Chemical pesticides are less than 100 years old. We got along just fine for beforehand for millennia without them.
With a FAR larger percent of the work force involved in farming and with FAR lower crop yields. Chemical pesticides are not desirable for obvious reasons but they do have a dramatic effect on the productivity of a piece of land for a given input of dollars. We got along without them because we didn't have access to them but there was a huge economic price paid in the process.
every culture that has adopted "modern" agriculture (i.e. the practice of clear-cutting forest, tilling soil and living primarily on annual (largely mono) crops) have eventually collapsed. All of them.
Horseshit. That is nothing more than unsubstantiated nonsense.
Look to the lands of the middle east that were once lush edens for a prime example of how desertification is the end result.
The lands of the middle east have been desert for for far longer than you seem to imply and they did not become desert because of human activity. Your "lush edens" were narrow river valleys (that still exist) which supported far smaller populations. Egyptian civilization grew in the Nile river valley and not outside of it - a fact that hasn't changed substantially to this day.
Look at the dust bowls of mid-western america as an example of how industrialization has only accelerated this process.
You are talking about something that happened 80 years ago as if nobody learned anything.
And I don't buy the usual retort of "try and feed the world with them". There are plenty of documented examples of permanent, sustainable agriculture (i.e. permaculture) systems that provide as much abundance and nutrition per acre
Convenient how you leave cost out of your equation there. Sure, you can do all kinds of interesting and productive agriculture if you don't consider the economic cost of doing so or if you can sell the product to wealthy consumers at Whole Foods. Furthermore many techniques do not scale easily. Any discussion of fancy food production methods HAS to include a price tag or it is nothing more than an academic exercise.
If a farm uses harmful pesticides, it should not be called organic.
The meaning of the term organic is tightly defined and is a matter of public record. What you believe it should mean is, for better or worse, irrelevant.
If calling it that is legal in the US, then the word has become meaningless.
Quite the opposite. It means VERY specific things and those specific things have nothing to do with ill-defined notions of healthiness. If you cannot be bothered to find out that there is a lot of greenwashing going on then that is on you. There are way too many people arguing that organic = great and GM food = evil without using any actual facts in the discussion. In principle organic foods may carry certain advantages and there is some evidence to support that but the key word there is some. Just because something say's "organic" or "natural" or "healthy" on the label doesn't mean a damn thing by itself. The issues at hand just aren't that simple.
So... because Apple has a lot of cash on hand they should have to pay more in damages?
Because the settlement apparently doesn't make the plaintiffs whole and Apple has the cash to make them whole. If Apple wrongfully received work for which they did not pay then Apple has committed a crime and those workers should be entitled to compensation for the entirety of the value of work performed. If you work any amount of time for an employer they cannot decide not to pay you for time worked. They cannot withhold pay except in very rare circumstances which almost certainly do not apply here.
The reward should be based on the damage done not the size of the defendants bank account.
This settlement is apparently for far less than the damage done meaning some of the cash in the defendant's bank account is wrongfully obtained.
We can look to the post office to see that neutrality does not limit a provider to one tier of service.
The postal service has the price for postage regulated by congress. They have to get regulatory approval to raise prices even a penny on stamps. Internet Service Providers are under no such strict regulatory scrutiny and you can be quite sure the prices they charge would not be in the best interest of consumers or the public at large. Furthermore the Postal Service is not in the business of providing content as well as delivery. Several ISPs (Comcast I'm looking at you) have a built in conflict of interest which does not exist in your postal service analogy.
While actual evidence would be good, it will likely never be "proven" in the same way that for fifty years, smoking was never "proven" to cause lung cancer.
Smoking was firmly shown to be a cause of lung cancer and other diseases decades ago. Once you do enough studies and control for enough variables you can very clearly pin down the aggregate effect of smoking across a population. While you often cannot establish that smoking caused a specific cancer in a specific individual with 100% certainty, you can very easily determine with a high sigma level of confidence (>3sigma) the effect on a population as a whole.
Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned.
DDT is a really useful pesticide. Doesn't mean using it is a good idea. There are plenty of things that are useful but have side effects that preclude their use for their intended purpose. Would you prefer that we start hand pollination instead?
Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten?
Exactly how do you propose to do this when the populations of bees are falling now?
Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?
Probably easier and safer to simply use a different pesticide. If indeed this stuff is affecting bees negatively, odds are very good it has other negative effects as well. Bees are FAR more vital to modern agriculture as well as the environment overall than this family of pesticides.
The point of organic farming is NOT to use any pesticides
Organic farms frequently DO use pesticides and in fact eliminating the use of pesticides completely is extremely challenging.
Nothing wrong with organic farming methods but what people think is involved with organic farming and how it really is conducted can differ greatly. Organic means very specific things but what it doesn't mean is just as important. There are enormous loopholes in what organic means and other terms like "natural" essentially mean nothing at all.
LOL, if you think Digikey and Mouser are expensive, check the prices (including shipping) from Newark or Farnell.
We order the majority of the small parts we buy through Heilind. They have a warehouse close to us which allows us to get stuff delivered next day using Fedex Ground. (We use a lot of Tyco and Molex stuff) You can cut the freight charges down a bit by having them ship on your Fedex/UPS account. Makes it harder for them to artificially jack up the freight. That's what most companies that buy electronic components do including mine. Also if you buy a fair bit of stuff and need just one or two pieces many distributors will send samples to you for just the cost of freight.
I've ordered from pretty much every electronics distributor of significance you can think of. Some are easier to work with than others.
Digikey and Mouser are about the most expensive places to go. They have everything and usually don't have minimum buys but the markups are huge. Arrow Electronics has them for $1.70. My company buys a lot of stuff through Heilind.
If you want to find out who has parts and how much, stocknet is a good resource.
TELECOMS have a monopoly on COPPER PHONE LINES. It has nothing to do with internet.
Really? Because I could have sworn I got access to the internet over those very copper cables. If you have to go through a monopoly to get access to the internet then it is a distinction without a difference.
And you could always get a phone via VOIP or Cellular.
Which requires either those same copper phone lines (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner or Charter) or wireless access through AT&T, Verizon, TMobile or Sprint. Which oligopoly would you like to use today?
Whatever advantage the telecoms had was gone at the turn of the century.
If that were actually true then we would see hundreds of telecoms rather than the local monopolies/duopolies enjoyed by most of the country.
Google doesn't necessarily care who provides the fast internet service to it's online customers.
Yes the do because the ISP who controls the connection to the end users can seriously mess with Google's business. Think about why Google developed Android. Google is an advertising company but if they can't control or influence the devices that actually touch the people they are trying to advertise to then handset makers and telecoms can shut them out or at least badly hurt Google's margins in exchange for access to eyeballs. And it wasn't just the ISPs either. Apple, Microsoft/Nokia and others could have basically refused to carry Google advertising and/or substituted their own. Same problem with ISPs to homes. It's potentially an existential threat to Google unless Google can find ways to make the ISPs play nice.
I think Google is rolling out some fiber networks in a few areas to provide a credible threat to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to hopefully force them to behave. Sort of a doomsday weapon which they hope to never need to use. Google is one of the few companies that has the cash to seriously consider rolling out their own network if they were forced to. In fact I could even see them conceivably partnering with Apple and Microsoft on this if the need arose. This would hurt Google's margins rather badly (running an ISP is expensive) but it is an option.
I think its fun to watch a company that built its fortune on tiny margins move into a industry that has enormous customer hostile margins.
You have that backwards. Google's net margins are 50% higher than AT&Ts and double Comcast's.
Google has a net profit margin of 21.5%. AT&T has a net profit margin of 14.1%. Comcast has net profit margins around 10.5%.
Google is going to fucking destroy the big ISPs everywhere they go.
And your evidence for this is what exactly? While it would make me very happy to see more competition, I seriously doubt Google is going to push AT&T, Verizon and Comcast out of their current monopolies on any sort of widespread basis.
I didn't say they were exerting oversight. I said that they probably have a good idea what is going. Much of their reporting to Congress is behind closed doors so you and I have no idea what they are actually talking about. But if the Congressional leadership was not kept in the loop to some extent you can bet they would be making a big political stink about it. The Republican leadership in the House would make claims that Obama was turning the country into a police state.
Knowing what the NSA is up do and being willing to do something about it are very different things. I think Congress knows more than they let on.
The best case scenario is that the market for electric vehicles contunues to grow at increasing rate as gasoline-powered ones get replaced, and Tesla can leverage their current position and experience to take a significant portion of it.
An investment strategy based on absurdly optimistic scenarios is a very good way to lose a lot of money. You are making the same sort of argument they made for.com stocks during the internet bubble 15 years ago. Is it possible that TSLA might grow into its current valuation? Sure. Is it likely? Hell no, at least not in a short enough time frame to matter. Are you seriously going to argue that Tesla is worth 1/3 of Ford right now? Because that is where its market cap is ($22B vs $60B). There is no sane valuation argument you can make that would justify that sort of price tag for the stock.
I think Tesla is a good company and (right now) a bad investment. The stock price far exceeds any reasonably likely scenario for its projected profits in the next several years. Put it this way. If I had $100,000 and could buy the Model S or the stock, I'd buy the car. It's a better investment right now. Hopefully that will change one of these days.
Massive cities are, by all measures, more efficient than suburban life or rural life.
"All measures"? Not even remotely true. Many or some measures I would agree with but not "all". Cities do have certain efficiencies but they aren't all positive. Cities concentrate some desirable things but also concentrate undesirable things too. Cities have more crime, more pollution, worse traffic, and of course more people. Cities are demonstrably less efficient in certain ways, particularly things related to plants animals and the benefits they provide like the oxygen you enjoy. Efficiency also depends on your lifestyle and what you are trying to get efficiency out of.
Trucking in and out food is orders of magnitude greener than producers sending out 1000 smaller trucks much farther
Where do you think the food comes from? I can and do get a huge portion of my food from local farms out here in the country where it is grown and I don't even have to drive anywhere special to get it. I have farmer's markets right on my daily commute and several farms as well. Hell, I have people who farm near me who supply your food and grow their own besides. Explain to me how your city is getting its food more efficiently than they are.
Wiring power to a 30 floor apartment building is much more efficient than stringing copper to an equal number of suburban homes.
At the cost of having to live in a 30 floor apartment building. I live in a 3000 square foot post and beam house with a huge amount of property and nearby parks (real parks). A shitty house anywhere close to NYC would cost twice as much and something comparable would cost 5-10X as much. An apartment might be thermodynamically efficient by some measures but are you really going to decide where you want to live based on that? If you want to get in a pissing match I can power my home with solar panels and/or wind if I want to and be net zero energy. Enjoy your boiler and cramped living space. [/teasing]
If you like city living that is cool but don't look down your nose at those who prefer a more rustic lifestyle.
People from big cities like NYC really need to understand that they do not live in the center of the universe and that not everything about living there is wonderful or desirable. I had the option to move to NYC a few years back and I'm glad I didn't. Nothing wrong with living there if it suits you but it's expensive, crowded, claustrophobic, dirty, and uncomfortable (for me). Urban living has its charms but so does rural living. For me the city is a nice place to visit but I have no interest in living there.
The suburbs also have to truck everything in and out: it's not like local farmland and local factories provide even a tiny percentage of the goods and foodstuffs used there.
And you think a lot of food is grown in big cities? And you are wrong about what you can get from local farmland. I could fairly easily source all of my food from within a one hundred mile radius if I was so inclined. Year around and for generally modest cost. Hell I have several very good restaurants I frequent within a modest drive who ONLY source locally and several more that source >80% locally.
It's a myth that non-urban areas somehow are less reliant on the "outside" than urban areas.
It's only a myth if you think of it in terms of total self-sufficiency. I can definitely source more of my food locally and for manufactured goods it's basically a push. No, rural areas aren't self sufficient islands but they generally are more self sufficient overall than urban areas.
All of that aside, cities are where basically all jobs are. There's nothing to do in exchange for money in small towns and rural places for most of us. There's no career path at all.
Not even remotely true. About a quarter of the population of the US lives outside cities. Guess what? They have jobs outside of cities too. Sure there are some jobs that are only available in cities. There also are some jobs that are only available in rural areas. Just depends on what you are trying to do. If you are an IT geek then yeah, you'll probably end up near a city somewhere. For what I do (engineering and accounting) I can be almost anywhere.
Why would anyone start a company that requires skilled workers in a place with a small talent pool?
Depends on what you are doing. There is a lot to be said for being a big fish in a small pond. Skilled workers are not so hard to find in rural areas even if the density of them might be lower. If you are doing manufacturing there actually is a large skilled talent pool in rural areas. Folks who work on farms generally are very mechanically inclined and well trained on the sort of skilled labor tasks you need to run a factory. Welding, machine operation/repair, etc. Also the labor tends to be less expensive and there is a non-trivial population of people who actually are attracted to non-urban areas.
Hell, there's also just NOTHING TO DO.
Only if you are a hermit that never goes outside your house. I live in a rural area. Within a 10 mile radius of my house I can: run, road bike, mountain bike, fish, hike, sail, boat, downhill ski, cross country ski, water ski, kayak, canoe, skate, sled, golf, shoot, rollerblade, horseback ride, garden, shop, dine, camp, and almost any other outdoor activity you can think of. I have high speed internet, movie theaters, decent shopping, good resturants, micro-breweries (plural), and I'm not far from a cool college town with sports, museums, theater and the other stuff you might expect. If you are bored in the rural area where I live it is your own damn fault.
Furthermore if I need access to a city and the things contained therein I can drive a relatively modest distance and have access to literally everything a city has to offer without having the burden of having to actually live with the noise, stench, pollution, crime, and claustrophobia. I'm not going to go to the museum or the s
It will be producing Panasonic batteries so I assume that the majority IP would be Panasonic.
I run a wire harness assembly company and we supply to battery harness makers. Ownership of the battery technology doesn't mean a thing as far as the assemblies that they go into are concerned. You may be right that Panasonic owns the IP on the batteries and their production but if Tesla doesn't own a lot or most of the assembly IP, I cannot really see any business angle that makes sense for Tesla. Tesla would have to own the rights to the product designs and probably some of the controls. I'd guess that Panasonic is really acting as a value-added contract manufacturer in this case.
The Gigafactory that Tesla is building will be majority owned by Panasonic.
That doesn't necessarily mean much. The important question is who owns the IP that is going into the products produced. Coke and Coke Bottling are/were separate companies. Guess which one makes the bigger profits? Apple outsources their actual manufacturing but they own the product produced. Who actually owns the manufacturing is important but it's often not the most important bit.
How does a rising stock price affect Tesla's profit?
It doesn't directly. What it affects is Tesla's ability to raise investment funds in the future. More specifically their cost of capital. If the stock price goes up, Tesla can raise more money for the same amount of dilution to existing shareholders. A rising stock price generally means a falling cost of capital. It's more complicated than that obviously but the relationship holds as a general principle.
The stock price also tends to correlate strongly with the happiness of the shareholders who are the owners of the company. Rising stock price = happy investors = continued employment for management team.
I think Tesla is an interesting company but I wouldn't touch their stock with a barge pole at the current price. The market cap of the company is 12X annual revenue. A reasonable revenue multiple is between 1X and 3X annual revenue. Tesla might be a great company but that doesn't make it a great investment at the current price.
since neither Congress nor the President has any real oversight of the CIA or NSA
I think the President has a very good idea what the NSA is up to since the reports they generate ultimately come to him and his direct reports. I'm pretty sure the Congressional leadership also has a fairly good idea what is going on. However I do not think their interests align with those of the citizenry and so they have little to no incentive to exercise what you or I would consider proper oversight. They benefit from the violation of our civil rights.
The amended compromise version allows collection of phone call records up to two hops away from a target, potentially including millions of customer records, and allows for collection without a judge's order in emergency cases. The amended bill also drops the requirement for a privacy advocate who can appeal the rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and extends the controversial Section 215 of the Patriot Act from 2015 through 2017.
This is the "weaker" version? This basically is a bill with no limits.
Two hops? That just means if you ever called the phone company, a utility, UPS/Fedex etc then they can "hop" to you. It's no real limitation at all. It also means that they can just declare something an emergency whenever they want. No real oversight. No advocate for the citizenry.
How can you have a revenue of 731 M$ while producing in the same period about 500 M$ worth of merchandise?
Because Tesla doesn't just make money selling cars. Read their financial statements and they'll detail their sources of revenue. Nothing particularly surprising there. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see Tesla end up making a big portion of their revenue manufacturing battery packs and power trains for other auto makers.
I know this will not be well recieved - but I do not understand the enthusiasm, or what is remarkable about SpaceX - the government never has built rockets
Several things are interesting about SpaceX.
First is that rockets are cool and SpaceX builds them.
Second is that SpaceX is doing things at a much lower cost than historical NASA contracts. NASA does not tend to contract with price as the primary objective. In fact SpaceX appears to be undercutting prices for commercial comsat launches which have nothing to do with NASA or the US government at all aside from permits. Lower costs means improved access to space which means more exploration and more useful technology both in space and in spinoff products.
Third is that SpaceX privately funded the development of their key technology. It's first launch vehicle (Falcon 1) and three rocket engines were developed without any government money. NASA has funded development of the Falcon 9 but that is really largely a modification of the technology SpaceX already had developed. This is NOT trivial. Contractors historically have built the rocket for NASA but NASA actually owned it. This may not sound like much on the surface but the implications are huge because it means that NASA no longer has to be in the space freight business. The government has successfully gotten the technology going and now is transferring important pieces of it to the private sector. SpaceX is unlikely to be the last company to get into the space cargo business but they've proved it is now possible.
I guess this is what the we call innovation these days
Technology that reduces costs and improves access to space definitely qualifies as innovation. Don't underestimate the importance of cost reduction. The computer you are reading this on is only possible because of innovations that led to reduced costs. That requires new technology, new operations and new designs. The purpose of NASA is not to drive down costs. NASA is fundamentally a research organization which we have been using as a sort of transport company. Thanks to the efforts of SpaceX and others the transport company part of their mission appears to be ending and NASA can and should concentrate on boundary pushing research activities.
The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded because of one tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect system.
Challenger exploded because it was an overly complicated system flying outside its designed parameters. Columbia burned up because it was an overly complicated system that was damaged in a fashion that NASA wasn't prepared to address.
Reusing rockets would require proof of perfection each time, taking the whole thing apart each time and spending so much time rechecking it
That depends entirely on the design. We do not require checking everything on aircraft (even high performance ones) between flights whereas when we first built them we did. It's entirely reasonable that we will eventually advance the state of the art in rocket design to the point where only select parts of the rocket require inspection on every flight. Just because we haven't done it yet doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Wouldn't it be better to mine everything we need from unmanned space?
Probably but we are a LONG way away from being able to do that. You have to crawl before you can walk. I'm not sure you have a full appr
Couldn't we cart back piles of resources to stations along the way for processing?
Perhaps or perhaps not. The technical and economic feasibility has yet to be determined. Replicating our terrestrial supply chain in space is just about the most complicated and difficult and (probably) expensive endeavor I can conceive of without invoking technology that is pure science fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Chemical pesticides are less than 100 years old. We got along just fine for beforehand for millennia without them.
With a FAR larger percent of the work force involved in farming and with FAR lower crop yields. Chemical pesticides are not desirable for obvious reasons but they do have a dramatic effect on the productivity of a piece of land for a given input of dollars. We got along without them because we didn't have access to them but there was a huge economic price paid in the process.
every culture that has adopted "modern" agriculture (i.e. the practice of clear-cutting forest, tilling soil and living primarily on annual (largely mono) crops) have eventually collapsed. All of them.
Horseshit. That is nothing more than unsubstantiated nonsense.
Look to the lands of the middle east that were once lush edens for a prime example of how desertification is the end result.
The lands of the middle east have been desert for for far longer than you seem to imply and they did not become desert because of human activity. Your "lush edens" were narrow river valleys (that still exist) which supported far smaller populations. Egyptian civilization grew in the Nile river valley and not outside of it - a fact that hasn't changed substantially to this day.
Look at the dust bowls of mid-western america as an example of how industrialization has only accelerated this process.
You are talking about something that happened 80 years ago as if nobody learned anything.
And I don't buy the usual retort of "try and feed the world with them". There are plenty of documented examples of permanent, sustainable agriculture (i.e. permaculture) systems that provide as much abundance and nutrition per acre
Convenient how you leave cost out of your equation there. Sure, you can do all kinds of interesting and productive agriculture if you don't consider the economic cost of doing so or if you can sell the product to wealthy consumers at Whole Foods. Furthermore many techniques do not scale easily. Any discussion of fancy food production methods HAS to include a price tag or it is nothing more than an academic exercise.
If a farm uses harmful pesticides, it should not be called organic.
The meaning of the term organic is tightly defined and is a matter of public record. What you believe it should mean is, for better or worse, irrelevant.
If calling it that is legal in the US, then the word has become meaningless.
Quite the opposite. It means VERY specific things and those specific things have nothing to do with ill-defined notions of healthiness. If you cannot be bothered to find out that there is a lot of greenwashing going on then that is on you. There are way too many people arguing that organic = great and GM food = evil without using any actual facts in the discussion. In principle organic foods may carry certain advantages and there is some evidence to support that but the key word there is some. Just because something say's "organic" or "natural" or "healthy" on the label doesn't mean a damn thing by itself. The issues at hand just aren't that simple.
So... because Apple has a lot of cash on hand they should have to pay more in damages?
Because the settlement apparently doesn't make the plaintiffs whole and Apple has the cash to make them whole. If Apple wrongfully received work for which they did not pay then Apple has committed a crime and those workers should be entitled to compensation for the entirety of the value of work performed. If you work any amount of time for an employer they cannot decide not to pay you for time worked. They cannot withhold pay except in very rare circumstances which almost certainly do not apply here.
The reward should be based on the damage done not the size of the defendants bank account.
This settlement is apparently for far less than the damage done meaning some of the cash in the defendant's bank account is wrongfully obtained.
We can look to the post office to see that neutrality does not limit a provider to one tier of service.
The postal service has the price for postage regulated by congress. They have to get regulatory approval to raise prices even a penny on stamps. Internet Service Providers are under no such strict regulatory scrutiny and you can be quite sure the prices they charge would not be in the best interest of consumers or the public at large. Furthermore the Postal Service is not in the business of providing content as well as delivery. Several ISPs (Comcast I'm looking at you) have a built in conflict of interest which does not exist in your postal service analogy.
While actual evidence would be good, it will likely never be "proven" in the same way that for fifty years, smoking was never "proven" to cause lung cancer.
Smoking was firmly shown to be a cause of lung cancer and other diseases decades ago. Once you do enough studies and control for enough variables you can very clearly pin down the aggregate effect of smoking across a population. While you often cannot establish that smoking caused a specific cancer in a specific individual with 100% certainty, you can very easily determine with a high sigma level of confidence (>3sigma) the effect on a population as a whole.
Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned.
DDT is a really useful pesticide. Doesn't mean using it is a good idea. There are plenty of things that are useful but have side effects that preclude their use for their intended purpose. Would you prefer that we start hand pollination instead?
Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten?
Exactly how do you propose to do this when the populations of bees are falling now?
Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?
Probably easier and safer to simply use a different pesticide. If indeed this stuff is affecting bees negatively, odds are very good it has other negative effects as well. Bees are FAR more vital to modern agriculture as well as the environment overall than this family of pesticides.
The point of organic farming is NOT to use any pesticides
Organic farms frequently DO use pesticides and in fact eliminating the use of pesticides completely is extremely challenging.
Nothing wrong with organic farming methods but what people think is involved with organic farming and how it really is conducted can differ greatly. Organic means very specific things but what it doesn't mean is just as important. There are enormous loopholes in what organic means and other terms like "natural" essentially mean nothing at all.
LOL, if you think Digikey and Mouser are expensive, check the prices (including shipping) from Newark or Farnell.
We order the majority of the small parts we buy through Heilind. They have a warehouse close to us which allows us to get stuff delivered next day using Fedex Ground. (We use a lot of Tyco and Molex stuff) You can cut the freight charges down a bit by having them ship on your Fedex/UPS account. Makes it harder for them to artificially jack up the freight. That's what most companies that buy electronic components do including mine. Also if you buy a fair bit of stuff and need just one or two pieces many distributors will send samples to you for just the cost of freight.
I've ordered from pretty much every electronics distributor of significance you can think of. Some are easier to work with than others.
Digi-Key $3.48 and Mouser $3.49
Digikey and Mouser are about the most expensive places to go. They have everything and usually don't have minimum buys but the markups are huge. Arrow Electronics has them for $1.70. My company buys a lot of stuff through Heilind.
If you want to find out who has parts and how much, stocknet is a good resource.
TELECOMS have a monopoly on COPPER PHONE LINES. It has nothing to do with internet.
Really? Because I could have sworn I got access to the internet over those very copper cables. If you have to go through a monopoly to get access to the internet then it is a distinction without a difference.
And you could always get a phone via VOIP or Cellular.
Which requires either those same copper phone lines (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner or Charter) or wireless access through AT&T, Verizon, TMobile or Sprint. Which oligopoly would you like to use today?
Whatever advantage the telecoms had was gone at the turn of the century.
If that were actually true then we would see hundreds of telecoms rather than the local monopolies/duopolies enjoyed by most of the country.
Google doesn't necessarily care who provides the fast internet service to it's online customers.
Yes the do because the ISP who controls the connection to the end users can seriously mess with Google's business. Think about why Google developed Android. Google is an advertising company but if they can't control or influence the devices that actually touch the people they are trying to advertise to then handset makers and telecoms can shut them out or at least badly hurt Google's margins in exchange for access to eyeballs. And it wasn't just the ISPs either. Apple, Microsoft/Nokia and others could have basically refused to carry Google advertising and/or substituted their own. Same problem with ISPs to homes. It's potentially an existential threat to Google unless Google can find ways to make the ISPs play nice.
I think Google is rolling out some fiber networks in a few areas to provide a credible threat to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to hopefully force them to behave. Sort of a doomsday weapon which they hope to never need to use. Google is one of the few companies that has the cash to seriously consider rolling out their own network if they were forced to. In fact I could even see them conceivably partnering with Apple and Microsoft on this if the need arose. This would hurt Google's margins rather badly (running an ISP is expensive) but it is an option.
I think its fun to watch a company that built its fortune on tiny margins move into a industry that has enormous customer hostile margins.
You have that backwards. Google's net margins are 50% higher than AT&Ts and double Comcast's.
Google has a net profit margin of 21.5%. AT&T has a net profit margin of 14.1%. Comcast has net profit margins around 10.5%.
Google is going to fucking destroy the big ISPs everywhere they go.
And your evidence for this is what exactly? While it would make me very happy to see more competition, I seriously doubt Google is going to push AT&T, Verizon and Comcast out of their current monopolies on any sort of widespread basis.
What do you consider congressional oversight?
I didn't say they were exerting oversight. I said that they probably have a good idea what is going. Much of their reporting to Congress is behind closed doors so you and I have no idea what they are actually talking about. But if the Congressional leadership was not kept in the loop to some extent you can bet they would be making a big political stink about it. The Republican leadership in the House would make claims that Obama was turning the country into a police state.
Knowing what the NSA is up do and being willing to do something about it are very different things. I think Congress knows more than they let on.
The best case scenario is that the market for electric vehicles contunues to grow at increasing rate as gasoline-powered ones get replaced, and Tesla can leverage their current position and experience to take a significant portion of it.
An investment strategy based on absurdly optimistic scenarios is a very good way to lose a lot of money. You are making the same sort of argument they made for .com stocks during the internet bubble 15 years ago. Is it possible that TSLA might grow into its current valuation? Sure. Is it likely? Hell no, at least not in a short enough time frame to matter. Are you seriously going to argue that Tesla is worth 1/3 of Ford right now? Because that is where its market cap is ($22B vs $60B). There is no sane valuation argument you can make that would justify that sort of price tag for the stock.
I think Tesla is a good company and (right now) a bad investment. The stock price far exceeds any reasonably likely scenario for its projected profits in the next several years. Put it this way. If I had $100,000 and could buy the Model S or the stock, I'd buy the car. It's a better investment right now. Hopefully that will change one of these days.
Massive cities are, by all measures, more efficient than suburban life or rural life.
"All measures"? Not even remotely true. Many or some measures I would agree with but not "all". Cities do have certain efficiencies but they aren't all positive. Cities concentrate some desirable things but also concentrate undesirable things too. Cities have more crime, more pollution, worse traffic, and of course more people. Cities are demonstrably less efficient in certain ways, particularly things related to plants animals and the benefits they provide like the oxygen you enjoy. Efficiency also depends on your lifestyle and what you are trying to get efficiency out of.
Trucking in and out food is orders of magnitude greener than producers sending out 1000 smaller trucks much farther
Where do you think the food comes from? I can and do get a huge portion of my food from local farms out here in the country where it is grown and I don't even have to drive anywhere special to get it. I have farmer's markets right on my daily commute and several farms as well. Hell, I have people who farm near me who supply your food and grow their own besides. Explain to me how your city is getting its food more efficiently than they are.
Wiring power to a 30 floor apartment building is much more efficient than stringing copper to an equal number of suburban homes.
At the cost of having to live in a 30 floor apartment building. I live in a 3000 square foot post and beam house with a huge amount of property and nearby parks (real parks). A shitty house anywhere close to NYC would cost twice as much and something comparable would cost 5-10X as much. An apartment might be thermodynamically efficient by some measures but are you really going to decide where you want to live based on that? If you want to get in a pissing match I can power my home with solar panels and/or wind if I want to and be net zero energy. Enjoy your boiler and cramped living space. [/teasing]
If you like city living that is cool but don't look down your nose at those who prefer a more rustic lifestyle.
People from big cities like NYC really need to understand that they do not live in the center of the universe and that not everything about living there is wonderful or desirable. I had the option to move to NYC a few years back and I'm glad I didn't. Nothing wrong with living there if it suits you but it's expensive, crowded, claustrophobic, dirty, and uncomfortable (for me). Urban living has its charms but so does rural living. For me the city is a nice place to visit but I have no interest in living there.
The suburbs also have to truck everything in and out: it's not like local farmland and local factories provide even a tiny percentage of the goods and foodstuffs used there.
And you think a lot of food is grown in big cities? And you are wrong about what you can get from local farmland. I could fairly easily source all of my food from within a one hundred mile radius if I was so inclined. Year around and for generally modest cost. Hell I have several very good restaurants I frequent within a modest drive who ONLY source locally and several more that source >80% locally.
It's a myth that non-urban areas somehow are less reliant on the "outside" than urban areas.
It's only a myth if you think of it in terms of total self-sufficiency. I can definitely source more of my food locally and for manufactured goods it's basically a push. No, rural areas aren't self sufficient islands but they generally are more self sufficient overall than urban areas.
All of that aside, cities are where basically all jobs are. There's nothing to do in exchange for money in small towns and rural places for most of us. There's no career path at all.
Not even remotely true. About a quarter of the population of the US lives outside cities. Guess what? They have jobs outside of cities too. Sure there are some jobs that are only available in cities. There also are some jobs that are only available in rural areas. Just depends on what you are trying to do. If you are an IT geek then yeah, you'll probably end up near a city somewhere. For what I do (engineering and accounting) I can be almost anywhere.
Why would anyone start a company that requires skilled workers in a place with a small talent pool?
Depends on what you are doing. There is a lot to be said for being a big fish in a small pond. Skilled workers are not so hard to find in rural areas even if the density of them might be lower. If you are doing manufacturing there actually is a large skilled talent pool in rural areas. Folks who work on farms generally are very mechanically inclined and well trained on the sort of skilled labor tasks you need to run a factory. Welding, machine operation/repair, etc. Also the labor tends to be less expensive and there is a non-trivial population of people who actually are attracted to non-urban areas.
Hell, there's also just NOTHING TO DO.
Only if you are a hermit that never goes outside your house. I live in a rural area. Within a 10 mile radius of my house I can: run, road bike, mountain bike, fish, hike, sail, boat, downhill ski, cross country ski, water ski, kayak, canoe, skate, sled, golf, shoot, rollerblade, horseback ride, garden, shop, dine, camp, and almost any other outdoor activity you can think of. I have high speed internet, movie theaters, decent shopping, good resturants, micro-breweries (plural), and I'm not far from a cool college town with sports, museums, theater and the other stuff you might expect. If you are bored in the rural area where I live it is your own damn fault.
Furthermore if I need access to a city and the things contained therein I can drive a relatively modest distance and have access to literally everything a city has to offer without having the burden of having to actually live with the noise, stench, pollution, crime, and claustrophobia. I'm not going to go to the museum or the s
It will be producing Panasonic batteries so I assume that the majority IP would be Panasonic.
I run a wire harness assembly company and we supply to battery harness makers. Ownership of the battery technology doesn't mean a thing as far as the assemblies that they go into are concerned. You may be right that Panasonic owns the IP on the batteries and their production but if Tesla doesn't own a lot or most of the assembly IP, I cannot really see any business angle that makes sense for Tesla. Tesla would have to own the rights to the product designs and probably some of the controls. I'd guess that Panasonic is really acting as a value-added contract manufacturer in this case.
The Gigafactory that Tesla is building will be majority owned by Panasonic.
That doesn't necessarily mean much. The important question is who owns the IP that is going into the products produced. Coke and Coke Bottling are/were separate companies. Guess which one makes the bigger profits? Apple outsources their actual manufacturing but they own the product produced. Who actually owns the manufacturing is important but it's often not the most important bit.
How does a rising stock price affect Tesla's profit?
It doesn't directly. What it affects is Tesla's ability to raise investment funds in the future. More specifically their cost of capital. If the stock price goes up, Tesla can raise more money for the same amount of dilution to existing shareholders. A rising stock price generally means a falling cost of capital. It's more complicated than that obviously but the relationship holds as a general principle.
The stock price also tends to correlate strongly with the happiness of the shareholders who are the owners of the company. Rising stock price = happy investors = continued employment for management team.
What I see is a goddam good time to invest.
I think Tesla is an interesting company but I wouldn't touch their stock with a barge pole at the current price. The market cap of the company is 12X annual revenue. A reasonable revenue multiple is between 1X and 3X annual revenue. Tesla might be a great company but that doesn't make it a great investment at the current price.
since neither Congress nor the President has any real oversight of the CIA or NSA
I think the President has a very good idea what the NSA is up to since the reports they generate ultimately come to him and his direct reports. I'm pretty sure the Congressional leadership also has a fairly good idea what is going on. However I do not think their interests align with those of the citizenry and so they have little to no incentive to exercise what you or I would consider proper oversight. They benefit from the violation of our civil rights.
The amended compromise version allows collection of phone call records up to two hops away from a target, potentially including millions of customer records, and allows for collection without a judge's order in emergency cases. The amended bill also drops the requirement for a privacy advocate who can appeal the rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and extends the controversial Section 215 of the Patriot Act from 2015 through 2017.
This is the "weaker" version? This basically is a bill with no limits.
Two hops? That just means if you ever called the phone company, a utility, UPS/Fedex etc then they can "hop" to you. It's no real limitation at all. It also means that they can just declare something an emergency whenever they want. No real oversight. No advocate for the citizenry.
How can you have a revenue of 731 M$ while producing in the same period about 500 M$ worth of merchandise?
Because Tesla doesn't just make money selling cars. Read their financial statements and they'll detail their sources of revenue. Nothing particularly surprising there. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see Tesla end up making a big portion of their revenue manufacturing battery packs and power trains for other auto makers.
I know this will not be well recieved - but I do not understand the enthusiasm, or what is remarkable about SpaceX - the government never has built rockets
Several things are interesting about SpaceX.
First is that rockets are cool and SpaceX builds them.
Second is that SpaceX is doing things at a much lower cost than historical NASA contracts. NASA does not tend to contract with price as the primary objective. In fact SpaceX appears to be undercutting prices for commercial comsat launches which have nothing to do with NASA or the US government at all aside from permits. Lower costs means improved access to space which means more exploration and more useful technology both in space and in spinoff products.
Third is that SpaceX privately funded the development of their key technology. It's first launch vehicle (Falcon 1) and three rocket engines were developed without any government money. NASA has funded development of the Falcon 9 but that is really largely a modification of the technology SpaceX already had developed. This is NOT trivial. Contractors historically have built the rocket for NASA but NASA actually owned it. This may not sound like much on the surface but the implications are huge because it means that NASA no longer has to be in the space freight business. The government has successfully gotten the technology going and now is transferring important pieces of it to the private sector. SpaceX is unlikely to be the last company to get into the space cargo business but they've proved it is now possible.
I guess this is what the we call innovation these days
Technology that reduces costs and improves access to space definitely qualifies as innovation. Don't underestimate the importance of cost reduction. The computer you are reading this on is only possible because of innovations that led to reduced costs. That requires new technology, new operations and new designs. The purpose of NASA is not to drive down costs. NASA is fundamentally a research organization which we have been using as a sort of transport company. Thanks to the efforts of SpaceX and others the transport company part of their mission appears to be ending and NASA can and should concentrate on boundary pushing research activities.
The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded because of one tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect system.
Challenger exploded because it was an overly complicated system flying outside its designed parameters. Columbia burned up because it was an overly complicated system that was damaged in a fashion that NASA wasn't prepared to address.
Reusing rockets would require proof of perfection each time, taking the whole thing apart each time and spending so much time rechecking it
That depends entirely on the design. We do not require checking everything on aircraft (even high performance ones) between flights whereas when we first built them we did. It's entirely reasonable that we will eventually advance the state of the art in rocket design to the point where only select parts of the rocket require inspection on every flight. Just because we haven't done it yet doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Wouldn't it be better to mine everything we need from unmanned space?
Probably but we are a LONG way away from being able to do that. You have to crawl before you can walk. I'm not sure you have a full appr
Couldn't we cart back piles of resources to stations along the way for processing?
Perhaps or perhaps not. The technical and economic feasibility has yet to be determined. Replicating our terrestrial supply chain in space is just about the most complicated and difficult and (probably) expensive endeavor I can conceive of without invoking technology that is pure science fiction.
There's not enough water in the Great Plains, so we're moving our agriculture to the lush Mojave Desert with its bountiful aquifers?
I think you have wrapped your head around the absurdity of the situation...