If you pick apart the movie it takes place in the early 2020s.
One clue is the Chinese space station. Another clue is the Shuttle mission number, which would have been a valid number if the shuttles had kept on flying into 2020.
I know of 2 cases where the EU alleged issues:
Google Maps, where Google put it's own reviews in front of other, like Yelp
In shopping results, where it put it's shopping search engine before others.
To your point, take a look at what you are saying. If Google ranks it's own services ahead of others, is it because they offer the best service? Google says yes, but then again their biased, so arguing that point is going to be futile.
A better question is if the are they optimizing their algorithms to make it look like their serveries are the best? A analogy might be Microsoft's Explorer. A big issue was not that Microsoft included Explorer in all their copies of Windows, but that Microsoft had optimized Windows so Explorer. i.e. Explorer could make special secret calls to the OS while other bowers could not. If they are that would be a big issue.
Yes, there is evidence of this. But it may not be illegal.
Part of the reason is a network effect. As Google brings in more and more information, it gets better at sorting it and finding connections. In the above example, Google knew people were wanting to search on maps so it bought a map outfit and started pouring data in. As it gets better at integrating various sets of data, the better it gets, the more people visit it, the more money it makes, the more data it can buy, and the virtuous cycle goes forth.
Then there is bundling, where Google uses it dominate position to promote it own second rate offerings above better results, tamping down completion.
Then there is jealously and fear at having such a large and powerful corporation outside their realm.
I would not say that. Yes, China's growth rate has fallen from 10% to 7%, but that is still higher than the West's 2%.
And yes, China is horrible misallocating resources and I reckon that when the bubble busts it will take the wind out of Alibaba's sails. But that is a argument for slower growth, not a falling stock price. (It could, you just need to build out your argument.)
As for shorting this piggy, as somebody who lived though the Dot.com crash seeing people do this first hand, I will point out that the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Take care.
I would take the opposite view. GM had a large number of inflexible costs. Old underutilized factories that they could not close, redundant union employees that could not fire, and a huge number of small unprofitable dealerships. The state franchise laws were so strong that the only way to fire these unprofitable customers was to dealer bankruptcy. GM and Toyota have roughly the same market share but GM had twice as many dealers. In the 60s GM had over 50% of the market share, so it made sense to have 7 brands, and thousands of dealerships. Plus Americans were more rural and spread out. By 2010 having that many dealerships was irrational, but state franchise law limited what GM could do.
It made sense for the individual dealership to hold on – why give away a valuable franchise for nothing? And GM did not have the money to buy them out – even a marginal franchise is worth a million. But the collective actions were an anchor around GM's neck.
You could see GM moving in the right direction in 2000-2010, transforming themselves from a huge slow moving dinosaur into something for the modern age, but they just could not move fast enough.
First, it assumes that the two parties have relatively equal power, or at the very least that one can't bully the other. Second, it assumes the situation is static. This is rarely true after 10 years. After 20 years, normally the situation has changed so much that one party dominates and can squeeze the other party dry.
It is a bit more subtle than that. Back in the 20s there were over a dozen auto manufactures and many repair shops, so that was not an issue. The issue was one of unbalanced power. The manufactures could bully the franchisors by forcing them to buy more cars than they could sell, yank their franchise after they had built up the brand and sell it somebody else, drive up franchise fees after the initial 10 year contract was over.etc.
A free market only works when there is a free exchange between 2 parties. The laws were supposed to, and did, redress this balance of power. Of course, what was true 100 years – or even 25 years does not necessarily apply today or to Tesla. The NADA today is about defending locally entrenched business interests and the status quo.
It is to show the size of the factory. From the article, it is supposed to produce "35 GWh." worth of batteries. I assume that is per year, but they are a bit coy on that detail.
What regulations are you talking about? In America both banks and charge / merchant / debit cards fall under the same laws. Banks may be more highly regulated but then again they are doing more things. That is, they make loans, take deposits etc. But I can't think of a major difference in terms of principals on how checking is treated differently than cards. For example, the same standards, a signature, are used for both. The differences I know of are on specifics, for example extra safeguards built into checking to clear the checks.
I am missing one of your point - why does it matter that VISA is owned by bank in Europe and is private in the US? Why does that matter?
I assume that you know that VISA was a single company until 2006. At that point the US Banks cashed out by selling VISA to the public and the European bans went their own way.
Google is actually in the delivery business - see their Google Shopping Express.
But no, this is not part of their core business – this falls into one of their moonshot projects. Personally, I don't like when companies move out of their core. General Motors going into IT consulting, Apple Computers going into MP3 players, Microsoft going into MP3 players, Amazon moving away from books into cloud services. etc. Historically these ventures generate piss poor returns for the owners. Generally these things are better left to start-ups. But sometimes you have to give management the benefit of doubt.
One could grow organs inside a person's body or in a tube, but there are issues about blood supply, proper growth, etc. A possible solution would be to grow human organs in animal hosts. Transgenic pigs are often cited as a possible choice. They are about the right size for many organs and their immune system should be able to be tweaked so as not to reject the foreign tissue. Of course, this approach has other technical hurdles to overcome. I am not willing to bet on what the answer will be.
Still in the realm of science fiction but we are getting closer every day.
It is not just "fun" things. Cities are more productive than rural areas. Bigger cities are more productive than smaller cities.
It is not because the more productive people move to larger cities – that variable has been controlled. Bigger cities offer economies of scale, allows deeper areas of expertise to developed, and networking effects. And if one wants to argue that in theory the internet can overcome the need for physical proximity, hard data argues otherwise. In the past 30 years, productivity and income has risen faster in larger cities than mid-tier cities.
If I had to guess it is a quasi-legal thing. People probably want some type of assurance that their message had been delivered.
I worked in a US Bank and we were still sending out telegrams in 2002. The telegram served kind of the same function as certified mail. We could confirm that the message had been received on the other end. We were conducting "urgent" business (generally business that needed a turnaround time of 1 to 3 business day) with older cliental (e-mail was not assured).
You got me on the date thing – I am showing my age.
On to your point, I would agree that we need librarians and archivist. However you are off point. The topic at hand is about lending libraries and the most efficient way to lend out books, music, movies, etc. Almost everything you point out is in the domain of research, archive, and other special collection libraries. These libraries tend not to lend stuff out. Does it matter if a library or a historical society holds these archives? I can't think of one.
Then I would suggest, and I do in fact encourage, reform of the copyright laws.
Clinging to yesterday's 19th century inefficient technology with some ill-defined nostalgia for the past is probably not the best way to ensure liberty in the 20th century. As a case in point, my library immediately deletes all borrowing history the moment a book is returned or the e-book lending period expires. Not exactly on point to what you are saying, but pointing out the type of things we should be doing. That being said, even if all libraries go DRM, there is nothing stopping you from walking into a bookstore and buying a hardback with a $20 bill.
Libraries do carry books for "financial reasons", in the sense that library space is a cost and libraries don't have unlimited money. They do try to get the most bang out of their buck to server their "customers". Libraries routinely cull their collections. Most libraries have book sales where they get rid of their excess inventory, making room for new books.
That being said, most libraries tend to take a long and deep view. What was trendy yesterday and obscure today is the stuff of historical research tomorrow. This is particularly true for research and archival libraries. That being said, digital storage of media is getting cheaper and better every day.
You say not everybody can afford Kindles? The point was to close down all of the libraries, and used the money saved to buy everybody a Kindle or some other type of e-book. If e-books and libraries were equivalent than society would win. E-books and libraries are not equivalent yet, at least the book lending portion. However, my local library does allow me to check out e-books and audiobooks via the internet so we are getting close.
Taxes could be cut, libraries could be redeployed to something more useful - like coffee shops that could be used for networking. I say the last bit half in jest. If you are interested in networking, community meetings, etc. then we should figure out the best way to delivery that. Maybe generic community centers could do better? Other people have mentioned internet access and tech support. Maybe free city wide wifi would be a better choice?
I love libraries, but let's not try to justify their existence with a bunch of ad hoc ad ons in ex post facto rationalization of logic.
No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that.
IIRC there was a joke in the first Michael Bay's Transforms movie along those lines.
I think part of the reason is that it sounds kind of like Japanese and Finnish and Japanese are kind of in the same language group. Not saying there are kissing cousins like the romance languages, but as languages go they seem to be orphans which share a common great grandparent.
It is not about the NSA, it is about Windows XP. Windows XP (the pirated version) dominates the market. Microsoft has withdrawn support, which leaves China in a bit of a pickle. I am sure this will all go away if Microsoft would just start supporting XP again or China bought a couple of million of Windows 8 licenses.
Here is an analogy. I don't consider Klingon, Esperanto, or Latin to be real, living languages. They fill all of the requirements of being a language but people can't live their daily lives using these language and they don't think in these languages. Books may be translated into these languages, but few books are written in these languages. Native speakers are rare. Latin may be an edge case.
Yes, you can do a lot of things with BitCoins. But form the posts that I see on Slashdot, these retailors are immediately converting the BitCoins to the local currency. That suggests to me that the BitCoin economy is a mile wide and an inch deep.
As for BitCoin, I am not rooting it to fail but I think it will. From a technically aspect, it has many virtues as a currency. However, anything that acts like money is money. In good times, many things can act like money but in bad times the amount of money can contract rapidly. Hence monetary policy. BitCoins lacks that flexibly. I personally feel there is going to be a crisis and the whole thing will collapse. Now, on the flip side, hard money types will tell you this inflexibility is a virtue.
I too would be interested in know if there are legitimate BitCoin banks out there. I suspect not for 2 ½ reasons.
First, I don't think anybody is audacious enough to do that. At the very least it implies one has a solid back office. It also implies that one has a government issued charter (with the regulation, fees, and oversight that goes with that). If a loan goes south, how do I collect? These are not unsolvable issues. I suspect that some of the ponzi sachems out there that promised a fat return or interest rates pretended to have some type of fractional reserve going.
Second, you can break banking down into 2 parts. One is the “cash handling” aspect. I have a negative opinion on BitCoin but this it does well. The second part, the fractional banking part, is to allocate capital by transmuting short term deposits into long term loans. I have a hard time imagining anybody needing a long term loan in BitCoins. Because the price is volatile, we would need to find a business that needed a big upfront loan in BitCoins for capital and was expecting to do business in BitCoins for the future.
Which takes me to my ½ reason. BitCoin users tend to be hard money types who hate loans. While I look aghast at the amount of leverage in the current system, I do think some lending (or to be more precise, some time aspect of investment) is necessary. I personally don't think BitCoin will be a real currency until we start seeing loans being made.
And when you are done with that, look up "hobby income" on the IRS website.After all we need to distinguish between the casual WoW player and the professional gold miner.
If you are a US citizen, and you have income as defined by the IRS, they have jurisdiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Define "builds everything we use". China builds (assembles) the iPhone, adding about $3 for a $600 phone. (I know that is retail, but still..)
If you pick apart the movie it takes place in the early 2020s.
One clue is the Chinese space station. Another clue is the Shuttle mission number, which would have been a valid number if the shuttles had kept on flying into 2020.
I know of 2 cases where the EU alleged issues:
Google Maps, where Google put it's own reviews in front of other, like Yelp
In shopping results, where it put it's shopping search engine before others.
To your point, take a look at what you are saying. If Google ranks it's own services ahead of others, is it because they offer the best service? Google says yes, but then again their biased, so arguing that point is going to be futile.
A better question is if the are they optimizing their algorithms to make it look like their serveries are the best? A analogy might be Microsoft's Explorer. A big issue was not that Microsoft included Explorer in all their copies of Windows, but that Microsoft had optimized Windows so Explorer. i.e. Explorer could make special secret calls to the OS while other bowers could not. If they are that would be a big issue.
Yes, there is evidence of this. But it may not be illegal.
Part of the reason is a network effect. As Google brings in more and more information, it gets better at sorting it and finding connections. In the above example, Google knew people were wanting to search on maps so it bought a map outfit and started pouring data in. As it gets better at integrating various sets of data, the better it gets, the more people visit it, the more money it makes, the more data it can buy, and the virtuous cycle goes forth.
Then there is bundling, where Google uses it dominate position to promote it own second rate offerings above better results, tamping down completion.
Then there is jealously and fear at having such a large and powerful corporation outside their realm.
I would not say that. Yes, China's growth rate has fallen from 10% to 7%, but that is still higher than the West's 2%.
And yes, China is horrible misallocating resources and I reckon that when the bubble busts it will take the wind out of Alibaba's sails. But that is a argument for slower growth, not a falling stock price. (It could, you just need to build out your argument.)
As for shorting this piggy, as somebody who lived though the Dot.com crash seeing people do this first hand, I will point out that the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Take care.
I would take the opposite view. GM had a large number of inflexible costs. Old underutilized factories that they could not close, redundant union employees that could not fire, and a huge number of small unprofitable dealerships. The state franchise laws were so strong that the only way to fire these unprofitable customers was to dealer bankruptcy.
GM and Toyota have roughly the same market share but GM had twice as many dealers. In the 60s GM had over 50% of the market share, so it made sense to have 7 brands, and thousands of dealerships. Plus Americans were more rural and spread out. By 2010 having that many dealerships was irrational, but state franchise law limited what GM could do.
It made sense for the individual dealership to hold on – why give away a valuable franchise for nothing? And GM did not have the money to buy them out – even a marginal franchise is worth a million. But the collective actions were an anchor around GM's neck.
You could see GM moving in the right direction in 2000-2010, transforming themselves from a huge slow moving dinosaur into something for the modern age, but they just could not move fast enough.
It is not as easy as that.
First, it assumes that the two parties have relatively equal power, or at the very least that one can't bully the other. Second, it assumes the situation is static. This is rarely true after 10 years. After 20 years, normally the situation has changed so much that one party dominates and can squeeze the other party dry.
It is a bit more subtle than that. Back in the 20s there were over a dozen auto manufactures and many repair shops, so that was not an issue. The issue was one of unbalanced power. The manufactures could bully the franchisors by forcing them to buy more cars than they could sell, yank their franchise after they had built up the brand and sell it somebody else, drive up franchise fees after the initial 10 year contract was over.etc.
A free market only works when there is a free exchange between 2 parties. The laws were supposed to, and did, redress this balance of power. Of course, what was true 100 years – or even 25 years does not necessarily apply today or to Tesla. The NADA today is about defending locally entrenched business interests and the status quo.
It is to show the size of the factory. From the article, it is supposed to produce "35 GWh." worth of batteries. I assume that is per year, but they are a bit coy on that detail.
What regulations are you talking about? In America both banks and charge / merchant / debit cards fall under the same laws. Banks may be more highly regulated but then again they are doing more things. That is, they make loans, take deposits etc. But I can't think of a major difference in terms of principals on how checking is treated differently than cards. For example, the same standards, a signature, are used for both. The differences I know of are on specifics, for example extra safeguards built into checking to clear the checks.
I am missing one of your point - why does it matter that VISA is owned by bank in Europe and is private in the US? Why does that matter?
I assume that you know that VISA was a single company until 2006. At that point the US Banks cashed out by selling VISA to the public and the European bans went their own way.
Google is actually in the delivery business - see their Google Shopping Express.
But no, this is not part of their core business – this falls into one of their moonshot projects. Personally, I don't like when companies move out of their core. General Motors going into IT consulting, Apple Computers going into MP3 players, Microsoft going into MP3 players, Amazon moving away from books into cloud services. etc. Historically these ventures generate piss poor returns for the owners. Generally these things are better left to start-ups. But sometimes you have to give management the benefit of doubt.
Maybe not.
One could grow organs inside a person's body or in a tube, but there are issues about blood supply, proper growth, etc. A possible solution would be to grow human organs in animal hosts. Transgenic pigs are often cited as a possible choice. They are about the right size for many organs and their immune system should be able to be tweaked so as not to reject the foreign tissue. Of course, this approach has other technical hurdles to overcome. I am not willing to bet on what the answer will be.
Still in the realm of science fiction but we are getting closer every day.
It is not just "fun" things. Cities are more productive than rural areas. Bigger cities are more productive than smaller cities.
It is not because the more productive people move to larger cities – that variable has been controlled. Bigger cities offer economies of scale, allows deeper areas of expertise to developed, and networking effects. And if one wants to argue that in theory the internet can overcome the need for physical proximity, hard data argues otherwise. In the past 30 years, productivity and income has risen faster in larger cities than mid-tier cities.
If I had to guess it is a quasi-legal thing. People probably want some type of assurance that their message had been delivered.
I worked in a US Bank and we were still sending out telegrams in 2002. The telegram served kind of the same function as certified mail. We could confirm that the message had been received on the other end. We were conducting "urgent" business (generally business that needed a turnaround time of 1 to 3 business day) with older cliental (e-mail was not assured).
You got me on the date thing – I am showing my age.
On to your point, I would agree that we need librarians and archivist. However you are off point. The topic at hand is about lending libraries and the most efficient way to lend out books, music, movies, etc. Almost everything you point out is in the domain of research, archive, and other special collection libraries. These libraries tend not to lend stuff out. Does it matter if a library or a historical society holds these archives? I can't think of one.
Then I would suggest, and I do in fact encourage, reform of the copyright laws.
Clinging to yesterday's 19th century inefficient technology with some ill-defined nostalgia for the past is probably not the best way to ensure liberty in the 20th century. As a case in point, my library immediately deletes all borrowing history the moment a book is returned or the e-book lending period expires. Not exactly on point to what you are saying, but pointing out the type of things we should be doing. That being said, even if all libraries go DRM, there is nothing stopping you from walking into a bookstore and buying a hardback with a $20 bill.
Libraries do carry books for "financial reasons", in the sense that library space is a cost and libraries don't have unlimited money. They do try to get the most bang out of their buck to server their "customers". Libraries routinely cull their collections. Most libraries have book sales where they get rid of their excess inventory, making room for new books.
That being said, most libraries tend to take a long and deep view. What was trendy yesterday and obscure today is the stuff of historical research tomorrow. This is particularly true for research and archival libraries. That being said, digital storage of media is getting cheaper and better every day.
Not exactly true and kind of misses the point.
You say not everybody can afford Kindles? The point was to close down all of the libraries, and used the money saved to buy everybody a Kindle or some other type of e-book. If e-books and libraries were equivalent than society would win. E-books and libraries are not equivalent yet, at least the book lending portion. However, my local library does allow me to check out e-books and audiobooks via the internet so we are getting close.
Taxes could be cut, libraries could be redeployed to something more useful - like coffee shops that could be used for networking. I say the last bit half in jest. If you are interested in networking, community meetings, etc. then we should figure out the best way to delivery that. Maybe generic community centers could do better? Other people have mentioned internet access and tech support. Maybe free city wide wifi would be a better choice?
I love libraries, but let's not try to justify their existence with a bunch of ad hoc ad ons in ex post facto rationalization of logic.
That is true. But some linguists believe that Uralic and Altaic have common roots. The debate goes forward.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that.
IIRC there was a joke in the first Michael Bay's Transforms movie along those lines.
I think part of the reason is that it sounds kind of like Japanese and Finnish and Japanese are kind of in the same language group. Not saying there are kissing cousins like the romance languages, but as languages go they seem to be orphans which share a common great grandparent.
It is not about the NSA, it is about Windows XP. Windows XP (the pirated version) dominates the market. Microsoft has withdrawn support, which leaves China in a bit of a pickle. I am sure this will all go away if Microsoft would just start supporting XP again or China bought a couple of million of Windows 8 licenses.
Here is an analogy. I don't consider Klingon, Esperanto, or Latin to be real, living languages. They fill all of the requirements of being a language but people can't live their daily lives using these language and they don't think in these languages. Books may be translated into these languages, but few books are written in these languages. Native speakers are rare. Latin may be an edge case.
Yes, you can do a lot of things with BitCoins. But form the posts that I see on Slashdot, these retailors are immediately converting the BitCoins to the local currency. That suggests to me that the BitCoin economy is a mile wide and an inch deep.
As for BitCoin, I am not rooting it to fail but I think it will. From a technically aspect, it has many virtues as a currency. However, anything that acts like money is money. In good times, many things can act like money but in bad times the amount of money can contract rapidly. Hence monetary policy. BitCoins lacks that flexibly. I personally feel there is going to be a crisis and the whole thing will collapse. Now, on the flip side, hard money types will tell you this inflexibility is a virtue.
I too would be interested in know if there are legitimate BitCoin banks out there. I suspect not for 2 ½ reasons.
First, I don't think anybody is audacious enough to do that. At the very least it implies one has a solid back office. It also implies that one has a government issued charter (with the regulation, fees, and oversight that goes with that). If a loan goes south, how do I collect? These are not unsolvable issues. I suspect that some of the ponzi sachems out there that promised a fat return or interest rates pretended to have some type of fractional reserve going.
Second, you can break banking down into 2 parts. One is the “cash handling” aspect. I have a negative opinion on BitCoin but this it does well. The second part, the fractional banking part, is to allocate capital by transmuting short term deposits into long term loans. I have a hard time imagining anybody needing a long term loan in BitCoins. Because the price is volatile, we would need to find a business that needed a big upfront loan in BitCoins for capital and was expecting to do business in BitCoins for the future.
Which takes me to my ½ reason. BitCoin users tend to be hard money types who hate loans. While I look aghast at the amount of leverage in the current system, I do think some lending (or to be more precise, some time aspect of investment) is necessary. I personally don't think BitCoin will be a real currency until we start seeing loans being made.
And when you are done with that, look up "hobby income" on the IRS website.After all we need to distinguish between the casual WoW player and the professional gold miner.
If you are a US citizen, and you have income as defined by the IRS, they have jurisdiction.