It's as if I say "The voters decide the winner in an election", and you say "Almost nobody actually votes", as if this is a rebuttal to my statement.
That's actually important here because people allegedly pay for the right to vote. It's also like saying you bought a car and pay for car insurance but you take public transportation and never drive: why did you buy a car? By contrast, being a citizen of the United States of America automatically means you can vote for free, without paying for it.
Secondly, you skipped the part about some stocks having no voting rights so what the fuck are you buying?
Using your logic I could say that IPOs don't generate any wealth either. They just tranfer wealth between the current owners of the company and the new shareholders.
The difference is people buy and sell stocks to trade money between individuals or groups attempting to capitalize on the undervalue/overvalue of those stocks. This doesn't encourage any other business activity. IPOs are businesses raising capital to engage in business activity: it funds research and development, production, expansion, and so on.
So what stops a kid from deciding to spend 10 years learning blacksmithing right before this skill becomes useless in the face of industrialization?
You don't understand risk, do you? Probability versus Severity. Risk is lower when either of these is lower. So what's the probability of an industrial revolution, versus the probability of an upsurge of labor in a market that disconnects the production of skilled labor from the demand driver?
Historically, college education at student discretion has produced repeated cycles of skilled labor scarcity followed by overabundance; whereas vocational education driven directly by employers has produced faster reaction to skilled labor scarcity, resulting in a reduction of severity--the demand doesn't build out of control because demand immediately causes production of skilled labor, and the supply doesn't build to excess because skilled labor supply is essentially directly commissioned by the consumer.
The historical factors show that the amount of risk in an employer-driven skilled labor system is lower. Importantly, though, the risk is on employers: you could be trying to train, at your expense, a retarded monkey. In the modern system, the risk is higher *and* it's mainly offset onto students, so employers don't have to suffer direct risk; it's debatable if the system puts more risk overall on employers as well, since they can be subject to a supply shortage of skilled labor at any time. On the other hand, their risk management plan may include "train some people to be programmers if there aren't enough programmers and they all want $200k", so they effectively have a mitigation plan that allows them to reap the benefits without facing consequences.
If you create $10 of wealth but you derive $15 of wealth from others who you pass it on to--i.e. you farm wheat, you've created food--you've both increased the wealth in a system and deprived others of wealth.
In other words enrishing oneself does *NOT* *AWLAYS* come at the expense of depriving others of wealth!!!
Uh, I said that people try to "profit" by creating something worth less than what they sell it for--that they transfer to you a thing worth something like $10 but make you pay $15 for it, so you are less wealthy and they are more wealthy. And you use this as an example of not depriving others of wealth? Are you going to use contracting HIV in Africa as an example of having sex without getting an STD next?
Let's break it down: "you create $10 of wealth"--you have a thing worth essentially 10 dollars. "You derive $15 of wealth from others who you pass it on to"--you sell it for 15 dollars. The person who receives it is, essentially, 5 dollars less wealthy. They are deprived of 5 dollars of wealth.
To this you say:
In other words enrishing oneself does *NOT* *AWLAYS* come at the expense of depriving others of wealth!!!
It sticks in some places, doesn't in others. Around here we just spend days or weeks throwing solutions at problems going "does this work?" or blaming other people. I started using the specifying questions to gather information and actually defining and solving problems before anyone else had any idea what the hell was going on.
You can't just say, "Do better at solving problems." People don't know what the hell that means. It's like if you joined a boxing gym and the instructor told you "your stance is wrong" and then punched you in the face with no further explanation. Not helpful. Similarly with the OP complaining that his communication is apparently bad but no details on that--someone says "you need to learn to communicate better" and you're like "dude if I knew what the hell you were talking about I would have already fixed it!" Which just tells me there's an organizational problem with communication...
The owners of stock are the collective owners of a company. They vote on board members which decide things like who gets hired for high ranking positions in the company and how much they are paid, and ultimately what direction the company is going.
First off, nobody actually calls in voting rights. Second, I have had voting rights in 2 companies; I have held stock in 34. Common stock doesn't always convey voting rights. Third, common stock can be cancelled.
It's a very juvenile perspective that managers don;t actually do anything and that it is only physical labor that creates wealth. It is very easy to waste human effort and create 0 wealth or even negative wealth without proper planning.
Managers provide extremely important functions at all levels. Executive Management provides integration of various aspects of business with the business strategy, for example a CISO providing risk assessment and action as a top-level priority in the execution of the overall business plan rather than people at the bottom in IT crying that "OUR SECUR NETWURK R FUKED IT GUNNA GET HAXED" and nobody gives a shit. Middle managers provide a valuable communications channel down to functional managers, who determine what their functional areas require in terms of resources to perform operational duties and supply services to the rest of the business.
That said, businesses still concentrate wealth in the business and in the personal funds of managers. Similarly, having children is important for continuation of the species; but we are overpopulating the planet and destroying it and we need to scale that back a bit. When 7 billion becomes 185 billion on this one little rock, there won't be any continuation of the species.
You seem to think that IPOs are a good thing, but part of what makes stock in a company valuable is the ability to sell it. If there were no stock market, IPOs would not raise as much capitol.
I said IPOs are the only wealth-generating function of the stock market. There are other implications; ideally the stock market functions as a method of transferring partnership with a business, but in practice it doesn't. Part of this is because you don't trade preferred on the open market, and common can be sold without conveying voting rights. Common has historically carried unexercised voting rights; but these days I see a lot of non-voting shares.
You seem to be confusing day trading as the the entire stock market. The ability to buy and sell stocks creates liquidity of ownership. Without this, you will be more likely to have people who don't want to manage or own a company stuck doing this job.
This is a pile of nonsense. Non-public companies are bought and sold all the time.
There is no crystal ball to tell us what skills will be in demand in the future. Our education system doesn;t create this burden for students. That burden is there by default.
The burden is not there by default because by default vocational education is not accessible to the vast majority of the public. In ages past, in "the good old days", in times long forgotten, there was this thing called "Apprenticeship". We still have it in some places, but now you must have vocational education before apprenticeship. Prior, apprenticeship was the only form of vocational education. In this form, a guild or a business or a certain skilled tradesman would obtain vocational aid from an unskilled entrant laborer, transferring vocational skills upon them. In this way, the market demand for a skill creates a demand for the unskilled to take up such vocational apprenticeship, such that only so many as needed to aid those already in the profession will be taken up.
In other words, the history of vocational education has been that people got jobs relieving skilled tradesmen from performing low-skill labor, providing an immediate increase in labor ca
Trying to keep everything minimal and "need-to-know" creates a protectionist environment that is extremely counterproductive. It's better to put out a little too much information than not enough: people will filter technical bullshit they don't care about and work around excess information; they will absolutely fail to call back to something you elected not to say in a meeting when it suddenly becomes relevant 3 days later.
Getting overly verbose is bad; being overly guarded and constrained is worse.
You also want to learn some problem-solving strategies. If your workplace doesn't use something like the Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Decision Analysis method, they need to. It will establish a common language and methodology for approaching a problem. 100% of the problem isn't always you; in many organizations, communication has become comfortable but is still terribly poor. In those situations, when you try to intentionally improve you will make the problem worse because suddenly your communications skills will exceed the organization's; you must commit to also leading a communications improvement in the organization if this happens.
In fact I implied the exact opposite when I said that investment creates wealth, and used the stock market as an example of investing.
Investment in the stock market moves wealth; it does not create it. In our current system, investment in the stock market decreases wealth: broker's fees and taxes are taken from the movement of wealth in a system that doesn't actually create anything. The brokers supply the service of moving stocks around; but the act of moving stocks around doesn't produce any useful labor output. Even banks produce useful output: they facilitate business transactions, meaning you can mail a cheque or provide a debit payment rather than expending time and effort moving yourself singly across distance to transact business. Stock brokers mainly facilitate "I'm gonna get rich buyin' some stocks!", which has merit only as far as an entertaining and skill-based winnable game (see: Poker); stocks only provide economic benefit in the event of an IPO, where the public is given an opportunity to invest in a company--not necessarily put money in and expect more money out, but at the very least put money in because the company is doing something they think will benefit them (produce wealth in society).
For example when a student takes out a school loan, the goal is that the wealth of the knowledge the student gains is more valuable than the money spent on the loan. If it is not, then the student's loan was not a good decision.
Fair point. Opportunity value versus opportunity cost. It's mishandled today, and student loans are a terrible example for many reasons. Mortgages pre-FDR accomplished what you described because they were shorter-term; but post-FDR loans have been money sinks where the total cost of a home is ridiculously high.
Universal higher education--beyond basic math and science and technical skills (computers, etc.)--causes a situation in which students must speculate on the future of the job market, typically resulting in demand booms for certain vocational education (degrees) followed by flooding the market with people who mainly can't get jobs. Non-defaultable loans to facilitate this result in huge economic damage; government-funded "free education" tends to require government-mandated quotaing (restricts the economy) or run as a free-for-all with the same practical risks but the direct financial impact spread to the tax base. Typically the end result is a major increase in inequality between the rich and poor, with the less affluent winding up in dead-end careers and/or massive debt.
A lack of universal higher education creates an economic crisis: only rich kids can afford vocational education, so non-rich people are left behind. Unfortunately, businesses have trouble reaching their strategic goals: they can bid $250,000 for computer programmers and $400,000 for Photoshop experts, but they still won't find enough in the market to actually carry out business activities. Universal education creates a great supply of cheap skilled labor, not only reducing the per-seat cost but also allowing businesses to actually fill the number of seats they need. Sans this, businesses would have to... wait for it... INVEST in raising educated, less-affluent applicants from a secondary (high school) or post-secondary continuing education (basic college math and science) level to a vocational level. In this scheme, the businesses take on the risk, aiming for a lower total cost per skilled laborer and a virtually limitless pool of skilled labor.
You compare the opportunity cost of a loan with the opportunity cost of businesses paying to train their own laborers. Investing with leveraged funds is very much more difficult than investing with direct funds, carrying higher risk and higher costs.
Are you aware of the term falsifiability? Lets say hypothetically this was incorrect, what might be some hypothetical evidence to show that it is wrong?
So you can translate from german but you don't know what the term "zeitgeist" (which is also a term used in english) means? You could have just claimed not to have seen the movie without trying to prove you have never even heard of the term before. Even if you had never heard the term, you could have just looked it up.
Option 3: only hear it from idiots in political conversations, similar to the way stupid shit from Farenheit 911 was spouted around, so never bothered to care. Zeit and Geist are very commonly known words, by the way; it's like saying you know what "das ist gut" means in German. No shit. Everyone knows that.
More importantly, are you honestly trying to argue that we could have usury in an economic system that doesn't experience inflation?
Yes, but I wasn't even trying to argue it. I was stating it as an obvious truth without any support because I didn't think it was required.
It's an obvious truth that you can lend money and require more than 100% of the lent money to be paid back as a matter of course of economic activity and not run out of money if the money supply doesn't increase?
Is it also an obvious truth that you can perpetually fill glasses from a 1 gallon container of Iced Tea without ever making more tea?
This works even when you bring into the argument that the primary source of wealth is labor, and that you can work more to obtain more money: that money comes from somewhere, and its eventual source is a loan;
This is false. This assumes you can only work in exchange for an inflationary currency. Even if your paycheck came in dollars, you could immediately exchange your dollars for gold (a non-inflationary currency), and break the cycle, or you could just buy things with it (e.g. food, etc), or you could lend it to someone else (e.g. put it in a bank), or you could invest it (e.g. buying stock).
Okay, now I know you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're one of those people who thinks the Stock Market isn't a zero-sum game and that magic money comes out of it; I've had this argument too many times. The simple truth of the stock market is that money is exchanged around for goods (stock slips). If you get money out, someone else lost money: money is only moving around, not actually increasing.
You call valuing a dollar today higher than a dollar tomorrow "usury"
Usury is attaching interest to a loan. Technically it's attaching "unethical, illegal, or excessive" interest to a loan or just making loans on immoral terms or whatnot; the biggest historical use of the term is in Judaism, where Jewish law prohibits charging interest at all to Jews. It calls the practice "Usury", and states that it's moral in the eyes of God to charge interest to Gentiles but never to Jews.
It is what a rational person would do if you live in a universe where proper investing increases wealth faster than just working hard
Loans are an investment: they transfer wealth from one person to another.
There is actually no working economic system; they all eventually collapse.
I could say all mathematical theories are eventually proven wrong. As ridiculous as this statement is, how long will it take to prove I am wrong? Luckily the burden of proof is on me.
Furthermore, you can leave a term like "collapse" vague, and when it turns out that some economic systems just adapt, you can claim that it collapsed and a new one took it's place, regardless of how minor or gradual the change is. Maybe to others the examples of previous economic systems that failed is good evidence that *all* economic systems fail, but this is a logical fallacy.
All economic systems eventually reach a state of unsupportable inflation, excessive wealth concentration, or liqui
Yeah, engineering metal armor is really tough. Aluminum isn't just "weaker than steel", though. Steel can cycle, it can handle impacts, it can deform. An aluminum bicycle will eventually crack somewhere close to the bottom bracket due to cycling: there is a constant oscillation that places the greatest amount of force near the bottom bracket, forcing the bike frame to flex back and forth. Steel does not weaken from this unless you flex it far enough to deform permanently.
All of this means that aluminum can't handle as much of an impact before failure. Aluminum's failure mode moves from "dent" to "crack" much more quickly. Aluminum weakens with every cycle until it eventually cracks: vibration progressively makes aluminum more brittle, and cars vibrate.
Steel isn't an excellent substance because it's hard; it's excellent because it's steel. Brass is another one: extremely brittle, but every time you hit it with something it gets harder--and hardened brass is extremely hard (and heavy). Different applications than steel, but for certain applications you simply cannot beat brass because its material properties are perfect. Brass is ridiculously hard and rigid, but steel is better for bikes because it's much lighter and does flex under enough stress (more desirable than cracking); but brass is better for watch gears, door handles, plumbing fixtures, and certain nuts and bolts and other threaded connectors that need to shrug off occasional stress.
Aluminum is used here because it's light and cheap; but it leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. Steel in bikes doesn't leave much; aluminum and carbon fiber are lighter, but we're talking about a 5lb frame versus a 3lb aluminum frame versus a 1.5lb carbon fiber frame. Yes, a steel plate is too heavy for the Tesla; but Aluminum isn't "like steel, but less so, but lighter". It's completely UNLIKE steel and steel is almost precisely what you want here but too heavy.
What happens often with that scenario is by talking to the people in Finance, the developer ends up thinking he or she has learned something about finance, and can write up requirements which read well and will be accepted by the users, but actually has very little understanding of what the users need and will produce awful software.
From the PMBOK fifth edition released January, 2013:
The Planning processes develop the project management plan [...] The complex nature of project management may require the use of repeated feedback loops for additional analysis. As more project information or characteristics are gathered and understood, additional planning will likely be required.
In other words: You should have a kick-off meeting (Initiation Processes), in which basic requirements are gathered and scope is established. This is what you've described: we talk to those guys, we find out what they need. Then you should do further planning (Planning Process). Then you should take the output of that planning back to the same stakeholders--back to Finance or whoever--and engage in further planning to clarify the scope. We know the breadth of the scope, but not the depth: we know we're writing a new Accounting System, but we haven't exactly identified all the features that belong in one in the greatest detail. Somewhere down the line when implementing the General Ledger, you'll probably have to do this again as you realize nobody has made it exactly clear how to represent Credit and Debit accounts on the same ledger (it's simple, but unless you're an accountant you will probably scratch your head on the first pass).
Stop thinking you can just have a short chat with Finance and understand what they want out of you. It doesn't work that way.
There are a few reasons for this. First, every area of expertise has its jargon. Often jargon is an ordinary word with a different, specific meaning in a certain context.
And this is why project management relies heavily on expert judgment: you need experts who understand this jargon and can interpret it for you, and make decisions on conflicting requirements by involving the stakeholders and understanding their needs and relaying your constraints back to them. Our current Director of Finance did this job for a long time: he knew how to talk to IT, and he knew how to talk to Accounting, and he knew how to talk to Finance, so when IT and Finance and Accounting all had to work together he would act as The Guy who knew wtf everyone meant and made sure everyone was on the same fucking page.
When you start exploring the scope with a Work Breakdown Structure and other tools, you start exposing requirements and the project plan in terms that are visible to everyone. This will quickly alert your stakeholders and sponsors to differences in your understanding of jargon versus their understanding of jargon. Usually. Again, you're going to want to leverage expert judgment and skilled subject matter experts who know how to communicate below their field. Yes, Finance is talking down to you; you don't know shit about finance any more than they know about computers.
Second, something obvious to anyone who has even a 101 intro level of understanding in a field may be completely unexpected to someone outside of that field. When talking to the folks in Finance, there is some basic assumption so elementary they never mention because everyone in finance covered it in day one, but is completely unknown to the developer with no finance background. Talking will almost never solve this issue. They won't think to mention it; the developer won't know what question to ask.
Yeah, I hit these all the time when doing further analysis of requirements and trying to break down work very early in the planning process. We hit holes where the developers and managers try to handwave over something they don't understand, while loo
What is "Zeitgeist"? Time ghost? In any case I've not seen any such thing. Have you considered I might have a functional brain, rather than be jacked into Fox News or CNN or whatever anti-republicrat conspiracy machine stands philosophically opposed to the one you're jacked into? Come on man, I live under a rock; I read fantasy novels and don't watch TV news (I do, however, read The Onion, which is how I keep up on current events).
I've been running numbers in my head and working out economic theory, also looking at stuff like Keynesian Economics (severely flawed) and Austrian Economics (less flawed). There is actually no working economic system; they all eventually collapse, it's a matter of magnitude of collapse. Some will be a huge roller coaster ride; others will have good times and bad times, rather than great times and times of mass suicide and starvation. Some systems allow better for the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few who manage to keep it during economic collapse, while others make concentration of wealth harder and more readily facilitate dissemination of wealth during economic collapse.
You assume that "Y doesn't work without X" is the same statement as "X exists because Y". Gasoline engines do not work without gasoline, which could not have been invented without oil. Oil was not created by Jehovah for the purpose of running our gasoline engines; oil existed due to the events in the history of the earth, and facilitated gasoline and diesel engines. More importantly, are you honestly trying to argue that we could have usury in an economic system that doesn't experience inflation?
I was told there was goo. Many people have said the plate is steel. These are shortcomings; a carbide alloyed steel (titanium for weight reduction) plated with a non-carbide alloyed steel (ductile) would be better, but heavier. Perhaps they could micro-fuse aluminum that's been pressed into sheets the thickness of a soda can? Aluminum's highest strength-per-weight ratio comes when aluminum is in sheets of that thickness. They could use that as a tough core, but it would probably be vulnerable to piercing.
The issues with aluminum and carbide steels center around failure mode: aluminum cracks, steel doesn't. Carbide steel will break easier than non-carbide steel, but won't yield as much; mild steel will yield with less energy, but will absorb some energy in doing so and may thus deflect projectiles that would pierce carbide steel. Exotic layered armors are expensive though. Titanium is also weaker per volume than steel, but alloying lends some of its strength-per-mass.
You say you have only known two people who have had car fires, not that you've been tracking all car fires as reported by police and fire department radio statistics which are metrics exactly as accurate (not necessarily very accurate, but exactly as accurate) as car ownership metrics in the US.
A lot of people have brought up that car fires are ridiculously frequent; that the fuel tank in the rear of a car generally takes damage which frequently (not typically) causes fires in a rear-end collision (most collisions are rear-end collisions for one car) or side collision near that area; that the Tesla fires happen after severe damage like crashing through reenforced concrete and into a tree or having 30 pounds of metal rammed up into your car at ridiculously high speeds (70-100mph); and that car fires in gasoline cars are dangerous and tend to burn quickly and hot and cause death or severe burns, while car fires in a Tesla are contained by firewalls and per-cell thermally reactive fire suppression systems that contain and slow the spread of the fire to reduce its peak intensity and increase the opportunity time for a driver to escape the vehicle.
Of the above counterpoints, the very first was the only one that I was really keying on: you say you know two people who have had car fires; I know zero, but I know car fires happen frequently. I also don't have many friends, and I imagine the one friend I have who is a socialite and is directly socially connected to about a third of the local population has been in contact with many people who have actually had their cars catch fire. Similarly, I don't know anyone who's been shot or jailed or whatnot, but he has known several people who were murdered and who had shotguns discharged at them at close range (severe hospital ICU trip) during a robbery and who have been in jail and have been on crack and other crazy shit. I've never seen any of these things, but I know they happen.
I just don't like low-quality statistics. Your very first statement was hugely unqualified and had tons of potential sources of confounding. We simply don't know if there's a lot of bias here from you not living in an area with a lot of driving, or living in Alaska, or having very few friends, or living in a rich area where people maintain their cars better and drive better (fewer collision-induced fires), etc. We don't even know if these cars burned from a collision or from parking on leaves (the Tesla cannot cause a fire that way; on the other hand, I just vacuumed my driveway because my Mazda 3 nearly caused a yard fire).
Agile is, in a nutshell, a risk-lowering strategy for project management that incurs greater but more stable costs by repeatedly re-evaluating requirements along project phases in parallel.
Essentially, with basic Waterfall, you execute a series of project phases. At each phase, you re-evaluate your requirements, the progress of the project, and the needs of the organization to determine if what you're building still fits with what the user needs. With Agile, the next Project Phase will begin as soon as possible--if you can complete part of it after outputting a specific milestone deliverable in the previous phase, then you begin working on the next phase immediately. This includes repeated re-evaluation of requirements, which includes meetings with your clients (other department, coworkers, end users, managers, sponsors, whatnot) to examine what's been done, how the project is coming along, and how it addresses requirements.
This takes more time and expends more resources; however it also forces a re-evaluation of requirements, giving many more chances for your clients and sponsors to tell you that the project either is moving in a direction that doesn't satisfy requirements or is implementing requirements that have become obsolete. Obsoleting requirements reduces project work, but also invalidates some prior work--the fact that requirements are obsolete is not controllable, so the risk of discovering that the requirements are obsolete is the actual risk. Re-examining project requirements more frequently reduces the amount of work that will be done with obsolete requirements, decreasing risk.
Agile works fine. I dislike it, but I'm starting to understand and like it more. Project Management relies on communications; it includes Project Stakeholder Management and Communications Management, where stakeholders and their communications needs are classified and the frequency and mode of communications required are documented. Distributed development brings up a lot of communications needs and requires a good communications plan, because you're going to be communicating across differing cultures (yes even Norcal versus Socal presents issues in cross-cultural communications) with a lot of "virtual communications" (video conferencing, teleconferencing, etc. instead of face-to-face meetings). You can't just walk into the other department and talk to all these people during the course of their work; all communication will be highly structured, which is useful but is greatly aided by the inclusion of casual meetings. That means universal communications difficulties.
Solve your communications issue first. Then decide if you need Agile or Waterfall or what, because the best management strategy will depend on the project or even the project phase. You can't just slap Agile onto every project or run screaming away from it all the time and expect that to improve things. People love buzzwords because they think they can attach "DO THIS" "DON'T DO THAT" to things like Cloud or Agile or Virtualization, but they can't.
Every good management text explains the value of retention. Even hardly-relevant stuff in Kepner-Tregoe's problem solving techniques covers this: solving human resource problems is a good thing because replacing human resources means you made a mistake when hiring someone--a fucking expensive mistake. Now you have to eat the costs of months of settling in, plus general bad productivity, plus the cost of the hiring process (expended human time), plus salary and benefits paid to a worthless employee. Sometimes the mistake is less bad: you can modify their job function and gain something valuable while retaining their organizational experience (which is pretty significant); and sometimes the mistake is elsewhere: something besides "this employee sucks" is affecting their productivity, and correcting that is far less expensive and more valuable than throwing them out and replacing them with someone else who is more tolerant of the problem.
As for promotion from within, that's a tough one. Peter's Principle says people get promoted on merit and achievement, and cease being promoted once they've reached a level where merit and achievement no longer occur--because they can't function in their newest job. Now you have engineers who think they're smarter than their managers who become managers and still behave like engineers who think they're smarter than their managers... and their engineers. Then they micro-manage like hell and piss off all the engineers, who then work to get promoted up to management because they think they're so much smarter than their managers.
It really depends. Talking to people is often better. In large user bases that are isolated, this is hard; but when you're doing i.e. department-to-department, you're far better off asking. If you're writing software systems for Accounting and Finance, for example, there's 200 people working there. You want to interface with the Accounting Manager and Finance Manager--who will be doing, in part, exactly what's proscribed here--while also communicating with some of the actual people in these departments. This will get you a much better understanding of requirements than just "Well I don't know a fucking thing about finance, but I watch the finance people bang their heads on this shit a lot so we should do it this way instead! It would be better!"
Hub motors suck. I prefer a good differential where it's physically impossible to not respond close to optimally unless it seizes up. For example, a Torsen differential will always apply power where it reaches the ground: in acceleration to the rear wheels (the front start to slip), in optimal conditions to all four wheels, and in low-traction condition power will naturally migrate to the wheels with traction such that the amount of power delivered is maximized.
With a hub motor system, you have the ability to do other stuff like apply power to mess with steering and traction considerations for pre-crash systems and electronic stability control--modern systems instead apply steering adjustments and mess with anti-lock brakes on individual wheels. On the other hand, you also need a computer to take measurements and apply adjustments to the power distribution to the wheels. While a Torsen will always do this to fixed correctness (i.e. n% of optimal) with a fixed amount of efficiency, the correctness and basic efficiency of a computer controlled system vary with the maintenance state and tolerance of the sensors. The sensors may be imprecise (i.e 0+/-20) or inaccurate (i.e. 5+/-0.5), and will likely become less precise and less accurate over time until maintained and eventually replaced. A mechanical differential will become less efficient over time, reducing power; but the handling characteristics will remain the same.
Then you have faulty software. Many manufacturers won't give you a computer upgrade because upgrading the software causes a lot of risk; they will issue ECU updates when a problem known to be fixed in a newer ECU firmware is detected by the dealership mechanic, and third-party mechanics rarely have the ability to perform an ECU update. Often these updates bring improved fuel mileage and power by better stock engine tuning. Mechanical parts are readily replaced with extremely low risk: they either work or they don't, and they pass a certain amount of torque; computers are much more complex and the risk presented by an ECU update is much higher. Faulty software is a problem; and the benefit of being able to simply upgrade software to get better handling inherently carries more risk and may be a restricted option.
I find hardware differential systems with a single motor to be a better option.
Now move the fucking battery pack so this shit stops. 1/4" aluminum armor 'a good idea' and all, but only because you mounted the battery in a stupid fucking position.
That may imbalance the weight distribution of the vehicle, making it much more dangerous. It also may fail to adequately protect the vehicle from similar debris damage. Remember the other guy rammed through a reenforced concrete wall and hit a tree; many folks have conjectured that, sans armor and battery, this driver would have had the trailer hitch he hit come through the vehicle's baseboard and into his lap, potentially killing him but at least crippling him.
Your impulsive reaction and failure to adequately analyze risk has just cost thousands of lives per year where you tried to save three.
That being said, 1 in 6300 is a lot. We should develop safer battery systems for these cars.
Oh right let's see. The battery is protected by a thick steel plate that was punctured by ridiculously heavy road debris--you know, ramming into shit with your car is a bad idea. There was the one in Mexico that hit a concrete wall at 100mph and caught fire too. Don't know about contestant #3.
The battery compartment is thermally isolated from the car. There's firewalls.
The batteries have a dense thermoreactive foam around each cell. When the battery catches fire, every heat-damaged cell (primarily the burning ones) releases a thick insulative foam that prevents heat from damaging the other cells and causing a bigger fire. This also protects the passenger compartment.
So far they haven't EXPLODED INTO GIANT FIREBALLS.
You need more than $100 to pay off a $100 loan. There is $100 in the money supply. How do you provide more than $100?
The vast majority of the money supply in the US is non-existent. It's loaned into existence--it's owed money. If you stop loaning money, the money supply stops growing. This greatly decreases liquidity in the economy for the transfer of wealth.
The above illustration is for a mostly or completely loaned-into-existence economy: all money is actually owed to the bank, which primarily outputs money in the form of loans. If the bank makes a profit (as it must), it's bringing in more money than it's genuinely expending into the economy (i.e. to build new branches or pay tellers). That means, eventually, all money is owed to the bank. Unfortunately, with interest, that's more money than exists--unless perpetually more money is loaned into existence so that all that debt can be paid off.
This works even when you bring into the argument that the primary source of wealth is labor, and that you can work more to obtain more money: that money comes from somewhere, and its eventual source is a loan; and as the bank gets its loans paid back to it, the money supply shrinks and people simply can't pay you for labor (the liquidity argument stated above).
You can try to argue whatever vague shit like "That's ridiculous" and "You don't know what you're talking about" or even make some fancy technical counterpoints (several exist); but when you come straight down to the raw argument--that reducing the growth of the money supply by slowing down the amount of money put into the money supply by loans would cause an economic recession if not a depression or outright collapse--you're absolutely wrong. Shit, it's happened in the past decade: there was a collapse in demand for houses as the prices leveled off, which turned into a combination of defaults and fewer loans being handed out (which lead to more defaults because less money supply). Economists have been worried for several years that students will soon wise up and stop taking huge student loans, causing another drop in demand for credit and another severe economic recession.
It's a continuous theme in modern economics: people might stop $IRRESPONSIBLE_DEBT_BEHAVIOR but we've come to realize our economy will collapse if people stop taking out $50,000 in credit card debt and buying huge SUVs and getting second mortgages and $200,000 student loans.
Year 2000. $100M of loans borrowed. Incur interest, $110M needed in the money supply.
Year 2001. $110M of loans borrowed. Incur interest, $120M needed in the money supply.
Year 2002. 2000s pay off their $110M loans with money they made from 2001s buying crap. $120M of loans borrowed, $130M needed in money supply. 2001s have money from what 2002s buy.
Year 2003. People stop taking loans.
Year 2004. 2002s are... unable to get money to pay their loans because the fucking money supply has deflated! (or: Ceased to inflate because nobody is taking new loans)
Notice how when you borrow $100, you need more than $100 to pay it off? That's why we need inflation for our economy to function. If loans slow down--if population growth slows, if people stop taking loans, if banks stop giving loans--you get a recession. A terrible recession can become a depression.
Christ, it's like you're not really an economist. Go back to whatever college you got your degree from and demand your money back.
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It's as if I say "The voters decide the winner in an election", and you say "Almost nobody actually votes", as if this is a rebuttal to my statement.
That's actually important here because people allegedly pay for the right to vote. It's also like saying you bought a car and pay for car insurance but you take public transportation and never drive: why did you buy a car? By contrast, being a citizen of the United States of America automatically means you can vote for free, without paying for it.
Secondly, you skipped the part about some stocks having no voting rights so what the fuck are you buying?
Using your logic I could say that IPOs don't generate any wealth either. They just tranfer wealth between the current owners of the company and the new shareholders.
The difference is people buy and sell stocks to trade money between individuals or groups attempting to capitalize on the undervalue/overvalue of those stocks. This doesn't encourage any other business activity. IPOs are businesses raising capital to engage in business activity: it funds research and development, production, expansion, and so on.
So what stops a kid from deciding to spend 10 years learning blacksmithing right before this skill becomes useless in the face of industrialization?
You don't understand risk, do you? Probability versus Severity. Risk is lower when either of these is lower. So what's the probability of an industrial revolution, versus the probability of an upsurge of labor in a market that disconnects the production of skilled labor from the demand driver?
Historically, college education at student discretion has produced repeated cycles of skilled labor scarcity followed by overabundance; whereas vocational education driven directly by employers has produced faster reaction to skilled labor scarcity, resulting in a reduction of severity--the demand doesn't build out of control because demand immediately causes production of skilled labor, and the supply doesn't build to excess because skilled labor supply is essentially directly commissioned by the consumer.
The historical factors show that the amount of risk in an employer-driven skilled labor system is lower. Importantly, though, the risk is on employers: you could be trying to train, at your expense, a retarded monkey. In the modern system, the risk is higher *and* it's mainly offset onto students, so employers don't have to suffer direct risk; it's debatable if the system puts more risk overall on employers as well, since they can be subject to a supply shortage of skilled labor at any time. On the other hand, their risk management plan may include "train some people to be programmers if there aren't enough programmers and they all want $200k", so they effectively have a mitigation plan that allows them to reap the benefits without facing consequences.
If you create $10 of wealth but you derive $15 of wealth from others who you pass it on to--i.e. you farm wheat, you've created food--you've both increased the wealth in a system and deprived others of wealth.
In other words enrishing oneself does *NOT* *AWLAYS* come at the expense of depriving others of wealth!!!
Uh, I said that people try to "profit" by creating something worth less than what they sell it for--that they transfer to you a thing worth something like $10 but make you pay $15 for it, so you are less wealthy and they are more wealthy. And you use this as an example of not depriving others of wealth? Are you going to use contracting HIV in Africa as an example of having sex without getting an STD next?
Let's break it down: "you create $10 of wealth"--you have a thing worth essentially 10 dollars. "You derive $15 of wealth from others who you pass it on to"--you sell it for 15 dollars. The person who receives it is, essentially, 5 dollars less wealthy. They are deprived of 5 dollars of wealth.
To this you say:
In other words enrishing oneself does *NOT* *AWLAYS* come at the expense of depriving others of wealth!!!
Is English not your first language?
It sticks in some places, doesn't in others. Around here we just spend days or weeks throwing solutions at problems going "does this work?" or blaming other people. I started using the specifying questions to gather information and actually defining and solving problems before anyone else had any idea what the hell was going on.
You can't just say, "Do better at solving problems." People don't know what the hell that means. It's like if you joined a boxing gym and the instructor told you "your stance is wrong" and then punched you in the face with no further explanation. Not helpful. Similarly with the OP complaining that his communication is apparently bad but no details on that--someone says "you need to learn to communicate better" and you're like "dude if I knew what the hell you were talking about I would have already fixed it!" Which just tells me there's an organizational problem with communication...
The owners of stock are the collective owners of a company. They vote on board members which decide things like who gets hired for high ranking positions in the company and how much they are paid, and ultimately what direction the company is going.
First off, nobody actually calls in voting rights. Second, I have had voting rights in 2 companies; I have held stock in 34. Common stock doesn't always convey voting rights. Third, common stock can be cancelled.
It's a very juvenile perspective that managers don;t actually do anything and that it is only physical labor that creates wealth. It is very easy to waste human effort and create 0 wealth or even negative wealth without proper planning.
Managers provide extremely important functions at all levels. Executive Management provides integration of various aspects of business with the business strategy, for example a CISO providing risk assessment and action as a top-level priority in the execution of the overall business plan rather than people at the bottom in IT crying that "OUR SECUR NETWURK R FUKED IT GUNNA GET HAXED" and nobody gives a shit. Middle managers provide a valuable communications channel down to functional managers, who determine what their functional areas require in terms of resources to perform operational duties and supply services to the rest of the business.
That said, businesses still concentrate wealth in the business and in the personal funds of managers. Similarly, having children is important for continuation of the species; but we are overpopulating the planet and destroying it and we need to scale that back a bit. When 7 billion becomes 185 billion on this one little rock, there won't be any continuation of the species.
You seem to think that IPOs are a good thing, but part of what makes stock in a company valuable is the ability to sell it. If there were no stock market, IPOs would not raise as much capitol.
I said IPOs are the only wealth-generating function of the stock market. There are other implications; ideally the stock market functions as a method of transferring partnership with a business, but in practice it doesn't. Part of this is because you don't trade preferred on the open market, and common can be sold without conveying voting rights. Common has historically carried unexercised voting rights; but these days I see a lot of non-voting shares.
You seem to be confusing day trading as the the entire stock market. The ability to buy and sell stocks creates liquidity of ownership. Without this, you will be more likely to have people who don't want to manage or own a company stuck doing this job.
This is a pile of nonsense. Non-public companies are bought and sold all the time.
There is no crystal ball to tell us what skills will be in demand in the future. Our education system doesn;t create this burden for students. That burden is there by default.
The burden is not there by default because by default vocational education is not accessible to the vast majority of the public. In ages past, in "the good old days", in times long forgotten, there was this thing called "Apprenticeship". We still have it in some places, but now you must have vocational education before apprenticeship. Prior, apprenticeship was the only form of vocational education. In this form, a guild or a business or a certain skilled tradesman would obtain vocational aid from an unskilled entrant laborer, transferring vocational skills upon them. In this way, the market demand for a skill creates a demand for the unskilled to take up such vocational apprenticeship, such that only so many as needed to aid those already in the profession will be taken up.
In other words, the history of vocational education has been that people got jobs relieving skilled tradesmen from performing low-skill labor, providing an immediate increase in labor ca
You're describing Scrum, not Agile in general. Scrum is ridiculous.
Trying to keep everything minimal and "need-to-know" creates a protectionist environment that is extremely counterproductive. It's better to put out a little too much information than not enough: people will filter technical bullshit they don't care about and work around excess information; they will absolutely fail to call back to something you elected not to say in a meeting when it suddenly becomes relevant 3 days later.
Getting overly verbose is bad; being overly guarded and constrained is worse.
Try reading Tess Roeder's book. I recommend you give yourself a crash course in Project Management and give the PMBOK a read. These skills will help you communicate.
You also want to learn some problem-solving strategies. If your workplace doesn't use something like the Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving and Decision Analysis method, they need to. It will establish a common language and methodology for approaching a problem. 100% of the problem isn't always you; in many organizations, communication has become comfortable but is still terribly poor. In those situations, when you try to intentionally improve you will make the problem worse because suddenly your communications skills will exceed the organization's; you must commit to also leading a communications improvement in the organization if this happens.
In fact I implied the exact opposite when I said that investment creates wealth, and used the stock market as an example of investing.
Investment in the stock market moves wealth; it does not create it. In our current system, investment in the stock market decreases wealth: broker's fees and taxes are taken from the movement of wealth in a system that doesn't actually create anything. The brokers supply the service of moving stocks around; but the act of moving stocks around doesn't produce any useful labor output. Even banks produce useful output: they facilitate business transactions, meaning you can mail a cheque or provide a debit payment rather than expending time and effort moving yourself singly across distance to transact business. Stock brokers mainly facilitate "I'm gonna get rich buyin' some stocks!", which has merit only as far as an entertaining and skill-based winnable game (see: Poker); stocks only provide economic benefit in the event of an IPO, where the public is given an opportunity to invest in a company--not necessarily put money in and expect more money out, but at the very least put money in because the company is doing something they think will benefit them (produce wealth in society).
For example when a student takes out a school loan, the goal is that the wealth of the knowledge the student gains is more valuable than the money spent on the loan. If it is not, then the student's loan was not a good decision.
Fair point. Opportunity value versus opportunity cost. It's mishandled today, and student loans are a terrible example for many reasons. Mortgages pre-FDR accomplished what you described because they were shorter-term; but post-FDR loans have been money sinks where the total cost of a home is ridiculously high.
Universal higher education--beyond basic math and science and technical skills (computers, etc.)--causes a situation in which students must speculate on the future of the job market, typically resulting in demand booms for certain vocational education (degrees) followed by flooding the market with people who mainly can't get jobs. Non-defaultable loans to facilitate this result in huge economic damage; government-funded "free education" tends to require government-mandated quotaing (restricts the economy) or run as a free-for-all with the same practical risks but the direct financial impact spread to the tax base. Typically the end result is a major increase in inequality between the rich and poor, with the less affluent winding up in dead-end careers and/or massive debt.
A lack of universal higher education creates an economic crisis: only rich kids can afford vocational education, so non-rich people are left behind. Unfortunately, businesses have trouble reaching their strategic goals: they can bid $250,000 for computer programmers and $400,000 for Photoshop experts, but they still won't find enough in the market to actually carry out business activities. Universal education creates a great supply of cheap skilled labor, not only reducing the per-seat cost but also allowing businesses to actually fill the number of seats they need. Sans this, businesses would have to ... wait for it... INVEST in raising educated, less-affluent applicants from a secondary (high school) or post-secondary continuing education (basic college math and science) level to a vocational level. In this scheme, the businesses take on the risk, aiming for a lower total cost per skilled laborer and a virtually limitless pool of skilled labor.
You compare the opportunity cost of a loan with the opportunity cost of businesses paying to train their own laborers. Investing with leveraged funds is very much more difficult than investing with direct funds, carrying higher risk and higher costs.
Are you aware of the term falsifiability? Lets say hypothetically this was incorrect, what might be some hypothetical evidence to show that it is wrong?
So you can translate from german but you don't know what the term "zeitgeist" (which is also a term used in english) means? You could have just claimed not to have seen the movie without trying to prove you have never even heard of the term before. Even if you had never heard the term, you could have just looked it up.
Option 3: only hear it from idiots in political conversations, similar to the way stupid shit from Farenheit 911 was spouted around, so never bothered to care. Zeit and Geist are very commonly known words, by the way; it's like saying you know what "das ist gut" means in German. No shit. Everyone knows that.
More importantly, are you honestly trying to argue that we could have usury in an economic system that doesn't experience inflation?
Yes, but I wasn't even trying to argue it. I was stating it as an obvious truth without any support because I didn't think it was required.
It's an obvious truth that you can lend money and require more than 100% of the lent money to be paid back as a matter of course of economic activity and not run out of money if the money supply doesn't increase?
Is it also an obvious truth that you can perpetually fill glasses from a 1 gallon container of Iced Tea without ever making more tea?
This works even when you bring into the argument that the primary source of wealth is labor, and that you can work more to obtain more money: that money comes from somewhere, and its eventual source is a loan;
This is false. This assumes you can only work in exchange for an inflationary currency. Even if your paycheck came in dollars, you could immediately exchange your dollars for gold (a non-inflationary currency), and break the cycle, or you could just buy things with it (e.g. food, etc), or you could lend it to someone else (e.g. put it in a bank), or you could invest it (e.g. buying stock).
Okay, now I know you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're one of those people who thinks the Stock Market isn't a zero-sum game and that magic money comes out of it; I've had this argument too many times. The simple truth of the stock market is that money is exchanged around for goods (stock slips). If you get money out, someone else lost money: money is only moving around, not actually increasing.
You call valuing a dollar today higher than a dollar tomorrow "usury"
Usury is attaching interest to a loan. Technically it's attaching "unethical, illegal, or excessive" interest to a loan or just making loans on immoral terms or whatnot; the biggest historical use of the term is in Judaism, where Jewish law prohibits charging interest at all to Jews. It calls the practice "Usury", and states that it's moral in the eyes of God to charge interest to Gentiles but never to Jews.
It is what a rational person would do if you live in a universe where proper investing increases wealth faster than just working hard
Loans are an investment: they transfer wealth from one person to another.
There is actually no working economic system; they all eventually collapse.
I could say all mathematical theories are eventually proven wrong. As ridiculous as this statement is, how long will it take to prove I am wrong? Luckily the burden of proof is on me.
Furthermore, you can leave a term like "collapse" vague, and when it turns out that some economic systems just adapt, you can claim that it collapsed and a new one took it's place, regardless of how minor or gradual the change is. Maybe to others the examples of previous economic systems that failed is good evidence that *all* economic systems fail, but this is a logical fallacy.
All economic systems eventually reach a state of unsupportable inflation, excessive wealth concentration, or liqui
Yeah, engineering metal armor is really tough. Aluminum isn't just "weaker than steel", though. Steel can cycle, it can handle impacts, it can deform. An aluminum bicycle will eventually crack somewhere close to the bottom bracket due to cycling: there is a constant oscillation that places the greatest amount of force near the bottom bracket, forcing the bike frame to flex back and forth. Steel does not weaken from this unless you flex it far enough to deform permanently.
All of this means that aluminum can't handle as much of an impact before failure. Aluminum's failure mode moves from "dent" to "crack" much more quickly. Aluminum weakens with every cycle until it eventually cracks: vibration progressively makes aluminum more brittle, and cars vibrate.
Steel isn't an excellent substance because it's hard; it's excellent because it's steel. Brass is another one: extremely brittle, but every time you hit it with something it gets harder--and hardened brass is extremely hard (and heavy). Different applications than steel, but for certain applications you simply cannot beat brass because its material properties are perfect. Brass is ridiculously hard and rigid, but steel is better for bikes because it's much lighter and does flex under enough stress (more desirable than cracking); but brass is better for watch gears, door handles, plumbing fixtures, and certain nuts and bolts and other threaded connectors that need to shrug off occasional stress.
Aluminum is used here because it's light and cheap; but it leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. Steel in bikes doesn't leave much; aluminum and carbon fiber are lighter, but we're talking about a 5lb frame versus a 3lb aluminum frame versus a 1.5lb carbon fiber frame. Yes, a steel plate is too heavy for the Tesla; but Aluminum isn't "like steel, but less so, but lighter". It's completely UNLIKE steel and steel is almost precisely what you want here but too heavy.
What happens often with that scenario is by talking to the people in Finance, the developer ends up thinking he or she has learned something about finance, and can write up requirements which read well and will be accepted by the users, but actually has very little understanding of what the users need and will produce awful software.
From the PMBOK fifth edition released January, 2013:
The Planning processes develop the project management plan [...] The complex nature of project management may require the use of repeated feedback loops for additional analysis. As more project information or characteristics are gathered and understood, additional planning will likely be required.
In other words: You should have a kick-off meeting (Initiation Processes), in which basic requirements are gathered and scope is established. This is what you've described: we talk to those guys, we find out what they need. Then you should do further planning (Planning Process). Then you should take the output of that planning back to the same stakeholders--back to Finance or whoever--and engage in further planning to clarify the scope. We know the breadth of the scope, but not the depth: we know we're writing a new Accounting System, but we haven't exactly identified all the features that belong in one in the greatest detail. Somewhere down the line when implementing the General Ledger, you'll probably have to do this again as you realize nobody has made it exactly clear how to represent Credit and Debit accounts on the same ledger (it's simple, but unless you're an accountant you will probably scratch your head on the first pass).
Stop thinking you can just have a short chat with Finance and understand what they want out of you. It doesn't work that way.
There are a few reasons for this. First, every area of expertise has its jargon. Often jargon is an ordinary word with a different, specific meaning in a certain context.
And this is why project management relies heavily on expert judgment: you need experts who understand this jargon and can interpret it for you, and make decisions on conflicting requirements by involving the stakeholders and understanding their needs and relaying your constraints back to them. Our current Director of Finance did this job for a long time: he knew how to talk to IT, and he knew how to talk to Accounting, and he knew how to talk to Finance, so when IT and Finance and Accounting all had to work together he would act as The Guy who knew wtf everyone meant and made sure everyone was on the same fucking page.
When you start exploring the scope with a Work Breakdown Structure and other tools, you start exposing requirements and the project plan in terms that are visible to everyone. This will quickly alert your stakeholders and sponsors to differences in your understanding of jargon versus their understanding of jargon. Usually. Again, you're going to want to leverage expert judgment and skilled subject matter experts who know how to communicate below their field. Yes, Finance is talking down to you; you don't know shit about finance any more than they know about computers.
Second, something obvious to anyone who has even a 101 intro level of understanding in a field may be completely unexpected to someone outside of that field. When talking to the folks in Finance, there is some basic assumption so elementary they never mention because everyone in finance covered it in day one, but is completely unknown to the developer with no finance background. Talking will almost never solve this issue. They won't think to mention it; the developer won't know what question to ask.
Yeah, I hit these all the time when doing further analysis of requirements and trying to break down work very early in the planning process. We hit holes where the developers and managers try to handwave over something they don't understand, while loo
What is "Zeitgeist"? Time ghost? In any case I've not seen any such thing. Have you considered I might have a functional brain, rather than be jacked into Fox News or CNN or whatever anti-republicrat conspiracy machine stands philosophically opposed to the one you're jacked into? Come on man, I live under a rock; I read fantasy novels and don't watch TV news (I do, however, read The Onion, which is how I keep up on current events).
I've been running numbers in my head and working out economic theory, also looking at stuff like Keynesian Economics (severely flawed) and Austrian Economics (less flawed). There is actually no working economic system; they all eventually collapse, it's a matter of magnitude of collapse. Some will be a huge roller coaster ride; others will have good times and bad times, rather than great times and times of mass suicide and starvation. Some systems allow better for the concentration of wealth into the hands of the few who manage to keep it during economic collapse, while others make concentration of wealth harder and more readily facilitate dissemination of wealth during economic collapse.
You assume that "Y doesn't work without X" is the same statement as "X exists because Y". Gasoline engines do not work without gasoline, which could not have been invented without oil. Oil was not created by Jehovah for the purpose of running our gasoline engines; oil existed due to the events in the history of the earth, and facilitated gasoline and diesel engines. More importantly, are you honestly trying to argue that we could have usury in an economic system that doesn't experience inflation?
I was told there was goo. Many people have said the plate is steel. These are shortcomings; a carbide alloyed steel (titanium for weight reduction) plated with a non-carbide alloyed steel (ductile) would be better, but heavier. Perhaps they could micro-fuse aluminum that's been pressed into sheets the thickness of a soda can? Aluminum's highest strength-per-weight ratio comes when aluminum is in sheets of that thickness. They could use that as a tough core, but it would probably be vulnerable to piercing.
The issues with aluminum and carbide steels center around failure mode: aluminum cracks, steel doesn't. Carbide steel will break easier than non-carbide steel, but won't yield as much; mild steel will yield with less energy, but will absorb some energy in doing so and may thus deflect projectiles that would pierce carbide steel. Exotic layered armors are expensive though. Titanium is also weaker per volume than steel, but alloying lends some of its strength-per-mass.
You say you have only known two people who have had car fires, not that you've been tracking all car fires as reported by police and fire department radio statistics which are metrics exactly as accurate (not necessarily very accurate, but exactly as accurate) as car ownership metrics in the US.
A lot of people have brought up that car fires are ridiculously frequent; that the fuel tank in the rear of a car generally takes damage which frequently (not typically) causes fires in a rear-end collision (most collisions are rear-end collisions for one car) or side collision near that area; that the Tesla fires happen after severe damage like crashing through reenforced concrete and into a tree or having 30 pounds of metal rammed up into your car at ridiculously high speeds (70-100mph); and that car fires in gasoline cars are dangerous and tend to burn quickly and hot and cause death or severe burns, while car fires in a Tesla are contained by firewalls and per-cell thermally reactive fire suppression systems that contain and slow the spread of the fire to reduce its peak intensity and increase the opportunity time for a driver to escape the vehicle.
Of the above counterpoints, the very first was the only one that I was really keying on: you say you know two people who have had car fires; I know zero, but I know car fires happen frequently. I also don't have many friends, and I imagine the one friend I have who is a socialite and is directly socially connected to about a third of the local population has been in contact with many people who have actually had their cars catch fire. Similarly, I don't know anyone who's been shot or jailed or whatnot, but he has known several people who were murdered and who had shotguns discharged at them at close range (severe hospital ICU trip) during a robbery and who have been in jail and have been on crack and other crazy shit. I've never seen any of these things, but I know they happen.
I just don't like low-quality statistics. Your very first statement was hugely unqualified and had tons of potential sources of confounding. We simply don't know if there's a lot of bias here from you not living in an area with a lot of driving, or living in Alaska, or having very few friends, or living in a rich area where people maintain their cars better and drive better (fewer collision-induced fires), etc. We don't even know if these cars burned from a collision or from parking on leaves (the Tesla cannot cause a fire that way; on the other hand, I just vacuumed my driveway because my Mazda 3 nearly caused a yard fire).
Wind power: producing as much power as six nuclear reactors from just one turbine!
Agile is, in a nutshell, a risk-lowering strategy for project management that incurs greater but more stable costs by repeatedly re-evaluating requirements along project phases in parallel.
Essentially, with basic Waterfall, you execute a series of project phases. At each phase, you re-evaluate your requirements, the progress of the project, and the needs of the organization to determine if what you're building still fits with what the user needs. With Agile, the next Project Phase will begin as soon as possible--if you can complete part of it after outputting a specific milestone deliverable in the previous phase, then you begin working on the next phase immediately. This includes repeated re-evaluation of requirements, which includes meetings with your clients (other department, coworkers, end users, managers, sponsors, whatnot) to examine what's been done, how the project is coming along, and how it addresses requirements.
This takes more time and expends more resources; however it also forces a re-evaluation of requirements, giving many more chances for your clients and sponsors to tell you that the project either is moving in a direction that doesn't satisfy requirements or is implementing requirements that have become obsolete. Obsoleting requirements reduces project work, but also invalidates some prior work--the fact that requirements are obsolete is not controllable, so the risk of discovering that the requirements are obsolete is the actual risk. Re-examining project requirements more frequently reduces the amount of work that will be done with obsolete requirements, decreasing risk.
Agile works fine. I dislike it, but I'm starting to understand and like it more. Project Management relies on communications; it includes Project Stakeholder Management and Communications Management, where stakeholders and their communications needs are classified and the frequency and mode of communications required are documented. Distributed development brings up a lot of communications needs and requires a good communications plan, because you're going to be communicating across differing cultures (yes even Norcal versus Socal presents issues in cross-cultural communications) with a lot of "virtual communications" (video conferencing, teleconferencing, etc. instead of face-to-face meetings). You can't just walk into the other department and talk to all these people during the course of their work; all communication will be highly structured, which is useful but is greatly aided by the inclusion of casual meetings. That means universal communications difficulties.
Solve your communications issue first. Then decide if you need Agile or Waterfall or what, because the best management strategy will depend on the project or even the project phase. You can't just slap Agile onto every project or run screaming away from it all the time and expect that to improve things. People love buzzwords because they think they can attach "DO THIS" "DON'T DO THAT" to things like Cloud or Agile or Virtualization, but they can't.
Every good management text explains the value of retention. Even hardly-relevant stuff in Kepner-Tregoe's problem solving techniques covers this: solving human resource problems is a good thing because replacing human resources means you made a mistake when hiring someone--a fucking expensive mistake. Now you have to eat the costs of months of settling in, plus general bad productivity, plus the cost of the hiring process (expended human time), plus salary and benefits paid to a worthless employee. Sometimes the mistake is less bad: you can modify their job function and gain something valuable while retaining their organizational experience (which is pretty significant); and sometimes the mistake is elsewhere: something besides "this employee sucks" is affecting their productivity, and correcting that is far less expensive and more valuable than throwing them out and replacing them with someone else who is more tolerant of the problem.
As for promotion from within, that's a tough one. Peter's Principle says people get promoted on merit and achievement, and cease being promoted once they've reached a level where merit and achievement no longer occur--because they can't function in their newest job. Now you have engineers who think they're smarter than their managers who become managers and still behave like engineers who think they're smarter than their managers... and their engineers. Then they micro-manage like hell and piss off all the engineers, who then work to get promoted up to management because they think they're so much smarter than their managers.
It really depends. Talking to people is often better. In large user bases that are isolated, this is hard; but when you're doing i.e. department-to-department, you're far better off asking. If you're writing software systems for Accounting and Finance, for example, there's 200 people working there. You want to interface with the Accounting Manager and Finance Manager--who will be doing, in part, exactly what's proscribed here--while also communicating with some of the actual people in these departments. This will get you a much better understanding of requirements than just "Well I don't know a fucking thing about finance, but I watch the finance people bang their heads on this shit a lot so we should do it this way instead! It would be better!"
Hub motors suck. I prefer a good differential where it's physically impossible to not respond close to optimally unless it seizes up. For example, a Torsen differential will always apply power where it reaches the ground: in acceleration to the rear wheels (the front start to slip), in optimal conditions to all four wheels, and in low-traction condition power will naturally migrate to the wheels with traction such that the amount of power delivered is maximized.
With a hub motor system, you have the ability to do other stuff like apply power to mess with steering and traction considerations for pre-crash systems and electronic stability control--modern systems instead apply steering adjustments and mess with anti-lock brakes on individual wheels. On the other hand, you also need a computer to take measurements and apply adjustments to the power distribution to the wheels. While a Torsen will always do this to fixed correctness (i.e. n% of optimal) with a fixed amount of efficiency, the correctness and basic efficiency of a computer controlled system vary with the maintenance state and tolerance of the sensors. The sensors may be imprecise (i.e 0+/-20) or inaccurate (i.e. 5+/-0.5), and will likely become less precise and less accurate over time until maintained and eventually replaced. A mechanical differential will become less efficient over time, reducing power; but the handling characteristics will remain the same.
Then you have faulty software. Many manufacturers won't give you a computer upgrade because upgrading the software causes a lot of risk; they will issue ECU updates when a problem known to be fixed in a newer ECU firmware is detected by the dealership mechanic, and third-party mechanics rarely have the ability to perform an ECU update. Often these updates bring improved fuel mileage and power by better stock engine tuning. Mechanical parts are readily replaced with extremely low risk: they either work or they don't, and they pass a certain amount of torque; computers are much more complex and the risk presented by an ECU update is much higher. Faulty software is a problem; and the benefit of being able to simply upgrade software to get better handling inherently carries more risk and may be a restricted option.
I find hardware differential systems with a single motor to be a better option.
Now move the fucking battery pack so this shit stops. 1/4" aluminum armor 'a good idea' and all, but only because you mounted the battery in a stupid fucking position.
That may imbalance the weight distribution of the vehicle, making it much more dangerous. It also may fail to adequately protect the vehicle from similar debris damage. Remember the other guy rammed through a reenforced concrete wall and hit a tree; many folks have conjectured that, sans armor and battery, this driver would have had the trailer hitch he hit come through the vehicle's baseboard and into his lap, potentially killing him but at least crippling him.
Your impulsive reaction and failure to adequately analyze risk has just cost thousands of lives per year where you tried to save three.
How many people have you known that had Tesla cars?
Prius has a smaller battery. It can't drive the car 300 miles on a charge with 0-60 in 4.8 seconds.
That being said, 1 in 6300 is a lot. We should develop safer battery systems for these cars.
Oh right let's see. The battery is protected by a thick steel plate that was punctured by ridiculously heavy road debris--you know, ramming into shit with your car is a bad idea. There was the one in Mexico that hit a concrete wall at 100mph and caught fire too. Don't know about contestant #3.
The battery compartment is thermally isolated from the car. There's firewalls.
The batteries have a dense thermoreactive foam around each cell. When the battery catches fire, every heat-damaged cell (primarily the burning ones) releases a thick insulative foam that prevents heat from damaging the other cells and causing a bigger fire. This also protects the passenger compartment.
So far they haven't EXPLODED INTO GIANT FIREBALLS.
How much safer do you want it?
You need more than $100 to pay off a $100 loan. There is $100 in the money supply. How do you provide more than $100?
The vast majority of the money supply in the US is non-existent. It's loaned into existence--it's owed money. If you stop loaning money, the money supply stops growing. This greatly decreases liquidity in the economy for the transfer of wealth.
The above illustration is for a mostly or completely loaned-into-existence economy: all money is actually owed to the bank, which primarily outputs money in the form of loans. If the bank makes a profit (as it must), it's bringing in more money than it's genuinely expending into the economy (i.e. to build new branches or pay tellers). That means, eventually, all money is owed to the bank. Unfortunately, with interest, that's more money than exists--unless perpetually more money is loaned into existence so that all that debt can be paid off.
This works even when you bring into the argument that the primary source of wealth is labor, and that you can work more to obtain more money: that money comes from somewhere, and its eventual source is a loan; and as the bank gets its loans paid back to it, the money supply shrinks and people simply can't pay you for labor (the liquidity argument stated above).
You can try to argue whatever vague shit like "That's ridiculous" and "You don't know what you're talking about" or even make some fancy technical counterpoints (several exist); but when you come straight down to the raw argument--that reducing the growth of the money supply by slowing down the amount of money put into the money supply by loans would cause an economic recession if not a depression or outright collapse--you're absolutely wrong. Shit, it's happened in the past decade: there was a collapse in demand for houses as the prices leveled off, which turned into a combination of defaults and fewer loans being handed out (which lead to more defaults because less money supply). Economists have been worried for several years that students will soon wise up and stop taking huge student loans, causing another drop in demand for credit and another severe economic recession.
It's a continuous theme in modern economics: people might stop $IRRESPONSIBLE_DEBT_BEHAVIOR but we've come to realize our economy will collapse if people stop taking out $50,000 in credit card debt and buying huge SUVs and getting second mortgages and $200,000 student loans.
Uh.
Year 2000. $100M of loans borrowed. Incur interest, $110M needed in the money supply.
Year 2001. $110M of loans borrowed. Incur interest, $120M needed in the money supply.
Year 2002. 2000s pay off their $110M loans with money they made from 2001s buying crap. $120M of loans borrowed, $130M needed in money supply. 2001s have money from what 2002s buy.
Year 2003. People stop taking loans.
Year 2004. 2002s are ... unable to get money to pay their loans because the fucking money supply has deflated! (or: Ceased to inflate because nobody is taking new loans)
Notice how when you borrow $100, you need more than $100 to pay it off? That's why we need inflation for our economy to function. If loans slow down--if population growth slows, if people stop taking loans, if banks stop giving loans--you get a recession. A terrible recession can become a depression.
Christ, it's like you're not really an economist. Go back to whatever college you got your degree from and demand your money back.
Kinetic energy causing fires! Oh hell yeah!
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