justaguyonline

With the level of outsourcing and specialization that has gone on, most car manufacturers are evidently not really car manufacturers anymore, but actually internal combustion engine manufacturers and assembly line operators. They just pay other companies to make most of the parts for them and keep the engine in house as their "secret sauce", as a technology that can't easily be copied.

Likewise, Tesla isn't really an electric car company or even an electric motor company. Electric motors are something everyone's known how to make for a hundred years and they actually get a lot of their generic car bits like their interiors from the same companies who supply traditional car companies. Tesla's actually a battery pack company (this is why the PowerPack and the SolarCity merger makes sense). It's the knowledge and the experience that went into those packs that keeps other companies from easily copying Tesla.

The problem Ford and any traditional automaker faces is somehow pivoting from their current secret sauce, which took them decades and billions of dollars to develop, to a new one in a field that's completely unrelated, where almost nothing they already know applies.

That safety question is where my interest lies, because it seems completely at odds with the narrative the UAW is pushing. If the safety rate is truely higher in the Tesla factory and the compensation workers receive is equal to what auto workers in other factories receive, what does the UAW have to offer to Tesla factory workers by unionizing?

I would also point out that the UAW has been on a bit of a anti-Tesla public relations blitz lately, which is something that creates public pressure on Tesla, but doesn't seems like it would affect the workers at all. If the conditions in the factory are really that sub-standard the workers themselves would know, they wouldn't need newspapers to tell them that.

Both points are actually covered in the book, if I recall correctly. Kahneman writes something along the lines of Tversky or him remarking to the other that they were "just re-discovering things that their grandmother used to tell them."

Kahneman later writes that the only way to avoid cognitive biases that he's seen is to know them and be vigilant for them. And even that doesn't work a good deal of the time. I remember that passage being a very sobering part of the book.

I would say that the book is Kahneman's attempt to actually add to that 2500 year effort by making the observations more formalized, but available to a wider audience.

A fascinating story that manages to make up for an abomination of a website.

I found the comparisons between then the social networks of Latitude and digital social networks the most interesting. The failure of Latitude seems to be in (of course, perfect) hindsight due to the differences in cost between digital and "human" social networks. To support Latitude, the costs had to be raised far higher than it's user could support. Facebook of course just makes you pay with your eyeballs and your privacy. Both of which are evidently less dear to us than the cash in our wallets.

I can't help but take the human social network as an organization idea farther. I mean it in the best possible way when I point out that every time I go to church there is a point in time in which everyone is asked to give what nominally should be a significant amount of their income to the church to keep it operating. ( Not to mention the sermons we sometimes get could put NPR to shame...) All these networks also need funding to survive, this is not a problem that was unique to Latitude, but an organizational restraint that all social networks that rely on the "sneakernet" primarily instead of the internet face. And, it's one that they've solved.

The issue is trying to incorporate normal startup methods of monetization, or attempting to gather users in a typical software startup way before you even try to monetize. Facebook could do this because the cheapness and "distance" of online behavior makes it simple, but as illustrated in the article, physical space is expensive and people are messy creatures who just soak up time being dealt with (I wonder how much damage or wasted time "jukebox-incidents" caused on a regular basis). Human social network startups -- if such a class exists, would be better served in my mind by copying how other well established networks such as churches spread, giving up control of that spread and monetizing that growth instead.

For instance, Latitude could of taken their most dedicated participants, such as the author of this piece, and given them (perhaps a minimum amount of) training in creating their own network and allowed the to go out as "seeds" into other neighborhood and cities where they would create their own "secret societies". Then, sell digital services, supplies and consulting to these new operators. I would characterize it as catalyzing an organically spreading human experience and profiting off the demand created by that spread instead of centralizing an experience, homogenizing it and profiting off how easily accessible the information from that experience is.

It really was a great read. Most importantly to me, I got a lot of insight into American society by reading a bit about French society and politics.

It's things like this that make me wish I knew another language so I could peer across that barrier and into another microcosm more often.

Seeing this written here was pretty hilarious to me, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but one of the central parts of the TPP was exactly the point you're making: To expand tighter labor and environmental laws into places like Vietnam so American workers aren't competing against foreign workers whose government is willing to destroy their health and environment to undercut them in price.

The expansion of American copyright laws that the EFF is so against, is mainly there since selling America IP ( both cultural and intellectual) to foreign customers is one of the biggest sources of export income for American corporations and thus a big source of wages for their American employees. You of course can't sell a Disney DVD or a software solution to someone in Vietnam if it's legal for them to just copy it whenever they want.

"Wait it's not an Opinion piece? But it has a huge picture of the author on the front?"

I had to go back and check again after my initial skim and yep, they seems to calling this "investigative journalism." British journalism is weird.

Just out of curiousity, if that was basically the "initial plan" for Yucca mountain, what did the plan eventually become?

I understand what you're saying and agree about Fox and WSJ, but the fact is for years all major media corporations gave airtime to "opposing arguments" made by Think Tank talking heads on global warming despite the universal scientific agreement on it. That's what I mean by false equivalence and that's the attitude, and not purposeful misinformation by some outlets, that's the problem.

Yes, mainstream media has gotten better about that topic in particular, but in general journalists still go for the easier "stories" that can be portrayed as competing sides, or simple narratives in general rather than what would actually inform people about the world.

Or maybe, "The Truth About the Media's Persistent Vulnerability to Convenient Misinformation"

I mean: We're still dealing with climate change denialism after years of the media allowing false equivalence to obscure the overwhelming scientific consensus around it. Major news organizations will run headlines based straight off the contents of tweets by wikileaks inspite of their repeated false claims in the past like with the "leaks" post-coup in Turkey, or Assange's statements about the Panama papers

It's stuff like this that give me, someone who believes fake news are just articles about things that didn't happen published by news organizations that don't exist on social media, major trust issues with American media today (and don't even get me started on British media)

Not really, I get a lot of my in depth SpaceX info and analysis from r/spacex (which is a pretty great little community, and one of the best places to track behind the scenes SpaceX stuff) and all I've picked up from there is "probably at least once".

It'll also depend on the difficulty of each orbit, rockets that reach higher and/or deliver payloads with more extreme orbital inclinations, experience more stress and are less likely to be reliable enough to be reused.

New jobs are created when you create more demand by dropping prices, or build new markets for products that didn't have the opportunity to exist before because of cost. Capitalism isn't a zero sum game.

For example, reduced launch costs lower the barrier for smaller customers, who in turn need cheaper satellites that do smaller tasks, thus the recent growth of the nanosat sector of the space industry and companies like Planet [1].

Or, the recently planned satellite constellations by OneWeb and SpaceX. Both of these constellations are planned to involve 1000's of individual satellites, the launch of which would of been prohibitive with higher launch prices. I would definitely say more jobs would be created in the US by cheap, global internet than the 1000 or so that might be lost by the transformation of the US launch industry.

Everytime I read news like this it just furthers the impression in my mind that Congress's SLS (and that rocket program is truly owned by Congress, not NASA) is an incredible waste of money that makes your average military recruitment contract red-faced with embarrassment.

The US needs to create a heavy lift variant of the commercial orbital transportation services contract (COTS) [1] and/or the Commercial Crew Development program (CCDev) [2] and scrap the SLS program or at least release it from it's stupid congressional requirement to use grandfathered space shuttle contractors.

Estimates for the true cost of each space shuttle launch, which NASA and Congress were always cagey about, range from 700 million to over one billion dollars ( $196B/133 flights [3] ). The cost of the entire COTS program that created "two new U.S. medium-class launch vehicles and two automated cargo spacecraft"[4] as a replacement for the shuttle's cargo services was $800 million, less than or equal to the cost of a single shuttle flight.

In light of that it's always frustrating that I see the US dinking around with the $10+ billion dollar Orion program [5] or talk about throwing good money after bad by adding astronauts to the EM-1 mission. I mean, come on! How tied to corporate kickback interests and tiny amounts of local jobs can you get? Can Congress really not see the big picture here and the idea that we could have more people and mass in space (and probably job on the ground too) for a fraction of the current program costs?

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-servi...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/content/commercial-crew-program-the-ess...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program

[4] https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-releases-cots-final-report

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)

Compared to things like lithium-ion batteries or even the lead used in lead-acid batteries, I bet it's dirt cheap.

I'd say it's the manufacturing costs that will be the unanswered question.

I'm not sure if you're referencing the paper or not, but its conclusion lead me to a similar idea. The author points out that previously, higher education was mostly reserved for the elites of society and that its increasing prevalence among developed countries happened around the same time greater education began to gradually change from being correlated with greater trust in government to being correlated with less.

The obvious idea I had was that a greater amount of people were coming into contact with more information about the various failures their government (and every government) has. People are getting a "reverse civics" class now -- and in a way, ignorance was bliss.

Beautiful, I loved the "value" aspect of it, but I found the simple, but good game design the best part. A lot of people know to have a chime play when you pick up an "apple" in games for pavlovian reasons, but fewer would add that nice hum that movement created in general. It makes moving through space both a visual and auditory experience.

Nope, it took me a while before I realized I wasn't just stupid and that that graphs were completely unrelated too.

Here's a link to a version that seems to have the correct graphs: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1080/03906700500038819

I found Figure 3 particularly striking. Education (pre-1950) used to be correlated with greater trust in government, now it's correlated with less.

Found this document referenced in an article [1] I read about trust in American institutions. I usually skim these things but I was so surprised to hear that America's dropping trust in institutions is shared internationally that I ended up getting fascinated enough to read it.

I'm especially fascinated by the facts that a) this drop started at roughly the same time for most of these nations (the 1960-70's) and that b) we evidently know that in both Germany and Japan trust in government was rising heavily post-war until this point.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/03/...

Oh, God. I'm pretty much dying here from reading this. Some of it feels too true, but the best is just too witty not to laugh at.

I'm not sure if it's intentional, but it's raising questions once again in me about how useful the comments in aggregator sites like this end up being. Comments are almost always made by the 10% of people whose barrier to commenting is the lowest and judged and voted on by just the average hackernews reader. Assuming knowledgeable comments even happen, what gets upvoted is what seems reasonable or just pleasing to the average hackernews reader, not what is actually representative of the best available knowledge.

And, as hackernews gets bigger and bigger, the average user becomes more and more like the average internet user in general and the contributions become more and more like if you just talked to a group average person, not experts. If I wanted that kind of knowledge I'd just go talk to people in my daily life, listen to some rumors, etc.

I often suspect that hackernews exists partly because of the idea that conversations and comment sections like this are going to happen anyways and spew ill-formed opinions regardless and ycombinator figured they should at least have a finger in the place where they happen if nothing else.

I can emphatically say that the post in question was not deleted. I don't know why you would think that since you can visit the live post in question via the wayback machine link you posted.

The mention of Eglin Air Force Base is preserved too, but I don't see any connection between an Air Force base in the Florida panhandle and a unit that belongs to the GCHQ in the United Kingdom.

I feel like there's a burden of proof that you're putting on Elon Musk that you're not also putting on Morgan here. All we have is his personal testimony without any other evidence either.

Man, your reply is just exactly one of the reasons I almost never post online like this and just lurk.

Not only did you ignore the point of the post you replied to ("lets talk about the article and criticize those ideas in context"), you segued to exactly the kind of narratives that the author of the article was talking about and used them to declaim anyone who disagrees with you.

It would be one thing if you bothered to critique the author on any of his actual points, but you decided to ramp it up by somehow claiming if he got his way, we would be censoring Noam Chomsky. ctrl-f, censorship isn't even mentioned in the article.

The crux of your argument seems to be something along the lines that that the ideas in this article are being put forwards "for the benefit of the elites", which is the kind of thinking that I (and I think the author of the article would agree with me) that makes as much sense as saying "you are being punished for your hubris by Zeus". As in, you ascribe actions to beings that are fundamentally invisible to others, that secretly control the world around and that you can divine the existence of, but are unable to explain to others in any but in the most vaguest of terms.

The point that upsets me about this kind of behavior, is that in viewing it, often people are turned off and are less likely to take part in conversations where they see others treated that same way. The shrinking minority of people who post vs just lurk, already a tiny approximate 10%, in the end becomes the even smaller fraction of people who can put up with and dish out the exact same vitriol. Or, simply agree with vitriol directed elsewhere.