Walmart suing Tesla for Solar panel fires

As did the Easter Islanders.

I you fly across the USA and look out the window, there can be half-hour stretches when all you see is trees. With good vision, you might see a road now and then.

We probably have more trees than 100 years ago.

But in many places, like here in California, the ultimate destiny of trees is to burn. Our choice is to have lots of small fires or fewer giant ones. Or log a lot maybe.

I own a couple hundred trees. Mo has named most of them. They won't burn because we are subject to draconian forest maintenance and defensible space rules, and because the cabin is not very flammable.

I love it when people just make up stuff because it makes them feel good. I guess there are always going to be "feel good" people offering opinions of stuff.

So do you own the trees? Or do the trees own you?

Hustlers don't invent or build stuff. Americans do.

Hustlers don't save the world from Germany (twice) and Japan and the USSR.

nce of their neighbours to a degree that more cilivised countries wouldn't tolerate.

us in a particularly attractive sense - banning abortions and persecuting g ays seems to be the most obvious symptom of this heightened sensibility. Mu ch of the adventurous character seems to manifest itself in new ways of bei ng mean to the neighbours.

The US didn't save anyone from Germany either... oh, right, you make up you r own fake facts.

American industry has come up with some pretty nice things but I think the notion of American Innovation as a perpetual habit is a bit overblown. it goes through cycles.

In the late 20th and early 21st century at least it seems American industry has been at its most innovative when the industry in question has the metaphorical gun to its head, competition out for blood and they have no choice but to come up with something, and quickly, or it's lights out. Apple as an example.

The US steel industry meanwhile wasn't killed by China or Europe it was killed by complacency. Who doesn't like just collecting checks and not spending money?

the real labor of those efforts mostly fell to poor people. My father was a Boston minister's son he was a richie-rich by the standards of his fellows in the Amry in 1944, though lower middle-class by Boston standards.

The guys from the South? They often slept with their boots on because they'd never owned a real pair of shoes before; afraid they'd be stolen. And the majority of all of them had never fired a military-type rifle before they arrived at basic training, and many not even a hunting rifle. So poor their family couldn't even afford to buy them real store-bought shoes, much less a good-quality rifle and ammunition to practice with.

Seemed to work out OK even so.

Apple was started by a couple of guys who met in the Homebrew Computer Club. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook were started by dropout amateurs.

I don't see that sort of thing happening much in other countries.

The German Master Race, and the Emperor's blessed Samurai warriors, thought that they would out-gun the American hicks by 10:1. The actual ratio was roughly reversed.

The Wehrmacht fought extremely well given the circumstances they were under on both fronts at the time of the invasion of Europe (as compared to e.g. to the Italians or Hungarians who easily surrendered by the thousands.) Full strength German Army groups with new equipment were a terror.

By late 1944 when my late father was in southern Europe the conditions they were operating under were rarely favorable like that and in Northern Italy where my father was stationed, say, pretty bad. The few engagements he was in (he was a mortarman) were mostly artillery-pounding heavily dug-in defenders in the mountains and they never broke thru the Po Valley into the Anschluss before the war ended.

but even fighting generally outnumbered and lacking equipment under pressure in Northern Europe the Germans never gave up ground easy. They took a lot of casualties but it was never like 10:1. and two of my Dad's Boston school buddies who got sent to Germany instead of Italy never came home, killed in a lit-up Sherman in the Battle of Remagen.

in Eastern Europe the US tended to try not to go in to fights with under

Not trying to disparage the American soldier's skill they were at least on part with the Germans for the most part but they weren't miracle-workers and leadership learned the hard way after Market Garden to be careful about which fights you pick even with an enemy in retreat.

After the surrender the 10th Mountain immediately started training for the planned invasion of Japan and while I'm not comfortable with saying I'm glad the atomic bombings happen I know the chances my Dad would've survived that as a low-level NCO were not good no matter how much the trained.

mind you IDK if the Sherman really caught fire more often than any other tank. The newest German tanks were superior in just about every way they just didn't have very many of them.

The Sherman and T-34 were just okay. The T-34 wasn't nearly as reliable as commonly believed in the mythology (it was a dreadful tank in a lot of ways) and the Sherman probably wasn't as unreliable as is believed either.

All of them would catch fire if shot up enough. The US Army was quite a bit better at salvage operations and returning even heavily-damaged tanks and vehicles to service:

And other stretches when you see none.

Do you think the Easter Islanders made a good decision and tradeoff?

us

ance of their neighbours to a degree that more cilivised countries wouldn't tolerate.

ous in a particularly attractive sense - banning abortions and persecuting gays seems to be the most obvious symptom of this heightened sensibility. M uch of the adventurous character seems to manifest itself in new ways of be ing mean to the neighbours.

I assume this is a reference to the iPhone? I think this is not a good exa mple of your point. Apple was always disruptive. The time was right for a new phone paradigm. It was more about ineptness in the market otherwise. The people making flip phones had no motivation to rock the boat. Palm tr ied in a very inept way to market their idea of a "smart" phone which was j ust a phone an a PDA in the same package. It couldn't even use a number fr om the contacts list to dial the phone. You had to write it down, switch t o the phone and type it in. lol

No, the iPhone wasn't a result of Apple having their backs to the wall, it was about Jobs being brilliant with yet another new idea who's time was rig ht.

Largely the Shermans were out gunned. But the German tanks were largely ou tnumbered. That was the point. Our strength was in making tons and tons o f weapons which allowed us to continue fighting hard the whole war. The Ge rmans used very high tech weapons which were hard to make and hard to keep running. So as the war ran on they had fewer and fewer of them.

Some of the German weapons were amazing. They had AA towers over Berlin th at I don't think were ever taken be attack, they were sieged. The guns cou ld be used against tanks as well. When Berlin was taken they were some of the last to surrender to the Russians.

I don't know we could have actually defeated Germany without Russia. Most likely we would have obtained a truce.... for a while.

John Larkin has this happy delusion that the US "won" the first and second world wars. In both cases it got in late, and provided useful - but not dec isive - help at the end.

The USSR saved the world from Nazi Germany, and would have done it without help from the allies, though their help was very useful.

The US did defeat imperial Japan in WW2, but it didn't save the world from Japanese domination - the Japanese army and navy weren't up to that.

China fought Japan for much longer than the US did. It might not have beate n them without help, but it hadn't been beaten into insignificance before J apan attacked the US. They might not have saved the world from Japanese dom ination on their own, but they certainly contributed to Japan's eventual de feat.

Quite why John Larkin persists in posting this delusion escapes me. He was probably taught it at primary school, and still hasn't mastered the critica l thinking skills required to reject this kind of indoctrination.

ous

rance of their neighbours to a degree that more cilivised countries wouldn' t tolerate.

ious in a particularly attractive sense - banning abortions and persecuting gays seems to be the most obvious symptom of this heightened sensibility. Much of the adventurous character seems to manifest itself in new ways of b eing mean to the neighbours.

John Larkin wouldn't. ARM computers in Cambridge - originally Acorn Compute rs when I got a job offer from them - weren't started by drop-out amateurs.

I know their first software manager, who was getting Ph.D, in psychology at the same time, and his Ph.D. supervisor. The software manager was wise eno ugh to be unhappy about the other manager's skills and sold his share of th e company back to the other founders - Chris Curry and Herman Hauser - shor tly before it went bust for the first time.

Andy Hopper was active in the company (while remaining a lecturer at Cambri dge) and stayed associated with ARM computers. He might be the most signifi cant factor.

The undergrowth is often the problem, not the trees themselves.

With local small fires every few years will burn the undergrowth but not wildfire resistant trees. With the undergrowth cleared, the remaining trees will get more nutrient and more water so they are not that dry i.e. less fuel load. Of course the interval between such fires must be a few years so that some young fire resistant trees will be big enough to live through undergrowth fires. This was the situation before human interventions.

Now that even small fires are quickly put out, the undergrowth will grow every year more and more, sucking more and more nutrients and water from big trees. After a few years an inferno may start, burning also the top of the big trees.

To avoid such big fires burning down everything including trees and houses, the undergrowth should be regularly cleared every few years, by small controlled undergrowth fires, by manually cutting down and removing the undergrowth or letting cattle roam freely in the forest, eating the undergrowth.

Apple, as a corporation, was on the ropes for much of the mid 1990s if you recall - their 80s Macintosh "1984" heyday had long passed and they were selling a sprawling variety of (overpriced and underpowered) desktop PCs at different price points, Performas and Quadras and Quadra IIs and Mac Classics and 20th Anniversary Editions and God knows what, mostly to niche markets like education and arts/media.

First thing Jobs did before anything super "disruptive" happened was he did a sensible thing that was right out of Gordon Ramsey from that Save My Restaurant program whatever it's called - he cut the menu down. Don't serve 25 mediocre options like the average consumer appreciates huge choices. serve four excellent entrees that's it.

Oh right I totally forgot about the Centris, even:

Good grief that slushbox cost $2500 in 1993. Nuts!

You have to know where to look.

One starting point would be an early 80s book called "The Cambridge Phenomenon", detailing the interactions between all the (then) companies in Silicon Fen.

I've no idea whether it has been updated since, but the phenomenon undoubtedly continues.

And Roger Wilson was central to the development of the Acorn RISC Machine.

I'm not aware he was part of the financial/management corporate structure.