But the difference is Pepsi would also have had dedicated laboratories and food scientists, scientifically controlled exhaustive testing and unlimited access to any ingredient they wanted. Thus one would expect Pepsi's testing to have had much finer granularity than in this YouTube video).
With millions of dollars tied up in just a few percent of sales you can bet Pepsi knows just about as much as Coke does about Coke's ingredients (and vice versa of course).
The research for both companies is more about the fine minutiae—keeping an optimal differentiation between the two products more than treading on each other's territory. Trampling over each other for market share is done through advertising, not by making their products the same.
Pepsi probably also has had access to Coke's supply chain and long ago acquired samples of various inputs before mixing, which would make analysis easier. The two companies know they're competing mostly on production management and brand image, not secret ingredients. A decade or so ago a secretary from Coke tried to sell some of the company's "secrets" to Pepsi. Instead of jumping on the opportunity to get Coke's secrets, they contacted Coke's legal department and the FBI, with the three working together to prosecute her.
I worked in an fMRI lab briefly as a grad student. I suspect you'd be correct but perhaps not exactly why you'd expect. Studies using fMRI measure a blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the brain. This is thought to be an indirect measure of neural activity because a local increase in neural firing rate produces a local increase in the need for, and delivery of, oxygenated blood.
The question then is, do you expect a person who is really good at mental arithmetic to have less neural firing on arithmetic tasks (e.g., what is 147 x 38) than the average joe. I would hypothesize yes overall to solve each question; however, I'd also hypothesize the momentary max intensity of the expert to peak higher. Think of a bodybuilder vs. a SWE bench-pressing 100 lbs for 50 reps. The bodybuilder has way more muscle to devote to a single rep, and will likely finish the set in 20 seconds, while the SWE is going to take like 30 minutes ;)
I was a grad student at UCSD when Ed Vul published Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience [1], which stoked a severe backlash from the fMRI syndicate resulting in a title change to Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition [2]. There is a lot of interesting commentary around this article (e.g., “Voodoo” Science in Neuroimaging: How a Controversy Transformed into a Crisis [3]). To me it was fascinating to watch Vul (an incredibly rare talent, perhaps a genius), take on an entire field during his 1st year as assistant professor.
I don't know that it's actually prohibited. There is no Chinese telecommunications equipment allowed, no Huawei or Bytedance, but nothing prohibiting software merely being developed in China, not yet at least.
Although I did just check what regions AWS bedrock support Deepseek and their govcloud regions do not, so that's a good reason not to use it. Still, on prem on a segmented network, following CMMC, probably permissable
There’s nuance and debate about the 110 level 2 controls without bringing Chinese tech in to the picture. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in that meeting lol.
I agree, it would be the best of bad cases, in a sense. I have low trust in OpenAI due to its leadership, and in Meta, because, well, Meta has history, let's say.
Why are you equating busses to roads and not cars? Cars are not subsidized and in fact car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. Without car related taxes, we would absolutely need to charge bus fees to subsidize roadway costs, and they would probably need to be pretty steep.
Most states fail to collect enough in user fees to fully provide for roadway spending. This necessitates transfers from general funds or other revenue sources that are unrelated to road use to pay for road construction and maintenance.
Only three states—Delaware, Montana, and New Jersey—raise enough revenue to fully cover their highway spending. The remaining 47 states and the District of Columbia must make up the difference with tax revenues from other sources.
The states that raise the lowest proportion of their highway funds from transportation-related sources are Alaska (19.4 percent) and North Dakota (35.1 percent), both states which rely heavily on revenue from severance taxes.
that's about what I expected. And that's not even including sales tax from car purchases, and maintenance related spending. Suffice to say, without cars, a year bus pass would need to run ~ however much the average person spends per year on all car related taxes.
Well it wouldn’t because we wouldn’t have as many people driving cars, so there wouldn’t need to be as many roads so costs would be much lower.
In Ohio we just spend $2bn on about 2 miles of road to effectively temporarily ease congestion. That’s $2bn paid for by taxpayers regardless of how it’s paid, that we didn’t necessarily need to spend.
I’d also like to add, yes that “bus ticket” (I’m no fan of busses for short term travel) might be a little more expensive but consumer costs overall would’ve likely to go down. Why? Well in addition to already paying for highway infrastructure you’re paying $30,000, $50,000,
&c . on a vehicle, plus insurance, gas, repairs, tires, maintenance, interest on loans, &c. So while I think it’s hard to compare apples to apples, I think it’s good to have this information in mind as well when discussing this topic broadly.
Thanks. Yea also not accounting for other social costs - obesity, teen deaths, first responders and police spending time rescuing people who are maimed in car crashes.
There are benefits too and all, just saying we don’t really have a full cost readily available for comparison because it’s hard to measure, never mind the literal dollars and cents that go into funding.
Car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. I don't think free buses are going to be able to maintain the roadways.
A common misconception; usage fees only covered about 50% of highway-related expenses a few years ago. Feel free to find the latest numbers. This is less than the fare box recovery ratio of many transit systems, though not all.
And that, of course, does not include all the unpriced externalities of roads. For example, if you value a life at $1M, then the 40,000 people killed by drivers each year cost us collectively another $40B.
Electric golf carts have existed since the 1950s, and are the cart type available at most golf courses in the US. Regarding factories, a variant with a pallet mover or fork lift would be handy (but electric lifts are probably the second most common type if they haven't already surpassed propane).
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