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saudioger

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I mean... how does history not already tell you this? Nearly every person we remember as a historical figure was able to "sell" something to get there. The typical exception to this is the person who did something interesting, but someone else sold it for them after they died.

In the eyes of their lifetimes and most of history, Edison won the Tesla v Edison battle nearly 100%. Edison was a vastly better salesperson.

If you ask the average person who Nikola Tesla was today, they'd probably say something about the car company. Elon Musk sells the name Tesla better than Tesla himself ever did.

If your idea of success is obtaining money or changing hearts and minds, you better learn how to sell (or I guess you could devise a spectacularly dangerous weapon).

I hear that, my daughter can't even read but can play some really complex games with almost no direct intervention. Kids are incredible learning machines.

The restrictions on the iPad are rather mature at this point. I've blocked all unrestricted internet holes and just keep her within apps i've vetted.

I strongly recommend that you don't let your kids watch YouTube. There's some really low-quality garbage out there and there's just too much to properly curate. After some exploring on my own I absolutely do not trust YouTube at all to filter appropriately. This is just pure garbage streaming into your kids' faces.

Do anything else, Netflix at least has some barrier for kids content... but torrent a bunch kids shows if you have to.

I can't cite this case specifically, but normally it would be incredibly difficult to impersonate a government official as a source.

In my experience verifying a source means weeding out that possibility before publishing... e.g, cross-checking data from a third party (background checks, employment history, social media accounts, public records), then photos of credentials, video chats, etc. Then you cross-reference information with other sources on the story, etc... conspiracy is possible, but unless Bloomberg is inflating the number of sources it has, it would have to be a massive undertaking (state-sponsored).

Anonymous doesn't typically mean someone just calls up and says something and then it's off to the presses. They know exactly who gave them the information, but they're protecting the identities.

Maybe claims of "fake news" would be a lot less common if more people knew what went into verifying information before a major news outlet publishes a story.

There are a lot of startups that are in worse shape than that and hope to be profitable someday.

Let's assume it's true: Does Apple have a choice other than cover-up?

Let's say this was the first they're hearing about it, and it turns out to be true.

Can they publicly state the truth, point the finger at China in the process, and risk having to immediately uproot their entire supply chain?

Is there a course of action that's better than outright public denial?

Considering that large scale internet companies like Amazon and Apple buy enormous amounts of hardware, it's not an insane strategy. If you compromise 1 of every 1,000 pieces of hardware (or even one of every 10,000) odds are you'll end up in a major datacenter pretty quickly.

Well my point is that it could be corporate embarrassment AND willful fraud to cover up the corporate embarrassment. They have a huge incentive to lie, because even if they were truthful from the beginning and this did happen... it would be very bad for them.

I also think this goes far beyond "embarrassment" — this is something that could potentially destroy Apple's supply chain.

They're already on the hook for an enormous liability if it's true, so lying about it isn't really the worst option if there's even a small chance it avoids the issue.

After seeing what VW did with emissions, I wouldn't say any huge corporate cover-up is out of the question. Especially considering this situation would be very bad even if did happen and they were 100% truthful about it (it would create huge problems with China for them and their supply chain).

We just can't reasonably make conclusions either way yet.

Uhh, Apple and Amazon are providing very few hard facts... and have a HUGE amount to lose if the story is true.

I wouldn't take anything as certainty at this point, not even close.

My understanding is that while the sources were left anonymous, they were definitely confirmed as intelligence agents by Bloomberg... so if they were duped, it's a pretty serious (propaganda-level?) duping.

Individuals only care about efficiency if it impacts price.

There are numerous examples of people paying more for things in the long term because they're less expensive immediately. Entire industries are built on this. Again, humans aren't particularly good at forecasting long-term decisions.

Additionally, The VAST majority of emission decrease in the past 10 years in the US has been due to moving from coal to shale gas, not because of individual purchasing decisions. It's iterative movement that was caused by a combination of market forces and government regulations, not one or the other on its own (and the current administration is actually reversing many regulations that promoted shale gas over coal).

Renewables still don't even touch the impacts of moving from coal to shale gas.

Individuals don't care about efficiency, they care about price. This is partially why the government had to step in to create labor laws. Unless they're directly impacted by it right now, the average consumer does not care. The American meat industry is downright terrible in some cases, and people are buying more meat than ever.

If you halved the price of the iPhone by introducing slave labor in some faraway land, you would still sell a boatload of iPhones.

This is one of the ways that I believe government should intervene because individuals are very bad at deciding based on long-term impacts.

I mean opaque when it comes to 'this is a successful third-party product we sell, let's hijack the business' rather than the clarity of what a store brand is in general.

Stores do distance themselves a bit further though — Walmart has "Best Value" brand or whatever, which isn't as explicitly a Walmart brand.