Cars are basically global products now.

Volvo is Chinese owned but still designed in Sweden and (mostly) made in Europe, primarily Belgium and Sweden.

You can take trips to the Gothenburg plant and buy a Volvo fresh from the factory if you want, to save on tariffs.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.volvocars.com%2Fus%2Fl...

They have switched to some Chinese components and will probably switch to more over time. IIRC, the doors are made in China, probably a lot of the body parts. When Ford bought Volvo, people didn't call it an American brand, did they? Or, maybe they did, I'm not sure.

I work on my own (ICE) Volvo, and when I buy replacement parts, I remember they were made in Slovakia, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Italy, Malaysia, and France. I haven't yet needed to replace anything made in China, but I'm sure if you dig into something, say the wiring harness for my door was made in Turkey, you'll find that many of those components in the harness are made in China.

Well the nice thing is it will not be as perishable as meat

You seem to think that this is an announcement by McDonald's to increase veggie burger offerings or replace some meat burgers with veggie burgers.

It's not.

This is just an announcement that their current veggie burger offerings will be sourced from Beyond Meat rather than another competitor, like Impossible.

It's no different than a sunroof supplier announcing that it has been selected as the preferred vendor for Ford sunroofs. It has zero bearing on how many people buy sunroofs, but it does have bearing on the stock price of this particular vendor, as it means they are taking market share away from rivals. For Beyond Meat, that rival is Impossible, not the cattle industry.

Welcome to the world of enterprise software. Everyone hates it, it's easy to rag on it, but consider for a moment the constraints:

1. You are writing custom code for one user. Or maybe a handful of users. That means that all the salaries for the entire dev team, QA team, POs, PMs, managers, finance, HR, IT, facilities, salestaff, marketing costs, etc -- are paid by a small group of customers. Who gets special code made just for them. This is why it's so crappy yet also so expensive. This is why the "fully loaded" cost of 1 hour of dev time is so astronomically high.

2. You are working with clients that are constantly changing the requirements to this underfunded software project. These clients expect you to meet lots of certifications, fill out tons of paperwork, jump through hoops, etc.

3. Because this is a never ending stream of odd one-off projects for various bureaucracies, you are hiring from the bottom of the barrel in terms of dev pool. You are not google. You are not a game dev. You are not doing anything interesting with AI or the coolest language. You are not a startup. You are house of broken programmer toys, people who no longer care but drag themselves to work and do what is required as specified. A good chunk of your staff is from third world countries living in spread out timezones just clocking a paycheck. You have huge problems with turnover. Indian outsourcing companies, in particular, have a *terrible* time with turnover because their employees are given an endless stream of boring sh*t work. Anyone who has talent is always looking for a better job, where they own their code, their code is valued, and they work on interesting problems. But not you. Someone signed the contract to update the payroll system of Foo community college and off you go, never to see Foo or that code again six months later.

3. Have fun with three year sales pipelines, as you must meet an endless number of bureaucrats, flying around the country to land that Foo community college payroll client. You submit bids, fill out RFIs, give slideshows to bored Foo community college staff, trying your best to make the assistant deputy to financial operations feel special. Oh, all those sales costs, hotel, flight and travel have to be covered somewhere in that hourly rate, too. And those sales staff also need dental, 401K contributions, etc.

And at the end of the day, miracle of miracles, that payroll software is upgraded. You get the hell out of dodge and people are outraged that you charged so much, even though this work was done for a single customer, who wonder to themselves why they have to pay $300,000 to have some custom software written for them that would have been done by a smart high school kid in three months. This must be fraud! Look, there are *bugs*! And hey, you can buy a whole operating system for $100 from Microsoft, and that even includes some phone support! What a ripoff!

The point is rigtheousness -- both the self-righteousness of those who are on the "good side" and the opportunity to condemn and view yourself as better than those who are on the "bad side".

All modern politics is now a combination of only two things -- signalling righteousness and making money. The Paris Accord gives plenty of opportunity for both, as NGOs can signal righteousness, the courts can signal righteousness, and companies can continue to make money.

The problem is that these are randomly chosen metrics with profound measurement issues that give a superficiality of "numbers" but have no such accuracy. Then you say one nation scores 198.5687 and another scores 174.371 and you are pretending to have a meaningful number there when you really don't. So yeah, this is just another listicle, such as which countries are the best to take a vacation in, as measured by an index of seltzer water prices in top hotels -- Spain has a 124 whereas Italy is only 112! Oh no! It's _falling_behind_. But this bloomberg paper has no more accuracy than the seltzer water index.

This is all coming from management school BS that tries to assign "metrics" to things in order to use a patina of objectivity for dealing with complex and poorly understood phenomena such as "innovation". Then this gruel of working paper listicles is used to pressure for pet policy interventions because hey, it's science! Numbers! We need a seltzer water subsidy!

Let's just take an example, the famously impotent and nonsensical measure of patent activity, which development economists love to write papers about as they zoom around various conferences. If you've ever been in the patent game, the quantity of patents assigned is determined by a trade off of how litigious the nation is versus the tax advantages of things like IP transfer opportunities. Why does Ireland have a surge of patents -- did it become much more innovative, or did it become a tax haven? Why do some extremely innovative nations such as Japan historically not have as many patents? Because firms there don't wage patent wars against each other as much nations like the US. Did China suddenly get more innovative in the last 10 years or was there a national push to acquire more patents because of IP disputes with the US? I've got news for you, China is not more innovative today than it was two decades ago. Not at all. But it has a lot more patents now. And it goes on and on. You are cherry picking a handful of hard to measure variables, then throwing in some politics -- need to ding US schools because there are fewer foreign students (LOL) -- and all of a sudden you get a number! 124.19! Wow, Science!

Reddit Literally has a subreddit called fu*kthepolice. Go on the chap trap house reddit or any lefty reddit to see daily calls for violence. The Donald is perhaps the most well heeled subreddit out there that deals with politics, but the admins can't stand that it exists.

Why the fuck would I "think carefully" before buying anything from Amazon. They always have what I want. It's always a better price than the competition, and the reps are friendly, intelligent, polite, and helpful.

Because the point of walled garden is ultimately to charge you more. What is to prevent Amazon from determining how much you are willing to pay and then charging you the maximum? They can charge each customer a specific price unique to them for each item, thus fulfilling the goal of every monopoly, which is to grab the consumer surplus for the producer. There is absolutely nothing that requires that Amazon obey the law of one price, which is the only reason why we have a consumer surplus at all. With the rise of monopolistic platforms that serve as "intelligent" market places delivering a "customized" experience to each shopper, that consumer surplus is now endangered.

Therefore we need to not do all our shopping one platform, but keep a couple of platforms around and still keep the option of bypassing the platform and buying direct from the seller.

I also shop a lot at Amazon, but have been noticing that they they no longer always have the best price. Walmart often has lower prices. Sometimes the vendor has lower prices. For this reason, I often check with the vendor or other platforms before buying from Amazon. I'm not ready to dive into this walled garden and make it my home.

Twitter (and the cultural left) think if you say "It's OK to be white", that you are a white supremacist.

Meanwhile there are millions of accounts opining about how evil white people are, how minorities should never intermarry with white people and how white people should feel guilty for being white. This type of racism is promoted by Twitter.

This notion that if you if you are not as bigoted towards certain races as the cultural left demands, then you are a "white supremacist" or a "nazi" is very dangerous, and no one outside the extremist bubble really buys into this.

The primary way that this problem is manifest is via lack of a good tool chain, which makes it more difficult to debug. A strongly typed language is easier on both human and machine parsers. The consequences of this are manifold and painful for the developer even in the majority of cases where the actual bug is not a type error.

Yes, there are many fine minds from the region. but the institutions fail them. Who knows what the state of physics would be if there were world class Persian institutions supported by a liberal culture?

The cost of producing a TV show is not proportional to the number of people watching it.

If the cost of producing 3 channels of TV is $250/year/household in the UK, then the cost of producing 3 channels of TV in the U.S. (with 5 times the population) would be $50/year/household. For $250/year, we could get 15 channels.

And those 15 channels would have much more quality than the 50 paid channels in basic cable. Which are mostly extreme cooking shoes, reality television voyeurism, the weather channel, and talk show re-runs.

D'oh! Thanks, that makes sense.

So I want to send a 0 (low bit). I put in my low bit resister. The recipient also (happens) to put in a low bit resistor (50% chance). Now, the attacker knows I wanted to send 0.

So how does this not leak half the bits of the message? You cannot say "disregard" the message after you've already sent it.

1. Spend $X buying bonds
2. Use a portion of the interest to pay electricity bill.
3. Re-invest remainder.

For some value of X, you will earn enough in interest to pay your energy bills.

X will *certainly* be less than the amount of money required to build your own mini-power generation facility. I understand the need for on-site emergency backup, but in terms of day-to-day operation, your own boutique power plant will be more expensive than buying power at market price from the grid.

Economies of scale, people -- we do not need to make our own shoelaces, we can buy them from someone who specializes in doing this. Energy is a commodity, and HP shouldn't be investing in expensive ways to make cheap commodities.

Copyright is not a free market and filing antitrust suits over pricing or price collusion is specious

This misunderstanding is at the heart of the matter. Copyrights grant a monopoly (and therefore the right to engage in monopoly pricing) to the copyright holder for that specific work. The fact that a work is copyrighted does not grant monopoly rights to everyone else in the production chain, nor does it allow monopoly pricing for all books. I.e. you can say "this work which I own, I only make available to bookstores and re-sellers for $20". But the publishers cannot collude together and say "All books that *we* collectively own are only available for $20", nor can the bookstores and re-sellers collude to charge a fixed premium over what they pay publishers. The bookstore does not hold any copyrights, and no individual publisher holds all copyrights. So a general increase in the price of *all* books without any corresponding increase in marginal costs, prices paid to authors, or input prices is pretty good evidence of illegal collusion, irrespective of whether any individual book is copyrighted.

So what you have here are two illegal practices:

* publishers colluding with each other to charge high prices. They should be competing with each other, setting only the prices for the works that they (individually) hold copyrights over. Then if they charge too much for sci-fi author A, you can go to publisher B who holds sci-fi author B's copyrights. If B is substitutable for A, and B will be, to some extent, then a low enough price will force the publisher of A to also lower their price. When they all get together, they can set prices for all books, and this is illegal.

* Collusion on the part of the re-sellers (e.g. apple, Amazon), who hold no copyrights. Whenever anyone says, "I will charge a fixed markup", they run the risk of being undercut by someone else who is willing to take a smaller margin. Unless the first person colludes with the (monopoly) supplier, so that whenever the competing re-seller tries to lower their markup, the supplier jacks up the price to the re-seller or refuses to supply the re-seller until the re-seller gets the message that he must charge the same fixed markup. Incidentally, this is why there were multiple lawsuits over "MSRP" -- suppliers aren't supposed to have the power to set retail prices, and retail stores need to have the right to try to undercut each other by lowering prices to the end user. But when the original good has a sole supplier, there is always the possibility of producer forcing retailers to sell for a certain price by withholding supply or charging more to those retailers that offer discounts.

Whether or not the DoJ can *prove* collusion is one thing, but looking at the behavior or prices its pretty clear that illegal collusion is occurring, this despite the fact that that books are copyrighted.