Manual transmission drivers don't have three feet, they can't hold the break, clutch and gas at the same time.
You've never done a heel-and-toe shift I guess. Not really disagreeing with your main point (regarding rollback) - just being pedantic and pointing out that it is quite possible for two feet to control three pedals at once. In fact before synchronized transmissions became common it was nothing unusual to need to engage in some fancy footwork. Some race cars still do.
Rhonda Smith's story of six miles of interstate terror, as her Lexus suddenly zoomed to 100 miles per hour, will set the mood Tuesday for the first congressional hearing on Toyota's acceleration problems.
Yes and if you read more about it you'll find several interesting bits of info. One is that upon inspection there was no evidence that the brakes had been applied, including the MECHANICAL emergency brake. She also claimed under oath that she had complained about the problem to Toyota but the only record Toyota has is for an oil change. She also sold the car to a family member (not something you'd think she'd do if it really were unsafe) and according the the Wall Street Journal the car is still on the road.
Frankly I think there are a lot of people making up stories hoping to get money in a lawsuit, much the same way people made up stories about Audi a few decades ago. Yes, there appear to be some actual problems but there are a lot of liars out there too.
Even in the most modern car, I find this hard to believe, unless you include the entertainment/nav system in the count.
I'd suggest that it probably isn't terribly shocking. The amount of electronics in a modern car is pretty impressive. There are dozens (sometimes hundreds) of sensors, drive by wire, diagnostics systems, engine control, ABS, traction control, and much more. Frankly diagnostics these days almost requires a OBD-II scanner. All of this without even getting into the climate controls, entertainment systems and other stuff for fun and comfort.
Bear in mind that this explosion in electronics is a relatively recent thing. Cars even 15 years ago had FAR less electronics than today's cars.
Take a look at the statistics for death causes for people under 60, and you will find almost everyone who doesn't die old dies in a car.
Nonsense. Yes, motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death in the US for those between the ages of 15 and 34 (peaking at around 1 out of 3 deaths for the 15-24 age group) but it is nowhere close to "almost everyone" no matter what age group you choose. But don't let actual data get in the way of a good sound bite.
Look at what wasted labor there is in society, and you will find that producing and maintaining one high-price high-waste transportation system per citizen is quite a bit of work when horses managed do to better than that quite some time ago...
If horses were actually more efficient economically, we would still be using horses. If you think horses are cheap as a means of transportation, you clearly have never tried to use them. Yes there is a cost to modern infrastructure but there is a bigger (economic) cost to lacking it. The biggest obstacle to the growth of many nations (India is a good example) is a poor quality road infrastructure.
not to mention electricity and electric computer system transport. And PRT more recently.
You think a PRT is seriously a solution which makes sense for more than a few high density urban areas? Nice for airports but it isn't going to be much use on a farm.
Then read about pollution, and oil wars.
Yep, there is a downside to fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have serious problems in need of serious solutions. However there is a huge upside too which I note you are conveniently forgetting. I'd also like you to point out the magical technology you think will eliminate pollution. Solar and wind come closest but even they pollute. (you didn't think the steel in that turbine came without an environmental cost did you?)
Most of the financial regulators are former high level executives from Goldman Sachs...
Some are but most are demonstrably not. Many are financial industry insiders but that's by necessity. Do you really want an financial regulator who has no knowledge of the industry he/she is regulating? The only place to get people with the appropriate financial experience is from the finance industry.
I don't understand why we need so many useless regulators who are usually wolves being put in charge of the hen house when the courts could easily handle this.
While I admire your faith in the court system, in truth the courts are woefully ill-prepared to deal with the sorts of issues the SEC and other regulating bodies deal with. The court system is sloooooowww, expensive and can only effectively deal with misconduct after it has occurred. The courts are a poor monitoring system. The court system also is not heavily staffed with financial experts who understand the issues involved. Trust me, you REALLY don't want financially illiterate judges deciding financial regulations.
The reason the industry insiders often end up as regulators is precisely because they are the only ones who really understand what is going on. Finance is really, really complicated. Yes it's not perfect but that's why the regulators are accountable to other bodies including the President and Congress. If anything the problem with the regulators isn't (usually) that they do poor quality work but rather that they aren't given enough resources to really do a great job. The SEC for instance is badly understaffed given it's mandate. If you really want to keep a better watch on the finance industry, lobby congress to increase funding to the SEC and other watchdog agencies.
It's going to end up being prosecuted in a court of law anyway and not solved by some magic regulation hand-waving.
Spoken like someone who has no experience whatsoever in the financial industry. I won't argue that all regulations are good or well enforced but relying on the court system alone to solve the issues that regulators deal with daily would be insanity. If you really want to screw up the financial system, get rid of the regulators. Our current financial mess is due in significant part to a lack of regulation.
If the program were a control system for a jet fighter, or safety system for a subway line, I'd agree.
Nonsense. You write a crappy program which you sell to me which then gets 0wned because of your bad programming costing my business lots of money, I'll want your head on a platter. It doesn't have to cost lives to cause real harm. If you as a programmer can't be bothered to follow reasonable industry standards to prevent foreseeable and preventable harm to your users then you, my friend, are negligent under current law.
However whether I'm entitled to anything depends on whether you as the programmer A) fulfilled the design specifications of the software and B) satisfied your professional duty of care in the creation of your software. If you can't be bothered to program your software to reasonable industry standards for security then you ARE and SHOULD BE liable.
Let's be clear - you ALREADY are potentially liable as a programmer for harm caused by your actions. The only things protecting you are the fact that serious harm is relatively rare and hard to trace to you personally. If it can be proven that your negligent coding was responsible for allowing real, foreseeable and preventable harm to another party then you deserve to be sued.
The problem is that what you said could be easily applied to "oh no, there was a bluescreen of dearth, SUE!"
The word you are missing is reasonable and it is part of the test for whether the harm that occurred is worthy of a lawsuit. Like every programmer I've ever met you have immediately taken things to ridiculous logical extremes. A blue screen probably didn't cause my company an appreciable amount of harm. An insecure accounting system that gets hacked would cause a lot of harm. Which situation do you think I'm going to generate a lawsuit over? Which one do you think would get laughed out of court?
If you want to start criminalizing bugs, expect to see even more development moved overseas and less free and significantly less open source software.
The benefits of open source are no excuse for software that will cause significant harm to my person or my business. Furthermore, you can limit liability in many ways. Open source software also provides some protection because the user has the opportunity to review the code for risks themselves. If the user can't be bothered to check the quality of software they use when they have the source code you as a programmer have a pretty darn good defense.
I also doubt you'll see code going overseas more either if the companies doing so intend to sell the product here. Just because something is made in China does not exempt it form consumer protection laws here in the US. Sure there is a cost to any engineering but we certainly aren't demanding enough of our programmers most of the time.
...it is unreasonable and completely unrealistic to expect every line to be a pinnacle of perfection, just like it is unreasonable to expect that every sentence in a book is completely without error.
And every lawyer you ever talk to will agree with you AND then tell you that what you just said is irrelevant. Nobody really cares if the code is perfect. What they care about is if the code failed and someone got hurt (financially, physically, etc) as a result. If the code is designed and/or implemented such that a reasonably common and foreseeable attack (say a buffer overflow) can and does occur and harm results, then the programmer has failed in their duty of care. Doctors, (civil) engineers, lawyers, accountants and even tradesmen (electricians, etc) who engage in professional services all have this obligation to perform high quality work. When they fail in their duties they get sued and rightly so. They also carry liability insurance because nobody is perfect. Software engineers are not and should not be an exception. Just because your job is hard sometimes does not excuse you to do shoddy work that will cause harm to others.
This would be like holding a civil engineer responsible when a terrorist blows up a bridge
If the bridge failed to live up to its designed specifications then the engineer would be liable regardless of the means used to bring it down. Major structures ARE designed knowing that attack is possible and the engineers try to mitigate reasonably foreseeable and preventable problems. While a structure is never designed to withstand all possible attacks you can be sure the contract will outline performance requirements which the engineer is expected to meet. If the bridge met its designed performance specs AND those specs are deemed reasonable given the state of the art (no excuse for shoddy specs) then the engineer has met his professional obligations. Software engineering should be no different in this regard. Just because some software is badly designed and implemented doesn't mean all software engineers should be excused from standard of care in exercising their professional duties.
Bear in mind, only a fool would sign a contract with unlimited liability. Just make the contract one that clearly specifies the performance levels required and the resources (including time) needed to meet that level of performance. Then get liability insurance like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other skilled professionals do for when things do go wrong since nobody is perfect. Software engineering is not and should not be an exception.
Any competitor which doesn't block it will get more business.
Only if there is a competitive market. As it stands the major ISPs (telephone and cable companies) are really an oligopoly and there is little or no way for new competitors to easily enter the marketplace.
The problem there is that the government funded their cabling, yet the companies turned around and monopolized it.
The government did NOT fund their cabling. They granted AT&T and later the cable companies monopolies but generally speaking the networks were built with private funds. AT&T was wildly profitable for decades and there was no need for the government to give them any money. Furthermore there were good reasons to allow the monopoly to exist as it made the telecom system highly consistent everywhere with the attendant network effects benefiting everyone.
Currently their "low" rates are effectively subsidized, thus making competition difficult because a new competitor wouldn't be subsidized.
Again, wrong. They have the advantage of an existing network with it's attendant network effects. Building a cable network is hugely expensive - massive fixed costs. For the phone and cable companies, this cost has already been paid long ago. It is extraordinarily difficult to make an economic case to build a new network to compete with them. Utilities and telephone companies tend to form what is called a natural monopoly because the economies of scale required to provide the lowest cost service naturally tends to result in one or very few companies in the marketplace.
As you can see, it's not a free market in the first place.
Exactly my point. You can't argue it both ways. Either it is a competitive marketplace or it isn't. Given that it really isn't, I would not expect market forces to be especially useful in keeping the net "neutral" - only regulation can do that at the moment.
Power is finite and needs to be generated on-demand from (usually) consumable resources. Bandwidth doesn't fall in the the same category.
Really? Bandwidth is finite and it requires the exact same power from those exact same consumable resources, plus the equipment to deliver the data. I agree it's not quite an apples to apples comparison but it's closer than you are making it out to be. The difference is that one is a direct cost and the other is an indirect cost. They're both real costs but one can be directly assigned to a cost center and the other cannot. This has enormous implications that I think you should study a little deeper. Charging per bit is a way to turn an indirect cost into something resembling a direct cost. Not perfect to be sure but there are good reasons to do it.
For fibre, if you have something that's sitting around idle, you're "wasting" (say) 1 Gb/s of bandwidth each second that it's not lit up. It could be used to transfer information for someone, but if you've capped people and so they're not using it because they're over their caps, you have all this telco equipment doing absolutely nothing.
Whether that is a valid argument depends entirely upon whether there is excess capacity to be had and how the costs are allocated. The "wasted" bandwidth is only wasted if someone wants it and can't get it. If there is no demand for it then you have a case of excess capacity and the costs for the equipment will be higher for everyone who pays to use it. If the bit can be delivered but at the cost of slowing down other customers there is an opportunity cost in play. ISPs do need to make sure that all their customers have access to bits, not just the customers who use the most bits. There also might be upstream costs since your ISP probably pays some rate per bit for data delivered outside their own network. If bandwidth is artificially limited when it could otherwise be delivered without interfering with other customers, then your argument may carry weight.
With electricity, I'm being charged for the consumption of coal/gas/uranium (plus some overhead for transport). What exactly am I being charged for consuming when I download a bit?
The cost of the equipment to deliver that bit, the electricity needed to power that equipment, the staff needed to manage that equipment, depreciation, insurance, upstream bandwidth costs from other suppliers and a number of other costs. Welcome to the wonderful world of direct versus indirect costs. This is what makes cost accounting such an important and difficult endeavor.
It's not a matter of just "getting on with the times". Yes, the SI system is easier to work with, but there are immense costs in converting every system in use to another system.
True, but every other country in the world has already paid those costs. The metric system isn't terribly old. The longer the US waits the more expensive and difficult it becomes to switch.
You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric.
Most of those bits of software are already capable of metric (or easily made so) and generating new tables is trivial. Most engineering companies are quite capable of working with metric. Any company that does business outside the US (which is a LOT of them) already deals in metric whether they want to or not. It's a global economy and the US is intentionally incurring an unnecessary cost and burden on its own businesses.
Yes, the conversion would have some significant difficulties but the real difficulty is getting people to just accept metric as the standard. The biggest obstacle is simply people (older people especially) not wanting to bother - not the financial cost.
When my government is over $12,300,000,000,000 in debt, "getting on with the times" is the last thing on which I'd want it to waste more money.
As a percent of gdp the US has been in more debt as recently as 65 years ago. The conversion costs of going to metric, expensive as it would be, would be tiny in comparison. You could pay for the whole thing with a relatively modest cut in your choice of Defense, Social Security or Medicare. Of course good luck getting that done...
Consider it from the other side: why doesn't the world convert to Impirial Units? I'm sure no country wants to incur the cost of converting everything to another system.
Because the other 95% of the world's population has grasped the concept that using standard units saves money in the long run and makes it easier to communicate as well. Are you seriously arguing that 95% of the world's population should switch to a measurement system that even you admit is more difficult to work with? That's a bizarre way to convince someone...
Nice hand wave. Wrong - but a nice try anyway. I'm sure all those Nobel laureates in economics are glad that you set them straight about the "real world". I predict that every economist out there will suddenly dump their models in favor of yours.
Seriously, you claimed that marginal cost has nothing to do with pricing which is a demonstrably false claim. It's one of the first things anyone who takes an Econ 101 class learns. Even business owners that have never heard the term marginal cost adjust their pricing to try to maximize profits.
The world is full of lazy people that often don't have access to good pricing information.
Neither marginal revenue nor marginal cost require any external pricing information to be useful so long as you can adjust prices. And even the smallest businesses have access to quality pricing information if they care to look. Those that don't go out of business. 90% of new business ventures fail - it's not unusual.
If there was good information on pricing, Brick and Mortar store would practically cease to exist, except maybe Walmart.
So shipping has suddenly become magically free and instantaneous? I'm supposed to wait 3 days for my groceries to be delivered instead of stopping by the store on my way home? I'm supposed to pay UPS to ship my dry cleaning instead of just stopping by a store? I'm supposed to order everything off the internet and wait for delivery instead of going to a store? Apparently you think distribution and availability have no value. You have a very peculiar notion of how people live and businesses work.
Markets are incredibly efficient conveyances for pricing information. It's pretty much the whole reason they matter.
In the same ways, if people didn't want to pay for convenience then gas stations would only sell gas and not overpriced milk and food.
Even ignoring the convenience issue for a moment willingness to pay is not the same for almost any two people. You and I probably have different opinions about how much we are willing to pay for a gallon of milk. This is what a demand curve is all about.
Essentially the market is splitting into 2 types, those whose research prices and don't pay for convenience and the opposite.
No it isn't - at least not any more than it always has been. That's a nice convenient mental model but the "real world" (your term) is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm pretty confident that the models of supply and demand, marginal revenue and marginal cost that every economist on the planet uses are more predictive than your two tier model.
Lazy and uninformed end up paying more.
This is nothing new. They always have and always will.
I was exaggerating a bit, but my point was just that the cost of printing was not what sets the price of a book.
No need to exaggerate to make that point.
You agree, I think, since you say it is not the dominant cost.
You are quite correct on that score. I'm just correcting the incorrect assertion that the cost of printing one additional copy of a book is anywhere close to zero. It demonstrably is not. The cost of producing an additional copy of an e-book isn't actually zero either but it is FAR closer - so close that it is a rounding error in many cases.
You are under the false assumption that items are priced based on marginal cost.
If you take an economics 101 course you'll find that in most cases the optimal price to sell at is where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. So yes, prices are indeed based on marginal cost.
They aren't in practically any market...
On the contrary, prices are based on marginal cost in practically EVERY market including monopolies.
...they are priced at what consumers will pay and what the competition is selling at.
Which is what determines marginal revenue at a given price point. If they price the product too high, marginal cost will exceed marginal revenue which is a fancy way of saying they'll lose sales. If they price too low, sales will be high(er) but they will be leaving money on the table. But there is copious economic literature establishing that the optimal prices is where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. Don't take my word for it, look it up.
The marginal cost of printing a book is pretty close to zero too. That isn't why they cost as much as they do.
I've worked in publishing as an accountant and this statement is completely wrong. The marginal cost of production of even the highest volume books or newspapers is no where near zero. It's not the dominant cost (those would be marketing and distribution in most cases) but the marginal cost isn't zero or anywhere near zero.
Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
Vehicles are unique among energy technologies in that they typically have to carry their energy source around with them. So energy stored per mass is the most important figure of merit for vehicle propulsion, and electric vehicles are inherently 45 times worse than their liquid-fuel competition.
You are neglecting some pretty important facts. The first fact you are neglecting is energy conversion efficiency. Electric motors have FAR higher energy conversion efficiency - something like 90% versus 10-40%. The energy density of the fuels source itself is a factor but not meaningful by itself. Uranium has a far higher energy density than gasoline but we're not likely to put it in an automobile anytime soon.
Second, you are ignoring the weight of the equipment required to convert that energy into motion. Internal combustion engines are heavy and gasoline isn't much use for transportation by itself without a vehicle. What you should be comparing is the weight of the *entire* vehicle and those weights are demonstrably comparable. The Telsa Roadster is pretty similar in weight and performance to the Lotus that shares the same frame. It is the power per weight for the whole vehicle that matters, not just for the fuel source.
Third, you are assuming that current battery technology will never be improved upon. While batteries are not improving as fast as we would like, that doesn't mean they won't continue to improve. A breakthrough is still a realistic possibility with batteries whereas gasoline engines are unlikely to get significantly more utility from a liter of gasoline than they currently do.
argued that if free energy were discovered tomorrow, then the whole economy of the world would collapse.
I agree this is clearly nonsense in the long run though some countries (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, etc) who are primarily dependent on oil income would experience very severe economic problems. It is correct to say that oil is one of the underpinnings of the current economy and it would take some time for adjustment.
Of course, he simultaneously argued that oil production was used for so many applications that the world was dependent on it and could not function without it.
For the foreseeable future he is probably correct in that assertion. The number of products we use that have some form of oil-based products is astonishing. Besides fuels like gasoline or diesel, many, many, many other products have oil as a vital component for which there is no substitute. Synthetic fibers, lubricants, paints, plastics, coatings, chemicals, coolants, and fertilizers all jump to mind off the top of my head. Without oil for power and fertilizer, modern agriculture as we know it could not exist. It is entirely correct that our modern world could not function without oil.
I think you know little of how waiters work then. They already don't declare their tips fully.
True but if they don't declare at least 8% of their sales as tip income it will almost certainly trigger an audit. This information is required to be reported on form 4070 and the IRS knows there is a high propensity to cheat.
Snake oil salesmen would get criminal punishment, as they do nowadays.
That's quite irresponsible because someone (usually) has to get hurt before you act. Lawsuits (civil and criminal) are a useful deterrent but hardly a foolproof one especially when there is money to be made. There is a reason we have regulatory controls and approvals on dangerous medications and devices.
There would just not be lottery-kind incentive to sue anybody
I think you overestimate the actual cost and probability of success of medical tort lawsuits. Despite all the noise about them, they are nowhere near the biggest source of cost in medicine. They're a little like plane crashes - spectacular sometimes but rare and mostly not that big a deal on a day to day basis. My wife is a doctor so I'm more than a little familiar with this personally.
Yes, a video game can give valuable information whether someone has a neurological condition.
No one has claimed otherwise to my knowledge. But if the equipment is not designed and approved for that use by the FDA, the physician using it IS exposing him/herself to liability. Medications and devices get used for "off label" purposes all the time but the physician does so at their own risk, especially if there is no informed consent and/or if it is not within standard of care.
AFAIK no equipment can do that without a doctor and no (sane) doctor would ever rely on one positive output alone.
Quite right. But it does provide data and sometimes test data is misleading. Don't get me wrong, I think it is terrific that they are using cheaper technology - I'm just pointing out that there are sometimes risks in doing so.
What would happen if the liability was removed or limited?
Then you have the problem of snake oil salesmen. Liability is not always a bad thing. It protects all of us from unscrupulous vendors every day. You can either regulate heavily or allow liability but you have to have at least one of the two and preferably some of both.
Getting several million "liability" for essentially nothing is insane.
Are you seriously claiming that a video game is the same as diagnosing a neurological condition? In medicine we are literally talking life and death. Permanent injuries can result from momentary lapses of judgment or faulty equipment. It might be that a medical equipment provider is ripping off the buyer but that doesn't mean the liability cost isn't still very real.
If they were going to charge you 6k, why even bother about the warranty?
Because this isn't the PC on your desk. If there was a lawsuit any lawyer worth his retainer would stand up and ask the defendant "why did you think it was acceptable to tinker with the equipment in a way you knew would void the warranty when your tinkering resulted in the death/injury of my client?" Shortly thereafter the lawyers for the hospital would settle for a large sum of money MUCH larger than $6000. The decimal would move three or maybe four places to the right I would guess. Never underestimate the fear of lawyers.
That's not to say the medical equipment company wasn't ripping off the purchasers of the equipment. I suspect there was a very healthy profit margin in there.
From my point of view, if the machine was under warranty, the repair should have been free of charge.
Only if you agreed to that when you purchased it. Shady I'll agree but not unusual.
Yes they did. There are other things rolled into that cost to be sure (insurance, etc) but don't kid yourself. There is also a hefty profit margin there too. Medical equipment companies aren't doing this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. If they can get away with charging $6000 to swap a hard drive, they will.
Ok. So 2009 was the TDI, and 2010 is the Audi. So there are TWO clean diesel cars.
There's more. You just are being petulant about it and don't want to look.
I have absolutely no interest in ever purchasing a diesel. None.
That's up to you but you don't appear to be deciding that based on facts.
If I had one I'd have to drive well out of my way to find a station that sells diesel, and even then there would be one pump off to the side for transports.
Bullshit. I've owned diesels. It's not even remotely hard to find filling stations anywhere in the US and the pumps are normally right next to the gas pumps. There are plenty of diesel pickups and SUVs out there and they don't all refuel at truck stops.
I'll stick to my hybrid SUV and take my 45mpg, thanks.
The best MPG for any hybrid SUV currently sold is the Ford Escape and that gets 34MPG. Care to spout some actual facts?
The Prius, which blows away the Jetta TDI's CO2 and other emissions ratings while having more interior room, wasn't nominated.
Sounds great except the 2010 winner was the Audi A3 TDI and the Prius WAS in the competition as was the Honda Insight. That's two years running for diesels from Volkswagon.
A mass-market SULEV diesel is still a long way away.
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Manual transmission drivers don't have three feet, they can't hold the break, clutch and gas at the same time.
You've never done a heel-and-toe shift I guess. Not really disagreeing with your main point (regarding rollback) - just being pedantic and pointing out that it is quite possible for two feet to control three pedals at once. In fact before synchronized transmissions became common it was nothing unusual to need to engage in some fancy footwork. Some race cars still do.
Rhonda Smith's story of six miles of interstate terror, as her Lexus suddenly zoomed to 100 miles per hour, will set the mood Tuesday for the first congressional hearing on Toyota's acceleration problems.
Yes and if you read more about it you'll find several interesting bits of info. One is that upon inspection there was no evidence that the brakes had been applied, including the MECHANICAL emergency brake. She also claimed under oath that she had complained about the problem to Toyota but the only record Toyota has is for an oil change. She also sold the car to a family member (not something you'd think she'd do if it really were unsafe) and according the the Wall Street Journal the car is still on the road.
Frankly I think there are a lot of people making up stories hoping to get money in a lawsuit, much the same way people made up stories about Audi a few decades ago. Yes, there appear to be some actual problems but there are a lot of liars out there too.
Even in the most modern car, I find this hard to believe, unless you include the entertainment/nav system in the count.
I'd suggest that it probably isn't terribly shocking. The amount of electronics in a modern car is pretty impressive. There are dozens (sometimes hundreds) of sensors, drive by wire, diagnostics systems, engine control, ABS, traction control, and much more. Frankly diagnostics these days almost requires a OBD-II scanner. All of this without even getting into the climate controls, entertainment systems and other stuff for fun and comfort.
Bear in mind that this explosion in electronics is a relatively recent thing. Cars even 15 years ago had FAR less electronics than today's cars.
Take a look at the statistics for death causes for people under 60, and you will find almost everyone who doesn't die old dies in a car.
Nonsense. Yes, motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death in the US for those between the ages of 15 and 34 (peaking at around 1 out of 3 deaths for the 15-24 age group) but it is nowhere close to "almost everyone" no matter what age group you choose. But don't let actual data get in the way of a good sound bite.
Look at what wasted labor there is in society, and you will find that producing and maintaining one high-price high-waste transportation system per citizen is quite a bit of work when horses managed do to better than that quite some time ago...
If horses were actually more efficient economically, we would still be using horses. If you think horses are cheap as a means of transportation, you clearly have never tried to use them. Yes there is a cost to modern infrastructure but there is a bigger (economic) cost to lacking it. The biggest obstacle to the growth of many nations (India is a good example) is a poor quality road infrastructure.
not to mention electricity and electric computer system transport. And PRT more recently.
You think a PRT is seriously a solution which makes sense for more than a few high density urban areas? Nice for airports but it isn't going to be much use on a farm.
Then read about pollution, and oil wars.
Yep, there is a downside to fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have serious problems in need of serious solutions. However there is a huge upside too which I note you are conveniently forgetting. I'd also like you to point out the magical technology you think will eliminate pollution. Solar and wind come closest but even they pollute. (you didn't think the steel in that turbine came without an environmental cost did you?)
Most of the financial regulators are former high level executives from Goldman Sachs...
Some are but most are demonstrably not. Many are financial industry insiders but that's by necessity. Do you really want an financial regulator who has no knowledge of the industry he/she is regulating? The only place to get people with the appropriate financial experience is from the finance industry.
I don't understand why we need so many useless regulators who are usually wolves being put in charge of the hen house when the courts could easily handle this.
While I admire your faith in the court system, in truth the courts are woefully ill-prepared to deal with the sorts of issues the SEC and other regulating bodies deal with. The court system is sloooooowww, expensive and can only effectively deal with misconduct after it has occurred. The courts are a poor monitoring system. The court system also is not heavily staffed with financial experts who understand the issues involved. Trust me, you REALLY don't want financially illiterate judges deciding financial regulations.
The reason the industry insiders often end up as regulators is precisely because they are the only ones who really understand what is going on. Finance is really, really complicated. Yes it's not perfect but that's why the regulators are accountable to other bodies including the President and Congress. If anything the problem with the regulators isn't (usually) that they do poor quality work but rather that they aren't given enough resources to really do a great job. The SEC for instance is badly understaffed given it's mandate. If you really want to keep a better watch on the finance industry, lobby congress to increase funding to the SEC and other watchdog agencies.
It's going to end up being prosecuted in a court of law anyway and not solved by some magic regulation hand-waving.
Spoken like someone who has no experience whatsoever in the financial industry. I won't argue that all regulations are good or well enforced but relying on the court system alone to solve the issues that regulators deal with daily would be insanity. If you really want to screw up the financial system, get rid of the regulators. Our current financial mess is due in significant part to a lack of regulation.
If the program were a control system for a jet fighter, or safety system for a subway line, I'd agree.
Nonsense. You write a crappy program which you sell to me which then gets 0wned because of your bad programming costing my business lots of money, I'll want your head on a platter. It doesn't have to cost lives to cause real harm. If you as a programmer can't be bothered to follow reasonable industry standards to prevent foreseeable and preventable harm to your users then you, my friend, are negligent under current law.
However whether I'm entitled to anything depends on whether you as the programmer A) fulfilled the design specifications of the software and B) satisfied your professional duty of care in the creation of your software. If you can't be bothered to program your software to reasonable industry standards for security then you ARE and SHOULD BE liable.
Let's be clear - you ALREADY are potentially liable as a programmer for harm caused by your actions. The only things protecting you are the fact that serious harm is relatively rare and hard to trace to you personally. If it can be proven that your negligent coding was responsible for allowing real, foreseeable and preventable harm to another party then you deserve to be sued.
The problem is that what you said could be easily applied to "oh no, there was a bluescreen of dearth, SUE!"
The word you are missing is reasonable and it is part of the test for whether the harm that occurred is worthy of a lawsuit. Like every programmer I've ever met you have immediately taken things to ridiculous logical extremes. A blue screen probably didn't cause my company an appreciable amount of harm. An insecure accounting system that gets hacked would cause a lot of harm. Which situation do you think I'm going to generate a lawsuit over? Which one do you think would get laughed out of court?
If you want to start criminalizing bugs, expect to see even more development moved overseas and less free and significantly less open source software.
The benefits of open source are no excuse for software that will cause significant harm to my person or my business. Furthermore, you can limit liability in many ways. Open source software also provides some protection because the user has the opportunity to review the code for risks themselves. If the user can't be bothered to check the quality of software they use when they have the source code you as a programmer have a pretty darn good defense.
I also doubt you'll see code going overseas more either if the companies doing so intend to sell the product here. Just because something is made in China does not exempt it form consumer protection laws here in the US. Sure there is a cost to any engineering but we certainly aren't demanding enough of our programmers most of the time.
...it is unreasonable and completely unrealistic to expect every line to be a pinnacle of perfection, just like it is unreasonable to expect that every sentence in a book is completely without error.
And every lawyer you ever talk to will agree with you AND then tell you that what you just said is irrelevant. Nobody really cares if the code is perfect. What they care about is if the code failed and someone got hurt (financially, physically, etc) as a result. If the code is designed and/or implemented such that a reasonably common and foreseeable attack (say a buffer overflow) can and does occur and harm results, then the programmer has failed in their duty of care. Doctors, (civil) engineers, lawyers, accountants and even tradesmen (electricians, etc) who engage in professional services all have this obligation to perform high quality work. When they fail in their duties they get sued and rightly so. They also carry liability insurance because nobody is perfect. Software engineers are not and should not be an exception. Just because your job is hard sometimes does not excuse you to do shoddy work that will cause harm to others.
This would be like holding a civil engineer responsible when a terrorist blows up a bridge
If the bridge failed to live up to its designed specifications then the engineer would be liable regardless of the means used to bring it down. Major structures ARE designed knowing that attack is possible and the engineers try to mitigate reasonably foreseeable and preventable problems. While a structure is never designed to withstand all possible attacks you can be sure the contract will outline performance requirements which the engineer is expected to meet. If the bridge met its designed performance specs AND those specs are deemed reasonable given the state of the art (no excuse for shoddy specs) then the engineer has met his professional obligations. Software engineering should be no different in this regard. Just because some software is badly designed and implemented doesn't mean all software engineers should be excused from standard of care in exercising their professional duties.
Bear in mind, only a fool would sign a contract with unlimited liability. Just make the contract one that clearly specifies the performance levels required and the resources (including time) needed to meet that level of performance. Then get liability insurance like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other skilled professionals do for when things do go wrong since nobody is perfect. Software engineering is not and should not be an exception.
Any competitor which doesn't block it will get more business.
Only if there is a competitive market. As it stands the major ISPs (telephone and cable companies) are really an oligopoly and there is little or no way for new competitors to easily enter the marketplace.
The problem there is that the government funded their cabling, yet the companies turned around and monopolized it.
The government did NOT fund their cabling. They granted AT&T and later the cable companies monopolies but generally speaking the networks were built with private funds. AT&T was wildly profitable for decades and there was no need for the government to give them any money. Furthermore there were good reasons to allow the monopoly to exist as it made the telecom system highly consistent everywhere with the attendant network effects benefiting everyone.
Currently their "low" rates are effectively subsidized, thus making competition difficult because a new competitor wouldn't be subsidized.
Again, wrong. They have the advantage of an existing network with it's attendant network effects. Building a cable network is hugely expensive - massive fixed costs. For the phone and cable companies, this cost has already been paid long ago. It is extraordinarily difficult to make an economic case to build a new network to compete with them. Utilities and telephone companies tend to form what is called a natural monopoly because the economies of scale required to provide the lowest cost service naturally tends to result in one or very few companies in the marketplace.
As you can see, it's not a free market in the first place.
Exactly my point. You can't argue it both ways. Either it is a competitive marketplace or it isn't. Given that it really isn't, I would not expect market forces to be especially useful in keeping the net "neutral" - only regulation can do that at the moment.
Power is finite and needs to be generated on-demand from (usually) consumable resources. Bandwidth doesn't fall in the the same category.
Really? Bandwidth is finite and it requires the exact same power from those exact same consumable resources, plus the equipment to deliver the data. I agree it's not quite an apples to apples comparison but it's closer than you are making it out to be. The difference is that one is a direct cost and the other is an indirect cost. They're both real costs but one can be directly assigned to a cost center and the other cannot. This has enormous implications that I think you should study a little deeper. Charging per bit is a way to turn an indirect cost into something resembling a direct cost. Not perfect to be sure but there are good reasons to do it.
For fibre, if you have something that's sitting around idle, you're "wasting" (say) 1 Gb/s of bandwidth each second that it's not lit up. It could be used to transfer information for someone, but if you've capped people and so they're not using it because they're over their caps, you have all this telco equipment doing absolutely nothing.
Whether that is a valid argument depends entirely upon whether there is excess capacity to be had and how the costs are allocated. The "wasted" bandwidth is only wasted if someone wants it and can't get it. If there is no demand for it then you have a case of excess capacity and the costs for the equipment will be higher for everyone who pays to use it. If the bit can be delivered but at the cost of slowing down other customers there is an opportunity cost in play. ISPs do need to make sure that all their customers have access to bits, not just the customers who use the most bits. There also might be upstream costs since your ISP probably pays some rate per bit for data delivered outside their own network. If bandwidth is artificially limited when it could otherwise be delivered without interfering with other customers, then your argument may carry weight.
With electricity, I'm being charged for the consumption of coal/gas/uranium (plus some overhead for transport). What exactly am I being charged for consuming when I download a bit?
The cost of the equipment to deliver that bit, the electricity needed to power that equipment, the staff needed to manage that equipment, depreciation, insurance, upstream bandwidth costs from other suppliers and a number of other costs. Welcome to the wonderful world of direct versus indirect costs. This is what makes cost accounting such an important and difficult endeavor.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant.
It's not a matter of just "getting on with the times". Yes, the SI system is easier to work with, but there are immense costs in converting every system in use to another system.
True, but every other country in the world has already paid those costs. The metric system isn't terribly old. The longer the US waits the more expensive and difficult it becomes to switch.
You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric.
Most of those bits of software are already capable of metric (or easily made so) and generating new tables is trivial. Most engineering companies are quite capable of working with metric. Any company that does business outside the US (which is a LOT of them) already deals in metric whether they want to or not. It's a global economy and the US is intentionally incurring an unnecessary cost and burden on its own businesses.
Yes, the conversion would have some significant difficulties but the real difficulty is getting people to just accept metric as the standard. The biggest obstacle is simply people (older people especially) not wanting to bother - not the financial cost.
When my government is over $12,300,000,000,000 in debt, "getting on with the times" is the last thing on which I'd want it to waste more money.
As a percent of gdp the US has been in more debt as recently as 65 years ago. The conversion costs of going to metric, expensive as it would be, would be tiny in comparison. You could pay for the whole thing with a relatively modest cut in your choice of Defense, Social Security or Medicare. Of course good luck getting that done...
Consider it from the other side: why doesn't the world convert to Impirial Units? I'm sure no country wants to incur the cost of converting everything to another system.
Because the other 95% of the world's population has grasped the concept that using standard units saves money in the long run and makes it easier to communicate as well. Are you seriously arguing that 95% of the world's population should switch to a measurement system that even you admit is more difficult to work with? That's a bizarre way to convince someone...
Does this affect the government of South Carolina as well? After all, they were the first state to secede from the United States in 1860.
Economics 101 doesn't account for the real world.
Nice hand wave. Wrong - but a nice try anyway. I'm sure all those Nobel laureates in economics are glad that you set them straight about the "real world". I predict that every economist out there will suddenly dump their models in favor of yours.
Seriously, you claimed that marginal cost has nothing to do with pricing which is a demonstrably false claim. It's one of the first things anyone who takes an Econ 101 class learns. Even business owners that have never heard the term marginal cost adjust their pricing to try to maximize profits.
The world is full of lazy people that often don't have access to good pricing information.
Neither marginal revenue nor marginal cost require any external pricing information to be useful so long as you can adjust prices. And even the smallest businesses have access to quality pricing information if they care to look. Those that don't go out of business. 90% of new business ventures fail - it's not unusual.
If there was good information on pricing, Brick and Mortar store would practically cease to exist, except maybe Walmart.
So shipping has suddenly become magically free and instantaneous? I'm supposed to wait 3 days for my groceries to be delivered instead of stopping by the store on my way home? I'm supposed to pay UPS to ship my dry cleaning instead of just stopping by a store? I'm supposed to order everything off the internet and wait for delivery instead of going to a store? Apparently you think distribution and availability have no value. You have a very peculiar notion of how people live and businesses work.
Markets are incredibly efficient conveyances for pricing information. It's pretty much the whole reason they matter.
In the same ways, if people didn't want to pay for convenience then gas stations would only sell gas and not overpriced milk and food.
Even ignoring the convenience issue for a moment willingness to pay is not the same for almost any two people. You and I probably have different opinions about how much we are willing to pay for a gallon of milk. This is what a demand curve is all about.
Essentially the market is splitting into 2 types, those whose research prices and don't pay for convenience and the opposite.
No it isn't - at least not any more than it always has been. That's a nice convenient mental model but the "real world" (your term) is much more complicated and nuanced than that. I'm pretty confident that the models of supply and demand, marginal revenue and marginal cost that every economist on the planet uses are more predictive than your two tier model.
Lazy and uninformed end up paying more.
This is nothing new. They always have and always will.
I was exaggerating a bit, but my point was just that the cost of printing was not what sets the price of a book.
No need to exaggerate to make that point.
You agree, I think, since you say it is not the dominant cost.
You are quite correct on that score. I'm just correcting the incorrect assertion that the cost of printing one additional copy of a book is anywhere close to zero. It demonstrably is not. The cost of producing an additional copy of an e-book isn't actually zero either but it is FAR closer - so close that it is a rounding error in many cases.
You are under the false assumption that items are priced based on marginal cost.
If you take an economics 101 course you'll find that in most cases the optimal price to sell at is where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. So yes, prices are indeed based on marginal cost.
They aren't in practically any market...
On the contrary, prices are based on marginal cost in practically EVERY market including monopolies.
...they are priced at what consumers will pay and what the competition is selling at.
Which is what determines marginal revenue at a given price point. If they price the product too high, marginal cost will exceed marginal revenue which is a fancy way of saying they'll lose sales. If they price too low, sales will be high(er) but they will be leaving money on the table. But there is copious economic literature establishing that the optimal prices is where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. Don't take my word for it, look it up.
The marginal cost of printing a book is pretty close to zero too. That isn't why they cost as much as they do.
I've worked in publishing as an accountant and this statement is completely wrong. The marginal cost of production of even the highest volume books or newspapers is no where near zero. It's not the dominant cost (those would be marketing and distribution in most cases) but the marginal cost isn't zero or anywhere near zero.
Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg
Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
Vehicles are unique among energy technologies in that they typically have to carry their energy source around with them. So energy stored per mass is the most important figure of merit for vehicle propulsion, and electric vehicles are inherently 45 times worse than their liquid-fuel competition.
You are neglecting some pretty important facts. The first fact you are neglecting is energy conversion efficiency. Electric motors have FAR higher energy conversion efficiency - something like 90% versus 10-40%. The energy density of the fuels source itself is a factor but not meaningful by itself. Uranium has a far higher energy density than gasoline but we're not likely to put it in an automobile anytime soon.
Second, you are ignoring the weight of the equipment required to convert that energy into motion. Internal combustion engines are heavy and gasoline isn't much use for transportation by itself without a vehicle. What you should be comparing is the weight of the *entire* vehicle and those weights are demonstrably comparable. The Telsa Roadster is pretty similar in weight and performance to the Lotus that shares the same frame. It is the power per weight for the whole vehicle that matters, not just for the fuel source.
Third, you are assuming that current battery technology will never be improved upon. While batteries are not improving as fast as we would like, that doesn't mean they won't continue to improve. A breakthrough is still a realistic possibility with batteries whereas gasoline engines are unlikely to get significantly more utility from a liter of gasoline than they currently do.
argued that if free energy were discovered tomorrow, then the whole economy of the world would collapse.
I agree this is clearly nonsense in the long run though some countries (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, etc) who are primarily dependent on oil income would experience very severe economic problems. It is correct to say that oil is one of the underpinnings of the current economy and it would take some time for adjustment.
Of course, he simultaneously argued that oil production was used for so many applications that the world was dependent on it and could not function without it.
For the foreseeable future he is probably correct in that assertion. The number of products we use that have some form of oil-based products is astonishing. Besides fuels like gasoline or diesel, many, many, many other products have oil as a vital component for which there is no substitute. Synthetic fibers, lubricants, paints, plastics, coatings, chemicals, coolants, and fertilizers all jump to mind off the top of my head. Without oil for power and fertilizer, modern agriculture as we know it could not exist. It is entirely correct that our modern world could not function without oil.
I think you know little of how waiters work then. They already don't declare their tips fully.
True but if they don't declare at least 8% of their sales as tip income it will almost certainly trigger an audit. This information is required to be reported on form 4070 and the IRS knows there is a high propensity to cheat.
Snake oil salesmen would get criminal punishment, as they do nowadays.
That's quite irresponsible because someone (usually) has to get hurt before you act. Lawsuits (civil and criminal) are a useful deterrent but hardly a foolproof one especially when there is money to be made. There is a reason we have regulatory controls and approvals on dangerous medications and devices.
There would just not be lottery-kind incentive to sue anybody
I think you overestimate the actual cost and probability of success of medical tort lawsuits. Despite all the noise about them, they are nowhere near the biggest source of cost in medicine. They're a little like plane crashes - spectacular sometimes but rare and mostly not that big a deal on a day to day basis. My wife is a doctor so I'm more than a little familiar with this personally.
Yes, a video game can give valuable information whether someone has a neurological condition.
No one has claimed otherwise to my knowledge. But if the equipment is not designed and approved for that use by the FDA, the physician using it IS exposing him/herself to liability. Medications and devices get used for "off label" purposes all the time but the physician does so at their own risk, especially if there is no informed consent and/or if it is not within standard of care.
AFAIK no equipment can do that without a doctor and no (sane) doctor would ever rely on one positive output alone.
Quite right. But it does provide data and sometimes test data is misleading. Don't get me wrong, I think it is terrific that they are using cheaper technology - I'm just pointing out that there are sometimes risks in doing so.
What would happen if the liability was removed or limited?
Then you have the problem of snake oil salesmen. Liability is not always a bad thing. It protects all of us from unscrupulous vendors every day. You can either regulate heavily or allow liability but you have to have at least one of the two and preferably some of both.
Getting several million "liability" for essentially nothing is insane.
Are you seriously claiming that a video game is the same as diagnosing a neurological condition? In medicine we are literally talking life and death. Permanent injuries can result from momentary lapses of judgment or faulty equipment. It might be that a medical equipment provider is ripping off the buyer but that doesn't mean the liability cost isn't still very real.
If they were going to charge you 6k, why even bother about the warranty?
Because this isn't the PC on your desk. If there was a lawsuit any lawyer worth his retainer would stand up and ask the defendant "why did you think it was acceptable to tinker with the equipment in a way you knew would void the warranty when your tinkering resulted in the death/injury of my client?" Shortly thereafter the lawyers for the hospital would settle for a large sum of money MUCH larger than $6000. The decimal would move three or maybe four places to the right I would guess. Never underestimate the fear of lawyers.
That's not to say the medical equipment company wasn't ripping off the purchasers of the equipment. I suspect there was a very healthy profit margin in there.
From my point of view, if the machine was under warranty, the repair should have been free of charge.
Only if you agreed to that when you purchased it. Shady I'll agree but not unusual.
They did not charge 6k for the HDD.
Yes they did. There are other things rolled into that cost to be sure (insurance, etc) but don't kid yourself. There is also a hefty profit margin there too. Medical equipment companies aren't doing this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. If they can get away with charging $6000 to swap a hard drive, they will.
Ok. So 2009 was the TDI, and 2010 is the Audi. So there are TWO clean diesel cars.
There's more. You just are being petulant about it and don't want to look.
I have absolutely no interest in ever purchasing a diesel. None.
That's up to you but you don't appear to be deciding that based on facts.
If I had one I'd have to drive well out of my way to find a station that sells diesel, and even then there would be one pump off to the side for transports.
Bullshit. I've owned diesels. It's not even remotely hard to find filling stations anywhere in the US and the pumps are normally right next to the gas pumps. There are plenty of diesel pickups and SUVs out there and they don't all refuel at truck stops.
I'll stick to my hybrid SUV and take my 45mpg, thanks.
The best MPG for any hybrid SUV currently sold is the Ford Escape and that gets 34MPG. Care to spout some actual facts?
The Prius, which blows away the Jetta TDI's CO2 and other emissions ratings while having more interior room, wasn't nominated.
Sounds great except the 2010 winner was the Audi A3 TDI and the Prius WAS in the competition as was the Honda Insight. That's two years running for diesels from Volkswagon.
A mass-market SULEV diesel is still a long way away.
By long way away you mean possibly 2010?
And to get there will almost certainly involve some PITA features, such as urea injection or regularly-replaced particulate filters.
Refilling the urea tank once every 10-15,000 miles is a pain? Umm... sure. Whatever.