Will Tesla Succeed?

[hunter]

24. The most adaptable electronic device I've ever owned is a $35 Raspberry Pi.

https://www.raspberrypi.org

It emulates my old eight and sixteen bit computers very well.

My desktop computer and flip phone were literally other people's e-waste and my laptop is a base model chromebook.

I'm a Linux guy.

Our local high schools give chromebooks to students who don't have better, and most of the teachers love their chromebooks. Education software is very good and kids now "hand in" most of their work electronically.

In my daily experiences iPhones are not ordinary. My level of cell phone "ordinary" is a typical no-contract "smart" phone that costs $40 with plans as low as $7 a month.

The State of California offers Lifeline rates for either landlines or cell phones. I don't qualify for that but many people do.

Those are the communities I live in; internet computer hackers and underpaid and underappreciated working class people.

I suppose I could afford something made by Apple but nothing they make has ever appealed to me.

If somebody ever gave me a Tesla or an iPhone I'd give it away as fast as I could to someone who'd appreciate it, possibly because I'm as prone to tinkering and violating warranties as I am to misplacing things, or hanging out in rougher places where things get stolen.

That's not to say I don't have any habits of affluence. My wife and I eat very well, our dogs eat very well, and we appreciate good coffee wine, and beer; not the overly expensive sorts, but not regularly Bud or Coors Light either.

I don't suppose there's anything wrong about some forms of elitism so long as you remember that under slightly different circumstances the homeless person on the corner or the working person with a forty dollar phone could be you, and act accordingly. And rich or poor, measuring one's own self worth by one's possessions is always a bad idea.

Yep, I recognize I can be an obnoxious Linux evangelist and pedantic moralist...