Unfortunately it also requires the backers having similar views. Backers looking for a quick bump by playing the stock price quarter by quarter regardless of all other performance metrics hurt businesses because they compel short-term thinking.

For what it's worth I don't look upon the proposed end of quarterly reports by businesses as a cure either, I look at those sorts of reports as a way of assessing what could be going wrong with an eye on trying to correct it. I just don't think it's wise to use those as the main metric of success like the short-term traders would use them for.

NRA Accidentally Forgets To Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government.

Just from the summary it sounds like their production was scattered all over the world. It's difficult and expensive to keep good tabs on what's actually going on, particularly if much of that manufacturing is outsourced and it's someone else's factory producing parts to-spec but without direct firsthand oversight.

If they didn't downsize their American workforce it's probably because consolidating their production from overseas factories to one factory that is subject to close scrutiny meant that the job-losses happened overseas, not at home. It also sounds like their manufacturing is very heavily automated, meaning that the same number of employees doing things the old, less efficient way were able to take on the extra production capacity when the company switched to the more efficient way while closing those overseas factories.

Sharpie products have had pretty consistent and reasonable quality over the years, and they seem to be the most common standard by which permanent markers are judged, so they seem to be doing something right. Good on them if they were able to find a way to do it domestically and profitably.

And unfortunately usury seems to be the most widely accepted solution.

I've only faced financial security once in my life, I was young (was I even 21 yet?), I had just been laid-off as the doctom bubble burst, and that weekend my vehicle was stolen and per my folks' advice I only had liability coverage. Filing for unemployment covered my rent, my lack of vehicle meant I could cancel my auto insurance since obviously I didn't need it anymore, and my parents loaned me a car and covered food and utilities until I was able to find work within a few months.

I was lucky that I had access to a family safety-net, because sure as hell unemployment insurance payouts from the state-run fund only barely covered rent. It probably would have been difficult to get official food assistance since it's not oriented toward single men (I am not advocating that it be taken away from women, families, and kids, just stating the observation of current situation) and it probably would have taken time to even be rejected. But there are food banks that don't require being on food assistance.

I would personally love to see the system improved, to provide more coverage, and to better audit. There are always complaints about abuse of such systems, and while abuse happens, wouldn't it be possible to find and stamp-out individual examples of such abuse? The system does help people, it could help more, and the abuses could be curtailed if there was some will to actually investigate those abuses rather than just using them as pretexts to try to get rid of such systems.

Mmmhmm. There's a meme about an illegal money laundering medium, illegal hotel, and illegal taxi company, and probably another one that slips my mind. I'd argue that in many of these the goal is to privatize profits and push the burdens to operate onto the public.

I have no objection to businesses being forced to treat their workers well, and businesses being forced to go all-in when they are trying to do something, ie, structure to do it right and to give the development team the time and resources to do it, or don't do it.

We value companies weirder than that.

We value companies for short-term gains based on what we perceive of a long-term potential. We want to see long term profit potential but we live by expecting strong numbers quarter-by-quarter, so company management ends up doing things for the short-term to make themselves look good at the expense of the long-term (like eliminating their research & development institutions) and then get mad later when those companies fade into relative irrelevance compared to their prior market positions.

We want it all. But it's a lot easier to have it now, than it is to wait to have it later. So far too many companies operate in small thinking and far too many investors eat it up.

Sounds like it's time to switch to a mouse with a ball.

I was just going to compare it to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where technology is developed to a barely minimal working standard and then augmented stupidly, like the teeny tiny CRT displays with fresnel lenses sitting in front of them, connected to typewriters repurposed into electronic data entry keyboards.

Unfortunately while as zany as Gilliam's movie, it's not nearly as hilarious.

Not literature, simply fiction.

Anyone else getting vibes of the 'Dis-organizer' that Sam Vimes had in the Discworld novel Jingo, that would respond [Insert Name Here]?

I know. I started looking back in 2014 or so. We bought in 2016 and 2017 respectively. In 2016 there were not many options with that kind of range to begin with and most of them were either ugly looking or very expensive, and in 2017 we needed to replace a pickup truck, which didn't have EV options worth looking into.

Automobiles are durable goods, they should last. A combination of full-time telecommute for my wife and COVID-19 caused us to put a lot less wear on our vehicles, and I was able to change jobs to something that has me in the office only three days a week. It could be another decade before we need to replace our vehicles at this rate.

This is a long game.

The issue is that we're forced to place trust in our tools because there is not sufficient time in the day to perform original research on every single topic. Arguably the reductio ad absurdum approach would be that one would have to go everywhere to verify everything with one's own eyes.

The problem is that publicly-accessible AI generally seems to be that lets us down because its responses look the same whether they're genuine and factual or whether the system has taken-in bad data or otherwise 'hallucinated' a response. We already have problems with systems regurgitating incorrect responses due to stale data (think things like providing old business hours or old locations if a business has made a change) or wrong answers through bad data from ingesting forums without providing for verification of what any random schmuck with a username has said, and that's before some language model system is trying to produce answers.

I don't usually care for the term 'curate' for anything other than museums, but in the case of these sorts of systems, there needs to be a curation effort on the dataset, both to ensure that garbage isn't introduced from the outset, and to remove garbage as it is discovered while the system runs. If the point of developing AI was to reduce costs through reduction in labor, having to actually curate an AI dataset is going to be labor-intensive and thus costly, and those manpower savings are going to be less than originally claimed or projected as a result.

But until that sort of thing happens we have a tool that we can't really trust. If we can't trust the results, is it a tool that we can rely upon at all?

I have not yet been in the market for a new vehicle when an EV would have been in my price range and otherwise meeting my needs, but I had done some basic research on defining the family needs. We concluded that an EV would need a 150 mile range on a single charge. This would be the equivalent to the range that around a half a tank of gasoline gives to most combustion vehicles. This would be enough range to from where we live to the extreme oppose edge of town and back, with around 20% battery to spare. Since we have friends that live that far away in town, and on occasion shopping or entertainment has taken us that far, this seemed like a reasonable range for one of the two daily drivers in the household.

This is in a city that is geographically massive. The vast majority of people do not commute more than sixty miles one-way, and likewise it's even rarer for both people in a marriage to commute that distance or longer regularly. Additionally many of the places where people do commute that sort of distance, commuter rail ends up becoming a preferred option simply out of difficulty trying to affordably park in the urban areas where their job would be located.

We're already at the point where over 80% of two-car households could manage with at least one EV. Hell my neighbor owns a general contracting business that does jobs all over the state, and he just bought a Silverado 4WT electric truck. He could have to visit several jobsites a day to keep tabs on the progress and even in a job as driving-intensive as his he was able to go electric.

If Honda had brought the 'e' to North America with a slight bump in range from 137 to 150, it would have been a reasonable candidate for a second vehicle in our household. But they discontinued it despite charging such a vehicle at home in a surburban setting being a pretty practical option. I suspect it would have been a good fit for a lot of people actually, but it never made it to our shores.

Plus it's generally against the law to sell vehicles under-recall. Even used car dealerships aren't supposed to, though without enforcement from motor vehicle offices they are not as inclined to follow those laws and to check for recalls before selling.

I don't buy Toyotas because I don't like paying a 15% to 30% markup for the same capabilities that other brands have, even with a reputation for better reliability.

As for these particular vehicles, I'm a little tired of the term "SUV". When I was young, an SUV was a Sport-Utility Vehicle, it was a high-clearance vehicle, usually four-wheel-drive, that was durable enough to leave paved roads for rough driving conditions. It was something that could go further off the beaten path than a station wagon or sedan could, even further rear-wheel-drive pickup trucks and full-sized vans could. That term started being misused the better part of 30 years ago and has become meaningless, applied to any station wagon of any ride-height and roof-height. Many 'SUV' models body proportions nowadays are almost more like interwar-period 'suburbans' and wagons, tall, sit-upright vehicles with comparatively low floors. There's no more special 'sport' or 'utility' about them in an offroad sense.