It hasn't paid more than the occasional token statement towards being communist for decades now. It's still statist and authoritarian, of course, but it isn't communist.

Except that if no new small cars are being made, eventually the used car market for cars with a decade left in them will dry up.

They'll be stuck buying the huge used clunker that consumes even more fuel now that it's old and a bit worn out.

While the analogy isn't entirely correct, it's my impression that Tesla's cars are the equivalent of BMWs in country, at least for electric vehicles.

So BYD can be like, say, Toyota. Once you're high enough economically, getting a Tesla for appearance's sake starts becoming a thing. Or maybe you actually need the extra capabilities.

I have to point out that it's more "all US vehicles", it is very much not limited to electrics. Hell, I'd argue that there are far more ICE vehicles with this level of monitoring and interference level built in the USA than electrics.

Your "how much to disable" comment? You might as well apply that to any newish car these days.

Remember, it wasn't an electric vehicle where the manufacturer tried to make heated seats a subscription.

And China will happily give your data to the TLAs.

Forgot to state a couple points clearly:
1. An insulated tank full of molten salts is relatively cheap for the energy storage ability. It scales up very well, as the skin of the tank is where unwanted radiation/heat loss happens, and that goes up by the square, while the volume goes up by the cube. IE double the volume of the tank, surface area and heat loss should only go up 40%.
2. Power turbines are expensive, but not that expensive. Our standby natural gas turbines already have them, and having extras, well, it's not bad for a plant otherwise. IE if you have extra turbines, you can take one offline for maintenance or replacement without affecting operations much.

Actually, the latest is to steal a bit of technology from reflective solar thermal systems - thermal storage.

There's a push to switch to MSR - Molten Salt Reactor. There's a number of potential advantages to this, including reducing the pressure of the reactor and enabling much higher temperatures for efficiency. But in the context of balancing supply, if you build one of these, you can also build a relatively giant insulated tank. You fill it with the superheated molten salts, heated up by the reactor. You then build an appropriate number and type of turbines, so you generate the exact amount of steam you need at the time using the heat from the tank.

IE you could have a 4GWt* reactor, putting 4GW into the tank. Then you produce anything from 0-10GWe using turbines as necessary. Your only limit is not letting the tank get too cold(the salt will freeze and the steam won't be hot enough to turn the turbines well) or too hot. If there's a risk of the tank getting too hot, you can turn off the reactor if necessary. Realistically, they can scale the power plant's output enough to avoid it being a problem. If there's a risk of the tank getting too cold, well, time to build another reactor and tank setup. Or if it's a momentary problem, make the tank bigger.

*GWt = GigaWatt thermal, GWe = GigaWatt electrical

The executives putting in more hours could indeed be a move more designed to placate investors and lenders.

That said, it's quite likely that true improvements can be made, though this requires analysis.

Basically, an old management book I read talked about the tendency for executives, management, and employees to tend to lose tract of what's really important, what the true goal is.

For example, a web developer might have the goal of developing a kick-ass site for the business.
The production manager might be focused on keeping costs down for their production line.
The executive might be focused on the next quarterly profit report.

But they all forget that the ultimate goal is not just for the business to make money - but to make money in proper proportion for the investment. By which I mean that if you have $100M in equipment and spend $1M in labor and materials to produce $2M in sales, you might as well pack up, sell the equipment and invest in the market.

All the above goals might be helpful in being profitable but even the most kickass website isn't helping if it isn't driving sales or solving some other need of the company like attracting talent. Keeping production costs down doesn't mean anything if your customers are leaving because your quality is crap. or your required lead times for delivery are so long that they go elsewhere. And producing a profit in Q1 doesn't help if it means an even bigger loss in Q2. Remember, most investors are actually in it for the long run. They don't appreciate you burning the company down to look good momentarily (though yes, there are a class of investors who are just fine with this).

Samsung is so diversified that they make companies like GE and Amazon look focused. To me, it looks like Samsung went through a period of expansion and diversification for the sake of expansion and diversification.

So if I was an executive, I'd be looking to see if the company should be getting out of some of those sectors and product lines. Whether or not some products are being produced using old methods and the production can be streamlined. Does a product need a refresh? Can we fix a product so there isn't as many warranty repairs, so we stop getting beat up in reviews for it and can thus sell more. Is that design team basically spinning its wheels? Etc...

Still a pretty pathetic percentage - you may still help those in need, but a lot of them aren't actually vets.

Well, obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but generically speaking, productivity per hour going down with more hours worked is pretty much universal. The exact form of the slowdown, when it occurs, and how severe it is will vary, of course.

Fixing the bugs introduced because people were working tired isn't true productivity - I mean, it's productive use of the worker, but it's like the broken window fallacy - fewer bugs would be better yet, because fixing a bug can easily cost more time than producing the original code took.

To consider a few different examples:
1. Coding/Office work: Bugs and/or mistakes start creeping in, requiring rework. I've also heard that as you increase office hours, you also start seeing less and non-productive office activities taking place more often. Meetings have their place, but do you need an hour long one with everybody every day? I've heard that these sorts of meetings tend to be the first to go when you reduce working hours.
2. Taxi driver: The obvious one here would be that a tired driver is dramatically more likely to get into an accident. It doesn't take many wrecked taxi cars to make working those taxi drivers economically negative. That's before you include the deaths, injuries, and such. It's part of why there are so many rules about commercial drivers.
3. Factory worker: This is similar to the coder. One mistake and you ruin a part, meaning you have to replace the part and start over, including any machine work done before the mistake was made. Maybe you can fix it, like welding material back in, or grinding to remove material you shouldn't have added. But that takes time as well.
To use some family careers:
Woodworker - finger meets circular saw
Lumberer - misjudges a cut, drops tree on self
Accountant - makes some weird math errors and judgement calls

Hell, consider the epitome of a "manual labor" job - ditchdigger. It should be obvious that a ditch digger at maximum effort can move much more dirt than one that is hardly trying - but they can only sustain maximum effort for a few minutes, while "hardly trying" is doing so so they can last the entire shift. Productivity, as measured in amount of dirt moved per hour, increases as you have them work fewer hours. When one is concerned more about total dirt moved per day? Then longer hours makes more sense, but there's going to be a limit there where you don't get any more dirt moved per hour worked. It'll probably even start declining.

So yeah, it doesn't really matter - brain meat and physical meat gets tired from work. They need that time off to work right. Mental work can be spread out more easily, perhaps.

The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.

There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.

So we need to look for alternative explanations.

The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)

Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.

The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.

The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.

The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.

When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.

... are we putting blatant pseudoscience on Slashdot? Are we becoming Natural News? Ir InfoWars maybe?

Some people certainly think it's a problem. Me, I think that it can occasionally be a problem. In that more viewpoints is generally a good thing, a female programmer can bring different life experiences to the table, and maybe catch something an all-male crew would miss.

That said, it's probably not 100% critical to have a female for every project - a military targeting program might have less need than, say, a dating app.

I'm on the military side - The Wounded Warrier project is kind of the same way, lost track of the core mission. Now they spend most of their money advertising to get more money. The actual percentage that makes it to wounded veterans is pathetic.

I think I've seen the special effects software mentioned a few times, probably as a form of advertising for it.

But before photoshop (and similar) you had "airbrushing" and more. The tools just changed and became more sophisticated. Anything I see in a magazine, for example, I figure was heavily edited.

There's certainly no need to mention your special effects and finishing tools.

I remember some of the early "real crime" shows where they'd show information about some crime, do a re-enactment of the theorized crime, and such, while asking for help solving the case.

They routinely got lots and lots of calls from people spotting the actor in the re-enactment doing the criminal acts. Despite publishing what pictures they had of the actual suspect and clearly putting before the re-enactment "Warning: These is a re-enactment with paid actors, not the actual people involved". The warnings clearly weren't enough to disassociate the actors from the actual criminal in many/most people's minds.

So I can easily see the need to change up faces, even if that isn't the exact situation here.