A few years ago, those questions would get a laugh. Over time they've been given much more consideration.
I've always figured that self-driving cars would cause driver-operated cars to go the way of the manual transmission in the USA - limited to the cheapest end of the market, the specialist, and the enthusiast.
Because, really, after the drunks are forced into them, I figure the next step is to get Johnny one because it's so much safer than him having to drive -and he likes it because he can do his cellphone stuff while going someplace.
Then, when it's time for him to buy his own vehicle, he'll pick another self-driver because he doesn't know how to manually operate one, and might not even have a license to operate.
Plus, with them out there, it becomes much easier to start raising the standards for a driver's license.
Color me skeptical but I don't buy the manufacturers being altruistic - especially in the US. Case in point GM's ignition switch, or Ford's Pinot.
They're not being altruistic. Over in England/Europe there are a number of companies selling 'starter' cars that come with X years of free full coverage insurance. Insurance costs for new drivers over there have reached the point that it's often cheaper to buy the new car with included insurance than it is to buy an older used vehicle and pay.
Personally, I think that's a sign of a distorted market that isn't pricing risks right, but there you go. Companies offering insurance as a feature to sell the car.
Now introduce a self-driving vehicle that the company knows is going to get into accidents at 1% of the rate of traditional cars, much less the new driver cars. "Don't have to worry about liability insurance" can be a huge load off the mind of new drivers, drunk drivers, bad drivers, etc...
I think this is a critical failure of some people's thinking. You see, car makers haven't been working on 'Car that can get you to your destination' first. They've been working on a car that won't hit anything it doesn't have to. Collision avoidance has been task #1 for a long time.
To me, collision avoidance seems to be a mostly solved problem. Beyond that, it's having the car know where to go and not getting stuck that seems to be the problem.
I can see the car stopping(safely) and going "I don't know what to do in this situation" as acceptable at a low rate. Hell, have the ability for the car to connect with a helpdesk manned by professional drivers who can guide the car out of that situation and on it's way, while the scenario goes to the programmers to be added to the set.
A human is much more likely to do this than a self-driving car. The car doesn't get distracted, and a malfunctioning camera should be detected and result in the car taking itself out of service, since it should have redundant sensors. Those disagree too much, problem.
if you're driving in an extreme weather situation
I'll say that this alone is a reason to, more often than not, to simply stay home. Or even at work if you're there already.
That being said, I won't consider a car 'self driving' until you could take out the steering wheel and I'd still be able to get to work from home. From the sounds of it, they have the most critical part down - not hitting anything. They still need to beef up the routing though.
Amazing how you totally misread that. It's 41% of it's all-time profit.
Nope. Didn't misread it at all. Changed up the wording in a hope that others would understand better. The idea that a global giant gets most of it's income overseas shouldn't be a shocker.
At this point I kinda love it when people make asses out of themselves assuming things about me.
We are by pointing out examples of these companies that use legal loopholes as a basis for why we need the laws to change.
I was talking more about the tone of the article, keep in mind that mine was the first non-ac post.
nd what's incredible about it is that they aren't investing a massive amount of that money in the US since that's where a large part of the internal development is. Even if we presume they're investing the money abroad (which would be insane if they weren't), that tends to imply a lack of faith of getting enough ROI in investing in Microsoft itself*.
MS is no longer a 'growth' company. Realistically speaking, it should be paying a steady dividend.
Obviously, the real complaint is from stockholders who would rather see that $108.3 billion taxed and then given to them. That'd give them real results.
Actually, they'd rather see it untaxed. As is, the US tax rate is high enough that that might actually cost them money - as long as the money is out there, it's increasing the stock price. So if they sell the stock, they sell their share of that money, without the taxes that bringing it back and paying it as part of the dividend would.
He was talking about elemental hydrogen, IE H2. H2 isn't a naturally occurring thing on earth, not in any significant quantities that is. There are no hydrogen mines.
Ergo, the basic ways we get it are by electrolysis(minor source) and from hydrocarbons, of which the biggest is steam reformation from natural gas. However, this process takes up enough energy that in most applications it's just better to burn the natural gas directly.
Actually, it said 41% of it's *all-time* profit, which is very peculiar. Not revenue.
The two values are not precisely the same, though they are tied together. I was hoping that the vocabulary/term change would wake people up.
And yes, the problem is that they can't 'bring back' the money without paying lots of taxes on it, so they don't. They can spend that money while it's still overseas doing overseas stuff.
. "It chose to stay silent as it faces increased public scrutiny for holding $108.3 billion in earnings offshore (an incredible 41% of its all-time profit) and its history of tax dodging at home in Washington State."
Really, that a globally present company might have roughly 41% of it's revenue originate outside of the USA is 'incredible'? I'm surprised it's not higher!
Also, why not attack the horrible state of our laws that this happens in the first place? Does anybody here seriously pay any more taxes than they have to? Tax avoidance isn't the same as evasion - the prior is the art of using legal loopholes, the latter is illegal.
The altitude for flying is fixed. Meaning planes only fly at certain heights.
For the most part, you have 'lanes', and most planes fly a set route at a set altitude, but this is more a traffic control measure and that they've worked out that that route is the most efficient, on average.
I've been on flights where the pilot varied his altitude by more than 5k feet in order to get a more favorable wind or to avoid weather.
Why would I ask myself that, given that it does work with gasoline?
Gas prices rise and fall with the costs of the inputs. EVERYBODY is getting hit for that extra dime or nickel as oil prices fluctuate. EVERYBODY gets hit with the extra expenses when the refineries have to retool to produce the specialty gasoline blends for various regions. Etc...
yet gas prices are reasonably consistent across the board. Why do you think that is?
Because they can't reasonably lower their prices and stay in business, but they can't raise them either and stay in business because the other companies would keep selling at the lower price and take all their business?
I mean, it'd help if you tried to find a counter-argument that wouldn't be the state as described in the op's post. The whole "back at reasonable-margine-above-cost-of-production and the choice between them comes back to being mostly determined by geography."
The probability of a gas can's fuel-air ratio being ideal for ignition is exactly the same whether that gas can is next to another one or not.
Sorry, I wasn't clear in my first post. To be more clear, when I was referring to a single can and said ' much less over a significant area', I was talking about an explosive fuel/air mix OUTSIDE the can, as an ignition source inside a still mostly sealed can is unlikely. Still, a single leaky can is unlikely to reach the explosive mix, much less over enough area for ignition to be likely. However, add another leaky can and you've probably nearly doubled the maximum concentration, as well as made it a much bigger volume. Each additional leaky container increases the concentration and volume, increasing the chance of fire or explosion. This is well known - which is WHY cities say you can't have more than X containers inside a building. Though I'm pretty sure they're tripped a lot sooner than 20, and include things like proper fire containers besides just the cans.
This is where we disagree. The probability of a gas can's fuel-air ratio being ideal for ignition is exactly the same whether that gas can is next to another one or not.
Now measure the fuel-vapor ratio OUTSIDE the leaking gas cans. One leaking can is probably not going to be enough. Several? More likely. The idea is that multiple leaking gas cans increase the risk of fire/explosion exponentially.
the company that owns the vehicle has exactly the same chance of having a vehicle catch fire
Individual vehicles are expensive enough that I think it'd be cheaper to 'upgrade' from a couple gas cans to a proper gas tank, complete with fuel hose and pump.
I was assuming more like a few 5-gallon cans per vehicle—say 25 to 30 gallons in total.
I was figuring on 10 gallon gas cans, though 5 would be better in retrospect. Still, you said 20 cans - that would be 100 gallons, not 25-30.
A typical half-ton pickup can't even carry that much weight; that would exceed its maximum bed weight by about 250 pounds, not counting the gasoline tanks.
Incorrect. 200 gallons would be roughly 1,200 pounds, not including the cans, but I figure that will be insignificant. half ton trucks have bed capacities between 1,410 and 1,900 pounds. Easily within their limits.
Besides, tanks over 25 gallons have lots of additional regulations, and most cities' fire codes won't let you store more than 25-30 gasoline cans in a single home or business, so if you go over that limit, you'd never be able to legally park the vehicle overnight....
Park outside, outside of official city limits. Done.
Funny... But Douglas Adams had a logic error in there: "It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds."
Infinity divided by a constant, such as the percentage of inhabited worlds out of all worlds, is still infinity.
My belief in extra-terrestrial life is this: 1. You look at the Earth and you come up with a fairly staggering amount of coincidences for making life, especially intelligent life, easier to develop. 2. In a given volume of space, you only have a very limited number of stars, relatively speaking.
Roughly speaking, the number of stars within a given distance of a hypothetical planet with intelligent life on it(like us) is on the order of O(n^3). As the targeted feature becomes more rare, the more stars you need for one to statistically pop up, and therefore the average distance between planets with intelligent tool using life increases as the odds of any given star or planet having intelligent tool using life in the system or on the planet decreases.
The rarer we are, the further apart we are on average, in other words. If intelligent tool using life is equivalent to winning a couple lotteries per star, you're looking at hundreds of light years between civilizations. The range at which we'd detect a civilization identical to our own? Less than a light year unless we got lucky.
For most cars $5 worth of gas will get you atleast 40-60miles. If you're truly out of gas and you need this in an emergency then you should have thought about filling up before you go to the office.
A commonly quoted time for filling up with gas is '5 minutes'. If the delivery charge is only $5, and you make more than $60/hour, it makes financial sense. Even more so if it's more than 5 minutes for you to fill up. It's about a 3-5 minute detour for me to get OFF the highway and to the gas station, for example, I don't just drive past one on my way to work.
Sign up as a subscription service, and just hit the button whenever you notice you're low. Done.
Not something I'd do, but I can see the selling point.
Sure, I could go get my groceries, but I can just pay someone else to deliver them to me;
I still remember that milk used to be delivered. Grocery delivery makes more and more sense the older I get. You could deliver darn near the same stack of basics every two weeks and I'd be happy. Give me a web interface to add stuff to my 'normal delivery' when I run out of longer lasting things like spices, and I'm good to go.
So while dropping an open flame into pool of liquid gas isn't going to start a fire, holding the flame NEAR the liquid, or flicking a cigarette onto a bare spot on the side of your car where you happened to drip a little gasoline, WILL cause a gasoline fire, and possibly an explosion, if the air and gasoline vapor are at just the right concentration.
I also believe that the trope isn't gasoline, it's diesel that you're dropping the match into.
If you're going to do it with gasoline, pick a cold day. There's so many caveats that I wouldn't be the one doing it.
On the other hand, the life size exhibit of 'Killdozer 2: Done right!' showing off his welding skills, along with that he supplies the weed to have the area means that nobody really dares make an issue.
One cause for concern with this would be that Semis run on diesel - so you'd be converting a diesel tank into a gasoline tank, which can present issues as the risks are different. Diesel is generally safer, for example, not being an explosion hazard without a lot of work.
My (cheaper) car has smart cruise control (with collision avoidance) and lane keeping, so on the highway it's safe to take my hands of the wheel or be distracted - for a second or two.
Here's a question to get back to my point - What are the respective failure modes?
You mention that your car has collision avoidance. Have you looked into how smart that is? Is there ever a point at which it'll basically shit it's pants, tell you 'you drive', and disable itself completely? Or would it continue to do it's best to avoid hitting something until it comes to a stop because something is wrong?
Remember, I consider an 'autopilot' prone to unsafe deactivations to be unsafe and unready for the public market. That being said, I can be convinced that an assistive system could be sufficiently better to be safer, while not being a full auto-driver.
But that comes with the presumption that if it's a safety system that it be good enough that it's there to backup the driver - which means it has to be more reliable than a human drive, at least at that task. Lane following, collision avoidance, etc...
If the computer even has the option of saying "take over" before coming to a safe halt out of traffic somewhere in a worst case scenario, then I agree. It's not ready yet.
I'm fine with 'take over' for prototypes, where they're logging everything in order to expand capabilities. I'm not fine with it in production.
Though as I understand it they've started getting serious with collision avoidance systems - the car will stop itself if it thinks it's going to hit something.
As such, I find his "when" assumption that the computer WILL tell drivers to "Take over" at some moment's notice to be off.
Just remember that it was in response to a 'suck it up, Eastern Europeans have it bad' post, where I pointed out that to get to Eastern Europe, they'll probably travel through Western Europe first, and might notice a few things contrary to the GP....
Why are they willing to take on crippling debt without a method to pay for it just because someone else says its a good idea?
Because it's not just 'someone else'. It's almost everybody else. They have teachers saying college, they have counselors saying college, they have parents saying college, etc...
Well, you took your shot at the baby boomers, how bout the gen X'rs who are saying start saving and fund your retirement? We wont have the defined benefits package either, suck it up butter cup and step up. Two generations before the Millennials have been doing it, your turn.
...I hope this is towards the theoretical young adult and not me. I've been saving 10% of my income AND maxing out a ROTH IRA every year for a couple decades. And yes, my figuring on Social Security is $0. I figure I'll get 'some', but my goal is that it's a pleasant surprise, not a necessity.
Because we're subsidizing the rest of the world would be my guess.
Well, my theory is that we have a system that amounts to the careful merging of the worst aspects of a free market and government control. There is a touch of subsidizing the rest of the world, but drugs are far from the only excessive expensive part of medical care. Consider, most people don't pay for their medical care directly. What medical procedures are often paid for individually? Laser vision and cosmetic surgery. What procedures are drastically cheaper than the average medical intervention of similar magnitude? Laser vision and cosmetic surgeries.
Second, consider our 'insurance' system. Is there really a free market? Most states only have 1-3 companies providing insurance, you don't get your pick, your employer gets to pick. So your employer is paying the insurance company, meaning that you're not the customer of the insurance company, just an expense. Then you go get healthcare, and the provider bills the insurance - because you're not the customer(the insurance company is), they haven't felt the need to provide you with an accurate bill, and because you're paying a flat deductible in most cases you have no reason to pick a cheaper provider. Add in the expense of the in-fighting of the provider fighting to be paid and the insurer fighting to not pay out, and everything ends up fantastically more expensive.
What irks me is that I've figured out that if we could get our healthcare costs down to the MEDIAN of European costs, that the US governments would be able to provide universal health care to everybody in the country while spending not one extra dime, between current federal and state spending on healthcare. Matter of fact, we only need about another 10% over federal spending, which is easily, easily, covered by the state spending.
In other words, complaining that someone gets something cheaper than you do because they barely make a couple % of what you do while asking the rich to pay for more of your own expenses rings a bit hypocritical.
Except, of course, I'm not complaining about that. See above for my rant about inefficiencies.
It hates you, you hate it, now go beat it and drink wine from your enemies skull.
snerk. Now this is funny. That being said, companies that still do the loyalty thing tend to do better long term.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago, those questions would get a laugh. Over time they've been given much more consideration.
I've always figured that self-driving cars would cause driver-operated cars to go the way of the manual transmission in the USA - limited to the cheapest end of the market, the specialist, and the enthusiast.
Because, really, after the drunks are forced into them, I figure the next step is to get Johnny one because it's so much safer than him having to drive -and he likes it because he can do his cellphone stuff while going someplace.
Then, when it's time for him to buy his own vehicle, he'll pick another self-driver because he doesn't know how to manually operate one, and might not even have a license to operate.
Plus, with them out there, it becomes much easier to start raising the standards for a driver's license.
Color me skeptical but I don't buy the manufacturers being altruistic - especially in the US. Case in point GM's ignition switch, or Ford's Pinot.
They're not being altruistic. Over in England/Europe there are a number of companies selling 'starter' cars that come with X years of free full coverage insurance. Insurance costs for new drivers over there have reached the point that it's often cheaper to buy the new car with included insurance than it is to buy an older used vehicle and pay.
Personally, I think that's a sign of a distorted market that isn't pricing risks right, but there you go. Companies offering insurance as a feature to sell the car.
Now introduce a self-driving vehicle that the company knows is going to get into accidents at 1% of the rate of traditional cars, much less the new driver cars. "Don't have to worry about liability insurance" can be a huge load off the mind of new drivers, drunk drivers, bad drivers, etc...
What would a car on autopilot do?
Dodge to the best of it's ability?
I think this is a critical failure of some people's thinking. You see, car makers haven't been working on 'Car that can get you to your destination' first. They've been working on a car that won't hit anything it doesn't have to. Collision avoidance has been task #1 for a long time.
To me, collision avoidance seems to be a mostly solved problem. Beyond that, it's having the car know where to go and not getting stuck that seems to be the problem.
I can see the car stopping(safely) and going "I don't know what to do in this situation" as acceptable at a low rate. Hell, have the ability for the car to connect with a helpdesk manned by professional drivers who can guide the car out of that situation and on it's way, while the scenario goes to the programmers to be added to the set.
or if fails to see child running into the road...
A human is much more likely to do this than a self-driving car. The car doesn't get distracted, and a malfunctioning camera should be detected and result in the car taking itself out of service, since it should have redundant sensors. Those disagree too much, problem.
if you're driving in an extreme weather situation
I'll say that this alone is a reason to, more often than not, to simply stay home. Or even at work if you're there already.
That being said, I won't consider a car 'self driving' until you could take out the steering wheel and I'd still be able to get to work from home. From the sounds of it, they have the most critical part down - not hitting anything. They still need to beef up the routing though.
Amazing how you totally misread that. It's 41% of it's all-time profit.
Nope. Didn't misread it at all. Changed up the wording in a hope that others would understand better. The idea that a global giant gets most of it's income overseas shouldn't be a shocker.
At this point I kinda love it when people make asses out of themselves assuming things about me.
We are by pointing out examples of these companies that use legal loopholes as a basis for why we need the laws to change.
I was talking more about the tone of the article, keep in mind that mine was the first non-ac post.
nd what's incredible about it is that they aren't investing a massive amount of that money in the US since that's where a large part of the internal development is. Even if we presume they're investing the money abroad (which would be insane if they weren't), that tends to imply a lack of faith of getting enough ROI in investing in Microsoft itself*.
MS is no longer a 'growth' company. Realistically speaking, it should be paying a steady dividend.
Obviously, the real complaint is from stockholders who would rather see that $108.3 billion taxed and then given to them. That'd give them real results.
Actually, they'd rather see it untaxed. As is, the US tax rate is high enough that that might actually cost them money - as long as the money is out there, it's increasing the stock price. So if they sell the stock, they sell their share of that money, without the taxes that bringing it back and paying it as part of the dividend would.
He was talking about elemental hydrogen, IE H2. H2 isn't a naturally occurring thing on earth, not in any significant quantities that is. There are no hydrogen mines.
Ergo, the basic ways we get it are by electrolysis(minor source) and from hydrocarbons, of which the biggest is steam reformation from natural gas. However, this process takes up enough energy that in most applications it's just better to burn the natural gas directly.
Actually, it said 41% of it's *all-time* profit, which is very peculiar. Not revenue.
The two values are not precisely the same, though they are tied together. I was hoping that the vocabulary/term change would wake people up.
And yes, the problem is that they can't 'bring back' the money without paying lots of taxes on it, so they don't. They can spend that money while it's still overseas doing overseas stuff.
. "It chose to stay silent as it faces increased public scrutiny for holding $108.3 billion in earnings offshore (an incredible 41% of its all-time profit) and its history of tax dodging at home in Washington State."
Really, that a globally present company might have roughly 41% of it's revenue originate outside of the USA is 'incredible'? I'm surprised it's not higher!
Also, why not attack the horrible state of our laws that this happens in the first place? Does anybody here seriously pay any more taxes than they have to? Tax avoidance isn't the same as evasion - the prior is the art of using legal loopholes, the latter is illegal.
The altitude for flying is fixed. Meaning planes only fly at certain heights.
For the most part, you have 'lanes', and most planes fly a set route at a set altitude, but this is more a traffic control measure and that they've worked out that that route is the most efficient, on average.
I've been on flights where the pilot varied his altitude by more than 5k feet in order to get a more favorable wind or to avoid weather.
Why would I ask myself that, given that it does work with gasoline?
Gas prices rise and fall with the costs of the inputs. EVERYBODY is getting hit for that extra dime or nickel as oil prices fluctuate. EVERYBODY gets hit with the extra expenses when the refineries have to retool to produce the specialty gasoline blends for various regions. Etc...
yet gas prices are reasonably consistent across the board. Why do you think that is?
Because they can't reasonably lower their prices and stay in business, but they can't raise them either and stay in business because the other companies would keep selling at the lower price and take all their business?
I mean, it'd help if you tried to find a counter-argument that wouldn't be the state as described in the op's post. The whole "back at reasonable-margine-above-cost-of-production and the choice between them comes back to being mostly determined by geography."
The probability of a gas can's fuel-air ratio being ideal for ignition is exactly the same whether that gas can is next to another one or not.
Sorry, I wasn't clear in my first post. To be more clear, when I was referring to a single can and said ' much less over a significant area', I was talking about an explosive fuel/air mix OUTSIDE the can, as an ignition source inside a still mostly sealed can is unlikely. Still, a single leaky can is unlikely to reach the explosive mix, much less over enough area for ignition to be likely. However, add another leaky can and you've probably nearly doubled the maximum concentration, as well as made it a much bigger volume. Each additional leaky container increases the concentration and volume, increasing the chance of fire or explosion. This is well known - which is WHY cities say you can't have more than X containers inside a building. Though I'm pretty sure they're tripped a lot sooner than 20, and include things like proper fire containers besides just the cans.
This is where we disagree. The probability of a gas can's fuel-air ratio being ideal for ignition is exactly the same whether that gas can is next to another one or not.
Now measure the fuel-vapor ratio OUTSIDE the leaking gas cans. One leaking can is probably not going to be enough. Several? More likely. The idea is that multiple leaking gas cans increase the risk of fire/explosion exponentially.
the company that owns the vehicle has exactly the same chance of having a vehicle catch fire
Individual vehicles are expensive enough that I think it'd be cheaper to 'upgrade' from a couple gas cans to a proper gas tank, complete with fuel hose and pump.
I was assuming more like a few 5-gallon cans per vehicle—say 25 to 30 gallons in total.
I was figuring on 10 gallon gas cans, though 5 would be better in retrospect. Still, you said 20 cans - that would be 100 gallons, not 25-30.
A typical half-ton pickup can't even carry that much weight; that would exceed its maximum bed weight by about 250 pounds, not counting the gasoline tanks.
Incorrect. 200 gallons would be roughly 1,200 pounds, not including the cans, but I figure that will be insignificant. half ton trucks have bed capacities between 1,410 and 1,900 pounds. Easily within their limits.
Besides, tanks over 25 gallons have lots of additional regulations, and most cities' fire codes won't let you store more than 25-30 gasoline cans in a single home or business, so if you go over that limit, you'd never be able to legally park the vehicle overnight....
Park outside, outside of official city limits. Done.
Funny... But Douglas Adams had a logic error in there: "It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds."
Infinity divided by a constant, such as the percentage of inhabited worlds out of all worlds, is still infinity.
My belief in extra-terrestrial life is this:
1. You look at the Earth and you come up with a fairly staggering amount of coincidences for making life, especially intelligent life, easier to develop.
2. In a given volume of space, you only have a very limited number of stars, relatively speaking.
Roughly speaking, the number of stars within a given distance of a hypothetical planet with intelligent life on it(like us) is on the order of O(n^3). As the targeted feature becomes more rare, the more stars you need for one to statistically pop up, and therefore the average distance between planets with intelligent tool using life increases as the odds of any given star or planet having intelligent tool using life in the system or on the planet decreases.
The rarer we are, the further apart we are on average, in other words. If intelligent tool using life is equivalent to winning a couple lotteries per star, you're looking at hundreds of light years between civilizations. The range at which we'd detect a civilization identical to our own? Less than a light year unless we got lucky.
Tesla, I think, is in the uncanny valley, where it's good enough to fool you but has ugly failure modes.
Which could be a problem, but I'm willing to wait and see, hoping that they've put more thought into it.
If I hear about a slew of distracted driving accidents in Teslas, then I guess they didn't go good enough.
Does this mean that you need the key in the ignition to fill the car?
Or can you fill up, but not siphon, pretty much anytime?
If only they could be trusted to fuel the car without my presence. Gas locks are there for a reason...
Business opportunity there then, Pay $20 for our locking gas cap that we have a master key for, get a $5 discount on your next 4 fillups!
That being said, my truck doesn't have a locking cap, but it does have an anti-siphon system.
For most cars $5 worth of gas will get you atleast 40-60miles. If you're truly out of gas and you need this in an emergency then you should have thought about filling up before you go to the office.
A commonly quoted time for filling up with gas is '5 minutes'. If the delivery charge is only $5, and you make more than $60/hour, it makes financial sense. Even more so if it's more than 5 minutes for you to fill up. It's about a 3-5 minute detour for me to get OFF the highway and to the gas station, for example, I don't just drive past one on my way to work.
Sign up as a subscription service, and just hit the button whenever you notice you're low. Done.
Not something I'd do, but I can see the selling point.
Sure, I could go get my groceries, but I can just pay someone else to deliver them to me;
I still remember that milk used to be delivered. Grocery delivery makes more and more sense the older I get. You could deliver darn near the same stack of basics every two weeks and I'd be happy. Give me a web interface to add stuff to my 'normal delivery' when I run out of longer lasting things like spices, and I'm good to go.
So while dropping an open flame into pool of liquid gas isn't going to start a fire, holding the flame NEAR the liquid, or flicking a cigarette onto a bare spot on the side of your car where you happened to drip a little gasoline, WILL cause a gasoline fire, and possibly an explosion, if the air and gasoline vapor are at just the right concentration.
I also believe that the trope isn't gasoline, it's diesel that you're dropping the match into.
If you're going to do it with gasoline, pick a cold day. There's so many caveats that I wouldn't be the one doing it.
On the other hand, the life size exhibit of 'Killdozer 2: Done right!' showing off his welding skills, along with that he supplies the weed to have the area means that nobody really dares make an issue.
One cause for concern with this would be that Semis run on diesel - so you'd be converting a diesel tank into a gasoline tank, which can present issues as the risks are different. Diesel is generally safer, for example, not being an explosion hazard without a lot of work.
My (cheaper) car has smart cruise control (with collision avoidance) and lane keeping, so on the highway it's safe to take my hands of the wheel or be distracted - for a second or two.
Here's a question to get back to my point - What are the respective failure modes?
You mention that your car has collision avoidance. Have you looked into how smart that is? Is there ever a point at which it'll basically shit it's pants, tell you 'you drive', and disable itself completely? Or would it continue to do it's best to avoid hitting something until it comes to a stop because something is wrong?
Remember, I consider an 'autopilot' prone to unsafe deactivations to be unsafe and unready for the public market. That being said, I can be convinced that an assistive system could be sufficiently better to be safer, while not being a full auto-driver.
But that comes with the presumption that if it's a safety system that it be good enough that it's there to backup the driver - which means it has to be more reliable than a human drive, at least at that task. Lane following, collision avoidance, etc...
If the computer even has the option of saying "take over" before coming to a safe halt out of traffic somewhere in a worst case scenario, then I agree. It's not ready yet.
I'm fine with 'take over' for prototypes, where they're logging everything in order to expand capabilities. I'm not fine with it in production.
Though as I understand it they've started getting serious with collision avoidance systems - the car will stop itself if it thinks it's going to hit something.
As such, I find his "when" assumption that the computer WILL tell drivers to "Take over" at some moment's notice to be off.
Just remember that it was in response to a 'suck it up, Eastern Europeans have it bad' post, where I pointed out that to get to Eastern Europe, they'll probably travel through Western Europe first, and might notice a few things contrary to the GP....
Why are they willing to take on crippling debt without a method to pay for it just because someone else says its a good idea?
Because it's not just 'someone else'. It's almost everybody else. They have teachers saying college, they have counselors saying college, they have parents saying college, etc...
Well, you took your shot at the baby boomers, how bout the gen X'rs who are saying start saving and fund your retirement? We wont have the defined benefits package either, suck it up butter cup and step up. Two generations before the Millennials have been doing it, your turn.
...I hope this is towards the theoretical young adult and not me. I've been saving 10% of my income AND maxing out a ROTH IRA every year for a couple decades. And yes, my figuring on Social Security is $0. I figure I'll get 'some', but my goal is that it's a pleasant surprise, not a necessity.
Because we're subsidizing the rest of the world would be my guess.
Well, my theory is that we have a system that amounts to the careful merging of the worst aspects of a free market and government control. There is a touch of subsidizing the rest of the world, but drugs are far from the only excessive expensive part of medical care. Consider, most people don't pay for their medical care directly. What medical procedures are often paid for individually? Laser vision and cosmetic surgery. What procedures are drastically cheaper than the average medical intervention of similar magnitude? Laser vision and cosmetic surgeries.
Second, consider our 'insurance' system. Is there really a free market? Most states only have 1-3 companies providing insurance, you don't get your pick, your employer gets to pick. So your employer is paying the insurance company, meaning that you're not the customer of the insurance company, just an expense. Then you go get healthcare, and the provider bills the insurance - because you're not the customer(the insurance company is), they haven't felt the need to provide you with an accurate bill, and because you're paying a flat deductible in most cases you have no reason to pick a cheaper provider. Add in the expense of the in-fighting of the provider fighting to be paid and the insurer fighting to not pay out, and everything ends up fantastically more expensive.
What irks me is that I've figured out that if we could get our healthcare costs down to the MEDIAN of European costs, that the US governments would be able to provide universal health care to everybody in the country while spending not one extra dime, between current federal and state spending on healthcare. Matter of fact, we only need about another 10% over federal spending, which is easily, easily, covered by the state spending.
In other words, complaining that someone gets something cheaper than you do because they barely make a couple % of what you do while asking the rich to pay for more of your own expenses rings a bit hypocritical.
Except, of course, I'm not complaining about that. See above for my rant about inefficiencies.
It hates you, you hate it, now go beat it and drink wine from your enemies skull.
snerk. Now this is funny. That being said, companies that still do the loyalty thing tend to do better long term.