flexie

As a non-US citizen, I find it a terrible thought that somehow it should be morally better (or more legal) to kill non-US citizens than US citizens.

The only concern should be whether they are proven to be dangerous terrorists, not what their nationality is. If it's okay to kill a dangerous Afghan terrorist in a war zone in Afghanistan, then it's also okay to kill a dangerous American terrorist in a war zone in Afghanistan. Outside of war zones, I don't see any excuse for killing anyone, unless in self defense.

I am still not sure about what to think of the whole drone war. I see how it saves hundreds of thousands of lives, compared to bringing in ground troops, but it sure feels wrong and dystopian.

It's not a ruling. It's an administrative decision. And it's not dangerous. It has nothing to do with trade wars. Even insinuating that this is somehow a corrupt decision that takes aim at American companies is just way off. This decision has been several years in the making, and Google was told to stop their illegal conduct in April 2016.

EU treaty article 102 is about as clear as it gets. Google even had precedence to look at. And finally, they were warned by the EU commission more than 2 years ago but chose not to comply. This is a company with hundreds of lawyers on staff, and with the best law firms on retainer.

The fine is huge, but it's a small fraction of their revenue. This fine is measured based on guidelines that have been the same for more than a decade: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:52...

It may very well be trillions. After all Google has above 90 percent share of search in Europe. But it doesn't mean they shouldn't follow the rules.

The EU is not using Google or any other company as a piggy bank. Google is doing business in the European Union making tens of billions of dollars and they should follow the rules, just like their European, American and Asian competitors.

It's not like you have to be a legal genius to know the rules. They are right in the treaty (think of it as the EU constitution) and Google know about the many previous cases interpreting the rules that share similarity with theirs, including Microsoft's case about bundling Explorer with Windows and making it the default browser.

So Google and their hundreds of lawyers are well aware of the rules against abusing dominant position. Nevertheless, they have chosen to ignore the rules - maybe because they stood to gain so much money on breaking the rules.

When Google does business in Europe, they make use of European laws such as the trademark rights that grant them exclusivity to the brand "google", the copyright that grant them exclusivity to their source code, patent rights that grant them exclusivity to their many inventions, and hundreds of other laws that ensure that Google - just like European counterparts - can rely on the rule of law to protect them while they make money. Google itself has likely benefited tremendously from the exact same European competition law, that they are now fined for breaking. Were it not for such laws, Microsoft or Apple could and would likely have toppled Google from the advertisement market simply by forcing their own search engines, browser, maps, emails etc. on users of their operating systems.

Whether the administrative decision of the European commission to fine Google will hold up in court will be seen if Google decides not to accept the fine. So far the European Commission has had a good track record.

No, he is very likely going to be sued.

Musk is one of the most impressive entrepreneurs of our time. But he is also just human. Sometimes "totally fucked up" as you put it is the way we react, even when we shouldn't.

Musk could have chosen to ignore calls for help, but instead he exposed himself to the risk of failure. Then he was told his efforts were just PR and to "stick the submarine up where it hurts" by one of the now famous divers who currently speaks from a position not much less public than Musk's. Being told he had ulterior motives after repeatedly asking the person in charge of the rescue mission if they were sure they wanted his help (as the email shows), and after spending what is likely hundreds of thousands of dollars and days trying to help, is extremely disrespectful. I agree that he should have ignored it or simply rebuked it. But I understand he couldn't.

It's unworthy and completely wrong reaction, but it is understandable given the diver's prior attacks on him. Not that it's an excuse.

First, Tesla is not running out of cash. Tesla has a very attractive margin on every car it sells (and now it produces 7,000 of them weekly). The only reason they are losing money is large spending on R&D, SG&A, and in production capacity to satisfy a huge demand. Those are investments any tech company in their shoes would keep high while scaling up.

Second, most competitors are years away. Tesla is producing and shipping their mid priced car already, while most others are merely announcing, planning and developing theirs. If you want a 200 mile range, Nissan Leaf is already a decent competitor, though.

Most of us would like longer ranges (300 miles or more), and there is literally no other company than Tesla with EVs of that range. The EVs from VW, BMW, Daimler etc. are not on the market until maybe 2020, and with shorter range. Their second attempt will be ready 2-3 years after given the usual production cycle. By mid 2020, Tesla likely has substantially longer range than 300 miles and lower prices than $54,000, and they may very well be close to producing 1,000,000 EVs yearly (they just need to double current production rate once per year to achieve that).

By 2022-2023, when the competitors are finally ready with cars that can compete with the 2018 Tesla model 3, I bet Tesla is already down in the upper end of the low priced segment or the lower end of the mid priced segment and that they produce several millions of EVs yearly.

Like you, I would love for the others to catch up. Competition is good. But I increasingly doubt it will happen.

Tesla can literally just copy their current production lines a number of times at different places in the world, wait for the battery efficiency to improve as it has done every year, wait for battery price to drop, as it has done every year, while expanding their charging networks. Not that I think they won't keep innovating. It's just that they are so far ahead already.

I hindsight those would be right things to do.

But again: Maybe the kids went in there and the coach just followed with them. We assume that he was in charge, but we don't know. We don't know if he encouraged them to go in, or whether he tried to talk them out of it or something in between. If he encouraged them to go in, we don't know if he thought they would just enter the opening of the caves.

Some reports say that kids in that area regularly go to the caves. Maybe that's just what you do around there, like kids in America hanging out at a parking lot (which probably kills more kids annually) or kids hanging out at pools (in which way more kids probably drown than in caves). Maybe it's not considered so reckless.

Except as a tourist a couple of times, I have never been to such caves. I wouldn't think rain would be an issue. Like you, I have now read in the media that there were warning signs that said something about flooded caves during monsoon season, and maybe they saw the signs or should have seen the signs. Or maybe people in that area know that local caves flood during monsoon. I don't know. Three weeks ago I certainly wouldn't have thought of flooding as the obvious risk in a cave. I would probably have worried more about falling or slipping or snakes or earthquakes or getting lost.

And even if they did check the weather forecast, would they have known that caves would be flooded? In the last few days, every meteorologist in the world has looked into whether that mountain in Thailand would get rain and experts have tried to guess what it would mean for the flooding in the caves and the ongoing rescue mission. But although it rained it didn't mean that the water raised much. Maybe these people go to the caves regularly while it rains and it's not a problem.

We simply don't know enough to blame the coach.

Calling for prison without knowing much is very harsh.

We don't know if the coach led them in or if he just followed them.

We don't know how far in they went initially. Maybe they just went a bit inside the cave and then increasing water levels forced them further in.

At least he stayed with the boys. Imagine if no adult had been there.

Blaming the coach for the death of the rescue diver is completely uncalled for. There is causality, yes, but it was hardly foreseeable to the coach - if he really led them in - that they would get caught by flooding and that as a result of that a rescue attempt would be launched in which a diver would die.

Did Warren Buffet really know more hardship than today's young billionaires?

His father - one of the few college educated of his time - was already a stockbroker when Warren Buffet was a kid, and a member of the US Congress when Warren Bufffet was 12. Warren Buffet is white, male and of the "greatest generation" that went on to rule what became the most powerful country on Earth.

I get it that he wasn't born rich, but he was middle class just as much as today's billionaires.

Indeed. I find the ignorance about the European labor market amazing.

Not only do most Europeans get our 4-6 weeks of paid vacation. We also don't subtract any sick days from vacation days as is common in the US. We also get paid while sick. In some places by the employer, in some places by the government. Sometimes full pay, sometimes a reduced amount. We also have excellent government paid health care. We also have long termination notices. We have protection for temporary workers (so generally few Europeans work in Amazon jobs with day laborers picked up in the outskirts of the cities). Working weeks are typically 35-40 hours. We have protection for part time workers too. They can not be discriminated against. We have 1-3 years paid maternity leave. In some countries it's paid by employer (with refund from government), in other places it's paid by government directly. Usually the pay is part of salary. We have high participation of women in the labor market. We have paid paternity or parental leaves that are often longer than the American maternity leaves. We have government or labor union set minimum wages but most people make more than the minimum wages. Very few Europeans hold two jobs. If we lose our job, we have various welfare payouts and most importantly; we don't lose healthcare. At the end of working life, Europeans retire with public pensions and private supplements.

Now, there are variations from country to country since not all of the above is EU based; actually little of it is. I am speaking as someone who live in Denmark, Spain, the US and now Bulgaria. Every country in Europe has more of one thing and less of another. In Denmark, for example, the paid maternity leave is only at around one year, and women get paid what amounts to only a small fraction of their salary. In Bulgaria it's up to 3 years, of the first is 90 percent of salary, the second is around minimum wage and the third is without pay.

But generally speaking, European workers live a very sheltered and, I would say, privileged working life. I have yet to meet Europeans fearing loosing a job the way Americans do.

I live in the poorest country in Europe (Bulgaria) and virtually everyone below 50 has a smartphone.

The original iPhone was priced at $499 for 4GB, $599 for 8GB.

The standard model 3 that you refer to, which has a range of 350 km can barely be considered a long range EV, and it is actually not being produced yet. Tesla has only produced the more expensive version with a 510 km range.

Renault Zoe has a range of 240 km Chevrolet Bolt has a range of 380 km.

So none of them compares to the Model 3 actually produced.

Those are just European figures, just 3 brands, and just the existing numbers.

In 2006, the market for smart phones was tiny. A couple of years later, people paid 3 times more for a phone than they ever thought they would.

Yes, $500 for a phone is not the same as $50,000 for a car. But who would have thought that people would readily shed out $599 for a cell phone before Apple made that market? The amount of people able to pay $50,000 for a car is increasing every year due to the economic growth in Asia and elsewhere and Tesla expands the market of people interested in expensive cars in Europe and America beyond the usual motor enthusiasts to people like me.

More than 70M cars are produced worldwide every year. The 3 large German producers, Mercedes, Audi and BMW, are producing around 6M cars, of which many are priced similarly or more expensive than Model 3. That's just to mention some of the larger ones.

There is easily a demand for millions of cars within the upper end of the mid price segment like Model 3, and once the price of batteries goes down just a bit, EVs can reach the lower end of the mid segment.

We are not at the cheap segment yet, but it's just a matter of battery prices going down (through economy of scale; we actually don't need any breakthroughs in technology).

Then factor in charging networks. Right now, I don't have any supercharger near me. Next year I will. In 4-5 years I will have plenty.

As for not trusting the traditional manufacturers, I stopped buying Nokia and Ericsson and never came back, ones Apple marketed the iPhone. Not because they had had bad products or weren't trustworthy anymore. Just because it was obvious they produced the old tech and were behind on the new. People stopped buying horses and carriages when Ford produced his cars. Horses served us well for millennia.

And the hundreds of thousands of Teslas already driving billions of miles on the road are still driving well without the engines and expertise of BMW, right? People trust Tesla's tech now.

Indeed.

The only thing that holds Tesla down is whether they can scale production fast enough not to let others in. Forget about finance by now. They are not going bankrupt.

Production cycles in cars are at least 3 years. So the traditional manufacturers that more or all have announced they will market a competitive EV in 2019-2020, will get a second try in 2022-2023. I talk about their second try because it's unlikely that they will produce truly competitive EVs next year in their first try. Range and price are the main factors, and the range they talk about is generally 350-450 km, so a bit less than the Model 3 currently being produced, which have a range of 510 km. Tesla has historically upgraded their models with better batteries so it's a good bet that in 1-2 years Model 3 will have even better range. And the ones that they talk about now that have a range comparable to Model 3 are generally priced more like Model S or Y, so for a much smaller market.

In other words, I expect the old car manufacturers to market truly compatible EVs in 3-4-5 years. If Tesla can double it's production of Model 3 and other medium or low priced cars every year Tesla can produce

10k weekly mid 2019

20k weekly mid 2020

40k weekly mid 2021

80k weekly mid 2022

Needless to say that if that were to happen, and they produce 4 million EVs yearly in 4 years, it would be very hard for most of the others to get any footing in the market.

Maybe Tesla could achieve that by simply copying the existing production lines at the current Giga Factory or somewhere else in the world. We think that they would have to build huge factories which in itself takes time, and that they would have to innovate and automate much more than now but maybe part of the production could be achieved by adding more tents and hiring more people. Do we know?

When you read through the announcement and you realize that this is a company that even if it doubled it's current production rate it would still have orders for the close to a year's production, then you have got to pause and be amazed.

How many Model 3s could Tesla produce at its current facilities? 7,000? 10,000? 15,000? It wouldn't be enough to remotely satisfy the demand.

Truth is that once delivery picks up, more people will start to order since currently people like me think it's pointless to order a car that you would have to wait a year to get and that - in most parts of the world - you can actually not order yet. The orders are likely to increase proportionate to the production capacity as Model 3 will be made available around the world.

This company could build 3 Giga Factories around the world that each produce 10,000 Model 3s per week and demand would still not be met. Heck, they could have 10 Giga Factories and they might still not satisfy demand for Model 3.

And then there is the future demand for Model Y and - once they get economy of scale and battery prices go down a bit - demand for cheaper, smaller cars.

All this demand could be met by other car manufacturers if they too produced long range EVs of similar or better quality than combustion engine cars. But no-one does and no-one will for an other year. Don't say Nissan Leaf; it's not long range. And when they finally do, in 2-3 years or so, are you going to take a chance on one of the first competitive EVs from VW, Mercedes, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, Fiat, Toyota or Mazda or are you just gonna stick with Tesla, which by then comes with even better specs than today?

Tesla is the Apple of the car world. There is still room for other producers to make the Android cars that spend 3-4 year playing the catch up game of being one-two models behind in specs, and then maybe finally catch up in 5-10 years. But Tesla will get the better customers and the fat margins if the traditionalists don't hurry. And hurry a lot.

I am not sure what it going on here. How does it relate to crypto?

If you live in an area where housing costs are high, most other cost is likely also higher (tax, food, daycare, school, etc.).

GDPR requires those organisations to appoint a DPO, not to hire anyone new. It's like when you designate Ben to answer the phone after 5PM, Lisa to water the plants and the last guy to leave the office to turn off the light and close the windows (and for many companies there will be a lot less work involved with being a DPO, than with switching off the lights).

It’s not permitted to post the full text here. And worse if it’s done systematically on all articles from NYT.

I find that usually a google search on keywords provides free articles on exactly the same subject:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/0...

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/5280444/scot...

Otherwise, NYT is not a bad newspaper.

I do think a lot of those tweets are a work of fiction, quite original and influential. And unlike a lot of Nobel worthy literature they are also quite entertaining and reach a wide audience.

So it's not entirely impossible that he might one day receive it ;-)

Unlike the Nobel laureates in literature and sciences, the peace prize is not awarded by the Swedish Academy (in Stockholm). It's awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee (in Oslo).

So while Bush junior invaded Iraq and overturned Saddam Hussein because he wrongly thought they had weapons of mass destruction, his father, Bush senior, rightly thought so 13 years earlier but still decided to help Saddam Hussein.

That’s like saying Apple didn’t transform the cell phone industry but only led the industry by 2-3 years before Android followed.

Or that Apple didn’t innovate because they merely used known technologies like phones, batteries, and touch screens.

Hyperloop is near vacuum, not vacuum.

When assessing Musk's success, note that Tesla has singlehandedly pushed the entire auto industry towards electric vehicles. Before Tesla, electric vehicles were funny experimental things for hipsters. Very few people bought electric cars, and when they did it was usually only as a second car that could drive 100 miles around town. Virtually no major manufacturer were planning on changing that.

After Model 3, all major car manufacturers are changing their product development and production lines to make electric vehicles. It's now clear to everybody involved that in a number of years, it will only, or almost only, be electric vehicles.

Even if Tesla were to end up being a company that only sells a few hundred thousands cars per year, their impact will have been several orders of magnitude bigger. At the end of the next decade, tens of millions of electric cars will be produced every year and Tesla is the company that not only showed the way but forced an entire industry to go in that direction.

Now, why on Earth would Musk not be interested in promoting mass transit? Tesla is unlikely to produce 50 million cars yearly anyways, and - so far - electric vehicles are more expensive than ordinary cars and not much more suitable for dense city traffic than ordinary cars (although the cost is going down and although self-driving capabilities may change that a bit). But for many years to come, it's unlikely that the Boring Company or the Hyperloop is going to cannibalize on Tesla's market.

Agree

Lobbying is a way for the rich to legally shortcircuit democracy. It’s legal corruption and as bad for democracy as the illegal counterpart.

In Denmark we have had prefilled tax forms for I don’t know how many years. More than two decades. Nowadays its online. You log on and see your taxes and edit when necessary. It’s still unnecessarily complicated if you are not an employee, but for the 90 percent who receive salary as their only income and only have ordinary deductions it’s somewhat bareable although it can be hard to check if the tax authorities calculated the tax correctly.

Mankind has not had any rights for 99,9 percent of those hundreds of thousands of years you mention and we have only had such accessible records on each other for the past 25 years.