Working with people in different continents means brainstorming with them too.
You're not going to get complicated designs out of a brainstorm session. If you do, you've conflated it with a decision session, and have started doing design in your meeting. This invariably leads to bad decisions and bad design.
The question is how long you can go without maintenance and repair--what's the cost over time?
It's like when you hit someone's parked car and they make your insurance pay to fix their fucked-up door, but the door had already been smashed in by them hitting a fire hydrant 2 years prior. How much more damage did you really do? Well, okay, a lot. How much more cost did you add to the repair? None. Why should you have to pay for it? Largely, because you're a shitty driver.
It doesn't make sense to me to claim that drivers of big vehicles causing big damage to roads should be proportionally more responsible for the damage they cause, rather than the usage they make, when much of the damage is unmitigated wear and tear--when the road takes its greatest damage from freeze-thaw cycles. If 10% of the damage is caused by vehicle traffic--that is, if the amortized cost-per-year is only 90% as much with no traffic as it is with traffic--then 10% of the cost should be scaled based on traffic damage, and the other 90% is most fair scaled to bulk usage.
Of course, scaling for bulk usage is stupid, too. It makes the percentage of income paid toward road maintenance higher for lower-income users.
The more and the heavier the vehicles on the road, the more damage caused, the higher the cost of maintenance.
Leave an un-driven road un-maintained for 5 years and it will quickly become an un-drivable road with cracked pavement, potholes, and weedy overgrowth.
Than again, all-electric vehicles don't pay a dime for road maintenance. Maybe a per-mile charge is better.
Then you get better public transit infrastructure, or someone builds a valuable economic center (shopping mall, big office park) near a major population area, and people flat-out drive less.
I argue for a Citizen's Dividend funded by a flat 17% income tax on all business and individual income. By comparison, Social Security is funded by a separate OASDI tax of 6.2%, plus 6.2% payroll, capped on $117k income. What happens when wealth distribution changes? What happens when we have inflation, and the sheer amount of income below $117k is proportionally less than the amount above $117k? What happens when the tax on wage workers drives their wage demand up along with that 6.2% payroll that the business pays, and so labor is more expensive, and so they pay for more expensive management strategies (e.g. implement cellular manufacture, better project management, or automation) to reduce the number of employees and the amount they pay them?
The same thing is happening with roads as with a cap-and-dividend--another scheme some UBI advocates propose, in which we'd tax, e.g., pollution, and pay the tax revenue out to everyone equally. What happens when they switch to solar energy? What happens when people stop driving their cars as much? What happens when they get more efficient cars? What happens when they get electric cars? The weather and asshole plant roots do more damage to the roads than your tires, even if nobody ever drives on them.
Fuel taxes become per-mile taxes because people get more efficient cars. Per-mile taxes fail because people drive less thanks to positive economic factors (localized business, mass transit availability) and evasive behavior (moped ebike, which require no registration). What then?
Taxes on individual activities are also regressive, just as taxes on business are business-target. Taxing factory pollution output? I guarantee you I don't output 2.4 metric tonnes of coal-source CO2 per hour. Taxing liquor per liter of alcohol? I guarantee you a rich man will die of alcohol poisoning after just as much alcohol in one day as a poor man; it'll cost the same in taxes; and the rich man will have much less of his income taxed by the alcohol tax. Driving is the same: a rich man with $25,000,000 yearly income will not drive 2000 times as many miles as a poor man with $12,000--that's 24 million miles of driving, a thousand trips around the earth's circumference, or lapping the earth 2.7 times per day.
Taxing per driven mile means the rich man will be taxed a lower percentage of his income than a poor man, while any habitual behavior which reduces number of miles driven will reduce the income from this tax.
Yeah, but that breaks down in two primary situations: when you're in a hall with 1000 people, and when you're working remotely with 10 or 15 people who all have access to draw on a virtual whiteboard and thus need to be herded like cats.
Other graphical tools require more forethought, and so do important meetings with large project groups spread across wide geographical areas. At a point, the whiteboard isn't even a feasible tool, because spot-generation of more than a tiny fragment of the information you're exchanging is going to draw out your meeting into an unending mess of poorly-communicated ideas. That particular problem starts developing just slightly before the whiteboard ceases to be a feasible tool by its own nature: the whiteboard stops being an efficient tool before it ceases to be an effective tool.
You need to start bringing graphical diagrams and slideshows, models, and whatnot. Plan the meeting agenda ahead of time, distribute it, and make sure people have the information they're presenting ready. If it's a 20 minute meeting with 4 people in the same room and nothing complex to cover, get a white board; if it's a 20 minute meeting with 4 people on an online meeting, use a virtual whiteboard; if you have 12 teams and 35 people, tell them to have their shit ready when they get there.
Diagramming on a whiteboard remotely is a different problem. It's easily solved by pointing the camera at the whiteboard behind you, at least when you have 3 different people in 2 locations. When you have 27 locations and 150 people on the call, what then? A shared whiteboard that everyone fucks up completely in the first 15 seconds because there is not enough whiteboard space?
You quickly realize whiteboards are not the only graphical tool, and perhaps you should include some graphics designers on your project management team and have them help people prepare for meetings so they have PNG images to share and other graphical tools to use to share things. Come prepared with more than a magic marker.
No, because putty is ballsacks that can't be properly scripted, uses weird key files that need special conversion (it doesn't use an openssh key, but a putty identity key that you can convert to openssh using another program), and handles all kinds of terminal interactions in such a wrong way that you may as well be using Microsoft Word with a VB script to send commands across ssh. Start in a real terminal, where 27 sessions is C-a " instead of "oh fuck which alt-tab icon is it?!"
Geographical project management is a known hard problem. Most professionals are sloppy, and so only a few really good project managers can manage wide, disparate teams.
Take this in for a moment: my broad base of experience is so broad that I can see things others can't. I've done computer security (right down to kernel-level policy; I could build grsecurity and stack smash protection from scratch if I had to), system engineering, programming, that sort of shit; but I've also done the accounting for an entire business, personal finance management, and even a lot of finance and general economics (I've analyzed how loans work to develop strategies for debt management and elimination; my current pet project is the elimination of poverty by replacing our welfare system with a cheaper one that provides an infallible capitalist solution, but not a perfect one).
When IT people tell me finance or accounting people are too dumb to do anything, the only thing I can think about is how very glad I am that I don't have to handle the invoices or run the end-of-year income statement for a business with 47 departments and 10,000 employees. The finance manager is bewildered by computers, but knows well enough to select between highly-complex computer software products and get the right engineers with the right skills to do the things he doesn't understand at all. Result? over 95% of the mistakes in their work go away, and the work gets done in half the time, because most of the work is now automated and the humans are managing the flow of data and verifying the results.
People tell me the guy's an idiot because he can't install his own video driver when there's some kind of IRQ conflict or whatever.
Yeah, okay. The only reason IT people think accountants are dumb is the accountants aren't building rocket shuttles. Unless the accountants build something exciting that the IT people don't understand very well, they'll think the accountants are dumb. They basically think only about themselves, and don't understand why everyone isn't just like them, and figure anything other people can do that they can't do is dumb and pointless.
While your general analysis is sound and interesting, I prefer science to common sense. Science, however, supports Waldorf education and suggests a return to pre-John-Dewey education as a starting point; we should of course massively upgrade from that with a lot of new science that tells us all about learning.
There are better ways to do math, but not better ways to teach math. I don't mean calculators, either; I can do simple derivatives in my head--for some definition of "simple" up to and including the chain rule--using the methods we all know from our first week of calculus in high school. Somebody had to write that shit down, first, even though I can compute it mentally.
The soroban will teach you to do mental arithmetic; mnemonics and deep mnemonic interconnection will help you learn algebra and geometry; even chemistry that I've forgotten is stored visually for relearning from my own memory--I have an oil rig similar to the one Bruce Willis's daughter got fucked on acting as a mind palace for various redox reaction information, although it's falling apart from poor maintenance (yes, even those memories decay without upkeep).
I've been trying to learn to draw simply to improve visualization, largely for the purpose of rapidly improving my memory. I'm stubbornly doing it with a wacom tablet to jump over the big gap in one leap--it's faster and more efficient--but I will attest that putting pen to paper would be a lot less disconcerting than scaling the ginormous, vertical cliff I've selected.
It is the economics of comparative advantage. GM outsources the production of steel to steel mills, after all.
so a company would outsource the design and manufacture of the one feature their customers cared most about? I don't think you'll find many examples of that in history -- at least, examples in which the parent company survived very long.
Well, Dell, Gateway, and HP outsource their operating systems to Microsoft; people seem to care most about the OS on PCs. IBM tried to keep OS in-house, and lost the PC market when Microsoft came out with Windows and they had to compete OS/2+IBM with Windows+Everyone; Apple keeps their OS in-house, yet 7 times more Android phones actually sell into consumer hands, and 8 times as many Android phones ship to stores, while their PC market has always been so marginal that we point out Apple cultists as a special breed of idiot in our society.
Speaking of phones, didn't Nokia and Symbian both go under trying to make their own cell phone OS? Whatever happened to Blackberry's new platform, anyway? Is it just me, or has every cell phone manufacture who tried to make their own phone OS failed dismally in the global market? Apple seems to hold on well in the US, even catching up, even if it's not doing great in the world (Japan hates the iPhone; Android has over 93% market share); the iPhone is just an iPod, or the iPod is just an iPhone, and Apple's real market share is in the digital music industry.
This is how business works. Vertical monopolies are hard to build.
Another device with mobile characteristics disrupted the industry: Mobile phones, first with Android, then with Ubuntu Touch on it.
The iPhone got in on this somehow without all that; while Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and so forth kept their hold. Nokia went another way; Blackberry has been up and down. The manufacturers who didn't pounce on Android dropped out of the running.
It seems open-source software didn't displace those manufacturers who took advantage of the market change. What makes you think all this new technology will displace GM?
There are all kinds of strategies and techniques geniuses use--the same way a woodworker uses a rotary router upon wood--to achieve maximum utility from their brain. It is a simple tool requiring skill to produce results, as you apply skill with e.g. Krita to draw a digital painting: one tool, hundreds of technical procedures to produce complex results.
One of the most primary strategies used by the greatest geniuses--not simply experts who excel in a single field of interest, but geniuses who excel at anything they attempt on a dare--is to instill motivation. They examine a problem requiring effort, understand its implications, and find a reason for interest: something they already want, or a new thing they suddenly realize a desire for, is more readily achieved by this new effort. In this way, every task, every study, every problem becomes engrossing; the individual has an unfettered desire to pursue this thing which is lain before him, and so fails to recognize the effort he puts forth, and so puts forth much effort without resistance, and so excels.
You observe simply that some things require excessive effort to gain an end not sufficiently interesting; were that end more interesting, it would be more pursued. Likewise, the closer that effort is to something interesting--if an aspect of the effort itself is discovered interesting, or if each step of progression directly translates to a useful step of progression in something else interesting--the more strongly it is pursued. Simply put: if upon completion of X you can improve Y, completing X becomes interesting because of Y; if by way of progressing toward completion of X you improve Y, X becomes interesting because it is essentially Y as well.
You observe, of course, that turning the second situation into the first is a good control for humans: if doing 10% of X grants you 10% of Y, and you do not want people interested in Y to perform X, then you must adjust the system surrounding X, Y, or both such that completing X grants Y, or such that X has less impact on Y, so as to require more effort for returns and less returns for effort.
Suppose the automotive market did change, to one in which customers didn't care about fuel mileage, or number of seats, or whatever it is they do now, and instead cared only about what OS the car was running. How many decades do you think it would take to remove all the car- and engine-geeks from the company and replace them with digital-geeks?
They wouldn't. They'd outsource that part, and keep their necessary engineers. They'd pay Apple or Google or Tesla to build their fancy displays, their self-navigation systems, and their electric battery management systems, in the same way Subaru pays Porsche to build engines and Cadillac pays Mercedes-Benz to build their suspension systems. The investment for any of these companies to build the systems of the others would be large, save Tesla who would just ensure their continuous survival by becoming the battery supplier for everyone.
It is malicious prosecution. They're setting settlement lower than cost, meaning they're not confident they can win a high-cost lawsuit. If they ever initiate prosecution, it's straight malicious prosecution; holding the threat and strategically avoiding prosecution is coercion and legal racketeering, possibly criminal directly under the RICO act, supported by pattern behavior which indicates that they believe their activities constitute malicious prosecution.
In other words: they're generating circumstantial evidence enough to demonstrate malicious intent and abuse of the legal system in court. A good prosecuting lawyer can raise a lawsuit here and argue, legally, that these people are intentionally avoiding entanglement in an actual lawsuit, and so believe themselves to be pursuing a criminal action, and are avoiding that action but using the threat as leverage for racketeering--they are attempting to extort a broad base of victims for money through illegal abuse of the courts.
They're all working with the same faculties, you know; geniuses aren't endowed with better brains.
I have a large and fairly complex plan that puts a permanent end to all homelessness and hunger in the United States, costing less than our current welfare system, softening the blow of economic downturns and high unemployment, and even satisfying the problems of social security old-age pensions. It's a simple set of core actions with piles and piles of justification and analysis attached, rather than a network of fragile and uncertain bits of legislation built in a delicate web of questionable certainty. The beauty of it is that it's quick, easy, and durable; it solves all sorts of social problems through very minor action, through action which cannot fail because failure would come by spite which would only open the door for others to come profit by pushing success: this system will make some people extremely rich, and they will become rich by taking action to house and feed the poor, and yet the well of money they draw from for this is strictly and absolutely limited so as to not create a dangerous drain on our economy.
Do you think I was able to do such a thing because I was born with a much more capable brain than yours? Do you think it came with the package, a special upgrade you did not receive? Would you determine I'm some sort of in-born economic genius with a brain anatomy functionally superior to yours, genetics which you are denied, above and beyond the collective ability of all other humans on this planet? I have none of that; you have the same facilities I do, simply not put to the same use.
Your observation is quite right, but incomplete: there is no "smart kid" in the class; you only have one with some interest, and you will foster geniuses by creating interest in them. There are mental techniques to turn humans into intellectual gods, yes, and you can instill them within every single human child who enters your classroom, if only you can push the right button to make that child interested in learning. With those tools, then, you can repeat the same: grant them an interest in history, in mathematics, in languages, in technology, and they will become experts in those subjects in short order.
The argument against PTC is that the cost of these fatalities is only a few million dollars each, and PTC would cost several billion dollars, so it's uneconomic.
Do note that "uneconomic" means costs to someone increase. When that someone is taxpayers, money comes out of people's and business's hands; when that someone is the operator, they raise prices. In the first cases, people have less money with which to eat and commute, and businesses have less money with which to hire people, and so some people fall to poverty where they become mentally ill and diseased; in the second case, some people can't or refuse to afford the service, reducing its usefulness, slowing economy, and causing a similar effect on a larger or smaller scale--larger if it affects commerce at a high comparative advantage, smaller if it only affects people's ability to commute to work and the employer just fires them and hires more local people.
Economic consequences trickle down to real consequences measured in human suffering and death. Every economic action is measured by its offset: it causes damage amounting to 1500 people dying of poverty, but creates stimulus amounting to 2000 people rising out of poverty, and thus gives a bonus of 500 people rising out of poverty--the first 1500 may be sheltered, or they may be exchanged (person A falls to poverty so persons B and C can rise out of poverty). When given the equivalent option, I tend to favor sheltering; when given no equivalent option, I am completely unmoved by exchange (given the option of 50 million starving adults who are starving now or 0.1 million starving children who would starve if we saved those adults, I'll throw the children into the streets). I solidly oppose actions which increase human suffering in total, because it's uneconomic.
Doubtful that there was any kind of throttle malfunction due to dead man switch technology that has been on trains for decades.
That switch controls a throttle system that manages air intake in gas trains, fuel intake in diesel trains, and electricity regulation to the motors in electric rail. If the air or fuel intake sticks open, you get runaway acceleration; if an electrical component shorts or a solid state power MOSFET starts bleeding current, you get excess power to the motors. In that case, your switch might not work, unless it's engineered to cut off some other system--in race cars, the kill switch powers down the fuel pump by disconnecting the battery, because the throttle may stick open and cutting fuel pump cuts fuel going to engine in any and all cases.
Knee-jerk reaction. "It flipped over! You should have X! Do it! Do it now!" Next week: "The automated system didn't work, and caused the train to accelerate out of control and flip over! What irresponsible ass turned this on without proper testing?!"
Slashdot Mirror
Working with people in different continents means brainstorming with them too.
You're not going to get complicated designs out of a brainstorm session. If you do, you've conflated it with a decision session, and have started doing design in your meeting. This invariably leads to bad decisions and bad design.
Microsoft has made bigger blunders, and then refused to fix them.
The question is how long you can go without maintenance and repair--what's the cost over time?
It's like when you hit someone's parked car and they make your insurance pay to fix their fucked-up door, but the door had already been smashed in by them hitting a fire hydrant 2 years prior. How much more damage did you really do? Well, okay, a lot. How much more cost did you add to the repair? None. Why should you have to pay for it? Largely, because you're a shitty driver.
It doesn't make sense to me to claim that drivers of big vehicles causing big damage to roads should be proportionally more responsible for the damage they cause, rather than the usage they make, when much of the damage is unmitigated wear and tear--when the road takes its greatest damage from freeze-thaw cycles. If 10% of the damage is caused by vehicle traffic--that is, if the amortized cost-per-year is only 90% as much with no traffic as it is with traffic--then 10% of the cost should be scaled based on traffic damage, and the other 90% is most fair scaled to bulk usage.
Of course, scaling for bulk usage is stupid, too. It makes the percentage of income paid toward road maintenance higher for lower-income users.
The more and the heavier the vehicles on the road, the more damage caused, the higher the cost of maintenance.
Leave an un-driven road un-maintained for 5 years and it will quickly become an un-drivable road with cracked pavement, potholes, and weedy overgrowth.
Than again, all-electric vehicles don't pay a dime for road maintenance. Maybe a per-mile charge is better.
Then you get better public transit infrastructure, or someone builds a valuable economic center (shopping mall, big office park) near a major population area, and people flat-out drive less.
I argue for a Citizen's Dividend funded by a flat 17% income tax on all business and individual income. By comparison, Social Security is funded by a separate OASDI tax of 6.2%, plus 6.2% payroll, capped on $117k income. What happens when wealth distribution changes? What happens when we have inflation, and the sheer amount of income below $117k is proportionally less than the amount above $117k? What happens when the tax on wage workers drives their wage demand up along with that 6.2% payroll that the business pays, and so labor is more expensive, and so they pay for more expensive management strategies (e.g. implement cellular manufacture, better project management, or automation) to reduce the number of employees and the amount they pay them?
The same thing is happening with roads as with a cap-and-dividend--another scheme some UBI advocates propose, in which we'd tax, e.g., pollution, and pay the tax revenue out to everyone equally. What happens when they switch to solar energy? What happens when people stop driving their cars as much? What happens when they get more efficient cars? What happens when they get electric cars? The weather and asshole plant roots do more damage to the roads than your tires, even if nobody ever drives on them.
Fuel taxes become per-mile taxes because people get more efficient cars. Per-mile taxes fail because people drive less thanks to positive economic factors (localized business, mass transit availability) and evasive behavior (moped ebike, which require no registration). What then?
Taxes on individual activities are also regressive, just as taxes on business are business-target. Taxing factory pollution output? I guarantee you I don't output 2.4 metric tonnes of coal-source CO2 per hour. Taxing liquor per liter of alcohol? I guarantee you a rich man will die of alcohol poisoning after just as much alcohol in one day as a poor man; it'll cost the same in taxes; and the rich man will have much less of his income taxed by the alcohol tax. Driving is the same: a rich man with $25,000,000 yearly income will not drive 2000 times as many miles as a poor man with $12,000--that's 24 million miles of driving, a thousand trips around the earth's circumference, or lapping the earth 2.7 times per day.
Taxing per driven mile means the rich man will be taxed a lower percentage of his income than a poor man, while any habitual behavior which reduces number of miles driven will reduce the income from this tax.
Yeah, but that breaks down in two primary situations: when you're in a hall with 1000 people, and when you're working remotely with 10 or 15 people who all have access to draw on a virtual whiteboard and thus need to be herded like cats.
Other graphical tools require more forethought, and so do important meetings with large project groups spread across wide geographical areas. At a point, the whiteboard isn't even a feasible tool, because spot-generation of more than a tiny fragment of the information you're exchanging is going to draw out your meeting into an unending mess of poorly-communicated ideas. That particular problem starts developing just slightly before the whiteboard ceases to be a feasible tool by its own nature: the whiteboard stops being an efficient tool before it ceases to be an effective tool.
You need to start bringing graphical diagrams and slideshows, models, and whatnot. Plan the meeting agenda ahead of time, distribute it, and make sure people have the information they're presenting ready. If it's a 20 minute meeting with 4 people in the same room and nothing complex to cover, get a white board; if it's a 20 minute meeting with 4 people on an online meeting, use a virtual whiteboard; if you have 12 teams and 35 people, tell them to have their shit ready when they get there.
Diagramming on a whiteboard remotely is a different problem. It's easily solved by pointing the camera at the whiteboard behind you, at least when you have 3 different people in 2 locations. When you have 27 locations and 150 people on the call, what then? A shared whiteboard that everyone fucks up completely in the first 15 seconds because there is not enough whiteboard space?
You quickly realize whiteboards are not the only graphical tool, and perhaps you should include some graphics designers on your project management team and have them help people prepare for meetings so they have PNG images to share and other graphical tools to use to share things. Come prepared with more than a magic marker.
In a few years, we'll see that Tesla is indeed a car company, and Google is not.
No, because putty is ballsacks that can't be properly scripted, uses weird key files that need special conversion (it doesn't use an openssh key, but a putty identity key that you can convert to openssh using another program), and handles all kinds of terminal interactions in such a wrong way that you may as well be using Microsoft Word with a VB script to send commands across ssh. Start in a real terminal, where 27 sessions is C-a " instead of "oh fuck which alt-tab icon is it?!"
You should care because the world is still full of idiots who immediately install PuTTY on a new machine, instead of loading cygwin and using openssh.
Nobody who doesn't want their throat slit would be so rude to a fremen.
Geographical project management is a known hard problem. Most professionals are sloppy, and so only a few really good project managers can manage wide, disparate teams.
Everyone is wholly concerned with themselves.
Take this in for a moment: my broad base of experience is so broad that I can see things others can't. I've done computer security (right down to kernel-level policy; I could build grsecurity and stack smash protection from scratch if I had to), system engineering, programming, that sort of shit; but I've also done the accounting for an entire business, personal finance management, and even a lot of finance and general economics (I've analyzed how loans work to develop strategies for debt management and elimination; my current pet project is the elimination of poverty by replacing our welfare system with a cheaper one that provides an infallible capitalist solution, but not a perfect one).
When IT people tell me finance or accounting people are too dumb to do anything, the only thing I can think about is how very glad I am that I don't have to handle the invoices or run the end-of-year income statement for a business with 47 departments and 10,000 employees. The finance manager is bewildered by computers, but knows well enough to select between highly-complex computer software products and get the right engineers with the right skills to do the things he doesn't understand at all. Result? over 95% of the mistakes in their work go away, and the work gets done in half the time, because most of the work is now automated and the humans are managing the flow of data and verifying the results.
People tell me the guy's an idiot because he can't install his own video driver when there's some kind of IRQ conflict or whatever.
Yeah, okay. The only reason IT people think accountants are dumb is the accountants aren't building rocket shuttles. Unless the accountants build something exciting that the IT people don't understand very well, they'll think the accountants are dumb. They basically think only about themselves, and don't understand why everyone isn't just like them, and figure anything other people can do that they can't do is dumb and pointless.
While your general analysis is sound and interesting, I prefer science to common sense. Science, however, supports Waldorf education and suggests a return to pre-John-Dewey education as a starting point; we should of course massively upgrade from that with a lot of new science that tells us all about learning.
There are better ways to do math, but not better ways to teach math. I don't mean calculators, either; I can do simple derivatives in my head--for some definition of "simple" up to and including the chain rule--using the methods we all know from our first week of calculus in high school. Somebody had to write that shit down, first, even though I can compute it mentally.
The soroban will teach you to do mental arithmetic; mnemonics and deep mnemonic interconnection will help you learn algebra and geometry; even chemistry that I've forgotten is stored visually for relearning from my own memory--I have an oil rig similar to the one Bruce Willis's daughter got fucked on acting as a mind palace for various redox reaction information, although it's falling apart from poor maintenance (yes, even those memories decay without upkeep).
I've been trying to learn to draw simply to improve visualization, largely for the purpose of rapidly improving my memory. I'm stubbornly doing it with a wacom tablet to jump over the big gap in one leap--it's faster and more efficient--but I will attest that putting pen to paper would be a lot less disconcerting than scaling the ginormous, vertical cliff I've selected.
It is the economics of comparative advantage. GM outsources the production of steel to steel mills, after all.
so a company would outsource the design and manufacture of the one feature their customers cared most about? I don't think you'll find many examples of that in history -- at least, examples in which the parent company survived very long.
Well, Dell, Gateway, and HP outsource their operating systems to Microsoft; people seem to care most about the OS on PCs. IBM tried to keep OS in-house, and lost the PC market when Microsoft came out with Windows and they had to compete OS/2+IBM with Windows+Everyone; Apple keeps their OS in-house, yet 7 times more Android phones actually sell into consumer hands, and 8 times as many Android phones ship to stores, while their PC market has always been so marginal that we point out Apple cultists as a special breed of idiot in our society.
Speaking of phones, didn't Nokia and Symbian both go under trying to make their own cell phone OS? Whatever happened to Blackberry's new platform, anyway? Is it just me, or has every cell phone manufacture who tried to make their own phone OS failed dismally in the global market? Apple seems to hold on well in the US, even catching up, even if it's not doing great in the world (Japan hates the iPhone; Android has over 93% market share); the iPhone is just an iPod, or the iPod is just an iPhone, and Apple's real market share is in the digital music industry.
This is how business works. Vertical monopolies are hard to build.
I thought legal barratry had to target the same defendant repeatedly.
Another device with mobile characteristics disrupted the industry: Mobile phones, first with Android, then with Ubuntu Touch on it.
The iPhone got in on this somehow without all that; while Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and so forth kept their hold. Nokia went another way; Blackberry has been up and down. The manufacturers who didn't pounce on Android dropped out of the running.
It seems open-source software didn't displace those manufacturers who took advantage of the market change. What makes you think all this new technology will displace GM?
It's a bit simpler than that.
There are all kinds of strategies and techniques geniuses use--the same way a woodworker uses a rotary router upon wood--to achieve maximum utility from their brain. It is a simple tool requiring skill to produce results, as you apply skill with e.g. Krita to draw a digital painting: one tool, hundreds of technical procedures to produce complex results.
One of the most primary strategies used by the greatest geniuses--not simply experts who excel in a single field of interest, but geniuses who excel at anything they attempt on a dare--is to instill motivation. They examine a problem requiring effort, understand its implications, and find a reason for interest: something they already want, or a new thing they suddenly realize a desire for, is more readily achieved by this new effort. In this way, every task, every study, every problem becomes engrossing; the individual has an unfettered desire to pursue this thing which is lain before him, and so fails to recognize the effort he puts forth, and so puts forth much effort without resistance, and so excels.
You observe simply that some things require excessive effort to gain an end not sufficiently interesting; were that end more interesting, it would be more pursued. Likewise, the closer that effort is to something interesting--if an aspect of the effort itself is discovered interesting, or if each step of progression directly translates to a useful step of progression in something else interesting--the more strongly it is pursued. Simply put: if upon completion of X you can improve Y, completing X becomes interesting because of Y; if by way of progressing toward completion of X you improve Y, X becomes interesting because it is essentially Y as well.
You observe, of course, that turning the second situation into the first is a good control for humans: if doing 10% of X grants you 10% of Y, and you do not want people interested in Y to perform X, then you must adjust the system surrounding X, Y, or both such that completing X grants Y, or such that X has less impact on Y, so as to require more effort for returns and less returns for effort.
Suppose the automotive market did change, to one in which customers didn't care about fuel mileage, or number of seats, or whatever it is they do now, and instead cared only about what OS the car was running. How many decades do you think it would take to remove all the car- and engine-geeks from the company and replace them with digital-geeks?
They wouldn't. They'd outsource that part, and keep their necessary engineers. They'd pay Apple or Google or Tesla to build their fancy displays, their self-navigation systems, and their electric battery management systems, in the same way Subaru pays Porsche to build engines and Cadillac pays Mercedes-Benz to build their suspension systems. The investment for any of these companies to build the systems of the others would be large, save Tesla who would just ensure their continuous survival by becoming the battery supplier for everyone.
It is malicious prosecution. They're setting settlement lower than cost, meaning they're not confident they can win a high-cost lawsuit. If they ever initiate prosecution, it's straight malicious prosecution; holding the threat and strategically avoiding prosecution is coercion and legal racketeering, possibly criminal directly under the RICO act, supported by pattern behavior which indicates that they believe their activities constitute malicious prosecution.
In other words: they're generating circumstantial evidence enough to demonstrate malicious intent and abuse of the legal system in court. A good prosecuting lawyer can raise a lawsuit here and argue, legally, that these people are intentionally avoiding entanglement in an actual lawsuit, and so believe themselves to be pursuing a criminal action, and are avoiding that action but using the threat as leverage for racketeering--they are attempting to extort a broad base of victims for money through illegal abuse of the courts.
They're all working with the same faculties, you know; geniuses aren't endowed with better brains.
I have a large and fairly complex plan that puts a permanent end to all homelessness and hunger in the United States, costing less than our current welfare system, softening the blow of economic downturns and high unemployment, and even satisfying the problems of social security old-age pensions. It's a simple set of core actions with piles and piles of justification and analysis attached, rather than a network of fragile and uncertain bits of legislation built in a delicate web of questionable certainty. The beauty of it is that it's quick, easy, and durable; it solves all sorts of social problems through very minor action, through action which cannot fail because failure would come by spite which would only open the door for others to come profit by pushing success: this system will make some people extremely rich, and they will become rich by taking action to house and feed the poor, and yet the well of money they draw from for this is strictly and absolutely limited so as to not create a dangerous drain on our economy.
Do you think I was able to do such a thing because I was born with a much more capable brain than yours? Do you think it came with the package, a special upgrade you did not receive? Would you determine I'm some sort of in-born economic genius with a brain anatomy functionally superior to yours, genetics which you are denied, above and beyond the collective ability of all other humans on this planet? I have none of that; you have the same facilities I do, simply not put to the same use.
Your observation is quite right, but incomplete: there is no "smart kid" in the class; you only have one with some interest, and you will foster geniuses by creating interest in them. There are mental techniques to turn humans into intellectual gods, yes, and you can instill them within every single human child who enters your classroom, if only you can push the right button to make that child interested in learning. With those tools, then, you can repeat the same: grant them an interest in history, in mathematics, in languages, in technology, and they will become experts in those subjects in short order.
The argument against PTC is that the cost of these fatalities is only a few million dollars each, and PTC would cost several billion dollars, so it's uneconomic.
Do note that "uneconomic" means costs to someone increase. When that someone is taxpayers, money comes out of people's and business's hands; when that someone is the operator, they raise prices. In the first cases, people have less money with which to eat and commute, and businesses have less money with which to hire people, and so some people fall to poverty where they become mentally ill and diseased; in the second case, some people can't or refuse to afford the service, reducing its usefulness, slowing economy, and causing a similar effect on a larger or smaller scale--larger if it affects commerce at a high comparative advantage, smaller if it only affects people's ability to commute to work and the employer just fires them and hires more local people.
Economic consequences trickle down to real consequences measured in human suffering and death. Every economic action is measured by its offset: it causes damage amounting to 1500 people dying of poverty, but creates stimulus amounting to 2000 people rising out of poverty, and thus gives a bonus of 500 people rising out of poverty--the first 1500 may be sheltered, or they may be exchanged (person A falls to poverty so persons B and C can rise out of poverty). When given the equivalent option, I tend to favor sheltering; when given no equivalent option, I am completely unmoved by exchange (given the option of 50 million starving adults who are starving now or 0.1 million starving children who would starve if we saved those adults, I'll throw the children into the streets). I solidly oppose actions which increase human suffering in total, because it's uneconomic.
Doubtful that there was any kind of throttle malfunction due to dead man switch technology that has been on trains for decades.
That switch controls a throttle system that manages air intake in gas trains, fuel intake in diesel trains, and electricity regulation to the motors in electric rail. If the air or fuel intake sticks open, you get runaway acceleration; if an electrical component shorts or a solid state power MOSFET starts bleeding current, you get excess power to the motors. In that case, your switch might not work, unless it's engineered to cut off some other system--in race cars, the kill switch powers down the fuel pump by disconnecting the battery, because the throttle may stick open and cutting fuel pump cuts fuel going to engine in any and all cases.
Knee-jerk reaction. "It flipped over! You should have X! Do it! Do it now!" Next week: "The automated system didn't work, and caused the train to accelerate out of control and flip over! What irresponsible ass turned this on without proper testing?!"