I kind of automatically assume that any company that can successfully replace a third of their workforce with AI is not doing anything meaningful. I mean, a company that does nothing but write crappy rehashed product reviews could pull it off, or a company that has no plans to innovate or grow could maybe do it by laying off all the sales/advertising people, but otherwise, it seems like a stretch.

So the question, then, is whether this company is genuinely circling the drain with nothing to lose or just has leadership who have no idea what any of their employees actually do.

Ostensibly, yes, I could. I could even use an ancient Mac Mini with a built-in FireWire port to do that. But at some point, the level of hackiness becomes high enough that you're spending all your time dealing with things not working, and that's almost worse than it not working at all. :-)

M1 Max MacBook Pro. The setup involves a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter chained to a Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 adapter, which in turn is chained to a FireWire 800 to 400 adapter, which is then connected by a cable to the device. It's dongles all the way down.

One reason for quarterly reporting is that it gives greater transparency and insight into how a business actually works. Many businesses are seasonal. Most obviously, virtually all retail has its best quarter at the end of the calendar year. But many other types of businesses have key cycles each year that are tied to, for example, the buying habits of their largest customers. Suppliers matter, too; if farms have a bad quarter due to weather or other factors, for example, you're going to want to watch how that impacts food producers somewhere down the line.

Getting Thunderbolt ports isn't the problem; Apple's Thunderbolt-to-FireWire hardware does that, too. Without FireWire device family support in the kernel, FireWire hardware can't be used, period.

I depend on FireWire audio interfaces, so everything from Tahoe on is dead to me for the foreseeable future.

My problem is that I don't do audio recording often enough to justify spending the thousands of dollars it would cost to buy all new hardware, but I do it often enough that I can't upgrade my operating system and lose the capability. It's that really annoying middle ground that Apple really doesn't support well, though to be fair, I've gotten thirteen years out of it after Apple stopped shipping built-in FireWire ports, so I guess that's not too horrible. :-)

I tried getting off of FireWire a long time ago, precisely because I suspected that this would eventually happen. But to keep costs down, my plan was to buy a MOTU LP32 ADAT-to-AVB bridge so that I could keep using 16 inputs from my existing interfaces and supplement that with a MOTU Stage-B16. The problem is, the LP32 has been on permanent back-order for about two years now, with no sign of things improving.

I'm also a late adopter after lots of bad experiences, so I just downloaded Sequoia so that at least I won't be stuck on Sonoma forever. I'm hoping that by the time they stop shipping security updates for Sequoia, either MOTU will have the LP32 available again, someone will have figured out a way to get IOFireWireFamily to build and run on later OSes, or I will have found some other low-cost solution for a large number of inputs. Not holding my breath, though, on any of the above.

More like 1.6x. But they break even by 11k miles in Europe. (The exact number varies by location; this is an average.)

You seem to be under the false assumption that Europe is forcing people to scrap ICE cars. They're not. They're forcing companies to not build *new* ICE cars. This is not changing the number of cars that get scrapped at all. It is ensuring that the cars that replace the cars that were being scrapped anyway are efficient.

No, it doesn't. The break-even point in Europe is about 11,000 miles, which is less than a year. So by one year after they are sold, they have reduced CO2 emissions by as much as was released producing them. There is no "per year for a decade" here, because by the end of a year of driving, the manufacturing becomes effectively carbon-neutral.

So no, you're not adding 650 million tonnes of CO2. It takes 9 months to break even, which means at any given point in time, the average extra emissions from manufacturing each car would be half of that, so add up the extra CO2 emitted by manufacturing all cars as EVs for 4.5 months, and that's how much you've added. Not cumulative. One-time.

But it gets better than that, because you don't stop driving these cars after 9 months. So after that, they're carbon-negative. That means after 18 months, they've used as much as the next 9-month group of cars produced during their manufacturing, and so have those cars, so your next nine months of manufacturing are free. So after 18 months, the total CO2 from the changeover becomes effectively zero. After 27 months, the total CO2 from the changeover is negative by several months of driving by the cars made in the last 9 months. And so on.

The problem is that you apparently still haven't realized that a car gets built once, but is typically used for decades, and that the emissions for manufacturing are tiny compared with the emissions used during their ongoing operation, so even massive increases to the manufacturing emissions result in reductions in emissions over the relatively *short* term, much less the long term.

Churning out the new cars is a drop in the bucket compared with the CO2 savings. Again, nine months after they are made, they've reduced as much CO2 as the excess CO2 spent producing them. Even if we assume that the ICE car wouldn't have been made otherwise (which is not the case), the break-even point would still be only on the order of three years. And after that, they're reducing CO2 emissions more than the total emissions from manufacturing the vehicle. So the time to question sustainability is *after* you transition everyone over to EVs, not before. Doing that now is saving a tiny bit of emissions in the short term while costing you a *lot* of emissions over the long term.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

A large percentage of the people buying EVs have too much income to be eligible for the credit anyway. The median income for EV buyers is $140k, and for single people, the cutoff was just $150k. The purpose of the tax credit was to try to get EVs into the hands of people with more moderate income, but I suspect its main effect was cause people to lease the cars instead of buying them, where you could weirdly still get the credit.

IMO, Tesla needs a new CEO. The board of directors keeps trying to pump more money in his direction hoping that it will keep his attention and make him focus on Tesla, but IMO, the damage is done and won't magically go away just by convincing him to shut up and stop acting like a cartoon supervillain. Just two words (Mr. Trump's favorite two words), and the company's problems mostly go away.

Socialism with American Characteristics

Iowa's rolling farm fields of coffee

Yes and no. Yes, Sega and Nintendo should talk to each other to figure out how to deal with it. No, that doesn't change the fact that as a non-owner, Sega giving it to a merchant is not adequate for that merchant to gain the right to dispose of it and grant title to it

Again, the merchant's right to grant title exists only if that transfer is done by the legitimate owner of the item or that owner's authorized agent. If Nintendo had done so, then the OP would be correct. If Nintendo had authorized it, then the OP would be correct. But even in the best case, it's legally grey if Nintendo was not involved and can show clear documentation that Sega was not the legal owner, because that would be approximately exactly the same situation as if someone took stolen jewelry to a jeweler and the jeweler sold it.

And just in case someone misreads that, the case linked above hinged on two key facts: first, that the person who gave it to the jeweler was not a dealer, similar to how Sega is not a dealer in Nintendo dev kits, and second, that the company that gave it to that person had an agreement that denied him the right to transfer title in it. So in terms of the material facts, other than the nature of the products themselves and possibly the timing of the events, that case is very, very similar to this one.

In general, law enforcement would expect the owner to be the one reporting a theft. By disposing of Nintendo's property without their permission, Sega likely effectively committed theft. It would be weird for the thief to turn themselves in and expect the police to undo what they did.

And I would argue that if Nintendo doesn't care enough to go to the police to demand the return of their property, then Sega probably doesn't have a right to do so as a non-owner.

No, he's talking about Sega entrusting the goods to the scrap seller. Sega is not a retail merchant of electronics; it's a manufacturer. Entrusting that hardware to Sega almost certainly doesn't give Sega any particular right to transfer the title to someone else.

Nope. That only applies if the owner transfers those goods. What you're missing is that Sega didn't own this stuff in the first place, and therefore had no legal right to transfer it.

If someone sells stolen goods to a pawn shop and someone else buys those stolen goods, they still have to give them back if the rightful owner manages to track them down. This is legally no different, IMO.