The facts seem kind of light here. Sounds like Boeing essentially did further "due diligence" using privileged information, decided the whole concept wasn't viable and wasn't afraid to share that information.
Given that buying companies is the only way such a calcified company can expand its product base, you'd expect them to be better at it...
The Queenslander house style was built for large blocks that had sufficient airflow, they were built to be cheap and don't work properly with modern block sizes.
While they are iconic, and have some great design features, the lack of insulation is not one of them.
A modern well insulated house with a heatpump + solar is extremely energy efficient and comfortable in all weather.
“Modern block sizes” will vary where you live, and you can build smaller of course.
Obviously this is location dependent advice. If you live in a lifeless suburban wasteland, then outside is no better than inside. If, on the other hand, there is nature around you, and it doesn’t get too cold in winter, then insulation is a pointless exercise! Get a ceiling fan and learn to tolerate a bit of heat.
I, personally, need nature to stay mentally healthy, and having nature wander inside from time to time helps greatly.
It honestly feels like the technology advantage Netflix enjoyed has all but disappeared.
Content is now king and all of the other production companies have been making content for decades, Netflix is in serious trouble if it doesn’t lift its game.
To the extent they had or still have technology advantages, they are irrelevant. They do not own the majority of the best, most desirable content. Content producers have engaged in (anticompetitive) vertical integration wherein they also have become distributors. As happens in such situations, Netflix finds themselves squeezed out and taxed to death by monopolist studios like Disney, Paramount and Warner.
Solution: Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) licensing. Disney must set a price for a piece of content and then allow any distributor to pay that price to carry it. They must not advantage their own distribution service in any way (which they shouldn't be allowed to have in any case).
It's the modern-day version of United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. where movie studios were banned from vertically integrating with theatres.
However I note on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... that the decree has just been sunset with the reasoning that ""the antitrust restriction was no longer necessary as the old model could never be recreated in contemporary settings"" - but it seems really like the exact same model,
> "the antitrust restriction was no longer necessary as the old model could never be recreated in contemporary settings"
For some reason* everyone seems to think monopolism was this quaint thing of the past, and not the thing that every market everywhere sprints towards as fast as the technology of the era will allow without some kind of restraint or regulation.
Why would the public need multiple distributors for the same content?
Theaters take tons of staff and logistics to operate. A streaming service is comparably simple (once the initial system is setup) and can deploy all content to all customers within seconds with the efforts of minimal people and overhead.
Where exclusive distribution exists there is little or no competition on price, service or quality. Why bother - they own the content, if you want to watch, you will put up with whatever.
I still put up with listening to Joe Buck call the World Series because Fox has exclusive rights to the broadcast. I would pay money to hear just about anyone else call it, including an ML powered Vin Scullybot (RIP).
How much control a content maker should have is a tough line to delineate.
MLB choose to give Fox exclusive rights, and Fox chose to give exclusive announcing to Joe Buck. Ideally, you could just go to MLB.com and choose whichever announcer you want, or some other equivalent system.
I would lean towards MLB having the right to sell their games how they want, but they also benefit from taxpayer funded stadiums, so I would not mind the government being able to force certain terms like FRAND on them.
You are entitled to that opinion, but exclusive distribution is antithetical to the idea of competitive enterprise. If we are going to continue to go that route, America should stop pretending we care about robust markets.
I do not see why exclusive distribution is always a bad thing, unless one is also claiming that a manufacturer has no right to sell directly to end users, such as Tesla.
Would a carpenter be able to only distribute their furniture directly to their customer? A hotel be not be able to exclusively take reservations from their hotel guests? An independent videographer not be able to sell their own videos however they want?
I think the solution here is to reduce copyright to 10 years. Or maybe 15. Then there is no more “exclusive” distribution.
In our combined scenario a carpenter can sell to anybody as long as they sell to everybody at the same price for the same type of buyers (retail/wholesale).
The solution is to mandate non discriminatory licensing, everything else you suggested is a workaround to avoid that step.
I think the main issue will be that smaller producers and studios won’t be able to make successful content because all of the users and subscriptions will be held by the big players. And even if they can get a licensing deal to put their content on another platform, it won’t be as favourable as Disney gets on their own platform.
Why does a content creator automatically deserve the audience of Disney at a price they determine to be fair? They are free to sell their media directly to anyone on the planet. They can put it in Google Play Store or Apple TV app for purchase or rent. Or for free on YouTube if they want ad revenue.
There is no barrier to distribution these days. The only limitation is quality of content. If a content creator makes something good enough at a price point people will accept, then customers can easily pay it.
Because in general we have found that giant megacorporations building up monopolies and walling in customers has not been a desirable thing. In general its preferable that product producers and marketplaces be run by separate entities, which was largely the case until new technology came in.
The time we were walled in was when all you media was delivered via cable or satellite of broadcast channels, which is what executives at those companies decided to show you.
No one is walled in now. If a content producer in Tajikistan made something that blew everyone away, everyone can watch it around the world without having to go through the bosses at Disney and Comcast and Netflix.
By and large, people like their curators. For example, I have no interest in sifting through content to see if it is worth watching or not. So I let my sources mention a show or movie’s name a bunch of times before I decide to watch it.
Others depend on the fact that it u in a on Disney or Netflix or Apple TV to be the filtering mechanism. Others do not mind wading through YouTube or TikTok filth.
Thats not true. Even if you put your content online, that doesn’t mean it will get in front of people. Disney, through its mass and various distribution levers, can control a significant percentage of what Americans watch on a screen, which isn’t healthy for democracy or capitalism.
There are 8B people in the world, there is no way everyone has time to watch everything. There will be a filtering mechanism for everyone.
The important thing is that it can get in front of everyone. Which the internet enables very easily.
If the content is high quality, word will spread, people will share links to it, and everyone will have the opportunity to see it. This was not the case before the internet.
The distributor is irrelevant nowadays. Today, Disney’s role is to curate.
> The distributor is irrelevant nowadays. Today, Disney’s role is to curate.
Again, that's laughable nonsense. If I want to stream a Marvel movie, Netflix' curation is irrelevant, because you can ONLY find it on Disney. That's not curation, that's distribution.
> If the content is high quality, word will spread, people will share links to it, and everyone will have the opportunity to see it. This was not the case before the internet.
This isn't true - Rocky Horror Picture Show? That's the just the first one that comes to mind. There are so many cult classics from the 60s-80s.
> There are 8B people in the world, there is no way everyone has time to watch everything. There will be a filtering mechanism for everyone.
Right now it's whoever owns the exclusive license for a piece of content. That's my entire point - consumers aren't choosing the winners, content owners are.
Their technology advantage disappeared the day MLBAM started doing non-MLB stuff. You saw this most clearly with the HBO Go Game of Thrones season premieres. The first time they did it, it was with an in house solution built by a Microsoft veteran (who for some reason decided to build a team in Seattle), that absolutely failed.
The next season they outsourced to MLBAM and it was flawless.
And would you know it. Disney bought MLBAM.
Although now there are several content producers who can match up with Netflix, with their in house teams.
What I will never understand though was Netflix voluntarily choosing to eliminate the tremendous data collection operation they had in their rating system. One of Amazon's biggest advantages are the reviews. Netflix had that in the media space. They decided to throw it away for a system which has no user input (so no moat) where anything that is presented to you is invariably rated 99%. It makes absolutely no sense.
I remember actually rating shows and movies on Netflix. There were stars and I could give as many or as few as I wanted.
Now they give me some stupid thumbs-up/-down thing, and I just give them the finger in response. Ratings on Netflix are useless now.
I do have one huge bit of praise for them: the cancellation process was absolutely painless. Not being snarky, I really appreciated that! (Contrast with trying to cancel SiriusXM, or Spectrum Internet; both painful)
Try cancelling Waste Management residential trash pickup. I had to repeat myself over and over that I was cancelling because I was moving to an area they didn't serve, and no, I would not give them my new address to check.
After finally convincing them that yes, I really did want to cancel, I was about to hang up and decided to double check that my auto-pay billing would be cancelled too.
"Oh no, if you're enrolled in auto-pay, you have to call the billing department to stop that."
I was so angry I nearly lost my composure with the lady on the phone who clearly wasn't responsible for such an asinine setup. I wonder how many people got charged for services never rendered and didn't want to deal with their bullshit enough to fight for a refund because they didn't know they had to cancel that separately.
I find that Disney doesn't have better content, but it has new content. I've had Netflix for years and watched most of the stuff I liked. I got Disney and they had Castle. That's kept me going for months and I've not used Netflix since.
Yeah it has 8 seasons. I tend to watch a show from start to finish as it cuts down the time spent hunting for something to watch.
You're correct that any streaming service has a chance at providing a show I'd like. That's the problem for services at the moment. Netflix has a huge catalogue but I've watched the shows I like. Disney has a smaller catalogue but happens to have a show I can watch with my wife. So that's the one we like at the moment.
They don't differentiate on anything else for me. They both work well enough.
That said Disney is not on my spart TV so I have to use the Chromecast.
One show wonders aren’t a bad way to go - and I think this is how Apple+ is going to come in submarine. Price it cheap enough that no matter who you have as #1, you have them as #2.
It might have been originally designed to kill tanks, but it's incredibly well suited to current asymmetric warfare.
- Massive Payload capacity; it's a missile truck, 5x what a reaper can bring.
- Cannon can hit infantry in closer quarters than any explosive missile/bomb.
- Armoured and extremely tough, designed to survive small arms fire, loss of wing, loss of engine.
AC-130 might be the king of CAS but it's also crewed by 13 people and has a top speed half that of a hog... which is important when people need support _now_.
The US airforce don't like the A-10 because it's a platform that primarily does grunt work for the army and they'd rather spend that money on their own missions.
> AC-130 might be the king of CAS but it's also crewed by 13 people and has a top speed half that of a hog... which is important when people need support _now_.
It's also not suited for very low flying, it wants to perform large circles around the target to get the side-guns pointed at it. And the AF made it even less suited for very low flying as the J revision reduces the armor dramatically compared to previous variants: where H had enough armor for 37mm J is only armored against 7.62, and not even all posts (gunner is unarmored).
The M2 Browning .50 machine gun ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning ) is more than a century old, and still very widely used. Originally, it was an anti-tank weapon...then tank armor got thicker. It became primary armament on fighter airplanes...then enemy fighters got faster and better-armored. Then it was...
Being very flexible and useful in current-day military operations is why the M2's still around. (Though being mostly below the radar of the US's stupid rival-service-branches politics, and always-gotta-have-new-shiny-stuff mentality sure helps.)
> Massive Payload capacity; it's a missile truck, 5x what a reaper can bring
If you need a bunch of munitions, bring a B-1 or B-52. Those things are GREAT at annihilating a whole training camp.
> Cannon can hit infantry in closer quarters than any explosive missile/bomb.
A small (18lb warhead) hyper-accurate missile is better than a cannon than can easily shoot way off. If there's a bad guy hiding behind a building, you want to frag the guy, not shred the building.
> AC-130 has a top speed half that of a hog
What's better than something that can take off and get into position quickly is something that's already there and watching the situation - MQ-9s are GREAT at that, and AC-130s are almost always providing overwatch when they're up.
> Armoured and extremely tough, designed to survive small arms fire,
Important if you're constantly flying very low. Why are you constantly flying low though? MQ-9s and AC-130s don't need to do that.
>Communication and navigation are more difficult because GPS and satellite comms don't work underwater.
That's a really good point, how do you get a signal to a submerged unmanned submarine under all that conductive saltwater? Military submarines use VLF radio waves that can penetrate saltwater fairly deep, but those long wavelengths require enormous aerials and powerful transmitters that are one thing if you're the navy of a nuclear power, quite another if you're a shipping line looking to make a profit.
One of the reasons to use quantum gyroscopes is that will be accurate to within 1m or so after a day long underwater traverse of 1000 km or more. Communication while fully under still sucks though.
Powerful lasers, as used by laser depth sounders, will penetrate water to an 80m depth [1]. Might be possible to do a laser link directly to an overhead UAV or satellite? If they are following regular shipping lanes, it might be possible to have communication buoys (or nodes on the seafloor connected by fibre/cable) at regular intervals along the route, with laser or sonar communications to passing submarines. It would be a bit like "sections" of track in railways, with vehicles checking in as they enter/leave each section.
Surely a GPS mast shouldn't be a problem? And an IMU may be more expensive than a GPS receiver, but compared to the cost of the whole vessel, it's probably negligible.
Deep water subs require serious fixed reinforcement (like gigantic periodic rings) to prevent being crushed at low depths that would stop you from easily exposing the interior for unloading - but given that they're only going 50m deep I'm sure you could have some mechanism to pop the sub in half and get all the access you need. I feel like turbulence is sort of a solved problem by way of pallet packing - but that actually raises a larger concern of mine - the sub they display is pretty tube-shaped which means it's either not going to use pre-packed pallets (definitely the case if the image shown is to scale) or it's not going to use pre-packed pallets efficiently. Habours leverage pallets to minimize the manual labour needed for loading/unloading so while the ship might open like a sardine can it's not going to see a lot of use if someone needs to lift boxes out of it one at a time.
If there are no people on board, couldn't the air pressure be boosted to match the external water pressure?
If the pressure is balanced, removing the need for a pressure hull, the sub could have a more rectangular cross section, allowing it to be packed full of regular shipping containers.
I am not sure how thick the reinforcement actually need to be in order to comfortable cover the minimum 6 atmospheres of pressure at 50m. My intuition with diving gear tells me its should not be that bad, but I don't know how much things scale with volume.
Missile subs have large vertical tubes that can quickly be unloaded and loaded with a crane. If a sub can have big missiles you can pack it with pallets of bottles
Given the capacity of hospitals to treat everyone, assuming we can max them out, it takes about 40 years til everyone has it, assuming in those 40 years, there are no additional births.
They have fallen upto a media trap setup to push blame while ignoring everything else.
You hear the same in places where 90% have gotten two shots.
The vaccines don't work so well. If you want to reduce the curve you need to go out 70% less. No one wants to share that getting a vaccine was never enough. We were told just get a shot and it will kill covid you can go back to normal living. The vaccines are not that good.
Given that buying companies is the only way such a calcified company can expand its product base, you'd expect them to be better at it...