The local public health departments need time to get testing and tracing working. It is the only way to open up safely. We are way behind the Asian countries that learned the lessons of SARS.
Singapore and HK are cities, really, and the Singapore approach, aggressive contact tracing with mandatory stay at home orders, doesn't scale.
Taiwan and Japan are outliers so far, and they are monocultures, with famous compliance rates.
Korea is somewhat similar to Japan, but took a hit early, and has managed to beat it back.
China appears to have peaked, but did this with massive application of governmental policies which would never fly in the West.
Flatten the curve doesn't change that a large number of people are going to get this disease. The best news is danger increases with age, unlike the Spanish Flu. Africa is very young (media age), the US and China are roughly the same, while the EU in general is older (Italy and Germany especially). What matters is not hospital beds per capita, but ICU beds per capita. The US does much better by that measure. You don't need an ICU bed to give oxygen, which is what most serious clinical cases require. MIT Sloan gave a prize last year for a less expensive, simpler ventilator designed for most cases in countries with limited resources. We have options that aren't explored yet.
I don't see why contact tracing doesn't scale. The only thing preventing Google and Apple from producing a contact history for everyone is privacy laws and people without phones.
I’m sure a majority of people who step off a plane can’t say whether the plane was made by Boeing.
This also means that once Boeing gets the 737-8200 (or whatever) approved for flight, it will be unnoticed for customers who won’t ever notice the difference between it and an 800 or an A320.
> Do you think the majority of consumers pay any attention to the size of the engine when boarding a flight?
I am not an industry insider but my understanding is the vast majority of the flying public simply does not matter. We are flying on the cheapest possible ticket. The people who do matter imo are those who are flying on a corporate account or better yet those who control a corporate account. If wealthy people refuse to fly on this death trap, I think airlines will listen.
They’d have to go out of their way to even see it. The gate may or may not have windows into the tarmac and the jet bridge goes all the way to the door usually.
I would wonder what the standards used are. There was a recent article about how students are less prepared for University since Common Core was implemented. Maybe the advanced class is easier that it ever was.
The biggest problem with education for gifted or even average students is that our standards are too low. It would be like if we set a 10 minute max for the mile run. Anybody that could run faster would still get a 10Min score. Then we rate the school based on the average running time of the entire student body.
There is no incentive to push kids faster than 10 min. All the resources go into the 2 kids on crutches.
only 26 percent of the white athletes, legacies, dean’s listers, and faculty children Harvard admitted between 2009 and 2014 would still make the cut based on, say, their grades.
Probably a bigger issue for Amazon is that a large part of the ad market is competitors or potential competitors. Walmart, Safeway, and Azure won't be advertising on Amazon.
Does P&G want Amazon to control more of the retail market? Not if it has any brains. Amazon has it's own branded home speaker systems and will not sell Google's. If Amazon brought out a shampoo brand, would it sell head and shoulders?
Why would other big retailers pay for ads on Amazon's website? Brands are the ones who pay and already do. P&G already places a ton of advertising on Amazon for its various products. Search 'Tide' and look at the headline ad spot.
Amazon makes plenty of their own stuff, under Amazon basics, like 70 other brands, plus whatever they got with Whole Foods. Aside from the Kindle shenanigans, they haven't blocked competing brands.
stock LEGO in sets is around 10 cents per piece. technics are more expensive. Looking at Ebay, it looks like 30-50 cents on average. You are looking at $200K to $400K for the 1M Technics pieces. They said the motors cost $70K. Say up to $500K for LEGO including custom elements.
Relative to the retail price, the manufacturing cost of Lego elements are pennies on the dollar. For a $50 starwars set there might be 50 cents worth of plastic. The metal injection moulding dies cost tens of thousands, but one die can mould 120 million basic 2x4 bricks over it's lifetime.
Of course there's a whole other wing to their factories for sorting pieces into sets, they release hundreds of different sets a year which design teams spend months prototyping, they spend huge on marketing, community outreach, and licensing fees, and a non-trivial portion of their manufacturing capacity goes to Legoland resorts and projects like this Bugatti Chiron build. Nonetheless, the Lego group commands Apple-like profit margins.
Still, for the consumer the value proposition on a Lego purchase is very good, because it's value doesn't depreciate over time. In fact, vintage Lego sets have appreciated on average 10% per year over the last decade. Buying Lego is money in the bank, presuming you keep your Lego inventoried and save the boxes, stickers and instructions.
