No, you are making a series of incredibly wrong assumptions about me, and then suggesting you know better about my life situation than I do. You know nothing about my job, my relationship status, my income, my city, the type of building I live in, the size of my family, my travel needs, the stability of my situation, my age, or anything beyond the fact that I have no car, I am planning on an electric car, and I live in Canada. Yet somehow, you feel like you have a better handle on what I need than I do. Call it opinion if you want, but I'm calling it a very arrogant opinion.
and what is available for charging infrastructure is enough for those times I would need it.
I'm as dubious of that as I am of there ever being a Year of the Linux Desktop.
So you know my own city better than me? Why in the world would I lie about what I need? Why in the world would I buy an electric car if it didn't suit my needs? I get it, you don't think they work for you. But that doesn't mean they don't work for everyone.
Unless you move to where charging stations aren't as ubiquitous as in San Jose.
I don't live in San Jose, I live in Canada. And they're not ubiquitous here (except Ontario and Quebec). But I would still get an electric, because most charging is done at home and what is available for charging infrastructure is enough for those times I would need it.
In the case of EVs, your core competencies are Battery Design and EV Drivetrain.
Not necessarily. Nissan's core competency is designing and building cars: regulatory compliance, supply chain management, marketing, etc. In fact, they likely have very little (comparatively) competency in battery and EV drivetrain design and production.
Gold, cars, jewelry and other "investments" have value whether it's aesthetic or whatever, so can usually be enjoyed in some fashion while you own it. And real American $$ have the advantage of being - you know - legal tender for all debts, public and private" so is immensely useful/valuable. BTC, from all I can see, is just fools gambling. What am I missing?
But gold, cars, and jewelry don't tend to have intrinsic value anywhere close to equal their USD value. Sure, you can enjoy them in their own right, and gold does have some industrial uses. But the value of "enjoyment" doesn't reach anywhere near millions of dollars for jewelry, and there's no way industry alone could support a valuation of US$1200/oz. for gold.
These things mainly derive their value because people say they have value. People buy expensive art and warehouses full of expensive wine partially for enjoyment and prestige, but moreso as holders of value. BTC, USD, art, jewelry... they're all just tokens for keeping track of value. They just differ in the details: how volatile they are, how open to fraud they are, etc.
We all like USDs, because we all like USDs. That sounds like a tautology, but it's the truth. 350 million Americans, plus hundreds of millions more people around the world agree they have value, so they have value. And because of the number of actors, the USD has low volatility, which supports its use by people, which feeds back into its value (in one big circle).
Due to the small number of actors, art and wine and such can be very volatile so they aren't actually all that great for storing value, but rich people do it anyways for other reasons. If you have umpteen billions of dollars you can risk a little volatility in your value and get the side benefits of entertainment and prestige.
Because it's a tangible, physical object in my possession that I physically transfer to someone else's possession. It does not require any 3rd party to authenticate, or verify, and it doesn't get recorded in a public f'ing ledger for all eternity.
No. Money is not a tangible object. It is a system of accounting. I.e. a ledger. The difference is that it's a distributed ledger, while block-chain based currencies use one centralized ledger (centralized in the sense that all entries are collected together in one dataset, not in the sense that one entity runs it).
The bills and coins you have are tangible objects, but they are not money. They are entries in the ledger.
EVs cost now a lot more than ICEs, and what do you get for the extra money? Silent drive, extra torque, a warm fuzzy feeling of running a cleaner car? how many people care about that?
Well I think the people buying them now care about precisely those things. That was kind of my point. The math on choosing EV doesn't pencil out yet on dollars and cents alone, so people who are buying them are buying them for other reasons (just like you bought your 30k car for other reasons). But costs on EVs have a lot of room to go down, so the math will start to become more and more of a factor as the technology matures.
I don't think that's TCO you're using. Those are operational expenses. The T stands for Total, which would include purchase price, taxes, registration fees, etc...
Did you read all of swillden's post? That 20k included the cost to lease the car for three years, and then to purchase it outright at end of lease. I.e., yes, it was TCO that swillden was using.
I'm buying a new car, and just ran the numbers for a volt versus a normal gas engine.
In my commute? I save an amazing $321 a year.
That's less than $1 a day. in a car which is $3K MORE than the gas car, even after $9K in gov't/state bonuses.
You wannna push electric vehicles? Lower the cost of Electricity.
Don't forget to factor in maintenance costs. EVs are much simpler with fewer moving parts. No oil changes, no muffler replacements, etc.
But yeah, I'm not surprised the math doesn't pencil out yet. Modern EVs are still relatively new in the grand scheme of things, and there's a lot of optimizing still to be done. But the math will work out sooner or later. In the meantime the people buying them are doing so for reasons other than hard dollars and cents (i.e. the same reason anyone buys a $30k car in a world where $15k cars exist).
Car makers stay profitable by making the same car and selling it around the world (with a few planned modifications, such was flipping the steering wheel, and maybe a renaming). It keeps supply chains simple and amortizes design costs. If major markets in the rest of the world are banning new gas cars by 2025, 2030, or any year before 2040, then the UK won't actually have to do anything. GM isn't going to make an electric cars for other markets, and then have a special gas car for the UK; they'll just stop making gas cars. Legislation or not, by the year 2040 you won't be able to get a new gas car in the UK.
If many participants in a given industry end up colluding due to regulations being imposed on them, perhaps the viability of the regulations they're trying to bypass should be reexamined.
Or perhaps the viability of the technology being regulated should be reexamined. If we accept that the goal of the regulation (low PM levels) is a a good thing, why would we let people use a technology that breaks that regulation just because "It's too hard". There are alternatives (gasoline, and electric is becoming more viable every day).
Unless more US companies open Canadian offices and create jobs to be filled with these H1B losers this will go nowhere.
I suspect this is exactly the hoped-for outcome. It's a net-win for Canada if a company moves here. Even if 75% of their positions are H1B-equivalents, that other 25% is new jobs for Canadians, plus Canada gets more corporate income tax and other such benefits.
You have to delegate a ton of shit and can't pay close attention to a lot of it, especially if a lot of your energy is devoted towards business expansion, not existing operations.
As for the harassment culture, I always wonder at what point you can hold one person responsible for a culture populated by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Maybe he was all bro culture at the beginning and new hires just picked it up and perpetuated it.
More than likely this is the case, and that is his failing. As you correctly pointed out, a CEO can't deal with every minutia of a company. Their job, therefore, is to set the culture and expectations such that the peons who deal with the minutia do the "right" thing. A good leader knows that simple signals can have ripples throughout a whole company. Founding a company on bro culture leads to a company where harassment is tolerated.
their original goals (no weapons, internally developed IPs, doing good by their employees, etc.)
They outsourced their manufacturing and assembly plants to malaysia and similiar, gutted their American and some of their European workforce, eliminated many of their general purpose parts in exchange for special purpose parts, etc.
And technically all this stuff was already going on back in the late 90s (Star Wars LEGOs anyone?)
The big difference post-'03 is they started 'Disneyfying' themselves, theme parks everywhere, LEGO stores set up with a minimalist kid-friendly feel, local club activities to help reinforce that 'cult' feel.
They actually turned themselves around by doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of everything you just said. In the early 2000s their parts catalog ballooned with special-purpose parts, they were opening theme parks left and right, they blew their wad on all sorts of ill-thought-out side projects, and they lost their handle on their supply chain. This is where the $800 in debt and weak sales came from.
They were lucky that at the same time they started making the Star Wars sets, which provided the cash to float them through this otherwise-disasterly period. They saved themselves by really clamping down on special purpose parts, by shuttering or selling most of their theme parks, and by focusing on building a quality core brand.
Yes, if winning is your metric, then the stats are all right there. But as an owner, winning is probably not your number one goal (though it helps with your other goals). The Toronto Maple Leafs haven't won a cup since 1967... but they're the third most valuable NHL franchise.
Now let me ask you this: What's to prevent the fat and lazy from living meager lives on basic income and never contributing to society greatly increasing our taxes?
Absolutely nothing. But that's okay. In the bell curve of human population, you will always have some people who are fat and lazy and do nothing. They do it under our current system. They would do it under UBI. They would do it under any system you can think of. So you pay the meagre money, they sit at home watching soaps, at least they have a roof over their head and some basic food, and if all goes well they're not a particular burden on anyone else (other than the UBI you give them). And the rest of us--people with motivation and a drive to do more than just watch soaps--go about our productive lives.
No, under UBI you would get UBI plus what you made. So every dollar earned would be a dollar kept. Where under welfare every dollar earned reduces your welfare amount, so a dollar earned might only be 30 cents kept.
For example, say you're getting 25k assistance and have the option of taking a 25k. Under welfare, your assistance would be clawed back, so you your job + assistance would be, say, 35k. Under UBI your assistance would not be clawed back, so your job + assistance would be 50k. The UBI approach is a lot more incentive to work.
A well-designed UBI wouldn't prevent you from having something to do. In fact, it would encourage it. Right now, welfare systems encourage you to not do anything, because every extra dollar you make gets partially clawed back when they reduce your welfare benefit. For example, you make $25k a year sitting on your ass, or you can make $35k a year working a low-skill job. Basically you now work 40 hours a week for a marginal gain of $10k a year. That's just not worth it to most people.
If done right, UBI would achieve the following:
1) People who are lazy/infirm/unable to work end up with enough money to live, and at least will reduce their burden on the health system and other social services.
2) People who were on the old welfare system but have a bit of motivation will have a stronger incentive to work (see first paragraph).
3) People who are currently financially comfortable, but risk-averse, will now have a bit of a cushion to take risks (e.g. take a year off from their drudge-work job to try their hand at making The Next Big Thing)
4) Administration of welfare systems gets way easier, because you're not means testing. You literally just have to write cheques.
Slashdot Mirror
What?! The executive is 12?!?!
If I had an important message to give someone I'd get them on the phone - talking - or see them in person.
What an idiot!
Maybe they wanted a time-stamped, written record.
No, you are making a series of incredibly wrong assumptions about me, and then suggesting you know better about my life situation than I do. You know nothing about my job, my relationship status, my income, my city, the type of building I live in, the size of my family, my travel needs, the stability of my situation, my age, or anything beyond the fact that I have no car, I am planning on an electric car, and I live in Canada. Yet somehow, you feel like you have a better handle on what I need than I do. Call it opinion if you want, but I'm calling it a very arrogant opinion.
I'm dubious that you can foresee more than your immediate needs. Unexpected life-altering events happen regularly to young people.
Are you actually serious? Could you actually be more arrogant? I'm not young. Even if I was, I (or anyone else) don't need your paternalistic advice.
and what is available for charging infrastructure is enough for those times I would need it.
I'm as dubious of that as I am of there ever being a Year of the Linux Desktop.
So you know my own city better than me? Why in the world would I lie about what I need? Why in the world would I buy an electric car if it didn't suit my needs? I get it, you don't think they work for you. But that doesn't mean they don't work for everyone.
Unless you move to where charging stations aren't as ubiquitous as in San Jose.
I don't live in San Jose, I live in Canada. And they're not ubiquitous here (except Ontario and Quebec). But I would still get an electric, because most charging is done at home and what is available for charging infrastructure is enough for those times I would need it.
Interesting that you don't drive an EV.
I don't drive an EV because I don't have a car. But if/when my life situation changes such that I need a car, it will be electric.
In the case of EVs, your core competencies are Battery Design and EV Drivetrain.
Not necessarily. Nissan's core competency is designing and building cars: regulatory compliance, supply chain management, marketing, etc. In fact, they likely have very little (comparatively) competency in battery and EV drivetrain design and production.
Have YOU ever used an electric car? Because everyone I've talked to who has, has said they're never going back to an ICE car.
Gold, cars, jewelry and other "investments" have value whether it's aesthetic or whatever, so can usually be enjoyed in some fashion while you own it. And real American $$ have the advantage of being - you know - legal tender for all debts, public and private" so is immensely useful/valuable. BTC, from all I can see, is just fools gambling. What am I missing?
But gold, cars, and jewelry don't tend to have intrinsic value anywhere close to equal their USD value. Sure, you can enjoy them in their own right, and gold does have some industrial uses. But the value of "enjoyment" doesn't reach anywhere near millions of dollars for jewelry, and there's no way industry alone could support a valuation of US$1200/oz. for gold.
These things mainly derive their value because people say they have value. People buy expensive art and warehouses full of expensive wine partially for enjoyment and prestige, but moreso as holders of value. BTC, USD, art, jewelry... they're all just tokens for keeping track of value. They just differ in the details: how volatile they are, how open to fraud they are, etc.
We all like USDs, because we all like USDs. That sounds like a tautology, but it's the truth. 350 million Americans, plus hundreds of millions more people around the world agree they have value, so they have value. And because of the number of actors, the USD has low volatility, which supports its use by people, which feeds back into its value (in one big circle).
Due to the small number of actors, art and wine and such can be very volatile so they aren't actually all that great for storing value, but rich people do it anyways for other reasons. If you have umpteen billions of dollars you can risk a little volatility in your value and get the side benefits of entertainment and prestige.
Because it's a tangible, physical object in my possession that I physically transfer to someone else's possession. It does not require any 3rd party to authenticate, or verify, and it doesn't get recorded in a public f'ing ledger for all eternity.
No. Money is not a tangible object. It is a system of accounting. I.e. a ledger. The difference is that it's a distributed ledger, while block-chain based currencies use one centralized ledger (centralized in the sense that all entries are collected together in one dataset, not in the sense that one entity runs it).
The bills and coins you have are tangible objects, but they are not money. They are entries in the ledger.
EVs cost now a lot more than ICEs, and what do you get for the extra money? Silent drive, extra torque, a warm fuzzy feeling of running a cleaner car? how many people care about that?
Well I think the people buying them now care about precisely those things. That was kind of my point. The math on choosing EV doesn't pencil out yet on dollars and cents alone, so people who are buying them are buying them for other reasons (just like you bought your 30k car for other reasons). But costs on EVs have a lot of room to go down, so the math will start to become more and more of a factor as the technology matures.
I don't think that's TCO you're using. Those are operational expenses. The T stands for Total, which would include purchase price, taxes, registration fees, etc...
Did you read all of swillden's post? That 20k included the cost to lease the car for three years, and then to purchase it outright at end of lease. I.e., yes, it was TCO that swillden was using.
I'm buying a new car, and just ran the numbers for a volt versus a normal gas engine. In my commute? I save an amazing $321 a year. That's less than $1 a day. in a car which is $3K MORE than the gas car, even after $9K in gov't /state bonuses.
You wannna push electric vehicles? Lower the cost of Electricity.
Don't forget to factor in maintenance costs. EVs are much simpler with fewer moving parts. No oil changes, no muffler replacements, etc.
But yeah, I'm not surprised the math doesn't pencil out yet. Modern EVs are still relatively new in the grand scheme of things, and there's a lot of optimizing still to be done. But the math will work out sooner or later. In the meantime the people buying them are doing so for reasons other than hard dollars and cents (i.e. the same reason anyone buys a $30k car in a world where $15k cars exist).
Soooo did he manage to do what Dick Tree could not? It would be nice if the summary told me instead of making me RTFA.
Car makers stay profitable by making the same car and selling it around the world (with a few planned modifications, such was flipping the steering wheel, and maybe a renaming). It keeps supply chains simple and amortizes design costs. If major markets in the rest of the world are banning new gas cars by 2025, 2030, or any year before 2040, then the UK won't actually have to do anything. GM isn't going to make an electric cars for other markets, and then have a special gas car for the UK; they'll just stop making gas cars. Legislation or not, by the year 2040 you won't be able to get a new gas car in the UK.
Replying to remove mod. Didn't see the sarcastic post title. Carry on...
If many participants in a given industry end up colluding due to regulations being imposed on them, perhaps the viability of the regulations they're trying to bypass should be reexamined.
Or perhaps the viability of the technology being regulated should be reexamined. If we accept that the goal of the regulation (low PM levels) is a a good thing, why would we let people use a technology that breaks that regulation just because "It's too hard". There are alternatives (gasoline, and electric is becoming more viable every day).
Unless more US companies open Canadian offices and create jobs to be filled with these H1B losers this will go nowhere.
I suspect this is exactly the hoped-for outcome. It's a net-win for Canada if a company moves here. Even if 75% of their positions are H1B-equivalents, that other 25% is new jobs for Canadians, plus Canada gets more corporate income tax and other such benefits.
You have to delegate a ton of shit and can't pay close attention to a lot of it, especially if a lot of your energy is devoted towards business expansion, not existing operations.
As for the harassment culture, I always wonder at what point you can hold one person responsible for a culture populated by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Maybe he was all bro culture at the beginning and new hires just picked it up and perpetuated it.
More than likely this is the case, and that is his failing. As you correctly pointed out, a CEO can't deal with every minutia of a company. Their job, therefore, is to set the culture and expectations such that the peons who deal with the minutia do the "right" thing. A good leader knows that simple signals can have ripples throughout a whole company. Founding a company on bro culture leads to a company where harassment is tolerated.
their original goals (no weapons, internally developed IPs, doing good by their employees, etc.)
They outsourced their manufacturing and assembly plants to malaysia and similiar, gutted their American and some of their European workforce, eliminated many of their general purpose parts in exchange for special purpose parts, etc.
And technically all this stuff was already going on back in the late 90s (Star Wars LEGOs anyone?)
The big difference post-'03 is they started 'Disneyfying' themselves, theme parks everywhere, LEGO stores set up with a minimalist kid-friendly feel, local club activities to help reinforce that 'cult' feel.
They actually turned themselves around by doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of everything you just said. In the early 2000s their parts catalog ballooned with special-purpose parts, they were opening theme parks left and right, they blew their wad on all sorts of ill-thought-out side projects, and they lost their handle on their supply chain. This is where the $800 in debt and weak sales came from.
They were lucky that at the same time they started making the Star Wars sets, which provided the cash to float them through this otherwise-disasterly period. They saved themselves by really clamping down on special purpose parts, by shuttering or selling most of their theme parks, and by focusing on building a quality core brand.
My thought exactly.
Yes, if winning is your metric, then the stats are all right there. But as an owner, winning is probably not your number one goal (though it helps with your other goals). The Toronto Maple Leafs haven't won a cup since 1967... but they're the third most valuable NHL franchise.
Now let me ask you this: What's to prevent the fat and lazy from living meager lives on basic income and never contributing to society greatly increasing our taxes?
Absolutely nothing. But that's okay. In the bell curve of human population, you will always have some people who are fat and lazy and do nothing. They do it under our current system. They would do it under UBI. They would do it under any system you can think of. So you pay the meagre money, they sit at home watching soaps, at least they have a roof over their head and some basic food, and if all goes well they're not a particular burden on anyone else (other than the UBI you give them). And the rest of us--people with motivation and a drive to do more than just watch soaps--go about our productive lives.
No, under UBI you would get UBI plus what you made. So every dollar earned would be a dollar kept. Where under welfare every dollar earned reduces your welfare amount, so a dollar earned might only be 30 cents kept.
For example, say you're getting 25k assistance and have the option of taking a 25k. Under welfare, your assistance would be clawed back, so you your job + assistance would be, say, 35k. Under UBI your assistance would not be clawed back, so your job + assistance would be 50k. The UBI approach is a lot more incentive to work.
A well-designed UBI wouldn't prevent you from having something to do. In fact, it would encourage it. Right now, welfare systems encourage you to not do anything, because every extra dollar you make gets partially clawed back when they reduce your welfare benefit. For example, you make $25k a year sitting on your ass, or you can make $35k a year working a low-skill job. Basically you now work 40 hours a week for a marginal gain of $10k a year. That's just not worth it to most people.
If done right, UBI would achieve the following:
At last! An opportunity to make back my losses from my speculative investments in Linden Dollars.