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Why Silicon Valley Won't Be the Green Car Detroit
thecarchik writes "NPR boldly pronounced, 'The new automobile of the 21st century is likely to benefit from the culture of Silicon Valley, where people are used to taking a chip, a cell or an idea and working on it until it becomes something big.' We've thought about it for a year, and discussed it with many people. And we don't believe it. Silicon Valley is the wrong place to build an auto industry, for three main reasons."
You're welcome to justify your bigotry, but it's still bigotry.
Alternately, a rational person might ask themselves what percentage of the 9/11 hijackers were wearing traditional Muslim garb. Even suicide mission terrorists are only so stupid.
Good reasons to not do anything in Silicon Valley, nevermind California:
1) Taxes. California is expensive.
2) Employee wages. Because of taxes, they must be higher to be competitive.
3) Energy costs and grid instability. I'm continually amazed by how crappy things are there.
4) Uppity liberal engineers. No, seriously: these people make poor engineers. Good software developers, sure. Reasoning ability isn't in question; their ability to acknowledge the realities of the world around them for what it is, is.
5) Culture. This ties into #4, but the "I'm due" attitude makes for lazy workers who think they're entitled. Sometimes, hard and unpleasant work is required to get the job done; unless its personally interesting, this type of worker isn't going to get it done. (Check out where industrial machinery tends to be engineered. Hint: it's far from the beaches.)
6) Lost work hours due to environment. SUre, your workers might be there from 9-5 but if it takes an hour on either side of their work day to transit in heavy traffic to do so, they're not going to be on their game.
7) They need automotive engineers who understand what has been tried, why it should not be tried again, and so on. These people are likely to be located elsewhere, giving no incentive to move to California over any other state.
An electric car would be no different from an iPod in this respect.
Yet an iPod is significantly different than, say, a Nokia n8100 or a Microsoft Zune. Why? It may have to do with the culture and location in which they were designed, and what kind of engineers were working on it.
I'd sooner want John Deere or CAT engineers designing my EV than iPod engineers. JD or CAT engineers would be concerned with purely quantifiable things: input to output ratios, handling, suspension, etc. The iPod engineers might do some EC stuff, but for the most part, they're going to be focused on the design of the end result. I'd rather have an efficient EV built by experienced mechanical/electrical engineers that looks like a brick than I would a car that looks awesome but can't corner quickly without a wheel flying off, or an electrical short in cold weather that causes the thing to stall.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So his personal opinion in an opinion piece gets him fired?
NPR won't let their employees attend even nominally political rallies, so yes.
He even went on to say how much he is against outright hatred and racism based on work he has done.
Did he say how one of his best friends is a muslim too?
Sorry but NPR is showing its true colors. You must "one of us" or you are gone. Sad.
When "one of us" means not a bigot, then yes.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yeah; they demanded good pay for long hard hours.
Indeed, Chinese slave labour - or slave labour in general - is more cost effective.
If only the peons knew their place and worked for peanuts!
Trying to equate demanding a living wage with stock market games is just... wow. Just wow.
But hey, in the end it doesn't really matter. The United States will collapse, China will rise. Maybe they will recognize US nobility, maybe they won't. It's just a new empire replacing the old and corrupt one. We shall see if China too will flirt with individual freedoms, and if they'll get those confused with letting the rich and the powerful to oppress everyone else and sell the country piece by piece, like the US did.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
big problem because they let the students at UCSC vote in city elections.
Ah, 26th? Yup, its a well known fact college-aged students have the highest voting turnout of any age group. That's why they are so well represented!
Those students are overwhelmingly liberal
Aren't most students, everywhere more liberal? Have you been to Santa Cruz, it's a republican enclave, for sure!
don't understand that you need a tax base
Yup, students are dumb... Liberals do not support taxes?
won't be around for more than 4 years
Yup, after 4 years they demolish the campus.
huge shopping mall
Sounds gorgeous, what town wouldn't want one.
weak argument that customers are driving through Santa Cruz in order to get to the mall
Many countries have Value Added Tax deductions for visitors, obviously creating that was a weak argument.