expanding the scope/scale of these applications, getting the investments, and getting it commercially operating isn't a gigantic accomplishment, but it is not inventing it at all.
Elon Musk's constant talk about inventing and "work from first principles" ... is therefore kind of total bullshit. He has never done that, and neither have his businesses.
Because neuralese is a more direct encoding of the latent space of these models than English is. It's just dumping the latent space relatively directly into the embedder. If you're another model and you have the same embedder this will actually be understandable, in fact it will be FAR more information dense than English. So something like Qwen would potentially be saying up to 5120 things using one token. Now in practice it's not going to be that bad, it's going to be like 20 things or so, and additionally going to be far more context dependent than any English sentence (meaning depending on what preceeds and follows it can mean drastically different things)
So you can turn it to English, but only to a LOT of English, and doing so would slow the model down a great deal, and it would be a lot more like a detailed thought than a sentence.
Regularly, yes. On a lot of these sorts of products, nothing happens without governments making deals first. Mostly because governments have a need to make sure they get weapons too, not just money for the components they make.
Perhaps should be described as "sale is forbidden by default, but deals are common".
This goes 100% for either completed weapons, or components that can be directly used as a weapon, then you have "dual-use", and the less directly it's a weapon, the more free you are to do what you want.
Can you name any examples? European countries and the EU as a whole don't have an equivalent of the US's ITAR 'See-Through' rule, which lets the US control the usage of a system that has any US components.
I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government. It has been done within Europe, but only for major components, such as Germany's blocking at one point of sales to Saudi Arabia.
But this is the one-component-is-the-weapon, with everything going in one direction version of such a rule. An F35 has 300,000 components from 19 countries, so you can imagine what a maze the agreements for that one are.
It's also not just about the weapons and the danger they pose. It's also about jobs. Know-how (both spreading and restricting know-how). And even the traditional "synergy" (you've designed helicopter blah, hence you make radio component so-and-so, so how about you manufacture NATO standard blah radios and antennas) and the occasional monopoly (it's kind of secret but there aren't many companies that can make the obvious alloy needed for the trust vectoring to name one obvious thing)
Our side is NATO, and we make weapons that are designed to push the global integrated worldview and human rights ("America and it's allies") that we espouse as an alliance. And this view permeates all weapons. For NATO guns, one, you'll never get ridiculous ammo stores (that would enable you to eliminate a population for example), we all work on these weapons together, design them together, and if you try to use your own ammo, everything will fail. Most NATO weapons are defensive. You aim a NATO weapon at a (small) target, it finds that target and either kills it or it disables itself and falls to the ground, essentially intact. Russian weapons are the total opposite: they're meant to kill and if they can't kill their target, they'll just kill whatever and whoever's nearby. Sometimes up to the point they kill the weapon's operators. They will fire "cheap ammo" and literally come with instructions on how to make it. They are meant to kill on a very large scale, without precision and they are most definitely not safe to use. This philosophical difference applies to everything from machine guns to nuclear weapons.
A quick Google search will find you plenty of European legislation. And you should look at those laws like the Belgian laws here, like they were a company "Values" document. That is how the EU/Belgium (and other countries) react "by default", but specific treaties explicitly create exceptions to those rules between specific parties.
So like this: exporting guns and ammo is certainly not something any country allows their companies to do, but most/all countries make specific exceptions in treaties.
This just happens to have the advantage that it makes it extremely easy for politicians to deceive voters about weapons. "Belgian law says it's illegal to export weapons". 100% technically true, and totally misdirects people into believing Belgium doesn't export weapons, which is absolutely false.
Meanwhile, Belgium exports ~50 million euros worth of weapons. But Belgium is just an example, it's not like the Netherlands or France or (definitely) UK, or the EU as a whole are different.
You missed the point. The example asked for was this:
"I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government."
That would be something like "Belgium says the USA can't sell F-35s to Israel because the wings are Belgian-made" similar to how the USA prevents ASML from selling their machines to China.
Oh that's what you want. In the clusterfuck with the Turkey involuntary withdrawal from the F35 program half the treaties were renegotiated (you see, can't have any Turk produce weapons unless he's a "genius", that would not be fair. In other news: the Turkish definition of genius is mostly being the son in law of Erdogan [1])
I believe this agreement is part of the restructuring after that cluster... Note that the agreement is both about production and buying. [2]
"Finland has required extensive domestic participation, with industrial cooperation valued at a minimum of 30 percent of the contract price of procuring 64 F-35A fighters. Under the agreement, Finnish firms will produce the F-35’s forward fuselage structures, including components intended for export aircraft. The agreement also includes ..."
As to how the EU is involved: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-indus... (ie. that's where you go to ask for loans to start a factory for making F35 components, they have a page listing the deals ... somewhere). Note that this is one of the EU institutions that isn't in the budget (well, the loans aren't). They're not spending tax money to make those loans, they're printing money to make those loans.
So the Finnish government is making this deal, including details on export (and this is obviously weapons exports).
How is it an example of European governments preventing American weapons from being sold? Are you saying the Finns unilaterally decided that Turkey can't have F-35s, even if the USA wants to sell F-35s to them?
You misunderstand. Everything is prevented by law, with the purpose to make any change in production involve negotiations with the government, who then negotiates weapons/jobs/local production/... Without those negotiations, and the resulting exceptions to the law nothing can be sold, even dual use items are restricted.
And, of course, the other side of that coin: weapons export regulation is Europe is not something that is meant to actually prevent weapons export. Rather it is used like a company policy: it makes sure everyone regularly has to give the government something they want.
Which is, to put it mildly, not how politicians present those laws.
No, you misunderstand. You keep talking about things irrelevant to the key point.
Look at the political pressure the USA puts on ASML in the Netherlands to prevent them from selling certain products to China because those machines contain some American parts.
The question is explicitly when the reverse has happened, not some general info about European weapon exports or legislation.
Things like Wassenaar Arrangement and MTCR(that applies to a lot of hobby stuffs I'm interested in) are multinational and global. The US implementation is the most painful, but they're like non-Linux unices, sameish in concept and not like first-worlders get free passes.
(And these regs aren't complete nonsense; the technologies regulated by these are useful for guided munitions. It just so happens missile technologies are fully commoditized by now and also happens to be immensely useful for totally peaceful purposes too)
These, again, are export control restrictions at the point of sale and transfer, and the US follows them too. It's not the same thing as what we're discussing regarding the US's changing requirements regarding systems that embed its components.
Note that dual-use items (which Wassenaar regulates) and MTCR are not the same as the US's ITAR 'see through' rule which it uses to block third party sales of systems that contain even small numbers of US components.
For dual-use items, the EU's Directive 2021/821 governs things and broadly authorises exports to the United States through EU General Export Authorisations (EUGEAs) that don't require individual approval.[0]
In case you haven't noticed. Almost everything is supply limited in the economy. You cannot currently work and make stuff that gets sold at a supermarket. None of that stuff is American. Or European. Or Russian. Or Moroccan. Yes, maybe the luxury cheese section is local. Maybe the draft beer section. But they are large exceptions, nearly everywhere on the planet.
It's a complete miracle that anyone can have any job today.
So: "how is anyone going to afford robots if no one can work?" Well, exactly the same way as today.
Really? All you need to do to stop this is to stop governments from hiring robot "labor". Surely a democracy can make that decision, even when it means paying a little bit more, no?
Then people will say "you're doing this for the rich, and say it can't be done for the poor". Not even for long-term ill or old people living in poor areas.
True, except you're being way too easy on those other currencies. Currencies need to be issued by groups able to guarantee international trade, otherwise there's no point.
RMB - maybe, but nobody sane trusts China to not immediately change priorities on a dime
EUR - imho (much) less chance than RMB, but they're using a hack: of EUR is a massive entity and internally there's no choice. Literally not allowed (due to tax reasons) (exceptions of course made for favored entities) (I feel that those favored entities exist, and how big they are, should be a huge red flag for anyone considering using EUR)
JPY - can't project force ... and doesn't even try
AUD - no
CAD - no
SGD - no
I don't understand why you're not listing GBP, as they have at least at some point done this. Of course they were a worse steward of international trade than the worst point of the US. Also, you consider AUD, but not CHF?
So what choice is there, really? This is really a way to try to push the US to do more, for less "exorbitant privilege" (especially EUR). Of course, a great many people are very interested in doing just that. It strikes me as an extremely dangerous game to play. Yes, the odds of winning are good, but if you lose, you lose everything.
I was going by foreign currency reserves, which feature CAD and AUD in much greater quantities than CHF. Also I swapped in SGD for GBP, whoops.
Global reserves continue to hold USD in greater quantities than anything else. A movement away from the USD still means a relative loss of faith in the US. If there's nobody who can guarantee trade then you still need to hold reserves, right? You just have to hold a broad and shallow pool rather than going deep on one currency.
Pretty confident it’s going to be EUR, note how they dealt with Trump tariff’s shenanigans. Took it slowly, and decidedly, sure let the countries say words and what not, but at the end of the day it’s decided by the EU. Just one persons opinion.
And you're not terrified that's the situation? The beef the US has with the EUR is simple: the US is what's defending Europe militarily (nuclear and non-nuclear. The Pentagon is the reason Ukraine hasn't been nuked yet, or more likely, that Kiyv didn't surrender because they didn't have nukes). That was never given freely. It was politically impossible to get governments to actually pay for that, so it was decided to trade in USD (this was before petrodollar), giving the US "exorbitant privilege" (which roughly translates to that the US gets to tax most of global trade at something like 2 to 4% and use that for themselves). That the US got that was not an accident, but a policy decision. The Euro takes that away, but of course, no European country is willing to either now start paying, or to defend itself. To say nothing of France, the Netherlands or Denmark defending remote EU territories like Greenland, ABC islands or Polynesia (which would require, for starters, militarily controlling supply lines to those territories).
Given the history of economic sanctions (what the EU is doing) ... of course people don't know that history, but the TLDR is that nearly always economic sanctions are a prelude to war. They don't just not work. In many cases they cause wars. WW1 was caused by economic sanctions (and the scale of EU economic sanctions is 100x bigger than what caused WW1), and often the economic sanctions on Germany after WW1 are generally thought to be the big reason for WW2. It makes sense from a game theory perspective: if a government, whose power is fundamentally based on force, lets economic sanctions convince them, they will be attacked by their own people. So they simply cannot give in, and historically that's what you indeed mostly see: when a country is targeted by economic sanctions, it's government usually decides to attack.
The EUR is imposing very large scale sanctions on ... essentially everyone. Russia and China most obviously of course, but sanctions are so widely used by the EU you can literally say it's being used against everyone from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, or geographically from Paraguay to North Korea. And why is the EU doing this? Exactly the reason Trump is doing it: sanctions are "power without needing parliament to approve the budget for anything".
The fear is: the historically most likely outcome of what the EU is doing, what EUR is being used for, is another very large scale war.
Because if I can do nothing and make you do it, you solve it for me, for free. They'll make some argument (like western nations having used up the energy (and paid for it), and want to make them pay for it again. For a lot of countries that, and nothing else, is the purpose of climate action). Now get to work, taxpayer!
Because for most countries (and certainly for the largest oil producer in the world, Russia), global warming saves greatly on winter fuel use and increases agricultural harvests AND allows them to keep their population happy (because nothing keeps populations calm like cheap fuel/energy). That is the net effect, today.
Because for a lot of countries that really are the beneficiaries of causing global warming, ie. the oil producer countries, Russia, Saudi Arabia, US, Venezuela, Norway, and many small ones Azerbeidjan, causing global warming (ie. selling fossil fuels) is often the only reason they have an economy (mostly all except the US). So they demand a LOT of money, for free, to stop it. And nobody will pay that.
The last argument even goes for countries that are not direct oil or coal producers, like India or China but it's effectively the same argument (China runs on coal, and the country works on exports. Without energy no exports, so their coal usage is still increasing. Ie. same argument as above, they only have an economy because they're causing global warming, just more indirectly than Saudi Arabia)
Because WW2 was won with oil, and so countries that either want to start a war ("or fear they'll be the target/victims of the next big war") want access to oil. This argument goes especially for China, who fear they'll be targeted/"victimized" when they attack half of Asia starting with Taiwan and to a lesser extent for India (who feel they'll be at war with Pakistan, and Bangladesh whether they want to or not, and maybe China too) and even for EU countries (ie. for the ones that matter, France and Germany)
Look up China's oil reserves. You'll be collecting your jaw from the floor, I promise.
Summary: because most governments care about various things ... and not at all about people, about you. Mostly governments not even about their own people and certainly not about the climate where you live. They have a million concerns, a lot of which require fossil fuels, and for the people that compose those governments, climate change just doesn't matter.
Plus, if they can just do nothing, you still have to solve global warming. So doing nothing, aside from being very profitable, is also a great tactic to get you to fix it.
Take the Tesla metal casting advance (single-press casting, or as Tesla calls is "Gigacasting"): it is mostly the result of investment, more specifically all other carmakers deciding they weren't willing to risk it, no matter how many papers said the simulations were correct. Tesla risked it, it worked exactly like the (mostly German made) theory and simulations said it was going to work, and now everyone and their mother (ie. even non-car companies) are using it. Result: Tesla has a patent on it, that nobody has licensed since they were working on it decades before the first Tesla engineer thought of it. The idea was literally available in CAD software before Tesla started to work on it (not that I want to claim there wasn't a LOT of design + validation + testing + integrating + ... work left to be done)
This principle is generally true for all Elon Musk companies, and most of their accomplishments/vision. SpaceX is not even close to the first to land a rocket, for example (that was McDonnel-Douglas). Nor were they the second, or the fifth. Oh and only one of the companies that attempted it before SpaceX needed 2 tries, all others succeeded immediately, or the company died, some succeeded, and the company still died. SpaceX, by contrast, needed 7 crashes before succeeding for the first time (one of their rockets never tried to land on account of blowing up during ascent, I'm counting that one), and 17 tries before they first tried to move it to production.
I'm not to say integrating everything, massively expanding the scope/scale of these applications, getting the investments, and getting it commercially operating isn't a gigantic accomplishment, but it is not inventing it at all.
Elon Musk's constant talk about inventing and "work from first principles" ... is therefore kind of total bullshit. He has never done that, and neither have his businesses.
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