Can you provide some photographic proof that you are who you say you are,
edit: (sorry, the ability to remain anonymous is very important as lives are on the line). You might want to use a throw-away in that case as well because usernames can be tracked.
This is a really ridiculous request, several dozen people have already been arrested for tweets encouraging folks to protest. Asking this person to identify themselves this way puts them at significant risk.
Maybe you know Turkey as a modern, democratic country but we are not. I'm currently using Tor because of fear. You can face court in Turkey because of just re-tweeting something.
edit: sorry for my english. edited for some grammer mistakes.
Because current government tries to change how we live.
I think government's job is just trying to boost the economy, trying to not get into any war, paying the debts to IMF and etc.
But current ruling party forces our life styles into a shape which they draw.
Just one example:
- Taksim Square is a famous tourist attraction centers of Istanbul.
- Government first said to bars (pubs): "you can't put stalls on front of your bar." People protested just on facebook and twitter.
- They said: "you can't sell alcohol after 10pm but you can sell other things". Nothing happened. Just some protests but our PM labeled protesters as "alcoholics".
- After that they said: "Nope! No alcohol after 10 PM even for stores. You can't go to pubs, you can't buy from stores." People protested but PM said "So, you wanna raise your children as alcoholics?! We can't let this happen!"
You smell where these is going? Current ruling party tries to divide Turkey in two sides. "Religious good citizens" vs "atheists, lgbts, alcoholics, left-wings" etc.
Someone had to tell them "just because you are ruling party, you can't make everything you want". and we are trying to tell them this.
Well, since you're answering questions... Would you say in general that the government is becoming less 'secular'? Have there been other large changes pushed by the government besides the big issues I have heard about (including the alcohol issue)? Also, have there been laws put in place against atheism or LGBT rights issues?
One of the big issues right now is that these protests are not really getting coverage in the media here in the US. It's hard to get the full story.
"less secular" is not the only problem "less humble" is another.
examples:
- a blind man approached minister of health and says "we can't live with minimum-wage. Please improve current situations." And this is what the minister says: "You are blind and we gave you job. How dare you want more?" Source news article: http://gundem.milliyet.com.tr/bakan-akdag-gozlerin-gormuyor-...
- they don't have shame. we are using one of the most expensive oil in the world and after the last raise government said: "we didn't raise the price of oil, we just raised the tax". I can't find anything to say about that.
Is there an article you have seen in the western media that elaborates on what you've said here. I'm not finding my usual sources to be at all helpful explaining what is happening
> Can you provide some photographic proof that you are who you say you are, like maybe a picture of the riots (in bitbucket) linked in your profile here, with an embedded message to this post that isn't Photoshopped?
wtf? Are you the identity police around here? Would you like the man to get a police visit?
This comment and the one you posted below really make no sense at all.
The following is a description (slightly modified) from Dr. Peter Hammond's book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam:
The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat.
As long as the Muslim population remains around 1% of any given country they will be regarded as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to anyone. In fact, they may be featured in articles and films, stereotyped for their colorful uniqueness.
At 2% and 3% they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs [Europe, Australia, USA and Japan]. Six percent of US prison inmates are Muslim. Like any other minority, they won’t integrate, but work to build their own separate community.
From 5% on they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. South Africa's Muslim population is 2%, but they control 35% of the businesses, a large percentage of the banks and have five Cabinet seats while Christians (77% of the population) have none.
They will push for the introduction of halaal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves (along with threats for failure to comply).
At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia; Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world, but to establish Sharia law over the entire world.
When Muslims reach 10% of the population, they will increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. (Ei: car-burnings in France last October.) Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats.
After reaching 20% expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning (India, Mindanao, Philippines).
At 40% you will find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare [Indonesia].
From 60% you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and Jizya (infidel tax). (Sudan, Kosovo, Lebanon and Egypt).
After 80% expect State run ethnic cleansing and genocide [Western Papua (New Guinea), Iran, Biafra, Turkey and North Nigeria].
100% will usher in the peace of "Dar-es-Salaam" - House of Peace - as in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Yemen.
Islam is the main religion of the Turkish people, where the CIA World factbook states that 99.8%. It has not yet Implemented Sharia law there, you can be sure the unrest will continue there until Turkey is ruled by Sharia law.
Given the incredible over-representation of blacks in US prisons and the number of blacks that embraced Islam during the CRM this is a surprising statistic?
> Like any other minority, they won’t integrate, but work to build their own separate community.
Good, I am glad that we have worked out that this text is part of a larger demonstration of the evils of minorities in the United States. All those immigrants over all those generations, what a waste. I mean look at what has become of the Germans and Irish in America!
> South Africa's Muslim population is 2%, but they control 35% of the businesses, a large percentage of the banks..
Oh, it is good to know that the author if this knows nothing about South African history. This argument is exactly parallel to the idea that a cabal of Jews is running the western world, you realize that? I could make the same argument about the "evil" Chinese in the Muslim nations of south east Asia - how is it that these great and terrible Muslims allow another ethnic minority to concentrate economic power in nations where they are the majority but are somehow crafty enough to take over the economy of South Africa.
> When Muslims reach 10%.. Ei: car-burnings in France last October.
France is not actually at 10% but I am sure we can trust you that the motivations for rioting had nothing to do with economic conditions or being marginalized.
Way to misrepresent the process that is happening in Norway. The Scandinavian countries are having a large, sudden increase in economic inequality.
A school was closed in the area and a lot of families lost support. THAT is what is causing unrest amongst the predominately Muslim people in that area. The spark was the fact that police executed a man threatening his wife in a domestic dispute (police job is to calm and not escalate disputes, escalation is for military). If this consistent with Jihad I have same bridges to sell.
To be honest if you want a parallel this is closest to Britain's demonstration last year (IIRC) and similarly to do with growing economic inequality. Unless the Brittain blackies are on the Jihad train along with Zionist and aliens. And KKK.
I'm sorry I can't hear you over the sounds of Muslims threatening their government (Norway) with 9/11 events to get their own country-within-a-country.
You mentioned I wasn't responding to your argument, I was, you said Muslims always Integrate, and I responded with an example right now of Muslims threatening countries with 9/11 events to get an Islamic State within Norway. This game you are playing. Two can play it.
Why are you defending the terrorists? Instead of acknowledging the truth and letting it be, you do genetic fallacies and attacking the person instead of adressing the facts of the matter.
I did not say that all Muslims always integrate nor did I mean to imply it. You post original post makes broadly general statements about all the Muslims in the world, it says in fact that they "won't integrate". It seems to me that the burden of proof is on you with all these generalities.
Which terrorists was I defending? If I offer a defence of Catholics against accusations of violence does that make me an IRA supporter or defender?
I want to hear more about the cabal of Muslims running South Africa, it sounds fascinating!
I make broad sweeping generalizations about Muslim Extremists. Yes. By definition they are the ones that refuse to integrate and have on average 8 children per slave female and make it illegal to educate women.
Oh you're going for the "Islamic Takeovers of the world are OK because the Catholics did it too"? What the catholics did were wrong, and what the Extremist Muslims are doing is wrong too. Stop trying to apologize for the Extremist Muslims.
Blowing up children at Marathons to illustrate your hate of western values in the name of Allah is a BAD thing. Even if evil things were committed in the past, it was not OK then, and it's not OK now either. Can you at least acknowledge this much? Or should I expect another misdirection and fallacy?
I'm doing it because you were doing it. You've also removed some of your Extremist Muslim supporting statements. Don't want the FBI seeing that kind of stuff. It'll put you on the "no fly" list.
I think I made one edit to correct a typo. You removed the first line of your original posting that indicated that you thought that the protests were anti-secular and you added content that "addressed" one of my points to a post that originally only made reference to Norway.
Now I am editing this just to add that I see you are editing other comments as well, not just to correct typos but significantly altering their content. It seems cheap and petty.
Man, it's times like this which I had down-vote ability already. First a post up-thread asking for someone to give their real identity and now this. You must be a real jewel of a human.
Apart from its virulent anti-Islam sentiment this is a really confused comment: these protests are totally against the Islamist authoritarianism of the government!
Wow. That is one serious load of garbage! Never mind the incredibly baseless and stupid contents that follow, the premise is wrong: the protests themselves in the first place are opposing the present government's attempts to undermine Turkey's longstanding tradition of secularism.
Tesla said it best: "Tesla will sell its cars the way it wants. If some states don't allow that, then Tesla will simply sell them elsewhere."
When a piece of a neural network becomes corrupt and entrenched beyond repair, (cancerous) the tumor or cancer fights to protect itself, there are two solutions to these kinds of problems.
1. One solution is what Musk is doing, treat the dealerships as a cancerous growth in the mind, and pathways are built to bypass it, route around it. Don't fight it, don't fix it, don't interact with it. Establish as many barriers to its growth as possible and starve it so it doesn't grow. Eventually the superior paths created by Musk are the preferred ones to use, and the defective paths are garbage collected. The cancer will seeks to prevent the growth of new pathways because it does not want to be garbage collected.
2. Remove the growth. When the surgeon finds a tumor or cancer in your brain, it doesn't try to coax it to become better or try to "enhance it" to be better. A hole is cut in the head, and lasers and scalpels are used to physically remove the cancer.
These are the only two options to deal with cancerous growths working only to maintain its take on the system.
The metaphor is cute, but maybe overstated. Tesla isn't doing this because it's what a self healing network would do.
Tesla is doing this because it's a rapidly-growing startup whose production facilities are heavily oversubscribed already. They have no net downsides to giving up the "Texas" market for now, because they don't have enough cars to sell even without Texas (and the handful of other such states).
Eventually that won't be true. Once ramped up, they'll want that Texas market. And at that point someone will have to bend. Musk's bet is that at that point Texas will cave because they don't want to deny their voters the chance to purchase this great new car. Texas's "bet" (really the dealership lobbyists' bet) is that Tesla ultimately won't be successful and that by holding their ground here they will discourage other manufacturers from trying the same thing.
IMHO, things make much more sense when you argue in fact instead of metaphor.
>Once ramped up, they'll want that Texas market. And at that point someone will have to bend.
My money is on Tesla coming out on top here. Musk strikes me as the type of person that would rather give up sales while holding a huge "Fuck Texas" sign than to give in.
Edit: Added the parent comment I was responding to. Yes, Tesla is playing nice right now. That puts them in a better public opinion. But eventually they'll either step up their game or walk away from Texas. I don't see them giving in. But only time will tell here.
> IMHO, things make much more sense when you argue in fact instead of metaphor.
This is true. However, are you actually arguing in fact? Your statements read as an outside agent judging the intentions and motivations of other agents. Perhaps you're part of one of the groups and actually possess insider knowledge here?
Another potential outsider's reading of the bets and motivations at play (this taken from nearly 4 years working with auto dealerships):
The dealers have built up reliance on a system that allows them to screw over consumers in myriad ways that make them very good money every time a consumer needs a vehicle. They've already seen sales erode due to the economy, as well as the rise of internet-powered sales channels like craigslist, ebay, etc. While they cannot do anything about the former, the latter has been generally approached with dealers getting involved in listing their vehicles on the internet in an effort to constantly re-inject themselves into once private p2p marketplaces.
The dealers no doubt want Tesla to be successful as a manufacturer, they just do not want to allow a new precedent to establish wherein they are not standing as the gatekeepers between consumers and they cars they want. This has been a lucrative business model for them for a very long time. Everybody knows consumers hate it, and yet there's no other way to get your hands on a brand new car. Tesla has a fair amount of consumer interest, and dealers recognize this. So they want to make money off it, which will lead to even higher prices for consumers.
If Tesla succeeds, it's going to establish a manufacturer-operated dealership that vies directly with the existing model, leading to a situation where consumers may value that relationship higher than the one they've had to deal with for so long. Tesla will have an interesting-to-watch dynamic develop between its customers because the relationship will be direct -- right now, every other manufacturer establishes indirect relationships through the dealer proxy. In the Tesla-operated model, there will be no way for dealers to compete with the Tesla dealerships being the only one's with the new cars--this isn't like competing with the Honda dealership across town.
If the Tesla dealerships succeed and consumers take note, dealers would rightly fear other manufacturers following in its footsteps and setting up some trial direct dealerships. If that succeeds ... well, we can all see where that will lead. However, despite that kind of hopeful scenario, I think it is an irrational fear. Most manufacturers rely on dealers to more evenly distribute the risk of producing and selling expensive assets that require a lot of space (floorplan isn't free, and it's a significant dealer cost (which is why you should always buy the oldest car on the lot (measured in # days it has been in dealer inventory))). I seriously doubt automakers are very interested in taking on the work and headache of setting up more distribution networks and doing all of the various things dealers do now that actually serve their local markets. It seems more likely that they're trying to put out the wrong fire here.
Lastly, I'm not sure if this is what you were getting at, so apologies if it's just a longer stating of what you meant. Your comment was ambiguous as to what kind of success you think the Texas dealers are concerned with--ramping up the production facilities successfully so Tesla has enough cars to sell into the Texas market, or winning the fight to sell directly to consumers.
That was a very well written explanation of what the dealers are doing (and why). Thanks for laying it out so clearly.
| [F]loorplan isn't free, and it's a significant dealer cost
| (which is why you should always buy the oldest car on the
| lot (measured in # days it has been in dealer inventory)).
I realize this is a little off topic, but can you go into more detail of why this matters? If a dealer has N cars taking up space, why do they care whether I take the one that came in yesterday versus the one that came in a month ago? Selling either seems like it would free up the same space, so how is it different? Are there financial incentives that are at play for them, or is it more that they tend to consider the sunk costs?
More importantly, is that information I can find out and use to my advantage when negotiating?
If a car has been on the lot a long time, then there's not a lot of interest in it. The dealer is more likely to accept any offer just to get it off the lot. For a car that's newly arrived, there's a greater likelihood (or at least a greater expectation) that several customers may be interested, so the dealer is better off waiting to see if someone is willing to pay more.
In it's simplest form, non-excessively peppered with financial terminology and equations:
Floorplan is a line of credit dealers use to purchase their retail inventory. Each vehicle on the lot subjects the dealer to finance charges that begin accruing from the moment the dealer takes possession of the vehicle. So, say that the floorplan fees and interest are $100/day per vehicle (for simplicity's sake). The longer a car sits on the lot, the more profit the dealer is losing on that vehicle per day. Make sense?
Why do dealers care?
If you're being charged by the number of days a car is sitting on the lot, and a customer comes in an looks at a brand new, green car that arrived yesterday, and there is an identical twin in every way that is 400 days old, the salesman is going to push you to check out the older one and say they can make a special deal on it for some reason or another (sometimes they'll just say it's because it's been on the lot for a long time if they're really desperate). If you're paying interest on every product by the day, you want to get that out of your inventory as quickly as possible, because that's where you maximize your profit potential.
Often, you can find vehicles on lots that are marked down lower than other similar/identical cars. This is almost always due to floorplan age (I'm assuming we are only talking about new cars here, because used cars bring in a lot of other variables).
Some dealers operate in a way that they seek to capitalize on volume sales vs individual car sales as a way to both be more competitive and mitigate floorplan costs. These are often the best dealers to purchase from (and these are almost never luxury brand dealers) because they will typically sell every single vehicle at invoice price (or several hundred above), and build their profits instead around manufacturer incentives that pay out to the dealer $N per type of car in a graduated fashion where the payout increases as #s of types of cars sold increases. If you have a dealer in your area that advertises (and shows you the proof) that they sell at or near invoice, especially if that is their standard practice, you can safely assume they are a volume dealer. The salespersons are going to be focused on selling as many cars as they can because they are also making their income based on the number of cars sold, not a percentage of per-sale profits.
Can you use this on the lot to your advantage? Sure. Just ask the dealer/salesperson how long the car has been on the lot.
Is the floorplan cost flat? I ask because if you take into account both sunk costs and the fact that two identical models would have the same floorplan cost per day, why would they care to sell the older car first?
Let's say you have two cars on the floor:
Car A - just arrived
Car B - sitting for 100 days
The cost of the floorplan is $10/day (let's say)
If a customer comes in and buys car A and then car B sits for another 10 days, how is that different than a customer coming in and buying car B and letting car A sit for 10 days? In the end it should cost the dealership the same. It's all about moving inventory, not necessarily moving specific inventory.
I assume I'm missing something here, can you explain?
Well, floorplan financing is a finance vehicle like any other, so terms are different among participating providers. Also, I'm a bit unsure of what you mean by "sunk costs".
Each vehicle ordered into inventory is an advance on the line of credit that has repayment fees and interest. Each vehicle sold then translates into paying the floorplan provider the advance amount + fees.
In your example, I'm unsure of how you fail to see that Car B is already costing the dealership more money. But let's work it out anyway.
Car A just arrived. Car B has been sitting for 100 days.
Car A cost $20,000 and is on the lot for 0 days @ $10/day.
Total repayment? $20,000.
Car B cost $20,000 and is on the lot for 110 days @ $10/day.
Total repayment? $21,100.
If you were the dealer, would you want to lose that additional $1,100? I'm willing to bet it would matter to you.
Complex case:
You're in a floorplan agreement that requires repayment of advances in full (including accrued interest and fees) in n days. You damn well better sell enough specific inventory to cover this without losing profit. The longer specific inventory stays on the lot when you're repaying each period, the more screwed up your numbers become.
It is about both moving inventory and moving specific inventory when that inventory is costing the dealer as much money as 10 other cars that sit on the lot for 20 days each.
Moreover, the typical expected time-on-lot tends to be between 30-90 days. Floorplan terms are usually negotiated for these typical cycles. If a dealer is in a floorplan setup that is built for a 90-day max turnaround, and then has vehicles that sit around for 200+ days, that can add up to significantly higher fees per old car that eats into the profit margin. This is especially important with dealers who are selling based on a profit-per-vehicle basis, as opposed to the profit-per-level basis in use by volume dealers. Last thing you want to do (as a dealer) is strike a deal on a 200-day-old car that you had to strip to invoice price or below to sell, and then repay a floorplan advance + fees that exceed the sales price. It happens, but you still don't want it to happen.
More important still, if a dealer is unable to keep moving inventory off their lot (whether through consumer sales, fleet sales, or dealer trades), then they have more inventory eating up their floorplan, diminishing the amount of inventory they can continue to purchase to replenish supply.
Now, to balance all this out and try to create new profit centers that both put more cash in the bank and provide another opportunity to make money off a potentially negative car sale, we have the Dealer Finance Officer. An absolutely disgusting professional. But that is a different kind of discussion. You may already be familiar with how finance officers help increase dealer profits-per-sale.
> Car A just arrived. Car B has been sitting for 100 days.
> Car A cost $20,000 and is on the lot for 0 days @ $10/day. > Total repayment? $20,000.
> Car B cost $20,000 and is on the lot for 110 days @
> $10/day. Total repayment? $21,100.
I still don't know if I see the difference between the two. We're at Day N (where Car A has been there 0 days and Car B has been there for 110 days). If we sell Car A but not Car B, on Day N+1 we will pay an additional $10 in financing. If we sell Car B but not Car A, on Day N+1 we will pay an additional $10 in financing.
It doesn't matter which bucket we put the additional marginal cost of keeping a single car on the lot, it's the same overal expense to the dealership. Unless the marginal cost increases for a car over time, which, for all I know, it might.
The point is that it matters very much to a dealership and they see a significant difference between the two.
Dealer staff aren't usually trying to look at overall expenses--that's for the accountants to bother with--but the profit/loss per vehicle. This is enforced by nearly everyone's income (on the sales and finance side of the business) being determined on a per-sale basis.
Simplistically, each car on the lot represents a loan. The longer it sits there, the higher the fees & interest paid. Dealers want to move each unit as quickly as possible to keep the repayment fees as low as possible, and to prevent eating up dealer holdback, floorplan assistance, and other incentives. Nearly all of these are calculated on a per-car basis. If it did not matter to dealers, they (and their salespeople) would not know how long the cars stay on the lot--because it directly tells them how much money they're losing per day on that vehicle. Moreover, nearly every salesperson and manager at the dealership know exactly which cars are the oldest cars on the lot, in rough (if not exact) order of age.
The various ways dealers make money--holdbacks, incentives, rebates, floorplan assistance, inflated MSRPs, documentation fees, etc.--all exist to offset the expected costs of doing business--floorplans, commissions, taxes, regulatory fees, etc.
When Car A hits the lot on Day N, the dealer is sitting on 100% profitability from the sale (let's just assume 0 haggling & they get sticker price + all their fees, etc.). Each day the car sits on the lot, they drop further from 100%. The dealer and salespeople are highly incentivized to sell for as close to 100% as they can.
Beyond that, a dealer is in a very unhappy position when the cost of having Car B on the lot is high enough that it begins decreasing the profitability of other cars sold. How does occur? In simplest terms: Car B is on the lot long enough that it's actually eaten through all the cash assistance available to the dealer for Car B, and is now eating through the cash available on Car A.
Let's say the dealer loses 1% profit per day on the lot. It takes 100 days to reach 0, obviously. On day 101, the dealer is now at -1% profit, and that has to come from another car on the lot. It's not unheard of for a car to be on the lot for 300-400 days. I've rarely seen much over 400, but it happens (especially with oddly configured models). In our simple, imaginary scenario, that 400-day-old car has eaten through not only its own profit, but that of 3 other cars.
When you arrive on Day N and Car B has already been there for 100 days, the dealer is significantly further from 100%, and is going to be more willing to bend further to move Car B than s/he is to move Car A, which is sitting on 100%, and whose profit the dealer is strongly interested in preserving.
There are further factors often at play here, as well. Say you are a Sales Manager at the dealership. You have a salary, but on top of that, let's suppose you are paid bonuses based not only on number of cars sold (like salespeople), but also on average days-on-the-lot. The better you are at moving your inventory, the more you make. Have a few cars sitting on the lot significantly longer than the others? Well, now your bonus is fucked up.
The longer a car has been sitting on the lot, the higher your possible chances of working out a better deal purchasing that car. Once a car hits a certain age on the lot, the dealers may even dip into their holdback and other assistance dollars to get the thing moved.
Note: I am not attempting to suggest that the dealers are behaving entirely rationally. I'm just pointing out that these things matter to dealers, who typically look at everything on a profitability-per-car basis.
Disclosure: I know enough about bonuses from selling the oldest cars on the lot to feel confident in saying that lot age matters very much to dealers in a number of ways--enough so that they're willing to pay a salesperson more to sell the 400-day-old car than the 20-day-old car. It matters. The 20-day-old car might make you $300. The 400-day-old car could make you $1,000. When John and Jane Doe walk on to the lot to find their new sedan and you have almost exactly what they're looking for in a 400-day-old model and exactly what they're looking for in a 20-day-old model, which one do you suppose you will try to sell them?
>This is true. However, are you actually arguing in fact?
The whole point of arguing in fact is that you can prove someone wrong! The poster makes specific claims and you rebut them -- if I cared enough, I could do some investigation and see who is correct.
That's not true when an argument consists entirely of a metaphor.
And the whole point of my question (re: arguing in fact) was that the parent was not arguing with facts, but was advancing suppositions with no provided factual basis. I was not rebutting any claims made.
To that end, and as I stated clearly, I did the same, offering guesses at what might be going on in the dealer opposition based on experience working with dealerships before. But, ultimately, even my surmising lacks evidence, and so neither of us are arguing with facts--we're simply not advancing a metaphor.
EDIT: Attempting to clarify that my comment was not intended to dispute anything the parent said, but to add another potential view. Apparently I misunderstood the parent's meaning of the phrase "argue in fact".
Good grief. I said "argue in fact", not "with facts". The point is to have a discussion about reality, using concepts from reality. Clearly you see the value in that becuase as shardling points out that's exactly what you did.
I don't see why you are willing to discuss the specifics of car dealership gamesmanship in Texas yet demand that I do so within the framework of an analogy to self-healing neural networks.
Basically: you're strawmaning like crazy. Stop it.
Seriously? Strawmaning like crazy? How so and where? I've set up no straw man here.
Your phrasing "argue in fact" was ambiguous to my reading, which is why I asked what you meant. And yet I didn't dispute or oppose anything you said. All I did was point out that, just as I was about to do, you were making some guesses at bets/motivations as an outsider. Since I'm not refuting anything you say, how can I be proposing a straw man?
Relax, friend. I made no demands that you discuss anything within the framework of an analogy to a self-healing neural network. Moreover, I was replying to shardling's comments that there specific (implicitly factual) claims made that could be determined correct or not with some investigation if he cared--to which I simply pointed out there were no factual claims made, but that we were both positing potentialities and guesses, not factual claims.
Can we take a step back and see there was an apparent misunderstanding of intention? We were not having a disagreement.
Maybe I am not understanding the meaning of "massively oversubscribed" but I thought it meant that the demand significantly exceeds the supply. 2 months to deliver a car is a decent stretch of time considering you can go to just about any dealer and drive away with the car you want. And if they don't have it on the lot, they'll find it and trade with another dealer within a day or 2. They all have inventory. I take it that Tesla doesn't keep a lot of inventory on hand.
Elon has said that demand will outstrip supply for the next several years--but six to eight weeks is pretty much normal for any custom built car from Ford, MINI, BMW, Mercedes, etc.
If the Texas Auto dealers were smart, they would buy some lobbyists to give extra incentives to Tesla to bring them on board with the corrupt system. For example, the dealerships selling the Tesla vehicle at no cost, or maybe even provide an additional $3000-7000 tax credit only for Texans. Or perhaps giving Tesla a bushel of cash for every Tesla sold (temporally) through dealerships.
Then when Musk is on board and massive profits streaming, the credits will revert back to burdens on Texans. The cancerous dealer network remains with us for another few decades until the next chance at a disruptive technology to remove it.
Car Dealerships should go the way of newspapers. Imagine if newspapers used their financial might to squish the Internet when it was just a wire between two research facilities? If newspapers hired lobbyists to create laws making it illegal to route around newspapers, then could they how long could they have delayed the internet?
That's really the operative phrase isn't it? I think we've already established that some people aren't above burning down their own house to evict an unwanted guest. As it has already been pointed out though, Texans are good at one more thing: Voting people out.
You're getting to the real heart of the problem though. The dealers are taking the retro-futuristic approach the newspapers didn't take with the internet. But then the newspapers didn't know just how disruptive that wire will become either.
Oh dear god, this is overwrought. Elon Musk is not the righteous cause, and everyone opposing him is not the devil, and this is not some dramatic showdown (to paraphrase a line from Serenity). I support changes to the dealer system, but when you start the arguement by suggesting your opponent is akin to a cancer, you're not showing any interest in that. If the dealer system changes, it should do so for everyone, not just Tesla.
The dealer system cannot be salvaged, it is using the law to subvert Justice. You are part of the cancer by suggesting we try to massage the cancer instead of removing it as the useless appendage it is that only hassles customers and provides no useful service other than putting up a barrier to buying cars at the expense of people who want to buy them.
When I see a thug standing by the pool of water, and punching everyone who comes and gets water for their lunch money, I don't enter a dialog with the thug for proposed changes. I remove it, for the good of all.
And all politicians and senators must have their DNA samples taken and posted online, with photo and name, as a show of good faith that it's not a big deal to let some cancerous arm of the government keep your specific blueprint for bootstrapping a human.
By this logic, someone who likes to exercise a lot will have people who tell them them are too athletic. Some people don't like to exercise at all, and others will tell them they are too lazy.
You better pick which side you are on so you can shrug off the people laughing at you.
This ignores the point that the optimal spot on the spectrum is somewhere in the middle, or left of/right of center depending on the situation. This post ignores the fact that a starving artist should be proud of their ways when someone says they are not focusing on money enough. I prefer critically analyzing the substance of the cretique instead of just sticking to my position, and treating their mockery as always non-constructive.
Imagine if a nation who had a significantly worse obesity epidemic going on that was way worse than in the US. And they were pushing to sell seeds to us.
It's kind of like a hobo who is next to death trying to sell you some health pills while insisting that his poor health is not caused by the health pills he has been taking all the time.
My grandmother gave me some advice years ago: "Never trust a skinny chef". If you're buying food to keep people from starving to death, wouldn't you trust the fat salesman to have good product?
It's because of stuff like this that Cloud Computing is not a very good solution, because at the drop of a hat, some user, or someone could drop in a picture of an underage girl showing some boob, or some folder of MP3 songs or whatever, and then everyone starts shouting 'Oh god won't somebody think of the children', and you come back to your data centers are in ruins, locks cut, doors broken in, and all that is left is cat5 cables, and a 7 year legal battle (from another legal system in a different country) ahead of you.
It's because of stories like this that I keep hidden secret offsite offline backups, that only I know about and you would have to torture me to get that info. That way when your entire business is squished from the judicial system of a different country based on the behaviors of a person you don't even know, at least you can salvage what you have and try to pivot and get your stolen income streams back while you enter a 7 year legal battle where you win.
You have to plan for hurricanes knocking out your individual data centers, and you have to plan for legal hurricanes that knock out ALL your data centers. It's part of the new world. You have to be able to replicate, or else the mafia don walks into your shop, and you have to do everything they say.
With prior preparation, you can tell the don you are not interested in his insurance, and then buckle down for the legal/illegal hurricane coming your way.
Many international businesses include over zealous US law enforcement in their disaster recovery plans as a disaster to recover from. US government interference is considered a disaster along side fire, flooding, war, hacking, criminal activity, and so on.
So, sure, store data in a convenient, well run, good value, US based cloud, but what do we do if the FBI raid the data centre the cloud lives in and we lose our data or access to it.
Kinda sad that people actually have to consider that.
The problem isn't technology, it's the states unwillingness (or inability) to adapt laws to the future or reality. Combined with excessive law enforcement where they seem to be compensating for their failure to actually stop technology.
We're talking about computer systems designed by humans? There is no such thing as a perfect solution, just a solution that hasn't shown any downsides yet.
Perfect at the moment... we don't have decentralized personal data storage yet and "hidden secret offsite offline backups" is a big regression in terms of usability.
Encryption is the big missing piece in a lot of cloud computing.
That being said, this is still about the law and not technology. Although I'm confident in technologies ability to provide self-defence.
Right, but you could also get accused of a crime at any time. If police take your equipment, then good luck getting it back. It doesn't matter if you're proven innocent, or if proven guilty, and have served your time. If the police take it, it will gather dust in evidence storage somewhere for years (or mysteriously disappear to show up in possession of friends/family of a LEO).
Cloud computing is a perfect solution for a world which is not run by humans. In the actual world, however, cloud computing is only a good solution for data you don't care about very much.
I keep local backups of everything. The HP Microserver I bought is very handy for stuff like that. If anything happens to my servers (ALL of them) being back online will be a matter of hours/days and not years.
How would that help in a situation like Dotcom's? Their servers were taken and his house was raided. Any backup system at his house would have been taken as well.
But that doesn't really scale to a "solution". Yes, it works for you, or any other technically savvy person. But the average cloud subscriber wants a solution as an ALTERNATIVE to that.
I've got a hp microserver but haven't yet set it up. I've never set up a server from scratch before, do you have any advice or guidance or any good tutorials? Good to hear that they're serving you well though
Depends on what you want to achieve with it. I installed Ubuntu Server, threw and configured SAMBA and a small LAMP server on it and not much more. For getting the backups from the production servers I use rdiff-backup and cron. I'm not using RAID at the moment as it suits me better to just have four big drives.
A friend of mine is running the same setup plus a Plex Media Server and some small toys.
My Twitter and HN handle are the same and my email is on my profile if you have any specific question.
Thanks for the info, that's kind of what I want it for - backups, general file storage and possibly a development server. I'll be sure to get in touch if I need some advice, the offer of help is much appreciated.
HP claims 22dB. I saw a blog post that swapped the fan and added a variable resistor to achieve 6dB. The one I got at the office is barely noticeable (it's at my feet).
On a home setting a closet would be a good place to hide it and shield any sound from the hard driver or fans.
Just to throw in, my synology purpose-built nas is virtually silent. The drives chatter a bit now because I turned off their automatic acoustic management (AAM), but other than that I cannot hear it unless I am right by it.
> It's because of stuff like this that Cloud Computing is not a very good solution
I think it's important to note that it's not the technology's fault that this is happening, it's built into the way that we execute it. What if cloud storage wasn't just disk or datacenter redundant, but it was provider redundant as well? That way when one provider goes out of business, users aren't affected.
It's still way too early for this to happen (nobody likes turning into a commoditized service), but I think (hope) some day it will.
What technology should do seems to be open to interpretation - it's not surprising those in power have a different interpretation than those who are not.
Sure. That was envisioned as a problem too back when the Internet was created (or maybe I'm just giving too much credit after the fact), so they structured the technology in such a way as to circumvent the problem.
This is the whole "Innocent until proven guilty" thing is being replaced with "Guilty until proven innocent" in the world of web services.
One itch I would like scratched is a cloud service that protects against the Insanity of the legal system. I have a dream that a program or set of hardware can stay online until a judge has ordered its termination. You can't take the thing offline with an ax first, and then give the broken pieces back to the defendant (without anti-static bags) after the judge clears you of wrong-doing. That's not right.
A service where the judicial system can rape your data centers and get all the information they need to convict you, while your income streams remain intact, UNTIL the judge decides you are illegal.
The notion of having a business destroyed upon accusation, and then giving the broken pieces back to the defendant after the judge says: "No wrong-doing here", makes me sick to my stomach. I don't want to give my kids a world that works like that.
I imagine step one for prosecutors will then be to get the judge to specifically order the service shut down, due to hard caused to third parties or some other reason (whether valid or not). It's a common and vital tactic for prosecutors to seize funds of defendants so they can't mount an adequate defense.
I think the only way around that is to get laws changed, or have provisions in place to illegally host your service after it's been ordered shut down. The latter will probably just cause more legal problems.
As I understand it, the trouble is that money isn't evidence, necessarily (while Dotcom's server data would be) and civil seizure of money only applies to the proceeds of a crime. If you're a mob boss, you probably have lawyers and accountants working to keep the illegally-earned money out of your legitimate bank accounts.
This only applies to criminal cases, where the evidence can take months. For civil cases it's closer to "a preponderance of evidence leans towards guilt unless proven otherwise."
I too keep hidden secret offsite offline backups. But there's little to worry about Dropbox or other large US clouds. It's a safe bet that the only judicial system that will squish a cloud will be the US's, for a small cloud or one not based in the US.
Cloud Computing is fine if it uses proper encryption etc.
That few players do this is a market opportunity. If I was running a cloud service there's no way I'd want any ability to tell what data was being stored....
No idea why you are getting down-voted. But you are right. Cloud Computing is fine - if cloud services were properly implementing user sided encryption.
It's a short term issue. When I mean short term it could last at least 20 years.
I earnestly believe that society is trying to find boundaries but technology is updating far faster than a democracy can change the rules.
I live in the cloud now for the reasons like many do: price and features. As much as I want to follow the principles that you have set forth, Drobos and quality hard drives are expensive when I can rely on Evernote, iCloud, Everpix and Vimeo for securing my data at a far cheaper price and less problems.
I don't think maeon3 is saying it's the technology's fault exactly. The point seems to be that, since you have control over your stack but not over government regulations, you should probably do what you can to protect your data or your company's data.
It doesn't really matter. Compare the statistical odds of your vote impacting an election (forget for now the odds of an election actually impacting policy in the way the voters intended) to the odds of you being able to switch your stack away from a cloud service.
since there are millions of different competing interests in electing officials, and passing policies, you always risk not having control over government policies and regulations.
There will always be bad policies and ridiculous regulations. If you are building technology which fails to take this human reality into account, you are building bad technology.
None of that is a particular issue with cloud over any other way of hosting your data.
Of course, there's an argument where the cloud provider or colo is too willing to hand over your stuff, and if you have your own, in-house datacenter, at least you get to tell them to come back with a warrant. But when they do, you're done. Even though it was found illegal, I'm pretty sure the dotcom raid was done with warrants.
If the prisons were focused on fixing the root problem in the criminals, as if they were some sort of refuge for edification, conditioning and correction then a large body of the homeless would commit a strategic crime in order to get there so they can at least get three meals and an opportunity to move up in the world from rock-bottom.
Like slavery in the 18th century, prisons are a necessary evil to punish people who do not deserve rehabilitation, correction or edification. Conditions have to be bad enough so that a large segment of the rock-bottom citizens don't commit crime just to get some hope. Therefore the conditions of prison have to be a few steps less desirable than being homeless, penniless, cloth less, hungry and with no hope of getting out of it.
It's my belief that jails are full of criminals because we don't understand the mental illnesses that brought them there. If we can do whole-brain simulation, emulation, and detection in a client, I think studying the body of brains in jail vs the body of brains outside jail will reveal some remarkable findings. It could be their ethical systems were coaxed into the off position, and we may be able to detect this before a person commits crime. Saying: "You better get your ethical centers back on-line, or we'll have to put you under increased surveillance".
> If the prisons were focused on fixing the root problem in the criminals, as if they were some sort of refuge for edification, conditioning and correction then a large body of the homeless would commit a strategic crime in order to get there so they can at least get three meals and an opportunity to move up in the world from rock-bottom.
1. Prisons as correctional center far outweighs some homeless guy pick-pocketing so that he doesn't have to die tired, hungry, cold, alone on pavement.
2. A homeless guy not dying on the pavement is a benefit in itself.
> prisons are a necessary evil to punish people who do not deserve rehabilitation, correction or edification.
People go to prison for a variety of reasons. Not paying your parking ticket or possessing 5gm of Marijuana do not qualify as "do not deserve rehabilitation".
> Like slavery in the 18th century, prisons are a necessary evil
Slavery was a necessary evil?
> It's my belief that jails are full of criminals because we don't understand the mental illnesses that brought them there.
1. You can believe whatever you want.
2. Stretch the definition of law and everybody is a criminal.
3. The spectrum of things you can go to jail for is so wide the belief that all criminal brains are wired the same way has a low probability.
4. The belief that "criminals" deserve what they get is how all sorts of draconian laws come into being. When the govt. says it tortured a few alleged terrorists, and you stand on the sidelines and cheer, you don't realize you are being instrumental in your own destruction. Tomorrow it can be you getting water-boarded, and the rest of us "good citizens" will stand on the sidelines and cheer.
> The belief that "criminals" deserve what they get is how all sorts of draconian laws come into being. When the govt. says it tortured a few alleged terrorists, and you stand on the sidelines and cheer, you don't realize you are being instrumental in your own destruction. Tomorrow it can be you getting water-boarded, and the rest of us "good citizens" will stand on the sidelines and cheer.
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
What about when the socioeconomic game is rigged against you and has been for most of the last 400 years of American history?
I mean, yeah, poverty is without question a factor--but stopping there feels disingenuous to me. Why are they poor? is then a relevant question, and I think that "because of the racism of old white men" is not the worst explanation I've heard.
OK, but then that's a different issue. It isn't racism in the criminal justice system, and it isn't the criminal justice system's failure. It's the failure of the rest of society.
And even if it is racism originally, it's plausible that it's "because of the racism of dead white men." Two centuries ago they kidnapped millions of Africans and brought them here as slaves. Then they were freed without anyone offering to return them to their original communities in Africa or providing them any resources here to raise successful children. The legacy of that is not going away any time soon even if racism today were totally eradicated, because even in a society with greater upward mobility than we have now, poor parents will always be more likely to have poor children than rich parents.
If what you say is true, then why is this not an explicit part of our criminal justice system? Why are there no laws and regulations which spell out the brutalities that prisoners should be exposed to? Why is the process not formalized, institutionalized, documented, and routine?
Why has there been no public campaign to repeal or modify the 8th amendment to the US constitution (banning cruel and unusual punishments)? Or to set new legal precedent in the UK to invalidate the equivalent protections in the English/British constitutions? If it is such a foundationally important part of a well-functioning society then why is it not being talked about and debated above board?
The law of the U.S. and other countries is full of such two-tiered systems, i.e. what is written and what is well-known, e.g. "Don't ask, don't tell". All human society works that way; we learn it at home and at school.
There's a guy currently in solitary confinement serving time for felony hacking. The hack? Executing GETs against a public API. He got a 41-month sentence for that.
I am hoping this is satire and you aren't seriously arguing that "prisons have to be barbaric otherwise the homeless and the destitute would use them to avoid starvation".
> people who do not deserve rehabilitation, correction or edification
Wow. I know it's a matter of philosophical debate whether such people actually exist[0]. But it's a matter of wilful ignorance to pretend that anything but a tiny minority of the US prison population falls under that category.
I think they don't. There's people that would be a really bad idea to ever let back in to society (say, a Breivik) but for a lot better reasons than "does not deserve rehabilitation/edification". Then there's people for whom rehabilitation is pointless because they're so mentally deranged they're not going to get better. Obviously such cases are the minority and very rare.
Also, did you consider to think: If your homeless prefer prison, that might not be because your prisons are too pleasant, but rather how you treat your homeless? Why are they left without "an opportunity to move up in the world from rock-bottom"? It's a ridiculous argument, "we can't treat group X humanely because then group Y who we also don't give a chance will want it too"--what?!
It's those lowest rungs that a society is judged by, you know. Whether the average American has a better life means absolutely zilch as long as you leave your schizophrenics begging and mumbling in the streets, and keep people in solitary the way this article describes.
>Conditions have to be bad enough so that a large segment of the rock-bottom citizens don't commit crime just to get some hope.
The blatantly obvious alternative to this is for the government to provide adequate food assistance and homeless shelters such that you can get the free meals and roof without committing a crime first, in which case there would be no incentive to do this whatsoever.
Devil's advocate here: You can't charge up your car when your power goes out for a few days. Wheras gas stations have generators and gas rolls in on time, supercharger networks and home power drink from the same power grid.
There's a word for all this: stranded and on-the-grid more than ever before.
When power goes out, the city of electric cars also grinds to a halt. And heaven forbid all the people have their cars plugged in ready to charge when the grid comes back on.
Does this mean I need to have a hefty 2 stroke generator with 8 gallons of gas ready to go to charge up the car when the power is out for a few days? You'd probably need a $1000 generator to provide the watts and amps.
A multi-day power outage has happened to me 1 time in my 40+ years. My various internal combustion cars have failed maybe 5 or 6 times. That's a small sample size, but I suspect that overall the grid is more reliable than vehicles (electric or gas) themselves.
In the 1st world I think very few people would ding you for building a business model that relied on a predictable steady supply of electricity. Non issue.
Data centers are supposed to have backup generators and systems in place to fuel them up should the need arise. Can't do the same for every house in a city.
However I agree, building something that depends on the grid is not crazy. For example: TVs, computers, light bulbs, fridges, ...
It's a sad time when people seriously think it is easier to have deep-well pumped, shipped, refined, shipped again toxic substances supplied than electricity.
Use the money you would take to buy your 2-stroke generator and invest it into a bunch of solar panels. Also, donate some money to your local power company, because power outages are not at all a common thing in the european half of the developed world.
Add multi-day electrical outages to the list. During the Northeast Blackout in 2003 you simply could not buy gas for several days in many places because gas pumps run on, you guessed it, electricity.
Actually, I think owning an EV would make me less worried about multi-day blackouts. You can charge an EV from a gas or diesel generator or solar (or wind or...), but a gas car can only run on gas.
If you going to think up worse case scenarios then I could think of few for gas-powered cars too. You can't be always prepared for every highly unlikely corner cases.
What's stopping you from keeping your own generator?
I suppose you'd be effectively limited to the max range of your vehicle from the generator, but if there's no power for 200-300 miles then there's probably bigger problems.
I'm pretty sure the supercharges are hooked up to solar panels for power generation as well as the grid. I'm sure without the grid they won't be able to charge at full output but they should still work.
Being able to use your EV to power your home in an emergency, at least low level stuff like minimal lighting and keeping the freezer frozen, might be awesome. Have a house storage battery fed by solar, too, but the EV could ferry out to pick up charge from a remote location which still has power.
Look at the picture of that line for gas on that web page. I can assure you that that was not an anomaly. It looked like that all over the country. There were probably cars in that gas line which did not fit into the picture. Those cars I'm sure were moving very slowly. At some point the gas station would run out of gas. Then cars would race to the next gas station.
Americans are used to turning on the water faucet, and always having warm, clean water come out of it. They are used to flipping a light on, and if the switch is not flipped again, that bulb burning for weeks on end until it burns out. Once you travel outside the US, especially if it is not somewhere like western Europe or Japan, you begin to see that this is not the case in much of the world. And I'm not talking about the poorest slum in Bangladesh or deep in the Amazon, I'm talking in large cities, in locally middle class surroundings in much of the world. It gives one perspective on such things. Warm, clean water does not consistently pour out of faucets by magic, it requires an infrastructure which a great deal of the world does not have. In the same manner, political troubles, wars, natural disasters and the like have a way of stopping oil shipments. It is not until this stops unexpectedly that most people realize the fragility of such things.
edit: (sorry, the ability to remain anonymous is very important as lives are on the line). You might want to use a throw-away in that case as well because usernames can be tracked.