Almost everyone in the age group in question is aware of these problems. It doesn't seem like a moral panic. It is a truly radical change in human life to have so much information in one place, so accessible, all the time. The newspaper changed society, the telegram changed business and war, but none systemically changed human behavior and thinking for every human it comes in contact with like a smart phone.
It has changed childhood behavior, and parenting behavior as well.
I really don't think this is a standard fear of something not understood, it's pretty clear it's affecting people and there should be a change.
... and that's why the King's war against pamphleters is just! Kids are learning morse code at an alarming rate! Ban AI art, if not all art! No, okay. Just no.
I vape daily and use disposables (yes, I am the baddie.)
You'd be surprised. A lot of people go out drinking, do not want to bum cigarettes off of strangers or smell bad but still want to use nicotine and drink. Single use vapes you throw away the next day are great for that. Women buy disposables a lot, according to the personnel at the vape shop I go to which specializes in disposables.
I think vaping even disposables is better than smoking cigarettes. I would ban cigarettes before banning disposables purely due to the litter from butts. It does not help that in the US public smoking areas do not exist so people often throw it on the ground.
Nicotine is not a nice habit but there are certainly lesser evils in the spectrum and disposables are a far lesser evil than cigarettes.
People who litter butts are just as comfortable littering disposables if the streets near me are anything to go by. Also, things like lithium are kinda rare - just chucking them on the ground is terrible for the environment overall, better to have not made them in the first place.
Nitpick: lithium isn’t rare, per se, but it is somewhat expensive (environment and capital, though capital costs have been going down) to extract/mine/distill.
Parent comment poster here: I also use disposable vapes at times, but in the last year I have made a concerted effort to dismantle and reuse/recycle what I can from them. (Yes I have a fire resistant box of many different types of lithium ion batteries taped up inside that i’ll get around to using in a project or recycling someday…)
These numbers are for enlisted recruits. To wash out of basic training/boot camp and be enlisted there has to be serious problems. Bed wetting, serious violence, egregious disciplinary problems or major integrity violations, Maybe being overweight or failing physical standards at the very beginning / end of training. With most of these things you just get rolled back and stay longer in training. The most common drops are early, often for integrity problems like lying to a recruiter about a criminal past or failing the initial drug test. After that if a person is kicked out of recruit training it's for the issues mentioned above and there doesn't seem to be any "fixing it"
These decisions are made by training commanders pretty much on a case by case basis, often with the armed service's needs in mind. Everyone who's at enlisted basic training is needed, because it's about volume.
I'll underscore this point. Basic training is not hard, and we really want people to pass. Like you said, if someone really wants to be there, we'll typically work with them for as long as necessary to get them through... second and third chances, for sure, with instructors practically holding their hand. Like I said in my other comment, if someone just couldn't handle tough academics, we found an easier job for them. When I actually separated people from the Army and sent them back to civilian life, it was usually a mutual decision.
Polygraphs are based on principles beyond junk science. Any person who has been in a cult organization and has successfully exited can testify to convincing yourself something happened or is true even if the evidence is overwhelmingly the opposite, even under a polygraph. People are not reliable sources of fact, period. They are an interrogation technique based on scare tactic strategy to get people to confess to something regardless of if it is true or not.
Polygraphs only do one thing, enable lazy investigation into claims of fact. That's why police love them so much.
Take a deep breath. The US endowment for the arts wrote this article to preserve the history of a person who impacted the arts in the US. No one is worshipping him. He had known problems, took criticism for it and it is a known fact by those who enjoy his music.
No one is here to dismiss the damage he caused to the condor population. I do question why you wanted to bring this up though. While it is interesting and important, I don't know if it's commentary relevant for this thread specifically. Wishing you well these holidays
At what point is saying "it's two years away, trust me!" Not just naive optimism but false advertising or market manipulation? He publicly said this for like four years, and then he walks it all back.
I just don't get it. Any other little person does this and they would be big time side by investors and shareholders, and yet people want to trip all over each other talking about how awesome he is.
After those two years have passed, probably. But the claim was actually stronger than that. It was that it should earn back the money it cost by running an autonomous taxi service during night and office hours. That specific claim was a scam from day one. That was not even on the research stage, and probably never will be.
Also that would require lending your vehicle out to random strangers all the time, so you couldn't keep anything valuable/fragile in the car and you'd need to clean it rather frequently.
Even on the face of it, it's more like owning a taxi than a car that makes you money.
Not to mention the various licenses and insurances required to ferry people around.
Anyone who gave it a second thought probably didn't take it seriously, but that didn't stop a whole bunch of fans and stock market analysts to sketch out some far flung implications.
Not defending Musk, but investors and shareholders don’t abandon him because he has delivered huge returns to them through Tesla stock. He is always too optimistic (maybe intentionally) about the timelines, but ends up generating money in the end.
Plus, he is super rich and people want to be close to big money - could lead to many benefits through networking and opportunities.
Does he end up generating money in the end though? The only way to say that definitively is if Tesla were at some point in the future to shut up shop and return a balance to the shareholders many multiples of what they bought the stock for.
Until that happens the plates are still spinning and could go either way.
Well we already know alt right weirdos have their heads so far up their own asses they can lick their nostrils clean, so we'll just keep marginalizing them and their insanity.
Which is equally balanced with the anti-fanbois that don't have a Tesla but still flock to any thread about Musk to voice their opinions.
Look, I don't have a Tesla, never owned one. I don't use Twitter. I think Musk has major flaws. There is definitely a growing trend of anti-Musk vs Musk fanboi flame wars. This thread seems to be no better.
It never actually has to be a lie. Making predictions years into the future is impossible if variables are changing. He can make a perfectly truthful estimate of when the product will be ready as of today’s information, and then the information changes.
It’s up to you as a consumer to either discredit the optimism or buy into it.
On the other hand: Because he is always wrong with his timelines it cant be security fraud because everyone knows (and ridicules him/memes it) that his timelines are wrong.
It's more about the consumer's satisfaction IMHO. For one reason or another, it appears that the Tesla customers are happy with their purchase.
There is a cult mentality and the cult members are happy with what they got, even if it's not exactly as advertised however it's not just about the cult mentality but it's about the overall experience of the product.
I think if Elizabeth Holmes delivered slick blood testing machines that work no different than those on the market(large amount if blood instead of a drop), but had better workflow and user experience, Theranos could have been a success like Tesla.
She tried to imitate Steve Jobs, had she imitated Elon Musk she would have been fine. She should have had the Siemens machines modified to work with modern GUI, developed some automation for drawing large quantities of blood in a pod at the mall and integrate all that with the healthcare and keep repeating that in 2 years just a drop of blood would ne enough.
The only difference between Musk and Holmes was that Musk actually delivered something that had some redeeming properties.
The cars are nice and fun to drive. The charging network is ubiquitous and works perfectly. The highway-based "autopilot" isn't revolutionary, compared to other similar products, but works competently and makes long drives easier. The FSD Beta is a hot steaming pile of garbage that will kill people given the slightest opportunity.
Exactly, Theranos' R&D is also capable of threatening people's health by giving too inacurate results. Instead, they should have made an App that coordinates healthcare providers with service points where modified for automation Siemens machines are used. When asked about the single drop tests, just say its coming in 2 years and if the tech and science develops enough some time in the future they can do that too.
> I think if Elizabeth Holmes delivered slick blood testing machines that work no different than those on the market(large amount if blood instead of a drop), but had better workflow and user experience, Theranos could have been a success like Tesla.
I wouldn't have said that Tesla just imitated existing car companies. Can you elaborate?
I don't suggest that at all. What Tesla did was to create an electric car with good user experience without developing any revolutionary tech. That's what Theranos should have done, create a good user experience on the existing tech. They did wrong by betting on inventing the tech.
If Tesla's prime value proposal was to invent some tech that will do something revolutionary, they would have gone bust like Theranos. Instead, they built charging network and kick ass infotainments system that made their electric cars practical.
I very much disagree. They didn't just make cars "that work no different than those on the market". They jump-started mass-market electrification of cars, solving who knows how many problems along the way, in technology, business, regulation, manufacturing, etc etc. That's very different to making another Ford Focus.
Tesla did and is betting on battery costs coming down due in part to tech under development and they could have been on the wrong side of that bet. I think unlike Theranos, battery tech has a semipredictable cost curve
Betting on economies of scale and improved performance is quite different than betting on tech that doesn't exist. Theranos bet on doing over 200 blood test from single drop of blood, which is science fiction. They may try to solve it but there's no clear path.
Theranos could have been amazing; the core conceit of "cram a bunch of different experts into a room and let them riff off each other" could have been amazing.
The Problem is that it didn't happen, because Elizabeth Holmes was a control-freak fraudster. She specifically siloed them to try and control information, which is the exact opposite of "put em in a room together".
> I don't suggest that at all. What Tesla did was to create an electric car with good user experience without developing any revolutionary tech.
Not sure what you mean. They are the ones that made the tech good enough for mainstream adoption. Your post reads like the “iPhone didn’t have any revolutionary tech” types.
> They are the ones that made the tech good enough for mainstream adoption.
So, this is a common idea, but it doesn't _really_ gel with reality. The Tesla S, Nissan Leaf, VW's first electric car platform, and the Renault Z-E platform are contemporaries to within about a year (iirc it was Leaf, then an unsuccessful Z-E-based car, then eGolf in limited quantity, then S, then mass-market eGolf and Renault Zoe). Of these, the Leaf sold far more units than the S over its lifetime; the Zoe was about the same as the S, the eGolf somewhat less.
Tesla didn't have a _true_ mass-market car until the Model 3 some years later.
Your chronology is screwed up, we didn’t hit mass market until the model 3.
The litmus test is what cars you see on the roads of Wyoming. There are plenty of model 3s, and a leaf was an extremely rare site because the car was nearly useless outside of a city commute.
> The litmus test is what cars you see on the roads of Wyoming.
Given that US adoption of electric cars lagged other developed world countries, and thus early electric cars were generally designed for European, Chinese, and to some extent Japanese, market preferences, that seems like an extremely weird litmus test. Tesla _was_ the first company to release a mass-market car aimed at the _US_ market (or at least the first credible attempt; the Leaf was available in the US but was just too far from US market preferences), but the Chinese and European markets already had mass-market electric cars.
The iPhone didn't have any revolutionary tech, in fact, it was quite lacking when you compare what was out there and that's why many people claimed that it will fail.
What iPhone had was a revolutionary user interface that provided the outstanding user experience despite lacking a lot of features and functions.
Its capacitive touchscreen was revolutionary. That's what enabled the UI to be done in a different way. This isn't some "great design creates great product" thing. It's the underlying tech that did it, and if the UI had been different, it would been just as revolutionary.
I would argue that the addition of the app store is what made the iPhone really jump phones forward.
Nope, capacitive screens and multitouch were 30 years old tech. Sure, Apple did engineering to actually make it into the product they shipped but that wasn't what Apple invented with iPhone.
Everything is built from something else. Not doing the fundamental science that leads to a product doesn't mean that the product itself isn't innovative. Apple's interface elements[0] and interactions[1] were no doubt derived from elsewhere too. Getting UI elements on a screen wasn't new. Cramming a capacative touchscreen into a phone was very new.
Right, people were buying iPhones because they wanted to touch two or more fingers. Everyone was trying to make screens that can register multiple touches but Apple was the first to crack it and this led to natural success of market demanding multiple touches and they having it.
had musk not purchased tesla after the roadster was built, all of his claims would have been utter bull. now that there was an entry electric car he could spin any tale or justify any hype by pointing to the one functioning model.
from there it was absolutely the modern car manufacturers game, promise a concept, deliver some part of it, talk about next quarter.
frankly having level 4 self driving pulled of by mercedes in california first should be the ultimate proof. merc did it in house faster without hyping it. wild
yeah he over promised on FSD, but still delivered on reusable rockets, and more or less nudged all other manufacturers to producing eletric cars at minimum, a few years earlier than they intended to.
He also exposed twitter's political bias & collusion with US security agencies, and exposed that the company can run with 80% less staff.
This then is a fine example that past performance is absolutely no indication of future one, despite our emotions screaming at us that its the case. We just don't like uncertainty or lack of trust environment by default, so subconsciously prefer replacing it with more comforting bad truth/lie rather than accepting the other choice.
The Space Shuttle from the 80s was reusable too. Falcon 9 isn't fully reusable (upper stage) and now Starship drops some new ring into the sea.
> More or less nudged all other manufacturers to producing eletric cars at minimum
Didn't he instead let them delay making electric cars by transacting with them for their ZEV credits?
I think the SpaceX stuff is still impressive, but he didn't deliver on his big statements. Dragon was supposed to land on Mars years ago for instance. The Space Shuttle wasn't economical, but Starship went back to lots of elements of its design.
Meaning you can use a social security number of a dead person. A common form of immigration fraud.