Astral Codex Ten

Ford

9 min read

Ford

Article

Ford is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between March 25, 2021 and April 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Distribution 1 represents car companies in your region. Again, it has low variance, so they’re all pretty similar. Ford vs. GM”; “If Ford refuses to sell cars to black people”; “family’s purchase of a Ford tractor”. It most often appears alongside Tesla, America, China.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: March 25, 2021
  • Last seen: April 08, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship
March 25, 2021 · Original source
Okay, now suppose that Distribution 1 represents car companies in your region. Again, it has low variance, so they're all pretty similar. Ford vs. GM, something like that.
What about Distribution 2? Now Point B is Tesla, making revolutionary new environmentally-friendly cars. In fact, let's say it's some super-Tesla that's even better than the real Tesla, plus their cars are affordable even for the poorest people. Point A is Yugo (or if you know a more modern example of a terrible car company, use that). Now which distribution would you rather have?
Diversity libertarianism is usually in favor of companies being allowed to do a wide range of things, because it ensures everyone will be well-served. If you assume an arbitrarily large number of uncorrelated companies, then whatever the thing you want is, there's at least one existing or easy-to-start company doing it. If Ford refuses to sell cars to black people, Toyota should see a profit opportunity and step in. If both Ford and Toyota ban blacks at the same time, some upstart like Tesla should step in. If Ford, Toyota, and Tesla all do it, some guy with a wrench who's always dreamed of making cars in his garage should notice a billion-dollar business opportunity lying on the ground, get seed capital from equally greedy investors, and solve the problem.
Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
Borlaug’s section, in contrast, begins not in the rarefied world of middle-class New York, but on the unforgiving prairie of Saude, Iowa, which his poor Norwegian immigrant family tries to farm. He comes of age at roughly the same time as Vogt, but his early life may as well be mid-1800s Little House on the Prairie: Borlaug and his siblings literally have to walk three miles in the snow to get to their one-room schoolhouse. Fortunately, he is freed from a life of subsistence farming and given the chance to go to high school and college by his family’s purchase of a Ford tractor, which nicely sets up his lifelong optimism about the ability of technology to improve lives. While attending college in Minneapolis at the height of the Great Depression, Borlaug sees a crowd of striking dairy farmers being beaten by police and National Guardsmen for protesting the drop in the price of milk by surrounding a scab-driven milk truck. "Not all of the shouting men were farmers, Borlaug realized," Mann writes. "Some of them were just hungry – famished men, women, and children, almost maddened by want." Where Vogt might have curled his lip in distaste and gone home to write a pamphlet about this scene as an illustration of humanity’s taxing the earth’s carrying capacity and reaping the consequences, for Borlaug this was the catalyst for homing in on solving the problem of hunger. Mann: "Something must be done, he thought. Those famished people were ready to tear apart the world, and who could blame them? Here began, or so he said afterward, the work that would make him the original Wizard."
Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
June 04, 2021 · Original source
1. Barefoot. Unable even to afford shoes, they must walk everywhere they go. Income $1 per day. One billion people are at Level 1.
Flying cars didn’t have the same issues; they were being developed privately. But regulation doomed them. Harold Pitcairn was almost successful in developing a flying car, but then in World War II the government nationalized his helicopter patents (they promised to give them back after the war, but reneged) and he spent the rest of his life in court. He won, 17 years after his death. Bruce Hallock had a promising design, but he sold a plane to a missionary group in Peru and was arrested as an “arms trafficker”. Robert Fulton had a successful prototype, “however, Fulton’s financial backers had become discouraged with the seemingly endless expense of meeting government production standards, and they withdrew their support.” Molt Taylor “was actually in serious negotiations with Ford as late as 1975 to have the Aerocar mass-produced. The monkeywrench was thrown into the negotiations by the FAA and the DOT. Taylor already had an airworthiness certificate for the Aerocar, granted by the CAA (predecessor of the FAA) after a delay of 7 years from its first flight. He claims that the agencies turned thumbs down on the Aerocar ‘because everybody would have one, and we couldn’t handle the [air] traffic.’ Airplane regulation has only gotten stricter: “The entire F.A.R. / A.I.M., which every airman is responsible for knowing, is 1085 pages long. At least it was in 2013; a new one comes out every year.” So in the end, we have none of these technologies. No flying cars, even though they were prototyped almost a hundred years ago. Some nuclear energy, but crippled, aged, feared, and hated. 3D printing, but no nanotech. No level 5. Because the state needs legibility, and progress is not legible. The bureaucratic incentives are to calcify. If no one does anything new, no one will do anything wrong. Hall:
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
Imagine having to start your own car company in Zimbabwe. Your past experience is "peasant farmer". You have no idea how to make cars. The local financial system can muster up only a few million dollars in seed funding, and the local manufacturing expertise is limited to a handful of engineers who have just returned from foreign universities. Maybe if you're very lucky you can eventually succeed at making cars that run at all. But there's no way you'll be able to outcompete Ford, Toyota, and Tesla. All these companies have billions of dollars and some of the smartest people in the world working for them, plus decades of practice and lots of proprietary technology. Your cars will inevitably be worse and more expensive than theirs. Every country that's solved this problem and started a local car industry has done so by putting high tariffs on foreign cars. Locals will have to buy your cars, so even if you're not exactly making a profit after a few years, at least you're not completely useless either.
Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
Offset your carbon emissions if you can afford it
30. https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/ford-hits-carbon-emissions-reduction-target-eight-years-early-2018-07-27/rep_id:4136 . Good information on Ford was hard to find, but I'm calculating this based on their claim that they reduced emissions by 3.2 million metric tons and this corresponds to reaching their goal of decreasing emissions by 32%. That suggests their original emission level was 10 million tons and so their remaining level is 6.8 million tons. This is just their manufacturing emissions - it doesn't count emissions from the cars they make.
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
If you buy Ford you also have to pay off its debt which makes the ratio a little less crazy. "Ford Motor long term debt for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $93.895B, a 10.45% increase year-over-year." vs. "Tesla long term debt for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $0.872B, a 69.91% decline year-over-year."
I've worked along former SpaceXers and hung out with current ones (mostly in outdoors sports). If you work in the industry, especially in LA, you run into them. I was also interviewed by Brogan at Hyperloop a while back (super nice guy). The SpaceX hiring bar for technical talent is super high and I wouldn't exaggerate to say the average SpaceX engineer is twice as talented and hardworking as the average Boeing guy. Also, pretty arrogant in my experience (versus Googlers I've met tend to be humble even if they went to Stanford). I think this really started from the top of the company and he couldn't have built this pyramid of insane talent if he didn't have an informed, critical understanding of mechanical engineering.
He got accepted to a Stanford PhD program in engineering
My Takeaways From AI 2027
April 08, 2025 · Original source
History provides examples of very fast industrial transitions. For example, during WWII the US converted most civilian industry to a war footing within a few years. The most famous example is Willow Run, where the government asked Ford to build a bomber factory; three years after the original request, it was churning out a bomber per hour.
How did Willow Run move so quickly? It had near-unlimited money, near-unlimited government support, talented people in charge, and the ability to piggyback off Ford’s existing capacity to build and staff factories.
And we predict they get the factories. This is maybe overdetermined - did you know that right now, in 2025, OpenAI’s market cap is higher than all non-Tesla US car companies combined? If they wanted to buy out Ford, they could do it tomorrow.