The Boeing 747 has its instantly recognised "hump" precisely because Boeing thought at the time of its design that it wouldn't have a long sales life as a passenger aircraft, as the future was "obviously" supersonic for passenger transport. Therefore, the design was optimised for roll-on roll-off cargo transport through the nose section, which made it a very good cargo aircraft and thus increased its forecasted sales life
It's worth noting that Boeing has tried pitching a fully double-deck passenger 747 to the airlines every few years almost since the 747 first rolled out. There has never been enough demand for it so Boeing never built it. The A380 (still hasn't turned a profit) seems to bear out that market research.
The 747 was actually Pan Am's baby - the president of Pan Am personally asked Boeing for such a large aircraft. Boeing wasn't so sure about its viability in the market, so you're right they hedged their bets.
Regardless of what regulatory conspiracies may or may not have contributed, Concorde was ultimately doomed by the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s which caused oil prices to quadruple. Any claims that it was financially viable are a fantasy. By the time it retired it was barely eeking out money in what is probably the most profitable route in the world (London/Paris - New York/DC), meaning it would've lost money pretty much everywhere else.
GP has it a bit wrong - people weren't sure if supersonic transport or large efficient planes were the future back when oil was cheap in the 1960s. Once oil prices shot up, it was obvious which was better.
The problem with those ultra-large aircraft is that they can be thirsty in terms of fuel, crew-intensive and, except on a small number of really "thick" routes, quite hard to fill. With the airline business mostly operating on quite thin margins, efficiency matters and the smaller, single-deck planes are looking better in that regard right now.
It isn't the large size which makes them thirsty for fuel. It's the fact that they have 4 engines. When it comes to propulsion, fewer is more efficient. The 777 and A340 are roughly the same size (300-400 passengers), and the 777 beat the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market (1881 orders vs 377) because it uses 2 engines vs the latter's 4 engines. It was so bad when Airbus proposed the A350 as a competitor to the 787, airlines seized the opportunity and got Airbus to redesign the A350 to be a little bigger so it would also compete with the 777.
People are looking at the flagships and thinking the A380 had something to do with the 747's demise. It's actually the 777 which cannibalized the 747's market. The newest 777-9X is pretty much a drop-in replacement for the 747-400 (the most successful model). Because 2 engines is better than 4.
Consider yourself lucky. I live in California but still have a Canadian bank account from when I used to work there. My Canadian bank caught on to these Photoshop shenanigans. I tried filling out their form to authorize EFTs to a new currency exchange service (my original one went out of business). They won't accept electronic copies, nor faxes. They won't even accepted a mailed notarized copy. They told me I had to print out the form, sign it, and bring it in person with photo ID to the nearest branch office which is in Canada 1300 miles away.
Now think of this way. Now you get no subsidy on the phone, and they didn't lower their monthly bill by $21. So what Verizon, Spring, and T-Mobile did was effectively raise their monthly rates because you get no more subsidy, and the monthly cost of the plan is the same as it was before.
Actually, T-Mobile does charge you $20/mo less if your contract period is expired or you BYO device. I haven't been following the other carriers, but I presume their new plans work the same.
Under the old subsidized phone model, if you BYO device or your contract ended, you were still paying the monthly subsidized rate, so the carriers were making more money off you than they should have been. The only way to avoid this was to buy a new phone and enter a new contract. By coercing you into spending money on a new phone when the old one still meets your needs just fine, the carrier (and phone manufacturer) were making more money off you than they should have been.
In the end, the new plan paradigm is better. You pay for the monthly service, and if you want your phone subsidized it shows up as a separate line item in your bill. There's no more leeching phone subsidy payments out of people who own their phones, by hiding the subsidy in the monthly service fee.
PC laptops are nearly always labeled with easy-to-identify model numbers that you can search for on Google or eBay. Apple makes it very difficult for the average buyer to identify which year a Macbook was built, so the neophyte buyer just sees "Macbook" and assumes it's reasonably current. My cousin almost got suckered by this into buying a Core 2 Duo Macbook during the Sandy Bridge days (just before Ivy Bridge's release). His school store was selling it at a "massive" $200 discount. An appropriate discount would've been $400-$500.
Wireless transmissions take place on publicly owned airwaves. Jamming these airwaves is theft of publicly owned bandwidth.
They don't jam the signals (in the sense of broadcasting noise). They turn the building into a big faraday cage. I stayed at one of these hotels and my phone's reception went from 4 bars outside to 0-1 bar inside. I tried standing next to a window and still was barely getting a signal. Later I found out they make conductive film you can put on the windows - optically transparent but makes for a seamless faraday cage.
See, this is where the "making available" argument falls apart. If you're going to charge a file sharer for making available a copy of a song to a hundred thousand other people, then you are effectively claiming they are a pirate distributor. When someone sells bootleg CDs, you do not also charge the people who bought the CDs. They are not guilty of a crime since they paid for the CD (just paid to the wrong person). You charge the pirate distributor and that effectively indemnifies their customers.
So if you're going to charge a file sharer with copyright violation as if they're a pirate distributor because they "made available" a hundred thousand copies, then you cannot charge any of those hundred thousand people they shared files with for the same crime. The "making available" argument casts those people as innocent and unknowing victims of the single pirate distributor who was illegally giving away the file for free.
The alternative is to view all of these file sharers as pirates. In which case the number of downloaded copies by definition must exactly equal the number of file sharers. And each pirate is guilty of "making available" only one copy (to him or herself). And an appropriate punishment is probably a fine on the order of 3x-10x the price of the CD or DVD.
The beauty of fiction is that you can dream up all sorts of solutions to the problem. To borrow an idea from another space series franchise, If the Death Star fired a beam which lowered the gravitational constant in a volume inside the planet to near zero, the planet's rotational inertia would make it fly apart on its own. No energy (or matter) input needed.
Oh, and in The Netherlands we use 31 US gallons per capita per day. That's 7 times less. We don't shower less either. But in our climate we don't have a lot of swimming pools. Maybe that's a good explanation? I'm not sure about the price of water in California though - it looks rather difficult to compare to our pricing.
My (California) water bill is broken up into tiers. The lowest level - essential - is what's estimated a regular family of 4 should use (55 gal/day per capita) without landscaping. So that's really not that far off from the Netherlands where most people live in apartments without lawns. California water districts serving predominantly residential areas report an average consumption around 75 gal/day per capita. The water districts serving agricultural and wealthy areas report consumption around 300+ gal/day per capita. So the vast majority of Californians are frugal with water. It's just agriculture and landscaping for rich people which consume a profligate amount of water.
It's also worth pointing out that one of the reasons water consumption in the Netherlands is so low is because you've successfully exported your water consumption. That is, someone outside the Netherlands uses the water to produce goods, which are then imported into the Netherlands for consumption without the water use being attributed to you. This isn't really "saving" water - you're not really reducing its consumption, you're just paying someone else to use it for you in their name. Which is not a bad thing if you can shift consumption to a region where water is plentiful; just don't make the mistake of using it to brag about how "little" water you use.
This is what I don't understand. Samsung makes like a hundred different phones. Instead of one flagship phone and one flagship phablet, why can't they just make two - one to try to appeal to the fashionistas, and one to appeal to their traditional buyers who want a micro SD slot and removable battery.
If it's anything like military hardware, the expense isn't in the manufacturing, it's in the testing. Those $100 hammers you hear about? They're not $100 because the contractor is trying to rip off the military. They're $100 because some military brass decided the hammer should be capable of pounding 2 inch nails into a dozen different types of hardwood 2x4s in 3 hits by an average 20 yo male, endure 1000 hours of such use, do those things in climates ranging from -40 F to +130 F, withstand heating to 250 F or cooling to -150 F for an hour and still be capable of performing aforementioned functions, withstand 24 hours immersed in seawater without exhibiting visual signs of corrosion, and survive 100 drops from 5 feet without any weakening between the handle and head. The contractor looks at these requirements, calculates the cost of designing, building, and running these tests as $750,000. The military wants 10,000 hammers which cost $2 each in bulk from Home Depot. Final cost is then $770,000, add on 30% margin for profit and cost overruns, divide by 10,000 hammers, and you're at $100,10 per hammer, which they graciously round down to $100.
I would imagine medical equipment has to satisfy similar stringent quality standards before being approved for human use. Factor in the cost of that testing, divide by the limited market (only about 600,000 primary care physicians in the U.S.), and divide again by the expectation that a metal stethoscope will probably last a decade or two (so only 30,000-60,000 physicals will be buying one each year), and something that costs a few cents to make can easily end up costing a few dollars for it to be worth it for the manufacturer to actually get it approved for sale. In the case of a 3D printer, you'd probably be required to run a separate test for every combo of printer and plastic material.
That's an invalid comparison. It's like comparing how a plane crash kills hundreds of people while a car crash kills 1-4, therefore cars must be safer.
To compare properly, you have to normalize the consequences by the amount of power generated. So 1 nuclear plant = 1 hydro plant = 2 coal plants = 7500 wind turbines = 19 square km of solar panels. Then you apply the failure rate of each technology based on the construction, operation, and maintenance of that amount of infrastructure. Even with Fukushima and Chernobyl, nuclear is by far the safest power generation technology. Hydro is second - a close second if you exclude Banqiao, a distant second if you include it. Then come wind and solar which kill about an order of magnitude more people per MWh generated than nuclear. (Little-known fact: despite nuclear power producing 12% of the world's electricity vs 2% for wind, and suffering its second-worst accident in history in March 2011, nobody died from nuclear power during that month, while wind killed one person. Someone forgot to lock the ladder to a wind turbine, and a high school student climbed up and fell to his death. While forgetting to lock one ladder is unlikely, multiply it by the 7500 turbines needed to replace a nuclear plant and it's almost certain to happen.)
Coal is about 4 orders of magnitude worse. That is what is not even an argument. We should be doing everything we can to replace coal with any of the alternatives. But because some people have a stick up their ass about nuclear, they're insisting we phase out coal slowly so it can be replaced with only renewables, even though right now nuclear is the only power source which can realistically replace coal.
Nuclear doesn't have to be our final power source. We can transition over to nuclear for a few decades while R&D into renewables drops their price to more competitive levels. Then we can phase out the nuclear plants and replace them with renewables. That would get us off coal almost immediately, saving hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives each year compared to our current trajectory, where we're hanging on to coal plants because certain people are adamant that we cannot build new nuclear plants. Those coal deaths are on your heads.
Musk has repeatedly said that he's far more interested in changing the world than in making money. The dollars and cents are merely a vehicle for his visions.
Ultimately, dollars and cents are what matters, not vision. "Vision" is only called that in hindsight when the idea succeeds economically. When it fails, we call the would-be visionary a "crackpot".
You can spend all your money buying Segway and giving them away. But that's only sustainable so long as you're pumping money into it. To really "change the world", the idea has to be economically self-sustainable - it has to be economically competitive with if not superior to alternative ideas. In other words, it will continue on its own even if the originator disappears from the market.
In the future if/when most of our electricity is generated by nuclear and renewables, and battery tech has advanced to the point where you don't need a half ton of batteries that take a minimum 30 minutes to half-fill, I'm sure EVs will be economically superior. But pushing for their widespread adoption before you reach that point of economical sustainability is wasting money. You are much better off spending that money on R&D to advance those specific technologies more rapidly.
Gaining market share in an entrenched industry by turning convention on its head may not be extremely profitable at first.
Despite that, it still works sometimes: are Jeff Bezos' ear's ringing?
Amazon is not profitable because they're pouring money into expansion. If they weren't doing that, that money would show up in their books as profit. I haven't read TFA, but Summary says Tesla is reducing production.
The quickest way to increase diversity is to get rid of discrimination protection. It is very risky to hire someone from a protected group.
File this under sad-but-true. The very laws and rules that are intended to protect a group can end up causing them harm.
I used to manage a medium-sized company (50+ employees) which the Bureau of Labor Statistics had selected as part of its data sample (it's how they generate things like employment statistics - unemployment rate, new jobs added, etc.). I thought it was really weird that we didn't care about gender when hiring or working, and the only reason I had to actually count the number of female employees was to fill out the montly BLS form.
You'll also note from that cover letter that "The BLS will use the information you provide for statistical purposes only
and will hold the information in confidence to the full extent permitted by law. In
accordance with the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act
(Title 5 of Public Law 107-347), the information you provide to the BLS will not be
disclosed in identifiable form without your informed consent." I suspect the EEOC has similar restrictions, and this is just some folks in Congress trying to pressure a company to release the info directly, after they first tried to get the info from the EEOC and were told point blank that that would be illegal.
A lot of people are going to choke on the idea of paying full price. $199 every 3-4 years doesn't seem like a big deal. $700 for a new iPhone sounds fucking horrible.
The way T-Mobile does it, there's really not much difference from paying $199 every few years. T-Mobile charges $20/mo if you don't pay for the phone in full. So over a 3 year contract that's $720. Add the $199 you paid up front and you've paid $920 in total for your subsidized phone. Not much different than if you'd bought it with a 3 year loan.
The only difference this makes (and it's an important one) is that if you don't upgrade your phone after 3 years and continue to use it, the $20/mo surcharge drops off your monthly bill. Just as though you had bought the phone outright, because by that point you have bought the phone outright. For nearly two decades now, carriers (except T-Mobile) have been fleecing customers who don't upgrade phones after their contract is up. It was ripe for a FTC investigation.
I don't think it'll do much to the average (mean) price of smartphones. The median price will probably drop though. In other words, more people will be buying lower priced phones, while the price of high-end phones wealthy people buy will go up. That's pretty much how the rest of the computer industry works (graphics cards are an extreme example, with people who can afford high-end cards paying 3-4x more for roughly 2x the performance).
As for Apple vs. Android, I've suspected or a while that Android buyers have been subsidizing iPhone buyers. True the high-end Android phones are priced similarly to the iPhones. But the bulk of Android sales are the lower-priced models, which are often half to a third the cost of an iPhone when purchased outright. But you look at the carrier subsidized pricing and the iPhone will be $199 down, while the mid-tier Android phone will be $99 down. In other words, the full price of the iPhone is ~$400 more, but the carrier is only charging $100 more for it. That means either the carrier is losing $300 on the iPhone, or they're making $300 extra on the Android phone which is effectively subsidizing the iPhone price.
If that goes away and the $400 mid-tier phone now costs $400 vs. $800 for the high-end phone, then yes it will hurt sales of those high-end phones.
So far the MPAA has been losing everywhere for years. I don't see this going anywhere.
Even if they win, they lose. The only reason Hollywood makes money hand over fist is because they have mindshare - their celebrities and artists are known throughout the world, so everyday people want to watch their movies or hear their songs.
The Internet drops the cost of the distribution business to near zero. If Hollywood tries to keep a stranglehold on their existing distribution channels, that just creates an opportunity for alternate channels servicing artists and movies elsewhere in the world. As the people in those alternate channels become more famous, Hollywood loses mindshare. Fewer people are interested in what their celebrities and artists are doing, and they put themselves out of business.
There is a way to make it happen, but I doubt it will fly. Korea basically did this in the 1970s and 1980s. The government knew it didn't have the road infrastructure to support every household owning a car, so they taxed cars up the wazoo. A car that might cost $10,000 would cost $50,000 after taxes ($100,000 in today's dollars). This had the effect of severely discouraging car ownership. In its place, a robust taxi industry sprang up. I remember visiting downtown Seoul and 80%-90% of the cars on the road were taxis. There were no traffic jams, and if you didn't want to wait for a bus you could hail a taxi within 15-30 seconds.
It all fell apart in 1988. One of the Democratic nominees for President (Gephardt if I remember), in a bid to win Michigan made a huge ruckus about how Hyundai was allowed to sell its cars for $6000 in the U.S., while an equivalent Ford cost $45,000 in Korea. He conveniently left out that the same Hyundai also cost $45,000 in Korea. He didn't win the nomination, but the damage was done. U.S. public sentiment forced the U.S. to pressure Korea to remove their car taxes. Cars in Korea suddenly became affordable to the average household, and Korea plummeted into two decades of gridlock.
For example, centralised servers have far more chance of being run by renewables than your home computer. Google for example, is tending to do stuff like build their servers near hydroelectric plants or where there's wind farms or solar available.
So outsourcing your needs CAN actually be a good thing; and if everyone did it, it's a net positive.
No, it's a net negative Building your server farm near hydroelectric plants doesn't reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned. It increases them. The entire electrical grid is connected. If Google's server farm weren't there, the hydroelectric power would be transmitted to fill a need somewhere else. All Google does by locating their servers there is cause someone else to use fossil fuel power instead of hydroelectric power.
Put another way, certain power plants produce as much power as they can (wind, solar, to some extent hydro and nuclear). Other plants scale their production so that total generation matches demand - coal for day/night variability in demand (they're shut down overnight), gas for instantaneous variability in demand. If you add a server farm on the demand side, it doesn't matter which power plants are nearest to it. The net effect is that additional gas and coal must be burned to handle the added power demand.
The only way to add a server farm and reduce fossil fuel consumption is to build additional non-fossil electrical generation capacity along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure there are! You have your choice of vi or emacs. :)
Try here as a starting point. The fact sheet has lots of technical info, but little in the way of how it operated.
Not really flag waving. TFA is a UK site. Maybe they were being polite and saying flattering things during the eulogy?
It's worth noting that Boeing has tried pitching a fully double-deck passenger 747 to the airlines every few years almost since the 747 first rolled out. There has never been enough demand for it so Boeing never built it. The A380 (still hasn't turned a profit) seems to bear out that market research.
The 747 was actually Pan Am's baby - the president of Pan Am personally asked Boeing for such a large aircraft. Boeing wasn't so sure about its viability in the market, so you're right they hedged their bets.
Regardless of what regulatory conspiracies may or may not have contributed, Concorde was ultimately doomed by the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s which caused oil prices to quadruple. Any claims that it was financially viable are a fantasy. By the time it retired it was barely eeking out money in what is probably the most profitable route in the world (London/Paris - New York/DC), meaning it would've lost money pretty much everywhere else.
GP has it a bit wrong - people weren't sure if supersonic transport or large efficient planes were the future back when oil was cheap in the 1960s. Once oil prices shot up, it was obvious which was better.
It isn't the large size which makes them thirsty for fuel. It's the fact that they have 4 engines. When it comes to propulsion, fewer is more efficient. The 777 and A340 are roughly the same size (300-400 passengers), and the 777 beat the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market (1881 orders vs 377) because it uses 2 engines vs the latter's 4 engines. It was so bad when Airbus proposed the A350 as a competitor to the 787, airlines seized the opportunity and got Airbus to redesign the A350 to be a little bigger so it would also compete with the 777.
People are looking at the flagships and thinking the A380 had something to do with the 747's demise. It's actually the 777 which cannibalized the 747's market. The newest 777-9X is pretty much a drop-in replacement for the 747-400 (the most successful model). Because 2 engines is better than 4.
Consider yourself lucky. I live in California but still have a Canadian bank account from when I used to work there. My Canadian bank caught on to these Photoshop shenanigans. I tried filling out their form to authorize EFTs to a new currency exchange service (my original one went out of business). They won't accept electronic copies, nor faxes. They won't even accepted a mailed notarized copy. They told me I had to print out the form, sign it, and bring it in person with photo ID to the nearest branch office which is in Canada 1300 miles away.
Actually, T-Mobile does charge you $20/mo less if your contract period is expired or you BYO device. I haven't been following the other carriers, but I presume their new plans work the same.
Under the old subsidized phone model, if you BYO device or your contract ended, you were still paying the monthly subsidized rate, so the carriers were making more money off you than they should have been. The only way to avoid this was to buy a new phone and enter a new contract. By coercing you into spending money on a new phone when the old one still meets your needs just fine, the carrier (and phone manufacturer) were making more money off you than they should have been.
In the end, the new plan paradigm is better. You pay for the monthly service, and if you want your phone subsidized it shows up as a separate line item in your bill. There's no more leeching phone subsidy payments out of people who own their phones, by hiding the subsidy in the monthly service fee.
PC laptops are nearly always labeled with easy-to-identify model numbers that you can search for on Google or eBay. Apple makes it very difficult for the average buyer to identify which year a Macbook was built, so the neophyte buyer just sees "Macbook" and assumes it's reasonably current. My cousin almost got suckered by this into buying a Core 2 Duo Macbook during the Sandy Bridge days (just before Ivy Bridge's release). His school store was selling it at a "massive" $200 discount. An appropriate discount would've been $400-$500.
To figure out exactly what model Macbook you're getting, you need the serial number.
They don't jam the signals (in the sense of broadcasting noise). They turn the building into a big faraday cage. I stayed at one of these hotels and my phone's reception went from 4 bars outside to 0-1 bar inside. I tried standing next to a window and still was barely getting a signal. Later I found out they make conductive film you can put on the windows - optically transparent but makes for a seamless faraday cage.
See, this is where the "making available" argument falls apart. If you're going to charge a file sharer for making available a copy of a song to a hundred thousand other people, then you are effectively claiming they are a pirate distributor. When someone sells bootleg CDs, you do not also charge the people who bought the CDs. They are not guilty of a crime since they paid for the CD (just paid to the wrong person). You charge the pirate distributor and that effectively indemnifies their customers.
So if you're going to charge a file sharer with copyright violation as if they're a pirate distributor because they "made available" a hundred thousand copies, then you cannot charge any of those hundred thousand people they shared files with for the same crime. The "making available" argument casts those people as innocent and unknowing victims of the single pirate distributor who was illegally giving away the file for free.
The alternative is to view all of these file sharers as pirates. In which case the number of downloaded copies by definition must exactly equal the number of file sharers. And each pirate is guilty of "making available" only one copy (to him or herself). And an appropriate punishment is probably a fine on the order of 3x-10x the price of the CD or DVD.
The beauty of fiction is that you can dream up all sorts of solutions to the problem. To borrow an idea from another space series franchise, If the Death Star fired a beam which lowered the gravitational constant in a volume inside the planet to near zero, the planet's rotational inertia would make it fly apart on its own. No energy (or matter) input needed.
My (California) water bill is broken up into tiers. The lowest level - essential - is what's estimated a regular family of 4 should use (55 gal/day per capita) without landscaping. So that's really not that far off from the Netherlands where most people live in apartments without lawns. California water districts serving predominantly residential areas report an average consumption around 75 gal/day per capita. The water districts serving agricultural and wealthy areas report consumption around 300+ gal/day per capita. So the vast majority of Californians are frugal with water. It's just agriculture and landscaping for rich people which consume a profligate amount of water.
It's also worth pointing out that one of the reasons water consumption in the Netherlands is so low is because you've successfully exported your water consumption. That is, someone outside the Netherlands uses the water to produce goods, which are then imported into the Netherlands for consumption without the water use being attributed to you. This isn't really "saving" water - you're not really reducing its consumption, you're just paying someone else to use it for you in their name. Which is not a bad thing if you can shift consumption to a region where water is plentiful; just don't make the mistake of using it to brag about how "little" water you use.
This is what I don't understand. Samsung makes like a hundred different phones. Instead of one flagship phone and one flagship phablet, why can't they just make two - one to try to appeal to the fashionistas, and one to appeal to their traditional buyers who want a micro SD slot and removable battery.
So how does this doctor in a poor country who can't afford a stethoscope get a 3D printer?
If it's anything like military hardware, the expense isn't in the manufacturing, it's in the testing. Those $100 hammers you hear about? They're not $100 because the contractor is trying to rip off the military. They're $100 because some military brass decided the hammer should be capable of pounding 2 inch nails into a dozen different types of hardwood 2x4s in 3 hits by an average 20 yo male, endure 1000 hours of such use, do those things in climates ranging from -40 F to +130 F, withstand heating to 250 F or cooling to -150 F for an hour and still be capable of performing aforementioned functions, withstand 24 hours immersed in seawater without exhibiting visual signs of corrosion, and survive 100 drops from 5 feet without any weakening between the handle and head. The contractor looks at these requirements, calculates the cost of designing, building, and running these tests as $750,000. The military wants 10,000 hammers which cost $2 each in bulk from Home Depot. Final cost is then $770,000, add on 30% margin for profit and cost overruns, divide by 10,000 hammers, and you're at $100,10 per hammer, which they graciously round down to $100.
I would imagine medical equipment has to satisfy similar stringent quality standards before being approved for human use. Factor in the cost of that testing, divide by the limited market (only about 600,000 primary care physicians in the U.S.), and divide again by the expectation that a metal stethoscope will probably last a decade or two (so only 30,000-60,000 physicals will be buying one each year), and something that costs a few cents to make can easily end up costing a few dollars for it to be worth it for the manufacturer to actually get it approved for sale. In the case of a 3D printer, you'd probably be required to run a separate test for every combo of printer and plastic material.
That's an invalid comparison. It's like comparing how a plane crash kills hundreds of people while a car crash kills 1-4, therefore cars must be safer.
To compare properly, you have to normalize the consequences by the amount of power generated. So 1 nuclear plant = 1 hydro plant = 2 coal plants = 7500 wind turbines = 19 square km of solar panels. Then you apply the failure rate of each technology based on the construction, operation, and maintenance of that amount of infrastructure. Even with Fukushima and Chernobyl, nuclear is by far the safest power generation technology. Hydro is second - a close second if you exclude Banqiao, a distant second if you include it. Then come wind and solar which kill about an order of magnitude more people per MWh generated than nuclear. (Little-known fact: despite nuclear power producing 12% of the world's electricity vs 2% for wind, and suffering its second-worst accident in history in March 2011, nobody died from nuclear power during that month, while wind killed one person. Someone forgot to lock the ladder to a wind turbine, and a high school student climbed up and fell to his death. While forgetting to lock one ladder is unlikely, multiply it by the 7500 turbines needed to replace a nuclear plant and it's almost certain to happen.)
Coal is about 4 orders of magnitude worse. That is what is not even an argument. We should be doing everything we can to replace coal with any of the alternatives. But because some people have a stick up their ass about nuclear, they're insisting we phase out coal slowly so it can be replaced with only renewables, even though right now nuclear is the only power source which can realistically replace coal.
Nuclear doesn't have to be our final power source. We can transition over to nuclear for a few decades while R&D into renewables drops their price to more competitive levels. Then we can phase out the nuclear plants and replace them with renewables. That would get us off coal almost immediately, saving hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives each year compared to our current trajectory, where we're hanging on to coal plants because certain people are adamant that we cannot build new nuclear plants. Those coal deaths are on your heads.
Ultimately, dollars and cents are what matters, not vision. "Vision" is only called that in hindsight when the idea succeeds economically. When it fails, we call the would-be visionary a "crackpot".
You can spend all your money buying Segway and giving them away. But that's only sustainable so long as you're pumping money into it. To really "change the world", the idea has to be economically self-sustainable - it has to be economically competitive with if not superior to alternative ideas. In other words, it will continue on its own even if the originator disappears from the market.
In the future if/when most of our electricity is generated by nuclear and renewables, and battery tech has advanced to the point where you don't need a half ton of batteries that take a minimum 30 minutes to half-fill, I'm sure EVs will be economically superior. But pushing for their widespread adoption before you reach that point of economical sustainability is wasting money. You are much better off spending that money on R&D to advance those specific technologies more rapidly.
Amazon is not profitable because they're pouring money into expansion. If they weren't doing that, that money would show up in their books as profit. I haven't read TFA, but Summary says Tesla is reducing production.
I used to manage a medium-sized company (50+ employees) which the Bureau of Labor Statistics had selected as part of its data sample (it's how they generate things like employment statistics - unemployment rate, new jobs added, etc.). I thought it was really weird that we didn't care about gender when hiring or working, and the only reason I had to actually count the number of female employees was to fill out the montly BLS form.
You'll also note from that cover letter that "The BLS will use the information you provide for statistical purposes only and will hold the information in confidence to the full extent permitted by law. In accordance with the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act (Title 5 of Public Law 107-347), the information you provide to the BLS will not be disclosed in identifiable form without your informed consent." I suspect the EEOC has similar restrictions, and this is just some folks in Congress trying to pressure a company to release the info directly, after they first tried to get the info from the EEOC and were told point blank that that would be illegal.
The way T-Mobile does it, there's really not much difference from paying $199 every few years. T-Mobile charges $20/mo if you don't pay for the phone in full. So over a 3 year contract that's $720. Add the $199 you paid up front and you've paid $920 in total for your subsidized phone. Not much different than if you'd bought it with a 3 year loan.
The only difference this makes (and it's an important one) is that if you don't upgrade your phone after 3 years and continue to use it, the $20/mo surcharge drops off your monthly bill. Just as though you had bought the phone outright, because by that point you have bought the phone outright. For nearly two decades now, carriers (except T-Mobile) have been fleecing customers who don't upgrade phones after their contract is up. It was ripe for a FTC investigation.
I don't think it'll do much to the average (mean) price of smartphones. The median price will probably drop though. In other words, more people will be buying lower priced phones, while the price of high-end phones wealthy people buy will go up. That's pretty much how the rest of the computer industry works (graphics cards are an extreme example, with people who can afford high-end cards paying 3-4x more for roughly 2x the performance).
As for Apple vs. Android, I've suspected or a while that Android buyers have been subsidizing iPhone buyers. True the high-end Android phones are priced similarly to the iPhones. But the bulk of Android sales are the lower-priced models, which are often half to a third the cost of an iPhone when purchased outright. But you look at the carrier subsidized pricing and the iPhone will be $199 down, while the mid-tier Android phone will be $99 down. In other words, the full price of the iPhone is ~$400 more, but the carrier is only charging $100 more for it. That means either the carrier is losing $300 on the iPhone, or they're making $300 extra on the Android phone which is effectively subsidizing the iPhone price.
If that goes away and the $400 mid-tier phone now costs $400 vs. $800 for the high-end phone, then yes it will hurt sales of those high-end phones.
Even if they win, they lose. The only reason Hollywood makes money hand over fist is because they have mindshare - their celebrities and artists are known throughout the world, so everyday people want to watch their movies or hear their songs.
The Internet drops the cost of the distribution business to near zero. If Hollywood tries to keep a stranglehold on their existing distribution channels, that just creates an opportunity for alternate channels servicing artists and movies elsewhere in the world. As the people in those alternate channels become more famous, Hollywood loses mindshare. Fewer people are interested in what their celebrities and artists are doing, and they put themselves out of business.
There is a way to make it happen, but I doubt it will fly. Korea basically did this in the 1970s and 1980s. The government knew it didn't have the road infrastructure to support every household owning a car, so they taxed cars up the wazoo. A car that might cost $10,000 would cost $50,000 after taxes ($100,000 in today's dollars). This had the effect of severely discouraging car ownership. In its place, a robust taxi industry sprang up. I remember visiting downtown Seoul and 80%-90% of the cars on the road were taxis. There were no traffic jams, and if you didn't want to wait for a bus you could hail a taxi within 15-30 seconds.
It all fell apart in 1988. One of the Democratic nominees for President (Gephardt if I remember), in a bid to win Michigan made a huge ruckus about how Hyundai was allowed to sell its cars for $6000 in the U.S., while an equivalent Ford cost $45,000 in Korea. He conveniently left out that the same Hyundai also cost $45,000 in Korea. He didn't win the nomination, but the damage was done. U.S. public sentiment forced the U.S. to pressure Korea to remove their car taxes. Cars in Korea suddenly became affordable to the average household, and Korea plummeted into two decades of gridlock.
No, it's a net negative Building your server farm near hydroelectric plants doesn't reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned. It increases them. The entire electrical grid is connected. If Google's server farm weren't there, the hydroelectric power would be transmitted to fill a need somewhere else. All Google does by locating their servers there is cause someone else to use fossil fuel power instead of hydroelectric power.
Put another way, certain power plants produce as much power as they can (wind, solar, to some extent hydro and nuclear). Other plants scale their production so that total generation matches demand - coal for day/night variability in demand (they're shut down overnight), gas for instantaneous variability in demand. If you add a server farm on the demand side, it doesn't matter which power plants are nearest to it. The net effect is that additional gas and coal must be burned to handle the added power demand.
The only way to add a server farm and reduce fossil fuel consumption is to build additional non-fossil electrical generation capacity along with it.