jernfrost

When we hear the word "owner" we associate that with full ownership, as if you own a car, house or whatever and take care of it and use it.

This kind of ownership is much closer to lending money to someone. While they are technically owners, emotionally speaking the arrangement is much more as if Elon Musk owns the company and the "owners" lent him money.

Elon Musk is the person who has built the company and spent a considerable amount of time working in it, putting his heart and soul into the company. An investor can jump in at any time and become an "owner". Does not mean an investor has the same emotional attachment to the company.

Say you build a house with lots of efforts over many years and live there for decades. To pay the bills you sell ownership shared in the house to investors. What happens to that house is going to matter a lot more to you than the investor.

It is not without reason that family run companies often outperform stock owned companies. When you have an attachment to a company beyond mere short term profit, that is a stronger bond.

Really? What makes you conclude that? Elon Musk is kind of like Steve Jobs and Wozniak molded into one person. Musk has deeper technical knowledge than Jobs ever had while he also has some of Jobs intuition about design and products.

You talk of a subset. A lot of casual games on iOS a very good: Cut the rope, Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Simple Rockets. Civilization for iPad was very good. I can't remember all the stuff I've played but a lot of games are not the candy crush kind.

Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.

Tailored to their hardware, more modern and is written in Objective-C which makes it much easier for Mac developers to integrate in their projects, since Objective-C interface nicely with Swift and most script languages.

Does it matter anymore? People are using less and less of the higher level stuff of OpenGL. Most of the graphics code is now in the engine. OpenGL is getting very outdated, who starting a project today would chose it over Vulcan, Directx or Metal? I would bet most small shops would prefer to use some sort of middle layer or engine from a third party. That pushes the problem of implementing the lower layers in Vulcan, DirectX or Metal to a small group of specialists.

"Okay, but truck driving is a job. You don't do it for fun or as a hobby. "

I knew a software developer who purposefully became a truck driver because he enjoyed it. That was long time ago when conditions might have been better though.

How is "just raise wages" more simplistic than "just lower taxes?" Somebody has to foot the bill no matter what you do. Do you think tax cuts are free? They are no less free than wage increases. When you cut taxes somebody else has to get their taxes increased to make up for the short fall, or some other service needs to be cut.

"Markets don’t work that way. You raise wages, trucking gets more expensive and demand drops, causing all sorts of unintended consequences." YES! That is EXACTLY how markets work! These "unintended" consequences you speak of are the whole beauty of the free market. When you get a shortage of one good, the price of the good increase. This sends a price signal out in the rest of the economy which means more resources gets allocated to produce more of that good. That is the so called "unintended" consequences you speak of.

"Trucking is so competitive that most companies would go out of business if they raised wages 200-300%." No, because they could raise prices. If all the competition got 200-300% higher wages, they would also be forced to raise prices, which means you are competing on a higher price.

Take McDonalds in my native Norway. They pay their workers about $25 per hour. How can they pay that without raising prices a lot? Yes they do have much higher prices than the US. But how can they then compete? They can because everybody else has higher prices. This isn't rocket science.

"The world is governed by reality, not wishes and hopes and mandates dictated by people that have little understanding of the economics of logistics — or the economics of anything for that matter."

Exactly, in a functioning market economy, prices of a good for which there is a shortage such as truck drivers, the price would go up. When prices don't go up, it suggests it is not a functioning free market. There could be many reasons for that. One would be e.g. collusion between companies or weak competition.

Yeah I see this a lot. Like in the US they seem to go after individual doctors for mistakes. In Norway it is more the hospital which gets punished.

Also economical compensation for medical error is something you apply to the government to get. If you think they pay too little or don't pay then you go to court.

I've noticed that in the US almost everything seems to go to court straight away. In Norway and probably rest of Europe there are much more non-court systems to deal with problems.

E.g. if a company has behaved badly you contact the consumer ombudsman and they will make a ruling or advocate on your behalf. They kind of collect complaints from many consumers and will get more involved if more consumers complain.

Companies will usually follow a ruling by the consumer ombudsman. If they don't do anything then that is when you get into court.

It might be one of the reasons why there are significantly fewer lawyers in Europe than the US.

I’d also like to add the social democrat view of welfare as practiced in nordic countries. We try to avoid the American solution of a huge patchwork of small individual programs.

Instead we prefer broad non-means tested rights.

The reason is twofold: a lot of people don’t want to degrade themselves into taking welfare, hence they end up with no help.

Support and quality for means tested programs tend to drop quickly, because only narrow interest groups exist to champion it.

We see this with e.g. schools. It the middle class all send their children to private schools then the quality of public schools tend to be very bad. That is because there is less pressure to improve it.

We saw this phenomenon over night when de-segregation happened. Blacks schools which got white studens received a lot more improvements, upgrades and quality focus.

But a solution that works isn’t worth it, if the abusers don’t get punished and humiliated for their moral failings. /s

The opioid crisis is an outcome of out of controll capitalism in the US. It was drug companies and doctors through sheer greed who made it happen.

This crisis has not happened in other western countries were money isn’t in full controll of politics.

I can respect that we have different views on how to reach the same goal, however I take issue with the conservative propensity to judge people. All too frequently conservatives rate people with some sort of failing as lesser people. There is a propensity to believe more in punishment and threats than positive re-enforcements.

I believe in effective solutions. Often it seems conservatives will refuse to use an effective and proven solution if they deem it had somebody getting something for nothing.

It seems as if conservatives will stay wide awake at night angry about somebody getting something they didn’t deserve.

As a liberal I don’t care as much about what people deserve as I care about what works as well as human dignity.

In Norway, we tend to follow a non-aggressive approach to prison and despite much higher standards than say in the US, the cost per prisoner isn't significantly higher.

Prison guards in Norway are essentially university educated social workers. American prison guards from what I've read are essentially just guys with a stick. They just get a couple of weeks of training.

Guards in Norway work closely with prisoners and do activities with them and get to know them. This leads to lower levels of aggression. I've seen accounts of other European visiting Norwegian prisons remarking how much more calm the atmosphere is.

When you lock up people and treat them as animals you create anger, resentment and aggression which they take out on each other or the guards if given the opportunity.

I believe this is a principle which applies to all walks of life including how you raise children. Children who live under strict regimes which are heavily focused on punishment don't act well. They easily become violent and lack self control.

If there is always an overwhelming force present to punish every transgression you make, all you learn is to be behave when you are under threat. When that control is gone you have no ability to control yourself.

Sitting on the other side of an interview, I was so annoyed with the guy I was doing the interview with because he insisted on these algorithm challenges. I told him these tasks are bullshit, because the job we do doesn't involve coding algorithms EVER.

I wanted to focus on the ability to read messed up code and figure out what it roughly does and how to improve it.

Turned out we were both kind of wrong, although I would claim my co-worker was way more wrong than me. Our candidates pretty much failed all these algorithm questions. And when my co-worker tried to help it turned out that he didn't have a proper grasp of the problems we presented either.

My reading code test didn't work very well either, because these test subjects were fresh out of college and had little experience in reading larger code bases, refactoring and dealing with software engineering problems. Like most people in college they had mostly dealt with toy sized programs.

So in the end what proved the best guide was plain old boring interview questions. Our interview was largely a failure but we hired the programmer on a hunch anyway based on her explanation of some theoretical subjects.

It turned out that she worked out just fine despite failing pretty much all the tests we had made. That is because a lot of development these days is more about persistence, motivation and ability to google. She was practical, eager to find solutions and eager to google and that made her get stuff done.

Fake news is what got Hitler into power. The fake news Hitler banned was the “fake” according to the same standard as Trump: news he didn’t like.

This issue is not as cut and dry as you think. As Theo van Gogh said: a tolerant society can not be tolertant towards the intolerant.

In Norway the media has an ethics organization they vuluntarily join, which may make rulings on whether a news organization has abused their power or not. It doesn’t carry any actual punishment to my knowledge but it is a public embarrasment so media try to respect its rulings.

Fake news is what got us dictatorships like Nazi Germany. Spreading lies about socialists and jews was how they gained votes.

In fact the nazis did just like the fox and the trump crowd today and labeled all mainstream news fake.

I don’t think you can dismiss the danger of such news environment. It plunged Germany into dictatorship. A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections.

I turned 40 this year. It is definitely a time you start thinking about your past and the future ahead of you. I think about health problems you can develop, like bad back, bad knees, obesity etc. My dad was very slim and fit in his 30s, but I remember how fat he got in his 40s and how he later developed diabetes because of it.

I also really miss the excitement and novelty I felt about things when I was younger. I look at my kids, how the smallest things are so fun and exciting for them. Now so much just feel like so much like "been there, done that". If If watch a movie, it all feels so predictable. If I travel, there doesn't seem like anything ever seems fresh or new anymore.

Perhaps because the world has become more similar. You can buy the same stuff anywhere in the world and the same chain stores are all over the world.

It also feels like I haven't quite followed up with expectations. When I visit the homes of parents of my kids playmates, their houses look so proper and serious. I feel I can't have people on visit because I still got half assembled 3D printers and robots in the living room. I feel like somebody who doesn't really want to grow up, but everybody is pushing me in that direction, even myself in the sense that I can't feel the same geek appreciating for technology. Technology feels less and less exciting and more like tools with a purpose. They have no intrinsic value as novelties or coolness.

Strangely I seem to care way more about people than technology. Do other ex-geeks/present geeks feel this way? Like tech stuff just isn't as interesting anymore. You get more interested in people? I think it is more fun to teach technology or write about it now, than actually doing it.

I am Norwegian and I believe we also have problems with loneliness in Scandinavia, but perhaps not this severe. While living in the US I did in fact feel very lonely. It was easy to make lots of friends, but most friendships felt fairly shallow. I felt people in America was so into putting on a facade all the time rather than showing their true self and their vulnerabilities.

It could of course just be a cultural difference, the place I was in or whatever. But regardless it was one of the reasons I left the US. I've been able to find deeper friendships in other countries. Although no place has it been so quick to make friends as in the US, getting invited to people's home etc. So Americans are easy to be around and fun to hang around.

But when you are alone in a country without family, you feel a need to have some really close friends.

I thought Panasonic only made the cells and that tesla assembles the batteries, cooling system, electric drive train etc.

Something has to change. Hollywood movies are just so receipt oriented. I kind of like super hero stuff, but I hate most of the super hero movies coming out. I loved kick-ass, and I think the various super hero series on Netflix such as Jessica Jones has been quite good.

Other than that I realize I want to see more movies from other cultures. I am Norwegian myself but have tended to gravitate towards Hollywood, because the production and is higher quality and selection of actors is better.

However I have noticed that some of the stuff that I have enjoyed the most and which has felt most fresh such as Skam, has been from my own country.

There is a lot of foreign films I never get access to because they are not really distributed. I notice when recommending Norwegian series or movies to friends abroad, that they are really hard to get hold of and even harder to get subtitles for.

The teen drama Skam only worked because fans made the subtitles themselves for the foreign audience.

Netflix shows a path forward here in that they are opened up for more diversity and allow more foreign series. E.g. you got Norwegian Viking comedy series "The norsemen" on Netflix.

It was made in a way that I think is a great solution going forward for foreign film/series makers. The creators of the Norsemen filmed every scene in Norwegian and English successively so that the show could be shown easily to both a domestic and foreign audience.

I wonder what happens when China becomes more environmentally friendly than the US. What sort of excuses will the Trump crow come up with then?

Usually whatever is done in Europe is ignored in the US, with the reason that China is so much worse. China has been a useful bogeyman for conservatives for decades as a reason to not make any sort of improvement whether related to the environment, workers salaries, work conditions, universal health care etc.

In practice however democracy doesn't work in the US. The system allows a duopoly of two parties which have long ago been bought by corporate interests. You actually need laws in a democracy to prevent government from being taken over by special interests.

In Norway we traditionally secured this by strong limitations on the usage of political ads. Hence you could not fund yourself to political popularity. The other mechanism is that starting a new party is very easy in Norway, so as soon as established parties are not representing the interests of people they will get squeezed out by new parties.

I think what helps Norway, is that we don't view our constitution and political system as an immutable document. We have been far more willing to tinker with the system and improve it than in the US. I think this is down to the fact that getting where we are today is a very gradual historical process.

When our constitution was written it was not a full democracy. It still involved a king with considerably political power. In the US, the country begins with a pretty good constitution very early on. This I think has enforced the myth that there is no need for regular updates and improvements.

Yes which is why efficient public transport start with city planning. American cities are not built for public transport. They are built for cars.

You need to redesign American cities. The most obvious thing to change is zoning laws. Residential areas, offices and stores need to be more mixed.

Another issue is that many problems exist simply because it is too easy to drive. With easy driving you end up with donut cities where anything of importance is located in a ring around the outskirts of the city. That kills the ability to utilize public transport effectively.

If you discouraged driving more activity would be forced into neighborhoods and into the downtown area, which would make public transport functional. It is much easier to feed people with public transport into a downtown area than into a ring on the outskirts.

Partly agree. It is fine when it puts low demands on you. It is much harder to get people to do the right thing when it is a significant burden.

It is also a question of habit and social norms. A lot of what we claim is internal moral values, is really just social conformism. We don't throw garbage around and shop lift in large part because we don't want to be worse people than everybody else we know.

We see this in countries with a lot of cheating on taxes. It is hard to break out of, because nobody wants to pay taxes while knowing that none of their friends pay. Nobody wants to be the lone sucker doing the good deed. On the flip side you don't want to cheat on taxes if you know everybody else is really particular about paying it.

So I think the establishment of social norms is very important. And to do that one might need to create incentives and rules to kickstart people. As the norms develop you could cut back on the incentives and rules.

I've seen this in my native Norway. Fathers and mothers could split the maternity leave. Although almost no father took advantage of this. It simply wasn't an established social pattern. Your boss would look funny at you if you did it. Then the government mandated that some weeks should be taken by the father otherwise those weeks were lost and could not be used by the mother.

Within few years the social norms around father staying home looking after kids, changed radically in Norway. Hence government policies DO matter for how personal values and behavior develops.

Agree, that is why one should advocate taxation and subsidies which promote green lifestyles rather than moralizing and pestering people. Just make it economic to be environmentally friendly.

Now I don't drive but I use public transport. However I'd be okay with biking if we had a much better bike lane system in Oslo, Norway where I live. When I lived in the Netherlands I biked everywhere. It was often faster to do than public transport. It felt safe and it gave me about 1 hours of exercise each day.

You feel better from getting exercise, you save money and time. So once cities and authorities actually plan for green living it isn't very hard to do so.

Yet in my native Norway, the green shift has been much more about making life miserable for those who drive, while making few benefits for those who use public transport or drive.

A particular bad development, is ever more centralization by the government in the same of efficiency and saving money. It means pharmacies, doctors offices, police stations, hospitals are made fewer and placed further and further apart. This means public services you used to be able to walk to or bike to, now requires a car.

All this happens while government keeps harping on people needing to use their car less.

There is a lot of things I think our government is really good at in Norway, but transport is an area we utterly suck at. I am very envious of the Dutch.

It doesn't make sense to compare Tesla to other car companies that way. The others have much higher volumes to spread costs on and they have been doing this stuff for over 100 years. That means the basics of car manufacturing has already been developed.

Tesla R&D isn't just about creating yet another model, but about creating the very first car model in that category that they have ever done.

I think it would be very odd if they kept having equally high R&D when upgrading their models.

Nothing in the car industry was EVER revolutionary. Cars have naturally progressed from earlier related technologies.

In fact I would claim most technologies are like that. Hence to call something revolutionary, it makes most sense to talk about who has made a radical improvement.

It is kind of like how there were smart phones before iPhone, but iPhone was such a radical improvement that it represented a revolution.

In much the same manner, the Model S was a revolution, similar to iPhone. It pushed electric cars significantly forward and set the bar for what an electric car could be.

That is belittling SpaceX accomplishments. They were told by all the "big boys" in the rocket industry that what they were doing could not be done.

Nobody had landed a rocket that way before SpaceX and Blue Origin did it.

There is nothing fancy about Falcon 9 rockets materially wise as far as I know. The key innovation was in the control software and using software industry style rapid iterations to try again and again until they nailed it.

SpaceX developed rockets at much faster pace and lower cost than the competition thanks to this iterative approach vs the water fall method used by the competition which cost 10x as much and is significantly slower.

Your talk of material science would be more relevant to the space shuttle I think. That was an attempt at reuse using sophisticated technology and materials. The spaceX innovation is reusing a cheap rocket. NASA developed a reuse system based on a very expensive and advance design.

Yeah I also read about how American car factories used super sophisticated and expensive computer system back in the 80-90s only to realize that the Japanese accomplished the same with just people and some cleverly placed sticker symbols.

I think underlying a lot of this is a disdain in America for blue collar workers. People at the top thing of them as dumb monkeys and that there is nothing to what they do. Hence the falsely assume a computer or robot can do the job just as well.

The Japanese showed that by utilizing what humans are actually got at you get better productivity. Using humans the same way as robots is a very bad way of utilizing the flexibility inherent in a human.