Does everyone also know about the outsize influence China has on Vietnam? If the goal is to de-risk a China / US Trade War scenario and prevent Chinese government from stealing chip tech etc - then you dont get much by going to their pals next door ;)
This is an article that paraphrases another article from the Financial Times (https://archive.is/iuXAm) both of which lack any real sources or facts from Apple themselves. The only people quoted are a random Bain consultant and Vivek Wadhwa who basically shows up with an opinion whenever anyone says "India" - regardless of whether he actually understands the industry or not.
None of this is to say that the problems might not be real, but bear in mind that China literally started producing electronics in the 80s, a 40 year headstart. And even then, until the early 2000s even in India Chinese goods had the reputation of being low quality, and for good reason. It takes years of experience on multiple levels to achieve the level of production that Apple targets. But it's not unachievable, even in India.
The country has pulled this off in other sectors - IT, Aerospace, Automotives and Pharmaceuticals to name a few.
This is HN so the moment I say IT and India in the same sentence a megathread of outsourcing woes will start to form. But Tech in India is much more than outsourcing for the last 2 decades - solid tech companies serving global and local markets like Freshworks, Zomato, Zoho, BharatPe, RazorPay, Chargebee etc have emerged.
Apple is big enough and has sufficient resources to have known that manufacturing in India will have a learning curve. It's not like they sent a team of 5 engineers on a plane and told them to go get it built. Apple has been operating in the country for well over a decade now - it's only just starting to scale things up on the production side. This will also pass.
at this scale and complexity it's definitely one of the earlier projects. Apple does almost nothing "off the shelf" - tools, processes and often even materials are engineered to their specific needs. That's different from the more lego like manufacturing that most electronics require.
no idea why this is getting downvoted. This is super relevant. Germany has had at best handled their Turkish immigrants in a step-motherly fashion and until today you're automatically at a huge disadvantage with a Turkish sounding name / look in a lot of roles and industries. Heck the government even had a plan up until the 90s around "sending them back to Turkey".
So if anything the German media needs to do a way better job of highlighting this.
Yeah, even people who honestly believe that they are firmly pro-immigrant often have trouble accepting them in any role beyond cleaning services or running a kebab place. In reaction to this, some third generation descendants of immigrants seem to identify less with the country they have never left longer than a short vacation than their parents and grandparents.
It is very valuable for both immigrants (+descendants) and natives to see such a nice example of success far outside of typical immigrant roles.
I will be neither surprised if they do nor if they don’t. Tesla have ~ten billion miles of experience, so at this point I think the question is “how long will it take to figure out a data-efficient algorithm?” rather than “can it be done?”
Back in 2009 I was expecting this to be available before 2019, and I didn’t have in mind anything as limited as either the “motorways only” autopilot of Tesla nor the (single?) heavily mapped city system of Waymo.
I agree with pads & tampons being a great invention. Can we however please finally stop referring to "2nd and 3rd world" countries. Get on a plane - things are more similar than different in most parts of the world, stop perpetuating dated notions.
On your last point: Having recently returned from rural africa where girls miss significant amount of school for lack of pads & tampons (still), I can't exactly agree with this sentiment.
As an alternative to "2nd/3rd" or "developing" countries, I really like the "Four Levels of Global Income" model[0] that Hans Rosling put forth in his book Factfulness[1] (a must-read IMO).
It gives a much clearer perspective on how people live (and as you mentioned, how similarly people live across the world amongst the same income levels)
These terms don't mean 2nd and 3rd tier countries. At least they didn't used to.
> The three-world model arose during the Cold War to define countries aligned with NATO (the First World), the Eastern Bloc (the Second World, although this term was less used), or neither (the Third World). Strictly speaking, "Third World" was a political, rather than an economic, grouping.
I actually didn't state anything about economic grouping. My point is the notion is dated - and you've illustrated that quite well with your comment. The eastern & non-aligned blocs dont exist any more & the first world has split into its own bloc-ish things, yet everyone is a lot more willing to play ball with each other than at any given time in history before.
Get on a plane? Please, I'm from a plane. Being able to live in these highly developed western countries is a massive privilege. And trust me, a lot of things you take for granted these days, say birth control pills or IUD for women, are still frowned upon and not the easiest to access in China unless you're married, despite its development in the last 20 years. And even relatives who are making good earnings still wash their dishes by hand and dry their clothes with air, restaurants and food handling have little health inspection standards unless you're at a 5 star hotel. And I'm not talking about the rural parts of China, I'm talking about some of the most developed cities.
It’s common for women in Japan to get their friends traveling abroad (to eg Taiwan or Vietnam) to bring them back eg birth control or the morning after pill. It’s expensive and typically not covered by insurance (problem 1), and extremely hard to get a prescription for because the doctor will likely be male and lecture you on how you should get married and have babies (problem 2).
2nd / 3rd world notions have nothing to do with GDP. There are plenty of countries (a lot of the middle east for example) that would have back when 2nd and 3rd world were relevant notions been considered 3rd world, these currently have some of the highest GDP (PPP Adjusted) per Capita ;)
Yes, but the parent didn't imply that the two necessarily correlate. All you showed was that developing countries can have a high GDP. Are there any countries considered first world that have a low GDP?
there's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things. This is a great example.
Additionally today they announced that while profits on stock trading (specifically derivatives) can be taxed fully, losses can only be accounted for upto 10.000€
Berlin is trying to freeze rents for the next 5 years and make it possible to retroactively lower rents to the level of 2013.
This kids, is what it looks like when a government is too scared to solve bigger structural challenges (digitization of the beauraucracy, switch to electromobility, better competitive environment for startups, questionable pension system, unneccesarily high taxes that keep leading to surpluses, I could go on) - and instead keep themselves occupied with non-issues that are PR heavy. Schade.
Compared to the US, Germany is more regulation heavy in general. Many of those regulations seem fine or even great, there are definitely ones that weird me out a bit as an American living here though, like legally enforced quiet hours on Sunday, days where it's illegal to dance, and really just the large amount of government-religion interaction.
The US has lots of overbearing regulations and laws relating to "moral" stuff such as drinking and nudity. In many places in the US, it's illegal to drink alcohol in public [!!!]. That's pretty fucked up, not being allowed to drink a beer on a park bench. And don't get me started on the puritan anti-nudity laws...
I don't know. The US does seem to also have its fair share of strange, overbearing laws to the point where you can easily find "weirdest us laws" lists online:
Those are generally on the books because they are unenforced, so nobody even thinks to remove them. Were they enforced, they'd be struck quickly. Sometimes that even happens.
Are the ones in Germany enforced? Honest question, I don't know, and I'm interested in the answer.
Dancing Ban? Usually not unless you're either A) a very big venue or B) a public place like a school. But for either cases it wouldn't matter much since most of them are closed on those days since they are usually national holidays anyway.
You are severely misinformed if you believe these to be mandated by law. Also missing from US law: parental leave and sick days. None of these things are mandated, they are purely up to individual companies to optionally provide, which just isn't good enough in the rest of the world.
And even so. Do you want the US to be ranked together with developed nations or places like Papua New Guinea and ...
Huh, turns out that's the only other country listed besides the US that has no paid maternity leave.
In the US, the government dictates what hours you're allowed to drink, and in buildings that serve alcohol, you frequently need a license to be able to dance in those same places - even when there is no alcohol being served at that time.
There’s a difference between business licenses and making dancing itself illegal. I don’t know if that’s a real law somewhere in Germany, but it’s definitely further along in restricting personal freedom than requiring a business license to allow dancing in a club that serves alcohol, and I’d be surprised if Germany doesn’t have similar laws.
Although I imagine there could be some very conservative local jurisdictions, in the US, that outlaw dancing in some ways as well.
Having something be licensed simply means that it’s now illegal for you to do that thing.
It’s a euphemism.
Honestly, I feel it must be unconstitutional to outlaw protected expression by people simply because they are standing in a building in which other people serve alcohol at other times.
Dancing itself isn't illegal, just doing it publically, on those days. It's rarely enforced, many places have exceptions that it's allowed unless the local church mess is disturbed due to noises.
>there's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things.
As unnecessary as it might seem, however, it is not bizarre. This piece of legislation was not cooked up overnight, as you suggest. Basically, this is how the start of enacting Article 13 aka 'meme ban' looks like.
I'm pretty sure this is just a consequence of that EU copyright reform that passed some months ago (article 11&13/15&17). At least the linked article talks about it (in German).
The EU can't make laws themselves. The way they work is by requiring member states to make laws and this is Germany's.
Correct, it is the national implementation implementation of an EU directive.
And to the other point: There are two kinds of EU law. Regulationsa and directives. Regulations are direct law in all member states, directives need national implementation.
The study has a major flaw in that it ignores the grouping effect that makes self-driving cars & fleets completely different from chauffers. Shared usage will:
- most definitely happen in the case of "errand" like rides. The request to "pick up my shopping from Target" will be clubbed with 5-10 other similar requests and delivered at the same time.
- lead to single rides being a rarity, and at best a perk like "first / business class"
- bigger cars on the road with more seats, driving autonomously vs the nightmare equivalent of everyone having a chauffeur
A well reasoned rebuttal but it only works if people renting or timesharing vehicles for just single jobs. If things remain in their current ownership model (I buy a car and keep it in my driveway when not in use) their study holds merit.
The fleet prediction is indeed a game changer and should be prioritized over single ownership in order to curb VMT but it would be a large paradigm shift and those don't always go as planned.
that sounds like wishful thinking to me. coordinating with other people is hard. and if the ride is free, why bother. also people want to stay independent and not have to share.
the option to share an uber or equivalent for example is already there. every time i used it the trip took longer than had i not shared. missed a train because of it once too.
so i doubt that sharing will happen as much as you think
Only when you're driving around humans. When you're using automated cars to replace errands, it becomes a lot easier to coordinate a set of grocery pickups, laundry dropoffs, and so on.
With concepts like Amazon Lockers in apartment complexes, you can pick up their laundry from one locker, deliver cleaned goods to another, all while they're at work.
that may work with services that manage this, but not if i use the car to manage my own. those are two entirely different kind of uses of self driving cars.
additionally - even with the best intentions (in Germany for example, we have a great deposit based system where you return bottles for recycling / reuse at your local supermarket and get the deposit back) - it turns out that recycling just does not work as it should. DW (1) recently did an expose which showed that significant amounts of plastic that's sent through the recycling process actually ends up in south east asia (many companies are now banning this) - where it ends up getting burned / dumped into the ocean etc.
If we stopped it at the source - and forced these companies to spend a fraction of their massive revenues into innovating around more sustainable alternatives (effectively just pricing in the externality that they are currently getting a free ride on). You'd end up with a much better scenario where consumers can still enjoy the products and don't even have to deal with the cognitive overload of sorting 12 different types of waste.
I think one of the biggest coups that governmentes & corporations have pulled off is to let the burden of environmentally friendliness get shifted to the end consumer. This means that it requires masses of people to first get informed, then get mobilized and then start boycotting or putting pressure on these companies to change something. Pretty wasteful cycle if you ask me, easier to price it in much earlier at the source.
