I realise the driver system in windows has moved along (hopefully for the better) a lot recently, but about 15 years ago I remember looking into developing a custom driver for a USB device I had developed. My background was as an embedded developer so I had a detailed knowledge of how the bits on the bus worked, and what the host controller chip was doing. All I wanted to do was send some packets to my device and receive a few packets back from a windows application - nothing real time or taxing of the system's capabilities.
I got a copy of Walter Oney's windows driver model book, and proceeded to work my way through it.
Even now, as someone who does a fair amount of web development, working my way through ten years of terrible javascript language and library designs decisions to make otherwise simple things happen on a webpage, it still shocks me just how ridiculously horrible the WDM was. The basic IRP system was already pretty over the top architectural astronauty, but I guess you could accept that they had to provide for the possibility that there would be a lot of fancy new peripherals in the future. But once you figured that out, the book went into how incredibly broken the model was once you had to support multi-processor system and plug and play. What ensued was basically 200 pages describing the most horrible mess of obscure synchronisation problems you could possibly find in a couple of pages worth of driver code.
Ever since I ceased being shocked when my computer BSOD due to a third party driver. Frankly, if the thing allowed you to get much done at all, whoever wrote the driver probably deserved a medal or something.
Anyway, with such an experience, this back dating driver thing doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
One useful thing I remember reading about Lord Sugar (that champion of business, who made most of his fortune from buying rental properties, yay) is when he talked about the days after the Amstrad IPO. Most of his management became instant millionaires (which meant something back then), and he commented that some turned up at work the next day and continued with no perceptible change in their behavior, while others rocked on up late in a brand new car and proceed to turn into giant egos. The most interesting thing is that he didn't seem to think there was any predictor as to how someone would turn out.
In my own short business career I would tend to agree with this. It is extremely hard to know how someone will behave when they come into money, because most people do not have much money or any hope of getting it. You can have people who appear frugal and responsible, and they will always tell you how responsible they will be if they ever got money, but in my experience none of this prevents them undergoing a quite remarkable gollum like transformation when a large enough quantity of cash is placed in front of them.
It would appear this guy falls into the 'drunk on money' category. Personally I'm surprised the VC's or whoever put the money up let him get away with this sort of behavior. Someone like that is not going to ever make you money, because for them money is the end, not the means by which you can build a profitable organisation.
I wonder if you say the same thing to those who trade coins and stamps?
What about tulips?
There is a fuzzy line between trading that is useful, and that which becomes speculation. If it were so clear as to where that line was, we would never have an asset bubble again. I would suggest that when the financial industry is apparently producing record levels of 'value', while most western economies are no longer able to produce enough housing and infrastructure to sustain the middle class, that the real 'value' to humanity of much of that financial activity is rather overstated.
Yes, good point, that is certainly a problem. However, I would counter that these modern unicorn companies that are built around the cult-of-founder are the least likely to suffer from that sort of problem anyway. Regular, medium sized, diversified ownership companies that the raiders target can't really use super shares to protect themselves, as it wouldn't be clear who should have the super shares.
I'm not saying share classes don't have a place, but I do think that the CEO's in american public companies are already so powerful, that we are just setting ourselves up for another giant financial scam if this practice becomes widespread.
That's not really true. They just want to get 'some' power. The problem with many of these new unicorn tech businesses is that buying a share does not give you any useful voting rights in the company's operation. People like zuck hold share classes that basically means he can out vote everyone even though he doesn't own much of the business. This isn't really healthy and has set a precedent which many other tech companies are all to happy to follow.
You might say that nobody has to buy the shares. That's true, but again, I don't think this is something we want to see become the norm, which is what is happening now. It's a bit like when govts pass surveillance laws for a specific situation, and when people complain they say 'hey it's not going to affect you, it's just this special case, don't worry' and then ten years later they are using those laws to keep the population in check. These super share classes are fine when the companies act like regular companies, but as soon as it is widespread, there are just so many ways in which the unicorns can screw their shareholders, it could get really really nasty.
You also have to wonder whether it would be healthy to end up in a situation where 70% of the shareholders cannot stop the CEO from doing something they all don't want him to do. Because that is really the only situation where Zuckerberg needs his super shares, so what does he think he might want to do that would require this sort of power?
Personally, I think markets need counterbalancing forces, and this is one of them, even though it will probably fail.
If you find a full on professional IDE is a bit intimidating, then start with something like Processing.org until you feel comfortable with the basic language constructs (variables, functions etc). I know when I started out many many years ago, the wall of information you had to wade through just to get some text to print out somewhere was a bigger battle than learning the actual language semantics. I think those of us who know the tools inside out don't realise how intimidating it can be for someone who is starting from scratch and just wants to paint pixels.
Can I ask you what is the source of this information?
Fiduciary duty to shareholders, basically. The other side of this board level obsession with profit is all the regular people who buy mutual funds and shares based on which one is going to give them the biggest payback. In the end people want profits, and if CEOs aren't interested in delivering these, then CEOs can be moved aside by boards. Note, this is what happened to Steve Jobs, fortunately for him he got the ultimate comeuppance out of the situation, but this is rare.
India is not going to be making the display, battery or silicon. At best they might be assembling the boards there, building the case parts, and assembling the final product. My guess would be Apple will be leaning heavily on the India govt to ensure they are only doing that final bit.
In any case, the critical parts of all those components are heavily automated. Board assembly is pretty much completely automated these days. Most of the case machining is automated (I think they still run drill & tap machining centres with operators manually loading, but they may have moved to 5-axis by now). The biggest issue is probably on final assembly, but I can't imagine Apple has not been working with Foxconn on automating much of that by now as well, given the rising labour costs in China and situations like India, Brazil and now Trump. It isn't hard, there just wasn't any reason to bother before.
If you visit a modern electronics contract manufacturer, most of it is people in anti-static coats loading up parts into part feeders. There is very little hand labour left, unless you are talking very low volume.
The most annoying thing for Apple is that they had to bother doing this, when there was a perfectly good robot factory in China that could supply the stuff.
The only time I have dealt with an electrician was when I had a piece of machinery installed, and the electrician proceeded to waste half a day trying to decide which sized cable to use for the current capacity (this was a external run of about 2m). When I finally checked his work, I found he had overrated the cable by about 3x the machine's cable requirements spec (I don't think he bothered to read it) and well beyond what was protected by the breaker (at least he fitted the right one), and the stiffness of the oversized cables meant nothing fitted into the terminal blocks properly, and it had taken him at least 2 hours of extra work to try to ram everything into the switch board which was bursting at the seams.
I also used to have a friend who was a sparky. By the time I had graduated with an EE degree, he had a house, couple of nice cars, and every Christmas he would get three or four of the latest tech gadgets as a 'gift' from all his suppliers.
I don't blame them for making hay, but the electrician industry in many countries really is a bit of a protected guild.
Palmer Lucky. I disagree with you that it is a fad. I think there are some pretty interesting uses for the tech. Having tried one, there is a odd sense of immersion that you don't get from other forms of media, and it seems to work pretty well for simulation games (racing etc). However, you're right that it's pretty overblown with hype, as is anything tech related these days.
Personally, I simply think the tech is not ready yet. We need much higher resolution/refresh rate screens, and a huge increase in computing power for a much reduced price. Think Apple Newton vs iPhone - the ideas were similar, the tech just wasn't where it needed to be yet. It's probably going to be another decade before the computing power gets there, and by then I think the screen situation will take care of itself.
I don't think it is unreasonable to believe it could eventually grow into a decent sized market. But, a bit like Facebook, I think this idea that people are going to spend their lives in VR, or even that people outside of gaming and professional applications will use it, is a bit silly.
It doesn't matter. If the govt keeps handing out citizenship to billionaires so they can buy up large parts of the country for their private estates without having to seek permission, no New Zealander will be allowed outside of Auckland in a few more years.
I get your sentiment, but I think that is unfair. A lot of brexiters I have met when I used to travel around up North for work, were quite well meaning people who had simply been fed the lie that the EU causes all their problems for the last twenty years. Anytime their politicians stuffed up, went back on a promise or just flat out neglected them, along would come UKIP or a tabloid to start blaming the EU for the problem, and successive Labour and Tory governments quietly stepped aside to let it happen.
Many parts of England have never recovered from being decimated by Thatcher (I think many of the reforms were required, but they simply left towns to rot, rather than help with any sort of transition), and the convenient scape-goat for politicians doing nothing about this has been the EU. It has been the ultimate case of getting caught in a lie, and it amazes me that rather than anyone admitting that areas outside London have been neglected and need more focus, they are just going through with the foot shooting operation.
This is silly. The UK is not proposing putting tariffs on anything - part of the argument for Brexit (which I voted against) is that the UK could have more free trade deals with everyone else and avoid EU tariffs. They want to do a free trade deal with China for example. Further, if the UK was even considering tariffs to protect its industries, why would it propose putting tariffs on industries (making server racks) that don't even exist? It would make slightly more 'sense' to put tariffs on food or gas turbines - you know, stuff it actually makes.
However, the one thing the UK has strongly hinted at is that it will throw around tax breaks like candy to prevent its economy from imploding. I imagine that Microsoft UK just wants to make sure it is first in line.
The US only needs to send goods and services back the other way to otherwise prevent a trade imbalance that would collapse the USD, making the country unable to afford more goods. But that hasn't happened because the Chinese do not allow their businesses to freely dispose of the USD they get for selling their goods. Instead the USD they hold gets stuck in US treasury bills, real estate and the stock market, which keeps the USD strong against the RMB and allows Chinese mercantilism to continue. Indeed, it is wholely advantageous for the US to exchange printed pieces of paper (treasury bonds) that pay negative rates of interest for all the stuff they consume out of China.
China is not stupid though. It has used this mercantilism trade to build up its own industrial base and extract western industrial knowledge. If it can successfully transition to a domestic consumption driven economy, it will not need US consumption anymore, and I imagine at that point it will start extracting its funds from the US. That will most certainly fix US unemployment - by making US wages similar to those in developing countries.
In the end the wealth of your country is determined by the real goods and services it produces, not the various games it can play with other lawyers. It wasn't British political nous that built the empire - that was important, but the underlying base of their power was British industrial might, and the same thing is repeated through history. The US had that after the war, and so ran the world, but in the last few decades it has decided that making banking products is the key to prosperity. I have confidence it will bounce back though - the country still has incredible technological capabilities - but we could have all saved a lot of trouble if people had focused on generating real wealth, rather than fiddling the numbers on a balance sheet.
I live in central London and we have a similar situation with food delivery bike riders. A couple have a very organised camp setup at a local church park. Another sleeps every morning at my wife's gym (where I presume he has discovered a membership is far cheaper than rent). I don't think I've ever seen a situation where there were so may people working yet homeless. There was a story in the paper recently about a guy who got a job at a pub that opened till 3am, and would then wonder around until one of the train stations opened at 5am so he could go in and sleep.
I just cannot see how this situation can continue. I don't think I could personally stand visiting the big empty homes of rich people to deliver them overpriced takeaways every night, while knowing that I'll never be able to buy a home of my own anywhere on the wages I'm earning. At some point surely these people will realise they outnumber the rich they are delivering meals for, and something is going to happen?
It's going to be hilarious when all the new MacBook owners have finished converted everything to USB-C and then realize they can't plug things into a bus without a dongle.
These sorts of disaster stories have appeared for every Olympics I can remember. The reality is that (a) most of the athletes are borderline sociopathic animals, and these sorts of problems are not going to prevent them from fighting hard for their shiny piece of metal; (b) for most of the events, you simply need a large field with some markings on it. The chances of that not working out are pretty low.
From living through the London Olympics, it was pretty clear that the whole event is just for TV. The crowd and fan areas are just backdrops for the TV pictures, and a lot of issues (such as the grey British summer) can be fixed by turning up the brightness and using various filters.
The same thing will happen in Rio, and the great Olympic juggernaut will roll on.
The trouble that Europe has is it is stuffed full of old people. That is why the place has the same level of visionary development as your grandparent's living room has had since the 1970s. Old people are at a different time in their life, and understandably care less for change and progress, but when they clog up the political system, they make life extremely grumpy and difficult.
The trouble is that not all of Europe is old, and those who are young are getting tired of the 'waiting for death' and 'back in my day' mentality that is gripping the West. Globalization might have it's problems, but most young people are no longer under the illusion that their problems are being caused by that Greek or Chinese person who they partied with in Ibiza last year.
The danger for the West is that there are other places with better demographics, and rapidly increasing standards of living. Europe should be busy trying to bring in young skilled workers from these places to offset the coming demographic cliff, and also encouraging young people to procreate. Instead they are closing off the borders, and making it harder and harder for young people to afford to start families by trying to extract all their earnings through rent seeking activities in the belief that storing fiat currency is a viable way to fund their pensions.
It is hard to see how it will not all crash and burn at some point. The global retirement asset bubble thing will burst when the inflow of new money to the ponzi scheme declines (either from prices simply becoming impossible to afford by new entrants, or old people having to cash out) which will wipe out the supposed retirement savings of millions, forcing them to have to rely on state pensions. This will then set up a direct political contest (as opposed to the proxy contest going on in the housing/debt market right now) between young workers and pensioners. Stripped of the housing capital gains illusion, I think any young person who is not debt enslaved will vote with their feet at this point, which will accelerate the dependency ratio shrinkage (a problem Japan didn't have to deal with due to its tight knit culture).
Eventually we'll reach a sensible compromise where young people will have to pay a bit more tax to prevent poverty among old people, and old people will have to accept a reduced standard of living in their retirement. Unfortunately it will be a bumpy road getting there, but that is how populous democracies solve these sorts of problems.
Making electric car components is not hard, and there are few real gains to be made in the drive train.
Speaking as someone who makes electronic car components for a living, I'd say you have no idea what you are talking about if you think making them isn't hard. I think there are substantial gains still to be made in the drive trains, particularly for EVs and hybrid vehicles. I think gasoline and diesel engines are probably well into the diminishing returns though.
Okay, so what would be an innovation in drivelines that would be so disruptive to the industry? Better power electronic switches? You think Apple is doing all this so they can beat out infineon on power switch topologies? Or maybe they have some new improved modulation software for the drivers that will improve them over the 95%+ efficiency they are now. You think that is what a consumer electronics company has 1000 engineers working on? What about motors? Are they developing a core steel that can handle higher flux levels, or a cheaper source of high strength permanent magnets, just so they can reduce the size of the already tiny electric motor (whether induction or PM) in electric vehicles a bit more? Even if they made a superconducting motor that took up half the space of Tesla's oversized induction motor, that is hardly going to be the tech that breaks the market open.
In a quantitative sense, electric drive trains are currently extremely efficient, compact and of reasonable cost compared to the other parts of an electric vehicle. If you think that is where the big advances in electric vehicles are coming from then you can't see the wood for the trees. Give some real examples of areas in the drive train that are ripe for disruption or stop pretending to be an expert.
My guess is they're building one to try to understand them from the ground up to be suppliers of technology or to lure a major carmaker without an electric car into building it for them.
Making electric car components is not hard, and there are few real gains to be made in the drive train. The biggest area remaining for innovation/cost reduction is the batteries, and I doubt that Apple wants to become the world's biggest battery company. I suspect the whole 'electric car' angle is simply because they wouldn't exactly start working on a future transport solution by using a petrol car as a base.
Autonomous cars will be a massive disruptor the day they are released. This will happen someday, but maybe not as soon as people think. If Apple is looking for the next big disruption, then I don't think anyone doubts this will be one of them. Whether they can do it or not, or do it better than Tesla/Google is another question, but at least if they get the product out the door they won't have to wonder if it will be a bit of a fizzer (relatively speaking) like the iwatch.
I doubt they are just making a consumer electric car. The main bottleneck to the widespread adoption of these now is ultimately batteries, and Apple isn't a battery company, nor does it seem they are positioning themselves ahead of Tesla on mass producing batteries. In terms of vehicles, while a 1950s modernist designed Ive car in one color might appeal to some people, there are plenty of great car designs around that are pretty functional and nice to look at. Believing they can beat the market on that would be pretty naive. And then there are the masses of people who don't care what a car looks like and buy a Mondeo.
I imagine there is more to it than that. If they are going for disruptive, then the end game (where the puck is currently going) is to develop an autonomous vehicle taxi service - indeed, a service that integrates what Uber, Google and Tesla are doing into one company. That seems more like the type of thing Apple would do.
However, this would be a huge thing to do. While their products certainly have some nicely refined tech in them, they haven't ever really done anything at the bleeding edge of raw computing that gives me confidence that they can pull this off.
Kurzweil ist a stellar example for that. He is also wrong, 100 years ago, Newspapers were rare and expensive, but they did report all the things that mattered. At that time, the idea was already several centuries old (on paper).
This is the problem with having a plutocracy. You have to make up lots of bullshit jobs for all the kids-of-someone-rich who didn't win at the talent lottery.
Slashdot Mirror
I realise the driver system in windows has moved along (hopefully for the better) a lot recently, but about 15 years ago I remember looking into developing a custom driver for a USB device I had developed. My background was as an embedded developer so I had a detailed knowledge of how the bits on the bus worked, and what the host controller chip was doing. All I wanted to do was send some packets to my device and receive a few packets back from a windows application - nothing real time or taxing of the system's capabilities.
I got a copy of Walter Oney's windows driver model book, and proceeded to work my way through it.
Even now, as someone who does a fair amount of web development, working my way through ten years of terrible javascript language and library designs decisions to make otherwise simple things happen on a webpage, it still shocks me just how ridiculously horrible the WDM was. The basic IRP system was already pretty over the top architectural astronauty, but I guess you could accept that they had to provide for the possibility that there would be a lot of fancy new peripherals in the future. But once you figured that out, the book went into how incredibly broken the model was once you had to support multi-processor system and plug and play. What ensued was basically 200 pages describing the most horrible mess of obscure synchronisation problems you could possibly find in a couple of pages worth of driver code.
Ever since I ceased being shocked when my computer BSOD due to a third party driver. Frankly, if the thing allowed you to get much done at all, whoever wrote the driver probably deserved a medal or something.
Anyway, with such an experience, this back dating driver thing doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
One useful thing I remember reading about Lord Sugar (that champion of business, who made most of his fortune from buying rental properties, yay) is when he talked about the days after the Amstrad IPO. Most of his management became instant millionaires (which meant something back then), and he commented that some turned up at work the next day and continued with no perceptible change in their behavior, while others rocked on up late in a brand new car and proceed to turn into giant egos. The most interesting thing is that he didn't seem to think there was any predictor as to how someone would turn out.
In my own short business career I would tend to agree with this. It is extremely hard to know how someone will behave when they come into money, because most people do not have much money or any hope of getting it. You can have people who appear frugal and responsible, and they will always tell you how responsible they will be if they ever got money, but in my experience none of this prevents them undergoing a quite remarkable gollum like transformation when a large enough quantity of cash is placed in front of them.
It would appear this guy falls into the 'drunk on money' category. Personally I'm surprised the VC's or whoever put the money up let him get away with this sort of behavior. Someone like that is not going to ever make you money, because for them money is the end, not the means by which you can build a profitable organisation.
Do they force you to queue for a ticket booth where you have to explain why you won't pay their $25 'suggested' donation before they let you use them?
I wonder if you say the same thing to those who trade coins and stamps?
What about tulips?
There is a fuzzy line between trading that is useful, and that which becomes speculation. If it were so clear as to where that line was, we would never have an asset bubble again. I would suggest that when the financial industry is apparently producing record levels of 'value', while most western economies are no longer able to produce enough housing and infrastructure to sustain the middle class, that the real 'value' to humanity of much of that financial activity is rather overstated.
Yes, good point, that is certainly a problem. However, I would counter that these modern unicorn companies that are built around the cult-of-founder are the least likely to suffer from that sort of problem anyway. Regular, medium sized, diversified ownership companies that the raiders target can't really use super shares to protect themselves, as it wouldn't be clear who should have the super shares.
I'm not saying share classes don't have a place, but I do think that the CEO's in american public companies are already so powerful, that we are just setting ourselves up for another giant financial scam if this practice becomes widespread.
That's not really true. They just want to get 'some' power. The problem with many of these new unicorn tech businesses is that buying a share does not give you any useful voting rights in the company's operation. People like zuck hold share classes that basically means he can out vote everyone even though he doesn't own much of the business. This isn't really healthy and has set a precedent which many other tech companies are all to happy to follow.
You might say that nobody has to buy the shares. That's true, but again, I don't think this is something we want to see become the norm, which is what is happening now. It's a bit like when govts pass surveillance laws for a specific situation, and when people complain they say 'hey it's not going to affect you, it's just this special case, don't worry' and then ten years later they are using those laws to keep the population in check. These super share classes are fine when the companies act like regular companies, but as soon as it is widespread, there are just so many ways in which the unicorns can screw their shareholders, it could get really really nasty.
You also have to wonder whether it would be healthy to end up in a situation where 70% of the shareholders cannot stop the CEO from doing something they all don't want him to do. Because that is really the only situation where Zuckerberg needs his super shares, so what does he think he might want to do that would require this sort of power?
Personally, I think markets need counterbalancing forces, and this is one of them, even though it will probably fail.
If you find a full on professional IDE is a bit intimidating, then start with something like Processing.org until you feel comfortable with the basic language constructs (variables, functions etc). I know when I started out many many years ago, the wall of information you had to wade through just to get some text to print out somewhere was a bigger battle than learning the actual language semantics. I think those of us who know the tools inside out don't realise how intimidating it can be for someone who is starting from scratch and just wants to paint pixels.
Can I ask you what is the source of this information?
Fiduciary duty to shareholders, basically. The other side of this board level obsession with profit is all the regular people who buy mutual funds and shares based on which one is going to give them the biggest payback. In the end people want profits, and if CEOs aren't interested in delivering these, then CEOs can be moved aside by boards. Note, this is what happened to Steve Jobs, fortunately for him he got the ultimate comeuppance out of the situation, but this is rare.
India is not going to be making the display, battery or silicon. At best they might be assembling the boards there, building the case parts, and assembling the final product. My guess would be Apple will be leaning heavily on the India govt to ensure they are only doing that final bit.
In any case, the critical parts of all those components are heavily automated. Board assembly is pretty much completely automated these days. Most of the case machining is automated (I think they still run drill & tap machining centres with operators manually loading, but they may have moved to 5-axis by now). The biggest issue is probably on final assembly, but I can't imagine Apple has not been working with Foxconn on automating much of that by now as well, given the rising labour costs in China and situations like India, Brazil and now Trump. It isn't hard, there just wasn't any reason to bother before.
If you visit a modern electronics contract manufacturer, most of it is people in anti-static coats loading up parts into part feeders. There is very little hand labour left, unless you are talking very low volume.
The most annoying thing for Apple is that they had to bother doing this, when there was a perfectly good robot factory in China that could supply the stuff.
The only time I have dealt with an electrician was when I had a piece of machinery installed, and the electrician proceeded to waste half a day trying to decide which sized cable to use for the current capacity (this was a external run of about 2m). When I finally checked his work, I found he had overrated the cable by about 3x the machine's cable requirements spec (I don't think he bothered to read it) and well beyond what was protected by the breaker (at least he fitted the right one), and the stiffness of the oversized cables meant nothing fitted into the terminal blocks properly, and it had taken him at least 2 hours of extra work to try to ram everything into the switch board which was bursting at the seams.
I also used to have a friend who was a sparky. By the time I had graduated with an EE degree, he had a house, couple of nice cars, and every Christmas he would get three or four of the latest tech gadgets as a 'gift' from all his suppliers.
I don't blame them for making hay, but the electrician industry in many countries really is a bit of a protected guild.
Palmer Lucky. I disagree with you that it is a fad. I think there are some pretty interesting uses for the tech. Having tried one, there is a odd sense of immersion that you don't get from other forms of media, and it seems to work pretty well for simulation games (racing etc). However, you're right that it's pretty overblown with hype, as is anything tech related these days.
Personally, I simply think the tech is not ready yet. We need much higher resolution/refresh rate screens, and a huge increase in computing power for a much reduced price. Think Apple Newton vs iPhone - the ideas were similar, the tech just wasn't where it needed to be yet. It's probably going to be another decade before the computing power gets there, and by then I think the screen situation will take care of itself.
I don't think it is unreasonable to believe it could eventually grow into a decent sized market. But, a bit like Facebook, I think this idea that people are going to spend their lives in VR, or even that people outside of gaming and professional applications will use it, is a bit silly.
It doesn't matter. If the govt keeps handing out citizenship to billionaires so they can buy up large parts of the country for their private estates without having to seek permission, no New Zealander will be allowed outside of Auckland in a few more years.
I get your sentiment, but I think that is unfair. A lot of brexiters I have met when I used to travel around up North for work, were quite well meaning people who had simply been fed the lie that the EU causes all their problems for the last twenty years. Anytime their politicians stuffed up, went back on a promise or just flat out neglected them, along would come UKIP or a tabloid to start blaming the EU for the problem, and successive Labour and Tory governments quietly stepped aside to let it happen.
Many parts of England have never recovered from being decimated by Thatcher (I think many of the reforms were required, but they simply left towns to rot, rather than help with any sort of transition), and the convenient scape-goat for politicians doing nothing about this has been the EU. It has been the ultimate case of getting caught in a lie, and it amazes me that rather than anyone admitting that areas outside London have been neglected and need more focus, they are just going through with the foot shooting operation.
This is silly. The UK is not proposing putting tariffs on anything - part of the argument for Brexit (which I voted against) is that the UK could have more free trade deals with everyone else and avoid EU tariffs. They want to do a free trade deal with China for example. Further, if the UK was even considering tariffs to protect its industries, why would it propose putting tariffs on industries (making server racks) that don't even exist? It would make slightly more 'sense' to put tariffs on food or gas turbines - you know, stuff it actually makes.
However, the one thing the UK has strongly hinted at is that it will throw around tax breaks like candy to prevent its economy from imploding. I imagine that Microsoft UK just wants to make sure it is first in line.
More importantly, the money isn't gone forever.
The US only needs to send goods and services back the other way to otherwise prevent a trade imbalance that would collapse the USD, making the country unable to afford more goods. But that hasn't happened because the Chinese do not allow their businesses to freely dispose of the USD they get for selling their goods. Instead the USD they hold gets stuck in US treasury bills, real estate and the stock market, which keeps the USD strong against the RMB and allows Chinese mercantilism to continue. Indeed, it is wholely advantageous for the US to exchange printed pieces of paper (treasury bonds) that pay negative rates of interest for all the stuff they consume out of China.
China is not stupid though. It has used this mercantilism trade to build up its own industrial base and extract western industrial knowledge. If it can successfully transition to a domestic consumption driven economy, it will not need US consumption anymore, and I imagine at that point it will start extracting its funds from the US. That will most certainly fix US unemployment - by making US wages similar to those in developing countries.
In the end the wealth of your country is determined by the real goods and services it produces, not the various games it can play with other lawyers. It wasn't British political nous that built the empire - that was important, but the underlying base of their power was British industrial might, and the same thing is repeated through history. The US had that after the war, and so ran the world, but in the last few decades it has decided that making banking products is the key to prosperity. I have confidence it will bounce back though - the country still has incredible technological capabilities - but we could have all saved a lot of trouble if people had focused on generating real wealth, rather than fiddling the numbers on a balance sheet.
I live in central London and we have a similar situation with food delivery bike riders. A couple have a very organised camp setup at a local church park. Another sleeps every morning at my wife's gym (where I presume he has discovered a membership is far cheaper than rent). I don't think I've ever seen a situation where there were so may people working yet homeless. There was a story in the paper recently about a guy who got a job at a pub that opened till 3am, and would then wonder around until one of the train stations opened at 5am so he could go in and sleep.
I just cannot see how this situation can continue. I don't think I could personally stand visiting the big empty homes of rich people to deliver them overpriced takeaways every night, while knowing that I'll never be able to buy a home of my own anywhere on the wages I'm earning. At some point surely these people will realise they outnumber the rich they are delivering meals for, and something is going to happen?
It's going to be hilarious when all the new MacBook owners have finished converted everything to USB-C and then realize they can't plug things into a bus without a dongle.
I don't know. I saw the 2010 documentary about Zuckerberg, and he really came across as a bit of a dick.
Having said that, at least he didn't come across all fruit-loops and unicorns like that 2015 documentary about the internship at Google.
These sorts of disaster stories have appeared for every Olympics I can remember. The reality is that (a) most of the athletes are borderline sociopathic animals, and these sorts of problems are not going to prevent them from fighting hard for their shiny piece of metal; (b) for most of the events, you simply need a large field with some markings on it. The chances of that not working out are pretty low.
From living through the London Olympics, it was pretty clear that the whole event is just for TV. The crowd and fan areas are just backdrops for the TV pictures, and a lot of issues (such as the grey British summer) can be fixed by turning up the brightness and using various filters.
The same thing will happen in Rio, and the great Olympic juggernaut will roll on.
The trouble that Europe has is it is stuffed full of old people. That is why the place has the same level of visionary development as your grandparent's living room has had since the 1970s. Old people are at a different time in their life, and understandably care less for change and progress, but when they clog up the political system, they make life extremely grumpy and difficult.
The trouble is that not all of Europe is old, and those who are young are getting tired of the 'waiting for death' and 'back in my day' mentality that is gripping the West. Globalization might have it's problems, but most young people are no longer under the illusion that their problems are being caused by that Greek or Chinese person who they partied with in Ibiza last year.
The danger for the West is that there are other places with better demographics, and rapidly increasing standards of living. Europe should be busy trying to bring in young skilled workers from these places to offset the coming demographic cliff, and also encouraging young people to procreate. Instead they are closing off the borders, and making it harder and harder for young people to afford to start families by trying to extract all their earnings through rent seeking activities in the belief that storing fiat currency is a viable way to fund their pensions.
It is hard to see how it will not all crash and burn at some point. The global retirement asset bubble thing will burst when the inflow of new money to the ponzi scheme declines (either from prices simply becoming impossible to afford by new entrants, or old people having to cash out) which will wipe out the supposed retirement savings of millions, forcing them to have to rely on state pensions. This will then set up a direct political contest (as opposed to the proxy contest going on in the housing/debt market right now) between young workers and pensioners. Stripped of the housing capital gains illusion, I think any young person who is not debt enslaved will vote with their feet at this point, which will accelerate the dependency ratio shrinkage (a problem Japan didn't have to deal with due to its tight knit culture).
Eventually we'll reach a sensible compromise where young people will have to pay a bit more tax to prevent poverty among old people, and old people will have to accept a reduced standard of living in their retirement. Unfortunately it will be a bumpy road getting there, but that is how populous democracies solve these sorts of problems.
It unleashed forces which we are barely able to perceive...
...except with an oscilloscope.
But seriously, hyperbolize much?
This is why marketing doesn't invite you to client facing meetings...
Making electric car components is not hard, and there are few real gains to be made in the drive train.
Speaking as someone who makes electronic car components for a living, I'd say you have no idea what you are talking about if you think making them isn't hard. I think there are substantial gains still to be made in the drive trains, particularly for EVs and hybrid vehicles. I think gasoline and diesel engines are probably well into the diminishing returns though.
Okay, so what would be an innovation in drivelines that would be so disruptive to the industry? Better power electronic switches? You think Apple is doing all this so they can beat out infineon on power switch topologies? Or maybe they have some new improved modulation software for the drivers that will improve them over the 95%+ efficiency they are now. You think that is what a consumer electronics company has 1000 engineers working on? What about motors? Are they developing a core steel that can handle higher flux levels, or a cheaper source of high strength permanent magnets, just so they can reduce the size of the already tiny electric motor (whether induction or PM) in electric vehicles a bit more? Even if they made a superconducting motor that took up half the space of Tesla's oversized induction motor, that is hardly going to be the tech that breaks the market open.
In a quantitative sense, electric drive trains are currently extremely efficient, compact and of reasonable cost compared to the other parts of an electric vehicle. If you think that is where the big advances in electric vehicles are coming from then you can't see the wood for the trees. Give some real examples of areas in the drive train that are ripe for disruption or stop pretending to be an expert.
My guess is they're building one to try to understand them from the ground up to be suppliers of technology or to lure a major carmaker without an electric car into building it for them.
Making electric car components is not hard, and there are few real gains to be made in the drive train. The biggest area remaining for innovation/cost reduction is the batteries, and I doubt that Apple wants to become the world's biggest battery company. I suspect the whole 'electric car' angle is simply because they wouldn't exactly start working on a future transport solution by using a petrol car as a base.
Autonomous cars will be a massive disruptor the day they are released. This will happen someday, but maybe not as soon as people think. If Apple is looking for the next big disruption, then I don't think anyone doubts this will be one of them. Whether they can do it or not, or do it better than Tesla/Google is another question, but at least if they get the product out the door they won't have to wonder if it will be a bit of a fizzer (relatively speaking) like the iwatch.
I doubt they are just making a consumer electric car. The main bottleneck to the widespread adoption of these now is ultimately batteries, and Apple isn't a battery company, nor does it seem they are positioning themselves ahead of Tesla on mass producing batteries. In terms of vehicles, while a 1950s modernist designed Ive car in one color might appeal to some people, there are plenty of great car designs around that are pretty functional and nice to look at. Believing they can beat the market on that would be pretty naive. And then there are the masses of people who don't care what a car looks like and buy a Mondeo.
I imagine there is more to it than that. If they are going for disruptive, then the end game (where the puck is currently going) is to develop an autonomous vehicle taxi service - indeed, a service that integrates what Uber, Google and Tesla are doing into one company. That seems more like the type of thing Apple would do.
However, this would be a huge thing to do. While their products certainly have some nicely refined tech in them, they haven't ever really done anything at the bleeding edge of raw computing that gives me confidence that they can pull this off.
Kurzweil ist a stellar example for that. He is also wrong, 100 years ago, Newspapers were rare and expensive, but they did report all the things that mattered. At that time, the idea was already several centuries old (on paper).
This is the problem with having a plutocracy. You have to make up lots of bullshit jobs for all the kids-of-someone-rich who didn't win at the talent lottery.