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Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
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12 Feb, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Elon Musk has said multiple times that the new Tesla Roadster will have a "SpaceX option package" that uses compressed air thrusters to give faster acceleration and possibly tighter turning. Will this actually happen?
For what it's worth I think he's probably serious. It doesn't seem that hard to do and the kind of people who drop $200k on a sports car seem pretty likely to drop another $50k to shave a few more miliiseconds off their 0-60 time.
Or more importantly to be able to tell people at parties that their Tesla has the SpaceX option package.
Also it's probably good for Tesla's brand to have a car with a thruster option even if it's so expensive/impractical that hardly anyone actually buys it.

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Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
13 Feb
This is a really telling list. The most vocal Republican Trump critics in 2017-18 Senate were Flake and Corker, neither of whom ran again. Republican Senators seem to believe they'll pay an extremely high political price for opposing Trump, even now that he's out of office.
It's hard to imagine the Senate ever convicting a president in an impeachment case, no matter what he or she does. Political realities mean only a tiny fraction of the president's co-partisans will ever vote to convict, and opposition parties never get close to 2/3 majorities.
Which is a little bit terrifying because it means that presidents now have immense latitude to do whatever they want.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
12 Feb
Matt has a paywalled piece arguing that examination-based elite schools aren't actually better than regular schools. I found this interesting because it cuts strongly against my own intuitions. I think people might be misreading the studies on this. slowboring.com/p/the-misguide…
As Matt summarizes here, studies on the value of selective high schools compare the results of students who were just above the admissions cutoff to those who were just below, and finds little difference. Image
This seems like convincing evidence that going to a selective school isn't that valuable for a student at the margins of the admission criteria. But that's a different claim than saying the school isn't good for its average student.
Read 9 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
1 Feb
Here's a thread about short-selling. When someone sells a stock short, they borrow a share from someone else and immediately sell it. Then later they have to buy a share and return it to its owner. If the stock's price falls in between, the short seller makes a profit.
A key thing that a lot of people miss (including me until a few days ago) is that every act of short-selling also creates an additional long position. The guy the short borrowed the stock from still has a long position, and so does whoever you sold the share to.
So when you take a big short position on a stock you're effectively flooding the market with newly created shares. Expanding the supply of anything pushes down its price.
Read 17 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
29 Jan
It seems like people who think that a short squeeze is a magical way to take money from rich people aren't thinking things through all the way.
It's true that if you bid up the price of a heavily shorted stock, then some of the shorts will be forced to buy the stock at inflated prices. In a sense that's a transfer of wealth from shorts to longs. But that's not the end of the story.
The gains of people holding $300 GME stock are paper profits. They don't matter unless people can cash out. And if everyone starts trying to cash out the price will go back down to $30 or something. A lot of people won't actually get $300.
Read 6 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
28 Jan
It should be emphasized how low the stakes of the GME circus are. Only a tiny fraction of stocks and hedge funds are impacted. There is zero reason to think that reddit memes are going to become an important factor driving stock prices in general.
Josh is right that a lot of the retail investors who get involved in this are going to lose money. That's bad. But most investors aren't going to buy GME and they are unlikely to be affected at all.
A good rejoinder that some folks (notably @arpitrage) made to this is that the GME episode proves there's a reliable way for an online mob to blow up over-subscribed short positions. This might make traders more gun-shy about shorting stocks.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
24 Jan
Just finished listening to Matt Stoller's Goliath, a political and intellectual history of the anti-monopoly movement over the last ~100 years. It gave me a better understanding of the intellectual history of 20th Century anti-monopoly thinking.
In particular, Stoller draws a distinction I hadn't thought very much about previously: between liberals who favor leaving monopolies in place and regulating them strictly vs. those who oppose bigness as such.
As Stoller tells it, New Dealers erected a complicated legal system designed to tilt the playing field in favor of small companies.
Read 10 tweets

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