That's true because DoE is the Department of Energy which has nothing to do with education.
They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.
What specific "bullshit federal regulations" are you referring to? The Department of Education by far the smallest cabinet department and with the exception of the No Child Left Behind act (mandated by CONGRESS) they really don't have much involvement in the day to day running of schools in the US. The ED coordinates federal assistance, enforces civil rights, and collects data. They are not heavily involved in determining curricula or standards (outside of NCLB), they do not accredit schools and compared to most countries the US is hugely decentralized in education.
There are some subject-matter-experts who are a genuine menace in the classroom(I suspect that most of us probably took at least one course in college from the TAs they shoved all the actual work of teaching the course onto.
I've had more that a few full tenure professors who had NO business lecturing to a classroom. In many of these cases I was actually glad when they handed off to a TA. I want the best teachers and could not care less if they are subject matter experts beyond the level of the class. The research most professors do has little or nothing to do with what they are teaching most of the time. Even when it is related the classroom stuff is so far below their research that it becomes irrelevant. I don't need a Nobel prize winner to teach me physics 101. I just want someone who is a very good lecturer and has an solid grasp of the material being taught at the level it is being taught.
That said, the notion that teaching theory is somehow a substitute for actually knowing the subject is an absurd and dangerous notion. Learning about driving in a classroom is no substitute for actually having spent time driving. I cannot fathom how anyone would thing a background in civics could possibly qualify someone to teach computer science no matter how good they are at the mechanics of teaching.
My biggest concern with AI is the same concern with automation: our economy is built on the assumption that labor is a scarce resource.
Labor is a scarce resource but not remotely the only one. Minerals and raw materials are scarce. So is energy. So is time, space, land, and imagination. Labor is an important constraint but hardly the only one. Furthermore even if you automate one activity, that doesn't make labor not-scarce in general. It just means that people start working on something else they didn't have time for previously. A few people suffer economically in the sort run from these sort of dislocations but over time scales of many years they are barely noticeable.
With increasing automation, that assumption is rapidly breaking down. As higher and higher level tasks require less and less people society is in trouble unless we can somehow modify our economic system to account for that breakdown.
It isn't remotely breaking down. Used to be that 90% of people spent their time farming. Once we figured out how to automate that activity we still need people doing it but most others could start doing other valuable activities that they didn't have time for previously. Same thing has happened (and is currently happening) with manufacturing. We need fewer people to do much of the work but we will always need some. Everyone else is moving on to other activities. There are an effectively unlimited number of economically valuable activities humans can do in the long run. Even humans that are of modest intelligence.
The AI we should be worried about include self driving cars, natural language processing, pattern recognition, and robotics. These technologies could combine to make a majority of humans unemployable. The don't do this by making humans unnecessary. They do it by making certain humans so productive that average people have no economic value.
For a person to become economically unviable a few things have to happen. 1) A machine has to match or exceed a typical worker's productivity AND flexibility AND trainability. 2) The machine has to be produced at such a low cost that the capital costs can be amortized over a very small number of units produced, possibly as small as 1. 3) There has to be no other economically valuable activity available to people replaced by automation. 4) There has to be no regulation restricting the use or application of automation.
Here's why I'm not worried: 1)I run a manufacturing company. I assure you that we are in NO danger of developing a machine that can exceed the flexibility and trainability of typical humans for a wide variety of tasks that a human of normal intellect can perform. Any such level of generalized automation is still a loooong way away and automation that is easy to use is even further. 2) Even if we do develop machines that are highly productive, flexible and easy to train, they will almost certainly be expensive. This means that low volume or complicated production or production that is outside the design parameters of the machine will continue to be done by humans. Any robot that would approach human level intellect and capability would be absurdly expensive and likely to remain so. 3) Even if we develop machines that are productive, flexible, trainable and very very cheap, there are an almost unlimited number of economically valuable activities available to people beyond what is being automated. 4) Even if the three items above come to pass, people can simply artificially make automation economically unviable via legislation.
Even with in the US, whether through malice or apathy, transferring money between accounts with different banks can take an absurd amount of time
How are you doing the transfer? Check? ACH? Wire Transfer? The faster you want the money moved the more it will cost. I can wire money to basically any account around the globe nearly instantly via Wire Transfer. If you send a check there is back end transaction processing (including security) to that method of money transfer - far more than most people appreciate. If you are a small customer writing a check and dealing with banks from different states then they might put a 7+ day hold on money transfers because of security reasons. Other money transfer methods have different transaction times but security and processing time will generally make it substantially longer than a few seconds.
Fans of bitcoin are under the delusion that bitcoin is cheaper but that's only true if you don't account for risk and availability. Bitcoin carries a lot of risk and it isn't widely accepted. To be widely accepted there would have to be a LOT of expensive infrastructure built up and a lot of regulatory burden which would evaporate any cost advantage it might have achieved by using the internet as a transaction backbone.
It worked out; but it seems as though banking is one of those things that gets more customer-hostile the lower you go.
If you are a small customer in ANY industry you are going to get worse customer service than big customers. You cost more to serve on a unit cost basis so you will get charged more for the same services. It's nothing personal it's just basic economics. It costs roughly the same to serve a $1million account as it does a $1,000 account. It's cheaper to serve one large customer than 1000 small ones.
As an investment, Bitcoin might still end up being a scam.
No need for the qualifier. Even if we accept that Bitcoin itself isn't a scam, Bitcoin routinely is used for scams and even when it is used honestly it's generally a terrible investment positively dripping with risk.
You do run a bit of currency risk but if you make many small transactions you'll lose some and win some, it's a quite okay facilitator of trade.
"A bit of currency risk"? Presumably you mean exchange rate risk and it is WAY more than "a bit" (no pun intended). Bitcoin is terribly volatile compared with traditional currencies so anyone who plans to hold it for any length of time is taking a LOT of exchange rate risk. If you hold it in an exchange you also are taking on agency risk, counterparty risk, and several other types of risk each of which is larger than for large traditional currencies like the dollar, yen or euro.
While it's hard to pin down the size of the secondary market in baseball cards, the daily "trading volume" in baseball cards is similar in size if not bigger most likely. (Sales of new cards are around $200 million/year and the secondary market is considerably larger) I know $50 million sounds like a lot but it really isn't even if the $50 million figure you cite is true.
But would not a computer be cheaper and better still?
Not necessarily and the reasons are usually based in economics. I run a manufacturing plant for my day job. Much of what we make in our plant can be substantially automated. The technology already exists and I could write a check to buy it tomorrow. But I don't most of the time. Why? No return on investment. For automation to make sense a few things have to happen. 1) The automation has to do a job with adequate or better competence than the people it is replacing. 2) The automation has to deliver unit costs lower than the wages that would be paid for the lifetime of the project. This has to include the opportunity cost of tying up that capital, the cost of financing, the loss of flexibility, and the risk of the project. It doesn't matter if you are producing widgets or passenger-miles or transporting cargo. You have to be able to recoup the cost of the automation. If you can't then there is no point in even developing it, much less buying it.
Generally speaking any kind of automation requires a relatively large amount of production volume to justify the higher up front costs and loss of flexibility. It's trivial to show cases where it does and doesn't make economic sense, both for manufacturing and for automated transportation. Computers are demonstrably not always cheaper. Full disclosure, I'm a certified cost accountant. I do these sort of calculations for a living. Computers are NOT necessarily cheaper or better.
What is the train-driver ("engineer") supposed to do, that a computer-program can not do?
Train engineers are effectively a pilot very much like the pilot for an airplane or a ship. Much of what they do can be and has been automated to some degree. In a few cases there are no human operators but not always. Engineers are useful both technically and economically. Full automation of any kind has to cover enough corner cases, do all the things that human operators can and be low enough priced to justify the high up front costs. Do a little studying on what it takes to operate and pilot a train safely. You'll find it's quite a bit more complex that you would ever guess. The economic value of automating the remaining bits is harder to justify because the returns aren't amazing.
A train driver gets paid salary, health-benefits, and retirement plan — not insignificant monies.
You have to divide that salary by the value of what is being transported. A train carries FAR more cargo than anything except a ship so the unit cost of their cargo is generally lower than for a car. Nobody is staying engineers are cheap but rail is economically very competitive for a reason. Warren Buffet bought BNSF railroad because it is very profitable and likely to remain so. Much more so than pretty much any trucking company out there.
I do not deny, that a self-driving car is useful. But the hardware and software required to achieve that is vastly more complex.
Yes it is more complex but that doesn't mean that the automation for trains is simple. That is a separate issue from what the economic opportunity is. You could fully automate every train in the US and it wouldn't make a huge difference from what we have now. Railroads would make a bit more bank and engineers would have to find another occupation. Fully automated cars on the other hand would change daily life as we know it. Yes it's a harder problem to solve but there is FAR more money to be had in solving it.
Automating trains would've been the logical first step — the way black-and-white TV was a precursor to color.
If the economics to automate railroads fully was available and made economic sense it would have been done already. Humans are still in the loop for a variety of reasons, mostly economic, some technical and a few political.
I still don't understand, why we don't have self-driving trains already
We already do. You could have found that out in under 20 seconds on google. It's being implemented on normal railways too.
the task is so much simpler with one-dimensional roads, no size/weight restrictions on the necessary equipment, and full control of the signs and signals
I think you may be underestimating the complexity of train operations. Nevertheless the cost of a person to operate the train is much smaller in comparison to a car. Trains already do have a lot of automation and are getting more all the time but the financial potential of automation isn't nearly as large as with automobiles.
They want Volkswagen to be released from its obligation to fix cars already on the road, and instead require that the company substantially accelerate its rollout of zero-emission vehicles.
And how do they propose to make whole the people that VW defrauded? You can't simply leave those people hanging. Moving to electric vehicles is fine and all but VW has two debts from their lies. One to society (indirect victims) and the other to their customers (direct victims). This proposal only deals with the first one. Any proposal that does not compensate customers of these vehicles is a non-starter. Could be as simple as a cash payment but it can't be a promise to develop new technology someday.
People don't want to pay because they see the expensive, shit-quality job done by the govt' agencies and generally don't want that.
You mean like being able to send a letter anywhere in the US and have it arrive within a few days for $0.49? [/sarcasm] What a stupid generalization. Governments routinely provide all kinds of services with excellent efficiency and quality. Not everything but they are hardly these palaces of incompetence you claim. While the private sector is definitely better for some things the notion that government cannot do anything well is simply ridiculous nonsense.
You ever see 10 Cal-Trans (or local equivalent) workers all standing around one guy with a shovel? The populace doesn't hade infrastructure upgrades, but they do get frustrated after seeing that and then the projects go massively over budget. "Good enough for govt' work" is a saying for a reason.
I see plenty of private company construction workers standing around one guy with a shovel all the time. Has nothing to do with whether or not they are public employees. That's just the nature of construction work. Apparently you've never done road work. I have. Trust me, most of the time they are working plenty hard. Harder that people who post to slashdot anonymously during work hours.
As for projects that go massively over budget, you think that never happens in the private sector? If you actually think that you are incredibly naive.
The article has a video with Hotz demonstrating some basic autonomous driving similar to what Tesla rolled out earlier this year.
Basic autonomous driving is (relatively) easy to do as long as you don't care much about it being actually useful in the real world. I suspect many good programmers and engineers could accomplish something functional (and dangerous) pretty quickly. It's not much more than an RC car with some sensors. Think Roomba on steroids. The problem is all the corner cases needed to actually make the system safe in real world driving. That is highly non-trivial.
I think you are over looking the potential for municipal broadband to choke change and growth.
It is also able to drive change and growth. The notion that all government's do is stifle progress is demonstrably nonsense.
Say what you will about Comcast and friends but we have things like 100Mbps down 75Mpbs up links at affordable prices.
In some places you do. In others not so much. And you might consider picking an example of a company that is somewhat more beloved than Comcast. They are among the least liked companies in America for well deserved reasons. Monopolies don't do shit to improve service unless there is some form of competition. I guarantee that if AT&T or Verizon isn't there to compete that Comcast wouldn't improve their service very fast.
Consider the article about Flit Michigan's water system the other day. The issue was really not the water source but the infrastructure. How many places have over crowed schools, etc?
Do you have any concept of how hard it is to get taxpayers to fund upgrades to a water system even in a city without financial problems? Taxpayers routinely vote down school levies. This isn't government failing, it is the citizens saying they don't want to pay for any of this.
I am sure public broadband systems could deliver today's technology to consumers more cheaply and better serve under served areas, but the cost would likely be that the level of service rarely improves.
As long as the municipal system doesn't prohibit via laws private enterprise from competing, what is the problem? If the municipal system doesn't improve then private enterprise can fill in the gap. But if the citizens of a town collectively want to run their own broadband that should be their right to do so. If they end up paying more in the long run then that is their problem isn't it? Towns that consider municipal broadband probably aren't being well served now by the private companies so why should they expect that to change in the future?
If you allow municipal broad band it will choke out terrestrial ISPs. The broad band market is broken because there is to little competition, plan to effectively make it so the government is the only game in town isn't a solution to that.
Your argument makes no sense. Trading a public monopoly for a private one doesn't improve anything and it means the citizens have even less say in what they want. There is no reason to prohibit municipal broadband provided private companies are still legally allowed to build their own networks too.
Shouldn't the people who polluted the river bear some of the blame?
River pollution isn't apparently the problem. The lead is in the pipes. Switching to the Flint River water apparently freed the lead into the system. But don't let that get in the way of a good anti-capitalist rant.
Hey Texas dumb-shits, "wind-driven amplification of the torsional oscillation..." Sure as hell sounds like resonance to me. Unless they have some other definition.
The proper term for it is aeroelastic flutter. It's a well understood phenomena most famous in jet airplanes but it occurs other places too including apparently this bridge.
Current Apple competitors do not have the same profit margins as Apple either.
Incorrect. Both Google and Microsoft both have net profit margins comparable to Apple. Go look at their financials. They are all between 20-30% net margins depending on the time period examined and those sorts of margins are nothing unusual for software companies. (Yes Apple is really a software company) Those sorts of margins are unheard of for manufacturing companies. Apple will not change this equation.
Today's cars are becoming computer driven, it is Apple field again.
Not all software is the same. The difference between the software in a car and the software in a PC is huge. Apple's facility with consumer electronics should not be assumed to translate well to automobiles. While there is plenty of electronics in a modern car, there is far more to a car that has nothing to do with electronics. Designing and tuning a suspension or building a structural frame or a seat are not software and never will be.
You just don't know how successful they will be or not and what they will show. Probably iCar v1 will not be huge success, but once the hype will be driven up, iCar v2 or v3 should attract masses of iFans willing to pay 20% or 30% more for extra bells an whistles that "only Apple has".
Here's what you don't understand. We're talking about the largest purchase people make outside of their house. The economics are completely different both on cost and . Apple quite simply cannot price these products that high and still sell enough of them to recover their costs. They cannot outsource the production like they currently do because it costs too much and there are too many quality problems. They CANNOT make 25%+ margins on cars because of the cost structure. Apple's brand will not change that equation. Apple has been successful because they've been focused on what they are good at which is software and industrial design for consumer electronics. If they want to swim off into the deep waters that is the auto industry, I wish them well, but you are deluded if you think they can maintain their margins in that industry.
Nevada doesn't have an *water* problem, they contribute more water to the Colorado river than they take out of it.
The mere existence of Las Vegas at it's current size IS a water problem. There is zero reason for a city that size to exist in the middle of the desert. The amount of water that has to be diverted to support Las Vegas is obscene.
Their problem is that California, which is totally overpopulated and drought stricken, desperately needs Nevada's water
The fact that California's farmers use more water does not excuse the existence of Las Vegas and it certainly isn't a justification for making the place larger than it already is. It is a ridiculous place to build a factory, no matter what tax incentives they offer.
Also, Las Vegas is powered by the Hoover dam.
No it is not. 95% of the power generated by the dam goes to other states.
The worst place you could put this factory is in one of the cold climate states, where the power would almost certainly come from coal.
Cold climate states have dams too and some generate far more power than the Hoover dam. Factories are generally cheaper to heat than to cool. I should know because I've run several of them in both hot and cold climates. Unless they build their own power plant (solar?) this plant will be powered by fossil fuels just like the rest of Vegas.
There are very few companies in the world that do well with multiple products lines in the same space, and even fewer that do well with multiple product lines in radically different spaces. Apple has become wildly successful going after things they do well in the areas they know, generating repeat business and creating a lot of satisfied customers.
The biggest reason why I'm pretty sure it isn't Apple behind this weird venture in the desert is simple. Apple has ~$200 billion in cash. They could buy 100% of Ford, GM, FiatChrysler AND Honda and at their current market capitalization and still have several billion left over. They have ZERO reason to shadow finance some speculative startup in an industry they have no experience with. Would make far more sense to buy a company like GM outright and run it as an independent subsidiary.
Note I'm not saying they should buy those companies (they really shouldn't) but merely that they could.
5 Seconds on google would have answered your question. The only place you really need to look is their financial statements. Yes they really have that much. Much of it is parked overseas or in various investments.
For the record, Apple has more cash on hand than Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook COMBINED.
I actually also really discount the Apple Car idea, myself.
Sounds like we have the same thought. I have NO idea why Apple would want to get into the business of manufacturing automobiles. I work in that industry. The companies with the best margins (Toyota, Porsche, etc) clear around 10% net profit. Compare that with the 25%-30% Apple currently enjoys and it's hard to see how Apple could get into the market without incurring massive shareholder dissatisfaction. (read lawsuits galore) There is a reason there hasn't been a new major car company in decades.
Like you point out, cars are massively more complicated than the products Apple currently makes, have huge capital requirements, difficult legal issues, entrenched competitors, etc. Apple is a remarkable company but even they would have a hard time with this. Obviously they have the war chest to give it a go but I'm not sure people appreciate just how massively different building cars is from designing consumer electronics.
No, the real reason it doesn't matter is because we will have a new president 14 months from now who will most likely have a completely different position on encryption.
It's adorable that you really seem to believe that. Hail to the new boss, same as the old boss.
They also said they would never make a tablet computer, too.
Oh, well that's a clearly compelling piece of evidence... Glad you cleared that up with such an airtight argument. [/sarcasm]
Seriously, could it be Apple? I suppose, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. The argument for it is basically that A) Apple has a lot of money and B) there are rumors they are thinking of building cars and C) Apple is secretive. That's it. That's a pretty thin argument. There is, to my knowledge, no known link between the two companies. Zero. So saying it has to be Apple is the sort of leap a conspiracy theorist would come up with. If you've got something more than that, please share with the class. I won't be embarrassed to be wrong but I require a bit more evidence than vague conjectures.
I hear there's a tech company with $200B in cash that's rumored to be building a car.
No it almost certainly is not Apple. Apple would have little reason to hide the fact that they were getting into building cars. Furthermore, Apple as a corporation has some.. ahem, control issues. I very much doubt that they would work through proxies like this - it's completely out of character for them. Furthermore there have been plentyofjournalists asking if Apple is involved and the answer seems to be a pretty clear no.
Faraday Future will release more information on their Tesla fighter, 100% electric car at CES in January.
Why would you build a $1Billion factory or even plan one before you have a marketable product in an industry that is promising but barely exists? Who would finance that? I don't care how wealthy the backers (allegedly some mysterious Chinese guy named Jia Yueting) are, that make zero sense unless the backer has no expectation of a return on their investment. Something bigger and possibly fishy is going on here. I'd like to know who really is financing this because that would explain a lot about what their motivations might be.
Furthermore building manufacturing plants in the middle of the desert is nuts. Sure you can get some solar power but it just stretches already thin water resources even further. It's insanely bad public policy. The air conditioning bill alone will be astronomical.
Slashdot Mirror
They have no students. They operate no schools.
That's true because DoE is the Department of Energy which has nothing to do with education.
They piss away billions of dollars and damage education by imposing bullshit federal regulations on local schools.
What specific "bullshit federal regulations" are you referring to? The Department of Education by far the smallest cabinet department and with the exception of the No Child Left Behind act (mandated by CONGRESS) they really don't have much involvement in the day to day running of schools in the US. The ED coordinates federal assistance, enforces civil rights, and collects data. They are not heavily involved in determining curricula or standards (outside of NCLB), they do not accredit schools and compared to most countries the US is hugely decentralized in education.
There are some subject-matter-experts who are a genuine menace in the classroom(I suspect that most of us probably took at least one course in college from the TAs they shoved all the actual work of teaching the course onto.
I've had more that a few full tenure professors who had NO business lecturing to a classroom. In many of these cases I was actually glad when they handed off to a TA. I want the best teachers and could not care less if they are subject matter experts beyond the level of the class. The research most professors do has little or nothing to do with what they are teaching most of the time. Even when it is related the classroom stuff is so far below their research that it becomes irrelevant. I don't need a Nobel prize winner to teach me physics 101. I just want someone who is a very good lecturer and has an solid grasp of the material being taught at the level it is being taught.
That said, the notion that teaching theory is somehow a substitute for actually knowing the subject is an absurd and dangerous notion. Learning about driving in a classroom is no substitute for actually having spent time driving. I cannot fathom how anyone would thing a background in civics could possibly qualify someone to teach computer science no matter how good they are at the mechanics of teaching.
My biggest concern with AI is the same concern with automation: our economy is built on the assumption that labor is a scarce resource.
Labor is a scarce resource but not remotely the only one. Minerals and raw materials are scarce. So is energy. So is time, space, land, and imagination. Labor is an important constraint but hardly the only one. Furthermore even if you automate one activity, that doesn't make labor not-scarce in general. It just means that people start working on something else they didn't have time for previously. A few people suffer economically in the sort run from these sort of dislocations but over time scales of many years they are barely noticeable.
With increasing automation, that assumption is rapidly breaking down. As higher and higher level tasks require less and less people society is in trouble unless we can somehow modify our economic system to account for that breakdown.
It isn't remotely breaking down. Used to be that 90% of people spent their time farming. Once we figured out how to automate that activity we still need people doing it but most others could start doing other valuable activities that they didn't have time for previously. Same thing has happened (and is currently happening) with manufacturing. We need fewer people to do much of the work but we will always need some. Everyone else is moving on to other activities. There are an effectively unlimited number of economically valuable activities humans can do in the long run. Even humans that are of modest intelligence.
The AI we should be worried about include self driving cars, natural language processing, pattern recognition, and robotics. These technologies could combine to make a majority of humans unemployable. The don't do this by making humans unnecessary. They do it by making certain humans so productive that average people have no economic value.
For a person to become economically unviable a few things have to happen. 1) A machine has to match or exceed a typical worker's productivity AND flexibility AND trainability. 2) The machine has to be produced at such a low cost that the capital costs can be amortized over a very small number of units produced, possibly as small as 1. 3) There has to be no other economically valuable activity available to people replaced by automation. 4) There has to be no regulation restricting the use or application of automation.
Here's why I'm not worried:
1)I run a manufacturing company. I assure you that we are in NO danger of developing a machine that can exceed the flexibility and trainability of typical humans for a wide variety of tasks that a human of normal intellect can perform. Any such level of generalized automation is still a loooong way away and automation that is easy to use is even further.
2) Even if we do develop machines that are highly productive, flexible and easy to train, they will almost certainly be expensive. This means that low volume or complicated production or production that is outside the design parameters of the machine will continue to be done by humans. Any robot that would approach human level intellect and capability would be absurdly expensive and likely to remain so.
3) Even if we develop machines that are productive, flexible, trainable and very very cheap, there are an almost unlimited number of economically valuable activities available to people beyond what is being automated.
4) Even if the three items above come to pass, people can simply artificially make automation economically unviable via legislation.
Even with in the US, whether through malice or apathy, transferring money between accounts with different banks can take an absurd amount of time
How are you doing the transfer? Check? ACH? Wire Transfer? The faster you want the money moved the more it will cost. I can wire money to basically any account around the globe nearly instantly via Wire Transfer. If you send a check there is back end transaction processing (including security) to that method of money transfer - far more than most people appreciate. If you are a small customer writing a check and dealing with banks from different states then they might put a 7+ day hold on money transfers because of security reasons. Other money transfer methods have different transaction times but security and processing time will generally make it substantially longer than a few seconds.
Fans of bitcoin are under the delusion that bitcoin is cheaper but that's only true if you don't account for risk and availability. Bitcoin carries a lot of risk and it isn't widely accepted. To be widely accepted there would have to be a LOT of expensive infrastructure built up and a lot of regulatory burden which would evaporate any cost advantage it might have achieved by using the internet as a transaction backbone.
It worked out; but it seems as though banking is one of those things that gets more customer-hostile the lower you go.
If you are a small customer in ANY industry you are going to get worse customer service than big customers. You cost more to serve on a unit cost basis so you will get charged more for the same services. It's nothing personal it's just basic economics. It costs roughly the same to serve a $1million account as it does a $1,000 account. It's cheaper to serve one large customer than 1000 small ones.
As an investment, Bitcoin might still end up being a scam.
No need for the qualifier. Even if we accept that Bitcoin itself isn't a scam, Bitcoin routinely is used for scams and even when it is used honestly it's generally a terrible investment positively dripping with risk.
You do run a bit of currency risk but if you make many small transactions you'll lose some and win some, it's a quite okay facilitator of trade.
"A bit of currency risk"? Presumably you mean exchange rate risk and it is WAY more than "a bit" (no pun intended). Bitcoin is terribly volatile compared with traditional currencies so anyone who plans to hold it for any length of time is taking a LOT of exchange rate risk. If you hold it in an exchange you also are taking on agency risk, counterparty risk, and several other types of risk each of which is larger than for large traditional currencies like the dollar, yen or euro.
Still $50 million is traded daily in Bitcoin.
While it's hard to pin down the size of the secondary market in baseball cards, the daily "trading volume" in baseball cards is similar in size if not bigger most likely. (Sales of new cards are around $200 million/year and the secondary market is considerably larger) I know $50 million sounds like a lot but it really isn't even if the $50 million figure you cite is true.
But would not a computer be cheaper and better still?
Not necessarily and the reasons are usually based in economics. I run a manufacturing plant for my day job. Much of what we make in our plant can be substantially automated. The technology already exists and I could write a check to buy it tomorrow. But I don't most of the time. Why? No return on investment. For automation to make sense a few things have to happen. 1) The automation has to do a job with adequate or better competence than the people it is replacing. 2) The automation has to deliver unit costs lower than the wages that would be paid for the lifetime of the project. This has to include the opportunity cost of tying up that capital, the cost of financing, the loss of flexibility, and the risk of the project. It doesn't matter if you are producing widgets or passenger-miles or transporting cargo. You have to be able to recoup the cost of the automation. If you can't then there is no point in even developing it, much less buying it.
Generally speaking any kind of automation requires a relatively large amount of production volume to justify the higher up front costs and loss of flexibility. It's trivial to show cases where it does and doesn't make economic sense, both for manufacturing and for automated transportation. Computers are demonstrably not always cheaper. Full disclosure, I'm a certified cost accountant. I do these sort of calculations for a living. Computers are NOT necessarily cheaper or better.
What is the train-driver ("engineer") supposed to do, that a computer-program can not do?
Train engineers are effectively a pilot very much like the pilot for an airplane or a ship. Much of what they do can be and has been automated to some degree. In a few cases there are no human operators but not always. Engineers are useful both technically and economically. Full automation of any kind has to cover enough corner cases, do all the things that human operators can and be low enough priced to justify the high up front costs. Do a little studying on what it takes to operate and pilot a train safely. You'll find it's quite a bit more complex that you would ever guess. The economic value of automating the remaining bits is harder to justify because the returns aren't amazing.
A train driver gets paid salary, health-benefits, and retirement plan — not insignificant monies.
You have to divide that salary by the value of what is being transported. A train carries FAR more cargo than anything except a ship so the unit cost of their cargo is generally lower than for a car. Nobody is staying engineers are cheap but rail is economically very competitive for a reason. Warren Buffet bought BNSF railroad because it is very profitable and likely to remain so. Much more so than pretty much any trucking company out there.
I do not deny, that a self-driving car is useful. But the hardware and software required to achieve that is vastly more complex.
Yes it is more complex but that doesn't mean that the automation for trains is simple. That is a separate issue from what the economic opportunity is. You could fully automate every train in the US and it wouldn't make a huge difference from what we have now. Railroads would make a bit more bank and engineers would have to find another occupation. Fully automated cars on the other hand would change daily life as we know it. Yes it's a harder problem to solve but there is FAR more money to be had in solving it.
Automating trains would've been the logical first step — the way black-and-white TV was a precursor to color.
If the economics to automate railroads fully was available and made economic sense it would have been done already. Humans are still in the loop for a variety of reasons, mostly economic, some technical and a few political.
I still don't understand, why we don't have self-driving trains already
We already do. You could have found that out in under 20 seconds on google. It's being implemented on normal railways too.
the task is so much simpler with one-dimensional roads, no size/weight restrictions on the necessary equipment, and full control of the signs and signals
I think you may be underestimating the complexity of train operations. Nevertheless the cost of a person to operate the train is much smaller in comparison to a car. Trains already do have a lot of automation and are getting more all the time but the financial potential of automation isn't nearly as large as with automobiles.
They want Volkswagen to be released from its obligation to fix cars already on the road, and instead require that the company substantially accelerate its rollout of zero-emission vehicles.
And how do they propose to make whole the people that VW defrauded? You can't simply leave those people hanging. Moving to electric vehicles is fine and all but VW has two debts from their lies. One to society (indirect victims) and the other to their customers (direct victims). This proposal only deals with the first one. Any proposal that does not compensate customers of these vehicles is a non-starter. Could be as simple as a cash payment but it can't be a promise to develop new technology someday.
People don't want to pay because they see the expensive, shit-quality job done by the govt' agencies and generally don't want that.
You mean like being able to send a letter anywhere in the US and have it arrive within a few days for $0.49? [/sarcasm] What a stupid generalization. Governments routinely provide all kinds of services with excellent efficiency and quality. Not everything but they are hardly these palaces of incompetence you claim. While the private sector is definitely better for some things the notion that government cannot do anything well is simply ridiculous nonsense.
You ever see 10 Cal-Trans (or local equivalent) workers all standing around one guy with a shovel? The populace doesn't hade infrastructure upgrades, but they do get frustrated after seeing that and then the projects go massively over budget. "Good enough for govt' work" is a saying for a reason.
I see plenty of private company construction workers standing around one guy with a shovel all the time. Has nothing to do with whether or not they are public employees. That's just the nature of construction work. Apparently you've never done road work. I have. Trust me, most of the time they are working plenty hard. Harder that people who post to slashdot anonymously during work hours.
As for projects that go massively over budget, you think that never happens in the private sector? If you actually think that you are incredibly naive.
The article has a video with Hotz demonstrating some basic autonomous driving similar to what Tesla rolled out earlier this year.
Basic autonomous driving is (relatively) easy to do as long as you don't care much about it being actually useful in the real world. I suspect many good programmers and engineers could accomplish something functional (and dangerous) pretty quickly. It's not much more than an RC car with some sensors. Think Roomba on steroids. The problem is all the corner cases needed to actually make the system safe in real world driving. That is highly non-trivial.
I think you are over looking the potential for municipal broadband to choke change and growth.
It is also able to drive change and growth. The notion that all government's do is stifle progress is demonstrably nonsense.
Say what you will about Comcast and friends but we have things like 100Mbps down 75Mpbs up links at affordable prices.
In some places you do. In others not so much. And you might consider picking an example of a company that is somewhat more beloved than Comcast. They are among the least liked companies in America for well deserved reasons. Monopolies don't do shit to improve service unless there is some form of competition. I guarantee that if AT&T or Verizon isn't there to compete that Comcast wouldn't improve their service very fast.
Consider the article about Flit Michigan's water system the other day. The issue was really not the water source but the infrastructure. How many places have over crowed schools, etc?
Do you have any concept of how hard it is to get taxpayers to fund upgrades to a water system even in a city without financial problems? Taxpayers routinely vote down school levies. This isn't government failing, it is the citizens saying they don't want to pay for any of this.
I am sure public broadband systems could deliver today's technology to consumers more cheaply and better serve under served areas, but the cost would likely be that the level of service rarely improves.
As long as the municipal system doesn't prohibit via laws private enterprise from competing, what is the problem? If the municipal system doesn't improve then private enterprise can fill in the gap. But if the citizens of a town collectively want to run their own broadband that should be their right to do so. If they end up paying more in the long run then that is their problem isn't it? Towns that consider municipal broadband probably aren't being well served now by the private companies so why should they expect that to change in the future?
If you allow municipal broad band it will choke out terrestrial ISPs. The broad band market is broken because there is to little competition, plan to effectively make it so the government is the only game in town isn't a solution to that.
Your argument makes no sense. Trading a public monopoly for a private one doesn't improve anything and it means the citizens have even less say in what they want. There is no reason to prohibit municipal broadband provided private companies are still legally allowed to build their own networks too.
Shouldn't the people who polluted the river bear some of the blame?
River pollution isn't apparently the problem. The lead is in the pipes. Switching to the Flint River water apparently freed the lead into the system. But don't let that get in the way of a good anti-capitalist rant.
Hey Texas dumb-shits, "wind-driven amplification of the torsional oscillation..." Sure as hell sounds like resonance to me. Unless they have some other definition.
The proper term for it is aeroelastic flutter. It's a well understood phenomena most famous in jet airplanes but it occurs other places too including apparently this bridge.
Current Apple competitors do not have the same profit margins as Apple either.
Incorrect. Both Google and Microsoft both have net profit margins comparable to Apple. Go look at their financials. They are all between 20-30% net margins depending on the time period examined and those sorts of margins are nothing unusual for software companies. (Yes Apple is really a software company) Those sorts of margins are unheard of for manufacturing companies. Apple will not change this equation.
Today's cars are becoming computer driven, it is Apple field again.
Not all software is the same. The difference between the software in a car and the software in a PC is huge. Apple's facility with consumer electronics should not be assumed to translate well to automobiles. While there is plenty of electronics in a modern car, there is far more to a car that has nothing to do with electronics. Designing and tuning a suspension or building a structural frame or a seat are not software and never will be.
You just don't know how successful they will be or not and what they will show. Probably iCar v1 will not be huge success, but once the hype will be driven up, iCar v2 or v3 should attract masses of iFans willing to pay 20% or 30% more for extra bells an whistles that "only Apple has".
Here's what you don't understand. We're talking about the largest purchase people make outside of their house. The economics are completely different both on cost and . Apple quite simply cannot price these products that high and still sell enough of them to recover their costs. They cannot outsource the production like they currently do because it costs too much and there are too many quality problems. They CANNOT make 25%+ margins on cars because of the cost structure. Apple's brand will not change that equation. Apple has been successful because they've been focused on what they are good at which is software and industrial design for consumer electronics. If they want to swim off into the deep waters that is the auto industry, I wish them well, but you are deluded if you think they can maintain their margins in that industry.
Nevada doesn't have an *water* problem, they contribute more water to the Colorado river than they take out of it.
The mere existence of Las Vegas at it's current size IS a water problem. There is zero reason for a city that size to exist in the middle of the desert. The amount of water that has to be diverted to support Las Vegas is obscene.
Their problem is that California, which is totally overpopulated and drought stricken, desperately needs Nevada's water
The fact that California's farmers use more water does not excuse the existence of Las Vegas and it certainly isn't a justification for making the place larger than it already is. It is a ridiculous place to build a factory, no matter what tax incentives they offer.
Also, Las Vegas is powered by the Hoover dam.
No it is not. 95% of the power generated by the dam goes to other states.
The worst place you could put this factory is in one of the cold climate states, where the power would almost certainly come from coal.
Cold climate states have dams too and some generate far more power than the Hoover dam. Factories are generally cheaper to heat than to cool. I should know because I've run several of them in both hot and cold climates. Unless they build their own power plant (solar?) this plant will be powered by fossil fuels just like the rest of Vegas.
There are very few companies in the world that do well with multiple products lines in the same space, and even fewer that do well with multiple product lines in radically different spaces. Apple has become wildly successful going after things they do well in the areas they know, generating repeat business and creating a lot of satisfied customers.
The biggest reason why I'm pretty sure it isn't Apple behind this weird venture in the desert is simple. Apple has ~$200 billion in cash. They could buy 100% of Ford, GM, FiatChrysler AND Honda and at their current market capitalization and still have several billion left over. They have ZERO reason to shadow finance some speculative startup in an industry they have no experience with. Would make far more sense to buy a company like GM outright and run it as an independent subsidiary.
Note I'm not saying they should buy those companies (they really shouldn't) but merely that they could.
Not really sure where you got $200B in cash.
5 Seconds on google would have answered your question. The only place you really need to look is their financial statements. Yes they really have that much. Much of it is parked overseas or in various investments.
For the record, Apple has more cash on hand than Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook COMBINED.
I actually also really discount the Apple Car idea, myself.
Sounds like we have the same thought. I have NO idea why Apple would want to get into the business of manufacturing automobiles. I work in that industry. The companies with the best margins (Toyota, Porsche, etc) clear around 10% net profit. Compare that with the 25%-30% Apple currently enjoys and it's hard to see how Apple could get into the market without incurring massive shareholder dissatisfaction. (read lawsuits galore) There is a reason there hasn't been a new major car company in decades.
Like you point out, cars are massively more complicated than the products Apple currently makes, have huge capital requirements, difficult legal issues, entrenched competitors, etc. Apple is a remarkable company but even they would have a hard time with this. Obviously they have the war chest to give it a go but I'm not sure people appreciate just how massively different building cars is from designing consumer electronics.
No, the real reason it doesn't matter is because we will have a new president 14 months from now who will most likely have a completely different position on encryption.
It's adorable that you really seem to believe that. Hail to the new boss, same as the old boss.
They also said they would never make a tablet computer, too.
Oh, well that's a clearly compelling piece of evidence... Glad you cleared that up with such an airtight argument. [/sarcasm]
Seriously, could it be Apple? I suppose, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. The argument for it is basically that A) Apple has a lot of money and B) there are rumors they are thinking of building cars and C) Apple is secretive. That's it. That's a pretty thin argument. There is, to my knowledge, no known link between the two companies. Zero. So saying it has to be Apple is the sort of leap a conspiracy theorist would come up with. If you've got something more than that, please share with the class. I won't be embarrassed to be wrong but I require a bit more evidence than vague conjectures.
I hear there's a tech company with $200B in cash that's rumored to be building a car.
No it almost certainly is not Apple. Apple would have little reason to hide the fact that they were getting into building cars. Furthermore, Apple as a corporation has some.. ahem, control issues. I very much doubt that they would work through proxies like this - it's completely out of character for them. Furthermore there have been plenty of journalists asking if Apple is involved and the answer seems to be a pretty clear no.
Faraday Future will release more information on their Tesla fighter, 100% electric car at CES in January.
Why would you build a $1Billion factory or even plan one before you have a marketable product in an industry that is promising but barely exists? Who would finance that? I don't care how wealthy the backers (allegedly some mysterious Chinese guy named Jia Yueting) are, that make zero sense unless the backer has no expectation of a return on their investment. Something bigger and possibly fishy is going on here. I'd like to know who really is financing this because that would explain a lot about what their motivations might be.
Furthermore building manufacturing plants in the middle of the desert is nuts. Sure you can get some solar power but it just stretches already thin water resources even further. It's insanely bad public policy. The air conditioning bill alone will be astronomical.