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Comment Re:"Win"? (Score 1) 54

by Koreantoast (#65507578) Attached to: The Military Might Finally Win the Right To Repair
It's worse than that. The military essentially buys everything bespoke. They could easily have asked in contracts for right to repair, but their contracting officers, in an effort to drive acquisition costs down as low as possible, waive those rights to hit their metrics. Its only years later that they figure out how stupid their decision was.

Comment Re:I don't blame them (Score 2) 244

by Koreantoast (#65392929) Attached to: Japan's Honda To Scale Back On EVs, Focus On Hybrids

BS. Tesla is profitable without subsidies (although barely), and they have plenty of capital expenses. Kia and Hyundai are globally profitable.

This is a bit insincere however because Tesla received a lot of government subsidies to get to the point where they are today: in addition to the EV credits, they also received a $465M DoE subsidized loan. Yes, they're profitable without subsidies today, but it's in large part thanks to government support in their formative years. Now, they want to kill all that so other EV startups can't follow in their footsteps.

Comment Re:Nah - it's not as simple as that (Score 1) 238

by Koreantoast (#65391351) Attached to: America's College Towns Go From Boom To Bust
It's even more nuanced than that. For state colleges and universities, the government support question is very true - states have been reducing subsidies for in-state tuition, creating tuitions in some state that rival private schools. For private schools - there is a legitimate question on rapidly growing administrative costs. Some is driven by the government due to reporting requirements for various regulations. Some is due to new technologies - things like having to stand up IT departments to support wifi and more complex data networks than what existed in the 80s and 90s. Some is simply empire building by administrators. Of course, it's hard to even measure tuition costs because its like US healthcare - almost no one pays the list price due to grants, scholarships, and discounts. So lots of questions.

Comment Re:Shouldn't Need to File (Score 1) 277

It's pure politics. Anti-tax activists in the US, led by Grover Norquist, want to force individuals to file taxes to make paying taxes as painful as possible, rubbing the amount in your face. That way, individuals come to resent paying taxes and will fight harder to cut them.

Comment Re:NASA is basically going to shut down (Score 1) 46

by Koreantoast (#64946185) Attached to: JPL To Cut 5% of Workforce, Its Third Layoff This Year

SpaceX's first major customer was NASA, which supported SpaceX to design and build the Falcon-9 rocket and Dragon capsule for Space Station resupply (and, later, for crew launch).

And I wouldn't be surprised if Elon's new objective is to pull the ladder from underneath SpaceX so that NASA doesn't create or support any future competitors to SpaceX's newly established, effective monopoly on the US space industry.

Comment Makes Sense for a Limited Part of the US (Score 1) 152

This makes a lot of sense for a limited part of the United States, specifically the Northeast corridor running from DC to Boston. It's the one part of the country that Amtrak has robust service and is mostly competitive with both aircraft and cars. Yes, it's a limited part of the country, but it is also one of the most population dense and affluent parts of the United States. For example going from downtown Washington DC to lower Manhattan in New York City. By car, you theoretically can make it in about four hours (going up to eight depending on traffic) but with about $45 tolls. You can take Amtrak for ~$40 on the Regional, ~$100 on Acela if you book in advance for a 3-4 hour ride. If you try to fly, you're looking at $90 but it would require transportation to a suburban airport (say DCA) and then transportation from Queens or Newark into Manhattan (which can take another 30 to 60 minutes). Most people I know prefer to take the train although it can be more expensive because the demand is actually high.

Comment The Spotify Strategy (Score 4, Interesting) 81

The AI companies are trying to do the same thing Spotify did. It was near impossible for Spotify to identify every single copyright owner to negotiate and pay royalties for every single song - they had like 90% of the music negotiated and identified through large producers but had difficulty hunting down the remaining 10% of indie publishers and independent musicians. So they actually embraced a class action lawsuit brought forward by a couple musicians. The settlement created a court approved mechanism that lets them publish everything and then the artists have to come forward and collect. It's a great deal for Spotify since they no longer have to hunt for every single IP owner; now those artists have to come to them. From a Planet Money podcast that discussed it with UCLA law professor Xiyin Tang:

In the end, the class action didn't go to trial. The company and the folks who had songs in that tricky 10% ended up reaching a deal. Spotify agreed to pay them for all its past copyright infringements and set up a system to pay for streaming royalties going forward...

So if you think about the author's lawsuit from OpenAI's perspective, maybe the lawsuit isn't the worst thing. The company has used all of this copyrighted material, allegedly, hundreds of thousands of books. There is no good way to unfeed all of those books to their AI. But also, it would be a huge pain to track down every single author and work out a licensing deal for those books. So maybe this lawsuit will let them do it all in one fell swoop by negotiating with this handy group of thousands of authors who have collectively sued them.

Comment EV vs Gas Cost per Mile Numbers (Score 1) 174

by Koreantoast (#64597557) Attached to: British Startup Nyobolt Demos 4-Minute Battery Charging For EVs
As an EV driver, I can give you some quick math here. Assuming $4 per gallon at 25mpg, you're talking about 16 cents a mile. Meanwhile, when I charge my electric car at home, I'm paying about 3 cents per mile ($0.10 per kWh). Assuming you drive 10,000 miles per year, that's a good $1,300 in annual savings just for fuel/power. Now, I recognize that not everyone can charge at home, so let's use one of the most expensive chargers, Electrify America ($0.56 per kWh). There, for my car, it's about 15 cents a mile. So at that point, at best, about $100 annual savings, effectively a wash.

Comment GOOD in Long Run, Tragic in the Short (Score 1) 361

by Koreantoast (#64577415) Attached to: Birth Rates in Rich Countries Halve To Hit Record Low
I agree that overall, controlling the total human population and maybe even shrinking it a bit (until we can expand beyond the Earth) is a good thing - there's no need for us to flirt with the disaster of overpopulation. However, we have the opposite problem that a lot of our key social structures and infrastructure were setup around the assumption of a growing, or at minimum a stable working population - things like social safety nets, medical and education, etc. As the population disproportionately becomes grayer, it destablizes those systems - there isn't enough tax base to support all those living on pensions and social security, there aren't enough doctors and medical professionals to take care of them, etc. While it will eventually solve itself as all those older people die out, the road there will be a massive human tragedy as society struggles to care for all its elderly.

Comment Missed Key Part of Article - the Why (Score 3, Informative) 44

by Koreantoast (#64433774) Attached to: Sales of Samsung's Foldable Phones Have Nosedived in China
The OP left out a key element of the article, that a lot of this is being driven by "patriotic consumption" with Chinese consumers actively prioritizing Chinese companies if they have a "good enough" equivalent product. This, combined with aggressive technology investment, IP theft, and a willingness to sell at massive losses (with government subsidies) to drive competition out business (dumping) spells out long term problems for Samsung, and indeed most non-Chinese consumer electronics providers in China.

Samsung's foldable phones did have the technological edge initially but the Chinese manufacturers have since caught up. Moreover, the geopolitical factors that have brought Samsung's overall share in the Chinese phone market to 0% have also dented its foldable share.

There's a trend of “patriotic consumption” in China as consumers actively prioritize buying from local Chinese companies. So even if Samsung's foldables may be better, a lot of customers would opt for Chinese foldable phones instead. That's something Samsung might find difficult to reverse since there's only so much it can do to convince consumers. As it stands, there may be more pain in store for Samsung in China.

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