Coal is such a red herring regardless, as it's been dying, keeps dying, and there's not realistically anything that's going to save it.
Sadly I wouldn't be so fast to erect a tombstone on coal just yet. Several reasons: 1) Coal is incredibly abundant in the US (we are the Saudi Arabia of coal) and abundant supply tends to equal cheap 2) Never underestimate a strong political lobby regardless of the absurdity of their positions (see NRA) 3) Lots of idiot voters in the US who think money (regardless of source) is more important than breathable air and habitable climate 4) Solar and wind are coming on strong but aren't a slam dunk obvious economic choice just yet 5) We don't have anything that can fully replace coal in the next 50 years aside from nuclear and nuclear is a political dead end. 6) Partisan politics in Washington on the right that is suspicious of anything favored by "those hippies on the left" regardless of actual merit
Ahh but they do as a general proposition. They have to be enclosed in some sort of packaging which necessarily adds weight and bulk. Might not be a lot but it's definitely more than zero. Plus there has to be additional structure to accommodate the now bulkier enclosure for the batteries with a safety margin if you are swapping batteries in the field. I'm not saying it's going to be a vast amount of weight but the number will almost certainly be significant and will affect performance.
The bigger problem though isn't the idea of swapping battery packs even in light of the extra bulk/weight. That might be worth the tradeoff in the end. No the real problem is the economics and logistics of it. Airport gates would have to be totally redesigned to accommodate this completely new fueling system, the logistics of getting the batteries charged and where needed would need to be worked out, the batteries would need to be available everywhere the plane flies and preferably standardized to keep costs down. The economic problems are perhaps a bigger obstacle than the technical ones.
Airplanes spend enough time sitting on the ground that a typical fast charge period is not a hardship anyway, so who cares?
Sometimes they do but turnaround time on a lot of commercial aircraft is often less than 1 hour. That's not nearly enough time to recharge in a lot of cases given the current (and near future) state of the art in battery tech - at least if you want the batteries to last. Don't get me wrong, if they can get the charge times down along with the power/weight of the battery packs enough to make it all work I'm all about it. I just think it's going to be many years (if ever) before a battery electric plane is a realistic technology in day to day use and I'm pretty confident that aviation is going to be one of the last places we see battery-electric vehicles.
Only a fax provides positive confirmation that a message was received in good order.
No it does not. It provides confirmation that the message was delivered to a particular fax machine but provides no information beyond that, including whether or not it printed legibly on the other end.
When a person is making a six figure investment both sides need to have the confidence that information was sent AND received as intended.
If that's the goal a fax is definitely not the technology you want. You have absolutely no idea who picked up that piece of paper on the other end and what they did with it. Might have gone straight to the trash for all you know. Pretending that a fax is some sort of reliable means of logging communications is absurd.
Given the fractured nature of healthcare in the U.S., getting everyone on the same page regarding encryption and certificates is more or less impossible.
It's only impossible in the sense that it would require an act of our currently dysfunctional congress. Congress could make a standard required with the stroke of a pen and everyone would have to get on board. It really wouldn't be all that hard. But of course we have elected a quorum of of asshats who think that somehow this would be a bad thing.
Which is good but it tells us that she learned in a way that was compatible with how academia generally tests. It says little about how well she will do outside of school.
She actually couldn't change a light bulb in her room without help. One time, she admitted she "didn't know how many ounces were in a pound".
Most people in the world don't know how many ounces are in a pound. Outside of a few niche tasks it's not a particularly useful bit of information. Outside of America it's utterly useless information. My wife is an MD and extremely smart and I'm pretty sure she'd have to look that conversion up.
She can't cook.
So what? Lots of people are shitty cooks including a huge proportion of men I know. I know people who are CEOs of large companies who would struggle to boil water. Cooking is a skill that can be learned. Not everyone gives a shit about it and not everyone needs to be good at it.
She's a math teacher in high school.
So clearly she's good at something. I would wager we could find some shit you don't do very well too. Someone who is good at math but can't cook more valuable to society than someone who can cook but is shitty at math.
Of course it can. The problem is that schools very rarely actually do this. The ability to memorize and regurgitate data is a useful skill but it is HUGELY over valued in academia and has relatively little to do with performance in most real world jobs. Merit and ability come in many flavors and academia only addresses a narrow subset of them.
Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house. The schools nearby are mediocre at best on a good day.
Bullshit. I live in a place with pretty high property taxes and I pay about $6-8K per year in property taxes. If you're going to make shit up at least make the numbers believable. If you actually pay that kind of money in property taxes you are more than wealthy enough to afford a private school.
I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now would only add further insult and injury to the insult and and injury I already (and my kid) suffer in the pubLic schools.
So clearly this is a lie/troll. I am on staff at my local high school and none of the teachers make anywhere near six figures. There may be a few that do in some parts of the country but most make FAR less than six figures. Furthermore it never seems to occur to anyone that you get what you pay for. Talented people tend to go where there is good pay and if you pay your teachers shit you are going to get teachers who are too shitty for other jobs and the people you want teaching your kids will go do jobs where they can make a decent living. Pay shit wages and you get shit talent. That's true in pretty much every industry.
More money will not hire better teachers until the evil af teachers unions are destroyed.
Right because better pay never attracts better talent. Better to pay peanuts and ensure that all the talented people go to other jobs instead of educating your children. Instead let's make it so we can fire teachers the moment they teach a topic that is unpopular with the religious nutjobs or some other fringe group.
You have kids? You pay property taxes?
I do and from your post pretty clearly you do not.
I recently visited a retirement home, for a community event which was held there. Nobody knew me there, and I didn't talk to or identify myself to anyone, I just listened. Shortly afterwards, I started seeing ads for the retirement home in my Android phone browser. I can only conclude that Google is sharing my GPS location with advertisers...
That's certainly a reasonable conclusion. On the other hand you don't have the evidence to rule out coincidence. It could be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc since we humans are wired to see patterns to the point we see them even when they don't actually exist. Don't get me wrong, I think you are likely correct but it's not a certainty.
With automation, maybe they only need a crew of one. They can autoland at the nearest airport if something happens to the human.
Not any time soon. You are hugely overestimating the state of the art in automation. Co-pilots are going to be a thing in commercial aviation for the foreseeable future. Its unlikely automation is going to advance to the point where co-pilots are redundant any time soon.
I'm sure larger versions of this will be built, too. Even two or three more passengers means a significant change in the economics.
A) it's not obvious that larger versions are feasible. The power to weight issues with electric motors and batteries don't scale linearly. B) A handful of extra passengers doesn't change the economics wildly. C) What matter is the total amount of cargo the plane can carry (including passengers) for what distance and at what cost. Basically $/km/kg. Any discussion that does not involve cost+weight+distance is a waste of time.
Wow, it's like nobody has ever thought about multiple battery packs that can be swapped.
Wow, it's like you never thought about the fact that swappable battery packs weigh more than ones that aren't and that weigh matters a LOT on an aircraft.
Do you have any idea how much new infrastructure would be required to swap battery packs at the gate of a terminal? How much the extra structure and weight the aircraft has to carry to facilitate swapping? Swapping battery packs the size we are talking about here is a huge logistical and engineering problem. Maybe it can be made to work but it isn't obvious that it's a good solution.
Not with my own eyes, no. And according to the data neither have you. I have however seen literally dozens of gasoline powered cars burning by the side of the road over the last half century however with my own eyes and there were about 174,000 vehicle fires in the US in 2015 versus 40 total Teslas ever.
An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge and replace many of the turboprops and light jets in use now -- flying almost as far and almost as fast but for a fraction of the running costs -- could be in service within three years.
Any discussion of distance traveled in an aircraft without also indicating the weight of the cargo (including passengers) it can carry is either marketing hype or fanboyism. This is EXACTLY the same problem discussions of flying cars have. The problem isn't getting something aloft. The problem is getting something aloft that can do something useful and do it reliably and economically. Batteries are (currently) heavy and they stay heavy no matter their charge state.
Another problem. So let's say it can go 621 miles as indicated for argument's sake. Great. How long does it take to recharge because turnaround time in commercial aviation is an important economic issue. If the plane can only fly once per day it's not going to be economical to operate even if the fuel is free.
Are they trying to imitate Apple, and get their Software and Hardware offerings more "integrated"?
Short answer is yes. And it's probably the right thing to do (from Microsoft's perspective) for their Surface products.
Unfortunately, that model doesn't work for Windows, because it must work on widely-disparate Hardware.
Which is why Microsoft has started designing and selling their own hardware. Then they can control the stack and it also helps keep third party vendors from getting too crazy. There is no principled reason Microsoft cannot sell a tightly integrated device similar to Apple.
They can't even COPY Apple's business-model correctly.
Lately Apple has been having trouble with Apple's business model.
Snark aside, Microsoft seldom really copied Apple's business model, even on occasions when perhaps they should have. I'm not really sure why people persist in thinking Microsoft slavishly copies Apple. Their business models are quite different and their products are typically markedly different as are their customer bases. They compete but they cooperate a fair bit too. Yeah Apple accused them of "copying" the Mac GUI but one only has to use Windows for about 10 seconds to realize the similarities don't go very deep. Yes they are both GUIs but the interfaces are wildly different and always have been.
It's always entertaining to watch Apple fanboys rationalize Apple's mediocre, overpriced offerings.
Oh aren't you precious. Whether or not 4G congestion is a problem has nothing to do with Apple or fanboys. Either there are too many handsets for a tower to handle or there are not. If you want to refute the argument I made (which didn't mention or reference Apple even once) then please provide the evidence.
It's always entertaining to watch idiots resort to trolling people by accusing them of being fanboys when they have no actual evidence to support their argument.
If you read through the comments here you'll see that people are already experiencing congested 4G.
I think that most people have no actual data to support that hypothesis outside of some corner cases. They just have a bad/slow connection and presume that must be the cause even thought they have no actual evidence to support that hypothesis. They can't rule it out so they are making an argument from ignorance. The cellular providers aren't making congestion data available publicly so it's not clear in most cases how they would know with any real certainty. Just because your phone is having a slow/bad connection does not automatically mean network congestion is the issue. Furthermore I'm quite certain most of the people here have not really done any meaningful testing to verify their theory.
In any case it isn't going to get markedly worse in the next 12 months outside of some rare corner cases.
While not on the verge of bankruptcy, it will never be a cash generating machine in the current competitive environment.
That is not true at all. Amazon retail generates HUGE cash flow. Amazon's operating cash flow is enormous. Amazon also has a negative cash conversion cycle, meaning they pay their suppliers WEEKS later than they get paid. Very few companies achieve this happy state of affairs and none of their major competitors (including Walmart) can match them on this.
Don't confuse operating cash flow with profit. Amazon generates excellent operating cash flow but then they plow it back into the company to grow so their profit margins look weak.
AWS is a high margin monster with limited competition and a high degree of lock-in and network effects. These tend to be sustainable sources of value/returns.
All true as well though I disagree that there is limited competition. Google and Microsoft are pretty serious competitors and they aren't the only ones.
As of right now, anyone investing in AWS has to take the risk that AWS profits will be funneled off to cover losses in Amazon's retail business
Amazon makes nearly as much profit from their US retail business as they do from AWS. Don't take my word for it, see their financial statements. The only place they are losing money is their international retail business which they are trying to grow with mixed results. In 2017 Amazon made a profit of $2.8B from their retail operations, $4.3B from AWS and lost about $3B in international operations which was increased substantially from the previous year due to infrastructure investments. (in 2016 their international ops only lost $1.2B)
It is not uncommon for conglomerates to be worth more separate than together.
Amazon isn't a conglomerate in the traditional sense like GE or Siemens. You are correct but sometimes the whole is greater than the parts. See Berkshire Hathaway...
A credible business school professor who correctly predicted that Amazon would buy Whole Foods now says an AWS spinoff is inevitable.
Just because he guessed right once doesn't mean he'll guess right again. And I don't think Bezos gives a shit what short term windfall shareholders might want.
While a spinoff is certainly a possibility, I don't think it will happen any time soon. Part of the reason Amazon was able to make that business work is because it makes use of excess capacity on servers they already had to buy for other purposes. There also is something of a dog-fooding component to the business where Amazon learns what works and what doesn't on their own business which has some obvious utility. Now AWS has become kind of its own thing rather than a way to just use excess servers but there still is a lot of benefit to them to have both under the same roof.
I do think that AWS will be a huge business and possibly eventually much bigger than their retail operations. But for the near future I think there is much too much synergy between them to justify a spinoff.
It may happen faster than you think. Many cellular networks plan on retiring their older 2G and 3G kit for 5G.
I'm sure it will happen fairly fast but it isn't going to happen in just 12-18 months. This is people making a mountain out of a molehill. Apple has to build well over a hundred million iPhones each year and there is a development lead time and supply chain lead time. It takes time to design and source components in those sorts of volumes. Since 5G hasn't even hit the market yet, it would be a big risk for Apple to roll that out before the network technology is finalized and being installed and the rollout is going to take much longer than a year anyway. This is just pragmatism.
The problem is that as more people overload 4G networks, the solution will be the 5G networks and Apple users will be stuck with overloaded 4G networks.
Apple's going to move to 5G, just evidently not in the next 12 months. The rollout will take FAR longer than that so it's a sensible decision. I'm sure they'll be offering a 5G iPhone long before the scenario you outline comes to pass. 4G networks aren't going to get overloaded in the next 12-18 months.
Odd that Apple, which in the past has been eager to embrace new technology such as Lightning, USB C, etc. (some would say before its time) now is a laggard.
Apple isn't so much eager to embrace new tech as they are to get rid of old. They are rarely the first to a new technology but they are influential so they tend to be a trendsetter for the broader market. Once Apple invests in a technology they often turn it into a standard. Perhaps more importantly they also sometimes kill old standards. Floppy discs hung around for about a decade after they should have until Apple pulled the plug on them. Plenty of other examples.
Lightning isn't really new tech aside from the physical connector. It's just proprietary tech and honestly it should go away in favor of USB-C.
One thing to keep in mind with Apple and the iPhone. They really cannot be at the bleeding edge because the unit volumes they sell are so large. Anything they put into the iPhone they have to be able to reliably source tens or hundreds of millions of unit of that component. That inherently limits how close to the state of the art they can get. It's not a big deal to source 10,000 or even 100,000 electrical components (that's what I do for a living) but when you start talking numbers like 200 million, it becomes a big problem. The most cutting edge stuff just isn't usually available in that sort of volume.
Much of the increase has been traced to sinecure positions, a word coming from the old school church where the church created paid positions "without care" to the core mission of soul saving. I.e. graft.
I think you have no idea what universities spend their money on because the data doesn't support your position at all. Growth in tenured positions has been falling and salaries of professors barely keep pace with inflation in recent years. There are reasons for increasing college costs but not the ones you seem to believe.
Here, it is without care to the core mission of teaching.
What makes you think the core mission of every university is teaching? For some that is certainly true but it's definitely not true for a lot of big research universities. The teaching is almost just a little side hustle for them and only accounts for about 30% of costs. Universities are a lot more than some classrooms and blackboards.
Congress can stop these increases overnight by refusing to guarantee any loans for universities that increase spending more than inflation.
That's an idiotic idea for reasons almost too numerous to enumerate. I don't think you understand what inflation is. The rate of inflation has nothing to do with what causes university costs to increase or decrease nor is it a useful benchmark in most cases. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to increase costs more than the rate of inflation, some of which are not under the control of the university.
The explosion of administration staff is both surprising and absurd.
Absurd perhaps but not terribly surprising. A lot of the administration is for stuff that doesn't have much to do with classroom work. Universities aren't just a bunch of lecture halls. They have research, they have conferences, they have semi-pro sports, they have technology transfer, and a lot more. Look at the effect of the Bayh Dole Act on university research funding. That made a HUGE impact on the business model of universities. (and yes, universities are businesses) Universities are complex entities with a lot going on that you probably don't directly interact with but that requires a lot of administration to function.
That used to be true but why would you think it would be true any longer?
Because the evidence shows that it remains true as a general proposition. Not all cases of course. There are a lot of people going to college who probably shouldn't be there and there are courses of study where it's hard to see the return on investment being positive in a reasonable time frame. But the data clearly shows that even with the high (and rising) prices college degrees still very often represent a good investment thanks to the increased earning potential. Ironically this increased earning has less to do with the actual education received than from the piece of paper one gets at the end but that's another discussion.
So how can you possibly think the person with $200-$500k of debt can ever catch up?
Because they make a LOT more money than they would otherwise. A 4 year degree can add over a million dollars to your career earnings which more than makes up for the cost of the diploma. And let's be honest, very few students incur half a million in student debt.
The thing that totally tears down the "lifetime earnings" argument is that workplaces no longer seriously consider degrees.
Don't know where you got that idea but go talk to your local HR professionals if you continue to believe this. Having a college degree matters. A lot. For a lot of jobs. Some people manage to do well without one but the data doesn't lie. Having a college diploma makes a big difference for a lot of people.
The delay may make it easier for rivals like Samsung Electronics to win over consumers to phones that connect to 5G networks, which will provide a leap forward in mobile data speeds when they are introduced in 2019.
5G networks may be introduced in 2019 but they are hardly going to be ubiquitous. It's going to take years for them to roll out to cover the amount of area current 4G and LTE networks cover now. Samsung might be able to poach some customers from Apple but it's not going to be a mass exodus even in the worst case. The only thing that will get people to shift away from Apple in large numbers is if Apple produces a weapons grade stinker of an iPhone.
Are students being short-changed by their $60,000 degree courses?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. I think a better question is whether we are doing a good job directing people into schooling options appropriate for both the needs of the individual and society. For some reason we tend to look down on trade schools and anything else besides a 4+ year degree despite the fact that many jobs really don't require such education. Not everyone needs a 4 year college degree but we funnel a lot of people into college who probably don't need to be there.
And does a university education in 2018 represent good value for money?
It certainly can. The lifetime earning increase from a college degree very often substantially outweighs the cost of tuition. Not to mention that there are quite a few jobs you simple cannot get without having earned a college degree. I'm an engineer (among other things) and good luck getting a job as an engineer without a college degree. It's possible but really, really hard at most companies.
But do universities offer good value for students? Not when you consider the fact less than half the money that students pay in tuition fees is actually spent on teaching. The rest of the money from tuition fees goes into other services and parts of the administration.
That's kind of a dumb argument. Educating a large student body inherently comes with a lot of overhead. Let me use an analogy closer to the heart of many people here. Only about 10-25% of the cost of developing a piece of software is the actual engineering and code writing. The overwhelming majority of the cost to the company is in sales and administration. This isn't a good or bad thing, it's just how the numbers fall out. When you have a student body of 50,000 students, you need a lot of administrative staff to manage that. There is a lot more to teaching students than just doing a few lectures. That's not to say all schools manage their money effectively but the notion that administration isn't going to be pretty substantial at a large university is absurd.
Not to mention, teaching is only part of what universities do and arguably not even really their main purpose. They also are in many cases research institutions which has little to nothing directly to do with educating students but still carries very real costs. Part of student tuition often goes to pay for part of this even though the students may see little to no direct benefit from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Coal is such a red herring regardless, as it's been dying, keeps dying, and there's not realistically anything that's going to save it.
Sadly I wouldn't be so fast to erect a tombstone on coal just yet. Several reasons:
1) Coal is incredibly abundant in the US (we are the Saudi Arabia of coal) and abundant supply tends to equal cheap
2) Never underestimate a strong political lobby regardless of the absurdity of their positions (see NRA)
3) Lots of idiot voters in the US who think money (regardless of source) is more important than breathable air and habitable climate
4) Solar and wind are coming on strong but aren't a slam dunk obvious economic choice just yet
5) We don't have anything that can fully replace coal in the next 50 years aside from nuclear and nuclear is a political dead end.
6) Partisan politics in Washington on the right that is suspicious of anything favored by "those hippies on the left" regardless of actual merit
Swappable packs don't necessarily weigh more
Ahh but they do as a general proposition. They have to be enclosed in some sort of packaging which necessarily adds weight and bulk. Might not be a lot but it's definitely more than zero. Plus there has to be additional structure to accommodate the now bulkier enclosure for the batteries with a safety margin if you are swapping batteries in the field. I'm not saying it's going to be a vast amount of weight but the number will almost certainly be significant and will affect performance.
The bigger problem though isn't the idea of swapping battery packs even in light of the extra bulk/weight. That might be worth the tradeoff in the end. No the real problem is the economics and logistics of it. Airport gates would have to be totally redesigned to accommodate this completely new fueling system, the logistics of getting the batteries charged and where needed would need to be worked out, the batteries would need to be available everywhere the plane flies and preferably standardized to keep costs down. The economic problems are perhaps a bigger obstacle than the technical ones.
Airplanes spend enough time sitting on the ground that a typical fast charge period is not a hardship anyway, so who cares?
Sometimes they do but turnaround time on a lot of commercial aircraft is often less than 1 hour. That's not nearly enough time to recharge in a lot of cases given the current (and near future) state of the art in battery tech - at least if you want the batteries to last. Don't get me wrong, if they can get the charge times down along with the power/weight of the battery packs enough to make it all work I'm all about it. I just think it's going to be many years (if ever) before a battery electric plane is a realistic technology in day to day use and I'm pretty confident that aviation is going to be one of the last places we see battery-electric vehicles.
Only a fax provides positive confirmation that a message was received in good order.
No it does not. It provides confirmation that the message was delivered to a particular fax machine but provides no information beyond that, including whether or not it printed legibly on the other end.
When a person is making a six figure investment both sides need to have the confidence that information was sent AND received as intended.
If that's the goal a fax is definitely not the technology you want. You have absolutely no idea who picked up that piece of paper on the other end and what they did with it. Might have gone straight to the trash for all you know. Pretending that a fax is some sort of reliable means of logging communications is absurd.
Given the fractured nature of healthcare in the U.S., getting everyone on the same page regarding encryption and certificates is more or less impossible.
It's only impossible in the sense that it would require an act of our currently dysfunctional congress. Congress could make a standard required with the stroke of a pen and everyone would have to get on board. It really wouldn't be all that hard. But of course we have elected a quorum of of asshats who think that somehow this would be a bad thing.
My niece was a straight A student.
Which is good but it tells us that she learned in a way that was compatible with how academia generally tests. It says little about how well she will do outside of school.
She actually couldn't change a light bulb in her room without help. One time, she admitted she "didn't know how many ounces were in a pound".
Most people in the world don't know how many ounces are in a pound. Outside of a few niche tasks it's not a particularly useful bit of information. Outside of America it's utterly useless information. My wife is an MD and extremely smart and I'm pretty sure she'd have to look that conversion up.
She can't cook.
So what? Lots of people are shitty cooks including a huge proportion of men I know. I know people who are CEOs of large companies who would struggle to boil water. Cooking is a skill that can be learned. Not everyone gives a shit about it and not everyone needs to be good at it.
She's a math teacher in high school.
So clearly she's good at something. I would wager we could find some shit you don't do very well too. Someone who is good at math but can't cook more valuable to society than someone who can cook but is shitty at math.
Merit and ability can be tested for.
Of course it can. The problem is that schools very rarely actually do this. The ability to memorize and regurgitate data is a useful skill but it is HUGELY over valued in academia and has relatively little to do with performance in most real world jobs. Merit and ability come in many flavors and academia only addresses a narrow subset of them.
Escuse me but fuck you I just paid $25k in property taxes for a 3br, 2 bath house. The schools nearby are mediocre at best on a good day.
Bullshit. I live in a place with pretty high property taxes and I pay about $6-8K per year in property taxes. If you're going to make shit up at least make the numbers believable. If you actually pay that kind of money in property taxes you are more than wealthy enough to afford a private school.
I have met my daughters teachers. Paying them even more than the 6 figures they make now would only add further insult and injury to the insult and and injury I already (and my kid) suffer in the pubLic schools.
So clearly this is a lie/troll. I am on staff at my local high school and none of the teachers make anywhere near six figures. There may be a few that do in some parts of the country but most make FAR less than six figures. Furthermore it never seems to occur to anyone that you get what you pay for. Talented people tend to go where there is good pay and if you pay your teachers shit you are going to get teachers who are too shitty for other jobs and the people you want teaching your kids will go do jobs where they can make a decent living. Pay shit wages and you get shit talent. That's true in pretty much every industry.
More money will not hire better teachers until the evil af teachers unions are destroyed.
Right because better pay never attracts better talent. Better to pay peanuts and ensure that all the talented people go to other jobs instead of educating your children. Instead let's make it so we can fire teachers the moment they teach a topic that is unpopular with the religious nutjobs or some other fringe group.
You have kids? You pay property taxes?
I do and from your post pretty clearly you do not.
I recently visited a retirement home, for a community event which was held there. Nobody knew me there, and I didn't talk to or identify myself to anyone, I just listened. Shortly afterwards, I started seeing ads for the retirement home in my Android phone browser. I can only conclude that Google is sharing my GPS location with advertisers...
That's certainly a reasonable conclusion. On the other hand you don't have the evidence to rule out coincidence. It could be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc since we humans are wired to see patterns to the point we see them even when they don't actually exist. Don't get me wrong, I think you are likely correct but it's not a certainty.
With automation, maybe they only need a crew of one. They can autoland at the nearest airport if something happens to the human.
Not any time soon. You are hugely overestimating the state of the art in automation. Co-pilots are going to be a thing in commercial aviation for the foreseeable future. Its unlikely automation is going to advance to the point where co-pilots are redundant any time soon.
I'm sure larger versions of this will be built, too. Even two or three more passengers means a significant change in the economics.
A) it's not obvious that larger versions are feasible. The power to weight issues with electric motors and batteries don't scale linearly.
B) A handful of extra passengers doesn't change the economics wildly.
C) What matter is the total amount of cargo the plane can carry (including passengers) for what distance and at what cost. Basically $/km/kg. Any discussion that does not involve cost+weight+distance is a waste of time.
Wow, it's like nobody has ever thought about multiple battery packs that can be swapped.
Wow, it's like you never thought about the fact that swappable battery packs weigh more than ones that aren't and that weigh matters a LOT on an aircraft.
Do you have any idea how much new infrastructure would be required to swap battery packs at the gate of a terminal? How much the extra structure and weight the aircraft has to carry to facilitate swapping? Swapping battery packs the size we are talking about here is a huge logistical and engineering problem. Maybe it can be made to work but it isn't obvious that it's a good solution.
Ever seen a Tesla battery pack go up in flames?
Not with my own eyes, no. And according to the data neither have you. I have however seen literally dozens of gasoline powered cars burning by the side of the road over the last half century however with my own eyes and there were about 174,000 vehicle fires in the US in 2015 versus 40 total Teslas ever.
An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge and replace many of the turboprops and light jets in use now -- flying almost as far and almost as fast but for a fraction of the running costs -- could be in service within three years.
Any discussion of distance traveled in an aircraft without also indicating the weight of the cargo (including passengers) it can carry is either marketing hype or fanboyism. This is EXACTLY the same problem discussions of flying cars have. The problem isn't getting something aloft. The problem is getting something aloft that can do something useful and do it reliably and economically. Batteries are (currently) heavy and they stay heavy no matter their charge state.
Another problem. So let's say it can go 621 miles as indicated for argument's sake. Great. How long does it take to recharge because turnaround time in commercial aviation is an important economic issue. If the plane can only fly once per day it's not going to be economical to operate even if the fuel is free.
Are they trying to imitate Apple, and get their Software and Hardware offerings more "integrated"?
Short answer is yes. And it's probably the right thing to do (from Microsoft's perspective) for their Surface products.
Unfortunately, that model doesn't work for Windows, because it must work on widely-disparate Hardware.
Which is why Microsoft has started designing and selling their own hardware. Then they can control the stack and it also helps keep third party vendors from getting too crazy. There is no principled reason Microsoft cannot sell a tightly integrated device similar to Apple.
They can't even COPY Apple's business-model correctly.
Lately Apple has been having trouble with Apple's business model.
Snark aside, Microsoft seldom really copied Apple's business model, even on occasions when perhaps they should have. I'm not really sure why people persist in thinking Microsoft slavishly copies Apple. Their business models are quite different and their products are typically markedly different as are their customer bases. They compete but they cooperate a fair bit too. Yeah Apple accused them of "copying" the Mac GUI but one only has to use Windows for about 10 seconds to realize the similarities don't go very deep. Yes they are both GUIs but the interfaces are wildly different and always have been.
And who gets to decide if you've "provided as much technical assistance and information as possible"?
The prosecutor charging you with a crime presumably.
And on what basis will they make the decision?
Whether they got the information they were looking for of course.
It's always entertaining to watch Apple fanboys rationalize Apple's mediocre, overpriced offerings.
Oh aren't you precious. Whether or not 4G congestion is a problem has nothing to do with Apple or fanboys. Either there are too many handsets for a tower to handle or there are not. If you want to refute the argument I made (which didn't mention or reference Apple even once) then please provide the evidence.
It's always entertaining to watch idiots resort to trolling people by accusing them of being fanboys when they have no actual evidence to support their argument.
If you read through the comments here you'll see that people are already experiencing congested 4G.
I think that most people have no actual data to support that hypothesis outside of some corner cases. They just have a bad/slow connection and presume that must be the cause even thought they have no actual evidence to support that hypothesis. They can't rule it out so they are making an argument from ignorance. The cellular providers aren't making congestion data available publicly so it's not clear in most cases how they would know with any real certainty. Just because your phone is having a slow/bad connection does not automatically mean network congestion is the issue. Furthermore I'm quite certain most of the people here have not really done any meaningful testing to verify their theory.
In any case it isn't going to get markedly worse in the next 12 months outside of some rare corner cases.
While not on the verge of bankruptcy, it will never be a cash generating machine in the current competitive environment.
That is not true at all. Amazon retail generates HUGE cash flow. Amazon's operating cash flow is enormous. Amazon also has a negative cash conversion cycle, meaning they pay their suppliers WEEKS later than they get paid. Very few companies achieve this happy state of affairs and none of their major competitors (including Walmart) can match them on this.
Don't confuse operating cash flow with profit. Amazon generates excellent operating cash flow but then they plow it back into the company to grow so their profit margins look weak.
AWS is a high margin monster with limited competition and a high degree of lock-in and network effects. These tend to be sustainable sources of value/returns.
All true as well though I disagree that there is limited competition. Google and Microsoft are pretty serious competitors and they aren't the only ones.
As of right now, anyone investing in AWS has to take the risk that AWS profits will be funneled off to cover losses in Amazon's retail business
Amazon makes nearly as much profit from their US retail business as they do from AWS. Don't take my word for it, see their financial statements. The only place they are losing money is their international retail business which they are trying to grow with mixed results. In 2017 Amazon made a profit of $2.8B from their retail operations, $4.3B from AWS and lost about $3B in international operations which was increased substantially from the previous year due to infrastructure investments. (in 2016 their international ops only lost $1.2B)
It is not uncommon for conglomerates to be worth more separate than together.
Amazon isn't a conglomerate in the traditional sense like GE or Siemens. You are correct but sometimes the whole is greater than the parts. See Berkshire Hathaway...
A credible business school professor who correctly predicted that Amazon would buy Whole Foods now says an AWS spinoff is inevitable.
Just because he guessed right once doesn't mean he'll guess right again. And I don't think Bezos gives a shit what short term windfall shareholders might want.
While a spinoff is certainly a possibility, I don't think it will happen any time soon. Part of the reason Amazon was able to make that business work is because it makes use of excess capacity on servers they already had to buy for other purposes. There also is something of a dog-fooding component to the business where Amazon learns what works and what doesn't on their own business which has some obvious utility. Now AWS has become kind of its own thing rather than a way to just use excess servers but there still is a lot of benefit to them to have both under the same roof.
I do think that AWS will be a huge business and possibly eventually much bigger than their retail operations. But for the near future I think there is much too much synergy between them to justify a spinoff.
It may happen faster than you think. Many cellular networks plan on retiring their older 2G and 3G kit for 5G.
I'm sure it will happen fairly fast but it isn't going to happen in just 12-18 months. This is people making a mountain out of a molehill. Apple has to build well over a hundred million iPhones each year and there is a development lead time and supply chain lead time. It takes time to design and source components in those sorts of volumes. Since 5G hasn't even hit the market yet, it would be a big risk for Apple to roll that out before the network technology is finalized and being installed and the rollout is going to take much longer than a year anyway. This is just pragmatism.
The problem is that as more people overload 4G networks, the solution will be the 5G networks and Apple users will be stuck with overloaded 4G networks.
Apple's going to move to 5G, just evidently not in the next 12 months. The rollout will take FAR longer than that so it's a sensible decision. I'm sure they'll be offering a 5G iPhone long before the scenario you outline comes to pass. 4G networks aren't going to get overloaded in the next 12-18 months.
Odd that Apple, which in the past has been eager to embrace new technology such as Lightning, USB C, etc. (some would say before its time) now is a laggard.
Apple isn't so much eager to embrace new tech as they are to get rid of old. They are rarely the first to a new technology but they are influential so they tend to be a trendsetter for the broader market. Once Apple invests in a technology they often turn it into a standard. Perhaps more importantly they also sometimes kill old standards. Floppy discs hung around for about a decade after they should have until Apple pulled the plug on them. Plenty of other examples.
Lightning isn't really new tech aside from the physical connector. It's just proprietary tech and honestly it should go away in favor of USB-C.
One thing to keep in mind with Apple and the iPhone. They really cannot be at the bleeding edge because the unit volumes they sell are so large. Anything they put into the iPhone they have to be able to reliably source tens or hundreds of millions of unit of that component. That inherently limits how close to the state of the art they can get. It's not a big deal to source 10,000 or even 100,000 electrical components (that's what I do for a living) but when you start talking numbers like 200 million, it becomes a big problem. The most cutting edge stuff just isn't usually available in that sort of volume.
Much of the increase has been traced to sinecure positions, a word coming from the old school church where the church created paid positions "without care" to the core mission of soul saving. I.e. graft.
I think you have no idea what universities spend their money on because the data doesn't support your position at all. Growth in tenured positions has been falling and salaries of professors barely keep pace with inflation in recent years. There are reasons for increasing college costs but not the ones you seem to believe.
Here, it is without care to the core mission of teaching.
What makes you think the core mission of every university is teaching? For some that is certainly true but it's definitely not true for a lot of big research universities. The teaching is almost just a little side hustle for them and only accounts for about 30% of costs. Universities are a lot more than some classrooms and blackboards.
Congress can stop these increases overnight by refusing to guarantee any loans for universities that increase spending more than inflation.
That's an idiotic idea for reasons almost too numerous to enumerate. I don't think you understand what inflation is. The rate of inflation has nothing to do with what causes university costs to increase or decrease nor is it a useful benchmark in most cases. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to increase costs more than the rate of inflation, some of which are not under the control of the university.
The explosion of administration staff is both surprising and absurd.
Absurd perhaps but not terribly surprising. A lot of the administration is for stuff that doesn't have much to do with classroom work. Universities aren't just a bunch of lecture halls. They have research, they have conferences, they have semi-pro sports, they have technology transfer, and a lot more. Look at the effect of the Bayh Dole Act on university research funding. That made a HUGE impact on the business model of universities. (and yes, universities are businesses) Universities are complex entities with a lot going on that you probably don't directly interact with but that requires a lot of administration to function.
That used to be true but why would you think it would be true any longer?
Because the evidence shows that it remains true as a general proposition. Not all cases of course. There are a lot of people going to college who probably shouldn't be there and there are courses of study where it's hard to see the return on investment being positive in a reasonable time frame. But the data clearly shows that even with the high (and rising) prices college degrees still very often represent a good investment thanks to the increased earning potential. Ironically this increased earning has less to do with the actual education received than from the piece of paper one gets at the end but that's another discussion.
So how can you possibly think the person with $200-$500k of debt can ever catch up?
Because they make a LOT more money than they would otherwise. A 4 year degree can add over a million dollars to your career earnings which more than makes up for the cost of the diploma. And let's be honest, very few students incur half a million in student debt.
The thing that totally tears down the "lifetime earnings" argument is that workplaces no longer seriously consider degrees.
Don't know where you got that idea but go talk to your local HR professionals if you continue to believe this. Having a college degree matters. A lot. For a lot of jobs. Some people manage to do well without one but the data doesn't lie. Having a college diploma makes a big difference for a lot of people.
The delay may make it easier for rivals like Samsung Electronics to win over consumers to phones that connect to 5G networks, which will provide a leap forward in mobile data speeds when they are introduced in 2019.
5G networks may be introduced in 2019 but they are hardly going to be ubiquitous. It's going to take years for them to roll out to cover the amount of area current 4G and LTE networks cover now. Samsung might be able to poach some customers from Apple but it's not going to be a mass exodus even in the worst case. The only thing that will get people to shift away from Apple in large numbers is if Apple produces a weapons grade stinker of an iPhone.
Are students being short-changed by their $60,000 degree courses?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. I think a better question is whether we are doing a good job directing people into schooling options appropriate for both the needs of the individual and society. For some reason we tend to look down on trade schools and anything else besides a 4+ year degree despite the fact that many jobs really don't require such education. Not everyone needs a 4 year college degree but we funnel a lot of people into college who probably don't need to be there.
And does a university education in 2018 represent good value for money?
It certainly can. The lifetime earning increase from a college degree very often substantially outweighs the cost of tuition. Not to mention that there are quite a few jobs you simple cannot get without having earned a college degree. I'm an engineer (among other things) and good luck getting a job as an engineer without a college degree. It's possible but really, really hard at most companies.
But do universities offer good value for students? Not when you consider the fact less than half the money that students pay in tuition fees is actually spent on teaching. The rest of the money from tuition fees goes into other services and parts of the administration.
That's kind of a dumb argument. Educating a large student body inherently comes with a lot of overhead. Let me use an analogy closer to the heart of many people here. Only about 10-25% of the cost of developing a piece of software is the actual engineering and code writing. The overwhelming majority of the cost to the company is in sales and administration. This isn't a good or bad thing, it's just how the numbers fall out. When you have a student body of 50,000 students, you need a lot of administrative staff to manage that. There is a lot more to teaching students than just doing a few lectures. That's not to say all schools manage their money effectively but the notion that administration isn't going to be pretty substantial at a large university is absurd.
Not to mention, teaching is only part of what universities do and arguably not even really their main purpose. They also are in many cases research institutions which has little to nothing directly to do with educating students but still carries very real costs. Part of student tuition often goes to pay for part of this even though the students may see little to no direct benefit from it.