From what I can see, Tesla makes significant profit on every unit sold. They're "losing money" because they're not simply running a fixed operation, but are investing massive capital in expanding capacity to ramp up the volume at which it sells those cars. If they are successful in ramping up sales to the volumes they're investing to be capable of producing, their high profit margin per car will more than pay back the capital investment.
This doesn't surprise me. For many people a call phone is used much more than a laptop, so arguably if you're going to spend $1,000 on tech there's more return on the cell phone than a laptop. Don't think of it as "just a phone" - think of it as the personal electronics that most consumers use more than any other, as a camera, camcorder, web browser, email, etc. Heck, if you ask 'kids' now, most of them care a lot more about their cell phone than laptop or car!
on top of that, with the move towards pricing plans separately from hardware, people are buying phones less often and keeping them longer, and getting them fixed instead if replaced. So buying a more expensive phone less often isn't as crazy as it would be if you replaced it every year or two.
Exactly - the licensed content is essentially the same on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Apple, etc., because _anybody_ can license network content, pretty much. The exclusive content is a big differentiator - you have to pay for Netflix/Apple/Hulu/Amazon to get their original and exclusive content. So even if it's a small percentage of what people watch, it may well be a large factor in how people decide which streaming service to subscribe to.
Luckily shows you don't watch don't cost you anything, not even time, since everyone gets their own stream of whatever they want. So if they make a few shows that you really like (Stranger Things and Altered Carbon, for example) and you hate comedy specials, don't watch the comedy specials. Given how well Netflix understands their audience, there are guaranteed a bunch people who love the comedy specials and hate big-budget SF, and that's fine, too. Netflix isn't a mass market channel, it's a distribution mechanism to an infinite number of niches, because each show has its own audience it's targeting. And because each person gets their own stream unpopular shows don't mean they lost the opportunity to broadcast a more popular show (i.e. why broadcast TV always plays to the mainstream) they can afford to make 2,000 niche shows, and have 2,000 very happy audiences, which add up to a huge audience. Not bigger than broadcast TV yet, of course, but certainly bigger than the smaller cable networks - 117m subscribers in Q4 2017, according to https://www.statista.com/stati... .
They do tons of this with anime - presumably Netflix has a strong anime audience (my daughter, certainly) and I see tons of Japanese anime as "netflix original" - with Netflix credited in the show's credits. So perhaps Netflix licensed the content and paid for subtitling or something? I'm pretty sure that the programs were produced long before Netflix was involved.
Then there are shows like Travelers, which were produced internationally, where Netflix picked up the show for the first season, and helped finance the second season. That seems like a low risk way for Netflix to get programming, since it's based on watching their audience for the first season, allowing them to pick up shows that they knew that they have an audience for.
Quite a few networks are pulling more and more out of Hulu and Netflix and into their own site/application, for strategic reasons. Think of it this way - if you're making content, would you want to set up Netflix as the gatekeeper to all of your viewers/content, or would you want to control your own distribution? So while it's a hassle for viewers (all in one place is nice) I think that more and more content is going to be pulled from the aggregators. This might be good for Apple TV, which provides a unified user experience on top of all of the channel applications, so you can easily find and watch a show, no matter whether it comes from an aggregator (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon), channel app (e.g. Comedy Central, A&E, CBS AA, HBO, Showtime), a cable operator app (Comcast, etc.), satellite app (DirectTV). So while the world is likely to get more fragmented, there's some hope that it'll be unified by Apple and others, so people won't be forced to run a dozen different apps to watch their TV shows and movies.
While $35k isn't cheap, the average new car or truck purchase price in the US is a bit over $36,000, so $35,000 isn't an unreasonably high price, given that it costs ½ as much to drive, and has 1/3rd lower maintenance costs, than an ICE.
Yes, new cars cost more than used cars. You can get a used LEAF for $7,000. So?
You can get a used LEAF for $7,000, and it costs about $50/month in electricity. So if you drive it 46 months, that's $200/month. EV maintenance is pretty minimal, though tires aren't any cheaper than an ICE.:-)
That's also why Tesla started charging - the more they charge, the more people charge at home, leaving the superchargers available for long-distance travelers. Though since almost all Tesla owners right now get free supercharging, they've got no (financial) reason not to use the superchargers instead of plugging in at night.
This is somewhat incorrect - Tesla is making a profit on each car sold. However, they are investing those profits, and more, into building out their infrastructure. So while it's true that right now they're spending a lot more than they are making, the fact that each car sale is profitable means that if they stop building new infrastructure they instantly turn profitable. Or, a more rational strategy, they grow sales (which is why they're spending so much on their factories and charging stations) to cover their capital costs.
Tesla has shown designs for supercharger stations that have battery packs that are charged by solar and/or the grid, so they can store power gradually (i.e. no 'spike' to the grid) and then deliver it to vehicles as needed. There's the cost of the battery packs, of course, but it should save them a ton on the cost of electricity, since constant power is much cheaper than peak power.
You don't buy a $80,000 sports car for cheap driving. Perhaps the $35,000 sedan they're targeting at the mass market might be a more reasonable comparison. That's a bit less than the $36,000 average new car and truck price in the US (December 2017). So would you be willing to spend $1,000 less than the average car in order to spend half as much on fuel, and 30% less on maintenance? Seems like a good deal, though due to popularity there's a bit of a waiting line.
Of course, the vast majority of the time you would be charging at home at an average of ½ that rate. The idea of superchargers is that they're needed for long-distance driving, not normal driving to work, errands, etc.
If it's a "dumb" meter with a wheel spinning around they can't tell what time of day electricity was consumed. But all modern power meters (that I have seen) are intelligent, and communicate back to the power company to report power consumption continuously, allowing the power company to charge based on time of day. And, of course, to manage supply vs demand quite precisely. This should be true on shared meter systems, too - it'd just be reporting the total consumption for the apartment complex, etc.
Of course, the power company might not want to give discounts at night. But the smart ones do, because when people can time shift consumption from peak to off-peak, that lets the power company defer spinning up generators just at peak, or building new plants, etc., which are all very expensive compared to steady-state power generation.
They finance solar panels and the savings each month are more than the savings in reduced electricity purchased from the power company, though of course it does take years to pay them off. Pretty sweet deal.
What a moronic article. The actual news is simply that Apple will be deprecating their _album_ format. This is not surprising, because digital singles have always outsold digital albums, and it's far from clear that the added album content increased album sales. I'd give Apple credit for at least trying to make digital albums interesting, but the reality is that for the majority of albums there are only one or two songs that are really popular, so only dedicated fans buy entire albums, and they'd probably buy the album even without the "extra stuff" in the LP format.
The idea that Apple is discontinuing iTunes completely is beyond stupid. It's a $billion revenue stream for Apple. Yes, digital downloads are shrinking a bit, while streaming is growing rapidly, but the two compliment each other, and both are highly profitable. And, perhaps more importantly to Apple, the more people's music is in iTunes, the more likely they are to buy Apple hardware to listen to their music.
I can see a number of factors that will tend towards autonomous, shared/fleet cars vs private ownership, once there's a "critical mass". First, economics: private cars are 5-10% utilized, while shared fleet cars are 50% utilized, so the cost of the car per ride is much lower, so many people will use shared rides instead of buying cars to save money. Second: parking. Cities allocate 40% of space to cars: parking, roads, etc. If cars don't need to be parked at homes, businesses, etc., and are much more efficient at navigating roads (AV's are better coordinated, so they can have far more throughput on the same road), which means that cities can get back a huge amount of space that can be used for parks, residences, and businesses, which cities will be eager to do, particularly in "downtown" areas. Third, insurance rates should be drastically lower for AVs. Most predictions are that AVs should have 90% fewer collisions than typical current cars, meaning that people riding in AVs will pay 1/10th the insurance rates, and have 1/10th the chance of being in an accident. Compounding that, people who drive manually not only put themselves and their passengers in more danger, but they put everyone around them at more risk as well, so at some point if 90% of riders are in AVs, in a few decades, there could be pressure on the remaining manual drivers to stop causing so many collisions.
It's not just changing the words, it's changing the meaning. They are saying that decisions can't be 'science-based' or 'evidence-based,' but instead must be 'based on science in consideration with community standards and wishes." It's a way to force the CDC to do things (like perhaps denying global climate change, pretending lots of people aren't dying from gunshots, etc.) because saying those things would upset some "wishes".
More than anything, this reminds me of the batshit crazy way the USSR politicized science, forcing people to do do insane things because they were ideologically correct, enforced by not just defunding research, but eventually imprisoning and executing thousands of scientists. This led to crop failures and famine, among other horrors, and of course derailed Russia science (and to a lesser degree, Chinese science) for decades. Details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
How is "But the patient outcomes were more or less the same" a statement that all we care about is dollars and cents. If the more expensive equipment didn't yield better medical outcomes, it's just wasting the patient's money (or the insurance coverage). The US already has bloated healthcare costs, because people like the latest, greatest stuff. But if the medical outcomes are the same, we're all better off doing things at lower cost, because that leaves more resources for other things of greater medical value.
And these weren't robots replacing surgeons, they were robots supporting surgeons.
Teaching to a test is fine for training courses to pass a certification (for example) where the goal is a specific, narrow competence. And there are trade schools that provide that kind of education. But the goal of high school general education is to produce citizens who are educated sufficiently to function in a Democracy, while the actual test only measures a tiny subset of a general education (math and reading), so in the world we live in "teaching to the test" destroys everything else that a well-rounded citizen should be exposed to, such as history, a foreign language, logic, art, theatre, music,... the things that make life worth living!
True. But keep in mind that teachers are required by law ("no child left behind") to teach to the test; if they don't, they get pay cuts and then fired, and entire schools can be shut down. When Texas started this strategy under Bush Jr., it led directly to corrupting the school systems, because they were forced to do so to save their schools. So, for example, they spent all class time cramming for the material on the test, and taking practice tests, which helps test scores but hurts actual education. Then as the bar was raised and penalties started really hitting, teachers "corrected" tests before submitting the scores, or transferred "bad" students to another school (on paper) the day before the test, so their scores wouldn't hurt the school. But it created (fake) rising test scores, so it was a "success" for the politicians.
Then Bush Jr did the same thing to the whole country, with the same dismal results.
This had nothing to do with parents or unions - generally, both parent and unions opposed the disaster of "no child left behind" and oppose "teaching to the test". But they didn't have the leverage to stop it, since it was pushed by the GOPs national and state political leaders, then enforced by the school administrators, who care a lot about their budgets.
Actually, the increase in the cost of education to students is driven by massive cutbacks in funding for education, causing schools to push costs onto the students. In the 70s, the public paid 75% of the cost of education, because having an educated population is good for everyone, and students paid 25%. Now, largely due to right-wing desire to pay lower taxes no natter what damage it does to the country, it's 25% public and 75% students, meaning that the cost of education to the student tripled (in constant dollars). That means that when you used to be able to pay for school by working part time, for example, or payable by a typical family's income, now that's impossible - other than the very wealthy, students have to go massively into debt taking out huge loans. That's highly profitable for the lenders (who make high interest rate returns on government guaranteed loans) but horrible for the students, who end up in massive debt for the rest of their lives.
Perhaps read "none of this is impacting regular education much at all. The vast majority of classes are not impacted;" Students protesting an offensive speaker at an auditorium doesn't "create a hostile work environment" for anyone except the speaker that's pissed off the students.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I can see, Tesla makes significant profit on every unit sold. They're "losing money" because they're not simply running a fixed operation, but are investing massive capital in expanding capacity to ramp up the volume at which it sells those cars. If they are successful in ramping up sales to the volumes they're investing to be capable of producing, their high profit margin per car will more than pay back the capital investment.
This doesn't surprise me. For many people a call phone is used much more than a laptop, so arguably if you're going to spend $1,000 on tech there's more return on the cell phone than a laptop. Don't think of it as "just a phone" - think of it as the personal electronics that most consumers use more than any other, as a camera, camcorder, web browser, email, etc. Heck, if you ask 'kids' now, most of them care a lot more about their cell phone than laptop or car!
on top of that, with the move towards pricing plans separately from hardware, people are buying phones less often and keeping them longer, and getting them fixed instead if replaced. So buying a more expensive phone less often isn't as crazy as it would be if you replaced it every year or two.
Interesting - so the "news" might actually be an artifact of Ookla's testing app having a bug? Interesting.
Exactly - the licensed content is essentially the same on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Apple, etc., because _anybody_ can license network content, pretty much. The exclusive content is a big differentiator - you have to pay for Netflix/Apple/Hulu/Amazon to get their original and exclusive content. So even if it's a small percentage of what people watch, it may well be a large factor in how people decide which streaming service to subscribe to.
Luckily shows you don't watch don't cost you anything, not even time, since everyone gets their own stream of whatever they want. So if they make a few shows that you really like (Stranger Things and Altered Carbon, for example) and you hate comedy specials, don't watch the comedy specials. Given how well Netflix understands their audience, there are guaranteed a bunch people who love the comedy specials and hate big-budget SF, and that's fine, too. Netflix isn't a mass market channel, it's a distribution mechanism to an infinite number of niches, because each show has its own audience it's targeting. And because each person gets their own stream unpopular shows don't mean they lost the opportunity to broadcast a more popular show (i.e. why broadcast TV always plays to the mainstream) they can afford to make 2,000 niche shows, and have 2,000 very happy audiences, which add up to a huge audience. Not bigger than broadcast TV yet, of course, but certainly bigger than the smaller cable networks - 117m subscribers in Q4 2017, according to https://www.statista.com/stati... .
They do tons of this with anime - presumably Netflix has a strong anime audience (my daughter, certainly) and I see tons of Japanese anime as "netflix original" - with Netflix credited in the show's credits. So perhaps Netflix licensed the content and paid for subtitling or something? I'm pretty sure that the programs were produced long before Netflix was involved.
Then there are shows like Travelers, which were produced internationally, where Netflix picked up the show for the first season, and helped finance the second season. That seems like a low risk way for Netflix to get programming, since it's based on watching their audience for the first season, allowing them to pick up shows that they knew that they have an audience for.
Quite a few networks are pulling more and more out of Hulu and Netflix and into their own site/application, for strategic reasons. Think of it this way - if you're making content, would you want to set up Netflix as the gatekeeper to all of your viewers/content, or would you want to control your own distribution? So while it's a hassle for viewers (all in one place is nice) I think that more and more content is going to be pulled from the aggregators. This might be good for Apple TV, which provides a unified user experience on top of all of the channel applications, so you can easily find and watch a show, no matter whether it comes from an aggregator (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon), channel app (e.g. Comedy Central, A&E, CBS AA, HBO, Showtime), a cable operator app (Comcast, etc.), satellite app (DirectTV). So while the world is likely to get more fragmented, there's some hope that it'll be unified by Apple and others, so people won't be forced to run a dozen different apps to watch their TV shows and movies.
While $35k isn't cheap, the average new car or truck purchase price in the US is a bit over $36,000, so $35,000 isn't an unreasonably high price, given that it costs ½ as much to drive, and has 1/3rd lower maintenance costs, than an ICE.
Yes, new cars cost more than used cars. You can get a used LEAF for $7,000. So?
You can get a used LEAF for $7,000, and it costs about $50/month in electricity. So if you drive it 46 months, that's $200/month. EV maintenance is pretty minimal, though tires aren't any cheaper than an ICE. :-)
That's also why Tesla started charging - the more they charge, the more people charge at home, leaving the superchargers available for long-distance travelers. Though since almost all Tesla owners right now get free supercharging, they've got no (financial) reason not to use the superchargers instead of plugging in at night.
This is somewhat incorrect - Tesla is making a profit on each car sold. However, they are investing those profits, and more, into building out their infrastructure. So while it's true that right now they're spending a lot more than they are making, the fact that each car sale is profitable means that if they stop building new infrastructure they instantly turn profitable. Or, a more rational strategy, they grow sales (which is why they're spending so much on their factories and charging stations) to cover their capital costs.
Tesla has shown designs for supercharger stations that have battery packs that are charged by solar and/or the grid, so they can store power gradually (i.e. no 'spike' to the grid) and then deliver it to vehicles as needed. There's the cost of the battery packs, of course, but it should save them a ton on the cost of electricity, since constant power is much cheaper than peak power.
You don't buy a $80,000 sports car for cheap driving. Perhaps the $35,000 sedan they're targeting at the mass market might be a more reasonable comparison. That's a bit less than the $36,000 average new car and truck price in the US (December 2017). So would you be willing to spend $1,000 less than the average car in order to spend half as much on fuel, and 30% less on maintenance? Seems like a good deal, though due to popularity there's a bit of a waiting line.
Of course, the vast majority of the time you would be charging at home at an average of ½ that rate. The idea of superchargers is that they're needed for long-distance driving, not normal driving to work, errands, etc.
If it's a "dumb" meter with a wheel spinning around they can't tell what time of day electricity was consumed. But all modern power meters (that I have seen) are intelligent, and communicate back to the power company to report power consumption continuously, allowing the power company to charge based on time of day. And, of course, to manage supply vs demand quite precisely. This should be true on shared meter systems, too - it'd just be reporting the total consumption for the apartment complex, etc.
Of course, the power company might not want to give discounts at night. But the smart ones do, because when people can time shift consumption from peak to off-peak, that lets the power company defer spinning up generators just at peak, or building new plants, etc., which are all very expensive compared to steady-state power generation.
They finance solar panels and the savings each month are more than the savings in reduced electricity purchased from the power company, though of course it does take years to pay them off. Pretty sweet deal.
What a moronic article. The actual news is simply that Apple will be deprecating their _album_ format. This is not surprising, because digital singles have always outsold digital albums, and it's far from clear that the added album content increased album sales. I'd give Apple credit for at least trying to make digital albums interesting, but the reality is that for the majority of albums there are only one or two songs that are really popular, so only dedicated fans buy entire albums, and they'd probably buy the album even without the "extra stuff" in the LP format.
The idea that Apple is discontinuing iTunes completely is beyond stupid. It's a $billion revenue stream for Apple. Yes, digital downloads are shrinking a bit, while streaming is growing rapidly, but the two compliment each other, and both are highly profitable. And, perhaps more importantly to Apple, the more people's music is in iTunes, the more likely they are to buy Apple hardware to listen to their music.
I can see a number of factors that will tend towards autonomous, shared/fleet cars vs private ownership, once there's a "critical mass". First, economics: private cars are 5-10% utilized, while shared fleet cars are 50% utilized, so the cost of the car per ride is much lower, so many people will use shared rides instead of buying cars to save money. Second: parking. Cities allocate 40% of space to cars: parking, roads, etc. If cars don't need to be parked at homes, businesses, etc., and are much more efficient at navigating roads (AV's are better coordinated, so they can have far more throughput on the same road), which means that cities can get back a huge amount of space that can be used for parks, residences, and businesses, which cities will be eager to do, particularly in "downtown" areas. Third, insurance rates should be drastically lower for AVs. Most predictions are that AVs should have 90% fewer collisions than typical current cars, meaning that people riding in AVs will pay 1/10th the insurance rates, and have 1/10th the chance of being in an accident. Compounding that, people who drive manually not only put themselves and their passengers in more danger, but they put everyone around them at more risk as well, so at some point if 90% of riders are in AVs, in a few decades, there could be pressure on the remaining manual drivers to stop causing so many collisions.
It's not just changing the words, it's changing the meaning. They are saying that decisions can't be 'science-based' or 'evidence-based,' but instead must be 'based on science in consideration with community standards and wishes." It's a way to force the CDC to do things (like perhaps denying global climate change, pretending lots of people aren't dying from gunshots, etc.) because saying those things would upset some "wishes".
More than anything, this reminds me of the batshit crazy way the USSR politicized science, forcing people to do do insane things because they were ideologically correct, enforced by not just defunding research, but eventually imprisoning and executing thousands of scientists. This led to crop failures and famine, among other horrors, and of course derailed Russia science (and to a lesser degree, Chinese science) for decades. Details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
How is "But the patient outcomes were more or less the same" a statement that all we care about is dollars and cents. If the more expensive equipment didn't yield better medical outcomes, it's just wasting the patient's money (or the insurance coverage). The US already has bloated healthcare costs, because people like the latest, greatest stuff. But if the medical outcomes are the same, we're all better off doing things at lower cost, because that leaves more resources for other things of greater medical value.
And these weren't robots replacing surgeons, they were robots supporting surgeons.
Teaching to a test is fine for training courses to pass a certification (for example) where the goal is a specific, narrow competence. And there are trade schools that provide that kind of education. But the goal of high school general education is to produce citizens who are educated sufficiently to function in a Democracy, while the actual test only measures a tiny subset of a general education (math and reading), so in the world we live in "teaching to the test" destroys everything else that a well-rounded citizen should be exposed to, such as history, a foreign language, logic, art, theatre, music, ... the things that make life worth living!
True. But keep in mind that teachers are required by law ("no child left behind") to teach to the test; if they don't, they get pay cuts and then fired, and entire schools can be shut down. When Texas started this strategy under Bush Jr., it led directly to corrupting the school systems, because they were forced to do so to save their schools. So, for example, they spent all class time cramming for the material on the test, and taking practice tests, which helps test scores but hurts actual education. Then as the bar was raised and penalties started really hitting, teachers "corrected" tests before submitting the scores, or transferred "bad" students to another school (on paper) the day before the test, so their scores wouldn't hurt the school. But it created (fake) rising test scores, so it was a "success" for the politicians.
Then Bush Jr did the same thing to the whole country, with the same dismal results.
This had nothing to do with parents or unions - generally, both parent and unions opposed the disaster of "no child left behind" and oppose "teaching to the test". But they didn't have the leverage to stop it, since it was pushed by the GOPs national and state political leaders, then enforced by the school administrators, who care a lot about their budgets.
Actually, the increase in the cost of education to students is driven by massive cutbacks in funding for education, causing schools to push costs onto the students. In the 70s, the public paid 75% of the cost of education, because having an educated population is good for everyone, and students paid 25%. Now, largely due to right-wing desire to pay lower taxes no natter what damage it does to the country, it's 25% public and 75% students, meaning that the cost of education to the student tripled (in constant dollars). That means that when you used to be able to pay for school by working part time, for example, or payable by a typical family's income, now that's impossible - other than the very wealthy, students have to go massively into debt taking out huge loans. That's highly profitable for the lenders (who make high interest rate returns on government guaranteed loans) but horrible for the students, who end up in massive debt for the rest of their lives.
Perhaps read "none of this is impacting regular education much at all. The vast majority of classes are not impacted;" Students protesting an offensive speaker at an auditorium doesn't "create a hostile work environment" for anyone except the speaker that's pissed off the students.
So you advocate what - a government mandated single curriculum for all students?