I have been wondering why driving licenses are given to persons with high testosterone level? Why not ban driving if your testosterone level is above certain safe threshold?
This has nothing to do with unsafe driving, it was a guy committing suicide in a way that killed two other people in the process.
If Trump is so opposed to this because he knows that the garbage his followers share on social media that is untrue is going to be caught up in this. For example, a few weeks someone I know from high school, who lives in a small town in a very conservative "red state", posted a link to article claiming that California was registering every illegal immigrant that they could find to vote.
I honestly don't know what the hell is going through these people's heads.
Just look at Trump's thing with the "3 million illegal voters" or whatever it was. It shouldn't take more than 30 seconds of deliberate thought to realize how insanely stupid a conspiracy theory that is.
Just imagine, 3 million illegal voters, that's not a conspiracy, it's a medium sized city. It's just a ridiculous idea that it could be happening.
How many non-college degree holders at those companies are getting the huge six-figure salaries vs $10-15 an hour support roles? And for those lucky enough to get more productive roles, is their pay comparable with their coworkers who have 4 year degrees, or are these companies using this as cost-cutting and just bringing in cheaper people to do the same roles?
I don't know about support roles but I'd think someone with a technical degree (or less) could slip into QA in a manual testing role.
Once you're in QA you're close enough to the technical side that you can start applying your skills, writing scripts to perform more advanced tests, build fuzzing tools, etc. Once you've demonstrated enough skills you can work your way into the development side.
You need to choose the right kind of org for this to work, probably a smaller to mid-sized org where roles and management are flexible enough that you can show some initiative and find the more technical tasks to do. We've had about half our QA folks eventually move to dev this way.
Once you've proven that capability in a professional setting the big orgs might be willing to take a look at you too.
As in who they decide is allowed to buy one? Either you allow all private companies to select who can use their service or you allow none of them to do so.
The baker was asking for the right to discriminate against a specific viewpoint because of their religious beliefs. The question was whether the baker's religious freedom was impinged enough to justify the violation of anti-discrimination laws.
Twitter and Facebook are trying to formula viewpoint neutral policies in order to get rid of toxic content and maintain healthy communities.
It's a tricky issue, but kind of unavoidable, and they're arguably doing it in a way that would be compatible with the US 1st amendment (if they were bound by it).
It's the same general principal as money in politics. You don't actually have to influence the individual for your contribution to further your point of view.
A corporation finds politicians with views naturally aligned to their objectives and helps those politicians get into office.
Similarly, a corporation finds researchers with view naturally aligned to their objectives and helps those researchers get papers into top journals and conferences.
The key is more public funding of science so private donors can't have such a big influence.
Yes, Tesla is priced like a tech company. Or more specifically, it's priced like a growth company. Automakers are like the weather: the best forecast for tomorrow is that it will be the same as today. Sometimes they do better, sometimes the do worse, but people don't generally expect them to make huge changes in their market share.
Tesla is growing rapidly. While traditional auto makers are constrained by sales, as evidenced by factories operating below capacity and massive marketing campaigns, Tesla is constrained by manufacturing, as evidenced by massive reservations and no significant marketing efforts.
That's all true, but that magical growth goes away when they start to become the next GM, so why should they be worth more than GM?
Tesla also has their energy business, which is also constrained by capacity. They've proven the value of utility-scale battery storage in Australia and elsewhere. The potential growth here is huge.
The Tesla solar business is less clear. Personally I think the visual stigma with traditional solar panels has passed as home solar has become more common, so most people who want solar are happy with regular panels.
They bought the solar for $2.5 billion in stock, so it can't be responsible for much of the valuation, as for the batteries maybe there's something there. But now you're pretty much arguing that their stock is due to their viability as an electric company, not a car company.
Outside of historical districts and the like, I'm not sure how large their solar roof market will prove to be once they reach full production.
But back to cars, they're looking at a production rate of 500,000 Model 3s next year. They're also going to be starting production of the Semi and announcing the pickup and Model Y next year. Their growth could easily reach over a million vehicles a year as quickly as they can build the factories, probably two million or more.
And don't ignore their Supercharger network. Tesla is the only option for road trips. Independent charging networks are focusing on the higher-density markets (i.e., California), though that may improve a bit over the next decade, but without support from auto manufacturers, they price charging well above what Tesla charges. In short, most people are happy buying an electric car as a second vehicle, but only consider Tesla if looking for an electric vehicle as their first car.
I don't see any other manufacturer providing serious competition for Tesla in the next five years, which will let them continue to grow rapidly to become a major player in the industry.
The short story seems to boil down to "Elon Musk is lying about Tesla being profitable for Q3 and Q4 this year." If they are profitable, then the story that they're going to run out of cash before being able to expand as described above falls apart.
You still need people to buy those cars. You have a waiting list when you make ~100k vehicles, but not when you make 1 million vehicles. The risk to Tesla isn't that it runs out of money, it's that one or several of Ford, GM, Honda, or Toyota make a really awesome EV and Tesla gets capped at a market share of 1 million.
The bigger risk is the big auto-makers to the above but also agree on an open spec so you can have Mom & Pop charging stations that serve any vehicle and it's incompatible with Telsa's superchargers. If that happens Tesla might be really screwed.
I'm not saying either will happen, but it's a mistake to price Tesla like they're already experiencing the best case scenario.
Has the short interest in Tesla decreased? If so, then shorts have cashed out, having a much better position than a week ago. But I'm not under the impression that the shorts have been exiting. It seems that there is a large contingent that really expects Tesla to outright fail, and they want to ride the stock down to zero.
There is a contingent that deeply wants to see Tesla fail because they view it as part of the environmental movement, and they see the whole movement as a leftist attack on free enterprise and their way of life. A company like Tesla being successful is counter to their worldview, and they desperately want to see electric cars fail. I have no evidence to prove that there's a connection to the Tesla shorts, but I suspect there is. I suppose that's part of the reason I so desperately want to see the shorts get bankrupted.
It's nothing that conspiratorial. Tesla has a bigger market cap than GM. I mean Tesla has a cooler brand, and they're currently dominating the EV market, but GM builds almost 100x as many cars, has about 15x the revenue (not sure how that math works), and has an operating income almost as large as Tesla's total revenue.
Sure Tesla has some serious potential around self driving cars and EV, but so does GM.
The idea that Tesla is worth more is just plain dumb. People are pricing it like an Apple or a Google, but car companies don't get those giant semi-monopolies that generate outrageous profits the way tech companies do. Tesla becoming as big as GM is their potential, but there's a good chance they won't reach that potential.
I don't trade stocks, but I can understand why people would short Tesla, it can't really go any higher and you have to think as some point it's going to go down.
In a nutshell, you are paid based on how hard it would be, and how much it would cost, for the company to replace you.
If your skills are commonplace, and it's easy to find other who will do it for minimum wage, you'll get minimum wage.
If your skills are rare enough, and important enough, that it would cost a lot for the company to replace you, they'll make sure they pay you enough to stick around, even if that's a lot of money.
Yeah, I'd generally agree with that. Though the total "value" of your product factors into it. For instance, programmers for Google, Facebook, and Apple tend to make a nice premium because the products they work on are so valuable. Some of that is explained by replacement cost, ie the lost value as someone new is brought up to speed. But a lot of that is managers want to pay their people more money and suddenly more money is available.
But I'm not sure any of these are a good way to explain CEO compensation, especially since performance is so hard to gauge. I think that it comes down to the fact that the thing deciding CEO compensation is other CEOs. And they find it really easy to keep justifying little raises over time.
I have listened to the question posed. I listened to it as it was posed.
It's actually not a really tough question, at all.
You're either really overthinking this, or playing the apologist. Either way, good luck selling that tripe.
Ok, so what would your answer be then? And remember the constraints her answer had to satisfy.
such a softball question.
A softball question would be "what would you do to improve our education system?" All you need to say is "inspire children" or "hire more teachers" and virtually no one will find something objectionable.
I'm not saying she's going to be doing a PhD but I think you're wildly underestimating the difficultly of answering a question in that situation.
I don't think many people would be able to yield a usably better one in that girl's place.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Probably not many beauty pageant participants, or high school drop-outs, or athletes that rode a railroad to fame based on their talent, and education was a distraction, but believe it or not, there are many of us who have to answer far more difficult questions on the spot on a daily basis.
The premise of the question suggests that Americans are dumb or ignorant, which is something you really don't want to seem to agree with if you want to be become "Miss Teen USA". But you're also supposed to set a good example and can't be seeming to excuse ignorance either.
So she actually starts out with what I think is a pretty clever approach, people know things that are relevant in their daily lives, which doesn't actually include a map of the world for a lot of people. It ends up being a bit of trivia they learned in school, but like many other "obvious" things they learned in school it gets lost in the subsequent decades (ie, Are you smarter than a 5th grader?). Sure you need to see a map if you travel internationally, or really like world news or history, but a lot of people just don't care about the things a map would tell them, so they just don't look at one.
Unfortunately that's a fairly abstract concept that's really hard to explain, so she ended up saying they don't have maps, which is kinda true but sounds even more stupid than the thing I typed out with a couple minutes to think about it.
Now, if it were you or me in a typical daily conversation we'd restart our explanation, deflect with a joke, pause for a while, or just shrug and shake our heads and everyone would quickly forget.
But she didn't have any of those options and needed to keep trucking to the time limit. So she tried to pivot to Education, other countries might do better with maps because they're in hostile regions of the world.... ok! time for another pivot! And... she has absolutely no place to go and it's all just gibberish.
I think the whole thing was good for a laugh, but it really doesn't say much about the contestant or her intelligence.
You don't keep any of what you produce, except in unusual circumstances. You trade the product of your labor in exchange for money. Why? Why would you do that? Because you would rather have money than the product of your labor. Why does your boss pay you? Because he wanted the product more than he wanted money. The end result is both sides have been enriched by the exchange.
I don't know what econ courses you've taken but you need to step outside of your frictionless vacuum.
CEO compensation went up 17.6%, this is probably almost entirely due to the tax bill. Do you really think the tax cut somehow made CEOs 17.6% more productive or valuable without affecting labour at all, or do you think there's other factors at work affecting compensation?
You probably won't understand that though, you seem to have a low IQ.
Are you deliberately trying to throw around juvenile Trumpy insults? Just what are you trying to signal?
Plenty of scientists are saying there is not a scientific link between the fires and climate change, even Vox ran a story with that.
Maybe they should go talk to the experienced firefighters that say that fire is behaving in ways they have never seen before. Things are changing and barring ALIENS! the only reasonable explanation is climate change...
Surprisingly, Aliens or climate change aren't the only possible explanations. I know, hard to believe but hear me out.
It's beginning to be widely accepted that fighting forest fires has contributed to making the big ones worse. When we stop small forest fires, that means dead fall and dried planet matter continue to accumulate. It turns out, larger trees used to survive small forest fires, and the smaller fires cleared out the dead fall and dried material. With us stopping those fires though, enough tinder is accumulating that when a fire does hit, it's bigger, stronger and worse than ever before.
I know, citation please, so here's a fire forest researcher from UBC from a region of Canada where we fight multiple forest fires every year saying the same thing.
Before you get too sad though, there is a silver lining. The faculty member mentions that changing forest fire management might be opposed by standard logging industry practices, so we can still hate on corporate/industrial causes for the problem, hurray!
The question isn't whether there are other contributing factors to the California wildfires, I'm pretty sure I've been hearing about the deadfall thing for the past 20 years.
It's also not a question whether the recent hot and dry climate in California is a significant contributing factor, because the answer is obviously.
The question is whether climate change is a significant contributing factor to the recent hot and dry climate in California, and that's a somewhat trickier question.
First you need to decide whether climate change really does make events like that more likely, and if you've made that determination you need to decide how comfortable you are trying to justify it in a peer-reviewed paper. Not all climatologists are agreed that the science is quite at that point.
But nothing on a consumer grade flight sim will provide you with any skill. I once had to land with a pretty decent crosswind in a 172. About 6 months after earning my license. Me and the pregnant misses on board. No FSX will be able to recreate the stress-induced focus that I needed to put that plane down safely. Just me, one hand on the throttle, one hand on the yoke, two feet on the pedals, and the runway in front of me.
The extra bit you needed to land wasn't skill, it was experience and confidence.
Flight sims provide training, just like practise for a sport. It's a great way to improve your skills but there's a small subset of things that you can only get from a real situation.
Now, tell them their customers are going elsewhere because the environmental image of a company is important, then they will wake up.
Sure, they'll hire an ad agency.
I remember Weyerhaeuser being in the news for an atrocious environmental record. And then I remember a bunch of Weyerhaeuser commercials with streams and green forests talking about how much they cared about the environment.
I'm guessing that was a lot cheaper than modifying their business practises.
Indeed, if cherry pickers could pick twice as much, then you'd need fewer cherry pickers and their bargaining power might fall, and they might get paid less for producing more. You might say this is unlikely, but it has actually been happening in many areas.
Or if the cherry picker moves to a place where there is a huge demand for cherry pickers their salary will shoot up. This is the story we know in tech. Move to silicon valley and there's a shortage of skilled developers, so you can get an outrageous salary. Stay local, you might produce just as much "value" but there's a lot more devs to choose from and your salary stays lower.
The value you produce factors into it, but an arguably more important factor is your bargaining power. Even if a cherry picker could in fact produce more value than a programmer, a programmer has a much rarer skillset than a cherry picker, so the programmer is able to bargain for a much bigger fraction of that value.
I think this is where the big gap comes from, if either the cherry picker or the programmer want a raise they need to a) justify the raise to their manager, b) have their manager justify their higher costs, and c) demonstrate why they should get more given the prevailing wage for comparable positions in the area.
But the CEO talks directly to the board, comparables are much harder to come by, and since the CEO is the major lever the board has they're bound to overvalue it. Plus boards are typically made of other executives, people who will be sympathetic to the idea of big CEO compensation.
Is the CEO making 312x as much contributing 113 employee units of value over the CEO making 200x as much? I don't think the calculation is that precise.
President Barack Obama said Friday that he told Russian President Vladimir Putin in September to “cut it out” in regard to allegations that his nation engaged in cyberattacks against the U.S. electoral process. Obama added that further hacking by Russia did not occur following Obama’s admonition.
What else could Obama do? Obama asked McConnell to issue a joint statement condemning Russia's election meddling and McConnell refused.
McConnell deliberately obstructed the defence to an attack on his nation's electoral foundations. When this is all said and done McConnell should be sitting in a cell next to Trump.
I'll preface this comment by I'm not a huge President Trump supporter. But people need to know how to look at things objectively, outside their views.
Objectively, he's lost the benefit of the doubt. He's started stripping people of security clearances for saying mean things about him. I have no confidence that any action he takes is for the good of the US, nor that he's given it any serious analytical thought.
I see two main reasons for this policy, one it's reversing an "Obama policy", which seems to be a main objective in its own right. And second, some advisor said it was a good and necessary thing. The problem there is the advisor has their own possibly narrow view of things, and their advice might not be the best direction for the country.
People are tired of the same rhetoric which is doing nothing. Yes this change can be dangerous, and yes it can be "messy". What was happening before is also dangerous and messy.
You know what makes it more dangerous and messy? Having a temperamental child who can't digest more than a page of very basic analysis make strategic decisions.
Why do you think President Trump was voted into office? It wasn't the Russians. Heavens knows we influence foreign governments much more. People are tired of the status quo.
Republicans nominated him because they were tired of the status quo, probably because their status quo really really sucked.
Trump then beat Clinton in the general election because of the electoral college, the FBI investigation into her email server, her IT guy making a really stupid decision deleting emails, Russian Hacking of the DNC, Russian hacking of John Podesta, Comey making the bizarre decision to announce he was "reopening" the investigation a week before the election because of Anthony Weiner, and Clinton herself, being an exceptional networker but a worse campaigner than a mouldy ham sandwich.
Kerry or Gore would have cleaned Trump's clock, Obama would have trounced him utterly, but against Clinton... he got a narrow win.
So change came in someone outside the political system.
By the way, I like your vast assumptions in your comment. I suppose you know for a fact how "Trump shoots from the hip" Talked to him lately? You know the man?
Have you been following the mainstream media? If you remember what they say and then see what actually happens you'll realize it's not actually fake. If it were anyone else he'd already be impeached or relieved of command via the 25th amendment. Unfortunately it's undemocratic for removing a president for being a ridiculous manchild when that was already apparent before the election.
The big reason people should use Linux is to free themselves from proprietary closed source OS that is designed to take away your freedom. You will notice that while SteamOS claims to be open source, actually the critical parts of it like the client, are closed source. I am all for Windows compatibility as a way for people transition away from windows while taking their apps with them.
If you're buying games on Steam then you're probably willing to compromise when it comes to proprietary vs open source.
However the compatibility layer needs to be able to work on fully open source OSs otherwise people would just be giving up one proprietary OS with vendor lock in for another proprietary OS with vendor lock in. You should not have to use a particular Linux distro to be able to benefit from Windows compatibility. Wine is the best solution since it is open source. People need to work on making that better rather than fragmenting with another closed source platform.
I'm using an Intel graphics card on Fedora so I'm already running Steam on a fully open source stack. I'm not sure why their new layer would change that.
As for Wine, there could be legal reasons (ie, NDAs, licensing other products, etc), but more likely it's strategic. If they get 95% percent of Windows games working flawlessly on Linux, but only through Steam, then you now own Linux gaming even more than you do now.
For example, despite all the problems you may have heard about in China, life there is significantly improved comparing to before the country's economic reform that turned itself from a backward socialist/communist state into the most capitalistic superpower, even though their governing doctrine is still communism.
I'll note that when you actually gave your example for a "(real) socialist" country you actually described it as "socialist/communist".
Most of the people here decrying the naivety of the youth are actually talking about communism. But most people when talking about communism tend to use a different label, communism.
Though when people talk about capitalism they still mean US-style capitalism, despite the fact the gap between pure capitalism and the US system is about as big as the gap between modern "Socialism" and Communism.
For a proper reading of the poll assume that a huge portion of the respondents are comparing a European style mixed economy to a US style mixed economy.
We started by breeding the compettion out of them all....that "everyone is a winner" bullshit, with you get a trophy just for processing oxygen.
And apparently we didn't teach them history, like how many in the past died due to socialism, nor did we teach them civics on how govt should work and their part in it...etc.
Well, its been a good run till now....just hope this crap doesn't come to pass till I'm well dead and underground, so that it doesn't affect my quality of life I and my peers worked hard for....
Or it could just be that when they say "socialism" they actually mean "I want a more progressive tax system, slightly more government regulation of business, and public healthcare, ie, Northern Europe".
One of the things that changes between generations is what they think a label actually means.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been wondering why driving licenses are given to persons with high testosterone level?
Why not ban driving if your testosterone level is above certain safe threshold?
This has nothing to do with unsafe driving, it was a guy committing suicide in a way that killed two other people in the process.
If Trump is so opposed to this because he knows that the garbage his followers share on social media that is untrue is going to be caught up in this. For example, a few weeks someone I know from high school, who lives in a small town in a very conservative "red state", posted a link to article claiming that California was registering every illegal immigrant that they could find to vote.
I honestly don't know what the hell is going through these people's heads.
Just look at Trump's thing with the "3 million illegal voters" or whatever it was. It shouldn't take more than 30 seconds of deliberate thought to realize how insanely stupid a conspiracy theory that is.
Just imagine, 3 million illegal voters, that's not a conspiracy, it's a medium sized city. It's just a ridiculous idea that it could be happening.
Must have asked for access to their server.
Haha, very funny.
The FBI HAD access to the server last time, images of the server VMs which is exactly what the FBI wanted.
I know it's a dumb joke, but lets not let this become the new "Al Gore claims he invented the Internet".
How many non-college degree holders at those companies are getting the huge six-figure salaries vs $10-15 an hour support roles? And for those lucky enough to get more productive roles, is their pay comparable with their coworkers who have 4 year degrees, or are these companies using this as cost-cutting and just bringing in cheaper people to do the same roles?
I don't know about support roles but I'd think someone with a technical degree (or less) could slip into QA in a manual testing role.
Once you're in QA you're close enough to the technical side that you can start applying your skills, writing scripts to perform more advanced tests, build fuzzing tools, etc. Once you've demonstrated enough skills you can work your way into the development side.
You need to choose the right kind of org for this to work, probably a smaller to mid-sized org where roles and management are flexible enough that you can show some initiative and find the more technical tasks to do. We've had about half our QA folks eventually move to dev this way.
Once you've proven that capability in a professional setting the big orgs might be willing to take a look at you too.
As in who they decide is allowed to buy one? Either you allow all private companies to select who can use their service or you allow none of them to do so.
The baker was asking for the right to discriminate against a specific viewpoint because of their religious beliefs. The question was whether the baker's religious freedom was impinged enough to justify the violation of anti-discrimination laws.
Twitter and Facebook are trying to formula viewpoint neutral policies in order to get rid of toxic content and maintain healthy communities.
It's a tricky issue, but kind of unavoidable, and they're arguably doing it in a way that would be compatible with the US 1st amendment (if they were bound by it).
It's the same general principal as money in politics. You don't actually have to influence the individual for your contribution to further your point of view.
A corporation finds politicians with views naturally aligned to their objectives and helps those politicians get into office.
Similarly, a corporation finds researchers with view naturally aligned to their objectives and helps those researchers get papers into top journals and conferences.
The key is more public funding of science so private donors can't have such a big influence.
Yes, Tesla is priced like a tech company. Or more specifically, it's priced like a growth company. Automakers are like the weather: the best forecast for tomorrow is that it will be the same as today. Sometimes they do better, sometimes the do worse, but people don't generally expect them to make huge changes in their market share.
Tesla is growing rapidly. While traditional auto makers are constrained by sales, as evidenced by factories operating below capacity and massive marketing campaigns, Tesla is constrained by manufacturing, as evidenced by massive reservations and no significant marketing efforts.
That's all true, but that magical growth goes away when they start to become the next GM, so why should they be worth more than GM?
Tesla also has their energy business, which is also constrained by capacity. They've proven the value of utility-scale battery storage in Australia and elsewhere. The potential growth here is huge.
The Tesla solar business is less clear. Personally I think the visual stigma with traditional solar panels has passed as home solar has become more common, so most people who want solar are happy with regular panels.
They bought the solar for $2.5 billion in stock, so it can't be responsible for much of the valuation, as for the batteries maybe there's something there. But now you're pretty much arguing that their stock is due to their viability as an electric company, not a car company.
Outside of historical districts and the like, I'm not sure how large their solar roof market will prove to be once they reach full production.
But back to cars, they're looking at a production rate of 500,000 Model 3s next year. They're also going to be starting production of the Semi and announcing the pickup and Model Y next year. Their growth could easily reach over a million vehicles a year as quickly as they can build the factories, probably two million or more.
And don't ignore their Supercharger network. Tesla is the only option for road trips. Independent charging networks are focusing on the higher-density markets (i.e., California), though that may improve a bit over the next decade, but without support from auto manufacturers, they price charging well above what Tesla charges. In short, most people are happy buying an electric car as a second vehicle, but only consider Tesla if looking for an electric vehicle as their first car.
I don't see any other manufacturer providing serious competition for Tesla in the next five years, which will let them continue to grow rapidly to become a major player in the industry.
The short story seems to boil down to "Elon Musk is lying about Tesla being profitable for Q3 and Q4 this year." If they are profitable, then the story that they're going to run out of cash before being able to expand as described above falls apart.
You still need people to buy those cars. You have a waiting list when you make ~100k vehicles, but not when you make 1 million vehicles. The risk to Tesla isn't that it runs out of money, it's that one or several of Ford, GM, Honda, or Toyota make a really awesome EV and Tesla gets capped at a market share of 1 million.
The bigger risk is the big auto-makers to the above but also agree on an open spec so you can have Mom & Pop charging stations that serve any vehicle and it's incompatible with Telsa's superchargers. If that happens Tesla might be really screwed.
I'm not saying either will happen, but it's a mistake to price Tesla like they're already experiencing the best case scenario.
Has the short interest in Tesla decreased? If so, then shorts have cashed out, having a much better position than a week ago. But I'm not under the impression that the shorts have been exiting. It seems that there is a large contingent that really expects Tesla to outright fail, and they want to ride the stock down to zero.
There is a contingent that deeply wants to see Tesla fail because they view it as part of the environmental movement, and they see the whole movement as a leftist attack on free enterprise and their way of life. A company like Tesla being successful is counter to their worldview, and they desperately want to see electric cars fail. I have no evidence to prove that there's a connection to the Tesla shorts, but I suspect there is. I suppose that's part of the reason I so desperately want to see the shorts get bankrupted.
It's nothing that conspiratorial. Tesla has a bigger market cap than GM. I mean Tesla has a cooler brand, and they're currently dominating the EV market, but GM builds almost 100x as many cars, has about 15x the revenue (not sure how that math works), and has an operating income almost as large as Tesla's total revenue.
Sure Tesla has some serious potential around self driving cars and EV, but so does GM.
The idea that Tesla is worth more is just plain dumb. People are pricing it like an Apple or a Google, but car companies don't get those giant semi-monopolies that generate outrageous profits the way tech companies do. Tesla becoming as big as GM is their potential, but there's a good chance they won't reach that potential.
I don't trade stocks, but I can understand why people would short Tesla, it can't really go any higher and you have to think as some point it's going to go down.
In a nutshell, you are paid based on how hard it would be, and how much it would cost, for the company to replace you.
If your skills are commonplace, and it's easy to find other who will do it for minimum wage, you'll get minimum wage.
If your skills are rare enough, and important enough, that it would cost a lot for the company to replace you, they'll make sure they pay you enough to stick around, even if that's a lot of money.
Yeah, I'd generally agree with that. Though the total "value" of your product factors into it. For instance, programmers for Google, Facebook, and Apple tend to make a nice premium because the products they work on are so valuable. Some of that is explained by replacement cost, ie the lost value as someone new is brought up to speed. But a lot of that is managers want to pay their people more money and suddenly more money is available.
But I'm not sure any of these are a good way to explain CEO compensation, especially since performance is so hard to gauge. I think that it comes down to the fact that the thing deciding CEO compensation is other CEOs. And they find it really easy to keep justifying little raises over time.
Do you really think the tax cut somehow made CEOs 17.6% more productive
Of course they did. What do you think?
Just to be clear... your generalizations have been strong enough that I'm not actually sure if this is a joke or not.
I have listened to the question posed. I listened to it as it was posed.
It's actually not a really tough question, at all.
You're either really overthinking this, or playing the apologist. Either way, good luck selling that tripe.
Ok, so what would your answer be then? And remember the constraints her answer had to satisfy.
such a softball question.
A softball question would be "what would you do to improve our education system?" All you need to say is "inspire children" or "hire more teachers" and virtually no one will find something objectionable.
I'm not saying she's going to be doing a PhD but I think you're wildly underestimating the difficultly of answering a question in that situation.
'Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it' (Goebbels).
That's Fake News!
I don't think many people would be able to yield a usably better one in that girl's place.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Probably not many beauty pageant participants, or high school drop-outs, or athletes that rode a railroad to fame based on their talent, and education was a distraction, but believe it or not, there are many of us who have to answer far more difficult questions on the spot on a daily basis.
I kinda doubt that.
Listen to the actual question that was posed, Recent polls have shown that 1/5th of Americans can't show the US on a world map.
It's actually a really tough question.
The premise of the question suggests that Americans are dumb or ignorant, which is something you really don't want to seem to agree with if you want to be become "Miss Teen USA". But you're also supposed to set a good example and can't be seeming to excuse ignorance either.
So she actually starts out with what I think is a pretty clever approach, people know things that are relevant in their daily lives, which doesn't actually include a map of the world for a lot of people. It ends up being a bit of trivia they learned in school, but like many other "obvious" things they learned in school it gets lost in the subsequent decades (ie, Are you smarter than a 5th grader?). Sure you need to see a map if you travel internationally, or really like world news or history, but a lot of people just don't care about the things a map would tell them, so they just don't look at one.
Unfortunately that's a fairly abstract concept that's really hard to explain, so she ended up saying they don't have maps, which is kinda true but sounds even more stupid than the thing I typed out with a couple minutes to think about it.
Now, if it were you or me in a typical daily conversation we'd restart our explanation, deflect with a joke, pause for a while, or just shrug and shake our heads and everyone would quickly forget.
But she didn't have any of those options and needed to keep trucking to the time limit. So she tried to pivot to Education, other countries might do better with maps because they're in hostile regions of the world.... ok! time for another pivot! And... she has absolutely no place to go and it's all just gibberish.
I think the whole thing was good for a laugh, but it really doesn't say much about the contestant or her intelligence.
You don't keep any of what you produce, except in unusual circumstances. You trade the product of your labor in exchange for money. Why? Why would you do that? Because you would rather have money than the product of your labor. Why does your boss pay you? Because he wanted the product more than he wanted money. The end result is both sides have been enriched by the exchange.
I don't know what econ courses you've taken but you need to step outside of your frictionless vacuum.
CEO compensation went up 17.6%, this is probably almost entirely due to the tax bill. Do you really think the tax cut somehow made CEOs 17.6% more productive or valuable without affecting labour at all, or do you think there's other factors at work affecting compensation?
You probably won't understand that though, you seem to have a low IQ.
Are you deliberately trying to throw around juvenile Trumpy insults? Just what are you trying to signal?
Plenty of scientists are saying there is not a scientific link between the fires and climate change, even Vox ran a story with that.
Maybe they should go talk to the experienced firefighters that say that fire is behaving in ways they have never seen before. Things are changing and barring ALIENS! the only reasonable explanation is climate change...
Surprisingly, Aliens or climate change aren't the only possible explanations. I know, hard to believe but hear me out.
It's beginning to be widely accepted that fighting forest fires has contributed to making the big ones worse. When we stop small forest fires, that means dead fall and dried planet matter continue to accumulate. It turns out, larger trees used to survive small forest fires, and the smaller fires cleared out the dead fall and dried material. With us stopping those fires though, enough tinder is accumulating that when a fire does hit, it's bigger, stronger and worse than ever before.
I know, citation please, so here's a fire forest researcher from UBC from a region of Canada where we fight multiple forest fires every year saying the same thing.
Before you get too sad though, there is a silver lining. The faculty member mentions that changing forest fire management might be opposed by standard logging industry practices, so we can still hate on corporate/industrial causes for the problem, hurray!
The question isn't whether there are other contributing factors to the California wildfires, I'm pretty sure I've been hearing about the deadfall thing for the past 20 years.
It's also not a question whether the recent hot and dry climate in California is a significant contributing factor, because the answer is obviously.
The question is whether climate change is a significant contributing factor to the recent hot and dry climate in California, and that's a somewhat trickier question.
First you need to decide whether climate change really does make events like that more likely, and if you've made that determination you need to decide how comfortable you are trying to justify it in a peer-reviewed paper. Not all climatologists are agreed that the science is quite at that point.
But nothing on a consumer grade flight sim will provide you with any skill. I once had to land with a pretty decent crosswind in a 172. About 6 months after earning my license. Me and the pregnant misses on board. No FSX will be able to recreate the stress-induced focus that I needed to put that plane down safely. Just me, one hand on the throttle, one hand on the yoke, two feet on the pedals, and the runway in front of me.
The extra bit you needed to land wasn't skill, it was experience and confidence.
Flight sims provide training, just like practise for a sport. It's a great way to improve your skills but there's a small subset of things that you can only get from a real situation.
Now, tell them their customers are going elsewhere because the environmental image of a company is important, then they will wake up.
Sure, they'll hire an ad agency.
I remember Weyerhaeuser being in the news for an atrocious environmental record. And then I remember a bunch of Weyerhaeuser commercials with streams and green forests talking about how much they cared about the environment.
I'm guessing that was a lot cheaper than modifying their business practises.
Indeed, if cherry pickers could pick twice as much, then you'd need fewer cherry pickers and their bargaining power might fall, and they might get paid less for producing more. You might say this is unlikely, but it has actually been happening in many areas.
Or if the cherry picker moves to a place where there is a huge demand for cherry pickers their salary will shoot up. This is the story we know in tech. Move to silicon valley and there's a shortage of skilled developers, so you can get an outrageous salary. Stay local, you might produce just as much "value" but there's a lot more devs to choose from and your salary stays lower.
Bargaining power is known as "value." There is value in what you produce.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I think you're also measuring the wrong thing.
The value you produce factors into it, but an arguably more important factor is your bargaining power. Even if a cherry picker could in fact produce more value than a programmer, a programmer has a much rarer skillset than a cherry picker, so the programmer is able to bargain for a much bigger fraction of that value.
I think this is where the big gap comes from, if either the cherry picker or the programmer want a raise they need to a) justify the raise to their manager, b) have their manager justify their higher costs, and c) demonstrate why they should get more given the prevailing wage for comparable positions in the area.
But the CEO talks directly to the board, comparables are much harder to come by, and since the CEO is the major lever the board has they're bound to overvalue it. Plus boards are typically made of other executives, people who will be sympathetic to the idea of big CEO compensation.
Is the CEO making 312x as much contributing 113 employee units of value over the CEO making 200x as much? I don't think the calculation is that precise.
What are you talking about - Obama said he directly talked to Putin and told him to cut it out before the 2016 election. You mean that didn't work?!?
Obama says he told Putin to ‘cut it out’ on Russia hacking
President Barack Obama said Friday that he told Russian President Vladimir Putin in September to “cut it out” in regard to allegations that his nation engaged in cyberattacks against the U.S. electoral process. Obama added that further hacking by Russia did not occur following Obama’s admonition.
What else could Obama do? Obama asked McConnell to issue a joint statement condemning Russia's election meddling and McConnell refused.
McConnell deliberately obstructed the defence to an attack on his nation's electoral foundations. When this is all said and done McConnell should be sitting in a cell next to Trump.
I'll preface this comment by I'm not a huge President Trump supporter. But people need to know how to look at things objectively, outside their views.
Objectively, he's lost the benefit of the doubt. He's started stripping people of security clearances for saying mean things about him. I have no confidence that any action he takes is for the good of the US, nor that he's given it any serious analytical thought.
I see two main reasons for this policy, one it's reversing an "Obama policy", which seems to be a main objective in its own right. And second, some advisor said it was a good and necessary thing. The problem there is the advisor has their own possibly narrow view of things, and their advice might not be the best direction for the country.
People are tired of the same rhetoric which is doing nothing. Yes this change can be dangerous, and yes it can be "messy". What was happening before is also dangerous and messy.
You know what makes it more dangerous and messy? Having a temperamental child who can't digest more than a page of very basic analysis make strategic decisions.
Why do you think President Trump was voted into office? It wasn't the Russians. Heavens knows we influence foreign governments much more. People are tired of the status quo.
Republicans nominated him because they were tired of the status quo, probably because their status quo really really sucked.
Trump then beat Clinton in the general election because of the electoral college, the FBI investigation into her email server, her IT guy making a really stupid decision deleting emails, Russian Hacking of the DNC, Russian hacking of John Podesta, Comey making the bizarre decision to announce he was "reopening" the investigation a week before the election because of Anthony Weiner, and Clinton herself, being an exceptional networker but a worse campaigner than a mouldy ham sandwich.
Kerry or Gore would have cleaned Trump's clock, Obama would have trounced him utterly, but against Clinton... he got a narrow win.
So change came in someone outside the political system.
By the way, I like your vast assumptions in your comment. I suppose you know for a fact how "Trump shoots from the hip" Talked to him lately? You know the man?
Have you been following the mainstream media? If you remember what they say and then see what actually happens you'll realize it's not actually fake. If it were anyone else he'd already be impeached or relieved of command via the 25th amendment. Unfortunately it's undemocratic for removing a president for being a ridiculous manchild when that was already apparent before the election.
The big reason people should use Linux is to free themselves from proprietary closed source OS that is designed to take away your freedom. You will notice that while SteamOS claims to be open source, actually the critical parts of it like the client, are closed source. I am all for Windows compatibility as a way for people transition away from windows while taking their apps with them.
If you're buying games on Steam then you're probably willing to compromise when it comes to proprietary vs open source.
However the compatibility layer needs to be able to work on fully open source OSs otherwise people would just be giving up one proprietary OS with vendor lock in for another proprietary OS with vendor lock in. You should not have to use a particular Linux distro to be able to benefit from Windows compatibility. Wine is the best solution since it is open source. People need to work on making that better rather than fragmenting with another closed source platform.
I'm using an Intel graphics card on Fedora so I'm already running Steam on a fully open source stack. I'm not sure why their new layer would change that.
As for Wine, there could be legal reasons (ie, NDAs, licensing other products, etc), but more likely it's strategic. If they get 95% percent of Windows games working flawlessly on Linux, but only through Steam, then you now own Linux gaming even more than you do now.
they haven't lived in a (real) socialist country.
For example, despite all the problems you may have heard about in China, life there is significantly improved comparing to before the country's economic reform that turned itself from a backward socialist/communist state into the most capitalistic superpower, even though their governing doctrine is still communism.
I'll note that when you actually gave your example for a "(real) socialist" country you actually described it as "socialist/communist".
Most of the people here decrying the naivety of the youth are actually talking about communism. But most people when talking about communism tend to use a different label, communism.
Though when people talk about capitalism they still mean US-style capitalism, despite the fact the gap between pure capitalism and the US system is about as big as the gap between modern "Socialism" and Communism.
For a proper reading of the poll assume that a huge portion of the respondents are comparing a European style mixed economy to a US style mixed economy.
We raised a generation of idiots.
We started by breeding the compettion out of them all....that "everyone is a winner" bullshit, with you get a trophy just for processing oxygen.
And apparently we didn't teach them history, like how many in the past died due to socialism, nor did we teach them civics on how govt should work and their part in it...etc.
Well, its been a good run till now....just hope this crap doesn't come to pass till I'm well dead and underground, so that it doesn't affect my quality of life I and my peers worked hard for....
Or it could just be that when they say "socialism" they actually mean "I want a more progressive tax system, slightly more government regulation of business, and public healthcare, ie, Northern Europe".
One of the things that changes between generations is what they think a label actually means.