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"Flagship" means important. The press release seems to indicate it's importance. https://corporate.ford.com/articles/electrification/blue-oval-city.html https

"Flagship" means important. The press release seems to indicate it's importance. https://corporate.ford.com/articles/electrification/blue-oval-city.html https://corporate.ford.com/articles/electrification/blue-ova... ""FORD TO LEAD AMERICA'S SHIFT TO ELECTRIC VEHICLES WITH NEW BLUEOVAL CITY MEGA CAMPUS IN TENNESSEE AND TWIN BATTERY PLANTS IN KENTUCKY; $11.4B INVESTMENT TO CREATE 11,000 JOBS AND POWER NEW LINEUP OF ADVANCED EVS FORD TO BRING ELECTRIC ZERO-EMISSION VEHICLES AT SCALE TO AMERICAN CUSTOMERS WITH THE LARGEST, MOST ADVANCED, MOST EFFICIENT AUTO PRODUCTION COMPLEX IN ITS 118-YEAR HISTORY""

stuaxo 3y ago
Yes, flagship is pretty normal usage, very strange quibble to have.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  I don't think the word "flagship" is the issue. The issue is that no other noun follows. If this was "flagship factory" or "flagship truck" it would be much clearer. To me the headline wasn't clearer do to "flagship" being followed by "socked" which I am most commonly used to seeing as a noun rather than a verb, especially in a news article rather than a conversation in a pub.
  - theodric 3y ago
    ^correct As a Car Guy, when they said 'battery flagship', I immediately understood that to mean the F150 Lightning: the top-of-the range version of their most popular vehicle, which also (now) runs on batteries. (The Lightning used to just be an obnoxiously-fast V8 truck.) Therefore: "Ford's F150 Lightning is moldy." Ew, nasty! Finding out that the author didn't intend "flagship" mean the truck, but a factory, is baffling.
  - tomjakubowski 3y ago
    Just search "flagship" on Google News and you'll see it is quite often used as a noun, and you're meant to infer what the thing is.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  It's a descriptor, not a noun (since we aren't discussing an actual flag ship). The title doesn't actually say anything meaningful.
- zo1 3y ago
  It's not normal usage at all, as it's missing the main "thing" that is the flagship. Flagship What?? Imagine it applying to any other thing to see what we mean. Google's flagship? Samsung's flagship? Apple's flagship? What it should be: Google's flagship product Samsung's flagship feature phone Apple's flagship iphone
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Maybe because it is a simple typo, with order of words. It is obviously an article about a factory that makes batteries, and it is important to Ford.
jvanderbot 3y ago
Ford's battery "Important" socked by ... Makes no more sense. What they wanted to say was "Ford's flagship battery plant" or something else. Flagship is an adjective unless it's meant to denote a ship that carries an admiral's flag.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Interesting. I understood it immediately, but I'm a pretty smart guy and can comprehend things without them being explicit, so I asked Claude.ai to see if it could do it. > Prompt: I saw a headline titled "Ford's Battery Flagship Socked by Mold Sickness, Workers Say". What do they mean by "flagship", a literal ship? > Claude Opus: No, in this context, "flagship" is not referring to a literal ship. In business and marketing, the term "flagship" is often used to describe the most important or leading product, location, or division of a company. > In the headline you mentioned, "Ford's Battery Flagship" likely refers to the company's primary or most advanced battery manufacturing facility or division. This facility or division is considered the "flagship" because it plays a crucial role in Ford's strategy to develop and produce batteries for their electric vehicles. > So, when the headline states that the "Battery Flagship" is "Socked by Mold Sickness," it means that this important battery facility is facing issues related to mold growth, which is reportedly causing health problems for the workers. But Claude Opus is a remarkable LLM. Very powerful. Mixtral 8x7B quantized down to 4 bits is also a remarkable LLM, but much smaller and runs on my laptop. I gave it the same prompt. > Mixtral 8x7b: "Flagship" in this context refers to the main facility or center of operation for a certain activity or product. In this case, it refers to Ford's main battery production plant. That was generated in 1.2 s. Not bad. Checking the actual article, it appears that is what the article is about. In a world-modeling and text-comprehension sense these models appear to beat many human beings on meaning inference in ambiguous contexts. Quite cool! One can imagine a future where humans without this inference skill can use a rapid-response text model to auto-translate things down to their comprehension level. After all, this entire discussion tree is a discussion about communication breakdown. It would be entirely obviated if these LLMs were placed in the comprehension path. Then we'd be operating at a higher level of discussion: talking about the referent rather than the reference, so to speak!
  - 3y ago
arrakeenrevived 3y ago
Yes I'm aware that "flagship" indicates importance, but I stand by my comment that the article does a poor job of explaining it. It only says "flagship" in the title, and also the title is the only place where it really even links the factory to Ford to explain why it's important to Ford. Also from reading other sources, the factory mentioned in this article is only 1 of 3 factories that are being built as part of the project. Other than that, the article calls the factory a "banner project for Joe Biden", as well as saying it's an "unprecedented" project for Kentucky", mentions investment by the Department of Energy, and also that it is being built for "SK On, a South Korean company". The article seems to be going out of its way to try and imply that this factory is some huge deal by name-dropping a bunch of people and attaching grand sounding adjectives, but doesn't actually explain why. It is, as the GP comment said, "all over the place". It seems there's a story here about mold that needs to be told, but in the best case this article is just bad writing, and in the worst case it seems like it's actively being clickbaity/deceitful.
deleted 3y ago
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stuaxo 3y ago

Yes, flagship is pretty normal usage, very strange quibble to have.

ajmurmann 3y ago
I don't think the word "flagship" is the issue. The issue is that no other noun follows. If this was "flagship factory" or "flagship truck" it would be much clearer. To me the headline wasn't clearer do to "flagship" being followed by "socked" which I am most commonly used to seeing as a noun rather than a verb, especially in a news article rather than a conversation in a pub.
- theodric 3y ago
  ^correct As a Car Guy, when they said 'battery flagship', I immediately understood that to mean the F150 Lightning: the top-of-the range version of their most popular vehicle, which also (now) runs on batteries. (The Lightning used to just be an obnoxiously-fast V8 truck.) Therefore: "Ford's F150 Lightning is moldy." Ew, nasty! Finding out that the author didn't intend "flagship" mean the truck, but a factory, is baffling.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  Just search "flagship" on Google News and you'll see it is quite often used as a noun, and you're meant to infer what the thing is.
zdragnar 3y ago
It's a descriptor, not a noun (since we aren't discussing an actual flag ship). The title doesn't actually say anything meaningful.
zo1 3y ago
It's not normal usage at all, as it's missing the main "thing" that is the flagship. Flagship What?? Imagine it applying to any other thing to see what we mean. Google's flagship? Samsung's flagship? Apple's flagship? What it should be: Google's flagship product Samsung's flagship feature phone Apple's flagship iphone
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Maybe because it is a simple typo, with order of words. It is obviously an article about a factory that makes batteries, and it is important to Ford.

jvanderbot 3y ago

Ford's battery "Important" socked by ... Makes no more sense. What they wanted to say was "Ford's flagship battery plant" or something else. Flagship is an adjective unless it's meant to denote a ship that carries an admiral's flag.

renewiltord 3y ago
Interesting. I understood it immediately, but I'm a pretty smart guy and can comprehend things without them being explicit, so I asked Claude.ai to see if it could do it. > Prompt: I saw a headline titled "Ford's Battery Flagship Socked by Mold Sickness, Workers Say". What do they mean by "flagship", a literal ship? > Claude Opus: No, in this context, "flagship" is not referring to a literal ship. In business and marketing, the term "flagship" is often used to describe the most important or leading product, location, or division of a company. > In the headline you mentioned, "Ford's Battery Flagship" likely refers to the company's primary or most advanced battery manufacturing facility or division. This facility or division is considered the "flagship" because it plays a crucial role in Ford's strategy to develop and produce batteries for their electric vehicles. > So, when the headline states that the "Battery Flagship" is "Socked by Mold Sickness," it means that this important battery facility is facing issues related to mold growth, which is reportedly causing health problems for the workers. But Claude Opus is a remarkable LLM. Very powerful. Mixtral 8x7B quantized down to 4 bits is also a remarkable LLM, but much smaller and runs on my laptop. I gave it the same prompt. > Mixtral 8x7b: "Flagship" in this context refers to the main facility or center of operation for a certain activity or product. In this case, it refers to Ford's main battery production plant. That was generated in 1.2 s. Not bad. Checking the actual article, it appears that is what the article is about. In a world-modeling and text-comprehension sense these models appear to beat many human beings on meaning inference in ambiguous contexts. Quite cool! One can imagine a future where humans without this inference skill can use a rapid-response text model to auto-translate things down to their comprehension level. After all, this entire discussion tree is a discussion about communication breakdown. It would be entirely obviated if these LLMs were placed in the comprehension path. Then we'd be operating at a higher level of discussion: talking about the referent rather than the reference, so to speak!
- 3y ago

arrakeenrevived 3y ago

Yes I'm aware that "flagship" indicates importance, but I stand by my comment that the article does a poor job of explaining it. It only says "flagship" in the title, and also the title is the only place where it really even links the factory to Ford to explain why it's important to Ford. Also from reading other sources, the factory mentioned in this article is only 1 of 3 factories that are being built as part of the project. Other than that, the article calls the factory a "banner project for Joe Biden", as well as saying it's an "unprecedented" project for Kentucky", mentions investment by the Department of Energy, and also that it is being built for "SK On, a South Korean company". The article seems to be going out of its way to try and imply that this factory is some huge deal by name-dropping a bunch of people and attaching grand sounding adjectives, but doesn't actually explain why. It is, as the GP comment said, "all over the place". It seems there's a story here about mold that needs to be told, but in the best case this article is just bad writing, and in the worst case it seems like it's actively being clickbaity/deceitful.

deleted 3y ago

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