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Tesla CEO Elon Musk just admitted what we have been saying since he first made his grand promises about the companys Cybercab robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robot: His target to mass-produce these products was unrealistic, and now theyre crumbling faster than a Cybertruck’s accelerator pedal. On January 20, Musk said on X that early production of both products will be “agonizingly slow”a remarkable admission for a man who has spent the past year telling investors these moonshot projects would save his flailing car company. “For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely fast,” Musk wrote. This is the same man who promised that the Cybercab would launch in 2026 at a price “under $30,000,” revolutionizing urban transportation with fully autonomous vehicles that would cost riders just 20 cents per mile. And the same person who, at his Hollywood spectacle of an event in October 2024, claimed these scissor-doored wonders would transform parking lots into parks. It’s the same Musk who said Optimus would be working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025, with 5,000 units produced in 2026 and eventually 1 million per year within five years. But two sources in the Optimus supply chain claim that “Tesla had only procured enough parts to produce 1,200 Optimus units and had manufactured close to 1,000 before manufacturing halted (more on this later). As of now, there are no robots doing any meaningful work in Tesla factories; this week, Musk claimed they are “currently doing simple tasks.” We do know, from videos online, that they move at glacial speeds and can’t replace human workers in any way. [Image: Tesla] Fail after fail Let’s review the scoreboard of broken promises. Musk announced the Cybercab in 2024 at the We, Robot event, saying production would begin in 2026. Experts immediately called BS. “Tesla software is at least years behind where Waymo is,” Matthew Wansley, a professor at New York’s Cardozo School of Law, told Reuters at the time. Wansley was right to be skeptical. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving manages 71 miles between critical disengagementsmoments when a human has to grab controlcompared to Waymo’s 17,311 miles. And that gap hasn’t closed. Tesla still reportedly depends heavily on tele-operators to prevent fatal accidents. On December 7, 2025, Musk promised that unsupervised Cybercabs were going to start driving in Austin in three weeks. There are no reports confirming this that I could find, though there is word that those Cybercabs are still supervised as of January 23, albeit from a chase car. Optimus, meanwhile, has become the Fyre Festival of robotics. Musk claimed in April 2025 that “Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue, like it’s really bananas. It will be the biggest product ever.” He told investors the robot would “eventually dwarf” Tesla’s vehicle business and could unlock “massive new economic value.” Production of the robot froze completely last June and October. Overheating joints, limp wrists, and batteries that died before lunch forced Tesla to halt procurement after manufacturing only about 1,000 units at $60,000 eachunits that moved at less than half the speed of the humans they were supposed to replace. Its no wonder hes now warning that he was deeply wrong (and yet still managed to throw another empty promise that we are supposed to believe). This slow admission is just the latest chapter in Musk’s decade-long saga of vaporware. He has claimed Tesla would solve Full Self-Driving “this year” every year since 2014. Its 2026, and Musk is warning of “agonizingly slow” production instead of the revolution he promised. [Image: Tesla] Here’s a prediction The timing of Musk’s confession couldn’t be worse for Tesla. The company’s core business is collapsing. Much of Tesla’s $1.39 trillion valuation, according to Reuters, “hinges on investor expectations for its self-driving technology and humanoid robots, even as the company’s core revenue and profit continue to come from electric vehicle sales.” Translation: The stock is inflated on fantasies while the actual business falters. So here we are, watching Musk admit that his previous timeline was fiction while maintaining that production will “eventually end up being insanely fast.” Eventually. That word again. Tesla trades with the valuation of a tech revolutionary while delivering the results of a struggling automaker with stagnant design, obsolete technology, and a CEO more focused on serving popcorn with speeded-up robots at Hollywood diners than fixing his company’s hemorrhaging sales. I’m not Musk, and my crystal ball may be as broken as his, but here’s my prediction: These “agonizingly slow” production ramps will decrease revenue numbers, wear investors patience thin, and ultimately end in an agonizingly fast stock collapse.
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E-Commerce
Mascots are currently enjoying a renaissance. From McDonalds Grimace to the WNBAs Ellie the Elephant and Pop-Tarts Pop-Tart guy, companies everywhere are leaning on characters to represent their brand values and attract eyes on social media. Now the Trump administration is joining in with its own mascot. Its a literal lump of coal. The coal mascotnamed Coalieappears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Coalie officially debuted on January 22, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted him (it?) on his X account. In the post, which has now been viewed more than 37,000 times, Burgum shared an obviously AI-generated illustration of himself kneeling next to a grinning, bug-eyed piece of coal that’s decked out in a yellow coal miners helmet, vest, and boots. The caption, in part, read “Mine, Baby, Mine!” [Image: USDOI] A deeper exploration of OSMREs website shows that Coalie appears to be a genuine effort on the agencys part to explain its goals. And while it may not have been OSMREs intention, a poorly designed lump of coal is actually the perfect metaphor to represent the Trump administrations desperate attempt to revive the coal industry. The perfect mascot for Trumps energy agenda Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has been on a mission to prop up coal, despite both environmental and economic data pointing to a dwindling future for fossil fuels. Coals dominance has been declining for years, and for good reason: Burning coal is linked to air pollution that can cause asthma, brain damage, heart problems, and more. Its one of the worst offenders for greenhouse gas pollution, with environmental experts estimating that the world needs to completely phase out coal power by 2040 in order to meet the goals set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Further, multiple studies have found that coal is among the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it significantly less competitive than renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and natural gas. Nevertheless, last April Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, at the same time that his administration suspended a decades-old program to detect lung disease in coal miners. In September, the Department of Energy announced plans to spend more than half a billion dollars to prop up coal. [Image: OSMRE] Now enter Coalie: the mascot tasked with the gargantuan challenge of making Trumps coal bailout seem palatable. In a new post to OSMREs website titled 10 Things to Know About How OSMRE Supports Americas Energy Legacy and Communities, Coalie is pictured smiling and waving in multiple hastily assembled graphics. Hes serving as the cheerful mouthpiece for several dubious claims, including that OSMRE works with Indigenous peoples by consulting with tribal leadership through a government-to-government process (see the federal governments long-standing history of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition), and that OSMRE evaluates the potential environmental impact of federal actions and practices responsible stewardship of public lands and resources (there is no environmentally responsible way to harvest coal). In short, Coalie has been handed an impossible job. Ironically, if any mascot could succinctly su up the Trump administrations asinine insistence on a fossil fuel comeback, it would be a shoddily slapped together illustration of a lump of coal.
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E-Commerce
If youre an old-school writer like me, usually the words alone are all you need. But once in a while, you need something extra. Im referring to all the special symbols that dont appear on your keyboard. Maybe you need to mark something as copyrighted with a , or you want to rave about the 8 order of fish and chips on your recent trip to London. Perhaps youre a mathematician whos working with . Y qué pasa si necesitas escribir una pregunta en espaol? Instead of having to dig deep into your virtual keyboards corners or memorize ASCII character codes, theres a free website you can use to copy these symbols and more directly to your clipboard for easy anywhere-pastingno matter what kind of device youve got in front of you. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Your special character cheat sheet To look up all those extra symbols that arent on your keyboard, just head to Symbol.wtf. Symbol.wtf is a single-page website with a searchable list of special characters. It takes just a few seconds to find whatever symbol you need. Clicking a symbol copies it to your clipboard so you can paste it into any text fieldwith no sign-ups, ads, or usage limits. Symbol.wtf offers 195 commonly used characters, including punctuation, currency, accent letters, arrows, musical symbols, and even playing card suits. Symbol.wtf makes it swift and simple to find any symbol. The whole list is easy enough to scroll through, but theres also a search bar and a list of filtering options at the top. The hardest part of using it is remembering the Symbol.wtf URL, but I just think to myself What the f was that symbol site again? and that usually jogs my memory well enough. What about emoji? The characters you find on Symbol.wtf are not emoji, which are defined separately under the Unicode standard. If youre typing on a phone, your keyboard almost certainly has an emoji button for looking up these symbols. What if youre not on your phone, though? You could bring up your computers emoji picker by pressing Win + . (on Windows), Fn/ + E (on a Mac), or Search + Shift + Space (on a Chromebook). But if that fails for whatever reason, you could just head to Unicode.party. Much like Symbol.wtf, its a searchable list of symbolswhich you can click to copy to your clipboard. Theres a skin tone selector at the top, and the search results are pretty much instantaneous. Unicode Party puts every emoji imaginable at your fingertips in an easily searchable list. Just dont let any young folks know youre looking up your emoji this way, because you know how theyll respond. Symbol.wtf and Unicode.party both work in any web browser. Theyre free to use with no ads or usage limits. No sign-up is required, and neither site does any tracking of your usage. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Category:
E-Commerce
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