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https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/2...

It wasn't Trump, it was Pence and Pompeo who threatened North Korea with a Libyan outcome.

Threatened? No, predicted.

Speaking in May 21 interview on Fox News, Pence said the reclusive regime could end up like the North African country "if Kim Jong Un doesn't make a deal."

Source

Sony has made plenty of profit from the Playstation. You should check your facts more carefully.

You should check your ability to read and comprehend what you're replying to more carefully. Especially if you want to criticize others for not 'checking their facts'.
Read the title of the article again. Slowly. See the "hardware-business" part? If not, try again until you do. Now then....

There's a very obvious difference between the Playstation hardware (you know, the stuff everyone else here is talking about) and the Playstation business unit (which only you are talking about).

It is a verifiable fact that at launch, Sony lost money on every Playstation 4 sold, a fact the guy you tried to criticize for not checking his facts got completely right (remember what we're talking about yet?). On the PS3 hardware (have you learned what that word means now?), they lost $3.5 Billion in 2007-2008 alone.
The business unit made that up with PlayStation Plus subs, game sales and things like peripheral licensing. But that doesn't change the fact that Sony took a loss on the hardware (once again, hardware is the stuff we're talking about, if you've been able to grasp that yet) and that mjwx's facts were completely correct despite your inability to comprehend that fact.

The Playstation has been a significant cash cow for Sony for quite a few years now. Microsoft tried to buy into the market with Xbox but Sony has been making money on Playstation for a long time.

The Playstation business unit has, yes. The latest generations of Xbox have also allowed the Xbox division to become a profitable unit within Microsoft as well, despite them also selling their console hardware (Damn, there's that word again. I hope you aren't still averse to it) at a loss. This is compounded a bit by the fact that Sony also gets a small piece of every Xbox sold due their patents related to the included Blu-Ray hardware (Shit! There's that word again! You just can't escape it. At least, not when it's the topic being discussed by everyone with the reading comprehension of a 3rd grader).

That doesn't mean they're making any money from it.

Sony has made plenty of profit from the Playstation. You should check your facts more carefully. In 2016 the Playstation division accounted for 3/4 of Sony's profits for the whole corporation.

The PlayStation hardware was sold at a significant loss

The Playstation has been a significant cash cow for Sony for quite a few years now. Microsoft tried to buy into the market with Xbox but Sony has been making money on Playstation for a long time.

And BTW your claim about "every teardown" is wrong. You mean "Every teardown by one Randy Munrone". Ingineerix, Jack Rickard, and Evannex disagree.,

You mean Sandy Munro? You know those guys have chops, right? They're not amateurs. Also, I don't know if you took the time to actually watch the entire interview, but he gave Tesla credit for numerous things that he thought they did extremely well — better, in fact, than literally anyone else. The electronics leap immediately to mind.

Besides that though, there are plenty of other media references as well, not to mention the owners complaining all over the official forums. Please don't pretend like Tesla isn't having quality control problems. They absolutely are, and there's no credibly denying it. When you get in to this kind of money, it's not cute to have problems like that. It's not an especially huge amount of money to spend for a product that does what it does, but it is enough money where it's disappointing for it to have that kind of flaw. If we didn't care about style, we'd all drive identical-looking vehicles which were based on the intersection of crash safety and aerodynamics.

It would be less embarrassing if this were Tesla's first car, but it isn't...

But at least Seattle didn't already do something crazy like pass a $15 per hour minimum wage law! Oh wait... yes they did.

Just so you know... that study is known to be flawed. You might want to update your views to include the latest and most complete information.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/05/raising-the-minimum-wage-doesnt-cost-jobs-multiple-studies-suggest/?utm_term=.c02f6259e293

And now that Seattle is asking Amazon to give a tiny percentage back to help the community that fostered them, they threaten to leave.

This argument would be more compelling if Seattle didn't already collect taxes from Amazon. Amazon already pays quite a lot in taxes. The Seattle city government basically said "We've decided we need even more money, you have money, so hand it over."

When even the extremely liberal Starbucks is complaining, maybe Seattle has gone too far.

Amazon doesn't like this, but it's really going to hurt low-margin businesses like fast food hamburger restaurants. The iconic local hamburger chain, Dick's Drive-in, will never open another location in Seattle, according to the founder's grandson Saul Spady.

"This is a tax on high-volume, low-margin businesses, like restaurants, and that's where it's going to put the most pain. And it's making restaurants like Dick's Drive-ins think really strongly about do we make our workforce more efficient, do we give less money to charity, or maybe we just don't be a business in Seattle."

Spady cites Denver's head tax equivalent, the Occupational Privilege Tax, saying, "If the nearest, largest head tax in the country is $50 and [Seattle's is] six times the nearest head tax, how is that a compromise?"

But at least Seattle didn't already do something crazy like pass a $15 per hour minimum wage law! Oh wait... yes they did.

If a city council giving orders truly leads to prosperity and happiness, then Seattle will be prosperous and happy. I fear it doesn't work that way.

So, you're saying that Apple, a company that sits on a pile of money so big they could probably buy a country or three, is at the same time under such crippling debt that it may destroy them?

If I have $600,000 to bribe Trump through his lawyer, can I get net neutrality reinstated?

If you like Big Macs and go to McDonalds, chances are seeing the calorie count on the menu won't make you get a salad.

True, but not for the reason you think.

China’s National Statistics Bureau said in January that the country’s total energy consumption in 2017 was up around 2.9% compared to a year ago, but coal’s share in total energy mix was down by 1.7%.

You are taking electricity's fossil fuel increase of 5.2 total , pretending it's all coal. And ignoring all the other coal uses that have fallen.

Around 15% of the increase in China’s electricity demand was due to higher demand for cooling, driven by a particularly hot summer. (This topic will be the focus of a forthcoming IEA report on how the projected growth in air conditioning usage around the world will affect global electricity demand). Despite continued reductions of coal use in buildings and industry, the growth in the power sector pushed up coal demand in China by 0.3%, after three years of declining demand. Despite this rebound, coal use in China remains below its 2013 peak.

So it's not a 5% increase for coal, it's only 0.3%. Why do you continue to post your lies?

It's not all doom and gloom like you think.
https://greenerideal.com/news/...

The report said that while China was outstripping every nation in sight, investment in renewable projects in the UK, Germany and the US tailed off. The US saw renewable investment withdraw by 6 percent to $40.5 billion, and with the Trump administration adding a new solar panel tariff, jobs lost to the sector in 2018 will amount to 23,000. On the flip side, China was responsible for 45 percent of the $279.8 billion spent on all renewables, and more than half of all new global solar capacity.

AN INCREDIBLE wave of solar energy peaking in China has helped to put renewable energy ahead of fossil fuels use for the first time. A total 98 gigawatts of solar energy technology – with 53 gigawatts installed in China – outstripped combined coal, gas and nuclear energies.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/2...

China maintained its position as a wind energy powerhouse, installing 19.7 GW, while the European Union added 15.6 GW of capacity, its best ever year. The U.S. installed a little over 7 GW of capacity.

2) Low taxes have high costs

Yeah, like an electorate from CA that's fleeing to find them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/1...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p...

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

I manage people in CA, but don't live there. I've visited frequently over the last ~30 years, and spent about a total of a year of my life in the state. It's a great place to visit, but no fucking way do I want to live there. And clearly, I'm not alone...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/1...
https://www.nbc26.com/news/nat...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/p...

Not to inject facts into a good discussion, but the reality is that Tesla stock dropped about 2% after the call, and it's already rebounded. (If you include the part of the drop that occurred right before the call, it would be about 5%. Figure $301 to $284 and back.)

Look at the 1-month variation in this link and note that the variation after the call is about the same as four other similar variations in the past 30 days.

Big, fat hairy deal.

Also, the questions that Musk avoided weren't "sober questions by respected Wall Street analysts", they were leading questions intended to elicit a response that could be taken in a negative light. In one case, the question was answered completely by the filed papers, and illustrated that the asker didn't do his homework.

Tesla is the most shorted stock in history right now (not most shorted in todays market, by some measures it's the most shorted stock of all time), and a lot of people would like to see it fall so they can make some money.

You won't get an honest opinion about Tesla for awhile, not until the short sellers realize that they can't bring the stock down using hype.

They got a huge tax break instead of an all-but-guaranteed tax hike.

Yeah, actually not. Clinton's plan contained significant cost reductions for people making under $50K/yr. Under trump, we got tax cuts for millionaires and tax bills for the middle class.

Unemployment is way down.

Not for rural whites. In fact, its still so bad for them that Michigan republicans are trying to exempt them from their draconian medicaid work requirements.
Also, those people at that Carrier plant that he "saved?" Yeah, they got fucked.

The stock market is way up.

(A) Doesn't mean squat for majority of people because they don't own stocks.
(B) Rate of growth in the stock market is slower than it was under Obama.
(C) China has stopped buying soybeans. Not just tariffs, full stop, buying em from somewhere else. China is the #2 largest market for US soy and soy is the #2 US crop export.

Denuclearization, peace, and potential reunification in Korea,

Not anything to do with trump. The sanctions only resulted in a ~20% increase in black market currency exchange, showing that it wasn't a big deal for a country that survived the great faminine of the 90s on nothing but Juche. Moon Jae-in is leading trump around by the nose. Though I guess you could say the fact that trump is so easily played by Moon is a point in trump's favor. So sure, promise that gloryhound a nobel prize if that's what it takes to keep him from screwing up everybody else's work.

Tons of sex cults and human trafficking rings have been broken up.

Ah, so now you reveal yourself as one of those RWNJ dumbasses. In fact, its the nothing of the kind. If anything, they've been cracking down on easy targets - adult sex-workers, not trafficking victims. Meanwhile Trump knowingly endorsed an actual pedophile.

Corrupt leaders and former leaders of many countries are actually being brought to justice.

Yeah. Putin. Duterte. Netanyahu MBS They've all been locked up!!! Yay!

The wall is being built.

Lol. He couldn't even get his own republican party to pay for it. Much less mexico.

Next year there will be no unconstitutional personal mandate for health insurance.

Yay! That's already working out so great for republicans.
Never mind how he totally fucked rural whites with empty promises about the opioid epidemic.

Why? The numbers by Tesla look pretty much as expected.

The past-performance numbers indeed were in range of expectations -- a mere $1B of cash burned for the quarter. But of course Tesla's viability depends on changing that trajectory quickly, and Elon's general refusal to answer questions about today's fundamentals and incessant focus on the Next Big Thing coming down the road Real Soon Now strongly suggest that's not happening.

Due to the Trump tax breaks and repeal of net neutrality, the communications cabal is racking in record profits:

Comcast Q1 2018 profit beats expectation:

  https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/2...

Verizon : Q1 2018 MASSIVE profit boost of 32%

https://www.highgeekly.com/bus...

These companies are carving up the internet (Comcast is "bundling Netflix", oh, and if you don't pay the higher Comcast rate, your traffic 'flix gets punished aka: deprioritized) and monetizing user data just EXACTLY as the NN supporters claimed would happen. The result is massive profits... which drive stock prices, higher consumer costs, and poorer user experience...

They got the bump from the tax cut in December when it passed, any NN stock bump would already be priced in as well.

But now the market is responding to the fact that people are dropping their cable subscriptions faster than expected.

Due to the Trump tax breaks and repeal of net neutrality, the communications cabal is racking in record profits:
Comcast Q1 2018 profit beats expectation:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/2...

Verizon : Q1 2018 MASSIVE profit boost of 32%
https://www.highgeekly.com/bus...

These companies are carving up the internet (Comcast is "bundling Netflix", oh, and if you don't pay the higher Comcast rate, your traffic 'flix gets punished aka: deprioritized) and monetizing user data just EXACTLY as the NN supporters claimed would happen. The result is massive profits... which drive stock prices, higher consumer costs, and poorer user experience...

Considering

* back in Feb. 2018 that Amazon's market cap was at $702.5 billion compared to Microsoft's at $699.2 billion (beating MS for the first time),

* but in March 2018 Amazon was at $684.3 billion compared to Microsoft's $692.4 billion ...

... yeaaaah, about that, Amazon buying Microsoft isn't going to happen anytime soon.

Except Apple still dropped to 5th place in China.

Well, they didn't see it that way.

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/2...

Not to worry, the SJW's will make sure it ends up racist against white and males before long.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/0...
https://www.americanthinker.co...
https://www.theaustralian.com....

Not really.

"Pharma bro" scammer Martin Shkreli has been sent to a federal prison in New Jersey to serve the remainder of his seven-year sentence after being denied his request for a minimum-security federal camp.......The prison is located on the U.S. military base at Fort Dix, about 80 miles from New York City, where Shkreli lived, and 30 miles from Philadelphia. It houses 3,945 inmates.

And in other news, California is experiencing an exodus. And it's mostly the middle class that's fleeing progressive California.

Not only that, Europeans live longer, are healthier, happier, and have more (and better) sex than Americans.

Here is someone who wants to give it a shot in the US, along with some of his reasoning.

I'll always applaud any engineering feat to develop, calibrate and make that robot do that 'one' thing, like put that single IKEA chair model together. But this is just hot air escaping from a cold window at a tail pipe party. Robotics tasks are and have been quintessential in manufacturing and a gaggle of other industries. Kind of reminds me of shit like this.

Now if there was some machine learning/AI image processing component where learning from video watching the humans put it together 50 seconds faster, it improved each time from it's own data points from before, then I'd be impressed and absolutely creeped out that Jeff Bezos has been right all along.

...then that this didn't happen?

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/0...

I certainly haven't heard anything about it since the initial reports.

Ferret

"See, the obsession is that investors have dumped BILLIONS into Tesla and it has been lost - yes, LOST - period."

The money hasn't been lost yet, but Tesla is burning through it's cash at a stunning rate. It looks to be a crapshoot as to whether Tesla will end this year flying high, dead broke, or struggling off into the future having sold off much of whatever it has in the way of marketable assets. See https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/3...

Moody's downgraded Tesla's credit rating to "Negative" a few weeks ago. That's not good.

Tesla is the most shorted company right now.

The problem with the situation is that most investors *want* Tesla to fail so that they can make money from the short sales.

OTOH, Elon Musk is aware of the shorts and tends to do something to prop up the stock price whenever it drops a little. Like announcing a new model or a new production goal. (The production goals are never met, but the announcements make the stock tick up a couple of percent.)

So right now we're awash in bear market opinions, and many suggestive (but worthless) statements keep making the rounds such as:

"Tesla has never made a profit"
"Tesla loses money on every car they sell"
"Tesla only survives due to government handouts"
"Tesla is so far behind that some people will get their cars $SOMENUMBER years from now"
"Tesla is burning through cash, will be bankrupt in $NUM months"
"Musk is a serial liar"

Those are the highlights - have I missed any?

To analyze #4 as an example ("burning through cash"), note that this is something the CFO and CEO keep track of and anticipate, and are responsible for raising more cash before the bankruptcy actually happens. Also, specifically Tesla predicts that they won't need another round of financing, but that option is certainly open if they need it.

It's nigh impossible to get an accurate assessment of Tesla's worth right now, due to corruption in reporting.

Tesla expects to turn a profit for the first time later this year. Their stock will probably skyrocket when that happens.

This is yet another misleading headline from Ars.

From the CNBC report it was quoting, which in itself is only quoting excerpts:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...

"Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering "gene therapy" treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.

"Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled "The Genome Revolution."

"The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

"The report suggested three potential solutions for biotech firms:

"Solution 1: Address large markets: Hemophilia is a $9-10bn WW market (hemophilia A, B), growing at ~6-7% annually."

"Solution 2: Address disorders with high incidence: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) affects the cells (neurons) in the spinal cord, impacting the ability to walk, eat, or breathe."

"Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness) Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets."

You can argue with the financial analysts view but I see nothing wrong in his analysis.

No one, and I mean no one, pre-funds their pension fund 75 years out, it's not rational.

As others have pointed out, the USPS doesn't actually have to fund benefits 75 years out.

But in any event, the real irrationality is having defined benefit plans in the first place. Those by their very nature require long-range assumptions about lifespan and market performance, and the people who made overly optimistic assumptions decades ago are long gone when they're proven badly wrong. If an entity providing a pension ceases to exist, the pensioners get screwed because there aren't enough dollars to pay what they were promised and there's nobody to keep refilling the leaky bucket. And if people live a lot longer than projected (as continues to be the case), the entity can get put under significant pressure due to the extra unanticipated funding. Take a look at NCR for a good recent example of how this can go badly wrong.

Public pensions are generally just kicking this can down the road, to the tune of a ~5% per year increase in the gap between their promises and their assets. But the music will inevitably stop someday, and there will be some people left without chairs.

If the USPS insists on continuing with a defined benefit plan despite all that, it's perfectly reasonable in my view to ask them to put themselves (and their retirees) in an equivalent risk position by assuring sufficient funds to pay everything they promised to pay. That's all that's going on here.

Because this is happening in China and not America. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...

That must be why since Trump has been President. China's currency increased over 10% and America's deficit only got worse.To a 9 1/2 year high.

Just read this and it's essentially case closed, is it not?

Everyone is painting Zuckerberg as the incredible mind that he is, and rightfully so he is. I will say then that when you're that incredible, then you're not naive, either, and you're going to make sure you're uber prepared and 20 steps ahead. You don't become Zuckerberg of the world by being naive and clueless, ladies and gentlemen.

It's all meaningless when you've paid the same people who are questioning you. This is just dog-and-pony public show to make sure we, as a democratic for-the-people country, are doing all the right steps through vision to make it look like they give a shit. Facebook isn't going away and neither is Zuckerberg and the empire of surveillance he created, nor is his entire fucking body of think-tanks he has on puppet strings to keep carrying it out. Notice how prepared Facebook is at all times at any backlash? "Oh we are pissed about this", and less than 24 hours later there's an already baked up, engineered and software developed solution to 'deal with it how 'you think' it's being dealt with. 20 steps ahead. That's all you need to know.

This changes nothing.

It takes an incredible mind, to turn around and have people in the company you operate go out of their way to violate HIPAA, then try to claim that it was perfectly okay to do it.

At this point, I'm pretty sure that FB has some serious problems and I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerburg tries to flee the US sometime in the near future.

Using non American citizens in management positions, as was obviously the case, is a textbook campaign finnance violation. They are now under yet another investigation

Analysis of a Recent Facebook company announcement:

Buried in a company announcement was acknowledgement that nearly all of its users have been targeted to some degree.

That makes about 2 billion users whose privacy was leaked.

Also, Facebook was trying to collect patient data from hospitals:

The idea was to build profiles of people that included their medical conditions, information that health systems have, as well as social and economic factors gleaned from Facebook.

Also also, Diamond and Silk (two pro-Trump bloggers from the election cycle) were deemed unsafe for the community by facebook. Their followers no longer receive a notice when they make a new post.

From Facebook:

"This decision is final and it is not appeal-able in any way." (Note: This is the exact wording that FB emailed to [Diamond and Silk].)

The main difference is that we today have a LOT more to spend our time and money on so we have to work more to get that shit paid.

False. While most things have rose at the rate of inflation, prices for entertainment have dropped substantially in the past 20 years. While a 55" tv would have cost $3,000+ just twenty years ago, they can now be bought for $300. Camcorders, cameras, tape/cd players have all been replaced by relatively inexpensive smartphones. Film and tapes for cameras and camcorders have been replaced by cheap memory cards and free unlimited online storage you can access anywhere from your phone. DVD and vcrs have been replaced by smart tvs with Netflix, Hulu and YouTube. 20 years ago you might spend thousands on a reasonable music and movie collection, that has been replaced by spending a few dollars a month on Netflix and Amazon streaming, Apple Music and Spotify.

Thanks to advances in vehicle reliability people are even keeping cars longer, an average of 11.5 years https://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/2...

So really this is the richest the average American has ever been.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/google-paying-apple-3-billion-to-remain-default-search--bernstein.html

I'm not a Microsoft fan, but Google has a way bigger reputation for just abandoning stuff. So bad that when Keep came out, people predicted when it would be abandoned:

That is true however the context of the thread isn't why you should pick Google over MS. The context was why developers haven't adopted .NET despite a MIT license.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still *hasn't* abandoned Windows Phone users, despite an ongoing, total failure in the marketplace:

What? Microsoft is no longer developing either features or hardware for Windows Phone as announced by Microsoft. I consider that abandoning the platform. Add to that 3rd party developers are not flocking to the platform as well as current developers are not updating their apps, I would say WP10 is dead.

With all of the knowledge and know how of the past, why did it take 50 or 60 years for access to space to drop for once?

Because getting to space is technologically hard. It takes a while for economies of scale to build up enough to really make a big difference.

It took about that long for air travel to become reasonably affordable. Heck even today an estimated 80% of the world population has never flown. When I was born less than half of the US population had never set foot inside an aircraft. The term jet set originated from the fact that until the 1960s-70s air travel was too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy.

In the beginning you are building infrastructure, but after that is done, you should be using it for its intended purpose, not as some lifelong gravy train of project contracts.

Well bear in mind that we took a 30 year wrong turn with the shuttle which delayed a lot of that infrastructure. We're just now digging out of the hole from that.

Melissa Mayer? Her name is Marissa Mayer. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/3...

It may not be their main way of selling, but Apple stores are the most profitable locations per square foot of any retail space, of any industry. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/2...

Warren Buffett admitted his investment company can take on bigger risks, giving total average higher rewards, because it's big enough to spread the risk around, something smaller competitors don't have by definition. The "network effect" is taking over every industry.

This is something people with lots of money have tried to claim many times yet the average age of a S&P company is under 20 years down from 60 years in 1958. It's not so simple that mega-corporations throw their weight around and win industry after industry just by being big. There's plenty room for new companies even though many of them get bought out eventually.

Which is what this article by Lora Kolodny is.
She really, REALLY, REALLY has an issue with Tesla.

And again... she puts doom&gloom in the title...

Tesla employees say automaker is churning out a high volume of flawed parts requiring costly rework
        Tesla employees say the company is manufacturing a high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles that need rework and repairs.
        The electrical vehicle maker has had to ship some flawed parts to remanufacturing facilities to avoid scrapping them, rather than fixing them in-line, according to sources; Tesla denies this.

Then she digs through "at least one Tesla employee profile on LinkedIn" to try to "prove" a much greater level of part rework - cause an employee listed working in a team of 130 instead of 40 on a CV.
But the best part is where she quotes experts.

Like this part at the end of the second paragraph...

Lean manufacturing specialist Matt Girvan, founder of MAG Consulting, said: "Even during what is considered 'launch' mode, if a company is selling its cars to customers, it should not be experiencing large amounts of rework.
This speaks to an internal quality issue that is on a magnitude that is not normal for most car manufacturers."

Then... after much more text and a "sad" photo of Musk (Why not a meme, Lora?), more text (including that LinkedIn part) - here's that same expert again, near the end of the article:

He said, "Problems are unavoidable in any factory. 'Rework' does happen... These listings speak to what is probably a large amount of product that has either not been built to specification or that has been built to an incorrect specification where the error wasn't found until later."

In autos, there is a widespread philosophy of "right the first time," Girvan added. Usually, automakers spend a lot of time on planning and prototypes before going into full production. One reason for a cautious approach is that too much scrap, and a high portion of parts that need rework, can eat into the already-challenging profit margins of auto assembly.

Also... Buried between Tesla's responses:

At least, Girvan said, "It's better to catch a defect in the factory and fix it -- far better than something occurring in the field involving a customer's vehicle."

Hmm... Put that way, all that "rework" (note the quote-marks in reply by Girvan) sounds a lot like quality control.
Instead of... you know... "backlog of flawed parts and vehicles", "flawed or damaged parts", "defect rate is so high", "surprisingly high ratio of flawed parts and vehicles"...

I don't know what it is about Kolodny and Tesla... but she really has it in for that company.

Uber's entire business model is based on (a) outright breaking laws duly passed by democratically elected legislatures

You've heard of gerrymandering, right? The USA is an oligarchy, not a democracy. There is more democracy the further away you get from Washington, but that still doesn't mean that all of those legislatures were democratically elected. If the democratic process is subverted, which it totally has been, then you can't say you've got democracy.

Since the rest of your comment is based on the fallacious notion that we have democracy in America, it can be ignored. ERR_NO_DATA

And hey, guess what! Maybe those crusty hidebound taxi regulators weren't quite a stupid as the tech world (or the tech world's boosters) like to think.

The argument is not that they are stupid, it is that they are corrupt.

Because another key to Uber's business model was convincing its drivers to ignore how freaking expensive it is to operate a vehicle as a taxi for any length of time, and to accept remuneration below the (total depreciation of the vehicle + hourly wage).

That's not anything Uber's done, though. They're simply taking advantage of the fact that the American economy is in the toilet, and rapidly circling the bowl and heading for the drain. Actual unemployment is at levels not seen since the great depression. The numbers are a lie as usual, but the particular nature of the numbers make them a bigger lie now than that usual state of affairs; since people drop off the statistics when they are no longer eligible to collect unemployment benefits. When people are so unemployed that the state has given up on helping them, they are no longer counted as unemployed. In an environment like this, are you surprised that people are willing to work for less than minimum wage? When there are no minimum wage jobs left, they will go looking for something even lower.

And speaking of lower, Some of these people are actually sleeping in their Uber car. It's not just a car loan, and a car in which to do business. It's a home.

TL;DR: I do not think you have any notion of just how bad things are in the USA right now.

Your anecdote does not invalidate the data. The data is that medical bills are the number 1 cause of bankruptcy in the US. From the USA Today/Motley Fool article:

The New York Times reported that 20% of Americans under 65 with health insurance had trouble paying their medical bills over the past year. Of those, 63% claim to have used up all or most of their savings to tackle their healthcare expenses

So even if people have medical insurance, in many cases they are spending every dollar they have for medical costs. This doesn't happen in most other countries. A lot of "shitholes" can provide all their people with medical care, but in the US it's not possible because the people who are making a lot of money off of other people's misery are much too powerful because of the horrible political system. If campaign finance is fixed then maybe there is a chance for this to change, but currently both the corporate parties are currently fully bought and owned which is the same reason that we don't have universal gun background checks or legal marijuana even though a majority of the people support such measures. We used to have a representative government, and we still do, but now the representatives work for the corporations and the rich rather than for the general public.

Meanwhile China is getting further and further ahead of you.

Meanwhile China is getting further and further ahead.