Of course sprawl increases prices. Look at any major city. The closer you are to the center of it, the higher the prices
This does not follow. Cities with the largest sprawl almost invariably are cheaper than cities that are constrained from sprawl by geography. This strongly suggests that sprawl lowers prices, not raises them. Therefore, artificially encouraging sprawl should have the same effect, barring some unexpected market force.
Those who don't want to commute for 4 hours every day will pay top dollar to be closer to work.
That explanation also makes no sense. It requires a provably false assumption that all businesses are located in the city center, whereas in practice, we know this to not be the case. In fact, in the Bay Area, most of the biggest businesses are nowhere near San Francisco. Yet large numbers of people pay exorbitant prices to live up there, and then a decent percentage of them commute AWAY from the city down to the South Bay where they work.
No, all indications are that pricing is higher in the middle of the city principally because people want to live in the middle of the city, rather than because of commutes to work. And housing prices in California are high principally because people want to live in California.
I'm not saying government interference can't have any impact on the prices, but I'm not convinced that it is a significant factor when compared with other factors, like the lack of unbuilt land, the crazy number of people who want to move in, and the insane salaries that many of those people earn.
Not necessarily. Artificial scarcity only increases prices if demand is constant. If you have artificial scarcity in housing only, but not in commercial construction, then demand remains constant because of people wanting to live near their workplaces. However, if you have artificial scarcity in both commercial and residential construction, then commercial prices may go up because of companies desperate to locate here, but housing prices will not necessarily go up, because there will be a limited number of businesses, and therefore a limited number of people who will want to live near those businesses.
Zoning laws limit where things can be built. That shouldn't affect housing prices at all unless you're saying that they aren't allocating enough residential areas compared with commercial areas. However, that's a completely different argument than arguing that zoning laws inherently reduce supply. Zoning laws are often problematic because of longer commute times caused by not being able to live near where you work, but again, that's an entirely different complaint.
Density restrictions, so long as they are applied similarly to commercial construction, just increase sprawl and commute times, rather than driving up pricing. Any claim to the contrary demands evidence. Now if you're arguing that they aren't being applied evenly, that's another matter, but again, that's an entirely different argument than claiming that density restrictions inherently drive up prices.
Lack of permitting actually tends to reduce housing prices, by keeping cheaper, older housing on the market, rather than newer homes/apartments/condos that will fetch a higher dollar value. So at least on the face of it, your argument appears to be completely backwards.
So again, please provide evidence that these things increase housing prices.
Or just modify all web browsers to automatically add a "This site is insecure, and may compromise your security. Are you sure you want to load this page?" message for every website in Australia, whether protected by TLS or not, under the assumption that TLS on Australian servers is inherently and irreparably compromised. Make it so that nobody outside of Australia is willing to do business with Aussie companies.
This will quickly spill over into the rest of the world. Once you see the democracies of the world go this route, the flood gates will open. There will be laws made all over the world that will copy this word for word. Entire turn-key packages to look all of this up will be sold to the highest bidders.
... that is, unless all the tech companies grow some balls and agree to all tell Australia to go f**k itself. If Australia finds itself suddenly drop-kicked back to the technological stone age by every major tech company refusing to do business with them (and Australia is small enough population-wise that it is an ideal line in the sand), then no other country would be crazy enough to follow their lead, and the crooked spooks who are pushing for this dangerous legislation would be forced to crawl back under their rocks for several decades.
Bears are horrifyingly powerful predators, both in terms of weaponry and armour. Those claws powered by the musculature of your typical brown bear has will inflict horrifying wounds.
Yeah. Bears' arms are powerful weapons. We keep trying to ban them, but the darned constitution guarantees us a right to bear arms. I can't imagine why anyone would want them, with all that hair and all, but to each his/her own, I suppose.
Signals travel at around a foot per nanosecond. That means the time to respond to a request must have no more than a few nanoseconds of variation. That seems unlikely to be possible, much less practical.
The right fix is for keyless driving and no-press keyless entry to be an optional feature that the user can disable.
Not really. It suggests that people move, on average, once every ten years, which doesn't seem that crazy. Bear in mind that young folks usually rent, and tend to job hop a lot, which means they have the opportunity to move closer to their next job as soon as their previous lease is up.
Yeah, but the point is that the overall interface design started way back then. Palm copied it into a smaller form factor, and PocketPC copied it from them. So although iOS wasn't first, Apple was.
Seriously, what type of fucked up worldview does it take to mock Romney and his fellow Republicans for opposing Russia in 2012, then turn around and claim that the Republicans are wholly owned by Russia in 2018?
One in which you recognize that, for the most part, supporting countries that aren't behaving like enemies is a good way to keep them on your side, but that when they start acting like enemies, you can't coddle them, or they'll continue to do so.
Russia's behavior has changed pretty dramatically since 2012, which was when Putin took the reins back from Medvedev and started behaving much more aggressively towards both its neighbors and the United States. What made sense in 2012 doesn't make sense today. We don't live in a static world. Friends change, enemies change, the geopolitical climate changes, and those who don't adapt often find themselves on the wrong side of history.
It is entirely possible to encrypt content for both the public key of the receiver and the government, without introducing any flaw into the encryption itself.
Pedantically, yes, but instead of introducing a flaw in the encryption, you're just shifting the flaw to the architecture surrounding it. Now you have a key that is so secret that law enforcement cannot be trusted to possess it, because if it gets out, every piece of encrypted data can then be decrypted.
The best you can do is come up with a key escrow scheme in which every device has its own unique government key. But even this approach has fundamentally the same problem. All it takes is one person gaining access to the server that holds all those keys, and suddenly everybody's data is at risk.
To come up with a scheme that has even a modicum of security, you have to go absolutely nuts with it, e.g.
Split each per-device key into multiple parts.
Store each part in a different country, in a room that only specific people have access to.
Ensure that access key holders are non-overlapping so that no single person can be coerced into providing access to more than one room.
Store all keys in printed form so that they cannot be accessed electronically (even temporarily). Place the printer itself in the locked room, with only a unidirectional serial cable providing a one-way data stream through the wall.
Provide independent databases in each of the rooms (all isolated from the public Internet) for looking up the location of the box in which that specific part of the key is physically stored.
Store the key in such a way that you can have a certain number of missing parts and still be able to reconstitute the key so a fire in one building will not destroy all of the keys.
Such things are theoretically possible, but they result in multi-million-dollar (maybe even multi-billion-dollar) expenses for the companies involved. And even if you do this, you are still at risk of a nefarious third party compromising the servers used for generating those keys and associating them with specific users' accounts, either allowing them to substitute their own keys or sniff the keys, effectively compromising all new users of the service after a specific date.
In short, there can be no technical solution to this problem that does not inherently create a gaping security hole so big you could drive a thousand M1A2 tanks through it side-by-side. So the only practical response when a government proposes something like this is to immediately put up a message on your site that says, "[Name of company] may soon become illegal in your country. Call your [legislator, parliamentarian] and tell them to vote no on [bill]." Then, if the law passes, follow through and deny access to your service to anyone in that country so that the government in question can serve as a cautionary tale for other governments considering similarly idiotic laws.
Scorched earth really is the only answer that neofascist governments understand. If they think they can get away with this sort of thing, they will try, and everyone will suffer greatly when (not if) the inevitable total compromise happens as a direct result. The only winning move is not to play.
Seriously though. An electric vehicle can only be a second vehicle. It can't be a first vehicle. Most people can't even spend $30K on a first vehicle, which makes this a luxury.
Actually, unless you buy a car with an inadequate range, it can be a first vehicle for most people. My Model X is my primary car. I drive four 2.5-hour round trips per week. I frequently drive to places that are several hours away. DC fast charging (e.g. Tesla's Supercharger network) makes the difference between an EV being usable as a primary car and not. Is it as easy as filling up a car? Not quite. But feasible? Heck, yes.
Unfortunately, right now, Teslas are, IMO, the only vehicles that are broadly usable as a first vehicle outside of California and a few other big cities, because the non-Tesla DC fast charging networks just aren't there yet. But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. When there are enough EVs to sustain other charging networks, they will get built out, too.
People buying the $100k roadster would've purchased regardless, it's not about saving money at that point. Neither is the $40k Tesla, if saving money is an issue the rich would all ride in used Toyota's not Volvo/BMW/Mercedes.
Not true at all. For the high-end, maybe, but for the Model 3, the difference between $38.5k (after tax credit) Tesla and a $46k (actual cost) Tesla means losing more than a quarter of the premium over a base model Camry hybrid. That becomes a fairly significant deciding factor in purchasing decisions.
Even Musk has asked for the removal of the subsidies. It's only benefitting if you are paying $8k in taxes anyway and most people making less than 125k typically do not end up owing $8k at the end of the year for an offset to be useful.
No, Musk would prefer for the subsidies to be extended in such a way that are tapered off solely by year of manufacture, rather than based on when a particular manufacturer hit a specific manufacturing target. Because Tesla was the first out of the gate, they put themselves in a situation where their cars are becoming ineligible for the tax credit just as they are starting to gain real traction in the overall car market, and all the latecomers to the party get the benefits of seeing what worked and what didn't for Tesla, all while getting to give tax credits to people who buy their cars. That kind of sucks for Tesla, because they basically did R&D for the whole industry, who are now getting to reap the rewards without much of the risk.
Wanting the subsidies to not come with a substantial first-mover penalty is not the same thing as wanting the subsidies to end.
Personally I prefer the prorating. I think it's good customer service and extends good will to the consumer. I don't like this change. However, I don't see how this is a regulation issue.
Just wait until they learn about ten-year contracts.
I'm pretty sure this isn't even the first Tesla driver to be pulled over for driving while unconscious. It's at least the second time in the Bay Area this year. There was one on the Bay Bridge back in January, another one back in May of 2016 (as seen in a video clip on YouTube), and at least one in between involving a Tesla mobile service vehicle.
Really? A drunk driver in a non-self-driving vehicle can't get up to 70 MPH and nod off, crossing the median and hitting a car head on? You realize 10,000 people die annually in the US due to DUI because of *exactly* what happened to the driver in this Tesla? There's nothing "new" about this. A self-driving vehicle did not "enable" any additional level of unsafe driving than any other vehicle capable of reaching 70 MPH.
On the contrary. It enabled seven whole minutes of unsafe driving with nobody conscious behind the wheel. When you think about it, that's pretty remarkable. If you nod off in a normal car, you're pretty much dead, and there's a decent chance you'll take other people with you. If you nod off in a Tesla, there's a nonzero chance you'll get pulled over in a complex traffic break seven minutes later, not having killed anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
This does not follow. Cities with the largest sprawl almost invariably are cheaper than cities that are constrained from sprawl by geography. This strongly suggests that sprawl lowers prices, not raises them. Therefore, artificially encouraging sprawl should have the same effect, barring some unexpected market force.
That explanation also makes no sense. It requires a provably false assumption that all businesses are located in the city center, whereas in practice, we know this to not be the case. In fact, in the Bay Area, most of the biggest businesses are nowhere near San Francisco. Yet large numbers of people pay exorbitant prices to live up there, and then a decent percentage of them commute AWAY from the city down to the South Bay where they work.
No, all indications are that pricing is higher in the middle of the city principally because people want to live in the middle of the city, rather than because of commutes to work. And housing prices in California are high principally because people want to live in California.
I'm not saying government interference can't have any impact on the prices, but I'm not convinced that it is a significant factor when compared with other factors, like the lack of unbuilt land, the crazy number of people who want to move in, and the insane salaries that many of those people earn.
Only if you average it over an entire year. If you average it over a day at a time, the sun in Alaska ranges from a lot more to perpetual twilight.
Not necessarily. Artificial scarcity only increases prices if demand is constant. If you have artificial scarcity in housing only, but not in commercial construction, then demand remains constant because of people wanting to live near their workplaces. However, if you have artificial scarcity in both commercial and residential construction, then commercial prices may go up because of companies desperate to locate here, but housing prices will not necessarily go up, because there will be a limited number of businesses, and therefore a limited number of people who will want to live near those businesses.
In order:
So again, please provide evidence that these things increase housing prices.
Care to explain to me what those things have to do with housing prices?
Wow. Tough crowd.
FTFY.
Or just modify all web browsers to automatically add a "This site is insecure, and may compromise your security. Are you sure you want to load this page?" message for every website in Australia, whether protected by TLS or not, under the assumption that TLS on Australian servers is inherently and irreparably compromised. Make it so that nobody outside of Australia is willing to do business with Aussie companies.
... that is, unless all the tech companies grow some balls and agree to all tell Australia to go f**k itself. If Australia finds itself suddenly drop-kicked back to the technological stone age by every major tech company refusing to do business with them (and Australia is small enough population-wise that it is an ideal line in the sand), then no other country would be crazy enough to follow their lead, and the crooked spooks who are pushing for this dangerous legislation would be forced to crawl back under their rocks for several decades.
Yeah. Bears' arms are powerful weapons. We keep trying to ban them, but the darned constitution guarantees us a right to bear arms. I can't imagine why anyone would want them, with all that hair and all, but to each his/her own, I suppose.
Signals travel at around a foot per nanosecond. That means the time to respond to a request must have no more than a few nanoseconds of variation. That seems unlikely to be possible, much less practical.
The right fix is for keyless driving and no-press keyless entry to be an optional feature that the user can disable.
Not really. It suggests that people move, on average, once every ten years, which doesn't seem that crazy. Bear in mind that young folks usually rent, and tend to job hop a lot, which means they have the opportunity to move closer to their next job as soon as their previous lease is up.
Yeah, but the point is that the overall interface design started way back then. Palm copied it into a smaller form factor, and PocketPC copied it from them. So although iOS wasn't first, Apple was.
One in which you recognize that, for the most part, supporting countries that aren't behaving like enemies is a good way to keep them on your side, but that when they start acting like enemies, you can't coddle them, or they'll continue to do so.
Russia's behavior has changed pretty dramatically since 2012, which was when Putin took the reins back from Medvedev and started behaving much more aggressively towards both its neighbors and the United States. What made sense in 2012 doesn't make sense today. We don't live in a static world. Friends change, enemies change, the geopolitical climate changes, and those who don't adapt often find themselves on the wrong side of history.
Probably because conservatives tend to be more successful, happier in their lives, and less likely to cheat than liberals.
It's equally likely that they're just better at covering it up.
The first in that space was the Newton, released almost 14 years before the iPhone, when used with a modem card attached to a cheap cell phone.
Pedantically, yes, but instead of introducing a flaw in the encryption, you're just shifting the flaw to the architecture surrounding it. Now you have a key that is so secret that law enforcement cannot be trusted to possess it, because if it gets out, every piece of encrypted data can then be decrypted.
The best you can do is come up with a key escrow scheme in which every device has its own unique government key. But even this approach has fundamentally the same problem. All it takes is one person gaining access to the server that holds all those keys, and suddenly everybody's data is at risk.
To come up with a scheme that has even a modicum of security, you have to go absolutely nuts with it, e.g.
Such things are theoretically possible, but they result in multi-million-dollar (maybe even multi-billion-dollar) expenses for the companies involved. And even if you do this, you are still at risk of a nefarious third party compromising the servers used for generating those keys and associating them with specific users' accounts, either allowing them to substitute their own keys or sniff the keys, effectively compromising all new users of the service after a specific date.
In short, there can be no technical solution to this problem that does not inherently create a gaping security hole so big you could drive a thousand M1A2 tanks through it side-by-side. So the only practical response when a government proposes something like this is to immediately put up a message on your site that says, "[Name of company] may soon become illegal in your country. Call your [legislator, parliamentarian] and tell them to vote no on [bill]." Then, if the law passes, follow through and deny access to your service to anyone in that country so that the government in question can serve as a cautionary tale for other governments considering similarly idiotic laws.
Scorched earth really is the only answer that neofascist governments understand. If they think they can get away with this sort of thing, they will try, and everyone will suffer greatly when (not if) the inevitable total compromise happens as a direct result. The only winning move is not to play.
Seriously though. An electric vehicle can only be a second vehicle. It can't be a first vehicle. Most people can't even spend $30K on a first vehicle, which makes this a luxury.
Actually, unless you buy a car with an inadequate range, it can be a first vehicle for most people. My Model X is my primary car. I drive four 2.5-hour round trips per week. I frequently drive to places that are several hours away. DC fast charging (e.g. Tesla's Supercharger network) makes the difference between an EV being usable as a primary car and not. Is it as easy as filling up a car? Not quite. But feasible? Heck, yes.
Unfortunately, right now, Teslas are, IMO, the only vehicles that are broadly usable as a first vehicle outside of California and a few other big cities, because the non-Tesla DC fast charging networks just aren't there yet. But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. When there are enough EVs to sustain other charging networks, they will get built out, too.
Not true at all. For the high-end, maybe, but for the Model 3, the difference between $38.5k (after tax credit) Tesla and a $46k (actual cost) Tesla means losing more than a quarter of the premium over a base model Camry hybrid. That becomes a fairly significant deciding factor in purchasing decisions.
No, Musk would prefer for the subsidies to be extended in such a way that are tapered off solely by year of manufacture, rather than based on when a particular manufacturer hit a specific manufacturing target. Because Tesla was the first out of the gate, they put themselves in a situation where their cars are becoming ineligible for the tax credit just as they are starting to gain real traction in the overall car market, and all the latecomers to the party get the benefits of seeing what worked and what didn't for Tesla, all while getting to give tax credits to people who buy their cars. That kind of sucks for Tesla, because they basically did R&D for the whole industry, who are now getting to reap the rewards without much of the risk.
Wanting the subsidies to not come with a substantial first-mover penalty is not the same thing as wanting the subsidies to end.
Just wait until they learn about ten-year contracts.
I'm pretty sure this isn't even the first Tesla driver to be pulled over for driving while unconscious. It's at least the second time in the Bay Area this year. There was one on the Bay Bridge back in January, another one back in May of 2016 (as seen in a video clip on YouTube), and at least one in between involving a Tesla mobile service vehicle.
On the contrary. It enabled seven whole minutes of unsafe driving with nobody conscious behind the wheel. When you think about it, that's pretty remarkable. If you nod off in a normal car, you're pretty much dead, and there's a decent chance you'll take other people with you. If you nod off in a Tesla, there's a nonzero chance you'll get pulled over in a complex traffic break seven minutes later, not having killed anybody.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about Bob Dole.
Well, genetically speaking, it's about half his fault. :-D
Thus goeth the last Republican politician that I still respected.