Banking in the us **IS** regulated -- either by the federal government or one of the states depending on the bank's charter.... Except for PayPal which is for some reason allowed to operate as an unchartered bank in the US.
Perhaps what you are in favor of is more effective regulation.
Seriously, I think it depends on the market. In many (too many if you ask me) markets, it works exactly as you describe -- monopoly, regulatory capture, awful product quality, etc,etc,etc.. In others, it doesn't. Example-restaurants -- there are a zillion of them and, while big chains hold a large chunk of the market here in the US, there are a lot one-of shops that hold on and make a living for the owner and a few employees. There's a certain amount of regulation by health departments. But that's sort of tangential.
Anyway, I don't have any problem with free markets when they work. But I think anyone who thinks that free markets are a panacea is in need of psychiatric help.
Actually, the energy industry provides quite a few jobs, and many of them pay well. Longterm, I'm a fan of solar, but I think it's capabilities are currently rather oversold. I'm far from convinced that roughnecking a drilling rig is a worse job than crawling around on a roof installing solar panels. Falling off a roof is unlikely to be the high point of one's day..
Not a stupid idea, but suppose you are a big box store and you need to get a load of... well... big boxes... containing miscellaneous goods to stores in medium sized towns far from your distribution centers. For Example: Plattsburgh, NY; Burlington, VT and Rutland, VT from Albany or Boston. Trucks are by far the easiest way to get that bunch of boxes from a loading dock in an industrial park near Albany to a loading dock at a shopping mall at the destination.
I expect there are legitimate roles both for trains and medium/long haul trucks.
Highways (and, perhaps surprisingly, race tracks) looik to be a much simpler problem for autonomous driving than urban or suburban driving. Basically the rules are:
1. Don't run into anything.
2. Don't take actions that might cause someone/something to run into you..
3. Stay under the speed limit.
4. Don't follow more closely than a safe stopping distance.
5 Signal when changing lanes
6. If you run into a situation you can't handle, pull over as far as you can from the traffic lanes, turn on flashers, and call for help.
There are another two or four or six thousand rules, but with a few tens of thousands of man hours and a LOT of testing, it looks doable.
You're kidding, right? Let me quote Michael Crichton
""... the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have the SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them, too." M Crichton, Airframe,1996"
It has to be a **LOT** better than "very good". If your truck runs over a 3rd grader walking to school, you're going to wish you'd thrown that Uber salesman under a moving eighteen-wheeler.
That said, truck terminals could be, and likely will be, built with or at expressway entrances/exits
As for job creation... About as likely as the five million great green jobs Barack Obama promised us in 2008. Nothing against Obama -- I voted for him... twice. He may well have been sincere. But I thought in 2008 that those jobs were illusory. And AFAICS, they were..
NY TIMES Nov 18, 2005... THERE is a venerable Wall Street joke featuring an investor who, having accumulated a large position in an illiquid stock, decides it is time to get out. "Yes, sir," replies the broker when he is told to sell. "To whom?"
In reality, I think they will actually do shuttle buses first. Fixed route. Slow enough for folks to get out of the way (if they choose to) Minimal kid, pet, livestock, wildlife etc in road problems. That and expressway trucking -- driver takes vehicle to on-ramp, dismounts. At destination, driver takes over truck at off-ramp. A zillion details to handle. And the Teamsters Union will want MAJOR concessions. But likely doable.
The bottom line -- both literally and figuratively -- in your link shows a net **LOSS** of $675M. in 2016. 2017 is expected to be much worse because of Model 3 start up costs. You pay for the factory up front, you don't book profits until you sell the product. I think the 1017 financials will be published in March.
So, No, Tesla is not making a profit even though the gross profit before subtracting operating costs and R&D is positive. Some people think it will eventually sell a lot of cars (and batteries), achieve net profits, pay down debt, and eventually return money to its investors. Some people think Tesla is doomed.
Largely. However in a perfect world Brennan's Verizon accounts would contain nothing but emails to his family and friends, ecommerce orders and confirmations, and the usual spam. All his government traffic would be from his.gov account and even that would only contain unclassified material. Classified stuff goes by other means.
Probably the moving parts most likely to fail in an ICE/hybrid car are wheel bearings and alternators. I assume that EVs have wheel bearings, and alternators are just electric motors run "backwards" to generate electricity from rotary motion. The multitude of moving parts inside a modern ICE are remarkably durable so long as the lubrication doesn't fail.
Wasn't Panasonic invited to the gigafactory party to provide the manufacturing expertise that Tesla lacks? I'm not sure Panasonic knows much about cars, but when it comes to making batteries, this is not their first rodeo.
The problem isn't that the factory has teething problems. It is that based, on its quarterly reports and other public data, Tesla is on its way to running out of money. It really looks from outside like Tesla needs to start delivering a lot of Model 3s and making a reasonable profit on each if it expects to stay out of bankruptcy court.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that without some significant revenue stream, Tesla doesn't have enough cash and locked in credit to make it through 2018. Google turns up a plethora of articles on this. Are they accurate? How the hell would **I** know?
I can understand what a hat might be good for. But what, exactly, might one want a flamethrower for? I suppose ISIS or the Taliban could find a use for a few gross of the product. But I suspect they could get a better price elsewhere.
(Indeed, Amazon offers a wide variety of devices from $300 down to a $11 "Culinary Torch - Auto Ignition Flamethrower Butane Burner Gas Torch for Camping Welding BBQ" A Culinary Torch for Welding BBQs? Yep. How have I gotten by all this time without one of those?)
One other thing. There are actually vast tracts of land here on Earth that are currently quite thinly populated.-- The Arctic -- Russia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland. Australia's outback. The US Great Basin and Western plains. Brazil. The Sahara. Who is settling in those places nowadays? What are their social structures?
Barring Mars or Lunar colinization. Three possibilities: (I'm sure there are others)
1. Huge, self sustaining, artificial satellites -- See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Incredibly costly today, but maybe in a century or so, building one or buying/leasing one from a failed predecessor group will be feasible.
2. Underground or undersea self sustaining colonies here on Earth.
3. Eventually, your community may be able to buy, or build, a starship that can undertake the multicentury trip to a distant star system thought to contain earthlike planets with the colonists in suspended animation. IIRC Arthur C Clarke's "Songs of a Distant Earth" addresses this.
One thing all those have in common that might not apply to a terraformed ("terrorized"?) planet is the need for a technically competent staff to keep the machinery running.
==========
What kind of culture? I'd maybe look at the settlement of the American West. In particular I'd read George Stewart's "Ordeal by Hunger" which, as I recall, gives a pretty good idea how an ad hoc collection of colonists (The Donner Party) organized themselves and managed/mismanged their journey into the unknown. I'd also look at the tightly managed Mormon migration from Nauvoo, IL to the Salt Lake Valley.
And, of course, many millions of Europeans migrated to the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Latin America using just about every imaginable social structure (and some that sort of stretch imagination to its limits)
You're right. There are problems in getting to Mars. And likely some people will die getting there. But it's really not a one-way trip. More like an incredibly expensive, and quite risky round trip. My take:
Cost to get two or three people to mars orbit -- about the same as Apollo, the Space Shuttle, or the ISS (to date). -- $150B in current dollars. Chances of their getting back alive -- I dunno 70-85%. They will likely have a bit of radiation damage and may not be great life insurance risks. But they will be functional
Biggest problems. Radiation. Need to develop some life support technologies for a two year trip with no resupply. Provisioning -- what sort of spares do you send for a two year trip with no hope of resupply?
Trip to the surface of Mars and back -- Much more expensive -- maybe $600B Problems? Same as trip to Mars orbit plus the need to get a lot of mass - a landing system for the crew, a return rocket vehicle, and probably a separate landing system for the return vehicle. -- from Earth to Mars. And a LOT of technology has to work.
Chance of the explorers getting back alive -- maybe 60%
Of course China and India will be the next great powers. There are four times as many Chinese as Americans, they respect learning, have reasonable discipline, have mastered modern technology, have an economy the size of the US economy that is growing several times faster and frankly, their country is being run a lot better than the US.
Barring catastrophe, How can they NOT end up having the largest voice in running the planet?
And the Indians are nearly as numerous.
If you ask me, "American leadership" for most of my long lifetime seems mostly to have consisted mostly of stumbling ineptly from one unnecessary disaster to another. Maybe the Chinese and Indians can do better.
Ironically, people hiding in a hole in the ground with a mountain on top are going to need the same infrastructure, consumables, and living and pro-creating space as the people living in hole in the ground with a building on top on Mars will need.
Yep. On top of which, you're not going to end up after a few generations with a population of Mars grown "humans" that find Earth gravity intolerable. I wouldn't be surprised to find that colonizing smaller bodies in the Solar System turns out to be a one way trip.
Slashdot Mirror
Banking in the us **IS** regulated -- either by the federal government or one of the states depending on the bank's charter. ... Except for PayPal which is for some reason allowed to operate as an unchartered bank in the US.
Perhaps what you are in favor of is more effective regulation.
Seriously, I think it depends on the market. In many (too many if you ask me) markets, it works exactly as you describe -- monopoly, regulatory capture, awful product quality, etc,etc,etc.. In others, it doesn't. Example-restaurants -- there are a zillion of them and, while big chains hold a large chunk of the market here in the US, there are a lot one-of shops that hold on and make a living for the owner and a few employees. There's a certain amount of regulation by health departments. But that's sort of tangential.
Anyway, I don't have any problem with free markets when they work. But I think anyone who thinks that free markets are a panacea is in need of psychiatric help.
"Because when you need bulletproof economic analysis, you should always go to a fiction writer."
May I take it then, that you think Ayn Rand had nothing worthwhile to say to the world? If so, we agree on something.
Actually, the energy industry provides quite a few jobs, and many of them pay well. Longterm, I'm a fan of solar, but I think it's capabilities are currently rather oversold. I'm far from convinced that roughnecking a drilling rig is a worse job than crawling around on a roof installing solar panels. Falling off a roof is unlikely to be the high point of one's day..
"Just use the fucking rail network for it"
Not a stupid idea, but suppose you are a big box store and you need to get a load of ... well ... big boxes ... containing miscellaneous goods to stores in medium sized towns far from your distribution centers. For Example: Plattsburgh, NY; Burlington, VT and Rutland, VT from Albany or Boston. Trucks are by far the easiest way to get that bunch of boxes from a loading dock in an industrial park near Albany to a loading dock at a shopping mall at the destination.
I expect there are legitimate roles both for trains and medium/long haul trucks.
Highways (and, perhaps surprisingly, race tracks) looik to be a much simpler problem for autonomous driving than urban or suburban driving. Basically the rules are:
1. Don't run into anything.
2. Don't take actions that might cause someone/something to run into you..
3. Stay under the speed limit.
4. Don't follow more closely than a safe stopping distance.
5 Signal when changing lanes
6. If you run into a situation you can't handle, pull over as far as you can from the traffic lanes, turn on flashers, and call for help.
There are another two or four or six thousand rules, but with a few tens of thousands of man hours and a LOT of testing, it looks doable.
"Markets work just fine when left alone."
You're kidding, right? Let me quote Michael Crichton
""... the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have the SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them, too." M Crichton, Airframe,1996"
"the AI's already very good "
It has to be a **LOT** better than "very good". If your truck runs over a 3rd grader walking to school, you're going to wish you'd thrown that Uber salesman under a moving eighteen-wheeler.
That said, truck terminals could be, and likely will be, built with or at expressway entrances/exits
As for job creation ... About as likely as the five million great green jobs Barack Obama promised us in 2008. Nothing against Obama -- I voted for him ... twice. He may well have been sincere. But I thought in 2008 that those jobs were illusory. And AFAICS, they were..
NY TIMES Nov 18, 2005 ... THERE is a venerable Wall Street joke featuring an investor who, having accumulated a large position in an illiquid stock, decides it is time to get out. "Yes, sir," replies the broker when he is told to sell. "To whom?"
"Bitcoin's value dipped $8,000 this morning "
In English there is a difference between the verb **to dip** and **to dip to**. The latter is probably what was intended.
"Prepositions" are important and they do not like to be ignored.
In reality, I think they will actually do shuttle buses first. Fixed route. Slow enough for folks to get out of the way (if they choose to) Minimal kid, pet, livestock, wildlife etc in road problems. That and expressway trucking -- driver takes vehicle to on-ramp, dismounts. At destination, driver takes over truck at off-ramp. A zillion details to handle. And the Teamsters Union will want MAJOR concessions. But likely doable.
Quantum Entanglement.
You think computers are not sentient, are not malicious, and don't hate you? You haven't worked with them long enough.
Which God?. ... There are so many ... And they often don't seem to like each other all that well.
The bottom line -- both literally and figuratively -- in your link shows a net **LOSS** of $675M. in 2016. 2017 is expected to be much worse because of Model 3 start up costs. You pay for the factory up front, you don't book profits until you sell the product. I think the 1017 financials will be published in March.
So, No, Tesla is not making a profit even though the gross profit before subtracting operating costs and R&D is positive. Some people think it will eventually sell a lot of cars (and batteries), achieve net profits, pay down debt, and eventually return money to its investors. Some people think Tesla is doomed.
"Isn't this about Verizon failing, not the gov?"
Largely. However in a perfect world Brennan's Verizon accounts would contain nothing but emails to his family and friends, ecommerce orders and confirmations, and the usual spam. All his government traffic would be from his .gov account and even that would only contain unclassified material. Classified stuff goes by other means.
Got all that?
Think it works?
Probably the moving parts most likely to fail in an ICE/hybrid car are wheel bearings and alternators. I assume that EVs have wheel bearings, and alternators are just electric motors run "backwards" to generate electricity from rotary motion. The multitude of moving parts inside a modern ICE are remarkably durable so long as the lubrication doesn't fail.
Wasn't Panasonic invited to the gigafactory party to provide the manufacturing expertise that Tesla lacks? I'm not sure Panasonic knows much about cars, but when it comes to making batteries, this is not their first rodeo.
The problem isn't that the factory has teething problems. It is that based, on its quarterly reports and other public data, Tesla is on its way to running out of money. It really looks from outside like Tesla needs to start delivering a lot of Model 3s and making a reasonable profit on each if it expects to stay out of bankruptcy court.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that without some significant revenue stream, Tesla doesn't have enough cash and locked in credit to make it through 2018. Google turns up a plethora of articles on this. Are they accurate? How the hell would **I** know?
I can understand what a hat might be good for. But what, exactly, might one want a flamethrower for? I suppose ISIS or the Taliban could find a use for a few gross of the product. But I suspect they could get a better price elsewhere.
(Indeed, Amazon offers a wide variety of devices from $300 down to a $11 "Culinary Torch - Auto Ignition Flamethrower Butane Burner Gas Torch for Camping Welding BBQ" A Culinary Torch for Welding BBQs? Yep. How have I gotten by all this time without one of those?)
One other thing. There are actually vast tracts of land here on Earth that are currently quite thinly populated.-- The Arctic -- Russia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland. Australia's outback. The US Great Basin and Western plains. Brazil. The Sahara. Who is settling in those places nowadays? What are their social structures?
Barring Mars or Lunar colinization. Three possibilities: (I'm sure there are others)
1. Huge, self sustaining, artificial satellites -- See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Incredibly costly today, but maybe in a century or so, building one or buying/leasing one from a failed predecessor group will be feasible.
2. Underground or undersea self sustaining colonies here on Earth.
3. Eventually, your community may be able to buy, or build, a starship that can undertake the multicentury trip to a distant star system thought to contain earthlike planets with the colonists in suspended animation. IIRC Arthur C Clarke's "Songs of a Distant Earth" addresses this.
One thing all those have in common that might not apply to a terraformed ("terrorized"?) planet is the need for a technically competent staff to keep the machinery running.
==========
What kind of culture? I'd maybe look at the settlement of the American West. In particular I'd read George Stewart's "Ordeal by Hunger" which, as I recall, gives a pretty good idea how an ad hoc collection of colonists (The Donner Party) organized themselves and managed/mismanged their journey into the unknown. I'd also look at the tightly managed Mormon migration from Nauvoo, IL to the Salt Lake Valley.
And, of course, many millions of Europeans migrated to the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Latin America using just about every imaginable social structure (and some that sort of stretch imagination to its limits)
You're right. There are problems in getting to Mars. And likely some people will die getting there. But it's really not a one-way trip. More like an incredibly expensive, and quite risky round trip. My take:
Cost to get two or three people to mars orbit -- about the same as Apollo, the Space Shuttle, or the ISS (to date). -- $150B in current dollars. Chances of their getting back alive -- I dunno 70-85%. They will likely have a bit of radiation damage and may not be great life insurance risks. But they will be functional
Biggest problems. Radiation. Need to develop some life support technologies for a two year trip with no resupply. Provisioning -- what sort of spares do you send for a two year trip with no hope of resupply?
Trip to the surface of Mars and back -- Much more expensive -- maybe $600B Problems? Same as trip to Mars orbit plus the need to get a lot of mass - a landing system for the crew, a return rocket vehicle, and probably a separate landing system for the return vehicle. -- from Earth to Mars. And a LOT of technology has to work.
Chance of the explorers getting back alive -- maybe 60%
Just a guess
Of course China and India will be the next great powers. There are four times as many Chinese as Americans, they respect learning, have reasonable discipline, have mastered modern technology, have an economy the size of the US economy that is growing several times faster and frankly, their country is being run a lot better than the US.
Barring catastrophe, How can they NOT end up having the largest voice in running the planet?
And the Indians are nearly as numerous.
If you ask me, "American leadership" for most of my long lifetime seems mostly to have consisted mostly of stumbling ineptly from one unnecessary disaster to another. Maybe the Chinese and Indians can do better.
Yep. On top of which, you're not going to end up after a few generations with a population of Mars grown "humans" that find Earth gravity intolerable. I wouldn't be surprised to find that colonizing smaller bodies in the Solar System turns out to be a one way trip.