As I understand it there was actually healthy demand for the Honda Fit and it sold profitably, but US-bound Fits were made in the same Mexico factory that made the more profitable Honda HR-V. The HR-V was successful enough that it displaced some Fit production and there were waiting lists at Honda dealers to get a Fit. Eventually the HR-V became popular enough that the Celaya factory switched to 100% HR-V production.
It wasn’t that Honda couldn’t sell Fits to Americans at a small profit, it’s that they found they could use their manufacturing capacity to sell more expensive, more profitable models to Americans instead.
> US-bound Fits were made in the same Mexico factory that made the more profitable Honda HR-V
> The HR-V was successful enough that it displaced some Fit production
> it’s that they found they could use their manufacturing capacity to sell more expensive, more profitable models to Americans instead.
That by definition implies that the Fit did not have ideal PMF. You do NOT want to be managing multiple SKUs, especially if they are cannibalizing each others market.
It's also an additional point showing that if given the option or the ability, consumers would spend a couple thousand more just to get a CUV instead if a hatchback.
Edit: I forgot, no one on HN understands how basic business works. Keep the downvotes coming
I’ve always seen UBI as part of a post-scarcity sci-fi future. Once the robots run the farms and deliver the food and build the buildings and so on, and there just isn’t enough work to go around for humans, of course the fruits of this productivity should be shared with the wider population (both morally and to prevent uprisings). Sure, in this sci-fi future you can live in your basic pod and eat basic food for free or you can work a little or a lot to try to upgrade your situation.
But I don’t think we’re there yet. We do have a lot of industries that rely on shit jobs that people would rather not do. If we, IMHO prematurely, try to institute a UBI now we’d be in for a world of pain along the way as the prices of basic services skyrocket without robots being ready to step in.
Instead, automation will make money irrelevant in the “we don’t need to make money because money ultimately only can be used to pay wages, and nothing else” way.
Since automation means you don’t pay wages anymore, you only need natural resources and energy.
When corporations no longer see (external) money as useful, but only as a way to apportion resources internally to stakeholders, that makes everyone outside of that system into ants.
If you make the "basic pod" a tent, wealthy countries could probably afford this sci-fi future today. But "enough money to live like a homeless person without having to beg or steal" doesn't sound so great as an aspirational goal, does it?
If the "basic pod" is supposed to be something more durable, probably the first step would have to be building enough homeless shelters for all the UBI recipients without another source of income.
Yes, I'm saying that wealthy countries can definitely afford the "basic food" part of the "live in your basic pod and eat basic food" future, but the "basic pods" are more uncertain. If there's not enough money to build enough homeless shelters to house everyone, how could there be enough money to pay for UBI high enough that everyone can afford a roof over their head?
Money has never been the problem for homelessness. It costs cities more money to deal with homeless people than it does to build public housing if the city provides the will to do so. This has been proven out time and time again.
There are many, many perverse incentives involved in keeping homeless people homeless.
At the general level, for many people witnessing exigent poverty is a calming horror. “I’m doing ok I guess”
Then, the broken healthcare system. We would need to acknowledge that we have an ill society that refuses to provide care for its victims and even its children.
Also, the homeless are a very useful spectacle to keeping people in line, a constant reminder that most people are a couple of bad months from living under a bridge. This prevents people from organizing for better pay, better conditions, better lives…. Facilitating the harvesting of all of the excess value that they can be coerced into providing for their employers.
What UBI does, as proven time and again, is empower people to risk looking for better jobs, better lives. Reduce the stress of daily life by removing the spectacle of losing your family and living in a box down by the park.
That people find the idea of this intolerable speaks volumes about the society we inhabit.
Wealthy countries could afford this even with proper housing, food etc (not fancy, but not tent/slop either). Even not so wealthy ones could afford something. You have to go back all the way to hunter/gatherer societies to have a situation where each person's productive labor only generates enough wealth to feed themselves. In any modern industrial society, the productivity is long past the point where each person produces enough to satisfy multiple people's needs, in aggregate. The only problem is that most of this generated wealth is then directed to satisfy the whims of the very few people at the top who get to collect economic rent from the rest of us.
> of course the fruits of this productivity should be shared with the wider population
we're quickly getting closer to that stage with the promises of AI-increased productivity; and yet, there is not the faintest signal from those building and profiting from AI that the fruits of the increased productivity will be shared; quite to the contrary it will be captured almost entirely by shareholders -- why are investors pouring hundreds of $B into AI otherwise?
> You could look at this as an abitrage opportunity where a business throwing out bulk waste has to pay for it, but if you distribute it to individual citizens whose trash bin still has a bit of room in it, you can throw it out for free.
Yeah, that’s what I figured was going on here. Reminds me of pizza delivery (in the US anyhow), which relies on pizza delivery guys not paying attention to the cost of vehicle wear-and-tear and proper insurance so your pizza is cheaper than if every pizza place owned properly maintained and insured vehicles.
Was it really this way in general or just with some little startups who didn’t mind taking risks? As far as I remember employers always cared where remote workers were for tax and other reasons (sanctions, compliance with local regulations, etc).
I believe you only need to work at a particular location for 6 months in a year to be considered a resident for tax purposes. But yeah there’s a certain flexibility with the truth if you go over but it’s not like the biggest deal since you’re paying state taxes either way and not that many people do it anyway.
It gets even more complicated when treaties are involved because they’ll supercede the law, have a lot less jurisprudence and are often unreadable gobblygook.
You end up with rules like (paraphrasing):
“If a member of a contracting state contracts in the other contracting state, they will only pay taxes in their other contracting state”
I vividly recall a coworker skyping into a department all-hands via satphone from the galapagos and we were doing work for the ACLU and Unicef at the time, not exactly a garage band startup.
Another reason in favor of reliance on contractors, at least in a couple of federal agencies I’ve worked with, is to improve diversity metrics. For agencies that require lots of technical workers, the reality is that means a heavily male workforce. But agencies (up until a few months ago) liked to tout that they were “model employers” with very diverse workplaces, and near gender equity. Then you actually show up and notice the building is full of the usual (for tech) contingent of white and Asian dudes but they don’t count as employees for diversity statistics.
That’s how I feel about present day humanity with regards to computer tech. I was born around the time of the 8086; my parents never really became fluent with computers. I was a nerd and got into computers as a teen, soon enough I had internet and then WiFi and now frickin smartphones hooked into LLMs. We’re the Information Age equivalent of those folks who spanned all the from the feudal era to riding Honda motorbikes.
I'm possibly a similar vintage and enjoy telling my kids about changes that have happened within my lifetime, and not just things I've read of. TVs without remotes, to corded remotes, to normal remotes, all-in-one things, remotes with touch pads, everyone watching shows on personal devices with touchscreens, etc. Or from rotary phones to corded to cordless to early mobile phones, to what they're familiar with now. Record players, rewinding cassette tapes with a pencil, recording songs from radio, carrying around CDs with your Discman, minidiscs, MP3s, streaming. Such an interesting and wide series of changes.
Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
Waymo rides are also potentially slower because they strictly follow speed limits. Not really problematic in downtown SF but it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll be received by riders when they expand to highway driving where most people generally expect to drive over the speed limit.
On most trips people do speeding saves an irrelevant amount of time. If somehow you encounter zero traffic from Palo Alto to SF and you go 15mph over the limit the whole way it makes the trip about 5 minutes shorter.
You have about 50% more KE at 80mph as you do at 65mph btw, if you find yourself needing to dissipate that energy rapidly.
Sure, there’s the math, but there’s also the human nature part of it. If you’re sitting in the right lane doing the speed limit, watching dozens of cars consistently zip past, it feels like you’re “falling behind” all of that traffic. I wonder how that will be received by the riding public.
For the opposite experience, take a taxi in a low- or maybe middle-income country.
There's a good chance the driver will zoom past everything else, weaving between lanes accordingly, and you'll wish you were one of the slow vehicles. Although I'd be less concerned if the seatbelts worked.
When I'm traveling substantially below traffic speed I'm also decently concerned about becoming the scene of the accident. Sure it won't be me paying for the accident but I'd just rather not risk it.
This is often repeated, yet despite the studies on speed differentials being dangerous I am still skeptical of the more specific claim that driving the speed limit specifically when others are speeding increases your risk of getting in an accident.
It's likely often repeated because if you try driving 55 in a 55mph zone where people are driving between 62-70, it'sterrifying, it feels like you're stopped. Whether the stat is true or not remains to be seen, but intuitively, it makes a lot of sense. Sure, your risk of rear ending someone at that point is probably negligible, but the odds of being rear ended? Hard to say
When I’m driving the speed limit and everyone is going much faster I feel fine… they all just flow around me… if they weren’t able to flow, they wouldn’t be flying past.
In the UK the speed limit for goods vehicles is 10 mph below the limit for cars on motorways so there are plenty of vehicles driving below the limit.
The real risk is the opposite, cars bunched together at the same speed. This is where pileups occur, somebody at the front does something stupid and the people at the back end up colliding.
Buy back the Mavericks (probably for less than he sold them for), fire Nico Harrison and trade to get Luka Dončić back.
Oh, you mean about 18F? I’d just keep trying to draw public attention to what appear to be hasty decisions made by this administration that aren’t actually beneficial to the country.
It wasn’t that Honda couldn’t sell Fits to Americans at a small profit, it’s that they found they could use their manufacturing capacity to sell more expensive, more profitable models to Americans instead.