I have a hard time imagining they're going to be any better with the gophers... There's plenty of companies with considerably younger workforces that still output some really shoddy products.
Seriously thou, you're never actually entitled to your job and if an employer is able to come up with a legal justification for getting rid of you, they can do it and there's really nothing you can do about it. If you lose out in a cost-value analysis then you should simply expect to be fired, nothing more, nothing less.
It could also be that the industry-level issue like standard practices for salary increases with years of experience just don't match the additional value a more experience employee provides to the company, particularly when you go beyond 50 and learning new things has become much harder than for a 20 or 30-something. Actually, considering how many new things you have to constantly be learning in the tech sector it's probably no wonder you start seeing an increasing rift between salary and employee value, along management behavior reflecting this, when people start getting to the kind of age where learning new things is genuinely harder than when you were still in your 30s.
My gut feeling is still that the guy who's suing IBM for age discrimination may have performed the best in his sales team, but when compared to his peers and normalized for salary his performance wasn't all that great anymore.
While people and companies who focus staff reductions on older workers are typically portrayed as mustache twirling evil or stupid here in/., I'm pretty sure IBM isn't stupid enough to have actually done what they're being accused of doing.
If I had to hazard a guess as to why he in particular was singled out for firing they probably either normalized performance for salary or then implemented a cost savings program that was aiming to maximize retained headcount. In both scenarios he's obviously going to be at a clear disadvantage compared to his younger peers with his obviously higher-than-average salary. If you look at previous cases of IBM getting rid of older workers you can find plenty of cases where they still offer to retain the workers as outside contractors, but with lower salaries suggesting that it's not about them not wanting older workers, but rather that they think older workers are just overpaid.
I've previously been met with some pretty hostile responses when suggesting the reason why so many older workers find themselves on the chopping block specifically because management thinks they're not worth the extra salary compared to their younger peers. Usually this just devolves into a straw man where commenters just start shittalking 20-somethings rather than actually discussing what I suggested so if you are just going to start sittalking 20-somethings, just don't even bother.
With high schools pushing everyone to go to college, it's a win-win for for everyone except the student.
You can't exactly blame them for that considering how we're moving more and more towards a knowledge economy and as a result both the demand and perceived value of physical labor has been going down for decades.
You can clearly see this in how wages for low-skill jobs hasn't kept up with inflation while wages for highly skilled workers like those in tech have either kept up with inflation or exceeded it.
Having been a student pretty recently (got my master's degree papers in 2016) what you're describing sounds way more like some rich trust fund kid than the average student.
The few of my fellow students that had cars were bangers used to commute from places barely served by public transport, nobody I knew actually owned their own apartment, daily "eating out" was just subsidized lunches at the school cafeteria, drinking was mostly at unlicensed student dives way cheaper than a regular bar and vacation trips were mostly to nearby cities to stay with friends or relatives living in them.
On top of that, people still worked on the side and particularly during the summers. Before I was able to get far along enough to be able to work in my own field during the summers I worked in construction during the summer and actually ended up having to delay my graduation because of working practically full time on the side while studying. A close friend of mine moonlighted as a security guard the whole time I knew him and actually liked the work.
Seriously thou, old people have complained about how young people are lazy, disrespectful and that we're doomed as a society because of them since at least Plato's times, but here we still are. Thus it's beyond obvious that new generations being worse than their predecessors isn't any less false than it was back in Plato's times.
I've personally been following GPU prices pretty closely for the last year or so and from what I've seen the drop-off hasn't even been that dramatic since the start of the year and there's still plenty of air in prices, particularly for AMD cards. You can find plenty of Nvidia cards for about MSRP, thou that's not all that unusual as there's been the occasional MSRP special trough the whole craze, but AMD cards still go for well above MSRP almost all across their range and there's actually a reason for that.
The last time there was a mining craze and then a bubble burst AMD, who like this time had the hardware best suited for this, and their board partners ended up badly over-producing and when the bubble burst almost over night finding themselves with a significant stockpile of unsold hardware. Not only that, a lot of miners also either intentionally broke their cards by wrapping them up so that they'd fail out of heat so they could return them for a refund or then flooded the second hand market with their cards, significantly reducing the demand for that surplus hardware and AMD and their partners needed to shift. The end result of this was that there was suddenly a huge amount of second hand top-end 200-series cards and really big discounts on new cards, which as you may be able to guess didn't exactly do wonders for their bottom line.
What seems to have happened this time as that AMD and their board partners were cautious and deliberately under-produced during the craze and now that things have died down they don't have the surplus stock Nvidia has. Nvidia has reportedly even had to resort to delaying the launch of their next generation of cards just so that they can shift their existing inventory without having to resort to fire sale prices.
If that's all you can think of when you hear the term "service industry" (look it up, it's an enormous amount of different kinds of jobs from retail and tourism trough clerical work to IT services) then you probably ought to refrain from expressing your opinions on the matter as you're really not informed enough to even have an informed opinion.
People have been talking about how automation is going to kill so many jobs and there's going just to be so much unemployment since the 1970s, but most of the workforce reductions in jobs that can be automated in a practical manner is from having those off-shored. So it's not just the optimists who are repeating the same story over and over again decade in and out, it's also the doomsayers.
In modern times the biggest "killer" of developed world jobs has by far been globalization, but despite talk from doomsayers about how much unemployment it was going to cause when it went into full swing in the 1980s, pretty much the workforce has been able to find new work, typically either doing the same kind of work or in other industries. The "mass unemployment" simply fizzled out in the face of an expanding service industry.
Back when mechanized agriculture massively reduced the need for agricultural labor it wasn't certain where the redundant workforce was going to go either, but the problem still solved itself despite lacking a coherent plan. Thus the fact that we don't know for certain where the workforce is going to go really isn't an argument for that workforce going unemployed. It's just that we haven't figured out where it's going to go and like the last two times there was a significant drop-off in the need for a particular workforce (agricultural labor when agriculture got mechanized and factory labor when off-shoring took off) it may even be a self-solving issue.
I'm from "the Atlantic pond" and despite having public healthcare systems where patients pay nothing or next to nothing for (good) healthcare we still have issues, thou much lesser ones, with recreational use of addictive painkillers and tranquilizers.
I have close family in the medical field so I'm pretty well aware of the situation over here and the main reason why we have much less opioid addiction is that we just don't give them out like doctors do in the U.S. One very important factor when a doctor determines what kind of painkiller to prescribe to a patient is the effect on their quality of life. Opioid-based painkillers are very effective, but they're also highly addictive so doctors need to weigh the additional pain relief against a potentially life-long addiction that can also escalate rather badly. The upshot of this is that opioid-based painkillers are only really used for extreme pain (like from life-threatening injuries) or to people suffering from terminal illness and this the effects of addiction won't last very long or have much time to go out of control.
My dad, a doctor with over 30 years of experience as a general practitioner, put it like this: "If you're going to be dead from cancer within the next year or so, it doesn't really matter if you get addicted to your pain medication. However if you've still got decades of life left it's another story". He's also told me about how he and pretty much his whole profession are horrified with how in the U.S drug companies are allowed to advertise addictive prescription medication directly to consumers.
Oh and before you blame our issues with recreational use of painkillers and tranquilizers, those very rarely start from patient self-medication. It's pretty much always completely recreational.
You're correct if you very specifically limit your scope to the crazy volatility we've seen over the last year or so, but go earlier than that (particularly 2 or more years ago) and most of the transactions for bitcoin really were related to drugs, money laundering for organized crime and ransomware payments. Sure, some of parts of those customer groups have left for other crypto "currencies" as bitcoin has become crazy volatile, but now that the bottom has pretty much fallen out of the speculator market they are making up a larger and larger portion of all the transactions.
My understanding is that the Japanese consider the risk of being caught of a crime to be pretty high, which it AFAIK is as their police isn't as overburdened as police is in many parts of the world, and you do get an unusually large amount of leniency if you do it. If you know you're almost definitely going to get caught, it's probably not worth it trying to run or cover your tracks.
So I guess we can safely assume that he wasn't as great at resolving internet arguments as he thought he was?
Because an argument that lead to one of the parties getting to pissed off they decided to find the other in meatspace so that could stab them to death can't have ended particularly well...
If you look at the trade balances between the U.S and the countries/blocks Trump has so far threatened or actually started a trade war with you can see that they all have a trade imbalance in their favor. Thus, in the short term at least, as long as it doesn't escalate beyond sides putting putting tariffs on imports from each other the U.S has a significant advantage over the other parties as any tariffs they're going to be putting into place are going to be significantly more effective than equally heavy handed tariffs by other parties.
The problems come in when you start to think about the long term or escalation beyond just tariffs. American-produced goods will obviously end up disadvantaged in foreign markets when compared to competing products produced by companies from any other country, however the real danger is if this escalates beyond just tariffs. While American companies don't bring that much in terms of physical goods over from home, they do bring over a lot of intellectual property and keep a lot of money from the sales of non-US produced goods and services in the regions those products and services were sold in. Once countries and trading blocks start messing with this money and this intellectual property, then things are very much going to tip in favor of the other countries/blocks.
My personal feeling here is that Trump sees the trade imbalance and understands the much greater impact of trade tariffs imposed by himself than those imposed by other countries in response. He may also understand the long term hazards and the hazards of the situation escalating beyond just tariffs, but his end game seems to be to use the unsymmetrical impact of these tariffs as leverage in trade negotiations to achieve more favorable trade deals with these countries than currently existing agreements.
They may claim to be all about privacy and all that stuff, but in reality their main source of reoccurring income has always been from the embedded search features, provided primarily by Google, the company they're talking up as the main enemy of privacy. Because of that I'm genuinely skeptical as to how truly committed they are to privacy as a proper committing to it would require them to stop using Google as the a search provider and we're not seeing anything even hinting towards this. Not only that, they also rather conveniently try to allude they're the only company trying to dedicate themselves to privacy when Opera has been doing that for years and Chromium is also basically a Chrome fork with much of the privacy-compromising stuff removed.
However the core of Mozilla's problems is that they've spent many years more focused on moonshot projects like FirefoxOS and politics, which includes everything from firing their CTO as he was taking the role of CEO on purely political grounds to spending a considerable amount of money modifying the codebase to modify any functionality using Master/Slave naming to not use it. To make up for this shortfall in spending on actual browser development they've also gone ahead and tried to streamline development by removing features despite very vocal opposition from their userbase. Hell, this isn't even the first time they've tried copying what their competition is doing, the last time they did major changes to the UI those changes ended up only making Firefox look more like Chrome and their users naturally hated that because if they'd want to use Chrome, then they'd actually use Chrome.
No, the real fundamental problem Firefox has had for the last decade or so is simply unfocused and incompetent management. Until they can to a complete management "flush" and replace their management with people focused on the actual product rather than everything else, I can't see Firefox going anywhere in terms of it's already small market share.
Because not only have we had multiple stories about the way facebook works when you stop logging in daily over the years, I've personally seen the way it works when I joined back in 2010. Decided it wasn't worth the constant notifications on mobile so I kept it browser-only and would only log in about 1-3 times week and good grief did they spam your email with notifications if you went more than 3 days without logging in.
However it turns out there's a very simple fix for that. Just go into your account settings, then the notification settings and under email chose the minimal notifications option where they just send you account, security and privacy related notifications. Think I can count the emails I've gotten over the years since then on the fingers of one hand.
If you've been paying attention to what's been going on over there since they decided their "In Meritocracy We Trust" parody of the oval office carpet in the CEO's office was offensive and had to be removed you'd know the place has let the lunatics run the asylum for years already. The only surprise here is that they decided to remove this particular doxxing case as it conforms really well to their particular bent so some semblance sanity may actually be returning to the madhouse.
The far left lunatics they've let run the company have removed projects and banned people on purely political grounds, made it very easy to add extremely broad codes of conduct with a focus on "If someone claims they've felt slighted the guilty one must be punished reality and plain sense be damned" types and implemented loads of asinine "diversity" policies like restricting certain positions based on race and putting an end to mentoring new hires because of how their diversity drive has lead to to many cases of minorities and women being mentored by white men.
This was the thing that struck me the most about the email for me as well. Hyping how they're closing in on the 5k/week production milestone is completely understandable when he knows it's immediately going to get leaked to the press in it's entirety, but blaming the fossil fuel industry and makers of gas guzzlers does make him look like a loon even if he's right. It wouldn't even be that out of character for either considering what happened to the EV-1.
The thing about volume manufacturing of something as big and complicated as a car is that it's an incredibly costly and difficult process, but once you've gotten something into proper volume production it's way easier to further expand from there. We got to see this here in Europe when communist block countries who had previously not manufactured cars in volume had serious trouble getting volume manufacturing going, but once communism fell it was pretty easy for western European companies to come in and pick up from there and scale up production even further with more complicated cars.
In other words, once they've been able to (reliably) crank out well in excess of 5k Model 3s per week it's going to be way easier to scale that up even further and/or start cranking out other cars in similar numbers. Sure, under the original GM-Toyota ownership the NUMMI plant's best year had an average weekly output of about 8.2k vehicles per week, but it produced a much wider array of vehicles on way less streamlined production lines so I can't imagine Tesla not being able to surpass that rate by a wide margin even this year.
If 8k vehicles a week is profitable, I'm pretty sure a similar number in high margin electric cars is more than enough to be profitable, particularly if you're not going trough the massive investments in getting a plant to actually reach that kind of production figures.
Musk isn't stupid and knows well that any company-wide email like this is going to leak so you can't exactly blame him for using the opportunity to hype the idea that Tesla is finally going to reach the goal of making 5k Model 3's per week. Particularly not when he's in the middle of fighting short sellers who would like to see Tesla floundering as hard as possible rather than reaching production milestones.
Still, the talk about short sellers I can understand as Tesla's not the only company short sellers have tried to mess with recently, but the unsubstantiated talk about fossil fuel companies and competitors still mostly making petrol and diesel cars being behind this does make him look like a bit of a loon in my eyes. If anyone wants to spy on Tesla, it's their Chinese rivals in the electric car market, not Ford or General Motors. Sure, General Motors has a history of being assholes, but mostly to the environment and their own factory workers.
Even assuming that attracting talent which is skin-level diverse is a zero sum game, Google has enough clout and resources, both in terms of money and HR staff ready to take advantage of their appeal, that they, if anyone, they should be able to play this zero sum game to their advantage. Regardless of how many applicable candidates there are, they should be able to hoover up an ever increasing share of these people.
Come to think of it, it's probably not actually a zero sum game as younger graduating classes from tech programs are more skin-level diverse than those of decades ago. This can also be seen in places like the StackOverflow user survey where you can see that women and racial minorities make up a larger percentage of the less experienced user base. All things being equal companies should be getting more skin-level diverse over time and not stuck in place like Google has gotten themselves.
Considering the lengths to which they've recently gone to increase skin-level diversity, which includes literally suspending all application processes for lower level positions where the applicant is white or asian, I do have to say that I am somewhat surprised by how little they've been able to move the needle.
Kind of makes you wonder what could have nullified their efforts this heavily. I know they've had some well meaning changes that have made their minority hires feel genuinely uncomfortable, like how the traditional mentoring of new hires has been changed so that your mentor will always be of the same race, but I didn't imagine they'd be able to take as many steps backwards as forwards like this. Either that or then they've knocked some sense into their hiring practices, which should have come with such a big backlash it would be well known to people outside the organization, so I can't image anything could explain this except well meaning policies that have backfired strongly enough to make their diversity hires leave in the same numbers as they're able to shepherd them in.
I guess that's good for them as nobody deserves to work in a place that makes you feel uncomfortable enough to make you want to quit your job. However I am somewhat worried about their remaining staff because if I know these diversity types, a setback will only cause them to double their efforts rather than take a moment to think about what they're actually doing.
Yes, he launched his campaign on his own dime and got pretty far by just saying outrageous things that caused the press to freak out, but pretty quickly had to start relying on donations and contributions like most other politicians.
Sure, he's not adding to the regulatory burden, but the stuff he's removing is actually the stuff that actually makes sense and whose removal only benefits big corporations. In other words he's just as corrupt as they come.
Considering it's in the best interests of an employment lawyer for there to be as much employment litigation as possible that's a pretty predictable statement to make. Precedent, which this makes, has a pretty huge impact on how court cases go and most companies and individuals don't just try to take every grievance to court, they make an assessment of their chances before they make that decision and precedent is obviously a factor in that assessment.
Sure, precedent won't stop a particular type of case from being brought before a court, but when the chances of winning or losing change, so will the likelihood of litigants to be willing to take it to court.
Like always, taxes on corporations are much harder to make stick than taxes on individuals. Mark my words, this tax will be back, just with the difference that it'll be off the bottom line of workers, not the companies they work for and companies (obviously) won't increase salaries to compensate.
The problem with the RTG isn't that it's going to decay completely, it's that being about the size and weight of car it's packed with way more power hungry systems the RTG may not be able to power anymore once it's been going around for the better part of a decade. Sure, it's got batteries to cover for peaks, but those have been needed from the start and will probably decay faster than the RTG and a battery failure was after all what killed Viking 2 despite also being RTG powered.
Solar panels definitely also decay over time, but those on the Mars Pathfinder mission saw a long term degradation of only about 0.15% per (earth) year. Their decay doesn't also require more energy to be used for heating due to less waste heat being produced.
I'm probably worrying too much and the thing that kills Curiosity probably is the environment with the way the soil is rich in really corrosive substances like perchlorate.
Considering how the two solar powered rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that touched down in January 2004 were originally only expected to survive for a few months only to have one finally go out in March of 2010 and the second finally in real peril of going out in June of 2018 it shouldn't be too much of a loss for the second one to finally go out. Both of them spectacularly outperformed what was expected of them and it's probably time for the last of them to quit it with the victory laps.
Not that Curiosity, their bigger nuclear-powered older bother, isn't doing well for itself either. It touched down in August 2012 and it's too still going despite an originally planned two year mission length. I'm interested to see if it'll last even longer or if the decay of it's Pu238-dioxide power source will be what keeps it from extending it's mission beyond the original goal by as much as Opportunity has.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a hard time imagining they're going to be any better with the gophers... There's plenty of companies with considerably younger workforces that still output some really shoddy products.
Seriously thou, you're never actually entitled to your job and if an employer is able to come up with a legal justification for getting rid of you, they can do it and there's really nothing you can do about it. If you lose out in a cost-value analysis then you should simply expect to be fired, nothing more, nothing less.
It could also be that the industry-level issue like standard practices for salary increases with years of experience just don't match the additional value a more experience employee provides to the company, particularly when you go beyond 50 and learning new things has become much harder than for a 20 or 30-something. Actually, considering how many new things you have to constantly be learning in the tech sector it's probably no wonder you start seeing an increasing rift between salary and employee value, along management behavior reflecting this, when people start getting to the kind of age where learning new things is genuinely harder than when you were still in your 30s.
My gut feeling is still that the guy who's suing IBM for age discrimination may have performed the best in his sales team, but when compared to his peers and normalized for salary his performance wasn't all that great anymore.
if data he used as evidence can be confirmed.
While people and companies who focus staff reductions on older workers are typically portrayed as mustache twirling evil or stupid here in /., I'm pretty sure IBM isn't stupid enough to have actually done what they're being accused of doing.
If I had to hazard a guess as to why he in particular was singled out for firing they probably either normalized performance for salary or then implemented a cost savings program that was aiming to maximize retained headcount. In both scenarios he's obviously going to be at a clear disadvantage compared to his younger peers with his obviously higher-than-average salary. If you look at previous cases of IBM getting rid of older workers you can find plenty of cases where they still offer to retain the workers as outside contractors, but with lower salaries suggesting that it's not about them not wanting older workers, but rather that they think older workers are just overpaid.
I've previously been met with some pretty hostile responses when suggesting the reason why so many older workers find themselves on the chopping block specifically because management thinks they're not worth the extra salary compared to their younger peers. Usually this just devolves into a straw man where commenters just start shittalking 20-somethings rather than actually discussing what I suggested so if you are just going to start sittalking 20-somethings, just don't even bother.
With high schools pushing everyone to go to college, it's a win-win for for everyone except the student.
You can't exactly blame them for that considering how we're moving more and more towards a knowledge economy and as a result both the demand and perceived value of physical labor has been going down for decades.
You can clearly see this in how wages for low-skill jobs hasn't kept up with inflation while wages for highly skilled workers like those in tech have either kept up with inflation or exceeded it.
Having been a student pretty recently (got my master's degree papers in 2016) what you're describing sounds way more like some rich trust fund kid than the average student.
The few of my fellow students that had cars were bangers used to commute from places barely served by public transport, nobody I knew actually owned their own apartment, daily "eating out" was just subsidized lunches at the school cafeteria, drinking was mostly at unlicensed student dives way cheaper than a regular bar and vacation trips were mostly to nearby cities to stay with friends or relatives living in them.
On top of that, people still worked on the side and particularly during the summers. Before I was able to get far along enough to be able to work in my own field during the summers I worked in construction during the summer and actually ended up having to delay my graduation because of working practically full time on the side while studying. A close friend of mine moonlighted as a security guard the whole time I knew him and actually liked the work.
Seriously thou, old people have complained about how young people are lazy, disrespectful and that we're doomed as a society because of them since at least Plato's times, but here we still are. Thus it's beyond obvious that new generations being worse than their predecessors isn't any less false than it was back in Plato's times.
I've personally been following GPU prices pretty closely for the last year or so and from what I've seen the drop-off hasn't even been that dramatic since the start of the year and there's still plenty of air in prices, particularly for AMD cards. You can find plenty of Nvidia cards for about MSRP, thou that's not all that unusual as there's been the occasional MSRP special trough the whole craze, but AMD cards still go for well above MSRP almost all across their range and there's actually a reason for that.
The last time there was a mining craze and then a bubble burst AMD, who like this time had the hardware best suited for this, and their board partners ended up badly over-producing and when the bubble burst almost over night finding themselves with a significant stockpile of unsold hardware. Not only that, a lot of miners also either intentionally broke their cards by wrapping them up so that they'd fail out of heat so they could return them for a refund or then flooded the second hand market with their cards, significantly reducing the demand for that surplus hardware and AMD and their partners needed to shift. The end result of this was that there was suddenly a huge amount of second hand top-end 200-series cards and really big discounts on new cards, which as you may be able to guess didn't exactly do wonders for their bottom line.
What seems to have happened this time as that AMD and their board partners were cautious and deliberately under-produced during the craze and now that things have died down they don't have the surplus stock Nvidia has. Nvidia has reportedly even had to resort to delaying the launch of their next generation of cards just so that they can shift their existing inventory without having to resort to fire sale prices.
If that's all you can think of when you hear the term "service industry" (look it up, it's an enormous amount of different kinds of jobs from retail and tourism trough clerical work to IT services) then you probably ought to refrain from expressing your opinions on the matter as you're really not informed enough to even have an informed opinion.
People have been talking about how automation is going to kill so many jobs and there's going just to be so much unemployment since the 1970s, but most of the workforce reductions in jobs that can be automated in a practical manner is from having those off-shored. So it's not just the optimists who are repeating the same story over and over again decade in and out, it's also the doomsayers.
In modern times the biggest "killer" of developed world jobs has by far been globalization, but despite talk from doomsayers about how much unemployment it was going to cause when it went into full swing in the 1980s, pretty much the workforce has been able to find new work, typically either doing the same kind of work or in other industries. The "mass unemployment" simply fizzled out in the face of an expanding service industry.
Back when mechanized agriculture massively reduced the need for agricultural labor it wasn't certain where the redundant workforce was going to go either, but the problem still solved itself despite lacking a coherent plan. Thus the fact that we don't know for certain where the workforce is going to go really isn't an argument for that workforce going unemployed. It's just that we haven't figured out where it's going to go and like the last two times there was a significant drop-off in the need for a particular workforce (agricultural labor when agriculture got mechanized and factory labor when off-shoring took off) it may even be a self-solving issue.
I'm from "the Atlantic pond" and despite having public healthcare systems where patients pay nothing or next to nothing for (good) healthcare we still have issues, thou much lesser ones, with recreational use of addictive painkillers and tranquilizers.
I have close family in the medical field so I'm pretty well aware of the situation over here and the main reason why we have much less opioid addiction is that we just don't give them out like doctors do in the U.S. One very important factor when a doctor determines what kind of painkiller to prescribe to a patient is the effect on their quality of life. Opioid-based painkillers are very effective, but they're also highly addictive so doctors need to weigh the additional pain relief against a potentially life-long addiction that can also escalate rather badly. The upshot of this is that opioid-based painkillers are only really used for extreme pain (like from life-threatening injuries) or to people suffering from terminal illness and this the effects of addiction won't last very long or have much time to go out of control.
My dad, a doctor with over 30 years of experience as a general practitioner, put it like this: "If you're going to be dead from cancer within the next year or so, it doesn't really matter if you get addicted to your pain medication. However if you've still got decades of life left it's another story". He's also told me about how he and pretty much his whole profession are horrified with how in the U.S drug companies are allowed to advertise addictive prescription medication directly to consumers.
Oh and before you blame our issues with recreational use of painkillers and tranquilizers, those very rarely start from patient self-medication. It's pretty much always completely recreational.
You're correct if you very specifically limit your scope to the crazy volatility we've seen over the last year or so, but go earlier than that (particularly 2 or more years ago) and most of the transactions for bitcoin really were related to drugs, money laundering for organized crime and ransomware payments. Sure, some of parts of those customer groups have left for other crypto "currencies" as bitcoin has become crazy volatile, but now that the bottom has pretty much fallen out of the speculator market they are making up a larger and larger portion of all the transactions.
My understanding is that the Japanese consider the risk of being caught of a crime to be pretty high, which it AFAIK is as their police isn't as overburdened as police is in many parts of the world, and you do get an unusually large amount of leniency if you do it. If you know you're almost definitely going to get caught, it's probably not worth it trying to run or cover your tracks.
So I guess we can safely assume that he wasn't as great at resolving internet arguments as he thought he was?
Because an argument that lead to one of the parties getting to pissed off they decided to find the other in meatspace so that could stab them to death can't have ended particularly well...
If you look at the trade balances between the U.S and the countries/blocks Trump has so far threatened or actually started a trade war with you can see that they all have a trade imbalance in their favor. Thus, in the short term at least, as long as it doesn't escalate beyond sides putting putting tariffs on imports from each other the U.S has a significant advantage over the other parties as any tariffs they're going to be putting into place are going to be significantly more effective than equally heavy handed tariffs by other parties.
The problems come in when you start to think about the long term or escalation beyond just tariffs. American-produced goods will obviously end up disadvantaged in foreign markets when compared to competing products produced by companies from any other country, however the real danger is if this escalates beyond just tariffs. While American companies don't bring that much in terms of physical goods over from home, they do bring over a lot of intellectual property and keep a lot of money from the sales of non-US produced goods and services in the regions those products and services were sold in. Once countries and trading blocks start messing with this money and this intellectual property, then things are very much going to tip in favor of the other countries/blocks.
My personal feeling here is that Trump sees the trade imbalance and understands the much greater impact of trade tariffs imposed by himself than those imposed by other countries in response. He may also understand the long term hazards and the hazards of the situation escalating beyond just tariffs, but his end game seems to be to use the unsymmetrical impact of these tariffs as leverage in trade negotiations to achieve more favorable trade deals with these countries than currently existing agreements.
They may claim to be all about privacy and all that stuff, but in reality their main source of reoccurring income has always been from the embedded search features, provided primarily by Google, the company they're talking up as the main enemy of privacy. Because of that I'm genuinely skeptical as to how truly committed they are to privacy as a proper committing to it would require them to stop using Google as the a search provider and we're not seeing anything even hinting towards this. Not only that, they also rather conveniently try to allude they're the only company trying to dedicate themselves to privacy when Opera has been doing that for years and Chromium is also basically a Chrome fork with much of the privacy-compromising stuff removed.
However the core of Mozilla's problems is that they've spent many years more focused on moonshot projects like FirefoxOS and politics, which includes everything from firing their CTO as he was taking the role of CEO on purely political grounds to spending a considerable amount of money modifying the codebase to modify any functionality using Master/Slave naming to not use it. To make up for this shortfall in spending on actual browser development they've also gone ahead and tried to streamline development by removing features despite very vocal opposition from their userbase. Hell, this isn't even the first time they've tried copying what their competition is doing, the last time they did major changes to the UI those changes ended up only making Firefox look more like Chrome and their users naturally hated that because if they'd want to use Chrome, then they'd actually use Chrome.
No, the real fundamental problem Firefox has had for the last decade or so is simply unfocused and incompetent management. Until they can to a complete management "flush" and replace their management with people focused on the actual product rather than everything else, I can't see Firefox going anywhere in terms of it's already small market share.
Seriously, how is this news to anyone?
Because not only have we had multiple stories about the way facebook works when you stop logging in daily over the years, I've personally seen the way it works when I joined back in 2010. Decided it wasn't worth the constant notifications on mobile so I kept it browser-only and would only log in about 1-3 times week and good grief did they spam your email with notifications if you went more than 3 days without logging in.
However it turns out there's a very simple fix for that. Just go into your account settings, then the notification settings and under email chose the minimal notifications option where they just send you account, security and privacy related notifications. Think I can count the emails I've gotten over the years since then on the fingers of one hand.
If you've been paying attention to what's been going on over there since they decided their "In Meritocracy We Trust" parody of the oval office carpet in the CEO's office was offensive and had to be removed you'd know the place has let the lunatics run the asylum for years already. The only surprise here is that they decided to remove this particular doxxing case as it conforms really well to their particular bent so some semblance sanity may actually be returning to the madhouse.
The far left lunatics they've let run the company have removed projects and banned people on purely political grounds, made it very easy to add extremely broad codes of conduct with a focus on "If someone claims they've felt slighted the guilty one must be punished reality and plain sense be damned" types and implemented loads of asinine "diversity" policies like restricting certain positions based on race and putting an end to mentoring new hires because of how their diversity drive has lead to to many cases of minorities and women being mentored by white men.
This was the thing that struck me the most about the email for me as well. Hyping how they're closing in on the 5k/week production milestone is completely understandable when he knows it's immediately going to get leaked to the press in it's entirety, but blaming the fossil fuel industry and makers of gas guzzlers does make him look like a loon even if he's right. It wouldn't even be that out of character for either considering what happened to the EV-1.
The thing about volume manufacturing of something as big and complicated as a car is that it's an incredibly costly and difficult process, but once you've gotten something into proper volume production it's way easier to further expand from there. We got to see this here in Europe when communist block countries who had previously not manufactured cars in volume had serious trouble getting volume manufacturing going, but once communism fell it was pretty easy for western European companies to come in and pick up from there and scale up production even further with more complicated cars.
In other words, once they've been able to (reliably) crank out well in excess of 5k Model 3s per week it's going to be way easier to scale that up even further and/or start cranking out other cars in similar numbers. Sure, under the original GM-Toyota ownership the NUMMI plant's best year had an average weekly output of about 8.2k vehicles per week, but it produced a much wider array of vehicles on way less streamlined production lines so I can't imagine Tesla not being able to surpass that rate by a wide margin even this year.
If 8k vehicles a week is profitable, I'm pretty sure a similar number in high margin electric cars is more than enough to be profitable, particularly if you're not going trough the massive investments in getting a plant to actually reach that kind of production figures.
Musk isn't stupid and knows well that any company-wide email like this is going to leak so you can't exactly blame him for using the opportunity to hype the idea that Tesla is finally going to reach the goal of making 5k Model 3's per week. Particularly not when he's in the middle of fighting short sellers who would like to see Tesla floundering as hard as possible rather than reaching production milestones.
Still, the talk about short sellers I can understand as Tesla's not the only company short sellers have tried to mess with recently, but the unsubstantiated talk about fossil fuel companies and competitors still mostly making petrol and diesel cars being behind this does make him look like a bit of a loon in my eyes. If anyone wants to spy on Tesla, it's their Chinese rivals in the electric car market, not Ford or General Motors. Sure, General Motors has a history of being assholes, but mostly to the environment and their own factory workers.
Even assuming that attracting talent which is skin-level diverse is a zero sum game, Google has enough clout and resources, both in terms of money and HR staff ready to take advantage of their appeal, that they, if anyone, they should be able to play this zero sum game to their advantage. Regardless of how many applicable candidates there are, they should be able to hoover up an ever increasing share of these people.
Come to think of it, it's probably not actually a zero sum game as younger graduating classes from tech programs are more skin-level diverse than those of decades ago. This can also be seen in places like the StackOverflow user survey where you can see that women and racial minorities make up a larger percentage of the less experienced user base. All things being equal companies should be getting more skin-level diverse over time and not stuck in place like Google has gotten themselves.
Considering the lengths to which they've recently gone to increase skin-level diversity, which includes literally suspending all application processes for lower level positions where the applicant is white or asian, I do have to say that I am somewhat surprised by how little they've been able to move the needle.
Kind of makes you wonder what could have nullified their efforts this heavily. I know they've had some well meaning changes that have made their minority hires feel genuinely uncomfortable, like how the traditional mentoring of new hires has been changed so that your mentor will always be of the same race, but I didn't imagine they'd be able to take as many steps backwards as forwards like this. Either that or then they've knocked some sense into their hiring practices, which should have come with such a big backlash it would be well known to people outside the organization, so I can't image anything could explain this except well meaning policies that have backfired strongly enough to make their diversity hires leave in the same numbers as they're able to shepherd them in.
I guess that's good for them as nobody deserves to work in a place that makes you feel uncomfortable enough to make you want to quit your job. However I am somewhat worried about their remaining staff because if I know these diversity types, a setback will only cause them to double their efforts rather than take a moment to think about what they're actually doing.
Yes, he launched his campaign on his own dime and got pretty far by just saying outrageous things that caused the press to freak out, but pretty quickly had to start relying on donations and contributions like most other politicians.
Sure, he's not adding to the regulatory burden, but the stuff he's removing is actually the stuff that actually makes sense and whose removal only benefits big corporations. In other words he's just as corrupt as they come.
Considering it's in the best interests of an employment lawyer for there to be as much employment litigation as possible that's a pretty predictable statement to make. Precedent, which this makes, has a pretty huge impact on how court cases go and most companies and individuals don't just try to take every grievance to court, they make an assessment of their chances before they make that decision and precedent is obviously a factor in that assessment.
Sure, precedent won't stop a particular type of case from being brought before a court, but when the chances of winning or losing change, so will the likelihood of litigants to be willing to take it to court.
Like always, taxes on corporations are much harder to make stick than taxes on individuals. Mark my words, this tax will be back, just with the difference that it'll be off the bottom line of workers, not the companies they work for and companies (obviously) won't increase salaries to compensate.
The problem with the RTG isn't that it's going to decay completely, it's that being about the size and weight of car it's packed with way more power hungry systems the RTG may not be able to power anymore once it's been going around for the better part of a decade. Sure, it's got batteries to cover for peaks, but those have been needed from the start and will probably decay faster than the RTG and a battery failure was after all what killed Viking 2 despite also being RTG powered.
Solar panels definitely also decay over time, but those on the Mars Pathfinder mission saw a long term degradation of only about 0.15% per (earth) year. Their decay doesn't also require more energy to be used for heating due to less waste heat being produced.
I'm probably worrying too much and the thing that kills Curiosity probably is the environment with the way the soil is rich in really corrosive substances like perchlorate.
Considering how the two solar powered rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that touched down in January 2004 were originally only expected to survive for a few months only to have one finally go out in March of 2010 and the second finally in real peril of going out in June of 2018 it shouldn't be too much of a loss for the second one to finally go out. Both of them spectacularly outperformed what was expected of them and it's probably time for the last of them to quit it with the victory laps. Not that Curiosity, their bigger nuclear-powered older bother, isn't doing well for itself either. It touched down in August 2012 and it's too still going despite an originally planned two year mission length. I'm interested to see if it'll last even longer or if the decay of it's Pu238-dioxide power source will be what keeps it from extending it's mission beyond the original goal by as much as Opportunity has.