World standards do not follow US standards. All vehicle makers have to conform to worldwide standards, not just the US. Besides, California standards are not the most strict when compared to international standards. Also California standards have been ratified by 12 other states. Since this is a proposed bill, it will not get out of committee without providing states the ability to set their own limits.
Serious question (because I don't know): It really works as simply as that? All this grand posturing can be undone by a committee?
In all likelihood, yes.
Of course, even if they explicitly prevent states from setting stricter standards for sales of cars, California can still tweak its carpool lane laws slightly and effectively get the same results
Create two categories of carpool lane: red and blue:
Red lanes require three passengers or a carpool access sticker for ZEV or qualifying PZEV except for a short stretch at left-side carpool entrance ramps, to allow vehicles to pass through the red lane to the adjacent blue lane.
Blue lanes require two passengers unless the vehicle's plate was issued before January 1, 2019 or it complies with stricter emissions standards.
Change the law so that Caltrans can create Blue lanes out of existing lanes on roads that have at least one Red lane, so long as at least one driving lane remains non-carpool.
Convert all existing Blue lanes to Red lanes.
Begin issuing light blue license plates on January 1, 2019 in lieu of white ones. Any vehicle with a blue plate in a blue lane requires either a blue carpool (CARB-compliant ICE) or red-lane (ZEV/PZEV) sticker.
Nobody in their right minds would buy or attempt to sell a car that can only be used in the rightmost lane on the freeways, so in effect, California would be enforcing those standards without enforcing them. As a bonus, it would so strongly discourage people from bringing non-compliant vehicles into the state of California, that car companies would feel pressure to sell cleaner cars everywhere.
Of course, the downside would be that it would encourage people thinking about moving to California to buy an older used car instead of a newer one, but that's likely to be lost in the noise.
If it's cost of living, then why should new teachers be excluded from it?
Their base pay goes up over time, too. Unless your question is "Why do people with no experience not get paid as much as people with twenty years' experience?" in which case the answer is "twenty years' experience".
The best thing that could happen to teachers is to bring back the respect people had for them back in the old days. None of this "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" crap. But that change isn't going to happen if the system keeps promoting mediocrity.
And at its core, that's a pay problem. When a high school senior is choosing a future major, faced with a choice between making $150,000 straight out of school with a CS degree and making $50k with an education degree, unless that student is *very* strongly driven to teach, if he or she is smart enough to do the former, he or she isn't going to choose the latter.
And at the college level, it is even worse. A new adjunct is lucky to get three courses per semester, which translates to only $30,000 per year.
When I said teacher salaries need to double, that's a lowball estimate.
Should performance be a factor? Probably. Should it be the only factor? No. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that in the often highly political world of academia, a pure seniority pay scheme without any adjustment for performance other than firing people who severely under-perform produces better outcomes by reducing salary biases that otherwise would favor the teachers who suck up over the ones who actually do a better job.
Being bad at measuring performance is not a valid reason to avoid measuring performance. It's a reason to find better performance metrics. Also, if you have district or intra-district level evaluators who's only visiting the school once a month or so, they're not going to be so easily convinced by teachers sucking up to them.
I agree in principle. In practice, though, it is much harder than you think. If you use student performance as a metric in isolation, you risk teachers teaching to the test, which doesn't inspire students to learn, but if you use student perception as a metric, the teachers who teach least are most popular. Maybe we'll come up with metrics that actually work at some point, but until then, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use bad metrics as a means of evaluating teachers who are already in the system now.
Multi-million-dollar classrooms is almost always an exaggeration.
No, it's not an exaggeration [nj.com].
It really is an exaggeration. When most people hear "multi-million-dollar classroom", they're expecting you to be talking about spending millions of dollars on what is in a classroom. Those are just very expensive buildings, in large part because land and construction prices are exorbitant in greater NYC. And even then, if you actually look at the cost per classroom, I doubt any of these actually exceeds $2 million per room unless you treat shared spaces like the gym, cafeteria, theater, bathrooms, hallways, etc. as being free.
Realistically, schools build buildings because they have exceeded the capacity of the old ones or because the cost of maintaining the old buildings has gotten so high that it is cheaper to build a new one and pay for it over thirty years than to maintain the existing one over that same time period. Cost-cutting on construction inevitably leads to higher maintenance costs in the long run, which over the life of the building ends up cutting into funds that could have been used to pay more teachers.
Do you have a source on the maintenance costs of older buildings? I don't remember seeing any work being done on them when I was in school, and we had some pretty old buildings.
Those are general residential rates. Superchargers get power at commercial rates, not residential. It costs about 26 cents per kWh in California at a supercharger, which is *much* cheaper than normal residential power rates. That said, it is much more *expensive* than the best-case cost on an EV-A or EV-B plan. At last check, those plans charged less than 13 cents per kWh for off-peak charging.
You don't drive a big rig for only five years, or if you do, you're selling it to somebody else who is going to drive it for another five to ten years. And the resale value is based on the assumption that you'll get O(15) years of life out of the vehicle.
If the fuel is free for only the first three years, it will be economically infeasible to operate it after those three years, because instead of consuming $70,000 in diesel fuel per year, you'll be consuming $350,000 in hydrogen per year, which means your fuel costs alone would exceed the purchase price of a brand new Tesla Semi by a factor of 2.8, and would exceed the total first-year operating cost of that Tesla Semi, including the hardware, by about a factor of 2.18 (assuming electricity continues to cost about half as much as fossil fuels).
Now to be fair, because fuel-cell big rigs are mostly electric, the reduced maintenance costs do offset some of that cost difference, but hydrogen-powered big rigs would still cost about twice as much per year to operate as diesel-powered big rigs, even if the hydrogen-powered big rigs had a maintenance cost of zero, which is probably not realistic.
Even if we assume that the maintenance costs are zero, and add that to the energy savings for the first three years, you still only save on the order of $325,000 (two years of fuel and warranted maintenance, plus one year of fuel and full-cost maintenance) over the cost of the diesel big-rig. You will burn through all of those savings in under a year. So by the four-year mark, you will have a vehicle that costs more to operate for another year than it would cost to replace it with your choice of either a diesel or electric. By the end of the 15-year service life, that translates to $1,815,000 in added costs by going with hydrogen — nearly as much as operating an entire second diesel truck.
Of course, if you buy a new one every four years, you only lose about $300,000 over a fifteen-year lifespan. Either way, that's not smart financially, it's pretty horrible for the planet, and it isn't a sustainable business model for Toyota. And that assumes that you're buying a base model at $80k. If you're buying a high-end vehicle at $200k, you would basically be throwing away an entire year worth of operating costs every four years, or $750k over a 15-year lifespan.
Because Washington state's AG Ferguson is trying to establish his bona fides for a gubernatorial run.
Well, then, he should be congratulated on shooting off his own foot. If he ever runs for anything broader than his state, we'll remember him as the Democrat who thought that defeating a purely theoretical bogeyman was more important than defending freedom of speech, and will absolutely not vote for him under any circumstances.
I'm in favor of reasonable gun control. Bans on descriptions of guns is not reasonable — particularly in a state whose own supreme court noted in JJR Inc. v. City of Seattle that prior restraint is per se unconstitutional. (They were slightly overzealous with that pronouncement, of course, but there is a very strong presumption of unconstitutionality.)
Freedom of speech is very nearly absolute in this country, and for good reason: it is the single most important right granted by the bill of rights. That's why the founding fathers saw fit to put it first on the list. Without it, the other freedoms cannot possibly stand. If you cannot talk about the government taking your guns, then no one will know until it is too late. If you cannot talk about being forced to testify against yourself, you cannot hope to regain your unjustly stolen freedom. If you cannot talk about illegal searches and seizures, you cannot prevent them from becoming commonplace. In short, if you cannot talk about what is wrong in the world, you cannot possibly hope to correct it.
If there is one thing that is always absolutely true in politics, it is this: absolute bans on any form of speech are per se wrong, and anyone in favor of such laws should not be elected to dog-catcher, much less governor of a state. It is every single American's god-given duty to make sure of it by voting for someone else.
uh... did they not vote a clown in that thinks just exactly this? Apparently even the citizens themselves believe they are too stupid to make their own decisions.
No, they believe that everyone else is too stupid to make decisions.
The problem with politics when it comes to passing laws that affect corporations that happen to reside within the borders of those cities is that most of the people affected live elsewhere. I guarantee you that, of the Mountain View residents who pushed for Facebook to not be allowed to put in free corporate cafes, very few of them work at Facebook. Anyone who did would have pointed out that adding tens thousand hungry employees to the Mountain View downtown is a recipe for complete traffic gridlock that will run right into the afternoon public school pickup gridlock, and that Mountain View is close enough to Menlo Park that they can safely expect all ten thousand of them to drive to the free corporate cafe at the main campus, bringing highway 101 to its knees.
What we need, to combat bad decisions made by people who lack understanding of the situation that they are trying to "correct", is a fundamental change in our political system. Rather than voting based upon where you live, we should be able to vote in every district where we have significant nexus, whether that's the place where you live, the place where you work, the place where you attend worship services, the place where you own a summer home, or whatever.
It seems to me that people who live in Fremont and work in San Francisco are affected by San Francisco elections at least as much as people who live in San Francisco, but work in Cupertino, Mountain View, or Meno Park. After all, residents who work elsewhere spend a few hours in the evening plus weekends, whereas people who live elsewhere and work in San Francisco spend most of their daytime hours in San Francisco. Arguably, they have *greater* interest than people who merely rent a bed there.
And because people would have to go out of their way to register in additional districts where they work or otherwise have significant nexus, this scheme would skew elections by adding more votes from people who are actively interested in voting, thus reducing the impact of people who just dogmatically check the box next to the incumbent with a D or R by his or her name.
This scheme would, of course, require more rigorous proof of nexus, but there could be a fee for additional (non-residence) voting districts to cover the cost of verification, and that fee could be used to help defray the cost of elections.
And this would, of course, also mean that people would be able to vote in more than one election, so it would be important for secondary voting to cover only elections for which the person would not otherwise be eligible.
For example, if I register in California and secondarily in Florida (pretend I own a summer home there), I should be able to vote in city and state elections in both. It is debatable whether I should be allowed to vote for senators and reps in both. On the one hand, ostensibly doing so would give me greater representation in Congress, but on the other hand, those folks do represent me, so it could also be argued that I should be able to vote for them. Either way, I should presumably not be able to vote for POTUS in both places.
Similarly, if I register in Santa Clara county and Santa Cruz county in California, I should be able to vote for officials in the appropriate city, plus the county. State senate and assembly are debatable, as before. I clearly should not be able to vote for the governor in both places, nor the U.S. senator. The U.S. representative, once again, is debatable. And again, the POTUS is right out.
This approach would greatly increase the complexity of running elections, and would greatly increase the printing costs for absentee ballots, but would produce government that more accurately reflects the desires of all the people in their districts, rather than merely the people who happen to rent a bed there. And I think overall, that would be a good thing.
No, the best way to fix bad public schools is to end seniority pay, cut administrative staff, stop building multi-million dollar classrooms and put that money into teacher salary and subsidized housing.
That's actually a pretty shortsighted way to "fix" the schools. Two of those things lead to worse outcomes in the long term.
Seniority pay is what most other people call "cost of living adjustments". Should performance be a factor? Probably. Should it be the only factor? No. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that in the often highly political world of academia, a pure seniority pay scheme without any adjustment for performance other than firing people who severely under-perform produces better outcomes by reducing salary biases that otherwise would favor the teachers who suck up over the ones who actually do a better job. At a bare minimum, a performance-based scheme requires independent evaluators, which means more administration, whereas you want less. That just won't work.
Multi-million-dollar classrooms is almost always an exaggeration. Realistically, schools build buildings because they have exceeded the capacity of the old ones or because the cost of maintaining the old buildings has gotten so high that it is cheaper to build a new one and pay for it over thirty years than to maintain the existing one over that same time period. Cost-cutting on construction inevitably leads to higher maintenance costs in the long run, which over the life of the building ends up cutting into funds that could have been used to pay more teachers.
I agree with you on cutting administrative staff, though it has to be done in the right way, or it can make things worse. For example, most school systems actually need to increase the number of people responsible for evaluating teachers, so that they can do so more often. And school systems with more struggling students often need to increase the number of counselors, too. And in school systems with inadequate funding, teachers' aides can often make the difference between being able to handle oversized classes and not.
What we need to cut down on are the people who work outside the schools at the district level (except teacher evaluators). To the maximum extent possible, we need to replace them with automation. Hire computer programmers to write tools that can handle those administrative duties automatically. Hire temp workers for short-term data entry tasks like keying in student enrollment forms at the start of each school year, or outsource it to a call center in India, or whatever. And so on.
But that mostly applies to larger school systems. The smaller the school system, the less bloat exists. Most of the disparity in public school quality comes not from how well the system is run, but from how high the average property taxes are in the areas that feed those schools. That dictates how much extra money gets fed into the system beyond the meager amount that the state pays. And that won't change no matter what you do at the school level, or even the school system level. School systems in poor cities will still be poor, and school systems in rich cities will still be rich.
If you really want to fix public schools, the way you do that is by passing a law making it illegal for cities to provide additional funds for their schools (with the exception of funding additional counselors in districts that need them), and requiring that they instead contribute that money to a statewide fund so that the funds can be distributed evenly, ensuring that every student gets the same amount of money spent on him or her, whether he or she is from a rich district or a poor district. Then, when the rich districts pitch an absolute fit complaining about inadequate funding for their schools, they will insist on the state kicking in more money to properly fund education, and we can start seriously talking about improvements.
Tesla's vehicles cost half as much per mile as gasoline-powered cars when the free period ends, instead of almost five times as much ($13.99 typical cost per kg * 1.13 kg per gallon of diesel = $15.81 per diesel-equivalent-gallon versus the $3.23 average cost per gallon of actual diesel in the most recent month).
Hydrogen fuel cells are a dead end. It doesn't matter how many years of free fuel you give away, so long as the cost of fuel is that much more expensive.
The pencil is only in high-end iPads so far, therefore it is a bad product?
It isn't that the product is bad, so much as that Apple's policy of creating artificial differentiation between similar products (beyond what is inherent to a larger screen) is bad, and the pencil is a lot less useful (or at least useful to a lot fewer people) because of it. Or maybe they were just having yield problems, and that kept demand down. *shrugs*
The focus of HomePod was audio, which is what I was referring to. Siri remains a weak point for Apple.
The problem is, the audio quality is the easy part. Realistically, the extra 1000% of effort required for the spatial modeling versus just producing a large enough driver to do the job is the sort of polish that maybe one tenth of one percent of your users care about. And even with the relatively large amount of effort required, it is still a drop in the bucket compared with the effort that would be required to bring Siri up to the level of the other products in that space.
And this assumes that it would even be possible for Apple to catch up. The way Amazon and Google have improved their products so quickly is by analyzing boatloads of analytics data and finding out which queries worked and which ones didn't. As long as Apple treats queries as private, that sort of analysis likely isn't possible, and the platform cannot easily improve.
If all you care about is having a speaker, that's great, but there are plenty of other companies in that space whose sole focus is building great audio systems. Adding Apple to that saturated market didn't really add anything, IMO. It seems like Apple shipped the HomePod solely because everybody else was building one, and they didn't want to be left out. That really isn't a good enough reason to make a product, IMO.
If Apple had invested that time and effort into making Amazon and Google tech integrate better with iOS, I think iOS users would have been a lot happier with the result. Apple should focus on what it does best — hardware — and stop wasting time and effort trying to compete with Internet service companies like Google and Amazon in areas where those sorts of companies inherently do a better job.
Would that be the FaceID camera that replaced functionality that for many users works better, rather than augmenting it, the Apple pencil that only works on a small subset of iOS devices, TruMotion that's a feature of LG TV sets, the A-series chips that exist primarily so Apple doesn't find themselves dependent on a chipmaker that can't meet their needs like they did with the PowerPC, or the HomePod that, despite its higher sound quality, nearly every reviewer says isn't nearly as usable as Amazon Alexa or Google Home?
I'm not saying that Apple has lost its spark, but those aren't very good examples.:-)
None of those are compelling for me, even as someone who carries a second phone for work (because I don't want my employer to be allowed to wipe my device, not because separating work calls matters).
The thing is, ten years ago, I would have jumped on the opportunity to have a second SIM card in my iPhone. I had an international SIM that saved a lot of money when making phone calls and using data overseas. These days, my main Sprint plan is cheaper in Europe than that European SIM card. It seems unlikely that I'll ever bother swapping SIM cards again, even though I bought my phone fully unlocked so I could if I needed to.
The only way I would be interested in a second SIM card on iOS would be if Apple coupled it with proper Google Project Fi support. The one thing I've noticed since I started carrying a second phone is that my Google Pixel has much more consistent cellular data service than my iPhone, because it uses Project Fi, which lets it transparently roam across multiple carriers (Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular) based on who has the strongest signal, rather than strongly favoring a single carrier's tower even when it has only a single bar (which, for data purposes, is effectively "No Service"). Weak spots in one carrier's service tend not to be weak on the others, so it gives me a much better, more consistent user experience. And that's not just out in the boonies, either. I get better and more consistent service in Cupertino with my Pixel than with my iPhone.
If I could get that sort of seamless networking experience on iOS, it might be worth sticking a Project Fi sim in the second SIM slot. But as long as Apple doesn't support Project Fi and won't create their own equivalent, I'd much rather have a headphone jack than a second SIM slot. At least that's something that I and a significant percentage of other iPhone users would actually use.
Actually, I should also say this is why most tech workers believe they are underpaid as they know of people in silicon valley earning twice or more their salary.
And the tech workers *in* Silicon Valley know of people elsewhere making twice as much after adjusting for the cost of living. (Alternatively, they know of people who own a house that's bigger than 600 square feet.)
As for the "homeless/ghetto person converted into fruit-picker" concept (note that there would be a need for many other types of ancillary and logistics-related labor required as well, from machinery repair to transportation/delivery/warehousing/storage related occupations, etc, etc), that actually does have some merit and *does not* require any sort of forced relocation or other drastic authoritarian actions. Just simply offer the jobs with good pay, job security, health benefits,...
And right there, in only six words, you summed up why that will never happen.
It's conceivable that, if done right, such a plan could almost eliminate involuntary joblessness, massively increase agricultural production
Agricultural production isn't going to go way up because you have better-paid people hand-picking crops, nor because you have more people picking crops. There really isn't much spoilage caused by crops going unpicked, percentage-wise. We might get double-digit millions of dollars in additional yield. That's like a hundredth of a percent of our country's net agricultural exports. It would have such a tiny impact on the total agricultural production in this country that it would be lost in the noise.
And you can't really increase the amount of land used for fields easily, because there's not enough fresh water for irrigation, not enough fertile land, etc.
and through the massive increase in supply reduce food prices
First, you want to pay a reasonable wage, then you want to reduce food prices. That can't work. The money to pay all those workers a reasonable wage has to come from somewhere, and it can only come from the food prices. The reason crops go unpicked is not because there aren't enough workers, but rather because above a certain level of production, prices fall to the point where the wages you can offer won't attract enough workers, and you can till the plants under for less than you would lose by bringing the crops to market.
Raise the cost of workers and you'll end up with a new equilibrium point; either way, the cost of food has to go up, not down, to pay those wages. Farm owners will limit production as needed to keep the price high enough to be able to pay those wages. And because the cost of food coming from the U.S. will be so much higher than the cost of food coming from other countries, we'll end up importing more and exporting less, which means there will be fewer picker jobs at those higher wages, producing a lower total output, not more.
This seems kinda useless. So, the -only- provider in an area is SHAMED but still has all the customers. Great. Can't wait to see how MA proposes curing cancer. "We will SHAME the cells!"
It is useless for many more reasons. For one, even bad publicity is good publicity. What you want is to recommend the ISPs that are NOT bad, not name the ones that are.
For another, no matter what, shaming won't help, because we've already done that. Everyone already pretty much knows which ISPs violate net neutrality, and it hasn't helped stopped the violations so far. Besides, if you want a list, it's pretty easy to generate: get a complete list of all the ISPs out there and remove any ISP with fewer than a thousand customers, and you're done, plus or minus some small epsilon.
Somehow, this reminds me of the joke about the hunter calling 911.
Operator: 911. What's your emergency? Hunter: I think I just killed my hunting partner. Operator: Okay, first I need you to check to make sure he's dead.
Whatever your fixed cost for owning the car is per day that is amortized over six times as many driving hours for a self driving taxi.
I'm not saying that there isn't a cost savings from that amortization; I'm saying that I would expect it to be smaller than the profit margin that anyone operating a vehicle fleet would expect as their ROI. Most of a car's costs are per-mile, not per-year, because a well-built car will still be running in three decades, assuming you still want to drive it.
If you could make extra money by taking your personal belongings out of it and setting it to self-driving taxi mode, however, would you?
Probably not, because I've seen how people treat cars that they don't own.:-)
I can get a monthly pass for the local transit system for $95. I could pay that for 10 years and it would be just over $11k, which isn't enough to buy a Nissan Versa, the current cheapest new car you can buy in the U.S. I could rent a lot of vehicles for weekend trips and vacations for what I'm saving.
You're missing the reason that the transit pass is cheap: each trip of a bus or subway carries double-digit numbers of people. The math doesn't work when you're talking about a taxi-like vehicle that carries just you, unless you treat it like a shuttle that makes multiple stops and picks up multiple unrelated people (and even then, it doesn't necessarily save that much).
For the most part, the cost of operating a vehicle is per-mile, not per year. The minimum cost-per-mile for any pay-per-use vehicle is the same as the cost-per-mile for an otherwise identical private vehicle. The maximum is far worse, because people tend not to take care of vehicles that they don't own, which means they are likely to require a lot more maintenance to fix interior damage.
Only the per-year costs go down with a pay-per-use fleet. If you drive less than 5,000 miles a year (unusually low), your driving habits might cost you an extra thirty bucks on oil changes or so per year, if we assume an ICE car. You also have the cost of maintaining the paint job and washing the car every so often. Either way, these things are all lost in the noise cost-wise, even when you add them all up, when compared against the per-mile costs unless you have to rent a parking space.
There is simply no universe in which a pay-per-use car can feasibly be cheaper than owning a car unless you are in some urban hell where they charge you a monthly rental fee for your parking space (and even in that case, it isn't technically the car, per se, that is costing you more, but rather parking it). If you're in that sort of location, you probably have mass transit sufficient to take care of your transportation needs.
For those people, the combination of mass transit with occasional use of a pay-per-use car can be cheaper than the cost of buying a car. But in those cases, it is the ultra-low cost of mass transit that is bringing the cost down, not the cost of the pay-per-use car, which will still be more expensive than owning a car, assuming again that you don't a rent a parking space by the month, and assuming that your car does not rust out before it stops working.
For everyone not in such a high-density area, many people will still probably decide that the convenience of not having to maintain a vehicle outweighs the cost difference, assuming that cost difference is relatively small. And that's a perfectly reasonable choice for many people. It is not, however, a cost-based decision, and it definitely will not be cheaper, just not exorbitantly more expensive as it is with human-driven taxis.
From an efficiency perspective, it would make more sense to partition the car with cloth dividers into five areas, then load up the groceries for up to five customers, then self-drive the car to each of their houses, open up the door where that customer's stuff is stored, and let the customer unload before driving to the next customer's house, and so on, until all of the groceries are delivered.
(Discussions of the shortest path problem are, of course, expected, along with discussions of whether frozen food should be delivered first.)
But maybe there's some other goal, like getting people used to riding in self-driving cars.:-)
That's the sort of terrible advice that keeps poor people poor. In the real world, depreciation is always built into the cost of renting or leasing something. If that new car loses half its value over the three-year lease, you can bet your backside that the lease more than covers the loss of value plus the interest that the actual owner loses on the cost of building the car and the opportunity cost from not selling the car outright, and that the actual owner (the car company) still comes out ahead.
Thus, in practice, owning is always less expensive than renting. Anyone who says otherwise is kidding him/herself. And that's why you should always buy, rather than rent or lease. The only possible exception is if there is some compelling reason to always have a car that is less than a certain number of years old, such as carpool lane stickers that can only be renewed for a certain number of years. Even then, in practice, it will still cost you considerably more money to lease than to buy it outright and sell it in three years, but it is less hassle, and for some people, that might be worth the extra few thousand dollars.
And the same will be true of self-driving taxi services. The taxi fleet companies will have to pay for the cost of upkeep and make a profit. Because of that profit margin, the only way such a service could possibly be cheaper than owning a car would be if you live in an environment where unused cars decay significantly over time, e.g. road salt territory. In those areas, driving a car all day long until it drops might save enough money over driving a car less frequently to make a pay-per-use fleet cheaper than owning. This is, however, a fairly unusual situation, as it does not apply very far south of Michigan.
Also, cars that you own have a significant advantage over pay-per-use cars, in that you can keep things in the car. Whether it is minor stuff like hand sanitizer and sunglasses or major stuff like your laptop bag, cars have a lot of stuff in them that belongs to the owner. In a pay-per-use car service, you would either have to carry all of that with you or you won't have it with you. This makes pay-per-use cars okay for people who rarely use cars, but completely unsuitable for people who practically live out of their cars. And obviously, there's a broad spectrum of people between those two extremes for whom it might or might not work.
So yes, there are good reasons to own something. Whether those reasons matter to you is entirely dependent on how you use your car.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget Needle Row and Gangland Heights.
World standards do not follow US standards. All vehicle makers have to conform to worldwide standards, not just the US. Besides, California standards are not the most strict when compared to international standards. Also California standards have been ratified by 12 other states. Since this is a proposed bill, it will not get out of committee without providing states the ability to set their own limits.
Serious question (because I don't know): It really works as simply as that? All this grand posturing can be undone by a committee?
In all likelihood, yes.
Of course, even if they explicitly prevent states from setting stricter standards for sales of cars, California can still tweak its carpool lane laws slightly and effectively get the same results
Nobody in their right minds would buy or attempt to sell a car that can only be used in the rightmost lane on the freeways, so in effect, California would be enforcing those standards without enforcing them. As a bonus, it would so strongly discourage people from bringing non-compliant vehicles into the state of California, that car companies would feel pressure to sell cleaner cars everywhere.
Of course, the downside would be that it would encourage people thinking about moving to California to buy an older used car instead of a newer one, but that's likely to be lost in the noise.
It's British for "valorware", of course.
Their base pay goes up over time, too. Unless your question is "Why do people with no experience not get paid as much as people with twenty years' experience?" in which case the answer is "twenty years' experience".
And at its core, that's a pay problem. When a high school senior is choosing a future major, faced with a choice between making $150,000 straight out of school with a CS degree and making $50k with an education degree, unless that student is *very* strongly driven to teach, if he or she is smart enough to do the former, he or she isn't going to choose the latter.
And at the college level, it is even worse. A new adjunct is lucky to get three courses per semester, which translates to only $30,000 per year.
When I said teacher salaries need to double, that's a lowball estimate.
I agree in principle. In practice, though, it is much harder than you think. If you use student performance as a metric in isolation, you risk teachers teaching to the test, which doesn't inspire students to learn, but if you use student perception as a metric, the teachers who teach least are most popular. Maybe we'll come up with metrics that actually work at some point, but until then, it doesn't make a lot of sense to use bad metrics as a means of evaluating teachers who are already in the system now.
It really is an exaggeration. When most people hear "multi-million-dollar classroom", they're expecting you to be talking about spending millions of dollars on what is in a classroom. Those are just very expensive buildings, in large part because land and construction prices are exorbitant in greater NYC. And even then, if you actually look at the cost per classroom, I doubt any of these actually exceeds $2 million per room unless you treat shared spaces like the gym, cafeteria, theater, bathrooms, hallways, etc. as being free.
Those are general residential rates. Superchargers get power at commercial rates, not residential. It costs about 26 cents per kWh in California at a supercharger, which is *much* cheaper than normal residential power rates. That said, it is much more *expensive* than the best-case cost on an EV-A or EV-B plan. At last check, those plans charged less than 13 cents per kWh for off-peak charging.
You don't drive a big rig for only five years, or if you do, you're selling it to somebody else who is going to drive it for another five to ten years. And the resale value is based on the assumption that you'll get O(15) years of life out of the vehicle.
If the fuel is free for only the first three years, it will be economically infeasible to operate it after those three years, because instead of consuming $70,000 in diesel fuel per year, you'll be consuming $350,000 in hydrogen per year, which means your fuel costs alone would exceed the purchase price of a brand new Tesla Semi by a factor of 2.8, and would exceed the total first-year operating cost of that Tesla Semi, including the hardware, by about a factor of 2.18 (assuming electricity continues to cost about half as much as fossil fuels).
Now to be fair, because fuel-cell big rigs are mostly electric, the reduced maintenance costs do offset some of that cost difference, but hydrogen-powered big rigs would still cost about twice as much per year to operate as diesel-powered big rigs, even if the hydrogen-powered big rigs had a maintenance cost of zero, which is probably not realistic.
Even if we assume that the maintenance costs are zero, and add that to the energy savings for the first three years, you still only save on the order of $325,000 (two years of fuel and warranted maintenance, plus one year of fuel and full-cost maintenance) over the cost of the diesel big-rig. You will burn through all of those savings in under a year. So by the four-year mark, you will have a vehicle that costs more to operate for another year than it would cost to replace it with your choice of either a diesel or electric. By the end of the 15-year service life, that translates to $1,815,000 in added costs by going with hydrogen — nearly as much as operating an entire second diesel truck.
Of course, if you buy a new one every four years, you only lose about $300,000 over a fifteen-year lifespan. Either way, that's not smart financially, it's pretty horrible for the planet, and it isn't a sustainable business model for Toyota. And that assumes that you're buying a base model at $80k. If you're buying a high-end vehicle at $200k, you would basically be throwing away an entire year worth of operating costs every four years, or $750k over a 15-year lifespan.
Hydrogen is a dead end and always has been.
Err... God-given. Gotta watch the typos.
Well, then, he should be congratulated on shooting off his own foot. If he ever runs for anything broader than his state, we'll remember him as the Democrat who thought that defeating a purely theoretical bogeyman was more important than defending freedom of speech, and will absolutely not vote for him under any circumstances.
I'm in favor of reasonable gun control. Bans on descriptions of guns is not reasonable — particularly in a state whose own supreme court noted in JJR Inc. v. City of Seattle that prior restraint is per se unconstitutional. (They were slightly overzealous with that pronouncement, of course, but there is a very strong presumption of unconstitutionality.)
Freedom of speech is very nearly absolute in this country, and for good reason: it is the single most important right granted by the bill of rights. That's why the founding fathers saw fit to put it first on the list. Without it, the other freedoms cannot possibly stand. If you cannot talk about the government taking your guns, then no one will know until it is too late. If you cannot talk about being forced to testify against yourself, you cannot hope to regain your unjustly stolen freedom. If you cannot talk about illegal searches and seizures, you cannot prevent them from becoming commonplace. In short, if you cannot talk about what is wrong in the world, you cannot possibly hope to correct it.
If there is one thing that is always absolutely true in politics, it is this: absolute bans on any form of speech are per se wrong, and anyone in favor of such laws should not be elected to dog-catcher, much less governor of a state. It is every single American's god-given duty to make sure of it by voting for someone else.
No, they believe that everyone else is too stupid to make decisions.
The problem with politics when it comes to passing laws that affect corporations that happen to reside within the borders of those cities is that most of the people affected live elsewhere. I guarantee you that, of the Mountain View residents who pushed for Facebook to not be allowed to put in free corporate cafes, very few of them work at Facebook. Anyone who did would have pointed out that adding tens thousand hungry employees to the Mountain View downtown is a recipe for complete traffic gridlock that will run right into the afternoon public school pickup gridlock, and that Mountain View is close enough to Menlo Park that they can safely expect all ten thousand of them to drive to the free corporate cafe at the main campus, bringing highway 101 to its knees.
What we need, to combat bad decisions made by people who lack understanding of the situation that they are trying to "correct", is a fundamental change in our political system. Rather than voting based upon where you live, we should be able to vote in every district where we have significant nexus, whether that's the place where you live, the place where you work, the place where you attend worship services, the place where you own a summer home, or whatever.
It seems to me that people who live in Fremont and work in San Francisco are affected by San Francisco elections at least as much as people who live in San Francisco, but work in Cupertino, Mountain View, or Meno Park. After all, residents who work elsewhere spend a few hours in the evening plus weekends, whereas people who live elsewhere and work in San Francisco spend most of their daytime hours in San Francisco. Arguably, they have *greater* interest than people who merely rent a bed there.
And because people would have to go out of their way to register in additional districts where they work or otherwise have significant nexus, this scheme would skew elections by adding more votes from people who are actively interested in voting, thus reducing the impact of people who just dogmatically check the box next to the incumbent with a D or R by his or her name.
This scheme would, of course, require more rigorous proof of nexus, but there could be a fee for additional (non-residence) voting districts to cover the cost of verification, and that fee could be used to help defray the cost of elections.
And this would, of course, also mean that people would be able to vote in more than one election, so it would be important for secondary voting to cover only elections for which the person would not otherwise be eligible.
For example, if I register in California and secondarily in Florida (pretend I own a summer home there), I should be able to vote in city and state elections in both. It is debatable whether I should be allowed to vote for senators and reps in both. On the one hand, ostensibly doing so would give me greater representation in Congress, but on the other hand, those folks do represent me, so it could also be argued that I should be able to vote for them. Either way, I should presumably not be able to vote for POTUS in both places.
Similarly, if I register in Santa Clara county and Santa Cruz county in California, I should be able to vote for officials in the appropriate city, plus the county. State senate and assembly are debatable, as before. I clearly should not be able to vote for the governor in both places, nor the U.S. senator. The U.S. representative, once again, is debatable. And again, the POTUS is right out.
This approach would greatly increase the complexity of running elections, and would greatly increase the printing costs for absentee ballots, but would produce government that more accurately reflects the desires of all the people in their districts, rather than merely the people who happen to rent a bed there. And I think overall, that would be a good thing.
That's actually a pretty shortsighted way to "fix" the schools. Two of those things lead to worse outcomes in the long term.
Seniority pay is what most other people call "cost of living adjustments". Should performance be a factor? Probably. Should it be the only factor? No. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that in the often highly political world of academia, a pure seniority pay scheme without any adjustment for performance other than firing people who severely under-perform produces better outcomes by reducing salary biases that otherwise would favor the teachers who suck up over the ones who actually do a better job. At a bare minimum, a performance-based scheme requires independent evaluators, which means more administration, whereas you want less. That just won't work.
Multi-million-dollar classrooms is almost always an exaggeration. Realistically, schools build buildings because they have exceeded the capacity of the old ones or because the cost of maintaining the old buildings has gotten so high that it is cheaper to build a new one and pay for it over thirty years than to maintain the existing one over that same time period. Cost-cutting on construction inevitably leads to higher maintenance costs in the long run, which over the life of the building ends up cutting into funds that could have been used to pay more teachers.
I agree with you on cutting administrative staff, though it has to be done in the right way, or it can make things worse. For example, most school systems actually need to increase the number of people responsible for evaluating teachers, so that they can do so more often. And school systems with more struggling students often need to increase the number of counselors, too. And in school systems with inadequate funding, teachers' aides can often make the difference between being able to handle oversized classes and not.
What we need to cut down on are the people who work outside the schools at the district level (except teacher evaluators). To the maximum extent possible, we need to replace them with automation. Hire computer programmers to write tools that can handle those administrative duties automatically. Hire temp workers for short-term data entry tasks like keying in student enrollment forms at the start of each school year, or outsource it to a call center in India, or whatever. And so on.
But that mostly applies to larger school systems. The smaller the school system, the less bloat exists. Most of the disparity in public school quality comes not from how well the system is run, but from how high the average property taxes are in the areas that feed those schools. That dictates how much extra money gets fed into the system beyond the meager amount that the state pays. And that won't change no matter what you do at the school level, or even the school system level. School systems in poor cities will still be poor, and school systems in rich cities will still be rich.
If you really want to fix public schools, the way you do that is by passing a law making it illegal for cities to provide additional funds for their schools (with the exception of funding additional counselors in districts that need them), and requiring that they instead contribute that money to a statewide fund so that the funds can be distributed evenly, ensuring that every student gets the same amount of money spent on him or her, whether he or she is from a rich district or a poor district. Then, when the rich districts pitch an absolute fit complaining about inadequate funding for their schools, they will insist on the state kicking in more money to properly fund education, and we can start seriously talking about improvements.
After that, minimally,
Tesla's vehicles cost half as much per mile as gasoline-powered cars when the free period ends, instead of almost five times as much ($13.99 typical cost per kg * 1.13 kg per gallon of diesel = $15.81 per diesel-equivalent-gallon versus the $3.23 average cost per gallon of actual diesel in the most recent month).
Hydrogen fuel cells are a dead end. It doesn't matter how many years of free fuel you give away, so long as the cost of fuel is that much more expensive.
It isn't that the product is bad, so much as that Apple's policy of creating artificial differentiation between similar products (beyond what is inherent to a larger screen) is bad, and the pencil is a lot less useful (or at least useful to a lot fewer people) because of it. Or maybe they were just having yield problems, and that kept demand down. *shrugs*
The problem is, the audio quality is the easy part. Realistically, the extra 1000% of effort required for the spatial modeling versus just producing a large enough driver to do the job is the sort of polish that maybe one tenth of one percent of your users care about. And even with the relatively large amount of effort required, it is still a drop in the bucket compared with the effort that would be required to bring Siri up to the level of the other products in that space.
And this assumes that it would even be possible for Apple to catch up. The way Amazon and Google have improved their products so quickly is by analyzing boatloads of analytics data and finding out which queries worked and which ones didn't. As long as Apple treats queries as private, that sort of analysis likely isn't possible, and the platform cannot easily improve.
If all you care about is having a speaker, that's great, but there are plenty of other companies in that space whose sole focus is building great audio systems. Adding Apple to that saturated market didn't really add anything, IMO. It seems like Apple shipped the HomePod solely because everybody else was building one, and they didn't want to be left out. That really isn't a good enough reason to make a product, IMO.
If Apple had invested that time and effort into making Amazon and Google tech integrate better with iOS, I think iOS users would have been a lot happier with the result. Apple should focus on what it does best — hardware — and stop wasting time and effort trying to compete with Internet service companies like Google and Amazon in areas where those sorts of companies inherently do a better job.
Would that be the FaceID camera that replaced functionality that for many users works better, rather than augmenting it, the Apple pencil that only works on a small subset of iOS devices, TruMotion that's a feature of LG TV sets, the A-series chips that exist primarily so Apple doesn't find themselves dependent on a chipmaker that can't meet their needs like they did with the PowerPC, or the HomePod that, despite its higher sound quality, nearly every reviewer says isn't nearly as usable as Amazon Alexa or Google Home?
I'm not saying that Apple has lost its spark, but those aren't very good examples. :-)
None of those are compelling for me, even as someone who carries a second phone for work (because I don't want my employer to be allowed to wipe my device, not because separating work calls matters).
The thing is, ten years ago, I would have jumped on the opportunity to have a second SIM card in my iPhone. I had an international SIM that saved a lot of money when making phone calls and using data overseas. These days, my main Sprint plan is cheaper in Europe than that European SIM card. It seems unlikely that I'll ever bother swapping SIM cards again, even though I bought my phone fully unlocked so I could if I needed to.
The only way I would be interested in a second SIM card on iOS would be if Apple coupled it with proper Google Project Fi support. The one thing I've noticed since I started carrying a second phone is that my Google Pixel has much more consistent cellular data service than my iPhone, because it uses Project Fi, which lets it transparently roam across multiple carriers (Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular) based on who has the strongest signal, rather than strongly favoring a single carrier's tower even when it has only a single bar (which, for data purposes, is effectively "No Service"). Weak spots in one carrier's service tend not to be weak on the others, so it gives me a much better, more consistent user experience. And that's not just out in the boonies, either. I get better and more consistent service in Cupertino with my Pixel than with my iPhone.
If I could get that sort of seamless networking experience on iOS, it might be worth sticking a Project Fi sim in the second SIM slot. But as long as Apple doesn't support Project Fi and won't create their own equivalent, I'd much rather have a headphone jack than a second SIM slot. At least that's something that I and a significant percentage of other iPhone users would actually use.
And the tech workers *in* Silicon Valley know of people elsewhere making twice as much after adjusting for the cost of living. (Alternatively, they know of people who own a house that's bigger than 600 square feet.)
And right there, in only six words, you summed up why that will never happen.
Agricultural production isn't going to go way up because you have better-paid people hand-picking crops, nor because you have more people picking crops. There really isn't much spoilage caused by crops going unpicked, percentage-wise. We might get double-digit millions of dollars in additional yield. That's like a hundredth of a percent of our country's net agricultural exports. It would have such a tiny impact on the total agricultural production in this country that it would be lost in the noise.
And you can't really increase the amount of land used for fields easily, because there's not enough fresh water for irrigation, not enough fertile land, etc.
First, you want to pay a reasonable wage, then you want to reduce food prices. That can't work. The money to pay all those workers a reasonable wage has to come from somewhere, and it can only come from the food prices. The reason crops go unpicked is not because there aren't enough workers, but rather because above a certain level of production, prices fall to the point where the wages you can offer won't attract enough workers, and you can till the plants under for less than you would lose by bringing the crops to market.
Raise the cost of workers and you'll end up with a new equilibrium point; either way, the cost of food has to go up, not down, to pay those wages. Farm owners will limit production as needed to keep the price high enough to be able to pay those wages. And because the cost of food coming from the U.S. will be so much higher than the cost of food coming from other countries, we'll end up importing more and exporting less, which means there will be fewer picker jobs at those higher wages, producing a lower total output, not more.
It is useless for many more reasons. For one, even bad publicity is good publicity. What you want is to recommend the ISPs that are NOT bad, not name the ones that are.
For another, no matter what, shaming won't help, because we've already done that. Everyone already pretty much knows which ISPs violate net neutrality, and it hasn't helped stopped the violations so far. Besides, if you want a list, it's pretty easy to generate: get a complete list of all the ISPs out there and remove any ISP with fewer than a thousand customers, and you're done, plus or minus some small epsilon.
Somehow, this reminds me of the joke about the hunter calling 911.
Operator: 911. What's your emergency?
Hunter: I think I just killed my hunting partner.
Operator: Okay, first I need you to check to make sure he's dead.
[Sound of a gunshot]
Hunter: Okay. Now what?
And yet nobody has trouble with square roots being defined, even though sqrt(4) is +/- 2.
I'm not saying they would, just that they aren't really known for having lots of organic food. :-)
I'm not saying that there isn't a cost savings from that amortization; I'm saying that I would expect it to be smaller than the profit margin that anyone operating a vehicle fleet would expect as their ROI. Most of a car's costs are per-mile, not per-year, because a well-built car will still be running in three decades, assuming you still want to drive it.
Probably not, because I've seen how people treat cars that they don't own. :-)
You're missing the reason that the transit pass is cheap: each trip of a bus or subway carries double-digit numbers of people. The math doesn't work when you're talking about a taxi-like vehicle that carries just you, unless you treat it like a shuttle that makes multiple stops and picks up multiple unrelated people (and even then, it doesn't necessarily save that much).
For the most part, the cost of operating a vehicle is per-mile, not per year. The minimum cost-per-mile for any pay-per-use vehicle is the same as the cost-per-mile for an otherwise identical private vehicle. The maximum is far worse, because people tend not to take care of vehicles that they don't own, which means they are likely to require a lot more maintenance to fix interior damage.
Only the per-year costs go down with a pay-per-use fleet. If you drive less than 5,000 miles a year (unusually low), your driving habits might cost you an extra thirty bucks on oil changes or so per year, if we assume an ICE car. You also have the cost of maintaining the paint job and washing the car every so often. Either way, these things are all lost in the noise cost-wise, even when you add them all up, when compared against the per-mile costs unless you have to rent a parking space.
There is simply no universe in which a pay-per-use car can feasibly be cheaper than owning a car unless you are in some urban hell where they charge you a monthly rental fee for your parking space (and even in that case, it isn't technically the car, per se, that is costing you more, but rather parking it). If you're in that sort of location, you probably have mass transit sufficient to take care of your transportation needs.
For those people, the combination of mass transit with occasional use of a pay-per-use car can be cheaper than the cost of buying a car. But in those cases, it is the ultra-low cost of mass transit that is bringing the cost down, not the cost of the pay-per-use car, which will still be more expensive than owning a car, assuming again that you don't a rent a parking space by the month, and assuming that your car does not rust out before it stops working.
For everyone not in such a high-density area, many people will still probably decide that the convenience of not having to maintain a vehicle outweighs the cost difference, assuming that cost difference is relatively small. And that's a perfectly reasonable choice for many people. It is not, however, a cost-based decision, and it definitely will not be cheaper, just not exorbitantly more expensive as it is with human-driven taxis.
Maybe you're confusing Waymo/Wal-Mart with Amazon/Whole Foods? :-D
From an efficiency perspective, it would make more sense to partition the car with cloth dividers into five areas, then load up the groceries for up to five customers, then self-drive the car to each of their houses, open up the door where that customer's stuff is stored, and let the customer unload before driving to the next customer's house, and so on, until all of the groceries are delivered.
(Discussions of the shortest path problem are, of course, expected, along with discussions of whether frozen food should be delivered first.)
But maybe there's some other goal, like getting people used to riding in self-driving cars. :-)
That's the sort of terrible advice that keeps poor people poor. In the real world, depreciation is always built into the cost of renting or leasing something. If that new car loses half its value over the three-year lease, you can bet your backside that the lease more than covers the loss of value plus the interest that the actual owner loses on the cost of building the car and the opportunity cost from not selling the car outright, and that the actual owner (the car company) still comes out ahead.
Thus, in practice, owning is always less expensive than renting. Anyone who says otherwise is kidding him/herself. And that's why you should always buy, rather than rent or lease. The only possible exception is if there is some compelling reason to always have a car that is less than a certain number of years old, such as carpool lane stickers that can only be renewed for a certain number of years. Even then, in practice, it will still cost you considerably more money to lease than to buy it outright and sell it in three years, but it is less hassle, and for some people, that might be worth the extra few thousand dollars.
And the same will be true of self-driving taxi services. The taxi fleet companies will have to pay for the cost of upkeep and make a profit. Because of that profit margin, the only way such a service could possibly be cheaper than owning a car would be if you live in an environment where unused cars decay significantly over time, e.g. road salt territory. In those areas, driving a car all day long until it drops might save enough money over driving a car less frequently to make a pay-per-use fleet cheaper than owning. This is, however, a fairly unusual situation, as it does not apply very far south of Michigan.
Also, cars that you own have a significant advantage over pay-per-use cars, in that you can keep things in the car. Whether it is minor stuff like hand sanitizer and sunglasses or major stuff like your laptop bag, cars have a lot of stuff in them that belongs to the owner. In a pay-per-use car service, you would either have to carry all of that with you or you won't have it with you. This makes pay-per-use cars okay for people who rarely use cars, but completely unsuitable for people who practically live out of their cars. And obviously, there's a broad spectrum of people between those two extremes for whom it might or might not work.
So yes, there are good reasons to own something. Whether those reasons matter to you is entirely dependent on how you use your car.