It actually makes sense to develop these cars in China. It's not that there are more qualified software developers in China, more than say in India, the US, or Europe. Part of the reason is that the wages are lower, although not lower than in other countries. The main reason is that China will be the largest market for autonomous vehicles due to several reasons. There is a push to electrify cars, which means new a lot of new cars bought in the future. There are huge emerging classes of workers will have or will soon have the money to buy these cars. The government is pushing these new cars and autonomous vehicles for economic, environmental, and competitive reasons. And China has the governmental structure to ensure that laws and lawsuits do not derail autonomous vehicle adoption. It's this last reason that is perhaps the most important.
Bro, you forgot to factor in regional costs of living. In some areas $2/day is enough to live well out of poverty.
I agree that the different costs of living are an important consideration. Do you personally know that $2/day is enough to subsist in any part of China, or have you read such numbers anywhere? That's where my skepticism lies. That China has made breathtaking advances in lifting many of its people out of poverty is obvious. That $2/day is a useful threshold for setting the poverty level is nowhere near as obvious.
It's the same in every country, even here in the US. A single person making $30K/year would be one cunt-hair close to living in the gutter in, say, San Francisco or Miami.
That same gross income would make the same person live well above the poverty line in Sebring, FL.
Yes, there are obviously differences in costs of living from region to region within any country. However, there are minimal costs of living in any area. In the US, the official poverty level for a single person in the contiguous 48 states is $12,140. I personally lived below the official poverty level growing up in a cheap area in the US. It's possible but not easy.
The question for this thread is what a useful poverty level should be for China. I've visited Beijing as a tourist and found the city to be nowhere near cheap, i.e., there's no way anyone could come close to living in Beijing on $2/day. How much do the costs of living fall when living in the countryside? I have no personal experience, and I couldn't google any data on this. However, although we might have visions of dirt-poor Chinese peasants who can live on 10% or 1% of what people in the cities pay, what are the real numbers? Absent even anecdotal accounts, I'm skeptical about the $2/day poverty level for any one specific location in China, let alone as a national poverty level.
The poverty level depends on what you need to live a reasonable life in a given country, so of course it will be lower in China. $2/day is not enough in big cities, but in rural areas it is.
Back in 1981 some 88% of the population was living on less than the modern equivalent of $2/day (adjusted for inflation), so no matter how you frame it it's clear that the majority of people have seen a considerable increase in their income and quality of life.
For the most part, Chinese government numbers are more trustworthy on a relative basis than an absolute basis. For example, estimates of economic growth are generally regarded outside of China as inflated, but they are nonetheless useful to indicate the movement of economic growth.
So, I agree that there has been obvious and dramatic improvements in the percentage of Chinese living in poverty. This is true by many measures. However, the specific absolute numbers for poverty are not trustworthy. $2/day is not enough to live in Chinese cities, where half the population lives. In fact, googling for prices in China, it's clear that $2/day is orders of magnitude less than what is necessary for basic necessities. It's harder to find costs of living in the countryside, so it's hard to gauge the hypothesis that $2/day is sufficient for the countryside. But it's hard to believe that the prices from the city to the countryside drop by orders of magnitude. I've never seen any country where that's true.
You can be forgiven for thinking that, because it was not that long ago what you say was true and you don't get a lot of news about China in the mainstream press.
But these days the poverty rate has been driven to 3.1 percent, because China has been working really hard to live the very poorest out of poverty.
Now China is of course known to cook some books, but even with that factored in they are far from having 2/3 of China below the poverty line these days.
It's not a matter of cooking books but cooking definitions. The poverty level often used for such breathtaking advancements in Chinese poverty eradication is an income of less than $2/day. Yes, earning around $500-600 per year is considered above the poverty level. This particular definition allows the China government to aim "to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020".
Bias is favoring one thing over another. Which is what you want certain algorithms to do. I want Youtube to find stuff I like. I want Google to find pages that are relevant to me.
Not sure how you are going to tease out the "good" bias from the "bad" bias, though.
Right. The problem is that the word "bias" is overloaded. Bias can mean prejudice. Bias can also mean a systemic, non-random distortion of a statistic. Algorithms are completely incapable of the former, as they have no sentience. It's the former that the bill wants to target, but the bill punts on the practically impossible task of defining prejudice by asking a group of humans to do that at a later time. This defining of prejudice by prejudiced humans can never lead to the eradication of prejudice but only a shifting of prejudice.
Companies are required to obey the law. Apple didn't make the law requiring certain terms and topics to be censored in China, but they are required to obey it, just like they are required to obey censorship laws in other countries, including America.
The Chinese government kills people deemed to be threats. Apple, Google, et al. obey Chinese censorship laws. People outside of China (e.g., on slashdot) criticize China and Apple, Google, et al., and that initial criticism is further criticized.
This is all as it should be in a civil society, with the possible exception of the first part.
It is not the job of western corporations to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese.
Here on slashdot, we're not trying to fix China. The China detractors are under no delusion that they have any non-zero influence on the Chinese government. Rather, these discussions and criticisms of China are for our benefit, not for China's. The hope is that such discussions in countries that allow citizens to challenge and criticize the government will prevent/blunt similar abuses in those countries.
Tesla's largest market may be trending toward saturation, hence the emphasis on Europe and China
Tesla's largest market to date hasn't even remotely saturated and the federal tax credit has rarely come into the consideration of those buying luxury cars. Tesla's expansion into Europe and China has necessitated a cheap platform and for that they needed to start getting an affordable car on the street. The expansion is just that... expansion.
Even a company in a completely open an unsaturated market benefits from expansion in this brave new world of demanding perpetually and steadily increasing profits.
For Tesla's sake, I hope what you're saying is true. However, sacrificing the current stable market for an emerging future market when the company still needs to watch cash flow is a strange decision, unless the current stable market isn't that stable. Tesla admitted to pulling in Q1 sales into the previous Q4 in order to take advantage of the federal tax credit sunset, so even Tesla recognizes the impact of that sunset on sales. Plus, Tesla explained the extra $2k discount as a compensation for the sunset, adding to the idea that the credit does affect sales. We'll have to wait for Q2 sales to see if the US market recovers.
What they have are manufacturing and quality control issues.
Yes, there are manufacturing and quality control issues, but those are not the only challenges. The current talking points attempt to pivot away from the elephant in the room, which is that Tesla's largest market may be trending toward saturation, hence the emphasis on Europe and China. Part of that potential decrease in demand comes from the sunsetting of the US federal tax credit. However, if some of that decrease comes from saturation of the potential market, then that is a big concern. The practical short-term addressable market is only a small subset of the total car market due to cost (i.e., a huge part of the market won't consider even a $35k car), availability of charging infrastructure (e.g., how do renters charge at home?), high cost of electricity (e.g., most people don't have access to free solar or at-work chargers), and range anxiety to a lesser but non-zero extent.
It is not surprising they missed their target deliveries this quarter. Their logistics system is dysfunctional. Since deliveries this quarter were mostly for European and Asian markets, i.e. where the remaining high-end customers still to be served are, this made it even worse.
This is the part that suggests that the US market is trending toward saturation, at least for the high-end, high-margin customers. If Tesla could sell more to the US market instead of the more costly operation of selling overseas to new markets, they would do so. The overseas markets can wait in deference to easier, short-term profits, if those profits were available.
"0% of incidents involved slow driver responses or missed detections" is not a believable absolute statement, at least not without statistical confidence intervals. There are already recorded historical incidents that contradict this 0% statement, so the statement is obviously not true in an absolute and infinite precision way. Either the study needs to state the confidence intervals or state how the study differs from the past contradictory historical incidents. For example, how does the statement that "drivers do not appear to over-trust the system to a degree that results in significant functional vigilance degradation in their supervisory role of system operation" square with the guy who died while watching the Harry Potter movie? Either the study was constructed in a way that doesn't capture this situation, or the metrics were constructed in a way that doesn't capture this situation.
US exports weapons to Saudi Arabia. What could be worse, a few routers?
This is an important question (i.e., the relative desirability and danger of these actions), and the answer must necessarily incorporate an understanding of relative motives and benefits. A disinterested third-party (say Vulcans) might view US actions to contain Huawei as unfair or harmful to societal interests in an international scope. Certainly from the viewpoint of Huawei and the Chinese government, such actions would be viewed as unfair and harmful in economic, military, and soft influence ways. However, from the viewpoint of the US and US institutions, containment of Huawei would only seem to be positive for economic competition, abatement of military risk, and other aspect such as soft influence. It's not reasonable to expect the US to act based on the Vulcan-viewpoint anymore than it is to expect China to act similarly, and it is especially unreasonable to expect any one country to take the Vulcan-viewpoint unilaterally.
it is only a matter of time before the US adopts similar policies.
America already has a similar system. We are ahead of China on this. The big difference is that in America your credit score is controlled by corporations rather than the government. But similar criteria are used, and excessive job-hopping can hurt your score.
The scary thing about the Chinese system is that it's unclear what the eventual effects of the social credit score will be. There only seem to be suggestions of effects that could occur. In contrast, the US credit report system has been in effect for a much longer time. Employment history is not a factor in credit scores but does appear in credit reports, and the reader of the report can decide how to use that information or whether to ignore it completely. It's entirely understandable that a lender would want to build a mathematical model to predict the likelihood of loan default and want to incorporate employment history as a predictor of future income stability. However, employment history could not be used for governmental sanctions or as evidence in a court proceeding. In contrast, the Chinese system lacks the history to determine its applications and limits, resulting in a sense of apprehension concerning its potential for abuse.
With those two in place, we could roll everything else back to pre-911 levels and not lose one iota of security.
The third exception is air marshals. Every plane didn't have an air marshal embedded in the flight before 9/11. Now they may have more than one. So it's those three, not those two. We could still eliminate the long queues for sexual abuse, however.
But these three measures only address one specific type of threat mode, i.e., a 911-style attack involving onboard human attackers who directly interact with other humans on the flight. There are many threat modes that don't involve onboard human attackers (e.g., time, altitude, or remote triggered bombs) or onboard attackers who only need to interact with the plane or who directly attack the plane (e.g., the shoe bomb), and none of these three measure address such attack modes.
I will single-issue-vote for any representative that promises to table and/or support legislation adding a stiff tax on products based on an e-waste assessment.
Tangential comment: It may be surprising to most English speakers, but the word "table" in the above context has exactly opposite meanings in the UK and the US. The above phrase in the UK means to "submit (a bill, etc) for consideration by a legislative body" whereas in the US, it means to "suspend discussion of (a bill, etc) indefinitely or for some time". During a recent conversation, my English friend and I were really confused for a while until we figured out what the other person meant.
While it is little consolation to the deceased, I fail to see how placing markers designed to deliberately cause a car wreck is not pre-meditated murder. Someone could easily be lying in wait in the woods with a rifle and shoot drivers, or waiting on overpass to drop bricks.
While there are fortunately very few people who are demented enough to shoot at people on the highway, there are many cases of mischievous teenagers who toss rocks from overpasses onto unsuspecting drivers. I have no doubt that these teenagers would try the "fool the self-driving car camera" trick after reading about it.
The difference being a human that sees lane markers leading into active oncoming traffic will decide there are shenigans and not follow.
Complete bollocks. Care to set up a situation like that and see how many drivers follow the dots blindly?
Unfortunately this situation occurs quite frequently at road construction sites where new lanes are overlaid over existing lanes. The old and new sets of lane markings make lane localization difficult at times even for humans to know where the true lane lies. Often in these cases, the human will follow the preceding and surrounding traffic in an attempt to avoid collisions, even if the true lane appears to be otherwise.
I think the Government of China has slowed down on bringing Taiwan back into the fold and are more comfortable with a natural transition, that will occur as soon as mainland China is a 'Democratic' as Taiwan
My feeling is that the main purpose of China's saber rattling toward Taiwan is to create a boogeyman that is detested more than the Communist Party, a la 1984. Aside from the 1984 effect and feel-good patriotism, China has very little to gain with a takeover/annexation/destruction of Taiwan. In fact, its economy is likely to take a hit, resulting in greater social instability and a greater threat to the party. The party is not stupid and realizes that the vilification of Taiwan and the rallying of patriots is more useful than the actual unification. This is the same diversionary tactic that Trump uses in villifying Mexicans, as the unifying cry is more important politically than the actual security threat.
not that Taiwan has a particularly stellar record for being democratic
I suppose that there are various way to gauge the democratic record of a country, but Taiwan's democracy is quite good, at least in the last few decades after the end of martial law. The key metric of a working democracy is the peaceful transition of power among opposition parties, which has happened several times already in Taiwan. If there is a part of the Taiwanese political process that is non-democratic, it's perhaps the up to 1 million Taiwanese businessmen living in China that China encourages/pays/extorts to fly back to Taiwan to vote in the elections.
The only question is, 'So who does Tencent and Baidu compete with in Taiwan', very unlikely to have anything to do with propaganda and much more likely that some insiders in Taiwan profit by this.
Of all East Asian countries, Taiwan is perhaps the most accepting of foreign media and entertainment, with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American media being easy to find. I doubt this has much to do with economic competition, as there are simply too many other media sources that compete with indigenous media.
Due to the existing settlement, Tesla had an obligation to police Musk's communications, regardless of the effect of the communication on the stock price and regardless of who else might have said the same thing.
That is the stand of SEC, and it looked like an open and shut case. He tweeted. There is no policing. Case closed.
But the agreement had an out for Elon. Only material tweets need to be policed. And SEC argued how will you know it is material or not, so you need policing. But that means all his tweets must be policed. Specifically that point was removed from the agreement. So SEC had agreed Elon has some discretion to decide whether or not a tweet is material. He need not ask for clearance if he believed, and there was reason to believe, the tweet is not material. The number 500K as well as 500 k/year numbers were already in the 2018Q4 quarterly report and guidance. So he had the reason to believe it was not material. It is not an easy case SEC thought it would be. The judge dismissed its motion for a judgement without trial.
I don't think either side is arguing that Musk has discretion. Rather, Musk's lawyers argue that Tesla has discretion, and it's Tesla's discretion has protects Musk's tweets. The SEC argues that there is no evidence that Tesla has exercised discretion. The SEC settlement is with Tesla, and therefore, it's Tesla that needs to uphold the terms of the settlement.
If the number 500k were in the quarterly report as the expected target, there would be no problem. The Q4 report said 360 to 400k. Then in the earnings call, Musk said that Tesla would "produce maybe on the order of 350,000 to 500,000 Model 3s, something like that this year." Musk's subsequent tweet said that Tesla "will make around 500K" cars in 2019. That's not a reiteration of public information, as a narrowing of a predicted range toward the upper portion is sufficiently material that most companies would release a PR statement.
Finally, as far as I can tell from googled news articles, the judge did not deny an SEC request for judgment without trial but rather asked for requests for an evidentiary hearing, which both sides decided to forego. But maybe I missed that article. Is there a link to such an article about the judge denying an SEC request?
SEC moved for a ruling without a hearing. And lost. It is not some open and shut case the press has been reporting. Tesla's sur-reply was super good. SEC was expanding and was introducing elements not mentioned in the first round.
I can't find any article that says that the judge denied an SEC motion to forego a hearing. Rather, I see many articles saying that the judge called for both sides to request an evidentiary hearing by March 26 and that both sides decided to forego the evidentiary hearing.
The key point of contention is the interpretation of the settlement point that Tesla "put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications". Tesla interprets that to mean that it has full discretion in interpreting what those controls and procedures should mean and implicitly when they apply. The SEC claims that there is no indication that such controls and procedures exist.
The free market disagrees with you. It caused absolutely no movement in the stock, either in the after market fueled by rumors alone, or the next day. Anyway, these numbers were hinted in many statements before. The dispute is 500K in 2019 or 500 K/yr rate in 2019. The tweet went through and a clarification was also issued. It is not material.
Many material facts end up causing no movement in the short-term stock price, but that lack of stock price movement doesn't detract from the intrinsic material nature of the information.
That the numbers may have been published previously or even entirely made up is also tangential. Due to the existing settlement, Tesla had an obligation to police Musk's communications, regardless of the effect of the communication on the stock price and regardless of who else might have said the same thing.
SEC contempt case is not strong. "Must pre screen all tweets" was the original demand, it was redlined and negotiated and taken out. So it is clear Tesla never agreed to pre screen ALL tweets. SEC seems to be under the impression there should be a standing panel with some board members and appointees to screen the tweets. Tesla seems to be thinking, if Elon agrees not to treat anything material, not tweet anything during trading hours, there is no need to pre screen, just a post screen to issue clarification before trading resumes.
The particular complaint against Tesla is a violation of the settlement that says, "Tesla will establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications". So, the question is whether Tesla instituted "additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk's communications". I suppose that Tesla could have perfunctorily instituted controls and procedures that it knew would not oversee Musk's communications. Perhaps Tesla thought that oversee means to simply observe without any actual control. Maybe Tesla thought that it would be the final arbiter of what constitutes material information. Unfortunately for Tesla, the court gets to be the final arbiter.
The particular tweet seems to be very immaterial, not much to hang its coat on.
The particular quote from Feb 19 is "Tesla made 0 cars in 2011, but will make around 500k in 2019." There's no question that that statement is material. Saying "Tesla's a great company!" is not material, but stating specific numbers that are usually stated during a quarterly report is obviously material.
Arguably, that was a solved problem between rational nation states. Mutually Assured Destruction kept us safe for 40 years during the Cold War. Either side could rain a salvo of missiles on the other, but neither did because they feared likewise retaliation.
We now have a different, more effective form of MAD. Instead of relying on the arguable love of a nuclear power's leader for his country, we now can rely on the love of that same leader for money. Putin, Xi Jinping, et al. are the richest people on the earth. By starting a nuclear war, they risk their money, since a decimation of the world's economy will rob them of their wealth. The intertwining of the global economy across countries makes the world safer by making the world's leaders dependent on the health of that economy in order to prop up their wealth.
The trouble with these sorts of phony degrees is they won't get you past HR filters designed to hire and H1-B over an American. You need a 4 year degree for that.
I think this is the crucial point, i.e., is this type of 5-month training phony or real? Despite good intentions, the only thing that matters is getting a job. There are plenty of fake diploma mills that are fake because the chance of getting a real job based on that degree is small. If this 5-month program doesn't lead to a job, then it's also phony. But the free, 5-month phony program is still better than the costly, longer phony program, as the only real risk is time.
With the diploma mills, it's clear that the business model is to fleece the banks and the students long enough to abscond with the profits. There is no profit possibility with the 5-month program unless the students end up with jobs. So, the 5-month program administrators are either delusionally incompetent or boldly visionary. I suppose there's a third possiblity, i.e., the Uber grab for VC money with a business model that is known to be unprofitable.
if they do manage to find you a job you'll be in deep if you ever lose it.
It's bad to lose a job and income, and there is risk in spending time and effort, if not money, on education and training. However, this income sharing arrangement seems to be much less risky than a student loan. Losing a job after graduating with a student loan at best postpones loan repayments and sometimes not even that. The main reason to get the 4-year traditional degree with the sunk upfront costs is the expectation of better job and income prospects. Unfortunately, there are many cases where this traditional education gamble fails and in retrospect, the shorter, no upfront fee education would have been better.
As people age, their salary expectations increase, but often their skills don't.
If they were really as valuable as they think they are, then some enterprising company should be able to hire them all and out-compete the companies staffed by younglings. Obviously, that isn't happening.
Most people don't get old and wise. They just get old.
Competition in the business environment isn't solely based on competence but also impacts on business, such as operating costs. It could very well be that hiring minimally competent, cheap workers is more competitive for a company than hiring more expensive, more competent workers. This is especially true when decisions are made by executives motivated by short-term stock incentives, which is often the case. For such companies, the sweet spot is hiring minimally competent workers at the lowest price. In fact, if the short-term incentive is sufficiently compensating, the minimally competent part is not necessary.
I recently took a trip to the UK, and their airport security system would have prevented this particular mistake. At Heathrow, there are two conveyor belts past the scanner, and the person viewing the scanned images can send the item to the cleared belt or the belt for further inspection. Absent this system, the TSA procedure should have been to stop the belt completely until the scanning person points out that item for further inspection.
Slashdot Mirror
It actually makes sense to develop these cars in China. It's not that there are more qualified software developers in China, more than say in India, the US, or Europe. Part of the reason is that the wages are lower, although not lower than in other countries. The main reason is that China will be the largest market for autonomous vehicles due to several reasons. There is a push to electrify cars, which means new a lot of new cars bought in the future. There are huge emerging classes of workers will have or will soon have the money to buy these cars. The government is pushing these new cars and autonomous vehicles for economic, environmental, and competitive reasons. And China has the governmental structure to ensure that laws and lawsuits do not derail autonomous vehicle adoption. It's this last reason that is perhaps the most important.
Bro, you forgot to factor in regional costs of living. In some areas $2/day is enough to live well out of poverty.
I agree that the different costs of living are an important consideration. Do you personally know that $2/day is enough to subsist in any part of China, or have you read such numbers anywhere? That's where my skepticism lies. That China has made breathtaking advances in lifting many of its people out of poverty is obvious. That $2/day is a useful threshold for setting the poverty level is nowhere near as obvious.
It's the same in every country, even here in the US. A single person making $30K/year would be one cunt-hair close to living in the gutter in, say, San Francisco or Miami.
That same gross income would make the same person live well above the poverty line in Sebring, FL.
Yes, there are obviously differences in costs of living from region to region within any country. However, there are minimal costs of living in any area. In the US, the official poverty level for a single person in the contiguous 48 states is $12,140. I personally lived below the official poverty level growing up in a cheap area in the US. It's possible but not easy.
The question for this thread is what a useful poverty level should be for China. I've visited Beijing as a tourist and found the city to be nowhere near cheap, i.e., there's no way anyone could come close to living in Beijing on $2/day. How much do the costs of living fall when living in the countryside? I have no personal experience, and I couldn't google any data on this. However, although we might have visions of dirt-poor Chinese peasants who can live on 10% or 1% of what people in the cities pay, what are the real numbers? Absent even anecdotal accounts, I'm skeptical about the $2/day poverty level for any one specific location in China, let alone as a national poverty level.
The poverty level depends on what you need to live a reasonable life in a given country, so of course it will be lower in China. $2/day is not enough in big cities, but in rural areas it is.
Back in 1981 some 88% of the population was living on less than the modern equivalent of $2/day (adjusted for inflation), so no matter how you frame it it's clear that the majority of people have seen a considerable increase in their income and quality of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For the most part, Chinese government numbers are more trustworthy on a relative basis than an absolute basis. For example, estimates of economic growth are generally regarded outside of China as inflated, but they are nonetheless useful to indicate the movement of economic growth.
So, I agree that there has been obvious and dramatic improvements in the percentage of Chinese living in poverty. This is true by many measures. However, the specific absolute numbers for poverty are not trustworthy. $2/day is not enough to live in Chinese cities, where half the population lives. In fact, googling for prices in China, it's clear that $2/day is orders of magnitude less than what is necessary for basic necessities. It's harder to find costs of living in the countryside, so it's hard to gauge the hypothesis that $2/day is sufficient for the countryside. But it's hard to believe that the prices from the city to the countryside drop by orders of magnitude. I've never seen any country where that's true.
2/3 of China is below the poverty line
You can be forgiven for thinking that, because it was not that long ago what you say was true and you don't get a lot of news about China in the mainstream press.
But these days the poverty rate has been driven to 3.1 percent, because China has been working really hard to live the very poorest out of poverty.
Now China is of course known to cook some books, but even with that factored in they are far from having 2/3 of China below the poverty line these days.
It's not a matter of cooking books but cooking definitions. The poverty level often used for such breathtaking advancements in Chinese poverty eradication is an income of less than $2/day. Yes, earning around $500-600 per year is considered above the poverty level. This particular definition allows the China government to aim "to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020".
Bias is favoring one thing over another. Which is what you want certain algorithms to do. I want Youtube to find stuff I like. I want Google to find pages that are relevant to me.
Not sure how you are going to tease out the "good" bias from the "bad" bias, though.
Right. The problem is that the word "bias" is overloaded. Bias can mean prejudice. Bias can also mean a systemic, non-random distortion of a statistic. Algorithms are completely incapable of the former, as they have no sentience. It's the former that the bill wants to target, but the bill punts on the practically impossible task of defining prejudice by asking a group of humans to do that at a later time. This defining of prejudice by prejudiced humans can never lead to the eradication of prejudice but only a shifting of prejudice.
Companies are required to obey the law. Apple didn't make the law requiring certain terms and topics to be censored in China, but they are required to obey it, just like they are required to obey censorship laws in other countries, including America.
The Chinese government kills people deemed to be threats. Apple, Google, et al. obey Chinese censorship laws. People outside of China (e.g., on slashdot) criticize China and Apple, Google, et al., and that initial criticism is further criticized.
This is all as it should be in a civil society, with the possible exception of the first part.
It is not the job of western corporations to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese.
Here on slashdot, we're not trying to fix China. The China detractors are under no delusion that they have any non-zero influence on the Chinese government. Rather, these discussions and criticisms of China are for our benefit, not for China's. The hope is that such discussions in countries that allow citizens to challenge and criticize the government will prevent/blunt similar abuses in those countries.
Tesla's largest market may be trending toward saturation, hence the emphasis on Europe and China
Tesla's largest market to date hasn't even remotely saturated and the federal tax credit has rarely come into the consideration of those buying luxury cars. Tesla's expansion into Europe and China has necessitated a cheap platform and for that they needed to start getting an affordable car on the street. The expansion is just that ... expansion.
Even a company in a completely open an unsaturated market benefits from expansion in this brave new world of demanding perpetually and steadily increasing profits.
For Tesla's sake, I hope what you're saying is true. However, sacrificing the current stable market for an emerging future market when the company still needs to watch cash flow is a strange decision, unless the current stable market isn't that stable. Tesla admitted to pulling in Q1 sales into the previous Q4 in order to take advantage of the federal tax credit sunset, so even Tesla recognizes the impact of that sunset on sales. Plus, Tesla explained the extra $2k discount as a compensation for the sunset, adding to the idea that the credit does affect sales. We'll have to wait for Q2 sales to see if the US market recovers.
What they have are manufacturing and quality control issues.
Yes, there are manufacturing and quality control issues, but those are not the only challenges. The current talking points attempt to pivot away from the elephant in the room, which is that Tesla's largest market may be trending toward saturation, hence the emphasis on Europe and China. Part of that potential decrease in demand comes from the sunsetting of the US federal tax credit. However, if some of that decrease comes from saturation of the potential market, then that is a big concern. The practical short-term addressable market is only a small subset of the total car market due to cost (i.e., a huge part of the market won't consider even a $35k car), availability of charging infrastructure (e.g., how do renters charge at home?), high cost of electricity (e.g., most people don't have access to free solar or at-work chargers), and range anxiety to a lesser but non-zero extent.
It is not surprising they missed their target deliveries this quarter. Their logistics system is dysfunctional. Since deliveries this quarter were mostly for European and Asian markets, i.e. where the remaining high-end customers still to be served are, this made it even worse.
This is the part that suggests that the US market is trending toward saturation, at least for the high-end, high-margin customers. If Tesla could sell more to the US market instead of the more costly operation of selling overseas to new markets, they would do so. The overseas markets can wait in deference to easier, short-term profits, if those profits were available.
"0% of incidents involved slow driver responses or missed detections" is not a believable absolute statement, at least not without statistical confidence intervals. There are already recorded historical incidents that contradict this 0% statement, so the statement is obviously not true in an absolute and infinite precision way. Either the study needs to state the confidence intervals or state how the study differs from the past contradictory historical incidents. For example, how does the statement that "drivers do not appear to over-trust the system to a degree that results in significant functional vigilance degradation in their supervisory role of system operation" square with the guy who died while watching the Harry Potter movie? Either the study was constructed in a way that doesn't capture this situation, or the metrics were constructed in a way that doesn't capture this situation.
US exports weapons to Saudi Arabia. What could be worse, a few routers?
This is an important question (i.e., the relative desirability and danger of these actions), and the answer must necessarily incorporate an understanding of relative motives and benefits. A disinterested third-party (say Vulcans) might view US actions to contain Huawei as unfair or harmful to societal interests in an international scope. Certainly from the viewpoint of Huawei and the Chinese government, such actions would be viewed as unfair and harmful in economic, military, and soft influence ways. However, from the viewpoint of the US and US institutions, containment of Huawei would only seem to be positive for economic competition, abatement of military risk, and other aspect such as soft influence. It's not reasonable to expect the US to act based on the Vulcan-viewpoint anymore than it is to expect China to act similarly, and it is especially unreasonable to expect any one country to take the Vulcan-viewpoint unilaterally.
it is only a matter of time before the US adopts similar policies.
America already has a similar system. We are ahead of China on this. The big difference is that in America your credit score is controlled by corporations rather than the government. But similar criteria are used, and excessive job-hopping can hurt your score.
The scary thing about the Chinese system is that it's unclear what the eventual effects of the social credit score will be. There only seem to be suggestions of effects that could occur. In contrast, the US credit report system has been in effect for a much longer time. Employment history is not a factor in credit scores but does appear in credit reports, and the reader of the report can decide how to use that information or whether to ignore it completely. It's entirely understandable that a lender would want to build a mathematical model to predict the likelihood of loan default and want to incorporate employment history as a predictor of future income stability. However, employment history could not be used for governmental sanctions or as evidence in a court proceeding. In contrast, the Chinese system lacks the history to determine its applications and limits, resulting in a sense of apprehension concerning its potential for abuse.
With those two in place, we could roll everything else back to pre-911 levels and not lose one iota of security.
The third exception is air marshals. Every plane didn't have an air marshal embedded in the flight before 9/11. Now they may have more than one. So it's those three, not those two. We could still eliminate the long queues for sexual abuse, however.
But these three measures only address one specific type of threat mode, i.e., a 911-style attack involving onboard human attackers who directly interact with other humans on the flight. There are many threat modes that don't involve onboard human attackers (e.g., time, altitude, or remote triggered bombs) or onboard attackers who only need to interact with the plane or who directly attack the plane (e.g., the shoe bomb), and none of these three measure address such attack modes.
I will single-issue-vote for any representative that promises to table and/or support legislation adding a stiff tax on products based on an e-waste assessment.
Tangential comment: It may be surprising to most English speakers, but the word "table" in the above context has exactly opposite meanings in the UK and the US. The above phrase in the UK means to "submit (a bill, etc) for consideration by a legislative body" whereas in the US, it means to "suspend discussion of (a bill, etc) indefinitely or for some time". During a recent conversation, my English friend and I were really confused for a while until we figured out what the other person meant.
While it is little consolation to the deceased, I fail to see how placing markers designed to deliberately cause a car wreck is not pre-meditated murder. Someone could easily be lying in wait in the woods with a rifle and shoot drivers, or waiting on overpass to drop bricks.
While there are fortunately very few people who are demented enough to shoot at people on the highway, there are many cases of mischievous teenagers who toss rocks from overpasses onto unsuspecting drivers. I have no doubt that these teenagers would try the "fool the self-driving car camera" trick after reading about it.
The difference being a human that sees lane markers leading into active oncoming traffic will decide there are shenigans and not follow.
Complete bollocks. Care to set up a situation like that and see how many drivers follow the dots blindly?
Unfortunately this situation occurs quite frequently at road construction sites where new lanes are overlaid over existing lanes. The old and new sets of lane markings make lane localization difficult at times even for humans to know where the true lane lies. Often in these cases, the human will follow the preceding and surrounding traffic in an attempt to avoid collisions, even if the true lane appears to be otherwise.
I think the Government of China has slowed down on bringing Taiwan back into the fold and are more comfortable with a natural transition, that will occur as soon as mainland China is a 'Democratic' as Taiwan
My feeling is that the main purpose of China's saber rattling toward Taiwan is to create a boogeyman that is detested more than the Communist Party, a la 1984. Aside from the 1984 effect and feel-good patriotism, China has very little to gain with a takeover/annexation/destruction of Taiwan. In fact, its economy is likely to take a hit, resulting in greater social instability and a greater threat to the party. The party is not stupid and realizes that the vilification of Taiwan and the rallying of patriots is more useful than the actual unification. This is the same diversionary tactic that Trump uses in villifying Mexicans, as the unifying cry is more important politically than the actual security threat.
not that Taiwan has a particularly stellar record for being democratic
I suppose that there are various way to gauge the democratic record of a country, but Taiwan's democracy is quite good, at least in the last few decades after the end of martial law. The key metric of a working democracy is the peaceful transition of power among opposition parties, which has happened several times already in Taiwan. If there is a part of the Taiwanese political process that is non-democratic, it's perhaps the up to 1 million Taiwanese businessmen living in China that China encourages/pays/extorts to fly back to Taiwan to vote in the elections.
The only question is, 'So who does Tencent and Baidu compete with in Taiwan', very unlikely to have anything to do with propaganda and much more likely that some insiders in Taiwan profit by this.
Of all East Asian countries, Taiwan is perhaps the most accepting of foreign media and entertainment, with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American media being easy to find. I doubt this has much to do with economic competition, as there are simply too many other media sources that compete with indigenous media.
Due to the existing settlement, Tesla had an obligation to police Musk's communications, regardless of the effect of the communication on the stock price and regardless of who else might have said the same thing.
That is the stand of SEC, and it looked like an open and shut case. He tweeted. There is no policing. Case closed.
But the agreement had an out for Elon. Only material tweets need to be policed. And SEC argued how will you know it is material or not, so you need policing. But that means all his tweets must be policed. Specifically that point was removed from the agreement. So SEC had agreed Elon has some discretion to decide whether or not a tweet is material. He need not ask for clearance if he believed, and there was reason to believe, the tweet is not material. The number 500K as well as 500 k/year numbers were already in the 2018Q4 quarterly report and guidance. So he had the reason to believe it was not material. It is not an easy case SEC thought it would be. The judge dismissed its motion for a judgement without trial.
I don't think either side is arguing that Musk has discretion. Rather, Musk's lawyers argue that Tesla has discretion, and it's Tesla's discretion has protects Musk's tweets. The SEC argues that there is no evidence that Tesla has exercised discretion. The SEC settlement is with Tesla, and therefore, it's Tesla that needs to uphold the terms of the settlement.
If the number 500k were in the quarterly report as the expected target, there would be no problem. The Q4 report said 360 to 400k. Then in the earnings call, Musk said that Tesla would "produce maybe on the order of 350,000 to 500,000 Model 3s, something like that this year." Musk's subsequent tweet said that Tesla "will make around 500K" cars in 2019. That's not a reiteration of public information, as a narrowing of a predicted range toward the upper portion is sufficiently material that most companies would release a PR statement.
Finally, as far as I can tell from googled news articles, the judge did not deny an SEC request for judgment without trial but rather asked for requests for an evidentiary hearing, which both sides decided to forego. But maybe I missed that article. Is there a link to such an article about the judge denying an SEC request?
SEC moved for a ruling without a hearing. And lost. It is not some open and shut case the press has been reporting. Tesla's sur-reply was super good. SEC was expanding and was introducing elements not mentioned in the first round.
I can't find any article that says that the judge denied an SEC motion to forego a hearing. Rather, I see many articles saying that the judge called for both sides to request an evidentiary hearing by March 26 and that both sides decided to forego the evidentiary hearing.
The key point of contention is the interpretation of the settlement point that Tesla "put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications". Tesla interprets that to mean that it has full discretion in interpreting what those controls and procedures should mean and implicitly when they apply. The SEC claims that there is no indication that such controls and procedures exist.
The free market disagrees with you. It caused absolutely no movement in the stock, either in the after market fueled by rumors alone, or the next day. Anyway, these numbers were hinted in many statements before. The dispute is 500K in 2019 or 500 K/yr rate in 2019. The tweet went through and a clarification was also issued. It is not material.
Many material facts end up causing no movement in the short-term stock price, but that lack of stock price movement doesn't detract from the intrinsic material nature of the information.
That the numbers may have been published previously or even entirely made up is also tangential. Due to the existing settlement, Tesla had an obligation to police Musk's communications, regardless of the effect of the communication on the stock price and regardless of who else might have said the same thing.
SEC contempt case is not strong. "Must pre screen all tweets" was the original demand, it was redlined and negotiated and taken out. So it is clear Tesla never agreed to pre screen ALL tweets. SEC seems to be under the impression there should be a standing panel with some board members and appointees to screen the tweets. Tesla seems to be thinking, if Elon agrees not to treat anything material, not tweet anything during trading hours, there is no need to pre screen, just a post screen to issue clarification before trading resumes.
The particular complaint against Tesla is a violation of the settlement that says, "Tesla will establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications". So, the question is whether Tesla instituted "additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk's communications". I suppose that Tesla could have perfunctorily instituted controls and procedures that it knew would not oversee Musk's communications. Perhaps Tesla thought that oversee means to simply observe without any actual control. Maybe Tesla thought that it would be the final arbiter of what constitutes material information. Unfortunately for Tesla, the court gets to be the final arbiter.
The particular tweet seems to be very immaterial, not much to hang its coat on.
The particular quote from Feb 19 is "Tesla made 0 cars in 2011, but will make around 500k in 2019." There's no question that that statement is material. Saying "Tesla's a great company!" is not material, but stating specific numbers that are usually stated during a quarterly report is obviously material.
Arguably, that was a solved problem between rational nation states. Mutually Assured Destruction kept us safe for 40 years during the Cold War. Either side could rain a salvo of missiles on the other, but neither did because they feared likewise retaliation.
We now have a different, more effective form of MAD. Instead of relying on the arguable love of a nuclear power's leader for his country, we now can rely on the love of that same leader for money. Putin, Xi Jinping, et al. are the richest people on the earth. By starting a nuclear war, they risk their money, since a decimation of the world's economy will rob them of their wealth. The intertwining of the global economy across countries makes the world safer by making the world's leaders dependent on the health of that economy in order to prop up their wealth.
The trouble with these sorts of phony degrees is they won't get you past HR filters designed to hire and H1-B over an American. You need a 4 year degree for that.
I think this is the crucial point, i.e., is this type of 5-month training phony or real? Despite good intentions, the only thing that matters is getting a job. There are plenty of fake diploma mills that are fake because the chance of getting a real job based on that degree is small. If this 5-month program doesn't lead to a job, then it's also phony. But the free, 5-month phony program is still better than the costly, longer phony program, as the only real risk is time.
With the diploma mills, it's clear that the business model is to fleece the banks and the students long enough to abscond with the profits. There is no profit possibility with the 5-month program unless the students end up with jobs. So, the 5-month program administrators are either delusionally incompetent or boldly visionary. I suppose there's a third possiblity, i.e., the Uber grab for VC money with a business model that is known to be unprofitable.
if they do manage to find you a job you'll be in deep if you ever lose it.
It's bad to lose a job and income, and there is risk in spending time and effort, if not money, on education and training. However, this income sharing arrangement seems to be much less risky than a student loan. Losing a job after graduating with a student loan at best postpones loan repayments and sometimes not even that. The main reason to get the 4-year traditional degree with the sunk upfront costs is the expectation of better job and income prospects. Unfortunately, there are many cases where this traditional education gamble fails and in retrospect, the shorter, no upfront fee education would have been better.
As people age, their salary expectations increase, but often their skills don't.
If they were really as valuable as they think they are, then some enterprising company should be able to hire them all and out-compete the companies staffed by younglings. Obviously, that isn't happening.
Most people don't get old and wise. They just get old.
Competition in the business environment isn't solely based on competence but also impacts on business, such as operating costs. It could very well be that hiring minimally competent, cheap workers is more competitive for a company than hiring more expensive, more competent workers. This is especially true when decisions are made by executives motivated by short-term stock incentives, which is often the case. For such companies, the sweet spot is hiring minimally competent workers at the lowest price. In fact, if the short-term incentive is sufficiently compensating, the minimally competent part is not necessary.
I recently took a trip to the UK, and their airport security system would have prevented this particular mistake. At Heathrow, there are two conveyor belts past the scanner, and the person viewing the scanned images can send the item to the cleared belt or the belt for further inspection. Absent this system, the TSA procedure should have been to stop the belt completely until the scanning person points out that item for further inspection.