Yes and then no one knows the prompt!
1,957 karma · joined November 3, 2014
This is the strategic decision that was the last nail in the coffin for European battery cell manufacturing: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery...
It is a rational assessment of realities when it comes to high end production. Not every industrial environment can produce every kind of industry. At some point the costs are too high to overcome the difference.
Turns out, the real moat of any successful car industry so far wasn't brand recognition, lobbyists, tariffs, or the pleasing sound of a shutting car door. It's the combustion engine itself. Or rather the industry you're embedded in that provides the metallurgy and chemistry to reliably produce high quality engine blocks and seals. Because your engine needs to withstand high pressures and temperatures that go from below freezing all the way up to way over 2000K. And you also need the know how and experience to build all of that together.
None of that can be exfiltrated as a zip file or wished into existence by party officials.
The EV sidesteps all of that in one go. Now it's all down to who has the best batteries and who can do high quality assembly real cheap. Both points go to China.
Why? The same reason: The surrounding industry. It's what you get from doing (even simple) electronics for decades, cultivating a competitive industry for assembly and high quality battery cells.
The only hope for the incumbents was hydrogen instead of batteries because this again is engineering and seals.
The alternative would have been to become really good at batteries themselves. However, Europe's best chance to get there, Bosch, decided in 2018 not to go that way [2].
Once you let all of that sink in, you realise the inevitability of the current situation.
And they knew. All this time they knew. The rest was song and dance for politicians and shareholders.
[1] https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/01/02/ch...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery...
No central place to search for software, files, or settings. You have to dig through layers of menu trees like an idiot.
No visual preview to find the right open window. You have to alt-tab through a list of windows like an idiot.
No way of separating windows into work spaces / desktops (whatever you might call them). You have to either constantly kill windows or work your way through layers of them. The point above doesn't help with that.
This one has less to do with Windows 2000 but was part of the state of the art of the time for software: Walls of icons and buttons and not even a way to group them. Sometimes the entire window is just one wall of tiles sometimes there's the tool bar of doom at the top.
On top of lacking usability, Windows 2000 is ugly. Mostly because all main UI elements like buttons are visually thrust into your face by faux 3d elevation. This had it's place at the time when most of your users would not have had experience with computer UIs in the first place. With those users UI designers back then felt they needed to overemphasize visual cues from the real world. Nowadays you can show the user just a box or something that looks like a link (because people are used to browsers now). Maybe give a cue by changing the emphasis on hover.
The other reason that comes to mind why Windows 2000 is so ugly is colors. Again, this is due to its time and the capabilities of graphics cards back then that mostly didn't allow more subtle color differences.
I'm just using Windows 2000 as pars pro toto here. Pretty much all graphical UIs back then were lacking modern usability features and UI sensibilities, regardless of OS.
> Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.
You have your slightly condescending explanation for why we disagree and I have mine. Let me give you a hint quoting Douglas Adams:
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
They were also somehow the only ones that offered music videos without being shut down.
Today there is no such criticism from the US because censorship is something that is also of an interest to the christian backers of the current government.
When the cat is out of the house, the mice dance on your dinner table.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...
3: https://web.archive.org/web/20100123181634/http://www.abc.ne...
Once you start using even a small fraction of their tech it instantly metastasises throughout the entire organisation because of lock in and "open standards" that weirdly only work with their own tech. If the MS tech creates a problem the solution is to pour more MS tech onto the festering wound.
You apparently have been so insulated from how actual companies have to deal with tech that you think your little forays using computers are what everything should be measured by. All you have is a developer and hobbyist point of view.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
I'd be careful venturing out into unknown territory together with an LLM. You can easily lure yourself into convincing nonsense with no one to pull you out.
That's a brilliant plan! Let me buy the piece of land where that high rise stands with money you can't afford. Oh, you mean you have split ownership between all the owners of the units so you now can afford it? I'll buy half of the units then and rent them out. And when things are not looking good for people, I buy some more when they can't afford their loans anymore. Can't let those units depreciate, can we? My friends are in on the party and together we're keeping the demand up. And those prices go up and up. Oh, the cost of each unit has now doubled and tripled while your wages haven't? Too bad for you. I can still afford them and now you have been out competed by me.
It's the same game just with a lower starting point.
Maybe this former financial trader can explain it better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTlUyS-T-_4&t=520s
Properties aren't bought up anymore to develop them or have any returns from use. They are being bought as a non-depreciating asset. Want to effortlessly park money and not have the money rot? Buy land. Never mind what happens to stand on top of it. You can see more and more of those rotting real estate plots all over the western world. And there's always someone who wants to park money.
Your thinking isn't wrong on a smaller scale. All those aspects matter for a local housing market. But the overall trend is governed by something else.