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I forgot who but, somebody made a good point about this switch to solar & renewables: it's going to crash the economy.

You make good points. I however think otherwise. For example, I think Trump's rollback of Obama's financial regulations that were designed to abate another 2007 - 2008 crash will put us in even more danger. As I watch the stock market soar, I can't get the word 'bubble' out of my mind.

...We've got massive amounts of investment wealth tied up in fossil fuels. People's retirements are heavily vested in them...

Admittedly, some do think it's a good idea to invest mostly in a single stock or industry, but I don't think that's a good idea for fossil fuels; the writing is on the wall. Diversifying your stock portfolio has always been a good idea, anyway.

Before Trump, the solar industry was booming. The fastest and largest growing job market was in renewable energy, specifically solar (1). Trump has seriously curtailed this growth with tariffs and elimination of tax credits, while at the same time, Trump has repealed rules and promoted coal, shale oil and fracking. As a result, oil production is up, and it has become much less affordable for business and home owners do go solar (2). Nonetheless, I find it telling, and perhaps foretelling, that the oil industry isn't happy about Trump's steel tariffs, NAFTA spats, and other policies (3). Something's not right; something smells and just seems rotten. And as the Ruskies say, a fish rots from the head down. But I digress.

Even with this turnabout, solar and renewable energy will soon be consistently cheaper than fossil fuels, and in some cases are cheaper now (4). I suspect that a few years after the US becomes the world's leading crude oil producer (5), solar and renewables will begin to surge and eventually dominate. Cheaper is better for the average consumer and business alike, which is better for the economy, and so the marketplace will abide. Eventually. Best to divest your fossil fuel investments before then. At least diversify while you still can.

BTW, some say fusion reactors are economically viable now (6). It may be true, but I expect it will take some 20 years before they come online. Such is the nature of the beast. Eventually my money will be on them. After all, cheaper is better.

(1) http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/2...

(2) https://ntknetwork.com/u-s-oil...

(3) https://www.politico.com/story...

(4) https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.engadget.com/2018/...

https://about.newenergyfinance...

http://energyinnovation.org/20...

https://about.newenergyfinance...

(5) http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/0...

(6) https://phys.org/news/2015-10-...

'For Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), however, Sloan's efforts weren't sufficient. "You should be fired," Warren told Sloan. "Wells Fargo needs to start over, and that won't happen until the bank rids itself of people like you who led it into this crisis." '

Attorney General to make a demand to Wells Fargo for damages on fake bank and credit card accounts (Nov. 29, 2017)

Wells Fargo cheated millions of customers. The Republican tax bill is about to hand it a big win. (Dec. 19, 2017)

It is maybe because it was not about developing... They were right about the time to develop. BUT the non scientist failed with their works: a success commercial embargo. The "political" premises under which scientists were wrong, there was technology exchange. A-Bomb asks Pakistan... For the missiles, check the usual suspect and strange pieces from western countries (an intermediary?). Seems more a political failure and a secret services failure than a scientific failure. It was never about developing but about transferring technology.

Digital ID's needed for all - so we can arrest Twitter users speaking out against the State.

Sounds farfetched? The UK is doing that today.

I mean, they do that already without digital ID"s, but it would save the police state a lot of time and bother if they could have the address pop up alongside the reported thought crim... er I mean tweet.

I've been looking at the stock market reporting for the last couple of years, and to make it interesting I bought some Tesla stock awhile ago.

My take is that all of the "important insightful" news reports we see about companies boil down to the following:

1) Reporter picks some stock to report on
2) Plugs the numbers into an algorithm that spits out a recommendation
3) Writes an article justifying that recommendation

Notably, reporters don't write about a stock because something happens or because it's a particularly good investment, and they don't muse any personal skill at analysis for the article - they basically take whatever is happening at the moment and use it to justify whatever is going on with the stock.

Daily market reports are always "Dow is down x% due to *this* thing happening in the world", as if the world incident is driving stocks. (As I write this, one of the top stories is "Dow posts best week since March as traders shake off G-7 trade jitters". The two linked points of information are unrelated.)

In the case of Tesla, the company is taking all their profit and borrowing extra to invest in manufacturing facilities. From the viewpoint of the algorithms, Tesla is burning through cash with no hope of recovery, as the chart on this page shows.

Any other company with Tesla's numbers would be a lousy investment. We see this all the time in other companies - burn through VC cash over a couple of years and then go bankrupt (or get bought out). (GitHub anyone?.)

Looking more closely at the chart shows a different story. Tesla takes several quarters to tool up, then releases a model and goes profitable for a while. They've done this twice now and are on the verge of a 3rd round. Once the Model 3 production is fully ramped up they will be positioned to *own* the car manufacturing industry in the US.

Tesla is a great opportunity to "go against the groupthink with reason", and Bruce has it exactly correct: Tesla stock will be closely held, making it ever more expensive to cover the short positions. Expect a temporary meteoric rise in value as the short holders fight each other trying to get out of their short positions.

Oh, and Tesla isn't one of the most shorted stocks in the US. It's the *most* shorted stock *ever*.

I've updated this from a comment I made before. To me, it seems like a more in-depth understanding of Intel's management in the past 15 years.

Intel's insufficient management: Intel has had many years of insufficient management, in my opinion. (Jan. 22, 2018)

Here is a comment of mine posted exactly 12 years ago: Lower prices are not the answer. Proposal. (June 9, 2006)

Intel's poor marketing: It is not difficult to find other evidence of insufficient management at Intel. Since the beginning of this year I've gotten 40 poorly considered, poorly written marketing emails from Intel. Whoever writes those ads seems to have almost no technical knowledge and no ability with sophisticated communication. This is an amazingly foolish sentence from emails I got from Intel on March 6 and March 8, 2018: "Up your marketing game with segment-focused campaigns..."

Recent background: Meltdown and Spectre: 'worst ever' CPU bugs affect virtually all computers (Jan 4, 2018) "Meltdown is currently thought to primarily affect Intel processors manufactured since 1995, excluding the company's Itanium server chips and Atom processors before 2013."

Linus Torvalds Calls Intel Patches 'Complete and Utter Garbage'. (Jan. 22, 2018)

Two previous errors in design of Intel processors: Pentium FDIV bug (1994) and the Pentium F00F bug (1997)

More EXTREME evidence of insufficient management at Intel: Intel was aware of the chip vulnerability when its CEO sold off $24 million in company stock. (Jan. 3, 2018)

Will Intel be allowed to PROFIT from many years of producing processors with vulnerabilities? Will Intel be treated like U.S. banks in 2008, when many banks profited and many finance system managers got bonuses after the financial crash?

If vulnerabilities are profitable, would Intel deliberately allow vulnerabilities in its products? Were the previous vulnerabilities deliberate? Did the CEO know about the vulnerabilities previously? Do others at Intel profit from the vulnerabilities?

The US is already in a (useless) trade war with some of his closest economical allies. Just last week Trump imposed a 25% on imported steel and a 10% tariff in imported aluminum. Canada, Mexico and most of Western Europe retaliated with tariffs of their own.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/...

I'm kinda surprised Republicans are not keeping track as this is exactly the same thing Bush Jr. tried in 2002. It was such a shitshow that they had to withdraw in less than a year.

"China's Ministry of Aerospace founded ZTE as a front to send officers abroad under non-diplomatic covers such as scientists, businessmen and executives for the purpose of collecting intelligence," documents in the case allege.

True, and yet Bayer is the company that rose to success at least in part through its children's heroin cough syrup. Apparently that didn't hurt the brand?

For those interested in option prices as an indicator:

Tesla December 140 puts are $4.55 as of this post For comparison, Apple December 100 puts are $0.14.

A put option allows the owner of it to sell shares of stock at the contract price at a specific date in the future. In this case, buying the right to sell someone TSLA for $140 / share in December 2018 will cost $4.55 / share. That means a buyer today thinks TSLA will decline to less than $135.45 per share ($140-$4.55) at which point the position becomes profitable.

Apple would have to decline to a bit less than $100 / per share to have a similar decline, but the $100 December put contract is close enough. In case of Apple, put sellers are offering the contract at 14 cents per share. In other words, sellers of Tesla puts are pricing them 32x the price of Apple puts, meaning put sellers are demanding a high price since they think the odds of Tesla declining by at least 50% are reasonably high, especially compared to Apple. Maybe it isn't fair to compare to Apple, but GM December 22 puts are selling for 24 cents, and that is less of a decline on a percentage basis.

Another way of looking at Tesla compared to GM and Ford in charts helps explain why the puts are so expensive. The charts are from last year, but the story hasn't changed much.

Do people not remember the joys that Apple Maps provides us with? ;)

I dunno, look at how little effort Apple puts in to Siri or Apple Maps. Compared to what Google have done with Assistant and Maps, or what Amazon has done with Alexa...

Apple is trying desperately to catch up on AI, buying startups and trying to hire like crazy, they're just not succeeding.

And yet Apple still sells plenty of iPhones.

And not doing so well.

According to Business Insider,

Apple : 63% of the revenue come from iPhone Sales (Hardware), 11% from iPad (Hardware), 11% from Mac (Hardware) and 5% from other product (Hardware). Only 11% are from services (software). So it's 89% Hardware and 11% Software.

That's ignoring that the major selling point of the hardware is the software that comes with it - IOW half of the hardware revenue should actually be counted as software revenue.

If you want to enter an argument, at least take the time to read it from the beginning.

The original argument was that Apple high markup margin wasn't impressing compared to other Tech company. My Argument is that comparing Apple to Microsoft is bad since Apple make a damn lot more hardware than MS. It mean that for each iPhone, there's a great portion of the expense for manufacturing them.

So, back to your point, it's irrelevant to the original argument. No matter how much software they put on the iPhone (It's only more expense), it's still damn impressive for an Hardware company to make such a high profit margin. If you take LG (or all other cellphone maker), their profit margin are way more thin.

According to Business Insider,

Apple : 63% of the revenue come from iPhone Sales (Hardware), 11% from iPad (Hardware), 11% from Mac (Hardware) and 5% from other product (Hardware). Only 11% are from services (software). So it's 89% Hardware and 11% Software.

That's ignoring that the major selling point of the hardware is the software that comes with it - IOW half of the hardware revenue should actually be counted as software revenue.

To be fair, you're comparing a software company to a hardware one.

No I am not. Apple is a software company at its core. No less an authority than Steve Jobs himself has said so publicly. Not a traditional one to be sure but they don't actually make any of the hardware they sell so they by definition cannot be a hardware company. A company is what it makes and for all practical purposes the only thing Apple actually makes themselves is software. They design some of the hardware but that's not the same thing.

According to Business Insider,

Apple : 63% of the revenue come from iPhone Sales (Hardware), 11% from iPad (Hardware), 11% from Mac (Hardware) and 5% from other product (Hardware). Only 11% are from services (software). So it's 89% Hardware and 11% Software.

Microsoft : 11% are from XBox (Hardware) and 5% are from Surface. Then there's 28% from Office Products (Software), 22% from Windows Server & Azure (Software), 18% from others (Most of it is Software), 9% from Windows (Software), and 7% from Ads (Software). So it's 16% Hardware and 84% Software.

I stand my point.

If you can't read the Wiki link (high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) frequency response within the human hearing range) then there is no hope for you. But then, we know you're an Apple fanatic, so there was no hope to begin with, so... Perhaps you should check reviews other than Apple Fanboi sites. Seriously, anyone who thinks a HomePod sounds better than a SONOS Play:1 is either deaf or a dyed-in-the-wool Apple Cultist.

I can read fine.

It's STILL SUBJECTIVE.

"Inaudible noise and distortion". Inaudible to WHO? And what KIND of Noise and Distortion, since IM distortion is MUCH more audible, depending on the frequencies involved, than THD is (haven't we had this discussion already?)

"Flat frequency response". Again, since NOTHING has a PERFECTLY-FLAT frequency response, that is an utterly impossible-to-achieve spec, sorry!

Oh, and do you really think that pitting ONE HomePod against TWO SonosOnes is a fair comparison?

In fact, the C/Net Review flatly states that:

"As we found in our review, the $349 (£319, AU$499) Apple HomePod is an accomplished speaker. By itself it outperforms the $199 (£199, AU$299) Sonos One, winner of our Editors' Choice award as the all-around best smart speaker."

[Emphasis mine]

So, Let's try TWO SonosOnes against TWO HomePods. Howabout THAT?

I NEVER said that the HomePod was the CHEAPER speaker, now did I? And THAT is the ONLY criteria where your C/Net review makes it's comparison.

So now, you have switched the argument from "Is the HomePod 'High Fidelity' " (whatever THAT means!) to "Is the HomePod more COST-EFFECTIVE than the SonosOne?"

BZZZT! Nice try, fucktard.

If you can't read the Wiki link (high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) frequency response within the human hearing range) then there is no hope for you. But then, we know you're an Apple fanatic, so there was no hope to begin with, so... Perhaps you should check reviews other than Apple Fanboi sites. Seriously, anyone who thinks a HomePod sounds better than a SONOS Play:1 is either deaf or a dyed-in-the-wool Apple Cultist.

Might as well start with refined graphite, add 1 milligram of ashes, and turn that into a diamond.

That's basically what they do.
Description above is short and doesn't go into details.
They DO purify the sample and try to use actual "source material" - but most of the diamond is made from added graphite.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Yes, it would. But who is going to buy it? EVERY console can play those games. Every phone can play those games.

I don't have a smart phone, because I don't want one.

I don't have a modern console because absolutely none of the online features appeal to me, and I don't trust the companies who make them with an internet connection. Because they'll spy on you, monetize you, and strip out features as they see fit.

I know people who have children, who would be far happier to give them something like the $60 NES Classic instead of their damned $1000 phone.

You are required to neither care nor buy one. But if you think nobody else will, you're a fucking idiot.

Just because a bunch of grumpy old men are saying "yarg, teh phone and teh modern consoles is teh better and the classic is teh sux0r" doesn't mean a lot of other people aren't going "cool, where do I get it".

So, go back to you fucking lawn, shaking your fist at the traffic and the noisy kids, shut the fuck up, and spare us your fucking melodrama -- because nobody gives a shit.

Some of these games were infinitely more enjoyable and playable than the idiotic fucking games I see on phones which are just there to sell ads and get you to buy shit in the game.

The Economist had a sense of humor about mergers by featuring camel sex on the cover.

Even if Apple is 13 percent of the mobile user base, it can still make a majority of app store revenue. Apple App Store's revenue per user is nine times that of Google Play Store (source: "Apple is pulling further ahead of Google in this one key area" by Kif Leswing), and 0.13 times 9 is more than 0.87 times 1. Or what has changed in the nearly two years since the publication of Leswing's article?

That and, I'm sure, this helped change Trump's mind:

Trump's controversial ZTE order came days after the Chinese government provided millions to a Trump Organization-tied project

Within three days of the Chinese government agreeing to provide $500 million in loans to an Indonesian theme park that the Trump Organization has a deal to license President Donald Trump's name to, the president stunningly ordered sanctions be rescinded against a major Chinese telecom company.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the $500,000,000.00 that a Chinese government bank just poured into a failing Trump property in Indonesia.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

No quid pro quo. You're the quid pro quo.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

But that social media platform can block, hellban, censor and terminate the accounts of anyone, including the President, over arbitrarily decided, biased terms of service.

If that were true, Trump's twitter account would already be shut down. He has violated the terms of service many times (such as linking to hate groups), but he has an exemption.

Rather than this unbalanced snippet.
http://www.businessinsider.com...

I'm not saying Amazon is totally right on this, specially if there are clients who were wrongfully banned... but there are plenty of reasons why Amazon would ban people for repeated returns, and the situation isn't as clear cut as this snipped is making it sound.

Basically, they have people who abuse the return system to get money from retailers in exchange for positive reviews on the product. Amazon is not the only one doing this, and it's becoming a widespread problem for online shopping.

https://overpopulationisamyth....

http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

http://www.businessinsider.com... (see: "Part Two: Advanced Economies That Will Shrivel And Die")

While the Earth may have its limits for any specific combination of human culture and technology, there is room for quadrillions of humans in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system. Jeff Bezos' take on that:
https://www.space.com/37572-je...

And on current USA human culture and politics and economics:
https://www.westernwatersheds....
"By far the greatest impact on the American landscape comes not from urbanization but rather from agriculture. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farming and ranching are responsible for 68 percent of all species endangerment in the United States. Agriculture is the largest consumer of water, particularly in the West. Most water developments would not exist were it not for the demand created by irrigated agriculture. If ultimate causes and not proximate causes for species extinction are considered, agricultural impacts would even be higher. Yet scant attention is paid by academicians, environmentalists, recreationists and the general public to agriculture's role in habitat fragmentation, species endangerment and declining water quality. The ironic aspect of this head-in-the sand approach to land use is that most agriculture is completely unnecessary to feed the nation. The great bulk of agricultural production goes toward forage production used primarily by livestock. A small shift in our diet away from meat could have a tremendous impact on the ground in terms of freeing up lands for restoration and wildlife habitat. It would also reduce the poisoning of our streams and groundwater with pesticides and other residue of modern agricultural practices."

Consider, "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?"
https://healthesolutions.com/s...
"Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac? In a classic case of contradictory government policy the pyramids in this graphic clearly show the inverse relationship between federal government agriculture subsidies and federal nutrition recommendations. The chart was put together by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, but its figures still, alas, look quite relevant. Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."

As long as we teach them that science can be overruled by a voice vote in Congress, and the laws of mathematics by the Australian legislature.

Or botanical categories overruled when The Supreme Court Says The Tomato Is A Vegetable — Not A Fruit

Though technically fruit, tomatoes fall under the category of "vegetable," according to the Supreme Court.

The high court issued this 1893 tomato ruling in a case brought by members of the Nix family against Edward Hedden, collector at the Port of New York, to recover the fees they spent transporting tomatoes.

The Nixes sued under the Tariff of 1883, which required taxes on imported vegetables — but not fruit.

(So moderators... parent wasn't trolling, but making a valid, demonstrable point.)

CohibaVancouver opined:

To me, the biggest condemnation of Trump is not that he's ill-informed - Lots of people are ill-informed on lots of things - It's that he has little interest in actually becoming informed. Obama read for hours each night - Briefing papers, books - You name it. Trump reads nothing.

Sadly, it's actually worse than that.

It is quite clear that not only does Trump have, as you put it, "little interest" in becoming informed, but, instead, that he actively resists any attempt to provide him with information on subjects that trigger him.

It's also why he labells as "fake news" anything that displeases him. It's not that those things are factually inaccurate. It's that he just doesn't want to hear them ...

Oh FFS, get a clue. MicroSoft is one of the largest contributors to open source software and even Bill Gates sings its praises now.

He also mentioned that his pet snail, Gary, is still 15 times faster than his tunnel boring machine. It looks like there is an upgrade in the TBM's future, as the snail will soon only be 10 times faster!

Let me help you out with a piece of advice: google is fucking easy to use.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...

http://observer.com/2018/04/tr...

http://www.politifact.com/trut...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...

https://angrybearblog.com/2018...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

http://fortune.com/2018/03/29/...

In developed countries we've seen the birth rate decline over the last several decades. I suggest that young people are reacting to negative conditions for having kids, by having less kids. Student debt, declining real wages, the rising cost of housing, expensive medical insurance, politics, religion shown to be empty, cultural Marxism; all are perceived by the primitive layers of our brains as the kind of resource scarcity and adverse social conditions that make having kids unwise.

And you'd be wrong. Birth rate and income are inversely correlated within the same age group (that is, after controlling for older people tending to have higher incomes). You'll also note that fertility rate (birthrate divided by number of women aged 15-44) is higher in lower income races like black and hispanic. The opposite of what you'd expect if the factors you listed were the cause.

The difference is probably due to ease of access to contraception. Wealthier people have better access to more effective (long-term) contraception. But its cost has come down and the taboo against it has mostly disappeared, so even poorer and younger people have more access to it.

Yeah, Amazon will never leave. Why, if they were planning that, first they'd have to figure out how to open up a second headquarters somewhere more conducive, right? They'd never even consider that!

You've got cause and effect mixed up. And a seriously warped concept of how "good negotiations" are supposed to work. First, Trump created tariffs on Chinese goods. The Chinese responded with tariffs of their own. Then Trump responded with more tariffs. And the Chinese responded with more tariffs. Trump responded by actions against ZTE. Trump then pre-empted the Chinese response by agreeing to not take action against ZTE if China would at least ease off on agricultural tariffs.

At best, this is slowing trade war tensions. Both sides are using tariffs as a tool to get the other side to stop being such a dick in certain areas. Stop trying to spin this as some master plan Trump is using to win favorable trade with China. It's a stupid pissing contest that's not actually resolving any of the real underlying trade/power imbalances on either side.

And Trump is back-pedaling on his stance against Chinese company ZTE

It's not called back-pedaling you moron, it's carrot and stick. He used the stick and him "generously" helping ZTE is the carrot, only now the new ZTE will behave - and be grateful to Trump for having been punished!

Do you seriously not see how this works???

right after the Chinese government agreed to back half the costs of a Indonesia project that will have a Trump branded golf course and hotels

Isn't it refreshing to have a president who gets kickbacks out in the open instead of through shell companies?

> Who did Trump telephone about this course reversal? Look for "sharp" investors who suddenly

The trump crime family has a lot of business in china (for example, most of ivanka's merch is sourced from china). The "sharp" investor here could be trump himself, fishing for bribes that will be routed through his subsidiaries in country. It would not be unprecedented, almost immediately within a month of inauguration, china granted his family trademarks that they had been stalling on.

Also, it should be pointed out, that ZTE was banned because they violated the sanctions on Iran. That's about the most damning proof that Benedict Donald DGAF about actually containing Iran.

Yeah I know the grid makeup in the USA, I'm just pointing fun at the general political climate over there that sees no real desire or push for green energy.

https://amp.businessinsider.co...

CNN's ratings are down 20%...I cannot understand how they believe what they're doing is in their best interests.

You have to stop thinking about "the news" as a business. I have an article that will help:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos signed the $250 million Washington Post deal with no due diligence

The objective isn't to earn money selling advertising, needing viewership/readership to accomplish that. The objective is to dictate what people think about...everything. It's mind control, not business. It has a financial payoff, but it's not as direct as subscriber numbers or advertising revenue.

Their standing army of 1.2M troops practices their own war games.

To defend themselves from American aggression that has already killed millions of them.

And let's remember that it was Kim Il-sung who invaded the south to start the conflict.

To kick out an occupying empire and its puppet government. American Exceptionalists always leave this fact out.

The United States came in and dismissed Korean's right to self-determination because it was too soclailisticky, and then banned socialist and communist parties from running in future elections. Having just been saddled and then free from one imperial colonialist power, Korean's weren't in the mood to take that shit now that it was coming from you instead of the Japanese.

The US keeps a token force of ~23k troops, many of whom are cooks, and doctors, and nurses, and secretaries. So, an annual exercise with your allies isn't "doing" much of anything to NK.

That's on a single base in Korea, America's largest foreign base in the world, out of many. You're also ignoring all the troops and missiles stationed in occupied Japan that are also pointed in Pyongyang's way, plus all the Navy ships in the region.

You can choose to be blase about the U.S. history in Korea, the fact that it killed another 3 million people in Vietnam under the exact same scenario except they won (Viet Cong kicking out your occupying troops and puppet government), and the millions killed in your most recent bloodbaths from Iraq to Libya - but North Koreans aren't going to be willfully blind.

It is entirely funded by its members

Not according to this article. More than half of its money comes from the gun industry. And then there are all those foreign contributions, including Russian sources.

Microsoft's downfall began when they fired most of their QA staff.

Everything has gone to shit since.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Satya Nadella has fucked things up, but it's not too late to fire him.

If you don't live in California, you wish you lived in California.

No, not really. I lived in California for awhile. I was very happy to it as a I left it going back to sane states. A place where I can water my lawn and not paint it. Yes, they where painting their lawns green when I was there.

You may have one of the highest economies but it isn't a healthy economy, with 700B in debt. At 13.9% you also have the highest tax rate. Do you know what the tax rate in that my state is? It's 0%.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

You also have one of the fastest growing homeless problems. You share that with New York. Wonder what you and NY have in common?

https://endhomelessness.org/ho...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

I have already address California's water dependency before so there is no need to rehash it. Other than to say with out taking water from other states California wouldn't be able to do any where near as much as it tries to do.

But the worse sin that California forces on the rest of the country is that shreeking fool Maxine Waters. You know if you would get rid of her then we could work together on the rest of your problems.

Tech workers are fleeing the United States to work on Canada:
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.digitaljournal.com/...
https://www.axios.com/exodus-u...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Come on news people, make up your minds.

California has areas with serious problems with affordable housing.

And that literally has nothing to do with the cost of the houses themselves but rather their scarce availability.

Not so. California's housing prices are a huge part of their affordable housing problem. In the booming tech cities, housing prices have gone up so much that minimum wage workers can't afford to live in the city they work in.

Here’s how many minimum-wage hours it takes to afford a two-bed in SF
Low-wage jobs are plentiful in S.F., but where can you live?
I tried living on an $8 per hour salary in San Francisco and it was a disaster

This is required for the basic habitability of our planet.

You are dismissing an entirely valid line of thinking. In this specific case, the real goal is to make houses energy efficient, or carbon-neutral, or something like that. There's many ways to do that other than solar panels. Maybe someone wants to use a geothermal energy system, or a wind turbine. Or maybe they don't want to connect to the grid at all. Maybe they want to use a passive cooling design and a green roof. Often times regulations that tell people *how* to solve the problem are really corporations trying to use the regulations to steer people toward their products. Like requiring a particular safety valve, that only one company has a patent on. This prevents other companies from innovating by developing similar products.

Why is it that the hype from competitors never plays out as a serious threat? We're back to capex. Making good, profitable EVs takes vast amounts of capex, both in R&D, and in production. And at present, Tesla is the only company that's been doing that.

No they are definitely not the only company doing that. The big auto makers are making big investments in EV tech but largely in R&D rather than production. Why? Because for them the production is actually the easy part. They have plenty of cash and experience building cars. Right now the EV market is too small to justify production for them so they are letting Tesla do the heavy lifting of building and proving the market. But Ford, GM, etc could bring an EV to market within 18-24 months. They do this all the time since that is approximately the development time of one of their cars. Their strategy is to be a fast follower which is a very sensible strategy in principle. (Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, and others do this very well) Whether it will actually play out to their favor is an open question but they have the cash to do it. In the mean time they make fairly handsome profits off their ICE powered vehicles and let Tesla take the lions share of the risk in the short run.

Now the risk is that they can't follow fast enough or with a good enough product and Tesla eats their lunch. Anyone who claims they know how it will play out is deluding themselves. I think Tesla has a strong chance to become a long term player IF they can keep their funding going (ala Amazon) long enough to get to minimum efficient scale on production. Their stock is hugely overvalued but as long as Elon can keep the hype train on the tracks that's entirely to Tesla's benefit. The incumbent automakers had better be watching what Tesla is doing carefully and taking notes because Tesla is the ones really pushing the innovation envelope in the industry and they clearly have shown there is strong demand for EVs and features not currently offered by the traditional automakers.

Is Jeff Bezos careful to be logical? It seems to me the answer is no, if you judge by how Amazon is managed. More evidence, added to the evidence in the parent comment:

A Slashdot comment: "you still can't sort prime-only items by price correctly (it includes the lowest priced non-prime seller)..."

And: "... Amazon literally still builds their rich pages using their normal grid layout, and in the most impossible to navigate way possible.

Amazon: Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit (Seattle Times, April 3, 2012)

Amazon: Amazon Under Fire Over Alleged Worker Abuse in Germany (Bloomberg, Feb. 19, 2013)

Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (Salon.com, Feb. 23, 2014)

Amazon: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (New York Times, Aug. 15, 2015) Quote: "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers..."

Amazon: Amazon paid no US income taxes for 2017 (SeattlePI, Feb. 27, 2018)

Amazon: Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse workers in UK 'peed in bottles' over fears of being punished for taking a break (Business Insider, April 16, 2018)

Amazon: The undercover author who discovered Amazon warehouse workers were peeing in bottles tells us the culture was like a 'prison' (Business Insider, April 18, 2018)

Amazon: Amazon Gets Tax Breaks While Its Employees Rely on Food Stamps, New Data Shows (The Intercept, April 19, 2018) Quote: "Though the company now employs 200,000 people in the United States, many of its workers are not making enough money to put food on the table."

Safe space flight depends on careful thinking. Everyone involved with flight into space must be logical. Maybe Jeff Bezos just needed to find a place to put his money; maybe he doesn't influence Bllue Origins much. But even if that is true, he has influence, and that is scary. My opinion.

Is Jeff Bezos careful to be logical? It seems to me the answer is no, if you judge by how Amazon is managed. More evidence, added to the evidence in the parent comment:

A Slashdot comment: "you still can't sort prime-only items by price correctly (it includes the lowest priced non-prime seller)..."

And: "... Amazon literally still builds their rich pages using their normal grid layout, and in the most impossible to navigate way possible.

Amazon: Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit (Seattle Times, April 3, 2012)

Amazon: Amazon Under Fire Over Alleged Worker Abuse in Germany (Bloomberg, Feb. 19, 2013)

Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (Salon.com, Feb. 23, 2014)

Amazon: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (New York Times, Aug. 15, 2015) Quote: "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers..."

Amazon: Amazon paid no US income taxes for 2017 (SeattlePI, Feb. 27, 2018)

Amazon: Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse workers in UK 'peed in bottles' over fears of being punished for taking a break (Business Insider, April 16, 2018)

Amazon: The undercover author who discovered Amazon warehouse workers were peeing in bottles tells us the culture was like a 'prison' (Business Insider, April 18, 2018)

Amazon: Amazon Gets Tax Breaks While Its Employees Rely on Food Stamps, New Data Shows (The Intercept, April 19, 2018) Quote: "Though the company now employs 200,000 people in the United States, many of its workers are not making enough money to put food on the table."

Safe space flight depends on careful thinking. Everyone involved with flight into space must be logical. Maybe Jeff Bezos just needed to find a place to put his money; maybe he doesn't influence Bllue Origins much. But even if that is true, he has influence, and that is scary. My opinion.

making new plastic is cheaper than recycling: http://www.businessinsider.com...

And according to this article, paper is actually more cost effective and reduces CO2 more than recycling plastic: https://www.bustle.com/article...

They want to be thought of as so ruthless that if one even commits the thoughtcrime of copying software, they will be prosecuted by the full power of Microsoft. This guy is a feather away from that ($0.25 cents a disc for free software? Is he even covering his DVD cost?) and is serving jail time. But they also want to be thought of as good guys making the world a better place. Kind of like the Goldman Sachs CEO saying he was doing "God's work" prior to the malfeasance uncovered when the 2008 Financial Crisis hit.

They are very happy to send this unmistakable message, despite feeble public protestations.