This is crazy! Everyone knows that the iPhone screen replacement industry employs thousands of workers throughout the world. Corning makes more glass because of it. Apple sells more new iPhones. Nowhere in this story do I see anyone defending the rights of the workers who fix broken glass.
If Corning really cared about the lowly worker, they would make glass that broke even easier. This could create thousands of new jobs and return the West to the worker utopia that it once was!
Maybe, although that is probably the best case scenario. The main problem is Erdogan is rapidly making enemies (remember he only had a slight majority in the elections) and the more 'conspirators' he locks up, the more enemies he will make. Saudi has the advantage that it essentially keeps its population under control by giving them all lots of money. The motivation to do something about a regime that is giving you a lavish and comfortable life is much lower than to do something about one that is locking up your family members.
Very very sadly (I love the country, Istanbul is probably my favorite city in Europe) I think this will end in a wider civil war. There is already a civil war in the east that Erdogan restarted with the Kurds, and I fear it will break out into a wider conflict now. You'll first see more insurgent action, but I think Erdogan will eventually start outright attacking his own towns and cities as his enemies pile up and become more resolved. Inevitably this opposition will end up looking across the Syrian border for support, and before you know it ISIS fascism has appeared in the country, the West is halfheartedly propping up an increasingly repressive Erdogan , and the whole place has fallen to pieces. That's basically what happened in Syria, and it really is the saddest thing for what was, until recently, a relatively moderate country full of amazing people and culture.
The economy has been growing quite steadily over this period, including since 2008. If that new wealth was divided up among American workers in the same way it was in the 1980s, then millennials would be better of than previous generations.
So the problem is not that we need a disruptive source of economic opportunity, it is that the existing disruptive sources of economic opportunity are generating wealth that is simply accumulating among current holders of wealth, to the exclusion of new workers.
Incidentally, such an in-equal wealth distribution could not - by definition - occur if the USA was the socialist country you seem to think it is.
I think that is probably right. I would be scared if I was those companies though. My observations from having to deal with the UK immigration system during her tenure as home secretary, is that she is a populist who will blindly acquiesce to public opinion in order to score points. I don't think she is someone who will try to shape public opinion around her own vision. In a way, this is probably why she is the perfect Brexit prime minister for the conservatives, but it is not really leadership, and shaping Britain according to the braying of the tabloid press might keep her in power, but isn't going to lead the country to a good place.
In New Zealand, the former prime minister Helen Clark did a similar thing to the leader of a fringe coalition partner (NZ uses MMP, so small parties frequently hold the balance of power). The guy, Winston Peters, was a known charismatic trouble maker (sound familiar?) and rose to power mostly by blaming immigrants for stealing jobs. So she made him foreign minister. It completely shut him down, as he was out of the country most of the time, had to put on a serious face so he didn't become the laughing stock of the world, and was hobbled in his ability to portray people from other countries as troublesome. It was an incredibly successful strategy, and he ended up doing an okay job of it.
However I wouldn't read so much into it being an attempt to destroy Boris. The foreign minister is largely a PR role, which Boris will be quite good at once he has apologized to everyone, and I think he has enough political nous to ensure nothing serious around Brexit can be pinned on him.
Leadsom and Davis on the other hand, have found themselves holding the poison chalice.
Personally, I find it all a little too convenient. It may very well have just been chance, but I wonder if Boris and Gove set up their 'stabbing in the back' thing as a way for Boris to exit from a situation he could not win from. Before his good friend Gove did this, Boris was basically trapped and would have had to follow through with brexit and all the ridiculous promises he made. He would basically have had to upset both the brexiters (by not being able to deliver on all the promises he made) and remainers (who see him as an unprincipled opportunist). He could have ended as the most hated prime minister in history, without anyone else to blame since he was the face of the brexit campaign.
If you consider his position, then what Gove did was actually an incredibly effective way for Boris to escape the trap. Gove spent his public image (which is off little value to him), and Boris got to preserve his by crawling off with hurt feelings, gaining some sympathy from the public instead of its scorn, and not having to deal with being labelled a quitter.
This would also explain a plot hole that didn't make sense to me before, around why Boris didn't just remain in the leadership race despite Gove joining. In the end all Gove had was claims that Boris wouldn't be a good leader. A seasoned politician like Boris could have easily run a PR campaign back that he would be a good leader, and discredit Gove (after all Gove had just stabbed him in the back). So why did he decide he suddenly had no chance of winning?
I suspect from this appointment that May was involved as well, and was promised the premiership at least until the next election. My prediction is Gove will do his 'penance' and then come back to the cabinet in a few months time, and Boris will start figuring out how to engineer a comeback as the 'hero of brexit' once May has done all the dirty work for him.
About 10% seem to really know their shit, the rest are faking it, spending most of the time copying and pasting non-working code and then letting other people fix it. Some of them ask embarrassingly ignorant questions that expose them as completely unqualified, but because of the bargain-basement rates they work for, no one seems to give a shit.
Outside top-tier firms, this statement could easily apply to the bulk of developers from western countries as well.
No need to do that. If I was the regulator I would just keep issuing the same statement in response to these multimillionaire CEOs - 'so you're saying you're not as good a business person as Page or Zuckerberg, so you want us to see if we can help you out?'.
Nobody is stopping these highly successful alpha business people from using their vast consumer relationships and network access to start their own youtube or whatever. The only thing stopping them is that they are not good enough at business. Perhaps if that message is shoved in their faces enough their shareholders will start demanding CEOs with entrepreneurial nous instead of the current crop of highly paid whinger.
What does payback even mean when bond rates are almost zero, and even negative in some countries? You could pay people with shovels to level every hill and valley between the two cities, and provided cars saved a non-zero amount of petrol over the journey it would be an economical investment.
I'm not saying this hyperloop thing is the best thing to do, but right now any sort of infrastructure investment is better than having hordes of unemployed Europeans sitting around twiddling their thumbs because everyone in Northern Europe is fixated on collecting surpluses of fiat currency.
The other possibility is that she also was played. You see this regularly in the property developer market - banks need someone charismatic to lend money too (which creates profit for them), but who is stupid/egoist enough to not wonder why this friendly bank guy is giving them all this money. The banks charm them into securing whatever earthly possessions they and their grandma have against these loans, and ensure the bank is first tier lender. While things are booming this money feeding machine makes the banks huge profits. When the bubble pops, the banks quickly liquidate the guy, recover their part of the loans, and leave the second tier lenders and bankrupted developer to wear the losses.
If she didn't setup a private trust and move a few million into it when she was a billionaire, then she really does seem like the sort of gullible charismatic puppet bubble investors look for.
Well said. Same happens in New Zealand. There is a startup incubator in Auckland that goes on endlessly about picking winners. This allows them to suck up vast amounts of government money earmarked for startups to feed into its staff salaries and fancy offices. Rather annoying for people with actual startups who have to compete with their vast PR machine for any seed money.
Problem is, most genuine startup founders are busy trying to get a real product out to customers that works. In my experience in both startups and large companies, this aspect of a company (actually making a working product) is mostly over looked. People just assume that if you 'go to China' or 'hire some consultants' the actual product will magic itself together. You can see this everyday on Kickstarter where a whole bunch of great ideas people discover making stuff with a reject rate that doesn't sink your company is no simple matter.
Over 20 years being in this game though, I've noticed an interesting trend - you don't really need investor money anymore, at least to get to the point of putting a working product in a customer's hand. Capital costs on things like hardware are lower then ever, and if your founders are technical and prepared to put in some sweat equity, you can get a long way before you even need to put money down. This has fashionably been called 'lean startups' but it is basically the way Apple/Google/MS/FB/HP etc all started.
Once you have cashflow/customers, you can get the attention of investors and cut through all the hype-merchants much easier.
The other problem they have is that the old show hasn't stopped. It has simply moved to a new channel where it will get an even bigger budget.
Unless Clarkson and co really stuff up, it is hard to see how their *new* show won't be at least as popular as their old gig. With Amazon's budget, a break, a license to try some fresh stuff, and in some ways even, a 'don't care, nothing to prove' attitude, they will probably be pretty successful at keeping the franchise alive with its previous viewers. Whether they can broaden that base to the US market is another question, and probably the bigger challenge.
Personally I'm happy Evans has gone. I hadn't heard of him before the show was announced, but he just came across as a wannabee Clarkson with an extremely irritating voice (seriously, I would never have believed his job was in radio if I hadn't read it myself). Perhaps he does have an interesting personality, but I didn't see it on the show. Matt Leblanc seems to have been an inspired choice though. It will be interesting to see whether he gets the show traction in the US.
The cost of brown field site development is one issue, but not really the major one. My wife has worked on a number of building refurbishments (they are extremely common in London), and they are not that difficult, expensive, or slow to complete vs new builds. Indeed, the cost of land is so high in London now, that it shouldn't make a difference anyway. Provided the cost of cleaning up the brownfield site is less than the greenfield equivalent value, the development still makes economic sense.
Rather, the main problem is that there is virtually no cost to just sitting on land in the UK. Property rates are incredibly low, and there is no land tax. For many properties now, rent would barely cover depreciation and management fees, so it is simpler to just leave the property empty. Similarly, why go to all the risk of building housing on an empty site when this makes you maybe 1/10 of the money you are making from annual capital gains. Doing actual construction has much more risk than doing nothing, and the returns are unlikely to be worth having to deal with contractors and suppliers.
Just visit the ghost streets of the west end, or Stratford (which 3 years on from the olympics is still releasing housing at a glacial pace) to see how this all works.
The London market is fundamentally being squeezed by land banking. The way to fix it would be with a tax on the unimproved value of land, with the proceeds used to build social housing, but the trouble the govt has now is that enough middle class people are tangled up in potential negative equity situations that they cannot let the bubble collapse.
My pick is a sterling crisis, and the BoE being forced to raise rates to defend the currency. This will wipe out all the middle class hanger-ons, clearing the way for a democratic re-adjustment of the land usage system.
This is slightly off topic, but does anyone else find it weird that we are on the cusp of all these radical new technology breakthroughs, yet we can no longer build enough new houses each year to keep up with population growth?
Imagine telling someone in the 1960s, when houses and transport infrastructure were being developed at record pace, that in the future we would indeed have the wrist watch phones and flying cars, but a high income family wouldn't be able to afford a rundown victorian era worker's cottage within an hour's commute of their job.
Something has gone very wrong with our economy if it is delivery these sorts of toys, yet basic needs go begging.
This is going to sound controversial, but I think we are at the point where we would be best to let these mega-corps go crazy disrupting industries and livelihoods en-mass. Big money has won, and workers are just fighting a rear guard action attempting to slow down the destruction of the middle class.
The reality though, is that none of this can sustain itself inside a democracy. Once enough of the middle class realize that even modest dreams (a home, stable income, time to pursue their own interest) are no longer attainable, there will be a political backlash. In my view, if that moment comes sooner, the backlash might be someone progressive, modifying the rules of capitalism to bring some sensibleness back to the setup. If the process is left too late, anger will build and I fear the backlash will be a coin-toss as to whether it is better or worse than what we have now.
Free-marketers like Uber just cannot see that there is a bigger 'free market' than the economic system. It is called the will of the masses, and even without democracy, it has proven to be quite capable of disrupting the rules when its interests are not met.
Supersonic air transport had its ascendancy in the 1970s because oil was cheap and plentiful, and the high bypass turbo fan had not been developed. Propulsive efficiency of a turbojet reaches its peak into the supersonic range, so Concorde wasn't as much of a gas-guzzler compared to something like a 707 as it would be now against modern jets. Factor in better aircraft/crew utilization and the thing could have been quite economical, particularly for business class travel.
Of course the sonic boom problem killed the viability even if the 747 hadn't come along so soon after. There were a lot of improvements they were planning for Concorde 2 that could have kept it in the running for quite a while on particular routes if this had not been the case.
If you have an airplane safety budget, would you rather spend it on preventative safety measures, or speeding up the location of the very small number of planes that crash and aren't found quickly? Other than a few notable exceptions (AF447, MH370 being the main ones) we generally find planes within an adequate amount of time, especially considering that it typically takes months to conclusively determine the cause of an incident and make recommendations that might improve safety.
This plane has probably been found already with divers and black box pinger locators en-route. The real issue for us is that the authorities are more concerned about figuring out what happened then keeping the 24 hr news monster updated.
The only time I hear about twitter it is when a media outlet writes a story about someone, usually someone else who works in the media, tweeting something that they think is important. From this I conclude that twitter is just a bunch of media and PR people sending messages between themselves so they can report those messages as 'news' to the general public when there is nothing else going on in the world.
Jack Welch only did this for management staff. I think most people who have had to deal with idiot managers stuck at the level of their incompetence (the Peter Principle) and clogging up the system for everyone under them, won't find this such a terrible idea. However, it also only really worked for GE because it was an exceptional company, so the bottom 10% of managers there were still in the upper levels of management experience/ability in general. I have heard (from someone who used a recruiter who worked with Welch) that they didn't even need to fire the bottom managers. They just passed their details along to the headhunters circling the company and those people had a new job within a week.
It sounds like your manager was like those little Steve Jobs' that populate the tech industry and believe they can have world class design on third world budgets.
I think the change is going to be gradual over 20 years. Within five years I think you'll see some companies pitching the idea of self-driving pods instead of light rail systems for local transport. Something like the Heathrow T5 pods but able to detect pedestrians in the way and stop. These would still require the roadway upgrades you need when you install a tramway, but would offer a more personalized service, better demand management and lower costs (no drivers, power delivery rails etc). The tech for this would not even be hard or expensive (basically just follow a line, obey automated signals, and stop if anything goes wrong), and weirdly, people already accept that if you get hit by a tram in a tramway it is probably your fault not the trams.
As the sensor and processing tech becomes cheaper you'll then see these pods start to venture off the tramways onto well formed residential roads, and you'll also see the need for roadway modifications reduce. Eventually we will get to the point where the things can run on standard roads, under all weather conditions, in dense traffic; but it's the old 80/20 rule, and I don't think that level of automation will be cost effective against a lower level of automation for perhaps a decade or more.
Interestingly, I think highway driving is going to be an area that happens later. At 20mph/32kph which is a typical urban speed for a vehicle, the actual stopping distance is less than 6 metres on dry tarmac. That is very short. If the image processing computer crashes, you just need a watch dog to emergency brake the vehicle. If the sensor can't figure out something, you just brake the vehicle. Compare that with simply getting the reliability level for the autonomous system high enough to ensure a software/hardware fault doesn't swerve the car into a median barrier at 100mph. We can certainly get there, but it isn't going to be cheap for a while yet.
Dropbox, like all these unicorns don't make their real money from selling an actual product or service. They make money by selling ownership of the future income stream they say will be produced by those services. The idea is to be able to front load the next 25 years of stratospheric projected earnings into today's share price. Then the initial investors can cash out and leave all the retail investors to sit around for 25 years wondering if they will ever get their money back.
If you realize this is the basic goal of the corporation while the initial investors are still involved, then you will see why they need to stack the place full of sales people and hype merchants.
So, I'm disappointed that Elon announced the "instant Mars demo" immediately after last month's at-sea landing. Yes, for Elon SpaceX has always been about Mars. But now is the time for SpaceX to focus on making a profit and having a rapid cadence. If Elon does that, he will have lots of $$$ and recovered boosters for Mars projects.
Perhaps, but the reality is that Elon did not design these rockets himself. What he did was convince the best minds in rocketry to move to a startup company with fewer resources than the companies they were leaving, longer work hours, and greater job insecurity. His ability to create a vision and convince people to buy into it is his real strength (as was Jobs etc) and that is what he knows best. Talent isn't easily attracted by 'we will ramp up production to xxx units per year'. It is attracted by 'we will change the world...' etc etc.
Having said that, you are right that at some point Elon needs to deliver in quantity, both with SpaceX and Tesla. The reality is that changing the world normally requires a lot of boring grunt work and it will be interesting to see if he is a good enough business manager to pull this off. Worryingly, this lack of pragmatism is what sunk Jobs before his second coming. He got carried away with the vision on things like Lisa and this got in the way of making a commercially viable product. One just hopes that Musk's reality distortion field has not developed to a level where it engulfs the host yet.
It's also not even that useful for those at the top. The post war years showed that when you have an economic system where people go to work every day to add to the pool of assets in a society, rather than fight each other over the assets that exist, everyone can literally live like a king. By shifting away from this productive economy to one where the most lucrative jobs are in trading assets between each other in a giant casino, even the rich miss out on things like new products and services, medical advances, and basic research that could have been produced instead.
Just look at the crazy property bubbles all around the west. Even the rich are not benefiting (except those playing the game) as the prices have gone up. They now just pay much more of their incomes for the same dilapidated housing that they thought was rubbish before (it is still rubbish). This is not real wealth, and until people realise that, the problem won't get better.
Slashdot Mirror
He hasn't finished the first master plan yet.
This is crazy! Everyone knows that the iPhone screen replacement industry employs thousands of workers throughout the world. Corning makes more glass because of it. Apple sells more new iPhones. Nowhere in this story do I see anyone defending the rights of the workers who fix broken glass.
If Corning really cared about the lowly worker, they would make glass that broke even easier. This could create thousands of new jobs and return the West to the worker utopia that it once was!
Maybe, although that is probably the best case scenario. The main problem is Erdogan is rapidly making enemies (remember he only had a slight majority in the elections) and the more 'conspirators' he locks up, the more enemies he will make. Saudi has the advantage that it essentially keeps its population under control by giving them all lots of money. The motivation to do something about a regime that is giving you a lavish and comfortable life is much lower than to do something about one that is locking up your family members.
Very very sadly (I love the country, Istanbul is probably my favorite city in Europe) I think this will end in a wider civil war. There is already a civil war in the east that Erdogan restarted with the Kurds, and I fear it will break out into a wider conflict now. You'll first see more insurgent action, but I think Erdogan will eventually start outright attacking his own towns and cities as his enemies pile up and become more resolved. Inevitably this opposition will end up looking across the Syrian border for support, and before you know it ISIS fascism has appeared in the country, the West is halfheartedly propping up an increasingly repressive Erdogan , and the whole place has fallen to pieces. That's basically what happened in Syria, and it really is the saddest thing for what was, until recently, a relatively moderate country full of amazing people and culture.
The economy has been growing quite steadily over this period, including since 2008. If that new wealth was divided up among American workers in the same way it was in the 1980s, then millennials would be better of than previous generations.
So the problem is not that we need a disruptive source of economic opportunity, it is that the existing disruptive sources of economic opportunity are generating wealth that is simply accumulating among current holders of wealth, to the exclusion of new workers.
Incidentally, such an in-equal wealth distribution could not - by definition - occur if the USA was the socialist country you seem to think it is.
I think that is probably right. I would be scared if I was those companies though. My observations from having to deal with the UK immigration system during her tenure as home secretary, is that she is a populist who will blindly acquiesce to public opinion in order to score points. I don't think she is someone who will try to shape public opinion around her own vision. In a way, this is probably why she is the perfect Brexit prime minister for the conservatives, but it is not really leadership, and shaping Britain according to the braying of the tabloid press might keep her in power, but isn't going to lead the country to a good place.
Will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Boris Johnson is the best bit
In New Zealand, the former prime minister Helen Clark did a similar thing to the leader of a fringe coalition partner (NZ uses MMP, so small parties frequently hold the balance of power). The guy, Winston Peters, was a known charismatic trouble maker (sound familiar?) and rose to power mostly by blaming immigrants for stealing jobs. So she made him foreign minister. It completely shut him down, as he was out of the country most of the time, had to put on a serious face so he didn't become the laughing stock of the world, and was hobbled in his ability to portray people from other countries as troublesome. It was an incredibly successful strategy, and he ended up doing an okay job of it.
However I wouldn't read so much into it being an attempt to destroy Boris. The foreign minister is largely a PR role, which Boris will be quite good at once he has apologized to everyone, and I think he has enough political nous to ensure nothing serious around Brexit can be pinned on him.
Leadsom and Davis on the other hand, have found themselves holding the poison chalice.
Yes, the Boris appointment was very interesting.
Personally, I find it all a little too convenient. It may very well have just been chance, but I wonder if Boris and Gove set up their 'stabbing in the back' thing as a way for Boris to exit from a situation he could not win from. Before his good friend Gove did this, Boris was basically trapped and would have had to follow through with brexit and all the ridiculous promises he made. He would basically have had to upset both the brexiters (by not being able to deliver on all the promises he made) and remainers (who see him as an unprincipled opportunist). He could have ended as the most hated prime minister in history, without anyone else to blame since he was the face of the brexit campaign.
If you consider his position, then what Gove did was actually an incredibly effective way for Boris to escape the trap. Gove spent his public image (which is off little value to him), and Boris got to preserve his by crawling off with hurt feelings, gaining some sympathy from the public instead of its scorn, and not having to deal with being labelled a quitter.
This would also explain a plot hole that didn't make sense to me before, around why Boris didn't just remain in the leadership race despite Gove joining. In the end all Gove had was claims that Boris wouldn't be a good leader. A seasoned politician like Boris could have easily run a PR campaign back that he would be a good leader, and discredit Gove (after all Gove had just stabbed him in the back). So why did he decide he suddenly had no chance of winning?
I suspect from this appointment that May was involved as well, and was promised the premiership at least until the next election. My prediction is Gove will do his 'penance' and then come back to the cabinet in a few months time, and Boris will start figuring out how to engineer a comeback as the 'hero of brexit' once May has done all the dirty work for him.
About 10% seem to really know their shit, the rest are faking it, spending most of the time copying and pasting non-working code and then letting other people fix it. Some of them ask embarrassingly ignorant questions that expose them as completely unqualified, but because of the bargain-basement rates they work for, no one seems to give a shit.
Outside top-tier firms, this statement could easily apply to the bulk of developers from western countries as well.
No need to do that. If I was the regulator I would just keep issuing the same statement in response to these multimillionaire CEOs - 'so you're saying you're not as good a business person as Page or Zuckerberg, so you want us to see if we can help you out?'.
Nobody is stopping these highly successful alpha business people from using their vast consumer relationships and network access to start their own youtube or whatever. The only thing stopping them is that they are not good enough at business. Perhaps if that message is shoved in their faces enough their shareholders will start demanding CEOs with entrepreneurial nous instead of the current crop of highly paid whinger.
What does payback even mean when bond rates are almost zero, and even negative in some countries? You could pay people with shovels to level every hill and valley between the two cities, and provided cars saved a non-zero amount of petrol over the journey it would be an economical investment.
I'm not saying this hyperloop thing is the best thing to do, but right now any sort of infrastructure investment is better than having hordes of unemployed Europeans sitting around twiddling their thumbs because everyone in Northern Europe is fixated on collecting surpluses of fiat currency.
The other possibility is that she also was played. You see this regularly in the property developer market - banks need someone charismatic to lend money too (which creates profit for them), but who is stupid/egoist enough to not wonder why this friendly bank guy is giving them all this money. The banks charm them into securing whatever earthly possessions they and their grandma have against these loans, and ensure the bank is first tier lender. While things are booming this money feeding machine makes the banks huge profits. When the bubble pops, the banks quickly liquidate the guy, recover their part of the loans, and leave the second tier lenders and bankrupted developer to wear the losses.
If she didn't setup a private trust and move a few million into it when she was a billionaire, then she really does seem like the sort of gullible charismatic puppet bubble investors look for.
Well said. Same happens in New Zealand. There is a startup incubator in Auckland that goes on endlessly about picking winners. This allows them to suck up vast amounts of government money earmarked for startups to feed into its staff salaries and fancy offices. Rather annoying for people with actual startups who have to compete with their vast PR machine for any seed money.
Problem is, most genuine startup founders are busy trying to get a real product out to customers that works. In my experience in both startups and large companies, this aspect of a company (actually making a working product) is mostly over looked. People just assume that if you 'go to China' or 'hire some consultants' the actual product will magic itself together. You can see this everyday on Kickstarter where a whole bunch of great ideas people discover making stuff with a reject rate that doesn't sink your company is no simple matter.
Over 20 years being in this game though, I've noticed an interesting trend - you don't really need investor money anymore, at least to get to the point of putting a working product in a customer's hand. Capital costs on things like hardware are lower then ever, and if your founders are technical and prepared to put in some sweat equity, you can get a long way before you even need to put money down. This has fashionably been called 'lean startups' but it is basically the way Apple/Google/MS/FB/HP etc all started.
Once you have cashflow/customers, you can get the attention of investors and cut through all the hype-merchants much easier.
The other problem they have is that the old show hasn't stopped. It has simply moved to a new channel where it will get an even bigger budget.
Unless Clarkson and co really stuff up, it is hard to see how their *new* show won't be at least as popular as their old gig. With Amazon's budget, a break, a license to try some fresh stuff, and in some ways even, a 'don't care, nothing to prove' attitude, they will probably be pretty successful at keeping the franchise alive with its previous viewers. Whether they can broaden that base to the US market is another question, and probably the bigger challenge.
Personally I'm happy Evans has gone. I hadn't heard of him before the show was announced, but he just came across as a wannabee Clarkson with an extremely irritating voice (seriously, I would never have believed his job was in radio if I hadn't read it myself). Perhaps he does have an interesting personality, but I didn't see it on the show. Matt Leblanc seems to have been an inspired choice though. It will be interesting to see whether he gets the show traction in the US.
The cost of brown field site development is one issue, but not really the major one. My wife has worked on a number of building refurbishments (they are extremely common in London), and they are not that difficult, expensive, or slow to complete vs new builds. Indeed, the cost of land is so high in London now, that it shouldn't make a difference anyway. Provided the cost of cleaning up the brownfield site is less than the greenfield equivalent value, the development still makes economic sense.
Rather, the main problem is that there is virtually no cost to just sitting on land in the UK. Property rates are incredibly low, and there is no land tax. For many properties now, rent would barely cover depreciation and management fees, so it is simpler to just leave the property empty. Similarly, why go to all the risk of building housing on an empty site when this makes you maybe 1/10 of the money you are making from annual capital gains. Doing actual construction has much more risk than doing nothing, and the returns are unlikely to be worth having to deal with contractors and suppliers.
Just visit the ghost streets of the west end, or Stratford (which 3 years on from the olympics is still releasing housing at a glacial pace) to see how this all works.
The London market is fundamentally being squeezed by land banking. The way to fix it would be with a tax on the unimproved value of land, with the proceeds used to build social housing, but the trouble the govt has now is that enough middle class people are tangled up in potential negative equity situations that they cannot let the bubble collapse.
My pick is a sterling crisis, and the BoE being forced to raise rates to defend the currency. This will wipe out all the middle class hanger-ons, clearing the way for a democratic re-adjustment of the land usage system.
This is slightly off topic, but does anyone else find it weird that we are on the cusp of all these radical new technology breakthroughs, yet we can no longer build enough new houses each year to keep up with population growth?
Imagine telling someone in the 1960s, when houses and transport infrastructure were being developed at record pace, that in the future we would indeed have the wrist watch phones and flying cars, but a high income family wouldn't be able to afford a rundown victorian era worker's cottage within an hour's commute of their job.
Something has gone very wrong with our economy if it is delivery these sorts of toys, yet basic needs go begging.
This is going to sound controversial, but I think we are at the point where we would be best to let these mega-corps go crazy disrupting industries and livelihoods en-mass. Big money has won, and workers are just fighting a rear guard action attempting to slow down the destruction of the middle class.
The reality though, is that none of this can sustain itself inside a democracy. Once enough of the middle class realize that even modest dreams (a home, stable income, time to pursue their own interest) are no longer attainable, there will be a political backlash. In my view, if that moment comes sooner, the backlash might be someone progressive, modifying the rules of capitalism to bring some sensibleness back to the setup. If the process is left too late, anger will build and I fear the backlash will be a coin-toss as to whether it is better or worse than what we have now.
Free-marketers like Uber just cannot see that there is a bigger 'free market' than the economic system. It is called the will of the masses, and even without democracy, it has proven to be quite capable of disrupting the rules when its interests are not met.
Mobile angular web apps might become usable now.
Supersonic air transport had its ascendancy in the 1970s because oil was cheap and plentiful, and the high bypass turbo fan had not been developed. Propulsive efficiency of a turbojet reaches its peak into the supersonic range, so Concorde wasn't as much of a gas-guzzler compared to something like a 707 as it would be now against modern jets. Factor in better aircraft/crew utilization and the thing could have been quite economical, particularly for business class travel.
Of course the sonic boom problem killed the viability even if the 747 hadn't come along so soon after. There were a lot of improvements they were planning for Concorde 2 that could have kept it in the running for quite a while on particular routes if this had not been the case.
If you have an airplane safety budget, would you rather spend it on preventative safety measures, or speeding up the location of the very small number of planes that crash and aren't found quickly? Other than a few notable exceptions (AF447, MH370 being the main ones) we generally find planes within an adequate amount of time, especially considering that it typically takes months to conclusively determine the cause of an incident and make recommendations that might improve safety.
This plane has probably been found already with divers and black box pinger locators en-route. The real issue for us is that the authorities are more concerned about figuring out what happened then keeping the 24 hr news monster updated.
The only time I hear about twitter it is when a media outlet writes a story about someone, usually someone else who works in the media, tweeting something that they think is important. From this I conclude that twitter is just a bunch of media and PR people sending messages between themselves so they can report those messages as 'news' to the general public when there is nothing else going on in the world.
Jack Welch only did this for management staff. I think most people who have had to deal with idiot managers stuck at the level of their incompetence (the Peter Principle) and clogging up the system for everyone under them, won't find this such a terrible idea. However, it also only really worked for GE because it was an exceptional company, so the bottom 10% of managers there were still in the upper levels of management experience/ability in general. I have heard (from someone who used a recruiter who worked with Welch) that they didn't even need to fire the bottom managers. They just passed their details along to the headhunters circling the company and those people had a new job within a week.
It sounds like your manager was like those little Steve Jobs' that populate the tech industry and believe they can have world class design on third world budgets.
I think the change is going to be gradual over 20 years. Within five years I think you'll see some companies pitching the idea of self-driving pods instead of light rail systems for local transport. Something like the Heathrow T5 pods but able to detect pedestrians in the way and stop. These would still require the roadway upgrades you need when you install a tramway, but would offer a more personalized service, better demand management and lower costs (no drivers, power delivery rails etc). The tech for this would not even be hard or expensive (basically just follow a line, obey automated signals, and stop if anything goes wrong), and weirdly, people already accept that if you get hit by a tram in a tramway it is probably your fault not the trams.
As the sensor and processing tech becomes cheaper you'll then see these pods start to venture off the tramways onto well formed residential roads, and you'll also see the need for roadway modifications reduce. Eventually we will get to the point where the things can run on standard roads, under all weather conditions, in dense traffic; but it's the old 80/20 rule, and I don't think that level of automation will be cost effective against a lower level of automation for perhaps a decade or more.
Interestingly, I think highway driving is going to be an area that happens later. At 20mph/32kph which is a typical urban speed for a vehicle, the actual stopping distance is less than 6 metres on dry tarmac. That is very short. If the image processing computer crashes, you just need a watch dog to emergency brake the vehicle. If the sensor can't figure out something, you just brake the vehicle. Compare that with simply getting the reliability level for the autonomous system high enough to ensure a software/hardware fault doesn't swerve the car into a median barrier at 100mph. We can certainly get there, but it isn't going to be cheap for a while yet.
Dropbox, like all these unicorns don't make their real money from selling an actual product or service. They make money by selling ownership of the future income stream they say will be produced by those services. The idea is to be able to front load the next 25 years of stratospheric projected earnings into today's share price. Then the initial investors can cash out and leave all the retail investors to sit around for 25 years wondering if they will ever get their money back.
If you realize this is the basic goal of the corporation while the initial investors are still involved, then you will see why they need to stack the place full of sales people and hype merchants.
So, I'm disappointed that Elon announced the "instant Mars demo" immediately after last month's at-sea landing. Yes, for Elon SpaceX has always been about Mars. But now is the time for SpaceX to focus on making a profit and having a rapid cadence. If Elon does that, he will have lots of $$$ and recovered boosters for Mars projects.
Perhaps, but the reality is that Elon did not design these rockets himself. What he did was convince the best minds in rocketry to move to a startup company with fewer resources than the companies they were leaving, longer work hours, and greater job insecurity. His ability to create a vision and convince people to buy into it is his real strength (as was Jobs etc) and that is what he knows best. Talent isn't easily attracted by 'we will ramp up production to xxx units per year'. It is attracted by 'we will change the world...' etc etc.
Having said that, you are right that at some point Elon needs to deliver in quantity, both with SpaceX and Tesla. The reality is that changing the world normally requires a lot of boring grunt work and it will be interesting to see if he is a good enough business manager to pull this off. Worryingly, this lack of pragmatism is what sunk Jobs before his second coming. He got carried away with the vision on things like Lisa and this got in the way of making a commercially viable product. One just hopes that Musk's reality distortion field has not developed to a level where it engulfs the host yet.
It's also not even that useful for those at the top. The post war years showed that when you have an economic system where people go to work every day to add to the pool of assets in a society, rather than fight each other over the assets that exist, everyone can literally live like a king. By shifting away from this productive economy to one where the most lucrative jobs are in trading assets between each other in a giant casino, even the rich miss out on things like new products and services, medical advances, and basic research that could have been produced instead.
Just look at the crazy property bubbles all around the west. Even the rich are not benefiting (except those playing the game) as the prices have gone up. They now just pay much more of their incomes for the same dilapidated housing that they thought was rubbish before (it is still rubbish). This is not real wealth, and until people realise that, the problem won't get better.