Are there really that many parts of the world that don't have electricity? I mean apart from large very low population areas.
There are a LOT of places with very low population density and limited to no grid. Look at a photograph of the world at night. The dark areas are where there is limited electrical grid access. I wouldn't even have to leave the lower 48 states of the US to drive to a place where refueling an EV would be a problem. Furthermore there are a LOT of countries where the grid does not cover all the citizens and/or is highly unreliable. Even some highly populated places have undependable grids.
Except of course that the supercharger network extends almost all the way up to Nordkapp (Norway's equivalent of Alaska's Point Barrow). The country is covered.
I guarantee there are places in Norway where you cannot drive an EV without refueling becoming a problem. It might be covered for the vast majority of use cases but not all of them. In the much larger US it would be rather easy to do in parts of the Western US or Alaska.
The problem with this argument of course, is that if there is no petrofuel, the IC engines don't work either.
I can fly or ship and store an arbitrary volume of gasoline or diesel literally anywhere in the world. Explain to me how you do the same with electricity. Especially given that battery packs are highly non-standardized not to mention very heavy/bulky in the case of an EV. I either have to fly in a generator and fuel for it (which then ironically could have been used to power an ICE without the middle step) or I have to be near a grid. Some places don't have access to a grid and those places aren't good places for EVs for the foreseeable future. I'm as big a fan of EVs as you'll find but the ability to transport and store fuel in a relatively compact physical volume is a decided advantage of ICEs.
Taking these fringe cases of a cabin in the remote woods like the Alaskan reality shows is where we start going off the rails.
Not at all. It's just an example of cases where an internal combustion engine will continue to make sense for some time to come. Don't get to wrapped up in it. Point is that there will likely always be internal combustion powered vehicles even if EVs dominate someday.
The whole "EVs can't handle extreme climates or places with low population density" thing is just plain silly.
It's not a population density thing. The question is whether there is refueling infrastructure available. Go to remote parts of Alaska or Antarctica and an EV would rapidly become useless because there is simply no way to practically charge it. It doesn't have to be a big town but you do need access to some means of charging it. There also are climates where EVs will struggle. Heat is actually a bigger problem than cold for them. In the cold they don't work as well but extreme heat can kill an EV. I think these are technical issues that can be worked out in time but they are real issues.
But most people can't afford a new car anyway, and most of the cars on the road are 5-10 years old minimum.
The average age of a car on the road today is around 11.5 years in the US.
To make a dent in the existing market is going to take a decade minimum, and even then most people will still be driving a fuelled car instead of electric.
I think you'll see a dent within a decade but the tipping point is undoubtedly further out. My guess is somewhere around 30 years from now. I figure it will take about 10 years for credible EVs in the major market segments at reasonable prices to become available and sell in meaningful numbers and a bit longer for the electric grid to reconfigure to deal with it. Then it will take a few decades for the old cars to wear out and be replaced with new ones. So probably we see a tipping point in 20-35 years with substantial numbers of EVs taking market share in 10-15 years. To your point, though it's going to take decades under the best of circumstances to get most of the petrol powered cars off the road.
Whether it pays for itself or not, it really doesn't matter if you can't afford it, people aren't buying it, production isn't there, and there'll be a glut of cheap petrol cars even when they do start taking over.
Well the interesting thing is that while there will be cheap petrol powered cars, as EVs become more popular the cost of petrol itself will have to increase and thus they become less affordable. People aren't going to care if they can get a car for $5000 used if gasoline costs $10/gallon because there is less demand for it. Oil benefits in part from economies of scale and if EVs start capturing meaningful market share (and it seems likely they will) then oil based fuels will HAVE to increase in cost to offset the lower demand.
With the exception of the grossly mismanaged Chernobyl, none of the other "disasters" actually killed many people. For Fukushima, the Tsunami killed thousands, but zero direct deaths from the plant.
Forgetting that it rendered the area several miles around the plant uninhabitable? The fact that 150,000 people had to be evacuated many of which still cannot return to their homes? That the cleanup has so far required 9 million cubic meters of contaminated soil to be scooped up and that the cleanup is expected to take decades? The fact that no one was directly killed doesn't begin to mean that it is safe or without extremely serious and expensive problems.
Fission power is great until it isn't. I think it's a better option than coal in most cases but that's damning with faint praise. Being against fission currently is effectively an endorsement of using fossil fuels. But it's very much a lesser of two evils sort of situation.
It is all hype. But the result of that hype is that Nuclear is artificially very expensive.
There is nothing artificial about its cost. Nuclear fission has failure modes that while rare, are extremely dangerous and expensive to mitigate. It is dangerous enough that it requires nation states to provide insurance guarantees and severe regulatory oversight to ensure safe operation. It's expensive because when things go wrong it can render large areas unfit for habitation. Most of the time it is fine but that's not what insurance cares about.
Also, just because an EV is fun to drive, doesn't mean that IC cars *aren't* fun to drive.
No argument from me.
Hop in a Ford Focus Sport or a Golf GTi and tell me it isn't fun.
We'll I've owned a GTi and it wasn't exactly mind blowing. I didn't hate it but it was just a hopped up econobox with the various compromises that entails. Hot hatchbacks try to be all things to all people and to my mind they fail in that for the most part. The Mercedes SLK I had was MUCH more fun (albeit less practical) to drive. It was faster, cornered way better, looked better, and did the one thing it was designed to do rather well. If you can only afford one car and need something small and practical with a bit of a kick then a hot hatch isn't a bad choice but as fun cars go they aren't the best option out there.
Even better, jump in an Audi Quattro and tell me what you think.
I've owned one of those too a while back. Performed well enough but fun to drive? It was ok in some conditions. Better than a hot hatch but worse than a proper sports car in the dry. Fairly fun on gravel and in sloppy weather.
Or find yourself a Group B rally car and take it for a spin on a dirt track.
Seriously? You're comparing a purpose built race car to a street legal EV? I'm sure it's amazing to drive an F1 car too but let's keep it realistic.
EVs aren't an evolution of fun, they're not the next generation of fun, they're more of a new branch of the family tree. They're going to replace whole classes of IC cars, e.g commuting, but they're not going to replace them all.
Yes there will probably be IC cars for the foreseeable future as long as those who use fossil fuels aren't required to pay for the full cost of the pollution they generate. My guess is that EVs will eventually account for the majority of cars with gas/diesel cars becoming specialty vehicles for tasks EVs aren't well suited for. (remote locations, extreme climates, etc) The advantages of EVs just make too much sense for most people if they can get the fueling infrastructure issues sorted out. How long this will take is anybody's guess but I'm thinking at least 30 years.
It sounds to me like they didn't want to spend resources improving/replacing their existing system, so they decided to say it's a human's fault instead of a system's fault.
At some level it is essentially always a human's fault if there was a human decision involved at any point. It might be the human(s) who designed the system or the one(s) who built the system or the one(s) who operated the system but at some level it is a human failure. That's why when someone tells you "the computer failed" they are saying a false statement because while it might not have been their fault, it almost certainly wasn't the fault of the machine - it was the fault of some person somewhere. The machine is simply doing exactly what it was designed and instructed to do. If something bad happens and you trace back why far enough the answer almost always is that some person made a mistake.
Now I'm not talking about blame here. That's different. It rarely is a productive exercise to seek out the person who failed and (figuratively) execute them. Most mistakes are unintentional and caused by putting a person in a situation where they were set up to fail. It's more useful to figure out how to design the system so that the failure mode cannot recur. Fix the problem, not the blame.
(Yes I'm aware that technically computers can actually make mistakes but this is so rare as to be inconsequential to my point - and even then those errors are typically errors made by the designer of the machine making it insufficiently robust)
AMD doesn't escape them, but they get to share them.
Sharing them only helps if your competition cannot fully utilize their own production capacity. That is not the case here. Intel has substantial production capacity which they (so far) are able to utilize efficiently and don't have to pay any margin leakage. Furthermore there are substantial advantages to be had from being vertically integrated. Any time you rely on a third party to produce something there are a host of frictional problems that add costs. Sometimes these are worth dealing with but they aren't a good thing if your competition doesn't have them.
Let me give an example from my own company which is comparable. We make wire harnesses. One of our products is a simple lead (wire plus terminal and seal) we sell to one of our customer for about $0.15 each. Currently we buy these leads from a third party for about $0.11 each because we don't have quite enough business to justify the $100,000 price of the automated production equipment needed to make them ourselves. We would need to make about a million of these per year to justify the equipment with a reasonably short breakeven but we only have orders for about 300,000 per year. If we owned the equipment and operate it at scale we could make the leads for about $0.08 each. At our current scale it makes sense to outsource the production but a larger company that already owns the production equipment. A competitor that has enough business to own the machine and utilize it fully could easily undercut us on price and not even have to take a loss. In this case we are in the role of AMD and our theoretical competitor is Intel.
YThe cost of developing a new process tech is huge (on the order of $10bn+). If you're selling ten million chips, then that's $1,000 per chip. You need to get a good hundred million chips out of the fabs before they start to bring the cost per chip down low enough that you can sell them.
And to date Intel has been able to do exactly that.
Even Intel is struggling to get the required economies of scale. They keep trying to get other people to use their fabs, but no one wants to use a fab where they're always going to be lower priority than Intel and where Intel may suddenly decide that they're competitors. They event threw in Atom IP cores basically for free for anyone willing to fab their SoCs with Intel. It didn't work.
This is actually a real concern for Intel. They have a huge investment in production capacity and they have to be able to utilize it fully to continue to maintain their strategic position and cost advantage. So far they've managed the trick but if they have an Achilles heel where AMD is concerned, this is it.
Again, that's a nonsense comparison. It's including Intel NICs, Intel SSDs, and all of the other things where Intel has a huge presence and AMD has none.
It's not nonsense at all. Those additional profits matter because they can support Intel in a price war in a particular market segment. It's illegal to sell below cost but Intel doesn't have to do that to hurt AMD. Intel just has to price their chips below AMD's cost to produce and it is game over. And Intel can do that because they have a cost advantage. Intel could put AMD out of business and not even have to go into the red to do it. Now this won't happen for various reasons but it is the economic cloud AMD has lived under for decades. It's also why AMD has been diversifying away from their CPU business. They know they cannot beat Intel in the CPU market.
You really don't understand how economies of scale work in this market.
I'm a certified accountant and I run a contract manufacturing company for my day job. I assure you I understand the economies of scale better than most and you aren't thinking about it properly. You have the bits about the startup capital costs more or less correct but yo
Time and time again we've heard this argument that some incumbent has an "insurmountable advantage". Then what happens? Some competitor comes along and crushes the incumbent!
AMD has had over 30 years to "crush" Intel and hasn't been able to get it done. Not a lot of reason to believe they are going to suddenly succeed after decades of playing a (distant) second fiddle. While it's not impossible that AMD invents something miraculous that Intel cannot match, it is deeply improbable. And while they would risk anti-trust litigation, Intel could put AMD out of the CPU business in very short order if they were given a free hand to do so. They could simply lower costs to below AMD's costs and hold them there. Intel wouldn't even have to take a loss to do it since Intel makes more in profit each year than AMD brings in in revenue.
Web browsers are a good example of this.
No they aren't because web browsers don't require billions in capital expenditures and billions more in R&D to make a product. Manufacturing a physical bit of hardware isn't really much like software development at all.
An "insurmountable advantage" is often not insurmountable at all.
Show me a credible path by which AMD conquers Intel in the CPU market and I'll concede the point and furthermore I'll buy AMD stock if I believe you. I have no dog in this fight and I don't care who wins. I'm just pointing out the economic reality which is that Intel can for the foreseeable future crush AMD and/or buy them out with figurative pocket change.
And when you look at how Apple does improve these products, it's mostly by paying other companies to do it for them.
That depends on the product and you have cherry picked a couple of examples convenient to your point and left out the ones that aren't. Not saying your point isn't valid but I disagree with the word "mostly" in your argument. It might be a fair argument that Apple falls behind when they do outsource instead of building products in house. When Apple gets it right they tend to REALLY get it right. But they don't have a perfect batting average and their record for integrating purchased technology is a bit spotty like most big companies.
Politics is not i-hate-that-guy-thus-everything-he-says.
Sorry but for a lot of people it is exactly that sort of tribal us-vs-them mentality. How else do you explain so much of they idiocy that goes on today? Religious disputes are almost always tribalism run amok. We see political parties oppose legislation that was their own idea simply because the other team tried to pass it. We see people acting against their own objective self interest just because the other party says it's a good idea. I agree that this is a monumentally stupid way to view the world but it's the world we live in at the moment.
This is not sports where your team is your team unconditionally. Those who would try to make you *feel* it's your team vs others team are using you as cattle.
Well, when I see or hear Trump do a single thing I think is good policy or even respectable behavior I'll give him the appropriate kudos for it. Not seeing any real danger of that happening any time soon. I'm not being used when I really and genuinely dislike his actions and policies. There are plenty of republicans I can support but he's proven beyond any doubt that he is to be opposed and removed from office as soon as possible. It's not a my team thing with Trump. He's just that bad.
This feels like Apple did this product simply to have something out there.
Probably true but the real question is how fast they will iterate and improve it. The original iPhone was a game changer but the first version didn't include a lot of features their competition had at the time. It succeeded on the improvements of later versions. There were MP3 players that were better than the iPod when it was introduced. Apple rarely is first into a market but they usually come with something decent and then keep improving it until it gains major market share. I recommend people never buy version 1.0 of a new Apple product because it takes them a few tries to work out the kinks even if they have the broad strokes more or less right.
hate to say it, but Jobs would of NEVER allowed this product to go out unless it was as good or better than the competition.
Jobs did exactly that with some regularity. Apple products are generally good quality but often are not best in class and more than a few have been quite deficient. Apple has some big hits but they aren't anywhere close to a perfect batting average even when Jobs was in charge.
That's slightly misleading, because it assumes that all of Intel is competing with all of AMD. They have some competing business units, but they are not entirely direct competitors.
I don't think it is misleading at all. You are correct that it's not 100% apples to apples but let's not pretend that a vast amount of AMDs revenue isn't directly competitive with Intel.
AMD no longer owns its own fabs, so doesn't require the same economise of scale to get the cost per wafer down
Incorrect. AMD doesn't get to escape those costs by outsourcing. While it may be cheaper than they could accomplish on their own (AMD is likely too small to achieve minimum efficient scale) it doesn't mean they can achieve cost parity with Intel and in fact you can tell they haven't by reading their financial statements. Intel makes twice as much profit every quarter as AMD brings in in total sales so that means Intel's costs are lower than AMD's by a lot. In a price war Intel wins in a romp. Furthermore those third party chip fabs don't make stuff for free so AMD has to pay a non-trivial markup on every chip they sell. Intel doesn't have this problem as they are vertically integrated and can keep that profit. AMD basically has to compete with Intel on price and Intel has an insurmountable cost advantage. You don't have to take my word for it. Look at their financial statements for proof. AMD is winning business mostly by charging thinner margins and because Intel let's them alone to keep anti-trust regulators off their backs.
The vast majority of that is on process technology, which is no longer a business that AMD is in (and where the returns have been very low for the past 5 years).
That process technology isn't a cost AMD escapes. You are under the misapprehension that outsourcing removes these costs - it doesn't. They just pay another company to do it for them plus a profit margin too - at the end of the day they pay MORE. Plus you are missing the important point. Intel has WAY more resources than AMD. Intel's PROFITS are over double AMDs total sales. In fact Intel's profits last year were roughly equal to AMDs entire market capitalization (both around $12B). Intel could literally drop their prices to below cost for AMD on all the products they compete in and still make a profit. Intel could drive AMD out of the market any time they wanted. The only reason Intel doesn't is to avoid anti-trust scrutiny.
Intel needs there cheap labor to crush AMD by volume
Nice theory but it lacks any basis in reality. Intel is literally over 10X the size of AMD by revenue (~$60B versus ~$5B) and AMD is in no danger of catching up to Intel any time soon. Furthermore most of Intel's manufacturing sites are in the US. They have precisely ONE chip fab in China versus NINE in the US. Approximately 75% of Intel's chip fabrication occurs in the US.
People tend to think of AMD as a close competitor but they aren't. Intel spends over double AMD's total revenue on R&D alone (~$12B last year). Frankly AMD really has no means to catch Intel in the markets that Intel dominates. Intel simply has an insurmountable cost advantage over AMD.
Starting in 2019, the bill would ban the sale of electronics that are designed "in such a way as to prevent reasonable diagnostic or repair functions by an independent repair provider. Preventing reasonable diagnostic or repair functions includes permanently affixing a battery in a manner that makes it difficult or impossible to remove."
You realize this would make something like a pacemaker technically illegal under this wording...
There are some things you don't actually want anyone but the manufacturer messing with. (Phones not among them obviously)
Unless you're a stockholder. Alphabet is priced at about 3x what it should be for a company that's done innovating, and it doesn't even pay a dividend.
I'm not a shareholder but I think Alphabet is priced reasonably fairly for the amount of profits the company generates and seems likely to continue to generate. The company is something of a one trick pony (advertising) but it's a really good trick. Innovation doesn't drive stock prices except insofar as people believe it will result in future profits. (intentionally ignoring bubble cases like Tesla as they are temporary exceptions) Alphabet's profits are about as good as they get and their stock price reflects this fact.
Put an MBA in charge of a company and they simply chase the next big thing instead of innovating and creating the next big thing.
Scapegoat much? And who would you put in change instead? Running a large company requires a very particular skill set which not a lot of people actually have. Going to school to learn some of those skills isn't something to be looked down upon any more than going to engineering school. Furthermore when you have revenues in the hundreds of billions it isn't easy to come up with ideas that move the needle. For Apple or Google to grow by 10% they need to build a company the size of eBay from scratch. You think that is a trivial endeavor? And despite your scapegoating and dislike for people who have gone to business school, a lot of them are actually quite good at what they do.
They do this because they are not innovators and creators, they are simply followers and maintainers.
That's a nice little strawman you have there. People with MBA degrees are no more or less innovative or creative than any other category. Some are good at it, most aren't. I can say the same thing about most engineers. Most engineers are not creative or innovators either and a lot of them aren't very good at engineering. Some are great but that doesn't mean all of them are.
It seems to be the plight of large companies to not want to take the risk of hiring an innovator.
No the problem is that the number of people who are both 1) highly innovative and 2) able to manage a large company, is a very small group. It's similar to the problem that schools with high academic standards find when trying to field a quality athletic team. Their talent pool is smaller because there are fewer people who are gifted both academically and athletically. Guys like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary.
So were most of the products that came out under Steve Jobs. Apple only makes 1-2 "revolutionary" products per decade. Their last big one was the iPhone/iPad (really the same product) which hit the market 10 years ago (7 for the iPad). Prior to that was the iPod which came out 18 years ago. Prior to that was the Powerbook (1991) and the Macintosh (1984). The real question is can Apple do another product on that scale again? They are so big now that it's hard to develop products that really move the needle revenue wise. For them to grow just 10% they have to basically build a business the size of eBay from scratch. There just aren't that many things you can do to generate that many billions in revenue. It's (comparatively) easy to look innovative and grow fast when you are small. Not so easy to make the elephant dance.
Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table.
Well the iPhone does account for well over 50% of their revenue. It is fair to point out that the Mac has been somewhat neglected of late though.
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
If you think Jobs didn't care about competitors you are mistaken. He cared a lot. See the "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" ads. The difference was that he was really good at product design and keeping the company focused so it didn't seem like he cared. But he had flesh eating lawyers on speed dial (ask Samsung) to deal with competitors.
For better or worse in any emergency twitter will get the information to a wider audience and will be picked up by the media faster than anything else these days.
You've apparently forgotten that they have a system that is able to contact EVERY PHONE IN THE STATE. In what universe is Twitter more efficient than that? Furthermore Twitter is hardly trustworthy nor does everyone have a Twitter account (I do not have one) so it's worse for me than the media.
So I don't have a Twitter account and have no plans to get one. Nothing against it just have no use for it. So using Twitter to communicate to me is going to be ineffective at best because the information will be at least 2nd hand by the time I get it. Twitter is a terrible substitute since why would anyone believe a message over twitter over the official warning system?
The correct answer is to send out another message on the same system that obviously has the ability to contact every cell phone in the state.
Now, some people MAY swallow a $100 sub over a $1500 license a bit easier but I really question how much they've really improved their income from those not inclined to spend money in the first place.
Evidently enough to make it worth the trouble. Subscription revenues tend to be a lot more consistent. Under a standalone license the cash flow from customers is kind of lumpy and unpredictable. Plus you have to sell them on the upgrades (which is expensive) and you can't guarantee they will actually buy the new version. Subscriptions do away with that and make the incoming revenue much more predictable which companies and Wall Street like. Problem is that they are a bit of a faustian bargain for a lot of people. The subscription might be short term cheaper but long term more expensive and you have to give away a lot of control over your data.
I get why companies do it. It makes sense for them financially. But for me at least it's too much of a one sided deal.
The last list price of Photoshop was $700, but even at $500, that's what apparently is now 4 years of subscription.
Doesn't really matter how many years it is. The problem is the subscription terms, not the cost. I can afford the subscription but if I stop paying for whatever reason I'm screwed or have to go to heroic measures to recapture my data. A lot can happen in 4 years. Plus I still use applications I acquired 10+ years ago and have no need to "upgrade". Why should I be stuck in a one sided contract with the devil for upgrades I don't actually need?
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Are there really that many parts of the world that don't have electricity? I mean apart from large very low population areas.
There are a LOT of places with very low population density and limited to no grid. Look at a photograph of the world at night. The dark areas are where there is limited electrical grid access. I wouldn't even have to leave the lower 48 states of the US to drive to a place where refueling an EV would be a problem. Furthermore there are a LOT of countries where the grid does not cover all the citizens and/or is highly unreliable. Even some highly populated places have undependable grids.
Except of course that the supercharger network extends almost all the way up to Nordkapp (Norway's equivalent of Alaska's Point Barrow). The country is covered.
I guarantee there are places in Norway where you cannot drive an EV without refueling becoming a problem. It might be covered for the vast majority of use cases but not all of them. In the much larger US it would be rather easy to do in parts of the Western US or Alaska.
The problem with this argument of course, is that if there is no petrofuel, the IC engines don't work either.
I can fly or ship and store an arbitrary volume of gasoline or diesel literally anywhere in the world. Explain to me how you do the same with electricity. Especially given that battery packs are highly non-standardized not to mention very heavy/bulky in the case of an EV. I either have to fly in a generator and fuel for it (which then ironically could have been used to power an ICE without the middle step) or I have to be near a grid. Some places don't have access to a grid and those places aren't good places for EVs for the foreseeable future. I'm as big a fan of EVs as you'll find but the ability to transport and store fuel in a relatively compact physical volume is a decided advantage of ICEs.
Taking these fringe cases of a cabin in the remote woods like the Alaskan reality shows is where we start going off the rails.
Not at all. It's just an example of cases where an internal combustion engine will continue to make sense for some time to come. Don't get to wrapped up in it. Point is that there will likely always be internal combustion powered vehicles even if EVs dominate someday.
The whole "EVs can't handle extreme climates or places with low population density" thing is just plain silly.
It's not a population density thing. The question is whether there is refueling infrastructure available. Go to remote parts of Alaska or Antarctica and an EV would rapidly become useless because there is simply no way to practically charge it. It doesn't have to be a big town but you do need access to some means of charging it. There also are climates where EVs will struggle. Heat is actually a bigger problem than cold for them. In the cold they don't work as well but extreme heat can kill an EV. I think these are technical issues that can be worked out in time but they are real issues.
But most people can't afford a new car anyway, and most of the cars on the road are 5-10 years old minimum.
The average age of a car on the road today is around 11.5 years in the US.
To make a dent in the existing market is going to take a decade minimum, and even then most people will still be driving a fuelled car instead of electric.
I think you'll see a dent within a decade but the tipping point is undoubtedly further out. My guess is somewhere around 30 years from now. I figure it will take about 10 years for credible EVs in the major market segments at reasonable prices to become available and sell in meaningful numbers and a bit longer for the electric grid to reconfigure to deal with it. Then it will take a few decades for the old cars to wear out and be replaced with new ones. So probably we see a tipping point in 20-35 years with substantial numbers of EVs taking market share in 10-15 years. To your point, though it's going to take decades under the best of circumstances to get most of the petrol powered cars off the road.
Whether it pays for itself or not, it really doesn't matter if you can't afford it, people aren't buying it, production isn't there, and there'll be a glut of cheap petrol cars even when they do start taking over.
Well the interesting thing is that while there will be cheap petrol powered cars, as EVs become more popular the cost of petrol itself will have to increase and thus they become less affordable. People aren't going to care if they can get a car for $5000 used if gasoline costs $10/gallon because there is less demand for it. Oil benefits in part from economies of scale and if EVs start capturing meaningful market share (and it seems likely they will) then oil based fuels will HAVE to increase in cost to offset the lower demand.
With the exception of the grossly mismanaged Chernobyl, none of the other "disasters" actually killed many people. For Fukushima, the Tsunami killed thousands, but zero direct deaths from the plant.
Forgetting that it rendered the area several miles around the plant uninhabitable? The fact that 150,000 people had to be evacuated many of which still cannot return to their homes? That the cleanup has so far required 9 million cubic meters of contaminated soil to be scooped up and that the cleanup is expected to take decades? The fact that no one was directly killed doesn't begin to mean that it is safe or without extremely serious and expensive problems.
Fission power is great until it isn't. I think it's a better option than coal in most cases but that's damning with faint praise. Being against fission currently is effectively an endorsement of using fossil fuels. But it's very much a lesser of two evils sort of situation.
It is all hype. But the result of that hype is that Nuclear is artificially very expensive.
There is nothing artificial about its cost. Nuclear fission has failure modes that while rare, are extremely dangerous and expensive to mitigate. It is dangerous enough that it requires nation states to provide insurance guarantees and severe regulatory oversight to ensure safe operation. It's expensive because when things go wrong it can render large areas unfit for habitation. Most of the time it is fine but that's not what insurance cares about.
Also, just because an EV is fun to drive, doesn't mean that IC cars *aren't* fun to drive.
No argument from me.
Hop in a Ford Focus Sport or a Golf GTi and tell me it isn't fun.
We'll I've owned a GTi and it wasn't exactly mind blowing. I didn't hate it but it was just a hopped up econobox with the various compromises that entails. Hot hatchbacks try to be all things to all people and to my mind they fail in that for the most part. The Mercedes SLK I had was MUCH more fun (albeit less practical) to drive. It was faster, cornered way better, looked better, and did the one thing it was designed to do rather well. If you can only afford one car and need something small and practical with a bit of a kick then a hot hatch isn't a bad choice but as fun cars go they aren't the best option out there.
Even better, jump in an Audi Quattro and tell me what you think.
I've owned one of those too a while back. Performed well enough but fun to drive? It was ok in some conditions. Better than a hot hatch but worse than a proper sports car in the dry. Fairly fun on gravel and in sloppy weather.
Or find yourself a Group B rally car and take it for a spin on a dirt track.
Seriously? You're comparing a purpose built race car to a street legal EV? I'm sure it's amazing to drive an F1 car too but let's keep it realistic.
EVs aren't an evolution of fun, they're not the next generation of fun, they're more of a new branch of the family tree. They're going to replace whole classes of IC cars, e.g commuting, but they're not going to replace them all.
Yes there will probably be IC cars for the foreseeable future as long as those who use fossil fuels aren't required to pay for the full cost of the pollution they generate. My guess is that EVs will eventually account for the majority of cars with gas/diesel cars becoming specialty vehicles for tasks EVs aren't well suited for. (remote locations, extreme climates, etc) The advantages of EVs just make too much sense for most people if they can get the fueling infrastructure issues sorted out. How long this will take is anybody's guess but I'm thinking at least 30 years.
It sounds to me like they didn't want to spend resources improving/replacing their existing system, so they decided to say it's a human's fault instead of a system's fault.
At some level it is essentially always a human's fault if there was a human decision involved at any point. It might be the human(s) who designed the system or the one(s) who built the system or the one(s) who operated the system but at some level it is a human failure. That's why when someone tells you "the computer failed" they are saying a false statement because while it might not have been their fault, it almost certainly wasn't the fault of the machine - it was the fault of some person somewhere. The machine is simply doing exactly what it was designed and instructed to do. If something bad happens and you trace back why far enough the answer almost always is that some person made a mistake.
Now I'm not talking about blame here. That's different. It rarely is a productive exercise to seek out the person who failed and (figuratively) execute them. Most mistakes are unintentional and caused by putting a person in a situation where they were set up to fail. It's more useful to figure out how to design the system so that the failure mode cannot recur. Fix the problem, not the blame.
(Yes I'm aware that technically computers can actually make mistakes but this is so rare as to be inconsequential to my point - and even then those errors are typically errors made by the designer of the machine making it insufficiently robust)
AMD doesn't escape them, but they get to share them.
Sharing them only helps if your competition cannot fully utilize their own production capacity. That is not the case here. Intel has substantial production capacity which they (so far) are able to utilize efficiently and don't have to pay any margin leakage. Furthermore there are substantial advantages to be had from being vertically integrated. Any time you rely on a third party to produce something there are a host of frictional problems that add costs. Sometimes these are worth dealing with but they aren't a good thing if your competition doesn't have them.
Let me give an example from my own company which is comparable. We make wire harnesses. One of our products is a simple lead (wire plus terminal and seal) we sell to one of our customer for about $0.15 each. Currently we buy these leads from a third party for about $0.11 each because we don't have quite enough business to justify the $100,000 price of the automated production equipment needed to make them ourselves. We would need to make about a million of these per year to justify the equipment with a reasonably short breakeven but we only have orders for about 300,000 per year. If we owned the equipment and operate it at scale we could make the leads for about $0.08 each. At our current scale it makes sense to outsource the production but a larger company that already owns the production equipment. A competitor that has enough business to own the machine and utilize it fully could easily undercut us on price and not even have to take a loss. In this case we are in the role of AMD and our theoretical competitor is Intel.
YThe cost of developing a new process tech is huge (on the order of $10bn+). If you're selling ten million chips, then that's $1,000 per chip. You need to get a good hundred million chips out of the fabs before they start to bring the cost per chip down low enough that you can sell them.
And to date Intel has been able to do exactly that.
Even Intel is struggling to get the required economies of scale. They keep trying to get other people to use their fabs, but no one wants to use a fab where they're always going to be lower priority than Intel and where Intel may suddenly decide that they're competitors. They event threw in Atom IP cores basically for free for anyone willing to fab their SoCs with Intel. It didn't work.
This is actually a real concern for Intel. They have a huge investment in production capacity and they have to be able to utilize it fully to continue to maintain their strategic position and cost advantage. So far they've managed the trick but if they have an Achilles heel where AMD is concerned, this is it.
Again, that's a nonsense comparison. It's including Intel NICs, Intel SSDs, and all of the other things where Intel has a huge presence and AMD has none.
It's not nonsense at all. Those additional profits matter because they can support Intel in a price war in a particular market segment. It's illegal to sell below cost but Intel doesn't have to do that to hurt AMD. Intel just has to price their chips below AMD's cost to produce and it is game over. And Intel can do that because they have a cost advantage. Intel could put AMD out of business and not even have to go into the red to do it. Now this won't happen for various reasons but it is the economic cloud AMD has lived under for decades. It's also why AMD has been diversifying away from their CPU business. They know they cannot beat Intel in the CPU market.
You really don't understand how economies of scale work in this market.
I'm a certified accountant and I run a contract manufacturing company for my day job. I assure you I understand the economies of scale better than most and you aren't thinking about it properly. You have the bits about the startup capital costs more or less correct but yo
Time and time again we've heard this argument that some incumbent has an "insurmountable advantage". Then what happens? Some competitor comes along and crushes the incumbent!
AMD has had over 30 years to "crush" Intel and hasn't been able to get it done. Not a lot of reason to believe they are going to suddenly succeed after decades of playing a (distant) second fiddle. While it's not impossible that AMD invents something miraculous that Intel cannot match, it is deeply improbable. And while they would risk anti-trust litigation, Intel could put AMD out of the CPU business in very short order if they were given a free hand to do so. They could simply lower costs to below AMD's costs and hold them there. Intel wouldn't even have to take a loss to do it since Intel makes more in profit each year than AMD brings in in revenue.
Web browsers are a good example of this.
No they aren't because web browsers don't require billions in capital expenditures and billions more in R&D to make a product. Manufacturing a physical bit of hardware isn't really much like software development at all.
An "insurmountable advantage" is often not insurmountable at all.
Show me a credible path by which AMD conquers Intel in the CPU market and I'll concede the point and furthermore I'll buy AMD stock if I believe you. I have no dog in this fight and I don't care who wins. I'm just pointing out the economic reality which is that Intel can for the foreseeable future crush AMD and/or buy them out with figurative pocket change.
And when you look at how Apple does improve these products, it's mostly by paying other companies to do it for them.
That depends on the product and you have cherry picked a couple of examples convenient to your point and left out the ones that aren't. Not saying your point isn't valid but I disagree with the word "mostly" in your argument. It might be a fair argument that Apple falls behind when they do outsource instead of building products in house. When Apple gets it right they tend to REALLY get it right. But they don't have a perfect batting average and their record for integrating purchased technology is a bit spotty like most big companies.
Politics is not i-hate-that-guy-thus-everything-he-says.
Sorry but for a lot of people it is exactly that sort of tribal us-vs-them mentality. How else do you explain so much of they idiocy that goes on today? Religious disputes are almost always tribalism run amok. We see political parties oppose legislation that was their own idea simply because the other team tried to pass it. We see people acting against their own objective self interest just because the other party says it's a good idea. I agree that this is a monumentally stupid way to view the world but it's the world we live in at the moment.
This is not sports where your team is your team unconditionally. Those who would try to make you *feel* it's your team vs others team are using you as cattle.
Well, when I see or hear Trump do a single thing I think is good policy or even respectable behavior I'll give him the appropriate kudos for it. Not seeing any real danger of that happening any time soon. I'm not being used when I really and genuinely dislike his actions and policies. There are plenty of republicans I can support but he's proven beyond any doubt that he is to be opposed and removed from office as soon as possible. It's not a my team thing with Trump. He's just that bad.
This feels like Apple did this product simply to have something out there.
Probably true but the real question is how fast they will iterate and improve it. The original iPhone was a game changer but the first version didn't include a lot of features their competition had at the time. It succeeded on the improvements of later versions. There were MP3 players that were better than the iPod when it was introduced. Apple rarely is first into a market but they usually come with something decent and then keep improving it until it gains major market share. I recommend people never buy version 1.0 of a new Apple product because it takes them a few tries to work out the kinks even if they have the broad strokes more or less right.
hate to say it, but Jobs would of NEVER allowed this product to go out unless it was as good or better than the competition.
Jobs did exactly that with some regularity. Apple products are generally good quality but often are not best in class and more than a few have been quite deficient. Apple has some big hits but they aren't anywhere close to a perfect batting average even when Jobs was in charge.
That's slightly misleading, because it assumes that all of Intel is competing with all of AMD. They have some competing business units, but they are not entirely direct competitors.
I don't think it is misleading at all. You are correct that it's not 100% apples to apples but let's not pretend that a vast amount of AMDs revenue isn't directly competitive with Intel.
AMD no longer owns its own fabs, so doesn't require the same economise of scale to get the cost per wafer down
Incorrect. AMD doesn't get to escape those costs by outsourcing. While it may be cheaper than they could accomplish on their own (AMD is likely too small to achieve minimum efficient scale) it doesn't mean they can achieve cost parity with Intel and in fact you can tell they haven't by reading their financial statements. Intel makes twice as much profit every quarter as AMD brings in in total sales so that means Intel's costs are lower than AMD's by a lot. In a price war Intel wins in a romp. Furthermore those third party chip fabs don't make stuff for free so AMD has to pay a non-trivial markup on every chip they sell. Intel doesn't have this problem as they are vertically integrated and can keep that profit. AMD basically has to compete with Intel on price and Intel has an insurmountable cost advantage. You don't have to take my word for it. Look at their financial statements for proof. AMD is winning business mostly by charging thinner margins and because Intel let's them alone to keep anti-trust regulators off their backs.
The vast majority of that is on process technology, which is no longer a business that AMD is in (and where the returns have been very low for the past 5 years).
That process technology isn't a cost AMD escapes. You are under the misapprehension that outsourcing removes these costs - it doesn't. They just pay another company to do it for them plus a profit margin too - at the end of the day they pay MORE. Plus you are missing the important point. Intel has WAY more resources than AMD. Intel's PROFITS are over double AMDs total sales. In fact Intel's profits last year were roughly equal to AMDs entire market capitalization (both around $12B). Intel could literally drop their prices to below cost for AMD on all the products they compete in and still make a profit. Intel could drive AMD out of the market any time they wanted. The only reason Intel doesn't is to avoid anti-trust scrutiny.
Intel needs there cheap labor to crush AMD by volume
Nice theory but it lacks any basis in reality. Intel is literally over 10X the size of AMD by revenue (~$60B versus ~$5B) and AMD is in no danger of catching up to Intel any time soon. Furthermore most of Intel's manufacturing sites are in the US. They have precisely ONE chip fab in China versus NINE in the US. Approximately 75% of Intel's chip fabrication occurs in the US.
People tend to think of AMD as a close competitor but they aren't. Intel spends over double AMD's total revenue on R&D alone (~$12B last year). Frankly AMD really has no means to catch Intel in the markets that Intel dominates. Intel simply has an insurmountable cost advantage over AMD.
Starting in 2019, the bill would ban the sale of electronics that are designed "in such a way as to prevent reasonable diagnostic or repair functions by an independent repair provider. Preventing reasonable diagnostic or repair functions includes permanently affixing a battery in a manner that makes it difficult or impossible to remove."
You realize this would make something like a pacemaker technically illegal under this wording...
There are some things you don't actually want anyone but the manufacturer messing with. (Phones not among them obviously)
Unless you're a stockholder. Alphabet is priced at about 3x what it should be for a company that's done innovating, and it doesn't even pay a dividend.
I'm not a shareholder but I think Alphabet is priced reasonably fairly for the amount of profits the company generates and seems likely to continue to generate. The company is something of a one trick pony (advertising) but it's a really good trick. Innovation doesn't drive stock prices except insofar as people believe it will result in future profits. (intentionally ignoring bubble cases like Tesla as they are temporary exceptions) Alphabet's profits are about as good as they get and their stock price reflects this fact.
Put an MBA in charge of a company and they simply chase the next big thing instead of innovating and creating the next big thing.
Scapegoat much? And who would you put in change instead? Running a large company requires a very particular skill set which not a lot of people actually have. Going to school to learn some of those skills isn't something to be looked down upon any more than going to engineering school. Furthermore when you have revenues in the hundreds of billions it isn't easy to come up with ideas that move the needle. For Apple or Google to grow by 10% they need to build a company the size of eBay from scratch. You think that is a trivial endeavor? And despite your scapegoating and dislike for people who have gone to business school, a lot of them are actually quite good at what they do.
They do this because they are not innovators and creators, they are simply followers and maintainers.
That's a nice little strawman you have there. People with MBA degrees are no more or less innovative or creative than any other category. Some are good at it, most aren't. I can say the same thing about most engineers. Most engineers are not creative or innovators either and a lot of them aren't very good at engineering. Some are great but that doesn't mean all of them are.
It seems to be the plight of large companies to not want to take the risk of hiring an innovator.
No the problem is that the number of people who are both 1) highly innovative and 2) able to manage a large company, is a very small group. It's similar to the problem that schools with high academic standards find when trying to field a quality athletic team. Their talent pool is smaller because there are fewer people who are gifted both academically and athletically. Guys like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary.
So were most of the products that came out under Steve Jobs. Apple only makes 1-2 "revolutionary" products per decade. Their last big one was the iPhone/iPad (really the same product) which hit the market 10 years ago (7 for the iPad). Prior to that was the iPod which came out 18 years ago. Prior to that was the Powerbook (1991) and the Macintosh (1984). The real question is can Apple do another product on that scale again? They are so big now that it's hard to develop products that really move the needle revenue wise. For them to grow just 10% they have to basically build a business the size of eBay from scratch. There just aren't that many things you can do to generate that many billions in revenue. It's (comparatively) easy to look innovative and grow fast when you are small. Not so easy to make the elephant dance.
Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table.
Well the iPhone does account for well over 50% of their revenue. It is fair to point out that the Mac has been somewhat neglected of late though.
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
If you think Jobs didn't care about competitors you are mistaken. He cared a lot. See the "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" ads. The difference was that he was really good at product design and keeping the company focused so it didn't seem like he cared. But he had flesh eating lawyers on speed dial (ask Samsung) to deal with competitors.
You can, I think, still get a permanent license of Lightroom.
Yes an old and unsupported version. No thanks. I'll just use software from a company that values my business or open source.
Actually, I'm in the market for some decent photo management software, any suggestions on competitors for Lightroom and the dead Aperture?
Sadly I haven't yet found anything worth bothering with. Might be something decent out there but I haven't seen anything I find satisfactory yet.
The system that wasn't working, and wasn't able to send out the correction? Is that the system you're talking about? Great system that.
Yep, that system. Twitter is not an acceptable alternative.
For better or worse in any emergency twitter will get the information to a wider audience and will be picked up by the media faster than anything else these days.
You've apparently forgotten that they have a system that is able to contact EVERY PHONE IN THE STATE. In what universe is Twitter more efficient than that? Furthermore Twitter is hardly trustworthy nor does everyone have a Twitter account (I do not have one) so it's worse for me than the media.
So I don't have a Twitter account and have no plans to get one. Nothing against it just have no use for it. So using Twitter to communicate to me is going to be ineffective at best because the information will be at least 2nd hand by the time I get it. Twitter is a terrible substitute since why would anyone believe a message over twitter over the official warning system?
The correct answer is to send out another message on the same system that obviously has the ability to contact every cell phone in the state.
Now, some people MAY swallow a $100 sub over a $1500 license a bit easier but I really question how much they've really improved their income from those not inclined to spend money in the first place.
Evidently enough to make it worth the trouble. Subscription revenues tend to be a lot more consistent. Under a standalone license the cash flow from customers is kind of lumpy and unpredictable. Plus you have to sell them on the upgrades (which is expensive) and you can't guarantee they will actually buy the new version. Subscriptions do away with that and make the incoming revenue much more predictable which companies and Wall Street like. Problem is that they are a bit of a faustian bargain for a lot of people. The subscription might be short term cheaper but long term more expensive and you have to give away a lot of control over your data.
I get why companies do it. It makes sense for them financially. But for me at least it's too much of a one sided deal.
The last list price of Photoshop was $700, but even at $500, that's what apparently is now 4 years of subscription.
Doesn't really matter how many years it is. The problem is the subscription terms, not the cost. I can afford the subscription but if I stop paying for whatever reason I'm screwed or have to go to heroic measures to recapture my data. A lot can happen in 4 years. Plus I still use applications I acquired 10+ years ago and have no need to "upgrade". Why should I be stuck in a one sided contract with the devil for upgrades I don't actually need?