Dealership experience: Famously hard sell and uneducated about EVs, vs. almost humorously soft-sell
I actually tried to buy a Bolt. Couldn't do it. You can't get one. Of course, you can't get a Model 3 right now either, but I'm not convinced that I'd be able to get a Bolt much before I can get a Model 3.
Company dedication: Makes EVs as a side project to their main business vs. fully invested in EVs.
And I'm pretty sure this is the reason I can't get a Bolt.
If Tesla manages the "production hell" ramp-up without any serious glitches that cause excessive delay / QA problems / expense, they've got it made.
I'm betting they will. Literally. I've been buying a little more TSLA every month for some time now. Lots of analysts have been rating it as overvalued on the fundamentals, but I think most of those analysts have one serious deficiency in their understanding: They don't know what driving an electric vehicle is like. Unless the traditional automakers can make the transition much, much faster than I think they can possibly do, Tesla is going to vault from being a niche player to a major automaker, and its value will rise accordingly.
I have great hopes for the solar roof and home battery businesses as well. It's clear to me that this is the future of residential power, and no one is as well-positioned as Tesla to reap the rewards.
There is one reason and one reason only that a (well run) corporation will spend money to create jobs. It is because they are following a business plan to get customers to buy their service or product. Because they see a market they can win at. Anything else and they will turtle up and hoard cash and lay people off if necessary to stop bleeding.
You should read a book on basic economics.
Capital seeks returns. Always. It never "turtles up". Oh, a company will absolutely lay people off if they are not generating income. This frees up the capital to flow to other ventures where it can generate income... which it will do by buying capital equipment, hiring people, etc. to produce products that people want to buy.
This is a Good Thing. Employing people and dedicating resources to produce stuff that no one wants to buy is bad for everyone. Oh, it appears in a very narrow view to be good for the people who are employed, but it's ultimately not really good for them because it makes the economy as a whole less productive, which means making less of the stuff that they need and want, which means prices go up. Meanwhile, at some point the corporation will run out of cash to pay them and their jobs will go away anyway.
The way companies (or any business, of any size) produce income is by making and selling stuff that people want, i.e. by benefiting people. Not because their motives are altruistic, but because that's how you make money, by pleasing your customers (sufficiently; if you're delighting them you're probably investing too much). And to make the economy able to generate the stuff people want it's crucial that capital and labor flows to the companies that can make best use of it to generate income (by making stuff people want). But that's only possible if capital and labor can also flow away from companies that can't make effective use of it.
Yes, obviously Tesla is only investing like crazy because the owners see a clear path to generating even larger returns. That's how business works. And it's not just a Good Thing, it is the single most important cause of the fact that your life is more comfortable, better-fed and generally better than your ancestors' lives were. If you don't believe me, you should take a hard look at the parts of the world that have experimented with alternative approaches to managing economic production.
You should also be happy that you're supporting your neighbors and your community.
Why shouldn't you be happy that you're supporting the community of wherever the Amazon shipping warehouse is? What is it about the place you live that makes it more deserving of support than somewhere else?
Because if one day you decide to start a small business like a restaurant (or even a carpenter shop), you'll sell to your neighbors, not to the Chinese guy who made your iPhone.
True, but I fail to see how that's relevant. Some businesses are inherently local, and locals buy from them. Others are globalizable, and local people are just as capable of offering services to the world as I am of buying from around the world.
Because locally produced stuff not only has a smaller carbon footprint
That's a potentially-valid point. We should implement carbon taxes so carbon footprint gets factored into the economics.
but also develops your local community (more expertise, and even more money to buy stuff at your carpenter shop)
Specialization is how we progress.
Because if everyone buys everything on Amazon, eventually no one around you will have a job.
Implicit in this statement is the assumption that only people far away can make stuff that gets sold on Amazon. Why do you believe that?
Care to provide a moral justification of why it's more important to send my money off to some other part of the world?
That's trivial. Those people in the other part of the world are just as human and just as deserving of my business as someone nearby. There is no moral reason to prefer local over distant; we're all people.
Fascist.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Not unless you can't count. However, it is a dirty word, because it means discrimination against people who are not like yourself.
Like it or not, it's still practiced, because it's beneficial to your self interests.
So are lots of other terrible and immoral things.
Support, trust, assistance, and focus should always follow a locality principal. Yourself/family->friends->extended family->neighbours->neighbourhood->city->state->country->world.
Nice assertion. Care to provide moral justification for it?
I often comparison shop, but usually end up buying from Amazon for the smoothness, consistency and safety... and for what's usually close to the lowest price I found anyway.
it'd be called collective bargaining. Everything's screwed up here because Uber is being allowed to break the law by declaring employees contractors.
IMO, the better solution is to make them true independent businesspeople by allowing them to set their own prices. Uber should just be the middleman connecting prospective riders to driver quotes, and taking a percentage cut for providing the platform and processing the payments.
Allowing drivers to set their prices would make pricing naturally follow the ebb and flow of supply and demand, eliminating the semi-artificial surge pricing, and the ability to game the system. Driver-set pricing would also ensure that prices are neither too high nor too low, but at exactly what riders (in aggregate) think the ride is worth.
Uber has total control the market (of people using the Uber app). They implemented a stupid pricing algorithm which is easy to game by drivers logging off.
But only as long as most of them do it. If the ad-hoc union gets enough defectors (call them "scabs"), then the surge price will never hit and the scabs will be making money while the good union boys sit logged out.
Also, if the pricing algorithm were to become more real-time, it would be impossible because the surge would disappear in an instant. I'd like to see an Uber competitor that does an actual real-time auction, letting drivers set their own pay rates (in terms of cost per mile, per minute of expected waiting, meter drop, etc.) and then showing riders not a single price but a set of prices based on their origin, destination and the locations and pricing set by each driver. The app should also show time-to-pickup and driver rating for each, and the rider could pick what they want, based on price, time and rating.
Drivers could be apprised of average current prices, and set alarms to be notified when the prices rise above a certain point.
Just for fun, we could also let riders set their price. If the app returns a list of prices that are all too high, they could enter what they want to pay, and all idle drivers in the area could be notified, to see if someone wants to take it, even though it doesn't meet their predefined price.
Enabling a more efficient market would eliminate this sort of price gaming.
... now that Amazon is huge, the small merchants are no longer needed.
Did they? I've been shopping on Amazon for nearly 20 years, long before there was a "marketplace" full of randoms trading on the good will that Amazon earned for itself. The "marketplace", for me, is primarily a source of clutter and confusion. It is the rare occasion that I will buy from "marketplace" seller unless it is fulfilled by Amazon. Without the predictable, reliable billing and shipping that I have come to expect from Amazon, I won't buy.
As such, adding these purchases to the Amazon return policy increases the chance that a "marketplace" seller will get my order.
From my perspective, Amazon made these "marketplace" sellers, not the other way around.
That's my experience as well. I normally click the "Prime" checkbox immediately after doing any product search on Amazon. If it's not the full Amazon experience, including extremely low-hassle return policies, I'm reluctant to do it. This change will make me much more likely to use marketplace sellers, though I'll still prefer buying from Amazon itself, with Prime shipping.
You should also be happy that you're supporting your neighbors and your community.
Why shouldn't you be happy that you're supporting the community of wherever the Amazon shipping warehouse is? What is it about the place you live that makes it more deserving of support than somewhere else?
The obvious answer is "because I live there", but, is that really an answer? Is this just the modern form of tribalism, or is there really some actual value in supporting people who live near you rather than people who live far away.
Nothing against mathematicians, but I suppose as a microbiologist the physics and engineering seems more 'applied' to me offhand, so perhaps more experience with killing things at some point.
But that's experience with killing terrestrial organisms. That's what I meant about a narrow view.
I guess a mathematician and physicist would be needed to help figure out how to kill a super intelligent shade of the color blue.
:-)
Or an organism based on an entirely different biochemistry, which our typical approaches to sterilization wouldn't touch.
why would a mathematician be a good generalist for a position like this?
Because mathematicians are good at everything.:P (My degree is in mathematics)
Is there some reason you think a physicist would be better? This job is about abstract analysis of an unknown problem space. What you need is someone who is smart, logical, thorough and able to think very broadly about the problem. Mathematicians and physicists both seem very appropriate to me. Engineers... maybe less so. And even for mathematicians, the posting requires "24 semester hours in physical science and/or related engineering science such as mechanics, dynamics, properties of materials, and electronics."
I thought it was odd the emphasis on physical sciences and engineering versus experience in microbiology or infectious disease. A university biosafety officer is going to understand how to sterilize things better than a physicist.
True, but a biosafety officer would tend to have a narrower view of the possible scope of risks. Since no one knows exactly what risks to consider it seems better to get a generalist who can consult with specialists, rather than the reverse.
They believe that open plan offices promote creative interaction while closed offices promote focused productivity, and they choose to favor the former over the latter.
The only people who believe that have spent the last few years of their working lives in a private office which could hold 40 employees under open-plan standards, with a private executive washroom too. That's what you need to be so out of touch as to believe that.
Actually, execs where I work also have desks in the open area... if they have desks at all. Many don't, but just roam from meeting room to meeting room with phone and laptop, working from couches in common areas between meetings.
It also doesn't help with boorish coworkers who get in your face who, when you had a door you could close, would often go away because as clueless as they are about social interactions they would see a closed door as 'privacy needed.'
You just have to establish some clear social norms. Where I work (though it's not relevant for me because I'm remote), you never speak to anyone who is at their desk working, without first instant messaging them to ask if they're interruptible. And "no" is a perfectly acceptable answer. Those who don't even want to be interrupted by an IM request log out of IM or mute their IM notifications (you can see if someone is muted).
This leads to lots of seemingly-odd things like sending an IM to the guy sitting right next to you, even though it would actually be less effort to tap him on the shoulder. It also appears to undermine the "free interaction" goal of an open plan office, but it really doesn't. If you can see that the person isn't focused on something, you can skip the IM, and in any case the IM overhead is minimal. I tend to just send "irq", and colleagues respond with "ack" or " ak", or even just "a" or "n".
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Dealership experience: Famously hard sell and uneducated about EVs, vs. almost humorously soft-sell
I actually tried to buy a Bolt. Couldn't do it. You can't get one. Of course, you can't get a Model 3 right now either, but I'm not convinced that I'd be able to get a Bolt much before I can get a Model 3.
Company dedication: Makes EVs as a side project to their main business vs. fully invested in EVs.
And I'm pretty sure this is the reason I can't get a Bolt.
If Tesla manages the "production hell" ramp-up without any serious glitches that cause excessive delay / QA problems / expense, they've got it made.
I'm betting they will. Literally. I've been buying a little more TSLA every month for some time now. Lots of analysts have been rating it as overvalued on the fundamentals, but I think most of those analysts have one serious deficiency in their understanding: They don't know what driving an electric vehicle is like. Unless the traditional automakers can make the transition much, much faster than I think they can possibly do, Tesla is going to vault from being a niche player to a major automaker, and its value will rise accordingly.
I have great hopes for the solar roof and home battery businesses as well. It's clear to me that this is the future of residential power, and no one is as well-positioned as Tesla to reap the rewards.
There is one reason and one reason only that a (well run) corporation will spend money to create jobs. It is because they are following a business plan to get customers to buy their service or product. Because they see a market they can win at. Anything else and they will turtle up and hoard cash and lay people off if necessary to stop bleeding.
You should read a book on basic economics.
Capital seeks returns. Always. It never "turtles up". Oh, a company will absolutely lay people off if they are not generating income. This frees up the capital to flow to other ventures where it can generate income... which it will do by buying capital equipment, hiring people, etc. to produce products that people want to buy.
This is a Good Thing. Employing people and dedicating resources to produce stuff that no one wants to buy is bad for everyone. Oh, it appears in a very narrow view to be good for the people who are employed, but it's ultimately not really good for them because it makes the economy as a whole less productive, which means making less of the stuff that they need and want, which means prices go up. Meanwhile, at some point the corporation will run out of cash to pay them and their jobs will go away anyway.
The way companies (or any business, of any size) produce income is by making and selling stuff that people want, i.e. by benefiting people. Not because their motives are altruistic, but because that's how you make money, by pleasing your customers (sufficiently; if you're delighting them you're probably investing too much). And to make the economy able to generate the stuff people want it's crucial that capital and labor flows to the companies that can make best use of it to generate income (by making stuff people want). But that's only possible if capital and labor can also flow away from companies that can't make effective use of it.
Yes, obviously Tesla is only investing like crazy because the owners see a clear path to generating even larger returns. That's how business works. And it's not just a Good Thing, it is the single most important cause of the fact that your life is more comfortable, better-fed and generally better than your ancestors' lives were. If you don't believe me, you should take a hard look at the parts of the world that have experimented with alternative approaches to managing economic production.
You should also be happy that you're supporting your neighbors and your community.
Why shouldn't you be happy that you're supporting the community of wherever the Amazon shipping warehouse is? What is it about the place you live that makes it more deserving of support than somewhere else?
Because if one day you decide to start a small business like a restaurant (or even a carpenter shop), you'll sell to your neighbors, not to the Chinese guy who made your iPhone.
True, but I fail to see how that's relevant. Some businesses are inherently local, and locals buy from them. Others are globalizable, and local people are just as capable of offering services to the world as I am of buying from around the world.
Because locally produced stuff not only has a smaller carbon footprint
That's a potentially-valid point. We should implement carbon taxes so carbon footprint gets factored into the economics.
but also develops your local community (more expertise, and even more money to buy stuff at your carpenter shop)
Specialization is how we progress.
Because if everyone buys everything on Amazon, eventually no one around you will have a job.
Implicit in this statement is the assumption that only people far away can make stuff that gets sold on Amazon. Why do you believe that?
Care to provide a moral justification of why it's more important to send my money off to some other part of the world?
That's trivial. Those people in the other part of the world are just as human and just as deserving of my business as someone nearby. There is no moral reason to prefer local over distant; we're all people.
Fascist.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
They wouldn't have to do this if the company paid well. If they paid well, then the drivers would think twice about it.
You apparently aren't well acquainted with homo sapiens.
Tribalism isn't a four-letter word.
Not unless you can't count. However, it is a dirty word, because it means discrimination against people who are not like yourself.
Like it or not, it's still practiced, because it's beneficial to your self interests.
So are lots of other terrible and immoral things.
Support, trust, assistance, and focus should always follow a locality principal. Yourself/family->friends->extended family->neighbours->neighbourhood->city->state->country->world.
Nice assertion. Care to provide moral justification for it?
I spend money in their business, they spend money in mine. That's not tribalism. That's just common sense.
People all over the world pay my salary, so I guess I should spread my spending as well.
I often comparison shop, but usually end up buying from Amazon for the smoothness, consistency and safety... and for what's usually close to the lowest price I found anyway.
it'd be called collective bargaining. Everything's screwed up here because Uber is being allowed to break the law by declaring employees contractors.
IMO, the better solution is to make them true independent businesspeople by allowing them to set their own prices. Uber should just be the middleman connecting prospective riders to driver quotes, and taking a percentage cut for providing the platform and processing the payments.
Allowing drivers to set their prices would make pricing naturally follow the ebb and flow of supply and demand, eliminating the semi-artificial surge pricing, and the ability to game the system. Driver-set pricing would also ensure that prices are neither too high nor too low, but at exactly what riders (in aggregate) think the ride is worth.
Uber has total control the market (of people using the Uber app). They implemented a stupid pricing algorithm which is easy to game by drivers logging off.
But only as long as most of them do it. If the ad-hoc union gets enough defectors (call them "scabs"), then the surge price will never hit and the scabs will be making money while the good union boys sit logged out.
Also, if the pricing algorithm were to become more real-time, it would be impossible because the surge would disappear in an instant. I'd like to see an Uber competitor that does an actual real-time auction, letting drivers set their own pay rates (in terms of cost per mile, per minute of expected waiting, meter drop, etc.) and then showing riders not a single price but a set of prices based on their origin, destination and the locations and pricing set by each driver. The app should also show time-to-pickup and driver rating for each, and the rider could pick what they want, based on price, time and rating.
Drivers could be apprised of average current prices, and set alarms to be notified when the prices rise above a certain point.
Just for fun, we could also let riders set their price. If the app returns a list of prices that are all too high, they could enter what they want to pay, and all idle drivers in the area could be notified, to see if someone wants to take it, even though it doesn't meet their predefined price.
Enabling a more efficient market would eliminate this sort of price gaming.
I'd say that depends heavily on what the area is like now.
... now that Amazon is huge, the small merchants are no longer needed.
Did they? I've been shopping on Amazon for nearly 20 years, long before there was a "marketplace" full of randoms trading on the good will that Amazon earned for itself. The "marketplace", for me, is primarily a source of clutter and confusion. It is the rare occasion that I will buy from "marketplace" seller unless it is fulfilled by Amazon. Without the predictable, reliable billing and shipping that I have come to expect from Amazon, I won't buy.
As such, adding these purchases to the Amazon return policy increases the chance that a "marketplace" seller will get my order.
From my perspective, Amazon made these "marketplace" sellers, not the other way around.
That's my experience as well. I normally click the "Prime" checkbox immediately after doing any product search on Amazon. If it's not the full Amazon experience, including extremely low-hassle return policies, I'm reluctant to do it. This change will make me much more likely to use marketplace sellers, though I'll still prefer buying from Amazon itself, with Prime shipping.
You should also be happy that you're supporting your neighbors and your community.
Why shouldn't you be happy that you're supporting the community of wherever the Amazon shipping warehouse is? What is it about the place you live that makes it more deserving of support than somewhere else?
The obvious answer is "because I live there", but, is that really an answer? Is this just the modern form of tribalism, or is there really some actual value in supporting people who live near you rather than people who live far away.
Nothing against mathematicians, but I suppose as a microbiologist the physics and engineering seems more 'applied' to me offhand, so perhaps more experience with killing things at some point.
But that's experience with killing terrestrial organisms. That's what I meant about a narrow view.
I guess a mathematician and physicist would be needed to help figure out how to kill a super intelligent shade of the color blue.
:-)
Or an organism based on an entirely different biochemistry, which our typical approaches to sterilization wouldn't touch.
When in doubt, kill it with fire.
What if it feeds on fire? We're talking about non-terrestrial biology here.
why would a mathematician be a good generalist for a position like this?
Because mathematicians are good at everything. :P (My degree is in mathematics)
Is there some reason you think a physicist would be better? This job is about abstract analysis of an unknown problem space. What you need is someone who is smart, logical, thorough and able to think very broadly about the problem. Mathematicians and physicists both seem very appropriate to me. Engineers... maybe less so. And even for mathematicians, the posting requires "24 semester hours in physical science and/or related engineering science such as mechanics, dynamics, properties of materials, and electronics."
This is true, but the attack on the Echo appears to be unnecessarily easy. Debug pads should not be left enabled in production devices.
FUCK THAT. Debug pads should be left enabled in ALL DEVICES.
I completely, and deeply, disagree, at least on any device that manages sensitive user information.
I thought it was odd the emphasis on physical sciences and engineering versus experience in microbiology or infectious disease. A university biosafety officer is going to understand how to sterilize things better than a physicist.
True, but a biosafety officer would tend to have a narrower view of the possible scope of risks. Since no one knows exactly what risks to consider it seems better to get a generalist who can consult with specialists, rather than the reverse.
Star Trek had it right. First you poke the button on the communicator, then it listens...
That is the way that these devices work, too, when they're not hacked. The only difference is that the "button" is a keyword.
Actually, Star Trek had that as well. The keyword was "Computer".
The "hack" described in TFA requires physical access to the device. Anything can be compromised by someone with physical access.
This is true, but the attack on the Echo appears to be unnecessarily easy. Debug pads should not be left enabled in production devices.
Programming isn't creative interaction.
You are clearly not a programmer. Not one that does anything non-trivial, at least.
The only people who believe that have spent the last few years of their working lives in a private office which could hold 40 employees under open-plan standards, with a private executive washroom too. That's what you need to be so out of touch as to believe that.
Actually, execs where I work also have desks in the open area... if they have desks at all. Many don't, but just roam from meeting room to meeting room with phone and laptop, working from couches in common areas between meetings.
Actually it's a fifth reason: Managers feel the open office place lets them intervene more directly and more directly influence their employees work.
Not where I work, and probably not at Apple, either.
It also doesn't help with boorish coworkers who get in your face who, when you had a door you could close, would often go away because as clueless as they are about social interactions they would see a closed door as 'privacy needed.'
You just have to establish some clear social norms. Where I work (though it's not relevant for me because I'm remote), you never speak to anyone who is at their desk working, without first instant messaging them to ask if they're interruptible. And "no" is a perfectly acceptable answer. Those who don't even want to be interrupted by an IM request log out of IM or mute their IM notifications (you can see if someone is muted).
This leads to lots of seemingly-odd things like sending an IM to the guy sitting right next to you, even though it would actually be less effort to tap him on the shoulder. It also appears to undermine the "free interaction" goal of an open plan office, but it really doesn't. If you can see that the person isn't focused on something, you can skip the IM, and in any case the IM overhead is minimal. I tend to just send "irq", and colleagues respond with "ack" or " ak", or even just "a" or "n".