According to Richtel, electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another's cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots.
I've always thought that once they became sufficiently popular you might need some sort of lock on the charger while charging otherwise merry pranksters (read @$$holes) might come along and just unplug your car, effectively leaving you stranded for a period of time if your charge is low.
It's too bad the replicators had to become a writer's tool.
It wasn't just the replicators and that's why I don't enjoy Star Trek much. The stories are fine but the writers ignore the internal "rules" of the universe whenever it is convenient for them. Replicators can make whatever you want except when the plot demands that they don't. Transporters have limits except when those limits are inconvenient to the plot. Every problem can be solved by the Particle-Of-The-Month. Known physics like relativity gets completely ignored. Language barriers are hand waved away.
However, I agree, something is going to be scarce. How about original, non-copied artwork originals... created by a specific human? That sort of thing.
Even if you have the ability to produce whatever you want you won't have the ability to produce it in effectively unlimited amounts in meaningfully short time spans. Eliminating scarcity effectively means invoking the powers of an omnipotent diety or granting such power to corporeal beings. Even the closest analogs to a lack of scarcity we have in our society (software) still have scarcity issues. You can reduce scarcity but you cannot eliminate it nor can you practically distribute goods evenly to everyone who wants/needs them.
One of the things that's interesting about Star Trek is that it does try to imagine a post-scarcity economy where there's no money.
That's an interesting thought experiment but since we do not and never will live in such a post-scarcity society it is ultimately meaningless. Some form of money is going to be a necessity for the foreseeable future. There simply is no scenario whereby we would have access to every possible resource we would need without some for of currency making the economy work. Star Trek is a fantasy that relies on fictional technology and unlimited harnessable energy sources. Since we do not have those things in the real world, such conjecture is ultimately academic.
People don't work for it. People don't work because they have to but because they want to
There are relatively few people who work because they want to. Most people are lazy, self indulgent and would happily sit on their ass doing nothing if there wasn't a fear of poverty driving them.
As an owner of a lifted, modified 98 TJ Wrangler, I have to say that two of the things that you point out in your post are real big reasons I love it so. It is simple to work on parts are readily available, there's a HUGE enthusiast after market.
I make a good chunk of my living making, designing and selling aftermarket Jeep parts. I run a small manufacturing company and Wrangler aftermarket parts are about 20% of our revenue. I'm better aware of the aftermarket for Jeeps than almost anyone reading this.
It's simple, durable, easy to work on and probably the MOST reliable vehicle I've ever owned.
I would mostly agree with you right up until the last bit. Wranglers are many things but reliable is not traditionally one of them. You admit below that you don't use them as a daily driver so it's not really clear to me how you came to that conclusion. EVERY industry reliability publication has the Wrangler pretty near the bottom of the list of rankings for reliability. The Wrangler has its charms but reliability is definitely not among them.
Yeah, it gets super shitty mileage. Yeah, the panel fits (build quality?) are unimpressive.
And it doesn't have to be that way. That is a choice made by the engineers at Chrysler. To me that sort of sloppiness is just inexcusable. It's not just bad build quality. They are needlessly badly designed by the engineers. The bad quality is because it is designed that way.
I gotta admit, the "low tech" DANA 30 front and DANA 44 rear axles are pretty solid.
They're fine for what they are. Durable, simple, cheap. But they also aren't necessarily the best. Don't get me wrong, I like a simple, cheap solution to a problem and if it isn't broken don't fix it. But I think Chrysler could do better. I very much doubt that the Dana axles could not be improved and I say this as someone who once worked at Dana and has watched them being made.
Did I say it's simple and easy to work on enough yet?
Sure. It's one of the nice things about it although that is less true in current editions than it was in earlier models. The electronics and modern engines are by necessity more complicated these days though that's not necessarily a bad thing. For example there are really only two practical ways to get key-on switched power in current models. You either have to drill a hole in your fusebox or buy an adapter (that my company makes - contact me if you want one) to run power off the cigar lighter behind the dash. Jeep did NOT make it easy to get third party devices to work on current model Wranglers even though they certainly could have. I would also argue that Chrysler could make them much easier to work on than they are and have intentionally chosen not to do that.
I would NEVER buy a jeep for a DD, mines a fun drive that sits in the driveway 9/10's of the year,
That is NOT what describes most Wrangler owners. Most Wrangler's are bought as daily driver runabouts by people who want to fantasize about living the rugged outdoor life but in reality are just suburban yuppies.
Sure, it has a bunch of drawbacks. But it has a "fun factor" that is impossible to measure.
That's no excuse for it being a poorly made product. Quality and fun are not mutually exclusive. Jeep Wranglers are well known for falling apart even when never driven off road. They have their charms but being well built is not among them. I think this is more of a Chrysler problem than a specific problem with Jeep but I think the problems are particularly pronounced in the Wrangler.
I'm sorry that you're not capable of seeing things from other people's perspective, by choice or not.
That's rather insulting and not true either. Don't mistake the ability to look at things objectively with an inability to see what other people think. The Jeep Wrangler is an objectively poorly made vehicle. It has other charms which people like which are mostly intangible but only a handful of buyers actually are a good fit for the vehicle. This is not conjecture on my part nor is it an inability to understand what is happening.
I run a small manufacturing company that makes a large chunk of our revenues selling aftermarket parts for Jeep Wranglers. I probably understand the buyers of Jeep Wranglers better than you do. I work with them daily, have designed products for the Wrangler and do a lot of aftermarket sales to some of the biggest vendors of aftermarket Jeep parts. And my statement stands. The Jeep Wrangler is not a well built vehicle. Few buyers of the vehicle are doing so for rational reasons. It has substantial and unnecessary design flaws and it is demonstrably not well constructed by today's standards. This cannot be argued. I get why people buy them. I don't get why people don't insist that they be better than they are. Every problem the Wrangler has could be improved without sacrificing what makes it special. You can have fun AND have a reliable, well built vehicle to do it in. I LIKE the Wrangler but I truly wish it were a better vehicle than it is.
I used to sell Jeeps. Never saw a car leak so much when new before. Every other unit leaked... from the factory.
Not surprising if you are talking about the Wrangler. It's one of the least sophisticated, least updated, poorest made vehicles out there. It gets terrible fuel economy, is known for being terribly unreliable, loud, isn't practical for most people who buy one, is uncomfortable to drive or ride in, and it isn't exactly cheap either. Sure it can climb rocks and has great traction in sloppy conditions but that's about the only really genuinely good thing about it. And for reasons that elude me it still sells like crazy. Jeep dealers don't even discount it.
I used to work for Dana Corp and I've been in the factory where they make the axles and done some projects there. I've also been in the Toledo assembly plant. The Wrangler plant builds cars VERY fast. It's one of the fastest plants measured by time to assemble the vehicle. But I think that comes at a cost. Jeep makes little effort to improve the Wrangler because people keep buying them and not demanding that they get better. The axles on the Wrangler are about as low tech as it gets. Jeep has a product that people love irrationally like Harley Davidson motorcycles in spite of the fact that the product is objectively badly made and unreliable.
Android fanboy here... just wondering - when Apple pulls an app from the store, does it force it to uninstall from your device(s) as well?
I've had one or two apps on an iPhone that were in the store and then got pulled for various reasons (nothing malware related). The app remained on my phone and functional. Whether Apple has the ability to reach in and remove the app I cannot say but it wouldn't surprise me if they did have the ability. We've seen Amazon do that with their Kindle and obviously it is technologically possible. I've not heard of them doing this yet and I presume it would be newsworthy if they did.
It's not a couple of software engineers, but proving that will be impossible
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I guarantee you that there is a paper trail here. NOTHING happens in an automotive company that large without a lot of documentation being generated. R&D, engineering, testing and management all HAD to be involved. If the government really decides to go after this (big if I know) I don't think it would be hard at all to prove that it was more than a few folks involved.
It's possible to get to the truth. It wouldn't even be that difficult; just arrest some engineers and file criminal charges. At some point one of them would cut a deal and talk. That won't happen, however.
It might if the right people are doing the prosecuting. It will take years however and the damage is already done. You are correct that even if they aren't willing to talk it wouldn't be that hard for a prosecutor to work his way to the real story.
Probably more than most people reading this and I've spent a good chunk of my career (several decades) dealing directly with large automotive companies. I run a small company that is a supplier to some of these big companies we are talking about.
There are quite a few layers of managers and worker bees, so the upper layers don't necessarily know what the lower layers are doing.
At least in the case of VW this wasn't some minor engineering decision. I don' t have a doubt in my mind that some folks pretty high up the food chain at VW knew. As for the other companies, we'll see. If it is merely a difference in real world vs test bench then that is one thing. If they intentionally did something different like VW then they should be spanked just as hard as VW. If they intentionally cheated then I hope they suffer the wrath of $diety.
So the managers may well have been in the dark about the "defeat device", because the managers are not engineers, and would not have seen that level of report. All they would see is a single bullet item on a PowerPoint slide: "meets EPA limits for emissions."
I doubt it went all the way to the CEO but I'm pretty sure more than a handful of middle management knew and there is a more than trivial chance the folks in charge of engineering, testing and/or R&D were well aware of what was going on. If they didn't then they weren't doing their jobs competently. Are you seriously going to argue that the head of R&D wouldn't know that it was impossible for a diesel engine without urea injection to meet EPA standards?
Or, as the old saying goes, "Never attribute to conspiricity that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Oh I think there is plenty of stupidity in play here. But I also think the people involved knew what they did was wrong. Greed and fear can make people cover up stupid decisions.
Ok, if they want to cheat then they should have to forfeit 3X any revenues (not profit which is a much smaller figure) they made from the products they sold. Have the money fund the EPA or something similar or refund the customers. Any engineer or manager who signed off on or was involved in this should be liable for damages as well as criminal charges with no corporate protection since this was a fraud.
I've also read in the last day or two that VW is (predictiably) trying to claim that management knew nothing about the emissions and that "a handful" of engineers were responsible. While there were obviously engineers responsible I have NO doubt whatsoever that management requested and signed off on this. They're just trying to throw a few peons under the bus to save their own skin.
If all ads on the internet were simple, text based or at least not animated, didn't play sounds, didn't block the content I actually want to see, didn't use tracking cookies and didn't take up much bandwidth, I would be happy to switch my ad blocker off.
The ads bother me for three reasons. 1) Bandwidth - if they want to buy me a gigabit fiber connection then they can talk to me about taking up my bandwidth. Until then then can fuck off. 2) Tracking - What I do on the web is my business and not theirs. If they want to track me then they can pay me cold hard cash and a lot of it. I'm NOT trading my privacy for a bit of ephemeral news content or articles about kittens. 3) Time - They are wasting my time which is the most precious thing I have. I have countless better things to do that engage in a war with self-entitled advertisers over whether they have a right to spew their ads at me and track my whereabouts.
Well, if you like going to those sites, it does become your problem as the more people who block ads, the less revenue they generate, and then their content will start to get worse, and eventually they'll disappear.
So what if they do disappear? I'll move on to something else. I have NO problem paying for content that I find valuable and I subscribe to several sites. The rest of them can dry up and blow away as far as I'm concerned. What they provide isn't valuable enough for me to care. I might miss a few for half a second but I'd get over it. If they want to PAY ME cold hard cash to look at their ads and track what I do then we can have a discussion about it. Until then their business model is stupid and I'm not about to give away my bandwidth and attention without what I consider adequate compensation.
Ok, they don't have the cash or equity either to 'acquire'.
Sure they do. All they have to do is issue stock and have the shareholders of the other company accept that as payment. You can call it a "merger" if you want but functionally it will be an acquisition by one company or the other at the end of the day. One management team is going bye-bye and whose left will tell you who bought who. Chrysler merging with Daimler was a "merger of equals" but not really. Happens all the time.
Dell can't 'acquire' EMC, there's no way they have the cash.
You don't need cash to do an acquisition or merger. It can be an all stock transaction which is essentially funny-money with no cash changing hands. Cash is nice but not actually required as long as your stock price is high enough.
Acquisition MIGHT be something which can be made to work.
There's no need to qualify that statement. Some acquisition activity is demonstrably beneficial. Berkshire Hathaway is a great example of a company that does lots of acquisitions. But the reason it works for them is that they are careful not to screw up what made the company they are acquiring great in the first place. (In fact they largely leave the acquired company alone aside from some capital allocation) Apple also is a pretty good example of a company that seems to usually do a good job with acquisitions. They get small companies for very clear reasons whose products are a clear fit with what Apple is trying to do. M&A can be a great way to cherry pick good new products and R&D. Pharmaceutical companies do this all the time with pretty good success. It CAN work but it's not easy or simple.
Other companies manage to screw it up royally. Daimler's merger with Chrysler. AOL with Time Warner. A big auto supplier I used to work for went bankrupt because they bought another big auto supplier in bad financial shape and couldn't digest the acquisition. Stock price went from $50 when I started to under $5 when I left. CEO made a deal literally on the golf course to try to grow the balance sheet top line but didn't do adequate due diligence and the bottom line went to hell.
I would argue that acquisitions is more destructive than constructive.
Frequently that is true and there is plenty of academic research to support this thesis. It's not true all the time however. There are plenty of very successful acquisitions and it's not hard to find them. I've been involved with a few successful ones myself. It's not hard to find acquisitions that destroyed value though.
The ones that tend to work best are bolt on inquisitions between companies with similar cultures. Integrating two companies is hard but if the cultures clash it will almost certainly be doomed from the start no matter how promising other facets of the deal might be.
As for the diversity issues they might as well not exist. As you said gaming is male dominated, but so is football, and at least in the case of football no one will do anything because there is too much money in it. Assuming (and I realize that my arguments rest on this assumption) that gaming can be as successful at the college scene as in the professional scene, the money will quash any significant action.
I'm afraid you are mistaken about the effects of Title IX. What would happen is that other men's activities (sports) would get pushed out to keep the gender balance. Football does that in men's college sports now. It takes all the oxygen out of the room for other men's sports. It gets something like 65 scholarships and there is no equivalent sport on the women's side of the ledger. Less popular men's sports typically get the ax to feed the beast. In my sport of wrestling there were something like 160 D1 programs 30 years ago. Now there are 77 last I counted. Most of these are casualties of the effect of football with respect to Title IX.
In addition its not like it would take much money to start the club.
More than you think if you want to do it in a big way. You'll need a travel budget, facilities to train, equipment to train with, insurance, etc. For comparison my sport is wrestling which is not a particularly expensive sport in D1 college and the typical budget of a D1 college wrestling team is around $400-600K per year. Some a bit less and a few a lot more. Usually the program exists thanks to alumni donations and the coaches do a lot of fundraising. Lately the big thing is to get an endowment for the program so that the funding doesn't come from the athletic department budget at all. I would imagine any esport program would end up with a similar sort of financial picture.
Great, now we can meaninglessly give away free rides to college for people to blow off class and play video games instead of blowing off class and playing with some sort of equipment outside.
Don't know where you went to school but I was a college athlete and I didn't get to blow off any classes nor did I get a "free ride".
I am waiting for the NCAA's drool to start accumulating over another pool of exploitable labor.
You'll be waiting a long time. I was a college athlete in division one under the NCAA. I assure you that the NCAA wants nothing to do with so called esports. The folks in charge don't even consider it a sport no matter what you or I might call it. Plus if the NCAA gets involved then there are Title IX issues that come into play given that the player demographics skew heavily male. You seriously think a D1 college is going to cut an athletic sport for varsity video games?
No, even if esports become a thing in colleges the NCAA is probably not going to be the parent organization.
Both. Either. Plus it requires some amount of athleticism.
What athletic abilities does it require?
Both fine and gross motor coordination. Physical strength. A modest amount of stamina and balance in some cases. Breath control. Hand-eye coordination. Plus if you are talking about biathon which is a shooting sport it requires substantial cardiovascular conditioning plus the ability to run or ski. If you are talking about bench shooting though the amount of athleticism required nearly inconsequential.
Honestly, if bridge and chess are considered sports, why not video games?
Very few people really consider bridge or chess a sport even including people who play seriously. Video games would probably fall into the same category as those would whatever that category happens to be. If you want to call it a sport then I can't really argue with that since a lot of activities are considered sports. (synchronized swimming anyone?) But it certainly does NOT fall under the heading of athletics. There is no appreciable athletic ability involved here including gross motor skills, balance, strength, or cardio-vascular conditioning.
At the university, the League of Legends club has become an official club sport, just like rugby or rowing.
That means it is a club but it doesn't mean it is athletic like rugby or rowing. Being a official university club means that the university sanctions the activity and maybe gives it a bit of funding and support. Which is awesome. Universities do this for lots of worthy of activities and it's always nice to see a new one added. However, calling it a part of college athletics is a bit of a reach since the amount of athleticism involved is minute. (no appreciable strength, balance, gross motor skills, etc required) I was a college athlete and while I enjoy video games as much as most, I don't consider them athletics. Fun? Sure. Cool? I think so. Sports? Maybe. Athletics? No.
You are correct that it isn't that simple but I don't think may people want to read about all the gory economic nuances involved. Nevertheless the biggest driver of cost early in the life cycle of a product like a RAM chip is going to be the fixed costs to begin production. The effect on unit costs won't become negligible until quite a lot of units have already been sold. It's not the only factor in play but it's normally the biggest. Once enough units have been sold other factors like the ones you mention tend to become dominant.
Nobody will want my chips if a new tech comes out that doubles density. My current equipment won't be useful anymore.
Old chips routinely continue to get produced long after they have been surpassed by newer/better technology. They don't just shut down production the moment something better comes along. There is a wind down period, often a rather protracted one - sometimes measured in years or even decades. Once the equipment is paid for they can continue to produce the product. Sometimes they'll sell the production once demand falls low enough. I deal with this sort of thing in my work when my customers specify old electronics. I had a customer request a specific Schottky diode that the original manufacturer (Motorola) stopped making 20 years ago and sold the business to a small volume maker. But you can still get the part even today if you had the need.
Hint: You are NOT a Google customer. You are Google's PRODUCT.
Not quite. Information about me is the product. If I were the product then that would be called slavery. I am the vendor and sole distributor of information about me. In a sense I am "selling" said data to Google in exchange for online services. Arguably this is a rather bad deal for me but I'm not the product - I'm the one selling the product. It just is that most people don't value data about themselves very highly.
Google's CUSTOMERS are INTERNET ADVERTISERS looking to strip mine your life for data.
Exactly. Google's customers want DATA about me. The data is the product. I just happen to be the source of said data and the only one that can "manufacture" actual true data about me.
Slashdot Mirror
According to Richtel, electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another's cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots.
I've always thought that once they became sufficiently popular you might need some sort of lock on the charger while charging otherwise merry pranksters (read @$$holes) might come along and just unplug your car, effectively leaving you stranded for a period of time if your charge is low.
It's too bad the replicators had to become a writer's tool.
It wasn't just the replicators and that's why I don't enjoy Star Trek much. The stories are fine but the writers ignore the internal "rules" of the universe whenever it is convenient for them. Replicators can make whatever you want except when the plot demands that they don't. Transporters have limits except when those limits are inconvenient to the plot. Every problem can be solved by the Particle-Of-The-Month. Known physics like relativity gets completely ignored. Language barriers are hand waved away.
However, I agree, something is going to be scarce. How about original, non-copied artwork originals... created by a specific human? That sort of thing.
Even if you have the ability to produce whatever you want you won't have the ability to produce it in effectively unlimited amounts in meaningfully short time spans. Eliminating scarcity effectively means invoking the powers of an omnipotent diety or granting such power to corporeal beings. Even the closest analogs to a lack of scarcity we have in our society (software) still have scarcity issues. You can reduce scarcity but you cannot eliminate it nor can you practically distribute goods evenly to everyone who wants/needs them.
One of the things that's interesting about Star Trek is that it does try to imagine a post-scarcity economy where there's no money.
That's an interesting thought experiment but since we do not and never will live in such a post-scarcity society it is ultimately meaningless. Some form of money is going to be a necessity for the foreseeable future. There simply is no scenario whereby we would have access to every possible resource we would need without some for of currency making the economy work. Star Trek is a fantasy that relies on fictional technology and unlimited harnessable energy sources. Since we do not have those things in the real world, such conjecture is ultimately academic.
People don't work for it. People don't work because they have to but because they want to
There are relatively few people who work because they want to. Most people are lazy, self indulgent and would happily sit on their ass doing nothing if there wasn't a fear of poverty driving them.
As an owner of a lifted, modified 98 TJ Wrangler, I have to say that two of the things that you point out in your post are real big reasons I love it so. It is simple to work on parts are readily available, there's a HUGE enthusiast after market.
I make a good chunk of my living making, designing and selling aftermarket Jeep parts. I run a small manufacturing company and Wrangler aftermarket parts are about 20% of our revenue. I'm better aware of the aftermarket for Jeeps than almost anyone reading this.
It's simple, durable, easy to work on and probably the MOST reliable vehicle I've ever owned.
I would mostly agree with you right up until the last bit. Wranglers are many things but reliable is not traditionally one of them. You admit below that you don't use them as a daily driver so it's not really clear to me how you came to that conclusion. EVERY industry reliability publication has the Wrangler pretty near the bottom of the list of rankings for reliability. The Wrangler has its charms but reliability is definitely not among them.
Yeah, it gets super shitty mileage. Yeah, the panel fits (build quality?) are unimpressive.
And it doesn't have to be that way. That is a choice made by the engineers at Chrysler. To me that sort of sloppiness is just inexcusable. It's not just bad build quality. They are needlessly badly designed by the engineers. The bad quality is because it is designed that way.
I gotta admit, the "low tech" DANA 30 front and DANA 44 rear axles are pretty solid.
They're fine for what they are. Durable, simple, cheap. But they also aren't necessarily the best. Don't get me wrong, I like a simple, cheap solution to a problem and if it isn't broken don't fix it. But I think Chrysler could do better. I very much doubt that the Dana axles could not be improved and I say this as someone who once worked at Dana and has watched them being made.
Did I say it's simple and easy to work on enough yet?
Sure. It's one of the nice things about it although that is less true in current editions than it was in earlier models. The electronics and modern engines are by necessity more complicated these days though that's not necessarily a bad thing. For example there are really only two practical ways to get key-on switched power in current models. You either have to drill a hole in your fusebox or buy an adapter (that my company makes - contact me if you want one) to run power off the cigar lighter behind the dash. Jeep did NOT make it easy to get third party devices to work on current model Wranglers even though they certainly could have. I would also argue that Chrysler could make them much easier to work on than they are and have intentionally chosen not to do that.
I would NEVER buy a jeep for a DD, mines a fun drive that sits in the driveway 9/10's of the year,
That is NOT what describes most Wrangler owners. Most Wrangler's are bought as daily driver runabouts by people who want to fantasize about living the rugged outdoor life but in reality are just suburban yuppies.
Sure, it has a bunch of drawbacks. But it has a "fun factor" that is impossible to measure.
That's no excuse for it being a poorly made product. Quality and fun are not mutually exclusive. Jeep Wranglers are well known for falling apart even when never driven off road. They have their charms but being well built is not among them. I think this is more of a Chrysler problem than a specific problem with Jeep but I think the problems are particularly pronounced in the Wrangler.
I'm sorry that you're not capable of seeing things from other people's perspective, by choice or not.
That's rather insulting and not true either. Don't mistake the ability to look at things objectively with an inability to see what other people think. The Jeep Wrangler is an objectively poorly made vehicle. It has other charms which people like which are mostly intangible but only a handful of buyers actually are a good fit for the vehicle. This is not conjecture on my part nor is it an inability to understand what is happening.
I run a small manufacturing company that makes a large chunk of our revenues selling aftermarket parts for Jeep Wranglers. I probably understand the buyers of Jeep Wranglers better than you do. I work with them daily, have designed products for the Wrangler and do a lot of aftermarket sales to some of the biggest vendors of aftermarket Jeep parts. And my statement stands. The Jeep Wrangler is not a well built vehicle. Few buyers of the vehicle are doing so for rational reasons. It has substantial and unnecessary design flaws and it is demonstrably not well constructed by today's standards. This cannot be argued. I get why people buy them. I don't get why people don't insist that they be better than they are. Every problem the Wrangler has could be improved without sacrificing what makes it special. You can have fun AND have a reliable, well built vehicle to do it in. I LIKE the Wrangler but I truly wish it were a better vehicle than it is.
I used to sell Jeeps. Never saw a car leak so much when new before. Every other unit leaked ... from the factory.
Not surprising if you are talking about the Wrangler. It's one of the least sophisticated, least updated, poorest made vehicles out there. It gets terrible fuel economy, is known for being terribly unreliable, loud, isn't practical for most people who buy one, is uncomfortable to drive or ride in, and it isn't exactly cheap either. Sure it can climb rocks and has great traction in sloppy conditions but that's about the only really genuinely good thing about it. And for reasons that elude me it still sells like crazy. Jeep dealers don't even discount it.
I used to work for Dana Corp and I've been in the factory where they make the axles and done some projects there. I've also been in the Toledo assembly plant. The Wrangler plant builds cars VERY fast. It's one of the fastest plants measured by time to assemble the vehicle. But I think that comes at a cost. Jeep makes little effort to improve the Wrangler because people keep buying them and not demanding that they get better. The axles on the Wrangler are about as low tech as it gets. Jeep has a product that people love irrationally like Harley Davidson motorcycles in spite of the fact that the product is objectively badly made and unreliable.
Android fanboy here... just wondering - when Apple pulls an app from the store, does it force it to uninstall from your device(s) as well?
I've had one or two apps on an iPhone that were in the store and then got pulled for various reasons (nothing malware related). The app remained on my phone and functional. Whether Apple has the ability to reach in and remove the app I cannot say but it wouldn't surprise me if they did have the ability. We've seen Amazon do that with their Kindle and obviously it is technologically possible. I've not heard of them doing this yet and I presume it would be newsworthy if they did.
It's not a couple of software engineers, but proving that will be impossible
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I guarantee you that there is a paper trail here. NOTHING happens in an automotive company that large without a lot of documentation being generated. R&D, engineering, testing and management all HAD to be involved. If the government really decides to go after this (big if I know) I don't think it would be hard at all to prove that it was more than a few folks involved.
It's possible to get to the truth. It wouldn't even be that difficult; just arrest some engineers and file criminal charges. At some point one of them would cut a deal and talk. That won't happen, however.
It might if the right people are doing the prosecuting. It will take years however and the damage is already done. You are correct that even if they aren't willing to talk it wouldn't be that hard for a prosecutor to work his way to the real story.
Have you ever worked in a larger corporation?
Probably more than most people reading this and I've spent a good chunk of my career (several decades) dealing directly with large automotive companies. I run a small company that is a supplier to some of these big companies we are talking about.
There are quite a few layers of managers and worker bees, so the upper layers don't necessarily know what the lower layers are doing.
At least in the case of VW this wasn't some minor engineering decision. I don' t have a doubt in my mind that some folks pretty high up the food chain at VW knew. As for the other companies, we'll see. If it is merely a difference in real world vs test bench then that is one thing. If they intentionally did something different like VW then they should be spanked just as hard as VW. If they intentionally cheated then I hope they suffer the wrath of $diety.
So the managers may well have been in the dark about the "defeat device", because the managers are not engineers, and would not have seen that level of report. All they would see is a single bullet item on a PowerPoint slide: "meets EPA limits for emissions."
I doubt it went all the way to the CEO but I'm pretty sure more than a handful of middle management knew and there is a more than trivial chance the folks in charge of engineering, testing and/or R&D were well aware of what was going on. If they didn't then they weren't doing their jobs competently. Are you seriously going to argue that the head of R&D wouldn't know that it was impossible for a diesel engine without urea injection to meet EPA standards?
Or, as the old saying goes, "Never attribute to conspiricity that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Oh I think there is plenty of stupidity in play here. But I also think the people involved knew what they did was wrong. Greed and fear can make people cover up stupid decisions.
A round of wrist slapping followed by executive bonuses for successfully dealing with the crisis.
Sad but probably true...
Ok, if they want to cheat then they should have to forfeit 3X any revenues (not profit which is a much smaller figure) they made from the products they sold. Have the money fund the EPA or something similar or refund the customers. Any engineer or manager who signed off on or was involved in this should be liable for damages as well as criminal charges with no corporate protection since this was a fraud.
I've also read in the last day or two that VW is (predictiably) trying to claim that management knew nothing about the emissions and that "a handful" of engineers were responsible. While there were obviously engineers responsible I have NO doubt whatsoever that management requested and signed off on this. They're just trying to throw a few peons under the bus to save their own skin.
If all ads on the internet were simple, text based or at least not animated, didn't play sounds, didn't block the content I actually want to see, didn't use tracking cookies and didn't take up much bandwidth, I would be happy to switch my ad blocker off.
The ads bother me for three reasons.
1) Bandwidth - if they want to buy me a gigabit fiber connection then they can talk to me about taking up my bandwidth. Until then then can fuck off.
2) Tracking - What I do on the web is my business and not theirs. If they want to track me then they can pay me cold hard cash and a lot of it. I'm NOT trading my privacy for a bit of ephemeral news content or articles about kittens.
3) Time - They are wasting my time which is the most precious thing I have. I have countless better things to do that engage in a war with self-entitled advertisers over whether they have a right to spew their ads at me and track my whereabouts.
Well, if you like going to those sites, it does become your problem as the more people who block ads, the less revenue they generate, and then their content will start to get worse, and eventually they'll disappear.
So what if they do disappear? I'll move on to something else. I have NO problem paying for content that I find valuable and I subscribe to several sites. The rest of them can dry up and blow away as far as I'm concerned. What they provide isn't valuable enough for me to care. I might miss a few for half a second but I'd get over it. If they want to PAY ME cold hard cash to look at their ads and track what I do then we can have a discussion about it. Until then their business model is stupid and I'm not about to give away my bandwidth and attention without what I consider adequate compensation.
Their bad business model is not my problem.
Ok, they don't have the cash or equity either to 'acquire'.
Sure they do. All they have to do is issue stock and have the shareholders of the other company accept that as payment. You can call it a "merger" if you want but functionally it will be an acquisition by one company or the other at the end of the day. One management team is going bye-bye and whose left will tell you who bought who. Chrysler merging with Daimler was a "merger of equals" but not really. Happens all the time.
Dell can't 'acquire' EMC, there's no way they have the cash.
You don't need cash to do an acquisition or merger. It can be an all stock transaction which is essentially funny-money with no cash changing hands. Cash is nice but not actually required as long as your stock price is high enough.
Acquisition MIGHT be something which can be made to work.
There's no need to qualify that statement. Some acquisition activity is demonstrably beneficial. Berkshire Hathaway is a great example of a company that does lots of acquisitions. But the reason it works for them is that they are careful not to screw up what made the company they are acquiring great in the first place. (In fact they largely leave the acquired company alone aside from some capital allocation) Apple also is a pretty good example of a company that seems to usually do a good job with acquisitions. They get small companies for very clear reasons whose products are a clear fit with what Apple is trying to do. M&A can be a great way to cherry pick good new products and R&D. Pharmaceutical companies do this all the time with pretty good success. It CAN work but it's not easy or simple.
Other companies manage to screw it up royally. Daimler's merger with Chrysler. AOL with Time Warner. A big auto supplier I used to work for went bankrupt because they bought another big auto supplier in bad financial shape and couldn't digest the acquisition. Stock price went from $50 when I started to under $5 when I left. CEO made a deal literally on the golf course to try to grow the balance sheet top line but didn't do adequate due diligence and the bottom line went to hell.
I would argue that acquisitions is more destructive than constructive.
Frequently that is true and there is plenty of academic research to support this thesis. It's not true all the time however. There are plenty of very successful acquisitions and it's not hard to find them. I've been involved with a few successful ones myself. It's not hard to find acquisitions that destroyed value though.
The ones that tend to work best are bolt on inquisitions between companies with similar cultures. Integrating two companies is hard but if the cultures clash it will almost certainly be doomed from the start no matter how promising other facets of the deal might be.
As for the diversity issues they might as well not exist. As you said gaming is male dominated, but so is football, and at least in the case of football no one will do anything because there is too much money in it. Assuming (and I realize that my arguments rest on this assumption) that gaming can be as successful at the college scene as in the professional scene, the money will quash any significant action.
I'm afraid you are mistaken about the effects of Title IX. What would happen is that other men's activities (sports) would get pushed out to keep the gender balance. Football does that in men's college sports now. It takes all the oxygen out of the room for other men's sports. It gets something like 65 scholarships and there is no equivalent sport on the women's side of the ledger. Less popular men's sports typically get the ax to feed the beast. In my sport of wrestling there were something like 160 D1 programs 30 years ago. Now there are 77 last I counted. Most of these are casualties of the effect of football with respect to Title IX.
In addition its not like it would take much money to start the club.
More than you think if you want to do it in a big way. You'll need a travel budget, facilities to train, equipment to train with, insurance, etc. For comparison my sport is wrestling which is not a particularly expensive sport in D1 college and the typical budget of a D1 college wrestling team is around $400-600K per year. Some a bit less and a few a lot more. Usually the program exists thanks to alumni donations and the coaches do a lot of fundraising. Lately the big thing is to get an endowment for the program so that the funding doesn't come from the athletic department budget at all. I would imagine any esport program would end up with a similar sort of financial picture.
Great, now we can meaninglessly give away free rides to college for people to blow off class and play video games instead of blowing off class and playing with some sort of equipment outside.
Don't know where you went to school but I was a college athlete and I didn't get to blow off any classes nor did I get a "free ride".
I am waiting for the NCAA's drool to start accumulating over another pool of exploitable labor.
You'll be waiting a long time. I was a college athlete in division one under the NCAA. I assure you that the NCAA wants nothing to do with so called esports. The folks in charge don't even consider it a sport no matter what you or I might call it. Plus if the NCAA gets involved then there are Title IX issues that come into play given that the player demographics skew heavily male. You seriously think a D1 college is going to cut an athletic sport for varsity video games?
No, even if esports become a thing in colleges the NCAA is probably not going to be the parent organization.
Is shooting a sport or a game?
Both. Either. Plus it requires some amount of athleticism.
What athletic abilities does it require?
Both fine and gross motor coordination. Physical strength. A modest amount of stamina and balance in some cases. Breath control. Hand-eye coordination. Plus if you are talking about biathon which is a shooting sport it requires substantial cardiovascular conditioning plus the ability to run or ski. If you are talking about bench shooting though the amount of athleticism required nearly inconsequential.
Honestly, if bridge and chess are considered sports, why not video games?
Very few people really consider bridge or chess a sport even including people who play seriously. Video games would probably fall into the same category as those would whatever that category happens to be. If you want to call it a sport then I can't really argue with that since a lot of activities are considered sports. (synchronized swimming anyone?) But it certainly does NOT fall under the heading of athletics. There is no appreciable athletic ability involved here including gross motor skills, balance, strength, or cardio-vascular conditioning.
At the university, the League of Legends club has become an official club sport, just like rugby or rowing.
That means it is a club but it doesn't mean it is athletic like rugby or rowing. Being a official university club means that the university sanctions the activity and maybe gives it a bit of funding and support. Which is awesome. Universities do this for lots of worthy of activities and it's always nice to see a new one added. However, calling it a part of college athletics is a bit of a reach since the amount of athleticism involved is minute. (no appreciable strength, balance, gross motor skills, etc required) I was a college athlete and while I enjoy video games as much as most, I don't consider them athletics. Fun? Sure. Cool? I think so. Sports? Maybe. Athletics? No.
Its not quite that simple.
You are correct that it isn't that simple but I don't think may people want to read about all the gory economic nuances involved. Nevertheless the biggest driver of cost early in the life cycle of a product like a RAM chip is going to be the fixed costs to begin production. The effect on unit costs won't become negligible until quite a lot of units have already been sold. It's not the only factor in play but it's normally the biggest. Once enough units have been sold other factors like the ones you mention tend to become dominant.
Nobody will want my chips if a new tech comes out that doubles density. My current equipment won't be useful anymore.
Old chips routinely continue to get produced long after they have been surpassed by newer/better technology. They don't just shut down production the moment something better comes along. There is a wind down period, often a rather protracted one - sometimes measured in years or even decades. Once the equipment is paid for they can continue to produce the product. Sometimes they'll sell the production once demand falls low enough. I deal with this sort of thing in my work when my customers specify old electronics. I had a customer request a specific Schottky diode that the original manufacturer (Motorola) stopped making 20 years ago and sold the business to a small volume maker. But you can still get the part even today if you had the need.
Hint: You are NOT a Google customer. You are Google's PRODUCT.
Not quite. Information about me is the product. If I were the product then that would be called slavery. I am the vendor and sole distributor of information about me. In a sense I am "selling" said data to Google in exchange for online services. Arguably this is a rather bad deal for me but I'm not the product - I'm the one selling the product. It just is that most people don't value data about themselves very highly.
Google's CUSTOMERS are INTERNET ADVERTISERS looking to strip mine your life for data.
Exactly. Google's customers want DATA about me. The data is the product. I just happen to be the source of said data and the only one that can "manufacture" actual true data about me.