> I'm not sure how it was in Butler's time, but I've read that the overwhelming majority of casualties in modern warfare are civilians.
This may be true, but a soldier probably has a far higher likelihood of dying in a war than a civilian, thereby "paying the bill." This means that in expectation, each individual soldier pays a higher value of the bill in comparison to each individual citizen.
It seems pretty unlikely that the data wouldn't be normalized by some metric of intensity of use since this is pretty much the first thing anyone would think of. Normalizing even by something as simple as "number of websites visited" would, I imagine, significantly reduce the contribution of such factors to the differences observed.
The fact that they spent so much money in hardware to test the battery usage and the amount of effort they put in to improve doesn't seem to imply that this was just a PR stunt.
How is conflict of interest generally handled in this sort of situation?
Given that Elon Musk is personally major investor in SolarCity and Tesla is a publicly traded company with obligations to its shareholders, would Elon be removed or limited in his ability to control negotiations with SolarCity? Even though it seems like an acquisition of SolarCity would fit within Tesla's overarching strategy, price negotiation could probably be affected by Elon's interests within SolarCity.
No, not necessarily (re Elon being limited or removed). In fact, that's very unlikely.
For example, Berkshire Hathaway has occasionally run into conflicts of interest over its long history. They've usually handled them by being as transparent and open about the details as possible. In one famous acquisition, they intentionally over-paid for the company they were buying that they already held a large stake in. They told the SEC during a questioning about it, that they over-paid by a bit because they wanted their new shareholders to be happy, long-term partners. The SEC regulators apparently struggled to understand the premise, per Buffett's biography.
I would suggest in Elon's case, that his best bet is to be extremely open about all details of the acquisition, including how the price was arrived at. Tesla should pay a bit more than what would otherwise be normal. The more transparent the better. There's nothing to inherently restricts Elon's role here, regulation wise, but he does need to be a bit careful so as to avoid setting up an easy lawsuit.
There are a lot of other comments here about margin calls and short sellers, but ignoring all of that, if Tesla had some financial interest in SolarCity, and Elon wanted to buy SolarCity, it may be a conflict of interest if Elon Musk personally attempted to acquire SolarCity instead.
During the most recent Berkshire shareholders meeting Warren mentioned that he tries to never personally buy anything that Berkshire owns or would have interest in owning (and he does personally own financial assets outside of Berkshire.) It is a pretty clear gulf for him and fairly easy since Berkshire operates as a holding company.
The whole view of conflicts of interest can not be fully be evaluated without untangling the exact details and facts of both Elon's ownership interests and Tesla's.
I own a tiny amount of both companies but I don't know enough concrete details about SolarCity. Conceivably if Tesla is moving heavily in to the battery/energy storage business SolarCity could have assets that are much more valuable to that business. I don't know if there is valuable IP, or maybe even the current SolarCity customer base is worth a lot as battery pack customers. Presumably a Tesla battery pack/powerpack doesn't make a lot of sense if the customer doesn't have solar power? If there is an overlap between customers and SolarCity is in bad financial shape, then the acquisition could make sense.
There is a lot of guessing here, and its probably something that may be really obvious either way only years from now.
"Docker is not an acceptable security solution for this, since it's most certainly possible to break out of containers."
Could you point to some resources that show that it is possible to break out of Docker containers? I understand that there have been bugs in the past that have caused this (using that to conclude that glot.io shouldn't use Docker is a bit like saying OpenSSL is now useless because of heartbleed) but it seems unlikely that breaking out of containers is possible due to the way Docker is designed.
Most of the vulnerabilities you mention are actually kernel vulnerabilities. While they affect Docker, they more accurately affect everything that uses "Linux containers". Although, Docker did have a bad history of security bugs with symlinks.
But given the fact that Linux doesn't have real containers, I feel very conflicted about opening that up to the internet.
Although the author may not have provided a citation for the claim, this has pretty much nothing to do with "life experience"? Roughly speaking, if you have a certain likelihood of knowing someone that dies in a car accident in a given year and every year of your life is somehow independent, it is not inconceivable that (most) people by the age of 50 know someone killed by a human-driven. car.
Also, deaths in car accidents are decreasing, so older people are likely to have known more people that died in car accidents in their youth than younger people today.
This doesn't seem like such a bad idea. I don't care about most of the stuff on Twitter. But, if I'm searching for something and a Tweet-like "post" exists that is relevant to what I'm searching for, I might like that.
There's no inherent reason why being cash flow positive is such an important consideration for a venture capital firm.
A startup that's not cash flow positive right now but could be massively so in the future (or, atleast, the market expects it to be massively cash flow positive in the future) is significantly more valuable than a startup that is cash flow positive right now but with not a ton of room for growth.
In fact, placing the requirement of cash flow positivity right at the beginning of the startup would probably squash a lot of good (i.e. valuable in the long-er term) ideas.
How do you know that it will ever produce returns?
Valuations are made out of belief (whole cloth).
The requirement is not a must, but you should take into account startup's burn rate over funding, which should eventually turn into burn rate over revenue. (without taking extra funding into account)
So, a startup that would have a huge burn rate should be much less valuable, as you're liable to lose money both short and long term. Same as with the bets, taking large bets with long timeframes is more liable to turn you bankrupt (both VC and startup owner) than taking small bets often, since you can back out at any given time.
(I'm not talking about motivation, that's a separate thing.)
However, markets are not rational, so startups with high burn rate are considered very valuable for some reason.
This may be true, but a soldier probably has a far higher likelihood of dying in a war than a civilian, thereby "paying the bill." This means that in expectation, each individual soldier pays a higher value of the bill in comparison to each individual citizen.