The debt of Aurora Innovation [sic] grew eightfold in a couple of years
atthew 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.) ⬆