FedEx and UPS are bit players. USPS is the big gorilla in the room.
Not in package shipping they aren't. USPS is small potatoes in the package shipping business. In Q2 2016 USPS shipped $1.2billion in packages. UPS had revenues 10X that amount over the same period the vast majority of which was in package shipments.
In a week, USPS moves more than UPS does in a year. FedEx is smaller. It takes USPS just 3 days to do the same.
You are comparing letters with packages. Not a meaningful comparison. In theory USPS could compete strongly in package delivery but they haven't been effective at it to date.
Amazon's network may be big, but they won't be UPS/FedEx big.
They don't have to be as big as the third party couriers networks. Amazon doesn't have to roll out delivery everywhere all at once to be efficient at it. They could simply start with population centers like NYC and back haul. Over time they build it up AND they have a guaranteed customer unlike the freight couriers.
You don't save $ by having "control over your shipments", you'd save by making your shipping system more efficient than alternative shippers. FedEx & UPS are pretty darn good at it and have a lot of experience.
Untrue on both counts. First off any time Amazon (or anyone else) ships via UPS or FedEx they are experiencing margin leakage to the tune of something like 8-13% which is actually quite a lot of margin in a low margin industry. That is money that could stay within the company if Amazon could vertically integrate. It's highly unlikely that for a substantial portion of Amazon's customer base that they couldn't save money by taking over at least a portion of the freight themselves. They certainly save money on back haul shipments they do themselves today and they could easily tackle the last mile problem piecemeal by offering Amazon delivery in dense population centers first. They don't have to replicate the entire UPS network from day one.
Trying to break into that game would be costly and maybe foolhardy. Just the fleet management alone could be enough to eat up any "savings".
As long as Amazon can achieve minimum efficient scale (look it up) on their freight services they would not be at a disadvantage. It's actually fairly routine for large companies like Walmart to have their own fleet of transport vehicles because it saves them money.
It might work out but I think you'd have to throw a lot of money at it to prime the pump.
Of course it would be a huge investment. But Amazon has the resources to do it and they are their own customer for the service so they don't have to sell the service to anyone else immediately. Furthermore they don't even really have to make a profit on the freight services. They could build their retail business by merely providing freight at cost which would allow them to sell products at lower costs to customers thus capturing more marketshare and making it harder still to compete with them online.
I would be interesting to see if they save any money here as well, considering UPS operates on about a 7-8% profit margin. Considering Amazon is such a large customer I would be willing to bet they make far less profit on Amazon shipments. Not a lot of room for savings unless they believe they have a new better way of doing shipping.
UPS had an operating profit of around 13% last year according to their annual report. That is plenty of margin to make it worthwhile for Amazon to want to vertically integrate their shipping.
Several considerations: 1) Amazon's retail business is a low margin business to begin with and they compete significantly on price - even a few percent can matter a lot. Walmart has margins of around 2-3% for comparison. If Amazon can eliminate the margin leakage to UPS that goes straight to their bottom line. 2) Integrating vertically has the benefit of having better control over the service you provide to customers. It is almost always harder to coordinate with an outside company than to deal with another internal division. 3) Amazon developing their own shipping service allows them to expand their business beyond shipping stuff sold through their own website. They could very conceivably capture business from UPS and FedEx and USPS. This creates a whole new revenue stream for them and diversifies the company somewhat.
UPS has a revenue of about $60 billion per year, while Amazon pays about $5 billion in yearly shipping costs. This puts them in an entirely different order of magnitude as far as scale goes. This makes it even less likely Amazon would save a lot of money.
You're looking at it the wrong way. The question is whether Amazon's freight service can reach minimum efficient scale in order to compete effectively. They don't necessarily have to match UPS in size to achieve comparable cost efficiency. Bear in mind as well that any shipments they do themselves they could in theory provide at or even below cost in order to scale Amazon's freight business AND that is revenue and profit not available to UPS/FedEx. Even if they don't try to make a profit on the freight at first it allows them to offer better pricing to customers (thus increasing retail revenue) and makes it even harder than it already is to compete in online shopping with them. Amazon also has the advantage that they can play UPS and FedEx against each other while they build their freight services.
Frankly it's kind of a no brainer for Amazon to get into the freight business in some form or fashion because vertical integration makes sense for them in a lot of ways. I also expect them to try to get into the office supply business (think Staples) and industrial supply business (think Grainger) in the near future in a big way. I think Amazon would kick the ass of the incumbents in those industries.
Maybe he/she doesn't like people who make outrageous claims they can't back up.
That's a peculiar stance given that Musk has largely backed up most of his claims with pretty good results. Sure he has missed a step here and there but by and large he's done what he has set out to do to date. He's proposed some pretty audacious ideas but so far his track record is absurdly good considering the difficulty of what he has attempted thus far. Some reasonable skepticism is fine but it's hard to argue that the guy doesn't produce.
Employees say the move was rejected by Ms. Mayer's team for fear that even something as simple as a password change would drive Yahoo's shrinking email users to other services.
At my company we call this "stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel".
I've noticed that a lot of "Prime Eligible" items are priced higher than the exact same item from a different merchant that is not eligible. So you're paying a subscription and paying more for the item still.
You're paying for the convenience of being able to get it in 2 days. You can get cheaper prices than Amazon offers in a lot of cases. The question is how much is it worth to you to spend the time looking? Sometimes it's worth it. Sometimes not so much. Generally I'll take a good price with excellent convenience over a great price with lots of hassle any day unless we are talking about an amount of money large enough that the number involves a comma.
You throw around the phrase "space nutter" as if that actually means something every time an article about Musk is posted. Let it go. If you want to make an evidence based case that going to Mars is not possible then fine. Ad-hominem attacks do not in any way bolster your case. They just make you look like a jerk.
There is no way ANYONE is going to Mars.
If you want to claim that people aren't going to be on Mars in the near future I would agree with you. Any such mission is going to take a while before it happens. If you are going to claim that it is categorically impossible that humans will ever set foot on Mars then you have no evidence to back you up. Present some actual and irrefutable evidence that putting humans on Mars is irreducibly impossible or shut up about it. So far your argument consists of calling anyone who is interested in solving the problem a "space nutter".
The trip alone would kill you with radiation.
And you of course have irrefutable proof not available to the rest of us that there is no possible way to mitigate that problem? Rhetorical question because of course since you don't and we know you don't. It's a known problem with numerous potential solutions. We aren't going to Mars tomorrow. If/when we do try to go it will be among the engineering challenges we face and one of the risks along the way. There is no evidence that it is a problem without any feasible solution given enough research and funding.
This guy is a scam artist and is trying to get taxpayer money to fund it, so he can siphon it off to pay for his other projects.
I'm not sure you know what the word means. Building at last count 4 successful and industry changing companies, three of which have nothing to do with space nor rely on any direct tax dollars, is a peculiar means of scamming people out of tax dollars. Furthermore most of the SpaceX mission list has private companies as clients as of today so basically no tax dollars are at work there either. Additionally SpaceX is actually SAVING tax dollars by reducing the cost to orbit over what NASA can do themselves. You might want to actually use some facts in your argument at some point. They tend to help.
Someone please take the Kool Aid away from this guy. His rocket just blew up recently and was asking for help in figuring out why...
And what have you done that is so amazing that we should care about your opinion? The guy has one rocket blow up and you proclaim him to be some kind of failure. Go out and find some new perspective. It seems you lost yours somewhere.
Since I got it I did find I start hitting Amazon first but I still look elsewhere as Amazon is not necessarily the cheapest location
Amazon is not always the cheapest but they usually are the most convenient in my experience. Generally their prices are competitive but if you need rock bottom pricing you can usually do better if you are willing to put in the time. For much of what I buy Amazon's prices are good enough that it isn't worth the extra time to save just a little extra. I'm fully aware that I'm paying for this convenience and generally I'm ok with that.
Either Amazon is driving many businesses out of business, or it is doing a great job completely dominating search engine results for several different search engines.
It's a bit of both. Amazon is definitely the 800lb gorilla of ecommerce. Even companies like Walmart are having a hard time dealing with them. And to be honest Amazon has earned their place. Honestly I do most of my shopping there these days because there isn't anything else remotely as convenient in most cases. They have the best selection, usually reasonable prices, excellent customer service, and checkout is a breeze. With Prime their shipping costs are very reasonable as well. I seldom have to go to a physical store anymore and that suits me just fine because that generally is a waste of my time. I really only shop locally for groceries, certain specialty items, and if I need something quicker than 2 days.
I also buy stuff for my company through Amazon. I used to get office supplies from Staples but they try to charge absurd prices and make me clip coupons. Amazon just charges a reasonable price up front and no hassle. Toner through Amazon for our printers is about 30% cheaper than at Staples.
Hardly. Prime is a perfectly reasonable deal and given its popularity a lot of people (myself included) find it to be good value for money. Maybe it doesn't suit your needs but it doesn't remotely fit the definition of a scam for many of us.
For the longest time, delivery times from Amazon for nearly everything was 2-3 days (in Europe), with some deliveries actually happening the next day.
I cannot speak for Europe but in the US even non-Prime orders usually arrive in 2-4 business days. Probably about 15% of what I order through Amazon isn't eligible for Prime and most of that arrives considerably before the estimated delivery date. Mostly it just depends on where it is shipping from. Stuff that ships within a single state radius usually arrives in 1-2 business days. Stuff from the opposite coast might take as long as 4-5 business days to receive. Even when I use Amazon's "No Rush" delivery it still tends to arrive within 4-5 business days.
Have you and the company you work for ever been on the receiving end of a due diligence examination?
Both given and received. I'm both an engineer and a certified accountant. My day job is to run a manufacturing company. I deal with audits routinely, some of which are quite stringent. Both product and process audits. I've also been involved in quite a few M&A due diligence audits.
I have, and it permanently jaded me towards the value of due diligence.
Admittedly many audits are not well conducted or are conducted by people who don't know what they are doing. The worst are when there is a conflict of interest on the part of the auditor or when the auditor thinks they know what they are doing but doesn't. I've been through more than a few ISO-9000 and TS-16949 audits where the auditor was utterly clueless. I've also been through ones where the auditor was really good and actually helped us find problems even we didn't notice. I've also been through a huge number of PPAPs, tax audits, and even some FDA audits since some of the parts we make are for medical devices.
Amazon is only free shipping if you're prime. (and if you're prime you're paying a whopping $100 a year in most cases).
Whether or not the Prime fees are a good deal depends on how much you shop on Amazon. Last year I ordered 155 packages from Amazon which were delivered via Prime. That means my per-parcel shipping cost was $0.65 each. That's barely more than a first class stamp. That is a good price by any reasonable measure.
There really is no such thing as "free" shipping. Either the shipping is rolled into the cost of the product you are buying or you pay for it separately but either way you are still paying for the shipping.
It was a good alternative to the iPhone, but at this point Apple has gone far away in smartphone technology.
That hasn't been true for a long time if indeed it ever was true. Not just with regard to Apple either. Android phones surpassed Blackberry phones a long time ago as well. Heck even Microsoft's offering are arguably better even if they haven't been well received in the market.
Hopefully in the future Blackberry can still return their smartphones on the market
"Hopefully"? Why hopefully? They were an arrogant and stagnant company with products that couldn't keep up with the competition. They threw the privacy and security of their users under the bus to cater to governments around the world. While I certainly welcome more competition in smartphones I don't think it can or should come from Blackberry.
You've got a low enough/. ID number to be fully aware of the fact that salesmen and corporate executives lie on a distressingly regular basis.
Both parties here have adequate engineering horsepower to see through any silly promises made by a sales droid. There also are competitors for launch contracts who will be more than happy to point out any real or perceived flaws in the launch system of their competitors. Seriously, this is a transaction between two large companies that know exactly what they are getting into with a launch contract. Both are perfectly capable of evaluating the risks involved and coming to an agreement on price and delivery. Nobody is being taken advantage of here or if they are then they should have hired better people because the dollar amounts are large enough on both sides that there is no excuse.
If a company has a $50million satellite and they don't do their due diligence about the company they hire to launch it then shame on the them. Given that the launch contract is for tens of millions of dollars they should take their time and ask whatever questions they need answered to properly assess the risk. If the launch company lies then they have grounds to take them to court to recover their losses.
Being prudent with other people's money is nowhere near equivalent to promising 100% reliability.
Who is being imprudent? The company who owns the satellite is or should be fully aware of the risks involved. The company who build the rocket has an obligation to disclose any known or reasonably foreseeable risks. As long as those two things happen and both parties are ok with the risk involved with it then there is no problem. Nobody is being taken advantage of here. One side pays the other a risk adjusted fee for launch services with the full understanding that the launch may fail. If the satellite owner isn't comfortable with the level of risk being taken then they shouldn't sign the contract.
Now if unreasonable promises were made or the rocket maker lied about what they were doing then that is why we have a court system.
You don't push technological or economic boundaries with other people's $50M satellites.
Yes you do. There is always a risk of failure when you put something on a rocket. Anyone who promises they can do it with 100% reliability is either lying or delusional. The satellite owners knew that when they signed the launch contract. You make contingency plans in case the rocket blows up and get insurance. If the risk of blowing up is higher more money should change hands but nothing fundamentally changes about the risks. There is no launch system with a perfect success rate and more than a hand full of launches nor is there likely to be one any time soon.
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world."
Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
While sending 80 peeps to Mars is cool, what are they going to do while they are there?
You have literally an entire planet to explore and you can't figure out what they are going to do when they get there? That's the easiest question to answer imaginable. The only real question is where to start. There are serious problems with actually getting there but what to do if we do get there is a question that answers itself.
Progress advances non-linearly, and fastest when someone with a vision leads.
Vision still needs funding. The biggest obstacle to getting to Mars is probably not a technical one. I suspect we could resolve enough of the technical issues within a relatively sort time span to get some boots on Mars with sufficient motivation at least for a brief visit. The biggest problem is one of funding. No private enterprise is going to fund an exploratory trip like this because there is no reasonable likelihood of return on investment. I just don't see how this thing gets built any time soon even if it is technologically feasible.
The only organization with enough money and no need for a financial return is the government. There is no evidence that there is any appetite in the US government to go to Mars and really the US is the only country currently with the technology to make it happen in the near future. (China, Russia or the EU might eventually but aren't there today) I don't see the US government getting interested unless it becomes a national pride thing kind of like the Cold War. We didn't go to the moon for science. We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. The only way I see it happening is if we get into another space race with the Chinese or the Russians and that seems improbable at the moment.
I love Elon Musk's optimistic approach to big problems. I really do hope he can get it done. I just have my doubts that some of his proposals are realistic in time frame he proposes given the economic realities of the situation. Maybe he has a plan to make it happen but so far I've seen scant evidence of one.
You're right. A 7.2% failure rate is horrible. (The Delta IV has a 3% failure rate, the Atlas V only 1.5% and the Ariane V a 2.3% rate. Only the Proton is worse, at 13% but that's since 1965.)
Not to come off as an apologist but my opinion when it comes to rockets is that if one isn't blowing some of them up then they probably aren't trying to push any technological or economic boundaries. I would actually be disappointed in them if they weren't experiencing some setbacks because that would mean they weren't trying as hard as they could. Rockets are complicated and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. They push the limits of our engineering capabilities. If you don't step over the line from time to time your pace of learning is going to be slow because you don't know where our limits are anymore. Doing the same safe already proven things everyone else has done will result in slow or no progress.
People who listen to it loud just want the pounding bass that you get at a night club or concert.
I get that but I don't really get the appeal unless you are actually in a night club or concert.
It's neat to hear that stuff on headphones
For some people but not everyone. Unfortunately a lot of headphone makers think that means all the rest of us want to listen to absurd amounts of bass in our headphones. Personally I do not. I want the audio to sound how the person who recorded it intended it to be heard for the most part. If I'm listening to a podcast I don't need extra bass if you get what I'm saying. My wife's car has a supposedly fancy branded name stereo system in it and the only notable thing they seem to have done with it is to dial up the bass to 11 as if that somehow makes it better. They of course did not provide a way to turn the bass down in case I don't want to feel like I'm in a techno club.
Aside from a few data-processing tasks which have already been automated (OCR, statistical analysis), there is no dirt simple way to use data to reduce human labor.
Complete nonsense. Computers are how you use data to reduce human labor and tons of tasks have been automated. To take the analogy further oil by itself is useless. You need a machine to do something useful with it. Data is the same way. By itself it is comparatively useless but with a computer you can do a lot to reduce human labor. For example CAD or bookkeeping or inventory are all data processing tasks which substantially reduce human labor with the help of data.
Mozilla announced last year that Firefox OS initiative of shipping phones with commercial partners did not bring the returns it sought.
And did anyone expect otherwise? Mozilla is an organization which has lost its purpose. It keeps chasing fads, copying the work of others, wasting money on projects that no one needed or wanted, and can't seem to figure out what to do next. Mozilla's original goal was to ensure there was an open web. Internet Explorer and Microsoft were in danger of turning the web into a monopoly. Firefox provided the fireblock to prevent this from happening. Problem is that once they accomplished that goal, they didn't know what to do next.
I like Firefox and use it as my primary browser. It's a decent albeit imperfect bit of software. But if Mozilla really wants to make a difference they need to focus on solving actual problems instead of trying to do a second rate version of whatever Google is working on this week. They need to focus on a specific problem and do it really well. They did that for a while with browser software. Time to genuinely focus on something new.
So, because something can be used to commit a crime, that is sufficient reason to assume that it is?
It's not sufficient reason by itself in most cases. But generally there is more to the story than just the existence of a tool.
Guns can be used to commit a crime too. A lot of crime involves a gun. But we don't ban those, right?
Umm, yeah actually a lot of places do. Not surprisingly those same places tend to have much lower rates of deaths and injuries from firearms and fewer crimes committed using one.
There is an intentionality to most tools. For a firearm their designed purpose is to injure/kill. That IS what they were designed to do. Sometimes there are defensible reasons to use a gun for its intended purpose (hunting, self defense, etc) but when the purpose of a tool is to injure some care in its use and handling is in order. Other tools like a hammer have less specific purposes - while a hammer can be used to injure that isn't the primary designed purpose of one. We don't have arguments about hammers because their designed purpose is typically not to cause physical harm to another.
Similarly when a tool is purpose built with a particular job, it is generally safe to presume that the tool will be used for that purpose absent evidence to the contrary. If it happens to have other uses then those should be taken into consideration when evaluating if a crime is being committed. It seems clear that the purpose of these ripping sites is to commit copyright infringement. Now you may not have an ethical problem with that and that's possibly a reasonable position to take but it IS a tool which is primarily being used to commit a crime under current law.
Hell, when I was about 12yrs, I went into a high end audio shop at the time, and heard my first pair of Klipschorns hooked to a McIntosh tube amp...and was hooked.
While there is nothing wrong with appreciating high quality sound, being willing to pay big $ for it makes you something of an outlier among the General Public.
But I wasn't the stand out of my day...all of my friends for the most part worked for and bought good stereos for home.
They did so because that was the fashion of the day. I seriously doubt many of them were audiophiles. Most young people I've ever met with expensive home stereos tend to listen to them at volumes that will ensure loss of hearing so that they will never be able to appreciate quality sound. In my college dorms 20+ years ago it was de-rigeur to have a ridiculously oversized stereo and to play it at volumes that would wake the dead. Subtle details of the sound were not important. Some of them were actually genuinely nice pieces of kit but that wasn't why anyone bought them.
So, wondering when the masses stopped caring at all about how the music sounded?
Why do you assume they ever really cared? People want to listen to music that evokes an emotion in them. For most the quality of the sound is largely incidental to this. Nobody really gives a crap if the latest Brittney Spears album has amazing fidelity.
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FedEx and UPS are bit players. USPS is the big gorilla in the room.
Not in package shipping they aren't. USPS is small potatoes in the package shipping business. In Q2 2016 USPS shipped $1.2billion in packages. UPS had revenues 10X that amount over the same period the vast majority of which was in package shipments.
In a week, USPS moves more than UPS does in a year. FedEx is smaller. It takes USPS just 3 days to do the same.
You are comparing letters with packages. Not a meaningful comparison. In theory USPS could compete strongly in package delivery but they haven't been effective at it to date.
Amazon's network may be big, but they won't be UPS/FedEx big.
They don't have to be as big as the third party couriers networks. Amazon doesn't have to roll out delivery everywhere all at once to be efficient at it. They could simply start with population centers like NYC and back haul. Over time they build it up AND they have a guaranteed customer unlike the freight couriers.
You don't save $ by having "control over your shipments", you'd save by making your shipping system more efficient than alternative shippers. FedEx & UPS are pretty darn good at it and have a lot of experience.
Untrue on both counts. First off any time Amazon (or anyone else) ships via UPS or FedEx they are experiencing margin leakage to the tune of something like 8-13% which is actually quite a lot of margin in a low margin industry. That is money that could stay within the company if Amazon could vertically integrate. It's highly unlikely that for a substantial portion of Amazon's customer base that they couldn't save money by taking over at least a portion of the freight themselves. They certainly save money on back haul shipments they do themselves today and they could easily tackle the last mile problem piecemeal by offering Amazon delivery in dense population centers first. They don't have to replicate the entire UPS network from day one.
Trying to break into that game would be costly and maybe foolhardy. Just the fleet management alone could be enough to eat up any "savings".
As long as Amazon can achieve minimum efficient scale (look it up) on their freight services they would not be at a disadvantage. It's actually fairly routine for large companies like Walmart to have their own fleet of transport vehicles because it saves them money.
It might work out but I think you'd have to throw a lot of money at it to prime the pump.
Of course it would be a huge investment. But Amazon has the resources to do it and they are their own customer for the service so they don't have to sell the service to anyone else immediately. Furthermore they don't even really have to make a profit on the freight services. They could build their retail business by merely providing freight at cost which would allow them to sell products at lower costs to customers thus capturing more marketshare and making it harder still to compete with them online.
I would be interesting to see if they save any money here as well, considering UPS operates on about a 7-8% profit margin. Considering Amazon is such a large customer I would be willing to bet they make far less profit on Amazon shipments. Not a lot of room for savings unless they believe they have a new better way of doing shipping.
UPS had an operating profit of around 13% last year according to their annual report. That is plenty of margin to make it worthwhile for Amazon to want to vertically integrate their shipping.
Several considerations:
1) Amazon's retail business is a low margin business to begin with and they compete significantly on price - even a few percent can matter a lot. Walmart has margins of around 2-3% for comparison. If Amazon can eliminate the margin leakage to UPS that goes straight to their bottom line.
2) Integrating vertically has the benefit of having better control over the service you provide to customers. It is almost always harder to coordinate with an outside company than to deal with another internal division.
3) Amazon developing their own shipping service allows them to expand their business beyond shipping stuff sold through their own website. They could very conceivably capture business from UPS and FedEx and USPS. This creates a whole new revenue stream for them and diversifies the company somewhat.
UPS has a revenue of about $60 billion per year, while Amazon pays about $5 billion in yearly shipping costs. This puts them in an entirely different order of magnitude as far as scale goes. This makes it even less likely Amazon would save a lot of money.
You're looking at it the wrong way. The question is whether Amazon's freight service can reach minimum efficient scale in order to compete effectively. They don't necessarily have to match UPS in size to achieve comparable cost efficiency. Bear in mind as well that any shipments they do themselves they could in theory provide at or even below cost in order to scale Amazon's freight business AND that is revenue and profit not available to UPS/FedEx. Even if they don't try to make a profit on the freight at first it allows them to offer better pricing to customers (thus increasing retail revenue) and makes it even harder than it already is to compete in online shopping with them. Amazon also has the advantage that they can play UPS and FedEx against each other while they build their freight services.
Frankly it's kind of a no brainer for Amazon to get into the freight business in some form or fashion because vertical integration makes sense for them in a lot of ways. I also expect them to try to get into the office supply business (think Staples) and industrial supply business (think Grainger) in the near future in a big way. I think Amazon would kick the ass of the incumbents in those industries.
Maybe he/she doesn't like people who make outrageous claims they can't back up.
That's a peculiar stance given that Musk has largely backed up most of his claims with pretty good results. Sure he has missed a step here and there but by and large he's done what he has set out to do to date. He's proposed some pretty audacious ideas but so far his track record is absurdly good considering the difficulty of what he has attempted thus far. Some reasonable skepticism is fine but it's hard to argue that the guy doesn't produce.
Employees say the move was rejected by Ms. Mayer's team for fear that even something as simple as a password change would drive Yahoo's shrinking email users to other services.
At my company we call this "stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel".
I've noticed that a lot of "Prime Eligible" items are priced higher than the exact same item from a different merchant that is not eligible. So you're paying a subscription and paying more for the item still.
You're paying for the convenience of being able to get it in 2 days. You can get cheaper prices than Amazon offers in a lot of cases. The question is how much is it worth to you to spend the time looking? Sometimes it's worth it. Sometimes not so much. Generally I'll take a good price with excellent convenience over a great price with lots of hassle any day unless we are talking about an amount of money large enough that the number involves a comma.
Musk is a Space Nutter.
You throw around the phrase "space nutter" as if that actually means something every time an article about Musk is posted. Let it go. If you want to make an evidence based case that going to Mars is not possible then fine. Ad-hominem attacks do not in any way bolster your case. They just make you look like a jerk.
There is no way ANYONE is going to Mars.
If you want to claim that people aren't going to be on Mars in the near future I would agree with you. Any such mission is going to take a while before it happens. If you are going to claim that it is categorically impossible that humans will ever set foot on Mars then you have no evidence to back you up. Present some actual and irrefutable evidence that putting humans on Mars is irreducibly impossible or shut up about it. So far your argument consists of calling anyone who is interested in solving the problem a "space nutter".
The trip alone would kill you with radiation.
And you of course have irrefutable proof not available to the rest of us that there is no possible way to mitigate that problem? Rhetorical question because of course since you don't and we know you don't. It's a known problem with numerous potential solutions. We aren't going to Mars tomorrow. If/when we do try to go it will be among the engineering challenges we face and one of the risks along the way. There is no evidence that it is a problem without any feasible solution given enough research and funding.
This guy is a scam artist and is trying to get taxpayer money to fund it, so he can siphon it off to pay for his other projects.
I'm not sure you know what the word means. Building at last count 4 successful and industry changing companies, three of which have nothing to do with space nor rely on any direct tax dollars, is a peculiar means of scamming people out of tax dollars. Furthermore most of the SpaceX mission list has private companies as clients as of today so basically no tax dollars are at work there either. Additionally SpaceX is actually SAVING tax dollars by reducing the cost to orbit over what NASA can do themselves. You might want to actually use some facts in your argument at some point. They tend to help.
Someone please take the Kool Aid away from this guy. His rocket just blew up recently and was asking for help in figuring out why...
And what have you done that is so amazing that we should care about your opinion? The guy has one rocket blow up and you proclaim him to be some kind of failure. Go out and find some new perspective. It seems you lost yours somewhere.
Since I got it I did find I start hitting Amazon first but I still look elsewhere as Amazon is not necessarily the cheapest location
Amazon is not always the cheapest but they usually are the most convenient in my experience. Generally their prices are competitive but if you need rock bottom pricing you can usually do better if you are willing to put in the time. For much of what I buy Amazon's prices are good enough that it isn't worth the extra time to save just a little extra. I'm fully aware that I'm paying for this convenience and generally I'm ok with that.
Either Amazon is driving many businesses out of business, or it is doing a great job completely dominating search engine results for several different search engines.
It's a bit of both. Amazon is definitely the 800lb gorilla of ecommerce. Even companies like Walmart are having a hard time dealing with them. And to be honest Amazon has earned their place. Honestly I do most of my shopping there these days because there isn't anything else remotely as convenient in most cases. They have the best selection, usually reasonable prices, excellent customer service, and checkout is a breeze. With Prime their shipping costs are very reasonable as well. I seldom have to go to a physical store anymore and that suits me just fine because that generally is a waste of my time. I really only shop locally for groceries, certain specialty items, and if I need something quicker than 2 days.
I also buy stuff for my company through Amazon. I used to get office supplies from Staples but they try to charge absurd prices and make me clip coupons. Amazon just charges a reasonable price up front and no hassle. Toner through Amazon for our printers is about 30% cheaper than at Staples.
Prime is mostly a scam anyway.
Hardly. Prime is a perfectly reasonable deal and given its popularity a lot of people (myself included) find it to be good value for money. Maybe it doesn't suit your needs but it doesn't remotely fit the definition of a scam for many of us.
For the longest time, delivery times from Amazon for nearly everything was 2-3 days (in Europe), with some deliveries actually happening the next day.
I cannot speak for Europe but in the US even non-Prime orders usually arrive in 2-4 business days. Probably about 15% of what I order through Amazon isn't eligible for Prime and most of that arrives considerably before the estimated delivery date. Mostly it just depends on where it is shipping from. Stuff that ships within a single state radius usually arrives in 1-2 business days. Stuff from the opposite coast might take as long as 4-5 business days to receive. Even when I use Amazon's "No Rush" delivery it still tends to arrive within 4-5 business days.
Have you and the company you work for ever been on the receiving end of a due diligence examination?
Both given and received. I'm both an engineer and a certified accountant. My day job is to run a manufacturing company. I deal with audits routinely, some of which are quite stringent. Both product and process audits. I've also been involved in quite a few M&A due diligence audits.
I have, and it permanently jaded me towards the value of due diligence.
Admittedly many audits are not well conducted or are conducted by people who don't know what they are doing. The worst are when there is a conflict of interest on the part of the auditor or when the auditor thinks they know what they are doing but doesn't. I've been through more than a few ISO-9000 and TS-16949 audits where the auditor was utterly clueless. I've also been through ones where the auditor was really good and actually helped us find problems even we didn't notice. I've also been through a huge number of PPAPs, tax audits, and even some FDA audits since some of the parts we make are for medical devices.
Amazon is only free shipping if you're prime. (and if you're prime you're paying a whopping $100 a year in most cases).
Whether or not the Prime fees are a good deal depends on how much you shop on Amazon. Last year I ordered 155 packages from Amazon which were delivered via Prime. That means my per-parcel shipping cost was $0.65 each. That's barely more than a first class stamp. That is a good price by any reasonable measure.
There really is no such thing as "free" shipping. Either the shipping is rolled into the cost of the product you are buying or you pay for it separately but either way you are still paying for the shipping.
It was a good alternative to the iPhone, but at this point Apple has gone far away in smartphone technology.
That hasn't been true for a long time if indeed it ever was true. Not just with regard to Apple either. Android phones surpassed Blackberry phones a long time ago as well. Heck even Microsoft's offering are arguably better even if they haven't been well received in the market.
Hopefully in the future Blackberry can still return their smartphones on the market
"Hopefully"? Why hopefully? They were an arrogant and stagnant company with products that couldn't keep up with the competition. They threw the privacy and security of their users under the bus to cater to governments around the world. While I certainly welcome more competition in smartphones I don't think it can or should come from Blackberry.
You've got a low enough /. ID number to be fully aware of the fact that salesmen and corporate executives lie on a distressingly regular basis.
Both parties here have adequate engineering horsepower to see through any silly promises made by a sales droid. There also are competitors for launch contracts who will be more than happy to point out any real or perceived flaws in the launch system of their competitors. Seriously, this is a transaction between two large companies that know exactly what they are getting into with a launch contract. Both are perfectly capable of evaluating the risks involved and coming to an agreement on price and delivery. Nobody is being taken advantage of here or if they are then they should have hired better people because the dollar amounts are large enough on both sides that there is no excuse.
If a company has a $50million satellite and they don't do their due diligence about the company they hire to launch it then shame on the them. Given that the launch contract is for tens of millions of dollars they should take their time and ask whatever questions they need answered to properly assess the risk. If the launch company lies then they have grounds to take them to court to recover their losses.
Being prudent with other people's money is nowhere near equivalent to promising 100% reliability.
Who is being imprudent? The company who owns the satellite is or should be fully aware of the risks involved. The company who build the rocket has an obligation to disclose any known or reasonably foreseeable risks. As long as those two things happen and both parties are ok with the risk involved with it then there is no problem. Nobody is being taken advantage of here. One side pays the other a risk adjusted fee for launch services with the full understanding that the launch may fail. If the satellite owner isn't comfortable with the level of risk being taken then they shouldn't sign the contract.
Now if unreasonable promises were made or the rocket maker lied about what they were doing then that is why we have a court system.
You don't push technological or economic boundaries with other people's $50M satellites.
Yes you do. There is always a risk of failure when you put something on a rocket. Anyone who promises they can do it with 100% reliability is either lying or delusional. The satellite owners knew that when they signed the launch contract. You make contingency plans in case the rocket blows up and get insurance. If the risk of blowing up is higher more money should change hands but nothing fundamentally changes about the risks. There is no launch system with a perfect success rate and more than a hand full of launches nor is there likely to be one any time soon.
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world."
Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
While sending 80 peeps to Mars is cool, what are they going to do while they are there?
You have literally an entire planet to explore and you can't figure out what they are going to do when they get there? That's the easiest question to answer imaginable. The only real question is where to start. There are serious problems with actually getting there but what to do if we do get there is a question that answers itself.
Progress advances non-linearly, and fastest when someone with a vision leads.
Vision still needs funding. The biggest obstacle to getting to Mars is probably not a technical one. I suspect we could resolve enough of the technical issues within a relatively sort time span to get some boots on Mars with sufficient motivation at least for a brief visit. The biggest problem is one of funding. No private enterprise is going to fund an exploratory trip like this because there is no reasonable likelihood of return on investment. I just don't see how this thing gets built any time soon even if it is technologically feasible.
The only organization with enough money and no need for a financial return is the government. There is no evidence that there is any appetite in the US government to go to Mars and really the US is the only country currently with the technology to make it happen in the near future. (China, Russia or the EU might eventually but aren't there today) I don't see the US government getting interested unless it becomes a national pride thing kind of like the Cold War. We didn't go to the moon for science. We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. The only way I see it happening is if we get into another space race with the Chinese or the Russians and that seems improbable at the moment.
I love Elon Musk's optimistic approach to big problems. I really do hope he can get it done. I just have my doubts that some of his proposals are realistic in time frame he proposes given the economic realities of the situation. Maybe he has a plan to make it happen but so far I've seen scant evidence of one.
You're right. A 7.2% failure rate is horrible. (The Delta IV has a 3% failure rate, the Atlas V only 1.5% and the Ariane V a 2.3% rate. Only the Proton is worse, at 13% but that's since 1965.)
Not to come off as an apologist but my opinion when it comes to rockets is that if one isn't blowing some of them up then they probably aren't trying to push any technological or economic boundaries. I would actually be disappointed in them if they weren't experiencing some setbacks because that would mean they weren't trying as hard as they could. Rockets are complicated and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. They push the limits of our engineering capabilities. If you don't step over the line from time to time your pace of learning is going to be slow because you don't know where our limits are anymore. Doing the same safe already proven things everyone else has done will result in slow or no progress.
People who listen to it loud just want the pounding bass that you get at a night club or concert.
I get that but I don't really get the appeal unless you are actually in a night club or concert.
It's neat to hear that stuff on headphones
For some people but not everyone. Unfortunately a lot of headphone makers think that means all the rest of us want to listen to absurd amounts of bass in our headphones. Personally I do not. I want the audio to sound how the person who recorded it intended it to be heard for the most part. If I'm listening to a podcast I don't need extra bass if you get what I'm saying. My wife's car has a supposedly fancy branded name stereo system in it and the only notable thing they seem to have done with it is to dial up the bass to 11 as if that somehow makes it better. They of course did not provide a way to turn the bass down in case I don't want to feel like I'm in a techno club.
Aside from a few data-processing tasks which have already been automated (OCR, statistical analysis), there is no dirt simple way to use data to reduce human labor.
Complete nonsense. Computers are how you use data to reduce human labor and tons of tasks have been automated. To take the analogy further oil by itself is useless. You need a machine to do something useful with it. Data is the same way. By itself it is comparatively useless but with a computer you can do a lot to reduce human labor. For example CAD or bookkeeping or inventory are all data processing tasks which substantially reduce human labor with the help of data.
Mozilla announced last year that Firefox OS initiative of shipping phones with commercial partners did not bring the returns it sought.
And did anyone expect otherwise? Mozilla is an organization which has lost its purpose. It keeps chasing fads, copying the work of others, wasting money on projects that no one needed or wanted, and can't seem to figure out what to do next. Mozilla's original goal was to ensure there was an open web. Internet Explorer and Microsoft were in danger of turning the web into a monopoly. Firefox provided the fireblock to prevent this from happening. Problem is that once they accomplished that goal, they didn't know what to do next.
I like Firefox and use it as my primary browser. It's a decent albeit imperfect bit of software. But if Mozilla really wants to make a difference they need to focus on solving actual problems instead of trying to do a second rate version of whatever Google is working on this week. They need to focus on a specific problem and do it really well. They did that for a while with browser software. Time to genuinely focus on something new.
So, because something can be used to commit a crime, that is sufficient reason to assume that it is?
It's not sufficient reason by itself in most cases. But generally there is more to the story than just the existence of a tool.
Guns can be used to commit a crime too. A lot of crime involves a gun. But we don't ban those, right?
Umm, yeah actually a lot of places do. Not surprisingly those same places tend to have much lower rates of deaths and injuries from firearms and fewer crimes committed using one.
There is an intentionality to most tools. For a firearm their designed purpose is to injure/kill. That IS what they were designed to do. Sometimes there are defensible reasons to use a gun for its intended purpose (hunting, self defense, etc) but when the purpose of a tool is to injure some care in its use and handling is in order. Other tools like a hammer have less specific purposes - while a hammer can be used to injure that isn't the primary designed purpose of one. We don't have arguments about hammers because their designed purpose is typically not to cause physical harm to another.
Similarly when a tool is purpose built with a particular job, it is generally safe to presume that the tool will be used for that purpose absent evidence to the contrary. If it happens to have other uses then those should be taken into consideration when evaluating if a crime is being committed. It seems clear that the purpose of these ripping sites is to commit copyright infringement. Now you may not have an ethical problem with that and that's possibly a reasonable position to take but it IS a tool which is primarily being used to commit a crime under current law.
Hell, when I was about 12yrs, I went into a high end audio shop at the time, and heard my first pair of Klipschorns hooked to a McIntosh tube amp...and was hooked.
While there is nothing wrong with appreciating high quality sound, being willing to pay big $ for it makes you something of an outlier among the General Public.
But I wasn't the stand out of my day...all of my friends for the most part worked for and bought good stereos for home.
They did so because that was the fashion of the day. I seriously doubt many of them were audiophiles. Most young people I've ever met with expensive home stereos tend to listen to them at volumes that will ensure loss of hearing so that they will never be able to appreciate quality sound. In my college dorms 20+ years ago it was de-rigeur to have a ridiculously oversized stereo and to play it at volumes that would wake the dead. Subtle details of the sound were not important. Some of them were actually genuinely nice pieces of kit but that wasn't why anyone bought them.
So, wondering when the masses stopped caring at all about how the music sounded?
Why do you assume they ever really cared? People want to listen to music that evokes an emotion in them. For most the quality of the sound is largely incidental to this. Nobody really gives a crap if the latest Brittney Spears album has amazing fidelity.