kamakazizuru's comments

I'd be curious to see how much of this was simply replaced by coal.

Does everyone also know about the outsize influence China has on Vietnam? If the goal is to de-risk a China / US Trade War scenario and prevent Chinese government from stealing chip tech etc - then you dont get much by going to their pals next door ;)

at this scale and complexity it's definitely one of the earlier projects. Apple does almost nothing "off the shelf" - tools, processes and often even materials are engineered to their specific needs. That's different from the more lego like manufacturing that most electronics require.

This is an article that paraphrases another article from the Financial Times (https://archive.is/iuXAm) both of which lack any real sources or facts from Apple themselves. The only people quoted are a random Bain consultant and Vivek Wadhwa who basically shows up with an opinion whenever anyone says "India" - regardless of whether he actually understands the industry or not.

None of this is to say that the problems might not be real, but bear in mind that China literally started producing electronics in the 80s, a 40 year headstart. And even then, until the early 2000s even in India Chinese goods had the reputation of being low quality, and for good reason. It takes years of experience on multiple levels to achieve the level of production that Apple targets. But it's not unachievable, even in India.

The country has pulled this off in other sectors - IT, Aerospace, Automotives and Pharmaceuticals to name a few.

This is HN so the moment I say IT and India in the same sentence a megathread of outsourcing woes will start to form. But Tech in India is much more than outsourcing for the last 2 decades - solid tech companies serving global and local markets like Freshworks, Zomato, Zoho, BharatPe, RazorPay, Chargebee etc have emerged.

Apple is big enough and has sufficient resources to have known that manufacturing in India will have a learning curve. It's not like they sent a team of 5 engineers on a plane and told them to go get it built. Apple has been operating in the country for well over a decade now - it's only just starting to scale things up on the production side. This will also pass.

no idea why this is getting downvoted. This is super relevant. Germany has had at best handled their Turkish immigrants in a step-motherly fashion and until today you're automatically at a huge disadvantage with a Turkish sounding name / look in a lot of roles and industries. Heck the government even had a plan up until the 90s around "sending them back to Turkey".

So if anything the German media needs to do a way better job of highlighting this.

hmm - I wouldn't be too surprised if Tesla has their electric self driving fleet of cabs out well before that.

2nd / 3rd world notions have nothing to do with GDP. There are plenty of countries (a lot of the middle east for example) that would have back when 2nd and 3rd world were relevant notions been considered 3rd world, these currently have some of the highest GDP (PPP Adjusted) per Capita ;)

I actually didn't state anything about economic grouping. My point is the notion is dated - and you've illustrated that quite well with your comment. The eastern & non-aligned blocs dont exist any more & the first world has split into its own bloc-ish things, yet everyone is a lot more willing to play ball with each other than at any given time in history before.

I agree with pads & tampons being a great invention. Can we however please finally stop referring to "2nd and 3rd world" countries. Get on a plane - things are more similar than different in most parts of the world, stop perpetuating dated notions.

there's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things. This is a great example.

Additionally today they announced that while profits on stock trading (specifically derivatives) can be taxed fully, losses can only be accounted for upto 10.000€

Berlin is trying to freeze rents for the next 5 years and make it possible to retroactively lower rents to the level of 2013.

This kids, is what it looks like when a government is too scared to solve bigger structural challenges (digitization of the beauraucracy, switch to electromobility, better competitive environment for startups, questionable pension system, unneccesarily high taxes that keep leading to surpluses, I could go on) - and instead keep themselves occupied with non-issues that are PR heavy. Schade.

Twist: The coffee drinker is still alive

The study has a major flaw in that it ignores the grouping effect that makes self-driving cars & fleets completely different from chauffers. Shared usage will: - most definitely happen in the case of "errand" like rides. The request to "pick up my shopping from Target" will be clubbed with 5-10 other similar requests and delivered at the same time. - lead to single rides being a rarity, and at best a perk like "first / business class" - bigger cars on the road with more seats, driving autonomously vs the nightmare equivalent of everyone having a chauffeur

additionally - even with the best intentions (in Germany for example, we have a great deposit based system where you return bottles for recycling / reuse at your local supermarket and get the deposit back) - it turns out that recycling just does not work as it should. DW (1) recently did an expose which showed that significant amounts of plastic that's sent through the recycling process actually ends up in south east asia (many companies are now banning this) - where it ends up getting burned / dumped into the ocean etc.

If we stopped it at the source - and forced these companies to spend a fraction of their massive revenues into innovating around more sustainable alternatives (effectively just pricing in the externality that they are currently getting a free ride on). You'd end up with a much better scenario where consumers can still enjoy the products and don't even have to deal with the cognitive overload of sorting 12 different types of waste.

I think one of the biggest coups that governmentes & corporations have pulled off is to let the burden of environmentally friendliness get shifted to the end consumer. This means that it requires masses of people to first get informed, then get mobilized and then start boycotting or putting pressure on these companies to change something. Pretty wasteful cycle if you ask me, easier to price it in much earlier at the source.

(1) https://www.dw.com/en/dumping-plastic-waste-on-others/av-494...

how did you do that?

thanks that helped! the RYG buttons of Mac now overlap with back reload etc - but I guess I can tweak the CSS to make that fit.

Thanks again!

I created a userChrome.css file (including the aforementioned snippets + the namespace line on top) and put it into the folder that Firefox tells me is my profile folder - still see the tabs on top though (Mac OS Mojave - FF - Quantum) - any ideas what could be the issue? I did restart firefox.

Not quite - especially in the commodities world - prices fluctuate and often ships can be at sea for months as the goods they carry are traded back and forth by companies based on energy contracts - in the end - something may have been produced in company X for 5€ and shipped when the price was 10€ - but by the time it arrives at its final destination its worth 50€ because the market has moved / the contract it was sold of was pegged at a higher rate

I hear this bit with "traditional car assembly" often. But is it really true? The powertrain isnt really the only difference - EVs are built fundamentally differently (and especially the Tesla models) from the ground up as compared to ICE based cars. If you look at the base series of most large car companies (on which most variants are eventually based) - they've been around for decades in some cases - making it easier to tweak and adjust over time, so production in and off itself hasnt changed that drastically.

good catch. I wonder how much of that is due to the immense pressure they had in Q1 leading to crazy overtime etc to get that 2270 number. The current average being maybe a more sustainable number that can be ramped up ?

yes, but with a human driver you have someone to take responsibility / punish for, what do you do with an alogrithm to provide justice?