Going into this assuming a constant 20 hour per day usage of every car in the fleet is called looking at things with rose colored glasses.
Knock that down to 6 hours a day, to have enough cars to accommodate the extremely busy times, and then idle a portion of the fleet waiting for the next call (probably by parking all over the city and powering up the closest car to the next fare).
Now you're down to $32,000/year.
Now subtract:
Insurance.
Gas or or power recharging
Inspections/Maintenance
Regular cleanings
Maybe you're looking at $15,000 per year after all that.
How much will a 4 person electric vehicle cost? $60,000? So that's 4 years til you see the first penny of actual profit. Unless you lease or borrow, then you're looking at financing costs/interest, etc. It'll allow you to see positive cashflow each month, at the cost of less actual profit over a longer period of time. Well, scratch that. No one is going to lease you the cars for the fleet - you're going to drive them into the ground by the time the lease is up. But Ubers big, they can obtain other financing either borrowing from banks or issuing bonds, for 4, 5, 6 or 7%.
And what will the useful life of these cars be? If they're averaging 30 mph for their fares, that's 63,000 miles per year. (not including other incidental mileage such as traveling to the next fare, returning for maintenance, getting a fresh charge, etc).
So after 4 years you've got a car with 250,000 miles. You got next to no resale value there. And this is when you start seeing actual profit from operating the vehicle (again if it was paid for in cash).
>the touch bar which removes physical keys from the keyboards of high end users - the one most likely to want to use physical keys.
And the ones least likely to be looking at their keyboard while they work.
Seriously.
OK, a macbook keyboard and screen are close together so shifting eyes isn't too much. Adding a external monitor? And then being supposed to switch where you're looking like that?
One of the important things (yet another) that people in general (and Tim specifically) forget that Steve Jobs did was, was not messing with the Pro users when rolling out new technologies. That's why the iMac was the first one with USB ports, to give device manufacturers time to write driver that would presumably be tested by the consumer level buyers before messing with the Pro work flow. Which is what they ought to have done with USB C. Rather than yank out all the ports that many pros use in order to saddle them with dongles and shit.
Besides getting rid of one of their best innovations in a decade, the Magsafe connector, just to make sure all the ports look the same...
* 2013 Macbook Pro, iPhone owner, etc... Have now seen two hardware updates that I felt safe ignoring. That's rather sad. A) Apparently Apple doesn't want our money anymore or B) we're a week away from 2017, and for 3+ years, the only upgrade path to better performance from my laptop has been to shed MacOS.
>Nonsense. What do you imagine will happen automation arrives at farms? The supply of food will increase, and the price will decrease. Same thing for trucking and the volume of goods carried down the world's roadways. The volume of cargo will go up, and the cost to move it will drop. Thats more economic productivity, which means more for all. Simply awesome.
Short sighted and fails to see many pitfalls.
First off, automation will only be available to those who can afford it. IE multinational corporations. Whether that's good or bad is your perspective, but it will spell the end of many small businesses. Many will sell, some will take on bank debt to try to compete under the new "rules" of labor being a one-time fixed cost that you amortize over an amount of years, rather than being able to pay as they go. That, or they'll cut wages even lower than they already are. And that work force was a million people in 2012.
Second, independantly of that, transportation is another industry that's being threatened with being automated away. That's 6.8 million people (3 million truck drivers, people loading, unloading, etc). Not counting independent contractors, owner/operators, which are very prevalent.
So, food is now cheaper, but you've taken away the means for millions and millions of people to actually purchase food.
And you last supposition, the volume of cargo will go up and the price to move it will drop. That's not correct - the cost to ship things doesn't drop as more stuff needs to get shipped, it rises as producers with more and more product to ship bid against one another in an effort to secure access to a limited resource. Gasoline prices stay constant, tire costs are constant, and the trucks themselves are fixed costs - you don't achieve new economies of scale by shipping more and more, you're locked in battle fighting over the same resources as not only your competition in that industry, but with every industry that has goods they want to ship to market. In the short term, that's higher profit margins for transportation companies, but in the longer term, that means they'll need to expand their fleets to capture more of that lost revenue - whose cost will be passed on to us as well.
So. We produce more food. We have far fewer people able to afford it. You lose tons of small/family farms in order to redistribute that income to Wall Street. And shipping prices most certainly rise, not just for foodstuffs, but for anything else that could be shipped on those same trucks as well.
We were attacked by a group of stateless outlaws on 9/11.
We retaliated against them shortly after, and opted to go after the state that had provided them sanctuary, and overthrew Taliban.
And then the Bush Administration provided fake evidence to the world about WMD's and terror connections in Iraq. When someone that knew better said something, they outed the fact that his wife was a CIA agent, putting her and her contacts at severe risk.
And then they invaded Iraq, overthrew Saddam, created a HUGE power vacuum, and the entire Baath party out on the street, military included. So you gave them zero reason to do anything but fight against the invaders. And provided a training ground for the worlds insurgents to come and practice their urban warfare skills, and spread out from there.
So yes. The middle east was already an unstable place, but Bush/Cheney Wars were entirely unnecessary, avoidable, and had horrendous side effects for us, the Iraqi's and the entire region.
It's a late 2013 model, Retina display, upgraded SSD.
As has been discussed to death already, Apples refresh gave me zero reason to want to upgrade. No performance benefits anywhere to be found.
And now, with this revelation, should my computer shit the bed, I'd probably go looking for a similar model on the used market than go with a new one.
Hopefully Apples next update in 2018 (given its current product life cycle) remedies that - give us a upgrade path to greater performance, the ability to upgrade and service some of the components ourselves. Oh, and bring back the Magsafe power adapter. I know my computer survived two near death incidents at coffee shops thanks to Magsafe, I can't image why in the world they'ed take that away. Oh, so we can have 4 matching ports, rather the 3 USB-C's and one power connector.
I'm getting to the point where I think 80% of what I do could be done with Linux with the same exact programs, 90-95% if i wanted to learn new things like GIMP, but I just prefer Mac OS X's look and feel. But the trajectory at Apple since Steve's death has me starting to think that I'm not a wanted customer anymore. I'd say that maybe mac's are just becoming expensive accessories to iPhones and iPods, but that can't be - you can't even plug the latest iPhone into the latest MacBook, after all!.
The Tax Foundation only had 2005 numbers available when I bookmarked the page a month or two ago. And i know things have changed since then, but none of your links provide the full picture, so I"m going to post this one for some historical data:
As of 2005, the States that paid more to the Federal Government than the spending they received in return were:
New Jersey Nevada Connecticut New Hampshire Minnesota Illinois Delaware California New York Colorado Massachusetts Wisconsin Washington Michigan Oregon Texas and Florida
Rhode Island was break even.
The rest of the states, at that point, were the recipients of that taxation.
You realize that you make a ton of money selling food to other states? Can you imagine what would happen to incomes in Nebraska if they only produced enough food for themselves?
Except OP is speaking factually, and you're just making stuff up based on what you want to believe, which is 100% wrong. A little research might help you not be an idiot, not that it matters since you're just an anonymous coward...
California sends far more money back up to the Federal Government than it gets back. It's the red states that are typically the subsidized ones, receiving back from the Federal Government far more than they pay into it.
Unfortunately, Canada is a bit too gold for many of us. But who knows, with a coal industry about to get revitalized, maybe Canada will take on more tropical temperatures in the coming years...
What so many fail to realize is that the Blue states are net exporters of Federal Tax dollars. We pay far more than $1 for every $1 of federal spending that comes back to our states. The Red states, on the other hand, suck off the teats of the blue states. You'll see no improvement, only even fewer tax dollars to support you than you already get.
It no more cheating than the gerrymandering the GOP has done (and now, will continue to do), redrawing districts to lump as many voters from the opposing party in the fewest number of districts as possible.
South Florida has long seemed like a separate state than the rest of Florida, too... But, the Constitution says that states can't be divided up after they've been established.
If California did such a move, it would essentially guarantee Red leadership for the rest of the country. Or more likely, would cause other Blue states to follow suit.
Part of me thinks that wouldn't be so bad, but on the other, if we're believing that the election was affected by other countries interfering with our politics in order to produce an outcome that was more desirable, it would probably be a gift beyond their wildest dreams to see the US splinter into two or three different countries.
Logistically, there's also the problem of Federal debt (among so many other things) - who assumes it?
Far from it. The Alt-Right is their own beast, not to be confused with the regular Republicans that embraced them and welcomed them into their party in order to give them a chance at... I don't even know, the GOP doesn't much like attempting to govern anymore.
Let me inherit a few hundred million dollar real estate empire, and I'll show you some grand accomplishments, too.
Seriously. What has he done? Blow up casinos? Run a fake university? He made an image of rich and gets to sell his name. That's all.
The stupid thing is that the thing that got him famous in his supporters eyes is saying "you're fired", NOT hiring people or creating jobs. That's who they think will spur the economy, a guy that fires people. But none of them claim to the the brightest bulbs, now do they?
I had a motorola atrix once. Easily my least favorite/least durable phone ever. I had an otter box case even, it slipped out of my hand from two feet above the ground, landed on the top corner of the phone, and entire screen turned into a spiderweb of cracks. Maybe other motorola's faired better?
Seems like the future for manufacturing in the US is the Elon Musk approach - factories employing as much automation as possible; those will provide jobs for the contractors that build them, but thereafter not so much.
Compared to his "gigafactory" which will make batteries and employ 6,500 people, the future of Tesla manufacturing will be that there are no people on the production line, at all.
Everyone loves to complain how we lost our manufacturing to China, but the truth is we began losing it a LONG time ago with the "invention" of automation. Companies bringing their manufacturing back to the U.S. will earn big rounds of applause, but in all likelihood, will only be doing so because they're determining that it's cheaper to do without the humans at all.
Actually, they've ported Apple Music to Android. I bought a android phone with an SD card for the express purpose of having that as my jukebox in my car; beats paying whatever it costs for the 128 GB iPhone.
(The app is mostly geared toward getting you to buy media from Apple, or become a subscriber to their streaming service, but also lets you download the contents your iTunes playlists to play locally from the phone)
That's pretty much the case for most technology offered in the last 5-10 years. Outside of gaming and a few other use cases, there just isn't a real reason to upgrade as rapidly as we did before.
I'm writing this on a late 2013 MacBook Pro. which, for me, is the longest lasting computer I've had, at least as the one I primarily. Short of hardware failure, I don't expect to need to buy a new model til at least 2018. Though, I may need to replace the battery soon, but that's just an effect of the computer being so useful for so long.
In their defense, upgrading their watch battery hasn't resulted in said watches getting engulfed in flames. That's pretty good when you think about it.
(Also coming from an iSheep, though I can't imagine ever wanting an iWatch)
Why rag on Apple about this? Maybe I'm mistaken, but can you name a smartphone maker who manufactures in the US? Or PC vendor? But Apple alone is the fall guy?
Is it just me to wonder why browser need gigabytes of memory just to display a webpage? They receive text, format it according to CSS rules, display relatively small sized images, and, yes, execute Javascript. Still, a HUGE webpage is still a tiny amount of data.
Considering that entire operating systems used to run comfortably on systems with 32MB of RAM in yesteryear, and could display all this media, it just astounds me that systems now require 4-8GB to provide a comfortable browsing experience.
Even if Chromes memory footprint has shrunk a little, i'm certain it still uses an obscene amount of RAM relative to what it actually does most the time.
Donalds sole saving grace is that he has never been in public service, so his communications, deliberations, etc are all still hidden from view. So instead, the only thing we can use to measure in on his judgement and soundness of mind is, well, the words he's said.
Slashdot Mirror
The post I was replying to specifically believed Uber could get 20 hour per day, 7 day a week, 50 week a year utilization out of their cars.
That's the only way their $105,000/year/car calculation works out.
Alas... Demand for Users isn't constant.
Going into this assuming a constant 20 hour per day usage of every car in the fleet is called looking at things with rose colored glasses.
Knock that down to 6 hours a day, to have enough cars to accommodate the extremely busy times, and then idle a portion of the fleet waiting for the next call (probably by parking all over the city and powering up the closest car to the next fare).
Now you're down to $32,000/year.
Now subtract:
Insurance.
Gas or or power recharging
Inspections/Maintenance
Regular cleanings
Maybe you're looking at $15,000 per year after all that.
How much will a 4 person electric vehicle cost? $60,000? So that's 4 years til you see the first penny of actual profit. Unless you lease or borrow, then you're looking at financing costs/interest, etc. It'll allow you to see positive cashflow each month, at the cost of less actual profit over a longer period of time. Well, scratch that. No one is going to lease you the cars for the fleet - you're going to drive them into the ground by the time the lease is up. But Ubers big, they can obtain other financing either borrowing from banks or issuing bonds, for 4, 5, 6 or 7%.
And what will the useful life of these cars be? If they're averaging 30 mph for their fares, that's 63,000 miles per year. (not including other incidental mileage such as traveling to the next fare, returning for maintenance, getting a fresh charge, etc).
So after 4 years you've got a car with 250,000 miles. You got next to no resale value there. And this is when you start seeing actual profit from operating the vehicle (again if it was paid for in cash).
That's not so profitable anymore, is it?
>the touch bar which removes physical keys from the keyboards of high end users - the one most likely to want to use physical keys.
And the ones least likely to be looking at their keyboard while they work.
Seriously.
OK, a macbook keyboard and screen are close together so shifting eyes isn't too much. Adding a external monitor? And then being supposed to switch where you're looking like that?
One of the important things (yet another) that people in general (and Tim specifically) forget that Steve Jobs did was, was not messing with the Pro users when rolling out new technologies. That's why the iMac was the first one with USB ports, to give device manufacturers time to write driver that would presumably be tested by the consumer level buyers before messing with the Pro work flow. Which is what they ought to have done with USB C. Rather than yank out all the ports that many pros use in order to saddle them with dongles and shit.
Besides getting rid of one of their best innovations in a decade, the Magsafe connector, just to make sure all the ports look the same...
* 2013 Macbook Pro, iPhone owner, etc... Have now seen two hardware updates that I felt safe ignoring. That's rather sad. A) Apparently Apple doesn't want our money anymore or B) we're a week away from 2017, and for 3+ years, the only upgrade path to better performance from my laptop has been to shed MacOS.
Judging from their recent track record, looks like we'll get to look forward to even bigger explosions in the future.
>Nonsense. What do you imagine will happen automation arrives at farms? The supply of food will increase, and the price will decrease. Same thing for trucking and the volume of goods carried down the world's roadways. The volume of cargo will go up, and the cost to move it will drop. Thats more economic productivity, which means more for all. Simply awesome.
Short sighted and fails to see many pitfalls.
First off, automation will only be available to those who can afford it. IE multinational corporations. Whether that's good or bad is your perspective, but it will spell the end of many small businesses. Many will sell, some will take on bank debt to try to compete under the new "rules" of labor being a one-time fixed cost that you amortize over an amount of years, rather than being able to pay as they go. That, or they'll cut wages even lower than they already are. And that work force was a million people in 2012.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topic...
Second, independantly of that, transportation is another industry that's being threatened with being automated away. That's 6.8 million people (3 million truck drivers, people loading, unloading, etc). Not counting independent contractors, owner/operators, which are very prevalent.
http://www.trucking.org/News_a...
So, food is now cheaper, but you've taken away the means for millions and millions of people to actually purchase food.
And you last supposition, the volume of cargo will go up and the price to move it will drop. That's not correct - the cost to ship things doesn't drop as more stuff needs to get shipped, it rises as producers with more and more product to ship bid against one another in an effort to secure access to a limited resource. Gasoline prices stay constant, tire costs are constant, and the trucks themselves are fixed costs - you don't achieve new economies of scale by shipping more and more, you're locked in battle fighting over the same resources as not only your competition in that industry, but with every industry that has goods they want to ship to market. In the short term, that's higher profit margins for transportation companies, but in the longer term, that means they'll need to expand their fleets to capture more of that lost revenue - whose cost will be passed on to us as well.
So. We produce more food. We have far fewer people able to afford it. You lose tons of small/family farms in order to redistribute that income to Wall Street. And shipping prices most certainly rise, not just for foodstuffs, but for anything else that could be shipped on those same trucks as well.
We were attacked by a group of stateless outlaws on 9/11.
We retaliated against them shortly after, and opted to go after the state that had provided them sanctuary, and overthrew Taliban.
And then the Bush Administration provided fake evidence to the world about WMD's and terror connections in Iraq. When someone that knew better said something, they outed the fact that his wife was a CIA agent, putting her and her contacts at severe risk.
And then they invaded Iraq, overthrew Saddam, created a HUGE power vacuum, and the entire Baath party out on the street, military included. So you gave them zero reason to do anything but fight against the invaders. And provided a training ground for the worlds insurgents to come and practice their urban warfare skills, and spread out from there.
So yes. The middle east was already an unstable place, but Bush/Cheney Wars were entirely unnecessary, avoidable, and had horrendous side effects for us, the Iraqi's and the entire region.
Ford might have pardoned Nixon, but it was hardly uncontroversial:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's a late 2013 model, Retina display, upgraded SSD.
As has been discussed to death already, Apples refresh gave me zero reason to want to upgrade. No performance benefits anywhere to be found.
And now, with this revelation, should my computer shit the bed, I'd probably go looking for a similar model on the used market than go with a new one.
Hopefully Apples next update in 2018 (given its current product life cycle) remedies that - give us a upgrade path to greater performance, the ability to upgrade and service some of the components ourselves. Oh, and bring back the Magsafe power adapter. I know my computer survived two near death incidents at coffee shops thanks to Magsafe, I can't image why in the world they'ed take that away. Oh, so we can have 4 matching ports, rather the 3 USB-C's and one power connector.
I'm getting to the point where I think 80% of what I do could be done with Linux with the same exact programs, 90-95% if i wanted to learn new things like GIMP, but I just prefer Mac OS X's look and feel. But the trajectory at Apple since Steve's death has me starting to think that I'm not a wanted customer anymore. I'd say that maybe mac's are just becoming expensive accessories to iPhones and iPods, but that can't be - you can't even plug the latest iPhone into the latest MacBook, after all!.
The Tax Foundation only had 2005 numbers available when I bookmarked the page a month or two ago. And i know things have changed since then, but none of your links provide the full picture, so I"m going to post this one for some historical data:
http://taxfoundation.org/artic...
As of 2005, the States that paid more to the Federal Government than the spending they received in return were:
New Jersey
Nevada
Connecticut
New Hampshire
Minnesota
Illinois
Delaware
California
New York
Colorado
Massachusetts
Wisconsin
Washington
Michigan
Oregon
Texas
and Florida
Rhode Island was break even.
The rest of the states, at that point, were the recipients of that taxation.
You realize that you make a ton of money selling food to other states? Can you imagine what would happen to incomes in Nebraska if they only produced enough food for themselves?
Except OP is speaking factually, and you're just making stuff up based on what you want to believe, which is 100% wrong. A little research might help you not be an idiot, not that it matters since you're just an anonymous coward...
California sends far more money back up to the Federal Government than it gets back. It's the red states that are typically the subsidized ones, receiving back from the Federal Government far more than they pay into it.
Damn pesky facts...
Unfortunately, Canada is a bit too gold for many of us. But who knows, with a coal industry about to get revitalized, maybe Canada will take on more tropical temperatures in the coming years...
What so many fail to realize is that the Blue states are net exporters of Federal Tax dollars. We pay far more than $1 for every $1 of federal spending that comes back to our states. The Red states, on the other hand, suck off the teats of the blue states. You'll see no improvement, only even fewer tax dollars to support you than you already get.
It no more cheating than the gerrymandering the GOP has done (and now, will continue to do), redrawing districts to lump as many voters from the opposing party in the fewest number of districts as possible.
South Florida has long seemed like a separate state than the rest of Florida, too... But, the Constitution says that states can't be divided up after they've been established.
If California did such a move, it would essentially guarantee Red leadership for the rest of the country. Or more likely, would cause other Blue states to follow suit.
Part of me thinks that wouldn't be so bad, but on the other, if we're believing that the election was affected by other countries interfering with our politics in order to produce an outcome that was more desirable, it would probably be a gift beyond their wildest dreams to see the US splinter into two or three different countries.
Logistically, there's also the problem of Federal debt (among so many other things) - who assumes it?
Far from it. The Alt-Right is their own beast, not to be confused with the regular Republicans that embraced them and welcomed them into their party in order to give them a chance at... I don't even know, the GOP doesn't much like attempting to govern anymore.
Let me inherit a few hundred million dollar real estate empire, and I'll show you some grand accomplishments, too.
Seriously. What has he done? Blow up casinos? Run a fake university? He made an image of rich and gets to sell his name. That's all.
The stupid thing is that the thing that got him famous in his supporters eyes is saying "you're fired", NOT hiring people or creating jobs. That's who they think will spur the economy, a guy that fires people. But none of them claim to the the brightest bulbs, now do they?
I had a motorola atrix once. Easily my least favorite/least durable phone ever. I had an otter box case even, it slipped out of my hand from two feet above the ground, landed on the top corner of the phone, and entire screen turned into a spiderweb of cracks. Maybe other motorola's faired better?
Seems like the future for manufacturing in the US is the Elon Musk approach - factories employing as much automation as possible; those will provide jobs for the contractors that build them, but thereafter not so much.
Compared to his "gigafactory" which will make batteries and employ 6,500 people, the future of Tesla manufacturing will be that there are no people on the production line, at all.
Gigafactory
https://www.fastcompany.com/30...
Tesla Factory
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Everyone loves to complain how we lost our manufacturing to China, but the truth is we began losing it a LONG time ago with the "invention" of automation. Companies bringing their manufacturing back to the U.S. will earn big rounds of applause, but in all likelihood, will only be doing so because they're determining that it's cheaper to do without the humans at all.
> Even porting iTunes would be a waste.
Actually, they've ported Apple Music to Android. I bought a android phone with an SD card for the express purpose of having that as my jukebox in my car; beats paying whatever it costs for the 128 GB iPhone.
https://play.google.com/store/...
(The app is mostly geared toward getting you to buy media from Apple, or become a subscriber to their streaming service, but also lets you download the contents your iTunes playlists to play locally from the phone)
That's pretty much the case for most technology offered in the last 5-10 years. Outside of gaming and a few other use cases, there just isn't a real reason to upgrade as rapidly as we did before.
I'm writing this on a late 2013 MacBook Pro. which, for me, is the longest lasting computer I've had, at least as the one I primarily. Short of hardware failure, I don't expect to need to buy a new model til at least 2018. Though, I may need to replace the battery soon, but that's just an effect of the computer being so useful for so long.
In their defense, upgrading their watch battery hasn't resulted in said watches getting engulfed in flames. That's pretty good when you think about it.
(Also coming from an iSheep, though I can't imagine ever wanting an iWatch)
Why rag on Apple about this? Maybe I'm mistaken, but can you name a smartphone maker who manufactures in the US? Or PC vendor? But Apple alone is the fall guy?
Is it just me to wonder why browser need gigabytes of memory just to display a webpage? They receive text, format it according to CSS rules, display relatively small sized images, and, yes, execute Javascript. Still, a HUGE webpage is still a tiny amount of data.
Considering that entire operating systems used to run comfortably on systems with 32MB of RAM in yesteryear, and could display all this media, it just astounds me that systems now require 4-8GB to provide a comfortable browsing experience.
Even if Chromes memory footprint has shrunk a little, i'm certain it still uses an obscene amount of RAM relative to what it actually does most the time.
Donalds sole saving grace is that he has never been in public service, so his communications, deliberations, etc are all still hidden from view. So instead, the only thing we can use to measure in on his judgement and soundness of mind is, well, the words he's said.