It all hangs on this: if the retailer is responsible for the sale all way until it reaches *your* hands, then it's simple. If the problem is yours as soon as the retailer hands it to the courier then you're out of luck - talk to your law makers.
That is a negotiated agreement between buyer and seller. There are copious laws about this in the US under the Uniform Commercial Code and there are defaults if nothing else is explicitly agreed to. If you see FOB on your packing slip that details exactly who owned the product at any given time. For instance if you see FOB Destination, that means that it is owned by the retailer until you take delivery of the product. FOB Origin means that you own it the moment it leaves the shipping dock on a courier's truck.
to get a PO box, and have all packages shipped to you there.
UPS will not deliver to PO boxes and in fact they cannot by law. Neither can FedEx, DHL, etc. Only the United States Postal Service can deliver to PO boxes. Since most of my deliveries do not come via USPS a PO box is rather useless to me. You can get a similar sort of service through places like UPS stores and they will accept packages from other couriers. Not the post office though.
And USPS shipping is usually less expensive than other options.
Not for equivalent service it isn't. USPS is generally more expensive and less convenient if you are paying for a similar level of service. I ship lots of packages and you can save money on postage in some cases through USPS but you generally get what you pay for.
Also, many large employers will let you receive parcels at your place of work, so they're received by a human into a secure building.
So do many small ones. I have most of my packages delivered to me at work because my driveway is basically impossible for a delivery truck to traverse in bad weather plus they tend to leave packages out in the weather by my garage instead of on my covered porch. Most employers are pretty cool about this sort of thing if you ask. Obviously not an option for everyone but it can be a good alternative.
Evidently you haven't had to deal with them as much as I have. USPS is clumsy and inefficient. Their workers don't work quickly and shipping anything through them is a pain in the ass. Shipping packages through USPS is generally more expensive for equivalent service to UPS or FedEx. USPS "tracking service" is generally utterly useless. It tells you that it's been shipped and that it's been delivered and nothing in between most of the time. USPS does a fine job with letters but they are the only ones allowed to handle those so it's not like there is any alternative unless you want to hire an expensive private courier.
They make sure the package gets in your hands.
Only if you pay them extra to do so, no different from UPS or FedEx. Ship something without requiring the recipient to sign for delivery and they will not take special measures to get it to you and only you.
If you're not home, they leave a ticket in your mailbox to pickup the package at the office, which is far less inconvenient then having a package stolen.
UPS and FedEx do the same thing provided you pay them to do so. Just like USPS. And speaking solely for myself, I find having to make a special trip to the post office to be a colossally bad use of my time. It's inconvenient and the postal workers at the counter take FOREVER to do anything. It's typically a half hour trip every time I go and sometimes worse. Furthermore you can have UPS or FedEx hold packages at their depot in exactly the same way if doing so makes sense.
And if it's small enough to fit in a mailbox, sure, someone might take it. But it's a federal offense.
"Might"? Theft from mailboxes happens all the time. It's illegal to steal a package even if it isn't in a mailbox so I'm not sure why you think thieves give a shit just because the post office is involved. I've had packages I've shipped stolen right off the back of the truck long before they even got to their destination both via UPS and via USPS.
Twenty years ago, I remember when a package that came by UPS or Fedex always had to be signed for and was never left on a doorstep.
Bullshit. I was shipping packages by the thousands (literally) twenty years ago and it was no different then than it is now. You can pay UPS and FedEx extra to require a signature to deliver the package or you can just tell them to drop it off and save the extra cash. Same with insuring the package. You pay them if you want the extra handling. Some areas they will not deliver to without a signature but that is not widely true and hasn't ever been true for all packages as far as I know.
That may all be true, but neither the USA or China are anywhere near the top of the list [wikipedia.org] when it comes to exports per capita.
That's just the law of large numbers at work. China and America are the first and third largest countries by population in the world. Together they account for roughly 25% of the world population and 33% of the world GDP. As a percent of GDP China is ranked 129th and America is ranked 157th and India is 134th. Those three countries account for over 40% of the world population. There just isn't enough market elsewhere for them to be per-capita leaders on exports. And that's not actually a problem.
What matters is, as was pointed out by Type44Q, whether you have a surplus or deficit.
I have a masters degree in finance and I've worked in the area of global sourcing for manufacturing for many years. I've actually traveled to China and other parts of the globe studying this very issue. It's not as simple as whether you carry a surplus or deficit in trade. The actual evidence for that is equivocal at best and it is hard to make consistent generalizations that reliably work. Look at the top net exports and import countries. It's very much a mixed bag of strong economies and weak ones. Russia, Ireland, and Italy have comparatively weak economies and yet are net exporters. China has a strong and growing economy but it's not as strong as many imagine it to be. The US is a net importer and yet it's unclear so far that this has had a meaningful detrimental effect on the US economy as a whole. (don't confuse the federal debt with net imports) There is justifiable concern about this issue but so far the actual effects seemed to be a mixed bag and dependent on the circumstances of a specific country. Surplus = Good is a simple but wrong argument.
I don't know if this is included in statistics that are released, but for an even better picture you should also include repatriated monies, such as profits from overseas subsidiaries coming into the country, or foreign workers sending money home to their families abroad.
You are talking about the capital account and the current account. Countries with a negative current account are by definition net importers but the evidence is not at all clear that this indicates a problem as a general proposition. Developed economies tend to run a current account deficit and money tends to flow from developed economies to developing ones but it's not clear that this is a harmful state of affairs. There are no simple sound bite sized answers here. You can have a healthy economy with a negative current account.
Apparently you're unaware of a certain multi-decade trade imblance that completely moots your point but regardless, they're more than welcome to tax the shit out of our exports which would be.... what, shale oil and shitty movies??
The US exports lots of stuff. Here are the top 10 categories of exports. Machines, electronics, aircraft, vehicles, oil, medical technology, plastics, gems/metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals. The US is the second largest export economy in the world behind China. In 2014 the US exported roughly $1.45 Trillion in goods.
So Trump being the asshole he is promising to be and starting a trade war will hurt Boeing, Caterpillar, GM, Ford, Intel, etc. Not to mention all of us when the prices of everything goes up in the ensuing trade war. Tariffs do not make things better. They save a few jobs at the expense of most everyone else.
Don't believe those fake news websites. I looked at multiple energy sources for my house and calculated out these:
Cite your sources or your numbers are meaningless and most likely fictitious. The numbers I've seen aren't even remotely close to that and you didn't bother to account for externalities like the cost of dealing with fossil fuel pollution.
The second big win is their web clipper (or is it Clearly?). It does a really good job of grabbing web page contents and leaving behind the stuff I don't want (mostly ads). I can tag it and store it in Evernote and find it later. When I'm working on a big project, it's a nice way of keeping all of my notes together.
So if you don't have a need to store content from web pages (I don't) it's more or less useless?
Played around with Evernote a few times but I've never been able to figure out how to integrate it into my workflow in a productive fashion. It just seems too clumsy to really be terribly useful. I can't really figure out a good way to use the service. Does anyone out there really find it terribly useful? If so for what?
Since I don't really use it right now I'm not worried about them looking at any non-existent data.
Yahoo turning down Microsoft's offer to buy them out for $45B has to go down as one of the dumbest business decisions of all time. Conversely Microsoft might win the award for biggest bullet (unintentionally) dodged of all time. Yahoo is just an absolutely pathetic company which has been badly managed for a long time.
But people die anyway. If your requirement is that unless you can absolutely guarantee that no one will be hurt you can not operate, then people shouldn't be allowed to drive cars either. Fail.
Nobody is calling for perfect safety. That is impossible. What we want is to minimize the hazard and that CANNOT happen without regulation. What I'm not ok with is an unregulated wild west when I'm in the line of fire. We regulate things that are dangerous for a reason so that we can minimize the damage. No reason it should be different for Uber's autonomous vehicles.
There is an absolute chance that someone will get hurt. Thats why there is financial compensation to make whole as best as possible those you are responsible for hurting.
That's for the accidents that cannot be avoided. You cannot make someone whole who is injured or dead. We can avoid a lot of accidents by proper regulation. Failing to regulate companies results in unnecessary harm to people. No amount of insurance money after the fact will resurrect someone who was killed because we couldn't be bothered to oversee an irresponsible company.
GM would not have committed the engineering mistake if it could have avoided it, and the ignition defect didn't contribute to GM's profits as you are alleging
It doesn't matter if the mistake was intentional or not. They failed to address it in a timely manner and to all appearances covered up the problem for a long time. Covering up the errors absolutely did add to GMs profits. Recalls are crazy expensive and GM failed to act about a known problem. Whether this was through greed or incompetence is irrelevant. The fact is that their actions hurt people in pursuit of greater profits. GM is merely one in a LOOOOONG line of companies that have killed and injured people in order to realize greater profits. If you need examples I refer you to BP, Union Carbide, Hooker Chemical, and I can keep going for hours.
Individual car ownership is going to go away in all of the populated parts of the country as soon as automated cars work well.
Nonsense. We already have public transportation and taxi services available and those haven't impacted car ownership hardly at all outside of some of the highest population density cities. The fact that a car is autonomous will not affect the cost model significantly. I could today call a taxi to take me everywhere but I don't. It's more expensive to do that than it is to own a car in most of the US.
How is communal ownership going to work with rush hour? Everybody will need a car at roughly the same time and those extra cars are going to be mostly idle just like they are now between commutes. I own a car because I need to drive a substantial number of miles daily, getting a taxi would cost more and I don't have to wait for my ride to arrive. Communal car ownership makes little to no sense for most people in the US.
NOW the model is to move to fleets of autonomous vehicles and eliminate the contract drivers asap.
That makes zero sense. A) there are no commercially available autonomous vehicles on the road today and won't be for a non-trivial number of years yet to come. Uber's efforts towards developing one might help but won't dramatically change the time frame. B) Owning the vehicles will be a huge cost and fundamentally alter their business model from an asset light one to an asset heavy one. While that isn't impossible it's unclear that Uber will be able to pull it off. Few companies manage to make such transitions successfully.
If they are hoping to replace drivers with automation it's going to be quite a while before the economics of that make any kind of sense. Autonomous vehicles will not be cheaper than human driven ones for quite a while.
Like hell it isn't. They don't own the cars. Owning a fleet of taxi vehicles is a hugely expensive asset. QED Uber's business model is asset light. They facilitate transactions and process payments but don't have to own much in the way of assets beyond a data center and some software. That's the very definition of an asset light business model. Don't conflate their business tactics with the amount of assets the actually own.
As long as Uber (or anyone else for that matter) meets those criteria already established, and validly registers the vehicle (to ascertain ownership in the event of an issue on the road), I don't see the need for additional regulation.
I do. We're talking about unproven technology operating the vehicle in a location that could result in physical harm to others. I absolutely want the government breathing down their necks to ensure that they are taking appropriate precautions to ensure public safety. I don't give a shit if they have insurance and a pile of cash. That doesn't bring people back from the dead after a wreck.
If Uber (or others) want to play on public roads with experimental equipment then a little oversight is completely justified.
Certainly not until the situation gets out of hand, which it won't.
That is a bogus assertion that you cannot possibly back up. There is a very real chance that someone might get hurt by one of their vehicles.
The liability these companies are taking by having their cars on the road is enough to make them take all the proper precautions.
Bullshit. Companies take risks that injure people all the time and the mere threat of liability is demonstrably not enough to stop them. Especially if the profit from their actions exceeds the likely cost of the liability. Ask GM about their ignitions and let me know how much the threat of liability helped the people who are now dead.
"Autonomous vehicle testing permit?" Who is the government to say they know more about autonomous vehicle testing than the people actually creating it?
Permits have nothing to do with knowing all about vehicle testing, though in actual fact state and federal government agencies actually know quite a bit. The reason for the permits has to do with ensuring that public safety is respected and that companies aren't behaving recklessly. If someone is going to be testing experimental and possibly dangerous vehicles on public roads where injuries to citizens might result then the government ABSOLUTELY SHOULD be involved. Nobody else is going to protect me from Uber's reckless pursuit of the almighty dollar. I'm quite sure Uber would literally run people over if there were no consequences for doing so. I have to get an operators permit to drive a vehicle on public roads. It should not be any different for Uber needing a permit to do the same with a computer driven car.
"We have looked at this issue carefully and we don't believe we do."
Translation: "We'll do whatever we want until a judge tells us to stop. Maybe not even then."
I don't really get why Uber would give a shit about autonomous vehicles. Their entire business model is based around an asset light setup. They don't own or insure the cars that Uber drivers use. Going to autonomous vehicles in any substantial way would require a very hefty capital investment AND it would ruin their (bogus) argument that they aren't a taxi service. It doesn't make much sense to me.
The problem of course, is that while the US has a good bit of coastline, we have a lot of real estate that is a long way from the ocean.
Of course we do. We also have the ability to transmit electricity there. And don't kid yourself. A huge percentage of the population of the US lives within two hundred miles of the ocean. This includes the entire populations of New York City, Boston, Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, Jacksonville, Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and plenty more. Counties directly on the shoreline account for 40% of US population. All of these cities could easily be supplied by off shore wind power. We're idiots for not taking advantage of this power source.
The east coast of the US is prone to some serious weather excursions in the form of hurricanes. A lot of them. Even in Rhode Island. So an offshore wind facility has to be designed with that in mind.
They are. My understanding is that they stop the turbines from spinning above a certain wind load (somewhere around 125kph currently). They have a hurricane mode where the blades are pitched to neutral so it doesn't spin and then locked down facing the wind. Of course if the wind gets high enough damage is likely to result from a hurricane on land or off shore. Cuba had some wind farms survive hurricane Sandy which had winds of 110mph.
It's not as if there are so many oil rigs in Texas that there isn't enough room for wind turbines.
Of course there is room. But nevertheless there isn't a single off shore wind farm on the Texas coast. The only reasonable conclusion is that some form of NIMBY must be at work if there is adequate wind to justify installation of a wind farm.
Most of the oil rigs are built far enough offshore that they aren't visible from the shoreline.
More than enough are visible from shore that obviously people aren't getting bent over the appearance of them.
Only in places where hypocritical NIMBY "wind turbines will disturb my pristine ocean view" left-wingers live
Plenty of right wing NIMBYs too. The only difference is the reasons. They tend to dislike it for political rather than aesthetic reasons. Usually due to connections to the fossil fuel industries.
In solid, Trump-voting Oklahoma and Texas, wind farms dot the landscape.
Not a lot of ocean front property in Oklahoma and in Texas the shorelines are already dotted with oil rigs. Last I checked oil companies weren't big fans of wind power. (pun slightly intended) Yeah they have on-shore wind but that's not the same thing.
The inhabited area of Texas is far smaller than that of the UK, especially if you don't count whole cattle ranches as residences.
Texas is very close in size to France (696,241 km^2 vs 643,801 km^2) but has roughly 40% of the population (26 million vs 66 million respectively). The UK population is roughly the same as France but an area of 242,495 km^2. So the population density of Texas is lower but if you take the rural areas of Texas out of the equation (most of West Texas) the population density isn't too far off from the UK. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin are all in the eastern half of the state and together account for most of the population. So the density of the "inhabited" parts of Texas (the eastern half mostly) is actually pretty close to the UK.
The west coast is pretty much useless with an extremely short continental shelf.
About 58% of US wind resources off shore are in waters too deep to mount to the sea floor. Fortunately a lot of work is going into developing floating wind turbines so this should become a non-issue in due course.
According to the DOE the US has over 2,000 gigawatts of available wind power offshore which is more than enough in theory to supply the entire current electricity consumption of the US. Frankly we are being foolish to not take full advantage of offshore wind.
The east coast does not have reliable wind patterns for efficient wind generation.
That's evidently not true at least as a general proposition since they are installing wind farms on the east coast including the one discussed here near Rhode Island. I'm sure it's focally true for some areas but clearly not for the entire eastern seaboard.
Yes and no. The answer like most things having to do with America the answer is complicated. America actually has quite a lot of wind and solar power installed with more coming all the time. But America also has some pretty entrenched fossil fuel interests and a climate denying political right and some NIMBYs that makes installing renewable power more difficult than it should be. America is pretty far behind on off-shore wind power in particular. Sad given that America is in many ways a maritime nation with some of the longest coasts in the world.
And you are wrong on all regards anyway. When the ISS can support half a dozen astronauts for month, then we obviously have the life support system.
The life support systems for the ISS are different than those for a trip to Mars. We understand basically how to go about it but that's a far cry from actually building a working one that is ready for a mission to Mars. We've never built one designed to survive and perform outside of the Earth's magnetic shield for more than a few days. (The moon is inside the Earths magnetic tail for a significant portion of every month) Though it sounds like a tautology you don't know if you can do something until you actually do it. We haven't done it and we haven't even built the prototypes yet. We just have some technology that we know will go into the prototypes.
A ship is the least problem... and the return trip only requires a ship in orbit of Mars and a landing/relaunch system.
Oh is that all? Well NASA should be able to whip that up in by Christmas. Did you actually say that out loud? You should because it's an absurd statement. That isn't a trivial either from an engineering or an economic standpoint. It took us the better part of a decade on a huge crash budget to build an incredibly flimsy lunar lander for a far easier and shorter mission. A Mars lander is a MUCH tougher engineering challenge. Mars is farther away, has a much stronger gravity well, has an actual atmosphere, cannot be communicated with in real time, etc. Those are all problems that can (probably) be solved but we don't have the solutions today and it will take a decade or more plus a huge dedicated budget to make it happen.
And radiation shielding is super simple: put the water tank and other stuff between the crew and the sun... done.
The radiation shielding isn't that simple at all. You are misinformed. People smarter and better informed than either of us have looked at this problem closely. There are two major sources of radiation of consider and the solar wind is actually the less dangerous of the two as it mostly can be shielded by the hull of the craft itself with materials we have access to today. The other is galactic cosmic rays from our galaxy which comes from all directions, not just the sun. So you can't just shield in the direction of the sun. So you need omnidirectional shielding and it needs to be light weight to be practical and affordable.
Do you have the foggiest idea how much it would cost to get that much water just into low earth orbit much less move it to Mars? Even for a the smallest imaginable spacecraft (far smaller than ideal) we're talking many tens of billions of dollars just to get the water into low earth orbit. But then you have to also launch the propellant and the now bigger ship to move that huge mass to Mars which hugely increases the cost. NASA has looked at this and the cost of doing it is economically prohibitive. So like I said, any solutions available to us today are economically unviable. We need a solution that is light weight and ideally not bulky. Water is not a practical solution.
As I mentioned in my other post: we lack know how. We don't know why so many landings are failing
We know perfectly well why the missions failed in almost every case. What you are failing to appreciate is the difficulty of actually achieving the missions with high reliability. The engineering involved is really really hard even with the best resources and smartest people. Failure is not only an option, it's almost inevitable.
Google has reportedly shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers.
This should surprise no one. The notion that Google was going to get into the low margin car manufacturing business was always preposterous. Google has no expertise in manufacturing nor any competitive advantage. Even if they did develop some self driving tech that was marketable they would still have to build and sell a car which is an expensive and low margin endeavor. And self driving cars is a completely new market which nobody really understands the economics of at all right now. There was no way Google would go from getting 25% net margins to 10% net margins in an industry they have no experience in. Google can't even be bothered to take manufacturing a smartphone seriously and we were supposed to believe they were going to get into automobile manufacturing? Google is a software company. Building cars was always going to be a bridge too far for them.
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It all hangs on this: if the retailer is responsible for the sale all way until it reaches *your* hands, then it's simple. If the problem is yours as soon as the retailer hands it to the courier then you're out of luck - talk to your law makers.
That is a negotiated agreement between buyer and seller. There are copious laws about this in the US under the Uniform Commercial Code and there are defaults if nothing else is explicitly agreed to. If you see FOB on your packing slip that details exactly who owned the product at any given time. For instance if you see FOB Destination, that means that it is owned by the retailer until you take delivery of the product. FOB Origin means that you own it the moment it leaves the shipping dock on a courier's truck.
to get a PO box, and have all packages shipped to you there.
UPS will not deliver to PO boxes and in fact they cannot by law. Neither can FedEx, DHL, etc. Only the United States Postal Service can deliver to PO boxes. Since most of my deliveries do not come via USPS a PO box is rather useless to me. You can get a similar sort of service through places like UPS stores and they will accept packages from other couriers. Not the post office though.
And USPS shipping is usually less expensive than other options.
Not for equivalent service it isn't. USPS is generally more expensive and less convenient if you are paying for a similar level of service. I ship lots of packages and you can save money on postage in some cases through USPS but you generally get what you pay for.
Also, many large employers will let you receive parcels at your place of work, so they're received by a human into a secure building.
So do many small ones. I have most of my packages delivered to me at work because my driveway is basically impossible for a delivery truck to traverse in bad weather plus they tend to leave packages out in the weather by my garage instead of on my covered porch. Most employers are pretty cool about this sort of thing if you ask. Obviously not an option for everyone but it can be a good alternative.
I'm a fan of the USPS.
Evidently you haven't had to deal with them as much as I have. USPS is clumsy and inefficient. Their workers don't work quickly and shipping anything through them is a pain in the ass. Shipping packages through USPS is generally more expensive for equivalent service to UPS or FedEx. USPS "tracking service" is generally utterly useless. It tells you that it's been shipped and that it's been delivered and nothing in between most of the time. USPS does a fine job with letters but they are the only ones allowed to handle those so it's not like there is any alternative unless you want to hire an expensive private courier.
They make sure the package gets in your hands.
Only if you pay them extra to do so, no different from UPS or FedEx. Ship something without requiring the recipient to sign for delivery and they will not take special measures to get it to you and only you.
If you're not home, they leave a ticket in your mailbox to pickup the package at the office, which is far less inconvenient then having a package stolen.
UPS and FedEx do the same thing provided you pay them to do so. Just like USPS. And speaking solely for myself, I find having to make a special trip to the post office to be a colossally bad use of my time. It's inconvenient and the postal workers at the counter take FOREVER to do anything. It's typically a half hour trip every time I go and sometimes worse. Furthermore you can have UPS or FedEx hold packages at their depot in exactly the same way if doing so makes sense.
And if it's small enough to fit in a mailbox, sure, someone might take it. But it's a federal offense.
"Might"? Theft from mailboxes happens all the time. It's illegal to steal a package even if it isn't in a mailbox so I'm not sure why you think thieves give a shit just because the post office is involved. I've had packages I've shipped stolen right off the back of the truck long before they even got to their destination both via UPS and via USPS.
Twenty years ago, I remember when a package that came by UPS or Fedex always had to be signed for and was never left on a doorstep.
Bullshit. I was shipping packages by the thousands (literally) twenty years ago and it was no different then than it is now. You can pay UPS and FedEx extra to require a signature to deliver the package or you can just tell them to drop it off and save the extra cash. Same with insuring the package. You pay them if you want the extra handling. Some areas they will not deliver to without a signature but that is not widely true and hasn't ever been true for all packages as far as I know.
That may all be true, but neither the USA or China are anywhere near the top of the list [wikipedia.org] when it comes to exports per capita.
That's just the law of large numbers at work. China and America are the first and third largest countries by population in the world. Together they account for roughly 25% of the world population and 33% of the world GDP. As a percent of GDP China is ranked 129th and America is ranked 157th and India is 134th. Those three countries account for over 40% of the world population. There just isn't enough market elsewhere for them to be per-capita leaders on exports. And that's not actually a problem.
What matters is, as was pointed out by Type44Q, whether you have a surplus or deficit.
I have a masters degree in finance and I've worked in the area of global sourcing for manufacturing for many years. I've actually traveled to China and other parts of the globe studying this very issue. It's not as simple as whether you carry a surplus or deficit in trade. The actual evidence for that is equivocal at best and it is hard to make consistent generalizations that reliably work. Look at the top net exports and import countries. It's very much a mixed bag of strong economies and weak ones. Russia, Ireland, and Italy have comparatively weak economies and yet are net exporters. China has a strong and growing economy but it's not as strong as many imagine it to be. The US is a net importer and yet it's unclear so far that this has had a meaningful detrimental effect on the US economy as a whole. (don't confuse the federal debt with net imports) There is justifiable concern about this issue but so far the actual effects seemed to be a mixed bag and dependent on the circumstances of a specific country. Surplus = Good is a simple but wrong argument.
I don't know if this is included in statistics that are released, but for an even better picture you should also include repatriated monies, such as profits from overseas subsidiaries coming into the country, or foreign workers sending money home to their families abroad.
You are talking about the capital account and the current account. Countries with a negative current account are by definition net importers but the evidence is not at all clear that this indicates a problem as a general proposition. Developed economies tend to run a current account deficit and money tends to flow from developed economies to developing ones but it's not clear that this is a harmful state of affairs. There are no simple sound bite sized answers here. You can have a healthy economy with a negative current account.
Apparently you're unaware of a certain multi-decade trade imblance that completely moots your point but regardless, they're more than welcome to tax the shit out of our exports which would be.... what, shale oil and shitty movies??
The US exports lots of stuff. Here are the top 10 categories of exports. Machines, electronics, aircraft, vehicles, oil, medical technology, plastics, gems/metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals. The US is the second largest export economy in the world behind China. In 2014 the US exported roughly $1.45 Trillion in goods.
So Trump being the asshole he is promising to be and starting a trade war will hurt Boeing, Caterpillar, GM, Ford, Intel, etc. Not to mention all of us when the prices of everything goes up in the ensuing trade war. Tariffs do not make things better. They save a few jobs at the expense of most everyone else.
Don't believe those fake news websites. I looked at multiple energy sources for my house and calculated out these:
Cite your sources or your numbers are meaningless and most likely fictitious. The numbers I've seen aren't even remotely close to that and you didn't bother to account for externalities like the cost of dealing with fossil fuel pollution.
The second big win is their web clipper (or is it Clearly?). It does a really good job of grabbing web page contents and leaving behind the stuff I don't want (mostly ads). I can tag it and store it in Evernote and find it later. When I'm working on a big project, it's a nice way of keeping all of my notes together.
So if you don't have a need to store content from web pages (I don't) it's more or less useless?
Played around with Evernote a few times but I've never been able to figure out how to integrate it into my workflow in a productive fashion. It just seems too clumsy to really be terribly useful. I can't really figure out a good way to use the service. Does anyone out there really find it terribly useful? If so for what?
Since I don't really use it right now I'm not worried about them looking at any non-existent data.
Yahoo turning down Microsoft's offer to buy them out for $45B has to go down as one of the dumbest business decisions of all time. Conversely Microsoft might win the award for biggest bullet (unintentionally) dodged of all time. Yahoo is just an absolutely pathetic company which has been badly managed for a long time.
But people die anyway. If your requirement is that unless you can absolutely guarantee that no one will be hurt you can not operate, then people shouldn't be allowed to drive cars either. Fail.
Nobody is calling for perfect safety. That is impossible. What we want is to minimize the hazard and that CANNOT happen without regulation. What I'm not ok with is an unregulated wild west when I'm in the line of fire. We regulate things that are dangerous for a reason so that we can minimize the damage. No reason it should be different for Uber's autonomous vehicles.
There is an absolute chance that someone will get hurt. Thats why there is financial compensation to make whole as best as possible those you are responsible for hurting.
That's for the accidents that cannot be avoided. You cannot make someone whole who is injured or dead. We can avoid a lot of accidents by proper regulation. Failing to regulate companies results in unnecessary harm to people. No amount of insurance money after the fact will resurrect someone who was killed because we couldn't be bothered to oversee an irresponsible company.
GM would not have committed the engineering mistake if it could have avoided it, and the ignition defect didn't contribute to GM's profits as you are alleging
It doesn't matter if the mistake was intentional or not. They failed to address it in a timely manner and to all appearances covered up the problem for a long time. Covering up the errors absolutely did add to GMs profits. Recalls are crazy expensive and GM failed to act about a known problem. Whether this was through greed or incompetence is irrelevant. The fact is that their actions hurt people in pursuit of greater profits. GM is merely one in a LOOOOONG line of companies that have killed and injured people in order to realize greater profits. If you need examples I refer you to BP, Union Carbide, Hooker Chemical, and I can keep going for hours.
Individual car ownership is going to go away in all of the populated parts of the country as soon as automated cars work well.
Nonsense. We already have public transportation and taxi services available and those haven't impacted car ownership hardly at all outside of some of the highest population density cities. The fact that a car is autonomous will not affect the cost model significantly. I could today call a taxi to take me everywhere but I don't. It's more expensive to do that than it is to own a car in most of the US.
How is communal ownership going to work with rush hour? Everybody will need a car at roughly the same time and those extra cars are going to be mostly idle just like they are now between commutes. I own a car because I need to drive a substantial number of miles daily, getting a taxi would cost more and I don't have to wait for my ride to arrive. Communal car ownership makes little to no sense for most people in the US.
NOW the model is to move to fleets of autonomous vehicles and eliminate the contract drivers asap.
That makes zero sense. A) there are no commercially available autonomous vehicles on the road today and won't be for a non-trivial number of years yet to come. Uber's efforts towards developing one might help but won't dramatically change the time frame. B) Owning the vehicles will be a huge cost and fundamentally alter their business model from an asset light one to an asset heavy one. While that isn't impossible it's unclear that Uber will be able to pull it off. Few companies manage to make such transitions successfully.
If they are hoping to replace drivers with automation it's going to be quite a while before the economics of that make any kind of sense. Autonomous vehicles will not be cheaper than human driven ones for quite a while.
Their business is not an asset light setup.
Like hell it isn't. They don't own the cars. Owning a fleet of taxi vehicles is a hugely expensive asset. QED Uber's business model is asset light. They facilitate transactions and process payments but don't have to own much in the way of assets beyond a data center and some software. That's the very definition of an asset light business model. Don't conflate their business tactics with the amount of assets the actually own.
As long as Uber (or anyone else for that matter) meets those criteria already established, and validly registers the vehicle (to ascertain ownership in the event of an issue on the road), I don't see the need for additional regulation.
I do. We're talking about unproven technology operating the vehicle in a location that could result in physical harm to others. I absolutely want the government breathing down their necks to ensure that they are taking appropriate precautions to ensure public safety. I don't give a shit if they have insurance and a pile of cash. That doesn't bring people back from the dead after a wreck.
If Uber (or others) want to play on public roads with experimental equipment then a little oversight is completely justified.
Certainly not until the situation gets out of hand, which it won't.
That is a bogus assertion that you cannot possibly back up. There is a very real chance that someone might get hurt by one of their vehicles.
The liability these companies are taking by having their cars on the road is enough to make them take all the proper precautions.
Bullshit. Companies take risks that injure people all the time and the mere threat of liability is demonstrably not enough to stop them. Especially if the profit from their actions exceeds the likely cost of the liability. Ask GM about their ignitions and let me know how much the threat of liability helped the people who are now dead.
"Autonomous vehicle testing permit?" Who is the government to say they know more about autonomous vehicle testing than the people actually creating it?
Permits have nothing to do with knowing all about vehicle testing, though in actual fact state and federal government agencies actually know quite a bit. The reason for the permits has to do with ensuring that public safety is respected and that companies aren't behaving recklessly. If someone is going to be testing experimental and possibly dangerous vehicles on public roads where injuries to citizens might result then the government ABSOLUTELY SHOULD be involved. Nobody else is going to protect me from Uber's reckless pursuit of the almighty dollar. I'm quite sure Uber would literally run people over if there were no consequences for doing so. I have to get an operators permit to drive a vehicle on public roads. It should not be any different for Uber needing a permit to do the same with a computer driven car.
"We have looked at this issue carefully and we don't believe we do."
Translation: "We'll do whatever we want until a judge tells us to stop. Maybe not even then."
I don't really get why Uber would give a shit about autonomous vehicles. Their entire business model is based around an asset light setup. They don't own or insure the cars that Uber drivers use. Going to autonomous vehicles in any substantial way would require a very hefty capital investment AND it would ruin their (bogus) argument that they aren't a taxi service. It doesn't make much sense to me.
The problem of course, is that while the US has a good bit of coastline, we have a lot of real estate that is a long way from the ocean.
Of course we do. We also have the ability to transmit electricity there. And don't kid yourself. A huge percentage of the population of the US lives within two hundred miles of the ocean. This includes the entire populations of New York City, Boston, Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, Jacksonville, Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and plenty more. Counties directly on the shoreline account for 40% of US population. All of these cities could easily be supplied by off shore wind power. We're idiots for not taking advantage of this power source.
The east coast of the US is prone to some serious weather excursions in the form of hurricanes. A lot of them. Even in Rhode Island. So an offshore wind facility has to be designed with that in mind.
They are. My understanding is that they stop the turbines from spinning above a certain wind load (somewhere around 125kph currently). They have a hurricane mode where the blades are pitched to neutral so it doesn't spin and then locked down facing the wind. Of course if the wind gets high enough damage is likely to result from a hurricane on land or off shore. Cuba had some wind farms survive hurricane Sandy which had winds of 110mph.
It's not as if there are so many oil rigs in Texas that there isn't enough room for wind turbines.
Of course there is room. But nevertheless there isn't a single off shore wind farm on the Texas coast. The only reasonable conclusion is that some form of NIMBY must be at work if there is adequate wind to justify installation of a wind farm.
Most of the oil rigs are built far enough offshore that they aren't visible from the shoreline.
More than enough are visible from shore that obviously people aren't getting bent over the appearance of them.
Only in places where hypocritical NIMBY "wind turbines will disturb my pristine ocean view" left-wingers live
Plenty of right wing NIMBYs too. The only difference is the reasons. They tend to dislike it for political rather than aesthetic reasons. Usually due to connections to the fossil fuel industries.
In solid, Trump-voting Oklahoma and Texas, wind farms dot the landscape.
Not a lot of ocean front property in Oklahoma and in Texas the shorelines are already dotted with oil rigs. Last I checked oil companies weren't big fans of wind power. (pun slightly intended) Yeah they have on-shore wind but that's not the same thing.
The inhabited area of Texas is far smaller than that of the UK, especially if you don't count whole cattle ranches as residences.
Texas is very close in size to France (696,241 km^2 vs 643,801 km^2) but has roughly 40% of the population (26 million vs 66 million respectively). The UK population is roughly the same as France but an area of 242,495 km^2. So the population density of Texas is lower but if you take the rural areas of Texas out of the equation (most of West Texas) the population density isn't too far off from the UK. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin are all in the eastern half of the state and together account for most of the population. So the density of the "inhabited" parts of Texas (the eastern half mostly) is actually pretty close to the UK.
The west coast is pretty much useless with an extremely short continental shelf.
About 58% of US wind resources off shore are in waters too deep to mount to the sea floor. Fortunately a lot of work is going into developing floating wind turbines so this should become a non-issue in due course.
According to the DOE the US has over 2,000 gigawatts of available wind power offshore which is more than enough in theory to supply the entire current electricity consumption of the US. Frankly we are being foolish to not take full advantage of offshore wind.
The east coast does not have reliable wind patterns for efficient wind generation.
That's evidently not true at least as a general proposition since they are installing wind farms on the east coast including the one discussed here near Rhode Island. I'm sure it's focally true for some areas but clearly not for the entire eastern seaboard.
Is Amercia really so far behind with renewables?
Yes and no. The answer like most things having to do with America the answer is complicated. America actually has quite a lot of wind and solar power installed with more coming all the time. But America also has some pretty entrenched fossil fuel interests and a climate denying political right and some NIMBYs that makes installing renewable power more difficult than it should be. America is pretty far behind on off-shore wind power in particular. Sad given that America is in many ways a maritime nation with some of the longest coasts in the world.
And you are wrong on all regards anyway. When the ISS can support half a dozen astronauts for month, then we obviously have the life support system.
The life support systems for the ISS are different than those for a trip to Mars. We understand basically how to go about it but that's a far cry from actually building a working one that is ready for a mission to Mars. We've never built one designed to survive and perform outside of the Earth's magnetic shield for more than a few days. (The moon is inside the Earths magnetic tail for a significant portion of every month) Though it sounds like a tautology you don't know if you can do something until you actually do it. We haven't done it and we haven't even built the prototypes yet. We just have some technology that we know will go into the prototypes.
A ship is the least problem ... and the return trip only requires a ship in orbit of Mars and a landing/relaunch system.
Oh is that all? Well NASA should be able to whip that up in by Christmas. Did you actually say that out loud? You should because it's an absurd statement. That isn't a trivial either from an engineering or an economic standpoint. It took us the better part of a decade on a huge crash budget to build an incredibly flimsy lunar lander for a far easier and shorter mission. A Mars lander is a MUCH tougher engineering challenge. Mars is farther away, has a much stronger gravity well, has an actual atmosphere, cannot be communicated with in real time, etc. Those are all problems that can (probably) be solved but we don't have the solutions today and it will take a decade or more plus a huge dedicated budget to make it happen.
And radiation shielding is super simple: put the water tank and other stuff between the crew and the sun ... done.
The radiation shielding isn't that simple at all. You are misinformed. People smarter and better informed than either of us have looked at this problem closely. There are two major sources of radiation of consider and the solar wind is actually the less dangerous of the two as it mostly can be shielded by the hull of the craft itself with materials we have access to today. The other is galactic cosmic rays from our galaxy which comes from all directions, not just the sun. So you can't just shield in the direction of the sun. So you need omnidirectional shielding and it needs to be light weight to be practical and affordable.
Do you have the foggiest idea how much it would cost to get that much water just into low earth orbit much less move it to Mars? Even for a the smallest imaginable spacecraft (far smaller than ideal) we're talking many tens of billions of dollars just to get the water into low earth orbit. But then you have to also launch the propellant and the now bigger ship to move that huge mass to Mars which hugely increases the cost. NASA has looked at this and the cost of doing it is economically prohibitive. So like I said, any solutions available to us today are economically unviable. We need a solution that is light weight and ideally not bulky. Water is not a practical solution.
As I mentioned in my other post: we lack know how. We don't know why so many landings are failing
We know perfectly well why the missions failed in almost every case. What you are failing to appreciate is the difficulty of actually achieving the missions with high reliability. The engineering involved is really really hard even with the best resources and smartest people. Failure is not only an option, it's almost inevitable.
Google has reportedly shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers.
This should surprise no one. The notion that Google was going to get into the low margin car manufacturing business was always preposterous. Google has no expertise in manufacturing nor any competitive advantage. Even if they did develop some self driving tech that was marketable they would still have to build and sell a car which is an expensive and low margin endeavor. And self driving cars is a completely new market which nobody really understands the economics of at all right now. There was no way Google would go from getting 25% net margins to 10% net margins in an industry they have no experience in. Google can't even be bothered to take manufacturing a smartphone seriously and we were supposed to believe they were going to get into automobile manufacturing? Google is a software company. Building cars was always going to be a bridge too far for them.