It’s kinda hard to call that a threat. It’s more accurate to say it’s an accusation that the guy is a terrorist.

I think arguments about who has a claim aren’t the real question here. Recency vs historic rights to a region aren’t enough and really never have been. The whole argument comes down to who has the power to hold the region and any arguments to the contrary are naive. Israel has the power, Palestinian’s didn’t want to play ball, so Israel took the ball home. A large part of Israel being able to hold the region has come down to geopolitics and capitalism. A lot of companies have headquarters and branches in Israel which makes a lot of money. Hamas, like the Taliban, are not expected to be good for big business. On top of that, Israel is friendly and cooperative with western allies and is one of the few such in the region. The west is not going to trade a friendly but harshly conservative Israel for an unfriendly and even more conservative Hamas.

You can talk all day about who deserves what, who has rights to what, and what the moral thing to do is. At the end of the day the world is going to follow the Golden Rule, “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

It’s kinda hard to call that a threat. It’s more accurate to say it’s an accusation that the guy is a terrorist.

Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn’t profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they’ve been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.

In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.

As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn’t be as proportionally profitable.

Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon’s antics hurting sales. Elon’s antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don’t want them anymore because they don’t want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).

Elon’s antics don’t stop there, he’s also hurt the investor’s opinion as well. A big reason Tesla’s stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don’t like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he’ll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.

Hey, I’m not saying this technology doesn’t have a use, and maybe if it’s stupidly expensive it will be heavily subsidized. The point I’m making is that it “likely” isn’t the solution to world wide water scarcity.

Another user commented that desalination is a grift, it’s not, the market forces just aren’t there yet to push its large scale implementation world wide. However, the idea that an upcoming technology may theoretically scale up and be the same economic scale is historically unlikely.

Historically the trajectory of this sort of technology is that it will define technology for the next 20 years (Nobel Peace Prize or more), or it will be bought up and buried by a big corporation (goodwill isn’t typically good for capitalism), or it won’t scale up as predicted and will be a major nothing burger.

It’s complicated, typically US rates aren’t a flat $/gallon. Most have flat fixed costs (meter fee, availability fees, etc) and then the actual volumetric rate charge is tacked on top of that. In my city the rate is additionally tiered, so the more water you use the more those later gallons cost. Most residential users fall into Tier 1 though, up to 4 CCF (Centicubic Foot or 748 gallons) per month, which is billed at $1.89 per CCF or $0.002526 per gallon.

So it’s hard to use the rates alone as there are additionally fixed rate costs (around $10 a month) and other usage is billed differently (commercial and industrial have higher flat rates as well as higher flat volumetric rate). The result is that commercial and industrial users pay higher rates than residential.

Luckily, my city also publishes raw statistics which indicates that, all things averaged together, the water costs around $0.04 per gallon.

But furthers the point I’m making. If your water costs more than mine then the potential price of this machine is even higher and the base price is already expensive as is. If this was truly a cheap and affordable alternative for people’s in need then it likely would have made that price point a major point of the article.

Just because it’s cheaper than an alternative doesn’t make it affordable.

EDIT: Also the article says

“the team estimates that the overall cost of running the system would be cheaper than what it costs to produce tap water in the United States.”

Great point, sorry for the error!

While this is a cool development I would recommend tempering expectations. The cost of tap water is exceptionally cheap and the claims made here likely take these estimates to the extremes. The economics of scale likely don’t match up.

For example, tap water in my city costs ~$0.04 per gallon, at 5 liters per hour, 0.264 gallons per liter, 24 hours per day, for 5 years is $2,312. So saying they can make it for less than the cost of tap water doesn’t mean it’s affordable.

EDIT: Forgot to convert from liters to gallons

That’s probably the best description of the situation anyone could make. Israel is in a tough spot where they are custodians of a state that from ~1930 till ~2015 has had the stated goal of destroying Israel. It’s only in very recent years that Palestinian sentiment has even toyed with coexisting. Outside of the situation the neighboring states still hold that sentiment and have tried to destroy Israel multiple times since ~1940. It also doesn’t help that the pseudo-government of Palestine are current and former terrorists.

All that said Israel’s government is very authoritarian and has not handled the custodianship adequately and the people of Israel seem to simply be ignoring the situation.

I wish people would talk about this, but Elon really isn’t that smart and he certainly isn’t a genius. I learned a long time ago that smart is relative and really shouldn’t be foisted onto people. Elon has a BA in Physics from a school known for business degrees. He also got a BS in Business, but UPenn and Wharton are known more for how hard it is to get in than how hard the classes are.

The website CollegeVine says UPenn is known as the “Social Ivy” and “UPenn’s admissions is highly-selective, but students applying to the UPenn College of Arts & Science (CAS) will find it less academically competitive than schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (although exceptional academics are still a must).”

By the way, he started college in 1990, transfered to UPenn in 1992, and states he graduated in 1995, but UPenn refutes that saying he graduated in 1997. This is a school where 96% of those who are accepted graduate within 150% of the degree time (4 year degree within 6 years) (https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/edu/215062/university-of-pennsylvania/graduation/).

Musk of course says he completed the courses in 1995, but there was some sort of mixup with an English and History credit that delayed the degree by 2 years.