Re:Why not go back to consumer sorting.
on
Recycling Is Dying
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· Score: 1
Really Aluminum, glass, and steel are easy to recycle. Plastic and paper can be burned for energy or recycled. I am not a fan of "green" as I feel most are just nut balls but come on I see recycling as just the way we should throw stuff away.
I agree. It seems like the big problem is "single stream". I had never even heard of "single stream" until this article. I currently live in a place that has "dual stream" and I still find it odd not to have to separate the cans from the plastic. It is more convenient but I would be happy to do the other and if we did happen to have "single stream", I would still probably separate the paper from the cans. Does "single stream" really increase recycling enough to justify the added expense? My experience is that the people that are going to recycle are going to recycle anyways and although "dual stream" is more convenient than having 5 different bins, I don't really see the advantage of "single stream". On another note, the city I know with the highest recycling participation is the one that charges $1 per bag for trash. The problem isn't that recycling is too cheap, it's that landfills are even cheaper.
A drug user is not necessarily an addict, just as all those who drink beer are not alcoholics.
Even if that is the case, someone who is struggling financially and has chidren should not be purchasing high priced street drugs but should instead be taking care of their children.
in at least some cases the cost of following up is greater than the amount saved by booting those that abuse the system. see: drug testing for welfare recipients
so, is the money actually what's important to you? or are you just a hardass that can't stand to see someone get something for free on principle?
In cases where you are following up on every person then yes I can see that but just like with drug testing, there is no reason that you couldn't do random sampling of 1 in 10 or even 1 in 1000. The OP never said that you had to followup with everyone but rather if they would do any followup at all to see if it's making any different or if this would just be another government program that is assumed to be working as intended. I give you "cash for clunkers" as an example of government waste that did nothing but benefit mostly the middle class with 2 cars while did nothing to actually help the poor or probably improve gas mileage as most of the real clunkers were excluded from the program and people who were driving them couldn't move up easily as many of the next steps up were trashed by the program.
Whether you agree or disagree with drug testing, the cost is just a ruse. Not only could you test randomly, you could do like the IRS does audits and only test 1 in 10 or 1 in 1000 people making the cost negligible. You could also use the already existing anonymous welfare fraud reporting system for people to report suspected drug users so you could more carefully select which people you "audit".
The big thing I hear about with drug testing though is that it hurts the children but if the parent is on drugs and we are not going to take the children away then maybe a compromise would be to continue to give them food stamps but at the same time continuously monitor them for drug rehab because it's not good for the children to be in a house with a drug addict either.
The downsides that I see are:
1) Most towns already have free internet access at the local libraries so we are subsidizing something that already exists.
2) Even if you wanted it in their homes, it would be much cheaper in most cases to run broadband to low income apartment
complexes than it would be subsidize each person in that complex. Are there any plans to try to "group" the access to
minimize cost.
3) Even subsidized broadband is still an extra expense as is the hardware necessary to connect to the broadband. It would
be cheaper and more efficient to have public internet cafes like most other countries (making them cheap or free) than it
would be to subsidize broadband.
Subsidizing broadband might help the lower middle class but will do very little to help the truly poor. Cheap or free internet cafes would be a lot cheaper and help a lot more people.
0) If denominator is zero, provide abusive error messages to the caller for not checking their inputs.
Yeah, that was the first option and you definitely should check your inputs but many times when you check your inputs and the denominator actually is zero then your program needs to decide how to continue. In the most common case I run into, setting the denominator to something small like 0.0001 and letting the program continue is an acceptable solution.
I think infinity makes a bit more sense than zero. And max is the closest thing to infinity.
I think the biggest problem is that depending on the application, you might want different things to happen. I find in my code, that I tend to want one of 4 mutually exclusive things to happen: 1) If denominator is zero, die. 2) If denominator is zero, set denominator to 1 and continue. 3) If denominator is zero, set denominator to 0.0001 (or some other similiar small number) and continue. 4) If denominator is zero, set final result of x/0 to zero.
Honestly, in my experience #4 (which is what the original poster suggested everyone should want) is rarely what I want. I almost always want one of the first 3. I do occasionally want #4 but setting the final result to zero just happens to not be the use cases that I personally run into the most.
A melon field can be plowed under one season and replanted the next season.
Yes, annuals CAN be skipped but are farmers actually doing that? Is there any attempt in California to say that farmers can only use water to keep alive their existing perennials and aren't allowed to grow annuals during a drought?
Or to put it another way (to more accurately reflect the energies involved), would you rather be hit in the arm by a 30mm round (taking your arm off), or hit by several dozen 9mm rounds.
The problem isn't the impact, its all the kinetic energy needs to go somewhere. Either into the Earth which vaporizes rock and spreads it around, or in the atmosphere that flash cooks the hemisphere
If I'm in a tank or aircraft then I'll much better off with the 9mm. A huge fireball the size of new york could take out the planet. Distributed irregularly across the planet, many of those pieces would land in uninhabited parts of earth. Many would also land on houses, etc, and could potentially still kill millions of people but that's not the same as causing a global winter.
That's assuming that the nuke actually blows it up. Nukes are FAR less effective in space because there's no atmosphere for the thermal energy to create a big shockwave, and there's no solid ground beneath it to amplify the intended direction of said shockwave.
Still though, nudging is probably a better approach.
The assumption everyone is making is that you would use a nuke to blow up the NEO. I would think it would make more sense to use the nuke to "nudge" the NEO. If you place or fire the nuke at the side facing earth (or the side opposite the direction you want it to go if that's different) then when it detonates it should blast the NEO in the opposite direction. We've already thought of doing this with spaceships which basically propel themself forward by firing nukes out the back. This seems like it would be the simplest way to move the NEO. Staying in one piece would actually be preferred with breaking up being the less desirable but hopefully still improved situation.
The eventual goal would be to automate away all the jobs that people don't like to do but I'm not sure that's 100% possible. Yeah, I like my job but I still would rather be on the beach sipping a margarita and/or pursueing one of my passions that I can't get paid for. If everyone was only allowed to work for 20 hours per week then presumably they could spend the rest of the time volunteering to do whatever job they would prefer to do. You would have to make sure somehow that it doesn't end up like high school football though where they limit the number of hours of practice so instead they have "optional voluntary" practice that is neither truly optional or voluntary because if you don't show up then you mysteriously get benched.
See how it is defined in terms of individuals and rational self interest? By definition, government has nothing to do with the process.
The government has a lot to do with the process but more importantly, the government has the ability to regulate the "commons". The reason that there are still fish in the ocean is because governments have come in with regulations on how many fish you can take out and when. The government can do the same thing with water. Without some authority setting limits, it's a free for all until nothing is less.
Why do you think water has no perceived value in the first place? It's because government has "stepped in" for over a century.
There are probably plenty of ways that the government has "stepped in" and made it worse but the government is good at a few things related to this area. One, is the government is best positioned for protecting the "tragedy of the commons". Secondly, the government is good at building large infrastructure and funding "insurance policies" which is what a desalination plant is when it's raining. And lastly, the government has the ability to tax water and raise the price of existing water to be on par with what it would cost coming from a desalination plant before the plant has even been built reducing the demand. Charging more for water makes more sense than rationing it. Most people's home water bill is an insignificant portion of their budget. The big abusers like golf courses and farmers though would quickly come up with better ways of doing business (even if that includes leaving the area or only planting crops when it rains)
That is insane. Desalination produces water for hundreds of times the cost that farmers are charged for the water they squander.
Then the first step is to increase the cost of water during a drought to be at least equal to what it would cost from a desalination plant. This would encourage conservation and might solve the problem without the need for new plants. Put a tax on water to make water cost the same as desalinated water and stockpile that money to build new desalination plants.
Are you willing to pay money for the land, pay money to build them, and pay money for the maintenance for when we don't need them? Or will you begin whining about all this useless infrastructure at that point?
Governments have been doing this for thousands of years. There are even stories in the bible about "saving for a rainy day" or in this case, saving for a drought. The US Government has caves all over this country full of honey, cheese, corn, and military equipment not to mention nukes that will never be used "just in case". Current estimate is that the drought cost California over 1.5 billion last year. If they build a desalination plant and then it rained it would be worth it to spend a few million a year keeping the plant maintained as an insurance policy for the next drought. It would be no difference than buying an insurance policy to protect against drought.
No, farming in an area when you absolutely need to have water transported in so that you can harvest a crop doesn't work in the long run.
Sure, it does. We've been doing it for thousands of years. In this case the only problem is that they are taking it from a place that still needs it. That obviously doesn't work. On the other hand, taking it from the ocean there would be an infinite supply. That is the correct solution. While they're at it, they should build up capacity past what is needed and use some of the excess desalinated water to replenish the water table that they so recklessly deplinished.
The problem is that the other people like having water. Are you going to steal their water if they won't give it willingly?
California is on the coast. There is more than enough water in the ocean to go around. The article about silicon valley nailed it. Even with the huge drought in California, water has no perceived value. This is one place where the government needs to probably step in. It needs to build a bunch of desalination plants. Desalination plants are relatively cheap, the only problem is that they are a huge risk to investors because if it does rain then they become worthless. Instead of waiting until it becomes more desperate, they need to stop hoping it will rain and just build the stupid things. Build them on barges if you want, that way you can sell them if it does rain but even if it does rain, you are so backlogged that you can still probably use the desalination plants.
I don't know if we're actually there yet, but at some point, we may need to start seriously discussing what it means to not have to have full employment while having the ability to produce more than ever.
We're already there in some ways. Many people could live on less than 40 hours per week. Besides people just wanting more and more, I think the main reason we haven't seen this yet though is because it will always be easier to train one person to work 60 hours than 3 people to each work 20.
If someone can come up with a basic income idea that doesn't have us ending up as entitled proles who expect the government to pay for everything
You're implying that basic income is the only solution. One simple solution without resorting to basic income would be to make it illegal to work more than 20 hours per week. Assuming the same amount of work needs to get done then this would effectively double the number of available jobs. I'm actually surprised politicians haven't tried this yet. You could effectively control unemployment by raising and lowering the number of hours allowed per week. We have overtime laws but they are a joke. Most people are exempt and even the ones that aren't time and half is still cheaper than the additional overhead of more employees.
You need people to maintain the robots, so while productivity skyrockets due to the automation, you don't get rid of workers completely.
Sure, you have one person maintaining 100 robots that produce 100k widgets per hour. How many widgets do you need? A large factory might employ 25 people and produce enough goods for 1M people.
No, the robots get to have work. When manufacturing went to china, a factory with 2000 people in the USA got shut down and a factory with 3000 people in china got opened. As manufacturing is moving back to the USA, the same factory with 3000 people in china is getting shut down and a factory with 25 people in the USA is being opened. That's one of the main reasons that it is cost effective to start moving stuff back to the USA.
From technical standpoint, apple is hopelessly late to the game.
Sure, they have clients on a bunch of devices but spotify is still sorely lacking in many areas mostly which includes actually listening to their customers. Take explicit lyrics. Despite years of requests, they refuse to put a explicit filter which effectively excludes a huge chunk of family friendly and business friendly environments. To make matters worse, they can't even hit the other end of the market where a quick google search shows a large group of people who WANT to listen to explicit lyrics getting annoyed that it plays the clean version instead. A quality service in just this one area could steal a good chunk of market share from both ends of spotify's base as most people either want to listen to explicit, don't want to, or are not allowed to because they are at work, etc...
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration supports the 300K per officer number. Their site: http://www.nhtsa.gov/ is a standard impossible to use, ugly and cumbersome site, so digging for the data to back up their statistic will be a task for the reader. I can only imagine that they don't include all police officers in that statistic, and only include those that wrote at least 1 traffic ticket. After all Federal Officers would be considered sworn, but in few instances would have jurisdiction to right a ticket. Many State and Local Officers would have the jurisdiction, but job duties wouldn't put them in position to write traffic tickets.
No, those numbers have to be wrong. That would make only 20k officers in the US. Just NYC has 40k officers. Granted some of them might not be traffic cops but the 300k per officer is misleading at best but most likely flat out wrong.
If most people leave their homes for their commute to work at (say) 8am, then calling for a car at 7.55 is going to be an exercise in frustration.
That's only if they are oversold. If they keep enough for daily peek demand they can charge 90% of car ownership during peak time (which still saves the driver money) and all the profit can be had during offpeak time where they can charge half price or less and still make considerable money as the peak drivers are really who are footing the majority of the bill. Electricity is already billed like this commercially where electricity during the night when there is plenty of capacity and little demand is charged at a lower rate than during peak times. Internet bandwidth, spot prices on amazon, and a host of other industries including the car rental industry already do this.
So they're going to phase out fossil fuels by the end of the century, by burning it all before the end of the century...
Duh!! New technology doesn't replace old technology until it does something better than the previous. The government can *try* to force it by taxing the old technology, outlawing it, etc.. but it only works halfway.
To make matters worse most "green" technology requires a ton of fossil fuels to make and will be almost impossible to produce once oil is gone. I'm actually worried about this more than the loss of gasoline. It's not just the energy required to build stuff but also there are a ton of products being produce with plastics, etc.. produced from the waste products of oil.
300k per traffic cop which pays for several other police officers who do real police work.
I *might* believe that but it still means that losing traffic fines isn't the complete disaster that it was made out to be. If only 1% of your force is collecting fines and it only makes up 10% of your budget then it's fairly easy to absorb and not as dire as the article makes it out to be.
Of the two industries I see being hit worse is all the professional drivers and possibly even worse I think car ownership will plummet. Why would I have a car parked for 23 hours a day when I can just call a self-driving pod and have it arrive in minutes?
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Really Aluminum, glass, and steel are easy to recycle. Plastic and paper can be burned for energy or recycled. I am not a fan of "green" as I feel most are just nut balls but come on I see recycling as just the way we should throw stuff away.
I agree. It seems like the big problem is "single stream". I had never even heard of "single stream" until this article. I currently live in a place that has "dual stream" and I still find it odd not to have to separate the cans from the plastic. It is more convenient but I would be happy to do the other and if we did happen to have "single stream", I would still probably separate the paper from the cans. Does "single stream" really increase recycling enough to justify the added expense? My experience is that the people that are going to recycle are going to recycle anyways and although "dual stream" is more convenient than having 5 different bins, I don't really see the advantage of "single stream". On another note, the city I know with the highest recycling participation is the one that charges $1 per bag for trash. The problem isn't that recycling is too cheap, it's that landfills are even cheaper.
A drug user is not necessarily an addict, just as all those who drink beer are not alcoholics.
Even if that is the case, someone who is struggling financially and has chidren
should not be purchasing high priced street drugs but should instead be taking
care of their children.
in at least some cases the cost of following up is greater than the amount saved by booting those that abuse the system. see: drug testing for welfare recipients
so, is the money actually what's important to you? or are you just a hardass that can't stand to see someone get something for free on principle?
In cases where you are following up on every person then yes I can see that but just like with drug testing, there is no reason that you
couldn't do random sampling of 1 in 10 or even 1 in 1000. The OP never said that you had to followup with everyone but rather if they
would do any followup at all to see if it's making any different or if this would just be another government program that is assumed to
be working as intended. I give you "cash for clunkers" as an example of government waste that did nothing but benefit mostly the
middle class with 2 cars while did nothing to actually help the poor or probably improve gas mileage as most of the real clunkers were
excluded from the program and people who were driving them couldn't move up easily as many of the next steps up were trashed by
the program.
Whether you agree or disagree with drug testing, the cost is just a ruse. Not only could you test randomly, you could do like the IRS does audits
and only test 1 in 10 or 1 in 1000 people making the cost negligible. You could also use the already existing anonymous welfare fraud reporting
system for people to report suspected drug users so you could more carefully select which people you "audit".
The big thing I hear about with drug testing though is that it hurts the children but if the parent is on drugs and we are not going to take the children
away then maybe a compromise would be to continue to give them food stamps but at the same time continuously monitor them for drug rehab
because it's not good for the children to be in a house with a drug addict either.
The downsides that I see are:
1) Most towns already have free internet access at the local libraries so we are subsidizing something that already exists.
2) Even if you wanted it in their homes, it would be much cheaper in most cases to run broadband to low income apartment
complexes than it would be subsidize each person in that complex. Are there any plans to try to "group" the access to
minimize cost.
3) Even subsidized broadband is still an extra expense as is the hardware necessary to connect to the broadband. It would
be cheaper and more efficient to have public internet cafes like most other countries (making them cheap or free) than it
would be to subsidize broadband.
Subsidizing broadband might help the lower middle class but will do very little to help the truly poor. Cheap or free internet cafes
would be a lot cheaper and help a lot more people.
I prefer the default option
0) If denominator is zero, provide abusive error messages to the caller for not checking their inputs.
Yeah, that was the first option and you definitely should check your inputs but many
times when you check your inputs and the denominator actually is zero then your
program needs to decide how to continue. In the most common case I run into, setting
the denominator to something small like 0.0001 and letting the program continue is
an acceptable solution.
I think infinity makes a bit more sense than zero. And max is the closest thing to infinity.
I think the biggest problem is that depending on the application, you might want different things to happen.
I find in my code, that I tend to want one of 4 mutually exclusive things to happen:
1) If denominator is zero, die.
2) If denominator is zero, set denominator to 1 and continue.
3) If denominator is zero, set denominator to 0.0001 (or some other similiar small number) and continue.
4) If denominator is zero, set final result of x/0 to zero.
Honestly, in my experience #4 (which is what the original poster suggested everyone should want) is rarely
what I want. I almost always want one of the first 3. I do occasionally want #4 but setting the final result
to zero just happens to not be the use cases that I personally run into the most.
A melon field can be plowed under one season and replanted the next season.
Yes, annuals CAN be skipped but are farmers actually doing that? Is there any attempt in California to say that farmers can only use water to keep alive their existing perennials and aren't allowed to grow annuals during a drought?
Or to put it another way (to more accurately reflect the energies involved), would you rather be hit in the arm by a 30mm round (taking your arm off), or hit by several dozen 9mm rounds.
The problem isn't the impact, its all the kinetic energy needs to go somewhere. Either into the Earth which vaporizes rock and spreads it around, or in the atmosphere that flash cooks the hemisphere
If I'm in a tank or aircraft then I'll much better off with the 9mm. A huge fireball the size of new york could take out the planet. Distributed irregularly across the planet, many of those pieces would land in uninhabited parts of earth. Many would also land on houses, etc, and could potentially still kill millions of people but that's not the same as causing a global winter.
That's assuming that the nuke actually blows it up. Nukes are FAR less effective in space because there's no atmosphere for the thermal energy to create a big shockwave, and there's no solid ground beneath it to amplify the intended direction of said shockwave.
Still though, nudging is probably a better approach.
The assumption everyone is making is that you would use a nuke to blow up the NEO. I would think it would make more sense to use the nuke to "nudge" the NEO. If you place or fire the nuke at the side facing earth (or the side opposite the direction you want it to go if that's different) then when it detonates it should blast the NEO in the opposite direction. We've already thought of doing this with spaceships which basically propel themself forward by firing nukes out the back. This seems like it would be the simplest way to move the NEO. Staying in one piece would actually be preferred with breaking up being the less desirable but hopefully still improved situation.
The eventual goal would be to automate away all the jobs that people don't like to do
but I'm not sure that's 100% possible. Yeah, I like my job but I still would rather be on
the beach sipping a margarita and/or pursueing one of my passions that I can't get
paid for. If everyone was only allowed to work for 20 hours per week then presumably
they could spend the rest of the time volunteering to do whatever job they would
prefer to do. You would have to make sure somehow that it doesn't end up like high
school football though where they limit the number of hours of practice so instead
they have "optional voluntary" practice that is neither truly optional or voluntary
because if you don't show up then you mysteriously get benched.
See how it is defined in terms of individuals and rational self interest? By definition, government has nothing to do with the process.
The government has a lot to do with the process but more importantly, the
government has the ability to regulate the "commons". The reason that there
are still fish in the ocean is because governments have come in with regulations
on how many fish you can take out and when. The government can do the same
thing with water. Without some authority setting limits, it's a free for all until
nothing is less.
Why do you think water has no perceived value in the first place? It's because government has "stepped in" for over a century.
There are probably plenty of ways that the government has "stepped in" and made it worse but the government is good at a few things
related to this area. One, is the government is best positioned for protecting the "tragedy of the commons". Secondly, the government
is good at building large infrastructure and funding "insurance policies" which is what a desalination plant is when it's raining. And
lastly, the government has the ability to tax water and raise the price of existing water to be on par with what it would cost coming from
a desalination plant before the plant has even been built reducing the demand. Charging more for water makes more sense than
rationing it. Most people's home water bill is an insignificant portion of their budget. The big abusers like golf courses and farmers
though would quickly come up with better ways of doing business (even if that includes leaving the area or only planting crops when it
rains)
That is insane. Desalination produces water for hundreds of times the cost that farmers are charged for the water they squander.
Then the first step is to increase the cost of water during a drought to be at least equal to what it would cost from a desalination plant. This would encourage conservation and might solve the problem without the need for new plants. Put a tax on water to make water cost the same as desalinated water and stockpile that money to build new desalination plants.
Are you willing to pay money for the land, pay money to build them, and pay money for the maintenance for when we don't need them? Or will you begin whining about all this useless infrastructure at that point?
Governments have been doing this for thousands of years. There are even stories in the bible about "saving for a rainy day" or in this case, saving
for a drought. The US Government has caves all over this country full of honey, cheese, corn, and military equipment not to mention nukes that
will never be used "just in case". Current estimate is that the drought cost California over 1.5 billion last year. If they build a desalination plant and
then it rained it would be worth it to spend a few million a year keeping the plant maintained as an insurance policy for the next drought. It would be
no difference than buying an insurance policy to protect against drought.
No, farming in an area when you absolutely need to have water transported in so that you can harvest a crop doesn't work in the long run.
Sure, it does. We've been doing it for thousands of years. In this case the only problem is that they are taking it from a place that still needs it.
That obviously doesn't work. On the other hand, taking it from the ocean there would be an infinite supply. That is the correct solution. While
they're at it, they should build up capacity past what is needed and use some of the excess desalinated water to replenish the water table that
they so recklessly deplinished.
The problem is that the other people like having water.
Are you going to steal their water if they won't give it willingly?
California is on the coast. There is more than enough water in the ocean to go around. The article about silicon valley nailed it.
Even with the huge drought in California, water has no perceived value. This is one place where the government needs to
probably step in. It needs to build a bunch of desalination plants. Desalination plants are relatively cheap, the only problem is
that they are a huge risk to investors because if it does rain then they become worthless. Instead of waiting until it becomes
more desperate, they need to stop hoping it will rain and just build the stupid things. Build them on barges if you want, that
way you can sell them if it does rain but even if it does rain, you are so backlogged that you can still probably use the desalination
plants.
I don't know if we're actually there yet, but at some point, we may need to start seriously discussing what it means to not have to have full employment while having the ability to produce more than ever.
We're already there in some ways. Many people could live on less than 40 hours per week. Besides people just wanting more and more, I think the main reason we haven't seen this yet though is because it will always be easier to train one person to work 60 hours than 3 people to each work 20.
If someone can come up with a basic income idea that doesn't have us ending up as entitled proles who expect the government to pay for everything
You're implying that basic income is the only solution. One simple solution without resorting to basic income would be to make it illegal to work more than 20 hours per week. Assuming the same amount of work needs to get done then this would effectively double the number of available jobs. I'm actually surprised politicians haven't tried this yet. You could effectively control unemployment by raising and lowering the number of hours allowed per week. We have overtime laws but they are a joke. Most people are exempt and even the ones that aren't time and half is still cheaper than the additional overhead of more employees.
You need people to maintain the robots, so while productivity skyrockets due to the automation, you don't get rid of workers completely.
Sure, you have one person maintaining 100 robots that produce 100k widgets per hour. How many widgets do you need? A large factory might employ 25 people and produce enough goods for 1M people.
so we get to have work too?
No, the robots get to have work. When manufacturing went to china, a factory with 2000 people in the USA got shut down and a factory with 3000 people in china got opened. As manufacturing is moving back to the USA, the same factory with 3000 people in china is getting shut down and a factory with 25 people in the USA is being opened. That's one of the main reasons that it is cost effective to start moving stuff back to the USA.
From technical standpoint, apple is hopelessly late to the game.
Sure, they have clients on a bunch of devices but spotify is still sorely lacking in many areas mostly which includes actually listening to their customers. Take explicit lyrics. Despite years of requests, they refuse to put a explicit filter which effectively excludes a huge chunk of family friendly and business friendly environments. To make matters worse, they can't even hit the other end of the market where a quick google search shows a large group of people who WANT to listen to explicit lyrics getting annoyed that it plays the clean version instead. A quality service in just this one area could steal a good chunk of market share from both ends of spotify's base as most people either want to listen to explicit, don't want to, or are not allowed to because they are at work, etc...
http://www.statisticbrain.com/driving-citation-statistics/
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration supports the 300K per officer number. Their site: http://www.nhtsa.gov/ is a standard impossible to use, ugly and cumbersome site, so digging for the data to back up their statistic will be a task for the reader. I can only imagine that they don't include all police officers in that statistic, and only include those that wrote at least 1 traffic ticket. After all Federal Officers would be considered sworn, but in few instances would have jurisdiction to right a ticket. Many State and Local Officers would have the jurisdiction, but job duties wouldn't put them in position to write traffic tickets.
No, those numbers have to be wrong. That would make only 20k officers in the US.
Just NYC has 40k officers. Granted some of them might not be traffic cops but the 300k
per officer is misleading at best but most likely flat out wrong.
If most people leave their homes for their commute to work at (say) 8am, then calling for a car at 7.55 is going to be an exercise in frustration.
That's only if they are oversold. If they keep enough for daily peek demand they can charge
90% of car ownership during peak time (which still saves the driver money) and all the
profit can be had during offpeak time where they can charge half price or less and still make
considerable money as the peak drivers are really who are footing the majority of the bill.
Electricity is already billed like this commercially where electricity during the night when there
is plenty of capacity and little demand is charged at a lower rate than during peak times.
Internet bandwidth, spot prices on amazon, and a host of other industries including the car
rental industry already do this.
So they're going to phase out fossil fuels by the end of the century, by burning it all before the end of the century...
Duh!! New technology doesn't replace old technology until it does something better than the previous. The government can *try*
to force it by taxing the old technology, outlawing it, etc.. but it only works halfway.
To make matters worse most "green" technology requires a ton of fossil fuels to make and will be almost impossible to produce once
oil is gone. I'm actually worried about this more than the loss of gasoline. It's not just the energy required to build stuff but also there
are a ton of products being produce with plastics, etc.. produced from the waste products of oil.
300k per traffic cop which pays for several other police officers who do real police work.
I *might* believe that but it still means that losing traffic fines isn't the complete disaster
that it was made out to be. If only 1% of your force is collecting fines and it only makes
up 10% of your budget then it's fairly easy to absorb and not as dire as the article makes
it out to be.
Of the two industries I see being hit worse is all the professional drivers and possibly
even worse I think car ownership will plummet. Why would I have a car parked for 23
hours a day when I can just call a self-driving pod and have it arrive in minutes?