Not really. Disasters result in money being spent on construction that otherwise would not have been spent on construction. That money does get taken away from other purchases, but not necessarily from purchases of things built by blue-collar workers in the United States, which was the subject of discussion.
A lot of people in rural areas were hoping that Trump would help them as their industries declined, but it was false hope.
That's a very popular platitude, but the facts seem to be pointing in a different direction.
From the article: "The biggest drivers of the blue-collar hiring surge are the rebound in oil prices, the need to rebuild after disasters such as Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and rising demand generated by a growing economy."
I know Trump has a lot of hot air, but even he cannot cause hurricanes.:-) And the economic growth started long before Trump took office, so we can pretty much attribute that growth to momentum. And although maybe Trump pissed off enough oil-producing allies to drive up the price of oil, I'm not sure I'd call that a net win....
The effects of Trump's trade wars will take at least another couple of years to be fully recognized.
Society does make an effort to protect against stupidity, but if you're going to actively ignore the protections, you are responsible for the result of your actions.
The usual standard is whether a reasonable person would expect the outcome, given the inputs. A reasonable person would not expect a car to simply drive right over a pedestrian in the roadway, absent unusual conditions, such as being blinded by the evening sun, suddenly encountering the pedestrian just beyond a sharp curve, or having the pedestrian step out from behind a parked car. Based on that, were it not for the explicit signage saying for pedestrians to not cross at that intersection between a trail and the road in question, fault would lie 100% with Uber. Responsibility is shared solely because of a technicality.
To be clear, the pedestrian should not have ignored the sign, but that does not change the fact that even in jaywalking cases, the onus is on the driver to avoid pedestrians if at all possible, and in this case, it clearly was possible. Thus, even in the most generous interpretation, Uber is nearly 100% at-fault.
1 - The Arizona DOT made that road too wide, it took too long for the pedestrian to reach the other side safely
Wait, WTF? The pedestrian doesn't have to reach the other side of the road — only the other side of the lane that the car is in. This is a transparently absurd deflection of responsibility.
2 - CO2 pollution due to inefficient human drivers probably reduced atmospheric visibility
Did he really argue smog? Because that's just not believable. Even with the low-quality dashcam (which had terrible night performance), you could clearly see the pedestrian several seconds before impact.
3 - The bike manufacturer for not having some sort of automatic lighting system built in
The intersection was well lit. Additional lighting would not have made any difference. Either the car sees the obstacle or it doesn't, and it did not do so because they turned off its ability to do so.
No, there's not plenty of blame to go around. IMO, 100% of the fault should lie with Uber. Legally, however, it's partially split, solely because that area is marked "no pedestrian crossing", which meant it was technically jaywalking, albeit in a stretch where a lot of people cross anyway. So it is technically not quite 100% Uber's fault, but close enough.
The dashcam video was misleading and implied that the intersection was much darker than it actually is. It is actually fairly well lit. Thus, a human almost certainly would *not* have hit her. The driver would have had to look down at a phone for several seconds to have done as badly as the Uber car did.
Not really in my experience. It's also the fucking music that keeps blaring from all speakers. Allegedly to "drown the noise" the people make. Which only results in people talking (or even yelling) louder so they can hear each other over the goddamn music!
This. I came here to say exactly this. You can't reduce noise by adding uncorrelated noise.
Now what someone *could* do is add microphones and speakers in every booth, then use a sophisticated matrix mixer to invert the waves with propagation delay and distance falloff, and effectively make it so that nobody hears anybody else in the room. This would be freaking awesome.
It would also be way more expensive than putting in carpet and replacing it every couple of years when it gets too soiled... but it would be awesome.
Except that this tunnel had a useful purpose even if none of the rest of the work ever got done; its purpose was to prove that the concept could work.
I mean, say you're building a hotel. It makes no sense to say, "Your design has extra doors intended to let you later add two additional wings, so we can't let you build the first wing without an environmental review that includes the second and third wing that you might or might not ever even build, or might completely change between now and when you build them." That would be borderline absurd.
It may or may not make sense to take the risk of a future expansion getting blocked by an environmental review. But that decision should be in the hands of the entity paying for the work. It isn't the government's responsibility to keep businesses from wasting money.
Yeah, but the point is that the second hole has to be evaluated after the first one is done, and the thousandth hole after the 999th one. At some point, the person evaluating it will say, "You know what, we really can't safely add the nth hole."
Even if you divide it into parts, as long as you evaluate the parts as you do them, either you'll reach a tipping point where the environmental impact becomes meaningful enough to trigger a review or you won't. If don't, then the whole project shouldn't have triggered a review, and if you do, then dividing it up had no effect.
That's... not true. Things have nonlinear effects. It's sorites paradox.
But even still, the subsequent parts have nonlinearly increasing effects. The only way you get the whole not equal to the sum of its parts is if you don't evaluate them as you do them, but rather pre-evaluate each part in isolation, which is an entirely different thing.
Are we worried about the disruption of the natural habitat of Lumbricus terrestris?
This is why we can't have nice things. If the individual parts don't have any environmental impact, neither does the whole. If the whole has an impact, then if none of the other parts had any impact, then whatever part happens to be last must, by definition, have the same impact as the whole. This is basic logic.
Heh. Fair enough. I hadn't noticed their controlling stake in Embraer. I wouldn't rule out Bombardier, though. The Global 7500 is going to ruffle some feathers on the bottom end, and if some of those enhancements make it into a future CRJ cabin upgrade, it could shake up the mid-range, too.
Indeed, the recent failures of the Russian space program are precisely what I was thinking of when I expressed concern over the quality control in Russian heavy manufacturing.
Meh. Airbus is a European company, and competes head-to-head with Boeing. The difference between one main competitor and two is not nothing, but it also isn't the end of the world. Besides, Boeing is also competing with companies like Bombardier (CRJ) and Embraer, with at least four more regional jet makers starting to gain popularity as well. Sure, those companies build only smaller, regional jets, but every one of those routes is one that could have been flown by a 737, but wasn't. The implication that Boeing is somehow going to go from no competition to crushing competition is kind of silly in that context. They have a *lot* of competition already, and one more player almost certainly isn't a big deal.
Also, I've seen Russian manufacturing quality control, and I've seen Chinese manufacturing quality control, and I wouldn't fly on a plane built by either one of them unless there was an American company running the show, with employees doing random drop-in checks to keep them honest. I've seen way too much appallingly bad quality control (we're talking loose screws rolling around inside, unauthorized part substitutions causing a 70% DOA rate, premature failure caused by overheating critical components while soldering, etc.) out of Chinese manufacturers to trust them with my life. And Russian heavy industry seems to do well up until they start cutting back on the rate of manufacture, and then those last few off the line are death traps.
If they make it fifty years without a significant uptick in crashes, I *might* start trusting them. And even then, it would still just be a "might", not a "will". And that's also true for any airline. They're going to be very wary of any new manufacturer until it has proven itself.
Actually, it wasn't changed, or at least not according to my reading of the terms and conditions. It still contains a clause saying that if you want to distribute binaries to end users, you must create an account with the App Store and comply with the policies thereof.
Just because Apple hasn't sued anybody over third-party distribution doesn't mean Apple has decided to allow it. You can bet your backside that if, for example, Steam decided to distribute via Cydia Impactor instead of through the App Store, there would be lawsuits flying.
And the Sherman Act is a tiny part of the body of law in question. In fact, I think it might be the only part that even uses the *word* "monopoly" in any form.
You mean some MBA realized they could gain market share with lower ticket prices if light travellers no longer had to subsidize the luggage mules.
Not really, no. In practice, what they've done is create a situation in which nobody pays the fee, but everyone gets screwed by the consequences of the decision.
The solution is obvious: They should charge for a second carry-on too.
It's not the second carry-on. It's the first. Anything big enough to require overhead bin space should be in checked luggage if at all possible, and the current scheme creates the opposite effect. This is bad, because it makes it hard for people who legitimately need to use the overhead bins. It also shifts the overall center of gravity for the plane higher, which likely has aerodynamic implications, though I'm not sure what, precisely. I doubt it is good.:-)
Yes, charging for carry-on bags would "solve" the problem, but I'm not convinced that it is a problem that needed to be solved in the first place. The number of people who fly with no bag whatsoever is vanishingly small, so basically a carry-on fee is tantamount to raising the ticket price for everyone. Maybe a few people will be fooled by that, and maybe a tiny percentage of people will actually be able to take advantage of it, but the net harm to customer perception of the airline should outweigh any benefit by a large margin, and any sane exec should see right through that and say, "No, this whole bag fee thing was a stupid idea. We should eliminate it entirely."
The big difference is that Apple's SDK terms and conditions make it nearly impossible (and maybe actually impossible) to legally distribute app binaries outside of the App Store. If Apple runs into trouble legally, it will probably stem from that limitation.
Ford is free to TRY to force those things, and consumers are free to buy other brands of cars if and when they do. This is legal because they are not a monopoly. Likewise, Apple is not a monopoly either, with 43.5% of US smartphone owners running some form of iOS. This should have been thrown out on prima facie definitions.
Antitrust != monopoly.
Yes, antitrust laws exist to prevent the monopoly abuses of the past, but they affect companies regardless of whether the company is a monopoly. The closer you get to being a monpoly, the more scrutiny you get, and the more likely the government is to decide that you're worth going after, but there's nothing inherently preventing me or the government from going after the owner of a single food truck in the Bay Area if the owner manages to find a way to violate antitrust laws.
I nearly always pay for "early-bird check-in" (as they call it), but I somehow forgot to select that for a return flight a couple of years ago. I was a bit upset when I went to retrieve my boarding pass and found it was C30something.
Early-bird check-in is a scam. At this point, they oversell the early-bird check-in to the point that you can still end up late in the B section (after half the plane has boarded) even if you pay the extra "upgrade" fee. So at this point, it isn't about getting better boarding; they have effectively just found a way to trick all their customers into paying an extra $25 per ticket without anybody noticing.
The problem, of course, is that some pencil-pusher MBA at the airlines realized that they could milk a few dollars more from customers if they charged a fee for checked bags. And suddenly, everybody is carrying on bags that they could have easily checked.
This completely broken system results in the last several rows having to gate-check their bags anyway (for free) because there isn't room. So instead of letting people who aren't in a hurry check their bags, ensuring adequate space for people who are, we now have a system in which folks carrying expensive camera gear have to pay extra for earlier boarding, or else they incur thousands of dollars in damage just so that somebody else can save the $30 checked bag fee for a bag that contains only clothes.
This "profit über alles" crap is beyond f**ked up.
It's all a scam. The entire airline system is deliberately designed to bilk customers out of every penny that they will pay. And the result is that flying is becoming more and more hated by anyone who has to do it on a regular basis. Mark my words, the day that high-speed rail becomes a reality, the airline industry will die a horrible death, because at this point, the only reason people still put up with air travel at all is because they have no choice.
Hearing that airlines are deliberately screwing over families to raise profits doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me to hear that they sacrifice babies on an altar beneath the airport to ensure safe travels. I really can't think of any level of evil that I would put past the people who run airlines these days, because every time I think they couldn't get more monstrous, they prove me wrong. Just saying.
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Not really. Disasters result in money being spent on construction that otherwise would not have been spent on construction. That money does get taken away from other purchases, but not necessarily from purchases of things built by blue-collar workers in the United States, which was the subject of discussion.
It would have to be double the median full-time wage for a given job category within a given region of the country. That would be much harder to game.
A lot of people in rural areas were hoping that Trump would help them as their industries declined, but it was false hope.
That's a very popular platitude, but the facts seem to be pointing in a different direction.
From the article: "The biggest drivers of the blue-collar hiring surge are the rebound in oil prices, the need to rebuild after disasters such as Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and rising demand generated by a growing economy."
I know Trump has a lot of hot air, but even he cannot cause hurricanes. :-) And the economic growth started long before Trump took office, so we can pretty much attribute that growth to momentum. And although maybe Trump pissed off enough oil-producing allies to drive up the price of oil, I'm not sure I'd call that a net win....
The effects of Trump's trade wars will take at least another couple of years to be fully recognized.
The usual standard is whether a reasonable person would expect the outcome, given the inputs. A reasonable person would not expect a car to simply drive right over a pedestrian in the roadway, absent unusual conditions, such as being blinded by the evening sun, suddenly encountering the pedestrian just beyond a sharp curve, or having the pedestrian step out from behind a parked car. Based on that, were it not for the explicit signage saying for pedestrians to not cross at that intersection between a trail and the road in question, fault would lie 100% with Uber. Responsibility is shared solely because of a technicality.
To be clear, the pedestrian should not have ignored the sign, but that does not change the fact that even in jaywalking cases, the onus is on the driver to avoid pedestrians if at all possible, and in this case, it clearly was possible. Thus, even in the most generous interpretation, Uber is nearly 100% at-fault.
Actually, I was talking about the spot where the person jaywalked.
1 - The Arizona DOT made that road too wide, it took too long for the pedestrian to reach the other side safely
Wait, WTF? The pedestrian doesn't have to reach the other side of the road — only the other side of the lane that the car is in. This is a transparently absurd deflection of responsibility.
2 - CO2 pollution due to inefficient human drivers probably reduced atmospheric visibility
Did he really argue smog? Because that's just not believable. Even with the low-quality dashcam (which had terrible night performance), you could clearly see the pedestrian several seconds before impact.
3 - The bike manufacturer for not having some sort of automatic lighting system built in
The intersection was well lit. Additional lighting would not have made any difference. Either the car sees the obstacle or it doesn't, and it did not do so because they turned off its ability to do so.
No, there's not plenty of blame to go around. IMO, 100% of the fault should lie with Uber. Legally, however, it's partially split, solely because that area is marked "no pedestrian crossing", which meant it was technically jaywalking, albeit in a stretch where a lot of people cross anyway. So it is technically not quite 100% Uber's fault, but close enough.
The dashcam video was misleading and implied that the intersection was much darker than it actually is. It is actually fairly well lit. Thus, a human almost certainly would *not* have hit her. The driver would have had to look down at a phone for several seconds to have done as badly as the Uber car did.
This. I came here to say exactly this. You can't reduce noise by adding uncorrelated noise.
Now what someone *could* do is add microphones and speakers in every booth, then use a sophisticated matrix mixer to invert the waves with propagation delay and distance falloff, and effectively make it so that nobody hears anybody else in the room. This would be freaking awesome.
It would also be way more expensive than putting in carpet and replacing it every couple of years when it gets too soiled... but it would be awesome.
And the review of that part of the project says, "There's too much of an impact", and the middle part doesn't get built.
Except that this tunnel had a useful purpose even if none of the rest of the work ever got done; its purpose was to prove that the concept could work.
I mean, say you're building a hotel. It makes no sense to say, "Your design has extra doors intended to let you later add two additional wings, so we can't let you build the first wing without an environmental review that includes the second and third wing that you might or might not ever even build, or might completely change between now and when you build them." That would be borderline absurd.
It may or may not make sense to take the risk of a future expansion getting blocked by an environmental review. But that decision should be in the hands of the entity paying for the work. It isn't the government's responsibility to keep businesses from wasting money.
Yeah, but the point is that the second hole has to be evaluated after the first one is done, and the thousandth hole after the 999th one. At some point, the person evaluating it will say, "You know what, we really can't safely add the nth hole."
Even if you divide it into parts, as long as you evaluate the parts as you do them, either you'll reach a tipping point where the environmental impact becomes meaningful enough to trigger a review or you won't. If don't, then the whole project shouldn't have triggered a review, and if you do, then dividing it up had no effect.
But even still, the subsequent parts have nonlinearly increasing effects. The only way you get the whole not equal to the sum of its parts is if you don't evaluate them as you do them, but rather pre-evaluate each part in isolation, which is an entirely different thing.
Are we worried about the disruption of the natural habitat of Lumbricus terrestris?
This is why we can't have nice things. If the individual parts don't have any environmental impact, neither does the whole. If the whole has an impact, then if none of the other parts had any impact, then whatever part happens to be last must, by definition, have the same impact as the whole. This is basic logic.
Heh. Fair enough. I hadn't noticed their controlling stake in Embraer. I wouldn't rule out Bombardier, though. The Global 7500 is going to ruffle some feathers on the bottom end, and if some of those enhancements make it into a future CRJ cabin upgrade, it could shake up the mid-range, too.
Indeed, the recent failures of the Russian space program are precisely what I was thinking of when I expressed concern over the quality control in Russian heavy manufacturing.
Meh. Airbus is a European company, and competes head-to-head with Boeing. The difference between one main competitor and two is not nothing, but it also isn't the end of the world. Besides, Boeing is also competing with companies like Bombardier (CRJ) and Embraer, with at least four more regional jet makers starting to gain popularity as well. Sure, those companies build only smaller, regional jets, but every one of those routes is one that could have been flown by a 737, but wasn't. The implication that Boeing is somehow going to go from no competition to crushing competition is kind of silly in that context. They have a *lot* of competition already, and one more player almost certainly isn't a big deal.
Also, I've seen Russian manufacturing quality control, and I've seen Chinese manufacturing quality control, and I wouldn't fly on a plane built by either one of them unless there was an American company running the show, with employees doing random drop-in checks to keep them honest. I've seen way too much appallingly bad quality control (we're talking loose screws rolling around inside, unauthorized part substitutions causing a 70% DOA rate, premature failure caused by overheating critical components while soldering, etc.) out of Chinese manufacturers to trust them with my life. And Russian heavy industry seems to do well up until they start cutting back on the rate of manufacture, and then those last few off the line are death traps.
If they make it fifty years without a significant uptick in crashes, I *might* start trusting them. And even then, it would still just be a "might", not a "will". And that's also true for any airline. They're going to be very wary of any new manufacturer until it has proven itself.
Actually, it wasn't changed, or at least not according to my reading of the terms and conditions. It still contains a clause saying that if you want to distribute binaries to end users, you must create an account with the App Store and comply with the policies thereof.
Just because Apple hasn't sued anybody over third-party distribution doesn't mean Apple has decided to allow it. You can bet your backside that if, for example, Steam decided to distribute via Cydia Impactor instead of through the App Store, there would be lawsuits flying.
And the Sherman Act is a tiny part of the body of law in question. In fact, I think it might be the only part that even uses the *word* "monopoly" in any form.
Not really, no. In practice, what they've done is create a situation in which nobody pays the fee, but everyone gets screwed by the consequences of the decision.
It's not the second carry-on. It's the first. Anything big enough to require overhead bin space should be in checked luggage if at all possible, and the current scheme creates the opposite effect. This is bad, because it makes it hard for people who legitimately need to use the overhead bins. It also shifts the overall center of gravity for the plane higher, which likely has aerodynamic implications, though I'm not sure what, precisely. I doubt it is good. :-)
Yes, charging for carry-on bags would "solve" the problem, but I'm not convinced that it is a problem that needed to be solved in the first place. The number of people who fly with no bag whatsoever is vanishingly small, so basically a carry-on fee is tantamount to raising the ticket price for everyone. Maybe a few people will be fooled by that, and maybe a tiny percentage of people will actually be able to take advantage of it, but the net harm to customer perception of the airline should outweigh any benefit by a large margin, and any sane exec should see right through that and say, "No, this whole bag fee thing was a stupid idea. We should eliminate it entirely."
Not in the U.S., except in a tiny strip along the eastern seaboard, and even then, not particularly high speed.
The big difference is that Apple's SDK terms and conditions make it nearly impossible (and maybe actually impossible) to legally distribute app binaries outside of the App Store. If Apple runs into trouble legally, it will probably stem from that limitation.
Antitrust != monopoly.
Yes, antitrust laws exist to prevent the monopoly abuses of the past, but they affect companies regardless of whether the company is a monopoly. The closer you get to being a monpoly, the more scrutiny you get, and the more likely the government is to decide that you're worth going after, but there's nothing inherently preventing me or the government from going after the owner of a single food truck in the Bay Area if the owner manages to find a way to violate antitrust laws.
Early-bird check-in is a scam. At this point, they oversell the early-bird check-in to the point that you can still end up late in the B section (after half the plane has boarded) even if you pay the extra "upgrade" fee. So at this point, it isn't about getting better boarding; they have effectively just found a way to trick all their customers into paying an extra $25 per ticket without anybody noticing.
The problem, of course, is that some pencil-pusher MBA at the airlines realized that they could milk a few dollars more from customers if they charged a fee for checked bags. And suddenly, everybody is carrying on bags that they could have easily checked.
This completely broken system results in the last several rows having to gate-check their bags anyway (for free) because there isn't room. So instead of letting people who aren't in a hurry check their bags, ensuring adequate space for people who are, we now have a system in which folks carrying expensive camera gear have to pay extra for earlier boarding, or else they incur thousands of dollars in damage just so that somebody else can save the $30 checked bag fee for a bag that contains only clothes.
This "profit über alles" crap is beyond f**ked up.
It's all a scam. The entire airline system is deliberately designed to bilk customers out of every penny that they will pay. And the result is that flying is becoming more and more hated by anyone who has to do it on a regular basis. Mark my words, the day that high-speed rail becomes a reality, the airline industry will die a horrible death, because at this point, the only reason people still put up with air travel at all is because they have no choice.
Hearing that airlines are deliberately screwing over families to raise profits doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me to hear that they sacrifice babies on an altar beneath the airport to ensure safe travels. I really can't think of any level of evil that I would put past the people who run airlines these days, because every time I think they couldn't get more monstrous, they prove me wrong. Just saying.
Meh. Can't they just build everything else in the car to require constant repairs, like Tesla does? :-D