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.

It has been an open secret in the cryptography community that Hal Finney was the designer of BitCoin from the very start. Hal died in 2014. Or at least he was frozen in liquid nitrogen so not talking either way.

Besides being the first person to be involved in BTC who didn't hide behind a pseudonym, Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched. And Hal never once accused Satoshi of stealing his work.

The reason Hal had to hide behind Satoshi is simple: The Harber Stornetta patent didn't expire until about 9 months after BTC launched. That covers the notion of the hash chain. There is absolutely no way anyone working in the field did not know about that patent or its imminent expiry. Hal certainly did because I discussed it with him before BTC was launched.

So the big question is why BTC was launched when it was, why not wait 9 months to have free and clear title? Well, Hal got his terminal ALS diagnosis a few weeks prior: He was a man in a hurry.

Having launched prematurely, Hal had to wait six years after the original expiry of the patent term to avoid a lawsuit over the rights to BTC from Surety. He died before that happened.

Oh and I have absolutely no doubt Hal mined the genesis blocks straight into the bit bucket. The key fingerprint is probably the hash of some English language phrase.

The real inventor of BitCoin wrote a paper describing the architecture two years earlier under his own name, Hal Finney. He got a terminal diagnosis of ALS a few months before he launched the BitCoin service, the pseudonym being necessary at the time because of the Haber-Stornetta patent on the BlockChain.

No, Hal, did not keep the coins. He invented BitCoin because he was a crank with weird ideas about inflation, not to get rich. Mining the coins and keeping them would have been a betrayal of his principles.

The proof of this is given by the fact that Hal did not in fact get rich from BTC despite being the ''second' person to join the project. Nor did Hal ever complain that Satoshi took the credit for what was very clearly his work. If Hal had been just another person coming along, there would have been every reason to keep the cash.

And we do in fact know Hal ran mining servers from the start and that he ended up in serious financial trouble due to his ALS. The freezing his head thing came from donations.

Craig Wright does seem to be the last of the three early advocates alive but that doesn't make him Satoshi. Wright has never shown the slightest sign of being the sort of person who builds such a thing and in any case, Hal's name is on the much earlier paper.

The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

This would then block the future as depicted in Minority Report.

"Hi there! Would you like to buy another [highly personal and embarrassing item]?"

There's a relief.

I visited Activision in the mid 1980s, when it was a shoe-string operation. Games for the C64 were coming along and quite impressive, including Little Computer People, which was running on a desk over a weekend to check for stability.

Seems it's all about IP these days.

Braintool (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbraintool.org) calls itself a "Topic Manager". It only works with Chrome-based browsers, but saves everything in org-mode (plain text) which is a big plus.

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.

They're coming for the upper bands which were available to Ham Radio enthusiasts. FCC doesn't care about us anymore.

Such a useless post and reflecting lack of actual knowledge of Fry's.

20 some years ago I bought my first laptop (still have it) at Fry's in Sunnyvale. It was still in the little grocery location, the shelves (and even former refrigerated goods) aisles has resistor and capacitor models sticking out of the floor. It's long since become some health club or other business after Fry's moved to a big store a couple blocks away.

In the hey day of the stores on E. Arques, E. Brokaw and E. Hamilton had about 40 or 60 cashiers, the queue moved pretty swiftly and they didn't take American Express. I tried to buy my first digital camera there and found that out. Went over to Wolf Camera to pick it up. Anyway, over the past few years I've visited the number of cashiers has dwindled down to only a handful. Few floor walkers, where once they were all over you, asking if you needed any help. Last visit I didn't see one at all.

At the end Fry's probably only had a dozen people working in each of their giant stores, a far cry from the hundreds they employed a decade or two before. The downsizing has been happening over time. Weep not for droves of employees losing their jobs, weep for the few who worked in desolate stores, with unstocked shelves who knew the writing was on the wall. They've been circling the drain for years.

The main hurt here is losing a chain which once carried just about everything the home hobbyist/maniac could ever want. That's been going on with the closure of Weird Stuff and Halted Specialties. I'll have to look to see if there's anyone left who sells components, wire, cable, solder, special tools, etc. I'd say they failed to plan well and we've known the eventual source of stuff is going to be our mailbox.

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!

The people who buy electric cars are hip urban professional types. The people who support Brexit are pensioners and skin-heads.

Dyson's public support for Brexit meant that most people in his target market wouldn't ride in a Dyson car, let alone buy one. And of course buggering off to Singapore because the Brexit he campaigned for would make assembly in the UK a disaster only made things worse.

It was a stupid idea anyway. Musk was there ten years ahead of him and was already churning out electric cars as a new entrant. It is far from clear Tesla can survive as VW and the major manufacturers enter the EV market. Dyson stood no chance. Sticking an electric motor in a vehicle instead of a petrol engine is not a huge feat of engineering. There are significant design differences but the bulk of the design and assembly technology is unchanged.

Electric vehicles still have doors, monocoque, windows, seats, suspension, in car entertainment, etc. Ford, GM and the rest only need to change one small part of the package. Sure, they have been slow to adapt. But nobody is making EVs at a profit yet. VW and BMW look set to change that this year.