Exactly this. Most of the time you get poorly researched articles (or nowadays, AI slop) about some topics only very remotely related to what the company actually does.
Here, the article is about something interesting that the company has expertise in (and even "insider info"), shows off that they do serious engineering, and is interesting to the target audience.
If I'm buying a 12V or 5V fan, it'll almost certainly be a Noctua. I don't know if they're the best, but they certainly seem to be among the better brands, and at something like $25 for a fan, they are certainly not overpriced enough to justify the effort of researching something better.
So whoever you are at Noctua, congratulations! This + the 3d model release are likely really paying off.
Likewise, a lot of the complaints people have about data centers are engineering choices. If companies can get away with it, they'll do it the cheap way.
What could be needed is internalization of external costs. If you release chemicals that cause problems, charge the polluter, and send the charges to those affected.
On a global scale this breaks down, because governments value the lives of non-citizens orders of magnitude below the lives of their own citizens. The US will spend millions to save one expected life at home; it will avoid spending thousands to save one expected life in a third world country.
Polluter pays models are becoming more common. Idk exactly how they function but in Ontario Canada they just switched from a municipal tax funded WM model to a private consortium funded model.
Often the pushback on these "polluter taxes" is that they increase the costs of downstream goods and therefore the consumer pays it anyway, but I think when the link of how the consumer is "already paying" is made clear (as was easy in the case of municipal WM taxes) it's also easier to see how the costs would actually reduce in the long term (bc for "management" this is another line item they can optimize via reduced pollution rather than some vague cost to society via property taxes)
The problem with "costs" is that when companies are finally faced with steep fines or lose a lawsuit, they would often declare bankruptcy or a spin-off a division and dump all the obligations to the spun-off company which would go bankrupt. The only thing that works, I believe, is the threat of criminal penalties with actual jail time.
That's a good point, so laws requiring bonds or insurance would also be needed. This could be an incentive towards at least limiting the worst case outcomes; if those are too large insurance may not be available.
If your neighbor decides not to, the only way for you to stay away from the war is to have weapons to kill them before they get to you...
(Of course, the best solution to an aggressive neighbor is to have so many weapons that they know they would die if they attacked, so they don't even try.)
It only starts to be a problem is when your government starts using those weapons in wars of aggression. Among Western democracies, only the US comes to mind...
> It only starts to be a problem is when your government starts using those weapons in wars of aggression. Among Western democracies, only the US comes to mind...
Israel (which Germany is providing weapons to) does nothing but attack its neighbors. A good portion of the imperialist aggression coming from the US is also done on Israel's behalf. Germany is certainly complicit in this.
So one year of revenue buys ~2500 cars at those prices, which is roughly the size of their fleet (~3000 according to Wikipedia). It seems plausible that newer cars will be cheaper as designs get optimized, economies of scale hit and what used to be really expensive cutting-edge hardware becomes commoditized and goes down in cost over time.
They certainly also need support including contractors that assist cars that get need human input, maintenance etc. and the electricity for the cars isn't free either, but just based on these numbers, it sounds like they are likely close to being profitable if you ignore R&D.
If you assume $10 a ride, and a car giving 3 rides an hour for 12 hours a day, that's $360 in revenue per car per day, close to the $320 you'd get from $350M/3000/365. That means each car pays for itself in about a year (ignoring all other costs, of course).
Based on this and the assumption that cars last for more than 2 years, I'd guess that Waymo is only "unprofitable" (not sure how this works in accounting terms) due to ongoing R&D and expansions and there really isn't much more to "subsidize".
I don't believe Google breaks it down but everyone assumes Waymo accounts for roughly 50% of $7.52B in "other bets" losses. And that's just 2025, losses in Q4 2025 are almost 2x Q4 2024. Cost factors are improving but they continue to shovel money into the R&D furnace.
They want, as described above, `20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing`.
I believe the two applicable options to have a company that counts as its own "person" is either AG or GmbH (~= LLC / "limited").
There is also SE which is a EU form for an AG, and various "partnership" forms that involve a partner that's fully liable. Usually, that partner is not an actual person but a "legal person", i.e. another SE or GmbH.
Even if you're not listed on a stock market, you might want to take on investments, e.g. "give me 10 million for 5% of the company" and I assume the latter is much easier with an AG.
In my experience, night trains with private cabins are fan service for rail fans, environmentalists and/or masochists, not real transport options.
One of the famous sleeper trains in Europe (Nightjet Vienna-Amsterdam) is often booked out weeks (sometimes months) in advance, costs as much as a plane ticket + hotel room or more, and you have a decent chance of being told (as you show up in the evening) that unfortunately one car is missing tonight and you have the option of a full refund (screwing up your entire trip and having to book a last minute plane ticket), or you can take a 50% refund on your 255 EUR sleeping ticket and spend the night sitting in the shared seating part on a seat that would have regularly cost 35 EUR. This was something that on some routes was happening routinely for over a year [1].
The night train from Switzerland to Malmö was cancelled (after tickets had already been sold) because the Swiss government decided to not subsidize it.
Trains like this offer zero flexibility (you have to book a specific train weeks in advance), go where they go which is a very limited route network, and even in Europe with all the environmentalists, rail networks, shorter distances, and massive government subsidies, they don't seem to be able to run them very frequently or on many routes.
Calling them equivalent or a replacement for self-driving cars (which would take the passenger where they want, when they want) is disingenuous and isn't going to magically convince people.
The one feature that Waymo has over other rideshare apps is that the cars presumably actually show up.
With all other apps, it feels like 50% of drivers just sit there waiting for you to cancel. I can't rule out that it's a bug with the app not showing updated locations in some cases (I've had an Uber show up even though the web app showed it three traffic lights away), but "actually gets me where I need to go in a timely manner" is a key feature and when "RIDE AVAILABLE, 3 MINUTES" turns into 7 minutes as soon as the app is done searching for a driver, and that turns into you having to cancel 5 minutes in and try again, the platform becomes useless.
Waymo cancels cars when they are unable to get to you in a reasonable time. The service will not resend a car automatically, so the user needs to babysit the app until they’re actually in the car. I’ve seen this twice in the last week. In Phoenix and SF we have preferred ride share or taxi when the car showing up is important, like getting to a medical appointment on time.
Yes exactly. I loved that when i opened up the app to go some where the first thing I saw before I even put in where I'm going, was how long until ill be picked up. the cars don't care about the trips, not trying to tip/ride max.
They'd only do it as long as the risk of getting caught and the punishment when caught made it worth it.
If the authorities that are supposed to enforce GDPR (and other data protection laws around the world) were doing their job, app makers would be a lot more careful with what they embed and what data they send where. Because these authorities don't seem to have been doing anything useful, it's now so normalized that you could probably send a $20M fine to every major app and be right about it.
Slightly more nuanced now — EDPB's 2024-2027 strategy explicitly prioritizes large-platform enforcement, and recent turnover-based fines (Meta €1.2B in 2023, TikTok €345M, Uber €290M in 2024) suggest the deterrence math is tightening. Health data under Art. 9 carries the heaviest penalty multipliers; the question on Flo is whether national DPAs coordinate via the one-stop-shop mechanism or local supervisory authorities (Polish UODO, French CNIL) move independently.
Blaming Railway for this feels a bit off... criticizing that they advertise the API for MCP use is valid, criticizing the lack of ability to set more granular permissions is valid - but complaining that an API call doesn't come with a confirmation prompt, or that after you deleted your data the infrastructure provider takes time to figure out whether they can use their backup to undo your mistake?
With a major provider, there would be a "recovery SLA", and it would be "we guarantee that once you make the delete call we won't be able to get your data back".
What I'm missing in this article is "we fucked up by not having actual, provider-independent, offline backups newer than 3 months". They'd have the same result if a rogue employee or ransomware actor got access to their Railway account, or Railway accidentally deleted their account, Railway went down, etc.
Here, the article is about something interesting that the company has expertise in (and even "insider info"), shows off that they do serious engineering, and is interesting to the target audience.
If I'm buying a 12V or 5V fan, it'll almost certainly be a Noctua. I don't know if they're the best, but they certainly seem to be among the better brands, and at something like $25 for a fan, they are certainly not overpriced enough to justify the effort of researching something better.
So whoever you are at Noctua, congratulations! This + the 3d model release are likely really paying off.
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