That's exactly the problem. I wouldn't say this if it weren't true. Local governments are being starved out by property taxes, and at the same time there's no incentive to build more residential capacity. Argue all you want but SF rent is higher than NYC which is impressive in it's own right. Property taxes being too low also impacts public transit like high speed rail. Right now they're stuck with 1930s era rail technology and it shows. 45 minutes go to from SF to Mountain View? Fucking lol.
You just buy whatever is for sale, raze it to the ground, and then build as many stories as your'e zoned for. Plead for more vertical height/units if applicable. If you're near downtown it's not difficult to get zoned for 23 stories. Even given $1mm profit, if you throw $100,000 towards the city council you still come out way way ahead.
Google offered a private bus service between downtown SF and Mountain View and there was a literal, outright rebellion against it. Protests blocking the busses and lawsuits and everything. They offered a private ferry service as well between SF and Redwood City (closest water port to MV) and that was quietly strangled despite being extremely popular. Citizens are very, VERY against making SF more popular to live because it's helping skyrocket the cost of living there way faster than businesses can adjust. In a sane rational world the city would respond by zoning more housing but they seem absolutely dead set against matching housing vs needs.
I've been looking in to this lately. Apparently in the late 70s early 80s they passed a law that says property taxes can only increase at a MAX of 2% per year. Inflation is 4% per year so over 10 years your effective taxes drop by HALF. This means you can't pay for infrastructure improvements as density increases, and there's no incentive for people to sell, which means there's no property to develop in to higher density residential stuff... if you can even get the local city council to approve such a project. Everything between SF and San Jose is basically suburban sprawl that backs up in to the mountains and marshland. There is PLENTY of land to build 35 story condos with 300 units of 2000 sq ft flats. There is no shortage of land to build huge, relatively cheap housing options for workers if you zone for it. But the locals there and local government is just totally broken and has zero incentive to improve housing. So you have a bajillion 22 and 23 year old programmers living in 600 sq ft efficiency over people's garages in the suburbs or five kids sharing a 2 million dollar house because the housing isn't there and local government won't zone to build it. It's nuts. I want to move to Mountain View or Palo Alto (because SF is too expensive so people are renting in the suburbs and commuting via Caltrain) but there is literally no 2 bedroom apartment available for less than $5000 a month(!) In Dallas I pay barely $1000 a month. I don't know how you can realistically survive within 2 hours of SF without making at least $70,000 a year, and even then you'd have to rely on public transit and eat ramen.
If there were a ferry between Oakland and Mountain View that would really open up the real estate market but there's no way I'm taking the ferry from Oakland to SF, and then a 45 minute "baby bullet" train from SF to Mountain view to save $1000 a month.
There's more jobs than housing, and that keeps pushing the rent higher and higher. Eventually either more housing is going to have to be built, or companies are going to have to move out of the area. But right now this is not sustainable with the majority of housing being 1 or 2 story 4 and 5 bedroom suburban houses.
Pretty much. Taxis are a dying industry, let's twist the knife and end it faster, technology has provided us with a better system. We're not hauling around portable computers running on Ni-Cad batteries with CRT displays, either.
I can get an Uber any time of the day or night to take me where I want to go. An Uber shows up within 5 minutes - always. If I call the taxi company for a cab, one may or may not show up between 45 minutes and an hour - if one shows up at all. Uber drivers are held accountable for the condition of their cars, their appearance, their personality. Taxi drivers stink, are rude and their cars are always a mess. I would never use a taxi. I always use uber.
Better yet, for the world traveler, Uber works in pretty much all major cities, tied to the same account. No messing around with local vs foreigner rates, tipping, blah blah blah. Just get in and GO. Then get OUT when you arrive. I HATE arguing with cabbies over fares, rates etc etc. it's absurd. Uber gets rid of all that and gives me a simple interface and one point of billing. If Uber was forced out of my city, I'd go buy a car rather than use Taxis.
Well it's down to 55c/ kWh over an entire year. Over 11 years it's actually cheaper than electricity. Assuming 50% utilization and a 25 year service life (rated, real world is expected to be 30) they are in fact both cheaper than grid electricity and by quite a bit! Especially if you are living on an island. Which about a billion humans are right now.
Solar's pretty close to being cheaper than buying it from the local power company. Like, really, really close. Google's got a big fat bounty for reducing the transformer/inverter down in cost and size, that's the last step. Lithium battery tech is about to make a huge generational leap, solar panels are very nearly free (they pay for themselves in the first year), it's just the controller/inverters.
Hell if someone would sell a 2-Ton DC-powered Air Conditioning unit wired directly to some solar panels and an ultra capacitor, that alone would drop your power bill by 70% in the summer here in Texas and 30-60% during the rest of the year. Trickle charge some small batteries for daily stuff. Electronics just absolutely sip power these days. My 40" HDTV uses just 40 watts - that's one third of the power my 2.1 "home theater" system uses.
It might sound fanatical but other than my dish washer, washing machine, air conditioning and dryer, I don't think there's any one device that uses more than 100w of power in my house any more.
It's called Intel vPro technology, which lets you run a hardware session of VLC from the BIOS, on the wall side of the power control. It's pretty impressive shit for enterprise but you can do a whole lot more with it obviously.
GPS waypoint autopilot has been a thing for so long it's already changed names at least twice. It used to be called Ardupilot but it's something else now. Both for wheeled, quadcopter, and traditional planes in the consumer realm. Under $200 , even.
I'm not super worried about it, they are rolling in money, have no public shareholders to be accountable to, and almost completely hold a monopoly on the PC digital download market. And every time they fuck up with the community they backpedal as hard as they can. It's possible they will go under in the next decade, but that's longer than the lifespan of a console, so I'm ok with that. When Gabe Newell dies some day (he's what, 65?) then it could take a turn for the worse but right now they seem be headed on the same upward vector that they've been headed on since about 2004 or so. I will continue feeding them a few bucks a month in terms of game sales for the foreseeable future. If their health becomes questionable, I'll reconsider it, but I've been an extremely satisfied customer since at least 2007.
Thanks yeah I came here to post this. Not only are trees farm-grown for paper/wood products, but importantly there are more trees now in North America than in 1850 thanks to more efficent planting and better resource planning.
It's very likely that due to deforestation for agricultural purposes, there are fewer trees. But paper products are a 100% renewable resource and the wood products industry is actually on top of keeping things replanted etc for a long term crop/resource point of view. So the western world need not worry, it's all the literal dirt-poor farmers in the Amazon who are burning up forest land to plant crops and graze cattle on notoriously nutrient-poor soil. You can help with this by stop eating McDonald's beef products most of which come from that region. The box and bag your Big Mac came in however, were probably made in the USA with renewable materials.
There's an outfit on amazon/ebay that sells 18v "Allpower" solar panels with an array of adapters to use with whatever brand laptop you have for reasonable prices. They just unfold, and then plug right in to your laptop. On a modern laptop, you could probably get away with running/charging a laptop on a 21w array for $90, but they make up to a 28w array for $130. Modern Haswell/Broadwell laptops run at about 15w with the display at full brightness. There's a 14w array too for $60, but if you're seriously considering buying a device like this you probably want the ability to run and charge at the same time, and it's unlikely you'll find a place that allows you to put the panel in full sun and comfortably work on the laptop. With 18v, you'll never fully charge the battery (you need 19-19.5v to do that) but it'll satisfactorily charge your laptop to about 93% very reliably.
Of course, if you're stuck in a rainstorm for three or four days and you wear down your laptop battery, you might have trouble getting it charged back up until the sun comes back out. But with modern 15 hour batteries in laptops you should be able to squeak by for a day or two of normal office work.
It's free advertising that has amazing marketing data generation, and customer interaction levels on par with the Victoria's Secret fashion show they televise every year. If they don't already directly address copyright issues in their EULA now, they will soon. All of the major publishing houses have been promoting e-sports for a while and there have been close to zero takedowns based on game streaming.
I see the potential for conflict here, but in the last four years it has been a non-issue, and Google's army of lawyers have vetted the project so I'm reasonably sure they're in the clear here for all but the smallest/out of touch developers.
The point of the government (in the US, originally) was to regulate interstate, international trade and provide a common defense. At some point along the lines, states lost a lot of their power to the federal government and we've moved in to a welfare state model (i.e. socialism). That's not a bad thing, especially as manufacturing is increasingly automated, and computers replace white collar jobs at an alarming rate, we're probably going to need some sort of guaranteed minimum income, but to answer your question, the primary purpose of government is/was to protect businesses and enforce trade agreements and defend against invasion/pirates. Neat stuff like guaranteed vacation, maternity leave, social security, health care etc are luxury items, like leather interior or power windows over the standard package.
It's near impossible to get a taxi to pick you up during peak hours from your house to go to a bar. The taxi drivers just plain won't do it for the $6 or so they get, plus time/gas lost going to pick you up, it's not worth risking missing an airport ride.
With Uber though, the invisible hand of the market selects them, and they must respond. I get rides to work on time, nearly every day. You can't reliably use taxis as transportation in my town, sadly.
I use the F5 key all the goddamn time, mostly refresh/rerun/recompile
F5 is generally the left-most Function key of the second block, separated by a space from the F4 key. I use the F5 way, way more than I do the 6 key (which is over on the numpad).
I got a wireless Microsoft Sculpt ergo keyboard and while I love it, it's taken me a while to get used to the fact that the F5 key is not in the middle, I have to look for the F6 key, then go one to the left. After six months or so I'm used to it, but old habits die hard, and that visual cue between the F4 and F5 keys being gone was hard to get used to. To be fair Microsoft has the corresponding Function key above each number key, although that's dumb because anyone buying this keyboard is a touch-typist.
HTML 5 won't let you set persistent cookies as deeply as Flash will. When you're tracking click through and then where they continue browsing through to and doing deep analytics on that sort of thing, flash cookies are amazing compared to what flash will do for you.
I commute to work about 4 miles each way by bicycle, in Dallas, in August. It was 104 here last Friday, and ~85F by the time I arrived to the office, but I don't sweat too much getting to the office. I wear typical business-casual riding in to the office, leave my shirt + undershirt untucked, and unbutton the top button, then tuck everything in when I arrive. I use a fan for when I first sit down but most people aren't even aware I cycle to work. The ride home on the other hand is a bit warmer. In London it's about 58-65 degrees at 8am in the summer, which is absolutely perfect weather for a commute of up to about 10 miles over flat ground. Most metro areas (seattle and SF excepted) are built on relatively flat areas compared to the surrounding terrain. Showering before you leave for work instead of the night before helps too, as you're very clean and slipping in to almost sterile clothes so stink isn't an issue going to work. I wouldn't cycle from work ten miles after work straight to a date, though.
But yeah if you're a fat couch potato who's grossly out of shape, you're going to have trouble not sweating, at least for the first two months until your heart and body regain some strength. The first two months of commuting were not ultra-pleasant but now that I'm back in shape with a strong healthy heart, 3-7 miles on an empty stomach in the morning (without coffee, even!) is a snap.
And your house could be hit by a meteor and crush you instantly at any moment.
I get the fear, but in urban areas cyclists are becoming a more and more common sight in the states. It's way less prevalent in the suburbs, but in the urban core it's less uncommon to see cyclists, and drivers are slowly becoming more aware of cyclists and expecting to see them on the roads. I definitely agree that cycling in a cylist-poor environment is way, way more hazardous than a cyclist rich one. In the last four years of cycling to work here in Dallas (home of the massive SUV) I've noticed that drivers give me a lot more room as they pass than they once did. I'm also seeing 4-5 people cycling to work on my ~20 minute morning commute, where before I saw none. Presumably if I was headed out of downtown I'd see more.
Their Atom text editor is built on top of Chromium/HTML 5/Javascript and whatever else web 2.0 stuff they could cram in there, it's not a huge stretch of the imagination that this app is built on top of that. Nobody builds projects from scratch in Java anymore (except, perhaps Cisco)
My uncle keeps a small loaded shotgun on "display" in a rack over the double doors in the informal dining room that leads out to the back yard as a matter of home security. While I don't fully agree with this concept, he's otherwise a very successful businessman and relatively normal. It would probably take 30+ seconds from yelling "Jeb! Get my gun!" until Jeb fetches the gun from the kitchen and gives it to his father, but probably not a whole lot.
Keep in mind this guy with the loaded shotgun in the kitchen is fairly normal, holds down a good job and well respected in the community. That leaves a lot of room below him for some crazy guys walking around with loaded shotguns in their trucks, strapped to their backs, or maybe just wandering around the backyard drunk looking for the neighbor's rooster who wakes him up too early every morning but has finally "trespassed" in to his yard. Law of averages says eventually a drone is going to be flying overhead of some redneck while he's within arm's reach of a loaded gun. It was only a matter of time.
I don't doubt that they're effectively a taxi company, the difference is that their drivers aren't fucking awful to deal with. If Uber dropped out of my city, I'd go buy a car rather than deal with trying to get a taxi.
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That's exactly the problem. I wouldn't say this if it weren't true. Local governments are being starved out by property taxes, and at the same time there's no incentive to build more residential capacity. Argue all you want but SF rent is higher than NYC which is impressive in it's own right. Property taxes being too low also impacts public transit like high speed rail. Right now they're stuck with 1930s era rail technology and it shows. 45 minutes go to from SF to Mountain View? Fucking lol.
You just buy whatever is for sale, raze it to the ground, and then build as many stories as your'e zoned for. Plead for more vertical height/units if applicable. If you're near downtown it's not difficult to get zoned for 23 stories. Even given $1mm profit, if you throw $100,000 towards the city council you still come out way way ahead.
Google offered a private bus service between downtown SF and Mountain View and there was a literal, outright rebellion against it. Protests blocking the busses and lawsuits and everything. They offered a private ferry service as well between SF and Redwood City (closest water port to MV) and that was quietly strangled despite being extremely popular. Citizens are very, VERY against making SF more popular to live because it's helping skyrocket the cost of living there way faster than businesses can adjust. In a sane rational world the city would respond by zoning more housing but they seem absolutely dead set against matching housing vs needs.
I've been looking in to this lately. Apparently in the late 70s early 80s they passed a law that says property taxes can only increase at a MAX of 2% per year. Inflation is 4% per year so over 10 years your effective taxes drop by HALF. This means you can't pay for infrastructure improvements as density increases, and there's no incentive for people to sell, which means there's no property to develop in to higher density residential stuff... if you can even get the local city council to approve such a project. Everything between SF and San Jose is basically suburban sprawl that backs up in to the mountains and marshland. There is PLENTY of land to build 35 story condos with 300 units of 2000 sq ft flats. There is no shortage of land to build huge, relatively cheap housing options for workers if you zone for it. But the locals there and local government is just totally broken and has zero incentive to improve housing. So you have a bajillion 22 and 23 year old programmers living in 600 sq ft efficiency over people's garages in the suburbs or five kids sharing a 2 million dollar house because the housing isn't there and local government won't zone to build it. It's nuts. I want to move to Mountain View or Palo Alto (because SF is too expensive so people are renting in the suburbs and commuting via Caltrain) but there is literally no 2 bedroom apartment available for less than $5000 a month(!) In Dallas I pay barely $1000 a month. I don't know how you can realistically survive within 2 hours of SF without making at least $70,000 a year, and even then you'd have to rely on public transit and eat ramen.
If there were a ferry between Oakland and Mountain View that would really open up the real estate market but there's no way I'm taking the ferry from Oakland to SF, and then a 45 minute "baby bullet" train from SF to Mountain view to save $1000 a month.
There's more jobs than housing, and that keeps pushing the rent higher and higher. Eventually either more housing is going to have to be built, or companies are going to have to move out of the area. But right now this is not sustainable with the majority of housing being 1 or 2 story 4 and 5 bedroom suburban houses.
Pretty much. Taxis are a dying industry, let's twist the knife and end it faster, technology has provided us with a better system. We're not hauling around portable computers running on Ni-Cad batteries with CRT displays, either.
Two miles from Downtown Dallas. Taxis here would rather pass up a local $7 fare for a $60 fare to the airport.
I can get an Uber any time of the day or night to take me where I want to go. An Uber shows up within 5 minutes - always. If I call the taxi company for a cab, one may or may not show up between 45 minutes and an hour - if one shows up at all. Uber drivers are held accountable for the condition of their cars, their appearance, their personality. Taxi drivers stink, are rude and their cars are always a mess. I would never use a taxi. I always use uber.
Better yet, for the world traveler, Uber works in pretty much all major cities, tied to the same account. No messing around with local vs foreigner rates, tipping, blah blah blah. Just get in and GO. Then get OUT when you arrive. I HATE arguing with cabbies over fares, rates etc etc. it's absurd. Uber gets rid of all that and gives me a simple interface and one point of billing. If Uber was forced out of my city, I'd go buy a car rather than use Taxis.
Well it's down to 55c/ kWh over an entire year. Over 11 years it's actually cheaper than electricity. Assuming 50% utilization and a 25 year service life (rated, real world is expected to be 30) they are in fact both cheaper than grid electricity and by quite a bit! Especially if you are living on an island. Which about a billion humans are right now.
Solar's pretty close to being cheaper than buying it from the local power company. Like, really, really close. Google's got a big fat bounty for reducing the transformer/inverter down in cost and size, that's the last step. Lithium battery tech is about to make a huge generational leap, solar panels are very nearly free (they pay for themselves in the first year), it's just the controller/inverters.
Hell if someone would sell a 2-Ton DC-powered Air Conditioning unit wired directly to some solar panels and an ultra capacitor, that alone would drop your power bill by 70% in the summer here in Texas and 30-60% during the rest of the year. Trickle charge some small batteries for daily stuff. Electronics just absolutely sip power these days. My 40" HDTV uses just 40 watts - that's one third of the power my 2.1 "home theater" system uses.
It might sound fanatical but other than my dish washer, washing machine, air conditioning and dryer, I don't think there's any one device that uses more than 100w of power in my house any more.
It's called Intel vPro technology, which lets you run a hardware session of VLC from the BIOS, on the wall side of the power control. It's pretty impressive shit for enterprise but you can do a whole lot more with it obviously.
GPS waypoint autopilot has been a thing for so long it's already changed names at least twice. It used to be called Ardupilot but it's something else now. Both for wheeled, quadcopter, and traditional planes in the consumer realm. Under $200 , even.
I'm not super worried about it, they are rolling in money, have no public shareholders to be accountable to, and almost completely hold a monopoly on the PC digital download market. And every time they fuck up with the community they backpedal as hard as they can. It's possible they will go under in the next decade, but that's longer than the lifespan of a console, so I'm ok with that. When Gabe Newell dies some day (he's what, 65?) then it could take a turn for the worse but right now they seem be headed on the same upward vector that they've been headed on since about 2004 or so. I will continue feeding them a few bucks a month in terms of game sales for the foreseeable future. If their health becomes questionable, I'll reconsider it, but I've been an extremely satisfied customer since at least 2007.
Thanks yeah I came here to post this. Not only are trees farm-grown for paper/wood products, but importantly there are more trees now in North America than in 1850 thanks to more efficent planting and better resource planning.
It's very likely that due to deforestation for agricultural purposes, there are fewer trees. But paper products are a 100% renewable resource and the wood products industry is actually on top of keeping things replanted etc for a long term crop/resource point of view. So the western world need not worry, it's all the literal dirt-poor farmers in the Amazon who are burning up forest land to plant crops and graze cattle on notoriously nutrient-poor soil. You can help with this by stop eating McDonald's beef products most of which come from that region. The box and bag your Big Mac came in however, were probably made in the USA with renewable materials.
There's an outfit on amazon/ebay that sells 18v "Allpower" solar panels with an array of adapters to use with whatever brand laptop you have for reasonable prices. They just unfold, and then plug right in to your laptop. On a modern laptop, you could probably get away with running/charging a laptop on a 21w array for $90, but they make up to a 28w array for $130. Modern Haswell/Broadwell laptops run at about 15w with the display at full brightness. There's a 14w array too for $60, but if you're seriously considering buying a device like this you probably want the ability to run and charge at the same time, and it's unlikely you'll find a place that allows you to put the panel in full sun and comfortably work on the laptop. With 18v, you'll never fully charge the battery (you need 19-19.5v to do that) but it'll satisfactorily charge your laptop to about 93% very reliably.
Of course, if you're stuck in a rainstorm for three or four days and you wear down your laptop battery, you might have trouble getting it charged back up until the sun comes back out. But with modern 15 hour batteries in laptops you should be able to squeak by for a day or two of normal office work.
It's free advertising that has amazing marketing data generation, and customer interaction levels on par with the Victoria's Secret fashion show they televise every year. If they don't already directly address copyright issues in their EULA now, they will soon. All of the major publishing houses have been promoting e-sports for a while and there have been close to zero takedowns based on game streaming.
I see the potential for conflict here, but in the last four years it has been a non-issue, and Google's army of lawyers have vetted the project so I'm reasonably sure they're in the clear here for all but the smallest/out of touch developers.
The point of the government (in the US, originally) was to regulate interstate, international trade and provide a common defense. At some point along the lines, states lost a lot of their power to the federal government and we've moved in to a welfare state model (i.e. socialism). That's not a bad thing, especially as manufacturing is increasingly automated, and computers replace white collar jobs at an alarming rate, we're probably going to need some sort of guaranteed minimum income, but to answer your question, the primary purpose of government is/was to protect businesses and enforce trade agreements and defend against invasion/pirates. Neat stuff like guaranteed vacation, maternity leave, social security, health care etc are luxury items, like leather interior or power windows over the standard package.
It's near impossible to get a taxi to pick you up during peak hours from your house to go to a bar. The taxi drivers just plain won't do it for the $6 or so they get, plus time/gas lost going to pick you up, it's not worth risking missing an airport ride.
With Uber though, the invisible hand of the market selects them, and they must respond. I get rides to work on time, nearly every day. You can't reliably use taxis as transportation in my town, sadly.
I use the F5 key all the goddamn time, mostly refresh/rerun/recompile
F5 is generally the left-most Function key of the second block, separated by a space from the F4 key. I use the F5 way, way more than I do the 6 key (which is over on the numpad).
I got a wireless Microsoft Sculpt ergo keyboard and while I love it, it's taken me a while to get used to the fact that the F5 key is not in the middle, I have to look for the F6 key, then go one to the left. After six months or so I'm used to it, but old habits die hard, and that visual cue between the F4 and F5 keys being gone was hard to get used to. To be fair Microsoft has the corresponding Function key above each number key, although that's dumb because anyone buying this keyboard is a touch-typist.
HTML 5 won't let you set persistent cookies as deeply as Flash will. When you're tracking click through and then where they continue browsing through to and doing deep analytics on that sort of thing, flash cookies are amazing compared to what flash will do for you.
I commute to work about 4 miles each way by bicycle, in Dallas, in August. It was 104 here last Friday, and ~85F by the time I arrived to the office, but I don't sweat too much getting to the office. I wear typical business-casual riding in to the office, leave my shirt + undershirt untucked, and unbutton the top button, then tuck everything in when I arrive. I use a fan for when I first sit down but most people aren't even aware I cycle to work. The ride home on the other hand is a bit warmer. In London it's about 58-65 degrees at 8am in the summer, which is absolutely perfect weather for a commute of up to about 10 miles over flat ground. Most metro areas (seattle and SF excepted) are built on relatively flat areas compared to the surrounding terrain. Showering before you leave for work instead of the night before helps too, as you're very clean and slipping in to almost sterile clothes so stink isn't an issue going to work. I wouldn't cycle from work ten miles after work straight to a date, though.
But yeah if you're a fat couch potato who's grossly out of shape, you're going to have trouble not sweating, at least for the first two months until your heart and body regain some strength. The first two months of commuting were not ultra-pleasant but now that I'm back in shape with a strong healthy heart, 3-7 miles on an empty stomach in the morning (without coffee, even!) is a snap.
And your house could be hit by a meteor and crush you instantly at any moment.
I get the fear, but in urban areas cyclists are becoming a more and more common sight in the states. It's way less prevalent in the suburbs, but in the urban core it's less uncommon to see cyclists, and drivers are slowly becoming more aware of cyclists and expecting to see them on the roads. I definitely agree that cycling in a cylist-poor environment is way, way more hazardous than a cyclist rich one. In the last four years of cycling to work here in Dallas (home of the massive SUV) I've noticed that drivers give me a lot more room as they pass than they once did. I'm also seeing 4-5 people cycling to work on my ~20 minute morning commute, where before I saw none. Presumably if I was headed out of downtown I'd see more.
Their Atom text editor is built on top of Chromium/HTML 5/Javascript and whatever else web 2.0 stuff they could cram in there, it's not a huge stretch of the imagination that this app is built on top of that. Nobody builds projects from scratch in Java anymore (except, perhaps Cisco)
Are you asking me to defend a position I explicitly said I don't agree with?
My uncle keeps a small loaded shotgun on "display" in a rack over the double doors in the informal dining room that leads out to the back yard as a matter of home security. While I don't fully agree with this concept, he's otherwise a very successful businessman and relatively normal. It would probably take 30+ seconds from yelling "Jeb! Get my gun!" until Jeb fetches the gun from the kitchen and gives it to his father, but probably not a whole lot.
Keep in mind this guy with the loaded shotgun in the kitchen is fairly normal, holds down a good job and well respected in the community. That leaves a lot of room below him for some crazy guys walking around with loaded shotguns in their trucks, strapped to their backs, or maybe just wandering around the backyard drunk looking for the neighbor's rooster who wakes him up too early every morning but has finally "trespassed" in to his yard. Law of averages says eventually a drone is going to be flying overhead of some redneck while he's within arm's reach of a loaded gun. It was only a matter of time.
I don't doubt that they're effectively a taxi company, the difference is that their drivers aren't fucking awful to deal with. If Uber dropped out of my city, I'd go buy a car rather than deal with trying to get a taxi.