Scarcity of land is much less of a problem if you have transporters.There is no longer a need to cluster because the bottleneck of transportation is eliminated. But we don't see any evidence that the technology is used to routinely move people around, so that may not be the answer.
Abundant energy helps solve the problem. If you have plenty of electricity to power electric cars or trains or whatever, you can easily move workers over larger distances to get to work. The cars are likely self-driving so the time spent in travel is not lost time, and they probably move more quickly than our current cars.
There is also the existence of the holodeck, which among other things is the endpoint of teleconferencing; it's a version where meeting at a distance really is as good as being there. That would certainly make the transportation problem simpler, as there would be less need for people to move around. Telecommuting would probably be the norm for office workers, to the extent that such workers would still exist, and even supervisors of robotic factories probably would not need to be physically present most of the time.
A post-scarcity society can happen without EVERYTHING being abundant. You can have a bipolar situation: everything is either abundant enough to be given away or scarce enough that it must be rationed. The early days of a space colony would be like that: anything that could be made in space would be abundant (as would energy because of the ability to gather huge amounts of solar power) but anything that had to come up from Earth would be extremely scarce.
The Federation is probably like that. Basic material resources are abundant because they can be made in matter replicators. (In TNG the automated kitchen can instantly make any dish instantly on demand; it is clearly being replicated rather than cooked. Using replication to make something as mundane as everyday meals suggests that the technology is pervasive.) Energy in the quantities needed by households is also abundant though the mechanism of generating it is unspecified. Computing resources are already abundant now; they will be vastly more so in such a future.
But the much more massive resources needed to build a starship are another matter (or perhaps antimatter). Presumably there are things in a starship that are beyond the ability of their replication technology. (Many are not, which is one reason that Picard's Enterprise does not have the recurring maintenance crises of Kirk's Enterprise; the later version can replicate most parts as needed.) If starships are scarce it also makes sense to make admission to the Starfleet Academy scarce; otherwise you will have a disgruntled cadre of people who were trained for jobs that do not exist.
Even after economic scarcity goes away, personal craftworks and experiences will remain scarce because they are not fungible. It isn't possible for everybody to own an original Picasso, to eat a meal personally cooked by a master chef, or to attend a specific live performance. Some of the sting is removed by the fact that you could own a replicated Picasso, eat a replicated copy of the meal in the cafeteria, or experience a holodeck recreation of the performance. But I suspect that a certain cachet would remain for having or experiencing the real thing, and that there would be a modest barter economy where such things were traded.
The police should know that it's unreasonable to expect somebody to pull over in an unsafe location. Any officer who acts otherwise should be cited for endangering traffic.
How about reforming of policing so that the police actually trust the citizens? A big part of the current problem is that the police are too quick to reach for their guns rather than believing that the actions of their suspects are something other than reaching for a weapon. Though come to think of it, that's also part of the citizens trusting the police.
It also depends on the size of the data. If you are working mostly with 8 bit numbers and bit patterns, the 8 bit AVR will be competitive in speed with a low end ARM. If you use a lot of 16 or 32 bit numbers, the ARM will blow away the AVR. If you are planning to do anything with floating point numbers, an ARM with an FPU will demolish the performance of any processor that doesn't have one.
Something to watch out for when you move up to faster ARM processors (over 100 MHz) and want to do real time work: execution time is not completely deterministic and cannot be calculated precisely. Those processors run at higher speeds than their flash memory and depend on caching and/or prefetching; the manufacturers often speak of a "flash accelerator" or the like. If you suffer an instruction fetch or static data fetch miss, the chip will stall for a bit.
Most Arduino boards run at 16 Mhz, so the power consumption will be higher. And if you want to lower the power consumption of the ARM you can reduce the clock speed. The running power use of that ARM is probably actually lower at the same clock speed than the ATMega328 but the sleep current is higher. And that NXP chip is not state of the art; a newer chip optimized for low power consumption like an STM32L0 will use even less power.
Aside from hacks like removing the LEDs, the sketch loaded on an Arduino affects power consumption. Even configuration of the ports matters. Enabling peripherals like the SPI and I2C interfaces uses some power. Using analog inputs takes a significant amount of power. Ports can even use extra power while they are not doing anything if you enable the on-chip pullups (about 0.25mA per pin), and pins that are not connected at all can use extra power because the CMOS transistors may hover in the active area (near 0.5xVdd). For minimum power consumption, unused I/O pins should be directly tied to Vdd or ground and the internal pullups should NOT be enabled for those pins.
There is a whole series of Nucleo boards now, with a choice of Cortex M0, M0+, M3, and M4 processors. And they are all under $11. Not a bad deal at all.
You're correct; there is currently no way to configure the CPLD elements of the PSoC series without using the Cypress IDE.
On the other hand, the PSoC chips have some appeal even in applications where you aren't going to use any of that, because they are the only ARM microcontrollers I am familiar with that are completely 5V-friendly not merely 5V tolerant. The chip actually runs at 1.8V, but every input and output has built in level shifting so it can accept 5V inputs AND produce 5V outputs. Each 8-bit port has a separate voltage reference pin so can have a mix of 5V, 3.3V, and/or 1.8V I/O in your system, though most of the inexpensive PSoC development board tie all the voltage references together. You can even power the chip from a 5V supply and use the on-chip regulator.
If you want to work with the Cypress chips without spending a lot of time in the Cypress IDE, you could create a bootloader and a fixed PSoC setup in the Cypress IDE, and then do everything else in the environment of your choice. The FreeSoC2 board from Sparkfun does exactly that, so you can program it with the Arduino IDE and never touch the Cypress software except to burn the supplied bootloader image (normally only once unless you erase it somehow).
The article is not about building a CPU from scratch, it's about putting an ARM microcontroller on a breadboard. Specifically an NXP LPC1114FN28, a Cortex-M0 chip that is one of the rare ARM processors avaialble in a DIP package. The high clock speeds are all inside the package; it has an on-chip PLL clock multiplier so even if you use an external crystal (optional; the chip also has an onboard 12 MHz RC oscillator) it's probably only going to run at something between 4 and 12 MHz. So long as you don't try to get any really high frequency signals off the chip, there should be no special challenges to breadboarding it.
On the other hand, unless you want to breadboard this to show that you can, it's probably a better idea to just use one of the many inexpensive ARM-based development boards that are available. Arduino Zero, Teensy, MSP432 Launchpad, STM32 Discovery, PSoC 4 and PSoC 5 Prototyping, and the various mbed-compatible boards are all possibilities.
Every recent GM vehicle already has a remote off switch - it's called OnStar. (OnStar does other things as well.) Not every GM vehicle owner actually has an OnStar account, but I suspect that they can shut down the car remotely even if you don't have one.
It is difficult to run screaming from ethanol blends when the use of E10 (or fuels using other alcohols but E10 is mostly what you encounter) is mandated in most major urban areas. Even if you're outside the area where the use of oxygenated fuel is required, you may get it anyway because the area outside the mandate area has so little population that it's not worth shipping non-ethanol gasoline into the region. Thus you get E10 everywhere in New England, even in rural Maine.
Comparing real world and official MPG figures is much easier because it's something that every car owner is equipped to do. Even if the car does not measure MPG you can get the mileage driven from the car and the amount of gas you buy from the pump and do the math. That makes it much harder to cheat. The first version of the EPA mileage rating was very unrealistic and led to cars getting much better numbers than they did when you actually drove them, but adjustments have been made over the years to bring them closer to reality. In my experiences with various rented cars over the past couple of years, I have gotten fuel mileage that is BETTER than the official number most of the time.
Those retirement benefits were part of the compensation package that the company and the employee agreed to. Allowing the company to weasel out of its obligations is giving the employee a retroactive pay cut that is unilaterally imposed by the company. Not fair at all. We need stronger legal protections to prevent that from happening.
Books that are just words take up little space. But books with illustrations can take up a lot of room. Graphic novels and modern textbooks are two common examples of types of books that will take up a lot of room on your Kindle; a single one of those can be 50MB or more.
Yes, you are. The standard is open with no restrictions or royalties. The reference implementation is licensed under the GPLv3 and must be used under the rules required by that license, but independent implementations of the standard may be licensed in any way you like.
There is an old riddle: "Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?" The answer you are supposed to give is that they are both the same weight because they are both a pound. But that is incorrect, because feathers (like most things) would be weighed in avoirdupois ounces and pounds, but gold is weighed in troy ounces and pounds. So an ounce of gold is heavier than an ounce of feathers (troy ounces are larger), but a pound of gold is lighter than a pound of feathers (there are only 12 troy ounces to a troy pound so the troy pound is lighter).
Metric is much simpler. A kilogram of feathers and a kilogram of gold have exactly the same weight (or for the pedants, the same mass).
Well, approximately. That was the original idea but of course it's not a practical standard, so for a while the official standard was the distance between two marks on an official standard bar. As our ability to measure the earth improved we discovered that the size of the standard meter was a bit off from the actual size of the Earth, but the existing standard was retained. Since then, it has been redefined in various light-based ways; first as a relationship to the wavelength to emissions lines from atoms, and currently as a relationship to the speed of light.
The inch, foot, mile, etc.? There have been no primary standards for those units since 1959. The current definition of a yard is that it is 0.9144 meters, and the other units are defined in relation to that. Before that the US and UK had their own standard yards, different from each other and from the current standard.
A 100g "ounce" is much larger than the American ounce. The actual number is 28g, but your "pound" is also larger so a 30g "ounce" might make more sense and would be a rounder number.
There are some other vestiges of non-metric units. Notably, many products in the US and intended mostly for the domestic market are still built with non-metric hardware. Things made for export generally are not.
The IoT version of Windows 10 is free as in beer, though not as in speech. Adafruit isn't paying anything to Microsoft for the OS, so there is no Microsoft tax. There is some cross-promotion going on with Microsoft; Microsoft recently sent a mass email to Insiders touting it, and Adafruit was featuring it on the front page of their web site. (It is no longer there, probably because the kit is currently sold out; I expect to see it pushed again once they build more.) But I don't think any money is flowing from Adafruit to Redmond; if anything the cash is likely to be going the other way.
Adafruit is rarely the low cost provider of tech toys and this kit is no exception; you could save a little bit of money by buying your own Pi, downloading the software and flashing a Micro SD card, and gathering the rest of the parts from cheap offshore sources. (Not that much money really; there is quite a bit of stuff in the box.) But Adafruit provides a lot of support for makers by using their resources to write drivers and tutorials, thus adding value to the things they sell, and the kit has the convenience of one stop shopping.
Their position on Windows IoT is "this is a cool new tech thing that some people might be interested in, let's offer it", just as they do with everything else; they don't take sides in tech battles. Over in the Arduino world, they are a manufacturing partner with arduino.cc (building the Gemma, and the Uno for the US market), but they also sell products from arduino.org (M0 Pro, Leonardo) and their own Arduino-compatible board (Metro 328).
The rate that Ford would have had to pay a private lender was abnormally high at the time. The double whammy of the struggles of the auto industry at the time and the concurrent financial industry crisis saw to that. Ford was a basically healthy company but would have had to borrow at junk bond rates if it could have found financing at all. Borrowing at that rate while their competitors were receiving government bailouts would have broken the company.
This retrenchment isn't a sign of defeat overall; mostly it's a withdrawal from some unsuccessful markets. Failure in a country could have been caused by a number of things: insufficient internet penetration and use, lack of understanding of the market, cultural resistance to couponing, or competition from a locally based alternative.
In the early days of Groupon there were some notable cases of businesses hurting themselves. The typical problem was a new business selling so many Groupons that they were unable to provide all the goods and services they promised, or were doomed to spending a couple of months selling everything at cost to fulfill them. That problem seems to have gone away now that people have a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of Groupon. Some Kickstart campaigns have doomed themselves in the same way, promising goods at prices that turned out to be lower than the cost of producing and shipping them, let alone development and labor costs.
Groupon will still struggle because they are in a business that has a low cost of entry and that does not have a strong network effect. They have a number of competitors (LivingSocial and Gilt City are a couple) as well as some that have already come and gone. Buying a coupon from Groupon has no particular advantage to customers over buying a similar coupon from a competitor, so there is not an incentive for brand loyalty.
But there is a demand for their type of service. It's a useful promotional tool to attract new customers, and for restaurants, salons, etc. to fill slack times in their schedule. (Groupons often have restrictions that prevent using them at the busiest times, and the requirement for reservations also serves as a filter to push Groupon users to less busy parts of the schedule.) I believe they will be one of the survivors.
On the bright side, you didn't pay extra because or the extra circling or because you were first taken to the wrong destination. If a regular cab driver made the same mistake, you would have because it would have meant extra time and mileage in the cab.
Uber, or at least the basic concept of Uber, is not crap. It is popular not only because it is less expensive, but also because it is an easier and safer way to get a ride.
Advantages for passengers: you know before you book a trip exactly how much it will cost. (It may change from day to day or even hour to hour because of surge pricing, but you never get in the car without knowing how much you will owe.) You don't have to verbally communicate over the phone or in the cab about where you are going. You don't have to carry cash or pull it out in the cab, making you less of a target for theft. There are no shortages of cabs caused by political boundaries (cabs that can't pick you up because of being licensed by the wrong town). There is no artificial scarcity of cabs imposed by government regulation (the medallion system).
Advantages for drivers: there is no risk of not getting paid. You don't have to verbally communicate with difficult to understand passengers. You don't have to carry or handle cash, making you less of a target for theft. There are no situations where you can't pick up rides because of political boundaries. There is no need to buy an absurdly expensive medallion, or lease one at a rate that makes it nearly impossible to make a living as a driver.
You may have noticed the similarities between the two lists. That's because most of the problems with the traditional taxi model hurt both the passenger and the driver. The medallion system, in particular, hurts both; the beneficiaries are the owners of the medallions, which until recently were government sanctioned licenses to print money.
There are some inherent problems with the Uber model. People who are technologically impaired (elderly, mentally challenged, disabled) or unbanked (homeless, undocumented, very poor) are left out of the system. It is impossible to travel anonymously, which could be a problem for refugees and the like. There are some remote areas where the model won't work because they lack the necessary communications infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Scarcity of land is much less of a problem if you have transporters.There is no longer a need to cluster because the bottleneck of transportation is eliminated. But we don't see any evidence that the technology is used to routinely move people around, so that may not be the answer.
Abundant energy helps solve the problem. If you have plenty of electricity to power electric cars or trains or whatever, you can easily move workers over larger distances to get to work. The cars are likely self-driving so the time spent in travel is not lost time, and they probably move more quickly than our current cars.
There is also the existence of the holodeck, which among other things is the endpoint of teleconferencing; it's a version where meeting at a distance really is as good as being there. That would certainly make the transportation problem simpler, as there would be less need for people to move around. Telecommuting would probably be the norm for office workers, to the extent that such workers would still exist, and even supervisors of robotic factories probably would not need to be physically present most of the time.
A post-scarcity society can happen without EVERYTHING being abundant. You can have a bipolar situation: everything is either abundant enough to be given away or scarce enough that it must be rationed. The early days of a space colony would be like that: anything that could be made in space would be abundant (as would energy because of the ability to gather huge amounts of solar power) but anything that had to come up from Earth would be extremely scarce.
The Federation is probably like that. Basic material resources are abundant because they can be made in matter replicators. (In TNG the automated kitchen can instantly make any dish instantly on demand; it is clearly being replicated rather than cooked. Using replication to make something as mundane as everyday meals suggests that the technology is pervasive.) Energy in the quantities needed by households is also abundant though the mechanism of generating it is unspecified. Computing resources are already abundant now; they will be vastly more so in such a future.
But the much more massive resources needed to build a starship are another matter (or perhaps antimatter). Presumably there are things in a starship that are beyond the ability of their replication technology. (Many are not, which is one reason that Picard's Enterprise does not have the recurring maintenance crises of Kirk's Enterprise; the later version can replicate most parts as needed.) If starships are scarce it also makes sense to make admission to the Starfleet Academy scarce; otherwise you will have a disgruntled cadre of people who were trained for jobs that do not exist.
Even after economic scarcity goes away, personal craftworks and experiences will remain scarce because they are not fungible. It isn't possible for everybody to own an original Picasso, to eat a meal personally cooked by a master chef, or to attend a specific live performance. Some of the sting is removed by the fact that you could own a replicated Picasso, eat a replicated copy of the meal in the cafeteria, or experience a holodeck recreation of the performance. But I suspect that a certain cachet would remain for having or experiencing the real thing, and that there would be a modest barter economy where such things were traded.
The police should know that it's unreasonable to expect somebody to pull over in an unsafe location. Any officer who acts otherwise should be cited for endangering traffic.
How about reforming of policing so that the police actually trust the citizens? A big part of the current problem is that the police are too quick to reach for their guns rather than believing that the actions of their suspects are something other than reaching for a weapon. Though come to think of it, that's also part of the citizens trusting the police.
It also depends on the size of the data. If you are working mostly with 8 bit numbers and bit patterns, the 8 bit AVR will be competitive in speed with a low end ARM. If you use a lot of 16 or 32 bit numbers, the ARM will blow away the AVR. If you are planning to do anything with floating point numbers, an ARM with an FPU will demolish the performance of any processor that doesn't have one.
Something to watch out for when you move up to faster ARM processors (over 100 MHz) and want to do real time work: execution time is not completely deterministic and cannot be calculated precisely. Those processors run at higher speeds than their flash memory and depend on caching and/or prefetching; the manufacturers often speak of a "flash accelerator" or the like. If you suffer an instruction fetch or static data fetch miss, the chip will stall for a bit.
Most Arduino boards run at 16 Mhz, so the power consumption will be higher. And if you want to lower the power consumption of the ARM you can reduce the clock speed. The running power use of that ARM is probably actually lower at the same clock speed than the ATMega328 but the sleep current is higher. And that NXP chip is not state of the art; a newer chip optimized for low power consumption like an STM32L0 will use even less power.
Aside from hacks like removing the LEDs, the sketch loaded on an Arduino affects power consumption. Even configuration of the ports matters. Enabling peripherals like the SPI and I2C interfaces uses some power. Using analog inputs takes a significant amount of power. Ports can even use extra power while they are not doing anything if you enable the on-chip pullups (about 0.25mA per pin), and pins that are not connected at all can use extra power because the CMOS transistors may hover in the active area (near 0.5xVdd). For minimum power consumption, unused I/O pins should be directly tied to Vdd or ground and the internal pullups should NOT be enabled for those pins.
There is a whole series of Nucleo boards now, with a choice of Cortex M0, M0+, M3, and M4 processors. And they are all under $11. Not a bad deal at all.
You're correct; there is currently no way to configure the CPLD elements of the PSoC series without using the Cypress IDE.
On the other hand, the PSoC chips have some appeal even in applications where you aren't going to use any of that, because they are the only ARM microcontrollers I am familiar with that are completely 5V-friendly not merely 5V tolerant. The chip actually runs at 1.8V, but every input and output has built in level shifting so it can accept 5V inputs AND produce 5V outputs. Each 8-bit port has a separate voltage reference pin so can have a mix of 5V, 3.3V, and/or 1.8V I/O in your system, though most of the inexpensive PSoC development board tie all the voltage references together. You can even power the chip from a 5V supply and use the on-chip regulator.
If you want to work with the Cypress chips without spending a lot of time in the Cypress IDE, you could create a bootloader and a fixed PSoC setup in the Cypress IDE, and then do everything else in the environment of your choice. The FreeSoC2 board from Sparkfun does exactly that, so you can program it with the Arduino IDE and never touch the Cypress software except to burn the supplied bootloader image (normally only once unless you erase it somehow).
The article is not about building a CPU from scratch, it's about putting an ARM microcontroller on a breadboard. Specifically an NXP LPC1114FN28, a Cortex-M0 chip that is one of the rare ARM processors avaialble in a DIP package. The high clock speeds are all inside the package; it has an on-chip PLL clock multiplier so even if you use an external crystal (optional; the chip also has an onboard 12 MHz RC oscillator) it's probably only going to run at something between 4 and 12 MHz. So long as you don't try to get any really high frequency signals off the chip, there should be no special challenges to breadboarding it.
On the other hand, unless you want to breadboard this to show that you can, it's probably a better idea to just use one of the many inexpensive ARM-based development boards that are available. Arduino Zero, Teensy, MSP432 Launchpad, STM32 Discovery, PSoC 4 and PSoC 5 Prototyping, and the various mbed-compatible boards are all possibilities.
Every recent GM vehicle already has a remote off switch - it's called OnStar. (OnStar does other things as well.) Not every GM vehicle owner actually has an OnStar account, but I suspect that they can shut down the car remotely even if you don't have one.
It is difficult to run screaming from ethanol blends when the use of E10 (or fuels using other alcohols but E10 is mostly what you encounter) is mandated in most major urban areas. Even if you're outside the area where the use of oxygenated fuel is required, you may get it anyway because the area outside the mandate area has so little population that it's not worth shipping non-ethanol gasoline into the region. Thus you get E10 everywhere in New England, even in rural Maine.
Comparing real world and official MPG figures is much easier because it's something that every car owner is equipped to do. Even if the car does not measure MPG you can get the mileage driven from the car and the amount of gas you buy from the pump and do the math. That makes it much harder to cheat. The first version of the EPA mileage rating was very unrealistic and led to cars getting much better numbers than they did when you actually drove them, but adjustments have been made over the years to bring them closer to reality. In my experiences with various rented cars over the past couple of years, I have gotten fuel mileage that is BETTER than the official number most of the time.
Those retirement benefits were part of the compensation package that the company and the employee agreed to. Allowing the company to weasel out of its obligations is giving the employee a retroactive pay cut that is unilaterally imposed by the company. Not fair at all. We need stronger legal protections to prevent that from happening.
Books that are just words take up little space. But books with illustrations can take up a lot of room. Graphic novels and modern textbooks are two common examples of types of books that will take up a lot of room on your Kindle; a single one of those can be 50MB or more.
Yes, you are. The standard is open with no restrictions or royalties. The reference implementation is licensed under the GPLv3 and must be used under the rules required by that license, but independent implementations of the standard may be licensed in any way you like.
There is an old riddle: "Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?" The answer you are supposed to give is that they are both the same weight because they are both a pound. But that is incorrect, because feathers (like most things) would be weighed in avoirdupois ounces and pounds, but gold is weighed in troy ounces and pounds. So an ounce of gold is heavier than an ounce of feathers (troy ounces are larger), but a pound of gold is lighter than a pound of feathers (there are only 12 troy ounces to a troy pound so the troy pound is lighter).
Metric is much simpler. A kilogram of feathers and a kilogram of gold have exactly the same weight (or for the pedants, the same mass).
Well, approximately. That was the original idea but of course it's not a practical standard, so for a while the official standard was the distance between two marks on an official standard bar. As our ability to measure the earth improved we discovered that the size of the standard meter was a bit off from the actual size of the Earth, but the existing standard was retained. Since then, it has been redefined in various light-based ways; first as a relationship to the wavelength to emissions lines from atoms, and currently as a relationship to the speed of light.
The inch, foot, mile, etc.? There have been no primary standards for those units since 1959. The current definition of a yard is that it is 0.9144 meters, and the other units are defined in relation to that. Before that the US and UK had their own standard yards, different from each other and from the current standard.
A 100g "ounce" is much larger than the American ounce. The actual number is 28g, but your "pound" is also larger so a 30g "ounce" might make more sense and would be a rounder number.
There are some other vestiges of non-metric units. Notably, many products in the US and intended mostly for the domestic market are still built with non-metric hardware. Things made for export generally are not.
The IoT version of Windows 10 is free as in beer, though not as in speech. Adafruit isn't paying anything to Microsoft for the OS, so there is no Microsoft tax. There is some cross-promotion going on with Microsoft; Microsoft recently sent a mass email to Insiders touting it, and Adafruit was featuring it on the front page of their web site. (It is no longer there, probably because the kit is currently sold out; I expect to see it pushed again once they build more.) But I don't think any money is flowing from Adafruit to Redmond; if anything the cash is likely to be going the other way.
Adafruit is rarely the low cost provider of tech toys and this kit is no exception; you could save a little bit of money by buying your own Pi, downloading the software and flashing a Micro SD card, and gathering the rest of the parts from cheap offshore sources. (Not that much money really; there is quite a bit of stuff in the box.) But Adafruit provides a lot of support for makers by using their resources to write drivers and tutorials, thus adding value to the things they sell, and the kit has the convenience of one stop shopping.
Their position on Windows IoT is "this is a cool new tech thing that some people might be interested in, let's offer it", just as they do with everything else; they don't take sides in tech battles. Over in the Arduino world, they are a manufacturing partner with arduino.cc (building the Gemma, and the Uno for the US market), but they also sell products from arduino.org (M0 Pro, Leonardo) and their own Arduino-compatible board (Metro 328).
The rate that Ford would have had to pay a private lender was abnormally high at the time. The double whammy of the struggles of the auto industry at the time and the concurrent financial industry crisis saw to that. Ford was a basically healthy company but would have had to borrow at junk bond rates if it could have found financing at all. Borrowing at that rate while their competitors were receiving government bailouts would have broken the company.
Fixies don't have derailleurs. So he clearly wasn't talking about a fixie.
This retrenchment isn't a sign of defeat overall; mostly it's a withdrawal from some unsuccessful markets. Failure in a country could have been caused by a number of things: insufficient internet penetration and use, lack of understanding of the market, cultural resistance to couponing, or competition from a locally based alternative.
In the early days of Groupon there were some notable cases of businesses hurting themselves. The typical problem was a new business selling so many Groupons that they were unable to provide all the goods and services they promised, or were doomed to spending a couple of months selling everything at cost to fulfill them. That problem seems to have gone away now that people have a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of Groupon. Some Kickstart campaigns have doomed themselves in the same way, promising goods at prices that turned out to be lower than the cost of producing and shipping them, let alone development and labor costs.
Groupon will still struggle because they are in a business that has a low cost of entry and that does not have a strong network effect. They have a number of competitors (LivingSocial and Gilt City are a couple) as well as some that have already come and gone. Buying a coupon from Groupon has no particular advantage to customers over buying a similar coupon from a competitor, so there is not an incentive for brand loyalty.
But there is a demand for their type of service. It's a useful promotional tool to attract new customers, and for restaurants, salons, etc. to fill slack times in their schedule. (Groupons often have restrictions that prevent using them at the busiest times, and the requirement for reservations also serves as a filter to push Groupon users to less busy parts of the schedule.) I believe they will be one of the survivors.
On the bright side, you didn't pay extra because or the extra circling or because you were first taken to the wrong destination. If a regular cab driver made the same mistake, you would have because it would have meant extra time and mileage in the cab.
Uber, or at least the basic concept of Uber, is not crap. It is popular not only because it is less expensive, but also because it is an easier and safer way to get a ride.
Advantages for passengers: you know before you book a trip exactly how much it will cost. (It may change from day to day or even hour to hour because of surge pricing, but you never get in the car without knowing how much you will owe.) You don't have to verbally communicate over the phone or in the cab about where you are going. You don't have to carry cash or pull it out in the cab, making you less of a target for theft. There are no shortages of cabs caused by political boundaries (cabs that can't pick you up because of being licensed by the wrong town). There is no artificial scarcity of cabs imposed by government regulation (the medallion system).
Advantages for drivers: there is no risk of not getting paid. You don't have to verbally communicate with difficult to understand passengers. You don't have to carry or handle cash, making you less of a target for theft. There are no situations where you can't pick up rides because of political boundaries. There is no need to buy an absurdly expensive medallion, or lease one at a rate that makes it nearly impossible to make a living as a driver.
You may have noticed the similarities between the two lists. That's because most of the problems with the traditional taxi model hurt both the passenger and the driver. The medallion system, in particular, hurts both; the beneficiaries are the owners of the medallions, which until recently were government sanctioned licenses to print money.
There are some inherent problems with the Uber model. People who are technologically impaired (elderly, mentally challenged, disabled) or unbanked (homeless, undocumented, very poor) are left out of the system. It is impossible to travel anonymously, which could be a problem for refugees and the like. There are some remote areas where the model won't work because they lack the necessary communications infrastructure.