What else is new? Elon Musk's businesses have benefited from billions in federal and state government subsidies and low-interest loan programs over the years.
The American taxpayer has been backing Musk since long before the current president was on the scene.
Tesla batteries only show very little degradation because their capacity is limited by software[1]. You can "increase" your battery capacity by ordering a $9,000 software update.
>You can "increase" your battery capacity by ordering a $9,000 software update.
Thats only for certain specific model and delivery time combinations.
i.e just before they introduced the 90kWh option in production, some 85kWh cars were shipping with the 90kWh pack.
If you ordered a particular pack before the next step size started shipping, then that's all you got.
>Tesla batteries only show very little degradation because their capacity is limited by software
Not true. It's mostly to do with active management of the battery, and keeping it within the optimal conditions for much of it's life. These are things your phone and laptop can't (or rather: don't) do.
Everyone tends to plug in their laptop/phone and charge to 100%, then leave it there for long periods of time. Plus, laptops and phones tend to get very hot, and there's no active cooling of the battery.
This combination of conditions tends to reduce the life of batteries significantly.
Leaving lithium batteries at their extremes of charge state reduces their lifetime.
Tesla recommends that their customers to charge to only about 80% for normal daily driving, and that if they need the full 100% range that they should start driving very soon after it reaches 100% charge. They also recommend not leaving it at empty for very long too as empty cells are more likely to drop below their minimum voltage, and die.
That's $10 million per employee (at a $20B valuation). That's not a lot of when you consider they're building a product that will book billions of dollars in advertising revenue.
$400 million USD total revenue in 2016 (from the article) is not exactly "billions of dollars".
But, in general, yes, I think the sales force required to engage advertisers should not be discounted when the first thing going through the head is "but it's just an app!".
true, but marketing is not superseded completely by product quality and product/market fit. You also need to make people aware of your product and make a strong value proposition.
I know everyone may say these are outliers, but Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc all had ZERO marketing and acquired millions of users.
Part of me thinks that alot of what people are saying about marketing applies to companies with a weak product or little differentiation. A monster, highly wanted product does appear to be the the exception
Google was the first actually-decent search engine - it allowed people to access the internet. All the others are social networks and largely rely on the network effect and being the one that becomes trendy, and thus aren't valid comparisons.
If you can spot and build the next Google then you may not need marketing, but those opportunities are rare.
But they did engage in grand designs (like the Aral water diversion project, and more recently the three gorges dam project) and lax environmental concerns. So it's not clear to me that they were "better" however they were perhaps worse because ideology dictated what they did moreso than some other considerations.
I just read through the research paper[1] and activity in frontoparietal network looks eerily similar to the reticular activating system[2] that heightens alertness and directs attention.
The reverse append used to be the favorite of the direct mail industry that was the most sophisticated with modeling before advent of the online ecosystem.
You can infer a lot about the person from their profile if it's public and also can try to match back to existing customer records if it's private.
EDIT: "reverse append" is the act of appending data to a phone call record based on the phone number.
What makes a top-ranked institution better than a "second-tier" school? The kind of applicant who would do well in the former will certainly do well in the latter.
The top-ranked institutions and "second-tier" schools charge about the same tuition but often have more generous financial aid so it can be cheaper to attend. Even if the sticker price would be the same for you, value of your degree is partially based on the reputation of the school so the top-ranked institution's degree is worth more.
Even if they will do as well in either and achieve the same learning outcomes, having a top-ranked school on your resume has value as a signal. And the alumni network has value as well.
I agree, but you would graduate with a better network, better branding, and possibly better skills from the top tier school, all of which have very real impact on the job market.
the 'crossover point' is different for everyone. e.g., would you rather be a 60th percentile student at a top-tier, or 90th percentile at a second-tier? (for some fuzzy, ill-defined definition of 'percentile') everyone needs to decide for themselves. as one oversimplified caricature, maybe it's still really hard to get an interview at your top-choice company even if you're 90th percentile at a second-tier school, but even the slackers who barely crawled to graduation at a top-tier school gets that same job interview.
Even a simple algorithm would be effective: the number of citations for each paper decayed by the age of the paper in years.