Can you please not change the title? The original title is "Turkey to implement international pact on access to shipping straits due to Ukraine war"
Turkey has NOT closed the Black sea; this article does not say that at all.
Turkey has stated continuously in last few days that it will follow the Montreux Convention, under which they cannot restrict vessels going back to their home base, including Russian ones.
The gist is, Montreux Convention ensures free travel through the straits at peacetime but allows for restrictions at wartime. Wartime could be a war that involves the countries with a shore on the Black sea but not Turkey or a war where Turkey is involved too.
So the news is, Turkey took its time to decide if this is a War or a limited time military operation and come to conclusion that this is a war indeed. As a result Turkey activated the passage restrictions for military ships at a wartime where Turkey is not taking part in. This essentially means, the Russian(an other Black sea nations) ships that are based in the Black sea can get through but Turkey may restrict those based elsewhere. It also means that Turkey can restrict American and other 3rd party warships from passing through the Bosphorus.
The purpose of the Montreux Convention is to keep peace in the Black sea by allowing free movement at peacetime(Turks can't stop ships from passing, therefore no reason to take it away from Turkey with force) and predefined restrictions at wartime(Turks can stop ships that are not based there, therefore limit the military build up), so this is not necessarily a pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian move.
Turkey sees the Montreux Convention as a primary mean to keep Turkey neutral in conflicts involving Russia and Istanbul out of the interests of large powers.
> Turkey has stated continuously in last few days that it will follow the Montreux Convention, under which they cannot restrict vessels going back to their home base, including Russian ones.
Your comment is misleading:
"Turkey called Russia's invasion of Ukraine a "war" on Sunday in a rhetorical shift that could pave the way for the NATO member nation to enact an international pact limiting Russian naval passage to the Black Sea."
"Under the 1936 Montreux Convention, Turkey has control over the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits that connect the Mediterranean and Black seas and can limit the passage of warships during wartime or if threatened."
> "Clearly they are reconsidering what they said."
I don't think that is the case. The short answer is, here's a link to a more detailed version of the article above - their recent change is calling it a "war", which allows them to trigger Montreux:
"Yet Cavusoglu (Turkey Foreign Minister) reiterated that Turkey cannot block all Russian warships accessing the Black Sea due to a clause in the pact exempting those returning to their registered base."
The long answer is, if you have been following European and Turkish politics in the last few years, you would see that Turkey is getting closer and closer to Russia (the F-35 debacle, getting S400 missile batteries, Turkstream etc). Turkey is also smart enough to play both sides. So, this move (to do nothing) is expected.
I agree with you that the Netflix UI is superb for browsing, however I have one major gripe - on Android TV they broke the back button.
I had to hardcode a kill app shortcut just for them.
For all other android tv apps that I have been using so far, the back button works normally, exiting the app at the topmost layer. However, repeated clicks of the back button in netflix UI just re-triggers the menu - part of their dark patterns to make it harder to quit the app...
I think back button suddenly closing the app is more hostile. When you do it accidentally, the recovery steps are painful (app switch, find app, focus to it etc). I totally understand why Netflix would prevent it from happening. I think iPhone solved it better than Android with the "super back" link or the app hopping gesture. Android could improve the back button with a long-press requirement in order to navigate away from the app too. In this current situation, Netflix is completely in the right to disable the behavior.
Sorry, I totally disagree that is is "completely in the right", I use 3 other video apps, they all give exit prompts instead, here is an example:
Netflix could have done what Prime video does
Prime Video: "Do you want to exit the app? (Yes/No)", then done
Netflix: scroll all the way down the menu options: Home, Play something, New & Popular, TV Shows, Movies, My List, Get Help, Exit Netflix (click), 8 clicks in total before you can exit.
So it takes orders of magnitude more clicks, and more time out of my life, every time I try to exit the Netflix app. Considering that exiting an app is something I do all the time, it is not great
I think the existence of exit prompts is sole admission of how painful this experience is for the users. The prompt itself can be a hindrance for the user too. I still think that it's an Android UX problem, not Netflix.
Tenure or not, is he seriously going give his students random final grades even before the first day of class (as he put it, "predestination")? Surely the school won't allow him to do this
Apparently a lot of bible thumpers go to that school and he's probably heard the predestination argument w.r.t. Covid & dying far too often. Him saying grades are predetermined is another way of challenging that viewpoint. The grades won't (or shouldn't) be assigned randomly
Later he goes on to explain how you can get an A from remote-friendly materials too.
While it's preposterous on the face of it, it's not even completely satirical since he goes on to explain the actual "rules" later for anything he "prescribes" early on.
Because Fab space has been at a high premium for some time, many manufacturers are focusing on producing higher priced (and higher margin/higher profit) items, maybe that is why you see less availability of down market AMD products? Also, AMD was pretty much sold out across the board beginning of the year; there was basically no availability of 5000 series in most retailers, and limits on CPUs per customer when they do come in stock.
Once the semiconductor situation settles down and it all goes back to normal, you'll probably see more availability of AMD on the lower tiers - the situation is already getting better with most of the 5600 (and higher) series of cpus back in stock now.
Sort of, but this is also sort of the point of owning your own fab!
There are others. What happens if TSMC has an unchallenged kingmaking node? Do they let AMD/Intel or AMD/NVidia keep their fat margins? Or do they say "the node makes the king -- start bidding"?
I'm still on the waitlist for the 5950 since Christmas. I bought an AMD laptop meanwhile, but never bothered removing my name from the list. I should start a pool on how long it takes before they contact me.
FWIW, 5950x started being regularly in stock at the local BestBuy (USA, California, Bay Area) so depending on where you are, you might want to look around.
As for me, ironically, once I could finally get it, I decided that I might as well await the next spin. Chipmageddon appears to have taught me patience.
The Japanese have several interesting drone projects, here's another one from Rakuten for drone delivery which has been in irregular short trials since 2016.
Just in time doesn't necessarily mean no buffer, the goal is to minimize excessive stockpiling and keep enough for continuous production, increasing stockpile when required.
Toyota, some might say THE pioneer of Just-in-time manufacturing, was one of the car manufacturers least impacted by the component shortage precisely because they started stockpiling very early on after they saw the upcoming issue.
Here's a quote from another Bloomberg article specifically on Toyota[1]:
"Toyota asks its Tier 1 suppliers to input detailed information about their most obscure parts and materials providers in a complex database that it maintains. Using this system to glean information about, say, a single headlight Toyota purchases for one of its cars, it can get information as granular as the names and locations of the companies that make the materials that go into surface treatments used on those headlights’ lenses and even the producers of the lubricants used on the rubber pieces in the assembly, Toyota spokeswoman Shiori Hashimoto says.
These lines of communication alerted the company early on that it needed to stockpile chips."
This is actually also discussed by Nassim Taleb in his book which I assume the parent comment is referencing.
He says Toyota is one of the few examples where just-in-time was not distorted and warped. So Toyota implements true just-in-time, which can be robust, with buffers. But most other companies implement a half-assed version that is very fragile.
While attending a training event, I talked to a pilot who flew cargo for a Tier 1 supplier to North American auto manufacturers. He had several stories of flying a jet with just a handful of boxes on board to avoid the line-down penalties.
My favorite was tower advising them they’d be fined for a departure during local curfew. “Roger, we better get our money’s worth then” and did a max performance takeoff and turn on course with whatever parts they were carrying.
We have a local field with an 11P-7A curfew (landing/takeoff surcharge technically).
I’m not sure it does much to keep the airport quiet as I’ve been in a holding orbit of three low-altitude airplanes from 6:45 AM to 7:00 with all of us waiting to avoid the curfew fee.
So, instead of slipping relatively quietly into the field from a random route to a straight-in, neighbors got to hear me orbit for three rectangular patterns over the same ground points plus two other airplanes doing the same low-altitude holding. If I were a neighbor, I’d much rather the simple straight-in to be encouraged.
The sports teams all just pay the fee; I never had to break the 11PM side while I was based there, but I would have as well. (It was less than an hour’s worth of gas, so it wouldn’t make sense to divert and reposition later.) I suspect the curfew makes people feel good while making the actual experience worse.
The curfew at Sydney is $1M (USD 730K), so large that airlines go to considerable lengths not to violate it, making sure they have accurate forecasts for the winds from LAX and running predictive models for various landing scenarios. They will really burn avgas if they can squeak it in before curfew, and they have been known to divert flights to Canberra or Brisbane and put the passengers into a hotel overnight rather than risk it.
Sometimes those curfew fines actually cause flights not to depart. Some years ago, I was sitting on the tarmac at John Wayne for about an hour, hoping to make it just under the nighttime curfew, but ultimately the flight was canceled and I had to get a shuttle to LAX and an alternative flight in the morning.
John Wayne is more forceful than some for sure. I flew a small plane their once and took off just at curfew - the runway lights went off the moment my wheels left the ground.
If they turned off before you passed the departure end, I’d raise that as safety concern (ASRS at a minimum, but this is something that I’d probably take straight to the FSDO).
It's been a while, but flying into Long Beach from a connection in Phoenix, the scheduled plane was delayed somewhere, they had boarded us on a replacement and then realized the plane was too loud, so they rushed us to a different plane (in the next terminal) that had the right noise reduction equipment.
Also, my Dad once had a late-ish flight to Long Beach that got diverted to LAX because delays pushed it past the curfew.
This is not quite accurate. Toyota began stockpiling materials a while back after having its supply chain disrupted. Having extra inventory, no matter how well-implemented, is actually an anti-pattern in lean manufacturing -- the good folks at Toyota are simply wise enough to know when they they should embrace lean vs. when they should back off it a bit.
The difference is that Toyota is a uniquely intelligent company with respect to supply chain.
The average American manufacturing company is run by a CFO operating with reports out of SAP or Peoplesoft. Their performance is measured by fiscal performance, so running to the penny and having no inventory benefits them more than making the company resilient. Wall St rewards quarterly performance, not resilience.
But if the optimal strategy only falls apart for uncommon events that you can't determine when they happen, how much of an incentive is there to run a conservative/gambling strategy like that?
It depends on your objectives. One bad event can put many companies out of business. The auto industry is a good example because US-Canadian border issues and snow can fubar things for half the year.
Look at companies like Boeing with absurdly complex supply chains. The inventory numbers look good, but the factories are idle when a truckload of magic bolts is stuck in a blizzard in South Dakota.
It also increases actual cost. I supported a GE business unit as a supplier for awhile. We hosed them for stupid last minute orders due to this sort of thing. They would pay more for expedited shipping, overtime, waste money on leasing stuff to avoid capex, etc.
There is no optimal strategy because there is no perfect knowledge. That's why good CEOs are paid their weight in gold. A vision and steady hands can pay off handsomely.
Depends completely on the risk vs reward. Black swans are more common than can be assumed from modeling past data so in general a slightly more conservative strategy than industry standard is more likely to win.
For example COVID style shutdowns could be reasonably modeled at X% per year after talking to a disease specialist. But, not all of them are going to be from diseases.
All of the car companies, dialed down orders at the start of the pandemic. Now they are all trying to stockpile chips, due to not enough supply. I imagine (no data to support) the increased size stockpiles are a large part of what makes the problem worse. Kinda like TP really.
Also, Toyota is now cutting 40 percent of global production due to chip shortage.
Any system with signalling delay will experience this effect. Changes will get amplified across layers. That's also a common way to die from a viral infection: your immune system goes into overdrive from too many signals of infection from different tissue cells. A common treatment is steroids, which dampen immune response.
Is an inherent instability in any system with long/slow information chains. It's more a failure mode of central planning than of free markets. We had a few companies making bad decisions based on bad demand forecasting. This is a problem mitigated by stock exchanges (commodities).
What you fail to mention (although you linked to an article that covers it) - is that Toyota was prepared due to the setbacks they suffered in the Tsunami. If it wasn't for that, they would not have stockpiled for and been ready for a pandemic. Even so, they are now dealing with chip shortages as well.
The thing is that you can not apply this method (suddenly stockpile because of anticipated shortage) globally. Now of course, putting gratuitous buffer everywhere would not be the panacea either. But some buffers may be needed to improve global resiliency.
One has to optimize to reduce fragility, but when massive chip (or anything else) shortages start to appear for extended periods it is obviously already way to late. And way too downstream if your strategy was just a punctual stockpile decided by a single company. Because that probably would have been impossible for everybody to apply this punctual strategy at the same time...
One advantage of starting to stockpile ahead of a crisis is that production is not yet affected much by the crisis, and the total amount buffered could be larger.
They started stockpiling key components after the earthquake roughly 8 years ago. You could do this globally if everyone took the Toyota approach and only stockpiled components likely to suffer disruption.
Seems like a low-on-details article with PR-like flavor.
According to this, Toyota cut production by 40%, though it does acknowledge that Toyota took less of a hit vs industry:
“New cars often include dozens of microchips but Toyota benefited from having built a larger stockpile of chips - also called semiconductors - as part of a revamp to its business continuity plan, developed in the wake of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami a decade ago.”
What's the quote about selling someone a product whose faults will occur when you're years gone and half way around the planet? I wonder how this mentality is avoided/regarded in Japan.
When many of the quality-focused companies in Japan took off they focused on gaining market share primarily through gaining repeat customers. A lot of their sales machinery was constructed around the idea of building a personal relationship with the customer to predict their needs as they arise.
This was in part because the domestic Japanese market was so small. Of course, it needs support from quality development and manufacturing. But it's also efficienct because it's much cheaper to sell something to someone who trusts you than to get it out by cold calling.
I think this papers backs up pretty well and goes into a lot more details of why it matters to focus on the flow. In fact it’s crucial that such issues that stop production including predicting and identifying demand-supply mismatch is essential for a smooth flow of operations. BUT, humans are humans and we plan for the best case scenario without giving due consideration for failure modes. Manufacturing is hardly an exception.
I wonder if they track the financial status of these far upstream suppliers. I've been doing some work with supply chain monitoring and often smaller companies in Europe are hesitant to share information on financial performance etc
As your link says Toyota has not been materially impacted until now, whereas all the other manufacturers had to scale back their production way earlier (I'm seeing articles from January and March). 8 months longer runway than everyone else is a pretty good deal.
The Toyota Production System is /the/ precursor to “Lean Manufacturing”, you could say that Toyota wrote the book on “lean”. While there are many companies that try (and fail) to replicate TPS, the Toyota Way is the standard by definition.
If you want to know the actual conditions, there is a recent article from a much better source
Bloomberg: The Last–And Only–Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out
She is an Australian virologist, now working in Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, previously scientific director of the biosafety lab at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School in 2016.
I read that and her volunteered info was all over news sites last week. However, this is not what we need. What we need is an independent body that goes into the Wuhan lab.
Let us inspect the bats. The cages, the equipment, the staff.
It seems unlikely to me that a team going to the lab now would be able to tell us anything at all about how the lab was operated 18 months ago. The chances that it hasn't been completely gutted and re-worked from scratch by now seem to me to be precisely zero. The window of opportunity to get a team in there and actually find out what was going on closed probably in late January or early in February 2020.
Meanwhile we have someone here with direct experience of the lab as it was at the actual time in question. It seems to me that's absolutely the best we are ever likely to get.
Turkey has NOT closed the Black sea; this article does not say that at all.
Turkey has stated continuously in last few days that it will follow the Montreux Convention, under which they cannot restrict vessels going back to their home base, including Russian ones.