The big three are not vertically integrated. Ford recently was talking about the industry outsources a lot of components. They tell somebody, e.g. Bosch, to make a seat motor, give specifications, then Bosch designs and manufactures it. That they might use that part across multiple models isn't vertical integration. This is also apparently why they can't do software updates like Tesla can -- Tesla IS vertically integrated in all of the ways that matter, unlike them.

As for the few companies today, a lot of that likely has to do with cars back then being a lot less complex than they are today. If you ever open the engine compartment of a 1930s era car, you'll see what I mean. Note also when most became defunct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Much of this added complexity is regulatory -- in those older times, you didn't need catalytic converters for example.

A lot of those companies also produced cars that were either dogshit, butt ugly, or both (I.e. AMC Gremlin.) They were either facing a buyout or bankruptcy in many cases.

He's currently binge watching Leave it to Beaver.

His legal guardian ends up paying for that, typically after he throws a tantrum over something he heard about Trump and breaks stuff.

You guys say that a lot.

https://stratechery.com/2024/e...

But this isn't the kind of thing where you have to wait a few years to find out you were wrong like the ESA did, because the present reality is that this does work, and the way you're doing things is mostly just wasteful. Some details on this, straight from the horse's mouth:

https://www.reddit.com/r/space...

It's ok for bits to flip as long as you've got a plan for detecting when this happens, and how you intend to correct when it happens.

Not only do we have the concept of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement; the current level of disagreement between the agreeing parties suggests that we actually have at least three distinct concepts of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement! Where a lesser leader might myopically interpret having a single agreed-upon set of terms as essential to a treaty; Great Leader understands that American Greatness requires more.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

Honestly, few people on this site are as hilarious as you are. Your main competitors are rsilvergun and drinkypoo.

Obviously. You couldn't be bothered to research the hint I left behind. Or perhaps you missed the hint entirely. Oh well.

I didn't say they don't.

No they don't. It certainly helps to reduce it, but only an UnknowingFool would think a flipped bit or two is necessarily either catastrophic or flight ending/endangering. Even somebody with a basic computer science understanding would understand why that may not be the case.

I didn't say that. What I am saying is there's a faster way to iterate, and even though it has been conclusively proven to work, the ESA still sticks to the old ways.

Actually the private sector has a lot less tolerance for this. Unlike the government, they can't just issue bonds for it and go infinitely into debt.

A few things to unpack here:
- Hubble (not ESA) certainly could, and was, so preceding that with "ESA/NASA projects like" followed by exactly one satellite is just something an UnknowingFool would say.
- James Webb (also not ESA) is rather unique because of its location, not because it's inherently unserviceable. What's more is there's no reason this couldn't change at some point. We may even be able to refuel it to extend its service life. For now, the only real limit is one of feasibility.
- NASA lets ESA have some time for JWST because it allowed them to provide the launch services, even though the ESA introduced three very long delays because of repeated launch engineering faults on their part. By the time it was ready, NASA had alternative launch services available, but it was too late to switch because it was already engineered specifically within the constraints of Ariane.

Even if that were true, it's still an incredibly low defect rate considering the overall size of the constellation. But it's pointless to entertain this because it's not true. To date there have been no more than 350 failed starlink satellites. Given the time Starlink has been around, that is far removed from even one per day. And we don't even know the cause of most of them, which could very well be from debris strikes or natural phenomenon (e.g. solar weather that once took out nearly an entire batch of new satellites, or micrometeor strikes.)

I'd tell you to do some basic research, but that username kind of precludes the possibility of you at least retaining any of that knowledge after you did.

I think you're one of few people on slashdot who's username accurately describes them IRL.

I see you're unfamiliar with the initial failures that Hubble dealt with, because it wasn't operational at the time that it first reached its intended orbital parameters, and required manual servicing just to get it operational. Or the micrometeor strike that slightly degraded JWST. Though JWST is huge compared to starlink birds. And as you said, there's only one of each.

I've noticed how you tend to do that.

Because the only thing that ever goes to space are telescopes. And they get there entirely by themselves. I also believe you don't understand the entire purpose of Ariane, or why it won't actually fulfill that purpose. But do go on.

They did. They tried to play the race/identity card multiple times. And it backfired.

Uh...what? Where are these numbers coming from?

We already do, by the billions. Whether you're aware of it is notwithstanding.

Controlled how? Money doesn't and indeed cannot control it. This has been proven time and time again. We've seen many, many elections where the side that had the largest campaign warchest lost handily. In the case of 2016, it was 11:1 in Hillary's favor. See also Scott Morse, who was literally directly opposed to exactly what his constituency was asking for, outspent the competition handily, had incredible amounts of PAC spending in his favor, and lost handily. Below, I'm going to say "you" and "you guys" because I don't have any political affiliation:

You guys flat out refuse to accept why your guy lost, or at least, that it might, just might be based on the loser's campaign being completely tone-deaf to an issue that's been eating away at its core base, (which I'm not part of, by the way, given I've been doing quite well for myself) if not flat out ignoring and/or telling it its core base to just shut up and deal with it, complete with the most ridiculous advertisements that makes them want to hate the campaign even more than they already did. You can't accept that you just might be wrong on a lot of shit, so instead you want to place the blame somewhere else. Not only does that do you no favors, you guys are hell-bent on breaking the constitution when it's not only totally unnecessary, but it will bite you even harder in the long run than this ever could have.

While you're doing your populist "rah rah rabble rabble" shit against billionaires like morons, some people have done the right thing, and have been trying to figure this one out by actually talking to the base rather than ignoring it (or telling it to shut up, they don't matter, etc) and gathering data. They eventually discovered something, which big shock, has nothing to do with Elon, and nothing to do with billionaires. Instead it has everything to do with what the Harris campaign got totally wrong, which was already following the existing rhetoric of the democratic party at the time:

https://pdxscholar.library.pdx...

Note this bit:

Emphasis mine. In other words: Science. That's also to say nothing of this: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/fiv...

If you don't understand why something like these come off as condescending:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Then you really have no idea why your guy lost. These may as well have been Trump ads. Data wins over ideology any day. You can deny it all you want, but that doesn't win elections.

It was a question, followed by a statement borrowing context from another thread, which I erroneously thought this thread followed from, namely the one where a bunch of people were having a populist "rah rah rabble rabble" about how nobody should be allowed to have a net worth of $100M. So yeah, I'll admit that mistake.

What makes less sense is the way progressives want to tax people based on purely speculative value as if it were dollar bills.

Except it's not money, you just think it is because you don't know (or more likely don't understand/comprehend) what the difference is.

I've been offered exactly this for my shares, and yes, the terms aren't as good as progressives usually think. The motivation behind it primarily is to give you liquidity for everyday expenses without having to sell your shares, which also means you get to keep any gains on them, which tends to benefit you a lot more in the long run, but is not even remotely guaranteed.

You only get somewhere around a fifth or a quarter of the current price of the stock, and if the stock falls in value so much, you'll get socked with a margin call. If you can't pay it, the bank then sells your shares, which violates your equity agreement with the company, which will probably make you ineligible for more shares from your existing grants, and assuming you're eligible for more share grants, your future grants will be lower, meaning you also lose future income.

It's a calculated risk, not a tax dodge or a handout. If you treat it as those, you'll probably be disappointed. In a few posts above, rsilvergun was complaining about how this isn't available to him and people like him -- and that's really for his own good. Same reason the SEC won't allow him to buy into private equity, even if it was offered to him. The law is designed to protect him. In theory, he could do it eventually, but he'd have to somehow prove that he's not a total moron when it comes to finance. But given he's a moron when it comes to virtually everything...good luck with that.

His lockout is 366 days. For 100% of his shares. Full stop.

The employees and early investors get to begin selling shares in as little as a month from now, with the rest gradually becoming available over time, and all of it by 180 days.

This is how it's done everywhere, including for regular employee shares.