• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Your article says:

    As part of a compensation package Tesla finalized in 2018, Mr. Musk received options to buy 304 million shares that are now worth more than $50 billion. While he has met the goals needed to receive those options, Mr. Musk does not appear to have converted them into shares of Tesla. If he had, he would be barred from selling them for five years.

    What are options? Does this mean he didn’t receive this compensation yet, and now he simply won’t receive it, assuming the company doesn’t appeal or move states like the article mentions? It says he had the option to buy 304 million shares - I assume he can buy them at a deep, deep discount compared to their current price?



  • Expanding a bit more on what everyone else says: This strategy works, as long as you never lose n times in a row, where n is the number of bets it takes to bet ALL of the money you currently have.

    So the more money you bring with you, the longer you can make this strategy work - but the more devastating it’ll be once you inevitably lose.

    If you go with a doubling strategy instead of a tripling strategy, that means you have to lose floor(log₂(x+1)) times to realize an unrecoverable loss (you don’t have enough to make your next bet), or one more than that to lose absolutely everything. With your tripling strategy the calculation is floor(log₃(2*x+1)). x is the amount of money you had after the last “reset”.

    So if you go to the casino with $100,000, your strategy will work as long as you don’t lose 11 times in a row - once you do, you’ve suffered your devastating unrecoverable loss. Every time your money triples you can last one more loss. Tripling your money is very difficult with this strategy, as most of the time when you win, it’s a small amount relative to what you’re holding - you need large losing streaks to make a real difference, and large losing streaks make reaching the threshold of an unrecoverable loss easier, obviously.

    Others have said it already, but - you can use this to win in the short term if you have a lot of money and only want to win a little bit more. If you use this strategy in the long term you will lose everything.




  • Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

    The leak got a lot worse pretty suddenly - so it’s now leaking something like a few gallons an hour I’d guess (Though water is the one utility we don’t pay for here, so it’s annoying but not world-endingly urgent). So I decided it was time to get around to this - but when I got to the point in the images, which is right after the escutcheon you mentioned, I was no longer certain how to proceed.

    Based on the images, is this still a relatively simple job that I can do with one or two trips to Home Depot? I don’t really know what I’m looking at here - do I grab the white part with pliers and yank it out (Or twist if it’s threaded)? If so, is the rest of your advice still relevant - take the seals to Home Depot and look for as close a match as I can, since I looked and looked and couldn’t find a manufacturer’s name?

    As of right now I’ve re-assembled it and turned the water back on. I did get a look at the pipes at least and they seem to be copper. There’s drywall behind the pipes that I would absolutely be willing to let a plumber tear into to avoid tile work. If I did end up calling a plumber, and nothing went wrong, do you happen to know the general ballpark of what it may cost?

    Also, sorry. I know I’m asking for a lot of information and advice here. If you’re not up for another round of free advice I’d totally get it.

    I went ahead despite the uncertainty and it all seems to have worked out. Instead of finding replacement seals I replaced the entire cartridge - I was able to find what was a pretty-much-exact match. The only problem I had is the set screw for the escutcheon wouldn’t keep it tight anymore - but I found another that worked. The old cartridge was so loose that I thought the new one was subtly the wrong size when it offered a large amount of resistance going in - because the old one would slide in and out with no resistance whatsoever.

    Thanks for the help - your comments in this thread more than any other went above and beyond.


  • For sure it is, and I noted it as one of many steps that needs to be taken earlier in this comment chain. Not to mention that doing this is a no-brainer even without the context of climate change. The problem with relying on them as your only strategy for carbon sequestration is that once the forests are mature, they start being basically carbon neutral - we need to pull out way more than even full reforestation could ever hope to do.

    Farming trees could even work for large scale long term carbon capture, if you do something like turn them into coal and re-fill and re-seal old mines with it in mass. I suspect we’ll be able to do much better with technological solutions though.





  • I think it’s more nuanced than that.

    Some people are saying it’s bad because they’re using it to “produce more oil” - and that I don’t buy. Sure, they’re directly pumping oil with the CO₂ they inject - but this is oil they’d extract either way, with or without direct air capture. In a strict comparison between the two situations, doing it with direct air capture is less bad than doing it without.

    The actual harm that could come from it is mentioned in the article - that they want to use this to justify pumping for longer than they would otherwise. It was actually a bit shocking to see how brazen and open the oil company representative was about that. If they succeed in using this to justify continued pumping, then that’s definitely bad. I don’t think the politics will work out in their favor though, especially not 10 or 20 years from now.

    But in the long-term I still see this as an absolute win. Above all else, what this technology needs to do is exist and be effective. For that it needs to be invested in heavily, and built and tested and run even when it’s ineffective and unprofitable. We aren’t anywhere near the stage where we have the technological capability to actually do direct air capture on a scale that matters globally. Helping us get to that point, to me, makes this move still a net positive. A pragmatic good.


  • I both agree and disagree with this. If it can be made profitable, then all the better - because then economics and policy can combine to bring it about faster than either would alone. But if it can’t be made profitable then I agree absolutely that it should be done anyways with tax revenue.

    Long-term it’s definitely not good to use it as an excuse to pollute more - these won’t do an ounce of good if they only exist to offset emissions we still produce. In the short term though, allowing carbon capture to act as an offset for emissions could still be a net long-term positive, in that it would shift the economics more in its favor - allowing faster development and a wider buildout. This assumes that the industries that use it in this fashion do eventually decarbonize anyways - which you could perhaps guarantee by having carbon capture stop counting as offsets at some designated future date.

    I think the pragmatic solution is to introduce yearly shrinking carbon caps, and allow them to be offset with carbon capture for a limited time - say, 10 or 15 years after the “net zero carbon” goal date. After that it’s all about building up that net negative number.