They're both questionable. Additionally, the need for a credit check is questionable.

Devices that you are intended [by the providers] to replace every 18-24 months due to either fashion or wear shouldn't cost so much that you would be willing to consider financing.

Even if financing phones on a mass scale somehow makes sense, banks should offer an phone loans (similar to auto loans) that are secured against the phone and/or your account to offer a low interest rate, with no need to go through the phone company for the financing at all.

Will there be a loss of efficiency, though?

At any given point in time, you could take a snapshot of an industry with a lot of competitors and conclude that if you consolidate all of their operations you could reduce redundancy and improve overall efficiency, but your monopoly would stagnate at that snapshot, consumer prices rise, and the monopoly would research improvements at just enough of a rate to be able to undercut newcomers when they pop up. Indeed there is a bit of a disincentive to making improvements as having too big of a margin would make the monopoly an obvious target for newcomers or regulation.

I think it would be quite informative to see a comparison between industries where there is a high degree of competition vs. those where there is a low degree of competition, on the metrics of, total energy to produce the thing over time, consumer cost of the thing over time, etc.

Yeah, I don't see what having a little fun with the archetypal papers says about the state of scientific research. What are we supposed to do, not do research into new things or review old research to try and glean new ideas to test or invalidate incorrect ideas when new data becomes available?

The only concerning part is that there is a paper missing: "We independently tested something everyone already knows and it did what we expected"

Maybe the paperwork to get that info precludes obtaining it swiftly enough to be useful for a rescue operation. Come to think on it.. how would you create a system that would allow rescue workers to obtain consent to retrieve that data and have sufficient safeguards against abuse?

How does Southwest do it, then, or any airline where you don't have an assigned seat?

That second bit should be revisited now that there are 3 billion smartphones in use.

I think we could get rid of time zones altogether and use mean solar time instead (or even apparent solar time). The math is trivial for modern, gps-equipped smart- phones/watches to perform on-the-fly and it would make sundials relevant again. Most people in temperate lattitudes wouldn't be more than 20 minutes off from typical daily activities (and only if traveling due west or east to get to them), and it would encourage knowledge of the sciences by having a closer relationship between the time and the track of sun (a shadow at apparent noon would always point north, everywhere), and sunrise would be the same time for everyone at the same lattitude.

Businesses could then specify open hours in Time + Lattitude (to whatever accuracy they need, but even just whole number latitudes would already be within 4 minutes), or in GMT + exact offset, or just use reference latitudes (i.e. the latitude directly under the sun at the time they open, etc.). I'd probably go with time+latitude as people who live nearby could ignore the latitude component.

Dunno how AutoPilot works, but I find adaptave cruise control to be more taxing than regular. The last car I used it in had 3 distance settings; too close, way too close and OMGWTFWHYARE YOU SO CLOSE. Naturally the last one was the default setting.

On an open road, by the time i'd be close enough for the adaptive adjustment would kick in I've already entirely disengaged cruise control to maintain distance. In stop-and-go traffic it might be nice, but how many models have adaptave cruise control that goes all the way down to zero and stays engaged?

Is that what's driving the graphics cards? I thought that several years ago they started to not be worth it because there were mass-produced specialized ASICs for sale that did calculations vastly more efficiently?

I don't think that will work very well, because when your friend drags you to something outside your comfort zone, you are getting a very special kind of curation: It's something that your friend enjoys enough to want to be able to share that enjoyment. It's probably, in your friend's opinion, the best representatation of whatever it is that they know about, because they're also making a pitch ("enjoy this idea with me"), and the thing that your friend, who knows you, thinks you are most likely to at least tolerate.

How would they recreate the experience of "someone having enough passion about something that they want to share that enjoyment with someone"?

Sure. What's the point of having labor standards if you're just going to have a backdoor where those standards can be violated?

US should require imported goods be produced with something equivalent to (or better) US labor and environmental standards or impose a tariff equal to the cost of meeting those standards and EU should do the same for goods going into their countries.

Do they have a law against raising everyone's rates and then just giving the people who accept the devices a discount?

What they should have done all along is provide an option to generate/replay simulated data to the app via the APIs the app requests. They should do this anyway, for non-privacy reasons (like demoing/testing navigation apps).

The short squeeze had a trigger: better prospects (possibly) for the company due to new leadership and direction. The question that I'm having is whether the wsb buying actually had any effect or if it's really just coincidental to the shorts having already shot themselves in the foot.

No, it has to do with the change of leadership and direction (More online focus, with a new CEO that has experience building an online company) and the shorts didn't adjust their position to account for the slight optimism improvement, and due to the 140% (>200% of "float") over shorting, maybe they even couldn't adjust their position without triggering exactly this situation.

In fact.. are we even sure that the WSB actions are actually causal? Maybe they just like the stock, but don't actually hold enough to move the price and the actual swing was caused by all the shorts tripping over each other, and wsb is a convenient scapegoat that seems happy taking the credit.