Matthew Garrett’s Employer, Aurora Innovation, Continues to Burn Down Through Debt and Lack of Marketable Products.

Matthew Garrett’s Employer, Aurora Innovation (blogged about previously), Continues to Burn Down Through Debt and Lack of Marketable Products.

Aurora is facing several new difficulties including proposed laws against autonomous semi-trucks even in their home state of California.

(These trucks would be a major safety hazard and a plot to make hundreds of thousands of Americans unemployed as human drivers are better at avoiding serious accidents.)

“These vehicles that they’re pushing are not legally able to be driven on our roads because they have not been proven to be safe. So it’s convenient to point at humans when (AV trucks) don’t have a track record yet,” Di Bene said.

Legislators want more time to study the technology’s safety. Assembly member Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), the head of the Assembly’s transportation committee, said the state Department of Motor Vehicles has so badly mishandled the driverless car industry – citing reports of robotaxis causing car jams, blocking emergency vehicles and fleeing from police – that she doesn’t want to make the same mistakes with big rigs this time around.

“The DMV has not done a great job at regulating this space,” Friedman said.

The Department of Motor Vehicles is tasked with issuing permits to all types of AVs, assuming the vehicles adhere to regulations. But legislators want to halt the DMV’s ability to grant those permits to long-haul trucks because of how disappointed they’ve been with the DMV’s deployment of driverless cars in the state.

-The Almanac (Samantha Stevens / Mountain View Voice)

Another problem the company faces is that each year it does business, it loses more money than the previous year. 2022 was their worst loss report yet, according to Yahoo Finance, at least for a whole year.

It’s when you get into the latest quarters that things really start looking horrific. $2.37 million in revenue in the latest quarter vs. $293.82 million in NEGATIVE earnings. And the two quarters before that were as bad or worse.

However, they have been raising money by selling off shares to offload their losses into things like pension and retirement plans that scoop up risky and toxic investments and make it someone else’s problem.

This would not be their ideal funding source except that at the interest rates the United States Federal Reserve is pushing up, it’s hard to get cheap money. It’s dried up, so now they resort to “finding a bigger fool”, or more likely, corrupt officials managing retirement funds.

For example, CalPERS is notoriously corrupt and sank a bunch of money into Tesla without asking anyone who is going to have to retire from the California government what THEY thought about it.

Reading the company financial statements, it’s hilarious how they simply push their “big product” further back and burn the furniture to stay warm while they speak of “adding length to our runway”.

They need that “longer runway” so they can pay Matthew Garrett to harass and annoy TechRights in various ways.

It’s hard for me to even imagine how much actual work they’re getting out of him seeing as how he’s become so devoted to trolling our chat rooms.

One would think that in an era of Pointy Haired Bosses installing keylogging spyware on employee computers to make sure they work, they would have noticed.

Then again, they count things like replying to dumb emails and generating PowerPoints “productive” and a “skill”. It’s not having a product that matters, it’s having a PowerPoint with all sorts of nice bars and graphs and pie charts.

Also, moving the mouse a lot is productive too. Maybe Matt GULAG is just moving his mouse and typing so it will count harassing us as productivity? It couldn’t possibly be that. Right?

I feel like spyware from your boss that measures mouse movement and keystrokes could be abused much like the system for counting “e-royalties” at Epinions dot com during the dotcom bubble.

You could make a tidy sum by writing crap articles and then making a browser plug-in that repeatedly cleared the cookies and hammered on the reload button.

There were so many things wrong at that place, but the articles blaming “reading circles” were way off the mark.

California is a hellhole where investors go to die.

Captive investors. People who thought they’d retire and their portfolio was full of crap.

Worker: “Where is my retirement money?”

Fund Manager and Government: “POCKET SAND!”

(Turns out you were fully vested in a homophobe from Ireland.)

Facebook is dying as the tech bubble bursts.

Facebook is collapsing right in front of us.

All you have to do is look at their stock price.

It’s “worth” less than 25% of what it was 13 months ago, even before you adjust for the fact that the money lost another 30% this year under Biden and (locally worse) Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Where you have to pay for three dozen eggs at 2020 prices to get only a dozen and you have to pay for two pounds of butter to get a pound, and you have to pay for 1.2 months worth of rent to get a month.

This is Illinois and this is America under the Democratic Party.

Phoronix is talking about Facebook’s code contributions to the BtrFS file system for Linux, which I admit I use personally.

Since it’s all under the GNU GPL, it will survive the collapse of the Second Tech Bubble, when Facebook is long gone. As did much Free and Open Source Software the last time, much of which is still developed and in use today.

But what will be gone when Facebook itself collapses?

Cat pictures?

Terror content that they don’t see anything wrong with (because there’s no human moderators and they try to cover it up with software that detects words)?

Anti-vaxxers? People denying that we had an election and they lost?

They don’t care what kind of an open sewer they’re running as long as people engage with advertising, but in Biden/Pritzker’s economy, ad revenue is worth very little right now and many of the ad firms themselves are shutting down and having 100% layoffs.

Meanwhile, the company is mostly being mocked for spending down all of their assets on something that looks like characters in a Nintendo 64 game where nobody has any legs, on a $600 VR headset.

Facebook truly is burning while Zuckerberg fiddles. This is priceless. I shall watch with great amusement and then laugh in “I still use IRC and lost pretty much nothing.”.

There’s nothing particularly unique about what’s happening to Facebook (“Fakebook”) in the economy of the Bay Area. Layoffs Tracker shows mostly what’s unfolding in failed blue cities and states.

Yesterday, a “self-driving” car company based in Pennsylvania called Argo AI went under, and 2,000 people lost their jobs, as their clients took possession of the company’s “intellectual property”.

Self-driving cars are a pipe dream. Tesla is now under CRIMINAL investigation by the feds for advertising that their cars are “self-driving”. (NewsWaffle proxy. Original.)

I mean, it’s technically true that “self-driving” cars can mostly manage to stay in a lane, but you can’t trust them not to run people over and say they were a shopping bag or slam into the back of a parked police car in Florida, so you still, legally, have to be paying attention to the road and ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

I linked to the ARGO AI story in Techrights IRC yesterday, highlighting Matthew J. Garrett, joking “You’re next, Bubbles.”.

(Which is what Peter Venkman told the judge in Ghostbusters II while the ghosts were flying away with his court reporter.)

He didn’t reply as far as I know. I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know.

The Federal Reserve may be fixing to lose all credibility.

I saw a report yesterday that says that many investors feel that the Fed will crater and stop aggressively hiking interest rates in December. The Fed hasn’t commented, but I guess we won’t have to wait long to see.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that jacking up interest rates through the roof and causing immediate and rampant destruction is the best or only way to get hyperinflation under control, but it is what’s available considering that Congress won’t quit throwing money around and bailing out Zombie Corporations like Japan did in the 90s before it gave up because the government deficits were just too large and the population wouldn’t stand for it anymore.

If true, this means that instead of just a Depression or just a hyperinflationary period, we’re going to get both as the Federal Reserve throws its hands into the air and gives up trying to deal with this using the tools it has available.

Matthew Garrett’s employer, Aurora, is nearly valueless and looking to be acquired by Microsoft.

Matthew Garrett’s employer, Aurora, is nearly valueless and looking to be acquired by Microsoft.

Matthew Garrett is the person who put Microsoft’s “Secure Boot” into GNU/Linux (which is designed to give Microsoft control over whether you can use a different OS on YOUR PC).

Almost like something from the Terran Empire Universe of Star Trek, the Free Software Foundation gave him an award for promoting Microsoft’s PC sabotage.

Garrett is a person who spends a lot of his free time essentially harassing Techrights, both in the IRC channel, and spouting what I feel is misleading information, outright lies, and negative propaganda about us on his Twitter account.

He works for a “self-driving” car company called Aurora Innovation, Inc.

We’re led to believe, according to Garrett, that he left Google (a stable company that makes money) to work at Aurora of his own volition.

Today I learned that Aurora is in deep shit.

This is what happened to their stock this year. Down nearly 80%.

I’d have to say it’s probably due to the recession and the rising interest rates at the Fed that investors are not in the mood to keep throwing money at this. Money that is getting a lot more expensive to borrow.

I noticed this when I came across a Bloomberg article about the bottom falling out of the self-driving car bubble.

“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” […] Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year and is now worth less than $3 billion. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company.

-Bloomberg Article

When I went to look up the share price to take a picture, the related news had the following, which appears to corroborate the Bloomberg story about the leaked memo, and says that Aurora is seeking a takeover from “Microsoft or Apple”.

Report: Aurora ponders possible sale to Microsoft or Apple amid other options

A few months ago, I laughed and called self-driving cars a pipe dream.

I also said anyone working in this field should be keeping their résumé updated because nobody wants it and it doesn’t actually work.

Earlier in the Bloomberg story, it spoke of a woman in San Francisco that had to go to CBS news because Google’s Waymo cars kept breaking the law and using her driveway as a turnaround dozens of times a day.

Other “self-driving” car companies have had to pay out money for running over pedestrians and saying the software thought they were a shopping bag, and in many cases the owner of the car is held liable for doing stupid things like riding in the back seat while the Tesla runs into a parked police car.

There’s other examples, but the technology just obviously isn’t going anywhere soon.