The video shows how the Earth flies through a cloud of asteroids on its journey around the sun, and yet we've only discovered about 1% of the near earth asteroid population.
Ok, how do we know what we haven't discovered yet? I know statistical techniques for estimating population sizes of wildlife. (Catch some number, tag and release, catch a bunch more and see how many tagged ones you catch which gives you a population estimate) I'm not sure those techniques are applicable here. Anybody have any idea how this estimate was arrived at or is it taken straight out of someone's derriere? Measurements of orbit perturbations? Something else?
Free speech is not the same thing as saying anything you want at any time without consequence. There are (for very good reasons) certain types of speech that are exceptions to the protections of the First Amendment.
Libel is not protected speech. Neither is obscenity, defamation, incitement, incitement to riot, fighting words, fraud, threats, speech covered by copyright, some forms of commercial speech and speech integral to criminal conduct.
He painstakingly measured how much information an astronaut/jet pilot could pay attention to at once, and react to within a certain time frame.
Aviation folks have an awesome term for when pilots freeze from information overload. They call it having a helmet fire which to this day cracks me up and is a perfect term for the problem.
Many more people are dying falling off roofs installing solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant.
Citation please.
We can't call them 'greens' or 'environmentalists' because they're really just supporting coal power, empirically.
No they aren't. The problem is that that coal and nuclear are necessary currently. There is actually one achievable option to minimize use of both and that is to reduce the demand. We've collectively shown no actual interest in doing that but that is effectively what you are arguing for if you argue against both nuclear and fossil fuels. It requires a fair bit of belt tightening that I think is unlikely but it is technically possible to a very substantial degree.
Covering 1/4 of New Mexico has been proposed as well
Please point out a single actually credible proposal to do that. Personally I think you are pulling "statistics" out of your hind end.
People treat it like it's inherently evil, when the truth of the matter is that any problems with it have been through mismanagement and poor planning.
It's not evil - just dangerous. Dangerous in a way that is challenging to mitigate. No amount of planning or good management or (probably) engineering will make fission power not dangerous. Sure we can mitigate it to some degree (thorium, etc) but we have no technology or management system that can eliminate the possibility of a serious incident. Plus even if our management was perfect (which is impossible though it's generally been very good so far) there is always the possibility of a natural disaster of sufficient scale overwhelming the safety features of the design or that a war or terrorist incident might result in unsafe operation of the plant. Nuclear is scary in a way that other forms of energy are not - even if sometimes this fear is irrational.
Furthermore there is the waste problem which nobody seems willing/able to adequately address. Perhaps worst of all, nuclear power has to address all the externality costs of its operation whereas fossil fuels do not. Fossil fuel plants get to dump massive amounts of carbon and other pollutants for free while nuclear is regulated probably tighter than any other industry in most places.
So while I think nuclear fission is a necessary part of the equation for the foreseeable future I don't think it has any realistic chance to be much more of the equation than it is now unless there are substantial technological breakthroughs, which we seem to be in no danger of making.
We can do better, and need to do better.
I have zero confidence that people will stop making mistakes or that the risk of nuclear fission can be made acceptably low to make it politically palatable ever again. I think the only type of nuclear energy that will solve the problem is if we can somehow figure out how to do fusion - and that is basically science fiction right now.
Wind and solar, while nice and clean, probably aren't going to ever be capable of delivering all the power the world needs/wants.
Unfortunately we probably cannot keep dumping pollutants (esp carbon) endlessly into the environment and expect there to be no consequences. For now the goal should be to minimize waste production and to force every form of energy production to cost the full price of its waste stream. I have no illusion that fossil fuels will go away in my lifetime but I strongly think we could substantially cut their use with renewables.
Not good enough nor plentiful enough nor convenient enough nor standard enough. They take 45 minutes to get an 80% charge and over an hour to get a full charge. Plus they're not much use if you don't have a Tesla. They're a good effort in the right direction but not good enough by a long shot yet.
Cheaper batteries would lead to longer ranged EVs
With fast charging you don't need longer range EVs - we already have EVs that can do over 200 miles on a charge now with more on the way. With lighter batteries (at the same power output) you also would get longer ranged EVs so arguably you'd be better off trying to get a better power to weight ratio before worrying about lowering cost. I suspect that you'll see more car makers trying Tesla's model starting at the high end with EVs and then EVs will filter down to the lower end of the market from the luxury market as volumes build and technology improves.
Basically you won't get cheaper batteries unless you can build them in larger quantities. You won't get to build them in larger quantities until you can convince them that they can refuel their vehicles in a convenient manner. There is however hope that through development of hybrid cars we can keep developing the batteries and increasing economies of scale until recharge times and ranges and prices are low enough to make pure EVs practical.
If we can get all the 'second' cars most families have to be EV
Won't happen. You will see a lot of hybrids which might eventually accomplish the same end but you won't see pure EVs until the range anxiety problem is solved. To do that you need to be able to refuel them substantially faster than current technology permits.
the high cost of the battery pack limits range
The power to weight ratio is what fundamentally limits range unless you are using fewer batteries than you could for a given vehicle. Beyond a certain point cramming more batteries into a vehicle results in diminishing returns to range (eventually becoming negative) and there are practical considerations (like passengers and cargo space) that limit the number of batteries that can be used as well. A Nissan leaf is a tiny car with an absurdly short range and doesn't have a huge amount of space for a large battery pack no matter what the cost is. While it works fine, for most people it's pretty limiting.
creating range anxiety,
Range anxiety is based on a combination of limited range and long recharge times. You could give the batteries away and you'd still have the problem.
Still, Tesla is reportedly selling every car they can manufacture, which tells me that they don't need 400 miles, 250+ is enough.
Tesla is selling a specialty supercar that costs $100,000. Practicality is not a paramount concern to someone who can afford a vehicle that expensive. Believe me I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I could but I'd still have another car with a gas/diesel engine. Simply visiting my parents house would exceed its range and I do that at least once a month. (no there isn't a supercharger along the route and using one would cause an hour delay to the trip)
If the amount of labor needed to produce one person's worth of goods and services is less than one person's worth of effort, then you are going to have people sitting around doing nothing. So your argument is that our society will do better and better as we have more and more people sitting around doing nothing.
Your statement about "one person's worth of goods and services" is a non-sequitur. You do not seem to grasp what capital efficiency or opportunity cost means. Capital efficiency is about spending resources in the most effective manner possible generating the maximum benefit. We have a finite amount of resources (manpower, money, raw materials) so you want maximize the benefit generated with them. Any time you unnecessarily support a business that is not using capital efficiently you are by definition wasting money, brains and materials. Doing so to protect a potentially obsolete business model is particularly stupid.
I'd say it's better to efficiently allocate HUMAN capital to maximize our benefit to society.
If you can be bothered to read carefully you'll notice that I mentioned human capital explicitly. But human capital is not the only kind that matters.
Like I've said before, I was brought up to respect the rules.
And what do you do when the rules are wrong? Just because something is a rule doesn't mean it is right nor does it mean it should be respected. Sometimes you have to show that a rule is wrong by your actions and accept that there may be consequences for that. I don't just meekly accept any rule if I think it is wrong. Not sure why anyone would.
To have a choice of a job at McDonalds, WalMart, or Uber is not what I want for my kids.
Nice strawman argument you have there. As if those would ever be the only three options...
The last taxi driver I had a conversation with was leasing his cab, and he had a plan to own it one day.
So what? If it's a bad business model why should I care? I see people literally daily who are entrepreneurs and quite a few have really stupid business plans. That's the risk you take when you want to own a business. I'd suggest the guy have a backup plan because most startup businesses fail and there is no guarantee that the business environment will be the same in 5-10 years. The guy certainly shouldn't be entitled to anything any more than any other entrepreneur.
Those are the types of people I feel should be rewarded.
People who should be rewarded are people who take risks and add value by doing so. If he wants a slow steady income that's fine but I'm not persuaded that he should be entitled to anything. If Uber makes traditional taxi's obsolete by providing more value to customers then it makes no sense to protect the guys providing less value. Nobody protects me in my job from competition so I see no reason why your taxi driver should get special treatment.
The cost of the battery packs is still the biggest thing holding EVs back from being practical
Disagree though I do agree that cost is a major issue - I just think it is not the biggest issue. The biggest thing holding EVs back is refueling time. Range anxiety is THE most common argument against EVs. Despite the logical argument that most people don't actually drive all that far in a given day, people need/want a car that can drive them 400 miles without worrying about refueling because sometimes they need to do that. Many people cannot afford multiple vehicles and if they want to go visit their parents in the next state they don't want it to be a multi-day expedition nor do they want to rent a car. Long refueling times are something of a showstopper bug even if the problem is mostly one of perception most of the time.
The cost of the battery packs it is really a second order result because EV production is still too small to get full economies of scale. Costs have been falling and will continue to fall so long as the vehicles continue to improve. If they solve the recharge time issue a LOT more people would seriously consider buying EVs and the cost issue would resolve itself in due course. Until an EV can be refueled in under 15 minutes people are going to have range anxiety. I would say cost is a strong second on the list of things holding back EVs.
In short they have no money now and nobody is willing to lend them more, so it's either cut spending or print more cash.
The problem isn't that they have no money now. They do. They have lots of Euros that have already been lent to them. The problem is that they owe much of it to creditors. They have the option (not a good one) of defaulting and keeping what cash they do have. Then they are de-facto still using the Euro even if they aren't in the Eurozone. It's going to be ugly if it comes to that though.
Of course as you very rightly point out, nobody will be willing to lend them more at that point so they are not in a good place no matter what they do going forward.
The more that Google directs users to its own content and its own properties, the more that speakers who write reviews, blogs and other materials become invisible to their desired audiences.
First of all, the notion that Google is directing people to their own services should surprise no one. Anyone who honestly expects them to be an unbiased party is delusional. Google is an advertising company (well over 90% of their revenue is advertising based) so everything they do should be viewed with that in mind. Providing unbiased search results is a second order consideration at best for them no matter what motto they claim to follow.
Second, is this really a problem? There are other search engines out there so if someone is unhappy with the answers they get then use a different one. Google has gotten to where they are mostly because they've provided a better service than their competitors. But there is very little keeping people using Google if there is reason to believe that has changed. Other search engines are only a URL away after all. I see potential for a problem but its a very small problem even in the worst case.
Bitcoin swings but has historically bubbled and crashed with each bubble peaking over the previous. Smooth our those peaks and valleys and you have a constant upward progression.
Even if true that is utterly useless information as far as most greeks will be concerned. Long term trends don't matter at all when you have to buy in today to avoid a catastrophe.
It sure will be attractive compared to the new drachma.
Considering you have no idea what currency Greece would go to post-euro that's a highly premature statement. Re-instituting the drachma might not be a great idea and might not even be practically possible. (It's not a trivial problem to switch over and it's not clear the greeks have a plan in place to do that) They could switch to the dollar, or the yen if they wanted to. In fact countries in financial crises with their currencies often do use a foreign currency instead of their own. In fact Greece could decide to use the Euro even if they weren't in the Eurozone. Not saying they will or should but they could.
In any case I disagree that bitcoin will be an attractive alternative to anything for most Greek citizens. There are much better options for most of them for any particular use case you care to mention.
The problem most Greeks suddenly face is that their money is now locked up as electronic balances in banks that have shut down for a week and won't let them have more than 60 euros at a time.
They'd have a LOT bigger problem if there was a bank run. Then a lot of them would have access to none of their money. Of course they could keep their money outside of the banks but that's got its own set of problems.
After crises like this (even America's own "great recession"), people tend to prefer forms of money are more than just bits or fiat paper, such as gold and silver.
Really? Go take a few ounces of gold bullion to McDonalds and try to buy a burger with it and let me know what happens. Furthermore whether you have gold or fiat currency does not affect whether a bank run can occur. Bank runs happened long before the gold standard was eliminated. While it's not a bad idea to have some amount of gold as an asset it doesn't solve problems like the ones facing Greece and Greek citizens right now.
One side effect of the crisis is that alternative currencies like Bitcoin suddenly look much more attractive as the "normal" currencies become unstable.
Bitcoin will not be more stable or attractive than other currencies including the dollar or probably even the euro except in some weird corner cases. If someone is putting money into bitcoin because they think it is even relatively stable then they are an idiot. If someone wants to use bitcoin to transfer money then there is a relatively small risk there but you'd have to be pretty dumb to just buy and hold bitcoins for any substantial length of time. Even if Greece does exit the Euro it isn't going to make bitcoin meaningfully more sensible than it already is. If someone wants to swap currencies to hedge against currency fluctuations I can think of a huge number of options I'd consider long before bitcoin for that purpose.
Tony Gallippi, the co-founder of bitcoin payment processor Bitpay, tweeted on Sunday night that he expected the price of bitcoin to rise to between $610 and $1,250 if Greece exits the Euro. The currency is currently worth $250.
I rest my case. If it can go up that fast then it can (and probably will) go down just as fast. Bitcoin is not a place anyone should be comfortable keeping their money for long unless they are speculating.
They're terrible for ignoring the law before they tried to change it.
Ignoring an unjust law is not always a bad idea. That's how we got lots of important laws changed. The Civil Rights movement would never have happened if people just went along with unjust laws. Muhammad Ali went to jail for being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. While I'm certainly not saying that taxi rides has anything close to that level of moral imperative if the law is a bad law then I don't have a problem with people doing the right thing prior to the law being changed. There may be consequences to this course of action. The important question is whether what Uber is doing actually is the right thing and I think that is perhaps unclear. I very much doubt they would make any headway in changing the laws without first demonstrating that they are in effect a pointless subsidy to taxi companies and the only way I'm aware of to do that is to ignore the law and actually show that.
Of course they are. They don't need to pay for a license. They pocket 90% of the savings and the user gets the other 10%.
There is more to value than price. Presumably they are cheaper from what you are saying. (I honestly have no idea and can't be bothered to look) But what about the service itself? Is it a better service? Are they more timely? Is it safe? Are the vehicles clean? Is it reliable? Basically, when you consider everything and weight it according to what really matters, is Uber a better value than a traditional taxi?
Force them to pay the same licenses fees as every other taxi driver, and their price will be the same as regular taxis.
As a potential customer I don't give a crap about whether or not they have to pay license fees. That doesn't improve or detract from the service as far as I'm concerned. I also don't care about the legal battles over the licensing. What I do care about is whether at the end of the day Uber better value for money. So I put it to you again, why is Uber better? Why would I give Uber my dollar instead of a traditional taxi company? Where will I get the best value for money?
The problem is that it destroys the jobs of taxi drivers, but does not create new jobs.
Does it really? Or does it make using a taxi service a better value so that the usage of taxis overall grows? Do we really want to subsidize a jobs program for taxi drivers or is there a better way to employ those resources? While there is some clear disruption going on it's not at all clear that that is a bad thing. If you spend two dollars on a taxi ride that could only cost one dollar then you have effectively subsidized the taxi driver and cannot use that extra dollar for some more productive use. If there is some externality that would be a serious problem for society then that is a relevant concern but providing a subsidy to taxi drivers when one isn't needed is stupid.
A journalist calls this "the 'sharing of remains' economy", where the real jobs disappear, and only some small cheap tasks remain.
That's a nonsense argument because it doesn't consider opportunity cost. Saving "real jobs" even if they are inefficient means that you have capital allocated in a sub-optimal way. Rather than employing that capital (both human and financial) in an optimal way you waste it subsidizing obsolete business models. If you take your argument to its logical end most of us should still be working on farms where the "real jobs" were because improving productivity and capital efficiency would be a death spiral. Fortunately the real world doesn't work like that. Efficient allocation of capital in the long run benefits society.
Uber is 1000 times better for transportation than the taxi cartel
Why? Seriously, I haven't used Uber and the last time I rode in a taxi was years ago so I have no dog in this fight. Why did you think Uber is better? Better service? Better value? Or is just that they are sticking it to The Man? I'm legitimately asking because I just don't really see what is so amazing about Uber as a casual observer. Saying they are "1000 times better" is obviously hyperbole but what makes them better if indeed they are better?
If they are actually providing a better value then more power to them. I'm definitely for disrupting industries that need disrupting. If the only advantage is that they aren't the incumbent companies then that isn't an adequate reason to my mind to support them with actual dollars. It just not clear to me which is the case here.
Amen. I really need a solid alternative to Chrome, that's all.
I keep using all the various browsers and despite its warts I keep coming back to Firefox as my primary browser. Chrome keeps "fixing" stuff that didn't need fixing and breaking it in the process. Safari has some behaviors I find annoying and (surprisingly) I run into a fair number of website that break on it. Plus Apple never seems to do Windows software very well and you can't get it on Linux. And IE isn't available on anything other than Windows even if I wanted to use it (I don't) so it's a non-starter.
Firefox isn't perfect by any means but it is cross platform, generally stable, generally predictable, and fits my particular work style. Basically it pisses me off the least of the major browser options. It's been my daily driver (so to speak) for quite a few years now. If something better came along I'd drop it without a second thought but none of the alternatives really seem to be meaningfully better.
Looks like Chromecast has gone the way of Google Chrome: Arbitrary and random A/B testing that you're never notified of, and no way to opt out of. This seriously pisses me the fuck off with Chome.
Amen brother. I used to have our company use Chrome but there was so much flakiness after updates that it became impossible to use. In our particular case weird behavior with PDFs was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. We use a lot of PDFs and Chrome just couldn't handle them in a sane manner, kept changing things and then it would randomly break for a user. It was always a pain in the ass to figure out why there was a problem and then then behavior would change a few weeks later. We don't have the most sophisticated group of users here and random changes in behavior are NOT helpful even if they are made with the best of intentions.
So we're using Firefox which is the best of the alternatives. (Safari has issues and IE is just a nonstarter) Firefox has its issues too but it don't create needless tech support issues for me which is what I really care about.
It very much depends on what they manage to do for the customer end.
Naturally. While there are some technical issues the real question will be economic. Presuming everything works the real challenge will be convincing people to buy transceivers to use the service. I strongly suspect they'll find that to be more difficult than making the satellites work.
LEO satellites zip past you so quickly that your uplink is being handed off between satellites at least every half hour
Faster than that really. I track the International Space Station now and then for fun and it goes horizon to horizon in less than 10-15 minutes much of the time. It's rarely directly overhead so like GPS you'd probably need several satellites to be overhead at any given time most of the time. It's a solvable problem provided you have the energy budget but I suppose not that much different in principle from cell tower handoffs from a fast moving car. A LOT farther away than a cell tower though even in the best of circumstances so I'm curious how the power budget will work out.
All any competitor has to do is be something less offensive than a freewheeling asshole and if their product is even remotely broadband, it WILL attract customers who already have a broadband ISP.
That's true but it's not the important question. The important question is not whether they can get customer (they probably can) but whether they can get ENOUGH customers. Anyone who tells you that they know the answer to that is either deluded or lying. Presuming the technology works (reasonable odds of that I think) we simply don't know if it will prove valuable enough to enough people to be economically viable.
Basically there will be a very large fixed cost to getting this thing running (probably $1-2 billion at minimum and possible more) and then some fairly substantial fixed operating costs that won't vary regardless of the number of customers. It will cost them this same amount whether they have 1 customer or 1 million. Then there are variable operating costs for each additional customer will be incurred. These will probably be comparatively small though not trivial. So the real question is how many customers do they need so that the fixed costs can be amortized over enough accounts to make the service economically competitive. I'm a cost accountant professionally and anyone who tells you they know the answer to that has NO idea what they are talking about. We can't make a good calculation even if we know the launch costs with absolute certainty because we have no idea what the denominator in the cost equation is.
I think you are underestimating just how desperate people are to get out from under Comcast's thumb.
Interesting notion though I'm not really convinced. Comcast would have some HUGE advantages, not the least of which is the ability to drop prices. I have Comcast as my ISP and while I certainly have no love for them I don't think they are stupid - just arrogant. Comcast could easily increase my bandwidth and/or drop my charges easily if they felt the competitive pressure (which is good for me). They are already wired to my house so they have no startup costs to recoup. It doesn't cost them really any more to provide me 100MB service than it does 20MB service. (The equipment is already there and the data costs to them are per MB not per MB/S) They could easily compete on price if they needed to and they have very deep pockets. I strongly suspect it wouldn't be hard for Comcast to simply ramp up the speed and/or drop prices until this satellite service seems unattractive by comparison.
So reasonable latency and competitive bandwidth (which isn't hard, despite inflated claims by Comcast) would finally give entrenched monopolies and duopolies some competition.
I would certainly welcome that if it comes to pass. However this is hugely speculative. We have no idea if the service is even feasible, much less cost competitive with wire-line ISPs. Basically I have an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. I don't think this proposed satellite service has an obvious natural customer base. Wouldn't mind being wrong but I just don't see it.
In my lifetime I will get to see Asia run out of cheap labor and the great manufacturing migration to Africa will start to happen.
You will not see Asia run out of cheap labor in your lifetime or in the lifetime of anyone reading this. The reason is simple. Supply and demand. Asia has the largest supply of labor anywhere in the world. China and India each individually have more people than all of Africa and Africa is far larger geographically.
You'll see it shift around some but it will take decades before even China can raise its GDP per capita to something close to the US or EU. India is even further behind and there are other countries like Bangladesh or Vietnam that are even further back. It took Japan and Korea and some of the other so called Asian Tigers 20-30 years to get to where they are now and they still do huge amounts of manufacturing. I've worked doing global sourcing including from China, India, Mexico and Southeast Asia. Believe me when I say demographics matter a lot when it comes to labor costs.
Manufacturing in Africa? Not until there are a lot of improvements to infrastructure and government first. China is investing rather heavily in Africa because they need resources but don't think for a minute that China will stop being a manufacturing powerhouse in your lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
The video shows how the Earth flies through a cloud of asteroids on its journey around the sun, and yet we've only discovered about 1% of the near earth asteroid population.
Ok, how do we know what we haven't discovered yet? I know statistical techniques for estimating population sizes of wildlife. (Catch some number, tag and release, catch a bunch more and see how many tagged ones you catch which gives you a population estimate) I'm not sure those techniques are applicable here. Anybody have any idea how this estimate was arrived at or is it taken straight out of someone's derriere? Measurements of orbit perturbations? Something else?
Free speech is not the same thing as saying anything you want at any time without consequence. There are (for very good reasons) certain types of speech that are exceptions to the protections of the First Amendment.
Libel is not protected speech. Neither is obscenity, defamation, incitement, incitement to riot, fighting words, fraud, threats, speech covered by copyright, some forms of commercial speech and speech integral to criminal conduct.
He painstakingly measured how much information an astronaut/jet pilot could pay attention to at once, and react to within a certain time frame.
Aviation folks have an awesome term for when pilots freeze from information overload. They call it having a helmet fire which to this day cracks me up and is a perfect term for the problem.
Many more people are dying falling off roofs installing solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant.
Citation please.
We can't call them 'greens' or 'environmentalists' because they're really just supporting coal power, empirically.
No they aren't. The problem is that that coal and nuclear are necessary currently. There is actually one achievable option to minimize use of both and that is to reduce the demand. We've collectively shown no actual interest in doing that but that is effectively what you are arguing for if you argue against both nuclear and fossil fuels. It requires a fair bit of belt tightening that I think is unlikely but it is technically possible to a very substantial degree.
Covering 1/4 of New Mexico has been proposed as well
Please point out a single actually credible proposal to do that. Personally I think you are pulling "statistics" out of your hind end.
People treat it like it's inherently evil, when the truth of the matter is that any problems with it have been through mismanagement and poor planning.
It's not evil - just dangerous. Dangerous in a way that is challenging to mitigate. No amount of planning or good management or (probably) engineering will make fission power not dangerous. Sure we can mitigate it to some degree (thorium, etc) but we have no technology or management system that can eliminate the possibility of a serious incident. Plus even if our management was perfect (which is impossible though it's generally been very good so far) there is always the possibility of a natural disaster of sufficient scale overwhelming the safety features of the design or that a war or terrorist incident might result in unsafe operation of the plant. Nuclear is scary in a way that other forms of energy are not - even if sometimes this fear is irrational.
Furthermore there is the waste problem which nobody seems willing/able to adequately address. Perhaps worst of all, nuclear power has to address all the externality costs of its operation whereas fossil fuels do not. Fossil fuel plants get to dump massive amounts of carbon and other pollutants for free while nuclear is regulated probably tighter than any other industry in most places.
So while I think nuclear fission is a necessary part of the equation for the foreseeable future I don't think it has any realistic chance to be much more of the equation than it is now unless there are substantial technological breakthroughs, which we seem to be in no danger of making.
We can do better, and need to do better.
I have zero confidence that people will stop making mistakes or that the risk of nuclear fission can be made acceptably low to make it politically palatable ever again. I think the only type of nuclear energy that will solve the problem is if we can somehow figure out how to do fusion - and that is basically science fiction right now.
Wind and solar, while nice and clean, probably aren't going to ever be capable of delivering all the power the world needs/wants.
Unfortunately we probably cannot keep dumping pollutants (esp carbon) endlessly into the environment and expect there to be no consequences. For now the goal should be to minimize waste production and to force every form of energy production to cost the full price of its waste stream. I have no illusion that fossil fuels will go away in my lifetime but I strongly think we could substantially cut their use with renewables.
Tesla Supercharging stations.
Not good enough nor plentiful enough nor convenient enough nor standard enough. They take 45 minutes to get an 80% charge and over an hour to get a full charge. Plus they're not much use if you don't have a Tesla. They're a good effort in the right direction but not good enough by a long shot yet.
Cheaper batteries would lead to longer ranged EVs
With fast charging you don't need longer range EVs - we already have EVs that can do over 200 miles on a charge now with more on the way. With lighter batteries (at the same power output) you also would get longer ranged EVs so arguably you'd be better off trying to get a better power to weight ratio before worrying about lowering cost. I suspect that you'll see more car makers trying Tesla's model starting at the high end with EVs and then EVs will filter down to the lower end of the market from the luxury market as volumes build and technology improves.
Basically you won't get cheaper batteries unless you can build them in larger quantities. You won't get to build them in larger quantities until you can convince them that they can refuel their vehicles in a convenient manner. There is however hope that through development of hybrid cars we can keep developing the batteries and increasing economies of scale until recharge times and ranges and prices are low enough to make pure EVs practical.
If we can get all the 'second' cars most families have to be EV
Won't happen. You will see a lot of hybrids which might eventually accomplish the same end but you won't see pure EVs until the range anxiety problem is solved. To do that you need to be able to refuel them substantially faster than current technology permits.
the high cost of the battery pack limits range
The power to weight ratio is what fundamentally limits range unless you are using fewer batteries than you could for a given vehicle. Beyond a certain point cramming more batteries into a vehicle results in diminishing returns to range (eventually becoming negative) and there are practical considerations (like passengers and cargo space) that limit the number of batteries that can be used as well. A Nissan leaf is a tiny car with an absurdly short range and doesn't have a huge amount of space for a large battery pack no matter what the cost is. While it works fine, for most people it's pretty limiting.
creating range anxiety,
Range anxiety is based on a combination of limited range and long recharge times. You could give the batteries away and you'd still have the problem.
Still, Tesla is reportedly selling every car they can manufacture, which tells me that they don't need 400 miles, 250+ is enough.
Tesla is selling a specialty supercar that costs $100,000. Practicality is not a paramount concern to someone who can afford a vehicle that expensive. Believe me I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I could but I'd still have another car with a gas/diesel engine. Simply visiting my parents house would exceed its range and I do that at least once a month. (no there isn't a supercharger along the route and using one would cause an hour delay to the trip)
If the amount of labor needed to produce one person's worth of goods and services is less than one person's worth of effort, then you are going to have people sitting around doing nothing. So your argument is that our society will do better and better as we have more and more people sitting around doing nothing.
Your statement about "one person's worth of goods and services" is a non-sequitur. You do not seem to grasp what capital efficiency or opportunity cost means. Capital efficiency is about spending resources in the most effective manner possible generating the maximum benefit. We have a finite amount of resources (manpower, money, raw materials) so you want maximize the benefit generated with them. Any time you unnecessarily support a business that is not using capital efficiently you are by definition wasting money, brains and materials. Doing so to protect a potentially obsolete business model is particularly stupid.
I'd say it's better to efficiently allocate HUMAN capital to maximize our benefit to society.
If you can be bothered to read carefully you'll notice that I mentioned human capital explicitly. But human capital is not the only kind that matters.
Like I've said before, I was brought up to respect the rules.
And what do you do when the rules are wrong? Just because something is a rule doesn't mean it is right nor does it mean it should be respected. Sometimes you have to show that a rule is wrong by your actions and accept that there may be consequences for that. I don't just meekly accept any rule if I think it is wrong. Not sure why anyone would.
To have a choice of a job at McDonalds, WalMart, or Uber is not what I want for my kids.
Nice strawman argument you have there. As if those would ever be the only three options...
The last taxi driver I had a conversation with was leasing his cab, and he had a plan to own it one day.
So what? If it's a bad business model why should I care? I see people literally daily who are entrepreneurs and quite a few have really stupid business plans. That's the risk you take when you want to own a business. I'd suggest the guy have a backup plan because most startup businesses fail and there is no guarantee that the business environment will be the same in 5-10 years. The guy certainly shouldn't be entitled to anything any more than any other entrepreneur.
Those are the types of people I feel should be rewarded.
People who should be rewarded are people who take risks and add value by doing so. If he wants a slow steady income that's fine but I'm not persuaded that he should be entitled to anything. If Uber makes traditional taxi's obsolete by providing more value to customers then it makes no sense to protect the guys providing less value. Nobody protects me in my job from competition so I see no reason why your taxi driver should get special treatment.
The cost of the battery packs is still the biggest thing holding EVs back from being practical
Disagree though I do agree that cost is a major issue - I just think it is not the biggest issue. The biggest thing holding EVs back is refueling time. Range anxiety is THE most common argument against EVs. Despite the logical argument that most people don't actually drive all that far in a given day, people need/want a car that can drive them 400 miles without worrying about refueling because sometimes they need to do that. Many people cannot afford multiple vehicles and if they want to go visit their parents in the next state they don't want it to be a multi-day expedition nor do they want to rent a car. Long refueling times are something of a showstopper bug even if the problem is mostly one of perception most of the time.
The cost of the battery packs it is really a second order result because EV production is still too small to get full economies of scale. Costs have been falling and will continue to fall so long as the vehicles continue to improve. If they solve the recharge time issue a LOT more people would seriously consider buying EVs and the cost issue would resolve itself in due course. Until an EV can be refueled in under 15 minutes people are going to have range anxiety. I would say cost is a strong second on the list of things holding back EVs.
In short they have no money now and nobody is willing to lend them more, so it's either cut spending or print more cash.
The problem isn't that they have no money now. They do. They have lots of Euros that have already been lent to them. The problem is that they owe much of it to creditors. They have the option (not a good one) of defaulting and keeping what cash they do have. Then they are de-facto still using the Euro even if they aren't in the Eurozone. It's going to be ugly if it comes to that though.
Of course as you very rightly point out, nobody will be willing to lend them more at that point so they are not in a good place no matter what they do going forward.
The more that Google directs users to its own content and its own properties, the more that speakers who write reviews, blogs and other materials become invisible to their desired audiences.
First of all, the notion that Google is directing people to their own services should surprise no one. Anyone who honestly expects them to be an unbiased party is delusional. Google is an advertising company (well over 90% of their revenue is advertising based) so everything they do should be viewed with that in mind. Providing unbiased search results is a second order consideration at best for them no matter what motto they claim to follow.
Second, is this really a problem? There are other search engines out there so if someone is unhappy with the answers they get then use a different one. Google has gotten to where they are mostly because they've provided a better service than their competitors. But there is very little keeping people using Google if there is reason to believe that has changed. Other search engines are only a URL away after all. I see potential for a problem but its a very small problem even in the worst case.
Bitcoin swings but has historically bubbled and crashed with each bubble peaking over the previous. Smooth our those peaks and valleys and you have a constant upward progression.
Even if true that is utterly useless information as far as most greeks will be concerned. Long term trends don't matter at all when you have to buy in today to avoid a catastrophe.
It sure will be attractive compared to the new drachma.
Considering you have no idea what currency Greece would go to post-euro that's a highly premature statement. Re-instituting the drachma might not be a great idea and might not even be practically possible. (It's not a trivial problem to switch over and it's not clear the greeks have a plan in place to do that) They could switch to the dollar, or the yen if they wanted to. In fact countries in financial crises with their currencies often do use a foreign currency instead of their own. In fact Greece could decide to use the Euro even if they weren't in the Eurozone. Not saying they will or should but they could.
In any case I disagree that bitcoin will be an attractive alternative to anything for most Greek citizens. There are much better options for most of them for any particular use case you care to mention.
The problem most Greeks suddenly face is that their money is now locked up as electronic balances in banks that have shut down for a week and won't let them have more than 60 euros at a time.
They'd have a LOT bigger problem if there was a bank run. Then a lot of them would have access to none of their money. Of course they could keep their money outside of the banks but that's got its own set of problems.
After crises like this (even America's own "great recession"), people tend to prefer forms of money are more than just bits or fiat paper, such as gold and silver.
Really? Go take a few ounces of gold bullion to McDonalds and try to buy a burger with it and let me know what happens. Furthermore whether you have gold or fiat currency does not affect whether a bank run can occur. Bank runs happened long before the gold standard was eliminated. While it's not a bad idea to have some amount of gold as an asset it doesn't solve problems like the ones facing Greece and Greek citizens right now.
One side effect of the crisis is that alternative currencies like Bitcoin suddenly look much more attractive as the "normal" currencies become unstable.
Bitcoin will not be more stable or attractive than other currencies including the dollar or probably even the euro except in some weird corner cases. If someone is putting money into bitcoin because they think it is even relatively stable then they are an idiot. If someone wants to use bitcoin to transfer money then there is a relatively small risk there but you'd have to be pretty dumb to just buy and hold bitcoins for any substantial length of time. Even if Greece does exit the Euro it isn't going to make bitcoin meaningfully more sensible than it already is. If someone wants to swap currencies to hedge against currency fluctuations I can think of a huge number of options I'd consider long before bitcoin for that purpose.
Tony Gallippi, the co-founder of bitcoin payment processor Bitpay, tweeted on Sunday night that he expected the price of bitcoin to rise to between $610 and $1,250 if Greece exits the Euro. The currency is currently worth $250.
I rest my case. If it can go up that fast then it can (and probably will) go down just as fast. Bitcoin is not a place anyone should be comfortable keeping their money for long unless they are speculating.
They're terrible for ignoring the law before they tried to change it.
Ignoring an unjust law is not always a bad idea. That's how we got lots of important laws changed. The Civil Rights movement would never have happened if people just went along with unjust laws. Muhammad Ali went to jail for being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. While I'm certainly not saying that taxi rides has anything close to that level of moral imperative if the law is a bad law then I don't have a problem with people doing the right thing prior to the law being changed. There may be consequences to this course of action. The important question is whether what Uber is doing actually is the right thing and I think that is perhaps unclear. I very much doubt they would make any headway in changing the laws without first demonstrating that they are in effect a pointless subsidy to taxi companies and the only way I'm aware of to do that is to ignore the law and actually show that.
Of course they are. They don't need to pay for a license. They pocket 90% of the savings and the user gets the other 10%.
There is more to value than price. Presumably they are cheaper from what you are saying. (I honestly have no idea and can't be bothered to look) But what about the service itself? Is it a better service? Are they more timely? Is it safe? Are the vehicles clean? Is it reliable? Basically, when you consider everything and weight it according to what really matters, is Uber a better value than a traditional taxi?
Force them to pay the same licenses fees as every other taxi driver, and their price will be the same as regular taxis.
As a potential customer I don't give a crap about whether or not they have to pay license fees. That doesn't improve or detract from the service as far as I'm concerned. I also don't care about the legal battles over the licensing. What I do care about is whether at the end of the day Uber better value for money. So I put it to you again, why is Uber better? Why would I give Uber my dollar instead of a traditional taxi company? Where will I get the best value for money?
The problem is that it destroys the jobs of taxi drivers, but does not create new jobs.
Does it really? Or does it make using a taxi service a better value so that the usage of taxis overall grows? Do we really want to subsidize a jobs program for taxi drivers or is there a better way to employ those resources? While there is some clear disruption going on it's not at all clear that that is a bad thing. If you spend two dollars on a taxi ride that could only cost one dollar then you have effectively subsidized the taxi driver and cannot use that extra dollar for some more productive use. If there is some externality that would be a serious problem for society then that is a relevant concern but providing a subsidy to taxi drivers when one isn't needed is stupid.
A journalist calls this "the 'sharing of remains' economy", where the real jobs disappear, and only some small cheap tasks remain.
That's a nonsense argument because it doesn't consider opportunity cost. Saving "real jobs" even if they are inefficient means that you have capital allocated in a sub-optimal way. Rather than employing that capital (both human and financial) in an optimal way you waste it subsidizing obsolete business models. If you take your argument to its logical end most of us should still be working on farms where the "real jobs" were because improving productivity and capital efficiency would be a death spiral. Fortunately the real world doesn't work like that. Efficient allocation of capital in the long run benefits society.
Uber is 1000 times better for transportation than the taxi cartel
Why? Seriously, I haven't used Uber and the last time I rode in a taxi was years ago so I have no dog in this fight. Why did you think Uber is better? Better service? Better value? Or is just that they are sticking it to The Man? I'm legitimately asking because I just don't really see what is so amazing about Uber as a casual observer. Saying they are "1000 times better" is obviously hyperbole but what makes them better if indeed they are better?
If they are actually providing a better value then more power to them. I'm definitely for disrupting industries that need disrupting. If the only advantage is that they aren't the incumbent companies then that isn't an adequate reason to my mind to support them with actual dollars. It just not clear to me which is the case here.
My two ChromeCasts are working great.
I know this might be a shock but it's actually possible for products to break in ways that affect some users and not others. Weird I know.
Seriously just because it works for you don't mean there isn't an actual problem. Consider yourself lucky.
Amen. I really need a solid alternative to Chrome, that's all.
I keep using all the various browsers and despite its warts I keep coming back to Firefox as my primary browser. Chrome keeps "fixing" stuff that didn't need fixing and breaking it in the process. Safari has some behaviors I find annoying and (surprisingly) I run into a fair number of website that break on it. Plus Apple never seems to do Windows software very well and you can't get it on Linux. And IE isn't available on anything other than Windows even if I wanted to use it (I don't) so it's a non-starter.
Firefox isn't perfect by any means but it is cross platform, generally stable, generally predictable, and fits my particular work style. Basically it pisses me off the least of the major browser options. It's been my daily driver (so to speak) for quite a few years now. If something better came along I'd drop it without a second thought but none of the alternatives really seem to be meaningfully better.
Looks like Chromecast has gone the way of Google Chrome: Arbitrary and random A/B testing that you're never notified of, and no way to opt out of. This seriously pisses me the fuck off with Chome.
Amen brother. I used to have our company use Chrome but there was so much flakiness after updates that it became impossible to use. In our particular case weird behavior with PDFs was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. We use a lot of PDFs and Chrome just couldn't handle them in a sane manner, kept changing things and then it would randomly break for a user. It was always a pain in the ass to figure out why there was a problem and then then behavior would change a few weeks later. We don't have the most sophisticated group of users here and random changes in behavior are NOT helpful even if they are made with the best of intentions.
So we're using Firefox which is the best of the alternatives. (Safari has issues and IE is just a nonstarter) Firefox has its issues too but it don't create needless tech support issues for me which is what I really care about.
It very much depends on what they manage to do for the customer end.
Naturally. While there are some technical issues the real question will be economic. Presuming everything works the real challenge will be convincing people to buy transceivers to use the service. I strongly suspect they'll find that to be more difficult than making the satellites work.
LEO satellites zip past you so quickly that your uplink is being handed off between satellites at least every half hour
Faster than that really. I track the International Space Station now and then for fun and it goes horizon to horizon in less than 10-15 minutes much of the time. It's rarely directly overhead so like GPS you'd probably need several satellites to be overhead at any given time most of the time. It's a solvable problem provided you have the energy budget but I suppose not that much different in principle from cell tower handoffs from a fast moving car. A LOT farther away than a cell tower though even in the best of circumstances so I'm curious how the power budget will work out.
All any competitor has to do is be something less offensive than a freewheeling asshole and if their product is even remotely broadband, it WILL attract customers who already have a broadband ISP.
That's true but it's not the important question. The important question is not whether they can get customer (they probably can) but whether they can get ENOUGH customers. Anyone who tells you that they know the answer to that is either deluded or lying. Presuming the technology works (reasonable odds of that I think) we simply don't know if it will prove valuable enough to enough people to be economically viable.
Basically there will be a very large fixed cost to getting this thing running (probably $1-2 billion at minimum and possible more) and then some fairly substantial fixed operating costs that won't vary regardless of the number of customers. It will cost them this same amount whether they have 1 customer or 1 million. Then there are variable operating costs for each additional customer will be incurred. These will probably be comparatively small though not trivial. So the real question is how many customers do they need so that the fixed costs can be amortized over enough accounts to make the service economically competitive. I'm a cost accountant professionally and anyone who tells you they know the answer to that has NO idea what they are talking about. We can't make a good calculation even if we know the launch costs with absolute certainty because we have no idea what the denominator in the cost equation is.
I think you are underestimating just how desperate people are to get out from under Comcast's thumb.
Interesting notion though I'm not really convinced. Comcast would have some HUGE advantages, not the least of which is the ability to drop prices. I have Comcast as my ISP and while I certainly have no love for them I don't think they are stupid - just arrogant. Comcast could easily increase my bandwidth and/or drop my charges easily if they felt the competitive pressure (which is good for me). They are already wired to my house so they have no startup costs to recoup. It doesn't cost them really any more to provide me 100MB service than it does 20MB service. (The equipment is already there and the data costs to them are per MB not per MB/S) They could easily compete on price if they needed to and they have very deep pockets. I strongly suspect it wouldn't be hard for Comcast to simply ramp up the speed and/or drop prices until this satellite service seems unattractive by comparison.
So reasonable latency and competitive bandwidth (which isn't hard, despite inflated claims by Comcast) would finally give entrenched monopolies and duopolies some competition.
I would certainly welcome that if it comes to pass. However this is hugely speculative. We have no idea if the service is even feasible, much less cost competitive with wire-line ISPs. Basically I have an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. I don't think this proposed satellite service has an obvious natural customer base. Wouldn't mind being wrong but I just don't see it.
In my lifetime I will get to see Asia run out of cheap labor and the great manufacturing migration to Africa will start to happen.
You will not see Asia run out of cheap labor in your lifetime or in the lifetime of anyone reading this. The reason is simple. Supply and demand. Asia has the largest supply of labor anywhere in the world. China and India each individually have more people than all of Africa and Africa is far larger geographically.
You'll see it shift around some but it will take decades before even China can raise its GDP per capita to something close to the US or EU. India is even further behind and there are other countries like Bangladesh or Vietnam that are even further back. It took Japan and Korea and some of the other so called Asian Tigers 20-30 years to get to where they are now and they still do huge amounts of manufacturing. I've worked doing global sourcing including from China, India, Mexico and Southeast Asia. Believe me when I say demographics matter a lot when it comes to labor costs.
Manufacturing in Africa? Not until there are a lot of improvements to infrastructure and government first. China is investing rather heavily in Africa because they need resources but don't think for a minute that China will stop being a manufacturing powerhouse in your lifetime.