It exists for the sole purpose of benefiting its investors and whoever may be behind any investment fronts used to push that currency. I wonder who they might be?
I fully agree with your take on this being an exercise in throwing money at a problem until it goes away. He probably didn't even need to go as far as diving headfirst into the world of fussy custom firmware to solve this issue either, Asus hardware comparable to his Linksys equipment is recommended so often that I can't imagine he researched the topic before making his buying decision.
Tesla deserves plenty of accolades just for getting to the point where they are producing multiple models of vehicle that conform to or exceed modern standards of quality .
However, Tthey have only managed to build "a" luxury sedan, "a" crossover SUV, and will soon be building "a" budget-luxury sedan. The real challenge is in attaining and sustaining the pace of development maintained by the rest of the industry. The automotive industry at large keeps a rolling cycle of refreshes and replacements on a roughly 3/6 year timetable (refreshed after 3 years, replaced after 6). Some niche models (Jeep Wrangler, Mazda Miata) stay in production far longer than that average but a 3/6 cycle is also a bit too long in ultra-competitive categories such as the compact crossover segment.
This is where I see Tesla beginning to struggle as their entirely bootstrapped operation has struggled to meet deadlines. That is cause for concern as it places their current lineup at a competitive disadvantage as their competition has gone through at least 1 refresh, if not a full replacement, since the design of their most recent model (Model X) was set in stone.
The Model S design was largely set in stone by 2009, 2010 at the latest and the Model X design was mostly locked in by 2012, 2013 at the latest. It took 3 years for both of those designs to actually reach showroom floors (2012 and 2016 respectively) so while the clock hasn't run out in terms of production life, the designs themselves are beginning to become dates. I don't just mean "design" as in styling, I mean it as the all-encompassing architecture of the vehicles.
While Tesla's offerings have several unique attributes which cannot be found in any of their closest competitors, one can only push an old design for so long before it becomes completely unappealing to consumers, even when sold at break even prices. I dare say that such a scenario may be playing out with the Model S as its sales had slumped leading up to the 2016 refresh that boosted sales, yet the bump still fell short of that model's best sales quarter which occurred back in 2015. The fact is that the Model S was designed to achieve the minimum level of refinement expected of a 2010-era, $65,000 luxury sedan with the silent, powerful electric powertrain being the plan to make up for its shortcomings in the areas of ride quality and interior fit and finish. Now that ~7 years have passed, the high end, mid-size sedan offerings from mass market brands have caught up to the Model S in many areas.
The Model S may smoke a Nissan Maxima in straight line and the Maxima can't hold a candle to the silence of the Tesla's powertrain but it also costs ~$35,000. In my opinion, it also has a better finished interior and more up-to-date styling than the Model S. We can argue all day over these points but you have to admit that manufacturers like Nissan are at least getting within striking distance in certain areas with cars costing half the price. Tesla needs to seriously step up their development game lest they be left behind with woefully dates products that simply cannot be discounted enough to remain appealing.
Land utilization is the issue. The largest solar farms in the US requires an order of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power as a relatively average nuclear plant.
The largest solar farm in the US, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, covers 25sq/km has a peak generation capacity of 550MW. The source uses the median of the 59 nuclear plants in the US to arrive at its 3.36sq/km (1.3sq/mile) per 1,000MW figure but the largest nuclear plant ever built, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, produces ~8MW on just 4.2sq/km of land which makes it twice as efficient in terms of land use as the median US plant.
That places solar at 13.75 sq/km per 1,000MW compared to nuclear's 0.525sq/km using the best case scenario for the density of existing sources. That doesn't even account for the variable output of the solar plant versus the consistency of nuclear generation. Solar is ultimately far too land hungry to ever serve as the world's primary source of electrity.
More importantly, with fusion, energy could become significantly cheaper allowing us to do things which weren't economically viable.
Make everything out of environmentally friendly, lighter and long lasting aluminium rather than steel + concrete.
Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.
Growing food crops indoors with artificial light, saving massive amounts of land.
Desalination to make all our water. No longer extracting it from rivers and aquifers. A cleaner, less polluted water source.
A single energy source - today we use petroleum (cars), natural gas (cooking and heating), electricity (lighting etc.), diesel (transport) and many more in industry. All of those need distribution networks. A single cheap energy source could coalesce a lot of infrastructure.
> Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.
Please, no. Some of what you said I'm onboard with, but definitely not this. The human impact of perpetual day is large and negative. The negative impact of massive artificial lighting on astronomy is also quite massive.
Until recently the limiting factor on utility scale solar was high costs. Now intermittency looks like the most important constraint. Land availability is not the bottleneck for the US or most other countries. There are some countries that have a dense enough population and/or low enough insolation that land availability is a significant constraint on solar deployment (Japan, Taiwan, UK, Belgium...) but that's not common.
The real annualized power of the Topaz Solar Farm comes to 6 megawatts per square kilometer, using its 2015 generation total of 1,301,337 MWh. At that areal productivity[1], if you could ignore intermittency, it would take ~95,000 square kilometers to supply the 2013 US electricity demand of 4,986,400,000 MWh.
The US Corn Growers Association estimated that 27% of US corn grown in 2011 was for ethanol, and corn covered 92 million acres:
Converting 27% of 92 million acres to square kilometers, the US is using about 100,500 km^2 to produce ethanol.
But you can't ignore intermittency, so (barring much improved storage, which may happen but can't be assumed) solar PV is not a drop-in replacement for nuclear power.
[1]Other areas of the US get less sun than central California, but newer farms with more efficient panels and single axis tracking increase areal productivity significantly over the fixed-tilt CdTe construction of Topaz, so I think that 6 MW/km^2 is a reasonable number to use.
>"Also interestingly, part of his motivation is explicitly monetary: he wants his life savings to go to his family, not a nursing home."
That sentiment may seem strange to most people but I think it's more than just a logical conclusion, it's an emotional one as well.
We recently lost one of our family's matriarch's (grandmother-in-law) after her long battle with a failing cardiovascular system. After one particularly difficult evening, she realized her time was about to come and asked her husband to stay by her side while she passed in their home. Unfortunately, her end did not come easily and a relative convinced my grandfather-in-law to call an ambulance when she went into respiratory arrest as it was shockingly painful to watch. She was taken to the hospital and placed in the ICU where she was stabilized but only at the footstep of death's door. The miracles of modern medicine managed to keep her borderline comatose body alive for almost a month in the ICU before the family could come to agreement on sending her to hospice.
That month in the ICU cost almost everything they had worked their entire lives for and was intended to be passed down to their children and grandchildren. Two lifetime's worth of hard work and thoughtful planning went to cover the cost of just one last month of "life".
My point in sharing that story is that the true cost of that month isn't measured in dollars and cents, it's measured in the loss of the legacy they had worked so hard to build. Neither of them viewed their estate as something as simple as "money". Instead they saw it as things like "college tuition for the grandchildren", "a wedding gift to help the grandkids start their married life", "land my ancestors have lived on for generations", and "one last vacation for the whole family". That's what I mean when I saw they lost their legacy and why it's as much or more of an emotional decision than a cold calculation of financial realities.
While I am absolutely in favor of "right to die" laws, there are already tools in place to cover situations like those of your grandmother-in-law. If someone does not want to be kept alive artificially, they should obtain a Do Not Resuscitate order[1]. This serves as an expression of the patient's wishes, and would supersede the relative who wanted the ambulance called.
When you consider situations like this, it makes total sense why hospitals would have every incentive to fight for "the right to life" and "foster a culture of life" and oppose right-to-die / assisted suicide.
While I can't speak for "hospitals". I can tell you that doctors are very much in favor of "do not resuscitate" directives, which would have prevented the scenario described above.
The way I read it, the point was that "another first virus" wasn't likely to be designed as a benign proof of concept by a tinkerer who meant no harm. The author's view is that the Morris Worm was a happy accident in that it grabbed all the attention owed to the first virus to affect networks on a global scale but it did so without causing any real and lasting harm.
1. "Driver-less cars have vastly shorter stopping distances at all speeds"
I can understand your expectation of reduced stopping distances due to the near-0 reaction time made possible by sufficient computing power. However, I wouldn't describe the computer's advantage as anything close to a "vast" one. There is no mechanical advantage to braking that is inherent for a driverless car and the difference in stopping distance due to reaction time is less than 1 car length (~10ft) at 30mph assuming the human driver has an average reaction times (0.25s). The advantage is still limited to roughly ~25ft at 60mph. That advantage is simultaneously significant and insignificant in that incredibly common outside factors will more than account for that disparity if not controlled for in the AI's programming. Tire pressure, tread depth, brake pad thickness, rotor wear, alignment, etc are all capable of individually accounting for a ~25ft reduction in stopping distance which leads me to my second point.
2. "Driver-less cars should never drive at a speed where they can't stop in time."
Real world driving conditions present so many uncontrolled variables that a speed considered "safe" by that logic will be pathetically slow. The current state of the art in driverless cars is Google's purely autonomous design which is limited to the pace of a golf cart (25mph). The number of variables introduced by vehicle condition and maintenance alone are so great that any vehicle capable of accurately accounting for each one would be impossibly expensive to buy and crushingly expensive to maintain. While all of our cars are capable of measuring speed (the legal maximum is +/- 5mph @ 50mph in the US, but +/-1-2% is most common) and most cars can measure tire pressure (+/-15% for the most common systems which measure indirectly with the ABS sensor), they don't measure either of those things accurately according to manufacturer specs and things only get worse over time. Personally, I can't see driverless cars ever growing past that hurdle, winding up limited to inner-city commuting/taxi duty.
3. "Same is true of balls and other small fast moving objects, they are not going to ping as kids."
This is actually one of the best examples of why speeds will have to remain slow enough to guarantee a negligible stopping distance.
If a human sees a ball roll into the street from behind an obstruction, they will reasonably deduce that there is a likelihood that a kid is chasing after it and slow down before the danger presents itself. An AI will see the balloon or ball and it will have to treat it as either a complete non-issue or as a mortal danger. If it treats it as a non-issue, it will have to be in a constant state of readiness to stop in the smallest reasonable distance, that means limiting speeds to a relatively glacial pace. If it treats it as a mortal danger, it will constantly produce false positives which leads to frustrated passengers when it brakes hard for every trashbag that blows across a 70mph highway.
That's one of my main criticisms of driverless cars in their current state. They are measurably superior in the areas in which human drivers are most flawed, yet their logic leads them to make decisions that no human would ever consider as logical. Even the most state of the art AI isn't even close to being able to account for the nearly infinite number of exceptions that stem from the chaos of the real world and which require an action contradictory to a principle of placing safety first. Just look at the first "unforced error" reported by the Google program where the AI's logic misjudged the actions of a bus due to logic which defined exceptions around the distance needed to merge on to a road. It just went for the merge, turning straight into the side (pretty much in the middle) of a bus moving at 15mph. No human would have made that decision.
1. Don't confuse optimal human reaction times with real world conditions. Drivers don't have unwavering focus on the path ahead. Accidents are the exception when things go wrong, so the median accident reaction time would be far higher than under optimal conditions and really hard to measure. If a self driving car can't safely stop then it really should complain and just slow down. I can see "Speed reduced Tires balding" really would get most people into the shop and my car already tracks tire pressure and breaking. Add GPS for absolute location and it will notice if there is a problem. Listing for weather reports is also a no brainier.
2. Google is being conservative with several cars being tested at much higher speeds, don't forget in the computer world being 1/3 as fast is really far less of a jump than you might think. In terms of accuracy GPS can auto correct distance traveled over time to get much higher accuracy. Much like how most computers clocks are far closer to the correct time than their cheep HW clock would suggest.
3. Your thinking like a human. Kids are really really slow at 10mph (which is fast for a kid) 7.5 feet is over 1/2 a second. So, your car can drive like there is always someone about to jump out from every intersection and sprint across the road without being all that slow. Depending on sensor location they can also see under other cars. ED: the Front drivers side headlight is a much better location to see around parked cars than where a driver sits.
Worst case self driving cars might drive slow when stuff is right next to the road. But, if I can be productive and safe it's a non issue as most driving is not in those conditions and I should slow down anyway.
Amazon isn't manufacturing these products either. They're just cutting out the middleman and going straight to the source in exactly the same manner as grocery stores do with their private labels.
Right - if you are already having a product made in China, you are the middle man. If you are actually making the product yourself, then Amazon might come to you and create an off-brand version with some trivial differences. But, in any case the designs of simple products are not nearly as sacred as the actual manufacture of them.
Unfortunately, it does have a depressing effect on new design and innovation. And it certainly seems that the low-cost Chinese manufacturers haven't got the knack for originality yet.
The reason AmazonBasic's offerings tend to dominate their respective markets isn't because they are the cheapest option. They dominate because they are the cheapest option which you can trust to work and continue working for whatever is considered a reasonable lifespan for that category of good.
You're right in that people care about quality, it's just that quality products don't have to cost as much as you think they do.
AmazonBasics provides a nice counter-balance to all the garbage that's currently being sold on Amazon and propped up by fake reviews. They're offering a solid no-frills product at a good price.
got a camera stand. averageish quality at discount price, and I think that's a very good formula, perfect fit for an online seller. not to shoddy to get a bad name, good enough for what it does and priced among the cheapo option of which is the better.
I think the consumer can only gain from such entries into the market. AmazonBasic products are often just a standardization of a simple product in a market with too many options. Consumers trust Amazon to deliver on their promises and when confronted with a choice between 800+ USB hubs, I'll choose the cheapest option that is guaranteed to work. There is almost 0 utility for the consumer in choosing a "better" USB hub than AmazonBasic's offering but the downside of choosing a "no-name" hub is measurably significant.
The genius in AmazonBasic concept was in realizing that building the better mousetrap doesn't always mean building the best mousetrap, it means building the best mousetrap for the price. There are so many goods with a market that falls into just two categories, ones that work and ones that don't. Whichever brand is able to gain consumers trust in knowing their offering will work will quickly rise to dominate such a market.
I'm curious how you know what's good for consumers more than they do. Would you mind explaining why it's bad for cost-cutting consumers in the long run?
Seems like amazon is content to run razor thin margins, and if they jack up the price after competitors go out of business, that move would recreate a market for item X and burn some Amazon good will.
I also find the Amazon branding on that laptop stand to be really tacky, though!
Ostensibly this kind of obvious copying is the sort of thing that design patents are supposed to thwart.
Re: why - It's really basic monopoly theory - squeeze out competition, then raise prices. Are you certain that Amazon will always be content to run razor thin margins? At some point Amazon will have subsumed the buying habits of the consumers long after Rain is dead and buried. Will someone new really come along?
I have one of these at work (and my colleague one of the name brand articles) - you don't see the branding on either one 99% of the time, because your laptop is covering it.
Ultimately, it is just a laptop stand, and it's a quality one. I'm just surprised that it took Amazon to come up with a lower priced competitor - I've been looking for something that wasn't $50 for a long time. All of its competitors other than Amazon are overpriced, flimsy pieces of plastic.
There's also a certain amount of acknowledgement that you're not going to get the best or perfect product for the price that you pay Amazon, but you will get better service (that is, replacement/refund) than you're likely to get from TJ's Wholesale Emporium or a random individual seller on Amazon.
