The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as “Amazon”) gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

I think there’s a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.

This is a result of a SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS membership is determined by the president and control of the senate at the time of vacancies. Neither of those are influenced by gerrymandering.

At the core of it this comes down to 2016 when a larger than typical number of people on the left lied to themselves and said “eh, they’re all teh same” and tossed their vote at a third party or just didn’t vote at all. Following that, SCOTUS went from a 4-4 tie (with 1 vacancy) to 6-3 conservative advantange.

I wouldn’t blame laziness, but instead a combination of apathy and people who are more interested in ideological purity than in accepting the available-better such that they would rather complain about the unavailable-best.

RBG refusing to retire in 2012-2014 also shares blame. She could have retired then and the court would be 5-4 instead.

It’s smart, I don’t know how people will feel about it but it’s smart.

The US and China are in an escalating economic cold war. It’s goes completely against US interests to invest finite resources into growing the economy of an economic rival — and ditto for the converse of China investing into growing the US economy. Especially in an aggressively competitive economic sector where relative technological advancement is king for competitive purposes.

Bitcoin can fuck off.

The point here is that car companies already charge for these things. The reality is basically two scenarios when ordering a car:

A: You pay $x, and they offer you heating steering wheels for $y. If you do not get them then, you do not get them ever.
B: You pay $x, and you can pay $y at any time to get heated steering wheels.

The business “bet” that (B) represents is that maintaining additional SKUs for each upgrade-feature and splitting off production lines to include or not include various combinations of features 1-2-3-etc. will cost them more money than just including it in every car. Then they can sell it to you on a whim. The actual feature itself does not cost anywhere near $y in either scenario to include, which is an important component of making this possible.

Now, you can say that (B) is a shitty scenario in a vacuum: if they’re willing to include it in every car, they should just charge every car what it costs to include plus some minor markup to allow the business to operate. E.g. if it costs $50 to include, they can increase the price of every car $55. And in that vacuum I’d agree. But it isn’t in a vacuum. That is not the scenario (B) is competing with. (B) is competing with (A). In (A) you are going to pay $200 or $300 or whatever for that $50-cost feature up front, or you never get it ever. In (B) you pay that $200 or $300 whenever you like.

It operates in a similar world to how Apple charges $200 to go from 8gb of RAM to 16gb of RAM, when that might cost them $10-20 at volume pricing. Or to use a well-liked company, how Valve charges $250 for a ~$10 SSD + ~$5-10 carrying case + ~$5-10 glass coating, on the base Steam Deck vs the fanciest Steam Deck.

This is not a “as a service” model. It’s a simple upselling business model. Profits on base models are low so as to have a low sticker price, and then they try to create profit off of upgrades. In this case, the software locked version is preferable to the consumer over the default version because it’s something you can unlock at any time, instead of only at purchase. It is not a new business model, nor is it even limited to electronics. The overall business model is shitty, but that applies to every instance of it: (A) and (B), and (B) is not differently shitty.

Service based systems are based on recurring revenue, in this case anything with a subscription. Which I specifically called out as something that would make it shitty and pointed to their subscription based or subscription-incentivizing behavior as shitty.

You did not understand what I wrote if your retort is on the “car as a service” subject.

Most car manufacturers charge money for those kind of upgrades. The difference is they specifically build or do not build the features into the car. If Tesla doesn’t charge meaningfully more and if they do not turn it into a subscription, I wouldn’t knock them for it.

There’s a lot to bitch at Tesla about, but being able to decide after the fact that you want a heated steering wheel isn’t one of them. FSD being bullshit even if it was free (and it is far from free!), the refusal to allow Android Auto/CarPlay, the intentionally rosy range estimates, the association with Musk… those are what I’d focus on. Unlockable steering wheel heating is not an issue.

You’re also making the implicit and incorrect assumption that this assumption of future income is not already the status quo. It is. The IRS already does this with your automatic withholding. It just does it at a higher level than necessary, due to what I mentioned above. Withholding basically assumes that a person will continue to earn whatever their paycheck was in every future payment period (weekly, semimonthly, whatever).

Your assumptions on how this would be dealt with are not realistic. The outlines of how to implement this not only already exist, they are already used and have been used for decades. All the IRS needs to do is glue together its knowledge of your income sources and lower the withholding amount based on being able to predict an individual’s income far more accurately.

Data on seasonal income is known too, for the record. Consistent trends in income changes with parts of the year are not a surprise to the government agencies that care about it.

For the majority of people out there, all their income is going to have digital records. A cash only store still deposits money in a bank, after all. For the people that don’t… chances are their income without a digital footprint isn’t being reported, and is small enough that no one is worried about that in the first place.

If the IRS is being told by a person’s work how much they’re paid, by their bank how much interest they got, by any Etsy-esque services how much they were paid… then the IRS has every bit of information it needs to get automatic withholding correct.

Right now withholding systems default to taking too much money out, because it’s easier for the government to send you money than it is for them to request money from you. It also avoids the headache of most people being hit with surprise IRS bills. The IRS could keep that default, and then as the year goes on it could shift that withholding down until it’s laser close. The negative there is that variability is bad for budgeting too, but with some work they could make it start close enough that it shouldn’t be all that variable.

The report gives a quick summary of what they include, but not any details or math.

The cost of underlying energy (gas, diesel, electric)
State excise taxes charged for road maintenance
The cost to operate a pump or charger
The cost to drive to a fueling station (deadhead miles)

Elsewhere it says it assumes 12k miles in a year and is focused on the midwest and Michigan in particular. As it so happens, Michigan charges for registration based on the car value. EVs cost more than ICE vehicles in the same market segment most of the time. This would fall under excise taxes that they include.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they also tacked on the cost to install a L2 charger once as “cost to operate a pump or charger” — intentionally ignoring that it’s a one-time fee to support EVs at a home. With those two data points they could easily add >$1000 to the cost to “charge” an EV for one year if that is what they wanted to do.

The people making the report clearly picked criteria that sounds reasonable but also intentionally misleads people. Not a surprise.

Does Boeing have any recent projects that are an unmitigated success? Everything I see from them is about a new project being a disaster in some manner.

Lots of things.

Use public transportation.
Have multiple experiences available nearby to do as a day activity.
Have a large pool of people available to meet and know.
Walk to anything interesting.
In general just have lots of options and variety for anything: work, groceries, eating out, etc.

Some small towns might have some walkability for downtown but nothing more than that.

I’d tell my friend that this one is on me. If they protested I’d offer to let them take the next time we ate at a restaurant.

I’m a big fan of paying bills separately though.

I can’t read the article but I think they’re making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill.

BEVs were nigh impossible to purchase a year ago. Tesla’s MSRPs were ~$10k higher than they are today, not even accounting for the tax credit. Other manufacturers were seeing dealer markups of $10k+ on a new BEV. Demand for BEVs went through the roof as (1) supply chain effects meant the price difference between ICE and BEV went down, and (2) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices way up. A 350% jump over last year doesn’t mean much in that light — what inventory even existed on dealer lots last year?

Both of those factors have faded. EVs are still selling well, but manufacturers are going to need to find more ways to lower prices in order to stay competitive and to keep demand up.

Every time I see crazy heat data for Arizona and other places like it in the US, it makes me wonder. When the fuck will we see a reversion of population trends of people moving south? Arizona, Texas, etc. are only going to get worse. Everywhere is going to get worse, but there’s a lot of rapidly growing areas that are on track to be non-viable for 1/3+ of the year within 10-20 years.

People should not be moving to Arizona, not with climate change as it is.

You’d be surprised at how many fabs there are in the US.

• TI has something like a half dozen to a dozen, predominantly in Texas
• Intel has more fabs than you can shake a stick at, mostly in Oregon but also Arizona
• Samsung has a fab in Texas
• GlobalFoundries exists in New York and Vermont
• Micron is in Idaho
• Wolfspeed has power electronics fabs in North Carolina and New York

And so on. The US has a lot of fabs. For best countries in the world to build a new fab, the US would rank somewhere between first and third place — and I think there’s a strong argument for the answer being “first place.” Unlike Taiwan and South Korea, US fab jobs and experience are not almost entirely dominated by one or two companies. The US isn’t located in one of the most geopolitically risky parts of the developed world. The US has a huge population and plenty of money to put into fab expansion.

The only issues here are (a) the US has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction projects, and (b) TSMC wants to pay workers like shit and treat them even worse, which doesn’t fly for technically skilled US workers. You can treat US technical workers workers poorly, but not as poorly as in much of Asia, and you definitely cannot do it without paying them very well.

On the timescale of 27 years, grid-scale storage is going to be a complete non-issue. There’s already a decent amount of work being done at that level right now and battery tech has been improving at a consistent pace. Renewables can work quite well as-is with a good mix of location and source. Offshore wind is more consistent wind speeds, solar locations can mitigate light cloud coverage, solar output peaks during the times of greatest human use, and land based wind is typically dispersed over large areas.

I’m a huge proponent of nuclear power, but as things stand it isn’t going to be necessary on these time tables. The value in nuclear is that it’s another thing we can build now without needing to wait ten years for battery prices to continue to decline or for manufacturing capabilities to ramp up. Building 10 GW of nameplate capacity wind+solar is great. Building 10 GW of nameplate wind+solar and 5 GW of nameplate nuclear is better! That’s the advantage of nuclear today, and we should fucking make use of it. That doesn’t make it mandatory in the long-term.

That’s not what they said.

What people are calling “AI” today is not AI in the sense of how laypeople understand it. Personally I hate the use of the term in this context and think it would have been much better to stick with Machine Learning (often just ML). Regardless, the point is that you cannot get from these system to what you think of as AI. To get there it would require new, different systems. Or changing these systems so thoroughly as to make them unrecognizable from their origins.

If you put e.g. ChatGPT into a robotic body with sensors… you’d get nothing. It has no concept of a body. No concept of controlling the body. No concept of operating outside of the constraints within which it already operates. You could debate if it has some inhuman concept of language, but that debate is about as far as you can go.

Actual AI in the sense of how we conceive of it at a societal level is something else. It very well may be that many years down the line that historians will look back at the ML advancements happening today as a major building block for the creation of that “true” AI of the future, but as-is they are not the same thing.

To put it another way: what happens if you connect the algorithms controlling a video game NPC to a robotic body? Absolutely nothing. Same deal here.

I always hated that argument from people.

Even if they’re right — which we all know they are not — it wouldn’t matter. Climate change is going to devastate human life if we do nothing. If, somehow, the source of the warming wasn’t human-caused, we’d still need to find a way to counteract it. It’s not our fault doesn’t prevent it from being our problem.

No idea, sorry.

This would be good, and mitigating climate change is going to require a solution by a thousand cuts.
To put the 230 megatons in context, global CO2 emissions in 2022 are estimated at ~40 gigatons, and total GHG emissions at ~50 gigatons. This would represent a ~0.5% reduction in emissions. Not bad at all, all told.