They probably do need to grow the market though, of 27 US launches so far this year the Falcon has had 17. Even if SpaceX steals some Soyuz launches to the ISS through the Commercial Crew program and a few more from Atlas/Delta there's not a lot of growth potential, unless China/Russia/ESA/Japan/India want to give up their own rocket programs.
To grow the market prices have to fall. There are potentially a lot of economically useful things we could launch into orbit that don't make economic sense at a $100 million price tag but do make sense at a $10 million price tag and even more of them at a $1 million price tag. Lowering cost to orbit is the first task required to grow the market because in many cases it overwhelms or at least increases other costs to the point that only mega corporations and nation states can afford to send anything into space currently. Imagine if they had a built a brand new 747 and could only use it once every time you wanted to fly from New York City to London. That's basically where the space industry has been for the last 50 years.
Fuck the cars, high end electric vehicles are a limited market.
All markets are limited markets. That said the market for luxury vehicles is a very big market and Tesla is doing rather well in it sales wise. I don't think you would argue that BMW or Mercedes are tiny companies and Tesla is apparently out selling them. That's nothing to sneeze at.
The big Tesla market, something the hedge fund shorts absolutely do not want to discuss, the home electric power systems, panels, batteries and control gear a far bigger market, probably something like 100 times the size of the vehicle market, each unit worth similar to a low end car and far more profitable, with numbers in the hundreds of millions.
Possibly true but if Tesla doesn't get their car company scaled up they aren't going to have the finances to try to tackle the power generation market. They have to crawl before they run and the energy generation market is likely going to be even trickier than the car market to figure out.
Tesla home power systems, cut your house from the grid, invest in a higher return than bank interest, far higher and fuel your Tesla vehicle from home.
Q2 Automotive gross margin increased to 20.6% GAAP and 21.0% non-GAAP. Thats their profit margin.
Gross margin is NOT profit margin. Those are different things and you need to understand the difference. Gross margin does not consider sales, administration, interest, taxes, and other overhead like engineering etc. Gross margin is just revenue minus cost of goods sold which is just direct costs of materials and labor. Gross margin is NOT profit and should not be confused with profit. You can easily have a 20% gross margin but a negative profit margin and if that remains the case long enough the company will eventually go bankrupt. Software companies often have gross margins in the 60-80% range because cost of production is very tiny - most of their costs are in engineering, sales and marketing. Manufacturing companies usually have gross margins in the 15-40% range depending on the product being made but that does not mean they are profitable.
Also, FYI, you book revenue when you ship, not produce. So having 13k vehicles in inventory is a drag on their balance sheet, not a boost.
How revenue is booked is unfortunately FAR more complicated and to a significant degree is an arbitrary decision. It's perfectly legitimate to book a sale when you sign a contract but before the product is delivered. Many companies do this. Other companies book the sale when the product is sent to a distributor (like an auto dealer) but not actually sold to the end customer. Other companies only book a sale when the end customer has received the product. You can even book a sale when cash is received for the product. All of these approaches are perfectly valid under GAAP. From what I understand Tesla somewhat conservatively books sales only when the customer takes delivery of the car. This is unusual in the industry. Most of the big auto makers book "sales" when the ship a car to a dealer even if it hasn't actually been sold to an end customer. They are treating the dealer as the customer of the product.
I'm waiting to hear how Tesla is losing money on each car it sells, such as some people have been saying around here (FALSELY) for months.
Tesla HAS been losing money on each car they sell. That is a factual statement. But it doesn't mean what some people think it means. People here keep confusing gross margin with net margin and haven't a clue what free cash flow is or fixed costs or variable costs.
It's absolutely normal for a new product to lose money on the first units they produce because they haven't produced enough units to amortize the fixed costs over. Here's a oversimplified totally-made-up example. I spend $1,000,000 making an assembly line - one time cost never to be repeated. It also costs $500,000 per year to operate the assembly line no matter how many units I make whether it be 1 or 100,000. So before I make a single unit I have $1.5 million in operating costs. Let's say I'm selling a car for $50,000 and my actual cost of labor and materials in that car is $40,000 so I have a gross profit of $10,000 per vehicle. That means the first 150 vehicles I make are going to be sold at a loss. I also have to sell a minimum of 50 vehicles every year just to cover the fixed costs of operation.
Tesla is in that exact situation, just with much larger numbers. The have the added wrinkle that they also have a lot of debt to service (around $11 billion reportedly) which can be treated as an additional fixed cost.
To me the advantage of the search bar was clear all the time if I was typing in a search item or a url.
That's just almost never a problem for me. I don't apparently search for things that are easily confused with a URL. The search bar seems to me to be something that should be added in an extension by those who like that workflow.
It was also much easier to see what the search engine was.
I have a default search engine so I know which one it uses and if I need to search a specific engine other than the default I can just navigate to it. I just don't see much advantage in that workflow. You be you of course but I don't see the point.
We already build most of our giant infrastructure projects years ago.
Your statement implies there is no further need for large infrastructure projects in the US which is plainly not true. Furthermore we have done a rather shitty job of maintaining the infrastructure we have and our public transit options (especially trains) are terrible in most of the country. Our power infrastructure needs rather substantial updating and modernization. Ask Flint Michigan it it's a good idea to never upgrade your water pipes for a century.
Infrastructure isn't something you build once and never worry about again. For a society to grow it needs to keep investing in it in ways both big and small.
Quite possibly yes. It connects some locations that are financially very important both locally and globally. Sure it will take quite a while to pay off (presuming it does) but I could see it being a net economic benefit overall. The Big Dig in Boston cost $24 billion so we're not in uncharted territory cost wise.
800 million/year...US$15,220/lanehour...
They are expecting roughly 29,100 vehicle crossings per day which is 10,950,000 crossings per year so accepting your math that would be ballpark $8/crossing. If it saves the amount of time the article claims they'll make the $800M back in fuel savings alone (3+ hours driving saved) irrespective of the value of the cargo carried and economic development resulting from the bridge. The real value in this bridge will probably be in the cargo and tourists it carries.
So yeah, it's a lot of money but one can make an economic case for it.
So you are a denier of reality, politics trumps the truth in your mind. Good to know.
Denier of reality? Quite the opposite. I'm WELL aware that our current president likes to think we all work for him and that he doesn't work for us. How is it that you missed that fact? Once he actually starts working for the American people (ALL of them) then we can have this discussion about my motivations.
Wow, you truly are an idiot. The administration is not asking for free labor. They are asking for employees to be able to take a leave of absence rather than having to quit their jobs and hope to get rehired later.
Yes they are asking for a discount on labor. If they were willing to pay market rates then they wouldn't have to go begging the private sector for talent. Hell they could just hire the company to do the work if they need the person or win the person away from the private sector outright by paying them competitively. There is no point to such a discussion unless they are trying to get labor at a discount.
Try to take off your political lens for a moment and at least read the summary: "discuss ways to make it easier for employees to take leaves of absence to help with government projects"
Grow up and learn to read what that really means. Politics is ALWAYS involved and to think otherwise is dangerously naive.
I really miss the time where we had a URL and a place for the search engine on all browsers.
I don't. I just type my search into the bar or I go to the website I want to search. Works fine. No idea why people keep trying to over complicate this stuff. Keep it simple. I pretty much never used the search bar when it was there because it didn't solve any problem for me. Maybe it was a hair slower but not enough for me to care.
Not currently running linux on a desktop machine but I am running Firefox on both Windows and Mac machines currently and haven't seen a memory leak of any significance in years. There was a time when those were problems but not so much recently. Like all browsers these days it does use a lot of memory but I haven't seen evidence of a memory leak in a long time. Given that you posted anonymously I'm guessing you are just throwing FUD around for fun.
And shutting down Firefox takes a good 10 minutes or so - I click the 'X' on the window and I can see the processes slowly shrink and eventually go away.
Again I call bullshit on this unless you are running a machine with some serious hardware problems. I have never seen any behavior like that on literally hundreds of machines I administer through work running firefox or in my personal use. Firefox does have its flaws but you don't need to make stuff up to point them out.
Idiots. You are working for the Country, the American people, not for Trump.
When Trump accepts that reality then I will too.
We are not talking about working on his campaign, we are talking about working on the software infrastructure for the nation.
So what? If it is important to the richest nation on earth then the richest nation on earth can damn well pay market rates for it. Buy fewer bombers if they need to find the money in the budget. The military is ridiculously over funded as it is.
Trump administration reportedly wants tech giants to make it easy for workers to take leaves of absence to help the government modernize
The easy way to do this is to pay the workers you want to utilize wages and benefits competitive with the private sector. This might require raising taxes to cover the cost. I cannot imagine the tech companies have much incentive to loan out any workers who are any good. I'm also dubious a lot of tech workers will be super enthusiastic about working on highly bureaucratic and low paying and likely boring government IT plumbing projects unless the government is willing to back up a dump truck of money. Even then it's not clear they would get the best and brightest.
However, White House officials believe tech workers are willing to "put politics aside."
HAHAHAHAHAAAA.... For this administration? I doubt they'll get any sort of wide spread enthusiasm as long as Trump is in office. I think it would be a tough sell for any administration but this one in particular seems rather unlikely.
Now Communism has a problem where any person who doesn't play by the plan can hurt the system. While Capitalism expected no plan, so anyone who does better then nothing, is a net benefit.
Nonsense. It's perfectly possible for someone under a capitalist system to be a drag on the system while making a lot of economic activity. Happens all the time. See the housing crisis in 2008 which was caused by a lot of people acting in their own self interest but eventually crashing the system. Explain to me how Bernie Madoff was a net benefit - I'd love to hear that one...
This creates a tenancy for communism to be more brutal in people following rules.
You mean as opposed to mass incarceration of people for minor offenses, prison camps for Japanese during WWII, Guantanamo Bay, routine murder of minorities by police, near genocide of native peoples, Jim Crow laws, etc - all of which happened in our capitalist society, some rather recently. While I understand and agree that what we call communist countries are generally more towards the dictator end of the spectrum, let's not pretend that capitalist countries have clean hands either. The US has a greater percentage of its population in prison than China does so it's pretty hard to argue that the US isn't rather brutal too - particularly to those without much money.
But Capitalism is often more insidious where the people who have money have the power, however they use their power behind the scenes, and are not the face of power.
That happens in both communist and capitalist societies as well as every other form of economic structure you can think of. That is not unique to capitalism.
No theory has ever been proven correct, and they cannot be by definition.
Common misconception. You are confused about the fact that all theories are falsifiable but that's NOT the same thing as saying that they cannot be correct. Theories that make testable predictions supported by evidence are by definition correct. Where you argument goes of the rails is that you are confusing what being falsifiable means. All scientific theories are falsifiable, meaning that you can specify the evidence required to prove them false and that you must always be willing to accept such evidence if found. That does NOT mean that such evidence necessarily exists nor does it mean that a theory cannot ever be correct. Calling a theory correct simply means it makes testable predictions supported by evidence for the conditions tested.
Further think for just a moment about what the word "correct" means. If I make a prediction and that prediction comes to pass then by definition my prediction was correct. There is nothing else meaningful you can call it. Now maybe I just got lucky with my prediction which is why we insist that predictions of scientific theories be reproducible. But if a theory makes a testable prediction and the evidence supports that prediction (with reproducibility) then by definition that theory is correct for any meaningful definition of the word correct. A scientific theory can be (and is) simultaneously correct and falsifiable.
If you want to get really pedantic, scientific theories are never "proven" to be correct, they are only shown to make correct predictions.
A distinction without a difference. Think for half a moment about what the word "correct" really means. The whole point of going out to gather evidence is to prove whether or not the predictions of the theory are correct. You make a prediction and and then you go gather evidence to see it matches your prediction. If the evidence supports the prediction then QED it is a correct model at least for the conditions tested. A theory might only work for some conditions and there might be better models but if it makes predictions that are supported by evidence then by definition it is correct.
You seem confused about the difference between the words incorrect and falsifiable. Just because a theory has a means by which it can be shown to be false (meaning it is falsifiable) does NOT mean it cannot be shown to be true. It just means that we know what it would take to prove it to be false.
How many years do you design it to be repairable for?
That's a decision that has to be made and there will be trade offs as a result both in economics and performance. I did not argue that everything should be made as easy to repair as possible so you are putting up something of a strawman here. I merely pointed out that repairability is almost always a function of product design and that many companies these days are electing to design products that are hard to repair because it is in their (usually short term) financial interest to do so even when it negatively impacts society and their customers and sometimes themselves in the long run.
It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma problem. Companies want the cheapest product and so do customers even though a company might get a better reputation and customers might get a better product if both were willing to sacrifice a little money in the short run for a better long term outcome.
Scientific theories can never be proved to be correct.
They most certainly can be proven correct and are routinely. You are confused about what being falsifiable means and what being correct means. Being falsifiable means that we can state what data would cause us to declare a theory to be incorrect. It does not mean the theory cannot be proven correct. Correct in the context of a theory means it provides useful predictions. Arguments to the contrary are nothing but philosophical masturbation about whether we really know anything for certain.
To give an example I can make a prediction with effectively 100% confidence that the Earth will rotate on its axis causing the Sun to rise somewhere to the East of me tomorrow. That theory has been tested daily for millions of years and it IS correct for any meaningful definition of the word correct. I also can tell you what data would cause me to declare my sunrise theory incorrect which means the theory is falsifiable. But falsifiable does not mean incorrect. If I have overwhelming confirmatory data and no data contradicting my hypothesis then the theory is correct until such time as contradicting data is found.
They will agree with experiments, and they will make predictions that are later verified, but that doesn't imply that they are correct.
If a theory makes a prediction that is verified by experiment then the theory is correct. If the theory does not agree with experiments then it is incorrect. There is no third option. If a future theory provides a more accurate model of what is happening that does not render the previous theory incorrect insofar as it has been verified by experiment. Correct simply means it provides a verifiable prediction.
They are useful, that's all. Newton's theory of gravity is (extremely) useful, even if it is known NOT to be correct.
Newton's theory IS correct. You can use it to predict the motion of many objects to a very high degree of precision. It is just useful/correct only for certain conditions of speed and size. General relativity did not render Newton's theories false. It just showed that they are a special case of the theory of general relativity much like the theory of special relativity is just a special case of general relativity.
But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them.
That's usually a result of shitty design. Designing something so that it can be repaired easily costs money and is (usually) more difficult so unsurprisingly people/companies prefer not to bother if they don't have to. If something is difficult to repair it is usually because they didn't adequately consider repair during the design of the product. Once in a while you run into a product that is made intentionally hard to repair (Apple I'm looking at you) but most of the time it's just benign neglect and/or economics.
There isn’t actually any such rating as X or XXX, those are porn marketing terms only. The closest actual rating is NC-17.
NC-17 is a relatively recent thing. There did used to be a X rating (never XXX though) but it got co-opted by the porn industry to such a degree that they had to change it to something less... promotional. I forget when NC-17 became official but it was within the last 20-30 years.
But most people WILL see and touch and have sex with other naked people, hopefully many thousands of times. Seems to me that we should celebrate depictions of sex,and discourage depictions of murder.
While I agree with you in principle, it's more complicated than that precisely for the frequency reasons you state. There are real consequences to sex (pregnancy, disease, etc) which most people are very likely to run into in some capacity, often before they are really sufficiently mature to deal with them appropriately. So some amount of caution clearly is warranted albeit probably not the ridiculous extremes we go to. It's obvious that a lot of people (including an alarming number of full grown adults) are incapable of behaving rationally when presented with sexually suggestive media much less the real thing. Given that they are going to run into situations in their life numerous times one has to be careful. It's similar reasoning to why we have separate men's and women's bathrooms. In principle it shouldn't matter but in practice it does. I agree we should celebrate depictions of affection but how we do so responsibly is sometimes quite challenging.
On the other hand very few people are likely to actually even witness much less be a part of an actual shooting or war so there is a degree of the abstract in putting those activities on screen. Not to mention that movie violence looks pretty much nothing like the real thing. You could watch the Avengers all day long because the consequences of the "violence" are so nerfed they make it into little more than a dance recital. Violence is and should be FAR more horrifying to see on TV but in real life it is generally somewhat less of a problem for most of the population.
Now if only the Standard Model were an actual theory, instead of a list of empirical observations.
It is a theory that made testable predictions (like the Higgs boson) that were later proven to be correct via experiment. If that's not a theory then nothing is.
They are saying that, as alternative theories become less likely, there is more reason to believe the Standard Model could be correct.
The Standard Model IS correct. It has been tested and the once a theory is tested the results cannot be unproven. Now it might be that the Standard Model only works for certain conditions or it might be a subset of a more comprehensive theory. Newton's laws of motion very correctly describe large objects moving slowly but the theory was subsumed into Einstein's theory of general relativity. Newton's laws fall out of relativity under certain conditions to a high degree of accuracy and utility. We might come to a better and more comprehensive understanding of the universe but what we have already proven about the Standard Model will stand forever.
Now we know that the Standard Model is an incomplete understanding of the universe. But what it has been shown to describe it describes very accurately and that will always remain true no matter what else we learn in the future. It makes testable and correct predictions about the behavior of some bits of the universe so QED it is correct for at least those phenomena.
A lot of salts these days come with their own plastic grinder container. I noticed the grinders in those things shard off small pieces of plastic. So what I do is slice open the container with a knife and pour it into something else.
I never really understood what the point of grinding salt tableside is other than being a pretentious twat. Total waste of time and money. We grind pepper because it has a flavor impact (peppercorns are a fruit and once ground some of the aromatics evaporate) but there is no meaningful effect on salt which is just a rock. There is essentially no culinary advantage to grinding your salt in a cheap plastic disposable grinder and it wastes money on an unnecessary activity.
Nothing about that. Microplastics could be nanograms or milligrams, and that is a massive difference.
It is a difference but it's unclear what effect such a difference might actually have. Once a toxicity threshold is reached the difference becomes to some degree academic. If nanograms of some substance is significantly toxic it doesn't really matter if there are milligrams present because you have the same problem either way. Drowning in an inch of water renders you just as dead as drowning in an ocean if you get what I'm saying. The problem is that we don't know what a safe amount is at this point. Could be a lot or could be very little and we don't even know if there are measurable health effects just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably do need to grow the market though, of 27 US launches so far this year the Falcon has had 17. Even if SpaceX steals some Soyuz launches to the ISS through the Commercial Crew program and a few more from Atlas/Delta there's not a lot of growth potential, unless China/Russia/ESA/Japan/India want to give up their own rocket programs.
To grow the market prices have to fall. There are potentially a lot of economically useful things we could launch into orbit that don't make economic sense at a $100 million price tag but do make sense at a $10 million price tag and even more of them at a $1 million price tag. Lowering cost to orbit is the first task required to grow the market because in many cases it overwhelms or at least increases other costs to the point that only mega corporations and nation states can afford to send anything into space currently. Imagine if they had a built a brand new 747 and could only use it once every time you wanted to fly from New York City to London. That's basically where the space industry has been for the last 50 years.
Fuck the cars, high end electric vehicles are a limited market.
All markets are limited markets. That said the market for luxury vehicles is a very big market and Tesla is doing rather well in it sales wise. I don't think you would argue that BMW or Mercedes are tiny companies and Tesla is apparently out selling them. That's nothing to sneeze at.
The big Tesla market, something the hedge fund shorts absolutely do not want to discuss, the home electric power systems, panels, batteries and control gear a far bigger market, probably something like 100 times the size of the vehicle market, each unit worth similar to a low end car and far more profitable, with numbers in the hundreds of millions.
Possibly true but if Tesla doesn't get their car company scaled up they aren't going to have the finances to try to tackle the power generation market. They have to crawl before they run and the energy generation market is likely going to be even trickier than the car market to figure out.
Tesla home power systems, cut your house from the grid, invest in a higher return than bank interest, far higher and fuel your Tesla vehicle from home.
That remains to be seen.
Q2 Automotive gross margin increased to 20.6% GAAP and 21.0% non-GAAP. Thats their profit margin.
Gross margin is NOT profit margin. Those are different things and you need to understand the difference. Gross margin does not consider sales, administration, interest, taxes, and other overhead like engineering etc. Gross margin is just revenue minus cost of goods sold which is just direct costs of materials and labor. Gross margin is NOT profit and should not be confused with profit. You can easily have a 20% gross margin but a negative profit margin and if that remains the case long enough the company will eventually go bankrupt. Software companies often have gross margins in the 60-80% range because cost of production is very tiny - most of their costs are in engineering, sales and marketing. Manufacturing companies usually have gross margins in the 15-40% range depending on the product being made but that does not mean they are profitable.
Also, FYI, you book revenue when you ship, not produce. So having 13k vehicles in inventory is a drag on their balance sheet, not a boost.
How revenue is booked is unfortunately FAR more complicated and to a significant degree is an arbitrary decision. It's perfectly legitimate to book a sale when you sign a contract but before the product is delivered. Many companies do this. Other companies book the sale when the product is sent to a distributor (like an auto dealer) but not actually sold to the end customer. Other companies only book a sale when the end customer has received the product. You can even book a sale when cash is received for the product. All of these approaches are perfectly valid under GAAP. From what I understand Tesla somewhat conservatively books sales only when the customer takes delivery of the car. This is unusual in the industry. Most of the big auto makers book "sales" when the ship a car to a dealer even if it hasn't actually been sold to an end customer. They are treating the dealer as the customer of the product.
I'm waiting to hear how Tesla is losing money on each car it sells, such as some people have been saying around here (FALSELY) for months.
Tesla HAS been losing money on each car they sell. That is a factual statement. But it doesn't mean what some people think it means. People here keep confusing gross margin with net margin and haven't a clue what free cash flow is or fixed costs or variable costs.
It's absolutely normal for a new product to lose money on the first units they produce because they haven't produced enough units to amortize the fixed costs over. Here's a oversimplified totally-made-up example. I spend $1,000,000 making an assembly line - one time cost never to be repeated. It also costs $500,000 per year to operate the assembly line no matter how many units I make whether it be 1 or 100,000. So before I make a single unit I have $1.5 million in operating costs. Let's say I'm selling a car for $50,000 and my actual cost of labor and materials in that car is $40,000 so I have a gross profit of $10,000 per vehicle. That means the first 150 vehicles I make are going to be sold at a loss. I also have to sell a minimum of 50 vehicles every year just to cover the fixed costs of operation.
Tesla is in that exact situation, just with much larger numbers. The have the added wrinkle that they also have a lot of debt to service (around $11 billion reportedly) which can be treated as an additional fixed cost.
To me the advantage of the search bar was clear all the time if I was typing in a search item or a url.
That's just almost never a problem for me. I don't apparently search for things that are easily confused with a URL. The search bar seems to me to be something that should be added in an extension by those who like that workflow.
It was also much easier to see what the search engine was.
I have a default search engine so I know which one it uses and if I need to search a specific engine other than the default I can just navigate to it. I just don't see much advantage in that workflow. You be you of course but I don't see the point.
We already build most of our giant infrastructure projects years ago.
Your statement implies there is no further need for large infrastructure projects in the US which is plainly not true. Furthermore we have done a rather shitty job of maintaining the infrastructure we have and our public transit options (especially trains) are terrible in most of the country. Our power infrastructure needs rather substantial updating and modernization. Ask Flint Michigan it it's a good idea to never upgrade your water pipes for a century.
Infrastructure isn't something you build once and never worry about again. For a society to grow it needs to keep investing in it in ways both big and small.
A 20 billion dollar bridge is a win?
Quite possibly yes. It connects some locations that are financially very important both locally and globally. Sure it will take quite a while to pay off (presuming it does) but I could see it being a net economic benefit overall. The Big Dig in Boston cost $24 billion so we're not in uncharted territory cost wise.
800 million/year...US$15,220/lanehour...
They are expecting roughly 29,100 vehicle crossings per day which is 10,950,000 crossings per year so accepting your math that would be ballpark $8/crossing. If it saves the amount of time the article claims they'll make the $800M back in fuel savings alone (3+ hours driving saved) irrespective of the value of the cargo carried and economic development resulting from the bridge. The real value in this bridge will probably be in the cargo and tourists it carries.
So yeah, it's a lot of money but one can make an economic case for it.
So should the Whitehouse use VI or Emacs?
Neither and they should send anyone who wastes government resources arguing about it to Guantanamo.
So you are a denier of reality, politics trumps the truth in your mind. Good to know.
Denier of reality? Quite the opposite. I'm WELL aware that our current president likes to think we all work for him and that he doesn't work for us. How is it that you missed that fact? Once he actually starts working for the American people (ALL of them) then we can have this discussion about my motivations.
Wow, you truly are an idiot. The administration is not asking for free labor. They are asking for employees to be able to take a leave of absence rather than having to quit their jobs and hope to get rehired later.
Yes they are asking for a discount on labor. If they were willing to pay market rates then they wouldn't have to go begging the private sector for talent. Hell they could just hire the company to do the work if they need the person or win the person away from the private sector outright by paying them competitively. There is no point to such a discussion unless they are trying to get labor at a discount.
Try to take off your political lens for a moment and at least read the summary: "discuss ways to make it easier for employees to take leaves of absence to help with government projects"
Grow up and learn to read what that really means. Politics is ALWAYS involved and to think otherwise is dangerously naive.
By using the @, many people wil not use it.
This is true. I will be one of them.
I really miss the time where we had a URL and a place for the search engine on all browsers.
I don't. I just type my search into the bar or I go to the website I want to search. Works fine. No idea why people keep trying to over complicate this stuff. Keep it simple. I pretty much never used the search bar when it was there because it didn't solve any problem for me. Maybe it was a hair slower but not enough for me to care.
This is my number one annoyance with Firefox.
Not currently running linux on a desktop machine but I am running Firefox on both Windows and Mac machines currently and haven't seen a memory leak of any significance in years. There was a time when those were problems but not so much recently. Like all browsers these days it does use a lot of memory but I haven't seen evidence of a memory leak in a long time. Given that you posted anonymously I'm guessing you are just throwing FUD around for fun.
And shutting down Firefox takes a good 10 minutes or so - I click the 'X' on the window and I can see the processes slowly shrink and eventually go away.
Again I call bullshit on this unless you are running a machine with some serious hardware problems. I have never seen any behavior like that on literally hundreds of machines I administer through work running firefox or in my personal use. Firefox does have its flaws but you don't need to make stuff up to point them out.
Idiots. You are working for the Country, the American people, not for Trump.
When Trump accepts that reality then I will too.
We are not talking about working on his campaign, we are talking about working on the software infrastructure for the nation.
So what? If it is important to the richest nation on earth then the richest nation on earth can damn well pay market rates for it. Buy fewer bombers if they need to find the money in the budget. The military is ridiculously over funded as it is.
Trump administration reportedly wants tech giants to make it easy for workers to take leaves of absence to help the government modernize
The easy way to do this is to pay the workers you want to utilize wages and benefits competitive with the private sector. This might require raising taxes to cover the cost. I cannot imagine the tech companies have much incentive to loan out any workers who are any good. I'm also dubious a lot of tech workers will be super enthusiastic about working on highly bureaucratic and low paying and likely boring government IT plumbing projects unless the government is willing to back up a dump truck of money. Even then it's not clear they would get the best and brightest.
However, White House officials believe tech workers are willing to "put politics aside."
HAHAHAHAHAAAA.... For this administration? I doubt they'll get any sort of wide spread enthusiasm as long as Trump is in office. I think it would be a tough sell for any administration but this one in particular seems rather unlikely.
Now Communism has a problem where any person who doesn't play by the plan can hurt the system. While Capitalism expected no plan, so anyone who does better then nothing, is a net benefit.
Nonsense. It's perfectly possible for someone under a capitalist system to be a drag on the system while making a lot of economic activity. Happens all the time. See the housing crisis in 2008 which was caused by a lot of people acting in their own self interest but eventually crashing the system. Explain to me how Bernie Madoff was a net benefit - I'd love to hear that one...
This creates a tenancy for communism to be more brutal in people following rules.
You mean as opposed to mass incarceration of people for minor offenses, prison camps for Japanese during WWII, Guantanamo Bay, routine murder of minorities by police, near genocide of native peoples, Jim Crow laws, etc - all of which happened in our capitalist society, some rather recently. While I understand and agree that what we call communist countries are generally more towards the dictator end of the spectrum, let's not pretend that capitalist countries have clean hands either. The US has a greater percentage of its population in prison than China does so it's pretty hard to argue that the US isn't rather brutal too - particularly to those without much money.
But Capitalism is often more insidious where the people who have money have the power, however they use their power behind the scenes, and are not the face of power.
That happens in both communist and capitalist societies as well as every other form of economic structure you can think of. That is not unique to capitalism.
No theory has ever been proven correct, and they cannot be by definition.
Common misconception. You are confused about the fact that all theories are falsifiable but that's NOT the same thing as saying that they cannot be correct. Theories that make testable predictions supported by evidence are by definition correct. Where you argument goes of the rails is that you are confusing what being falsifiable means. All scientific theories are falsifiable, meaning that you can specify the evidence required to prove them false and that you must always be willing to accept such evidence if found. That does NOT mean that such evidence necessarily exists nor does it mean that a theory cannot ever be correct.
Calling a theory correct simply means it makes testable predictions supported by evidence for the conditions tested.
Further think for just a moment about what the word "correct" means. If I make a prediction and that prediction comes to pass then by definition my prediction was correct. There is nothing else meaningful you can call it. Now maybe I just got lucky with my prediction which is why we insist that predictions of scientific theories be reproducible. But if a theory makes a testable prediction and the evidence supports that prediction (with reproducibility) then by definition that theory is correct for any meaningful definition of the word correct. A scientific theory can be (and is) simultaneously correct and falsifiable.
If you want to get really pedantic, scientific theories are never "proven" to be correct, they are only shown to make correct predictions.
A distinction without a difference. Think for half a moment about what the word "correct" really means. The whole point of going out to gather evidence is to prove whether or not the predictions of the theory are correct. You make a prediction and and then you go gather evidence to see it matches your prediction. If the evidence supports the prediction then QED it is a correct model at least for the conditions tested. A theory might only work for some conditions and there might be better models but if it makes predictions that are supported by evidence then by definition it is correct.
You seem confused about the difference between the words incorrect and falsifiable. Just because a theory has a means by which it can be shown to be false (meaning it is falsifiable) does NOT mean it cannot be shown to be true. It just means that we know what it would take to prove it to be false.
How many years do you design it to be repairable for?
That's a decision that has to be made and there will be trade offs as a result both in economics and performance. I did not argue that everything should be made as easy to repair as possible so you are putting up something of a strawman here. I merely pointed out that repairability is almost always a function of product design and that many companies these days are electing to design products that are hard to repair because it is in their (usually short term) financial interest to do so even when it negatively impacts society and their customers and sometimes themselves in the long run.
It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma problem. Companies want the cheapest product and so do customers even though a company might get a better reputation and customers might get a better product if both were willing to sacrifice a little money in the short run for a better long term outcome.
Scientific theories can never be proved to be correct.
They most certainly can be proven correct and are routinely. You are confused about what being falsifiable means and what being correct means. Being falsifiable means that we can state what data would cause us to declare a theory to be incorrect. It does not mean the theory cannot be proven correct. Correct in the context of a theory means it provides useful predictions. Arguments to the contrary are nothing but philosophical masturbation about whether we really know anything for certain.
To give an example I can make a prediction with effectively 100% confidence that the Earth will rotate on its axis causing the Sun to rise somewhere to the East of me tomorrow. That theory has been tested daily for millions of years and it IS correct for any meaningful definition of the word correct. I also can tell you what data would cause me to declare my sunrise theory incorrect which means the theory is falsifiable. But falsifiable does not mean incorrect. If I have overwhelming confirmatory data and no data contradicting my hypothesis then the theory is correct until such time as contradicting data is found.
They will agree with experiments, and they will make predictions that are later verified, but that doesn't imply that they are correct.
If a theory makes a prediction that is verified by experiment then the theory is correct. If the theory does not agree with experiments then it is incorrect. There is no third option. If a future theory provides a more accurate model of what is happening that does not render the previous theory incorrect insofar as it has been verified by experiment. Correct simply means it provides a verifiable prediction.
They are useful, that's all. Newton's theory of gravity is (extremely) useful, even if it is known NOT to be correct.
Newton's theory IS correct. You can use it to predict the motion of many objects to a very high degree of precision. It is just useful/correct only for certain conditions of speed and size. General relativity did not render Newton's theories false. It just showed that they are a special case of the theory of general relativity much like the theory of special relativity is just a special case of general relativity.
But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them.
That's usually a result of shitty design. Designing something so that it can be repaired easily costs money and is (usually) more difficult so unsurprisingly people/companies prefer not to bother if they don't have to. If something is difficult to repair it is usually because they didn't adequately consider repair during the design of the product. Once in a while you run into a product that is made intentionally hard to repair (Apple I'm looking at you) but most of the time it's just benign neglect and/or economics.
There isn’t actually any such rating as X or XXX, those are porn marketing terms only. The closest actual rating is NC-17.
NC-17 is a relatively recent thing. There did used to be a X rating (never XXX though) but it got co-opted by the porn industry to such a degree that they had to change it to something less... promotional. I forget when NC-17 became official but it was within the last 20-30 years.
But most people WILL see and touch and have sex with other naked people, hopefully many thousands of times. Seems to me that we should celebrate depictions of sex,and discourage depictions of murder.
While I agree with you in principle, it's more complicated than that precisely for the frequency reasons you state. There are real consequences to sex (pregnancy, disease, etc) which most people are very likely to run into in some capacity, often before they are really sufficiently mature to deal with them appropriately. So some amount of caution clearly is warranted albeit probably not the ridiculous extremes we go to. It's obvious that a lot of people (including an alarming number of full grown adults) are incapable of behaving rationally when presented with sexually suggestive media much less the real thing. Given that they are going to run into situations in their life numerous times one has to be careful. It's similar reasoning to why we have separate men's and women's bathrooms. In principle it shouldn't matter but in practice it does. I agree we should celebrate depictions of affection but how we do so responsibly is sometimes quite challenging.
On the other hand very few people are likely to actually even witness much less be a part of an actual shooting or war so there is a degree of the abstract in putting those activities on screen. Not to mention that movie violence looks pretty much nothing like the real thing. You could watch the Avengers all day long because the consequences of the "violence" are so nerfed they make it into little more than a dance recital. Violence is and should be FAR more horrifying to see on TV but in real life it is generally somewhat less of a problem for most of the population.
Now if only the Standard Model were an actual theory, instead of a list of empirical observations.
It is a theory that made testable predictions (like the Higgs boson) that were later proven to be correct via experiment. If that's not a theory then nothing is.
They are saying that, as alternative theories become less likely, there is more reason to believe the Standard Model could be correct.
The Standard Model IS correct. It has been tested and the once a theory is tested the results cannot be unproven. Now it might be that the Standard Model only works for certain conditions or it might be a subset of a more comprehensive theory. Newton's laws of motion very correctly describe large objects moving slowly but the theory was subsumed into Einstein's theory of general relativity. Newton's laws fall out of relativity under certain conditions to a high degree of accuracy and utility. We might come to a better and more comprehensive understanding of the universe but what we have already proven about the Standard Model will stand forever.
Now we know that the Standard Model is an incomplete understanding of the universe. But what it has been shown to describe it describes very accurately and that will always remain true no matter what else we learn in the future. It makes testable and correct predictions about the behavior of some bits of the universe so QED it is correct for at least those phenomena.
A lot of salts these days come with their own plastic grinder container. I noticed the grinders in those things shard off small pieces of plastic. So what I do is slice open the container with a knife and pour it into something else.
I never really understood what the point of grinding salt tableside is other than being a pretentious twat. Total waste of time and money. We grind pepper because it has a flavor impact (peppercorns are a fruit and once ground some of the aromatics evaporate) but there is no meaningful effect on salt which is just a rock. There is essentially no culinary advantage to grinding your salt in a cheap plastic disposable grinder and it wastes money on an unnecessary activity.
Nothing about that. Microplastics could be nanograms or milligrams, and that is a massive difference.
It is a difference but it's unclear what effect such a difference might actually have. Once a toxicity threshold is reached the difference becomes to some degree academic. If nanograms of some substance is significantly toxic it doesn't really matter if there are milligrams present because you have the same problem either way. Drowning in an inch of water renders you just as dead as drowning in an ocean if you get what I'm saying. The problem is that we don't know what a safe amount is at this point. Could be a lot or could be very little and we don't even know if there are measurable health effects just yet.