My office offers free charging. The bigger issue is determining 'who' gets to charge as since they put them in the EV population has exploded.
Maybe, but I cannot see that situation lasting after EVs are no longer a novelty. FTTB it makes a great news item for the company house magazine, being green and all that, but in the longer term, and after the EV population has exploded as you put it, and charging points have ceased to be hot news, why TF would a company provide free electricity - very significant amounts of it - to a couple of thousand cars every day? Especially when EVs are supposed to be cheaper to run than IC cars for which the employees currently manage pay for fuel themselves. Christ, my company even withdrew putting biscuits on the table at meetings because the bean counters saw a cost-saving there.
Same with government taxation. In the UK sale of petrol (sorry, gas) raises a huge amount of taxation for the government. FTTB, AFAIK there is no equivalent taxation on elecricity for EVs. When a significant proportion of people have EVs, the government is hardly going to tolerate such a hit on their income. So expect the present tax incentives (and things like parking fees and the London congestion charge being waived) not only to cease, but new forms of taxation to arise to replace the loss of that on petrol, perhaps based on distance travelled.
If the car owner does all charging at the office, the cost of electricity would offset at least some of the cost of replacing the batteries.
Why on earth would you assume that it would be free to charge your electric car at the office? Do you get free petrol (sorry, gas) from your employer? I would assume, outside of this scheme, that car charging points everywhere except at home would be operated with a credit card. In a scheme like this I would expect the employee to get a monthly bill based on the net kWh they had drawn (or monthly credit, if that were negative).
Oh, losing the Empire, you lost all those nations you STOLE!
I very much like a UK that is NOT an Empire.
We have enough imperialism for now...
No, but the European Union is an empire, as is the USA itself - a confederation of originally separate states which went to war in 1861 to prevent some from leaving it as they wished, and also expanded to include Indian nations and former Spanish territories such as Texas.
Given Snowden's background, it doesn't seem he has issues with divulging information.
That is not the view interrogation experts take. Even if you tell them everything, they can't be sure that there isn't more, so they will waterboard you anyway.
I wonder if Snowden thought all this through before he acted as he did. I suspect he is wondering by now if he bit off more than he can chew.
He said enough food and good health care. To counter his hypothesis, you would have to show examples of places with "enough" food and "good" health care, yet a still increasing birth rate.
Examples of places are - most places in the world. Even though standards in eg India and even Africa are not up to those of the West (and I'm not even sure of that any more unless you are rich), they are far higher than in 1900. As a result if which, after centuries of liitle increase, the world population has increased threefold. Even in the UK, the population increased hugely after about 1850 as a result of measures such as improved water and sewage treament, which are all part of healthcare.
you conveniently ignored the healthcare aspect altogether.
I could swear I mentioned health care in the context of Bin Laden's father. Population reduction (or the hope for it) has more to do with the availablility and acceptance of contraception and the status of women in backward societies. Some experts say it is to do with TV and films showing women a different way of life than just pumping out babies. These factors may or may not be linked to wealth. Just sending these people crates of money and medicine, or even investing in their infrastucture, will certainly not do it.
more of the increase will be in Africa and Asia, and there is a lot of potential to improve farming there. Basically we are okay population wise, it just look scary when you see the short term numbers.
Why do you only consider farming? Soon they will want cars, electricity, consumer gizmos, washing machines, and these need things like steel, copper and fuel. All of which are running into world shortage already. Look how rapidly China went from a nation of paddy fields to modern consumerism, and is now starting to outbid the West for the diminishing resources.
You are also assuming those African nations will be politically stable, in order to improve their farming. That is not their track record.
So let me see if I understand you. It is far better to dedicate living space, vegs and medicines to cattle than humans?
Definitely. Vegtables and cattle don't play loud music into the night, argue with me about fence lines, park cars across my driveway, mug me, whatever.
My point is that there is an optimum human population which we have already exceeded (at least in those areas that are reasonably inhabitable). Economies of scale were reached and passed long ago, and we are now seriously competing with each other (which is likely to turn into widescale fighting soon) for diminishing raw materials, fuel and above all land space. I spend a lot of my time dealing with issues that can be put down to overcrowding: time in traffic jams, having no room in my garden for a workshop, maintaining (or earning money to replace) things now made with inferior materials because good materials have become rare and unaffordable. Like I still have a couple of bits of furniture from my not-very-wealthy grandparents, solid wood that when it got shabby you could cheaply sandpaper and re-paint; now furniture is crap chipboard with paper-thin veneer that can only be replaced when shabby, requiring more hours of wage time than the re-paint ever did.
How bad will it have to become before you stop enjoying the population increase? Like this?
But the population isn't really increasing in the western world where we have all the food we can eat. By your reasoning western populations should be increasing a lot.
The population is increasing alarmingly in the UK. It has risen 20% in my lifetime, with vast areas of countryside built over in thet time A further 17% increase officially predicted in the next 25 years.
The number of people will stop increasing when also poor countries have enough food and good health care so that parents are confident that the children they get will reach adulthood.
Wishful thinking. It is culturally ingrained in many of those societies that the number of children you have is a status symbol, a virility statement. Osama bin Laden's father had 56 children and it wasn't because he was worried about health care.
Sounds like the Citroen Dyane, the ones that look like inverted deckchairs. Despite looking basic, they required all sorts of special tools (and I don't just mean spanners) even to do routine jobs. Just checking the brake shoes required peeing. The design was insane.
I have never recalled an era in history where I couldn't buy a PC without Windows,.............. (perhaps you're from an alternate universe where this was once the case)....My first PC was custom built with OS/2 Warp. My second was custom built with Red Hat Linux. My third came with Windows, but I only bought it because I didn't feel like building my own.......My most recent one was an Apple.
So you concede that the only PC's you have owned without having to buy Windows are ones you built yourself. I concede that you can buy an Apple (or Chromebook) without Windows, if you stretch the definition of a PC that far.
My alternate universe is the UK. Here it has not been possible to buy a PC without Windows, except from one or two specialist builders where everything is bespoke and you pay accordingly. I have seen no mainstream or High Street retailer in the UK where you could buy a PC without Windows since about 1995.
The old question remains whether unbridled capitalism and philanthropy can better address the world's woes, or, would a more socialist political structure.. better address...... the divide.
While I dislike necessarily connecting this with "socialism", I don't think the question even remains. History tells us what happened under unbridled capitalism - take a look at the industrial areas of the UK before government regulation intervened to stop such excesses as children in coal mines and to impose minimum standards for drinking water and sanitation. Yes, there were a few philanthropic capitalists (or more likely their wives), but they were lone voices.
It is clear fom Slashdot comments that Americans have a deep built-in phobia about anything done by government. No doubt this is rooted in the "free man" culture with which the USA was founded, the fact that the USA industialised after the worst period of laissez faire capitalist exploitation in Europe, and the myth of British tyrranic governance which fuelled the revolution; but it does gets beyond reason at times.
The less likely a couple's children are to die before they grow up, the more children they have. An increase in food, health, education, and so on means birth rates will decrease
I think you meant "more likely" there not "less likely", to make sense. Taking your point as corrected, there is wishful thinking there. It depends on the culture. In some cultures, the number of sons you have is a status symbol and a supposed statement of your virility (never mind that any one male orgasm produces enough sperm to fertilise every woman in the world). Also in some cultures the numbers of kids you have = the number of slaves at your disposal (and maybe the size of your private urban gang).
Increased healthcare/wealth/food/whatever will be taken in these cultures as a chance to have even more children. Osama Bin Laden's father had 56 children, and I don't believe it was because he was short of heath care.
You know, people have been predicting that we will exceed the carrying capacity of the earth, and be forced to put more marginal land under the plow since Thomas Malthus, about two hundred years ago. Yet we are using LESS land these days, growing more food, and growing it cheaper.
Extrapolate the earth's population growthand it reaches to infinity, and approaching it faster and faster. You think the earth's (or the Universe's) resources are infinite? Would you admit there was a limit when the entire mass of the Universe has been turned into human biomatter? From where I am, it looks like Malthus's prediction is on course. As for using less land, that seems pretty unlikely, considering that around 1813 the mid-west of the USA and most of South America was natural prairie, now farmed.
You also say nothing about the quality of life. I don't want to live in a pod like some Japanese do, with nowhere to go for peace and quiet. Fine if you like to spend all your time in crowded parties; I don't.
The car said it needed servicing and "may not restart", if it were me I'd probably keep driving too.
Only if that warning came up by itself, but this guy had just hit a serious chunk of iron in the road. I would have stopped straight away, even without the warning. Yet he carried on even after a warning as well.
The guy is an idiot. And we are expected us to listen to him giving advice on the subject of car purchases?
What is less clear is how using radio waves will be treated, especially if you live near a transmitter and can get some useful energy from it.
Indeed. Who says the radio waves these guys are intercepting are "stray"? They may be on the way to somewhere else useful. I'd feel pissed off if the neighbour who lives on the TV transmitter side of me put up a bedstead aerial to suck all the signal out of the air before it reaches me. It would be a legal case.
Sure, what's to stop a punk from knifing the tires on your car at any time? Nothing.
Psychology. They know there would be a shitstorm which can make them uncomfotable even if not caught and convicted. However, people generally seem to regard vandalism to communal property as something inevitable, just a matter to shrug off as part of modern life.
II'd love to see bike infrastructure built up everywhere.
Disagreed. Bike infrastructure is generally designed by people who do not have a clue about cycling, or who's cycling experience is done at slow jogging pace. Like putting Give-Way lines across the cycleway even where private driveways emerge. These "facilities" are also considered fair game for siting street furniture (just Google images for the book "Crap Cycle Lanes"), as well as unofficial stuff like parked cars, roadworks dumps and broken glass.
The idea of bike infrastucture was once vigourously opposed by cycling groups, at least until about 1970. The reason for the change is in the general lowering standard of bike riding. Most present-day cyclists seem to regard the pedals as like a switch to make the bike move, not something to put effort in. My bike riding speed is 18-20 mph, faster than a car can average in a city, and I would rather mix with cars than with pedestrians who are nearly stationary and totally unpredictable.
While that's a fair comment - it is the butt of jokes. However it is usually from people who've never actually lived there, and those who are such bad drivers they can't cope with a roundabout;)
You don't need to live there to encounter the roundabouts, and you do not have to be a bad driver to dislike them. The first time I drove my son to uni my route (A421) took me through that area. Every roundabout caused a luggage avalanche, and they were every few hundred yards for no apparent good reason. Perhaps they came into their own in the rush hour, but this wasn't. Found a different route next time.
The place looked so dreary that I asked my son (who was map-reading) where the heart of the city was. He said he believed it didn't have one - which sums up all I have heard about it.
Read your own reference. As it is Nov 5th, it is "Guy Fawkes Night" in the UK, the traditional term for it.
I notice that the UK media tends to refer to it as "Bonfire Night". That is merely for political correctness, because historically it was an anti-Catholic night. Guy Fawkes was part of a Catholic plot to assassinate King James I, and it is his effigy- the "Guy" - that is burned on the bonfire.
'people smuggling' isn't related to slavery; it's the politicised term for the people who help refugees get to Autralia. [It's] about the current Australian government's (xenophobic) anti-refugee policies
Cryst, you are naive.
Human trafficking is mostly about gullible girls being promised good jobs in more prosperous countries but actually being forced into prostitution. They may well be told to claim to be refugees, as also do adventurers who know that this is an almost sure passport to anywhere they want to go, thanks to the existence of so many gullible people like you who believe the bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
My office offers free charging. The bigger issue is determining 'who' gets to charge as since they put them in the EV population has exploded.
Maybe, but I cannot see that situation lasting after EVs are no longer a novelty. FTTB it makes a great news item for the company house magazine, being green and all that, but in the longer term, and after the EV population has exploded as you put it, and charging points have ceased to be hot news, why TF would a company provide free electricity - very significant amounts of it - to a couple of thousand cars every day? Especially when EVs are supposed to be cheaper to run than IC cars for which the employees currently manage pay for fuel themselves. Christ, my company even withdrew putting biscuits on the table at meetings because the bean counters saw a cost-saving there.
Same with government taxation. In the UK sale of petrol (sorry, gas) raises a huge amount of taxation for the government. FTTB, AFAIK there is no equivalent taxation on elecricity for EVs. When a significant proportion of people have EVs, the government is hardly going to tolerate such a hit on their income. So expect the present tax incentives (and things like parking fees and the London congestion charge being waived) not only to cease, but new forms of taxation to arise to replace the loss of that on petrol, perhaps based on distance travelled.
If the car owner does all charging at the office, the cost of electricity would offset at least some of the cost of replacing the batteries.
Why on earth would you assume that it would be free to charge your electric car at the office? Do you get free petrol (sorry, gas) from your employer? I would assume, outside of this scheme, that car charging points everywhere except at home would be operated with a credit card. In a scheme like this I would expect the employee to get a monthly bill based on the net kWh they had drawn (or monthly credit, if that were negative).
Oh, losing the Empire, you lost all those nations you STOLE! I very much like a UK that is NOT an Empire. We have enough imperialism for now...
No, but the European Union is an empire, as is the USA itself - a confederation of originally separate states which went to war in 1861 to prevent some from leaving it as they wished, and also expanded to include Indian nations and former Spanish territories such as Texas.
Given Snowden's background, it doesn't seem he has issues with divulging information.
That is not the view interrogation experts take. Even if you tell them everything, they can't be sure that there isn't more, so they will waterboard you anyway.
I wonder if Snowden thought all this through before he acted as he did. I suspect he is wondering by now if he bit off more than he can chew.
He said enough food and good health care. To counter his hypothesis, you would have to show examples of places with "enough" food and "good" health care, yet a still increasing birth rate.
Examples of places are - most places in the world. Even though standards in eg India and even Africa are not up to those of the West (and I'm not even sure of that any more unless you are rich), they are far higher than in 1900. As a result if which, after centuries of liitle increase, the world population has increased threefold. Even in the UK, the population increased hugely after about 1850 as a result of measures such as improved water and sewage treament, which are all part of healthcare.
you conveniently ignored the healthcare aspect altogether.
I could swear I mentioned health care in the context of Bin Laden's father. Population reduction (or the hope for it) has more to do with the availablility and acceptance of contraception and the status of women in backward societies. Some experts say it is to do with TV and films showing women a different way of life than just pumping out babies. These factors may or may not be linked to wealth. Just sending these people crates of money and medicine, or even investing in their infrastucture, will certainly not do it.
more of the increase will be in Africa and Asia, and there is a lot of potential to improve farming there. Basically we are okay population wise, it just look scary when you see the short term numbers.
Why do you only consider farming? Soon they will want cars, electricity, consumer gizmos, washing machines, and these need things like steel, copper and fuel. All of which are running into world shortage already. Look how rapidly China went from a nation of paddy fields to modern consumerism, and is now starting to outbid the West for the diminishing resources.
You are also assuming those African nations will be politically stable, in order to improve their farming. That is not their track record.
So let me see if I understand you. It is far better to dedicate living space, vegs and medicines to cattle than humans?
Definitely. Vegtables and cattle don't play loud music into the night, argue with me about fence lines, park cars across my driveway, mug me, whatever.
My point is that there is an optimum human population which we have already exceeded (at least in those areas that are reasonably inhabitable). Economies of scale were reached and passed long ago, and we are now seriously competing with each other (which is likely to turn into widescale fighting soon) for diminishing raw materials, fuel and above all land space. I spend a lot of my time dealing with issues that can be put down to overcrowding: time in traffic jams, having no room in my garden for a workshop, maintaining (or earning money to replace) things now made with inferior materials because good materials have become rare and unaffordable. Like I still have a couple of bits of furniture from my not-very-wealthy grandparents, solid wood that when it got shabby you could cheaply sandpaper and re-paint; now furniture is crap chipboard with paper-thin veneer that can only be replaced when shabby, requiring more hours of wage time than the re-paint ever did.
How bad will it have to become before you stop enjoying the population increase? Like this?
But the population isn't really increasing in the western world where we have all the food we can eat. By your reasoning western populations should be increasing a lot.
The population is increasing alarmingly in the UK. It has risen 20% in my lifetime, with vast areas of countryside built over in thet time A further 17% increase officially predicted in the next 25 years.
The number of people will stop increasing when also poor countries have enough food and good health care so that parents are confident that the children they get will reach adulthood.
Wishful thinking. It is culturally ingrained in many of those societies that the number of children you have is a status symbol, a virility statement. Osama bin Laden's father had 56 children and it wasn't because he was worried about health care.
Sounds like the Citroen Dyane, the ones that look like inverted deckchairs. Despite looking basic, they required all sorts of special tools (and I don't just mean spanners) even to do routine jobs. Just checking the brake shoes required peeing. The design was insane.
I have never recalled an era in history where I couldn't buy a PC without Windows,.............. (perhaps you're from an alternate universe where this was once the case). ...My first PC was custom built with OS/2 Warp. My second was custom built with Red Hat Linux. My third came with Windows, but I only bought it because I didn't feel like building my own.......My most recent one was an Apple.
So you concede that the only PC's you have owned without having to buy Windows are ones you built yourself. I concede that you can buy an Apple (or Chromebook) without Windows, if you stretch the definition of a PC that far.
My alternate universe is the UK. Here it has not been possible to buy a PC without Windows, except from one or two specialist builders where everything is bespoke and you pay accordingly. I have seen no mainstream or High Street retailer in the UK where you could buy a PC without Windows since about 1995.
The old question remains whether unbridled capitalism and philanthropy can better address the world's woes, or, would a more socialist political structure .. better address ...... the divide.
While I dislike necessarily connecting this with "socialism", I don't think the question even remains. History tells us what happened under unbridled capitalism - take a look at the industrial areas of the UK before government regulation intervened to stop such excesses as children in coal mines and to impose minimum standards for drinking water and sanitation. Yes, there were a few philanthropic capitalists (or more likely their wives), but they were lone voices.
It is clear fom Slashdot comments that Americans have a deep built-in phobia about anything done by government. No doubt this is rooted in the "free man" culture with which the USA was founded, the fact that the USA industialised after the worst period of laissez faire capitalist exploitation in Europe, and the myth of British tyrranic governance which fuelled the revolution; but it does gets beyond reason at times.
The less likely a couple's children are to die before they grow up, the more children they have. An increase in food, health, education, and so on means birth rates will decrease
I think you meant "more likely" there not "less likely", to make sense. Taking your point as corrected, there is wishful thinking there. It depends on the culture. In some cultures, the number of sons you have is a status symbol and a supposed statement of your virility (never mind that any one male orgasm produces enough sperm to fertilise every woman in the world). Also in some cultures the numbers of kids you have = the number of slaves at your disposal (and maybe the size of your private urban gang).
Increased healthcare/wealth/food/whatever will be taken in these cultures as a chance to have even more children. Osama Bin Laden's father had 56 children, and I don't believe it was because he was short of heath care.
You know, people have been predicting that we will exceed the carrying capacity of the earth, and be forced to put more marginal land under the plow since Thomas Malthus, about two hundred years ago. Yet we are using LESS land these days, growing more food, and growing it cheaper.
Extrapolate the earth's population growthand it reaches to infinity, and approaching it faster and faster. You think the earth's (or the Universe's) resources are infinite? Would you admit there was a limit when the entire mass of the Universe has been turned into human biomatter? From where I am, it looks like Malthus's prediction is on course. As for using less land, that seems pretty unlikely, considering that around 1813 the mid-west of the USA and most of South America was natural prairie, now farmed.
You also say nothing about the quality of life. I don't want to live in a pod like some Japanese do, with nowhere to go for peace and quiet. Fine if you like to spend all your time in crowded parties; I don't.
[Gates] didn't rob from anybody, He exchanged value for value.
He robbed me by making me pay for pre-loaded copy of Windows when I bought a PC, a copy I did not use. No "value-for-value" there.
The only transactions that are not a net win are when one is at the point of a gun. Bill Gates never pointed a gun at anyone.
You don't need a gun to force people to do things. Like "buy Windows or you can't have a PC"
If there was no value in Microsoft products then people wouldn't buy them.
People can buy things because they are forced to (see above), or because they are ignorant. You should read this The Grantham Grocer Fallacy
People care about safety of their vehicles
Some do. Some don't.
The car said it needed servicing and "may not restart", if it were me I'd probably keep driving too.
Only if that warning came up by itself, but this guy had just hit a serious chunk of iron in the road. I would have stopped straight away, even without the warning. Yet he carried on even after a warning as well.
The guy is an idiot. And we are expected us to listen to him giving advice on the subject of car purchases?
What is less clear is how using radio waves will be treated, especially if you live near a transmitter and can get some useful energy from it.
Indeed. Who says the radio waves these guys are intercepting are "stray"? They may be on the way to somewhere else useful. I'd feel pissed off if the neighbour who lives on the TV transmitter side of me put up a bedstead aerial to suck all the signal out of the air before it reaches me. It would be a legal case.
Sure, what's to stop a punk from knifing the tires on your car at any time? Nothing.
Psychology. They know there would be a shitstorm which can make them uncomfotable even if not caught and convicted. However, people generally seem to regard vandalism to communal property as something inevitable, just a matter to shrug off as part of modern life.
II'd love to see bike infrastructure built up everywhere.
Disagreed. Bike infrastructure is generally designed by people who do not have a clue about cycling, or who's cycling experience is done at slow jogging pace. Like putting Give-Way lines across the cycleway even where private driveways emerge. These "facilities" are also considered fair game for siting street furniture (just Google images for the book "Crap Cycle Lanes"), as well as unofficial stuff like parked cars, roadworks dumps and broken glass.
The idea of bike infrastucture was once vigourously opposed by cycling groups, at least until about 1970. The reason for the change is in the general lowering standard of bike riding. Most present-day cyclists seem to regard the pedals as like a switch to make the bike move, not something to put effort in. My bike riding speed is 18-20 mph, faster than a car can average in a city, and I would rather mix with cars than with pedestrians who are nearly stationary and totally unpredictable.
what explains the quarter million population?
It was cheap to buy a house there, at least when it was first built. I knew several people who moved there for that reason.
While that's a fair comment - it is the butt of jokes. However it is usually from people who've never actually lived there, and those who are such bad drivers they can't cope with a roundabout ;)
You don't need to live there to encounter the roundabouts, and you do not have to be a bad driver to dislike them. The first time I drove my son to uni my route (A421) took me through that area. Every roundabout caused a luggage avalanche, and they were every few hundred yards for no apparent good reason. Perhaps they came into their own in the rush hour, but this wasn't. Found a different route next time.
The place looked so dreary that I asked my son (who was map-reading) where the heart of the city was. He said he believed it didn't have one - which sums up all I have heard about it.
It's that unsupervised, these things and things like it will be vandalized, stolen, and used as public toilets.
They could mitigate this problem by requiring a credit card to enter,
You're telling me that vandals need a credit card to vandalise something these days? I must be falling behind the times.
As I remember from spending the first 30 years of my life living in Britain, it was, and still is called Bonfire Night by British people in Britain.
Must have depended where you lived or in what circle. Around me it was always "Guy Fawkes Night".
Read your own reference. As it is Nov 5th, it is "Guy Fawkes Night" in the UK, the traditional term for it.
I notice that the UK media tends to refer to it as "Bonfire Night". That is merely for political correctness, because historically it was an anti-Catholic night. Guy Fawkes was part of a Catholic plot to assassinate King James I, and it is his effigy- the "Guy" - that is burned on the bonfire.
'people smuggling' isn't related to slavery; it's the politicised term for the people who help refugees get to Autralia. [It's] about the current Australian government's (xenophobic) anti-refugee policies
Cryst, you are naive.
Human trafficking is mostly about gullible girls being promised good jobs in more prosperous countries but actually being forced into prostitution. They may well be told to claim to be refugees, as also do adventurers who know that this is an almost sure passport to anywhere they want to go, thanks to the existence of so many gullible people like you who believe the bullshit.
Link
Why the Indonesian government should be content to see so much of their best womanhood draining away like this is beyond me.