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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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No, Uber's (still) not profitable

Going to Defcon this weekend? I'm giving a keynote, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse," on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

Bezzle (n): 1. "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it" (JK Gabraith) 2. Uber.

Uber was, is, and always will be a bezzle. There are just intrinsic limitations to the profits available to operating a taxi fleet, even if you can misclassify your employees as contractors and steal their wages, even as you force them to bear the cost of buying and maintaining your taxis.

The magic of early Uber – when taxi rides were incredibly cheap, and there were always cars available, and drivers made generous livings behind the wheel – wasn't magic at all. It was just predatory pricing.

Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in, lighting $33b of its investors' cash on fire. Most of that money came from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, who brought you such bezzles as WeWork – a boring real-estate company masquerading as a high-growth tech company, just as Uber was a boring taxi company masquerading as a tech company.

Predatory pricing used to be illegal, but Chicago School economists convinced judges to stop enforcing the law on the grounds that predatory pricing was impossible because no rational actor would choose to lose money. They (willfully) ignored the obvious possibility that a VC fund could invest in a money-losing business and use predatory pricing to convince retail investors that a pile of shit of sufficient size must have a pony under it somewhere.

This venture predation let investors – like Prince Bone Saw – cash out to suckers, leaving behind a money-losing business that had to invent ever-sweatier accounting tricks and implausible narratives to keep the suckers on the line while they blew town. A bezzle, in other words:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber is a true bezzle innovator, coming up with all kinds of fairy tales and sci-fi gimmicks to explain how they would convert their money-loser into a profitable business. They spent $2.5b on self-driving cars, producing a vehicle whose mean distance between fatal crashes was half a mile. Then they paid another company $400 million to take this self-licking ice-cream cone off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Amazingly, self-driving cars were among the more plausible of Uber's plans. They pissed away hundreds of millions on California's Proposition 22 to institutionalize worker misclassification, only to have the rule struck down because they couldn't be bothered to draft it properly. Then they did it again in Massachusetts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/15/simple-as-abc/#a-big-ask

Remember when Uber was going to plug the holes in its balance sheet with flying cars? Flying cars! Maybe they were just trying to soften us up for their IPO, where they advised investors that the only way they'd ever be profitable is if they could replace every train, bus and tram ride in the world:

https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/

Honestly, the only way that seems remotely plausible is when it's put next to flying cars for comparison. I guess we can be grateful that they never promised us jetpacks, or, you know, teleportation. Just imagine the market opportunity they could have ascribed to astral projection!

Narrative capitalism has its limits. Once Uber went public, it had to produce financial disclosures that showed the line going up, lest the bezzle come to an end. These balance-sheet tricks were as varied as they were transparent, but the financial press kept falling for them, serving as dutiful stenographers for a string of triumphant press-releases announcing Uber's long-delayed entry into the league of companies that don't lose more money every single day.

One person Uber has never fooled is Hubert Horan, a transportation analyst with decades of experience who's had Uber's number since the very start, and who has done yeoman service puncturing every one of these financial "disclosures," methodically sifting through the pile of shit to prove that there is no pony hiding in it.

In 2021, Horan showed how Uber had burned through nearly all of its cash reserves, signaling an end to its subsidy for drivers and rides, which would also inevitably end the bezzle:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more

In mid, 2022, Horan showed how the "profit" Uber trumpeted came from selling off failed companies it had acquired to other dying rideshare companies, which paid in their own grossly inflated stock:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

At the end of 2022, Horan showed how Uber invented a made-up, nonstandard metric, called "EBITDA profitability," which allowed them to lose billions and still declare themselves to be profitable, a lie that would have been obvious if they'd reported their earnings using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Like clockwork, Uber has just announced – once again – that it is profitable, and once again, the press has credulously repeated the claim. So once again, Horan has published one of his magisterial debunkings on Naked Capitalism:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-three-uber-isnt-really-profitable-yet-but-is-getting-closer-the-antitrust-case-against-uber.html

Uber's $394m gains this quarter come from paper gains to untradable shares in its loss-making rivals – Didi, Grab, Aurora – who swapped stock with Uber in exchange for Uber's own loss-making overseas divisions. Yes, it's that stupid: Uber holds shares in dying companies that no one wants to buy. It declared those shares to have gained value, and on that basis, reported a profit.

Truly, any big number multiplied by an imaginary number can be turned into an even bigger number.

Now, Uber also reported "margin improvements" – that is, it says that it loses less on every journey. But it didn't explain how it made those improvements. But we know how the company did it: they made rides more expensive and cut the pay to their drivers. A 2.9m ride in Manhattan is now $50 – if you get a bargain! The base price is more like $70:

https://www.wired.com/story/uber-ceo-will-always-say-his-company-sucks/

The number of Uber drivers on the road has a direct relationship to the pay Uber offers those drivers. But that pay has been steeply declining, and with it, the availability of Ubers. A couple weeks ago, I found myself at the Burbank train station unable to get an Uber at all, with the app timing out repeatedly and announcing "no drivers available."

Normally, you can get a yellow taxi at the station, but years of Uber's predatory pricing has caused a drawdown of the local taxi-fleet, so there were no taxis available at the cab-rank or by dispatch. It took me an hour to get a cab home. Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.

Uber won't say why its margins are improving, but it can't be coming from scale. Before the pandemic, Uber had far more rides, and worse margins. Uber has diseconomies of scale: when you lose money on every ride, adding more rides increases your losses, not your profits.

Meanwhile, Lyft – Uber's also-ran competitor – saw its margins worsen over the same period. Lyft has always been worse at lying about it finances than Uber, but it is in essentially the exact same business (right down to the drivers and cars – many drivers have both apps on their phones). So Lyft's financials offer a good peek at Uber's true earnings picture.

Lyft is actually slightly better off than Uber overall. It spent less money on expensive props for its long con – flying cars, robotaxis, scooters, overseas clones – and abandoned them before Uber did. Lyft also fired 24% of its staff at the end of 2022, which should have improved its margins by cutting its costs.

Uber pays its drivers less. Like Lyft, Uber practices algorithmic wage discrimination, Veena Dubal's term describing the illegal practice of offering workers different payouts for the same work. Uber's algorithm seeks out "pickers" who are choosy about which rides they take, and converts them to "ants" (who take every ride offered) by paying them more for the same job, until they drop all their other gigs, whereupon the algorithm cuts their pay back to the rates paid to ants:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

All told, wage theft and wage cuts by Uber transferred $1b/quarter from labor to Uber's shareholders. Historically, Uber linked fares to driver pay – think of surge pricing, where Uber charged riders more for peak times and passed some of that premium onto drivers. But now Uber trumpets a custom pricing algorithm that is the inverse of its driver payment system, calculating riders' willingness to pay and repricing every ride based on how desperate they think you are.

This pricing is a per se antitrust violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, America's original antitrust law. That's important because Sherman 2 is one of the few antitrust laws that we never stopped enforcing, unlike the laws banning predator pricing:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/sites/ilr.law.uiowa.edu/files/2023-02/Woodcock.pdf

Uber claims an 11% margin improvement. 6-7% of that comes from algorithmic price discrimination and service cutbacks, letting it take 29% of every dollar the driver earns (up from 22%). Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi himself says that this is as high as the take can get – over 30%, and drivers will delete the app.

Uber's food delivery service – a baling wire-and-spit Frankenstein's monster of several food apps it bought and glued together – is a loser even by the standards of the sector, which is unprofitable as a whole and experiencing an unbroken slide of declining demand.

Put it all together and you get a picture of the kind of taxi company Uber really is: one that charges more than traditional cabs, pays drivers less, and has fewer cars on the road at times of peak demand, especially in the neighborhoods that traditional taxis had always underserved. In other words, Uber has broken every one of its promises.

We replaced the "evil taxi cartel" with an "evil taxi monopolist." And it's still losing money.

Even if Lyft goes under – as seems inevitable – Uber can't attain real profitability by scooping up its passengers and drivers. When you're losing money on every ride, you just can't make it up in volume.

Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #bezzles #hubert horan #uber #rideshare #accounting tricks #financial engineering #late-stage capitalism #narrative capitalism #lyft #transit #uber eats #venture predation #algorithmic wage discrimination

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alice-baid · 2 years

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According to Nova one advisor's latest report, titled Self-Driving Cars And Trucks Market Size: Industry Trends, Share, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2030," The global Self-driving Cars And Trucks market gathered revenue around 51.62 thousand units in 2021 and market is set to grow reach 3,195.9 thousand units by the end of 2030 and is estimated to expand at a modest CAGR of 53.7% during the prediction period 2022 to 2030.

#Self-Driving Cars And Trucks Market Size

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researchprecedence45 · 2 years

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According to the latest research study, the demand of global Self-driving Cars And Trucks market demand is expected to be approximately 51.62 thousand units in 2021 and market is set to grow 3,195.9 thousand units by the end of 2030 and is estimated to expand at a modest CAGR of 53.8% during the prediction period 2022 to 2030.

#Self-driving Cars And Trucks market Size

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simply-ivanka · 3 months

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Germany Should Have Listened to Trump

Tuesday 2.27.2024 Wall Street Journal

By Walter Russell Mead

Trump was right about Berlin’s self-defense and risky energy dependence on Russia.

The lower house of Germany’s Parliament voted to legalize the recreational use of cannabis last week. It was a timely move. Germany’s leadership class is going to need all the mellow it can find in a world that isn’t going Germany’s way.

Russian advances in Ukraine and American paralysis over the next aid package are reinforcing the reality that Germany needs to defend itself but lacks the power to do so. So are developments in the Red Sea, where German manufacturers must cope with shipping delays as the Biden administration fails to keep the vital waterway clear.

Forget the 2% of gross domestic product that Germany has repeatedly promised and failed to spend on defense. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius shocked many observers this month when he said that in the new world situation, Germany may have to spend as much as 3.5% of GDP for defense.

The economic news is also grim. Last year Germany’s GDP shrank 0.3%, and last week the government slashed 2024 growth estimates to a pitiful 0.2%. Economists expect negative growth during the first quarter of 2024, placing the country in recession. The outlook for housing is bleak, with business confidence reaching all-time lows. The news in manufacturing is little better. This month the widely followed HCOB German Flash Composite Purchasing Managers’ Index fell to 46.1, the eighth month in a row that the index has pointed to decreasing economic activity.

Energy prices are a particular sore spot. The chemical giant BASF announced €1 billion in spending cuts in its German operations, blaming a mix of weak demand in the German market and “structurally higher energy prices.” Enormous U.S. subsidies under the so-called Inflation Reduction Act are leading German companies to look across the Atlantic.

Chinese competition is another massive worry. China long ago passed Germany as the world’s largest car producer. Increasingly, especially in electric vehicles, it is challenging Germany as both a low-cost and high-quality manufacturer. Beijing aims to marginalize German capital goods and automobile companies in China while Chinese exporters challenge German dominance in world markets.

With the associations representing the small and medium-size Mittelstand firms that make up the heart of the German economy warning in a rare joint open letter about Germany’s loss of competitiveness, Economy Minister Robert Habeck isn’t mincing words. The economy is in “rough waters.” The “competitiveness of Germany as an industrial location” is in doubt.

It isn’t all doom and gloom. The outlook for the service sector is brighter than for manufacturing, and as the Journal reported last week, the Ifo Institute’s business-climate index improved slightly this month. The best that can be said for the outlook? “The German economy is stabilizing at a low level,” according to Ifo’s president.

Meanwhile, Germany’s dysfunctional three-party coalition government is paralyzed by internal struggles. The largest party in the coalition, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), is deeply divided over foreign policy, with many nostalgic for good relations with Russia and allergic to military spending. The SPD also wants Biden-like government spending initiatives to revive the German industrial machine and expand social benefits. The Greens, the next-largest party, are by German standards foreign-policy hawks but continue to press for a rapid energy transition that drives up costs for business and consumers. The third party in the coalition, the Free Democrats, wants to hold the line on government spending. As if this weren’t enough trouble, the conservative opposition parties have a blocking minority in Parliament’s upper house.

This is not where Germans thought they would be. Sixteen months ago, I visited Berlin and heard from a stream of government officials, think tankers and economists that everything was working fine. Russia was failing in Ukraine. The energy transition would boost German competitiveness and employment. Germany’s Mittelstand would handle anything China could throw at it.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that antiestablishment parties are growing in Germany. The far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) currently has more support than any of the governing parties, with one recent poll showing the AfD at 19%, the Social Democrats at 14%, the Greens at 13%, and the Free Democrats at 4%.

The most bitter pill of all for Germany’s establishment may be the realization that on the most important issues facing Germany, Donald Trump was right where they were wrong. Getting in bed with Vladimir Putin for cheap energy was both foolish and deeply disloyal to the West. German defense policy was self-defeating and dangerous. China wasn’t a reliable partner.

“Ich bin ein Berliner,” was President John F. Kennedy’s message to Germany. If Donald Trump returns to the White House, his message will likely be “Das habe ich gleich gesagt,” or “I told you so.”

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travelingthief · 2 years

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Hermes Devotional Post!

Not a complete list of course, so feel free to add on!

Travel

Dedicated travel playlist for Hermes

Mindful packing for trips

Road-trips/camping

Trying new modes of travel

Let Him pick the music

Travel by boat/kayak/canoe

Learn to roller skate, skateboard, or longboard

Learn to surf

Go for a bike ride

Find ways to save on gas (like rewards cards)

Misc.

Draw sigils on shoes

Leave coin offerings at the location you start your travels

Travel size portable altar

Give people in need bus fare

Go for a run

Picking up coins you find/leaving coins for others

Donating to homeless shelters

Car

Keep up on car maintenance (especially in the wintertime)

Courteous driving (Letting people out, stopping for pedestrians, using your blinker)

Clean snow off other drivers’ cars

Keep your car clean

Giving rides to others

Stopping for those that need help on the side of the road

Invite Him to ride in the passenger seat

Let Him pick the music

International

Get a passport!

Keeping up on foreign affairs

Decorate your passport

See the world!

Make a travel board/destination list

Learn about places you wanna go

Try foreign foods

Nature

Take a nature walk! (Or just a walk around the block)

Dedicate your hiking boots/running shoes to him

Find a spot in nature to talk to Him

Learn about birds in your area and where they come from and go.

Learn how animals communicate (great alongside Artemis)

Communication

Write letters to friends

Send postcards/greeting cards

Call a friend or relative

Reread messages/emails before sending

Communicate your thoughts and feelings in your relationships

Practice keyboarding

Establish and enforce your boundaries

Can and string telephones

Keep secrets entrusted to you

Support your local post office

Collect stamps/postcards

Dedicate your phone/laptop to Him

Have a penpal

Language

Keep a journal

Learn a new language/Revisit the language you started learning and then neglected

Learn ASL

Learn about the evolution of language and how it is always changing

Be mindful of the language you use in daily life and consider how it affects you and those around you

Change your self-talk! Keep it positive!

Voice training (Particularly for trans worshippers)

Thinking before you speak

Learn about older forms of communication (like Morse Code)

Learn braille

Go to the library and practice reading books in a foreign language (Great to do alongside Athena)

Practice writing (great to do alongside Apollo)

Learn about the elements of writing, like allegory and metaphors (alongside Apollo)

Trickery and luck

Play pranks (remember: good pranks cause confusion, not harm)

Learn magic tricks

Buy scratch offs/play the lottery

Understand how gambling addictions affect people

Dice and card games

Learn about good luck charms/Make your own

Night at the casino

Learn about superstitions

Games like billiards or darts

Arcade/video games/carnival games

Make small/friendly bets

Poker nights!

Game of horseshoes

Learn parlor games

Miscellaneous

Smoke a bowl with Him! (If your relationship is like that)

Offer him coffee and energy drinks

Trail mix, candy, road-trip snacks,

Learn a good joke

Write/perform stand up comedy

Related Jobs

Mail carriers and sorters

Retail workers (Hermes of Merchants & Commerce)

Canvassers

Editors, journalists, and writers

Newspaper routes

Bank tellers

Carnies

Casino workers

Gas station attendants

Mechanics

Where I Acknowledge Him

Gas stations

Mail carriers/trucks

Worn-looking travelers (thinking of the eye-patched man lounging on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. Hope to be that content one day)

Gumball machines give me his vibe

Arcade games, pinball machines, and air hockey

Flea markets/garage sales

Simple Acts to Devote to Him

Checking your mail

Checking email/voicemail

Buying stamps

Flipping a coin

Dice divination

Charm casting

Collections

Rocks

Coins/money

Good luck charms

Pens/writing utensils

Playing cards

Dice (Looking at you D&D players)

Offerings

Orange peels

Trail mix/peanuts

Road-trip snacks

Rocks & pebbles, coins, cool things you find outside

Travel souvenirs

Good luck charms

Energy drinks

Coffee (bonus points for gas station coffee)

Letters/postcards/stamps

Apples/bananas/grapes

Foreign foods

#hermes worship #hermes #mercury #hermes offering #hellenic polytheism #paganism #hellenic pantheon #hermes devotion #hermes god #mercury god #witchblr #greek gods

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spacetimewithstuartgary · 1 year

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Eyes on Hera: Asteroid mission's cameras ready ESA's Hera asteroid mission for planetary defense is about to gain its sight. Two complete and fully tested Asteroid Framing Cameras have reached OHB in Germany for integration aboard Hera's payload module. This instrument will provide the very first star-like view of Hera's target for the mission to steer towards the Dimorphos asteroid, which last year had its orbit altered by an impact with NASA's DART mission. "It is a huge milestone to have the very first Hera payload ready for integration onto the spacecraft," says Hannah Goldberg, Hera system engineer. "And the Asteroid Framing Camera, AFC, is not only our first payload, but also the most important, since by itself it can obtain all the mission's core goals. Hera payloads are arranged with core and opportunity objectives in mind—based firstly on the data we have to acquire, then the secondary results we seek to obtain whenever possible. "Our October 2024 launch date is creeping ever closer, but the mission subsystems are beginning to come together as planned. So the next time we'll see these cameras will be aboard the complete Hera flight model when overall spacecraft testing begins this autumn." Hera is Europe's contribution to an international planetary defense experiment. Following the DART mission's impact with the Dimorphos asteroid last year—modifying its orbit and sending a plume of debris thousands of kilometers out into space—Hera will return to Dimorphos to perform a close-up survey of the crater left by DART. The mission will also measure Dimorphos' mass and make-up, along with that of the larger Didymos asteroid that Dimorphos orbits around. Operated on a redundant basis—meaning one unit will be kept in reserve in case of failure—the AFC will play a pivotal role in Hera's mission. As well as acquiring detailed views of the surface of Dimorphos for scientific analysis, including the crater left by the DART impact, the AFC will also be used for guidance, navigation and control. The AFC will home in on Dimorphos when it is still a single point of light in the sky—seen in conjunction with the larger asteroid Didymos. The AFC will then transition to close-up navigation, utilizing edge detection to keep the asteroid centered in its field of view while tracking surface features to derive Hera's exact position from the asteroid in a similar manner to self-driving car software. Around the same size and shape as a household vase, the 1.3 kg AFC has been designed, manufactured and tested by Jena-Optronik in Germany. The compact design with its long baffle to protect the camera's optics from sunglare shares heritage with the startracker units that Jena-Optronik specializes in—utilized to map the stars around a spacecraft in order to pinpoint its position in space. Steffen Schwarz, Head of Marketing & Sales at Jena-Optronik, comments: "Hera is a prestigious mission and we at Jena-Optronik are looking forward to make a decisive contribution to its success through our camera." Possessing a 5.5 degree field of view, the monochromatic AFC acquires images using complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor active pixel sensor (CMOS APS) technology—an advanced, rad-hardened version of the imaging used in modern smartphone cameras—the FaintStar2 detector chip marketed by Caeleste in Belgium, initially designed for startrackers through a project in ESA's General Support Technology Program. "The images we will see from the AFC will resemble those returned by DART before its impact," adds Hannah. "For example, the picture we saw of the two asteroids together in DART's field of view, and then later on the boulder-strewn surface of Dimorphos as DART was about to collide. "The AFC's images will be complemented by color images from other instruments, including Hera's HyperScout instrument which will see in 25 different colors and the ASPECT hyperspectral imager aboard the Milani CubeSat, whose vision will extend beyond visible light into the infrared." Other Hera subsystems are currently being finalized: Hera's laser-based PALT (Planetary Altimeter) coming from Portugal; the HyperScout2 imager from the Netherlands; the Milani CubeSat from Italy and the Juventas CubeSat from Luxembourg; and the TIRI thermal imager contributed by Japan. TOP IMAGE....The Asteroid Framing Camera, AFC, will play a pivotal role in Hera’s mission. As well as acquiring detailed views of the surface of Dimorphos for scientific analysis, including the crater left by the DART impact, the AFC will also be used for guidance, navigation and control. The AFC will home in on Dimorphos when it is still a single point of light in the sky – seen in conjunction with the larger asteroid Didymos. The AFC will then transition to close-up navigation, utilising edge detection to keep the asteroid centered in its field of view while tracking surface features to derive Hera’s exact position from the asteroid in a similar manner to self-driving car software. Around the same size and shape as a household vase, the 1.3 kg AFC has been designed, manufactured and tested by Jena-Optronik in Germany. Credit: Jena-Optronik CENTRE IMAGE....This image from ASI’s LICIACube show the plumes of ejecta streaming from the Dimorphos asteroid after NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART, mission, made impact with it on 26 September 2022. Each rectangle represents a different level of contrast in order to better see fine structure in the plumes. By studying these streams of material, we will be able to learn more about the asteroid and the impact process. Credit: ASI/NASA/APL LOWER IMAGE....Asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft. The image was taken by the on board DRACO imager from a distance of 570 miles (920 kilometers). This image was the last to contain a complete view of both asteroids. Didymos is roughly 2,500 feet (780 meters) in diameter; Dimorphos is about 525 feet (160 meters) in length. Ecliptic north is toward the bottom of the image. This image is shown as it appears on the DRACO detector and is mirror flipped across the x-axis from reality. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL BOTTOM IMAGE....NASA's DART spacecraft impacted the Dimorphos asteroid at 23:15:04 UTC on 26 September 2022. Credit: NASA

#space #science #Astronomy #physics #hera #ESA

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shashi2310 · 3 months

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#Self-Driving Car Market #Self-Driving Car Market Size #Self-Driving Car Market Growth #Self-Driving Car Market Analaysis

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mariacallous · 2 years

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After four years of watching Donald Trump inflict flesh wounds on China with his ineffectual trade war, U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have found the jugular. The goal is the same, but this knife is sharper—and could set back China’s tech ambitions by as much as a decade.

The target: semiconductor chips, especially the cutting-edge variety used for supercomputers and artificial intelligence. New export controls announced by the Biden administration this month prohibit the sale of not only those chips to China but also the advanced equipment needed to make them, as well as knowledge from any U.S. citizens, residents, or green card holders.

The chips, wafer-thin and the size of a fingernail, underpin everything from our smartphones to the advanced weapons systems that the United States specifically called out in its filing announcing the export restrictions. Perhaps more important—and this is where the U.S. curbs will hurt China the most—they are indispensable to the technologies of the future, such as AI and self-driving cars, as well as virtually every industry from pharmaceuticals to defense.

“You can pick a cliche—people talk about it as the ‘new oil’ or whatever,” said Raj Varadarajan, a managing director and senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group whose research has focused on the semiconductor industry. “But it’s there in everything, it’s pervading everything, and that’s one of the reasons it’s become such a flashpoint.”

China has set out lofty ambitions for its technology sector, with several government plans over the past decade setting out targets such as self-sufficiency in high-tech manufacturing by 2025, global leadership in AI by 2030, and global industry standards dominance by 2035. The latest U.S. broadside is aimed squarely at that “Made in China” sign.

“I think this is part of also signaling to China that we are not just going to resolve to give China global leadership in some of these key areas,” said Daniel Gerstein, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corp. who previously served in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate. “We don’t want to lose and become beholden, if you will, to Chinese approaches.”

The semiconductor industry is the cornerstone of that strategy, and China has made significant strides in the recent past. The country now accounts for 35 percent of the global market, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). But that figure reflects the final sales of finished chips to electronics companies, many of which have large manufacturing operations concentrated in China. The more high-tech and critical parts of the process, such as chip design and initial production, are still dominated by the United States.

And while China can hold its own at the lower end of the spectrum and the production of older-generation chips, it still lags behind in the cutting-edge research, design, and advanced technology that the Biden administration’s export restrictions target. Those goals have now likely been pushed back several years.

A significant reason for China’s vulnerability, as well as its painstaking effort to achieve independence, is how interconnected the global semiconductor supply chain is. Chips will often be designed in one country; fabricated in another using machines from a third; tested in a fourth; and finally assembled and placed into electronic devices in a fifth—sometimes with a few more countries and steps in between.

And many of those countries have concentrated their strengths and capacities in certain parts of that process, creating potential bottlenecks that can easily be exploited. For instance, the SIA estimates that there are “more than 50 points across the value chain where one region holds more than 65% of the global market share.” And 92 percent of manufacturing capacity for the world’s most advanced chips is concentrated in Taiwan; the remaining 8 percent is in South Korea.

The United States is trying to hedge its bets on that front as well, passing the CHIPS and Science Act this year, which provides $52 billion in incentives—most of it for companies that set up chip factories on U.S. soil—and hundreds of billions of dollars more to further shore up its research and development capabilities. Biden has been doing the rounds in upstate New York this month, touting the impact of the act, including at an IBM plant in Poughkeepsie (a day before the export controls were announced) and a Micron facility in Syracuse on Thursday.

For the United States, building up its own manufacturing ecosystem is a fail-safe. For China, it has rapidly become an absolute necessity.

“This is an effort that is going to take hundreds of billions of dollars and an incredible amount of engineering talent and energy to recreate a semiconductor supply chain that doesn’t involve U.S. technology,” said Jordan Schneider, a senior analyst at the Rhodium Group. “This supply chain is so globalized, but also so specialized, that at any step in it there’s only a handful of firms in the world that can do it, and if you’re sort of locked out of any one of these steps, then you can’t make chips.”

There are still some unanswered questions, including how the restrictions will be implemented in practice. In many cases, they give companies the option to apply for licenses to use and sell U.S. technology.

“It’s not clear that permission will be denied. It’s very possible that permission will be given, and so it’ll just delay and slow down some things,” Varadarajan said.

The other big question is whether and how China might hit back. Beijing has slammed what it calls “abuse” of export controls and warned that the restrictions could ultimately “backfire” on Washington, but its response so far has been a distant cry from the tit-for-tat tariffs that were a hallmark of Trump’s trade war.

With semiconductors specifically, the vast gap between U.S. and Chinese technological capabilities means Beijing doesn’t have much with which to retaliate. While China accounts for a significant portion of mature node chips—older, larger semiconductors that are not as cutting-edge but are used in products such as cars—it is not indispensable, and production can likely shift elsewhere without much disruption.

“If the U.S. bans selling semiconductors to China, and China says [it is also] going to ban semiconductors, there isn’t much in terms of things that they make over there that they can ban equivalent to proportional response,” Varadarajan said.

China, in any event, is backed into a corner. Any move Beijing makes at the moment to cut itself off from the global supply chain could hit the country’s employment and exports, both of which it can ill afford with a current economic growth rate of 3 percent—far lower than government forecasts—and no easy way out.

Actions within China in the weeks after the U.S. export controls were announced betray the uncertainty within of what to do next. The Chinese government reportedly held emergency meetings with the country’s top semiconductor firms to assess the impact of the restrictions. The Financial Times reported that one of the leading firms, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp., has already asked several American employees to leave.

China will be forced to double down on its yearslong effort to build its own semiconductor ecosystem and might just achieve its goal of becoming self-sufficient in the long run. But in the short term, there’s likely to be pain.

“The Chinese companies are going to have an enormously difficult time trying to push past these limits without U.S. technology, but any effort to do so just to get to a 2022 level will probably take a decade or more,” Schneider said. “And even with all the effort, it’s not clear that they would succeed.”

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marketinsight12 · 8 months

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Self-Driving Car Market

Self-Driving Car Market -Market Overview And Outlook by Potential Growth | IMR

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pankajbuilder · 2 years

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Prediction About Future Construction Technology

Introduction

Future trends in construction technology will need to be taken into account as construction companies work to overcome labor shortages and stand out from the crowd. Investigate how these cutting-edge construction technologies will change the industry in the coming years to boost productivity and keep yourself competitive. Best Construction Companies will implement the following construction technology.

Future Prediction Construction

1. Artificial Intelligence for Construction Industry

AI has a lot to offer the construction industry. Create a large, high-quality database of previous results to work from before creating machine learning algorithms to make predictions. Our favorite application of AI involves developing new construction schedules by investigating tens of millions of different possibilities. Another application of AI in construction is image recognition. AI can be used to analyze images of the materials used on the job site and identify materials that are at risk, or it can be used to monitor worker behavior for high-risk trends.

2. The Connected Job Site

The linked job site is already in place. We anticipate that businesses will work much harder to implement this technology. In 2020, efforts to eliminate paper forms will ramp up. As a result, construction firms will need to use digital forms to communicate with others on the job site.

Construction managers benefit in two ways by fully utilizing the connected job site. For starters, they get better information from the site without having to travel every day. That means less wasted travel time and quicker change of decisions. Employees will experience less frustration while waiting for headquarters to respond.

3. Autonomous Vehicle

It's challenging to maneuver effectively in large construction sites, such as hotels, mines, and commercial buildings. Because of this, autonomous vehicles, also referred to as self-driving cars, are going to become more prevalent. Construction self-driving cars will be more popular than autonomous vehicles on public roads because they operate in a more constrained environment.

Rio Tinto, a mining company, has already begun utilizing autonomous vehicles in a few of its mines. Making use of these vehicles will help you get the most out of your small construction crew. Since these vehicles don't take breaks, they are also a great way to boost productivity.

4. 3D Printing

A wood/plastic model could typically only be modified so many times before it had to be replaced entirely. With 3D printing, contractors can easily modify their plans right now without having to start from scratch. While plastic and wooden models are restricted to straight lines, 3D printing can assist in the creation of curved designs.

What's even more amazing is that projects of all sizes are now being completed using 3D printing. Builders can 3D print parts and components for use in the actual construction of projects in addition to modeling applications!

5. Rise of Eco-Friendly Materials

More than ever, builders and contractors are making a conscious effort to use eco-friendly materials in their projects. Builders and contractors need to be aware of precisely what they're using and how the products they choose affect their carbon footprint because not all materials marketed as "green" are eco-friendly.

Consider using salvaged or reclaimed wood that comes from previously-cut trees instead of new wood for a construction project and causing further tree-killing. Steel is subject to the same idea. Steel must be produced using a lot of energy, but using recycled steel in a construction project can achieve the same results with a lot less material.

6. Robotics

Because they can complete automated tasks quickly and safely, robots are revolutionizing the construction industry. They are currently used in a variety of construction tasks, such as bricklaying, painting, loading, and more, and their use is only going to increase in the coming years.

Robotics on a construction site shields workers from hazardous conditions, lowers injuries and can be used to finish tasks when there is a labor shortage. Even though the construction sector will always need manual labor, cutting-edge robotics technologies can help expedite the process, minimize delays, and boost productivity in a variety of ways.

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