The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as “Amazon”) gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

I think there’s a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.

BRICS isn’t an alliance or a cohesive entity. It’s the equivalent of the G7 for major non-western economies. India and China hate each other. China and Russia only really get along in being anti-US. Brazil and South Africa have no real intersection with the geopolitical goals of the other. BRICS isn’t a geopolitical anything of any meaning.

I suspect India is doing this for the simple reason that they have zero control over Windows while they would have as much control as they want over internal-Linux use. They’re large enough that they can make it work, assuming they’re willing to dedicate the people and the money to it and put up with the non-insubstantial switching costs. Open question on what their follow through will look like, but it’s entirely within their capability.

It’s convenience and efficiency. At the end of the day a single cable can provide that functionality needed for 99.9% of such devices. Getting everything on a single cable format reduces waste, simplifies people’s lives, and even opens up competitive spaces. There’s no need for it to be two cables.

This is speculation based on the combination of physical constraints and changing usage.

Phone batteries today are in the 10-20 watt-hours range for capacity, or at least iphones are and that’s the data I found. Going from the typical ~20W fast charging rate to the full 240W capacity of USB-C EPR would allow a twelve times increase in battery capacity with no change to charge times. Are batteries going to increase in capacity by twelve times in the next 17 years? I’d be shocked if they did. The change from the iphone 1 to the iphone 14 pro max is 5.18Wh to 16.68Wh — a three times increase in 16 years.

Likewise, with data transfer, it’s a matter of how human-device interaction has shifted with time. People increasingly prefer (a) automated, and (b) cloud based data storage, and © if they do have to move data from device 1 to device 2, they would rather do it wirelessly than with a physical connection. USB4 on USB-C is meant for 80 Gbit/s = 9.6 GB/s transfers. That’s already faster than high end SSD storage can sustain today, and USB4 is a four year old standard. People on phones are going to be far more likely to be worried about their wifi transfer speeds than their physical cable transfer speeds, especially in 2040.

Then, on top of all of that… USB will continue to be updated. USB-C’s limitations in 2033 will not be USB-C’s limitations in 2023, just as USB-C’s limitations in 2023 are not the same as USB-C’s limitations at its inception in 2014. In 2014 USB’s best transfer rate was 10 Gbit/s, or 1/8 what it can do today.

I’d be surprised if USB-C was a limitation on phone technology even by 2040. The bandwidth and power delivery capacity are way beyond what are needed now. Data transfers from phones are going to increasingly move to wireless in that time frame too, I expect.

The limitation on the viability of USB-C with phones won’t be the actual technological viability of the standard with respect to phones. Instead, the problem for USB-C for phones will be if another standard comes out and starts being used by other devices that do need higher bandwidth or power delivery capability. Monitors, storage devices, laptops (etc.) will eventually need more than USB-C can provide, even with future updates to its capacity. When those switch over to something new, that will be when phones (and other devices) will need to consider a new standard too.

Sony’s big action games have done great on PC. It’s the lower profile games that have launched with little to modest success. Also the lack of marketing didn’t hurt the first few games as the novelty of a port at all basically created publicity. It’s becoming more and more expected now though, so they’ll need to do some marketing if they want big numbers at launch. Doesn’t need to be a big campaign but just find an excuse to generate extra discussion online.

Spider-man, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn all did amazingly. Even Days Gone did great. Uncharted and The Last of Us both had port issues at launch; Uncharted is in good shape now but TLoU still needs some work (and likely a bit of marketing to let people know that). Returnal is niche and I expect it will do well in the long run, but was never going to do gangbusters at launch. Sackboy and Ratchet & Clank aren’t generally the types of games I’d expect to do particularly well on PC.

I don’t know anything about tab syncing, so I don’t know. Sorry!

Does Boeing have any recent projects that are an unmitigated success? Everything I see from them is about a new project being a disaster in some manner.

On mobile: Hit the three line menu button -> “Send link to device”
On desktop: Right click on a tab -> “Send tab to device”

Kind of odd that they’re not the same language, actually. For what it’s worth I’m on iOS so it might be different for FF on Android.

I can send a tab from my mobile Firefox to my desktop Firefox by default, so that’s at least one of those that doesn’t need an extension.

Lots of things.

Use public transportation.
Have multiple experiences available nearby to do as a day activity.
Have a large pool of people available to meet and know.
Walk to anything interesting.
In general just have lots of options and variety for anything: work, groceries, eating out, etc.

Some small towns might have some walkability for downtown but nothing more than that.

I’d tell my friend that this one is on me. If they protested I’d offer to let them take the next time we ate at a restaurant.

I’m a big fan of paying bills separately though.

I can’t read the article but I think they’re making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill.

BEVs were nigh impossible to purchase a year ago. Tesla’s MSRPs were ~$10k higher than they are today, not even accounting for the tax credit. Other manufacturers were seeing dealer markups of $10k+ on a new BEV. Demand for BEVs went through the roof as (1) supply chain effects meant the price difference between ICE and BEV went down, and (2) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices way up. A 350% jump over last year doesn’t mean much in that light — what inventory even existed on dealer lots last year?

Both of those factors have faded. EVs are still selling well, but manufacturers are going to need to find more ways to lower prices in order to stay competitive and to keep demand up.

(1) I didn’t downvote you.
(2) I said something similar but critically different:

Building a streaming platform that expects to have multiple billions of dollars in revenue across hundreds of millions of users is going to have enormous fixed costs that cannot be trivially scaled down if user counts are lower. If they plan around a much lower user count they can scale it down at that planning phase, but not after the fact (at least not easily).

The intended size of the platform dictates the fixed costs.

And…
(3) The data you provided wasn’t fixed costs. It was variable costs like server time, music rights, and bandwidth.

Interesting. That’s dated October of 2009 and says Spotify had 5m users. Looks like they have ~200m users today. At a linear scaling it’d be twenty times larger, or £120m=$154m per month. That’s $1.85b/year.

In reality it wouldn’t scale linearly, but it also accounts for zero salaries, which was the major component of my comment.

Fixed costs isn’t the cost of having a single server with the storage. I’m thinking everything they need to have built up with the intent of having between N1 and N2 MAU, in order to make that viable.

It’s the cost of developing the software stack, of hiring the lawyers and accountants that (1) acquire the music rights and (2) handle the music payouts, it’s the lawyers that handle the different legal requirements across every major global economy, it’s the servers located in all of those countries with as many sub-national locations as necessary, it’s the IT staff that manage that server uptime, it’s the software developers that maintain that system and improve upon it so rivals don’t jump too far ahead… Etc.

Building a streaming platform that expects to have multiple billions of dollars in revenue across hundreds of millions of users is going to have enormous fixed costs that cannot be trivially scaled down if user counts are lower. If they plan around a much lower user count they can scale it down at that planning phase, but not after the fact (at least not easily).

Streaming services have an enormous amount of fixed costs. It might cost them several billion dollars/year to operate the necessary infrastructure even with zero customers, but the marginal cost to serve a customer might be on the order of $2/month on that $10/month subscription.

It’s why streaming and digital storefronts are such a sink/swim industry. Either a company gets over user number+sales threshold to override their fixed costs, upon which they become profitable and all further growth makes them exceedingly profitable. Or the company fails to do so or barely does so, and makes somewhere between giant losses to minimal profits.

From a quick search, Spotify’s user count should have grown somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times over since 2015.

This is not a cost increase that is mandated or justified by inflation. It never is. It’s a cost increase from a very, very, very simple fact: companies want profit, and Spotify’s leadership has concluded that they will gain more profit by increasing prices than they will by not doing so.

You’d be surprised at how many fabs there are in the US.

• TI has something like a half dozen to a dozen, predominantly in Texas
• Intel has more fabs than you can shake a stick at, mostly in Oregon but also Arizona
• Samsung has a fab in Texas
• GlobalFoundries exists in New York and Vermont
• Micron is in Idaho
• Wolfspeed has power electronics fabs in North Carolina and New York

And so on. The US has a lot of fabs. For best countries in the world to build a new fab, the US would rank somewhere between first and third place — and I think there’s a strong argument for the answer being “first place.” Unlike Taiwan and South Korea, US fab jobs and experience are not almost entirely dominated by one or two companies. The US isn’t located in one of the most geopolitically risky parts of the developed world. The US has a huge population and plenty of money to put into fab expansion.

The only issues here are (a) the US has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction projects, and (b) TSMC wants to pay workers like shit and treat them even worse, which doesn’t fly for technically skilled US workers. You can treat US technical workers workers poorly, but not as poorly as in much of Asia, and you definitely cannot do it without paying them very well.

As a vegetarian myself, I’ve thought about this a little bit.

I think it ultimately boils down to the fact that going vegan requires a lot more work from an individual. Avoiding meat might be a pain in the ass to implement at times, but the actual intellectual process is straightforward. You need to watch out for soup stocks, cheeses with rennet, and meat sauces basically. Everything else, at least in my experience, is obvious. Converting a recipe to vegetarian doesn’t require too much thinking. A lot of foods are just innately vegetarian and won’t be labelled as such: there aren’t “vegetarian pancakes” or “vegetarian pies” out there — they’re just expected to be vegetarian unless someone made a meat version. Only a small handful of pizzas will be labelled vegetarian even though most are or trivially can be made such. It’s easier to find/adapt recipes that are vegetarian compatible.

Going vegan is just a full extra process. Eggs, milk, butter aren’t visually obvious. Even bread isn’t certain to be vegan-friendly. The ingredients being removed from a recipe cannot be simply removed, especially with baked goods, without risking the entire recipe becoming a disaster. If you take a cookie recipe and remove the eggs and butter, you’re going to be disappointed; you need to find a recipe designed from the ground up to not use eggs or butter.

The extra restrictions on vegans mean they need to be much more specific about their foods than vegetarians.

On the timescale of 27 years, grid-scale storage is going to be a complete non-issue. There’s already a decent amount of work being done at that level right now and battery tech has been improving at a consistent pace. Renewables can work quite well as-is with a good mix of location and source. Offshore wind is more consistent wind speeds, solar locations can mitigate light cloud coverage, solar output peaks during the times of greatest human use, and land based wind is typically dispersed over large areas.

I’m a huge proponent of nuclear power, but as things stand it isn’t going to be necessary on these time tables. The value in nuclear is that it’s another thing we can build now without needing to wait ten years for battery prices to continue to decline or for manufacturing capabilities to ramp up. Building 10 GW of nameplate capacity wind+solar is great. Building 10 GW of nameplate wind+solar and 5 GW of nameplate nuclear is better! That’s the advantage of nuclear today, and we should fucking make use of it. That doesn’t make it mandatory in the long-term.