The Oxford Union is the world's most prestigious debating society with a tradition of hosting internationally prominent individuals across politics, academia, and popular culture. Founded in 1823 at a time when The University of Oxford restricted students from discussing certain topics, The Union continues to uphold the principle of free speech through the exchange and debate of a wide range of ideas and opinions, presented by a diverse range of speakers - some inspiring, others controversial. As we celebrate 200 years of free speech during our Bicentenary year of 2023, we reaffirm our commitment to our integral values and also our belief that the discussion of complex topics should not only be encouraged but is an essential element of any free society.
Now, click around a few of the videos, and observe if the above description, an honest self-image of the best and the brightest, I'm sure, comports with the actual reality on display.
Make special note of the attitudes displayed by these bright young minds and the questions put to the speakers. Heck, might even notice the ever increasing pop-culture nature of the proceedings. I guess hearing from PSY about Gangam style is one of the most of all time.
In short, a large chunk of these "elites" who go into politics are nepo babies governed by fashionable group think no different from their less monied peers. iPhones are the great equalizer. Everybody is equally cringy. It is a different caliber of person now from the heyday and naturally trends towards authoritarianism.
The exceptionalism is gone a long time ago already. It was perfectly lampooned half a century ago in shows like 'Yes Minister'. Lofty ideals, duty, intellectual curiosity, honesty, a sense of decency, long ago succumbed to mediocrity and farce. And that was the 80s. We are way past that stage where there was still a sense of shame, past the age of spin, hurling into cynical ambivalence now and soon complete forgetfulness.
In short, the West really is in decline and has been for a long time. People who have a clue about why this is a bad idea are nowhere near the halls of power. And I don't mean intricate technical knowledge, these subjects go back centuries, the relevant ideas and ideals are at the very core of what made these societies great in the first place. Poof.
You know why this is wrong instinctually, at your core, because you paid attention to the ship of state and still give a shit about something bigger than yourself. They don't.
There's nothing outright wrong with them, they are just basic ordinary consumers. And the lessons of the past will have to be re-learned if we don't accidentally find ourselves this time in an unescapable permanent dystopia.
> Their market cap is higher than most other car manufacturers (pumping out many times more vehicles than Tesla is), most of whom have caught up on EVs (is Toyota the only big manufacturer still lagging on EVs? I think they are)
Tesla is a top 5 car manufacturer by earnings at $14B for 2022.
Toyota is next up that list at earnings of $20B.
Tesla sell almost 0.5 million EVs a quarter and has a 60% EV market share in the US, it sells more than everybody else combined currently, and is growing very fast. Hard to know how it will all shake out but so far nobody has caught up. Doesn't mean they can't but they are chasing. EV share of the US market is only 7% but is clearly the future, and again, Tesla has 60% (!) share in that market segment.
Looking forward there is the Gigafactory in Mexico and the Cybertruck release. If that is a hit Tesla will maintain its market leader position in 2024 and surpass Toyota in earnings. And they keep dropping prices. With smaller earnings than Tesla, and no institutional knowledge of making EVs it is hard to come up with a reason how and why Toyota can end up with a larger share of the EV market - suddenly they will find themselves in the position of the scrappy startup and Tesla the incumbant. That is the reason for the market cap, not mean tweets or dank memes - investors don't care about that.
Probably the list of EV leaders will be mostly new companies like Tesla, not legacy brands. Maybe some Chinese companies. Whatever the case it will look very different than today.
#9 is EssilorLuxottica (sunglasses), and #11 is a clothing brand.
If this sort of Fashion ever goes out of style does that whole country go bankrupt? I fear what the unstoppable and inevitable ascendance of Balenciaga might do to the French.
One of the biggest industry in France is aerospace (might even be the biggest, not by market cap but by revenue/people employed), and yet Airbus (not only French of course, also German, Spanish, etc.) is headquartered in the Netherlands. Car maker Stellantis (far from being only French, maybe mostly Italian?) is also headquartered in the Netherlands. Neither are particularly dutch as far as I know.
I wonder to what extent the list you link to is affected by French companies moving their headquarters to the Netherlands (or sometimes Luxembourg). Either directly, or while merging with other European companies...
Netherlands are a little bit like the European Delaware in that regard... And would you exclude Delaware corps when looking at New York or California?
Safran is on this list. Airbus is listed under Netherlands, fair point.
> I wonder to what extent the list you link to is affected by French companies moving their headquarters to the Netherlands (or sometimes Luxembourg). Either directly, or while merging with other European companies...
Never heard of Prosus, but that's apparently a tech investment group.
ASML is of course a real tech innovator. I'm surprised to see Airbus listed as a Dutch company; isn't their HQ in France? Heineken is beer of course. Not terribly innovative, but a lot of people seem to like it anyway.
> Airbus's registered headquarters is in Leiden, Netherlands, but its head office is located in Toulouse, France. The 'SE' in its corporate name means it is a societas Europaea, which enables it to be registered as a European rather than a national corporation. Its shares are traded in France, Germany, and Spain. The company is led by CEO Guillaume Faury and is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.
(from Wikipedia)
Very surprised by that, I thought it was mostly French with some European contributions.
The first CES was held in June 1967 in New York City. It was a spinoff from the Chicago Music Show, which, until then, had served as the main event for exhibiting consumer electronics.
A trade show is where you hawk your wares. A tech conference has sponsors, these are companies that want to sell you things. From their perspective, KubeCon for example, is where they try and convince you that their monitoring and alerting software is the best one. So that's what it is for.
Have a free t-shirt why dontcha, you look like a person of good taste who also needs something to wear. Don't even have to pay you like the guy in the chicken suit spinning a sign outside the venue.
From your perspective, if your employer is sending you on a fact finding mission, it is a free vacation away from the office and the ol' ball and chain. So that is what it is for also.
If you go to a tech conference with expensive tickets and pay out of pocket and aren't buying or selling anything contemplate what you are doing with your life. This article opens like so:
New Orleanians are just as likely as not to offer you a drink within sixty seconds of greeting you. Eighteen hours after leaving there, I walked into the Salt Palace Convention Center and made a joke about still needing my caffeine to almost-certainly-a-mormon.
That's why the guys with the beer bellies wearing Hawaiian shirts at these shindigs are often well-to-do fountains of knowledge who just want to have fun. They have been around long enough.
>If you go to a tech conference with expensive tickets and pay out of pocket and aren't buying or selling anything contemplate what you are doing with your life.
If you can get a free pass as a speaker or otherwise and the conference is somewhere you'd like to spend some time anyway, it can make sense to spend a day or two at an event if it's something you're really interested in. But I agree in general that I'm not going to spend $1K+ out of my own pocket to attend a big commercial conference for fun.
> That's why the guys with the beer bellies wearing Hawaiian shirts at these shindigs are often well-to-do fountains of knowledge who just want to have fun. They have been around long enough.
Hey that's me (aside from the fountains of knowledge part... and the well-to-do part...).
> My battery has never spontaneously ignited and it doesn't cost $24k to replace every xxx-thousand miles.
> But it's not all roses, I don't get to ride in the HOV lane, but that's fine. I'm a socialist
Can't tell if joking. I guess you read about exploding Tesla batteries in Pravda?
People with families can't load their kids and dogs and luggage into a cute clown car like a Fiat 500. If it suits your needs better that's great. I downsize even more and ride a motorcycle. These things aren't comparable.
The market for $75,000+ cars is small by definition there's really no need to throw shade like this comrade, the comparable cars are in the decadent luxury segment to begin with - which Tesla happens to be dominating for a reason. Horses for courses.
Sure. Every singleton I see in the HOV lane really has a dog and two kids stuffed in the trunk. I just can't see them.
If you want a $75k+ luxury car, by all means, get one. But you're crazy if you say it's cheaper than a $4k used ICE vehicle, which was the initial claim. It's also crazy to say a $75k+ luxury car has a lower TCO than a $40k 2023 Camry.
Also, socialists don't call each other "comrade." You're thinking of European communists [*], and I suspect South American communists. But when I talked with South American communists, they just called me "Amigo."
Interesting fact I just learned: they're apparently still publishing Pravda, but that is not where I heard about Tesla battery fires. I learned about them from living down the road from a power station where Tesla batteries caught fire. Sort of a "Hey! I wonder where those fire trucks are going? Is that smoke coming from Moss Landing?" sort of moment. And while I often wonder if NBC, CBS and CNBC are crazy, they are not, as you suspect, outlets for Pravda.
* Or possibly French social democrats. It's hard to keep up with French political fashion.
Stop that. I did not say never. Gasoline cars explode too, I saw it in a blues brothers movie. Same as you, I've also seen a car fire in real life with the trucks and sirens and everything. Fires are a thing, the night is dark and full of terrors.
Sometimes civilian planes drop out of the sky or even get shot down. Even humans on occasion "spontaneously combust". I can link you news stories demonstrating such events, yet here you are in the day to day not paralyzed by fear of it happening to you. I assume.
> Also, socialists don't call each other "comrade."
Astute. I am not a socialist, amigo. Myself, I was actually thinking of good natured, how you say, Humor[*].
> Sure. Every singleton I see in the HOV lane really has a dog and two kids stuffed in the trunk. I just can't see them.
Never said that either. I said you can't fit that stuff into a little Fiat 500, it is not the same vehicle category. This isn't an opinion. It literally isn't.
> But you're crazy if you say it's cheaper than a $4k used ICE vehicle,
Never said that either!
> It's also crazy to say a $75k+ luxury car has a lower TCO than a $40k 2023 Camry.
Nor that.
Is this a reading comprehension issue or just a relentless insistence on throwing shade?
Once again: If you actually want to compare used ICE vehicles like a Camry to a Tesla, you'd compare to a comparable used Tesla model not a brand new $75,000+ one. Used Toyotas are extremely reliable and affordable, it is a great option! May very well be the best option depending on what is available in your location at a given moment.
Most people don't buy new, you might not want/need to, that is a separate discussion. Depending how much you drive, as fuel is expensive, eventually you'll break even - maybe around 10 years / 100k miles, you can look it up and do the calculation yourself.
It may or may not be the right option for somebody but surely has nothing to do with the completely different category of $75,000+ cars.
* Worldly socialists are often unfamiliar with the concept. Ymmv.
HN gets a public key, that's the account. The private key is stored on your device, say on iOS it would be stored encrypted in the secure enclave and accessible via TouchID/FaceID.
There is little to no point in stealing the HN user database at that point because that's all just useless public keys, it has no passwords.
If you wanted to add a device to the HN account you'd login, go to the settings, and generate another pub/private key for the new device rather than the traditional "change password". As there is no password. Most likely you're familiar with a variation of this already from sites like Github.
> If you wanted to add a device to the HN account you'd login, go to the settings, and generate another pub/private key for the new device rather than [..]
So I'm on my phone wanting to log into HN, and you're saying I need to go to my desktop (which is already logged in) to generate a key ... for the phone to be able to log in?
Umm, I'm not sure Joe Q. Public is going to view that as acceptible.
It's basically impossible to answer that hypothetical right now, because it depends entirely on the choice of client software. And that's still something that's evolving; it's just that Apple/Google/MS have the most prominent implementations here.
If you have an iPhone and a Mac? No, your iPhone will log in via iCloud keychain. You use touchid/faceid to auth as usual.
If you have an Android phone and a Chromebook/use Chrome? No, it will get sync'd implicitly. You use whatever the equivalent of touchid/faceid is to auth, as usual.
If you're using some third party, pure-software, syncing solution? No, probably not. For example, existing password managers will probably just store the key material, encrypt it, then sync across devices. Again, pure software solution. You use 1Password on Windows 11 and also on your iPhone? You'll probably be fine. (Note: this is hypothetical, because 1Pass doesn't support it yet, but this is probably how it will shake out.)
If you want to login with your Chromebook using a key it has generated and not export/sync the key, and you also have an iPhone at the same time you want to login with? Yes, you will need multiple keys, one for each device, and you will need to provision them.
Realistically this is also a change to login flows on the server as well, so there's work to be done for the UX. For example many server-side auth packages are still adopting Passkeys into their flow, they need to change their schemas and frontends. One change to explore e.x. is you can ask the user after registering with WebAuthn is to register other devices, if they have them. Whether or not that's a workable solution remains to be seen.
If you logged in to HN using Safari on a Mac the private-key (a.k.a "password") got chucked into your keychain as part of the account creation flow and is synced across all your iCloud devices.
So on your phone when visiting the HN login page you'd just be prompted for a fingerprint by TouchID and in you go. Actually quite seamless. This would be what 90%+ of users experience as normal people don't fiddle with defaults.
I don't use Windows but they have some sort of iCloud Passwords thing for Windows now too apparently. Just dipping their toe into slowly making it cross platform.
It becomes less seamless and more of a hassle when you are using multiple keychains or 3rd party apps which probably a lot of people here are. What I described is that case, when you have both an Android phone and an iPhone and they are completely sequestered from each other (maybe personal and work?).
> Just to clarify, these "normal people", they are the ones who typically click on links in phishing emails without actually thinking?
Yes? Heh, you know what normal people means, good. Guess what, phishing emails tricking people into visiting fake websites won't be as effective as with this flow there is no password for them to type in and accidentally give away to the attacker.
> Q: Why would one not expect to have devices sequestered from each other?
Because most people don't carry two phones or bother sequestering devices. It isn't the common case so it isn't a polished flow. At least not yet.
Don't know about a mountain as you probably use a password manager already, it isn't much different.
> If you wanted to add a device to the HN account you'd login, go to the settings, and generate another pub/private key for the new device rather than the traditional "change password".
I still don't understand how do I do that.
Let's say I registered account using iPhone. Now I want to log in with my Linux workstation. So I pick up iPhone, go to the https://news.ycombinator.com/settings click "Add device" and then what?
I guess something like "recover password" workflow? Like I type my e-mail on new device, receive login link and then via login link I can register new device?
If you are in Apple world, your keys are synced between iOS and macOS (and saved in Secure Enclave, so you need TouchID/FaceID to complete flow.) In 'Google' world, you can use them between Android devices and Chrome browser.
However, if you access from unsupported app/device (e.g. use Apple Passkeys and want to access from browser on Linux machine), you can always just scan QR code with phone, and use it to log-in.
> The private key is stored on your device, say on iOS it would be stored encrypted in the secure enclave and accessible via TouchID/FaceID.
What's important is that even though they are stored in the SE, they are no longer tied to the device and can be exported. Prior to the introduction of passkeys, all FIDO-based keys were minted inside the SE, without the option of being exported.
AI calm my troubled soul, relieve me from the mounting pressure and let me know that solutions are within reach.
Praise to You, who turns wrong to right. You can do anything at SocialMedia site. Anything at all.
The only limit is yourself.
Winner winner chicken dinner. Could sum the argument as: Transformers appear to be approximately emulating the brain despite us not fully understanding how either works "inside". Which is weird and eerie, but plausible.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/@OxfordUnion/videos
Now, click around a few of the videos, and observe if the above description, an honest self-image of the best and the brightest, I'm sure, comports with the actual reality on display.Make special note of the attitudes displayed by these bright young minds and the questions put to the speakers. Heck, might even notice the ever increasing pop-culture nature of the proceedings. I guess hearing from PSY about Gangam style is one of the most of all time.
In short, a large chunk of these "elites" who go into politics are nepo babies governed by fashionable group think no different from their less monied peers. iPhones are the great equalizer. Everybody is equally cringy. It is a different caliber of person now from the heyday and naturally trends towards authoritarianism.
The exceptionalism is gone a long time ago already. It was perfectly lampooned half a century ago in shows like 'Yes Minister'. Lofty ideals, duty, intellectual curiosity, honesty, a sense of decency, long ago succumbed to mediocrity and farce. And that was the 80s. We are way past that stage where there was still a sense of shame, past the age of spin, hurling into cynical ambivalence now and soon complete forgetfulness.
In short, the West really is in decline and has been for a long time. People who have a clue about why this is a bad idea are nowhere near the halls of power. And I don't mean intricate technical knowledge, these subjects go back centuries, the relevant ideas and ideals are at the very core of what made these societies great in the first place. Poof.
You know why this is wrong instinctually, at your core, because you paid attention to the ship of state and still give a shit about something bigger than yourself. They don't.
There's nothing outright wrong with them, they are just basic ordinary consumers. And the lessons of the past will have to be re-learned if we don't accidentally find ourselves this time in an unescapable permanent dystopia.