You aren't wrong on this point, but when I read "IGers cloning pets" I immediately jumped to IG Pet accounts.

I don't know how many of them there are, but some pets are probably a source of income for their owners.

The best example I can think of is Grumpy Cat. Grumpy Cat passed away some years ago, but what if their owners had cloned the cat and simply swapped the original out when the old one passed away. They could continue running the IG account.

I think this is where you will see pet cloning playing a "pivotal" role in something.

(Mind you I find the whole thing asinine, but it is what it is.)

This basically sounds like a debit.

For as "advanced" as Japan is, their financial sector is basically stuck in the 50's. The concept of checking accounts + debit cards doesn't exist in Japan (unless its magically changed in the last 5-7 years since I was there).

I really don't know how the West figured this out but Japan somehow hasn't yet. Now they're basically concocting weird systems to reinvent the wheel it seems.

It's even more telling that the company (ABL) they have chosen to launch with has only been around since 2017 and hasn't even done an orbital launch. This really suggests that Bezos/Blue Origin sees no path forward for their launch systems. Also unless ABL really starts moving fast, they'll be heavily restricted. ABL's current rocket they are developing only can do ~1300kg to LEO, compare that to Falcon 9's 22,000kg to LEO.

It's almost as if labor costs only make up a small fraction of the cost of goods... hmmm.

It also remind me of Papa John's former CEO throwing a fit over some of the added costs that Obamacare would bring. He complained it'd force them to raise the cost of pizza's by 5 cents -- a WHOLE Five pennies. How would anyone afford pizza's then?! /s

I know through family that this is pretty common.

If you have a base nearby and they fly planes that have an Electronic Warfare package installed, you can be guaranteed that once or twice a year radio devices just won't work for a few hours. The reason why is that the plane will be flying around and someone on the plane will have accidentally turned on EW or forgotten to turn to it off when re-entering airspace and now they're just "silencing" everything within like a 50 mile radius.

This kind of investigation is about 10 years too late for Japan. They use to have a fairly robust market in the cell phone industry with tons of different types of phones out there. It's not a shocker why they died though -- no app competition.

Back in 2010 I was in Japan as a student for a year and picked up a small relatively cheap flip phone. Iphones were floating around by that point and there were a few Android phones too I think, but they were few in Japan. I was more developer minded by this point and was curious what the options were for making apps for a flip phone. In short, there were none. The phones had a J2ME runtime but all code that wanted to be run on the phone had to be signed to work and digging around I found you'd have to be extremely buddy-buddy with the carrier to get that option. Compare this to my other phone I had at the time before Japan, a phone which ran Windows CE and which I had written some small apps for and it was entirely different.

Japan's phone market died because they couldn't adapt fast enough to Apple and Google letting third parties make apps for the phones. Japan wanted to maintain their own monopoly on the OS and the ecosystem and not let anyone in. And here we are today.

Ditto. This isn't the era of Windows 95 or ME.

Nearly all crashes I've had in the past 10-15 years can be traced back to my video card overheating pretty much. That's it.

On the flipside, the biggest annoyance from Windows nowadays -- almost on the level of BSODs from the olden days -- is the fucking forced "restart for updates."

I find it insane that this tech is just now hitting some stores. When I was in Japan 9-10 years ago, there were a number of sit down restaurants you could go to and place orders off a screen/tablet at the table. It's not that much different from how the tech was in most places in the US, you just cut the middle man out. When you put in an order at McDs or Chili's, the waiter just goes and puts it in the register and then it pops up on screens near the cooks. This pretty much screams "My job is mostly useless."

Now all the restaurants need to add is a "ring for any waiter" button and they'll be nearly caught up to Japan finally.

The funny part isn't the robot, but how many people aren't going to realize that the whole thing is a joke.

I don't believe for a moment that Tesla is actually pursuing this beyond maybe a "Friday hobby project" that some engineers are working on. If you consider how many years Boston Dynamics has spent just to get to their current Atlas design; there is no reason for Tesla to seriously pursue them. Plus, the software/models that Tesla has built for their cars is great and could probably be applied to land robots, but that only goes so far as "route planning" really. Making robots do useful things -- like pick stuff up & move it or open a door -- is an entire other field of research beyond what they do on cars.

At the end of the day, if they are half serious on this, they are better off partnering with BD and helping in software. It's less likely to hurt them money-wise.

I could not believe this was real so I actually went and looked at the GAO decision doc it self....and it is.

From the decision doc:

Oh and here is the safety bit:

Full Decision doc can be found here

Debatable.

The average driver doesn't want the current Waymo. Sure its a piece of amazing tech (it's legit Level 4) but its a glorified suburban taxi. The average driver wants a system that lets them disengage from highway driving more, and we've seen that trend with driving tech -- speed cruise control --> radar speed control (for bumper to bumper traffic) --> auto lane keeping --> and now we have some systems that will handle interchanges for you.

Start putting L4-Waymo on certain highway commute routes NJ-NY or Virginia-DC, and more people will start to consider it more seriously. That said, the current Waymo does have a market, but it'll have to show its capable of urban driving I think.

At first when I saw this article I laughed because there is no way this program/tax would ever fly because no one Republican or Democrat, is going to tolerate seeing a direct tax linked to how much they drove. Sure, gas taxes are just that, but the tax is "hidden" in most people's eyes.

But then I started thinking about this more: how the fuck would they tax you? No one is going to track their miles driven and the misreporting from "guessing" would just overload the IRS in potential audits. So the likely answer would be to send you a bill, but if you're already sending what you think someone drove, then why not just go the extra mile and also send out what you think they owe the IRS?

There are a ton of other practical problems with this whole idea, example, you sell a car used and forget to unregister, new owner is driving while you foot the tax. Plus, the govt's track record with something this high tech and scaled up is laughably bad. And then there is the tin foil hat stuff.

Long story short, even if this passes in the bill, the program is DOA.

This is quickly becoming false. 28 states right now have their systems set up now so that [usually] when you get new tags for your car, if you have a HEV or BEV, your car tag costs extra to offset the lost taxes from gas taxes.

This is not accurate. Last week's attempt was due to the space station (a thruster unexpectedly fired on the station).

More recent news states:

So the scrub today was due to something with the spacecraft.

Man, some of this shit just feels so disingenuous. You can go look at the 2020 Annual Filing yourself, on page 61, they have a real nice table for ya.

They sold $24.5B in cars in 2020 and only $1.5B in regulatory credits, out of a total of $30B in revenue (they don't just do cars and credits). That means that in 2020 those emission credits only made up 5% of their revenue. Did the credits help them over the finish line of profitability? Maybe, but you could also argue that their services side or their energy side did as well since those also made up ~5% of the total revenue.

The point is that these credits aren't a huge part of their income.