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sissij

Tesla Passes Ford in Market Value as Investors Bet on the Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...neral-motors-stock-market.html

new york times tesla science

shared by sissij on 04 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • But there is one exception. Tesla, the electric-vehicle upstart, continues to surge.
  • “Investors want something that is going to go up in orders of magnitude in six months to six years, and Tesla is that story,” said Karl Brauer, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book. “Nobody thinks Ford or G.M. is going to do that.”
  • Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has shattered the conventional wisdom that automakers should be viewed as a stable, reliable investment. Instead, he promotes his California-based company as a dynamic vehicle for growth, despite the risks and challenges ahead of it.
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  • But neither automaker has convinced Wall Street that it has shed its boom-or-bust reputation tied to broader economic cycles, or is at the forefront of new technology being developed for self-driving vehicles and electric cars.
  • “It’s almost like Tesla is positioned in people’s minds as an energy storage company that happens to put most of its batteries on wheels,” said Andrew Stewart, chief investment officer at Exchange Capital Management, an investment firm in Ann Arbor, Mich.
  • While Tesla may enjoy the favor of investors, it still faces some daunting hurdles to reach its goals.
  • sissij on 04 Apr 17
     
    In my research on Tesla, I found it very interesting that Tesla never has advertisement spreading out like Ford, Motor or other motor companies do. Yet, it is very popular and well-known. How does Tesla manage to be known by the public if they don't have any advertisement and their target costumers are the elites? One of the reason I found online about its propaganda strategy is its skill on giving stock holder confidence. Thus their stock price is always positive and healthy. By generating new ideas, Tesla is able to stay on the headline of the newspaper. When I saw this news, my first reaction is that it's Tesla again and give me a very positive image on the future of Tesla. This new way of propaganda is directly related to the new form of economics in the society so I found it very interesting. --Sissi (4/4/2017)
peterconnelly

Opinion | Elon Musk's Tesla Management Is a Bad Sign for Twitter - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...elon-musk-tesla-twitter.html

tesla management new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • His promises to preserve free speech, ban spam bots and dramatically boost revenue may have earned the blessing of the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, but with Twitter’s stock falling well below his offer price, Mr. Musk appears to be reneging on a deal that has made even Wall Street grow skeptical.
  • The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes.
  • The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes.
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  • he forces his employees to bridge the enormous gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes cruel workplace, to disastrous effect.
  • That fully self-driving announcement that so delighted his fans came as a far more jarring revelation to the project’s engineers, who found out about their staggering new mission when Mr. Musk tweeted about it.
  • This is the fundamental weakness of every organization run as a cult of personality: The dear leader can’t be everywhere or make every decision but often fails to provide the clear code of values that allows managers to independently shape their decisions around common goals.
  • Lawsuits by workers and California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing allege that Black workers were tasked with menial physical labor in parts of the factory nicknamed “the plantation,” where they were subjected to racist slurs and graffiti.
  • He ultimately gave up and cobbled together a manual-labor-intensive production line in an open-air tent.
  • Female workers have sued, alleging a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and groping by supervisors. Mr. Musk was indifferent, emailing workers who experienced abuse that “it is important to be thick-skinned.”
  • lantatio
  • Mr. Musk’s reliance on hype is especially jarring.
  • By moving to buy Twitter, Mr. Musk has not only added another distraction to his long list but has also already shown the same drive to announce sweeping decisions in public.
  • Ultimately Mr. Musk’s goals for Twitter, as they are for Tesla, are not about making the right decisions for his companies or the people who make them possible.
  • They are about playing to the crowd and burnishing the legend that keeps fresh bodies and minds moving through the businesses that chew them up and spit them out.
  • peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22
     
    Elon Musk's management at Tesla and his buying of Twitter
sissij

Elon Musk's New Company to Merge Human Brains with Machines | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...ge-human-brains-with-computers

technology research human machines

shared by sissij on 03 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • His new company Neuralink will work on linking human brains with computers, utilizing “neural lace” technology.
  • Musk talked recently about this kind of technology, seeing it as a way for human to interact with machines and superintelligencies.
  • What's next? We'll wait for the details. Elon Musk's influence on our modern life and aura certainly continue to grow, especially if he'll deliver on the promises of his various enterprises.
  • sissij on 03 Apr 17
     
    My mom had a little research project on Tesla and she assigned me to do that so I know some strategies and ideas of Tesla, although not very deep. I found that Tesla and Elon Must had very innovative ideas on its product. Electrical car is the signature of Tesla. The design of the car and idea of being green is really friendly to the environment of Earth. Now, they are talking about new ideas of merging human intelligence with machine. --Sissi (4/2/2017)
Javier E

'I Think This Guy Is, Like, Passed Out in His Tesla' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tesla-autopilot-sleeping.html

tesla automation self-driving car tech metaphor safety social media

shared by Javier E on 08 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • Tesla’s response to these videos has been consistent: Autopilot is meant to function as a complement to a conscious driver, not a replacement. If you don’t keep a hand on the wheel, your Tesla is supposed to beep at you; eventually it’s supposed to slow to a stop and put its hazard lights on. Anyway, who knows if these clips were real? Couldn’t some of them be the work of pranksters?
  • of course you can still fall asleep with a hand on the wheel — or you can go on YouTube and watch Tesla drivers swap tips for using a water bottle or custom “cellphone holder” to fool the system.
  • What’s fascinating is the way the sci-fi novelty of Autopilot — combined with the deep familiarity of old-fashioned driving — manages to warp our danger-detecting radar. There are instances in which investigators have found that the Autopilot system contributed to crashes, but none of those have been captured on film.
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  • driving is already one of the more dangerous activities Americans undertake on a daily basis. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “drowsy driving” was a factor in 91,000 crashes, resulting in 50,000 people injured and 810 deaths in 2017, so it’s theoretically possible that what some of these videos are showing us is disaster averted, not disaster in motion.
  • Tesla once generated widespread good will by promising affordable electric cars that would make the world cleaner and safer. But over time, its image was tarnished by missed deadlines, worrying crash reports, signs of a cultlike corporate culture and a chief executive, Elon Musk, who habitually exaggerates progress while announcing extravagant new ideas. This was hardly the institution you would want determining the future of highway safety.
  • These technologies — and the companies that engineer them — keep turning out to be less benign than imagined. We fell in love with Amazon, but now we miss the local stores it closed. We couldn’t resist the convenience of Uber and Lyft, but now we’ve seen their effect on public transit and drivers. “Jetsons”-esque smart-home technology turned out to be riddled with glitches and vulnerable to hackers.
  • Tech companies have hollowed out old industries, shredded privacy, disregarded regulations and created new vectors for the spread of misinformation and extremism, and now there is a sense that choices we have already made — tectonic shifts already in motion, terms of service already accepted — may be changing us in ways that we are only beginning to process, ready to leap up and bite us in the collective behind.
  • It’s hard to imagine a more potent visual metaphor for this feeling than a human lulled to sleep inside a hunk of metal and glass, hurtling down a highway under the control of proprietary algorithms beamed on board from Palo Alto
  • These videos are magnetic not just because of the eerie images they contain, but also because, watching them, we can’t actually be sure what we’re seeing. Is this danger or safety or both at once? Perhaps in a different era we would have cried out in excitement: How cool! Today we are more tempted to gasp in shock and call out a warning: Wake up!
aprossi

Elon Musk is trying to win China back - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

china science research Elon Musk technology

shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Elon Musk is trying to win China back
  • Elon Musk's Tesla has endured a rough couple of months in China. Now he's working overtime to win Beijing back
  • The Tesla CEO lavished praise on China during an interview with state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), where he pledged that the country would become his electric carmaker's "biggest market" in the long run
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  • He also lauded China's economic and climate goals — the country is currently the world's top greenhouse emitter, but has promised to drastically reduce the emissions over the next decade or so.
  • The charm offensive may be pivotal to Tesla's future in China. While the company has enjoyed special treatment from Chinese authorities in the past few years, it has faced an onslaught of criticism in recent weeks.
  • Last month, Tesla (TSLA) was summoned by Chinese officials to face questions about the quality of its Shanghai-made cars
  • Musk addressed those spying concerns on Saturday, saying at a Chinese development conference that his company's cars would never be used for such purposes.
  • "These are very aggressive goals. And I think they are great goals. And I wish more countries actually had these goals," Musk said. "I'm very confident that future of China is gonna be great."
  • Musk is one of the most popular American business leaders in China
tongoscar

Germans divided over plans for Tesla electric car factory | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...environmentalists-tree-felling

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • German environmentalists and political leaders are at loggerheads over a proposed Tesla electric car factory in woodland outside Berlin, with the government warning over the future of a project seen as key for its support of green technologies and regeneration in the east of the country.
  • The environmentalist group Grüne Liga Brandenburg (Green League Brandenburg) said the US company was being given “preferential treatment” and should not be allowed to start felling trees until it had been granted full building permission.
  • “To fell half of the forest, when many aspects of this process are yet to be clarified seems fairly problematic, which is why we have asked the court to deal with it,” said Heinz-Herwig Mascher of Grüne Liga. “It is not that we have something as such against Tesla as a company or its objectives. But we are concerned the preferential treatment they’re being given could set a precedence.”
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  • The project’s future is far from certain. It was hailed as an economic breakthrough for the underdeveloped region when it was announced by Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, in November.
  • Grünheide residents are divided over the issue. The town, home in the 20s to a bakelite plastics factory, has repeatedly missed out on any big economic success in the decades since reunification.
  • “Of course you always have to weigh up the economic interests with those of environmental protection,” he told Die Zeit. “It’s important to involve the locals in the discussion from an early stage, and that simply did not happen here. The people are supposed to feel blessed by the fact that Tesla is coming and bringing many jobs with it.”
runlai_jiang

Elon Musk: SpaceX and Tesla alive 'by skin of their teeth' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-43365710

shared by runlai_jiang on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Elon Musk says his companies SpaceX and Tesla are both still alive only "by the skin of their teeth".The entrepreneur told an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) conference that both companies almost went bankrupt in 2008.
  • He said 2008 was an incredibly difficult year - SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket failed for the third time, and Tesla almost went bankrupt two days before Christmas.
  • Mr Musk also got divorced, and he said he had to borrow money from his friends to pay his rent.
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  • "SpaceX is alive by the skin of its teeth, and so is Tesla - if things had just gone a little differently, both companies would be dead," he said.
  • Mr Musk remains convinced that life on Mars is both possible and necessary. He fears another "dark age" should a third world war occur, and feels that Mars will be integral to helping the human race survive and regenerate.He also feels there are plentiful business opportunities there.
Javier E

Opinion | Tesla suffers from the boss's addiction to Twitter - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-musk-tesla-twitter-obsession

twitter musk social media technology status

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • For some perspective on what’s happening with Elon Musk and Twitter, I suggest spending a few minutes familiarizing yourself with one of Twitter’s sillier episodes from the past, a fight that erupted almost a year ago between the “shape rotators” of Silicon Valley and the “wordcels” (aspersion intended) of journalism and related professions. Many of the combatants were, at first, merely fighting over which group should have higher social status (theirs), but the episode also highlighted real divisions between West Coast and East — math and verbal, free-speech culture and safety culture, people who make things happen and people who talk about them afterward.
  • For years now, conflict between the two groups has been boiling over onto social media, into courtrooms and onto the pages of major news outlets. Team Shape Rotator believes Team Wordcel is parasitic and dangerous, ballyragging institutions into curbing both free speech and innovation in the name of safety. Team “Stop calling me a Wordcel” sees its opponents as self-centered and reckless, disrupting and mean-meming their way toward some vaguely imagined doom.
  • his audacity seems to be backfiring, as of course did Napoleon’s eventually.
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  • You can think of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as the latest sortie, a takeover of the ultimate wordcel site by the world’s most successful shape rotator.
  • more likely, he fell prey to a different delusion, one in which the shape rotators and the wordcels are united: thinking of Twitter in terms of words and arguments, as a “digital public square” where vital questions are hashed out. It is that, sometimes, but that’s not what it’s designed for. It’s designed to maximize engagement, which is to say, it’s an addiction machine for the highly verbal.
  • Both groups theoretically understand what the machine is doing — the wordcels write endless articles about bad algorithms, and the shape rotators build them. But both nonetheless talk as though they’re saving the world even as they compulsively follow the programming. The shape rotators bait the wordcels because that’s what makes the machine spit out more rewarding likes and retweets. We wordcels return the favor for the same reason.
  • Musk could theoretically rework Twitter’s architecture to downrank provocation and make it less addictive. But of course, that would make it a less profitable business
  • More to the point, the reason he bought it is that he, like his critics, is hooked on it the way it is now. Unfortunately for Tesla shareholders, Musk has now put himself in the position of a dealer who can spend all day getting high on his own supply.
Javier E

Opinion | If You Want to Understand How Dangerous Elon Musk Is, Look Outside America - ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...twitter-free-speech-india.html

social media india global impact influence government repression tool twitter

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Twitter was an intoxicating window into my fascinating new assignment. Long suppressed groups found their voices and social media-driven revolutions began to unfold. Movements against corruption gained steam and brought real change. Outrage over a horrific gang rape in Delhi built a movement to fight an epidemic of sexual violence.
  • “What we didn’t realize — because we took it for granted for so long — is that most people spoke with a great deal of freedom, and completely unconscious freedom,” said Nilanjana Roy, a writer who was part of my initial group of Twitter friends in India. “You could criticize the government, debate certain religious practices. It seems unreal now.”
  • Soon enough, other kinds of underrepresented voices also started to appear on — and then dominate — the platform. As women, Muslims and people from lower castes spoke out, the inevitable backlash came. Supporters of the conservative opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and their right-wing religious allies felt that they had long been ignored by the mainstream press. Now they had the chance to grab the mic.
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  • Viewed from the United States, these skirmishes over the unaccountable power of tech platforms seem like a central battleground of free speech. But the real threat in much of the world is not the policies of social media companies, but of governments.
  • The real question now is if Musk’s commitment to “free speech” extends beyond conservatives in America and to the billions of people in the Global South who rely on the internet for open communication.
  • ndia’s government had demanded that Twitter block tweets and accounts from a variety of journalists, activists and politicians. The company went to court, arguing that these demands went beyond the law and into censorship. Now Twitter’s potential new owner was casting doubt on whether the company should be defying government demands that muzzle freedom of expression.
  • The winning side will not be decided in Silicon Valley or Beijing, the two poles around which debate over free expression on the internet have largely orbited. It will be the actions of governments in capitals like Abuja, Jakarta, Ankara, Brasília and New Delhi.
  • while much of the focus has been on countries like China, which overtly restricts access to huge swaths of the internet, the real war over the future of internet freedom is being waged in what she called “swing states,” big, fragile democracies like India.
  • other governments are passing laws just to increase their power over speech online and to force companies to be an extension of state surveillance.” For example: requiring companies to house their servers locally rather than abroad, which can make them more vulnerable to government surveillance.
  • Across the world, countries are putting in place frameworks that on their face seem designed to combat online abuse and misinformation but are largely used to stifle dissent or enable abuse of the enemies of those in power.
  • it seems that this is actually what he believes. In April, he tweeted: “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
  • Musk is either exceptionally naïve or willfully ignorant about the relationship between government power and free speech, especially in fragile democracies.
  • The combination of a rigid commitment to following national laws and a hands-off approach to content moderation is combustible and highly dangerous.
  • Independent journalism is increasingly under threat in India. Much of the mainstream press has been neutered by a mix of intimidation and conflicts of interests created by the sprawling conglomerates and powerful families that control much of Indian media
  • Twitter has historically fought against censorship. Whether that will continue under Musk seems very much a question. The Indian government has reasons to expect friendly treatment: Musk’s company Tesla has been trying to enter the Indian car market for some time, but in May it hit an impasse in negotiations with the government over tariffs and other issues
Javier E

A Billionaire Mathematician's Life of Ferocious Curiosity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fe-of-ferocious-curiosity.html

math creativity proof role model

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”After that, he was fired.His message is clearly aimed at young people: If I can do it, so can you.
  • Down one floor from his office complex is Math for America, a foundation he set up to promote math teaching in public schools. Nearby, on Madison Square Park, is the National Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath, an educational center he helped finance. It opened in 2012 and has had a quarter million visitors.
  • Dr. Simons received his doctorate at 23; advanced code breaking for the National Security Agency at 26; led a university math department at 30; won geometry’s top prize at 37; founded Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, at 44; and began setting up charitable foundations at 56.
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  • With a fortune estimated at $12.5 billion, Dr. Simons now runs a tidy universe of science endeavors, financing not only math teachers but hundreds of the world’s best investigators, even as Washington has reduced its support for scientific research. His favorite topics include gene puzzles, the origins of life, the roots of autism, math and computer frontiers, basic physics and the structure of the early cosmos.
  • In time, his novel approach helped change how the investment world looks at financial markets. The man who “couldn’t write programs” hired a lot of programmers, as well as physicists, cryptographers, computational linguists, and, oh yes, mathematicians. Wall Street experience was frowned on. A flair for science was prized. The techies gathered financial data and used complex formulas to make predictions and trade in global markets.
  • Working closely with his wife, Marilyn, the president of the Simons Foundation and an economist credited with philanthropic savvy, Dr. Simons has pumped more than $1 billion into esoteric projects as well as retail offerings like the World Science Festival and a scientific lecture series at his Fifth Avenue building. Characteristically, it is open to the public.
  • On a wall in Dr. Simons’s office is one of his prides: a framed picture of equations known as Chern-Simons, after a paper he wrote with Shiing-Shen Chern, a prominent geometer. Four decades later, the equations define many esoteric aspects of modern physics, including advanced theories of how invisible fields like those of gravity interact with matter to produce everything from superstrings to black holes.
  • “He’s an individual of enormous talent and accomplishment, yet he’s completely unpretentious,” said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist who is the president of Rockefeller University. “He manages to blend all these admirable qualities.”
  • Forbes magazine ranks him as the world’s 93rd richest person — ahead of Eric Schmidt of Google and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, among others — and in 2010, he and his wife were among the first billionaires to sign the Giving Pledge, promising to devote “the great majority” of their wealth to philanthropy.
  • For all his self-deprecations, Dr. Simons does credit himself with a contemplative quality that seems to lie behind many of his accomplishments.“I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world,” Dr. Simons said of his youthful math enthusiasms. “I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.”
anonymous

Baidu driverless car completes test on Beijing roads - BBC News - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...technology-35059938

science research knowledge psychology technology car test roads

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Chinese tech giant Baidu has successfully tested its driverless car on roads near the company's headquarters in Beijing.
  • "complex road conditions", including human drivers, the firm said.
  • "Fully autonomous driving under mixed road conditions is universally challenging, with complexity further heightened by Beijing's road conditions and unpredictable driver behaviour,"
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  • The car is able to detect vehicles, road lanes and objects in its path.
  • "It sounds a sensible move for them - whether it's driver assistance or towards automation, there's going to be a lot of development of the sensors, communications and the cloud computing,"
  • Google's prototype has been involved in nine crashes since testing on public roads began, though the company has said these are all the fault of humans, not the car's autonomous technology.
  • Finally, Elon Musk's high tech firm Tesla has had to limit the automatic steering and lane changing functions in its autopilot mode for drivers in Hong Kong.
Javier E

Movie Review: Inside Job - Barron's - 0 views

www.barrons.com/...111904502004575562621077193024

psychology economics great recession documentary review

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • On the outsize role of the GSEs and other federal agencies in high-risk mortgages, figures compiled by former Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto show that as of mid-2008, more than 70% were accounted for by the federal government in one way or another, with nearly two-thirds of that held by Fannie and Freddie.
  • As has been documented, for example, in a forthcoming book on the GSEs called Guaranteed to Fail, there was a steady increase in affordable housing mandates imposed on these enterprises by Congress, one of several reasons why they were hardly like other capitalist enterprises, but tools and beneficiaries of government.
  • I asked Ferguson why Inside Job made such brief mention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even then without noting that they are government-sponsored enterprises, subject to special protection by the federal government—which their creditors clearly appreciated, given the unusually low interest rates their debt commanded.
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  • Ferguson replied that their role in subprime mortgages was not very significant, and that in any case their behavior was not much different from that of other capitalist enterprises.
  • We get no inkling that Rajan's views on what made the world riskier, as set forth in his book, veer quite radically from those of Inside Job. They include, as he has written, "the political push for easy housing credit in the United States and the lax monetary policy [by the Federal Reserve] in the years 2003-2005."
  • Rajan, author of Fault Lines, a recent book on the debacle, speaks with special authority to fans of Inside Job. Not only is he in the movie—one of the talking heads speaking wisdom about what occurred—he is accurately presented as having anticipated the meltdown in a 2005 paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" But the things he is quoted as saying in the film are restricted to serving its themes.
  • Yet it's impossible to understand what happened without grasping the proactive role played by government. "The banking sector did not decide out of the goodness of its heart to extend mortgages to poor people," commented University of Chicago Booth School of Business Finance Professor Raghuram Rajan in a telephone interview last week. "Politicians did that, and they would have taken great umbrage if the regulator stood in the way of more housing credit."
  • THE STORY RECOUNTED in Inside Job is that principles like safety and soundness were flouted by greedy Wall Street capitalists who brought down the economy with the help of certain politicians, political appointees and corrupt academicians. Despite the attempts and desires of some, including Barney Frank, to regulate the mania, the juggernaut prevails to this day, under the presidency of Barack Obama.
  • This version of the story contains some elements of truth.
  • Text Size Regular Medium Large "A MASTERPIECE OF INVESTIGATIVE nonfiction moviemaking," wrote the film critic of the Boston Globe. "Rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument," opined the New York Times. The "masterpiece" referred to was the recently released Inside Job, a documentary film that focuses on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.
Javier E

A Voter Revolt Against 'Shareholder Value' - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...t-shareholder-value-1475621860

corporate shareholder value responsbility market fundamentalism

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • a Feb. 29 quotation from Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS, CBS -1.76 % that sums up everything wrong with today’s media culture—and with corporate America.
  • Reflecting on the Trump phenomenon at a media and technology conference, Mr. Moonves said that “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
  • Mr. Moonves is saying that CBS’s only responsibility is to maximize profits, not only in its entertainment division, but also in its news operation
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  • He knows that what his network is doing is against the national interest. He has just enough conscience to be aware that it is “terrible,” but not nearly enough to stop doing it. It might impair shareholder value, after all.
  • Mr. Moonves is suggesting that there is no difference in principle between entertainment and news. Both should be judged by the same standard—ratings. If policy speeches don’t attract large enough audiences, cut to a Trump rally.
  • If the leading purveyors of broadcast journalism make no distinction between news and entertainment, then who can blame viewers for seeing no difference between entertainment and politics?
  • American politicians and parties have used entertainment to draw audiences for the better part of two centuries. But there used to be countervailing forces, including prestigious broadcast news organizations. Not anymore. Once these organizations served as gatekeepers; now they are open-door enablers.
  • They are all in the grip of the same misunderstanding, that their business begins and ends with maximizing shareholder value.
  • They may believe that this is a statutory requirement or a fiduciary duty. If so, they are mistaken
  • It is Milton Friedman’s theory. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he wrote in “Capitalism and Freedom,” “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”
  • corporate law imposes no enforceable legal duty to maximize either profits or share prices.
  • And it is not politically sustainable. This is the clear meaning of the 2016 presidential election.
  • As a policy argument, Friedman’s thesis flunks key empirical tests
  • during the 1970s, inflation, recession, a stagnant stock market and rising competition from abroad created an opening for Friedman’s theory, which soon dominated corporate boardrooms.
  • In the name of maximizing shareholder value, corporations moved plants and jobs around the world, paid the lowest wages they could get away with, and scheduled work assignments to maintain managerial “flexibility,” whatever the consequences for workers’ families. Meanwhile, their lobbyists engineered a myriad of special interest breaks in the corporate tax code.
  • Now we can see what four decades of pursuing shareholder value at the expense of everything else has yielded
  • Public confidence in corporations is at rock-bottom, and public anger is sky-high
  • The revolt against the corporate economic agenda—free trade, a generous immigration policy, lower corporate taxes and the rest—is sweeping the country.
  • As the Republican rank and file has turned against corporations and New Democrats have given ground to left-wing populists, big business has been left politically homeless.
  • It will take corporate America a long time to climb out of this self-created hole.
  • Its first step should be to back long-overdue proposals for improving workers’ lives and incomes. Paid family leave is an idea whose time has come; so is a catch-up increase in the federal minimum wage; so are stable and predictable schedules for part-time workers.
  • Allowing workers to share in profits and productivity increases would be another good step.
  • Above all, corporate leaders should grasp the distinction between immediate gain and self-interest rightly understood. Pushing for the last increment of profit over the next quarter and the one after that comes at the expense of the strategies that can leave firms best positioned for the future.
  • America needs a new generation of corporate statesmen.
Javier E

Farewell to Kenneth Arrow, a Gentle Genius of Economics - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...genius-of-economics-1487959127

economics theory science economist nobel

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Is there a voting system that can be relied on to distill the will of a group of people? Arrow’s impossibility theorem regarding voting and combining preferences put him in the rarefied group of economists with theorems named after them.
  • Drawing upon mathematical logic, it shows that there is no possible voting scheme that can consistently and sensibly reflect the preferences of a set of individuals with diverse views
  • Any scheme that could ever be invented will be at risk of perverse outcomes, where, for example, the choice between options A and B is affected by the presence or absence of option C; or where a vote switch by one person toward option A makes it less likely to prevail.
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  • it also explained why committees have so much trouble coming to consistent conclusions and why, with an increasingly polarized electorate, democracy can become increasingly dysfunctional.
  • until Kenneth drew on the techniques of topology (that is, the study of geometric properties and spatial relations), no one had ever been able to establish precise conditions under which there would be prices that would clear all markets, or under which one could assume that the market outcome was optimal
  • in the early 1950s, he clarified the very specific conditions under which market outcomes were for the best and, of equal importance, the far more general conditions under which public interventions in markets had the potential to make things better.
martinelligi

S&P 500 jumps more than 1% to hit a record high, Nasdaq rallies 2.5% - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...market-open-to-close-news.html

economics

shared by martinelligi on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The S&P 500 climbed 1.3% to reach an all-time high, its first record since Feb. 16. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 350 points to hit another intraday record. The Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.5% amid a rotation back into tech shares. Tesla was up 4%. Apple, Facebook and Netflix all jumped at least 2%, while Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft shares were also higher.
  • Tech and growth stocks are rebounding from a swift correction triggered by rising interest rates. Higher rates make profits in far-off years seem less attractive to investors and can knock down stocks with relatively high valuations.
  • “The stimulus is beating the virus at least as far as the market is concerned,”
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  • President Joe Biden is expected to sign the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package Thursday afternoon. The plan will send direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, and will also put nearly $20 billion into Covid-19 vaccinations and $350 billion into state, local and tribal relief.
  • The economic reopening, coupled with additional fiscal stimulus, accelerated the rotation into more cyclical sectors, such as energy. The S&P 500 energy sector has been the biggest winner this year, up 40% so far.
Javier E

Do You Know the Difference Between Being Rich and Being Wealthy? - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...-and-being-wealthy-11596808802

wealth income money finance investment success analysis psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Housel, 36 years old, is a blogger and venture capitalist who writes beautifully and wisely about a central truth: Money isn’t primarily a store of value. Money is a conduit of emotion and ego, carrying hopes and fears, dreams and heartbreak, confidence and surprise, envy and regret.
  • Investing isn’t an IQ test; it’s a test of character. Unlike the man who chucked coins into the sea, Mr. Read could defer gratification and had no need to spend big so other people wouldn’t think he was small. From such old-fashioned virtues great fortunes can be built.
  • Investors think of such volatility as a kind of “fine” for having made a mistake, says Mr. Housel. Instead, they should regard it as a “fee,” the unavoidable cost of participation. You never know how big the fee will be or when you will incur it, but patience can make it bearable.
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  • Most investors regard Warren Buffett as someone who has parlayed brilliant analysis, hard work and extensive connections into one of the best track records in financial history. Mr. Housel, however, notices that Mr. Buffett accrued at least 95% of his wealth after age 65.
  • Had Mr. Buffett earned his world-beating returns for only 30 years rather than much longer, he would be worth 99.9% less, notes Mr. Housel. “The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century,” he writes of Mr. Buffett. “His skill is investing, but his secret is time.”
  • So Mr. Buffett—traditionally viewed as the greatest living example of investing skill—is also proof of the power of luck and longevity.
  • In a similar vein, “The Psychology of Money” argues the biggest determinant of long-term returns often happens to be when you were born. Adjusted for inflation, people born in 1950 earned essentially nothing in the stock market between the ages of 13 and 30, Mr. Housel shows. Those born in 1970 earned roughly nine times as much on stocks in their formative years. Those born in 2000? They may have to save a lot more than their parents did.
  • Bubbles form when catchy stories and the human need for imitation and conformity turn investing into a social imperative.
  • Mr. Housel urges investors to think about what money and wealth are for. He draws a critical distinction between being rich (having a high current income) and being wealthy (having the freedom to choose not to spend money).
  • Many rich people aren’t wealthy, Mr. Housel argues, because they feel the need to spend a lot of money to show others how rich they are
  • He defines the optimal savings level as “the gap between your ego and your income.” Wealth consists in caring less about what others think about you and more about using your money to control how you spend your time.
  • He writes: “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who[m] you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.”
runlai_jiang

GE Power, in Need of a Lift, Chases Tesla and Siemens in Batteries - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-next-big-business-1520420401

General electric Sodium-based battery competition technology

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The giant platform called GE Reservoir is expected to store electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels for later use. The battery-storage market is expected to grow in coming years as some utilities look for less-expensive alternatives to the power plants that fire up during peak hours to meet power demand.
  • Siemens, one of GE’s biggest rivals in the power business, paired with AES Corp. last year to launch Fluence Energy LLC, a joint venture that is building what is expected to be the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in California. IHS Markit predicts the global market for batteries in the power sector will grow 14% annually through 2025.
  • The company tried making batteries using sodium-based technologie
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  • Success would be a needed boost for the struggling conglomerate, which is in the middle of restructuring and said last week it would overhaul its board. GE is seeking access to a market that Navigant Research predicts will generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue in the next decade or so.
  • Prices of lithium-ion batteries have dropped sharply in recent years, as they have become ubiquitous in products such as laptops and smartphones, improving the economies of scale of manufacturing. That is start
  • GE is hoping to change that with the Reservoir platform. GE says the Reservoir battery can last about 15% longer than the best batteries currently on the market and can be installed quicker.
runlai_jiang

The Big Tech Trends to Follow at CES 2018 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ces-2018.html

technology science

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • magine this: When you leave the house, your air conditioner and lights turn off automatically. Then when a motion sensor detects a person in the house, like your house cleaner, it sends an alert to your phone. When you arrive home, a camera recognizes who you are and the door automatically unlocks.
  • Automated technologies like these will be at the forefront of CES, one of the world’s largest tech conventions, next week in Las Vegas. They underline one major trend: Increasingly, the innovations that are making their way into your personal technology aren’t physical electronics or gadgets at all.
  • he culmination of software, algorithms and sensors working together to make your everyday appliances smarter and more automated. It is
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  • Alexa and Her CounterpartsAlexa, Amazon’s intelligent assistant that listens to your voice commands to play music, order diapers and place a phone call, will be everywhere at CES.
  • Smart CitiesNowadays, it’s easy to shop for high-quality internet-connected home accessories, like light bulbs, thermostats and security cameras. At CES, Samsung is even planning to introduce a smart refrigerator at the electronics show that can listen to voice commands to control other home accessories.
  • Smarter CarsSelf-driving-car enthusiasts like Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, dream of a future where driverless cars eliminate traffic accidents while letting people do work on their commutes.They can keep dreaming: Autonomous vehicles still have a long way to go before they become safe and properly regulated.
  • Next-Generation Wireless TechnologyAs a growing number of devices rely on artificial intelligence, they will require faster bandwidth speeds. At CES, wireless companies like AT&T and Verizon are expected to give progress reports on so-called 5G, the fifth-generation network technology.With 5G, wireless carriers envision an era of incredibly fast speeds that let smartphone users download a movie in less than five seconds — roughly 100 times faster than the current network technology, 4G. Even more important, 5G is expected to greatly reduce latency to let devices communicate with each other with extremely fast response times.
tongoscar

China's electric car market has more than 400 competitors - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...le-could-be-over-electric-cars

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • SHANGHAI — As Tesla inaugurates a $2 billion electric-car factory in China this month, a brief stroll around an upscale shopping district here shows the company already has plenty of local competition.
  • For all the success China has had conquering other industries, it never really mastered the art of manufacturing cars with internal-combustion engines. Foreign brands have dominated since the 1990s, when General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen and others began ramping up sales, turning China into the world’s largest auto buyer.
  • The Chinese government has spent at least $60 billion to support the fledgling electric-car industry, including research-and-development funding, tax exemptions and financing for battery-charging stations, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. That’s encouraged a whopping 400-plus Chinese companies to get into the electric-car business, CSIS said.
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  • Unreliable batteries and other quality problems have also dampened consumer enthusiasm.
  • For now foreign car companies continue to see gold in China and are boosting local production of their own electric vehicles.
  • Consumer demand remains uncertain. On a recent afternoon, several drivers at a battery-charging station in an underground parking lot were lukewarm about their Chinese-brand electric vehicles.
Javier E

Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational? | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...y-is-it-so-hard-to-be-rational

psychology rationality thinking intellectual reason Bayesian logic Culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • an unusually large number of books about rationality were being published this year, among them Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” (Viking) and Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t” (Portfolio).
  • When the world changes quickly, we need strategies for understanding it. We hope, reasonably, that rational people will be more careful, honest, truthful, fair-minded, curious, and right than irrational ones.
  • And yet rationality has sharp edges that make it hard to put at the center of one’s life
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  • You might be well-intentioned, rational, and mistaken, simply because so much in our thinking can go wrong. (“RATIONAL, adj.: Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection,”
  • You might be rational and self-deceptive, because telling yourself that you are rational can itself become a source of bias. It’s possible that you are trying to appear rational only because you want to impress people; or that you are more rational about some things (your job) than others (your kids); or that your rationality gives way to rancor as soon as your ideas are challenged. Perhaps you irrationally insist on answering difficult questions yourself when you’d be better off trusting the expert consensus.
  • Not just individuals but societies can fall prey to false or compromised rationality. In a 2014 book, “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium,” Martin Gurri, a C.I.A. analyst turned libertarian social thinker, argued that the unmasking of allegedly pseudo-rational institutions had become the central drama of our age: people around the world, having concluded that the bigwigs in our colleges, newsrooms, and legislatures were better at appearing rational than at being so, had embraced a nihilist populism that sees all forms of public rationality as suspect.
  • modern life would be impossible without those rational systems; we must improve them, not reject them. We have no choice but to wrestle with rationality—an ideal that, the sociologist Max Weber wrote, “contains within itself a world of contradictions.”
  • Where others might be completely convinced that G.M.O.s are bad, or that Jack is trustworthy, or that the enemy is Eurasia, a Bayesian assigns probabilities to these propositions. She doesn’t build an immovable world view; instead, by continually updating her probabilities, she inches closer to a more useful account of reality. The cooking is never done.
  • Rationality is one of humanity’s superpowers. How do we keep from misusing it?
  • Start with the big picture, fixing it firmly in your mind. Be cautious as you integrate new information, and don’t jump to conclusions. Notice when new data points do and do not alter your baseline assumptions (most of the time, they won’t alter them), but keep track of how often those assumptions seem contradicted by what’s new. Beware the power of alarming news, and proceed by putting it in a broader, real-world context.
  • Bayesian reasoning implies a few “best practices.”
  • Keep the cooked information over here and the raw information over there; remember that raw ingredients often reduce over heat
  • We want to live in a more rational society, but not in a falsely rationalized one. We want to be more rational as individuals, but not to overdo it. We need to know when to think and when to stop thinking, when to doubt and when to trust.
  • But the real power of the Bayesian approach isn’t procedural; it’s that it replaces the facts in our minds with probabilities.
  • Applied to specific problems—Should you invest in Tesla? How bad is the Delta variant?—the techniques promoted by rationality writers are clarifying and powerful.
  • the rationality movement is also a social movement; rationalists today form what is sometimes called the “rationality community,” and, as evangelists, they hope to increase its size.
  • In “Rationality,” “The Scout Mindset,” and other similar books, irrationality is often presented as a form of misbehavior, which might be rectified through education or socialization.
  • Greg tells me that, in his business, it’s not enough to have rational thoughts. Someone who’s used to pondering questions at leisure might struggle to learn and reason when the clock is ticking; someone who is good at reaching rational conclusions might not be willing to sign on the dotted line when the time comes. Greg’s hedge-fund colleagues describe as “commercial”—a compliment—someone who is not only rational but timely and decisive.
  • You can know what’s right but still struggle to do it.
  • Following through on your own conclusions is one challenge. But a rationalist must also be “metarational,” willing to hand over the thinking keys when someone else is better informed or better trained. This, too, is harder than it sounds.
  • For all this to happen, rationality is necessary, but not sufficient. Thinking straight is just part of the work. 
  • I found it possible to be metarational with my dad not just because I respected his mind but because I knew that he was a good and cautious person who had my and my mother’s best interests at heart.
  • between the two of us, we had the right ingredients—mutual trust, mutual concern, and a shared commitment to reason and to act.
  • Intellectually, we understand that our complex society requires the division of both practical and cognitive labor. We accept that our knowledge maps are limited not just by our smarts but by our time and interests. Still, like Gurri’s populists, rationalists may stage their own contrarian revolts, repeatedly finding that no one’s opinions but their own are defensible. In letting go, as in following through, one’s whole personality gets involved.
  • in truth, it maps out a series of escalating challenges. In search of facts, we must make do with probabilities. Unable to know it all for ourselves, we must rely on others who care enough to know. We must act while we are still uncertain, and we must act in time—sometimes individually, but often together.
  • The realities of rationality are humbling. Know things; want things; use what you know to get what you want. It sounds like a simple formula.
  • The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be.By Joshua RothmanAugust 16, 2021
  • Writing about rationality in the early twentieth century, Weber saw himself as coming to grips with a titanic force—an ascendant outlook that was rewriting our values. He talked about rationality in many different ways. We can practice the instrumental rationality of means and ends (how do I get what I want?) and the value rationality of purposes and goals (do I have good reasons for wanting what I want?). We can pursue the rationality of affect (am I cool, calm, and collected?) or develop the rationality of habit (do I live an ordered, or “rationalized,” life?).
  • Weber worried that it was turning each individual into a “cog in the machine,” and life into an “iron cage.” Today, rationality and the words around it are still shadowed with Weberian pessimism and cursed with double meanings. You’re rationalizing the org chart: are you bringing order to chaos, or justifying the illogical?
  • For Aristotle, rationality was what separated human beings from animals. For the authors of “The Rationality Quotient,” it’s a mental faculty, parallel to but distinct from intelligence, which involves a person’s ability to juggle many scenarios in her head at once, without letting any one monopolize her attention or bias her against the rest.
  • In “The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking” (M.I.T.), from 2016, the psychologists Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak call rationality “a torturous and tortured term,” in part because philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and economists have all defined it differently
  • Galef, who hosts a podcast called “Rationally Speaking” and co-founded the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality, in Berkeley, barely uses the word “rationality” in her book on the subject. Instead, she describes a “scout mindset,” which can help you “to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course.” (The “soldier mindset,” by contrast, encourages you to defend your positions at any cost.)
  • Galef tends to see rationality as a method for acquiring more accurate views.
  • Pinker, a cognitive and evolutionary psychologist, sees it instrumentally, as “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” By this definition, to be a rational person you have to know things, you have to want things, and you have to use what you know to get what you want.
  • Introspection is key to rationality. A rational person must practice what the neuroscientist Stephen Fleming, in “Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness” (Basic Books), calls “metacognition,” or “the ability to think about our own thinking”—“a fragile, beautiful, and frankly bizarre feature of the human mind.”
  • A successful student uses metacognition to know when he needs to study more and when he’s studied enough: essentially, parts of his brain are monitoring other parts.
  • In everyday life, the biggest obstacle to metacognition is what psychologists call the “illusion of fluency.” As we perform increasingly familiar tasks, we monitor our performance less rigorously; this happens when we drive, or fold laundry, and also when we think thoughts we’ve thought many times before
  • The trick is to break the illusion of fluency, and to encourage an “awareness of ignorance.”
  • metacognition is a skill. Some people are better at it than others. Galef believes that, by “calibrating” our metacognitive minds, we can improve our performance and so become more rational
  • There are many calibration methods
  • nowing about what you know is Rationality 101. The advanced coursework has to do with changes in your knowledge.
  • Most of us stay informed straightforwardly—by taking in new information. Rationalists do the same, but self-consciously, with an eye to deliberately redrawing their mental maps.
  • The challenge is that news about distant territories drifts in from many sources; fresh facts and opinions aren’t uniformly significant. In recent decades, rationalists confronting this problem have rallied behind the work of Thomas Bayes
  • So-called Bayesian reasoning—a particular thinking technique, with its own distinctive jargon—has become de rigueur.
  • the basic idea is simple. When new information comes in, you don’t want it to replace old information wholesale. Instead, you want it to modify what you already know to an appropriate degree. The degree of modification depends both on your confidence in your preëxisting knowledge and on the value of the new data. Bayesian reasoners begin with what they call the “prior” probability of something being true, and then find out if they need to adjust it.
  • Bayesian reasoning is an approach to statistics, but you can use it to interpret all sorts of new information.
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