Your epileptic wife is having attacks, and you want a TWO year old to be not only alone in that situation, but responsible for a panic button? Dude, you are sick and need to get a frickin clue. Fast! Someone should seriously turn you in for child endangerment bordering on abuse!
Yeah, I honestly had to consider whether or not this was an early April fools gag...
You seem to have misread his situation, it's not that he *wants* that situation, it's a situation he wants to avoid. Yet, he also wants to prepare for it.
I'm tempted to whip up a little script that periodically downloads elementary OS and puts it up some place where people can download it by clicking a single link, possibly using BitTorrent. Anyone is fully within their rights to redistribute GPLd source code and/or binaries.
I'm sure the 5 people that actually have heard about and want to use Elementary OS will appreciate your work.
Seems like chemical analysis of the ash could solve this mystery pretty easily.
Anyone that watches TV knows they just need to put some it into the analyzer and they'll have the source of the ash in minutes. I don't understand why don't they just do that?
How do they define "Cyber Attack"? My home firewall fends off thousands of "cyberattacks" every day if you include port scans, and my webserver gets hundreds more vulnerability probes.
We won't have "apps", instead we'll have mini websites that kind of function like apps, but not really. But we won't call them apps so you can't complain that there are no apps.
Then another poster objected that no one will gamble on getting a car that someone has smoked in or left a mess, and my point was that people are *already* taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.
Not quite...
The difference is, at the car rental counter, if I get a car that was smoked in or a mess, I can go back and get another car (and I've had to do that before). If the car self-delivered to my office, it isn't nearly so simple.
Why can't it be simple? If the car is unacceptable, press the Reject button on your phone, and the car drives itself back to the depot to be cleaned, the person that left it a mess is billed for cleanup, and they send you a new car -- if you leave a messy car, when you're done with the car you press the "Clean me" button, it goes back to the depot to be cleaned, and you're charged some nominal fee (but less than the clean-up fee if someone else reports that the car is dirty).
The better question is why not? Why aren't they free? They aren't because you assume toll roads work. They don't. All toll roads do is allow more money to funnel somewhere. While Roads aren't free to build or maintain, their cost should be buried in what we already pay out. Any time there is an additional burden, it causes less usage.
That's exactly why we're in this mess -- the roads have been free and numerous for so long that people expect to be able to drive whenever and wherever they want, that was the promise of the 1950's car age, and for a while, it worked.
But now, we have sprawling cities and suburbs that are hard to serve with transit, and building new roads is not only expensive, but there's little room to do so in many cities (building double, triple or quadruple decked roads is even more expensive, with diminishing returns, adding a double decked lane does not double throughput because you need room for extra entrance/exit lanes to get to the second level).
Los Angeles tried to build enough roads to accommodate traffic, but even after devoting about 30% of their land area to roads they still have some of the worst traffic congestion in the nation.
Every time a road is built or expanded, it quickly becomes congested as people move to take advantage of the new, uncongested road which of course causes more congestion, so another expansion is needed, and the cycle continues.
A freeway lane can accommodate 1000 - 2000 cars per hour. A train line can accommodate 30,000 passengers per hour at 2 minute headways.
why not just tax tires? That would seem to be a fairly decent indicator of distance travelled. It would also tax those with soft squishy performance tires higher than those more budget conscious...
why not just tax tires? That would seem to be a fairly decent indicator of distance travelled. It would also tax those with soft squishy performance tires higher than those more budget conscious...
Because the last thing the government should be doing is encouraging people to ride on worn tires when the taxes on new tires are more than the price of the tires themselves. And people would gravitate toward harder compound tires that last longer, but have less road grip.
They are trying to move away from an imperfect system to determine usage taxes, moving to another imperfect system seems like a waste of time and money because they'll have to scrap that system as well after manufacturers learn how to build 100,000 mile tires.
For those relative few that do significant driving off public roads, they can use a GPS tracker.
Presumably the GPS tracker is so they can be taxed?
Why should people driving pay public roads pay tax when they're off public infra?
Because they are commercial vehicles, subject to special rules and oversight. It's like asking why people driving public roads are required to keep a detailed log book of their driving time -- which commercial drivers are also required to do.
Heavy commercial vehicles get a break on road taxes -- they pay much more than cars, but heavy vehicles cause much much much more (to the 3rd power) road damage than cars.
Yes, some people can take advantage of such services, and that is fine if they wish, but the poster I was replying to was implying that it was "the" solution, that we'd all stop owning our own cars.
That is silly.
No he wasn't, he was implying that self-driving cars were "the" solution -- your proximity to a car rental counter no longer matters if you can summon a car with your smartphone when you leave your office and have it waiting outside when you get to the sidewalk.
Then another poster objected that no one will gamble on getting a car that someone has smoked in or left a mess, and my point was that people are *already* taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.
There's a lot of logistics that need to be figured out to make this convenient enough to rely on, but that's ok, there's decades of work that needs to be done before fully autonomous self-driving cars are a reality.
People are already taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.
I'm not... I haven't rented a car for years...
I didn't mean *you* in particular, but with car rental fleets of over a million cars and $20B in revenue in the USA, plenty of people are willing to rent a shared car that someone else may have driven just hours before.
Car share? Ha! You must be joking...
A lot of people have ideas that might work in 2 or 3 big cities, but for the vast majority of America, have no chance.
Car sharing may not be usable by everyone but Zipcar is already operating in more than 30 USA metro areas.
There may be vast areas of the USA where transit, car sharing, etc won't work, but 80% of the USA population lives in designated urban areas, so most of the population may be able to take advantage of them.
"Except you forgot to pay gas, maintenance and insurance on those 40 miles."
And depreciation, say $15k over 150k miles is another $0.10 per mile (I'm not from the US, not sure of typical car prices and lifetime mileages. YMMV)
Car owners typically don't count depreciation "because they have the car anyway". However, once infrastructure (or choice to live and work close to mass transit) is available, you can choose not to own a car and rent one for the few occasions you need one.
Apart from those costs, your own time may also have value. IMO, time spent driving is a waste and costs me EUR 20/h in loss of life quality. Time in the train I use to read the newspaper or slashdot (or post comments, like now). The bike ride to the station is my primary form of exercise (no gym subscription).
Of course, the problem (at least where I live) is that there is not enough transit infrastructure in place to replace the car entirely -- I live a 15 minutes walk from a train line to the city where I work, so transit meets my needs for commuting. But that train line is very limited so if I want to go somewhere that's not served by the train (or want to take my dog somewhere), then I need a car.
Perhaps someday car share will be widespread enough to be practical, but it's not there yet. Renting a car from a traditional car rental place is out of the question due to the 10 mile distance to the nearest rental car agency (plus it wouldn't take many full-price car rentals to exceed the cost of owning a car)
So for me, I can remove insurance and depreciation (except mileage based depreciation) from the cost of commuting with a car, so my costs really are only gas & maintenance. Over the 9 years I've owned my car, maintenance averages out to around 8 cents/mile (this includes routine oil changes, two sets of tires, and one major $3000 engine repair)
If I included insurance and depreciation, that would add around 35 cents/mile to my costs.
Self-driving cars are mass transit. At some point, once you're no longer driving your car, it will occur to you that you don't really care if you own the car. That's when things will get interesting.
Oh yes we would, most people aren't going to want to take the gamble of being picked up by a car that the last person smoked in, left covered with fast food wrappers and stains, plus not having to wait for a pickup for an unexpected trip to the store.
People are already taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.
Book fair on the bullet train, which is 45-50 minutes is a dollar higher rate one way. The 3 zone trip you are referring to is the correct price (almost), but since you hit every stop it's a much longer commute (closer to drive time with traffic). Rates went up not too long ago, which you may not have known.
There is no surcharge for the Baby Bullet trains, and Caltrain couldn't charge such a surcharge today even if they wanted to -- they don't know which train you boarded or whether you transferred trains along the way. They only know the station where you boarded and the station where you departed.
The bigger problem with mass transit is the lack of convenience. If I am at the train station at 7:01 and miss the bullet train, I have to wait an hour for another train.
That's not quite true at Mountainview, if you miss the 6:57am train, you can take the 7:05 which gets you to SF 15 minutes later than the 6:57 would have. If you miss the 7:05, you can take the 7:23, which gets you to SF 22 minutes later than the 7:05. So yes, it takes you a bit longer if you miss your preferred train, but not an hour longer.
During prime time trains are every 30 minutes. Compare this to leaving in a car when I want and knowing about when I will get to the office.
You must drive on much different roads than I do -- to be sure that I'll make it to the office at a particular time, I have to pad my commute by at least 30 minutes to account for traffic. The train is much more consistent since it has no traffic delays, though when there is a delay (i.e. when someone is hit by a train), delays can be significant.
Also, the train is only part of the expense. Depending on which lot you park at in MV you have different rates, Muni and Bart are different rates so if you are not within walking distance of Caltrain you are paying another $4.00 minimum per day to commute.
Now compared to what you have to pay to park downtown SF it's cheaper, but that does not make it cheap by any means.
Isn't that what counts? That would make transit cheaper than driving.
Until working up there, I had no sympathy for the company private shuttles. I have since completely changed my mind on that one and take ours every day.
Sure, an employer sponsored shuttle that picks up close to home and drops you off right at the office sounds great, but would you be willing to pay the full fare for that if not sponsored by your employer?
Well I don't know -- who is "we"? You can't post as an Anonymous Coward and then complain that someone isn't following the chain of conversation, unless you are signed in, there is no chain of conversation to follow. But since the original post I replied to specifically said "cars", then no, I don't think "we" were talking about commercial trucks (cars, even commercial ones) don't tend to grossly change weight)
I wasn't limiting it to that since the original posted to which I replied didn't include the distinction.
Trucks are easy - use a GPS tracker, you can even tie it to load sensors or require the driver to indicate weight when loaded and charge by the pound and by the mile. Commercial drivers should not have the same privacy concerns as private cars.
But no, too many people will be border cases, where they travel from state to state, and there will be objections raised.
That's why I said make it a national tax -- everyone pays 10 cents a mile regardless of where they live. So it doesn't matter to the driver whether he does most of his driving in California or Nevada or does a cross country trip, the tax is the same. States won't care either since it'll pretty much even out in the end. Generally states have few border residents in comparison to the rest of their population.
The mileage tax can have a weight multiplier to account for weight.
That'll work for vehicles that don't grossly change weight.
That's not going to describe the vehicles of the most concern.
Those are commercial vehicles and would be taxed differently as they are now -- commercial vehicles already pay more taxes based on the vehicle's gross weight capacity.
Make the mileage tax a national tax, and it won't matter what state people drive in.
It will when it comes to funding. Even apportionment by population is a bad idea.
People would still report their mileage to their own DMV, so the tax is divided among each state based on their resident's reported driving. It won't be 100% accurate, but pretty close.
For those relative few that do significant driving off public roads, they can use a GPS tracker.
Or a tax on vehicle value each year. Something like...
(Blue Book Value - deductions) x Rate
Deductions would include, but not be limited to, a senior citizen deduction, low-income deduction, etc. I'm thinking something modest like $5k or something for low-income individuals. $7.5k for seniors. And only if the car has been driven at least 500 miles in a given year. But, this would have been done in conjunction with the local DMV.
California already does this -- they charge a Vehicle License Fee that is 1.15% of the market value of the car.
In our big cities, it seems like it's too late to add more mass transit. Where the hell would you put it? There's already skyscrapers there. All I can figure is that we need stringent state or federal guidelines for new city planning above a certain size that mandates effective mass transit in the design. You can add it to new growth, you can't shove it into old cities.
There's still room underground in most cities, though it's expensive -- San Francisco Muni is building a new underground line, and there's a plan to build a tunnel to bring Caltrain downtown.
Roads are another source of transit capacity -- single passenger cars (even self driving cars) are not an efficient way to move large numbers of people, so car lanes can be converted to light rail or BRT.
Example: I can take Caltrain from Mountain View to SF for 8.00 one way, so 16.00 round trip.
Those fares are high - That 3 zone trip would cost $7.25 cash fare, or $6.75 if paid with a Clipper Card. But if you were a regular commuter, you'd buy the $179 monthly pass, which equates to around $4 each way. It's over 40 miles by car, you'd be hard pressed to pay all expenses for a car for 10 cents/mile.
The train takes around 45 minutes to make the trip. Driving with no traffic also takes around 45 minutes, but during commute hours, 60 - 90 minutes is more realistic. If you can live and work near the stations on both ends, the train makes much more sense than driving. The financial district in SF is just a 15 - 20 minute walk from Caltrain, so there are a lot of jobs within walking distance of the SF Caltrain station, and SOMA is becoming a bigger and bigger job center.
The problem with Caltrain isn't the expense -- it's quite reasonably priced with a monthly pass, the problem is the schedule... trains run infrequently, non-comute headways are 60 minutes, and many stations are served infrequently (or not at all) by express trains so even during commute hours, some stations have 60 minute headways, so staying at work a few extra minutes could mean getting home 90 minutes late. Plus, infrequent trains mean commute hour trains are often standing room only... and their train cars are not built for standing - there are few handholds and narrow isles can make it hard for passengers to get on/off trains.
But you're absolutely right that the Bay Area suffers from too many competing transit systems, with disparate and often confusing fare structures, they finally have a single regional payment card (Clipper Card), but the even that is clunky and works differently on different systems. BART gets the lions share of funding (both through a dedicated sales tax and grants for capitol projects), but is very expensive for users, not very reliable, and is running at capacity with very little that can be done to improve capacity without spending billions of dollars. Yet they keep expanding the system.
Isn't there already something in every single car that records the number of miles driven?
It doesn't track road miles (and people will claim they don't drive on roads, and demand exceptions!), or vehicle weight (see the ratio of road wear per vehicle weight and cringe).
Sorry, but the odometer won't be enough.
The mileage tax can have a weight multiplier to account for weight. Make the mileage tax a national tax, and it won't matter what state people drive in.
For those relative few that do significant driving off public roads, they can use a GPS tracker.
There is actually a serious problem here because the gas tax--by far one of the largest of these--is supposed to be a usage fee, and MPG is increasing. Raising the gas tax isn't a great solution, because people with low MPG are often those who can afford it least, and because raising taxes are always a political firestorm (imagine how much industry would push back too). Electric cars are a whole new issue entirely--don't know how widespread they'll be long term though.
No, transportation infrastructure needs to be fed from somewhere else. One of the current solutions is to stick a GPS tracker in every car, which is admirable on the basis of fair payment for public road usage, but utterly catastrophic in every other way. I think we just need to pay for transport infrastructure from a general fund instead.
No need for a GPS tracker, just track odometer readings, verified during annual inspections.
The problem with funding road infrastructure from the general fund is that if users don't pay more when they use the roads more, they have no incentive to reduce their use by living closer to work or taking transit. Roads aren't free to build or maintain, and they should not be free to use.
These Koch-sucking idiots don't realize that fucking people over will have consequences. 4 or 5 people are getting richer, 100,000 people are getting laid off, and there are psychopaths all over the country who believe that's a good thing. I wish we could dope the water supply with antipsychotics.
I'm pretty sure there are more than 4 or 5 IBM shareholders, if the stock price goes up (or doesn't go down as much) because of these layoffs, many more than 100,000 people will become richer.
Sure, company insiders with lots of stuck benefit more, but it's not true that they are the only ones that benefit.
“I was included in the resource action in spite of consistently high performance numbers. I am the only woman in the work group and one of only a handful in the whole region. The male partners that were retained have crucial chummy drinking buddy relationships with their customers. The treatment and support of professional women, in spite of the window dressing at the top layers is appalling.”
if the drinking buddy relationship is crucial and you haven't maintained said relationships, then don't you think that's why you're being fired? If you are unwilling to maintain this crucial customer relationship, why should you be retained? Is there some reason why women can't be good drinking buddies too?
Somehow, I don't think the blog post quoted in the Forbes article is the official stance of IBM corporate PR:
Response from IBM (via its Hong Kong office’s blog):
IBM does not comment on rumors or speculation. However, we’ll make an exception when the speculation is stupid. That’s the case here, where an industry gadfly is trying to make noise about how IBM is about to lay off 26 percent of its workforce. That’s over 100,000 people, which is totally ludicrous.
Despite claiming to be an "official" IBM blog, I don't believe a corporate PR person would say that speculation is stupid or refer to an industry gadfly making noise.
Slashdot Mirror
Your epileptic wife is having attacks, and you want a TWO year old to be not only alone in that situation, but responsible for a panic button? Dude, you are sick and need to get a frickin clue. Fast! Someone should seriously turn you in for child endangerment bordering on abuse!
Yeah, I honestly had to consider whether or not this was an early April fools gag...
You seem to have misread his situation, it's not that he *wants* that situation, it's a situation he wants to avoid. Yet, he also wants to prepare for it.
I'm tempted to whip up a little script that periodically downloads elementary OS and puts it up some place where people can download it by clicking a single link, possibly using BitTorrent. Anyone is fully within their rights to redistribute GPLd source code and/or binaries.
I'm sure the 5 people that actually have heard about and want to use Elementary OS will appreciate your work.
Seems like chemical analysis of the ash could solve this mystery pretty easily.
Anyone that watches TV knows they just need to put some it into the analyzer and they'll have the source of the ash in minutes. I don't understand why don't they just do that?
How do they define "Cyber Attack"? My home firewall fends off thousands of "cyberattacks" every day if you include port scans, and my webserver gets hundreds more vulnerability probes.
We won't have "apps", instead we'll have mini websites that kind of function like apps, but not really. But we won't call them apps so you can't complain that there are no apps.
Then another poster objected that no one will gamble on getting a car that someone has smoked in or left a mess, and my point was that people are *already* taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.
Not quite...
The difference is, at the car rental counter, if I get a car that was smoked in or a mess, I can go back and get another car (and I've had to do that before). If the car self-delivered to my office, it isn't nearly so simple.
Why can't it be simple? If the car is unacceptable, press the Reject button on your phone, and the car drives itself back to the depot to be cleaned, the person that left it a mess is billed for cleanup, and they send you a new car -- if you leave a messy car, when you're done with the car you press the "Clean me" button, it goes back to the depot to be cleaned, and you're charged some nominal fee (but less than the clean-up fee if someone else reports that the car is dirty).
The better question is why not? Why aren't they free? They aren't because you assume toll roads work. They don't. All toll roads do is allow more money to funnel somewhere.
While Roads aren't free to build or maintain, their cost should be buried in what we already pay out. Any time there is an additional burden, it causes less usage.
That's exactly why we're in this mess -- the roads have been free and numerous for so long that people expect to be able to drive whenever and wherever they want, that was the promise of the 1950's car age, and for a while, it worked.
But now, we have sprawling cities and suburbs that are hard to serve with transit, and building new roads is not only expensive, but there's little room to do so in many cities (building double, triple or quadruple decked roads is even more expensive, with diminishing returns, adding a double decked lane does not double throughput because you need room for extra entrance/exit lanes to get to the second level).
Los Angeles tried to build enough roads to accommodate traffic, but even after devoting about 30% of their land area to roads they still have some of the worst traffic congestion in the nation.
Every time a road is built or expanded, it quickly becomes congested as people move to take advantage of the new, uncongested road which of course causes more congestion, so another expansion is needed, and the cycle continues.
A freeway lane can accommodate 1000 - 2000 cars per hour. A train line can accommodate 30,000 passengers per hour at 2 minute headways.
why not just tax tires? That would seem to be a fairly decent indicator of distance travelled. It would also tax those with soft squishy performance tires higher than those more budget conscious...
why not just tax tires? That would seem to be a fairly decent indicator of distance travelled. It would also tax those with soft squishy performance tires higher than those more budget conscious...
Because the last thing the government should be doing is encouraging people to ride on worn tires when the taxes on new tires are more than the price of the tires themselves. And people would gravitate toward harder compound tires that last longer, but have less road grip.
They are trying to move away from an imperfect system to determine usage taxes, moving to another imperfect system seems like a waste of time and money because they'll have to scrap that system as well after manufacturers learn how to build 100,000 mile tires.
For those relative few that do significant driving off public roads, they can use a GPS tracker.
Presumably the GPS tracker is so they can be taxed?
Why should people driving pay public roads pay tax when they're off public infra?
Because they are commercial vehicles, subject to special rules and oversight. It's like asking why people driving public roads are required to keep a detailed log book of their driving time -- which commercial drivers are also required to do.
Heavy commercial vehicles get a break on road taxes -- they pay much more than cars, but heavy vehicles cause much much much more (to the 3rd power) road damage than cars.
Yes, some people can take advantage of such services, and that is fine if they wish, but the poster I was replying to was implying that it was "the" solution, that we'd all stop owning our own cars.
That is silly.
No he wasn't, he was implying that self-driving cars were "the" solution -- your proximity to a car rental counter no longer matters if you can summon a car with your smartphone when you leave your office and have it waiting outside when you get to the sidewalk.
Then another poster objected that no one will gamble on getting a car that someone has smoked in or left a mess, and my point was that people are *already* taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.
There's a lot of logistics that need to be figured out to make this convenient enough to rely on, but that's ok, there's decades of work that needs to be done before fully autonomous self-driving cars are a reality.
People are already taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.
I'm not... I haven't rented a car for years...
I didn't mean *you* in particular, but with car rental fleets of over a million cars and $20B in revenue in the USA, plenty of people are willing to rent a shared car that someone else may have driven just hours before.
Car share? Ha! You must be joking...
A lot of people have ideas that might work in 2 or 3 big cities, but for the vast majority of America, have no chance.
Car sharing may not be usable by everyone but Zipcar is already operating in more than 30 USA metro areas.
There may be vast areas of the USA where transit, car sharing, etc won't work, but 80% of the USA population lives in designated urban areas, so most of the population may be able to take advantage of them.
"Except you forgot to pay gas, maintenance and insurance on those 40 miles."
And depreciation, say $15k over 150k miles is another $0.10 per mile (I'm not from the US, not sure of typical car prices and lifetime mileages. YMMV)
Car owners typically don't count depreciation "because they have the car anyway". However, once infrastructure (or choice to live and work close to mass transit) is available, you can choose not to own a car and rent one for the few occasions you need one.
Apart from those costs, your own time may also have value. IMO, time spent driving is a waste and costs me EUR 20/h in loss of life quality. Time in the train I use to read the newspaper or slashdot (or post comments, like now). The bike ride to the station is my primary form of exercise (no gym subscription).
Of course, the problem (at least where I live) is that there is not enough transit infrastructure in place to replace the car entirely -- I live a 15 minutes walk from a train line to the city where I work, so transit meets my needs for commuting. But that train line is very limited so if I want to go somewhere that's not served by the train (or want to take my dog somewhere), then I need a car.
Perhaps someday car share will be widespread enough to be practical, but it's not there yet. Renting a car from a traditional car rental place is out of the question due to the 10 mile distance to the nearest rental car agency (plus it wouldn't take many full-price car rentals to exceed the cost of owning a car)
So for me, I can remove insurance and depreciation (except mileage based depreciation) from the cost of commuting with a car, so my costs really are only gas & maintenance. Over the 9 years I've owned my car, maintenance averages out to around 8 cents/mile (this includes routine oil changes, two sets of tires, and one major $3000 engine repair)
If I included insurance and depreciation, that would add around 35 cents/mile to my costs.
Self-driving cars are mass transit. At some point, once you're no longer driving your car, it will occur to you that you don't really care if you own the car. That's when things will get interesting.
Oh yes we would, most people aren't going to want to take the gamble of being picked up by a car that the last person smoked in, left covered with fast food wrappers and stains, plus not having to wait for a pickup for an unexpected trip to the store.
People are already taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.
Book fair on the bullet train, which is 45-50 minutes is a dollar higher rate one way. The 3 zone trip you are referring to is the correct price (almost), but since you hit every stop it's a much longer commute (closer to drive time with traffic). Rates went up not too long ago, which you may not have known.
I took the fares right off the Caltrain website: http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/...
There is no surcharge for the Baby Bullet trains, and Caltrain couldn't charge such a surcharge today even if they wanted to -- they don't know which train you boarded or whether you transferred trains along the way. They only know the station where you boarded and the station where you departed.
The bigger problem with mass transit is the lack of convenience. If I am at the train station at 7:01 and miss the bullet train, I have to wait an hour for another train.
That's not quite true at Mountainview, if you miss the 6:57am train, you can take the 7:05 which gets you to SF 15 minutes later than the 6:57 would have. If you miss the 7:05, you can take the 7:23, which gets you to SF 22 minutes later than the 7:05. So yes, it takes you a bit longer if you miss your preferred train, but not an hour longer.
During prime time trains are every 30 minutes. Compare this to leaving in a car when I want and knowing about when I will get to the office.
You must drive on much different roads than I do -- to be sure that I'll make it to the office at a particular time, I have to pad my commute by at least 30 minutes to account for traffic. The train is much more consistent since it has no traffic delays, though when there is a delay (i.e. when someone is hit by a train), delays can be significant.
Also, the train is only part of the expense. Depending on which lot you park at in MV you have different rates, Muni and Bart are different rates so if you are not within walking distance of Caltrain you are paying another $4.00 minimum per day to commute.
Now compared to what you have to pay to park downtown SF it's cheaper, but that does not make it cheap by any means.
Isn't that what counts? That would make transit cheaper than driving.
Until working up there, I had no sympathy for the company private shuttles. I have since completely changed my mind on that one and take ours every day.
Sure, an employer sponsored shuttle that picks up close to home and drops you off right at the office sounds great, but would you be willing to pay the full fare for that if not sponsored by your employer?
Were we just talking about personal vehicles?
Well I don't know -- who is "we"? You can't post as an Anonymous Coward and then complain that someone isn't following the chain of conversation, unless you are signed in, there is no chain of conversation to follow. But since the original post I replied to specifically said "cars", then no, I don't think "we" were talking about commercial trucks (cars, even commercial ones) don't tend to grossly change weight)
I wasn't limiting it to that since the original posted to which I replied didn't include the distinction.
Trucks are easy - use a GPS tracker, you can even tie it to load sensors or require the driver to indicate weight when loaded and charge by the pound and by the mile. Commercial drivers should not have the same privacy concerns as private cars.
But no, too many people will be border cases, where they travel from state to state, and there will be objections raised.
That's why I said make it a national tax -- everyone pays 10 cents a mile regardless of where they live. So it doesn't matter to the driver whether he does most of his driving in California or Nevada or does a cross country trip, the tax is the same. States won't care either since it'll pretty much even out in the end. Generally states have few border residents in comparison to the rest of their population.
The mileage tax can have a weight multiplier to account for weight.
That'll work for vehicles that don't grossly change weight.
That's not going to describe the vehicles of the most concern.
Those are commercial vehicles and would be taxed differently as they are now -- commercial vehicles already pay more taxes based on the vehicle's gross weight capacity.
Make the mileage tax a national tax, and it won't matter what state people drive in.
It will when it comes to funding. Even apportionment by population is a bad idea.
People would still report their mileage to their own DMV, so the tax is divided among each state based on their resident's reported driving. It won't be 100% accurate, but pretty close.
For those relative few that do significant driving off public roads, they can use a GPS tracker.
That's just too sensible to work!
Or a tax on vehicle value each year. Something like...
(Blue Book Value - deductions) x Rate
Deductions would include, but not be limited to, a senior citizen deduction, low-income deduction, etc. I'm thinking something modest like $5k or something for low-income individuals. $7.5k for seniors. And only if the car has been driven at least 500 miles in a given year. But, this would have been done in conjunction with the local DMV.
California already does this -- they charge a Vehicle License Fee that is 1.15% of the market value of the car.
In our big cities, it seems like it's too late to add more mass transit. Where the hell would you put it? There's already skyscrapers there. All I can figure is that we need stringent state or federal guidelines for new city planning above a certain size that mandates effective mass transit in the design. You can add it to new growth, you can't shove it into old cities.
There's still room underground in most cities, though it's expensive -- San Francisco Muni is building a new underground line, and there's a plan to build a tunnel to bring Caltrain downtown.
Roads are another source of transit capacity -- single passenger cars (even self driving cars) are not an efficient way to move large numbers of people, so car lanes can be converted to light rail or BRT.
Example: I can take Caltrain from Mountain View to SF for 8.00 one way, so 16.00 round trip.
Those fares are high - That 3 zone trip would cost $7.25 cash fare, or $6.75 if paid with a Clipper Card. But if you were a regular commuter, you'd buy the $179 monthly pass, which equates to around $4 each way. It's over 40 miles by car, you'd be hard pressed to pay all expenses for a car for 10 cents/mile.
The train takes around 45 minutes to make the trip. Driving with no traffic also takes around 45 minutes, but during commute hours, 60 - 90 minutes is more realistic. If you can live and work near the stations on both ends, the train makes much more sense than driving. The financial district in SF is just a 15 - 20 minute walk from Caltrain, so there are a lot of jobs within walking distance of the SF Caltrain station, and SOMA is becoming a bigger and bigger job center.
The problem with Caltrain isn't the expense -- it's quite reasonably priced with a monthly pass, the problem is the schedule... trains run infrequently, non-comute headways are 60 minutes, and many stations are served infrequently (or not at all) by express trains so even during commute hours, some stations have 60 minute headways, so staying at work a few extra minutes could mean getting home 90 minutes late. Plus, infrequent trains mean commute hour trains are often standing room only... and their train cars are not built for standing - there are few handholds and narrow isles can make it hard for passengers to get on/off trains.
But you're absolutely right that the Bay Area suffers from too many competing transit systems, with disparate and often confusing fare structures, they finally have a single regional payment card (Clipper Card), but the even that is clunky and works differently on different systems. BART gets the lions share of funding (both through a dedicated sales tax and grants for capitol projects), but is very expensive for users, not very reliable, and is running at capacity with very little that can be done to improve capacity without spending billions of dollars. Yet they keep expanding the system.
Isn't there already something in every single car that records the number of miles driven?
It doesn't track road miles (and people will claim they don't drive on roads, and demand exceptions!), or vehicle weight (see the ratio of road wear per vehicle weight and cringe).
Sorry, but the odometer won't be enough.
The mileage tax can have a weight multiplier to account for weight. Make the mileage tax a national tax, and it won't matter what state people drive in.
For those relative few that do significant driving off public roads, they can use a GPS tracker.
There is actually a serious problem here because the gas tax--by far one of the largest of these--is supposed to be a usage fee, and MPG is increasing. Raising the gas tax isn't a great solution, because people with low MPG are often those who can afford it least, and because raising taxes are always a political firestorm (imagine how much industry would push back too). Electric cars are a whole new issue entirely--don't know how widespread they'll be long term though.
No, transportation infrastructure needs to be fed from somewhere else. One of the current solutions is to stick a GPS tracker in every car, which is admirable on the basis of fair payment for public road usage, but utterly catastrophic in every other way. I think we just need to pay for transport infrastructure from a general fund instead.
No need for a GPS tracker, just track odometer readings, verified during annual inspections.
The problem with funding road infrastructure from the general fund is that if users don't pay more when they use the roads more, they have no incentive to reduce their use by living closer to work or taking transit. Roads aren't free to build or maintain, and they should not be free to use.
Ask the AT&T sales guys they know where every strip club that takes amax is.
Are you serious? I signed a $60K/year contract with AT&T and all I got was lunch - what do you have to do to get the strip club treatment?
These Koch-sucking idiots don't realize that fucking people over will have consequences. 4 or 5 people are getting richer, 100,000 people are getting laid off, and there are psychopaths all over the country who believe that's a good thing. I wish we could dope the water supply with antipsychotics.
I'm pretty sure there are more than 4 or 5 IBM shareholders, if the stock price goes up (or doesn't go down as much) because of these layoffs, many more than 100,000 people will become richer.
Sure, company insiders with lots of stuck benefit more, but it's not true that they are the only ones that benefit.
“I was included in the resource action in spite of consistently high performance numbers. I am the only woman in the work group and one of only a handful in the whole region. The male partners that were retained have crucial chummy drinking buddy relationships with their customers. The treatment and support of professional women, in spite of the window dressing at the top layers is appalling.”
if the drinking buddy relationship is crucial and you haven't maintained said relationships, then don't you think that's why you're being fired? If you are unwilling to maintain this crucial customer relationship, why should you be retained? Is there some reason why women can't be good drinking buddies too?
Somehow, I don't think the blog post quoted in the Forbes article is the official stance of IBM corporate PR:
Response from IBM (via its Hong Kong office’s blog):
IBM does not comment on rumors or speculation. However, we’ll make an exception when the speculation is stupid. That’s the case here, where an industry gadfly is trying to make noise about how IBM is about to lay off 26 percent of its workforce. That’s over 100,000 people, which is totally ludicrous.
Despite claiming to be an "official" IBM blog, I don't believe a corporate PR person would say that speculation is stupid or refer to an industry gadfly making noise.