It almost looks like what should be happening here is a kind of natural selection process where Hollywood shifts their money spent making theatrical films where the theater plays a major role.
Exactly right. There is really not much point in going to a movie theater unless they can offer you something you cannot get at home. I have a 70" flat screen with a decent sound system in my house. That means that seeing a movie in a theater that doesn't involve a LOT of visual/audio wow-factor really is a pointless exercise. I can see a romcom in my living room and the experience is not lessened for it. But very few people have a home theater where you can really get the full experience of seeing Godzilla full sized. I bother going to see The Avengers in the theater because it adds something to the experience over what I can do at home. If it didn't then there would be no point in going. I think movie theaters have recognized this fact and you are seeing it reflected (for better or worse) in the sorts of movies being offered for theatrical release.
If you are fine watching movies on a (comparatively) tiny screen or on your phone that's fine but it misses the point. There is no reason for movie theaters to exist unless they can offer us something special. That means they necessarily are going to have to focus on certain types of movies and certain types of customers more than others. And that is totally fine. I don't need to go to a theater to see every movie released. I'm fine with seeing some stuff through streaming at home and other stuff at the theater when it suits the venue. In principle, piracy of a movie shouldn't be a huge problem for a theater because the viewing experience cannot be easily replicated if they are doing it right. Yes it will siphon off some marginal customers but most people go to a theater because it offers them something more than just a basic viewing of a movie.
What part exactly? The sound that's too loud when something explodes or too soft when someone's talking? The sticky floors? The people talking on the phone? The overpriced popcorn?
Wow dude, except for the overpriced popcorn I have to ask where did you find such a crappy theater. I go to movie theaters with some regularity since there are some movies that really are best seen on the biggest possible screen. Sometimes you want to see dinosaurs life sized instead of just 70 inches tall. It's also a nice way to go on a date with your significant other - cuddle close and no talking necessary for 2-3 hours. The sound is generally excellent, I can't remember the last time someone talked loud enough for me to be bothered by it and I certainly haven't seen anyone answer their phone in ages. Hell they even do a pretty good job cleaning the floors these days. I'm not saying none of those things happen but it's been my experience that the movie theaters are actually working pretty hard to make it a nice experience. I've seen them kick trouble makers out. Occasionally you run into some selfish assclown who tries to ruin it for everyone else but mostly people are pretty respectful and just trying to have a good time just like you and me.
As for the popcorn, do you understand the business model of a movie theater? Let me break it down. When you go to see Rogue One, the theater gets to keep something like 20% of the ticket price - the rest goes to the studio. They get to keep a bit more the longer the movie runs but they never get to keep most of it. That means when 30 people show up to a showing they might make $60 if tickets are $10 each. That isn't enough money to keep the doors open. That means they have to have other sources of income. You can think of movie theaters something like a concession stand that uses movies to get you to show up and buy something. (kind of like petrol stations in that respect - they don't make much if any profit on the fuel itself) So yeah, they jack up the price of the popcorn. But you know what? You don't have to buy it. But most do anyway because they enjoy it. Just because it isn't as cheap as possible doesn't mean it isn't good value for money. If people really thought the popcorn was overpriced then they wouldn't buy it and the theater would have to lower prices. Believe it or not you can see a movie without eating popcorn.
"Anyone" can make cars and earthmovers? Then explain to me why there hasn't been a new large car company created in decades. (No Tesla isn't profitable and they've been trying for about a decade) China for all it's manufacturing prowess doesn't yet have a single home grown car company of any consequence and it's going to be at least another decade before they do if not longer. The Koreans are the most recent significant entrants and their success has been decades in the making. Aside from some mergers the top 10 car companies today are roughly the same as the top 10 car companies 20 years ago not that different from 40 years ago. GM, Ford, Fiat/Chrysler, Nissan/Renault, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Peugeot, Hyundai. Good luck cracking that market.
The notion that anyone can get into capital intensive manufacturing is just naive nonsense. To do that you need capital and lots of it. Best case is that it takes decades to make a major dent. Japan's auto industry took nearly 30 years and some oil shocks before it was able to take serious market share. Nobody is going to drive Caterpillar out of business - they are one of our largest exporters. It it was easy to do then someone would have already done it. And you not only have to build the machine but you have to build the distribution and support infrastructure. To go toe to toe with Caterpillar takes decades even if everything goes right.
Drugs are a protection racket and could easily be made elsewhere, often for far far less.
Cute how you are confusing the cost of creating a pill with the (literally) billions of dollars it costs to bring a medicine to market. But by all means do away with patent protection if you prefer to bring medical research to a screeching halt. Distasteful as it is sometimes, a profit motive is a STRONG incentive to advance the state of the art in drugs and nobody is going to spend billions to develop a drug that someone else can copy for millions. Manufacturing the medicine is mostly not terribly difficult but given that you cannot separate it from the need for patent protection (because of the free rider problem) then you have an industry that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.
Medical equipment i'll give you, and semiconductors, but not a lot else.
"You'll give me"? Spare me the condescension. You have no idea what you are talking about. The top ten manufacturing industries in the US (in no particular orders) include: petroleum, steel, automobiles, aerospace, telecommunications, chemicals, electronics, food processing, consumer goods, lumber, and mining. (Yes mining, drilling and lumber are forms of manufacturing) What you'll notice is that almost all of that is capital intensive. The expensive bit isn't the labor doing the work but the equipment and facilities and materials needed to enable the labor to do the work. How do you think the US has 17% of the world manufacturing capacity with just 5% of the world population? The answer is automation and capital.
That's why Trump's empty promises about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US are just nonsense. The ONLY way that we increase number of jobs in manufacturing substantially is to cut wages (by a lot) so that labor intensive industries (think happy meal toys and textiles) are now attractive to make in the US. If you are good with people making $1-2/hour then by all means let's do it. Personally I think that's idiotic.
According to an estimate, internet shutdowns resulted in a loss of $2.4 billion in 2015.
Is that all? That's roughly 1% of Apple's annual revenue for perspective. Basically they're saying that you could achieve the same financial impact by Apple going on a long weekend. I realize $2.4 billion is a large number and certainly enough to be consequential to those affected but in the grand scheme of things it's just not as much of an impact as one might think. Obviously it's a hard number to pin down with any precision but I kind of would have expected a larger number.
I'm sure some Firefox supporters will post a bunch of unrealistic benchmarks showing how Firefox can run some convoluted JavaScript benchmark the fastest.
No I wouldn't bother with that. I don't think benchmarks mean much. What I can say is that anecdotally I use all the major browsers routinely and whatever speed difference they have are too insignificant for me to care about. I use Firefox the most because it's the one that annoys me the least but we're talking marginal differences. Safari and Edge aren't available cross platform so they aren't contenders to me though I do use them a fair bit for various reasons. Chrome is fine too - my preference is more based on my work flow and configuration preferences than anything else.
On every computer I've tried, from Windows to OS X to Linux, Firefox feels so much slower than Chrome.
I would disagree with that based on my own usage. I use both routinely and in both cases the constraint on speed is almost always the speed of my internet connection or the speed of the database servicing the information from the other end of the line.
I wouldn't say that Chrome is as much of a winner here, but it isn't unusual for me to look at top or some other process manager and seeing Firefox with many gigabytes of resident memory.
I wouldn't say Chrome is any better at all. Not to any meaningful degree. I'm not criticizing Chrome but I think the problem is just that there is a lot of data to display and keeping a compact memory footprint while maintaining performance is actually a rather challenging problem.
Make Firefox a browser that people are excited to use, rather than one that they dread using.
"Excited to use"? I don't want to get excited about my browser. I want to not notice my browser at all. I just don't want it getting in the way of my work flow. I don't think you could make an "exciting" browser anymore. They're fairly mature technology at this point and I'm ok with that.
Trump is a businessman, so I'm surprised he doesn't see this.
Trump isn't a very good businessman and is more concerned about his image than anything else so I'm not surprised at all.
In business terms, we need to be focused on keeping our customers happy right now, not on how we can raise our prices.
Sort of. The problem many US business have costs that are somewhat out of whack for certain types of products. Trump is making noise about bringing back "manufacturing jobs" but what he doesn't get is that the jobs that left CANNOT come back unless there is a big fall in wages. The jobs that left are mostly labor intensive jobs that are going to go wherever labor costs are cheapest. No amount of tariffs or political sabre rattling are going to bring these jobs back to the US. Labor costs are too high for that to be possible. Trump doesn't know this because he doesn't know anything about manufacturing. The US manufacturing sector is (depending on the measurement used) somewhere north of $3 Trillion annually and growing steadily. We don't make happy meal toys. We make jet aircraft and cars and earthmovers and drugs and medical equipment. But we don't need the masses of people we once did to make these. It's like farming - automation has freed up labor to go do other stuff in man cases. There is a need for SKILLED labor though and lots of it.
I'd give Trump some credit about understanding real estate but speaking as someone who has spent several decades in manufacturing I can tell you that he hasn't said anything about manufacturing that indicates he knows what he is talking about on that subject. His promises to "bring back manufacturing jobs" are empty lies that he cannot make happen even if he wasn't just pandering and really meant it. Manufacturing is alive and well in the US but it isn't going to be a source of unskilled jobs. Those will come elsewhere for the most part. What we need to be doing is promoting skilled trades where there is a HUGE existing need (3-5 million open jobs) but we've decimated the talent pipeline for these good and good paying jobs. Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) has been talking about this and he's pretty much dead right.
Still cheaper to get the DVD from the library, though.
Not really. It would cost me gas money plus time to get there and rent it as well as to return it. I'd probably spend as much or more money in gas. Plus our local library has a modest and mostly old selection and isn't open during particularly convenient hours. To get anything really recent probably is impossible and anything beyond their modest collection would require a few days lead time to get it from another library. Not exactly an impulse decision.
I've always thought Amazon's strategy was: "Let's buy another company to distract the shareholders from the fact that we don't have any profits to our name."
Amazon could have fairly substantial profits today if they really cared to. But that would be rather short sighted of them. I've done the analysis on their financial statements. The company actually kicks off a fair bit of free cash flow but they are plowing most of it back into various investments. Some sensible, some not so much. They are no longer some fly by night dotcom.
Amazon is still pretending to be a tech stock when they should be a dividend-paying blue chip stock?
To pay dividends you need to be kicking off lots of spare cash. Amazon has never fit that description once in their existence. They reinvest pretty much all profits back into growing the company.
OTOH, when I go fishing, I bleed my catch prior to taking it home to prepare as food. Based on testimony from people who have almost bled to death, this is one of the best ways to die - it feels like falling asleep.
Yeah except for that rather nasty knife cut that hurts like hell. And the hook. And the oxygen hunger from being yanked out of the water. Other than that it's just peaches and rainbows.
Seriously, it's ok to fish and I have no problem with that. Just don't think I'm deluded enough to think that fishing is some sort of comfortable death for the fish. It isn't. It's approximately as nasty as being caught by any other predator. Maybe gentler than an immediate evisceration but not by much.
your actions almost always lead to animals suffering a natural death by predation,
That does not apply to domesticated livestock in most cases. You are correct but kind of talking apples and oranges.
my actions lead to them suffering the most painless death possible, my way actually results in less cruelty than yours.
Baloney. If you shop at a supermarket that is not true by definition. I don't actually have a problem with consumption of meat but pretending that the animals who were slaughtered to bring you your meal were treated kindly. Sometimes they were but often they weren't. Industrial scale meat production isn't easy to reconcile with humane treatment of animals. A sad but true fact.
But everything has consequences - both action and inaction.
Quite right. I agree with your general thesis, just not some of the parts of the argument. I think your conclusion is correct but your path to get there needs a more robust set of supporting arguments.
Please consider a lifestyle not of eating animal but of compassion.
I prefer to acknowledge that I am an omnivore and be grateful that I have high quality food to eat including sources of animal protein.
That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.
Does it really? Was your produce picked by well paid and well treated people? Furthermore I dispute your attempt to frame the argument to imply that all animal protein comes from sources that were cruel to the animals. That is demonstrably not true in a non-trivial number of cases. Furthermore you and I might have very different ideas of what constitutes cruelty.
What is your excuse for eating meat, ***three*** times a day, at ***every** meal?
I don't. I might have a piece of meat once a day under normal circumstances, often once every 2-3 days. As for an excuse, I don't need one and don't apologize for eating animal protein if the mood strikes me. I'm an omnivore and I'm ok with that. I'm grateful to the animal that gave it's life so that mine may continue. I also raise chickens and consume the eggs which provides significant percentages of my protein needs. My making a choice to not eat meat will not improve the lives of a single animal. Not one. The meat will still be produced and sold even if I don't buy it. If you are concerned about how animals are treated then you need to look at the other end of the supply chain and work to improve regulations ensuring the humane treatment of animals.
Firewood comes from treesthat take decades to grow (if not longer) . We burn through it in a fraction of that time.
We can but we don't have to. The trick is to burn it at a net rate no faster than it grows. That is a choice we make. If we burn the wood faster than the sources of it grow then it is no longer carbon neutral.
And where do you think the carbon in coal and oil came from?
They came from plants and animals that died millions of years ago. That carbon has essentially been taken out of circulation. By digging it up and burning it we are adding it back to the ecosystem. Burning wood is roughly carbon neutral if you are not burning it faster than the wood grows because it just circulates carbon already in the ecosystem.
I don't think Uber is looking to make the capital investment into a fleet of self-driving cars but rather that they're looking at self-driving technology as a means to secure more drivers once self-driving vehicles become mainstream.
If that is the case then it makes even less sense. Why not just wait for someone to develop the technology (plenty of others working on it) and then just buy it when it is ready if the only purpose is to supplement their driver pool. Uber doesn't bring any special capabilities to the table here. The ONLY reason to do the research on self driving cars is if you plan to either produce products or license the technology to others. Is Uber planning to get into the car manufacturing business? Are they planning to supply technology to the car industry? None of this has ANYTHING to do with their current business model. The only thing that might make sense is if they are working on some sort of dispatch technology so that they can direct self driving cars to paying customers once the technology is ready. But compared to developing the self driving cars themselves that's a trivial endeavor.
If a driver has a self driving vehicle and has a choice between Uber, which allows him to send out his self-driving vehicle to earn money for him when he doesn't need to use it, or Lyft, which will only pay him when he's driving, I would believe the driver would select to use the Uber platform.
You are conflating two issues. Why Uber would need to be doing R&D on self driving vehicles is a completely separate issue from how self driving vehicles would be used within a taxi service. There is no obvious reason for Uber to be doing R&D on self driving vehicles. They have no special technical expertise in automotive R&D. Unless they are planning to develop some saleable technology out of the R&D then they are simply wasting their investors money on what amounts to a marketing boondoggle. Uber hasn't even figured out how to make their taxi business profitable and I'm supposed to believe they are a serious player in developing self driving cars? Makes zero sense.
So getting drivers for a new service is not a real barrier to entry, the only issue is convincing customers to request rides using it.
That's the case now because a dominant player hasn't emerged just yet. But let's say hypothetically that Uber successfully gains enough of an edge that they are tying up a quorum of available drivers at a given time. This means that customers looking for a ride are going to increasingly not going to bother trying the smaller taxi companies because they will be less likely to get a ride when they need it. This means that the drivers are going to increasingly be forced to work with Uber and they've got a cycle going that basically reduces other ride share firms to niche roles. It's kind of like with eBay. The buyers and sellers increasingly are driven to use the same platform whether they prefer it or not.
Now it might not go this way. It's possible that the taxi market will remain fragmented with multiple players kind of like it is today. But if that's the case then Uber probably won't remain a going concern as a business. They've kind of taken a shoot for the moon approach which if it works they will make a killing but if it doesn't they will lose a ton of money.
Not true at all. I can tell you with with a reasonably narrow set of error bars what the income and profitability of Coca-Cola Corporation will be for the next few years. Their business is very stable, predictable, and proven. I could probably make a pretty good guess what their balance sheet will look like 10 years from now.
Uber? No idea. Anyone who tells you they can tell you what Uber's profitability will look like is full of crap. Especially when we are talking about them building a business around a technology that doesn't even exist yet outside of the laboratory. Any investor in Uber is basically taking a huge chance on a very speculative venture. Nothing wrong with that but it's anything but predictable.
The question is: can Uber attract investment in their plan?
Just because they can attract investment does NOT mean the plan will work. Ask any venture capitalist an they will tell you that maybe 1 of ever 10 companies they invest in turns into a good business. One or two more maybe do better than break even. The rest go down in flames. Investment dollars do not in any way ensure success.
saying "actually owning the vehicles would cost a ton of money for no obvious benefit to Uber" is not true. Simple math shows they would make a killing. Even if you estimate that they average a measly $15/hr with their autonomous cars, working an average of 20 hours per day, 50 weeks/yr, that's $105,000 per year. I think that's what they call profitable.
I'm a certified cost accountant. Lot of problems with your analysis.
First off there are no autonomous vehicles to buy and we don't know when there will be. It is unlikely they will be cheap especially at first. Even once they become available there will be regulations and legal issues to sort out before they can become a viable business. It's going to be a while.
Second you did not consider costs at all. We don't know what the cost of an autonomous vehicle will be. You did not consider costs at all. You didn't consider the cost of fuel, the cost of insurance, the cost of engineering, the cost of administration, legal costs, the cost of maintenance, the cost of financing, the cost of regulations, and a host of other costs. Profits are revenue minus costs so until you properly consider costs your analysis is farcical. I can generate huge revenues by selling $2 bills for $1. I'll also be bankrupt in no time at all.
Third, demand will not be constant and average utilization is unlikely to be anywhere close to your rosy estimates. A substantial portion of the time the car is going to be driving unoccupied to pick up passengers. It's going to have down time to refuel. It's going to have down time for maintenance. It's going to break down now and then. It's going to get vandalized. There are going to be substantial periods where there are no fares to get. The list goes on and on. You are assuming an extremely naive best case scenario that is unlikely to exist in the real world.
$105K sounds like a lot but consider that even if we take your overly rosy assumptions about utilization and assume the car averages a modest 20mph during that time period it will cover something like 140,000 miles during that year. So you will have to replace the vehicle in just over a year most likely even assuming it performs exceptionally well. Few cars last much beyond 200K miles. We have no idea how reliable the navigation equipment on an autonomous car will prove to be. My guess is that there will be all sorts of problems with sensors going bad, getting covered with gunk and snow, etc. An autonomous vehicle will almost by definition be less reliable than an identical vehicle without the extra equipment.
Finally, I stand by my statement that there is no competitive advantage to Uber in owning their taxis. It adds a lot of cost and reduces their margins. What's to prevent GM from simply making and operating their own taxi service? Not like Uber is going to get self driving cars cheaper than GM will. Uber's advantage right now is that they don't have to buy any cars. There are only so many drivers and cars out there to utilize and Uber is the biggest fish in that pond. This gets them network effect advantages and keeps their costs (relatively) low. If they have to buy the cars then the network effect advantages of tying up all those cars as Uber drivers (rather than Lyft) goes away. Then they are just another taxi service with some fancy cars. It takes a huge amount of money to buy a gigantic fleet of cars which then has to compete against what they already had. It makes no sense.
Autonomous vehicles would be a whole new business model for Uber,
That might be fine if they had figured out a way to make their current business model profitable. Perhaps they will in due time but given the size of their losses so far that's not a certainty. It's rarely a good idea to try a second business model before you make the first one work.
Any other company trying to launch a robot driven taxi fleet without all of these pieces in-place will be at a significant disadvantage to Uber. Anybody who thinks that robot taxis are "the way of the future" would be wise to invest in or partner with Uber to make it happen.
I think that is far from a given. First off for Uber to have a sustainable competitive advantage they will have to find a path to profitability. Robot taxis aren't going to be a thing in even the most optimistic scenario for a number of years. If Uber can become the largest taxi service AND do so profitable AND not get sued into oblivion AND not run afoul of regulations then MAYBE they would be worth partnering with.
In a traditional business sense, of course it makes no sense. But that doesn't apply here.
Sure it does. The laws of economics are not suspended for the benefit of Uber.
Uber is in a competitive industry with few barriers to entry, and very little profit, yet they have a market cap of $50B. How can they possibly justify that valuation to their investors?
Uber is not a publicly traded company so they do not have a market cap in the conventional sense. Their valuation is based on an extrapolation from the percentage of the company purchased by investors and the price of that investment. If you buy 10% of a company for an investment of $5B then the company is valued at $50B. That doesn't mean that it actually would be worth that amount on the open market and it certainly doesn't mean they are actually worth $50B. It means the most recent investor felt it was worth that but it is dangerous to extrapolate that too far.
You think there are few barriers to entry in their industry? I disagree. There are some pretty substantial network effects in play here. There are only so many drivers and cars to go around and they are going to tend to gravitate towards the company which is most likely to have the biggest user base. Sure, users can in theory switch easily but what good is switching to a taxi service that doesn't have any drivers? Scale will matter here which is why Uber is trying to grow as fast as possible. Uber has something like the same advantage eBay has. The buyers and sellers will tend to gravitate to the largest platform. Frankly the self driving car thing is nothing but a pointless distraction from building their network as far as I can tell.
From a publicity point of view, their defiance of the California DMV was pure genius.
Perhaps but I think you'd have a hard time showing a causal relationship between that and Uber's bottom line.
They need to be perceived as a gutsy company aggressively pursuing new tech.
No they do not. They WANT to be perceived that way (for reasons that aren't entirely clear) but wants and needs are different things.
Uber will never be able to justify its valuation to investors.
They wouldn't be the first in that situation. I am inclined to agree but never is a very long time and I've seen more unlikely companies succeed. They have a lot of revenue which is actually the hardest part. Once you have that then profits are a possibility. Without revenues they are screwed. Whether the investors will make their money back kind of depends on how much they dumped in and what sort of margins Uber can make. Are they selling $2 bills for $1 or do they simply have to get to a certain scale and/or cost targets? Hard to say. In any case their profits will have to be rather substantial for the investors to not take a haircut.
Its just that Uber doesn't want to play by the rules, even when the rules are being bent for their benefit.
I get the impression that is something of a cultural thing with Uber at this point. They're not even trying to get along. They are just acting the part of a bully and trying to do whatever they want. I think their corporate mantra is "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" but they don't even bother with the forgiveness bit.
Either that, or Uber knows it's autonomous car program is not ready for prime time.
I think this is probably close to the mark. Uber getting involved in autonomous cars makes absolutely zero business sense. Their entire business model is based on an asset-light utilization of vehicles owned by the people that drive for them. They are basically a middle-man matching and scheduling taxi service. Actually owning the vehicles would cost a ton of money for no obvious benefit to Uber. Uber owning the vehicles (autonomous or not) would A) undermine their (absurd) argument that they aren't a taxi service and B) require a HUGE investment in assets and the attendant insurance, maintenance, upkeep, registration, and tracking. Uber has no infrastructure to do this nor do they have the capital to buy such a fleet.
Uber getting into autonomous vehicles smacks of marketing more than engineering. They want to project an image and seem hip but this is a project well outside their wheelhouse and they don't curently have the profits to support projects like this like Google or Apple or even Amazon does. I think they are trying to steal a page from the Netflix playbook and be ready for what they think will be the next industry evolution but it would make a LOT more sense for them to let someone else figure out the autonomous vehicle thing and just buy them when the time comes. They are a me-too entry into what is already a crowded field and they have no particular advantage in making autonomous cars and some very obvious disadvantages.
I design machines with (tens of) thousands of individual electrical parts. When you have to be sure that this will fit that, and that will fit this other thing, that has to be compatible with something else that needs to fit yet another thing...
I'm an engineer too. I design assembly lines and wire harnesses for a living, some with considerable complexity. My day job is running a company that manufactures wire harnesses so I work in pretty much the same field. Some of our more complex products have many hundreds to thousands of components.
How would anyone ever properly invent such an animal without hundreds of tabs open?
Seriously? We've been making products that complicated without hundreds of tabs literally for centuries. I very much doubt you can show me a use case where you actually need to have hundreds of tabs open and are making effective use of them for engineering. I've designed products and assembly lines of comparable complexity to what you are talking about. I've worked in the auto industry for a few decades and a typical car has around 30,000 parts. I can assure you that most cars are designed without a browser open with hundreds of tabs. My father was an engineer for the phone company and he designed networks of cabling of huge complexity. For most of his career he didn't even have a computer to work with. I work with a very similar set of data for every product I deal with as you and I think your argument is bonkers. It sounds to me like you just haven't figured out an efficient work flow.
And yet in some use cases that's the desired behavior.
That doesn't mean you design the family sedan to rev to 16000rpm like an F1 car and actually use it that way. Someone opening 100+ tabs is a clear corner case. Very few people do this and it's pretty easy to argue that it isn't a work flow common enough to worry about supporting even if we ignore the fact that it's clearly kind of a bonkers way of working.
Because you don't use your tools the way others do doesn't mean that either case is wrong. It means that some tools are poorly designed for some use cases.
Actually it very much can mean that one of the use cases is an improper use of the technology. To use another car analogy, you don't keep your car at redline driving around town. Yes you CAN do it but that doesn't make it a good idea. Running a browser with hundreds of tabs open is similar. It's an inefficient work flow than very few people use and most people would find actually rather difficult to manage. Browsers aren't designed to manage hundreds of tabs. If you want to use it that way it is your choice but that doesn't mean the rest of us are under any obligation to think that it is a good or sensible choice.
Why is that "Wrong"? Because your brain doesn't work that way? That's how I've always browsed and only recently did it become terrible.
It's "Wrong" in the sense that just because you can do something it doesn't mean it is a good idea. Your brain doesn't work that way either even if you think it does. People are demonstrably terrible at multitasking. That's why we can't talk on the phone and drive at the same time safely. You cannot possibly convince me that you are doing anything productive with most of those tabs. It's merely a form of hoarding. Opening that many tabs chews up a ton of memory and then you complain that things get slow? Of course it gets slow! What else would you expect?
Now it's your prerogative to run your browser any way you want but don't whine to me that it gets slow when you are doing something that very predictably should result in it running poorly. Furthermore don't pretend I'm stupid enough to believe that you are maximizing productivity by opening dozens of tabs you cannot possibly be actively working with.
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It almost looks like what should be happening here is a kind of natural selection process where Hollywood shifts their money spent making theatrical films where the theater plays a major role.
Exactly right. There is really not much point in going to a movie theater unless they can offer you something you cannot get at home. I have a 70" flat screen with a decent sound system in my house. That means that seeing a movie in a theater that doesn't involve a LOT of visual/audio wow-factor really is a pointless exercise. I can see a romcom in my living room and the experience is not lessened for it. But very few people have a home theater where you can really get the full experience of seeing Godzilla full sized. I bother going to see The Avengers in the theater because it adds something to the experience over what I can do at home. If it didn't then there would be no point in going. I think movie theaters have recognized this fact and you are seeing it reflected (for better or worse) in the sorts of movies being offered for theatrical release.
If you are fine watching movies on a (comparatively) tiny screen or on your phone that's fine but it misses the point. There is no reason for movie theaters to exist unless they can offer us something special. That means they necessarily are going to have to focus on certain types of movies and certain types of customers more than others. And that is totally fine. I don't need to go to a theater to see every movie released. I'm fine with seeing some stuff through streaming at home and other stuff at the theater when it suits the venue. In principle, piracy of a movie shouldn't be a huge problem for a theater because the viewing experience cannot be easily replicated if they are doing it right. Yes it will siphon off some marginal customers but most people go to a theater because it offers them something more than just a basic viewing of a movie.
What part exactly? The sound that's too loud when something explodes or too soft when someone's talking? The sticky floors? The people talking on the phone? The overpriced popcorn?
Wow dude, except for the overpriced popcorn I have to ask where did you find such a crappy theater. I go to movie theaters with some regularity since there are some movies that really are best seen on the biggest possible screen. Sometimes you want to see dinosaurs life sized instead of just 70 inches tall. It's also a nice way to go on a date with your significant other - cuddle close and no talking necessary for 2-3 hours. The sound is generally excellent, I can't remember the last time someone talked loud enough for me to be bothered by it and I certainly haven't seen anyone answer their phone in ages. Hell they even do a pretty good job cleaning the floors these days. I'm not saying none of those things happen but it's been my experience that the movie theaters are actually working pretty hard to make it a nice experience. I've seen them kick trouble makers out. Occasionally you run into some selfish assclown who tries to ruin it for everyone else but mostly people are pretty respectful and just trying to have a good time just like you and me.
As for the popcorn, do you understand the business model of a movie theater? Let me break it down. When you go to see Rogue One, the theater gets to keep something like 20% of the ticket price - the rest goes to the studio. They get to keep a bit more the longer the movie runs but they never get to keep most of it. That means when 30 people show up to a showing they might make $60 if tickets are $10 each. That isn't enough money to keep the doors open. That means they have to have other sources of income. You can think of movie theaters something like a concession stand that uses movies to get you to show up and buy something. (kind of like petrol stations in that respect - they don't make much if any profit on the fuel itself) So yeah, they jack up the price of the popcorn. But you know what? You don't have to buy it. But most do anyway because they enjoy it. Just because it isn't as cheap as possible doesn't mean it isn't good value for money. If people really thought the popcorn was overpriced then they wouldn't buy it and the theater would have to lower prices. Believe it or not you can see a movie without eating popcorn.
Anyone can, and does make cars and earthmovers.
"Anyone" can make cars and earthmovers? Then explain to me why there hasn't been a new large car company created in decades. (No Tesla isn't profitable and they've been trying for about a decade) China for all it's manufacturing prowess doesn't yet have a single home grown car company of any consequence and it's going to be at least another decade before they do if not longer. The Koreans are the most recent significant entrants and their success has been decades in the making. Aside from some mergers the top 10 car companies today are roughly the same as the top 10 car companies 20 years ago not that different from 40 years ago. GM, Ford, Fiat/Chrysler, Nissan/Renault, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Peugeot, Hyundai. Good luck cracking that market.
The notion that anyone can get into capital intensive manufacturing is just naive nonsense. To do that you need capital and lots of it. Best case is that it takes decades to make a major dent. Japan's auto industry took nearly 30 years and some oil shocks before it was able to take serious market share. Nobody is going to drive Caterpillar out of business - they are one of our largest exporters. It it was easy to do then someone would have already done it. And you not only have to build the machine but you have to build the distribution and support infrastructure. To go toe to toe with Caterpillar takes decades even if everything goes right.
Drugs are a protection racket and could easily be made elsewhere, often for far far less.
Cute how you are confusing the cost of creating a pill with the (literally) billions of dollars it costs to bring a medicine to market. But by all means do away with patent protection if you prefer to bring medical research to a screeching halt. Distasteful as it is sometimes, a profit motive is a STRONG incentive to advance the state of the art in drugs and nobody is going to spend billions to develop a drug that someone else can copy for millions. Manufacturing the medicine is mostly not terribly difficult but given that you cannot separate it from the need for patent protection (because of the free rider problem) then you have an industry that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.
Medical equipment i'll give you, and semiconductors, but not a lot else.
"You'll give me"? Spare me the condescension. You have no idea what you are talking about. The top ten manufacturing industries in the US (in no particular orders) include: petroleum, steel, automobiles, aerospace, telecommunications, chemicals, electronics, food processing, consumer goods, lumber, and mining. (Yes mining, drilling and lumber are forms of manufacturing) What you'll notice is that almost all of that is capital intensive. The expensive bit isn't the labor doing the work but the equipment and facilities and materials needed to enable the labor to do the work. How do you think the US has 17% of the world manufacturing capacity with just 5% of the world population? The answer is automation and capital.
That's why Trump's empty promises about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US are just nonsense. The ONLY way that we increase number of jobs in manufacturing substantially is to cut wages (by a lot) so that labor intensive industries (think happy meal toys and textiles) are now attractive to make in the US. If you are good with people making $1-2/hour then by all means let's do it. Personally I think that's idiotic.
According to an estimate, internet shutdowns resulted in a loss of $2.4 billion in 2015.
Is that all? That's roughly 1% of Apple's annual revenue for perspective. Basically they're saying that you could achieve the same financial impact by Apple going on a long weekend. I realize $2.4 billion is a large number and certainly enough to be consequential to those affected but in the grand scheme of things it's just not as much of an impact as one might think. Obviously it's a hard number to pin down with any precision but I kind of would have expected a larger number.
I'm sure some Firefox supporters will post a bunch of unrealistic benchmarks showing how Firefox can run some convoluted JavaScript benchmark the fastest.
No I wouldn't bother with that. I don't think benchmarks mean much. What I can say is that anecdotally I use all the major browsers routinely and whatever speed difference they have are too insignificant for me to care about. I use Firefox the most because it's the one that annoys me the least but we're talking marginal differences. Safari and Edge aren't available cross platform so they aren't contenders to me though I do use them a fair bit for various reasons. Chrome is fine too - my preference is more based on my work flow and configuration preferences than anything else.
On every computer I've tried, from Windows to OS X to Linux, Firefox feels so much slower than Chrome.
I would disagree with that based on my own usage. I use both routinely and in both cases the constraint on speed is almost always the speed of my internet connection or the speed of the database servicing the information from the other end of the line.
I wouldn't say that Chrome is as much of a winner here, but it isn't unusual for me to look at top or some other process manager and seeing Firefox with many gigabytes of resident memory.
I wouldn't say Chrome is any better at all. Not to any meaningful degree. I'm not criticizing Chrome but I think the problem is just that there is a lot of data to display and keeping a compact memory footprint while maintaining performance is actually a rather challenging problem.
Make Firefox a browser that people are excited to use, rather than one that they dread using.
"Excited to use"? I don't want to get excited about my browser. I want to not notice my browser at all. I just don't want it getting in the way of my work flow. I don't think you could make an "exciting" browser anymore. They're fairly mature technology at this point and I'm ok with that.
Trump is a businessman, so I'm surprised he doesn't see this.
Trump isn't a very good businessman and is more concerned about his image than anything else so I'm not surprised at all.
In business terms, we need to be focused on keeping our customers happy right now, not on how we can raise our prices.
Sort of. The problem many US business have costs that are somewhat out of whack for certain types of products. Trump is making noise about bringing back "manufacturing jobs" but what he doesn't get is that the jobs that left CANNOT come back unless there is a big fall in wages. The jobs that left are mostly labor intensive jobs that are going to go wherever labor costs are cheapest. No amount of tariffs or political sabre rattling are going to bring these jobs back to the US. Labor costs are too high for that to be possible. Trump doesn't know this because he doesn't know anything about manufacturing. The US manufacturing sector is (depending on the measurement used) somewhere north of $3 Trillion annually and growing steadily. We don't make happy meal toys. We make jet aircraft and cars and earthmovers and drugs and medical equipment. But we don't need the masses of people we once did to make these. It's like farming - automation has freed up labor to go do other stuff in man cases. There is a need for SKILLED labor though and lots of it.
I'd give Trump some credit about understanding real estate but speaking as someone who has spent several decades in manufacturing I can tell you that he hasn't said anything about manufacturing that indicates he knows what he is talking about on that subject. His promises to "bring back manufacturing jobs" are empty lies that he cannot make happen even if he wasn't just pandering and really meant it. Manufacturing is alive and well in the US but it isn't going to be a source of unskilled jobs. Those will come elsewhere for the most part. What we need to be doing is promoting skilled trades where there is a HUGE existing need (3-5 million open jobs) but we've decimated the talent pipeline for these good and good paying jobs. Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) has been talking about this and he's pretty much dead right.
Still cheaper to get the DVD from the library, though.
Not really. It would cost me gas money plus time to get there and rent it as well as to return it. I'd probably spend as much or more money in gas. Plus our local library has a modest and mostly old selection and isn't open during particularly convenient hours. To get anything really recent probably is impossible and anything beyond their modest collection would require a few days lead time to get it from another library. Not exactly an impulse decision.
I've always thought Amazon's strategy was: "Let's buy another company to distract the shareholders from the fact that we don't have any profits to our name."
Amazon could have fairly substantial profits today if they really cared to. But that would be rather short sighted of them. I've done the analysis on their financial statements. The company actually kicks off a fair bit of free cash flow but they are plowing most of it back into various investments. Some sensible, some not so much. They are no longer some fly by night dotcom.
Amazon is still pretending to be a tech stock when they should be a dividend-paying blue chip stock?
To pay dividends you need to be kicking off lots of spare cash. Amazon has never fit that description once in their existence. They reinvest pretty much all profits back into growing the company.
OTOH, when I go fishing, I bleed my catch prior to taking it home to prepare as food. Based on testimony from people who have almost bled to death, this is one of the best ways to die - it feels like falling asleep.
Yeah except for that rather nasty knife cut that hurts like hell. And the hook. And the oxygen hunger from being yanked out of the water. Other than that it's just peaches and rainbows.
Seriously, it's ok to fish and I have no problem with that. Just don't think I'm deluded enough to think that fishing is some sort of comfortable death for the fish. It isn't. It's approximately as nasty as being caught by any other predator. Maybe gentler than an immediate evisceration but not by much.
your actions almost always lead to animals suffering a natural death by predation,
That does not apply to domesticated livestock in most cases. You are correct but kind of talking apples and oranges.
my actions lead to them suffering the most painless death possible, my way actually results in less cruelty than yours.
Baloney. If you shop at a supermarket that is not true by definition. I don't actually have a problem with consumption of meat but pretending that the animals who were slaughtered to bring you your meal were treated kindly. Sometimes they were but often they weren't. Industrial scale meat production isn't easy to reconcile with humane treatment of animals. A sad but true fact.
But everything has consequences - both action and inaction.
Quite right. I agree with your general thesis, just not some of the parts of the argument. I think your conclusion is correct but your path to get there needs a more robust set of supporting arguments.
Please consider a lifestyle not of eating animal but of compassion.
I prefer to acknowledge that I am an omnivore and be grateful that I have high quality food to eat including sources of animal protein.
That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.
Does it really? Was your produce picked by well paid and well treated people? Furthermore I dispute your attempt to frame the argument to imply that all animal protein comes from sources that were cruel to the animals. That is demonstrably not true in a non-trivial number of cases. Furthermore you and I might have very different ideas of what constitutes cruelty.
What is your excuse for eating meat, ***three*** times a day, at ***every** meal?
I don't. I might have a piece of meat once a day under normal circumstances, often once every 2-3 days. As for an excuse, I don't need one and don't apologize for eating animal protein if the mood strikes me. I'm an omnivore and I'm ok with that. I'm grateful to the animal that gave it's life so that mine may continue. I also raise chickens and consume the eggs which provides significant percentages of my protein needs. My making a choice to not eat meat will not improve the lives of a single animal. Not one. The meat will still be produced and sold even if I don't buy it. If you are concerned about how animals are treated then you need to look at the other end of the supply chain and work to improve regulations ensuring the humane treatment of animals.
But were they infamous for that when they were hiring the early-hire developers in question?
If they are unethical scumbags now they probably were back then too. We just know more about it now.
Firewood comes from treesthat take decades to grow (if not longer) . We burn through it in a fraction of that time.
We can but we don't have to. The trick is to burn it at a net rate no faster than it grows. That is a choice we make. If we burn the wood faster than the sources of it grow then it is no longer carbon neutral.
And where do you think the carbon in coal and oil came from?
They came from plants and animals that died millions of years ago. That carbon has essentially been taken out of circulation. By digging it up and burning it we are adding it back to the ecosystem. Burning wood is roughly carbon neutral if you are not burning it faster than the wood grows because it just circulates carbon already in the ecosystem.
I don't think Uber is looking to make the capital investment into a fleet of self-driving cars but rather that they're looking at self-driving technology as a means to secure more drivers once self-driving vehicles become mainstream.
If that is the case then it makes even less sense. Why not just wait for someone to develop the technology (plenty of others working on it) and then just buy it when it is ready if the only purpose is to supplement their driver pool. Uber doesn't bring any special capabilities to the table here. The ONLY reason to do the research on self driving cars is if you plan to either produce products or license the technology to others. Is Uber planning to get into the car manufacturing business? Are they planning to supply technology to the car industry? None of this has ANYTHING to do with their current business model. The only thing that might make sense is if they are working on some sort of dispatch technology so that they can direct self driving cars to paying customers once the technology is ready. But compared to developing the self driving cars themselves that's a trivial endeavor.
If a driver has a self driving vehicle and has a choice between Uber, which allows him to send out his self-driving vehicle to earn money for him when he doesn't need to use it, or Lyft, which will only pay him when he's driving, I would believe the driver would select to use the Uber platform.
You are conflating two issues. Why Uber would need to be doing R&D on self driving vehicles is a completely separate issue from how self driving vehicles would be used within a taxi service. There is no obvious reason for Uber to be doing R&D on self driving vehicles. They have no special technical expertise in automotive R&D. Unless they are planning to develop some saleable technology out of the R&D then they are simply wasting their investors money on what amounts to a marketing boondoggle. Uber hasn't even figured out how to make their taxi business profitable and I'm supposed to believe they are a serious player in developing self driving cars? Makes zero sense.
So getting drivers for a new service is not a real barrier to entry, the only issue is convincing customers to request rides using it.
That's the case now because a dominant player hasn't emerged just yet. But let's say hypothetically that Uber successfully gains enough of an edge that they are tying up a quorum of available drivers at a given time. This means that customers looking for a ride are going to increasingly not going to bother trying the smaller taxi companies because they will be less likely to get a ride when they need it. This means that the drivers are going to increasingly be forced to work with Uber and they've got a cycle going that basically reduces other ride share firms to niche roles. It's kind of like with eBay. The buyers and sellers increasingly are driven to use the same platform whether they prefer it or not.
Now it might not go this way. It's possible that the taxi market will remain fragmented with multiple players kind of like it is today. But if that's the case then Uber probably won't remain a going concern as a business. They've kind of taken a shoot for the moon approach which if it works they will make a killing but if it doesn't they will lose a ton of money.
Everything in the future is far from a given.
Not true at all. I can tell you with with a reasonably narrow set of error bars what the income and profitability of Coca-Cola Corporation will be for the next few years. Their business is very stable, predictable, and proven. I could probably make a pretty good guess what their balance sheet will look like 10 years from now.
Uber? No idea. Anyone who tells you they can tell you what Uber's profitability will look like is full of crap. Especially when we are talking about them building a business around a technology that doesn't even exist yet outside of the laboratory. Any investor in Uber is basically taking a huge chance on a very speculative venture. Nothing wrong with that but it's anything but predictable.
The question is: can Uber attract investment in their plan?
Just because they can attract investment does NOT mean the plan will work. Ask any venture capitalist an they will tell you that maybe 1 of ever 10 companies they invest in turns into a good business. One or two more maybe do better than break even. The rest go down in flames. Investment dollars do not in any way ensure success.
saying "actually owning the vehicles would cost a ton of money for no obvious benefit to Uber" is not true. Simple math shows they would make a killing. Even if you estimate that they average a measly $15/hr with their autonomous cars, working an average of 20 hours per day, 50 weeks/yr, that's $105,000 per year. I think that's what they call profitable.
I'm a certified cost accountant. Lot of problems with your analysis.
First off there are no autonomous vehicles to buy and we don't know when there will be. It is unlikely they will be cheap especially at first. Even once they become available there will be regulations and legal issues to sort out before they can become a viable business. It's going to be a while.
Second you did not consider costs at all. We don't know what the cost of an autonomous vehicle will be. You did not consider costs at all. You didn't consider the cost of fuel, the cost of insurance, the cost of engineering, the cost of administration, legal costs, the cost of maintenance, the cost of financing, the cost of regulations, and a host of other costs. Profits are revenue minus costs so until you properly consider costs your analysis is farcical. I can generate huge revenues by selling $2 bills for $1. I'll also be bankrupt in no time at all.
Third, demand will not be constant and average utilization is unlikely to be anywhere close to your rosy estimates. A substantial portion of the time the car is going to be driving unoccupied to pick up passengers. It's going to have down time to refuel. It's going to have down time for maintenance. It's going to break down now and then. It's going to get vandalized. There are going to be substantial periods where there are no fares to get. The list goes on and on. You are assuming an extremely naive best case scenario that is unlikely to exist in the real world.
$105K sounds like a lot but consider that even if we take your overly rosy assumptions about utilization and assume the car averages a modest 20mph during that time period it will cover something like 140,000 miles during that year. So you will have to replace the vehicle in just over a year most likely even assuming it performs exceptionally well. Few cars last much beyond 200K miles. We have no idea how reliable the navigation equipment on an autonomous car will prove to be. My guess is that there will be all sorts of problems with sensors going bad, getting covered with gunk and snow, etc. An autonomous vehicle will almost by definition be less reliable than an identical vehicle without the extra equipment.
Finally, I stand by my statement that there is no competitive advantage to Uber in owning their taxis. It adds a lot of cost and reduces their margins. What's to prevent GM from simply making and operating their own taxi service? Not like Uber is going to get self driving cars cheaper than GM will. Uber's advantage right now is that they don't have to buy any cars. There are only so many drivers and cars out there to utilize and Uber is the biggest fish in that pond. This gets them network effect advantages and keeps their costs (relatively) low. If they have to buy the cars then the network effect advantages of tying up all those cars as Uber drivers (rather than Lyft) goes away. Then they are just another taxi service with some fancy cars. It takes a huge amount of money to buy a gigantic fleet of cars which then has to compete against what they already had. It makes no sense.
Autonomous vehicles would be a whole new business model for Uber,
That might be fine if they had figured out a way to make their current business model profitable. Perhaps they will in due time but given the size of their losses so far that's not a certainty. It's rarely a good idea to try a second business model before you make the first one work.
Any other company trying to launch a robot driven taxi fleet without all of these pieces in-place will be at a significant disadvantage to Uber. Anybody who thinks that robot taxis are "the way of the future" would be wise to invest in or partner with Uber to make it happen.
I think that is far from a given. First off for Uber to have a sustainable competitive advantage they will have to find a path to profitability. Robot taxis aren't going to be a thing in even the most optimistic scenario for a number of years. If Uber can become the largest taxi service AND do so profitable AND not get sued into oblivion AND not run afoul of regulations then MAYBE they would be worth partnering with.
In a traditional business sense, of course it makes no sense. But that doesn't apply here.
Sure it does. The laws of economics are not suspended for the benefit of Uber.
Uber is in a competitive industry with few barriers to entry, and very little profit, yet they have a market cap of $50B. How can they possibly justify that valuation to their investors?
Uber is not a publicly traded company so they do not have a market cap in the conventional sense. Their valuation is based on an extrapolation from the percentage of the company purchased by investors and the price of that investment. If you buy 10% of a company for an investment of $5B then the company is valued at $50B. That doesn't mean that it actually would be worth that amount on the open market and it certainly doesn't mean they are actually worth $50B. It means the most recent investor felt it was worth that but it is dangerous to extrapolate that too far.
You think there are few barriers to entry in their industry? I disagree. There are some pretty substantial network effects in play here. There are only so many drivers and cars to go around and they are going to tend to gravitate towards the company which is most likely to have the biggest user base. Sure, users can in theory switch easily but what good is switching to a taxi service that doesn't have any drivers? Scale will matter here which is why Uber is trying to grow as fast as possible. Uber has something like the same advantage eBay has. The buyers and sellers will tend to gravitate to the largest platform. Frankly the self driving car thing is nothing but a pointless distraction from building their network as far as I can tell.
From a publicity point of view, their defiance of the California DMV was pure genius.
Perhaps but I think you'd have a hard time showing a causal relationship between that and Uber's bottom line.
They need to be perceived as a gutsy company aggressively pursuing new tech.
No they do not. They WANT to be perceived that way (for reasons that aren't entirely clear) but wants and needs are different things.
Uber will never be able to justify its valuation to investors.
They wouldn't be the first in that situation. I am inclined to agree but never is a very long time and I've seen more unlikely companies succeed. They have a lot of revenue which is actually the hardest part. Once you have that then profits are a possibility. Without revenues they are screwed. Whether the investors will make their money back kind of depends on how much they dumped in and what sort of margins Uber can make. Are they selling $2 bills for $1 or do they simply have to get to a certain scale and/or cost targets? Hard to say. In any case their profits will have to be rather substantial for the investors to not take a haircut.
Its just that Uber doesn't want to play by the rules, even when the rules are being bent for their benefit.
I get the impression that is something of a cultural thing with Uber at this point. They're not even trying to get along. They are just acting the part of a bully and trying to do whatever they want. I think their corporate mantra is "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" but they don't even bother with the forgiveness bit.
Either that, or Uber knows it's autonomous car program is not ready for prime time.
I think this is probably close to the mark. Uber getting involved in autonomous cars makes absolutely zero business sense. Their entire business model is based on an asset-light utilization of vehicles owned by the people that drive for them. They are basically a middle-man matching and scheduling taxi service. Actually owning the vehicles would cost a ton of money for no obvious benefit to Uber. Uber owning the vehicles (autonomous or not) would A) undermine their (absurd) argument that they aren't a taxi service and B) require a HUGE investment in assets and the attendant insurance, maintenance, upkeep, registration, and tracking. Uber has no infrastructure to do this nor do they have the capital to buy such a fleet.
Uber getting into autonomous vehicles smacks of marketing more than engineering. They want to project an image and seem hip but this is a project well outside their wheelhouse and they don't curently have the profits to support projects like this like Google or Apple or even Amazon does. I think they are trying to steal a page from the Netflix playbook and be ready for what they think will be the next industry evolution but it would make a LOT more sense for them to let someone else figure out the autonomous vehicle thing and just buy them when the time comes. They are a me-too entry into what is already a crowded field and they have no particular advantage in making autonomous cars and some very obvious disadvantages.
I design machines with (tens of) thousands of individual electrical parts. When you have to be sure that this will fit that, and that will fit this other thing, that has to be compatible with something else that needs to fit yet another thing...
I'm an engineer too. I design assembly lines and wire harnesses for a living, some with considerable complexity. My day job is running a company that manufactures wire harnesses so I work in pretty much the same field. Some of our more complex products have many hundreds to thousands of components.
How would anyone ever properly invent such an animal without hundreds of tabs open?
Seriously? We've been making products that complicated without hundreds of tabs literally for centuries. I very much doubt you can show me a use case where you actually need to have hundreds of tabs open and are making effective use of them for engineering. I've designed products and assembly lines of comparable complexity to what you are talking about. I've worked in the auto industry for a few decades and a typical car has around 30,000 parts. I can assure you that most cars are designed without a browser open with hundreds of tabs. My father was an engineer for the phone company and he designed networks of cabling of huge complexity. For most of his career he didn't even have a computer to work with. I work with a very similar set of data for every product I deal with as you and I think your argument is bonkers. It sounds to me like you just haven't figured out an efficient work flow.
And yet in some use cases that's the desired behavior.
That doesn't mean you design the family sedan to rev to 16000rpm like an F1 car and actually use it that way. Someone opening 100+ tabs is a clear corner case. Very few people do this and it's pretty easy to argue that it isn't a work flow common enough to worry about supporting even if we ignore the fact that it's clearly kind of a bonkers way of working.
Because you don't use your tools the way others do doesn't mean that either case is wrong. It means that some tools are poorly designed for some use cases.
Actually it very much can mean that one of the use cases is an improper use of the technology. To use another car analogy, you don't keep your car at redline driving around town. Yes you CAN do it but that doesn't make it a good idea. Running a browser with hundreds of tabs open is similar. It's an inefficient work flow than very few people use and most people would find actually rather difficult to manage. Browsers aren't designed to manage hundreds of tabs. If you want to use it that way it is your choice but that doesn't mean the rest of us are under any obligation to think that it is a good or sensible choice.
Why is that "Wrong"? Because your brain doesn't work that way? That's how I've always browsed and only recently did it become terrible.
It's "Wrong" in the sense that just because you can do something it doesn't mean it is a good idea. Your brain doesn't work that way either even if you think it does. People are demonstrably terrible at multitasking. That's why we can't talk on the phone and drive at the same time safely. You cannot possibly convince me that you are doing anything productive with most of those tabs. It's merely a form of hoarding. Opening that many tabs chews up a ton of memory and then you complain that things get slow? Of course it gets slow! What else would you expect?
Now it's your prerogative to run your browser any way you want but don't whine to me that it gets slow when you are doing something that very predictably should result in it running poorly. Furthermore don't pretend I'm stupid enough to believe that you are maximizing productivity by opening dozens of tabs you cannot possibly be actively working with.