Luke tried to emulate them but made the same mistakes, resulting in Kylo Ren. Then he meets Rey and sees that she doesn't fear the dark side, to her it's all just the Force and a part of her. Luke realizes that the Jedi order was the problem, as does Yoda, and that Rey and Kylo Ren are the future, free from all that baggage and liberated to do the right thing.
The new trilogy has so far mirrored the first one to an extent, but this is where it really diverges. Rey isn't descended from some great bloodline, Kylo Ren isn't a Sith. Ren killed his master not to save someone he cared about, for his own personal gain. The resolution won't be the return of the Jedi, it will be the end of the Jedi and something new taking their place and starting with Rey.
Did you only watch the movie halfway or something?
Is Kylo Ren a Sith? Well he's not a "formal" Sith, but his biggest idol is a Sith lord (Darth Vader), and then he kills Snoke in order to take control of the new Evil Empire. So he definitely chose the Dark Side. At the end of TLJ, there is no dark/light mixture or dichotomy left in Ren, he is fully Dark Side. And unlike Anakin/Vader who killed his Sith master to redeem himself and destroy the Sith, Ren pulls a classic Stih maneouver - he kills his master so HE can become the master. The internal conflict within Ren that we see from the beginning of TFA is conclusively resolved in favour of the Dark Side.
Rey? No, she is not coming from some great bloodline - but similarly, neither was Anakin/Vader, so that's not something entirely new. Rey gets tempted by the Dark Side, but rather than running from it, confronts it, and then realizes it's not for her. Any internal conflict she has is by the end of the movie resolved in favour of the Light Side. End of the Jedi? Well, Luke quite clearly states at the end of the movie that the Jedi will continue (I forget the exact quote) and it's obvious he is thinking of Rey as a (future, at least) Jedi. The difference between Rey and the Jedi of old is that she has not gone through formal training and had her mind imprinted with the old Jedi teachings and books, she will be a new, touchy-feely-gut-and-pure-internal-goodness-based Jedi. Luke tried to replicate the old Jedi order and failed (why he would attempt to do so is very poorly motivated, knowing his own family history and that of the Galaxy; AFAIK there are some exp. univ. books where Luke decides not to re-establish the order due to its past faults, which makes a lot more sense - but here we just come back to the fact that the whole story in TLJ is poorly written and poorly motivated), now Rey will "reboot" the Jedi order based on her intuition rather than ancient wisdom. Well, maybe, we actually have no idea what happens next since they just make it up as they go along and give each movie to different writers and directors...
The Phantom Menace was a slow and boring movie with an overall story that barely held together. It was the least offensive movie of the prequels, but certainly was the most boring.
The Last Jedi was an objectively terrible movie with a bad story that was internally inconsistent and utterly incongruous. Truly, TLJ has absolutely no redeeming qualities.
You may be correct, but there could be another factor... Solo is unlike the rest of the Star Wars movies because it's not about magical force-wielding Jedi/Sith. Solo's characters are more "average" people than most Star Wars movies. Rogue One is the closest to Solo in terms of Force-wielding characters and Jedi vs Sith plot lines, but Rogue One characters clearly had latent/untrained Force powers, and they fought against chief evil Sith Lord Vader. Anyway, the lack Jedi/Sith and Force powers might be hard for the masses to get into or at least hard to get into as summer action blockbuster sort of movie.
This is a good point, and has occurred to me as well. You are probably right that this is a factor too.
However, from my point of view, this is maybe the movie's main strength...lack of Jedi/Force crap (crap because of the way they ruined it and made a total farce of it in TLJ) is refreshing. It's a big galaxy, most people don't have Force powers, seeing what else is going on besides the Jedi stuff is interesting. Besides, if we look at the original SW (ANH), the Force is there but is not the overwhelming part of the narrative...it builds up to be more important in the sequels (which is OK because it was a new concept, and kept mostly mysterious, so it doesn't bore you in the end) until it becomes the centrepoint of the story almost. However the prequel and seqel trilogies are all Force, Force, Force, Light, Dark, Light, Dark - it gets a bit old. I also think Solo worked out well because the characters were not burdened by the whole Dark Side/Light Side dichotomy. They could be "good guys" in one scene and "bad guys" in the next without this being some world-shattering event that alters the balance of the Universe.
This was of course a movie made for streaming. It's almost the definition of not worth a movie theater trip.
I disagree. Actually, I think that "Solo" is by far the best of the Disney Star Wars movies. I think the problem is that The Last Jedi was the worst Star Wars movie ever (yes, worse than Episode I) and that pissed people off. They will watch Episode IX since they wan't to know how the story will end, but they won't bother with an "anthology" movie outside of the main storyline since they don't feel like they are missing anything important.
The one time I was in an Uber, the driver was downright scary and incompetent. With a real cab, I have a plate number I can file a complaint against.
You have to realize that people's experience will vary a lot by locale.
In the city where I currently live, Uber does not operate, but there exists a local Uber clone (seriously, the app is almost identical...). Unlike Uber however, they have found a way to operate legally from the beginning. Looking through the laws on the books, they realized they could register as a car-hire (limo-driver-hire) service without being a taxi...but with the app, essentially operate like a taxi. The taxi drivers are furious of course, however so far the authorities haven't found anything illegal in the venture (which might change since the taxi drivers are lobbying hard to have the laws changed and the "loopholes" closed).
Now the comparison: the number of taxi drivers is fixed. Getting a license usually requires some kind of bribery...the city sets the maximum price, so theoretically anyone can offer a lower one...but this is very rare as the taxi associations have a cartel-like agreement not to undercut each other. Most of the taxi associations are run by people who are essentially mobsters. The taxi profession has some unmerited tax breaks...dishonest taxi drivers that pray on tourists by charging double, triple, even 10 times the allowed maximum rate operate with impunity. Most taxi drivers are rude, they are careless drivers, and some of them are down-right scary folks when you see them. The population of the city almost universally loathes them. A lot of them drive cars that shouldn't really be on the road, yet "somehow" they pass inspection. Every time a government tries to get them in line a bit, they protest and block the city traffic during rush hour with their cars. Oh, and they always bitch if you don't have exact change (paying by card is available in only a very small number of vehicles).
On the other hand, all the drivers of the Uber-like app that I've met are nice, cultured, friendly normal people who seem to care about doing their job...and drive properly with care. Cars are usually in better condition....and the prices are 20-40% less than with the taxis. You can pay by credit card, so you don't care about change...everybody who has used the app almost universally comments "what a refreshing change! Nice drivers!" and so on.
The island of Papua, also known as New Guinea, is divided into two. The eastern half of the island, along with surrounding islands, was mostly a German colony (called German New Guinea, and it has left behind interesting placenames, such as the Bismarck sea), with parts claimed by the British. After 1918, the British claim was combined with the former German colony to create a League of Nations mandate governed by Australia. In 1949 this mandate became a United Nations Trust Territory administred by Australia. In 1975 this territorry became independent as the "Independent State of Papua New Guinea", abbreviated to PNG.
The western half of the island was a Dutch colony (and never administred by Australia), just like Indonesia was. Indonesia became independent in 1949, but West Papua remained a Dutch colony. Indonesia claimed West Papua as its own, and was quite aggressive in attempting to kick the Dutch out and acquire it. In 1960s, the Dutch started preparing to grant West Papua independence, but under threat of Indonesian invasion, handed West Papua over to a UN transitional administration - which then handed it over to Indonesia in 1963, when Indonesian troops occupied the western part of the island. In 1969, there was supposed to be a referendum on whether West Papua wanted to be part of Indonesia or not, but the Indonesian essentially faked it, and just annexed the territory outright. Since then there has been an armed conflict of low intensity between the Indonesian government and some groups in West Papua who want independece or unification with PNG. That part you got right...but that's not happening in PNG, but in West Papua.
The problem is the anti-smokers don't want a compromise with the vaping. They want a FULL STOP or the right to punch smokers in the face for their habits. It's today's us vs. them.
I always thought it was the tobacco companies really pushing the vaping bans behind the scenes. Initially, in most places, vapes weren't regulated at all, so you could vape in all the places that smoking was banned in. My guess was that the cigarette manufacturers freaked out that tons of people would switch to vaping just for the convenience, so they lobbied to have vaping treated legally exactly like smoking, in order to create a level playing field (in which the tobacco giants, as the established players, would naturally have the advantage).
Tesla seems to take all the fun out of performance. It used to be able oil and gas and the small of exhaust coming out of two dual 2.5" exhaust pipes with a sound that made an indication of how fast it was. Now it's just a really quick golf cart.
Chacun à son goût.
These things you call "fun" are to me noise and air pollution. I love the fact that performance electric cars are fast and quiet. I look forward to a day when all cars emit no exhaust and almost no sound.
Sure it is. Just tell your boss that you want as much vacation as a European, and also want to be paid as much as a European. He will be happy to oblige.
Which European? You really think that vacation time is the main factor between the difference in wages between the US and different European countries?
The Swiss make more on average per year than Americans (in PPP dollars the figure is almost the same, however I think after-tax wages are larger in Switzerland, it's a very low-tax country), yet they have European-style vacation time. The minimum vacation time in Switzerland is 4 weeks per year (many workplaces offer 5). In addition, Swiss males up to age 34 must spend 3 weeks per year doing military service (longer if they are substituing civil service for it). So, a large part of the Swiss population spends something like ~1.5-2 months per year off of work, yet they still make more money than Americans.
FaceTime and WhatsApp are easier to connect, as they only require the phone number.
Skype is stagnating or falling in terms of user-base because of smartphone chat & VoIP (including video call) apps like WhatsApp, Viber, FaceTime, Telegram, etc.
I used to use Skype a lot, then once I got a smartphone and most of my contacts got on Viber I just stopped using it frequently. Whereas before I used Skype pretty much every day, now I use it maybe a couple of times per month...sometimes months go buy without using it. It wasn't a conscious decision, it happened spontaneously. The smartphone apps are tied to what you normally use for talking to people - a phone. It's always with you...if you have someone's phone number, you can see immediately whether they use the same app as you do...there are video calls as well, and on top of that most of these apps have a desktop version so you can use them while at your computer. On the other hand, Skype for Android has always felt pretty bloated, my phone would always appear to slow down, it took a while to load, and it doesn't seem like something you want to keep on in the background for instant messaging.
Interesting defining the "real" problem in terms of people rather than in terms of amounts.
If 10000 people avoid paying $1000 is that a real problem compared to 18000000 avoiding paying $1?
The whole Cayman Islands thing is a complete red herring. The rich don't pay taxes not because their funds are stashed in some Cayman fund, that applies to maybe a handful of people only. They simply use the tax laws to their advantage locking up their money in assets which they depreciate in exchange for tax cuts among many other rules. You can avoid paying tax quite happily within Australia.
It's also a matter of enforcement. Say everyone in the country is avoid paying $1-2 of taxes. That adds up to a lot. However, can you enforce it? Without some Orwellian scheme, I mean. Now assume a few thousand people are avoiding paying a few tens/hundreds of thousands (and maybe millions) of tax? Easier to enforce, as you are chasing less people, and the payoff will be bigger, since each person caught nets a bigger amount.
Is offshoring limited to "maybe a handful of people only"? I doubt, since estimates say that up to 10% of global wealth is stashed offshore. That doesn't seem like just a handful.
Of course the other things you mention are important. The rich can game the system and legally avoid paying tax, while the average bloke on the street can essentially only evade taxes illegally - and be punished for it when caught.
If you're already engaging in an illegal transaction, money laundering, etc... why would you let the fact that paying over $10K in cash is illegal stop you?
Not only that, I actually fail to see how this measure solves anything.
The people who are the *real* problem when comes to tax evasion and tax avoidance - the super-rich who keep their money in offshore tax havens and the global mega-corporations doing double dutch sandwiches and whatever - don't do cash transactions over $10K. They have their lawyers wire the money from the Cayman Islands to Macau, or whatever.
Ordinary folks that pay the car mechanic or the painter in cash to avoid paying taxes don't pay over $10K in those transactions, that's usually a few hundred or a few thousand dollars.
So this might only catch criminals that seek to buy things at a legitimate establishment, say a drug dealer who goes into a department store or a car dealership. Probably not a very large demographics.
In the end, all Chinese tech companies are going to have a fully Chinese-sourced technology "stack" for all of their products, so that they can sell to whomever they please without worrying about the US government.
Maybe. People always talk like this stuff is cost free. It's not an inevitable conclusion.
It would've happened anyway eventually as that is openly China's strategy (see e.g. the "Made in China 2025" plan). Stuff like this just accelerates those plans.
China never wanted to perpetually be a source of cheap labour for Western companies. From the get-go, the idea was to eventually be able to make everything independently, and to use Western outsourcing to learn.
What this will do is motivate Chinese companies to accelerate their shift away from the use of any kind of American IP, services, or subsystems.
In the end, all Chinese tech companies are going to have a fully Chinese-sourced technology "stack" for all of their products, so that they can sell to whomever they please without worrying about the US government.
As soon as there is no longer an oversupply of labour, employers will get much nicer. Basic law of market economy.
Or that might get them to accelerate their investment into replacing human labour with machine labour. Especially if they want to compete globally with companies based in countries with cheaper labour. Or they might outsource production to a cheap labour country. Or... there are many possible outcomes, the one you list is just one possible of many. It's been seen before.
The one thing no one has mentioned is that there is a way to reduce the cost of labour in advanced Western countries without cutting people's net earnings: drastically cut income taxes. Western tax systems are heavily focused on taxing income from salaries and wages. This makes human labour expensive, and stimulates businesses to think of replacing it. Cut my taxes by say 30% and I'll be willing to work for a lower gross salary - hell, I can probably get a raise in net terms while my employer also saves money.
If that doesnt fully solve the problem, we can go to a shorter work week to distribute remaining work evenly among more people in smaller chunks. There is no need for communist/socialist basic incomes and other crackpot ideas.
I don't see how enforcing a shorter work week (while keeping the same total income I presume, i.e. increasing the hourly wage - otherwise, what is the point exactly?) is less communist/socialist/crackpot than a basic income (which is just a cheaper way to distribute welfare payments to the unemployed, which already exist in most countries).
Either way, you're advocating for intervention in the economy to stop companies doing what you presume they would otherwise do: fire people they don't need anymore.
Question: do you go to a teller to get money or do you go to the ATM? Many people still like to go to the bank. Especially older people. There are already fewer people working in bsnking.
I remember reading somewhere that after the introduction of the ATM, the total number of bank tellers actually went up. Yes, with ATMs, banks now needed less tellers per branch. This however made branches cheaper to operate, so they opened more of them.
The issue is that during an earnings call, you field the analyst questions, not indulge feel good fanboyism.
That's just doing things the way they are usually done, and Musk's MO is to re-evaluate every practice (why do we do this? no, really, why, not "because that's the way it's done"). Musk is certainly not infallible and has a lot of flaws, but in my book, telling "analysts" to go whistle is not one of them. These "analysts" serve no useful purpose and I don't see why any CEO should indulge them with anything...any investor with half a share deserves more of a seat at the table and more of a voice than some "analyst".
Musk may be unable to provide good business leadership through controversial/rough times.
I doubt this to be true, since Musk's companies have already had a lot of rough times (including multiple near-bankruptcies) and have managed to survive. Of course, it's always possible that the next rough ride will kill them, that Musk has run out of luck, become overconfident etc., however experience in leadership in controversial and rough times is one thing he certainly does have.
Musk hates the fact that Tesla is a public company (he said as much when explaining once why SpaceX has not gone public). Tesla went public out of desperation, to get funding at a time it was running out of cash. If Musk had the money to take it back to being private, he probably would. With its large valuation, he's kind of a victim of his own success in that sense.
What we learned is that Musk has not realized that those stockholders are the owners of the company, not him.
And neither are the analysts who are upset and asked the questions we are discussing. Those are short sellers who have a negative interest in TSLA.
Bingo. Why should the CEO of any company (doesn't matter if it's Tesla or Musk) respond to questions fielded by people who are not invested in the company? Or even worse, those who have an interest in seeing the company fail?
In my world, any "respected stock market analyst" would be required, before uttering a word of "analysis" or "advice", to
1) Reveal his entire investment portfolio in detail, so we can see whether his money is where his mouth is. You're telling me to buy a stock but didn't buy it yourself? You're telling me to sell but you yourself hold it? STFU.
2) Show how much of his personal wealth is invested, i.e. how much he is risking by following up on his own advice. Is he just investing a little on the side, or can he actually pretty much bankrupt himself if he is wrong? That'll show you how much he actually believes what he is saying...and whether he is trying to actively decieve people or not.
"Stock market analysts" that make more money "analyzing" and "advising" than they do actually trading stocks are, simply put, bullshitters. When you have, as in this case, short sellers who actively want to make the company look bad so they can profit masquerading as "analysts", that is even worse. Every CEO should tell them to go whistle.
You compare the face with the face in your database of all people that bought a legit ticket. If that doesn't produce a match, you ask for the ticket and ID, and do a manual check.
Matching tickets to names and forcing the buyer / person indicated as attendee at the time of the purchase of the ticket to be the person who uses a ticket is a terrible way to fight scalping.
Can't I buy tickets for a friend as a gift? What if I misspell his name or am unaware of his legal name in his ID (example: lots of East Asian people living in North America adopt English names informally...I know the guy as "John" but his actual name in his passport is "Zhenyu")? Can't I give the ticket to a friend or family number if I am unable to attend? Finally, what's wrong with re-selling the ticket at face value (i.e. without me making any sort of profit) if for some reason I cannot attend (I get sick, have to attend a funeral, whatever)? To prevent a relatively rare occurrence in terms of number of tickets sold (scalping) you're inconveniencing a large number of people. OK, for some events where scalping might be actually or potentially through the roof (I don't know, like, the FIFA World Cup final or whatever), this type of policy may be justified...but for the local concert in your city for which you bought tickets via Ticketmaster? It's overkill.
There are much easier ways to fight scalping other than deploying a massive surveillance system. You'd probably catch and convict a whole bunch of scalpers with less money. Not to mention simple solutions (max. amount of tickets you can buy in a single transaction and/or within a given period of time, etc.).
Whatever the reasons behind this multi million dollar investment are, we can be sure it ISN'T for user convenience.
Clearly. This either has something to do with security, or with cutting labour costs (less people at the gate - the security guard is now the person who also checks the occasional person who needs to show a ticket, instead of having both a ticket inspector and a security guard at each gate), or both.
There is no way this will be faster than with experienced (by which I mean, people who have done more than 2 shows) ticket people at the gates. Turnstiles and automatically opening gates...right. There's a reason why, during rush hour in many subway systems, they open one or two gates wide and put a ticket collector/inspector next to it. It's faster than the automated system.
That 's why you don't have problems with taxing the working class to shift money to investment bankers for purposes other than green energy.
C'mon, if there's one Western country where the financial elites rip off the common man the most, it's gotta be the US. If there's a Western country where the government has been captured the most by big business, it's the US. European governments are a lot more responsive to what their citizens want. Far from perfect, but if you look at the past 20 or so years, much better than the US.
Did any of these people resent having such a narrowly defined job? Imagine, for example, the guy who is allowed to attach the multimeter leads to the actuator, but was not allowed to actually look at the multimeter: does that job make any sense? I dunno, but I expect after a while you just figure it's a cushy job, requiring little effort, and you're glad to go home at the end of the day and drink a beer.
My feeling is that these types of situations arise from bad "compromises" arrived at in negotiations by unions and management. Typically, union members are most concerned about getting higher wages, while on the other hand, employers are typically not willing to make those wages as high as the employees want them. Therefore, to mollify them, employees are offered various other things as "compensation". One of these things is this seggregation of jobs, which ensures a given number of hours for each employee (probably including overtime) and creates some sort of "job security" (until your very narrowly defined task is in the end done by a machine specifically designed to perform this simple, narrowly defined task much more efficiently than you).
Something like this happened at the university where I studied: Teaching Assistants (TAs) went on strike demanding higher pay. They didn't get it (not significantly in any case), but they got other "concessions". First, the number of hours a TA could work per semester was increased (like doubled or something). The only way someone could do that many hours was to not do his graduate research at all that semester (and, with all TAs being graduate students, research was the primary reason they were there - TAing is an optional side activity). Second, every TA who had a certain number of hours one semester was guaranteed by the new contract to get at least the same amount of hours next semester...which, while providing "job security" for existing TAs, had the effect of completely screwing new entrants in the job pool - new graduate students of which there were a couple of hundred every semester. While previously, each one of them could get a TA position easily, now many had to wait until they third or fourth semester to get one...while someone who was lucky to get twice the standard amount of hours one semester when there was a TA shortage now had to be offerred the same amount of hours each subsequent semester.
In the typical "bad compromise", this particular union ended up doing what unions typically do: protect existing employees at the expense of future ones.
Not to mention that TA pay was not even the root cause of the issue - the root cause is that graduate students are not paid enough for their primary activity (research), so they have to resort to TAing to get by. No one wants to increase the minimum funding package though. I did hear of one professor doing it from his own research funds: he didn't want his students to waste time TAing every semester, so he told them he would pay them in total as much as they would earn taking a TA position, on the condition they promised not to take one. Another university where I also did graduate studies solved the problem systemically by employing all PhD students as research assistants at nearly industrial-equivalent salaries - TA duties were rolled into that (about 15% of the total working time of each PhD student). Nobody complained, because they were paid well.
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Luke tried to emulate them but made the same mistakes, resulting in Kylo Ren. Then he meets Rey and sees that she doesn't fear the dark side, to her it's all just the Force and a part of her. Luke realizes that the Jedi order was the problem, as does Yoda, and that Rey and Kylo Ren are the future, free from all that baggage and liberated to do the right thing.
The new trilogy has so far mirrored the first one to an extent, but this is where it really diverges. Rey isn't descended from some great bloodline, Kylo Ren isn't a Sith. Ren killed his master not to save someone he cared about, for his own personal gain. The resolution won't be the return of the Jedi, it will be the end of the Jedi and something new taking their place and starting with Rey.
Did you only watch the movie halfway or something?
Is Kylo Ren a Sith? Well he's not a "formal" Sith, but his biggest idol is a Sith lord (Darth Vader), and then he kills Snoke in order to take control of the new Evil Empire. So he definitely chose the Dark Side. At the end of TLJ, there is no dark/light mixture or dichotomy left in Ren, he is fully Dark Side. And unlike Anakin/Vader who killed his Sith master to redeem himself and destroy the Sith, Ren pulls a classic Stih maneouver - he kills his master so HE can become the master. The internal conflict within Ren that we see from the beginning of TFA is conclusively resolved in favour of the Dark Side.
Rey? No, she is not coming from some great bloodline - but similarly, neither was Anakin/Vader, so that's not something entirely new. Rey gets tempted by the Dark Side, but rather than running from it, confronts it, and then realizes it's not for her. Any internal conflict she has is by the end of the movie resolved in favour of the Light Side. End of the Jedi? Well, Luke quite clearly states at the end of the movie that the Jedi will continue (I forget the exact quote) and it's obvious he is thinking of Rey as a (future, at least) Jedi. The difference between Rey and the Jedi of old is that she has not gone through formal training and had her mind imprinted with the old Jedi teachings and books, she will be a new, touchy-feely-gut-and-pure-internal-goodness-based Jedi. Luke tried to replicate the old Jedi order and failed (why he would attempt to do so is very poorly motivated, knowing his own family history and that of the Galaxy; AFAIK there are some exp. univ. books where Luke decides not to re-establish the order due to its past faults, which makes a lot more sense - but here we just come back to the fact that the whole story in TLJ is poorly written and poorly motivated), now Rey will "reboot" the Jedi order based on her intuition rather than ancient wisdom. Well, maybe, we actually have no idea what happens next since they just make it up as they go along and give each movie to different writers and directors...
The Phantom Menace was a slow and boring movie with an overall story that barely held together. It was the least offensive movie of the prequels, but certainly was the most boring.
The Last Jedi was an objectively terrible movie with a bad story that was internally inconsistent and utterly incongruous. Truly, TLJ has absolutely no redeeming qualities.
Exactly.
You may be correct, but there could be another factor... Solo is unlike the rest of the Star Wars movies because it's not about magical force-wielding Jedi/Sith. Solo's characters are more "average" people than most Star Wars movies. Rogue One is the closest to Solo in terms of Force-wielding characters and Jedi vs Sith plot lines, but Rogue One characters clearly had latent/untrained Force powers, and they fought against chief evil Sith Lord Vader. Anyway, the lack Jedi/Sith and Force powers might be hard for the masses to get into or at least hard to get into as summer action blockbuster sort of movie.
This is a good point, and has occurred to me as well. You are probably right that this is a factor too.
However, from my point of view, this is maybe the movie's main strength...lack of Jedi/Force crap (crap because of the way they ruined it and made a total farce of it in TLJ) is refreshing. It's a big galaxy, most people don't have Force powers, seeing what else is going on besides the Jedi stuff is interesting. Besides, if we look at the original SW (ANH), the Force is there but is not the overwhelming part of the narrative...it builds up to be more important in the sequels (which is OK because it was a new concept, and kept mostly mysterious, so it doesn't bore you in the end) until it becomes the centrepoint of the story almost. However the prequel and seqel trilogies are all Force, Force, Force, Light, Dark, Light, Dark - it gets a bit old. I also think Solo worked out well because the characters were not burdened by the whole Dark Side/Light Side dichotomy. They could be "good guys" in one scene and "bad guys" in the next without this being some world-shattering event that alters the balance of the Universe.
This was of course a movie made for streaming. It's almost the definition of not worth a movie theater trip.
I disagree. Actually, I think that "Solo" is by far the best of the Disney Star Wars movies. I think the problem is that The Last Jedi was the worst Star Wars movie ever (yes, worse than Episode I) and that pissed people off. They will watch Episode IX since they wan't to know how the story will end, but they won't bother with an "anthology" movie outside of the main storyline since they don't feel like they are missing anything important.
The one time I was in an Uber, the driver was downright scary and incompetent. With a real cab, I have a plate number I can file a complaint against.
You have to realize that people's experience will vary a lot by locale.
In the city where I currently live, Uber does not operate, but there exists a local Uber clone (seriously, the app is almost identical...). Unlike Uber however, they have found a way to operate legally from the beginning. Looking through the laws on the books, they realized they could register as a car-hire (limo-driver-hire) service without being a taxi...but with the app, essentially operate like a taxi. The taxi drivers are furious of course, however so far the authorities haven't found anything illegal in the venture (which might change since the taxi drivers are lobbying hard to have the laws changed and the "loopholes" closed).
Now the comparison: the number of taxi drivers is fixed. Getting a license usually requires some kind of bribery...the city sets the maximum price, so theoretically anyone can offer a lower one...but this is very rare as the taxi associations have a cartel-like agreement not to undercut each other. Most of the taxi associations are run by people who are essentially mobsters. The taxi profession has some unmerited tax breaks...dishonest taxi drivers that pray on tourists by charging double, triple, even 10 times the allowed maximum rate operate with impunity. Most taxi drivers are rude, they are careless drivers, and some of them are down-right scary folks when you see them. The population of the city almost universally loathes them. A lot of them drive cars that shouldn't really be on the road, yet "somehow" they pass inspection. Every time a government tries to get them in line a bit, they protest and block the city traffic during rush hour with their cars. Oh, and they always bitch if you don't have exact change (paying by card is available in only a very small number of vehicles).
On the other hand, all the drivers of the Uber-like app that I've met are nice, cultured, friendly normal people who seem to care about doing their job...and drive properly with care. Cars are usually in better condition....and the prices are 20-40% less than with the taxis. You can pay by credit card, so you don't care about change...everybody who has used the app almost universally comments "what a refreshing change! Nice drivers!" and so on.
I'm afraid you've messed things up a bit.
The island of Papua, also known as New Guinea, is divided into two. The eastern half of the island, along with surrounding islands, was mostly a German colony (called German New Guinea, and it has left behind interesting placenames, such as the Bismarck sea), with parts claimed by the British. After 1918, the British claim was combined with the former German colony to create a League of Nations mandate governed by Australia. In 1949 this mandate became a United Nations Trust Territory administred by Australia. In 1975 this territorry became independent as the "Independent State of Papua New Guinea", abbreviated to PNG.
The western half of the island was a Dutch colony (and never administred by Australia), just like Indonesia was. Indonesia became independent in 1949, but West Papua remained a Dutch colony. Indonesia claimed West Papua as its own, and was quite aggressive in attempting to kick the Dutch out and acquire it. In 1960s, the Dutch started preparing to grant West Papua independence, but under threat of Indonesian invasion, handed West Papua over to a UN transitional administration - which then handed it over to Indonesia in 1963, when Indonesian troops occupied the western part of the island. In 1969, there was supposed to be a referendum on whether West Papua wanted to be part of Indonesia or not, but the Indonesian essentially faked it, and just annexed the territory outright. Since then there has been an armed conflict of low intensity between the Indonesian government and some groups in West Papua who want independece or unification with PNG. That part you got right...but that's not happening in PNG, but in West Papua.
The problem is the anti-smokers don't want a compromise with the vaping. They want a FULL STOP or the right to punch smokers in the face for their habits. It's today's us vs. them.
I always thought it was the tobacco companies really pushing the vaping bans behind the scenes. Initially, in most places, vapes weren't regulated at all, so you could vape in all the places that smoking was banned in. My guess was that the cigarette manufacturers freaked out that tons of people would switch to vaping just for the convenience, so they lobbied to have vaping treated legally exactly like smoking, in order to create a level playing field (in which the tobacco giants, as the established players, would naturally have the advantage).
Tesla seems to take all the fun out of performance. It used to be able oil and gas and the small of exhaust coming out of two dual 2.5" exhaust pipes with a sound that made an indication of how fast it was. Now it's just a really quick golf cart.
Chacun à son goût.
These things you call "fun" are to me noise and air pollution. I love the fact that performance electric cars are fast and quiet. I look forward to a day when all cars emit no exhaust and almost no sound.
Sure it is. Just tell your boss that you want as much vacation as a European, and also want to be paid as much as a European. He will be happy to oblige.
Which European? You really think that vacation time is the main factor between the difference in wages between the US and different European countries?
The Swiss make more on average per year than Americans (in PPP dollars the figure is almost the same, however I think after-tax wages are larger in Switzerland, it's a very low-tax country), yet they have European-style vacation time. The minimum vacation time in Switzerland is 4 weeks per year (many workplaces offer 5). In addition, Swiss males up to age 34 must spend 3 weeks per year doing military service (longer if they are substituing civil service for it). So, a large part of the Swiss population spends something like ~1.5-2 months per year off of work, yet they still make more money than Americans.
This is "proper" since most Americans would rather earn more than have more time off.
If you want more time off, then ask your employer. But don't try to force your preferences on me.
Crazy people (in my opionion)
FaceTime and WhatsApp are easier to connect, as they only require the phone number.
Skype is stagnating or falling in terms of user-base because of smartphone chat & VoIP (including video call) apps like WhatsApp, Viber, FaceTime, Telegram, etc.
I used to use Skype a lot, then once I got a smartphone and most of my contacts got on Viber I just stopped using it frequently. Whereas before I used Skype pretty much every day, now I use it maybe a couple of times per month...sometimes months go buy without using it. It wasn't a conscious decision, it happened spontaneously. The smartphone apps are tied to what you normally use for talking to people - a phone. It's always with you...if you have someone's phone number, you can see immediately whether they use the same app as you do...there are video calls as well, and on top of that most of these apps have a desktop version so you can use them while at your computer. On the other hand, Skype for Android has always felt pretty bloated, my phone would always appear to slow down, it took a while to load, and it doesn't seem like something you want to keep on in the background for instant messaging.
Interesting defining the "real" problem in terms of people rather than in terms of amounts.
If 10000 people avoid paying $1000 is that a real problem compared to 18000000 avoiding paying $1?
The whole Cayman Islands thing is a complete red herring. The rich don't pay taxes not because their funds are stashed in some Cayman fund, that applies to maybe a handful of people only. They simply use the tax laws to their advantage locking up their money in assets which they depreciate in exchange for tax cuts among many other rules. You can avoid paying tax quite happily within Australia.
It's also a matter of enforcement. Say everyone in the country is avoid paying $1-2 of taxes. That adds up to a lot. However, can you enforce it? Without some Orwellian scheme, I mean. Now assume a few thousand people are avoiding paying a few tens/hundreds of thousands (and maybe millions) of tax? Easier to enforce, as you are chasing less people, and the payoff will be bigger, since each person caught nets a bigger amount.
Is offshoring limited to "maybe a handful of people only"? I doubt, since estimates say that up to 10% of global wealth is stashed offshore. That doesn't seem like just a handful.
Of course the other things you mention are important. The rich can game the system and legally avoid paying tax, while the average bloke on the street can essentially only evade taxes illegally - and be punished for it when caught.
If you're already engaging in an illegal transaction, money laundering, etc... why would you let the fact that paying over $10K in cash is illegal stop you?
Not only that, I actually fail to see how this measure solves anything.
The people who are the *real* problem when comes to tax evasion and tax avoidance - the super-rich who keep their money in offshore tax havens and the global mega-corporations doing double dutch sandwiches and whatever - don't do cash transactions over $10K. They have their lawyers wire the money from the Cayman Islands to Macau, or whatever.
Ordinary folks that pay the car mechanic or the painter in cash to avoid paying taxes don't pay over $10K in those transactions, that's usually a few hundred or a few thousand dollars.
So this might only catch criminals that seek to buy things at a legitimate establishment, say a drug dealer who goes into a department store or a car dealership. Probably not a very large demographics.
Are those patents actually enforceable in China? What about places China will or might sell to, like Iran, or African countries, or...?
In the end, all Chinese tech companies are going to have a fully Chinese-sourced technology "stack" for all of their products, so that they can sell to whomever they please without worrying about the US government.
Maybe. People always talk like this stuff is cost free. It's not an inevitable conclusion.
It would've happened anyway eventually as that is openly China's strategy (see e.g. the "Made in China 2025" plan). Stuff like this just accelerates those plans.
China never wanted to perpetually be a source of cheap labour for Western companies. From the get-go, the idea was to eventually be able to make everything independently, and to use Western outsourcing to learn.
What this will do is motivate Chinese companies to accelerate their shift away from the use of any kind of American IP, services, or subsystems.
In the end, all Chinese tech companies are going to have a fully Chinese-sourced technology "stack" for all of their products, so that they can sell to whomever they please without worrying about the US government.
As soon as there is no longer an oversupply of labour, employers will get much nicer. Basic law of market economy.
Or that might get them to accelerate their investment into replacing human labour with machine labour. Especially if they want to compete globally with companies based in countries with cheaper labour. Or they might outsource production to a cheap labour country. Or... there are many possible outcomes, the one you list is just one possible of many. It's been seen before.
The one thing no one has mentioned is that there is a way to reduce the cost of labour in advanced Western countries without cutting people's net earnings: drastically cut income taxes. Western tax systems are heavily focused on taxing income from salaries and wages. This makes human labour expensive, and stimulates businesses to think of replacing it. Cut my taxes by say 30% and I'll be willing to work for a lower gross salary - hell, I can probably get a raise in net terms while my employer also saves money.
If that doesnt fully solve the problem, we can go to a shorter work week to distribute remaining work evenly among more people in smaller chunks. There is no need for communist/socialist basic incomes and other crackpot ideas.
I don't see how enforcing a shorter work week (while keeping the same total income I presume, i.e. increasing the hourly wage - otherwise, what is the point exactly?) is less communist/socialist/crackpot than a basic income (which is just a cheaper way to distribute welfare payments to the unemployed, which already exist in most countries).
Either way, you're advocating for intervention in the economy to stop companies doing what you presume they would otherwise do: fire people they don't need anymore.
Question: do you go to a teller to get money or do you go to the ATM? Many people still like to go to the bank. Especially older people. There are already fewer people working in bsnking.
I remember reading somewhere that after the introduction of the ATM, the total number of bank tellers actually went up. Yes, with ATMs, banks now needed less tellers per branch. This however made branches cheaper to operate, so they opened more of them.
The issue is that during an earnings call, you field the analyst questions, not indulge feel good fanboyism.
That's just doing things the way they are usually done, and Musk's MO is to re-evaluate every practice (why do we do this? no, really, why, not "because that's the way it's done"). Musk is certainly not infallible and has a lot of flaws, but in my book, telling "analysts" to go whistle is not one of them. These "analysts" serve no useful purpose and I don't see why any CEO should indulge them with anything...any investor with half a share deserves more of a seat at the table and more of a voice than some "analyst".
Musk may be unable to provide good business leadership through controversial/rough times.
I doubt this to be true, since Musk's companies have already had a lot of rough times (including multiple near-bankruptcies) and have managed to survive. Of course, it's always possible that the next rough ride will kill them, that Musk has run out of luck, become overconfident etc., however experience in leadership in controversial and rough times is one thing he certainly does have.
Musk hates the fact that Tesla is a public company (he said as much when explaining once why SpaceX has not gone public). Tesla went public out of desperation, to get funding at a time it was running out of cash. If Musk had the money to take it back to being private, he probably would. With its large valuation, he's kind of a victim of his own success in that sense.
What we learned is that Musk has not realized that those stockholders are the owners of the company, not him.
And neither are the analysts who are upset and asked the questions we are discussing. Those are short sellers who have a negative interest in TSLA.
Bingo. Why should the CEO of any company (doesn't matter if it's Tesla or Musk) respond to questions fielded by people who are not invested in the company? Or even worse, those who have an interest in seeing the company fail?
In my world, any "respected stock market analyst" would be required, before uttering a word of "analysis" or "advice", to
1) Reveal his entire investment portfolio in detail, so we can see whether his money is where his mouth is. You're telling me to buy a stock but didn't buy it yourself? You're telling me to sell but you yourself hold it? STFU.
2) Show how much of his personal wealth is invested, i.e. how much he is risking by following up on his own advice. Is he just investing a little on the side, or can he actually pretty much bankrupt himself if he is wrong? That'll show you how much he actually believes what he is saying...and whether he is trying to actively decieve people or not.
"Stock market analysts" that make more money "analyzing" and "advising" than they do actually trading stocks are, simply put, bullshitters. When you have, as in this case, short sellers who actively want to make the company look bad so they can profit masquerading as "analysts", that is even worse. Every CEO should tell them to go whistle.
You compare the face with the face in your database of all people that bought a legit ticket. If that doesn't produce a match, you ask for the ticket and ID, and do a manual check.
Matching tickets to names and forcing the buyer / person indicated as attendee at the time of the purchase of the ticket to be the person who uses a ticket is a terrible way to fight scalping.
Can't I buy tickets for a friend as a gift? What if I misspell his name or am unaware of his legal name in his ID (example: lots of East Asian people living in North America adopt English names informally...I know the guy as "John" but his actual name in his passport is "Zhenyu")? Can't I give the ticket to a friend or family number if I am unable to attend? Finally, what's wrong with re-selling the ticket at face value (i.e. without me making any sort of profit) if for some reason I cannot attend (I get sick, have to attend a funeral, whatever)? To prevent a relatively rare occurrence in terms of number of tickets sold (scalping) you're inconveniencing a large number of people. OK, for some events where scalping might be actually or potentially through the roof (I don't know, like, the FIFA World Cup final or whatever), this type of policy may be justified...but for the local concert in your city for which you bought tickets via Ticketmaster? It's overkill.
There are much easier ways to fight scalping other than deploying a massive surveillance system. You'd probably catch and convict a whole bunch of scalpers with less money. Not to mention simple solutions (max. amount of tickets you can buy in a single transaction and/or within a given period of time, etc.).
Whatever the reasons behind this multi million dollar investment are, we can be sure it ISN'T for user convenience.
Clearly. This either has something to do with security, or with cutting labour costs (less people at the gate - the security guard is now the person who also checks the occasional person who needs to show a ticket, instead of having both a ticket inspector and a security guard at each gate), or both.
There is no way this will be faster than with experienced (by which I mean, people who have done more than 2 shows) ticket people at the gates. Turnstiles and automatically opening gates...right. There's a reason why, during rush hour in many subway systems, they open one or two gates wide and put a ticket collector/inspector next to it. It's faster than the automated system.
That 's why you don't have problems with taxing the working class to shift money to investment bankers for purposes other than green energy.
C'mon, if there's one Western country where the financial elites rip off the common man the most, it's gotta be the US. If there's a Western country where the government has been captured the most by big business, it's the US. European governments are a lot more responsive to what their citizens want. Far from perfect, but if you look at the past 20 or so years, much better than the US.
Did any of these people resent having such a narrowly defined job? Imagine, for example, the guy who is allowed to attach the multimeter leads to the actuator, but was not allowed to actually look at the multimeter: does that job make any sense? I dunno, but I expect after a while you just figure it's a cushy job, requiring little effort, and you're glad to go home at the end of the day and drink a beer.
My feeling is that these types of situations arise from bad "compromises" arrived at in negotiations by unions and management. Typically, union members are most concerned about getting higher wages, while on the other hand, employers are typically not willing to make those wages as high as the employees want them. Therefore, to mollify them, employees are offered various other things as "compensation". One of these things is this seggregation of jobs, which ensures a given number of hours for each employee (probably including overtime) and creates some sort of "job security" (until your very narrowly defined task is in the end done by a machine specifically designed to perform this simple, narrowly defined task much more efficiently than you).
Something like this happened at the university where I studied: Teaching Assistants (TAs) went on strike demanding higher pay. They didn't get it (not significantly in any case), but they got other "concessions". First, the number of hours a TA could work per semester was increased (like doubled or something). The only way someone could do that many hours was to not do his graduate research at all that semester (and, with all TAs being graduate students, research was the primary reason they were there - TAing is an optional side activity). Second, every TA who had a certain number of hours one semester was guaranteed by the new contract to get at least the same amount of hours next semester...which, while providing "job security" for existing TAs, had the effect of completely screwing new entrants in the job pool - new graduate students of which there were a couple of hundred every semester. While previously, each one of them could get a TA position easily, now many had to wait until they third or fourth semester to get one...while someone who was lucky to get twice the standard amount of hours one semester when there was a TA shortage now had to be offerred the same amount of hours each subsequent semester.
In the typical "bad compromise", this particular union ended up doing what unions typically do: protect existing employees at the expense of future ones.
Not to mention that TA pay was not even the root cause of the issue - the root cause is that graduate students are not paid enough for their primary activity (research), so they have to resort to TAing to get by. No one wants to increase the minimum funding package though. I did hear of one professor doing it from his own research funds: he didn't want his students to waste time TAing every semester, so he told them he would pay them in total as much as they would earn taking a TA position, on the condition they promised not to take one. Another university where I also did graduate studies solved the problem systemically by employing all PhD students as research assistants at nearly industrial-equivalent salaries - TA duties were rolled into that (about 15% of the total working time of each PhD student). Nobody complained, because they were paid well.