> I don't see this delivery issue for Tesla dragging on beyond this quarter.
My perspective is that these issues will continue.
1. Tesla closed a severe number of their stores. All sales-staff thought they were going to be fired, but then Elon Musk reversed his decision. In effect: Tesla's sale staff has low morale due to boneheaded moves by Tesla leadership.
2. Tesla's future sales strategy is still a big question. Will Tesla push "online only"? If so, all of these salespeople should be looking for a new job, before the next round of layoffs. Tesla has done nothing to satisfy its sales staff. Rumor is that the commissions program was also severely cut during the whole process.
3. Tesla has had dramatic price cuts throughout Q1. We all knew they needed to do this as they lost the Tax Credit, but I think most people hoped that the price cuts would have worked. $2000 off of all vehicles in January, the "release" of the $35k Model 3 (except none have been delivered yet), etc. etc.
4. Tesla changed their sales policies to be far more forgiving to customers in Q1. Customers can return a vehicle as long as its under 1000 miles and before a week is up (allegedly anyway. I dunno how the process works). In any case, the price drops + very forgiving sales policies are trying to court more buyers. But... all of this resulted in 30% fewer sales in the Quarter (compared to last quarter). So Tesla was unable to counteract the drop in demand.
5. The $3750 US Tax Credit runs out in June, and is halved again to only $1375. Other cars, like Honda Clarity, still have the full $7500 tax credit, and are available at $33,000 (under the $35k Model 3, which isn't even being delivered yet). The competition is picking up, and the competition still has all of the tax credits available.
This is one of the reasons I'm categorically against any kind of DNA databases. Yes, they can be useful. But if a crime is a bit harder to solve and there is a nice & convenient match against a DNA database of for instance known offenders (or babies whose blood was sampled right after birth...) then policework will shift from 'whodunnit' to 'howdidtheydoit'. Rationalization after such a detail comes up is a path that is a lot more tempting than to come up with suspects for which there is no evidence at all.
> a limp handshake relays less DNA than a bone-crushing one
Bowing seems to make good sense in this context.
Finally, shocking he wasn't compensated for spending a long time in jail.
It is slightly unusual. Germany is somewhat similar, as is China (scaled to their population).
The Tokyo metro is famously 30% of the population of Japan.
It'd be like LA having nearly 100 million people.
The Moscow metro is 11% of Russia. The NYC metro is 6% of the US by comparison.
Germany's two largest metro areas - Berlin and Ruhrgebiet - have a comparable share of its population to NYC at around 6%-7%.
Stockholm is 23% of Sweden. London is nearly 21% of the UK. Paris is 18% of France. Toronto is 16% of Canada. Mexico City is 16% of Mexico. Madrid is 14% of Spain. Amsterdam is 13% of the Netherlands. Bucharest is 12% of Romania. Rome is 12% of Italy. Jakarta is around 11% of Indonesia. Lagos is 11% of Nigeria. São Paulo is 10% of Brazil.
Amazingly, the Shanghai and Beijing metro areas are close to or sub 2% of China.
> K, so it appears that you don't support tools that allow people to get around censorship. That's fine, but that is literally the point of Bitcoin. You just don't like the use case.
You cannot try to shame me into saying a technology that's been proven to have a major security flaw doesn't have that flaw. It's precisely because I care about this more than you that I can accept that bitter pill and you cannot.
> My definition of "working" has nothing to with theoreticals
Then you are a sucker, and you deserve to lose what you put in. Still, I hope you'll be okay, mmkay?
> Or in other words, if it really doesn't work, as you claim, the how come it its working?
Well, aside from the fact that its not working very well at all... It's prototype-level technology escalated to national limelight because of initial interest from a lot of questionable and probably illegal people. Unlike previous things like the internet, the value exchange mechanism is very direct, making it much more attractive for money laundering.
> As defined by the fact that it is literally the best existing tool out there for this usecase. (IE, visa and mastercard will block your money, and yet bitcoin still works)
I'm fairly sure the cost of a dozen viable stolen identities to use as money movement channels is MUCH cheaper than the transaction fees on bitcoin, so it's not like the enterprising criminal doesn't have a classical, high performance, downmarket option.
Bitcoin in particular is libertarian chic and anarchist crypto-religion. Ethereum has MUCH more interesting properties, but still needs several years to bake.
> If you disagree, fine, go ahead and try to stop my money going to places that you don't want it to (ex, such as Wikileaks).
If you really wanna donate to a bunch of authoritarian-loving pro-rapist people with such bad opsec that a single twitter actor blew a core comms network wide open? Be my guest. Crypto-fash it up.
For those not following the consumer SSD market closely, this is a bit of an upset. Previously, Samsung was king and basically unchallenged on price/performance for mainstream and high performance loads. Now we've got Western Digital, previously seen as a spinning rust king with an SSD side business, coming in and making an extremely competitive offering. While they're not strictly better, they're the best the market has seen from outside Korea or Intel.
If you want to quickly get the long-short of the review, check out the 'Destroyer' benchmark[0] and the price/gb chart[1]. Though I recommend reading the entire thing, anandtech reviews are a treat.
Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left. Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split. The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in front of the Tesla, and at this point resemble the diamond lane markers in the middle of the split lanes. My guess is that the autopilot mistook these lines for the diamond lane marker and steered towards them thinking it was centering itself in the lane.
If this theory turns out to be correct then Tesla is in deep trouble because this would be a very elementary mistake. The system should have known that the lanes split at this point, noticed that the distance between what it thought was the diamond lane marker and the right lane line (which was clearly visible) was wrong, and at least sounded an alarm, if not actively braked until it had a better solution.
This is actually the most serious aspect of all of these crashes: the system does not seem to be aware when it is getting things wrong. I dubbed this property "cognizant failure" in my 1991 Ph.D. thesis on autonomous driving, but no one seems to have adopted it. It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed. Tesla seems to have done neither.
My perspective is that these issues will continue.
1. Tesla closed a severe number of their stores. All sales-staff thought they were going to be fired, but then Elon Musk reversed his decision. In effect: Tesla's sale staff has low morale due to boneheaded moves by Tesla leadership.
2. Tesla's future sales strategy is still a big question. Will Tesla push "online only"? If so, all of these salespeople should be looking for a new job, before the next round of layoffs. Tesla has done nothing to satisfy its sales staff. Rumor is that the commissions program was also severely cut during the whole process.
3. Tesla has had dramatic price cuts throughout Q1. We all knew they needed to do this as they lost the Tax Credit, but I think most people hoped that the price cuts would have worked. $2000 off of all vehicles in January, the "release" of the $35k Model 3 (except none have been delivered yet), etc. etc.
4. Tesla changed their sales policies to be far more forgiving to customers in Q1. Customers can return a vehicle as long as its under 1000 miles and before a week is up (allegedly anyway. I dunno how the process works). In any case, the price drops + very forgiving sales policies are trying to court more buyers. But... all of this resulted in 30% fewer sales in the Quarter (compared to last quarter). So Tesla was unable to counteract the drop in demand.
5. The $3750 US Tax Credit runs out in June, and is halved again to only $1375. Other cars, like Honda Clarity, still have the full $7500 tax credit, and are available at $33,000 (under the $35k Model 3, which isn't even being delivered yet). The competition is picking up, and the competition still has all of the tax credits available.