Earnings week seems to arrive just a little bit sooner every fall — or it could just be the nonstop cheering from Big Tech who had a banner quarter thanks to the COVID quarantine turning many of us into a captive audience for their products and services. Here are some headlines from the week that was.
What, you thought your child was just going to indoctrinate themselves to life within the surveillance state? For free? In this economy? Not a chance. Not when Jeff Bezos can ding you for a trio of Benjamins on the way out.
Speaking of Jeff Bezos getting even more wealthy, Amazon made an extra $26 billion in sales during Q3 2020 thanks to our shelter in place rules and everybody embracing delivery for, well, everything.
Oh the woes of Tesla ownership. First the company offered a $2,500 infotainment system upgrade that gave customers access to YouTube, Netflix, Hulu — none of which should be watched while operating a motor vehicle mind you, unless you spring for the $10,000 FSD mode (though it’s being called is a “distant second” to GMC’s SuperCruise) — but had to ditch the existing AM, FM and Sirius functions. Now the company is offering to restore the FM and Sirius capabilities that used to be there with the addition of a new tuner and antenna for the low, low discount price of $500.
Netflix is yet again getting a little more expensive. The company announced last week that its standard plan will now cost $14, a dollar increase, and its premium plan will rise two dollars to $18 a month. I’m old enough to remember when cord cutting actually saved people money.
Under Armour is looking to shed some weight, namely its MyFitnessPal and Endomondo apps. The former is being put up for sale with a $345 million price tag, the latter is simply being shut down, all so that the company can achieve a greater degree of “investment flexibility.”
You can become an expert in just about anything if you read enough books on the subject. If you don't believe me, ask Elon Musk. Whenever anyone asks him how he learned to build space-traveling rockets, this is his three word answer: "I read books."
Musk is no rocket scientist, at least not by training. He has a bachelor's degree in economics and another one in physics, and although he got into Stanford's Ph.D. program in energy physics/material science, he dropped out after two days to launch Zip2, a city guide software company that the founders sold to Compaq for $307 million. A few years later he co-founded the company that would become PayPal, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion.
It was at this point, flush with internet millions, that Musk began setting his sights on colonizing Mars. He attempted to buy rockets from the Russians, but they demanded a price even an internet millionaire couldn't afford, and generally refused to take him seriously, according to a profile in Esquire. So Musk told aerospace consultant Jim Cantrell who was working with him that they would build the rockets themselves.
He showed Cantrell his plans, and Cantrell thought, "I'll be damned -- that's why he's been borrowing all my books." Musk had been ingesting Cantrell's textbooks on rocket-building and had transformed himself into an expert. "He knew everything," Cantrell told Esquire. "He'd been planning to build a rocket all along." And that's how SpaceX was born.
It works even if you're not Elon Musk.
"All right," you might argue, "Musk learned to build rockets by reading books. But he's a genius. Ordinary mortals can't do this." But they can, at least they with houses, if not rockets. I know, because my father-in-law, an otherwise unremarkable man who spent most of his adult life working for the Postal Service, did just that.
I never met him; he died a few years before my husband Bill and I got together. But Bill remembers how his father (also named Bill) rebuilt the family home piece by piece over the years, reconfiguring it as needed. He brought in fill and raised and leveled the yard. He built on new rooms and added a wheelchair ramp for his granddaughter. When he wasn't rebuilding his own house, he was helping the neighbors renovate theirs. He could have had a successful contracting business if he'd been willing to give up the steady paycheck of a civil servant. Bill senior never took a course -- he just read books about whatever he wanted to do, and then he went and did it.
Want to read your way to success yourself? Begin with a growth mindset -- the belief that your abilities are not fixed in stone but can change over time, and that you can expand and change them if you're willing to put in the effort. It works for Musk: Someone with a bachelor's degree in economics and physics who believes he can learn to build his own rockets has a growth mindset, and then some. Next, if you can, do what Musk did when he hooked up with Cantrell. Find one or more mentors who can advise you and help guide your learning. At the very least, your mentor can help you figure out which books to read to build greater expertise more quickly.
And finally, put that expertise to the test. Dan Coyle, who's written several bestselling books about what makes some individuals, and some teams, more successful than others, recommends spending 30 percent of your time learning and 70 percent testing your newfound knowledge. So, to cement your expertise, test your own knowledge, preferably by trying things out in the real world.
That's what Musk did when he began building rockets, several of which crashed or went off-course before he and his team figured out how to fly them reliably. This summer, NASA trusted SpaceX rockets to send astronauts into space from the U.S. for the first time in nine years. It's a huge achievement, and it all began with a big stack of borrowed textbooks.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta is already making some significant (and arguably needed) strides forward. Electreksays the automaker has rolled out an update that, according to Elon Musk, should reduce the need for human intervention by about a third. He didn’t elaborate on what led to the improvements besides more real-world use, but that’s still a huge leap for an initial update.
You can expect more Full Self-Driving updates every five to ten days, Musk added. He further acknowledged that the system would never be perfect, but hoped the likelihood of an error would eventually dip “far lower” than what you’d expect from a human.
These kinds of rapid improvements may well be necessary. Tesla still hopes to make the FSD beta widely accessible by the end of 2020, and that might only happen when the system is reliable enough that most drivers will feel comfortable using it.
Within a few days, internet sleuths had taken a more careful look at the videos SSC NA provided. They determined that when you line them up with video taken by the existing record holder (Koenigsegg’s Agera RS) setting a top speed on the same roadway, the Tuatara appears to be going slower between several landmarks. They also checked the math on the known distances of the highway, and estimated what was possible based on the car’s gearing, and called into question whether the information provided was accurate.
Since then, SSC NA has said the wrong video may have come out, but stood by tis numbers, and said the record was certified using Dewetron GPS equipment. However Dewetron said it could not certify the results, and did not have the raw data, as Autoblog’s explainer breaks down in full.
Now, early on Saturday morning, SSC NA founder and CEO Jerod Shelby posted a video acknowledging the record-setting run as “tainted,” and said he dropped the ball on properly packaging the announcement in a way that could be verified and indisputable. While he didn’t break down details of what did or did not happen on October 10th, he promised that “in the near future” SSC North America will do the top speed run again, complete with witnesses and additional support from GPS companies to verify the data. He also invited Shmee150, Misha Charoudin and Robert Mitchell — some of the YouTubers who posted videos digging into the data — to come see SSC NA next attempt in person, and thanked everyone who looked into the facts of the run.
Tesla cars are now smarter about recognizing street signs. Electrekreports that the automaker is pushing a software update that lets Autopilot detect speed limit signs using the EV’s cameras. Your car should stick to the limit more accurately than it did before, when it was relying solely on GPS data. You shouldn’t risk a ticket just because your car sped up prematurely.
You should also have fewer embarrassing moments at intersections. There’s now a chime that sounds when the traffic light you’re waiting for turns green. If there’s a car in front of you, the chime will wait until that vehicle moves forward It’s still up to you to confirm your intention and resume semi-autonomous driving, but that beats listening to honking horns from people waiting behind you.
As with most Tesla updates, it could take a few weeks before the new features reach your car. Still, it’s a significant update. It promises a smoother Autopilot experience, of course, but it also inches Tesla slightly closer to its dreams of full self-driving — your car won’t have to rely quite so much on pre-supplied data to navigate.
Tesla has appeared in a JD Power Initial Quality Study for the first time, and it doesn’t look good for the electric car maker — although the story is more complex than it sounds. JD Power ranked Tesla last out of 32 brands operating in the US, with 250 problems per 100 vehicles. The top brands, Dodge and Kia, had ‘just’ 136 problems. Tesla wasn’t officially participating in the study as it doesn’t grant permission to survey owners in 15 states where it’s required, but JD Power collected enough surveys (about 1,250) from other states to produce a score.
That’s not a sterling result, but the numbers don’t say everything. JD Power automotive president Doug Betts told CNBC that Tesla’s issues were mostly related to production-related issues like body panel gaps, paint flaws and squeaks. For contrast, nearly a quarter of all automakers’ problems stemmed from infotainment issues like touchscreens, phone connectivity and built-in navigation. Tesla vehicles may have more issues, then, but they’re less likely to be ones that affect the basic functionality of the car.
We’ve asked Tesla for comment.
These findings aren’t completely surprising. Tesla has been scrambling to boost production and make cars like the Model 3 profitable, and there have long been concerns that refinement wasn’t the highest priority. It’s not uncommon to read new owners’ stories of panel gaps and other small but irksome issues, particularly for earlier production runs of a given EV. It’s not certain how Tesla will respond to the study, but this could spur on critics who want the company to focus less on car delivery numbers and more on the quality of the cars that reach customers.
Tesla doesn’t simply make automobiles. The organization also engineers, manufactures and installs solar panels -- both the traditional type and modules that appear like everyday roof tiles. And while the latter looks like it can be a course to more mainstream adoption of renewable electricity, the previous remains the cross-to solution for the solar enterprise. Tesla has updated its panels to be about 10 percentage greater green, and has additionally lowered its fees. for the reason that the sizes and designs of the panels are nevertheless exactly the identical, that’s a pretty wonderful improvement.
in keeping with Electrek, Tesla rated its medium-sized panel at 7.56 kW earlier than the update, but it’s now indexed as eight.sixteen kW. The fee has additionally dropped from $19,500 (earlier than federal incentives) to $16,000. That bump in performance, blended with an over 17 percentage charge drop, ought to persuade a respectable amount of homeowners to make the jump to solar electricity.
not everything has been dandy for Tesla’s solar department, although. a few sun panels have brought about fires -- one at a Walmart keep and every other at an Amazon warehouse. The company additionally lately canceled years-lengthy preorders for its sun roof tiles. optimistically those greater efficient panels don’t have any foremost troubles.
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