I agree with you. It makes no rational sense for the corporation to act this way. I can see how they end up losing a court case but can't explain why they don't pay up.
It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money. I expect the company had created strong incentives for employees to claw that back. Someone has followed those incentives against the interest of the corporation. This happens all the time although in this case they break the law.
Eventually there's a lawsuit and a lot more people get involved including people without any incentive to do illegal things. However those involved originally present some varnished version of the truth (to avoid getting fired!) the company trusts this version of events. They decide to fight the case in court.
Then they lose the case. Those who decided to fight it realise they made a bad choice and they now look bad too. It's at this point that the weirdest thing happens. Why do they choose to close the store instead of paying up? My guess is that it became personal for someone.
> It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money.
It did not, the franchisees simply wanted out because they were offered better paid work overseas.
They told corporate they wanted to sell the franchise back to them, as they say they wanted to recoup their investment in the franchise before they left the USA.
Corporate arrived the same day and started saying the franchise owes them $200,000, didn't inventory the franchise, terminated their franchise that day, seized the franchise that same day.
It’s a farcical notion that people are uniformly rational actors, as well as the notion that rational is adjacent to just.
It’s an unfortunate fact that many people in positions of wealth and power default to “F-you my lawyers will drown you and I will win” in every single case, regardless of merit.
Many times, that is the singular strategy that has put them in that position of wealth and power. Many times, they apply this strategy to every situation where they already possess an asset or service for which they have not paid, and that asset or service is valued higher than an ongoing good faith relationship with the person or entity that they owe for the asset or service that they received.
It’s a wholly predatory strategy but it can be a very rational calculus, and it can propel you to the very pinnacle of wealth and power. Its continuously surprising to plebs because it goes against the fantasy of the fundamental justice of society that they have been inculcated with, a convenient lie that keeps powerless people in their lane and justifies the use of police powers to protect the criminal activity of the owner class.
I say this as a member of the owner class. I try not to be one of those people, but it’s easy to see justice as an unnecessary and frivolous expense. I’d estimate that a significant fraction of my peers are in this category, and nearly everyone else occasionally dabbles, often without even being aware of it as their lawyers push in that direction.
Ultimately, it’s a side effect of obscene inequality. I don’t know how to fix it, much less how to make the world somehow intrinsically just. IMHO there is no justice except the justice we go out of our way to create. Justice is not the natural state of the world.
I agree people and especially corporations act this way. Indeed many people believe that it's a corporation's fiduciary duty to lawyer up if that's expected to be cheaper than paying up.
Here, they are looking at small amounts of money, but they close a store, which presumably involves writing down an asset and forgoing future revenue. This only gives them a small chance of avoiding payment and risks the reputation of the entire firm.
The earlier decisions all fit the narrative of coldly rational, but I find the final decision to close the store doesn't fit. It's almost impossible to imagine how it ends well for the corporation.
It works extremely well which is why bullies and abusers use the tools they do.
Nobody wakes up as an adult and starts doing these behaviors. They have been these kind of maladjusted bullies for most likely their entire lives.
Since current US police forces are largely made up of these exact kind of people, and these people instinctively back each other up, the police also use these tactics to bully people they don't like.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that this nation loves a bully like Trump so much, we have spent decades supporting and elevating bullies to positions of power.
> Its continuously surprising to plebs because it goes against the fantasy of the fundamental justice of society that they have been inculcated with, a convenient lie that keeps powerless people in their lane and justifies the use of police powers to protect the criminal activity of the owner class.
Even without the propaganda factor, its also surprising to plebs because there are plenty of plebs who try similar schemes and get their ass handed to them in the courts. Thievery is not an exclusive invention of the well-to-do. But being rich enough means you can actually afford a competent legal defense, which will delay the case out until the opposing party capitulates, because the cost of fighting[0] is far higher for you than them. This is the same reason why convicted felon Donald Trump is also on his second Presidential term. It turns out, you can outrun the long arm of the law, and most people are just not fast enough to do it.
It also doesn't help that the law is really out of shape. The US justice system is specifically optimized to get quick judgments against legally inexperienced defendants, mainly because they can't fight back. It's the same reason why housecats hunt and kill mice and small birds, and not, say, capybara or eagles. But all the features that make it really easy to hunt weaker legal prey also make it harder to take on big cases. Things like lawyers being stupid expensive and there being no fee shifting mechanism means weak defendants fold, but also that the government won't bother fighting tough cases. Which, again, shifts the risk of illegal behavior to the poor and unconnected.
[0] Oh no, I've started to channel the Lines on Maps guy.
lol. Yeah, being an a-whole isn’t the exclusive hobby of the wealthy, by a long shot. Crappy character, unlike the future, is relatively evenly distributed.
> Eats for the way - your driver picks up a takeaway for you to eat while they drive you to your destination.
This seems like the kind of terrible idea that an LLM might have come up with. I'm pretty sure most drivers do not want people eating (especially a whole meal) in their car, and I can't imagine a lot of instances where you're calling an Uber and don't have time to get yourself food, but don't mind waiting an extra 10 minutes for the driver to detour, find parking, and wait for your food.
Not to mention what anyone who's worked in an office with a shared kitchen can tell you - the smell getting into a car where an indeterminate amount of people have eaten different meals. Like climbing into a food court dumpster.
> I can't imagine a lot of instances where you're calling an Uber and don't have time to get yourself food
Recently I got a car to take me to the train station and picked up food on the way. Seems pretty common to me. Of course, I didn't need or want it charged as a premium feature in the app.
This seems like the doom of all tech companies that hit a single kernel of a good idea, hire a big development team to build it, and then, once it's running well and making money, leadership looks around and sees this big body of developers, product managers, project managers, QA, and management tree, looking around for something else to do. Then, instead of saying, "Let's find the next big thing to do," they say, "Cram dozens more things into the thing that already works. Anything you can think of, spin up a team of 10 to bolt it onto the main product. Move things around to make everything fit. Run experiments on users to see if this new crap moves the metrics. A/B test to see what we should keep and what we should silently remove next update. Attach this other company's product that we just bought."
In a few years, what do you end up with? The modern version of every single fucking app we use today.
Well, travel booking is one of those things every company wants to get involved with because it's just straight referral fees. I get advertisements to book travel through my phone company (T-Mobile US) and a slew of financial services companies.
If it's easy enough to add to the app and sticks around for a while, it may well be profitable even if only a small percentage of customers use it or even realize it's available.
For many many reasons this engine only has one economic application - delivery of a nuclear payload in a way which is very hard for missile defences to stop.
ICBMs can go faster than this already but as I understand it they go higher allowing for earlier detection and they follow a more predictable trajectory which makes interception more realistic.
I find super fast missiles far scarier than advanced AI. I suppose they maintain the "mutually assured destruction" which might be the main reason there hasn't been a nuclear war since WW2, but it's not a huge comfort.
My take is also a missile, but as an interceptor, not offensive purposes. North Korea has shown that they can deliver a payload to Japan if they want. If the NKs do decide to launch something at Japan, it's not going to be tipped with conventional explosives. It'll be a nuke. Hypersonic interceptor seems the more likely application is this tech to me.
I think that hypersonic interceptors would use a rocket motor and not a ramjet, but I'm not sure.
I think this is for offence because I understood the advantage of this engine (compared to a rocket engine) is that you don't carry oxygen so you can carry more fuel and get more range. I think range is much more useful for offence than defence.
I am possibly making myself look foolish now as I'm not an expert on either rockets or ramjets and I might have incorrectly dismissed defensive applications.
Not sure I entirely appreciate the use-case vs classical targeting. I'd imagine you're going so fast that you don't really have the opportunity to engage in thought that is particularly useful.
The Wiki pages says top speed is about Mach 4. There are already multiple rockets from US, Russia, and China that can achieve the same (or more) but with a solid-fuel rocket motor. What is the advantage of a ramjet here? It just seems way more complex and much less well tested (in labs and in combat). Also, has this missile (Meteor) been used in any combat scenarios? To be clear, the max speed for any fighter jet is about 2.5 Mach. Once one (or two) of these missiles has locked on, you are done. I read some funny commentary once about how to shoot down a modern fighter jet: Two missiles. They can dodge the first one, but sacrifice so much speed, that the second one can easily find its target.
Missiles versus aircraft is a fight between very high kinetic energy in the missile, and relatively low kinetic energy in the plane, but with the ability to generate more kinetic energy. Missiles don't have a lot of fuel, so they need to generate a lot of kinetic energy to still be effective by the time they reach the target. Typically a missile will accelerate to its top speed in the first few seconds of flight and coast the rest of the way. At very long ranges, all the energy generated when launched has bled off, so there's two common solutions for long-range missiles to generate more energy: a "dual pulse" motor is basically a second rocket motor that fires later in the course; or a ramjet, which can be throttled up and down and is more fuel efficient than a rocket engine.
A ramjet drastically increases range against maneuvering targets. The 'maximum range' quoted for missiles like the AIM-120D (Likely 140-170km) is normally for a front on shot at extremely high altitude (10-15km+) with no evasive actions. With an evading target the No Escape Zone (where a target likely can't kinetically evade the missile) will only be 15-25km.
The Meteor has a longer sustainer and a terminal boost meaning that the No Escape Zone is though to be upwards of 60km. Qatar might have used Meteors to shoot down Iranian Su 24's just a few months ago based on the range they were shot at.
You really need to play combat flight sims (like DCS) to understand why a ramjet AA missile makes a lot of sense ;)
It's not mainly about top speed, but about endurance (e.g. flying under power for the entire flight time of the missile).
The gist ist that traditional BVR AA missiles are only powered at the start of an engagement (and a lot of that power is used to gain height) until their rocket engine runs out of fuel. For a large part of its flight, traditional AA missiles glide without power towards the target, meaning the missile will lose speed from the moment the rocket engines are switched off, and even more for each required maneuver that needs to be performed afterwards (that's why it is a valid strategy for the targeted airplane to evade the missile by forcing it into a turn during its unpowered flight phase - e.g. instead of doing a 180 and flying straight away from the missile, fly a roughly 90 degree course to the incoming missile to force it into a wide turn, which means the missile will lose more energy than it would when remaining on a straight course).
A ramjet powered missile on the other hand flies under power for the entire engagement, it can 'cruise' towards the target and then for the final phase of the engagement speed up and home in on the target (or generally do complex maneuvers) without losing speed, which gives the target airplane much fewer options to evade the attack.
> I read some funny commentary once about how to shoot down a modern fighter jet: Two missiles. They can dodge the first one, but sacrifice so much speed, that the second one can easily find its target.
With a ramjet missile you don't need a second missile to exploit the target's depleted energy. And the two-missile strategy also doesn't really work when the other aircraft fires a single Meteor from a greater distance first ;)
It's not that simple. If the target aircraft is outside the minimum abort range then they can still evade multiple missiles, regardless of whether the shooting platform or the missiles themselves are locked on. Typically they would do so by descending into denser air and beaming the missile to bleed its limited energy. On larger missiles a ramjet can potentially allow it to retain more energy into the terminal phase.
There are a variety of other defenses including countermeasures, signature reduction, EW, and decoys which also complicate the issue.
judging by what we saw so far in Russia, Ukraine, and Israel, defensive missiles don't require particularly sophisticated offensive missiles to overwhelm.
yeah, but those are using conventional explosives, only countries like the US and Russia have enough nukes to do the same with nuclear explosives, a country like japan would need a sophisticated missile instead
The same crowd who always vote against their own interests. To paraphrase, "give them somebody to look down on, and they'll empty their pockets for you."
I'm not sure but I suspect that people who've run out of space in an existing data centre will be willing to pay for increased density rather than relocating.
The very first sentence of this article mistakes Terabytes and Petabytes. I used to dismiss the entire article as poor quality on seeing a mistake like this. But these days it also feels like an indicator the article was written by a human and might actually have something interesting to say.
Sadly not in this case though - the Kioxia drives are interesting, but the fact that Dell has put some in a box is much less so.
All it really means is that big corps that have already existing sales relationships with Dell will be purchasing them in the next fiscal year. Anyone else that needed this level of storage density has already built their own boxes.
The world model is useful for planning. It can "anticipate" consequences of actions. This can be used for a kind of tree search to decide on optimal actions in robotics
I don't quite understand the business logic behind "blocking" openclaw (you can still use it at API rates) but I never saw how this was unethical. Anthropic has no ethical obligation to support other people's software
Blocking openclaw made everyone realise that what anthropic giveth, anthropic can take away.
It is similar to the xAI gas turbines in that it tarnished their image - at least amongst those naive people who saw them as a plucky startup rather than a profit seeking corporation who don't like competition.
I agree with you that the ethics are very different.
I don't get it. On the one hand we had Steve Jobs saying "No App Store!" and everyone getting up in arms, then here we have "no obligation to have Anthropic support other people's software," and that being OK. So which is it? Or does the answer change daily depending on what makes us feel good?
I find the ethics of power generation, resource use, and pollution in a world struggling with climate change to be more of a challenge than whether a few people can run some software. And that’s coming from a Claude user that’s getting tired of their shenanigans.
It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money. I expect the company had created strong incentives for employees to claw that back. Someone has followed those incentives against the interest of the corporation. This happens all the time although in this case they break the law.
Eventually there's a lawsuit and a lot more people get involved including people without any incentive to do illegal things. However those involved originally present some varnished version of the truth (to avoid getting fired!) the company trusts this version of events. They decide to fight the case in court.
Then they lose the case. Those who decided to fight it realise they made a bad choice and they now look bad too. It's at this point that the weirdest thing happens. Why do they choose to close the store instead of paying up? My guess is that it became personal for someone.
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