If one were to actually read up on the subject instead of constructing straw men to knock down, one might find that plastic straws, being extremely lightweight, tend to avoid sweepers, are easily carried into sewers and waterways, and have quite a few other problems.
I missed this in my earlier reply. This sounds like the street sweepers aren't working very well, which is a design problem. If they aren't picking up straws, they also aren't picking up a significant percentage of any number of other things—candy wrappers, grass, leaves, etc.—all of which contributes to clogging storm drains and other infrastructure problems. A better solution, then, would be to build street sweepers that actually leave the streets clean of debris, rather than blaming the debris for having the audacity to not get swept up.
Yes, but you're talking about food trucks that operate in essentially a closed venue. That's why most of them come back; people are eating the food right there. It's equivalent to a dine-in situation.
If you're talking about food trucks operating in places where people actually take food to go, it doesn't work nearly as well, because the utensils won't make it back to you, which would add about a buck and a half to the price of every meal. Over the long run, such a cost increase will eventually put those food trucks out of business, in favor of food trucks that don't require utensils (pizza, hot dogs, etc.). The economics don't always work.
The problem is more cats in the sanctuary. Release them on the google campus or somewhere *other* than the sanctuary.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they're doing. The cats keep coming back to the park anyway.
The feeding stations increases the size of the cat population that the sanctuary can accommodate. Without the extra food in the sanctuary there may be fewer cats. Too much competition for limited food may cause some migration elsewhere, secondary food sources interfere with that pressure.
There are a lot of "may"s and "might"s in that paragraph. AFAIK, that secondary food source is not in the park in question, but merely near it. The park is fairly large, and the other side of the park is a marsh area with plenty of fish, birds, etc. There's plenty of food without the feeding station. If anything, that station draws cats out of the park, not in. And it lets them catch cats that are too close to the park, so that they can release them farther away.
There is no development in the sanctuary.
You don't seem to be familiar with the area in question. From what I've read, the feeding station is actually on Google's campus, not in the so-called "sanctuary" (really just a former landfill that overlooks the Shoreline Amphitheater). And there's major construction within a couple of hundred feet. This isn't something happening in the middle of nowhere. The park is across the street from Google's campus and immediately adjacent to Google's athletic park.
There is nothing magical about their OS build either, other than that it is bundled with crap-ware and may never get a security update.
This. Huawei only guarantees two years of updates, so if you aren't planning to replace your phone at least every two years, you'll end up on an out-of-date, security-compromised OS with no way to upgrade. If you can unlock your bootloader, you have the option of installing LineageOS and getting several more years out of the device.
Bootloader locking serves an important purpose, but it should not be legal to deny consumers the ability to unlock their own devices. And that goes for Apple, too. If bootloader unlocking were required by law, no doubt the Android port to iPhones would get updated, not to mention that you'd have people doing things similar to XPostFacto/MacPostFactor, getting newer versions of iOS to run on older hardware.
Right now, locked bootloaders are turning technology into disposable junk, destroying the resale market, and creating an e-waste nightmare. That alone should be ample reason for the government to get involved.
Try asking a restaurant if they'll give you metal utensils to go. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The biggest logistical problem with all of these idiotic "Let's ban plastic [insert product here]" ideas is that almost invariably there is no adequate alternative. California's grocery bag ban, for example, means that we have to buy trash bags that use several times as much plastic, took several times as much diesel fuel to drive them to the store, and cost a couple of orders of magnitude more money. It is basically a poor tax masquerading as an environmental policy.
This proposed law is no exception to that rule. The problem is not plastic utensils. There are no viable alternatives to plastic utensils that can be made anywhere near that price point, so when you order food to go, expect a significant cutlery surcharge if this goes through. For people who can afford that, it's probably no big deal, though at some point, we've just replaced an excess of plastic waste with an excess of metal waste.
Now if they carve out a broad exception for biodegradable plastics, this law would be fine, but it also wouldn't solve the problem that they claim to be trying to solve (plastic utensils on the beaches) because they still don't degrade that quickly.
But as with all the plastic ban laws, the real, fundamental problem with this particular law is that they're trying to treat the symptom instead of the root cause. When we ask ourselves why these utensils are turning up in streams and rivers, we come up with only three real possibilities:
Street sweeping doesn't happen often enough to take care of occasional litter (accidental or otherwise)
Garbage pickup doesn't happen often enough to keep cans from overflowing and bits getting left behind
Automated garbage trucks have a spillage problem
Notice what all of these have in common? They're all failures of the government to do their f**ing jobs. And instead of solving the real problem, they're trying to find ways to make it everyone else's problem but their own. It's time that we started choosing elected officials who will actually do what we're paying them to do, by requiring their employees to do what we're paying them to do. That's the only real solution. Everything else is just trying to apply a thousand 1" Band-Aids over a missing limb.
Not really, they are a non-native species introduced not an ecosystem.
Well, yes, domestic cats and dogs are a non-native species, but on the flip side, the only reason those owls aren't getting eaten by coyotes and mountain lions is that humans chased them all away. So on the whole, they're probably not worse off (except in terms of finding grasslands to burrow in).
There are also non-rescued cats that are released to the wild.
Who cares? The cats were in the wild to begin with. If they did nothing, even in the best-case scenario, there would be more cats—maybe all not right there in the park, but there would be more cats, and the owls don't just live in that park, which means that on the whole, neuter-and-release does help the owl population.
Also, chances are good that they put the feeding station in that park because the cats were already attracted to the owls. So moving the feeding station won't reduce the nearby cat population; it will just reduce the number of cats caught.
But even if I'm completely wrong, and they actually put the feeding station in the park in a deliberate attempt to kill as many owls as possible, I still couldn't get all up in arms about the burrowing owl deaths.
Burrowing owls are a nuisance to property development in the Bay Area, causing significant construction delays (waiting for the young to leave the burrows), because they're a species of "special concern" in California. However, the fact is that even though the California population is dropping (and in Canada and parts of Mexico), they are not endangered on a worldwide scale, nor they are even threatened. Their habitat is grasslands in pretty much all of North and South America. Their habitat is changing, and they are being forced out of certain parts of the developed world, but in terms of overall population, they aren't in trouble, and because their habitat is so broad and so diverse, they aren't likely to ever be endangered globally.
I'm okay with local conservation if there's a good reason for it. Keeping the Bald Eagle around, for example, was worth the headaches it caused, because it's our national bird, and keeping it in our country is generally a good idea. But an owl that can live anywhere shouldn't have special rights to live in a particular spot if that spot happens to involve some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. If they're just as happy in $150-per-acre territory as $1.5 million-per-acre territory, then the best way to protect the owls is to stick them in a cage, drive them to Kansas, and say, "Good luck." Get them out of here.
Failing that, the second best approach is to let the cats do what they do, and just stop caring about it. And, of course, the third best approach involves breading and barbecue sauce.:-D
This was an incredibly stupid thing to do but there was no intention on the part of the SWATTERS to cause a death.
I'm not so sure. The lack of remorse tells me that at the very least, they didn't care if they caused a death, and they took an action that they knew or reasonably should have known could have directly caused a death. It's like picking up a gun, pointing it at someone, and pulling the trigger, then claiming that because you didn't know if the gun was loaded, it should be treated as an accident. Unless you're a five-year-old, that argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
Unfortunately, many states still treat depraved indifference to human life as manslaughter. In many states, this would be second-degree murder, and you might even be able to argue for first. Either way, a life sentence is entirely appropriate, IMO.
For housing, the prices get a lot cheaper the farther out you go. For commercial real estate, the difference is smaller, because if the market is heavy enough to command high prices, there are businesses ready to snap up the limited commercial real estate quickly, even in the suburbs. (Remember, there tends to be a smaller percentage of commercial real estate in the suburbs; that's what makes it suburbs.) The larger the metro area, the farther out you have to go before the cost difference becomes meaningful.
Also, larger buildings are generally cheaper than smaller ones, which means having four satellite offices can be more expensive than a single, central office, even if the price of land is much lower in the suburbs, because you can build a single building that's 4x as high. Also, smaller offices often require an admin, security guard, etc., all of which disproportionately add to the ongoing operations costs associated with the extra locations.
So if a business wants to be in the city center for prestige, it would take a BIG difference in cost to matter. If they don't, they will likely move their entire operation farther out into the suburbs, rather than host a few employees in multiple locations. Either way, the point remains that the difference in building costs obviously isn't enough to offset the perceived costs of spreading out, or else they would have already spread out, and a $10,000 one-time credit is unlikely to change that equation.
Their options are to either spend $X for the space in downtown or spend ~$X for the space elsewhere, and the only difference is the grant to fund construction, which almost certainly won't cover the construction costs. No business will take advantage of this to let employees work closer to home. If businesses were interested in spreading out, they would have already done so. A few thousand dollars of seed money won't change that equation meaningfully, because a small, one-time grant can't balance out the ongoing pain of having some of your workers in a different location.
Instead, these grants will be used by people who were already going to build small offices. They'll take the free money to do what they were going to do anyway, and the only people who will benefit are the co-working space companies that refurbish the buildings.
And this is why government bureaucrats who have never worked in any business for a day in their lives should not try to come up with creative ways to solve businesses' problems. They'll fall victim to special interests and fail to solve the problem. Every. Time.
Yeah, this is not at all what we need. Encouraging small businesses is fine, but it does nothing about the very real problem that so many businesses still expect workers to be physically present most or all of the time. What this will do is pay someone to build a work area designed for a small business, and afterwards, that small business will then require people to work out of that small office, resulting in exactly zero changes to telecommuting behavior/support.
What we need is an actual tax break for businesses that let people telecommute, to the tune of an annual $30,000 per worker credit if an employee works remotely (defined as "anywhere other than in an office with 5 or more people, subject to the additional requirement that the location must be chosen by the employee, without the employer setting any limitations on that location beyond what is reasonable to ensure the protection of trade secrets and employee safety") for at least 48 weeks out of the year, or a $5,000 per worker credit for workers who are remote for at least 50% of work days, available to any business with at least 300 employees.
Those numbers are sort of arbitrary, but I think they're in the right order of magnitude. After all, the per-employee facilities cost in the Bay Area (about $6,000 per year) is clearly not enough to convince businesses to change the way they do things, so it would have to be a lot more than that to force businesses to either adopt telecommuting or explain to their stockholders why they are passing up free money.
That's the general public's fault for not knowing what an "autopilot" in an aircraft does... It dumbly follows a set heading/altitude/speed, or similarly dumbly follows a GPS route/speed (with an error of much more than the average lane width, probably), and knows enough (with some pilot input) to change direction/altitude within the capabilities of the aircraft. If there's a mountain or other aircraft in the way, it will happily fly right into it for you.
That hasn't been true for many years. All modern large aircraft should at least have basic TCAS to warn the pilot if you're about to crash into other planes, and some newer planes, such as the A380, can automatically adjust course in autopilot mode to avoid a collision. Newer aircraft equipped with T2CASTM and similar should be largely immune to CFIT, too, automatically pulling up as needed, or at least that's my understanding.
Also, most modern aircraft, when flow into airports that have the proper equipment, can do autoland without pilot intervention, and a few aircraft can also do autonomous takeoff, though I don't think regulations currently allow them to enable it. So basically, once you taxi to the end of the runway, the best modern autopilots could, albeit illegally, literally take you to the taxiway at the other end of the other airport's runway without intervention except when things go wrong.
At-fault crashes per million miles is the only relevant metric for comparison purposes. The total number of miles driven just gives you the margin of error. You really don't need billions of miles driven to make a valid comparison, IMO.
That said, Tesla's actual self-driving mile count is still zero, to the best of my knowledge. Their current setup is incapable of making a number of critical driving decisions, including lane changes, turns, exits, stopping at traffic lights or stop signs, etc. Comparing a driver-as-a-backup system to a pure self-driving solution wouldn't be a fair comparison even if Waymo had as many miles as Tesla, because Waymo's miles wouldn't have a driver ready to intervene at a moment's notice.
So it is more like comparing a fairly rare ATOL-capable aircraft to a high-volume-manufactured aircraft with traditional autopilot in the air. No comparison is really possible or useful, because they're two very different animals.
A surprising number of items get sold by third-party sellers using one of several centralized warehousing services, in which the seller gets the product order and instructs a warehouse to send it out. This causes a surprising number of mistakes when the warehouse drops a product or substitutes a different one without telling anyone. It is often not the fault of the merchant.
But yes, I mostly try to avoid third-party merchants. I've had significantly worse luck with them than with Amazon themselves.
I'm pretty sure a paper sleeve wouldn't have helped. It looked like they didn't let the resin on the discs harden adequately before putting them into the cardboard slots, so part of the plastic came off when you pulled them out, and part of it got scarred while they were sliding them in. Either that or they didn't use enough hardener in that batch. Either way, it was pretty clearly a plastic fabrication mistake, and they would have stuck to a paper sleeve just as easily.:-/
Unless you buy something that is legitimately defective, there is no reason to return it. I'm pretty old and I can count the number of times I've returned something on one hand, and have fingers left over.
I wish the number of times I bought something that was legitimately defective was small enough to count on one hand (even in binary). I once bought the Stargate SG-1 collection on DVD, and the discs were so badly scarred right out of the box that it took... I SEVEN sets just to successfully build one single complete set, by mixing and matching discs. I posted photos online.
This is, unfortunately, not particularly unusual these days. Manufacturing quality turned to crap a long time ago.
The demographics of the driver magically make Teslas appear safer to drive.
The demographics of the driver magically DO make Teslas less likely to get in wrecks. How many teenagers do you know who drive Teslas? The people with the highest accident risks don't drive such expensive cars, so you would automatically expect many fewer accidents, assuming all else is equal.
Yes AP uses the published speed limit of the road. And it will only allow 5mph over the legal limit on AP, anything above that on non motorways will not work and you have to to take manual control.
And IMO, they desperately need to change that. There are plenty of minor, highway-like streets in the Salinas, CA and Santa Cruz, CA areas where the average speed is 15 over what Tesla's nav system thinks is the posted limit (and might, in fact, be the posted limit). If you actually drive only 5 over, you risk causing serious accidents and possibly even getting killed by people angrily passing you in no-passing zones (that typically extend the entire length of the streets in question).
Arguably, the speed limits need to be fixed to be more realistic, but that's not nearly as easy to accomplish as removing a single 'if' statement, or adding an option flag in a menu to let you override the autosteer limit in a particular location.
Also, when they *do* update the speeds to be more realistic, no matter how many times you try to add the correct speed limits into the TomTom database from which Tesla sources its data, they'll never actually get updated. High Street in Santa Cruz has been 30 MPH for at least two years, and is still marked 25. The average traffic speed is 35 (5 over the posted limit, 10 over what Tesla's nav system thinks is the posted limit). If you don't disable AP on that road, you'll get run over. And cars routinely speed up to 45 MPH about two blocks before the speed limit actually changes to 40, so if you're still doing 30 (or worse, 25), you're *really* going to get run over.
In other words, such limits are fundamentally dangerous, because they take control of speed away from the driver, who is the only one qualified to determine what constitutes a safe speed on a particular road, given the current road conditions. Driving too slowly can be just as dangerous as speeding.
90k Teslas on average with 5 deaths means 1 in 18000 Teslas.
Useless statistic. Yes, that's ostensibly lower than the average (one per 13,000 cars) for all registered vehicles in the U.S., but without knowing how many miles the Teslas were driven, we can't know if that's actually low or high.
Typically, the number of accidents (and, thus, fatal accidents) is proportional to the number of miles driven, not the number of cars. Some cars sit in somebody's front yard rusting, and never even see the road except when another car isn't working. And people who are wealthy enough to afford Teslas are more likely to live close to work, and thus have shorter commutes, so they are exposed to fewer opportunities for wrecks. They're also less likely to be driving home for an hour or more after a long day of work, and thus less likely to suffer from fatigue-related crashes.
And even if you assume all of those confounding factors don't exist, there's still the elephant in the room, which is that most folks use AP only on streets where it has worked well for them in the past. Thus, the potential for AP-caused accidents is artificially reduced. If some other driver used it differently, that other driver could have very different results, making a general "this makes driving safer" conclusion impossible to reach without much more fine-grained data in which you compare the crash rates for various types of driving (city streets versus highways, urban versus rural, straight versus windy) independently with AutoPilot off versus on.
And realistically, you also need to separately compare AP unavailable versus AP off, because drivers may behave differently when they have deliberately disabled AP versus drivers who do not have AP. (This can determine to what extent regular use of AP makes drivers less situationally aware over time.)
In short, comparing the number of crashes to the number of vehicles is so prone to being skewed by other variables that it is almost useless as a metric for the safety of the vehicles. You might as well throw darts at a dartboard.
Personally, I think that AutoPilot reduces driver fatigue, which likely improves safety on the whole. But I'm not willing to state that definitively without actual data, which Tesla has thus far refused to provide. That's unfortunate, and it makes me wonder if they have something to hide. After all, if the data really were in their favor, you would expect them to be quick to release it. Unless, of course, they just haven't bothered to do any analysis, in which case I wonder about their competence.
In other words, I would say to Tesla, "Data or GTFO."
One can, however, copy such old works freely here... and give them away or even charge for them. Derivative works are also allowed, but the characters and depictions would have to be changed because of trademark protection.
I think if it turns out Disney is pushing for this, the only appropriate response is mass rebellion, in the form of creating DeepFake porn starring Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Agree to stop only if and when they agree to stop being copyright thugs.
Bonus points if you synchronize the moans to the tune of "Ooh, Mickey, you're so fine".
However, this is not a false alarm: these substances, like acrylamide, are known carcinogens in large doses.
This is a blatantly false alarm, because A. no study has ever shown coffee to increase risk of cancer in humans with any real confidence, and B. multiple studies have shown that coffee reduces the risk of multiple varieties of cancer, including liver cancer, endometrial cancer, oral cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. And for all other types of cancer, results are neutral. The sole evidence in favor of coffee increasing cancer risk came from one study that suggested a weak correlation with increased childhood leukemia in children of mothers who drank coffee while pregnant, and even the evidence there is not very strong.
In other words, it's worse than a false alarm. It's exactly the opposite of what science is saying.
It's entirely reasonable to think that small doses might also have this effect.
No, it flies in the face of mounting evidence to think that, so it is entirely unreasonable.
p>It's not hard to imagine a difference though. When you're in the gym and you get winded, you pause for a moment. Do you know what happens if you do that at a physically demanding job? Some a-hole yells at you for slacking and tells you to get back to work or don't bother coming back.
I think you're on the right track here. The difference between getting injured on the job and injured doing something fun, notwithstanding the availability of worker's comp, is that at work, you feel pressured to return to your job, where you're likely to get re-injured if you return too soon, whereas if you injure yourself at the gym because you have a non-physical job, that injury won't keep you from working, and you wont feel pressured to go back to whatever sport or exercise caused the injury before it is fully healed.
Slashdot Mirror
I missed this in my earlier reply. This sounds like the street sweepers aren't working very well, which is a design problem. If they aren't picking up straws, they also aren't picking up a significant percentage of any number of other things—candy wrappers, grass, leaves, etc.—all of which contributes to clogging storm drains and other infrastructure problems. A better solution, then, would be to build street sweepers that actually leave the streets clean of debris, rather than blaming the debris for having the audacity to not get swept up.
Yes, but you're talking about food trucks that operate in essentially a closed venue. That's why most of them come back; people are eating the food right there. It's equivalent to a dine-in situation.
If you're talking about food trucks operating in places where people actually take food to go, it doesn't work nearly as well, because the utensils won't make it back to you, which would add about a buck and a half to the price of every meal. Over the long run, such a cost increase will eventually put those food trucks out of business, in favor of food trucks that don't require utensils (pizza, hot dogs, etc.). The economics don't always work.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they're doing. The cats keep coming back to the park anyway.
There are a lot of "may"s and "might"s in that paragraph. AFAIK, that secondary food source is not in the park in question, but merely near it. The park is fairly large, and the other side of the park is a marsh area with plenty of fish, birds, etc. There's plenty of food without the feeding station. If anything, that station draws cats out of the park, not in. And it lets them catch cats that are too close to the park, so that they can release them farther away.
You don't seem to be familiar with the area in question. From what I've read, the feeding station is actually on Google's campus, not in the so-called "sanctuary" (really just a former landfill that overlooks the Shoreline Amphitheater). And there's major construction within a couple of hundred feet. This isn't something happening in the middle of nowhere. The park is across the street from Google's campus and immediately adjacent to Google's athletic park.
If we were just talking about straws, nobody would care. Straws are not generally considered utensils. They're talking about plastic forks and knives.
This. Huawei only guarantees two years of updates, so if you aren't planning to replace your phone at least every two years, you'll end up on an out-of-date, security-compromised OS with no way to upgrade. If you can unlock your bootloader, you have the option of installing LineageOS and getting several more years out of the device.
Bootloader locking serves an important purpose, but it should not be legal to deny consumers the ability to unlock their own devices. And that goes for Apple, too. If bootloader unlocking were required by law, no doubt the Android port to iPhones would get updated, not to mention that you'd have people doing things similar to XPostFacto/MacPostFactor, getting newer versions of iOS to run on older hardware.
Right now, locked bootloaders are turning technology into disposable junk, destroying the resale market, and creating an e-waste nightmare. That alone should be ample reason for the government to get involved.
Try asking a restaurant if they'll give you metal utensils to go. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The biggest logistical problem with all of these idiotic "Let's ban plastic [insert product here]" ideas is that almost invariably there is no adequate alternative. California's grocery bag ban, for example, means that we have to buy trash bags that use several times as much plastic, took several times as much diesel fuel to drive them to the store, and cost a couple of orders of magnitude more money. It is basically a poor tax masquerading as an environmental policy.
This proposed law is no exception to that rule. The problem is not plastic utensils. There are no viable alternatives to plastic utensils that can be made anywhere near that price point, so when you order food to go, expect a significant cutlery surcharge if this goes through. For people who can afford that, it's probably no big deal, though at some point, we've just replaced an excess of plastic waste with an excess of metal waste.
Now if they carve out a broad exception for biodegradable plastics, this law would be fine, but it also wouldn't solve the problem that they claim to be trying to solve (plastic utensils on the beaches) because they still don't degrade that quickly.
But as with all the plastic ban laws, the real, fundamental problem with this particular law is that they're trying to treat the symptom instead of the root cause. When we ask ourselves why these utensils are turning up in streams and rivers, we come up with only three real possibilities:
Notice what all of these have in common? They're all failures of the government to do their f**ing jobs. And instead of solving the real problem, they're trying to find ways to make it everyone else's problem but their own. It's time that we started choosing elected officials who will actually do what we're paying them to do, by requiring their employees to do what we're paying them to do. That's the only real solution. Everything else is just trying to apply a thousand 1" Band-Aids over a missing limb.
Well, yes, domestic cats and dogs are a non-native species, but on the flip side, the only reason those owls aren't getting eaten by coyotes and mountain lions is that humans chased them all away. So on the whole, they're probably not worse off (except in terms of finding grasslands to burrow in).
Who cares? The cats were in the wild to begin with. If they did nothing, even in the best-case scenario, there would be more cats—maybe all not right there in the park, but there would be more cats, and the owls don't just live in that park, which means that on the whole, neuter-and-release does help the owl population.
Also, chances are good that they put the feeding station in that park because the cats were already attracted to the owls. So moving the feeding station won't reduce the nearby cat population; it will just reduce the number of cats caught.
But even if I'm completely wrong, and they actually put the feeding station in the park in a deliberate attempt to kill as many owls as possible, I still couldn't get all up in arms about the burrowing owl deaths.
Burrowing owls are a nuisance to property development in the Bay Area, causing significant construction delays (waiting for the young to leave the burrows), because they're a species of "special concern" in California. However, the fact is that even though the California population is dropping (and in Canada and parts of Mexico), they are not endangered on a worldwide scale, nor they are even threatened. Their habitat is grasslands in pretty much all of North and South America. Their habitat is changing, and they are being forced out of certain parts of the developed world, but in terms of overall population, they aren't in trouble, and because their habitat is so broad and so diverse, they aren't likely to ever be endangered globally.
I'm okay with local conservation if there's a good reason for it. Keeping the Bald Eagle around, for example, was worth the headaches it caused, because it's our national bird, and keeping it in our country is generally a good idea. But an owl that can live anywhere shouldn't have special rights to live in a particular spot if that spot happens to involve some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. If they're just as happy in $150-per-acre territory as $1.5 million-per-acre territory, then the best way to protect the owls is to stick them in a cage, drive them to Kansas, and say, "Good luck." Get them out of here.
Failing that, the second best approach is to let the cats do what they do, and just stop caring about it. And, of course, the third best approach involves breading and barbecue sauce. :-D
I'm not so sure. The lack of remorse tells me that at the very least, they didn't care if they caused a death, and they took an action that they knew or reasonably should have known could have directly caused a death. It's like picking up a gun, pointing it at someone, and pulling the trigger, then claiming that because you didn't know if the gun was loaded, it should be treated as an accident. Unless you're a five-year-old, that argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
Unfortunately, many states still treat depraved indifference to human life as manslaughter. In many states, this would be second-degree murder, and you might even be able to argue for first. Either way, a life sentence is entirely appropriate, IMO.
For housing, the prices get a lot cheaper the farther out you go. For commercial real estate, the difference is smaller, because if the market is heavy enough to command high prices, there are businesses ready to snap up the limited commercial real estate quickly, even in the suburbs. (Remember, there tends to be a smaller percentage of commercial real estate in the suburbs; that's what makes it suburbs.) The larger the metro area, the farther out you have to go before the cost difference becomes meaningful.
Also, larger buildings are generally cheaper than smaller ones, which means having four satellite offices can be more expensive than a single, central office, even if the price of land is much lower in the suburbs, because you can build a single building that's 4x as high. Also, smaller offices often require an admin, security guard, etc., all of which disproportionately add to the ongoing operations costs associated with the extra locations.
So if a business wants to be in the city center for prestige, it would take a BIG difference in cost to matter. If they don't, they will likely move their entire operation farther out into the suburbs, rather than host a few employees in multiple locations. Either way, the point remains that the difference in building costs obviously isn't enough to offset the perceived costs of spreading out, or else they would have already spread out, and a $10,000 one-time credit is unlikely to change that equation.
Their options are to either spend $X for the space in downtown or spend ~$X for the space elsewhere, and the only difference is the grant to fund construction, which almost certainly won't cover the construction costs. No business will take advantage of this to let employees work closer to home. If businesses were interested in spreading out, they would have already done so. A few thousand dollars of seed money won't change that equation meaningfully, because a small, one-time grant can't balance out the ongoing pain of having some of your workers in a different location.
Instead, these grants will be used by people who were already going to build small offices. They'll take the free money to do what they were going to do anyway, and the only people who will benefit are the co-working space companies that refurbish the buildings.
And this is why government bureaucrats who have never worked in any business for a day in their lives should not try to come up with creative ways to solve businesses' problems. They'll fall victim to special interests and fail to solve the problem. Every. Time.
Yeah, this is not at all what we need. Encouraging small businesses is fine, but it does nothing about the very real problem that so many businesses still expect workers to be physically present most or all of the time. What this will do is pay someone to build a work area designed for a small business, and afterwards, that small business will then require people to work out of that small office, resulting in exactly zero changes to telecommuting behavior/support.
What we need is an actual tax break for businesses that let people telecommute, to the tune of an annual $30,000 per worker credit if an employee works remotely (defined as "anywhere other than in an office with 5 or more people, subject to the additional requirement that the location must be chosen by the employee, without the employer setting any limitations on that location beyond what is reasonable to ensure the protection of trade secrets and employee safety") for at least 48 weeks out of the year, or a $5,000 per worker credit for workers who are remote for at least 50% of work days, available to any business with at least 300 employees.
Those numbers are sort of arbitrary, but I think they're in the right order of magnitude. After all, the per-employee facilities cost in the Bay Area (about $6,000 per year) is clearly not enough to convince businesses to change the way they do things, so it would have to be a lot more than that to force businesses to either adopt telecommuting or explain to their stockholders why they are passing up free money.
No, ATOL. Autonomous TakeOff and Landing.
That hasn't been true for many years. All modern large aircraft should at least have basic TCAS to warn the pilot if you're about to crash into other planes, and some newer planes, such as the A380, can automatically adjust course in autopilot mode to avoid a collision. Newer aircraft equipped with T2CASTM and similar should be largely immune to CFIT, too, automatically pulling up as needed, or at least that's my understanding.
Also, most modern aircraft, when flow into airports that have the proper equipment, can do autoland without pilot intervention, and a few aircraft can also do autonomous takeoff, though I don't think regulations currently allow them to enable it. So basically, once you taxi to the end of the runway, the best modern autopilots could, albeit illegally, literally take you to the taxiway at the other end of the other airport's runway without intervention except when things go wrong.
At-fault crashes per million miles is the only relevant metric for comparison purposes. The total number of miles driven just gives you the margin of error. You really don't need billions of miles driven to make a valid comparison, IMO.
That said, Tesla's actual self-driving mile count is still zero, to the best of my knowledge. Their current setup is incapable of making a number of critical driving decisions, including lane changes, turns, exits, stopping at traffic lights or stop signs, etc. Comparing a driver-as-a-backup system to a pure self-driving solution wouldn't be a fair comparison even if Waymo had as many miles as Tesla, because Waymo's miles wouldn't have a driver ready to intervene at a moment's notice.
So it is more like comparing a fairly rare ATOL-capable aircraft to a high-volume-manufactured aircraft with traditional autopilot in the air. No comparison is really possible or useful, because they're two very different animals.
A surprising number of items get sold by third-party sellers using one of several centralized warehousing services, in which the seller gets the product order and instructs a warehouse to send it out. This causes a surprising number of mistakes when the warehouse drops a product or substitutes a different one without telling anyone. It is often not the fault of the merchant.
But yes, I mostly try to avoid third-party merchants. I've had significantly worse luck with them than with Amazon themselves.
I'm pretty sure a paper sleeve wouldn't have helped. It looked like they didn't let the resin on the discs harden adequately before putting them into the cardboard slots, so part of the plastic came off when you pulled them out, and part of it got scarred while they were sliding them in. Either that or they didn't use enough hardener in that batch. Either way, it was pretty clearly a plastic fabrication mistake, and they would have stuck to a paper sleeve just as easily. :-/
I wish the number of times I bought something that was legitimately defective was small enough to count on one hand (even in binary). I once bought the Stargate SG-1 collection on DVD, and the discs were so badly scarred right out of the box that it took... I SEVEN sets just to successfully build one single complete set, by mixing and matching discs. I posted photos online.
This is, unfortunately, not particularly unusual these days. Manufacturing quality turned to crap a long time ago.
The demographics of the driver magically DO make Teslas less likely to get in wrecks. How many teenagers do you know who drive Teslas? The people with the highest accident risks don't drive such expensive cars, so you would automatically expect many fewer accidents, assuming all else is equal.
And IMO, they desperately need to change that. There are plenty of minor, highway-like streets in the Salinas, CA and Santa Cruz, CA areas where the average speed is 15 over what Tesla's nav system thinks is the posted limit (and might, in fact, be the posted limit). If you actually drive only 5 over, you risk causing serious accidents and possibly even getting killed by people angrily passing you in no-passing zones (that typically extend the entire length of the streets in question).
Arguably, the speed limits need to be fixed to be more realistic, but that's not nearly as easy to accomplish as removing a single 'if' statement, or adding an option flag in a menu to let you override the autosteer limit in a particular location.
Also, when they *do* update the speeds to be more realistic, no matter how many times you try to add the correct speed limits into the TomTom database from which Tesla sources its data, they'll never actually get updated. High Street in Santa Cruz has been 30 MPH for at least two years, and is still marked 25. The average traffic speed is 35 (5 over the posted limit, 10 over what Tesla's nav system thinks is the posted limit). If you don't disable AP on that road, you'll get run over. And cars routinely speed up to 45 MPH about two blocks before the speed limit actually changes to 40, so if you're still doing 30 (or worse, 25), you're *really* going to get run over.
In other words, such limits are fundamentally dangerous, because they take control of speed away from the driver, who is the only one qualified to determine what constitutes a safe speed on a particular road, given the current road conditions. Driving too slowly can be just as dangerous as speeding.
Useless statistic. Yes, that's ostensibly lower than the average (one per 13,000 cars) for all registered vehicles in the U.S., but without knowing how many miles the Teslas were driven, we can't know if that's actually low or high.
Typically, the number of accidents (and, thus, fatal accidents) is proportional to the number of miles driven, not the number of cars. Some cars sit in somebody's front yard rusting, and never even see the road except when another car isn't working. And people who are wealthy enough to afford Teslas are more likely to live close to work, and thus have shorter commutes, so they are exposed to fewer opportunities for wrecks. They're also less likely to be driving home for an hour or more after a long day of work, and thus less likely to suffer from fatigue-related crashes.
And even if you assume all of those confounding factors don't exist, there's still the elephant in the room, which is that most folks use AP only on streets where it has worked well for them in the past. Thus, the potential for AP-caused accidents is artificially reduced. If some other driver used it differently, that other driver could have very different results, making a general "this makes driving safer" conclusion impossible to reach without much more fine-grained data in which you compare the crash rates for various types of driving (city streets versus highways, urban versus rural, straight versus windy) independently with AutoPilot off versus on.
And realistically, you also need to separately compare AP unavailable versus AP off, because drivers may behave differently when they have deliberately disabled AP versus drivers who do not have AP. (This can determine to what extent regular use of AP makes drivers less situationally aware over time.)
In short, comparing the number of crashes to the number of vehicles is so prone to being skewed by other variables that it is almost useless as a metric for the safety of the vehicles. You might as well throw darts at a dartboard.
Personally, I think that AutoPilot reduces driver fatigue, which likely improves safety on the whole. But I'm not willing to state that definitively without actual data, which Tesla has thus far refused to provide. That's unfortunate, and it makes me wonder if they have something to hide. After all, if the data really were in their favor, you would expect them to be quick to release it. Unless, of course, they just haven't bothered to do any analysis, in which case I wonder about their competence.
In other words, I would say to Tesla, "Data or GTFO."
I think if it turns out Disney is pushing for this, the only appropriate response is mass rebellion, in the form of creating DeepFake porn starring Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Agree to stop only if and when they agree to stop being copyright thugs.
Bonus points if you synchronize the moans to the tune of "Ooh, Mickey, you're so fine".
Possibly, but it could also be that they are using crappy little speakers that don't reproduce lower mids adequately.
This is a blatantly false alarm, because A. no study has ever shown coffee to increase risk of cancer in humans with any real confidence, and B. multiple studies have shown that coffee reduces the risk of multiple varieties of cancer, including liver cancer, endometrial cancer, oral cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. And for all other types of cancer, results are neutral. The sole evidence in favor of coffee increasing cancer risk came from one study that suggested a weak correlation with increased childhood leukemia in children of mothers who drank coffee while pregnant, and even the evidence there is not very strong.
In other words, it's worse than a false alarm. It's exactly the opposite of what science is saying.
No, it flies in the face of mounting evidence to think that, so it is entirely unreasonable.
I think you're on the right track here. The difference between getting injured on the job and injured doing something fun, notwithstanding the availability of worker's comp, is that at work, you feel pressured to return to your job, where you're likely to get re-injured if you return too soon, whereas if you injure yourself at the gym because you have a non-physical job, that injury won't keep you from working, and you wont feel pressured to go back to whatever sport or exercise caused the injury before it is fully healed.