Here's some more on the license server that was recently added to HomeDaemon-MCP.

One of the biggest issues that faces any software publisher today is piracy and security.  The two are intertwined; not only do you lose sales (maybe a lot of them) to piracy, but what's worse is that stolen copies of the code frequently have "special features" (viruses and similar nasties) added to them, and since most software installers run with privileges this is a huge problem since the user grants permission for the code to install.

If that happens to include a trojan, cryptolocker or other nasty the user is screwed.

HomeDaemon-MCP of courses faces the same challenge, were I to start distributing it or if someone buys it and starts distributing it.  The code also inherently uses cryptography via the OpenSSL library, which it must to (among other things) provide a SSL-protected web server so you can control and monitor your home without other people breaking in.

For those who haven't run a web server with a certificate before in order to have the little padlock show up on user's displays you must have both a certificate and key.  The certificate is public and anyone can retrieve it but the key must remain private.  In addition someone has to "vouch" for that certificate and key belonging to you as being actually yours, which is why there are companies that sell said certificate certification services (e.g. Comodo, Verisign, etc.)  The idea behind "public" certification authorities is that they allegedly actually vet who someone is (at some level, which depends on the service bought and paid for) and supposed are trustworthy (that is, they won't allow anyone to impersonate them and, for example, issue a bogus certificate.)  There's plenty of reason to believe the latter is definitely not true if the person doing the insisting on impersonation is a government agency, by the way (since a government can insist rather loudly including by locking people up or even shooting them if they refuse), but for ordinary brigands and thieves it's probably secure against such games.

In the realm of a private device there's no reason to pay for a public certificate though; you're not a business taking money from the random public. In that case the company that sells you the "thing" is, if trustworthy (and if not why did you give them money?) probably good enough.  However, the requirement for a certificate that is vouched for by someone you trust still exists or anyone can stick a random certificate that claims to identify your site "in the middle" and by doing so decode all the traffic and steal it -- including your password, at which point breaking in becomes pretty darn easy!

HomeDaemon-MCP has always allowed you to specify who is the "root" of that trust in the certificates it uses.  This is now part of what the license server provides.

In addition the certificate and key are also provided by the license server.  That is, formerly if someone stole (or "borrowed") your SD card they could trivially read the key file since it's physically there and virtually any computer can read an SD card -- suddenly your system is not secure any more.  That's because if the key file has a password on it (which would prevent its use, at least without a lot of resource to crack it, as it's encrypted) the software can't start on its own after a power failure because there's nobody present to put in the password.  This by the way is true for most web servers as well, which is why most of them in "ordinary" commerce rely on the physical security of the device rather than a password on the private key for the certificate in question.  This is mitigated by the fact that if your certificate is compromised (e.g. you learn someone may have stolen the key file) you can ask whoever issued it to revoke it and reissue a new certificate, which of course you'd do after generating a new key (and fixing however the old one got stolen.)  As a result the utility of stealing a key on a webserver is somewhat limited since the certificate it is linked to is easily marked compromised (in other words explicitly "do not trust this") and replaced.

What's been coded into HomeDaemon-MCP to effect the "boot up" is a pair of certificates -- that is, CA certificates to validate the connection to the license server.  There is both a root certificate (for which the key is stored on an offline piece of media in a safe and an "intermediate" certificate (which has its key available to sign regular certificates.)  This particular intermediate certificate signs only one server certificate -- for the license server.  Rather than read them from a file the system instead has them coded in the executable.  If these keys are stolen from the server side, that is, if whoever is running the license server itself has a security problem then you'd have to reissue all the keys anyway since you must assume they've all -- including the server's certificate and issuer certificate -- have been compromised.  As a result there's little downside to this approach; if such a breach occurs then the binaries would have to be recompiled and re-issued and until they are, the old ones would refuse to talk to the fixed license server with its new certificate chain.

In addition the server and client sides are both coded to insist on extremely high security connections; if a client tries to connect using something that can be replayed or is not sufficiently safe the server will refuse.

Now when the HomeDaemon-MCP code starts up it asynchronously starts to not only run as usual but also tries to acquire a license set.  It does so by sending a unique hardware ID, a user-specified password and cryptographic hashes of both the executable being run and the operating system kernel.

The server then validates all of this against its data, specifically:

• Is the hardware ID known to the license server?  That is, did the user steal the software and is trying to use it on multiple (or an unauthorized) piece(s) of hardware?
  
  
• Is the password correct?  That is, is the user's assertion of being the owner of the hardware in question reasonably "good"?
  
  
• Is the executable's hash good?  That is, not only has it not been tampered with (essential) but is it an authorized revision (useful)?  This allows the license granter to, for example, only allow "free" updates for a certain period of time.
  
  
• Is the kernel's hash good?  This is one the license granter may not care about, but on the other hand they may.  It provides the ability to gate support and operation to a list of known-good operating system kernels.  Since a tampered-with operating system is even more dangerous than a tampered executable this is arguably quite a good thing.  However, it is somewhat limited in that the overhead cost of real-time cryptographically checking every operating system component is extremely high, and thus that's not attempted.
  
  
• Is the place the connection is coming from ok?  The current code doesn't check IP addresses against a white or black list, but there's no reason it can't since every connection has an endpoint and TCP connections will not work unless they are valid in both directions.  This doesn't stop someone from "bouncing" off another address but it can prevent someone from using a license in an area that the granter considers "prohibited" (e.g. Iran, China, etc.) without the user taking extraordinary steps.

If the server doesn't like any of the parameters passed to it then it simply shuts down the connection and goes away with no response at all.  The client code will keep trying a couple of times a minute.

If and only if it likes all of the parameters provided then it responds with an operational CA chain for the web and master server, the certificate and key for same, and, if the client is authorized to run as a slave node, the certificate and key for that (which is distinct from that used for the web server.)  All of this is sent over a PFS-encrypted channel and thus is useless if the raw data is captured and replayed even if you somehow manage to later steal the license server's private key.

The HomeDaemon-MCP code installs those credentials and as a result encrypted mode operation, including web access, immediately becomes functional.  A couple of times a day, or if the code is restarted (e.g. after a power failure) the same scenario repeats so if updates are made to the license data the new certificate(s) and key(s) will be loaded.

Since access to the web server functionality is pointless if there's no web access at all (e.g. no access to the Internet) the short delay during startup means nothing since you, as the user, can't get to the service until internet access is restored.  Because license acquisition takes place asynchronously event processing starts immediately and operates normally even if the server is unavailable for some period of time -- but you can't get into the system to manually control or monitor it as the web server (and master capability) is effectively non-functional, immediately closing any connection attempted as the system knows the security credentials are missing.

At no time is any of the returned data stored locally, and there's also no buffer space in which to stash it in the code; instead it is dynamically allocated as required and then immediately cleared when no longer needed.  Therefore if you were to force an attachment and RAM dump of the executable you might be able to recover the credentials, but the the amount of code-hacking you'd have to do to make that information usable in the binary would be quite severe.  The other alternative would be to hack the binary to disable secure-mode operation entirely.  However, if you managed to pull off not only killing the checks but also enabling the access without the credentials you would basically destroy any pretense of security in the application itself and thus render it not only worthless to the user but potentially quite dangerous since random people on the Internet could quite-trivially break in and/or steal your login and password!  In addition if the legitimate licensee figures out you did any of this with his certificate and key he can sign into the license sever's client side and request that the server revoke it.

As such this appears to be pretty good as a security model.  Nothing is perfect; all commercial applications suffer from some risk of hackery and this is no exception, but as applications go since access to the outside world is basically required and secure access to same is also required in order to make it safe hacking out the protection scheme, if violated through hacking on the binary, leaves you with a highly-compromised piece of code that nobody in their right mind would use to control anything.

The License Server code as it sits right now runs against a flat directory structure and doesn't check kernel and executable hashes, or against a Postgres database -- with the query process entirely configurable.  The latter is also multi-threaded making possible very high levels of performance.    What won't be included is the customer-facing front end that handles people setting up their accounts and paying, since that's highly specific to whatever sort of payment model and collection system (e.g. credit cards, PayPal, etc) you wish to use.  I can of course code something along those lines up for a price -- or you can, if there's not already an appropriate "cart-style" web application that fits your needs or that you already have.

As a reminder HomeDaemon-MCP is for sale "lock, stock and barrel" and in source form; my previous article on the potential market is here, and the page on some of the capabilities can be found here.  Finally, there's a not-yet filed provisional patent related to the code that, for obvious reasons, I won't be going into any sort of detail on but will file same before turning over anything that could lead you to figure it out.  Who knows what that's worth, and the acquiring party will be free to file the permanent application and pursue its perfection and issue, should they so choose.  It's entirely possible that patent is more than worth the asking price on its own, incidentally..... but of course as with all things of this sort nobody knows until it's filed and marketed.

Look to the right for contact information.

I've been harping on this more-or-less continually since 2011 -- it relates to your personal health and reliance on the health care system in the United States.

Specifically, if you look like you're pregnant and you're not (or can't be) -- let's just make it simple folks; if you stand in the shower, look straight down, and you see gut instead of genitals.....

You can ignore this (again), if you want.  But time's pretty-much up.

Trump's "tax cuts" are going to accelerate the deficit spending trend that Obama (and Bush before him) initiated.  The Fed's machinations over the last 100+ years are utterly irrelevant because all of them are in fact driven by Congress.  The Fed is a creature that operates at the behest of Congress, as a creation of Congress, and every single dollar it has "printed" it has "printed" because Congress spent money it did not have.

In other words, Congress ran a deficit.

The Fed has its share of detractors and I'm among them.  But those who refuse to place responsibility where it belongs are fraud-running jackasses, and while I'm happy to try to educate folks those who refuse to learn and cling to that which is trivially disproved mathematically wind up on my "ignore" list.

The bottom line: It is Congress, which is elected by you, that has destroyed the purchasing power of the currency and enabled all of the fraud and force in our economy today.

Every.
Single.
Bit.

Health care costs have exploded because of fraud, extortion and just plain intentional bloat.  Hiring ratios of 10-30:1 for administrators to doctors and nurses are just a start.  You pay for every one of those people but they never provide a single second of care to a single person.  This crap standing alone is strangling the economy and it's strangling the Federal Government.

Then you add onto it monopolist protections system-wide.  You can't get a price before a procedure and you can't hold someone to a price.  How much you pay has nothing to do with the complexity and everything to do with how you pay (or whether you can.)  The health system is the only form of "business" in which a hospital or physician bills you for fixing their screw-ups -- and if those screw-ups kill or permanently maim you they're "entitled" to bill you for that too.

The entire health system in this country, top to bottom, is a racketeering enterprise on grand scale, it currently consumes one fifth of all money spent in the United States, stealing at least 80% of that, and in many cases produces negative or zero net value while doing so.

The Federal Government knows this.  It also knows that if the Attorney General, Congress or the President puts a stop to it there's a monstrous recession -- in fact, from an economic definition perspective an immediate Depression will result.  It wouldn't last long and we'd be far better off when it was over but the next 12 to 18 months would be nasty and whoever is in office at the time will get blamed -- and lose their jobs.

As a result none of the people in office -- not federal, state or local -- will do it unless the public rises and demands it, making clear that there are three -- and only three -- alternatives: Do it, leave peacefully and be replaced by someone who will, or rest in pieces.

Ultimately the people of any nation have the right to issue such a demand -- but only in concert, as a body politic.  1776 was such a demand and when the answer "nuts!" came back from the British monarchy the colonists reply was "ok, since you insist in pieces it shall be."

No lone person has the right to do it (we call that terrorism) but the people as a body politic always do, provided the alternatives are laid on the table.  That's the very premise on which a representative republic is based.

Well, you won't do it.  Not collectively, or in sufficient numbers.

You'd rather get screwed on-balance.

As a result your only alternative is to not need the medical scam.

Sadly if you do need it and the tipping point comes -- which may be as early as this year, you're going to be severely hosed -- or worse, dead.

There's much more, of course -- autos, "higher" education and other areas of grift and scam (FANG-cough-cough!) but this one you can actually take some level of personal control over and thus to a meaningful degree evade.

I've written many pages on this topic, and unfortunately there are some who have enough bad luck, or have just let things go too long, for whom there is no way out at this point.  There's nothing that can be done if you're in that position.  But if you're not, and most people who are today dependent on the medical scam can make a difference, then you're running out of time -- fast.

Start reading, and start doing.

Sorry, but no.

Dec 13 11:30:25 HD-MCP HD-MCP[46870]: SSL Handshake failed at protocol level on [120.210.191.60]
Dec 13 11:30:25 HD-MCP HD-MCP[46870]: SSL ACCEPT Error [http request] on [120.210.191.60]
Dec 13 11:30:57 HD-MCP last message repeated 40 times

Nice try *******.

No, you can't break into my HomeDaemon-MCP server.

No, you can't break into my home control system.

No, it doesn't have a cloud connection, no, it won't talk to you without signing in, and no, you can't get in without first negotiating HTTPS either.

And no, attempting to hammer it won't******it off.

Psst.... the codebase continues to improve and the opportunity is still there, if someone wants it.

Bet against my view on "Make America Great Again".

And have about a million and a half to put on the table in support of your belief.

For what?

HomeDaemon-MCP.

So let's say you spent the $1.5m and acquire everything.

Here's a hypothetical way of looking at the opportunity.

There are roughly 80 million single-family, detached homes in the US. (I'll ignore condos, mobile homes and townhouses, although some of the first and last are potential customers as well.)

We'll also assume you can appeal to just 0.1% of those single-family homes.  That's a tiny penetration.

But it would amount to 80,000 installations.

The hardware cost to install is under $100 for a minimal install (that's the power that comes from running on a $35 hardware base!) and under $500 for a typical install including sensors and control points (e.g. switches, etc.)

We'll assume you sell the base hardware and software alone for a one-time price of $350, and 50% of your installs go that way (homeowner does the rest on his or her own.)  That's $10m in gross profit.

The real money is in the annuity stream and installed systems.  We'll assume those have a minimum install of $1,500 billed out, of which $500 is your fixed cost.  That fixed cost includes $100 for the controller and $400 for a mix of motion sensors and controlled points.  Install time is 3 hours @ $60 each for skilled labor, or $180.  That's $820 across 40,000 installs, or $32.8 million.  We're now to $42.8 million in gross profit.

Now assume you use the certificate system built into the software and slightly extend it (yes, I can do that on a contract basis, or you can if you have a competent programmer on staff, since the framework is already in the code) to add an annuity-style revenue stream for maintenance, updates and offer an option to the customer for same.  We'll assume you charge $20/month for this and half your 40,000 install-it-for-me customers go for it.

That's another $4.8 million a year in revenue and the effort to issue the certs is about 1 minute each per year.  You can automate that, of course, but there will be expense in doing so.  Of course the actual time spent servicing said customer is variable (and you'd have to take a guess on that), but over 3 years that gets you to $57.2 million.

We haven't yet included what you can make off the "higher end" installations (the million dollar+ homes and condos) where the owner wants not 10 control points but 30, and is willing to pay for it.  He gets convenience, security (e.g. access to his IP cameras and triggering points from them), no cloud required so Google, Amazon and others do not have access to the inside of his home, ever, and you get to sell that -- it's private, it's his or hers, and it's accessible and controllable from anywhere in the world via said secure infrastructure that has no access for anyone other than him -- including you!

Let's assume that of the 40,000 "you install" locations 10% of them are truly high-end homes (remember, we started with 0.1% penetration into the market and now we're at 10% of 50% of those) are not $1,500 installations, they're $3,000+ installations and your gross margin on those is 50% -- which is easily achievable.  That's another $6 million in gross profit; we are now at $63.2 million.

Is this a reasonable projection over three years time?  It's in the game.  No, it's not "riskless" by any means, but on an adjusted risk:reward basis it looks pretty damn good.  In fact, it's not all that far off what I accomplished with MCSNet in terms of return-on-invested capital.  The real return is always on sweat equity as that gives you much more control for the risk you take, but you have to have something that affords you enough operating margin to make it worth it.

Of course there's SG&A to be accounted for.  How good of a businessperson are you?  Cost control is a big part of the game in any business but any line of work is a hell of a lot easier to succeed at when you start with a nice fat margin on the goods and services you sell up front.

This is a 40%+ gross margin business, in short, as I analyze it, and in areas where you have existing people I bet you can sell to vastly more than 0.1% of the households.  Certainly in many metro areas far more than 0.1% are in the $300,000+ price category where a system like this is a tiny percentage of the home's price yet the value delivered in convenience, energy saving and security dramatically outweigh the tiny uptick in cost generated by including or adding it.

So if you're "MAGA" or just believe my view on monopolists, the rule of law and such is horribly pessimistic and wrong, and in addition have the cash to put on the table to back your position with a big fat check then come do so.  Show me that my pessimism is unwarranted the best way anyone ever can -- by making a bunch of money that I am intentionally leaving on the table, handing to me just one fortieth of what I could have had.  We'll drink a beer together when you prove my view on the business environment in the US to be unreasonably pessimistic and you'll laugh as you motor away from the pier on your new yacht.

Of course the above is all "back-of-the-envelope" speculation but that's how a decent functional business plan starts being developed.  It's how MCSNet was developed originally, but before it was actually executed on I fleshed it out and actually wrote a full five-year business plan with pro-forma financials.

The difference between doing something like this and the Ponzi scheme nonsense peddled by many on Wall Street such as belief in 30% growth figures into the indefinite future when you already have half the nation on your service (cough-amazon-netflix-facesucker-cough-cough!) this sort of back-of-the-envelope pencil-out assumes 0.1% penetration into potential buyers.

What happens if you can get 2% penetration?  You make well north of a billion, and then you really laugh at me.

So if you're both "accredited" (you almost-certainly are if you have the capital) and this makes you salivate look right, click and email me.  We'll talk.

When I started MCSNet my view on business changed. I don't consider a 10% gross margin to be attractive at all.  IMHO if you can't get into the 30s it's not worth it on a risk-adjusted basis, and the target is 40%.  IMHO this, while certainly not "buy it and sit" like speculating in something like Bitfraud, fits that category -- but since success is of course directly related to both your analysis (rather than mine) and how you execute (rather than how I execute) this is all hypothetical, but if that 0.1% penetration can be turned into 0.5%, well...... you do the math.

There's no reason Elon Musk shouldn't be under indictment right now.

Let's look at the latest monstrosity claim from him: His "truck".

The truck can drive 500 miles on a single charge, which was higher than some analysts had expected. That may mean that, in terms of range, the vehicle could meet the needs of long haul truck drivers.

....

Tesla will also build a network of Tesla "Megachargers" that will charge the trucks' batteries to a 400 mile range in 30 minutes.

Ok, let's talk about this.

There apparently were eight charging ports, and with a 100kw battery behind each that would be 800Kw.  To deliver 90% of capacity in 30 minutes you'd have to deliver approximately 1.5 Megawatts plus losses; batteries are 80-85% charge efficient during the bulk phase until they reach about 80% of capacity (at which point their efficiency goes down materially) and the electronics to control the charge have loss too -- probably in the neighborhood of 10%.  So we have a 76%, more or less, efficiency on the charge rate which means we must deliver almost exactly 2 Megawatts to the truck for that 30 minutes.

I note that 500 kilowatts has to be dissipated somewhere for that entire period in the truck or the batteries, controller equipment or both catch on fire.  This is a serious problem all on its own that I am not convinced Musk can solve.

Then there is the economic issue.  Musk claims he's going to "guarantee" a 7c/kwh price for all that power.  How he thinks he can do this in a commercial environment where demand meters are used by law is beyond me; the first time a trucker needs to be charged at 4:00 PM on a 95 degree day there will be a very large surprise delivered in the form of the bill.  Never mind that the trucker (or company) will be paying for the 25% losses too; you get to pay for the entire megawatt-hour even though you only keep 75% of it; the rest heats the air.  Apparently Musk thinks that he can simply build "battery packs" to store energy and thus charge them when the power is cheaper.  Ok, that's fine and well, except (1) now you have another 25% loss, stacked (you take one when you charge the pack when "cheaper" and then when the truck is charged) and for each truck's worth of capacity in said battery bank he gets to buy another battery that would otherwise go in the truck, plus another 25% to cover the losses when the truck is charged, plus the electronics to charge, discharge and control that "banked" pack.  Somehow this all is going to "work out" to 7 cents/kwh.

Let me make this clear: No it won't.  If Tesla guarantees that rate to the buyer then Tesla will absorb billions in losses and the more trucks are on the road and the more miles they drive the more money the company loses.

But it pales beside what Musk claims to be able to do when it comes to charging these trucks in the first place.  The average house in the United States consumes about 12 megawatt/hours of energy over the entire year, or about a megawatt-hour per month.  Musk intends to suck twice as much energy from the electrical grid as your house consumes in a month in 30 minutes.

To put some perspective on this that means that one such truck charging will place approximately the same load on the grid as 1,400 houses.  One truck.

What happens when 20 of them show up at the truck stop?  You know they do that today -- they fill their diesel tanks and they're on their way, although they typically only fill said tanks half as often as these batteries will require charging.

So it won't be 20 of them it will be 40 since their range-before-refueling is about half of common OTR trucks now.  Now we're talking about the load of roughly 57,000 additional houses that will be instantly presented to the grid and which the grid must be able to support -- per truck stop or terminal!

Who's going to pay to build all that out and with what will they do so?

It won't be Elon Musk.

I don't believe Musk can deliver this thing at all, nor do I believe he can deliver the Roadster either as the double-size battery pack required to do so (against today's Model S and X) won't fit in the chassis.  So that problem exists too, and it's not an easy one to solve.

Finally, when it comes to the truck there are some other interesting issues related to efficiency.  See, this thing is supposed to be able to couple to any existing trailer.  Ok, fine, but existing trailers are flat-backed and thus have fairly nasty aerodynamics.  You've seen the "trailer tail" things on some of them, I'm sure -- a flip-out contraption that cuts -- somewhat -- the aerodynamic drag generated by the turbulence at the rear of the vehicle. I'm not at all confident the sort of highway range Musk is talking about can be achieved without material improvement in the aerodynamics at the rear and bottom of the vehicle, which means "no standard trailers for you sir!"

That leads to a very large problem; you see flat-back trailers are that way so they can be backed into a loading dock and both loaded and unloaded.  It also makes intermodal (container) shipping possible since a container can be dropped onto a skeleton trailer that locks into the corners of the rectangular container box.  How do you do that if you apply real and effective aerodynamics to the rear and bottom/sides of the trailer?  You don't.  While there are answers to this problem they likely involve a complete renovation of how loading docks are designed and work today, never mind container ships, and that design is literally everywhere from the corner grocery store to the large manufacturing center.  Good luck with shoving that change down every receiving and shipping dock in the nation's budget, never mind the expected gross increase in size such changes would require (e.g. for "side loading" or similar.)  Oh, and since there are length limits on combination vehicles (tractor/trailers, etc) as well you either get to forfeit quite a bit of usable cargo volume or the laws have to be changed to accommodate the materially-longer aerodynamic section of said trailer!

All of the foregoing assumes you believe 800kw of battery is enough.  I'm not so sure.  The math doesn't pencil today on that and I don't see how Tesla can overcome the deficit under any plausible scenario.  Today's diesel truck gets ~8.5mpg, roughly, fully loaded @ 80,000lbs gross (maximum 50-state legal limit.)  Diesel contains ~136,000 btu/gal, so if we take 500 miles (maximum range of said EV truck) we would need ~60 gallons of fuel containing ~8.2 million BTUs if that was a conventional diesel-powered tractor. A modern diesel (with all of its computer controls and transmission) can achieve very close to 40% thermal efficiency in steady-state on-road operation (assuming ~5% gearbox and parasitic loss), which means 3.264 million BTUs have come out the business (driveshaft) end of the engine and transmission when it finishes burning that 60 gallons of fuel.

Musk's 800kw battery only has 2.7 million BTUs of energy in it.  That's 18% short, roughly, but in fact it's worse than that because neither his motors or the PWM controllers for them are lossless, and remember, we've accounted for the diesel's engine and transmission/accessory inefficiency.  If we assume Tesla's electric motors are 90% efficient (possible but unlikely; 85% is more-likely but I'll give him the other 5) and the controller is also 90% efficient (possible) the stacked loss there is 19% so now he only delivers 648kw over that same period of time to the driveshaft(s).

In other words he's not short 18% on energy content he's short a whopping 32%!

I call immediately on him being able to improve the total loss budget by 32% ex engine and transmission -- which basically means through aerodynamics since his truck still needs to roll on tires and the trailers are identical -- so he can't get much if anything on rolling resistance.  That leaves aero and to obtain that sort of gain even on the freeway, say much less in combined-cycle use, would be enormous.

Oh, and the batteries?  They come off the useful load of the truck as well, so on a dollars per pound-mile moved for cargo the electric truck has a further deficiency to overcome.  In short his claimed range and parity level for power is a big stretch right up front!

In the end what we have here is Musk promising to deliver what he can't today, and he's counting on two things to bail him out:

• Wall Street will continue to give him money on the come in the hope that the technology in batteries advances fast enough for him to be able to actually build the packs and fit them in the vehicles, along with solving the heat dissipation problem during charging that would otherwise cause the vehicle to catch on fire and be destroyed.  Given the relatively short timeline he has set for himself I rate the odds of this happening as perhaps one in a thousand since none of this can be done today.
  
  AND (not or)
  
  
• The Government will force you to pay for his charging systems by having a gun shoved up your nose and the money extracted from you both for the additional generating capacity necessary and infrastructure upgrades to get that generating and power-delivery capacity to the truck stops and terminals effectively none of which currently have anywhere near that sort of capacity available to them.   Oh by the way many of these terminals are a long way away from existing generating capacity and high-voltage transmission equipment so the build-out cost will be even worse -- by a lot -- than it first appears.  As a conservative guess this is likely to put a 15-30% increase on your home electric bill should any material percentage of the OTR fleet convert.  There are roughly 1.9 million heavy and tractor-trailer drivers employed today; consider what would happen if 500,000 trucks were to attempt to convert to electric drive each of which would require a 2 Megawatt charge for 30 minutes every six operating hours.  There is no possible way to support any material percentage of the current OTR trucks converting to electric power on the existing grid and this build-out will not be paid for by Tesla or the trucking companies if it is attempted -- it will be paid for by you.

Theft as a business model is a crime.  Promising that which you can only deliver via speculative advances in technology and by stealing a large part of your operating cost from others who do not use it ought to land your ass in prison and reduce your company to a smoldering pile of ash.

Then again Hastings did exactly that to America with Netflix and Net Neutrality and Amazon's Bezos does it daily with cross-subsidizing product sales with AWS, including to the Federal Government (which means he steals from every taxpayer to do so), so why shouldn't Musk rob everyone of tens of thousands of dollars in his plan to "build" these trucks right up front, since you didn't lynch Hastings or Bezos when they did it and in fact rewarded both with billions.

This **** has to stop, the firms doing it must be destroyed and their executives imprisoned.