I agree with you. Subscription revenue has explicitly been part of Tesla's strategy for years. I'm not sure when this statement first appeared in their SEC findings, but this is from their 2021 10-K:
"As our vehicles are capable of being updated remotely over-the-air, our customers may purchase additional paid options and features through the Tesla app or through the in-vehicle user interface. We expect that this functionality will also allow us to offer certain options and features on a subscription basis in the future."
Here in Washington DC we've set up many different types of traffic cameras. One side effect is a reduction in the number of negative interactions the average person has with the police. There are communities where the cops treat people like piggy banks and spend tons of time aggressively enforcing minor traffic violations. That has negative effects on trust, not to mention the number of fatal interactions that have stemmed from traffic stops. Other jobs that can be done by the police in other places are handled by Parking Enforcement, the Department of Buildings, etc.
The recent presence of federal agents and soldiers has reversed some of the hard-fought gains in trust, but my broader point still stands: more automated enforcement of traffic laws has positive effects in how people interact with the police. This effect needs to be balanced against the harms of increased surveillance.
This is a weird suggestion, but the American Girl Doll book Samantha Learns a Lesson has the most ELI5 explanation of the pitfalls of the Industrial Revolution I've ever seen. I mean that literally, my five year old loves the book and the movie based on it. This era is my favorite in all of human history, I've read thick tomes about it, and this old children's novel is seriously fantastic.
R! If you're a data person and you've never used R, give it a shot. It's a lovely language for cleaning and analyzing data, and the core development team keeps making improvements.
Those moderate Trump voters are a big deal, regardless of their numbers. If two out of a hundred Trump voters had gone the other way, we'd have a different president right now.
This sounds like the kinds of healthcare claims data that I often analyze for work. Just in case you have a team of seven doctors working on you at the same time while you're in hospice, they keep a column for just about everything.
I've found it's easier just to keep things NULL in many cases. Sure, if you have a student database with the column favorite_sport, maybe it makes sense to use the value "Not a sports fan." But think about an email list with the column unsubscribe_date. For active recipients, you'll want that field to be NULL.
I agree with you. I also find that adding DISTINCT can sometimes make it easier for my colleagues to understand code, especially when I'm using multiple CTEs and it might be easy to miss a one-to-many join.
This assumption got me in trouble as a junior analyst years ago. I was asked to analyze our customer base and wrote something like the below. Management congratulated me on finding thousands more customers than we'd ever had before.
SELECT
zipcode.rural_urban_code,
COUNT(*) AS n_customer
FROM
customer
INNER JOIN
zipcode USING(zipcode)
GROUP BY 1;
Why not host in house? If you have an application with stable resource needs, it can often be the cheaper and more stable option. At a certain scale, you can buy the servers, hire a sysadmin, and still spend less money than relying on AWS.
If you have an app that experiences 1000x demand spikes at unpredictable times then sure, go with the cloud. But there are a lot of companies that would be better off if they seriously considered their options before choosing the cloud for everything.
"As our vehicles are capable of being updated remotely over-the-air, our customers may purchase additional paid options and features through the Tesla app or through the in-vehicle user interface. We expect that this functionality will also allow us to offer certain options and features on a subscription basis in the future."
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