Can't speak for the UK, but in the Netherlands the tax deduction laws have changed (already 4 years ago) to no longer give lease-car drivers a tax advantage when driving a hybrid. Only full electric cars were eligible for a lower tax rate - the hybrids were taxed like regular ICU cars.
I have personally driven a C350e - a hybrid with an amazingly short range - and I really like the concept. If you compare the fuel consumption with similar cars (same, weight, size) it is much more fuel efficient. And indeed, that greatly depends on how disciplined the driver is. I charge wherever I can, manually set the car to 'full electric' until I run out of charge and don't "blaze around small roads at excessive speed". The 1600 kg Mercedes can run a comfortable 1 liter per 30 kms and more.
So sure, the fancy stories told by the salesmen, you are never going to see happen. But better fuel consumption without the charging stress (anyone seen the Tesla's waiting in line for supercharger-stations during the previous winter when we still were allowed to ski?) is easily done.
In the Netherlands there are two levels of sales tax (BTW); the high one for "luxury" goods - 21%, and a low (9%) one for necessary stuff. A lot of goods are necessary, and there is no need for the country to profit from (after all, the sales tax goes to the government, not to the shop owner).
You can also use sales tax to nudge people into buying more healthy food. The fact that hamburgers and chips are cheaper than a salad and fruit is something you can correct somewhat by moving junk food to the higher sales tax.
And I personally also think that the judges might have taken into account that this seems like yet another multinational that wants a tax cut over the heads of the normal companies. The news that Mr President pays nickles and dimes as income tax where John Doe pays tenfold nicely paints the picture...
How are ads "not the same thing"?!? The idea is that Apple takes 30% of whatever you sell via an app available in the App Store. Some sell games, Facebook sells ads. It is actually their core business.
Likely, the real reason why Facebook won't have to pay the 30%, is that it is too big a customer to lose. Facebook is too important for Apple as a customer to have in the App Store. So Apple and Facebook made a deal, which is what you can do if you are big enough...
The fact that a new iOS will reduce the tracking of users by Facebook is not even remotely touching the topic we're discussing here. If Apple has a rule that it can take 30% of every sale made via an app from the App Store, this should be applied to every sale. Everything else smells like Trumpism, where you pay less taxes the richer you are...
You'd need more than a regular 787, given that the circumference of the earth is 40.000 km so you'd have to fly roughly 1600 km/h or more than mach-1...
Then again, that is when flying at the equator. Taking off further north/south would reduce the speed required to stay in sync with the rising or setting sun...
Given that the circumference of the Earth for a given latitude is easily approximate to cos(latitude) * 40000 km you can fly around 60 degrees north or south and be comfortably on the cruising speed of a 787 (~800 km/h).
At 60 degrees the planet is nearly uninhabited for vast stretches. Ok, that would not affect sunsets. But at 66.6 degrees sunsets stop to happen depending on the time of the year. Already St. Petersburg (Russia) at 60 degrees north is famous for their white nights. At 30.000 ft it's worse. So not convinced about spectacular sunsets, I would expect continuous twilight.
I live at 64 degrees and sunsets take "forever" and are mostly boring compared to at more southerly locations.
I'm aware of that, haha, I live nowadays right by the 60N latitude (Stockholm, Sweden) and came from Brazil at around 23S, I've experienced both types of sunsets and I'd say I find the ones at higher latitudes to be much more spectacular than the short ones closer to the equator.
So let's say a trip onboard a 787 around the +-60 latitude during spring/fall equinox is completely doable for chasing the sunset :)
How cycnical - an article further down (Two young scientists built a $250M business using yeast to clean up wastewater) links to Forbes.com that indeed allows me to set my tracking preferences.However, anything other than 'accept' will result in a message stating 'we are processing the request <snip> this may take up to a few minutes'.
So they can set hundreds (yeah - that is right, I have seen pages tell me they wanted 500+ cookies to set, some of them to last 20 years) of cookies in a second or so, but will take minutes of me waiting for the page to show while they 'process my preferences'?!?
This is like the companies that mysteriously lack the ability to unsubscribe you from their mailing lists in less than 30 days, even though plenty of us manage to run systems that normally do it in real time.
True!
If it would, then male baldness would have been "natural de-selected" a long time ago. But since men are getting bald mostly after they had their offspring, partners (nature) cannot select on this...
Also in today's world it is cheaper for one machine to produce 1.000 identical parts than for the same machine produce 10 times 100 different parts. You need stock of each, tests of each.
Imagine how efficient car maintenance would be of only we'd use one standardized car. You can have the larger model, but all components are the same, every garage has them...
Like Tesla is doing with one engine for all cars and a mono frame pressed out of a metal sheet. Cybertruck deliverable in every color you like as long as it's metal. I have read somewhere the complexity in production lines are similar as the big O notation. Henry Ford would be proud of Elon.
Most car manufacturers are massively reducing complexity. Toyota's Next Generation Architecture is reducing total manufacturing costs by 20% by simplifying their entire platform of vehicles into a common set of types and using similar hardware wherever possible.
For me it redirects to a page from https://guce.advertising.com, telling me my browser is out of date and that I have to go to browsehappy.com to get a new one...
You're right. Disable javascript on [*.]archive.org, and you can read techcrunch just fine. Arguably, better :D
TL;DR: Google cloud revenue includes Saas offerings (docs, gmail etc), in addition to the infrastructure part. They may make roughly 2.5bln per quarter now, but it's still small compared to Microsoft (12.5bln per quarter, includes Azure + Office/outlook) or Amazon (10bln per quarter, AWS only). What is impressive is the growth of the business unit - more than 50% in the last year (they do have to keep it up at the same rate for 4 more years to catch up to competitors though)
First Mover Advantage is still pretty important though.
Tesla is selling cards today, Waymo is not. Tesla's cars are good-enough for most of the buyers so Waymo's technical superiority has to bs much much better warrant the attention and change in public perspective.
On very important thing is tesla has established that your will get better with software updates over time. Other cars have nice adaptive cruise control and self-driving tech but the thought that the car you bought today can in a few months drive better is a massive psychological advantage imo. I don't think Waymo can compete on self-driving features anymore. They have to make the better car and driving experience as a holistic package to stick
> Why is the natural assumption that everyone will own their FSD car?
Great point.
Tesla exists for people who want to own/drive their cars with cool tech and the dream of FSD down the line via a magical update
Waymo's launched Waymo One as a taxi service but it's only available in one region. My understanding has been that they want to buy a fleet of cars, outfit them with their FSD tech for a taxi service? (So competing with Ridesharing services as an autonomous alternative)
There is certainly plenty of room in the market for people both models
From the article: However, under the laws of the People's Republic, government agencies can more or less search any machine at any time in the Middle Kingdom, meaning profiles on 56.5 million American residents appear to be at the fingertips of China, thanks to CheckPeople – we assume Beijing has files on all of us, though, to be fair.
And that is exactly how the Europeans feel when their health records are handled by Google and the TSA wants to know their Facebook handle: what initially appeared as a nice-to-have is now all over a sudden a government source of data no one anticipated...
Edit - oh darn, I forgot Ancestry.com and 23andMe, which are even worse examples: US police has full access to all DNA samples provided by anyone in the past. That is 20 million DNA samples. Not name or age - full genetic info...
I’m starting to think the Facebook / Google way of harvesting data may really be over complicated. This kind of services shows people are willing to pay to give personal data that literally defines them as individuals to a commercial entity.
A dna test was really helpful in finding all my half siblings and other family members because my biological dad is a sperm donor.
The fact that my DNA can somehow turn up at the scene of a crime somewhere and the police can query the sample I sent to Ancestry x years ago, well, let's say that I already knew that risk going into it and it will have to be what it will have to be.
In our lifetimes, I'm not seeing a way for us to dismantle the forces that are pushing for such a big surveillance state.
Therefore, by definition, you can either find a way to cope within that surveillance state, or you can move to somewhere so remote and hidden that you can't be caught doing what they don't like.
>Therefore, by definition, you can either find a way to cope within that surveillance state, or you can move to somewhere so remote and hidden that you can't be caught doing what they don't like.
The problem with this is that by submitting your DNA, you're not handwaving away your own privacy - you're also making the decision for your relatives as well to handwave away their privacy.
>In our lifetimes, I'm not seeing a way for us to dismantle the forces that are pushing for such a big surveillance state.
"It's hard so why even bother trying". Yeah, fuck this milquetoast line of thought, to be frank. The cost of liberty is eternal vigilance. Don't engage in the sort of activity that lays the groundwork for totalitarian surveillance.
No, the only problem is that the government has access to the records, not that I gave my data to some private company.
It's like saying we shouldn't use cell phones and GPS because if our phones somehow interact with each other, your location data is given to my phone, and then my phone is less secure than yours and leaks both of our info to the government.
The only fault occurring here is the government's decision to gain access to and use this data
I don't think so, it reads like the surveillance state is so pervasive, the risks of leaking data to it so ever-present, and the possible use of that data in the future in ways we couldn't have guessed is largely a collective-action problem that likely can only be solved with laws, rather than individuals opting in or out of everything.
The commented completely missed the fact that they are contributing to building the mass surveillance that covers OTHERS that don't opt in. You can't opt out of 23 and me since your relatives opt in for you.
The US does not collect everyone's DNA at birth, and there would be some pushback against that. But there isn't against 23 and me because few care about others.
Roughly... Crime is committed, police find DNA sample at scene, police compare sample with online DNA registry, hits as a near-match for personX, police now know that a sibling/cousin of personX is the culprit. That sibling/cousin never allowed their own DNA to be collected.
I may have a story saved on an old sd card somewhere.. but I think it was Italian? A major crime was solved by pattern matching DNA to a close relative, which brought about a few people in the town who's DNA was 90(?)% similar or something.. they did find the killer/rapist whatever they were looking for..
but the process of investigating and questioning led investigators, family members, and through rumor / whispering and news articles to discover that one of the grandparents (of a well known family) had cheated and birthed a love child that was assumed to be of whatever family name.. and then they had kids - and they all had positions in the town.. but now the truth was known that none of those grand kids, their families, etc were actually part of the whatever-family-name dynasty.
A whole group of people and a town and some industries changed forever because dna is similar (and much dna is not as well) - and the use of this technique roping in and affecting others that had nothing to do with alleged crime - certainly can have other real world consequences.
I have personally driven a C350e - a hybrid with an amazingly short range - and I really like the concept. If you compare the fuel consumption with similar cars (same, weight, size) it is much more fuel efficient. And indeed, that greatly depends on how disciplined the driver is. I charge wherever I can, manually set the car to 'full electric' until I run out of charge and don't "blaze around small roads at excessive speed". The 1600 kg Mercedes can run a comfortable 1 liter per 30 kms and more.
So sure, the fancy stories told by the salesmen, you are never going to see happen. But better fuel consumption without the charging stress (anyone seen the Tesla's waiting in line for supercharger-stations during the previous winter when we still were allowed to ski?) is easily done.