Over the years, Google has paid Mozilla in excess of $2 Billion. If you don't think Google "owns" Mozilla, you are delusional.
And they've also received upwards of a billion from Yahoo who last I checked was decidedly not owned by Google. I'm aware of the funding but the difference is that Mozilla can and does get funding from other sources. So my choices are 100% Google owned (Chrome) or something less than 100% Google financed (Firefox). I'll take the later option thanks. Mozilla is it's own entity and that counts for something even if it isn't as much as one would hope.
You could use Chromium or Vivaldi and be even less corporate influenced, but still chrome compatible.
Maybe but I don't care at all about compatibility with Chrome and don't see any particular value in that. I want a web browser that works on the sites I visit, is cross platform, has strong privacy controls, is actively developed, and isn't a security train wreck. Edge and Safari are out for me since they are one platform only and one company only. I don't really trust the various forked browsers related to Chrome and Firefox and other "minor" browsers to remain viable and supported long term though I'm glad they exist. So the only real options for me are Chrome and Firefox and I choose Firefox because it's less tied to a single for-profit corporation plus I'm used to it and have been using it a long time. It's not that I hate Chrome but I don't 100% trust Google's interests to align with my own. A little diversity of platform can be a good thing.
If anyone was really outraged, they would get something else.
That implies that there is something else for them to get. There really isn't. Microsoft was convicted in court of having a monopoly. Do you know what that word means? It means there aren't other options on the PC. The only other options are linux which perpetually lags Windows on the PC desktop in application options and the OS X which is both pricey and ties you to Apple. Both linux and OS X are fine options for some but as much as it irritates me to say it, Windows is the best offering available for a lot of people and companies. A lot of software people want is only available on Windows. If the people around you use Windows chances are high you will too. If you play games on your PC it's a virtual certainty are you are running Windows to do it.
FB is a clumsy toddler in evilness compared to Google.
Perhaps. Facebook is definitely more blatant about their evil. Google is harder to avoid. Both companies have WAY too few restrictions on what they can do with data about basically everyone.
Google is rapidly becoming the new Microsoft. No wonder they ditched the "Don't Be Evil" motto.
Honestly I think Facebook wins the current edition of the Evil Olympics among tech companies. But maybe Google is just a sneakier player and unfortunately the two of them combined are really hard to avoid if you give half a shit about your privacy. I don't have a Facebook account but I'd be truly shocked if they don't maintain some sort of profile about my activities on the web. I block what I can but it's hard to stop them entirely.
Any company in a position of power is likely to abuse that power to some degree. IBM did, Microsoft did, and the list goes on. Trust them at your peril.
On the other hand, did you really think Google weren't tracking the #%#%$% out of you whenever you logged into anything?
Definitely. One of the reasons I don't use or install Chrome even though I do use some Google services. I use Firefox in part because it's the only one of the major browsers to not be owned by a major tech company. Chrome seems to work fine but compared with Firefox it's at more or less a dead heat technically speaking and performance-wise (for my purposes anyway) so why tie myself tighter to Google than absolutely necessary? That's not an argument that Firefox is perfect (it isn't) but it seems to be the least worst option in this regard.
Duh. People have greater access to alcohol so this should surprise no one. That said it depends on exactly when you measure it. During a war firearms clearly are the bigger danger. Also I'm not especially worried about someone pointing a beer at me even if they are angry.
Well, there's one way to fix that - ban alcohol! Make it illegal, and alcohol-related deaths should pretty much stop happening.
Comparing regulation of a mild recreational drug to regulation of a purpose built weapon is a fairly ridiculous comparison. That said there is plenty of evidence that prohibition did have positive effects regarding mortality despite arguably being bad policy. Likewise regulation of firearms in countries that took the matter seriously has been shown to reduce mortality from firearms. Again it might or might not be good policy but it does have a measurable effect on mortality rates.
This has been a marquee unsolved problem in Mathematics for over 150 years. Any simple proof would have been found long ago.
Just because nobody has figured out a "simple proof" after a lot of years of trying it doesn't logically follow that one cannot exist. You had it right when you said a simple proof "seems unlikely" which the evidence would suggest is true.
I would argue you're typical office worker could be perfectly happy with Word 6.0 and Excel 4.0 on Windows For Workgroups. A solid WYSIWG word processing and spread sheet with easy document sharing on file shares etc. All without having to learn any cryptic commands etc.
I'm sure a lot of very productive work could be done with this sort of setup. However there are a LOT of features that have come since then that you probably are taking for granted. For example anyone who works in financial analysis (and I have/do) pretty much has to be a spreadsheet wonk and will delve pretty deep into the feature set. Many of the features we use all the time didn't exist or were very primitive when Excel 4.0 was state of the art. The features of Excel 4.0 would be VERY limiting to someone working in that industry today. It would hurt productivity badly. A lot of seemingly minor features become really important once you have access to them. That's not to say that Excel 4.0 is bad software or that good work couldn't be done with it but you really cannot credibly argue that there haven't been meaningful improvements since then.
To use a car analogy imagine its 1999 (everyone uses their mobile phone fore this now) GPS was the new hotness. It made sense from a feature standpoint to include a GPS navigation system in your dashboard. Prior to that the feature set of the typical car had not changed much from say the mid 60's. There were a few "under the hood" improvements.
A "few"? I understand the point you are trying to make but I am old enough to have driven cars from the 60s and 70s as daily drivers. If you think nothing improved between the mid-60s and 1999 in cars then you don't know cars - at least the older ones. They vastly improved safety, efficiency per horsepower, comfort, reliability, traction control, braking and quite a lot more. Carburetors disappeared in favor of fuel injection. Anti-lock braking, air bags, traction control, and more became standard equipment. Tires are FAR better as are suspensions. Corrosion control is vastly improved - cars used to basically rot underneath you. Pollution controls advanced massively. Air conditioning became standard equipment. Cars from the 60s were lucky to reach 100K miles even with careful maintenance while cars from 1999 did it routinely with fairly minimal attention to maintenance. Yes they had basically the same basic foot pedals and wheel etc but to claim nothing improved aside from a "few" things under the hood is just ridiculous.
remains at a point where the additional features you can put in are only really value adds to some - the majority don't need the feature and in a lot of cases might not even want it. These is where we are with PCs today.
Only with some pieces of software. Maybe word processing is reasonably mature but it doesn't follow that all software on PCs is equally so. And frankly I would argue even for "mature" software there probably is a lot of room for improvement not being fully realized. I can think of dozens of improvements I'd like to see in spreadsheets off the top of my head that would be of interest to huge numbers of users. Software like QuickBooks which is very widely used and ostensibly "mature" lacks whole categories of features that accountants would love to have. (I'm an accountant so I would know - for example it has no built in concept of a work order for manufacturing) And even if the feature set in these applications is fully realized they rarely are very good at collaborating with other software. To this day something as basic as copying images from one application to another is often clumsy and inconsistent even within a single office suite.
There also is the fact that while a majority of users may not need/want a given feature, some do. And the exact features that matter to a given user vary and cannot be easily predicted by the software maker. Nobody really wants to have 50 different versions o
Good coding practices back then aren't any different than today.
That's not even remotely true. SOME good coding practices from back then are unchanged. Some have changed quite a lot. To claim otherwise is de-facto a claim we haven't learned anything new about coding in the last 40 years which is an assertion I reject outright.
He gave you the source. It was a attributed paraphrased quote. What part of that was confusing to you?
Because that sounds like nonsense. NOTHING is inherently difficult? OK then.
It sounds like nonsense because you didn't understand it, ironically proving the veracity of the statement. Just because YOU don't understand a thing doesn't mean it is necessarily a hard problem to someone else. That is you assuming that because YOU can't solve it that nobody else can either which is hubris on YOUR part.
Interestingly, as much as we all hate subscription models from companies like Abode and Microsoft, those subscription models do give these companies more of an incentive to focus on stability, efficiency, and security instead of features.
How do you figure? Unless there is competitive pressure to do so they have your money and will (probably) do as little as they can get away with. Why incur extra cost if the customer is going to pay anyway? Companies with no competitive or regulatory pressure tend not to be real enthusiastic about quality since it costs money.
You don't recall the QNX demo floppy? It fit a multitasking networked OS that even included a Doom demo.
I remember a lot of things. I remember PDP-11 computers that ran the operations of entire companies with 512K of RAM. They also were the size of refrigerators, took a ton of power, and by today's standards were slower than frozen molasses. Yes you can do some impressive things in small amounts of memory if you need to. Doesn't mean it's the most efficient or effective or best or cheapest way to do it when it isn't a constraint. Do you really think the vaunted Apollo guidance computer was made the way it was just because the engineers like compact code? No it was built that way because it HAD to be.
Shit today is just bloated.
The first computer I had had a whopping 16Kilobytes of RAM. It was functional but slow and had a lot of limits. Do you really think we should be writing code the same way we did then just because we can? Do you restrict yourself to driving a Model T Ford because cars today "are just too bloated"? Do you live in a tent because houses are "just too bloated"? No you don't. There is overhead that comes with the progression of technology and that's not inherently a bad thing. Minimalism is only a virtue when it serves a functional purpose.
I understand the appeal of compact tight code. I really do. But the amount of hand wringing people make over it is just ridiculous. It's making perfect the enemy of good.
Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy?
Sure do. I also remember that it did close to fuck all in the way of useful tasks compared to the devices I have right now. Is there a point to this nostalgia over what now is primitive technology? If your OS fits on a single disk it is either a VERY narrowly focused device that doesn't do much else or it is a very primitive system that cannot do much. Just because something isn't coded in hand written assembler doesn't mean it is bad.
iPhone 4s was released with iOS 5, but can barely run iOS 9. And it's not because iOS 9 is that much superior -- it's basically the same. But their new hardware is faster, so they made software slower.
No they made it DO MORE. It didn't get slower out of incompetence or laziness. (well mostly anyway...) It is a more complicated system that does tasks that weren't previously possible with the older hardware. It's NOT "basically the same" if you really look at it carefully. A lot of new technology has been added which comes at a cost. You could run the old system on the new hardware and it would run faster but do fewer useful things. Pick your poison. I remember running the same DOS system that ran on my 286 on a 486 and it was a whole lot faster but it didn't really take full advantage of that extra speed for most tasks. The code was written the way it was because of the hardware limitations of the day. No different than today.
It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore.
This statement presumes A) that software in the past was all those things (it wasn't) and that B) that the meaning of all those things is clear (it isn't). Define "quality". Define "fast". Define "efficient". And under what context are we talking? That statement makes for a good sound bite but it's as vague as an astrology reading if you really think about it.
SG&A is not part of gross margin for a reason: it does not rise in correlation with production volumes as a production line spools up.
Accountant here. That's not true. Some SG&A expenses very much do correlate with production volumes. For a simple example the water bill of a plant generally is not included in Cost of Goods Sold but is (usually) in SG&A because it's too hard to divvy up to specific activities. But it will change with production volumes because more production = more water usage. Facts like this are very common in P&L statements and it is incorrect to assume all variable costs are in the gross margin and all fixed costs are in SG&A. A lot of stuff ends up in SG&A that ideally should be in COGS simply because it's too hard to figure out how to allocate the costs.
Here's a good example of a real-life measurement you can use to determine how much fabrication goes into the average AC statement, because Tesla has around a 20% profit margin per car
You are talking about Gross Margin which is NOT the same thing as Profit Margin. Gross Margin is the sales revenue minus the parts and labor directly used to build the vehicle. It does not include engineering, sales, marketing, R&D, financing, interest, taxes, overhead, and a multitude of different costs. Profit Margin only comes after all those other costs are taken into account.
That said, Tesla's Gross Margin is comparable to that of Toyota and FAR less than that of luxury brands like Ferrari (around 50% gross margin). It's a solid number for a company in that particular industry but nothing remarkable either. Ford's gross margin is lower because of some labor cost issues and loses non-truck vehicles but Ford has a NET profit to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Even really profitable car companies generally have profit margins measured in single digit percentages. But when you do billions in sales a year that adds up to a pretty big number. Walmart has low margins too but nobody is arguing they aren't profitable. Tesla's Gross margins should give confidence that they CAN get to profitability but they have some hurdles to get there - most notably their debt burden.
Great mileage, comfortable, and I am never stuck in traffic thanks to California wisely allowing what 90% of the world's population can do - filter and lane share.
Comfortable is a matter of perspective but you be you. There are a lot of drawbacks to motorcyles. Miniscule cargo capacity, not great for passengers (particularly children), FAR more dangerous to operate than a car, zero climate controls, noisy, and horrible in the snow. Some of these may not be issues for you specifically but if motorcycles were so awesome more people would be riding them. I have nothing against motorcycles (except Harley's which are exclusively ridden by noise polluting asshats) but their advantages are only applicable to a rather small subset of the population under certain conditions.
I have zero interest in a car with the same range as my motorcycle - and that takes hours to recharge versus 3 minutes (5 gallons of gas pumps plenty quick).
You'll change that tune if you ever get married or start a family. You aren't going to strap your child to the back of a motorcycle and it's not likely your spouse will want to go everywhere on the back of your motorcycle.
Anyway I own a Chevy Bolt EV. Unless you are riding further than 240 miles at a go, I spend less time refueling my EV than you do your motorcycle. I spend literally 10 seconds plugging it in in my garage and it's fully charged up when I get back to it. I also possibly spend less money doing it too since the cost to refuel an EV is around 1/4-1/3 that of a similar gas powered vehicle. My Bolt has a MPGe of 119mpg which is competitive with a lot of motorcycles.
Hey, when you sell cars below cost (essentially giving them away), you can move a lot of cars! Now, add in the $17,600 that Tesla loses on each vehicle ($717 million loss last quarter to ship 40,740 cars) and the $7500 the Government gives you to buy one, and you end up with the mythical $35K and up car actually costing $60K.
You are clearly not an accountant and you obviously don't work in manufacturing because you have the accounting analysis completely wrong. Where to begin...
TLDR version is that Tesla isn't going to have to raise prices - the just have to keep their variable costs low and sell a lot of cars and they should reach profitability. Presuming their debt load doesn't kill them before that happens of course.
1) You are assuming Tesla's costs are constant and fixed which is never true in manufacturing. This is not unique to Telsa. 2) Tesla has spend a huge amount of money building up a supply chain and assembly line and distribution/service network. This money gets recouped as they build and sell vehicles. This is a fixed up front cost which does not change not matter how many vehicles they sell. They have to achieve a certain volume of sales to be profitable which takes time. Every other car manufacturer experiences the exact same thing. 3) You failed to distinguish between fixed and variable costs and are allocating all the fixed costs to the first few vehicles produced. Literally almost every product manufactured by any company would seem to lose money if you allocated all the fixed costs over the first few units sold and then (wrongly) held that cost constant. That's not how it actually works. The more units Tesla sells the more units they can spread the fixed costs across. This is why buying large quantities of something gets you a better price than buying small quantities. 4) The tax credit has zero direct bearing on Tesla's profitability or lack thereof. It's an incentive to buy external to Tesla but doesn't add or subtract a dime to Telsa directly. Other than maybe getting some marginal sales the wouldn't have otherwise it doesn't add or subtract costs to Tesla. 5) That 40K vehicles sold number you quote is for ALL Tesla cars sold which includes the much more expensive Model S and Model X as well as the Model 3. You cannot evaluate the profitability of one car by conflating it's sales with that of another. 6) Half of Tesla's loss is accounted for by their R&D expenditures. 7) No Tesla will NOT have to raise prices to achieve profitability. If you think their current P&L shows this you don't understand how accounting works.
I know the diesel trains can be very good for hauling massive loads of stuff.
Just being pedantic but most of them are properly termed diesel-electric where electric motors drive the wheels and the diesel engine has no direct connection to the drive wheels. It just exists to drive a generator. You could seamlessly replace the diesel engine with a different power source (including hydrogen fuel cells) and it would function more or less identically.
Hydrogen is fantastic as it has no byproduct (if I recall, just water vapor?) but it's dangerous to contain and pretty sure it's very hard to make efficiently.
It is very clean once you get it in the fuel cell but the process of getting and transporting the hydrogen tends to be inefficient (electrolysis) or dirty (processing fossil fuels) so it isn't so great once you think about the whole system. Hydrogen isn't so much dangerous to contain as it is (comparatively) expensive and difficult.
Honestly not a bad idea, assuming it fully replaces diesel trains long term.
It won't replace diesel trains most likely because it's not economically competitive or efficient for the reasons mentioned above plus a few others not mentioned. There are corner cases where hydrogen fuel cells will make a lot of sense but it's hard to see a future where they replace diesel engines on a widespread basis in most applications including trains. That said I hope they keep working the technology because some interesting things are bound to come out of it one way or another.
Well that's because you can't really prove that something isn't happening.
You absolutely can prove that something isn't happening and we do it all the time. It's called evidence of absence. Furthermore the concept you are confused about is proving a negative and the notion that we cannot prove a negative isn't universally true either.
Unless H2 is obtained from electrolysis using renewables or nuclear then its the complete opposite of a carbon neutral solution
Even doing that is still wasteful for most applications. If you are already generating electricity from renewables or nuclear you are going to waste a lot of that energy processing H2 so most of the time it makes more sense to just use the energy directly and skip the H2 altogether. I think H2 makes sense for cases where the H2 is generated as a byproduct of some other useful process but it's kind of idiotic as a primary fuel stock in most use cases.
What about efficiency? Something in the back of my mind tells me that current hydrogen fuel cells are not very energy efficient when the entire process from power source to vehicle motion is considered. But that's not a rigorous analysis. Just something I might have read once.
No you have it right. Hydrogen fuel cells are quite efficient for the part of the process on the vehicle but the larger process of producing and distributing the hydrogen is wasteful and economically not competitive. Your options are primarily either some sort of energy intensive electrolysis or some sort of processing of fossil fuels where it is generally more efficient to just use the fossil fuels directly. While there are corner cases where hydrogen fuel cells make sense, in general there usually more efficient ways to deliver power.
I see hydrogen fuel cells as a good option to power things in cases where we are generating hydrogen as a byproduct of some other necessary process which does happen with some regularity. For example a lot of chemical processing flares natural gas as a byproduct which could in theory be captured and used instead of burned as "waste". This sort of limits the scale they can be used but it's still useful. Powering select trains might be a good application in some cases depending on how the hydrogen is sourced.
Your intuition probably has you thinking Germany is the greenest major European country due to its investment in solar and wind. In actual fact France is the greenest large economy, by far, because nuclear.
That's only true if you define "green" as "not-fossil-fuel" or "not carbon emitting". Nuclear is comparitively "green" as far as carbon and particulates go but it's impossible to argue that it doesn't have it's own rather nasty and definitely not "green" waste products. Worse it unfortunately goes hand in hand with WMD development as well which is probably the more serious problem with nuclear. (save the sputtering retorts about thorium, etc - it's a problem we haven't resolved so far though I'm hopeful we will someday) It seems clear that the problems from dumping massive amounts of carbon into our atmosphere is the more serious existential threat so nuclear probably has the lesser downside but calling it "green" is somewhat misleading if you don't explain what you mean when you use the term.
No but you can make penalties for it for companies that do stupid things. Companies are supposed to be able to hire smart people to figure this stuff out and if they fail to do that there should be consequences with teeth.
Some things you just have to let them work themselves out.
Product liability isn't one of them. Neither is negligence.
If you have a brand of devices that are constantly getting compromised. People will stop buying them.
HAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!! I refer you to Microsoft Windows, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Office. Not to mention countless shitty routers and IOT devices that get pnwned every day. People buy things all the time with vast security problems that are well known about prior to purchase. Your argument is not supported by facts.
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Over the years, Google has paid Mozilla in excess of $2 Billion. If you don't think Google "owns" Mozilla, you are delusional.
And they've also received upwards of a billion from Yahoo who last I checked was decidedly not owned by Google. I'm aware of the funding but the difference is that Mozilla can and does get funding from other sources. So my choices are 100% Google owned (Chrome) or something less than 100% Google financed (Firefox). I'll take the later option thanks. Mozilla is it's own entity and that counts for something even if it isn't as much as one would hope.
You could use Chromium or Vivaldi and be even less corporate influenced, but still chrome compatible.
Maybe but I don't care at all about compatibility with Chrome and don't see any particular value in that. I want a web browser that works on the sites I visit, is cross platform, has strong privacy controls, is actively developed, and isn't a security train wreck. Edge and Safari are out for me since they are one platform only and one company only. I don't really trust the various forked browsers related to Chrome and Firefox and other "minor" browsers to remain viable and supported long term though I'm glad they exist. So the only real options for me are Chrome and Firefox and I choose Firefox because it's less tied to a single for-profit corporation plus I'm used to it and have been using it a long time. It's not that I hate Chrome but I don't 100% trust Google's interests to align with my own. A little diversity of platform can be a good thing.
If anyone was really outraged, they would get something else.
That implies that there is something else for them to get. There really isn't. Microsoft was convicted in court of having a monopoly. Do you know what that word means? It means there aren't other options on the PC. The only other options are linux which perpetually lags Windows on the PC desktop in application options and the OS X which is both pricey and ties you to Apple. Both linux and OS X are fine options for some but as much as it irritates me to say it, Windows is the best offering available for a lot of people and companies. A lot of software people want is only available on Windows. If the people around you use Windows chances are high you will too. If you play games on your PC it's a virtual certainty are you are running Windows to do it.
I don't understand tech people that still uses crap like Windoze...
Then study up on network effects.
FB is a clumsy toddler in evilness compared to Google.
Perhaps. Facebook is definitely more blatant about their evil. Google is harder to avoid. Both companies have WAY too few restrictions on what they can do with data about basically everyone.
Google is rapidly becoming the new Microsoft. No wonder they ditched the "Don't Be Evil" motto.
Honestly I think Facebook wins the current edition of the Evil Olympics among tech companies. But maybe Google is just a sneakier player and unfortunately the two of them combined are really hard to avoid if you give half a shit about your privacy. I don't have a Facebook account but I'd be truly shocked if they don't maintain some sort of profile about my activities on the web. I block what I can but it's hard to stop them entirely.
Any company in a position of power is likely to abuse that power to some degree. IBM did, Microsoft did, and the list goes on. Trust them at your peril.
On the other hand, did you really think Google weren't tracking the #%#%$% out of you whenever you logged into anything?
Definitely. One of the reasons I don't use or install Chrome even though I do use some Google services. I use Firefox in part because it's the only one of the major browsers to not be owned by a major tech company. Chrome seems to work fine but compared with Firefox it's at more or less a dead heat technically speaking and performance-wise (for my purposes anyway) so why tie myself tighter to Google than absolutely necessary? That's not an argument that Firefox is perfect (it isn't) but it seems to be the least worst option in this regard.
What? Alcohol causes more deaths than firearms?!
Duh. People have greater access to alcohol so this should surprise no one. That said it depends on exactly when you measure it. During a war firearms clearly are the bigger danger. Also I'm not especially worried about someone pointing a beer at me even if they are angry.
Well, there's one way to fix that - ban alcohol! Make it illegal, and alcohol-related deaths should pretty much stop happening.
Comparing regulation of a mild recreational drug to regulation of a purpose built weapon is a fairly ridiculous comparison. That said there is plenty of evidence that prohibition did have positive effects regarding mortality despite arguably being bad policy. Likewise regulation of firearms in countries that took the matter seriously has been shown to reduce mortality from firearms. Again it might or might not be good policy but it does have a measurable effect on mortality rates.
This has been a marquee unsolved problem in Mathematics for over 150 years. Any simple proof would have been found long ago.
Just because nobody has figured out a "simple proof" after a lot of years of trying it doesn't logically follow that one cannot exist. You had it right when you said a simple proof "seems unlikely" which the evidence would suggest is true.
I would argue you're typical office worker could be perfectly happy with Word 6.0 and Excel 4.0 on Windows For Workgroups. A solid WYSIWG word processing and spread sheet with easy document sharing on file shares etc. All without having to learn any cryptic commands etc.
I'm sure a lot of very productive work could be done with this sort of setup. However there are a LOT of features that have come since then that you probably are taking for granted. For example anyone who works in financial analysis (and I have/do) pretty much has to be a spreadsheet wonk and will delve pretty deep into the feature set. Many of the features we use all the time didn't exist or were very primitive when Excel 4.0 was state of the art. The features of Excel 4.0 would be VERY limiting to someone working in that industry today. It would hurt productivity badly. A lot of seemingly minor features become really important once you have access to them. That's not to say that Excel 4.0 is bad software or that good work couldn't be done with it but you really cannot credibly argue that there haven't been meaningful improvements since then.
To use a car analogy imagine its 1999 (everyone uses their mobile phone fore this now) GPS was the new hotness. It made sense from a feature standpoint to include a GPS navigation system in your dashboard. Prior to that the feature set of the typical car had not changed much from say the mid 60's. There were a few "under the hood" improvements.
A "few"? I understand the point you are trying to make but I am old enough to have driven cars from the 60s and 70s as daily drivers. If you think nothing improved between the mid-60s and 1999 in cars then you don't know cars - at least the older ones. They vastly improved safety, efficiency per horsepower, comfort, reliability, traction control, braking and quite a lot more. Carburetors disappeared in favor of fuel injection. Anti-lock braking, air bags, traction control, and more became standard equipment. Tires are FAR better as are suspensions. Corrosion control is vastly improved - cars used to basically rot underneath you. Pollution controls advanced massively. Air conditioning became standard equipment. Cars from the 60s were lucky to reach 100K miles even with careful maintenance while cars from 1999 did it routinely with fairly minimal attention to maintenance. Yes they had basically the same basic foot pedals and wheel etc but to claim nothing improved aside from a "few" things under the hood is just ridiculous.
remains at a point where the additional features you can put in are only really value adds to some - the majority don't need the feature and in a lot of cases might not even want it. These is where we are with PCs today.
Only with some pieces of software. Maybe word processing is reasonably mature but it doesn't follow that all software on PCs is equally so. And frankly I would argue even for "mature" software there probably is a lot of room for improvement not being fully realized. I can think of dozens of improvements I'd like to see in spreadsheets off the top of my head that would be of interest to huge numbers of users. Software like QuickBooks which is very widely used and ostensibly "mature" lacks whole categories of features that accountants would love to have. (I'm an accountant so I would know - for example it has no built in concept of a work order for manufacturing) And even if the feature set in these applications is fully realized they rarely are very good at collaborating with other software. To this day something as basic as copying images from one application to another is often clumsy and inconsistent even within a single office suite.
There also is the fact that while a majority of users may not need/want a given feature, some do. And the exact features that matter to a given user vary and cannot be easily predicted by the software maker. Nobody really wants to have 50 different versions o
Good coding practices back then aren't any different than today.
That's not even remotely true. SOME good coding practices from back then are unchanged. Some have changed quite a lot. To claim otherwise is de-facto a claim we haven't learned anything new about coding in the last 40 years which is an assertion I reject outright.
Source please?
He gave you the source. It was a attributed paraphrased quote. What part of that was confusing to you?
Because that sounds like nonsense. NOTHING is inherently difficult? OK then.
It sounds like nonsense because you didn't understand it, ironically proving the veracity of the statement. Just because YOU don't understand a thing doesn't mean it is necessarily a hard problem to someone else. That is you assuming that because YOU can't solve it that nobody else can either which is hubris on YOUR part.
Interestingly, as much as we all hate subscription models from companies like Abode and Microsoft, those subscription models do give these companies more of an incentive to focus on stability, efficiency, and security instead of features.
How do you figure? Unless there is competitive pressure to do so they have your money and will (probably) do as little as they can get away with. Why incur extra cost if the customer is going to pay anyway? Companies with no competitive or regulatory pressure tend not to be real enthusiastic about quality since it costs money.
You don't recall the QNX demo floppy? It fit a multitasking networked OS that even included a Doom demo.
I remember a lot of things. I remember PDP-11 computers that ran the operations of entire companies with 512K of RAM. They also were the size of refrigerators, took a ton of power, and by today's standards were slower than frozen molasses. Yes you can do some impressive things in small amounts of memory if you need to. Doesn't mean it's the most efficient or effective or best or cheapest way to do it when it isn't a constraint. Do you really think the vaunted Apollo guidance computer was made the way it was just because the engineers like compact code? No it was built that way because it HAD to be.
Shit today is just bloated.
The first computer I had had a whopping 16Kilobytes of RAM. It was functional but slow and had a lot of limits. Do you really think we should be writing code the same way we did then just because we can? Do you restrict yourself to driving a Model T Ford because cars today "are just too bloated"? Do you live in a tent because houses are "just too bloated"? No you don't. There is overhead that comes with the progression of technology and that's not inherently a bad thing. Minimalism is only a virtue when it serves a functional purpose.
I understand the appeal of compact tight code. I really do. But the amount of hand wringing people make over it is just ridiculous. It's making perfect the enemy of good.
Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy?
Sure do. I also remember that it did close to fuck all in the way of useful tasks compared to the devices I have right now. Is there a point to this nostalgia over what now is primitive technology? If your OS fits on a single disk it is either a VERY narrowly focused device that doesn't do much else or it is a very primitive system that cannot do much. Just because something isn't coded in hand written assembler doesn't mean it is bad.
iPhone 4s was released with iOS 5, but can barely run iOS 9. And it's not because iOS 9 is that much superior -- it's basically the same. But their new hardware is faster, so they made software slower.
No they made it DO MORE. It didn't get slower out of incompetence or laziness. (well mostly anyway...) It is a more complicated system that does tasks that weren't previously possible with the older hardware. It's NOT "basically the same" if you really look at it carefully. A lot of new technology has been added which comes at a cost. You could run the old system on the new hardware and it would run faster but do fewer useful things. Pick your poison. I remember running the same DOS system that ran on my 286 on a 486 and it was a whole lot faster but it didn't really take full advantage of that extra speed for most tasks. The code was written the way it was because of the hardware limitations of the day. No different than today.
It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore.
This statement presumes A) that software in the past was all those things (it wasn't) and that B) that the meaning of all those things is clear (it isn't). Define "quality". Define "fast". Define "efficient". And under what context are we talking? That statement makes for a good sound bite but it's as vague as an astrology reading if you really think about it.
SG&A is not part of gross margin for a reason: it does not rise in correlation with production volumes as a production line spools up.
Accountant here. That's not true. Some SG&A expenses very much do correlate with production volumes. For a simple example the water bill of a plant generally is not included in Cost of Goods Sold but is (usually) in SG&A because it's too hard to divvy up to specific activities. But it will change with production volumes because more production = more water usage. Facts like this are very common in P&L statements and it is incorrect to assume all variable costs are in the gross margin and all fixed costs are in SG&A. A lot of stuff ends up in SG&A that ideally should be in COGS simply because it's too hard to figure out how to allocate the costs.
Here's a good example of a real-life measurement you can use to determine how much fabrication goes into the average AC statement, because Tesla has around a 20% profit margin per car
You are talking about Gross Margin which is NOT the same thing as Profit Margin. Gross Margin is the sales revenue minus the parts and labor directly used to build the vehicle. It does not include engineering, sales, marketing, R&D, financing, interest, taxes, overhead, and a multitude of different costs. Profit Margin only comes after all those other costs are taken into account.
That said, Tesla's Gross Margin is comparable to that of Toyota and FAR less than that of luxury brands like Ferrari (around 50% gross margin). It's a solid number for a company in that particular industry but nothing remarkable either. Ford's gross margin is lower because of some labor cost issues and loses non-truck vehicles but Ford has a NET profit to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Even really profitable car companies generally have profit margins measured in single digit percentages. But when you do billions in sales a year that adds up to a pretty big number. Walmart has low margins too but nobody is arguing they aren't profitable. Tesla's Gross margins should give confidence that they CAN get to profitability but they have some hurdles to get there - most notably their debt burden.
Great mileage, comfortable, and I am never stuck in traffic thanks to California wisely allowing what 90% of the world's population can do - filter and lane share.
Comfortable is a matter of perspective but you be you. There are a lot of drawbacks to motorcyles. Miniscule cargo capacity, not great for passengers (particularly children), FAR more dangerous to operate than a car, zero climate controls, noisy, and horrible in the snow. Some of these may not be issues for you specifically but if motorcycles were so awesome more people would be riding them. I have nothing against motorcycles (except Harley's which are exclusively ridden by noise polluting asshats) but their advantages are only applicable to a rather small subset of the population under certain conditions.
I have zero interest in a car with the same range as my motorcycle - and that takes hours to recharge versus 3 minutes (5 gallons of gas pumps plenty quick).
You'll change that tune if you ever get married or start a family. You aren't going to strap your child to the back of a motorcycle and it's not likely your spouse will want to go everywhere on the back of your motorcycle.
Anyway I own a Chevy Bolt EV. Unless you are riding further than 240 miles at a go, I spend less time refueling my EV than you do your motorcycle. I spend literally 10 seconds plugging it in in my garage and it's fully charged up when I get back to it. I also possibly spend less money doing it too since the cost to refuel an EV is around 1/4-1/3 that of a similar gas powered vehicle. My Bolt has a MPGe of 119mpg which is competitive with a lot of motorcycles.
Hey, when you sell cars below cost (essentially giving them away), you can move a lot of cars! Now, add in the $17,600 that Tesla loses on each vehicle ($717 million loss last quarter to ship 40,740 cars) and the $7500 the Government gives you to buy one, and you end up with the mythical $35K and up car actually costing $60K.
You are clearly not an accountant and you obviously don't work in manufacturing because you have the accounting analysis completely wrong. Where to begin...
TLDR version is that Tesla isn't going to have to raise prices - the just have to keep their variable costs low and sell a lot of cars and they should reach profitability. Presuming their debt load doesn't kill them before that happens of course.
1) You are assuming Tesla's costs are constant and fixed which is never true in manufacturing. This is not unique to Telsa.
2) Tesla has spend a huge amount of money building up a supply chain and assembly line and distribution/service network. This money gets recouped as they build and sell vehicles. This is a fixed up front cost which does not change not matter how many vehicles they sell. They have to achieve a certain volume of sales to be profitable which takes time. Every other car manufacturer experiences the exact same thing.
3) You failed to distinguish between fixed and variable costs and are allocating all the fixed costs to the first few vehicles produced. Literally almost every product manufactured by any company would seem to lose money if you allocated all the fixed costs over the first few units sold and then (wrongly) held that cost constant. That's not how it actually works. The more units Tesla sells the more units they can spread the fixed costs across. This is why buying large quantities of something gets you a better price than buying small quantities.
4) The tax credit has zero direct bearing on Tesla's profitability or lack thereof. It's an incentive to buy external to Tesla but doesn't add or subtract a dime to Telsa directly. Other than maybe getting some marginal sales the wouldn't have otherwise it doesn't add or subtract costs to Tesla.
5) That 40K vehicles sold number you quote is for ALL Tesla cars sold which includes the much more expensive Model S and Model X as well as the Model 3. You cannot evaluate the profitability of one car by conflating it's sales with that of another.
6) Half of Tesla's loss is accounted for by their R&D expenditures.
7) No Tesla will NOT have to raise prices to achieve profitability. If you think their current P&L shows this you don't understand how accounting works.
I know the diesel trains can be very good for hauling massive loads of stuff.
Just being pedantic but most of them are properly termed diesel-electric where electric motors drive the wheels and the diesel engine has no direct connection to the drive wheels. It just exists to drive a generator. You could seamlessly replace the diesel engine with a different power source (including hydrogen fuel cells) and it would function more or less identically.
Hydrogen is fantastic as it has no byproduct (if I recall, just water vapor?) but it's dangerous to contain and pretty sure it's very hard to make efficiently.
It is very clean once you get it in the fuel cell but the process of getting and transporting the hydrogen tends to be inefficient (electrolysis) or dirty (processing fossil fuels) so it isn't so great once you think about the whole system. Hydrogen isn't so much dangerous to contain as it is (comparatively) expensive and difficult.
Honestly not a bad idea, assuming it fully replaces diesel trains long term.
It won't replace diesel trains most likely because it's not economically competitive or efficient for the reasons mentioned above plus a few others not mentioned. There are corner cases where hydrogen fuel cells will make a lot of sense but it's hard to see a future where they replace diesel engines on a widespread basis in most applications including trains. That said I hope they keep working the technology because some interesting things are bound to come out of it one way or another.
Well that's because you can't really prove that something isn't happening.
You absolutely can prove that something isn't happening and we do it all the time. It's called evidence of absence. Furthermore the concept you are confused about is proving a negative and the notion that we cannot prove a negative isn't universally true either.
Unless H2 is obtained from electrolysis using renewables or nuclear then its the complete opposite of a carbon neutral solution
Even doing that is still wasteful for most applications. If you are already generating electricity from renewables or nuclear you are going to waste a lot of that energy processing H2 so most of the time it makes more sense to just use the energy directly and skip the H2 altogether. I think H2 makes sense for cases where the H2 is generated as a byproduct of some other useful process but it's kind of idiotic as a primary fuel stock in most use cases.
What about efficiency? Something in the back of my mind tells me that current hydrogen fuel cells are not very energy efficient when the entire process from power source to vehicle motion is considered. But that's not a rigorous analysis. Just something I might have read once.
No you have it right. Hydrogen fuel cells are quite efficient for the part of the process on the vehicle but the larger process of producing and distributing the hydrogen is wasteful and economically not competitive. Your options are primarily either some sort of energy intensive electrolysis or some sort of processing of fossil fuels where it is generally more efficient to just use the fossil fuels directly. While there are corner cases where hydrogen fuel cells make sense, in general there usually more efficient ways to deliver power.
I see hydrogen fuel cells as a good option to power things in cases where we are generating hydrogen as a byproduct of some other necessary process which does happen with some regularity. For example a lot of chemical processing flares natural gas as a byproduct which could in theory be captured and used instead of burned as "waste". This sort of limits the scale they can be used but it's still useful. Powering select trains might be a good application in some cases depending on how the hydrogen is sourced.
Your intuition probably has you thinking Germany is the greenest major European country due to its investment in solar and wind. In actual fact France is the greenest large economy, by far, because nuclear.
That's only true if you define "green" as "not-fossil-fuel" or "not carbon emitting". Nuclear is comparitively "green" as far as carbon and particulates go but it's impossible to argue that it doesn't have it's own rather nasty and definitely not "green" waste products. Worse it unfortunately goes hand in hand with WMD development as well which is probably the more serious problem with nuclear. (save the sputtering retorts about thorium, etc - it's a problem we haven't resolved so far though I'm hopeful we will someday) It seems clear that the problems from dumping massive amounts of carbon into our atmosphere is the more serious existential threat so nuclear probably has the lesser downside but calling it "green" is somewhat misleading if you don't explain what you mean when you use the term.
You can't "law" stupid away.
No but you can make penalties for it for companies that do stupid things. Companies are supposed to be able to hire smart people to figure this stuff out and if they fail to do that there should be consequences with teeth.
Some things you just have to let them work themselves out.
Product liability isn't one of them. Neither is negligence.
If you have a brand of devices that are constantly getting compromised. People will stop buying them.
HAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!! I refer you to Microsoft Windows, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Office. Not to mention countless shitty routers and IOT devices that get pnwned every day. People buy things all the time with vast security problems that are well known about prior to purchase. Your argument is not supported by facts.