Don't know much about the ride share industry, but am interested and curious. Which parts of this type of app do you think would be particularly difficult to scale?
I'd be skeptical if ridesharing is possible without some human operational involvement. The most complex part is not the 99% of trips that go right, but the 1% that go wrong. The consequences of failure are more severe than say, a SaaS app not working correctly.
Historically, soldiers have generally been reluctant to use their weapons. During WWII, around 20% of soldiers actually fired their weapons in combat. Even fewer shot to kill often aiming over the heads of the enemy. This is a form of posturing both to the enemy and their comrades. Through extensive use of conditioning, that rate and lethality of fire was raised during Vietnam and subsequent wars.
Even among tribal societies, warfare is highly ritualized in a manner that does not optimize for maximum lethality. Richard Gabriel, in studies on tribal societies in New Guinea have noted that hunts occurred with accurate feathered. Tellingly, tribal warfare employed featherless arrows. Similarly "counting coup" among American Indians involves touching rather than killing the enemy.
Cold blooded killers have their uses for society, especially in warfare. An excellent book on this subject is On Killing.
Cold blooded killers aren't synonymous with psychopaths. It turns out that many of the Nazis weren't psychopaths, but rather psychologically unremarkable people whose institutions and culture allowed them to collectively perform acts of evil over and above what any of them could have done individually. This is called the "banality of evil", and it became widely understood after the Milgram experiment and the Eichmann trial.
Groups of people have always been more ruthless than individuals. Psychopaths are remarkable not in their ruthlessness but in their ability to achieve it all by themselves.
It's different than the normal HN fare, but worth a read. We may be a society of killer apes, but we're not as eager to kill in warfare as you might think. Especially when the other guy was compelled at gunpoint by his government to join the military (that is, drafted) just like you were.
The point was, with the attitude to strangers in clan warfare (not modern post-clan societies), psychopaths have nothing to add regarding ruthlessness. See old Scandinavia.
For stylized cattle raids (e.g. historical Ireland, before the vikings) among old neighbors, there will of course be agreed levels below extermination (or the neighbours will be gone long before western contact).
not only does it seem strange to make a marketing center on a barge, but it's absolutely huge. at a conservative rough count, it's about 8 8-foot-wide shipping containers wide, and about 6 20-foot-long shipping containers long. and four storeys high. that's 30000 square feet. for a showroom.
I agree, data center seems more likely, but there are strong hints already that Google Glass sales will need extra space. Google has been having fitting events so far with large areas of buildings dedicated to it and they are only servicing small batches of testers and conference goers so far. You can Google the Google Glass pickup experience and see pictures of the Chelsea office area and MV area, etc., people bragging about the champagne, ice cream, valet parking, etc..
As someone who has worked for smartphone OEMs, it is entirely possible a reduced return rate would be worth having extensive pickup experience options like this. Return rate was a huge consideration. If you have a high return rate, carriers won't even carry your device in their stores. Similarly, Samsung is having a big issue with Galaxy Gear watch returns right now.
Just for a frame of reference, the Grand Central Terminal Apple store is 23,000 square-feet. Their proposed store in Union Square (SF) will occupy about 25,000 square-feet, with two levels and 1/3 of the building "behind the scenes", call 30,000 square feet total.
It might make more sense if compared to the size of the Exploratorium rather than something like a showroom, and the visible, water location could be important if people are otherwise likely to ignore a large warehouse showcasing a technology which they think is a waste of time to even think about.
Except if you guess that the marketing center is virtualized and exists everywhere a Google Glass device does, requires lots of bandwidth, thus access to coastal fiber gateways. Considering the potential power of a centralized augmented-reality system with probably the most mature total information awareness system ever built as a decentralized back-end, putting them on floating barges with potential access to international waters makes lots of sense.
Speaks for not being able to find the charging point in the parking lot, perhaps? Don't forget that Musk formulated his assertion of Broder's motivation based on a data log of the car traveling between 5mph and 15mph for 0.6 miles. That sounds almost exactly like my average journey to find a parking spot at the mall.
But no, you're right, let's assume a long-term New York Times veteran lied in the paper, intentionally. That's a safer explanation in the face of your call for Occam's Razor...
John Broder does have an affinity for writing articles about big oil. I don't exactly want to assume he was paid under the table to denounce electric cars, but it's odd for a writer to have 90% of their articles being related to oil: http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/peopl...
On Feb 8, 4 days before the controversial tesla article, he wrote one about how poorly the Chevrolet Volt & Ford Transit performed. I think he already decided on the tone of the article before he drove the Tesla.
His other articles about oil drilling claim that they help with job creation... you be the judge.
I've had two experiences with the press. I have many friends who have also had far more interaction with the press than I have.
I will tell you this:
Both times I made it into the paper, my feeling while giving the interview was that the reporter was writing the story their way despite what I was saying. I was asked leading questions, questions that asked me to come down on one side or another of a complex issue. I was asked repeatedly the same question in different ways to elicit a response that would support a conclusion I didn't agree with.
My friends confirmed my suspicions when they saw the articles that were written. If you dont think that a significant percentage of the articles you read in the paper are pushing a particular viewpoint despite contrary evidence, I'd like a little of what you are smoking.
Just in case you were asking, one of the reporters I'm talking about works for the New York Times. This is the article I was talking about:
> His other articles about oil drilling claim that they help with job creation... you be the judge.
Since I live in ND, we have lots of oil drilling going on, and the Dec 2012 unemployment rate was 3.2% compared to the national rate of 7.8%; I would find that a factually true statement.
Texas seems to be doing fine too and they have a bit of a population. The line you quoted is factual. Oil employees a lot of people and generates a lot of money.
We had a ton of fine women working as telephone operators once too. My father was a typewriter repairman for a bit.
When was the last time you saw either one of those?
Oil's biggest advantage (other than the massive amount of energy density) is that the full cost of acquiring it isn't factored into the cost per barrel. Since oil is both a commodity and a strategic resource, the government has committed its full resources in the aim of securing supply.
You can argue if this is or isn't a good thing, but you can't argue the fact that it happens.
I have no idea how your comment relates to anything I wrote. Oil employees a lot of people. The reporter's comment was factual. If we are talking subsidies then "green" isn't exactly dieting at the federal trough.
My point is this: just because oil employs lots of people, it isn't a reason to concentrate investment in those industries.
The reporter might have been reporting a true statement, but it wasn't informative or even relevant to the discussion about energy technologies. There were plenty of telegraph operators, milkmen, and dockworkers once too. Technological advancement made those jobs redundant or irrelevant.
This is fantasy. Slap a $20/ton or $50/ton carbon tax (highest non-crackpot estimate) on oil and people will still gladly pay it. The idea that oil use would severely diminished by such a cost internalization is pure wishful thinking.
Carbon tax? I'm not talking about pollution here. I'm talking about geopolitics. If the cost of maintaining a fleet of ships in the Persian Gulf was fully factored into the cost of oil imported from the middle east, you think it's be close to the price we pay for it now?
Yep, oil is totally non-fungible, and oil-rich nations wouldn't reap the immense profits of selling it on the massive global market without the US government specifically forcing them to.
Lousy education, lousy average pay vs other places, lousy level of social services.
Sure, we've got a lower cost of living than most places, but I'd argue that we've also got a lower quality of life.
When the oilfield is hot, we have lots of high paying jobs for people. Fortunately for us, it's hot right now. What they'll all do when the current boom dries up, I haven't any idea.
The reporter's statement is "oil drilling creates jobs". Do you believe he was right or wrong? He and I have made no mention of anything but that statement.
I was responding specifically to "Texas seems to be doing fine" by agreeing that yes, Texas has lots of jobs when the oil-patch is hot. But, also pointing out that it isn't necessarily worth bragging about that our economy is so dependent upon a single factor, one over which we have so little control. And, also that the definition of "fine" may not be the same for everyone here, specifically me, a resident of Texas, who certainly enjoys low taxes, but nevertheless might also like to see less blight and poverty. I made and make no comment over anything the reporter may have said, but with respect to the general statement "oil drilling creates jobs", I'd say, well, yeah so do lots of things. Does oil drilling really create the sort of prosperity that we really want?
Again, "a lot" is a statement that is only true in context. And particularly given that Oil's ability to employ is completely dependent upon geological formations that no-one has any control over, it's disingenuous to try to generalize it beyond the context where it's true.
Farming is geographically limited and it is a rather large employer in the US. Oil has a effect on more industries than just energy. Tesla would not be able to build their cars with oil products. It's disingenuous to not look at actual employment numbers and reach of industry when trying to say something factual isn't.
You want to calculate the total employment of all industries enabled by oil and then say that the next barrel of oil is responsible for a proportional number of that total?
What about those industries that use oil only because it's still currently cheaper than its alternatives? What about those industries that are already transitioning away from oil and would barely notice if oil became even more expensive? What about those industries where oil is crucially important, but is a fairly minor cost concern and even a doubling of price wouldn't seriously impact their ability to produce products, profits and employees?
How in the world would we even calculate that out to determine how many jobs would exist or not, based on whether we drill the next oil well?
And how would we calculate where those jobs would exist?
Because, oil being fungible, lower production just drives global price up. And the losers in such scenarios tend to be the poorer people and industries, which tend not to be in the US. (It would take a much larger jump in the price of oil to make the next US job in an oil-reliant industry infeasible, than it would take in, say, the developing world.)
And when we do drill that next well, it just lowers (or keeps low) the existing price of oil, and the primary place we'd expect oil-dependent jobs to be created that would not have otherwise been economically feasible without that cheaper oil, is again in the developing world.
So if you want to say oil is massively important, I agree. I never said otherwise.
But if you want to say that the next oil well will necessarily create lots of US jobs, I continue to disagree on the basis that the next oil well simply doesn't directly add many jobs.
And if you want to say that cheaper oil also tangentially creates jobs, I will again agree, but stipulate that new jobs created only because of that cheaper oil, will overwhelmingly be created outside the US.
So I will continue to disagree that the next oil well in the US will have a large impact on US employment.
That has nothing to do with anything. The point is that he appears to highlight the positive effects of oil drilling but not the negative effects (environmental degradation, etc.).
Not the negative effects? "Shell Violated Air Permits for Arctic Ships, E.P.A. Says"? "Interior Dept. Expedites Review of Arctic Drilling After Accidents"? "Rig Runs Aground in Alaska, Reviving Fears About Arctic Drilling"?
"Shell Violated Air Permits for Arctic Ships, E.P.A. Says"
Frankly that article reads like "EPA claims some infractions but they are no big deal". I can't imagine anyone reading that article and coming away very critical of Shell.
>he wrote one about how poorly the Chevrolet Volt & Ford Transit performed
Is the claim that they are actually doing very well, and he was incorrect in his article? Or that he is biased merely for writing an article based on negative facts?
The notion was that a pattern of articles that tend to support the same group should raise our estimate of a bias in favor of that group.
All of them could be perfectly accurate, incidentally - consider a journalist who investigates 100 stories for every one he publishes and only publishes those that are favorable; while none of the articles would contain actual falsehoods, clearly this is a bias.
Whether that's the case here is a much deeper question that I can't answer from my extremely limited skimming of the available media and this thread.
Huh? He writes about many, many other energy-related topics. Just page through his stories. Climate, natural gas, EPA regulations, wind tax credits ...
The street view here is outdated but I'm pretty sure you would see them immediately as you exit off the highway and, end to end, the rest area is about 0.25 miles. I don't think there's any other way to accumulate 0.6 miles in this rest stop without driving around in circles.
If this was the only discrepancy, I'd be more skeptical. However, there are a large number of problems with the reporting. Large enough that said reporter has an obligation to respond.
> let's assume a long-term New York Times veteran lied in the paper
What you are asking us to believe than is that Musk faked all this data. Because if he didn't fake the data, then the NYTimes story still doesn't add up, regardless of speculation on his activities.
Furthermore, you are asking us to believe that numerous other reviews by respectable, veteran reports, were wrong.
Maybe this report is the one man speaking out against a large conspiracy of a company and numerous reporters. But it's on him to prove now.
let's assume a long-term New York Times veteran lied in the paper, intentionally
If anything, I think that some veteran reporters get full of themselves and become unafraid of slanting things according to their biases as they get older. Look at the trouble Dan Rather got into at the end of his career because he was determined to sink George W. Bush.
What does his being a veteran have anything to do with his affinity to lie?
The main factor that affects someone's likelihood of lying is whether they think they can get away with it. Broder most likely knew that the car was logging data. However, he probably didn't know just how detailed the logging was, and assumed it was too rudimentary to refute the kind of story he was cooking up in his head before he even started the drive.
It doesn't seem likely the reporter lied intentionally - or at least, not consciously.
However, didn't we see that long apology yesterday about how easy it is to lie to yourself and others, even when truth is everything to you? This is why we have double blind medical trials etc. – because people are biased and can't help but lie to keep their preconceptions true.
Can be entirely harmless: The car displays 0 miles range, and he is at the charging station. Why not try to figure out how much reserve he still has before it shuts down? He didn't report negatively about this either.
Pushing a battery too far can affect its characteristics. What tradeoffs Tesla made in the protection circuitry (is it more important to protect the battery's lifespan or get you to your destination this time?) is interesting, but getting at it that way could well change the outcome of the current test if they've opted to stress the latter.
I have definitely done things to batteries, in devices with poor protection circuitry, that have lopped off a good portion of the time that the battery would hold a charge. Since the ultimate complaint was how short a time the battery held a charge, it doesn't seem irrelevant at all. If I'm complaining about a leaky bucket, the fact that I did something that may have added holes is highly relevant. Looking at the data Musk posted, it doesn't seem to have likely been the cause here, but that data wasn't available when the article was written.
Maybe, but I do think Occam's Razor favors the "expected 90, saw 50 in bad lighting, misread it as 90, could not misread it when it dropped to 45" explanation over both the "battery suddenly dropped from 90 to 45" explanation and the "NYT reporter saw 50, lied his butt off and said it was 90 to tech support for no reason, then ran with the lie in his article because he's a shill for oil and hates electric."
Driving back and forth in front of the charger doesn't seem quite so crazy given the distances involved. The distance the Tesla logs for is ~0.5 miles at a speed of ~10mph, but that's only 3 minutes of malfeasance, if it's anything at all.
And I'm not sure it's malfeasance -- because it's certainly not led to anything in the report. Maybe he wanted to park and get some food but then remembered that the charging takes a while and did it in opposite order. That could take 3 minutes easily off.
"He's lying" explains everything in the same way that "God did it" explains everything. Now you have to explain what John Broder has to gain from falsifying a review and why it was worth risking his livelihood. Tesla makes it sound like he just really hates electric cars.
That is also equally easy to explain:
He gets more clicks because of the picture of motor trend's car of the year on the flatbed.
Also, he didn't think he'd get caught.
People "risk their livelihood" all the time by lying to their boss, etc. I don't think any complex calculus is necessary to explain why someone would do that.
Did we not just read yesterday about a highly paid writer risking his livelihood by making up Dylan quotes? Clearly, it happens.
I know it's mentally exhausting, but when reading anything you have to ask, "what does the author want to be true?" Musk quoted Broder's earlier article:
"Yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.”
so I think we know what it is that Broder wants to be true.
Do you know how many MILLIONS of conventional cars are manufactured a year? Who are the biggest companies in the world? You will be shock that they are energy companies.
There are HUGE economic interest in the outcome of different transportation methods. The salary of a man is nothing compared with the BIILIONS over the table just delaying the future one or two years.
I had a friend whose only job at a big French car company maker was organizing summer experiences for car journalist vacations in Europe. I could not believe that a journalist will accept that, now I understand the reviews you find in most car magazines(You never find anything negative).
On the contrary, he probably would have been risking his livelihood by posting a glowing review. Major automobile manufacturers would call the NYT and complain that the review was not fair and balanced and did not adequately highlight the drawbacks of the Tesla compared to ICE and to their own electric or hybrid vehicles. Not wanting to do business with an institution that severely misrepresents the products of these major manufacturers they have decided to cut ad-spend at NYT by 50%. Editor is now responsible for multi-million dollar decrease in revenue. Editor cannot afford to publish stories or employ writers that will result in significant loss of revenue.
That seems like a lot of speculation to me. Other reviewers have given the Tesla S a positive review and have not been destroyed by the oil industry so why should this guy be any different? There seems to be a lot of he said/she said going on and a lot of speculation, but not a lot of demonstrable facts.
Other reviewers may not be under the same influences from incumbent auto manufacturers or the oil industry for various reasons. They almost certainly also have less readership than the NYT so what they say matters less.
There may be speculation about certain facts in the case but there is absolutely no speculation as to the fact that this and every other corporate journalist is under systemic influence. In any other industry it would be plainly obvious that employees understand not to insult, aggrieve or otherwise harm their employers customers, especially by way of prominent national media. Somehow everyone manages to convince themselves that what is obvious is no longer so when it comes to journalists and the MSM.
All of his other articles for the NYT are about the oil and gas industry - that might explain his motivation for publishing a fraudulent negative review.
If you're a car reporter driving a loaner vehicle of one of the most sophisticated production cars in the world, you shouldn't really be surprised that the vehicle has data logging. I'd be surprised if most modern luxury cars don't have some level of logging in their systems - I'm pretty sure even my 2007 mid-priced car has logged usage data accessible to the dealer on usage patterns when I take it in, because they've told me things like "you have been driving the car only very occasionally."
It's true they could guess that, but the issue was the interval between usage, not the mileage. As I understand it, pretty much every car built in the last 10 years does some degree of logging, if only to provide a record of what the car was doing immediately before a crash. For cars with more electronic systems - stability, ABS, and certain automatic transmissions - they do more logging so that dealers can debug problems.
For example, my car also has an adaptive transmission system that collects data on my driving behavior and uses it to improve when the car chooses to shift. Sometimes folks have the dealer erase this data so the car "re-learns" to shift fo r them.(http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/technology_gui...)
It has been claimed that they are informed when the car is given, and they sign a waiver about that. Of course, maybe it's just in the legalese that nobody reads - though you probably should read legalese that comes attached to very expensive items.
Absolutely not true. I don't know what the Tesla's speedometer display is like, but my experience with digital displays in cars is the exact opposite. I am much more likely to misread a digital display - in my old car this happened all the time with the digital clock display in the dash. I've never owned a car with a digital-only speedometer, but I've never liked them in rental cars.
Digital displays are obviously better for reading a precise value, but not necessarily an accurate one. To generalize, I would say being off by a a couple percent is more likely when reading an analog display, but off by a factor of two is more likely by misreading a digital one.
You're right -- it's not impossible but it might have been difficult. I hadn't checked out the interior and so I was not sure what sort of display one looks at to see the remaining range; there is one which suggests that you can see it right under the odometer:
...in which case there is not much of an excuse for that type of thing. On the other hand there is a screen which gives the same information but would be very easy to misread, especially if there were glare:
But yeah, it's not like I was thinking, some display with LCD/LED style digits where a 5 is just one line away from being a 9. You are very correct in that regard.
No, he's not an automotive journalist. His main beat these days is on climate/eco issues. That said, I've never heard of automotive journalists being 'professionally trained to notice things accurately' as a matter of course.
My apologies. I assumed the journalist test-driving a car for the NYT automotive section was an automotive journalist. Nevertheless, the "professionally trained to notice things accurately" applies generally to the fact that he's a journalist.
But if I'm writing for NYT, known for their accuracy and integrity, I tripple check every number and make copious notes. Mixing up and 5 and 9? Seems like something a journalist wouldn't do casually.
a) Lincoln tunnel isn't in NYC's downtown. Even Holland isn't. NYC downtown generally defined as below Canal St. So how NYT reporter drove through it, I have no idea.
b) .5 mile is too short for driving back and forth. I can easily walk .5 mile in under 10 minutes.
c) As the _average_ temp setting was 72F... So the next statement is funny, the NYT reported turned the temperature up to 74F? From what? The average temperature? That doesn't make any sense at all.
The spirit of pedantry is clearly alive and well on this forum.
The commenter here is guilty of forcing his impressions on the situation in the same way Broder seems to be forcing a slant on the Tesla story. How far you walk is completely irrelevant. I know people who run marathons. They don't spin around a 100 car lot many times.
If the temperature setting in the thermostat increased when he said he decreased it, which is the actual claim, that could be a smoking gun. The only innocent explanation could be that he couldn't see what he was doing while he was driving.
However, there are FAR too many BIG screw-ups and coincidences here for that to make sense. How could a professional journalist be so damn incompetent to:
1. mistake "50" for "90".
2. increase the temperature when he meant to decrease it.
3. start each leg of the journey with less and less energy after filling each time.
4. leave the car unplugged for a good part of the time he claimed to be charging it.
In NYC, downtown is anything that is down from the part of town you are referencing. Realistically, if the drive drove from the Lincoln tunnel and down the west side hwy, he would be driving downtown.
Anyway, to anyone outside of NYC, downtown is where the streets are crazy and one way and lots of business takes place... so, really, by that definition, anywhere below Central Park can be considered 'downtown'... especially if you are uptown.
Driving downtown, not THROUGH it. Driving THROUGH downtown means driving THROUGH downtown, not going towards downtown.
So Musk made a minor mistake, so the NYT reporter made few minor mistakes. I don't see lies, just two different sides of the same story.
Of course the NYT reporter could have driven downtown and take FDR uptown, but I don't see any prove of that. That would make a little sense if you took Holland, but not Lincoln tunnel.
Not to nit pick, but uptown starts at 60th and above, and most people would consider midtown to be below that to 34th, then the no mans land, and the village to be downtown i.e. below 14th street. Maybe if you were being a jerk about it you'd say that the numbered streets were "uptown", which would make the line to be houston. What you are saying here is that the east village, lower east side, and soho aren't "downtown" which is crazy.
Tesla says he spent five minutes driving around a parking lot. I don't know about you but in a busy station, I've spent far longer trying to find an open spot.
For example it takes having not only a working business plan, but a working business plan that makes sense.
For example it takes a quality control, six sigma program to make sure hardware and software costs less to support than the revenue it brings in.
For example it takes VCs not afraid of investing in teams and organizations of people not heard of before, that have good ideas, but need to hire experienced people to guide them.
For example it requires companies to hire more people in the USA instead of offshoring to cheaper labor markets in foreign nations. Make it affordable by doing cross-training of different factory positions like New Balance Shoes does, only do it for hardware.
For example it takes people who actually know how to run a business instead of the inner circle of elite social kliks who either lack degrees or have the wrong ones.
For example it takes giving the public what they want, instead of telling them what they want and changing how your product works just because it has a 'new look' or is 'shiny' but confuses a majority of the users. (Windows 8/RT)
For example it takes reforming the way business is done in SV, end the overpaying of executives (esp when the company turns a loss) and make executive pay based on how profitable the company is, and pay the employees more salary with better benefits by cutting executive salaries.
I'm aware that many systemic problems require multiple people to resolve as your incredibly insightful comment notes.
This post however, is complaining for the sake of complaining. I for one do not rail against the Second Law of Thermodynamics for destroying my beautiful perpetual motion machine ideas.
Similarly, offering vague pablums on the state of business in Silicon Valley without real solutions is at best indulgent.
