Hyundai might have some great EV offerings that are cheaper, but Rivian does not have anything even close in terms of price, unless you only consider Plaid models. You can get a used model 3 for $20k now, which is good value if you put aside politics & CEO.
> if you are in a miles country no one is converting it to km or vice versa
My relatives & friends visiting from Europe often appreciate knowing such values in km/C. There are various other reasons to want to do the conversions too, and sometimes speed > accuracy. It's a bit ridiculous to think that _no one_ is doing these conversions and that shortcuts/approximations like this are not useful.
"Smart" TVs seem to fall into the same category. Manufacturers realized they can make much more money and hit a (much) lower price point by packaging telemetry and using/selling the data. Nowadays "dumb" TVs either aren't available or come at a premium.
> Taking badges out of the cloud reduces points of failure by several orders of magnitude.
I'm not convinced that's true, or at least certainly not an order of magnitude. Wouldn't a badge system hosted on-prem also need a user management system (database), a hosted management interface, have a dependency on the LAN, and need most of the same hardware? Such a system would also need to be running on a local server(s), which introduces points of failure around power continuity/surges, physical security, ongoing maintenance, etc.
All of those things would also be needed by the cloud provider, too. Just because it's on-prem doesn't mean it doesn't need servers, power conditioning, physical security, etc. "Cloud" isn't magic fairies. It's just renting someone else's points of failure.
In addition, you're forgetting the thousands of points of failure between the building and the cloud provider. Everything from routers being DDOSed by script kiddies to ransomware gangs attacking infrastructure to Phil McCracken slicing a fiber line with his new post hole digger.
The remote solution requires all of those same things, plus in addition it requires internet connectivity to be up and reliable, the cloud provider be available and the third party company be up and still in business.
Adding complexity and moving parts never reduces points of failure. It can reduce daily operating worries as long as everything works, but it can't reduce points of failure. It also means than someday when it breaks, the root causes will be more opaque.
Within the building’s on premise hosted infrastructure, are they going to buy multiple racks and multiple servers spread far enough apart so that there aren’t many single points of failure that will bring the badge machine down if they fail?
> This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web.
> About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, ...
I remember double quotes being infinitely more useful 10 years ago than they are today and much more strict (i.e. good for technical searches). You could put actual code syntax into double quotes and it would return meaningful results containing that syntax. Nowadays there is no way I'm aware of to force google to respect every single character within double quotes — it's much more fuzzy now and frequently characters like `!;.,/\|{}[]` are ignored/dropped from inside quotes and the quality of (technical) results suffers. It's the 80/20 optimization problem discussed elsewhere in this thread...
Forget the article; the Fed is currently targeting a rate of 0.00-0.25 as far as I'm aware. That's the same as 2008, which was the lowest target ever.
>As of 30 October 2019 the target range for the Federal Funds Rate is 1.50–1.75%.[10] This reduction represented the third of the current sequence of rate decreases: the first occurred in July 2019. As of March 15, 2020 the target range for Federal Funds Rate is 0.00–0.25%,[11] a full percentage point drop less than two weeks after being lowered to 1.00–1.25%.[12]
>The last full cycle of rate increases occurred between June 2004 and June 2006 as rates steadily rose from 1.00% to 5.25%. The target rate remained at 5.25% for over a year, until the Federal Reserve began lowering rates in September 2007. The last cycle of easing monetary policy through the rate was conducted from September 2007 to December 2008 as the target rate fell from 5.25% to a range of 0.00–0.25%. Between December 2008 and December 2015 the target rate remained at 0.00–0.25%, the lowest rate in the Federal Reserve's history, as a reaction to the Financial crisis of 2007–2008 and its aftermath
For that figure to be true you would have to ignore the requirement that you maintain awareness and control of the vehicle at all times. Autopilot !== FSD. Your car did not "drive itself," you were in control of the car 100% of the time — at least I hope so...
In terms of workload, there is a huge difference between monitoring a system as opposed to hyper-focus and constant micro-adjustments for hours on end. The car stays in the lane as if on rails, passes other cars and takes exits. It also stops at traffic lights off highway and then continues as it turns green (if following a lead car).
I know what I paid for. And I am getting my money's worth given how much it has kept improving. The new FSD Beta looks even more promising. It's swiftly reaching the point where it is a question of liability and regulatory approval.
I see my FSD as watching a new driver about 18 years old. It's not amazing, it's a bit jerky, but watching an 18 year old drive vs having to drive is still a reduction in mental stress. It makes commutes bearable.
Personally, my sell threshold is when my BTC is worth enough (after CG taxes) to pay off my student loans. Given the latest price increases, it's getting very close :)
