Well, that's the point where they get totaled by the insurance company, sure, but then they get sold as salvage. Somebody buys them. If they're recent enough, chances are they still fix them up and sell them, and if they can't fix them, then they get turned into parts for repairing other cars. It's not like those cars suddenly become scrap metal at that point, with the exception of the damaged body panels.

I mean, I can still buy a remanufactured battery for a 2012 Tesla thirteen years later. Arguably, you could say that the model is still in production, by some definition of "model", or you could say that a remanufactured battery isn't being manufactured, but the fact of the matter is that this is where those salvage vehicles' parts often end up.

The real question is whether it makes sense to do so. And at some point, it doesn't. The battery is a big enough expense that a lot of folks won't bother to replace it when it fails. That number isn't zero, though. And a lot of car dealers will do so when they take them in on trade.

Correct, though if new packs exist for that model, you can likely pay the difference and get one. You can even upgrade to a larger battery in some cases. For example, probably every Model S or X from 2012 through 2020 or so has a battery with the same frame, connector (give or take swapping a plastic plate with the one from the old pack), mounting (give or take swapping out a plate), etc. Some folks have actually put a 100D pack into a 2015 Model S 70D.

Android tries to attract high-end customers, and they do attract some, but the fact remains that Apple is a prestige brand, and tends to own the lion's share of the high-end market. Blaming a company for being unable to hold enough of the high end is a much weaker argument than blaming a company for using (or, arguably, abusing) its market position to limit competition in a related market.

If by "fine", you mean manually switching between networks, then yes, it is "fine". You could kind of do that with Google Fi on an iPhone, too, IIRC. But that's hardly comparable to what the experience should be, which involves seamless switching based on signal strength, GPS location, possibly whether there are critical long-running network connections open, etc., and maybe even tunneling via a VPN over top of those networks so you don't drop connections when you switch. I mean, doing it right involves a metric f**kton of OS support that Apple hasn't shown a willingness to provide.

Android is a fragmented pile of dozens of companies, the largest of which has maybe a little over half of Apple's marketshare, and they go down from there. As long as Apple owns roughly half the market and refuses to allow seamless network switching software, the situation likely won't improve much. If they had an eighth of the market, things would be different, because they wouldn't be particularly relevant. If they loosened up their grip on apps, things would be different, because the tools would exist. But the status quo leaves a lot to be desired, IMO.

And let me be clear, I use an iPhone every day, and I use a Mac every day. I'm not saying this because I hate Apple. I'm saying this because I think Apple is doing something stupid, and they need a course correction.

I'm not convinced five is enough unless all five have solid nationwide coverage, or unless the carriers are forbidden from owning towers. In any situation where you have only a couple of nationwide carriers, the weaker carriers quickly degrade and consolidate, and then you're back to one or two usable carriers.

The problem is that building a good nationwide network is expensive, and the carriers are too busy competing with each other in the densest areas for anybody to bother providing good service everywhere. So you have good service on Verizon in one spot, good service on AT&T in another spot, and good service on T-Mobile in another spot, but none of them have good service everywhere. This is why infrastructure is best handled by a giant nonprofit monopoly, ideally as a joint venture among all the service providers, or as a government-run nonprofit, or some other similar form, with access leased to anybody who wants to pay for it.

If our phones could transparently roam on every network, we'd have amazing service everywhere. There's solid coverage for pretty much the entire U.S., with the exception of a few areas up in the mountains and maybe some large national parks. But because you can't, you're stuck with crap. And because the phone networks have to all have high levels of coverage in the densest areas, there's an incredible amount of wasted redundant infrastructure in those places, and damn near none in other places. It's grossly inefficient.

If you really want to know who I blame for this mess, it's Apple. You see, Google tried to do a really great thing with Google Fi. It could roam between multiple carriers. That never worked on iOS. Apple wouldn't make it possible for such things to happen, which pretty much killed any chance of Google Fi branching out to more networks, because the folks who would be willing to pay a premium for that would mostly be iPhone users. And so after Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular merged, Google Fi became a single-carrier network again, and nobody is even trying to do anything like that anymore.

If Apple had made it possible for carriers to do those sorts of complex roaming setups on the fly, then other companies probably would have followed in the footsteps of Google Fi, and we'd have more true un-carriers that roam across multiple networks. You'd pay a bit more, but they'd work so much better. And at some point, you'd likely reach a point where nobody is still using the carriers directly, instead choosing to buy from resellers that provide a better value, and the carriers would start reducing service redundancy and start improving service in lower-density areas.

Unfortunately, as long as Apple has such a stranglehold on the U.S. cell phone hardware market and refuses to play ball with MVNOs that want to do carrier switching, we'll continue to have to put up with the sh*tty oligopoly mess that we have now.

Mind you, Apple isn't the only entity to blame, but IMO they definitely played a big role in propping up the big megacorp carriers in a negative way. Trump's thoroughly regulatory-captured FCC also deserves a lot of blame for allowing the Sprint/T-Mobile merger to happen, and Biden's still-too-weak FCC for allowing the T-Mobile/U.S. Cellular deal as well, though at least the tower operations and most of the spectrum remained in a separate entity in the latter merger, which is to say that they didn't botch things up as badly.

Humans do things for strangers and get nothing in return all the time. It's actually a big part of what makes us human.

I never said that. That's one of a very large number of disadvantages to a workplace that is almost all men. Treating the women in the workplace badly is a second disadvantage. Not having the female voice in product design is a third. There are lots of other reasons. But you're kidding yourself if you think that not being able to socialize with people who might actually become more than colleagues isn't harmful psychologically, particularly in the tech world, where folks are often pressured to spend way more time on the clock than people in most other industries.

That's because your understanding of the issue is superficial. Lots of those programs begin in high school, which is way too late.

It has worked. Over twenty-five years, we've gone from tech being 90% men to 70% men. If you don't call that "working", then I'd love to know what metrics you consider relevant.

I'm not. I'm saying that a lot of people aren't comfortable with things because they didn't start getting used to them at a young enough age, and that if more young girls got the same level of tech experience that boys have, the outcomes would likely be different.

Wow. And you're calling me sexist. Rolling my eyes here.

Having the same opportunity to play video games doesn't make them want to play video games. And this assumes the opportunity is the same, which probably isn't true. Either way, that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they could become interested in tech in other ways that don't involve video games, which makes it entirely moot.

And this comment in the context of an article where a CEO is literally saying that people should go to the office for more social interaction... priceless.

Never said that, nor anything like that.

I have a lot of family who are nurses, and there's actually quite a bit.

I never said they had to go to work. I said that they had to find women. I mean, I guess they could adopt, but...

Correct. But show me how a man can have a baby without a woman, and I'll show you a miracle.

Sorry, but there is ample evidence. You just aren't willing to listen to anything that disagrees with your preconceived notion of how the world works. You're still wrong.

Other than a brief period when T-Mobile was really shaking things up, we haven't had much competition in the cellular phone market. Service now on T-Mobile is worse than it was on Sprint before the merger. AT&T is and has always been a disaster. This leaves Verizon as the de facto major carrier outside of major cities, and even in many parts of major cities.

Calling this competition is a joke. There's Verizon, and then there's everybody else eating the scraps that fall off the table.

But the neat thing is that there are apparently so many business phones and car entertainment systems out there that there are about one third more subscribers than there are people over age 10 in the United States:

• Verizon: 146.1 million
• AT&T: 118.2 million
• T-Mobile post-merger with Sprint: 132.8 million
• Total: 397.1 million

These numbers should lead one to question... well, everything, really.

EVs break even after something like 15,000 miles, on average. So unless you only drive your car 3 miles per day on average, you're gonna pass the break-even point within 15 years.

That said, either their analysis or the Slashdot summary thereof must be at least slightly flawed, IMO, because otherwise, they could not come to this conclusion:

That's simply not the case when you factor in the harsh reality that a majority of owners won't replace the battery when it eventually fails unless it is still under warranty. To do the math, if you have a car that has a 300-mile battery and a second car that has a 150-mile battery, if you drive it until the battery fails, assuming cycle count is a strong indication of failure rate (and I believe that it is), the car with the 300-mile battery will have gone twice as many miles, on average.

There's just no way that the environmental impact of the 300-mile car is twice that of the car with the 150-mile battery, because that would basically mean that the rest of the car must have zero material that gets mined, zero manufacturing effort, zero mass causing increased tire wear, etc. This is a nonsensical theory.

IMO, encouraging the use of smaller batteries is counterproductive, at least until we get to the point where the batteries outlive the cars.

Of course it will. If their kids didn't have porn to look at, they'd have to look at each other.

Oh, wait, they wanted the teen pregnancy rate to get *lower*?

One of my friends commented, "Oh, look. Dollar General is selling food now." It's a silly logo change that IMO weakens the brand. But I'm not going to get all hysterical about it. It's their company, their decision, and it has exactly zero impact on my life.

Communism's problem is inability to scale. When you have a few dozen people in a commune, social norms are adequate to keep people in line, and there are limited amounts of power involved, so power has a limited ability to corrupt the leaders. Scaling it up to a country doesn't really work, so you end up with too many compromises that make it no longer truly communism. It's not that people aren't doing it the right way; it's that it can't be done the right way at scale.

I think you're a fool. Do you honestly think that tech offices are better without women? That having hordes of men with almost zero chance of ever having a relationship because women don't exist are ever going to not be miserable? That people who are miserable are going to do their best work? The software industry is the essence of hell because there's not enough gender diversity. That aspect of DEI is, IMO, critically important for the industry to be healthy.

We've dumped endless amounts of time and money into programs that mostly start a decade later than they should. There should be a programming thread that starts in about first grade, lacing logic-related subjects, giving directions, spatial reasoning, and other skills that are related to CS, adding progressively more code-like behavior over time, in much the same way that kids learn math today. By the time they get to high school, they should be able to write real-world code in a useful programming language.

My strong belief is that girls just aren't exposed to it in the same way. Boys play a lot more video games, and are exposed to tech a lot more at a young age, and they see it as cool and fun. Girls mostly don't do that. And as long as that is the case, and as long as programming isn't taught as a mandatory part of the education system, you're not going to see any gender balance in tech, because they won't have that spark that causes them to try it in the first place.

More than that, though, if women really are fundamentally different and won't take an interest no matter what we do — if we get CS into the curriculum and it still doesn't change the gender balance — then we need to drop all pretense about forcing people into the office for socialization reasons. Either the office is a place where you can meet people of the opposite sex and get to know each other or it isn't. If it isn't, then every extra hour you spend in the office is an hour you can't spend meeting someone who will make you happy, and the societal harm from that is huge.

See above.

First, they have to become dads. When the workplace is too gender imbalanced, that's hard.

It's not exactly the same. Hospitals have historically been about 70/30 women to men (not all the staff are nurses). Twenty-five years ago, 91% of tech workers were men. After 2.5 decades, all of those programs have driven that number down to probably 70%. The programs you seem to believe aren't working actually are working. Things aren't nearly as bad as they used to be. We're just not there yet.

They do. We don't, because this is a tech site, but people in those fields do. Of course, the biggest reason that there aren't more male teachers is because our society is so screwed up that a lot of people automatically assume that a male who wants to work with kids intends to grope them, so that gender imbalance is probably not going to change unless you fix our paranoid society first. But the rest of those fields, sure.

Anybody who goes through college can be an administrative assistant. There's no special training for that. And the main reason that there are fewer stay-at-home dads is because the men tend to earn better salaries, so if only one parent is going to work, it's not the wife. If you want more stay-at-home dads, you have to start by making salaries more fair.

Yes, they are different. But they each contribute different perspectives. Having more women in tech tends to result in better products that work better, because they reflect those more diverse perspectives on how the tech should work. The same is true for having more minorities. This has been shown in study after study. It's not about an oddball philosophy claiming that people are equivalent. Rather, it's the exact opposite — a learned understanding that it is our diversity that makes us great.

If women or minorities are less attracted to CS as a field, that still wouldn't diminish the need for their voices; it would just mean that achieving that diversity of voices is harder and requires more concerted effort.

What you're describing isn't DEI. It's a right-wing caricature of DEI.

Unfortunately, yes, this. The harsh reality of DEI is that any push to hire more minorities, women, etc. at one company comes at the expense of other companies, because it doesn't address the real problem, which is lack of diversity in the hiring pipeline, which is caused by lack of diversity in the graduation rate, which is caused by lack of diversity in choosing a major, which is caused by lack of interest, which is likely caused by lack of exposure at a young age.

And worse, by making one company more diverse, you're potentially making it even harder for minorities, women, etc. who work at other companies that are less diverse, creating even more negative sentiment towards the industry that makes fewer women, minorities, etc. consider that as a career path.

Useful DEI initiatives involve things like going into underprivileged neighborhoods and giving out computers and teaching kids to code or do robotics, programs that encourage young girls to take an interest in coding, etc. These things will result in real improvements to the diversity of the industry. And analyzing pay rates to look for signs of inequity is also useful. And looking for policy changes that would make it less likely for particular subsets of the workforce to drop out of the workforce is also useful. But that's not what I think of when I hear "DEI", and half of that stuff doesn't even fall under the DEI umbrella at most companies.

Yeah, and in that context, this comment by the exec seems like gaslighting:

After all, there are, to within the margin of error, no new college hires coming in. There's nobody completely lost, because all the jobs that they could do are either being replaced by AI or being done by a much smaller number of people using AI. So the main reason he gives for returning the office suddenly dries up in this new economic reality.

The rest of his comments read like someone non-technical who thinks that people learn technical skills by watching other people do them. That works for learning management skills. It does not work for technical skills, or at least not at the water cooler. Water cooler conversations in tech fall into one of two categories: A. things that have nothing to do with work, B. things that should have been an email to document what was discussed. Doing it orally in the office just reduces efficiency, both by making miscommunication way more likely and by increasing the odds of forgetting some important point and doing it wrong.

There is value in human interaction. But we have that on the screen already. There is some value in in-person interaction, but there is no value in giving up an hour or more of your day five days per week to drive into a distant office. Once a week, sure. Five days? No. And this is doubly true when most or all of the coworkers who are working on your specific project are working from a different office halfway across the country in a different time zone, which is quite often the case in big companies.

If people could work from a shared location that's five minutes away, and actually interacted with people in a meaningful way, they wouldn't resist coming into the office nearly as much. But this is approximately never the case, in practice. Instead, we drive long distances to sit and stare at a screen that's not particularly different from the one we have at home, to remotely talk to the same people that we could have remotely talked to from home, to eat food of lower quality than we have at home, and to interact with people almost entirely for social purposes, which we could do just as easily anywhere.

IMO, there are really only two options that make sense:

• Spread out these big companies across a bunch of different offices that are close to where clusters of your employees live. Defragment the teams over time so that most of your interactions involve people at the same office.
• Treat travel time as part of the workday, and allow workers to work fewer hours in exchange for doing so.

If you want us to come in to work five days per week, fine. Move the office or pay us for the time we waste because of your poor planning.

Given a choice, I'd gladly deal with ten people who are overzealous at fighting for their coworkers, friends, and neighbors to be treated fairly (the folks you're calling SJWs) on my team over even a single person who berates their coworkers rather than helping them learn to do better, without the slightest hesitation. The first group may be a pain in the ass if they feel you're doing the wrong thing as a boss, but at least they're a pain in the ass for a good reason. The second group is just a pain in the ass, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Again, bullying is not leadership. You can bully people into doing a mediocre job, and you can even bully them into spending long hours to do a mediocre job faster, but you can't bully them into enjoying what they're doing, and people who don't enjoy what they're doing aren't ever the best they can be. Bosses who learn that lesson can lead everyone. Bosses who don't learn that lesson struggle to lead anyone.

I can't speak to the pre-NeXT Steve, but the post-NeXT Steve was known for being extremely demanding, and expecting a high level of competence, and getting angry if you tried to bulls**t him, and even for berating people's work, but not for threatening people or berating the people themselves, to the best of my knowledge.

To be blunt, avoiding a tenth of your team because you don't want to deal with them is a guaranteed way to fail as a manager. Part of being a competent manager is figuring out how to manage each individual, and the way you do that is going to differ depending on who you are managing.

Yeah, there can be a point where individuals simply are unmanageable, and at that point, that's where HR comes in. If they are doing their jobs and are not creating a hostile work environment, you should be able to manage them. As a boss, it's literally your job to manage the people you have working under you. If you can't figure out how to manage 10% of your reports, you should consider a career that doesn't involve managing people. This really isn't a grey area. Some people just aren't good at managing.

And denigrating a big chunk of your workforce with slurs like "SJW" really is exactly what they're talking about when lawyers use the words "creating a hostile workplace" in the context of wrongful termination claims, etc. You cannot adequately manage people if you don't respect them. So it's not just bad from the perspective of the company not doing as well as it otherwise could. It's also bad from the perspective of losing very expensive lawsuits, which is why managers who say things like you just said tend not to be managers for very long.

True, but it also often takes people over them jerking a knot in them when they go too far and cause serious harm to their underlings. Contrast Steve Jobs before he got fired for being a tyrant and Steve Jobs after his return. The best thing that can happen to leaders like that is getting fired and having to try again at a new company, and hopefully learning from their mistakes.

Leadership != bullying, and one of the greatest failures in the modern world is people thinking that the only way to lead people is to scare them into doing what they have to do. Because when you scare people into doing something, they're only going to do just enough to not get fired. They're going to keep their heads down and not rock the boat. And when something genuinely is badly broken, they're not going to say anything out of fear of getting blamed for pointing it out. When you inspire people, that's when they do their best work. That is how you manage people — not by intimidation, but by inspiration and by example.

No, 10% were traumatized enough to seek professional help. In my world, if you traumatize ten people so badly in your professional career that they need therapy, you probably shouldn't be managing anyone, and whoever is managing you should be doing everything possible to limit your interactions with other people.

Just saying.