As long as the economy kept cranking along, no problems. I'm worried where they'll go once they realize you can't grow forever. People put up with dictators as long as their situation is improving enormously. when that stops...
See 1984. Control thought, language, and news. Then create alternate enemies for would-be disgruntled people. Punish the disobedient as enemies of the people. Economic turmoil is only a challenge for governments who care about human rights. In fact, the Chinese government is concerned about the possibility of the challenge to their tight-fisted control that economic turmoil might present. Therefore, it believes it needs to double down on the Orwellian strategies.
If they ignored doing business with any country that has human rights violations then I can't think of a single country on earth they could do business in, maybe some of the smaller Scandinavian countries. Certainly US/Russia/UK/AUS/All Asian and middle eastern countries, all communist and dictator driven countries etc would be out and most European countries too. really companies should stay the fuck out of politics, obey the local laws, if you object refuse to do business there, end of story.
Perfectly stated!
I think it's nonsensical to consider a government's human rights violations as a binary variable. There is certainly a wide range of severity of human rights abuse. A binary variable would be essentially equate totalitarian regimes that kill tens of millions to states that are guilty of privacy or property violations. A similar viewpoint for parents would equate sex abusers with parents who yell at their kids.
More importantly, in the specific case of China, the government-mandated censorship of apps has a direct relationship to human rights abuses by that government.
"Dr. Holick, 72, said that industry funding "doesn't influence me in terms of talking about the health benefits of vitamin D."
It is arguable that this doctor wasn't directly influenced by lobbying money. However, there is a definite appearance of impropriety. The doctor's statement above is not believable. What he should have said is, "I accepted money that influences me to promote ideas that I already believed in."
Everyone on this site cheered when Google went evil and fired that man for saying men and women are different. Working with China? What else do you expect from an evil corporation? This is actually pretty tame. Google isn't giving people cancer like Monsanto or robbing their bank accounts like Wells Fargo.
Well, if it's just censorship and denial of information, that's one level of evil. However, if that censorship is coupled with surveillance that is shared with the government, then it possibly leads to legal penalties that are life changing. If I search for Falun Gong, it's one thing to not see any hits, but it's an entirely different thing to get a knock on my door or see my social credit rating drop.
The Gallup survey simply asks for an up-down view on the word capitalism. A necessary and much more informative question would have probed what the viewed denotation and connotations of that word are in the minds of the surveyed people. My guess is that most young adults (and even old adults) do not know what capitalism is. However, they know what the US system is "capitalism". Thus, the question is likely mostly useless as a comment on the virtues of theoretical capitalism. Rather, the question effectively asks for a comment on the respondent's view of the current US economy, and it is wholly unsurprising that many young people who are struggling financially would have a negative view of a term that describes the economic system that currently afflicts them.
"But this is not plagiarism; rather, we are standing on the shoulders of a giant for our own innovation," she added, according to local media reports. Ms Gao was also quoted as saying that the company had so far been doing very well in terms of customer satisfaction.
Not plagiarism? Well, that's technically correct.
Well, it technically is plagiarism, albeit not in the traditional domain of interpersonal communication. If code can be copyrighted, then it can be plagiarized.
This would be corporate espionage at worst and copyright/trademark infringement at best. But let's leave that aside and wonder why they weren't satisfied with grabbing and using Chromium, the open source project Chrome is largely based on. I'm certain they have the technical expertise to compile and create a distribution package. That shouldn't be a high hurdle to jump, so it come back to why?
This is a good point. I think the answer is obvious. There was never an intent to distribute this code outside of China. Hence, there were no worries about legal ramifications outside of China. The Chinese government views the use of "standing on the shoulders of a giant for our own innovation" via direct copying and appropriating of technology as a tactic that furthers the national interest. It's not just that the Chinese government would refuse to prosecute such technology transfer that is illegal under Western laws, it openly supports, encourages, and through various Chinese laws mandates such transfers as the cost of doing business in China.
Also, if Google is willing to hold it's nose as it plays by Chinese rules in enforcing censorship and surveillance, it obviously wouldn't complain about this type of IP theft. I suppose in a sense, the Chinese government has effectively purchased a license to use this software, with payment rendered in the form of potential Chinese ad revenue.
I've always said, when you disable location on Android it's more likely that you're just toggling your own ability to see the location data that Google is collecting. Just because now your phone won't show you your current location doesn't mean it isn't being recorded, it just means your phone won't share it with you.
I always disable location on my phone, but not because I believe that Google isn't still tracking me. I do it to save battery usage. At least in previous versions of Android, enabling location seemed to trigger background processes. Since these the activities of these processes were largely related to ads and other things that had no direct benefit to me, I turned off location. The battery savings was always immediately noticeable.
The amount of personal, private information that Google has collected and calculated is staggering. Think of the US government having that information but with no semblance of legal checks (no required warrants, no FOIA requests, no need to get Congress to allow data collection, no voting disagreeable people out of office, etc.) on the use/abuse of that information, and that is the current situation with Google. The only comfort users have is the assurance that Google will do no evil.
It's interesting that one motivation for using microwave communications is to avoid the risk of disruptions like inadvertent cable cuts. However, cables buried in the ground are probably more resilient to attacks than 16-mile communications over open air. If humidity spikes can impact communications, how about steam chimneys, kites, and balloons along the path placed by competitors, not to mention intermittent random jamming.
Dunno about you, but my corporate gym doesn't have a sauna. Nor do the public schools, the storefront gyms or other facilities the proles commonly use. Are you sure these findings aren't just looking at wealthy white guys somewhat interested in health vs. the great unwashed cheetoh-eating masses?
Looks like the meta-analysis didn't mention any factor analysis, which should have been an obvious thing to do in a correlation-based study. Of course, the reason for that lack of analysis could be that the studied papers themselves avoided factor analysis (which seems to be the case at least for the first five or so paper abstracts that I scanned).
If new cars cost more, more people keep driving old cars. Would you prefer 5% of the old cars are upgraded to new cars getting 20% better emissions, or that 20% of the old cars are upgraded to new cars getting 10% better emissions?
Are these necessarily the correct options for the future? Ford is dropping small cars because expensive trucks are more profitable, and they're able to do this because they think the regulatory pressure for mileage is decreasing.
Most definitely. For example, there were fierce battles in San Jose over whether to call the Vietnamese area Little Saigon, Vietnamese Business District, or Saigon Business District, which led to protests and attempts to recall a city council member. Sometimes these battles are political, as with the naming of the Vietnamese area in San Jose. Sometimes the battles are cultural, as with the Koreatown naming push in Santa Clara. There was pushback from the non-Koreans in the area to calling the entire area Koreatown. In the end, the city decided not to officially designate the area as Korean. However, someone at Google decided to do the opposite, and so Koreatown shows up not only in Google Maps but also in the search results.
Google has massive power to change language, names, and thinking. For example, a short while ago, Google Maps navigation suddenly started using the term "slip road". From the context, it was obviously talking about on and off ramps to highways, but it would always say slip road. I finally looked up the word and saw that it was a British term. However, Google has broadened the recognition of the word at least to the US.
It just goes to show "Do No Evil" was complete and utter media theatre. Google will do anything for the almighty dollar!
It also shows that supposedly intelligent people are easily caught up in meaningless propaganda. It has always been obvious that "Do no evil" had no useful purpose. Evil has no universally accepted definition, and therefore "Do no evil" has as much meaning as "Do no X". Furthermore, very few people outside of comic book villains actually intend to do evil. Murderers and criminals have rationalizations that turn what others might view as evil into non-evils and sometimes even virtues. In fact, this is exactly what is happening with Google support for Chinese censorship and monitoring.
This is accurate. There are way too many five star reviews. If you want to look at real reviews, look at the 3 star ones that have comments. They are usually balanced reviews. No product is five star perfect. Even a 4 star review is suspect. What amazon should have is a scale from 1 to 10. The spammers will always choose 9 or 10.
The distribution of scores should be roughly normal, but the mean and variance depend on the reviewer. Some reviewers tend to score high and some low, but within a short time window, each reviewer tends to exhibit the same mean and variance. The range of different means is due to the difference in semantic meanings of scores for each reviewer because Amazon didn't explicitly guide reviewers on the semantic meaning of each score value.
"the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced"
Then... just announce it?
Why is this a problem? In most computing systems, is the era encoded as a string or as an enumerated value? If it's enumerated, the corresponding human-readable string can be changed later.
The mere fact that innocent citizens show up on the radar at ALL for police trying to solve a crime is very troublesome.
You want to absolutely minimize false positives.
I disagree. I think you should set up the AI to always produce false positives and probably hide the percentage of the match as well. Just like a lineup it should always return the top 10 results sorted randomly regardless of how closely they match. That way the cops don't start relying on it as something that it isn't.
A post-filter does help to mitigate the probability of a false positive for an individual. However, it doesn't mitigate the aggregate inequities in the false negative rate. There is a similar problem with racial profiling. Even if only true violators are identified, the unfair bias allows some demographic groups to significantly reduce their probability of getting caught. An analogy would be allowing a specific demographic to flash their donated-to-police-charity card to avoid traffic tickets. Even if only true traffic violators are caught, the fact that one group gets let off the hook is wrong and also feels intuitively wrong.
But I still think Xi will softly invade Taiwan, and we will look the the other way.
China has been softly invading Taiwan for many years, and it's almost too late to reverse the effects. There are one million Taiwanese businessmen in China, businessmen who have financial incentives to support the mainland regardless of the effects on the island. China has discovered the secret weapon that is much more powerful than the thousands of missiles aimed at the island. Chinese people listen to money, and the Taiwan are no different. There is a corporate and individual brain and heart drain to the mainland based on financial rewards that will render the Taiwanese government impotent.
Right now, the Chinese government is just playing with the rest of the world. These orders to kowtow to Chinese dictates don't matter for the status of Taiwan. They exist only to exert Chinese power and embarrass foreign governments in revenge for a past history of national humiliation. The soft invasion is not just an invasion of Taiwanese sovereignty but also of Western dignity.
> If GM or Toyota were to offer an all-electric car with a 300-mile range priced at $35k...
Does it have to be GM or Toyota? Cos the new Nissan Leaf Tekna has a (claimed) range of 270 miles for ~35k USD equivalent.
The current Leaf has a claimed range of 151 miles, which is an improvement over previous years. It's getting close to the 220 miles of the standard Model 3.
If the Leaf could increase its range a bit more while still keeping in the $35k range AND if people knew about it, it would seriously eat into Tesla sales, well at least until Tesla actually sells $35k cars, which might be a while. The key is that pretty much only Toyota spends money on advertising the Prius, and pretty much only for the hybrid. The incumbent makers still don't care about the Tesla market enough to actually spend money on it. Once the advertising dollars and dollar incentives are committed, it will be a different market.
Ford just announced a plan to spend $4 billion on autonomous vehicles. If they committed $4 billion to electric cars, Tesla would be in serious trouble. However, Ford and the other incumbents don't care, at least not yet.
>> If GM or Toyota were to offer an all-electric car with a 300-mile range priced at $35k, it would most certainly steal some Tesla's Model 3 customers immediately, even if the offered car were technically not as well designed.
The point is : if it's not as well designed, it wouldn't cost as low as 35k.
I don't think Tesla's engineering expertise is necessarily in cost-effective manufacturing. An argument could be made that Teslas cost more due to their innovative design. The point that I'm making is that other car makers could drop features and specs to lower price, e.g., smaller screens, software with fewer features, lower grade materials, smaller batteries, etc. A significant portion of the Model 3 reservations are for people who can only start to consider cars in the $35k and below price range. And with all cars, the lower the price the greater the pool of serious buyers.
It really is an amazing car. . . I feel like a requirement to short the stock is one of the following:
1) You have never test driven a Model 3
2) You are a shill for some competing industry/company
I like Tesla the car, but Tesla the company still presents some plausible reasons to doubt their financial future. The most compelling reason is that Tesla has yet to demonstrate that it can earn money consistently. It may eventually achieve financial stability, but it has yet to demonstrate stability. A second compelling reason is that the big car companies have yet to significantly compete in the market. Yes, there are technological impediments to catching up to Tesla products in the short term, but the incumbents have other advantages, such as marketing, dealerships, mature manufacturing, and most importantly sufficient financial reserves to battle Tesla on price. If GM or Toyota were to offer an all-electric car with a 300-mile range priced at $35k, it would most certainly steal some Tesla's Model 3 customers immediately, even if the offered car were technically not as well designed. A $12k price difference (almost $20k if the $7.5k US federal tax credit is considered) would be substantial. GM and Toyota would be able to lower their price even at a per-car loss in order to attract customers, while Tesla has no such leeway.
The 'juice' inside a coconut has always been called milk AFAIR. It's a natural thing to do, to extend the use of a word to cover something 'similar'.
It's not similar and just because something has been done a certain way doesn't make it accurate. If it comes from a plant it is by definition not milk. Milk is a substance secreted by mammals to feed their young. If it doesn't come from a mammal it isn't milk. If it comes from a plant it is juice. So the accurate term is coconut juice.
Whose definition? Most English dictionaries will list as explicit definitions both mammary secretions as well as similar secretions from plants and other sources. In fact, most non-English dictionaries also define white plant liquids as milk. Both direct mammary secretions and similar liquids are clearly definitions. Of course, some people may choose to exclude one of the dictionary entries, e.g., cow milk producers, but this is as silly as raw milk producers claiming that pasteurized or skim milk isn't milk at all because those products clearly aren't directly secreted by cows.
Finally California does something right in it's government
California politics has become significantly less dysfunctional since we switched to non-partisan primaries. The new system favors moderate candidates open to compromise, over partisanship and pandering to special interests.
That's an interesting take to call a single-party government "non-partisan" when it it is actually completely partisan in the sense that one party controls the executive and legislative branches and can completely ignore the minority party. As a result, absolutely no compromise is now needed. Of course one-party governments are in no way less subservient to special interests than contested governments, and that is true whether we're talking about California or Texas.
Furthermore, the notion that eliminating Republicans from most general elections results in the election of more moderates is funny. The new system ensures that Democrats can now pander solely to the base because many Republican voters will refuse to vote when their only choices are Democrats.
All your suggestions are only of concern for executives that are interested in the long term. Unfortunately our current corporate structure incentivizes behavior that maximizes short-term stock spikes. As a result, squeezing as much as possible out of communities is a no-brainer for companies, even though the result is a community that is less desirable for the employees of those companies.
I've been told many times that on those surveys "management considers anything less than an 8 [out of 10] a fail"
Then the problem is with the management for overvaluing a survey that is non-uniformly sampled, based on a small sample size that results in large confidence intervals, with statistical aggregation based on non-standardized data, and that doesn't collect corresponding data to tease out factors (e.g., maybe low scores are correlated with time of day, amount of purchase, etc.).
Fortunately, private life isn't the military -- employees shouldn't be treated like soldiers.
But the exact same underlying implied and always existing possibility of coercion exists. That's the problem. There is no way to eliminate the thought of possible retaliation from the mind of the underling, and therefore true consensuality is impossible.
This is an interesting development in the use of ARM processors in large computing systems. However, how much progress this represents depends on the dollars and watts needs to produce results. News articles frequently mention the 2.3 petaflops number, but the procurement cost of the system and the power needed to achieve the peak petaflops number are hard to find. If this ARM system doesn't present a compelling dollars or watts story, what is the advantage of this system over competing technologies?
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As long as the economy kept cranking along, no problems. I'm worried where they'll go once they realize you can't grow forever. People put up with dictators as long as their situation is improving enormously. when that stops...
See 1984. Control thought, language, and news. Then create alternate enemies for would-be disgruntled people. Punish the disobedient as enemies of the people. Economic turmoil is only a challenge for governments who care about human rights. In fact, the Chinese government is concerned about the possibility of the challenge to their tight-fisted control that economic turmoil might present. Therefore, it believes it needs to double down on the Orwellian strategies.
If they ignored doing business with any country that has human rights violations then I can't think of a single country on earth they could do business in, maybe some of the smaller Scandinavian countries. Certainly US/Russia/UK/AUS/All Asian and middle eastern countries, all communist and dictator driven countries etc would be out and most European countries too. really companies should stay the fuck out of politics, obey the local laws, if you object refuse to do business there, end of story.
Perfectly stated!
I think it's nonsensical to consider a government's human rights violations as a binary variable. There is certainly a wide range of severity of human rights abuse. A binary variable would be essentially equate totalitarian regimes that kill tens of millions to states that are guilty of privacy or property violations. A similar viewpoint for parents would equate sex abusers with parents who yell at their kids.
More importantly, in the specific case of China, the government-mandated censorship of apps has a direct relationship to human rights abuses by that government.
"Dr. Holick, 72, said that industry funding "doesn't influence me in terms of talking about the health benefits of vitamin D."
It is arguable that this doctor wasn't directly influenced by lobbying money. However, there is a definite appearance of impropriety. The doctor's statement above is not believable. What he should have said is, "I accepted money that influences me to promote ideas that I already believed in."
Everyone on this site cheered when Google went evil and fired that man for saying men and women are different. Working with China? What else do you expect from an evil corporation? This is actually pretty tame. Google isn't giving people cancer like Monsanto or robbing their bank accounts like Wells Fargo.
Well, if it's just censorship and denial of information, that's one level of evil. However, if that censorship is coupled with surveillance that is shared with the government, then it possibly leads to legal penalties that are life changing. If I search for Falun Gong, it's one thing to not see any hits, but it's an entirely different thing to get a knock on my door or see my social credit rating drop.
The Gallup survey simply asks for an up-down view on the word capitalism. A necessary and much more informative question would have probed what the viewed denotation and connotations of that word are in the minds of the surveyed people. My guess is that most young adults (and even old adults) do not know what capitalism is. However, they know what the US system is "capitalism". Thus, the question is likely mostly useless as a comment on the virtues of theoretical capitalism. Rather, the question effectively asks for a comment on the respondent's view of the current US economy, and it is wholly unsurprising that many young people who are struggling financially would have a negative view of a term that describes the economic system that currently afflicts them.
"But this is not plagiarism; rather, we are standing on the shoulders of a giant for our own innovation," she added, according to local media reports. Ms Gao was also quoted as saying that the company had so far been doing very well in terms of customer satisfaction.
Not plagiarism? Well, that's technically correct.
Well, it technically is plagiarism, albeit not in the traditional domain of interpersonal communication. If code can be copyrighted, then it can be plagiarized.
This would be corporate espionage at worst and copyright/trademark infringement at best. But let's leave that aside and wonder why they weren't satisfied with grabbing and using Chromium, the open source project Chrome is largely based on. I'm certain they have the technical expertise to compile and create a distribution package. That shouldn't be a high hurdle to jump, so it come back to why?
This is a good point. I think the answer is obvious. There was never an intent to distribute this code outside of China. Hence, there were no worries about legal ramifications outside of China. The Chinese government views the use of "standing on the shoulders of a giant for our own innovation" via direct copying and appropriating of technology as a tactic that furthers the national interest. It's not just that the Chinese government would refuse to prosecute such technology transfer that is illegal under Western laws, it openly supports, encourages, and through various Chinese laws mandates such transfers as the cost of doing business in China.
Also, if Google is willing to hold it's nose as it plays by Chinese rules in enforcing censorship and surveillance, it obviously wouldn't complain about this type of IP theft. I suppose in a sense, the Chinese government has effectively purchased a license to use this software, with payment rendered in the form of potential Chinese ad revenue.
I've always said, when you disable location on Android it's more likely that you're just toggling your own ability to see the location data that Google is collecting. Just because now your phone won't show you your current location doesn't mean it isn't being recorded, it just means your phone won't share it with you.
I always disable location on my phone, but not because I believe that Google isn't still tracking me. I do it to save battery usage. At least in previous versions of Android, enabling location seemed to trigger background processes. Since these the activities of these processes were largely related to ads and other things that had no direct benefit to me, I turned off location. The battery savings was always immediately noticeable.
The amount of personal, private information that Google has collected and calculated is staggering. Think of the US government having that information but with no semblance of legal checks (no required warrants, no FOIA requests, no need to get Congress to allow data collection, no voting disagreeable people out of office, etc.) on the use/abuse of that information, and that is the current situation with Google. The only comfort users have is the assurance that Google will do no evil.
It's interesting that one motivation for using microwave communications is to avoid the risk of disruptions like inadvertent cable cuts. However, cables buried in the ground are probably more resilient to attacks than 16-mile communications over open air. If humidity spikes can impact communications, how about steam chimneys, kites, and balloons along the path placed by competitors, not to mention intermittent random jamming.
Dunno about you, but my corporate gym doesn't have a sauna. Nor do the public schools, the storefront gyms or other facilities the proles commonly use. Are you sure these findings aren't just looking at wealthy white guys somewhat interested in health vs. the great unwashed cheetoh-eating masses?
Looks like the meta-analysis didn't mention any factor analysis, which should have been an obvious thing to do in a correlation-based study. Of course, the reason for that lack of analysis could be that the studied papers themselves avoided factor analysis (which seems to be the case at least for the first five or so paper abstracts that I scanned).
If new cars cost more, more people keep driving old cars. Would you prefer 5% of the old cars are upgraded to new cars getting 20% better emissions, or that 20% of the old cars are upgraded to new cars getting 10% better emissions?
Are these necessarily the correct options for the future? Ford is dropping small cars because expensive trucks are more profitable, and they're able to do this because they think the regulatory pressure for mileage is decreasing.
Are they "official" names for neighborhoods?
Most definitely. For example, there were fierce battles in San Jose over whether to call the Vietnamese area Little Saigon, Vietnamese Business District, or Saigon Business District, which led to protests and attempts to recall a city council member. Sometimes these battles are political, as with the naming of the Vietnamese area in San Jose. Sometimes the battles are cultural, as with the Koreatown naming push in Santa Clara. There was pushback from the non-Koreans in the area to calling the entire area Koreatown. In the end, the city decided not to officially designate the area as Korean. However, someone at Google decided to do the opposite, and so Koreatown shows up not only in Google Maps but also in the search results.
Google has massive power to change language, names, and thinking. For example, a short while ago, Google Maps navigation suddenly started using the term "slip road". From the context, it was obviously talking about on and off ramps to highways, but it would always say slip road. I finally looked up the word and saw that it was a British term. However, Google has broadened the recognition of the word at least to the US.
It just goes to show "Do No Evil" was complete and utter media theatre. Google will do anything for the almighty dollar!
It also shows that supposedly intelligent people are easily caught up in meaningless propaganda. It has always been obvious that "Do no evil" had no useful purpose. Evil has no universally accepted definition, and therefore "Do no evil" has as much meaning as "Do no X". Furthermore, very few people outside of comic book villains actually intend to do evil. Murderers and criminals have rationalizations that turn what others might view as evil into non-evils and sometimes even virtues. In fact, this is exactly what is happening with Google support for Chinese censorship and monitoring.
This is accurate. There are way too many five star reviews. If you want to look at real reviews, look at the 3 star ones that have comments. They are usually balanced reviews. No product is five star perfect. Even a 4 star review is suspect. What amazon should have is a scale from 1 to 10. The spammers will always choose 9 or 10.
The distribution of scores should be roughly normal, but the mean and variance depend on the reviewer. Some reviewers tend to score high and some low, but within a short time window, each reviewer tends to exhibit the same mean and variance. The range of different means is due to the difference in semantic meanings of scores for each reviewer because Amazon didn't explicitly guide reviewers on the semantic meaning of each score value.
"the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced"
Then... just announce it?
Why is this a problem? In most computing systems, is the era encoded as a string or as an enumerated value? If it's enumerated, the corresponding human-readable string can be changed later.
The mere fact that innocent citizens show up on the radar at ALL for police trying to solve a crime is very troublesome.
You want to absolutely minimize false positives.
I disagree. I think you should set up the AI to always produce false positives and probably hide the percentage of the match as well. Just like a lineup it should always return the top 10 results sorted randomly regardless of how closely they match. That way the cops don't start relying on it as something that it isn't.
A post-filter does help to mitigate the probability of a false positive for an individual. However, it doesn't mitigate the aggregate inequities in the false negative rate. There is a similar problem with racial profiling. Even if only true violators are identified, the unfair bias allows some demographic groups to significantly reduce their probability of getting caught. An analogy would be allowing a specific demographic to flash their donated-to-police-charity card to avoid traffic tickets. Even if only true traffic violators are caught, the fact that one group gets let off the hook is wrong and also feels intuitively wrong.
But I still think Xi will softly invade Taiwan, and we will look the the other way.
China has been softly invading Taiwan for many years, and it's almost too late to reverse the effects. There are one million Taiwanese businessmen in China, businessmen who have financial incentives to support the mainland regardless of the effects on the island. China has discovered the secret weapon that is much more powerful than the thousands of missiles aimed at the island. Chinese people listen to money, and the Taiwan are no different. There is a corporate and individual brain and heart drain to the mainland based on financial rewards that will render the Taiwanese government impotent.
Right now, the Chinese government is just playing with the rest of the world. These orders to kowtow to Chinese dictates don't matter for the status of Taiwan. They exist only to exert Chinese power and embarrass foreign governments in revenge for a past history of national humiliation. The soft invasion is not just an invasion of Taiwanese sovereignty but also of Western dignity.
> If GM or Toyota were to offer an all-electric car with a 300-mile range priced at $35k...
Does it have to be GM or Toyota? Cos the new Nissan Leaf Tekna has a (claimed) range of 270 miles for ~35k USD equivalent.
The current Leaf has a claimed range of 151 miles, which is an improvement over previous years. It's getting close to the 220 miles of the standard Model 3.
If the Leaf could increase its range a bit more while still keeping in the $35k range AND if people knew about it, it would seriously eat into Tesla sales, well at least until Tesla actually sells $35k cars, which might be a while. The key is that pretty much only Toyota spends money on advertising the Prius, and pretty much only for the hybrid. The incumbent makers still don't care about the Tesla market enough to actually spend money on it. Once the advertising dollars and dollar incentives are committed, it will be a different market.
Ford just announced a plan to spend $4 billion on autonomous vehicles. If they committed $4 billion to electric cars, Tesla would be in serious trouble. However, Ford and the other incumbents don't care, at least not yet.
>> If GM or Toyota were to offer an all-electric car with a 300-mile range priced at $35k, it would most certainly steal some Tesla's Model 3 customers immediately, even if the offered car were technically not as well designed.
The point is : if it's not as well designed, it wouldn't cost as low as 35k.
I don't think Tesla's engineering expertise is necessarily in cost-effective manufacturing. An argument could be made that Teslas cost more due to their innovative design. The point that I'm making is that other car makers could drop features and specs to lower price, e.g., smaller screens, software with fewer features, lower grade materials, smaller batteries, etc. A significant portion of the Model 3 reservations are for people who can only start to consider cars in the $35k and below price range. And with all cars, the lower the price the greater the pool of serious buyers.
It really is an amazing car. . . I feel like a requirement to short the stock is one of the following:
1) You have never test driven a Model 3
2) You are a shill for some competing industry/company
I like Tesla the car, but Tesla the company still presents some plausible reasons to doubt their financial future. The most compelling reason is that Tesla has yet to demonstrate that it can earn money consistently. It may eventually achieve financial stability, but it has yet to demonstrate stability. A second compelling reason is that the big car companies have yet to significantly compete in the market. Yes, there are technological impediments to catching up to Tesla products in the short term, but the incumbents have other advantages, such as marketing, dealerships, mature manufacturing, and most importantly sufficient financial reserves to battle Tesla on price. If GM or Toyota were to offer an all-electric car with a 300-mile range priced at $35k, it would most certainly steal some Tesla's Model 3 customers immediately, even if the offered car were technically not as well designed. A $12k price difference (almost $20k if the $7.5k US federal tax credit is considered) would be substantial. GM and Toyota would be able to lower their price even at a per-car loss in order to attract customers, while Tesla has no such leeway.
The 'juice' inside a coconut has always been called milk AFAIR. It's a natural thing to do, to extend the use of a word to cover something 'similar'.
It's not similar and just because something has been done a certain way doesn't make it accurate. If it comes from a plant it is by definition not milk. Milk is a substance secreted by mammals to feed their young. If it doesn't come from a mammal it isn't milk. If it comes from a plant it is juice. So the accurate term is coconut juice.
Whose definition? Most English dictionaries will list as explicit definitions both mammary secretions as well as similar secretions from plants and other sources. In fact, most non-English dictionaries also define white plant liquids as milk. Both direct mammary secretions and similar liquids are clearly definitions. Of course, some people may choose to exclude one of the dictionary entries, e.g., cow milk producers, but this is as silly as raw milk producers claiming that pasteurized or skim milk isn't milk at all because those products clearly aren't directly secreted by cows.
Finally California does something right in it's government
California politics has become significantly less dysfunctional since we switched to non-partisan primaries. The new system favors moderate candidates open to compromise, over partisanship and pandering to special interests.
That's an interesting take to call a single-party government "non-partisan" when it it is actually completely partisan in the sense that one party controls the executive and legislative branches and can completely ignore the minority party. As a result, absolutely no compromise is now needed. Of course one-party governments are in no way less subservient to special interests than contested governments, and that is true whether we're talking about California or Texas.
Furthermore, the notion that eliminating Republicans from most general elections results in the election of more moderates is funny. The new system ensures that Democrats can now pander solely to the base because many Republican voters will refuse to vote when their only choices are Democrats.
All your suggestions are only of concern for executives that are interested in the long term. Unfortunately our current corporate structure incentivizes behavior that maximizes short-term stock spikes. As a result, squeezing as much as possible out of communities is a no-brainer for companies, even though the result is a community that is less desirable for the employees of those companies.
I've been told many times that on those surveys "management considers anything less than an 8 [out of 10] a fail"
Then the problem is with the management for overvaluing a survey that is non-uniformly sampled, based on a small sample size that results in large confidence intervals, with statistical aggregation based on non-standardized data, and that doesn't collect corresponding data to tease out factors (e.g., maybe low scores are correlated with time of day, amount of purchase, etc.).
Fortunately, private life isn't the military -- employees shouldn't be treated like soldiers.
But the exact same underlying implied and always existing possibility of coercion exists. That's the problem. There is no way to eliminate the thought of possible retaliation from the mind of the underling, and therefore true consensuality is impossible.
This is an interesting development in the use of ARM processors in large computing systems. However, how much progress this represents depends on the dollars and watts needs to produce results. News articles frequently mention the 2.3 petaflops number, but the procurement cost of the system and the power needed to achieve the peak petaflops number are hard to find. If this ARM system doesn't present a compelling dollars or watts story, what is the advantage of this system over competing technologies?