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Krispy Kareem posted:It was, but I don't think their stake in Alibaba actually generated any cash flow. So they were still making a profit off their internet business (if smaller and smaller profits). GM's problem was hardly the success of the DirecTV business, it was 100% due to the finance arm they set up, GMAC. It was always profitable, but when regulations were relaxed in the mid-80's, it grew to dominate GM's business. They stopped being a car company that would help you afford an automobile, and became a finance company that happened to make cars. This drove car design towards some strange goals, and benefited nobody. Spinning that off into a separate business was critical to GM's turnaround process.
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Oct 11, 2016 17:15
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Speaking as a guy who knows little about cars, what were these design goals? The most influential goal was that fleet leasing was the most profitable thing for the finance side, and vehicles got designed around maximizing profit over the term of the average lease. This meant extremely cheap to build and maintain with a fixed lifetime, nothing new in powertrain development, artificial feature segmentation, bland appearance, etc. Car development for performance basically stopped, and feature packages for non-leasing needs became branding exercises ( sport packages that were really colour and trim options ). The design of a cars appearance also got crushed into blandness, and design studios lost most of their talent. It's like being a cake baker. Sure, large purchasers are nice for business, but if you start optimizing for them all you end up making are sheet cakes with different colour icing. All your smaller business goes away and your brand fades into obscurity. You need to keep appealing to the different parts of your market, even if some are less bottom line profitable, because the relationship between them in synergistic.
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Oct 11, 2016 20:09
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McPhearson posted:It was a DVI cable and some display port to DVI adapters. The thing is it was successfully delivered, but the tracking info says it was given to the military and is still on the way. shouldn't they have a system that flags errors like something that's been in transit for a month after the delivery date? Tracking numbers are re-used, all the courier companies do this. There is supposed to be a fallow period after delivery, but it's up the company originating the product to manage that, not the courier company, so you can end up with numbers coming up again right away.
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Nov 12, 2017 01:53
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Whiskey A Go Go! posted:How is The Source still in business? I went there for Boxing Day and I greeted by a guy who was just giving off a aura of insufferably with his puns and "jokes" about the PlayStation 4 camo controller. Then he tried to hard sell me a Bell Cellphone and FibreOp internet when I was just trying to pay for the controller along with 5 different "addons" they had on the cash area. It was not worth the 5 dollars savings at all. Bell owns them now. Anything besides their cell and internet service signup push is just a sideline to try to pull you in the door.
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Dec 28, 2017 17:58
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Bonzo posted:Now this I can kinda agree with. Guitar Center (plus Long and McQuade in Canada) are just soulless. I feel like I might as well shop at Best Buy. Long and McQuade is a music instrument rental company, not a music instrument sales company. Anything they make from sales is nice and it keeps their name circulating, but the profit from rental dwarfs it. The Gibson guy sounds hugely disconnected from the actual problems with both his company and the industry in general. He has some ‘gut feeling’ that he is convinced is the solution, and focuses all his attention on how nobody will try it, without ever asking them why they won’t do it. This is pretty common at all levels, this guy just has the authority to make an entire company suffer his delusions.
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Mar 2, 2018 09:44
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Subjunctive posted:You can’t use foreign driver’s licenses in Australia? Nope. You need an international drivers license when visiting a lot of countries.
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Jul 31, 2018 18:13
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Bamabalacha posted:I was about to say “wow, I wish the new buses/streetcars here in Toronto had USB ports for charging”, but then I remembered that people will shove gum and garbage into every single crevasse on all public transit anywhere. Strangely, that doesn't really happen. The ports are too useful to the demographic that chews gum, so they rarely jam them. They do need to be quickly serviceable/changeable, because they get broken all the time. Any transit service that doesn't put them in is just being lovely, especially on long/express routes.
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Aug 3, 2018 02:22
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Don Gato posted:Wasn't the app store from the iPhone 3? I remember the original iPhone was terrible but enough people bought it that a couple of years later it managed to actually change the world. iPhone 1 had the first usable web browser in that form factor, and enough ‘anywhere’ data access to use it in a casual way. The fact it was also a phone was secondary. The original plan was that all the apps would just be websites, with the phone doing very little and servers doing all the heavy lifting. This was a decent idea, but apps made this way proved to be slow and unreliable. Apple eventually realized if they let people develop native apps they could take a cut of the money, and do it in a way that still guaranteed them complete control over the device experience, something they had fought all the carriers over extensively.
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Jan 25, 2019 10:23
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Volcott posted:I keep hearing the fix described as a software upgrade but also that they're installing/activating a second stall sensor that was previously being sold as DLC. There were always two attitude / angle of attack sensors, but the system that detects a potential stall only used one of them unless you bought a safety 'package' of software upgrades. And yes, the system pushes the nose of the plane down, in theory to level it out, but in practice if the sensor failed or otherwise produced bad data, the anti stall system would force the plane into a dive. Pilots could push the override, but unlike anti stall systems on previous 737's, the override on the MAX-8 timed out after 40 seconds and the anti-stall system could again force the plane into a dive. The procedure to actually disable the new system was new to the MAX-8, and was not especially brought to the attention of older 737 pilots when they being qualified on the new one. Also, Boeing told the FAA that the system could only adjust the flight controls by .8 degrees, but in reality, the anti-stall system could make changes up to 2.5 degrees, a huge difference in how fast the plane would change pitch and a drastic shortening of the time pilots had to react. This is almost entirely the result of ongoing funding cuts for regulation and enforcement, and any politician who just chants 'regulation is bad' should be fired into the sun.
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Apr 2, 2019 22:30
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Knormal posted:That's good to hear it's at least technically possible, so maybe at some point it'll become cheaper than taking advantage of the third world. I think that's about the best we can ask for right now. It’s not going to be fast, but every electric car maker expects regulations requiring they recycle any batteries they sell, and most of them are working on their designs to make that possible and cheap. We are in no way even close yet, but battery makers are under direct pressure from car makers to make cell construction reversible. It’ll need regulations to make it happen, but it will happen, the components in a battery make it to valuable to ignore. The best thing governments could do is prevent exports of used cells, make sure they are recycled ‘at home’ to prevent dumping and false claims of ‘recyclability’ from manufacturers.
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Feb 8, 2021 08:16
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:I guess Tesla and SpaceX succeeded because electric cars and space rockets meet two important criteria: Tesla was founded by people who aren’t Musk, who only bought in later and used his wealth to leverage control away from the founder. You’ll notice they are having issues making a new model or refreshing an existing model, as most anybody with any talent for that has quit to either found another car company (Lucid) or just work for one. It’s why they suddenly signed everybody up to use and access their charging connector, the supercharger network is pretty much the only valuable asset they have left. SpaceX is more something he was involved with from the start, but I’d look at Gwynne Shotwell as the person who likely built the company and lead to almost all its successes. I hope history treats her more kindly than the present is, she’s been an absolute driver of space related progress.
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Jul 14, 2023 22:49
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Boywhiz88 posted:There's also a realization that oh wait, the way we design cars means that even Tesla's are godawful heavy because of their batteries so they wreck roads more and burn through tires faster. Oh wait... there hasn't been a widespread realization of that. Yet. Nor will there be, because both those things are false. Even the heaviest electric car weighs very little compared to light trucks, box trucks, and big rigs, which contribute almost all wear and tear to road surfaces. Tires for electric vehicles are pricier due to manufacturer demands for low rolling resistance, but shouldn’t wear any faster due to the weight of the vehicle, as the need to carry that weight around is built in to the tire design. (USER WAS PERMABANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 3, 2024 02:20
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