Actually, your story is a great example of why most people aren't really making an effort to change behaviors over climate change concerns. At the end of the day, we need to use a lot of energy to accomplish the things in life we want to do. Everything from taking those trips to visit family or friends to the daily work commute needed to earn a paycheck.... These things are relatively non-negotiable. Most of us only have so much income we can spend on things, and making more requires MORE energy usage. Maybe you start a service business as a side job or second job? Well, now you're traveling around to client sites in your spare time and running errands for needed supplies to do the work. With the high cost of such propositions as switching your vehicles to electric cars, it's out of financial reach for many people still.
The biggest changes will only come about as the primary energy sources are converted over from burning fossil fuels. The power generation plants are actually doing this, but it's a very slow process that's (perhaps ironically) slowed down quite a bit by all the legal requirements for things like "environmental impact studies" - foisted upon the utility companies by the likes of Greenpeace. The main solution will probably be nuclear power - which is the toughest one to put online without a lot of resistance from environmental groups.
Honestly, I feel like I've almost over-extended myself already, financially, investing in some of these "Green" solutions. I put as many PV solar panels on my roof as the company could fit, using the most efficient ones per square foot available at the time. I traded in a Jeep and a sports car to get a used Tesla S. And I just took out a loan to do some home repairs that included ripping down the old siding and material behind it and replacing it with better insulated, modern materials. So hopefully, that cuts down on my winter heating bill and energy usage. So I'm going to sleep well at night that I've done my share. But realistically, all of this is a tiny drop in the bucket in the big picture -- even if it's a huge chunk of my total income.
I find it interesting so many investors are trash-talking Elon Musk and his unwillingness to just "pipe down and start acting like a typical, boring big business CEO". Yet you see all the praise of the street artist Banksy, when he trolled buyers at the Sotheby's auction with his self-shredding painting someone paid $1.4 million for.
Of course, what we're going to see with that situation is that the value of the painting will almost DOUBLE thanks to those antics, and both Sotheby's and Banksy win tons of free publicity and name recognition.
I feel like Musk is another one of the rebel, eccentrics who just wants to make and sell some cool products and do things that can change the world, in the long-run. If his insulting short-sellers and frank attacks of people who attacked his business models, efforts and idea first are a problem for you? Fine.... Go invest in any of thousands of boring, stable stocks for big businesses owned by stuffy people in suits.
At the end of the day, what really matters is the ability to build and sell a product or a service that people want to buy. Tesla has succeeded in droves, making a car that many owners consider "the best automobile I've ever owned". And he's privatizing space travel with his OTHER business, which slowly makes NASA obsolete. Good stuff, in my book!
Every single company I ever worked in I.T. for had "that one spreadsheet"... the king-sized mess of macros and multiple sheets with cells linked to outside data sources that was always causing problems, yet was business-critical.
The worst I ever ran across was at a metal heat-treating company. A former engineer constructed a crazy-complex spreadsheet over the years when he worked there. I'm pretty fuzzy on what its purpose even was, but something to do with generating cost estimates for various metal treating processes. I believe a few other guys tried to pick it up where he left off, when he switched jobs and added even MORE stuff to it.
The interesting thing about it was that it seemed to do so many things, and occupied enough memory when loaded, that it exposed some actual bugs in Excel itself. I remember they complained to the I.T. staff about some odd behavior where it would just refuse to total up a set of values and left them set to 0, which led to a division by zero error elsewhere in it. Using the latest (at the time) version of Excel fixed the issue, so we had to make sure everyone was on the latest Office release to use it. But it was always causing problems, even though they'd fight and fight to keep using it anyway -- since it gave them answers they couldn't get any other way. I don't think anyone understood it well enough to really fix or rewrite it. There were a lot of complex formulas in it that were probably pulled from various obscure reference books on metalurgy and such.
I remember how Microsoft Access used to create these types of messes too, until enough people just rebelled against it and it went by the wayside. A long time ago, one of my co-workers used to tell everyone in our workplace that if they had anything developed in Access that was actually being used as a "production" application, to hand it over to him so he could convert it into an Oracle database instead. The only place he allowed Access was for someone just doing development of some project that wasn't complete yet. (It was decent at letting someone do rapid development of a database idea, even if their knowledge of databases and queries was really limited.)
Tim Cook says this: "When the free market doesn't produce a result that's great for society you have to ask yourself what do we need to do. And I think some level of government regulation is important to come out on that."
Yet, he's talking about the same "free market" that allowed Apple to make so much money. Last I recalled, he wasn't so keen on government regulation and interference when it was about restrictions on letting him repatriate money Apple earned abroad without getting taxed on it.
1. Companies need to take some more care to release products that work as advertised! If you want to reduce the number of support calls, make sure the product you're selling doesn't NEED that much support for malfunctions or failure to perform as stated on the box or in marketing materials.
2. Provide better documentation. (There was a Slashdot discussion about this topic just a day or two ago, with someone asking why nothing seems to come with a decent printer manual anymore.) If customers can't figure a product out that they just bought, they're going to call in to ask about it.
3. Stop hiring the cheapest warm bodies you can get to answer your phones or do online chat support! I just had a terrible experience using Amazon's online chat support last week. Had a simple request.... Just wanted to find out if I could exchange a broken camera that came as part of a videoconferencing solution, rather than having to tear the whole installation back out and box it ALL up for a return. The first lady I chatted with SLOWLY asked me bunch of really basic questions, such as confirming the product I was asking about was a specific one.... After all that, she tells me she "has to forward me to a specialist who can handle my concern" and I start chatting with a second individual, who asks the SAME annoying questions over again. I think it took a good 45 minutes to finally get the answer that they couldn't help me at all unless I shipped the whole thing back. (I could have just done that process online in 30 seconds.) When I asked if we could just do an even exchange -- that required another 10 minutes for them to tell me they couldn't because of some kind of system problem on their end.
4. If you call in and it says your wait time will be excessive? Offer to let the person hang up and receive a call back when someone is available. T-Mobile does this on their support line, and I believe Tesla Motors does it too. It should become the industry standard. Let people get back to whatever else they're doing rather than tying up their phone listening to hold music and waiting.
Exactly! I find it rather sad that so many people are worried enough about Mexicans crossing over to the U.S. border illegally to "steal jobs", when most of the work they'd do is "cash under the table" stuff that nobody else wanted to do at affordable prices, or migrant labor that will just be automated with machinery, moving forward, if there aren't people like them desperate enough for money to come here and do it cheaper than the cost to automate.
Meanwhile, they say very little about the H1B scam that steals real, "career quality" American jobs left and right -- often with labor that came here under false pretenses to begin with.
People keep saying the printed manuals are gone because "few people wanted to read them", or "that's what people want".
But IMO, we started running into a real problem where the people making a lot of the devices and software didn't have good enough writing skills to produce good manuals for them.
I remember really starting to see this in the late 90's and early 2000's, when the small computer reseller I worked for would receive products like new modems or I/O cards with instruction books that were really difficult to read, since they were very poor translations from Chinese. The fact we were building PCs from a bunch of components like this meant we really didn't HAVE a good set of instructions to bundle with the computers when we sold them. So we'd give customers a folder stuffed with all the little instruction sheets and the motherboard manual (which was usually the best manual of the bunch, though also questionable at times). Only the big name computer brands like Lenovo, Toshiba or HP could afford to hire people to write up decent instruction books to include. And most of those really weren't that helpful either. They wasted a lot of time with diagrams showing you where the lights, connection ports and switches or buttons were, plus any mandatory legal statements about things like FCC certifications and some really high-level overview of how to navigate a few things in Windows and any proprietary crapware they bundled on top of it. A far cry from the manuals the 1980's 8-bit era computers included, that taught you how to PROGRAM the thing.
Every corporate I.T. job I've had has included some technical writing as part of the user support I've had to do, and I see a lot of instructional stuff put together by various colleges and universities along the same lines, for students and staff. So really, manufacturers have been able to successfully "offload" expectations in that manner too. (Why write and bundle instructions to teach you the ins and outs of setting up email on your Android phone? Your school or employer has already spent money asking someone to make you one.)
Even as an advanced computer user now, with over 30 years of experience with the things? I still learn a lot of hidden tricks and tips for using whatever the latest operating system is on my machine when I watch the YouTube videos or read the enthusiast web sites that post about them. This stuff really SHOULD have been documented by the creators of the code. But these days, I think they just assume the knowledge gets disseminated by the Internet-using crowd, and some of the users enjoy the "Easter egg" element of surprise of discovering the stuff, even long after using the product.
You can just look at Elon Musk's previous tweets and public communications to see that he tends to get excited about things and make promises or statements about them that are a bit optimistic.
I have no reason to believe what happened here was a snap decision on his part that going private would be a really good thing for Tesla in the long-haul. And when he got word that some of the folks in Saudi Arabia were about to dump serious money into investing in an EV, he made a bet they were referring to HIS company and made the statement he made.
Unfortunately, the Saudis sunk $1 billion of capital into "Lucid", a wanna-be Tesla competitor that doesn't even have a single finished product yet available to the public. It remains to be seen how that will turn out for everyone.
I never said co-ops were a new idea that hadn't been tried yet, and I was the first suggesting it.....
I simply said that's the smarter way to do things if you're a "little guy" and can't afford to put together a farm on your own. What IS sleazy on government's part is harassing farmers with agencies like the FDA to insist they can't sell fresh eggs or unpasteurized milk, even if they have customers happy to pay for it.
Collusion isn't really the problem you paint it as, EXCEPT for the fact the big businesses have been able to get GOVERNMENT to assist them to block potential competition. Government often does one thing with one hand, while doing the opposite with the other hand, too. It's dangerous to believe it's "helping level the playing field" just because it's forcibly taking people's income (taxation) to redistribute some of it to the group you feel is wronged (the farmer, in this case).
A great example of this are the subsidies government gives for "clean energy". Sounds like it might be a good idea, except then? They get more electric cars on the roads and all of a sudden, all that tax revenue they obtained from gasoline taxes declines. So they want to turn around and start slapping taxes on people who drive electric vehicles. Same situation with legislation like the increasing fuel economy mandates Obama put on auto-makers. The better gas mileage government demands they start obtaining would choke off the revenue stream government wants to get from drivers. So you KNOW they'll find other ways to claw that back.
Every time government meddles in the marketplace, the consumer winds up paying for it.
Out where I live, we're seeing a lot of old family-owned farms closing up because the owners want to retire, and their kids have no interest in trying to keep working the farm. Nobody else wants to buy the land for farming it either. Really, for all the people expressing so much sorrow over the farmer's plight? The reality is that they're not taking the steps needed to remain profitable on their own terms. You talk to many of them, and they get all indignant about the farm land being bought for not only new housing developments, but even conversion into city parks.
Times have changed, and what I see is that there's still a lot of room to make lots of money in farming, IF you do it on a relatively small scale and shoot for higher profit margins offering really fresh, organic produce and/or meats. You ALSO (like all other businesses) have to be good at doing the marketing and distribution. Work deals with area restaurants to exclusively use YOUR products and advertise your farm right on their menu. See if area grocery stores will allocate a small section just to your products and feature them. Unless you're lucky enough to be right off a major road that's used heavily for tourist traffic, you probably won't make it by just putting up a produce stand during the day and trying to sell to passers-by.
By contrast? You could put together some kind of co-op with other farmers, joining forces to work a bigger farm as a group. But these medium-sized, old family farms just don't seem like the best idea, moving forward. Too much expense, both up-front and to work that much land. Too much risk if things don't pan out in a given season. And no point in trying to compete with big, corporate agriculture who cranks out the bulk of the food people eat.
There's still too much of a mentality that "government owes us" something to help sustain farming. Farm subsidies are, by and large, a bad idea and need to go away. It's ridiculous how often a farm is paid NOT to grow a certain crop or compensated when they can't sell what they've got for as much money as they wanted to. America produces plenty of food, and does it more efficiently than ever before. It's probably the case that with more automation/robotics, we'll get to a point where they require very little human labor to do the actual farming. So either you're part of that large scale food production operation, or you're a niche farmer, offering something special at a higher mark-up.
People tend to assume that GOVERNMENT regulation is somehow superior to individuals making decisions on their own. But government is just made of more individuals, subject to the same ability to be corrupted and same temptations to cheat, lie or rip off their fellow man for personal gain.
Obviously, the IDEA is that people in government were vetted and selected by the rest of the public as their preferred choices to "speak for them" by taking a stance on issues. But the result is always a compromise, where an often significant minority disagrees strongly with the leaderships' decisions and where supporters are often disappointed by how "watered down" promises get by the time they're turned into actions.
IMO, one of the primary reasons Bitcoin was even created was to provide a decentralized form of currency that ISN'T subject to any government's regulations. That comes with some risk, obviously... but also benefits in some situations. And yes, it DOES aid some people in doing criminal things. But ultimately? Crimes are still crimes, regardless of currencies used in transactions done as part of them. If you hire someone to kill a person and pay them in Bitcoin instead of a regulated government currency? The murder was still a murder and there should be ways to prove someone hired the other person without having to trace the flow of the funds.
There's no need for "balance" here at all! That already exists by way of people having MANY options to do some sort of barter or exchange of a form of payment in return for goods or a service. Bitcoin should be here to offer that anonymous, non centrally-governed option.
I don't think it would matter if Elon Musk cured cancer tomorrow. There's a group of people out there who truly despise what the guy is accomplishing, because they don't want to see things change from cars running on gasoline and working the way they've always worked.
I would agree that it's not one big conspiracy, so much as several groups with anti-Tesla agendas for different reasons.
You've got, on one hand, the stereotypical blue-collar auto mechanic who always works on his own vehicles and makes a living repairing others at small garages or as a mobile mechanic or what-not. Tesla may be seen as a threat to his living. He doesn't want a bunch of vehicles running around that he doesn't understand and can't repair.
On the other end of the spectrum, you've got the investors who kept sinking money into bets against Tesla's success. They have the ability to seed Internet blogs and to influence bigger publications to print negative articles, in attempts to scare people away from holding Tesla stock.
Somewhere between that, you've got some people with a political agenda against Musk succeeding. They may be ultra-conservatives who see what he does as part of the "Green agenda" they're fighting against. Or they may take issue with the fact the Federal government extended loans to him. Maybe both. I've talked to a few of these people and I think half the time? It's just rooted in jealousy. They tend to be small business owners themselves who are struggling, and say things like, "If people gave ME the kind of loans they threw at Elon Musk, I'd have an amazing business too... probably better than his!"
All I can say is this: Space-X alone should be a company you rally behind if you don't like big government. They're taking a whole industry that was the sole domain of Federal government for decades, because it was believed it was "too big an undertaking for private industry to accomplish" and taking it private.
If they really had 14,000 cars or so traveling through there daily, where did all that traffic go? Surely it wasn't all local traffic. I have to assume his move to ban cars from passing through just increased the traffic in surrounding areas, as people were forced to detour around it.
This doesn't seem like a very workable plan for many cities. He might get away with it as long as he's a lone exception to the rule. But as soon as you have a few adjacent cities trying to pull it off, you're going to create some real traffic problems and effectively roadblock travelers from passing through that part of the country.
Fact: I have no interest in carrying around another Android phone right now. The photos coming from the latest iPhones look excellent. As Apple pointed out in their presentation, even a cover photo for Time magazine was shot with one. So arguing whether or not a Google Pixel has a better camera is, IMO, a bit pointless. I mean, kudos to Google for making that good a camera in their phone.... I just fail to see how it changes anything? Very few people who prefer using iOS to Android's OS would switch products to a Pixel phone just because of the slightly better camera capabilities.
If the camera functionality is THE most critical factor for you? I'm wondering why you didn't invest in an SLR to use for your photography instead? A good SLR will still handily beat even Google's Pixel 3 when it comes out.
A while back, Apple bought out a wireless charging company, and for a while - they were registering patents on ways to wirelessly power all sorts of Apple products. (I recall one diagram showing a typical room with an iMac set up, where it looked like they were proposing making the iMac so it doubled as the wireless charging base for peripherals sitting near it. The keyboard, the mouse and your iPhone, for example, would all charge if they were in proximity of the iMac.)
So to go from experimenting with ideas for all of that to struggling to get a simple QI charging mat to function? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
I've seen problems with several other wireless charging mats on the market, where they overheat and shut down while trying to recharge iPhones. I suspect there may be some inherent design problems with the phones themselves when it comes to their ability to charge at higher rates? As long as a given charging mat only provides a lower charging power level, they seem to work just fine. (I have a Belkin I use to charge my iPhone X every night on my nightstand and it works flawlessly. A second charging mat built into a tray that fits in my car seems to work ok with it too.)
Apple was probably trying to release a charger that could charge the devices faster than competing products on the market already, and that's where they're hitting difficulties. Maybe they've experimented with charging in on/off bursts or something, thinking they could still make that work in some manner to charge their phones faster than competing devices charge -- but that isn't panning out for them? IMO, it's not a bad idea at all to refuse to go with active cooling (fans, etc.) just to make one work without overheating. Fans are prone to failure over time, including getting noisy if they don't stop spinning, outright. It's more of a lazy, band-aid way to deal with excessive heat than a "best solution". (Many people don't know that Apple put fans in the Airport Extreme wireless routers, and guess what tends to fail on them and cause overheating errors and issues? Older models that didn't have fans just keep on working and working. I've seen people still using the original flying saucer shaped Airport wi-fi routers, despite them being so outdated, technology wise, it's kind of ridiculous.)
I do have a couple complaints -- and these are unfortunately typical of Apple's new software releases these days.
1. The new, enhanced Apple Maps only start out with improved map data for California. The rest of the nation gets added over time. (Because California is clearly the most important place in the nation, right? 49 other states not ready yet is no big deal.)
2. I understand the screentime feature that lets you limit your kids' time they can use the iPhone is buggy. Kids can mess with the settings and give themselves more time, undermining the whole point of the restrictions. (A number of people on forums said they reported these bugs during the beta, but none of it was fixed by the release.)
Realistically? This stuff will get sorted out within a few months. But I've seen this with OS X releases too.... things that *really* should have been working properly by release day simply aren't. (It took Apple several releases to get multi-display support with more than 2 displays working properly on the "trash can" Mac Pro, even though you could boot into Windows on the machine and get them working just fine. Pretty embarrassing oversight on a multi-thousand dollar "Pro" workstation!
It always feels to me like Apple doesn't employ enough software developers, and people working on one project regularly get pulled off of it to assist elsewhere, whenever something is nearing a deadline.
The information stated is no surprise at all. We all know the cost of living out on the west coast has gotten insane. Tech companies desperately want to hold onto that clout of having an HQ in the heart of Silicon Valley, but it's only doable as long as young, singles want to work there so badly, they'll take what amounts to these massive pay cuts due to high housing costs and more.
Even on the other side of the country, you deal with the same struggle to some extent in the DC metro area and anyplace around NYC.
These may be places where you can find employment with high profile companies -- but they're poor choices for raising families. You have to figure out what you want and live in a sensible area to suit you.
I was born and raised in the midwest, in St. Louis, Missouri -- and although I left for a DC area tech job, that was only doable for us because we found a small town with much more "down to earth" housing prices. It means I have an hour or so commute to and from work, but it's also a job where I can work from home some days. As the job has evolved with time, they opened a couple of additional offices in this area and another one changed location in DC a couple of times. So trying to strategically rent or buy property "close to work" would have been a mistake anyway. I do know that St. Louis has recently made some real effort towards creating new tech jobs -- so that might be a really good place for someone to consider, if they want to work in tech but raise a family too. It's very much a family-friendly city, with so many things to do that have no admission cost (a world class zoo and many great museums, for example).
Well, let's be realistic here.... The funding going for things like mass incarceration and military exercise in foreign countries won't just get fully redirected to healthcare and education subsidies if you put a stop to those things. It's a powerful "selling point" to get a point across, but government funds often go to one area because of a complex underlying situation. It's not just a general pot that all the money piles up in until they decide how to divvy it up.
If you believe some of the reports about the Pentagon, alone? It claims they "lost" over 9 trillion dollars. The funds just "vanished" with no records to show where they might have gone. And while sure, Trump and others promised to "investigate"? How much uproar have you heard lately about any of it? Yeah, not much. They'll basically stall until it's forgotten about and move on. If you could just reclaim THAT money, you'd have all sorts of options of other places you could spend it. But truthfully, SOMETHING happened to it -- and probably had a lot to do with cash payments to various foreign leaders to make deals happen or not happen around the world.
There will obviously be plays on words, as the new phones roll out. Xs = Excessively costly, etc. etc.
And admittedly it's a bit difficult spitting out "iPhone Xs Max". But what usually happens is people shorten up the names to whatever they find comfortable. Pretty sure the new iPhones will start getting called either an Xs or a "Max"?
At least with Apple, you don't have the problem of them making dozens of variations of a phone for different pre-paid carriers to sell. I can't even remember what the name is of the cellphone I got my kid with a prepaid Simply Mobile plan. She wanted a case for it and it was a huge effort locating the right one to fit it. There are simply too many models that all look roughly alike in photos.
I'm sure there are places where the high water marks were put on buildings.... But I know in many cases, you just have shopkeepers showing you such things as, "water that once reached the level of where my business name is painted on the window glass".
In reality, for-profit insurance companies have a vested interest in drug prices being kept in check, because it gets harder to sell people policies when they're stuck increasing their rates sufficiently to cover these inflated medication prices!
One of the negatives of single-payer healthcare is that it would be funded from taxpayer dollars, meaning as per usual -- central government lacks motivation to keep the costs down. Since they don't have to show a profit on THEIR books, they simply find other avenues to extract the required revenue to pay whatever they're asked to pay.
The real problem here is that this Nirmal Mulye character fails to understand that the pharmaceutical industry isn't truly a "free market" business. It already receives special favors by way of the FDA protecting exclusive rights to a new drug for years after it's brought to market, and rules preventing overseas competitors from selling their offerings here as cheaper alternatives. They're very much a protected monopoly on a given drug, holding customers (whether they be end users paying out of pocket, or insurers paying on their customer's behalf) hostage to either pay any price they dream up, or to simply do without the cure.
I live in the Northeast and every time a reporter starts showing the people putting up sandbags and preparing, and they get interviewed? They say the same kinds of things. "Been through this a number of times before." The shop owners in places like Annapolis will show you how high flood waters have been, decades ago compared to the last few times they dealt with flooding. And predictions for this one seem to be, at most, somewhat equivalent to one of the higher water levels they saw long ago.
This article talks about a worldwide slowdown of 10% noted in the last 70 years for hurricane movement? Might be completely true, but does that really signify man-made climate change as the culprit? Or would you see at least a 10% variance one way or the other, if you were tracking their speeds of travel in different time periods further back than the last 70 years? Either way, 10% doesn't seem like a huge difference? Assuming the amount of rainfall is directly related to how long the storm sits in a given area, or how much time it has to pick up ocean water as it travels? Wouldn't that mean it accounts for only 6 inches of extra rain from a 60 inch rainfall?
Yep.... I think about that. And every time, I'm reminded that the problem is due to a Socialist / Communist government that's made life that miserable for the common citizens.
I feel no guilt about owning or using my iPhone X in a nation that has always had laws in place that ensure OUR people don't have things that bad.
As it's OFTEN said, if Foxconn didn't have those contracts with Apple, there would simply be MORE misery in China because people would starve, or not have basic shelter, because there was no place for their pre-teens or teens to go work to help the family by earning something.
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Actually, your story is a great example of why most people aren't really making an effort to change behaviors over climate change concerns. .... These things are relatively non-negotiable. Most of us only have so much income we can spend on things, and making more requires MORE energy usage. Maybe you start a service business as a side job or second job? Well, now you're traveling around to client sites in your spare time and running errands for needed supplies to do the work. With the high cost of such propositions as switching your vehicles to electric cars, it's out of financial reach for many people still.
At the end of the day, we need to use a lot of energy to accomplish the things in life we want to do. Everything from taking those trips to visit family or friends to the daily work commute needed to earn a paycheck
The biggest changes will only come about as the primary energy sources are converted over from burning fossil fuels. The power generation plants are actually doing this, but it's a very slow process that's (perhaps ironically) slowed down quite a bit by all the legal requirements for things like "environmental impact studies" - foisted upon the utility companies by the likes of Greenpeace. The main solution will probably be nuclear power - which is the toughest one to put online without a lot of resistance from environmental groups.
Honestly, I feel like I've almost over-extended myself already, financially, investing in some of these "Green" solutions. I put as many PV solar panels on my roof as the company could fit, using the most efficient ones per square foot available at the time. I traded in a Jeep and a sports car to get a used Tesla S. And I just took out a loan to do some home repairs that included ripping down the old siding and material behind it and replacing it with better insulated, modern materials. So hopefully, that cuts down on my winter heating bill and energy usage. So I'm going to sleep well at night that I've done my share. But realistically, all of this is a tiny drop in the bucket in the big picture -- even if it's a huge chunk of my total income.
I find it interesting so many investors are trash-talking Elon Musk and his unwillingness to just "pipe down and start acting like a typical, boring big business CEO". Yet you see all the praise of the street artist Banksy, when he trolled buyers at the Sotheby's auction with his self-shredding painting someone paid $1.4 million for.
Of course, what we're going to see with that situation is that the value of the painting will almost DOUBLE thanks to those antics, and both Sotheby's and Banksy win tons of free publicity and name recognition.
I feel like Musk is another one of the rebel, eccentrics who just wants to make and sell some cool products and do things that can change the world, in the long-run. If his insulting short-sellers and frank attacks of people who attacked his business models, efforts and idea first are a problem for you? Fine .... Go invest in any of thousands of boring, stable stocks for big businesses owned by stuffy people in suits.
At the end of the day, what really matters is the ability to build and sell a product or a service that people want to buy. Tesla has succeeded in droves, making a car that many owners consider "the best automobile I've ever owned". And he's privatizing space travel with his OTHER business, which slowly makes NASA obsolete. Good stuff, in my book!
Every single company I ever worked in I.T. for had "that one spreadsheet" ... the king-sized mess of macros and multiple sheets with cells linked to outside data sources that was always causing problems, yet was business-critical.
The worst I ever ran across was at a metal heat-treating company. A former engineer constructed a crazy-complex spreadsheet over the years when he worked there. I'm pretty fuzzy on what its purpose even was, but something to do with generating cost estimates for various metal treating processes. I believe a few other guys tried to pick it up where he left off, when he switched jobs and added even MORE stuff to it.
The interesting thing about it was that it seemed to do so many things, and occupied enough memory when loaded, that it exposed some actual bugs in Excel itself. I remember they complained to the I.T. staff about some odd behavior where it would just refuse to total up a set of values and left them set to 0, which led to a division by zero error elsewhere in it. Using the latest (at the time) version of Excel fixed the issue, so we had to make sure everyone was on the latest Office release to use it. But it was always causing problems, even though they'd fight and fight to keep using it anyway -- since it gave them answers they couldn't get any other way. I don't think anyone understood it well enough to really fix or rewrite it. There were a lot of complex formulas in it that were probably pulled from various obscure reference books on metalurgy and such.
I remember how Microsoft Access used to create these types of messes too, until enough people just rebelled against it and it went by the wayside. A long time ago, one of my co-workers used to tell everyone in our workplace that if they had anything developed in Access that was actually being used as a "production" application, to hand it over to him so he could convert it into an Oracle database instead. The only place he allowed Access was for someone just doing development of some project that wasn't complete yet. (It was decent at letting someone do rapid development of a database idea, even if their knowledge of databases and queries was really limited.)
Tim Cook says this: "When the free market doesn't produce a result that's great for society you have to ask yourself what do we need to do. And I think some level of government regulation is important to come out on that."
Yet, he's talking about the same "free market" that allowed Apple to make so much money. Last I recalled, he wasn't so keen on government regulation and interference when it was about restrictions on letting him repatriate money Apple earned abroad without getting taxed on it.
1. Companies need to take some more care to release products that work as advertised! If you want to reduce the number of support calls, make sure the product you're selling doesn't NEED that much support for malfunctions or failure to perform as stated on the box or in marketing materials.
2. Provide better documentation. (There was a Slashdot discussion about this topic just a day or two ago, with someone asking why nothing seems to come with a decent printer manual anymore.) If customers can't figure a product out that they just bought, they're going to call in to ask about it.
3. Stop hiring the cheapest warm bodies you can get to answer your phones or do online chat support! I just had a terrible experience using Amazon's online chat support last week. Had a simple request .... Just wanted to find out if I could exchange a broken camera that came as part of a videoconferencing solution, rather than having to tear the whole installation back out and box it ALL up for a return. The first lady I chatted with SLOWLY asked me bunch of really basic questions, such as confirming the product I was asking about was a specific one.... After all that, she tells me she "has to forward me to a specialist who can handle my concern" and I start chatting with a second individual, who asks the SAME annoying questions over again. I think it took a good 45 minutes to finally get the answer that they couldn't help me at all unless I shipped the whole thing back. (I could have just done that process online in 30 seconds.) When I asked if we could just do an even exchange -- that required another 10 minutes for them to tell me they couldn't because of some kind of system problem on their end.
4. If you call in and it says your wait time will be excessive? Offer to let the person hang up and receive a call back when someone is available. T-Mobile does this on their support line, and I believe Tesla Motors does it too. It should become the industry standard. Let people get back to whatever else they're doing rather than tying up their phone listening to hold music and waiting.
Exactly! I find it rather sad that so many people are worried enough about Mexicans crossing over to the U.S. border illegally to "steal jobs", when most of the work they'd do is "cash under the table" stuff that nobody else wanted to do at affordable prices, or migrant labor that will just be automated with machinery, moving forward, if there aren't people like them desperate enough for money to come here and do it cheaper than the cost to automate.
Meanwhile, they say very little about the H1B scam that steals real, "career quality" American jobs left and right -- often with labor that came here under false pretenses to begin with.
People keep saying the printed manuals are gone because "few people wanted to read them", or "that's what people want".
But IMO, we started running into a real problem where the people making a lot of the devices and software didn't have good enough writing skills to produce good manuals for them.
I remember really starting to see this in the late 90's and early 2000's, when the small computer reseller I worked for would receive products like new modems or I/O cards with instruction books that were really difficult to read, since they were very poor translations from Chinese. The fact we were building PCs from a bunch of components like this meant we really didn't HAVE a good set of instructions to bundle with the computers when we sold them. So we'd give customers a folder stuffed with all the little instruction sheets and the motherboard manual (which was usually the best manual of the bunch, though also questionable at times). Only the big name computer brands like Lenovo, Toshiba or HP could afford to hire people to write up decent instruction books to include. And most of those really weren't that helpful either. They wasted a lot of time with diagrams showing you where the lights, connection ports and switches or buttons were, plus any mandatory legal statements about things like FCC certifications and some really high-level overview of how to navigate a few things in Windows and any proprietary crapware they bundled on top of it. A far cry from the manuals the 1980's 8-bit era computers included, that taught you how to PROGRAM the thing.
Every corporate I.T. job I've had has included some technical writing as part of the user support I've had to do, and I see a lot of instructional stuff put together by various colleges and universities along the same lines, for students and staff. So really, manufacturers have been able to successfully "offload" expectations in that manner too. (Why write and bundle instructions to teach you the ins and outs of setting up email on your Android phone? Your school or employer has already spent money asking someone to make you one.)
Even as an advanced computer user now, with over 30 years of experience with the things? I still learn a lot of hidden tricks and tips for using whatever the latest operating system is on my machine when I watch the YouTube videos or read the enthusiast web sites that post about them. This stuff really SHOULD have been documented by the creators of the code. But these days, I think they just assume the knowledge gets disseminated by the Internet-using crowd, and some of the users enjoy the "Easter egg" element of surprise of discovering the stuff, even long after using the product.
You can just look at Elon Musk's previous tweets and public communications to see that he tends to get excited about things and make promises or statements about them that are a bit optimistic.
I have no reason to believe what happened here was a snap decision on his part that going private would be a really good thing for Tesla in the long-haul. And when he got word that some of the folks in Saudi Arabia were about to dump serious money into investing in an EV, he made a bet they were referring to HIS company and made the statement he made.
Unfortunately, the Saudis sunk $1 billion of capital into "Lucid", a wanna-be Tesla competitor that doesn't even have a single finished product yet available to the public. It remains to be seen how that will turn out for everyone.
No... I don't think I'm as ignorant as you claim.
I never said co-ops were a new idea that hadn't been tried yet, and I was the first suggesting it.....
I simply said that's the smarter way to do things if you're a "little guy" and can't afford to put together a farm on your own. What IS sleazy on government's part is harassing farmers with agencies like the FDA to insist they can't sell fresh eggs or unpasteurized milk, even if they have customers happy to pay for it.
Collusion isn't really the problem you paint it as, EXCEPT for the fact the big businesses have been able to get GOVERNMENT to assist them to block potential competition. Government often does one thing with one hand, while doing the opposite with the other hand, too. It's dangerous to believe it's "helping level the playing field" just because it's forcibly taking people's income (taxation) to redistribute some of it to the group you feel is wronged (the farmer, in this case).
A great example of this are the subsidies government gives for "clean energy". Sounds like it might be a good idea, except then? They get more electric cars on the roads and all of a sudden, all that tax revenue they obtained from gasoline taxes declines. So they want to turn around and start slapping taxes on people who drive electric vehicles. Same situation with legislation like the increasing fuel economy mandates Obama put on auto-makers. The better gas mileage government demands they start obtaining would choke off the revenue stream government wants to get from drivers. So you KNOW they'll find other ways to claw that back.
Every time government meddles in the marketplace, the consumer winds up paying for it.
Out where I live, we're seeing a lot of old family-owned farms closing up because the owners want to retire, and their kids have no interest in trying to keep working the farm. Nobody else wants to buy the land for farming it either. Really, for all the people expressing so much sorrow over the farmer's plight? The reality is that they're not taking the steps needed to remain profitable on their own terms. You talk to many of them, and they get all indignant about the farm land being bought for not only new housing developments, but even conversion into city parks.
Times have changed, and what I see is that there's still a lot of room to make lots of money in farming, IF you do it on a relatively small scale and shoot for higher profit margins offering really fresh, organic produce and/or meats. You ALSO (like all other businesses) have to be good at doing the marketing and distribution. Work deals with area restaurants to exclusively use YOUR products and advertise your farm right on their menu. See if area grocery stores will allocate a small section just to your products and feature them. Unless you're lucky enough to be right off a major road that's used heavily for tourist traffic, you probably won't make it by just putting up a produce stand during the day and trying to sell to passers-by.
By contrast? You could put together some kind of co-op with other farmers, joining forces to work a bigger farm as a group. But these medium-sized, old family farms just don't seem like the best idea, moving forward. Too much expense, both up-front and to work that much land. Too much risk if things don't pan out in a given season. And no point in trying to compete with big, corporate agriculture who cranks out the bulk of the food people eat.
There's still too much of a mentality that "government owes us" something to help sustain farming. Farm subsidies are, by and large, a bad idea and need to go away. It's ridiculous how often a farm is paid NOT to grow a certain crop or compensated when they can't sell what they've got for as much money as they wanted to. America produces plenty of food, and does it more efficiently than ever before. It's probably the case that with more automation/robotics, we'll get to a point where they require very little human labor to do the actual farming. So either you're part of that large scale food production operation, or you're a niche farmer, offering something special at a higher mark-up.
People tend to assume that GOVERNMENT regulation is somehow superior to individuals making decisions on their own. But government is just made of more individuals, subject to the same ability to be corrupted and same temptations to cheat, lie or rip off their fellow man for personal gain.
Obviously, the IDEA is that people in government were vetted and selected by the rest of the public as their preferred choices to "speak for them" by taking a stance on issues. But the result is always a compromise, where an often significant minority disagrees strongly with the leaderships' decisions and where supporters are often disappointed by how "watered down" promises get by the time they're turned into actions.
IMO, one of the primary reasons Bitcoin was even created was to provide a decentralized form of currency that ISN'T subject to any government's regulations. That comes with some risk, obviously ... but also benefits in some situations. And yes, it DOES aid some people in doing criminal things. But ultimately? Crimes are still crimes, regardless of currencies used in transactions done as part of them. If you hire someone to kill a person and pay them in Bitcoin instead of a regulated government currency? The murder was still a murder and there should be ways to prove someone hired the other person without having to trace the flow of the funds.
There's no need for "balance" here at all! That already exists by way of people having MANY options to do some sort of barter or exchange of a form of payment in return for goods or a service. Bitcoin should be here to offer that anonymous, non centrally-governed option.
I don't think it would matter if Elon Musk cured cancer tomorrow. There's a group of people out there who truly despise what the guy is accomplishing, because they don't want to see things change from cars running on gasoline and working the way they've always worked.
I would agree that it's not one big conspiracy, so much as several groups with anti-Tesla agendas for different reasons.
You've got, on one hand, the stereotypical blue-collar auto mechanic who always works on his own vehicles and makes a living repairing others at small garages or as a mobile mechanic or what-not. Tesla may be seen as a threat to his living. He doesn't want a bunch of vehicles running around that he doesn't understand and can't repair.
On the other end of the spectrum, you've got the investors who kept sinking money into bets against Tesla's success. They have the ability to seed Internet blogs and to influence bigger publications to print negative articles, in attempts to scare people away from holding Tesla stock.
Somewhere between that, you've got some people with a political agenda against Musk succeeding. They may be ultra-conservatives who see what he does as part of the "Green agenda" they're fighting against. Or they may take issue with the fact the Federal government extended loans to him. Maybe both. I've talked to a few of these people and I think half the time? It's just rooted in jealousy. They tend to be small business owners themselves who are struggling, and say things like, "If people gave ME the kind of loans they threw at Elon Musk, I'd have an amazing business too ... probably better than his!"
All I can say is this: Space-X alone should be a company you rally behind if you don't like big government. They're taking a whole industry that was the sole domain of Federal government for decades, because it was believed it was "too big an undertaking for private industry to accomplish" and taking it private.
If they really had 14,000 cars or so traveling through there daily, where did all that traffic go? Surely it wasn't all local traffic. I have to assume his move to ban cars from passing through just increased the traffic in surrounding areas, as people were forced to detour around it.
This doesn't seem like a very workable plan for many cities. He might get away with it as long as he's a lone exception to the rule. But as soon as you have a few adjacent cities trying to pull it off, you're going to create some real traffic problems and effectively roadblock travelers from passing through that part of the country.
Fact: I have no interest in carrying around another Android phone right now. The photos coming from the latest iPhones look excellent. As Apple pointed out in their presentation, even a cover photo for Time magazine was shot with one. So arguing whether or not a Google Pixel has a better camera is, IMO, a bit pointless. I mean, kudos to Google for making that good a camera in their phone .... I just fail to see how it changes anything? Very few people who prefer using iOS to Android's OS would switch products to a Pixel phone just because of the slightly better camera capabilities.
If the camera functionality is THE most critical factor for you? I'm wondering why you didn't invest in an SLR to use for your photography instead? A good SLR will still handily beat even Google's Pixel 3 when it comes out.
A while back, Apple bought out a wireless charging company, and for a while - they were registering patents on ways to wirelessly power all sorts of Apple products. (I recall one diagram showing a typical room with an iMac set up, where it looked like they were proposing making the iMac so it doubled as the wireless charging base for peripherals sitting near it. The keyboard, the mouse and your iPhone, for example, would all charge if they were in proximity of the iMac.)
So to go from experimenting with ideas for all of that to struggling to get a simple QI charging mat to function? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
I've seen problems with several other wireless charging mats on the market, where they overheat and shut down while trying to recharge iPhones. I suspect there may be some inherent design problems with the phones themselves when it comes to their ability to charge at higher rates? As long as a given charging mat only provides a lower charging power level, they seem to work just fine. (I have a Belkin I use to charge my iPhone X every night on my nightstand and it works flawlessly. A second charging mat built into a tray that fits in my car seems to work ok with it too.)
Apple was probably trying to release a charger that could charge the devices faster than competing products on the market already, and that's where they're hitting difficulties. Maybe they've experimented with charging in on/off bursts or something, thinking they could still make that work in some manner to charge their phones faster than competing devices charge -- but that isn't panning out for them? IMO, it's not a bad idea at all to refuse to go with active cooling (fans, etc.) just to make one work without overheating. Fans are prone to failure over time, including getting noisy if they don't stop spinning, outright. It's more of a lazy, band-aid way to deal with excessive heat than a "best solution". (Many people don't know that Apple put fans in the Airport Extreme wireless routers, and guess what tends to fail on them and cause overheating errors and issues? Older models that didn't have fans just keep on working and working. I've seen people still using the original flying saucer shaped Airport wi-fi routers, despite them being so outdated, technology wise, it's kind of ridiculous.)
I do have a couple complaints -- and these are unfortunately typical of Apple's new software releases these days.
1. The new, enhanced Apple Maps only start out with improved map data for California. The rest of the nation gets added over time. (Because California is clearly the most important place in the nation, right? 49 other states not ready yet is no big deal.)
2. I understand the screentime feature that lets you limit your kids' time they can use the iPhone is buggy. Kids can mess with the settings and give themselves more time, undermining the whole point of the restrictions. (A number of people on forums said they reported these bugs during the beta, but none of it was fixed by the release.)
Realistically? This stuff will get sorted out within a few months. But I've seen this with OS X releases too .... things that *really* should have been working properly by release day simply aren't. (It took Apple several releases to get multi-display support with more than 2 displays working properly on the "trash can" Mac Pro, even though you could boot into Windows on the machine and get them working just fine. Pretty embarrassing oversight on a multi-thousand dollar "Pro" workstation!
It always feels to me like Apple doesn't employ enough software developers, and people working on one project regularly get pulled off of it to assist elsewhere, whenever something is nearing a deadline.
Trump has nothing to do with this except for a comment from him at one point that he wanted to investigate the missing funds.
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
The information stated is no surprise at all. We all know the cost of living out on the west coast has gotten insane. Tech companies desperately want to hold onto that clout of having an HQ in the heart of Silicon Valley, but it's only doable as long as young, singles want to work there so badly, they'll take what amounts to these massive pay cuts due to high housing costs and more.
Even on the other side of the country, you deal with the same struggle to some extent in the DC metro area and anyplace around NYC.
These may be places where you can find employment with high profile companies -- but they're poor choices for raising families. You have to figure out what you want and live in a sensible area to suit you.
I was born and raised in the midwest, in St. Louis, Missouri -- and although I left for a DC area tech job, that was only doable for us because we found a small town with much more "down to earth" housing prices. It means I have an hour or so commute to and from work, but it's also a job where I can work from home some days. As the job has evolved with time, they opened a couple of additional offices in this area and another one changed location in DC a couple of times. So trying to strategically rent or buy property "close to work" would have been a mistake anyway. I do know that St. Louis has recently made some real effort towards creating new tech jobs -- so that might be a really good place for someone to consider, if they want to work in tech but raise a family too. It's very much a family-friendly city, with so many things to do that have no admission cost (a world class zoo and many great museums, for example).
Well, let's be realistic here.... The funding going for things like mass incarceration and military exercise in foreign countries won't just get fully redirected to healthcare and education subsidies if you put a stop to those things. It's a powerful "selling point" to get a point across, but government funds often go to one area because of a complex underlying situation. It's not just a general pot that all the money piles up in until they decide how to divvy it up.
If you believe some of the reports about the Pentagon, alone? It claims they "lost" over 9 trillion dollars. The funds just "vanished" with no records to show where they might have gone. And while sure, Trump and others promised to "investigate"? How much uproar have you heard lately about any of it? Yeah, not much. They'll basically stall until it's forgotten about and move on. If you could just reclaim THAT money, you'd have all sorts of options of other places you could spend it. But truthfully, SOMETHING happened to it -- and probably had a lot to do with cash payments to various foreign leaders to make deals happen or not happen around the world.
There will obviously be plays on words, as the new phones roll out. Xs = Excessively costly, etc. etc.
And admittedly it's a bit difficult spitting out "iPhone Xs Max". But what usually happens is people shorten up the names to whatever they find comfortable. Pretty sure the new iPhones will start getting called either an Xs or a "Max"?
At least with Apple, you don't have the problem of them making dozens of variations of a phone for different pre-paid carriers to sell. I can't even remember what the name is of the cellphone I got my kid with a prepaid Simply Mobile plan. She wanted a case for it and it was a huge effort locating the right one to fit it. There are simply too many models that all look roughly alike in photos.
How would this really solve the problem? I saw people throwing old batteries in the trash on the regular, for as long as I can remember.
I'm sure there are places where the high water marks were put on buildings.... But I know in many cases, you just have shopkeepers showing you such things as, "water that once reached the level of where my business name is painted on the window glass".
In reality, for-profit insurance companies have a vested interest in drug prices being kept in check, because it gets harder to sell people policies when they're stuck increasing their rates sufficiently to cover these inflated medication prices!
One of the negatives of single-payer healthcare is that it would be funded from taxpayer dollars, meaning as per usual -- central government lacks motivation to keep the costs down. Since they don't have to show a profit on THEIR books, they simply find other avenues to extract the required revenue to pay whatever they're asked to pay.
The real problem here is that this Nirmal Mulye character fails to understand that the pharmaceutical industry isn't truly a "free market" business. It already receives special favors by way of the FDA protecting exclusive rights to a new drug for years after it's brought to market, and rules preventing overseas competitors from selling their offerings here as cheaper alternatives. They're very much a protected monopoly on a given drug, holding customers (whether they be end users paying out of pocket, or insurers paying on their customer's behalf) hostage to either pay any price they dream up, or to simply do without the cure.
I live in the Northeast and every time a reporter starts showing the people putting up sandbags and preparing, and they get interviewed? They say the same kinds of things. "Been through this a number of times before." The shop owners in places like Annapolis will show you how high flood waters have been, decades ago compared to the last few times they dealt with flooding. And predictions for this one seem to be, at most, somewhat equivalent to one of the higher water levels they saw long ago.
This article talks about a worldwide slowdown of 10% noted in the last 70 years for hurricane movement? Might be completely true, but does that really signify man-made climate change as the culprit? Or would you see at least a 10% variance one way or the other, if you were tracking their speeds of travel in different time periods further back than the last 70 years? Either way, 10% doesn't seem like a huge difference? Assuming the amount of rainfall is directly related to how long the storm sits in a given area, or how much time it has to pick up ocean water as it travels? Wouldn't that mean it accounts for only 6 inches of extra rain from a 60 inch rainfall?
Yep.... I think about that. And every time, I'm reminded that the problem is due to a Socialist / Communist government that's made life that miserable for the common citizens.
I feel no guilt about owning or using my iPhone X in a nation that has always had laws in place that ensure OUR people don't have things that bad.
As it's OFTEN said, if Foxconn didn't have those contracts with Apple, there would simply be MORE misery in China because people would starve, or not have basic shelter, because there was no place for their pre-teens or teens to go work to help the family by earning something.