I don't need an excuse -- I buy what I feel I need. If you can get by with a Vespa, good for you. If you feel the need to drive an H2 around, good for you. I don't give a flying shit.
I drive the SUV about 10,000 miles/year. $4/gallon gas will cost me about $2,000. No problem for me. Those who cannot afford gas will need to find new cars. The market will take care of it.
The real problem is that everything is moved via truck and made out of plastic. SUV or not, rising petroleum prices are going to cascade into everything else anyway.
Good for you -- at least you benefited from the exploding value of your land.
I had some friends who loved their land, which had been in the family since the Dutch days. They basically went broke paying ursurious property taxes until eventually they had to sell -- and even then got screwed because the new suburbanites, anxious to preserve "the rural character" of the area, raised the minimum size of a subdivision to 10 acres.
I really believe that the way we do things is fundamentally flawed - you cannot devalue your currency and export industry for 40 years without consequence.
At some point, the billions spent on maintaining thousands of interstates and hundreds of thousands of bridges, the massive army, etc will become too onerous, and I think you'll see the suburban model fail when that happens.
As it continues to become more expensive to commute, people like you will either go broke commuting, or find a way to make a living locally.
I'd rather see farmland in places like Ohio & Upstate NY be used as farmland, instead of being yet another place for asshats sick of citylife to throw up yet another cookie-cutter 4 bed/2.5 ba colonial on 1.2 acres.
The drivetrain and auxillary systems (A/C, alternator) in a car sap as much as 30% of the engine's actual output.
Your engine's transmission has an "overhead" that accounts for a suprisingly large amount of power producted by the engine. In 4WD/AWD vehicles, the transfer case claims yet more power.
Power plants by comparison are very simple: produce steam to spin a turbine. Producing steam is straightforward and can be a 90+% efficient process. (Even home heating boilers can be 85% efficient)
Even more likely, it depends on the number of gasoline wholesalers in the area and how tight the gasoline market is kept there.
In a state like CA or NY, where wholesalers have been consolidated to 4-5 rather than 15-20, prices move twice a day. Gas is $2.70 in NY, $2.38 40 miles away in NJ. About $0.18 of that difference is tax, the rest is the gasoline market.
Notice that the old Standard Oil companies are getting together again and even foreign companies are merging... ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, BP-Amoco-Arco, etc. Less competition in oil production & refining = higher prices.
Your assumptions about SUVs are a little off. I bought a Honda Pilot (which is the equivilant to an Explorer or GMC Envoy) after I bought a house because I needed to be able to haul stuff.
Being able to avoid blowing money on getting stuff delivered or renting/borrowing trucks is worth it to me.
Alot of people with kids buy minivans and SUVs for similar reasons -- you have to drive around alot in the US to get things done, and having everything in the car saves time & money.
Europe has smaller cars, but it also has more sensible living conditions. You don't need to drive 25 miles to shop or take your kids to school.
The Prius is about style over substance. Your average Prius yuppie wants to save the earth AND impress the neighbors. So instead of spending $8,000 on a used Echo that gets 40mpg or buying a new Civic or whatever, they get a $22,000 Prius.
And as an added bonus, you get to show everyone that YOU CARE. You can shame your republican neighbors and impress the hippie chicks at the food co-op.
Our current model, where every individual drives 5-80 miles twice a day to work, shop, etc is unsustainable, period.
The long-term "fix" is to do what the Chinese are doing -- build sustainable cities where mass-transit and mixed use areas eliminate the need for most cars.
You're absolutely right. Apple is far superior with its more flexible and powerful PowerPC platform and velocity engine.
Oh, wait, Apple's moving to cheaper Intel hardware that it can continue to sell at high margins... and is relying on draconian DRM and hardware lock-in to remain in business.
They are, but the "consumer" lines of HP, IBM, Dell, etc aren't the same as the "business" computers. Most companies outsource manufacturing of consumer PCs, particuarly retail lines to companies like Flextronics.
There are other differences too... comsumer PCs will include Windows XP Home and can't join a domain. You also usually get a shorter warranty and different software load.
The business PCs focus on stability for drivers and common, high quality parts. IBM guarantees driver compatability for all PCs manufactured during an 18-24 month product cycle. Consumer PCs are more bleeding edge and are more likely to contain cheapo parts choosen for availability or cost reasons.
In effect, "consumer" PCs and "business" PCs are completely different products.
Upgrading actually doesn't cost alot in real terms, because you avoid having to maintain maintenance contracts for old equipment. Extending the maintenance contracts to 6-7 years easily approaches the cost of replacing the equipment.
In the environment that I describe, staffing and keeping parts inventory for a repair depot for older, out of warranty hardware isn't feasible.
I worked at a place that sold the first retail PC under $500 in college. Some Packard Bell 300Mhz Cyrix thing.
Our store sold about 3,000 of them (they were stacked in a big pyramid in the middle of the store and sold out), and ended up getting over 1,200 back due to defects of some sort.
We actually rented a warehouse to handle the repair of them, and while trying to cannibalize parts (as getting warranty parts took about 3 months) we noticed that each machine had different parts. Some had top of the line memory (PC100 i think), others had old SIMMs with DIMM adapter thingys.
PB literally stuck whatever was in parts bin in these machines. Absolutely amazing!
Those numbers are probably based upon survey results from consumers or support calls, so I wouldn't give too much creedence to them.
Consumers aren't going to be able to distinguish hardware problems from software ones.
I'd be more interested in seeing warranty claim data from business customers. I think that actual hardware failures within a 4-year cycle for IBM/HP/Dell "business" PCs would be somewhere in the 3-5% range.
Deployment and provisioning costs are generally greater than the actual equipment. In some environments, after you factor in software, maintenance & installation, the real cost of a PC on a desk approaches $4,000 or more.
Crappy hardware means more replacements, more downtime for workers and more time reimaging and coordinating the scheduling techs or CEs to replace broken equipment. That translates to more staff and more money.
After you factor in salary, benefits, training, telecom costs and equipment, adding another helpdesk employee can easily cost an extra $60,000/yr. Annual raises & insurance costs drive that figure up every year as well.
If you're in an environment like mine where you do phased replacements of 10,000 PCs/yr, that's adding another $6/pc, which is a significantly more than the $3-4/pc that you could have spent on better hardware to begin with.
A laptop for middle school is a waste of time & money unless there is some unusual justification -- kids can learn computers just fine with a desktop.
Alot of these mandatory laptop schemes have more to do with getting more school funding and handing out patronage to friends and family in the laptop reseller business.
The problem is that back in 1998 or 1999, foam panel insulation was introduced to replace some sort of freon (or other CFC) spray foam insulation, because the manufacture of most CFCs is banned in most of the world.
The foam panels on Columbia took out critical tiles on the leading edge of the wing. Previous shuttle tile damage had been limited to less critical sections.
The Columbia disaster is a classic example of what happens when external events and political pressures interfere with the engineering process.
If this radical new technology is anything like the new, improved, "Deep Blue" search backing IBMs support pages, its a real piece of junk, almost like Altavista circa 1998.
You're an idiot who's going to either one of those old bitter IT dorks or working at Sears after the layoff.
Technology companies get rich by reinventing the wheel every ten years. They take advantage of douchebags like you who are willing to devote 80 hour weeks to learning the latest tech fad that tech companies and book publishers push. How many times has XML been reinvented?
If you want to be one of those bitter old fools bemoaning the long lost days of Perl & C++ on RH 5, fifteen years from now, good for you. I'll take the raise.
That won't help you. When the bubble pops, lots of major lenders will go bust, and loan standards will go back to the way they were back in the good old days - 20-25% down, point penalties for 30 yr loans vs. 15 yr loans, etc.
Sure -- the chinese wall issue is already addressed by worker contracts. The financial sector isn't pushing for this kind of regulation.
The people pushing these kinds of regulations are companies like Wal-Mart that have had anti-fraternization and anti-union policies for years that have been thrown out of state court.
In my area, a 45 year old widow and part-time Wal-Mart employee married a coworker and was fired for violating the anti-fraternization policy. She ended up suing and getting a substantial payout.
I'll bet you that if you google around, you'll find that lobbyists for the fast food and big box retail are behind this policy.
Where do you think all of the migration South and West came from? In 1960 Palo Alto was orange groves and garlic farms. Boulder was a ranch town, not the epicenter of creeping sprawl.
Communities revolve around families and center around church and school. In the Northeast, the church had a huge networks of schools and churches all targeted at different ethnic communities. I'll bet you $5 that any Irish or Italian born into a working/middle class family before 1965 went to a catholic school.
In the late 60s state legislation and Federal funding started beefing up public schools and property taxes. At the same time, mandatory bussing to support Brown vs. Board of Education led cities and towns to build mega-schools where everyone went to the same place. Small-midsize northeast cites would move to a single high school serving 5,000-10,000 kids.
The result is that the real cost of sending kids to parochial school became too high due to the high property taxes, and that combined with the move from community-based schools to bussing or large scale schools smashed the communities that church was built around.
Drive through any northeast city and you'll notice a ton of Catholic churches, many abandoned today. They built so many churches because communities grew around them... the Germans in an area would go to one church, the Italians to another, and the Poles to yet another. The heart of the community was built around families whose children went to the church school.
As the communities that formed around church and school were weakened, alot of things happened... People moved away, they changed churches and vibrant urban neighborhoods slowly devolved as absentee landlords began to outnumber homeowners.
My family is a great example. We're Irish Catholics from NYC. My mother's side of the family, including extended family, lived within a 10 block area for three generations. Except for the last generation to grow up, which is scattered across the country. My father's side has only been here in the US for 50 years, but his family all stayed in the NY metro area, while all of the kids moved away.
I'd recommend reading "Bowling Alone"... (http://www.bowlingalone.com/) it documents how organized social activity has essentially died in America in the last 20-50 years. One notable exception is evangelical churches.
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I don't need an excuse -- I buy what I feel I need. If you can get by with a Vespa, good for you. If you feel the need to drive an H2 around, good for you. I don't give a flying shit.
I drive the SUV about 10,000 miles/year. $4/gallon gas will cost me about $2,000. No problem for me. Those who cannot afford gas will need to find new cars. The market will take care of it.
The real problem is that everything is moved via truck and made out of plastic. SUV or not, rising petroleum prices are going to cascade into everything else anyway.
Good for you -- at least you benefited from the exploding value of your land.
I had some friends who loved their land, which had been in the family since the Dutch days. They basically went broke paying ursurious property taxes until eventually they had to sell -- and even then got screwed because the new suburbanites, anxious to preserve "the rural character" of the area, raised the minimum size of a subdivision to 10 acres.
I really believe that the way we do things is fundamentally flawed - you cannot devalue your currency and export industry for 40 years without consequence.
At some point, the billions spent on maintaining thousands of interstates and hundreds of thousands of bridges, the massive army, etc will become too onerous, and I think you'll see the suburban model fail when that happens.
The market will take care of you.
As it continues to become more expensive to commute, people like you will either go broke commuting, or find a way to make a living locally.
I'd rather see farmland in places like Ohio & Upstate NY be used as farmland, instead of being yet another place for asshats sick of citylife to throw up yet another cookie-cutter 4 bed/2.5 ba colonial on 1.2 acres.
The drivetrain and auxillary systems (A/C, alternator) in a car sap as much as 30% of the engine's actual output.
Your engine's transmission has an "overhead" that accounts for a suprisingly large amount of power producted by the engine. In 4WD/AWD vehicles, the transfer case claims yet more power.
Power plants by comparison are very simple: produce steam to spin a turbine. Producing steam is straightforward and can be a 90+% efficient process. (Even home heating boilers can be 85% efficient)
Even more likely, it depends on the number of gasoline wholesalers in the area and how tight the gasoline market is kept there.
In a state like CA or NY, where wholesalers have been consolidated to 4-5 rather than 15-20, prices move twice a day. Gas is $2.70 in NY, $2.38 40 miles away in NJ. About $0.18 of that difference is tax, the rest is the gasoline market.
Notice that the old Standard Oil companies are getting together again and even foreign companies are merging... ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, BP-Amoco-Arco, etc. Less competition in oil production & refining = higher prices.
Your assumptions about SUVs are a little off. I bought a Honda Pilot (which is the equivilant to an Explorer or GMC Envoy) after I bought a house because I needed to be able to haul stuff.
Being able to avoid blowing money on getting stuff delivered or renting/borrowing trucks is worth it to me.
Alot of people with kids buy minivans and SUVs for similar reasons -- you have to drive around alot in the US to get things done, and having everything in the car saves time & money.
Europe has smaller cars, but it also has more sensible living conditions. You don't need to drive 25 miles to shop or take your kids to school.
The Prius is about style over substance. Your average Prius yuppie wants to save the earth AND impress the neighbors. So instead of spending $8,000 on a used Echo that gets 40mpg or buying a new Civic or whatever, they get a $22,000 Prius.
And as an added bonus, you get to show everyone that YOU CARE. You can shame your republican neighbors and impress the hippie chicks at the food co-op.
Actually, you missed the point.
Our current model, where every individual drives 5-80 miles twice a day to work, shop, etc is unsustainable, period.
The long-term "fix" is to do what the Chinese are doing -- build sustainable cities where mass-transit and mixed use areas eliminate the need for most cars.
You're absolutely right. Apple is far superior with its more flexible and powerful PowerPC platform and velocity engine.
Oh, wait, Apple's moving to cheaper Intel hardware that it can continue to sell at high margins... and is relying on draconian DRM and hardware lock-in to remain in business.
Is emacs that common anymore? I haven't seen anyone using emacs outside of university in about 6 years.
They are, but the "consumer" lines of HP, IBM, Dell, etc aren't the same as the "business" computers. Most companies outsource manufacturing of consumer PCs, particuarly retail lines to companies like Flextronics.
There are other differences too... comsumer PCs will include Windows XP Home and can't join a domain. You also usually get a shorter warranty and different software load.
The business PCs focus on stability for drivers and common, high quality parts. IBM guarantees driver compatability for all PCs manufactured during an 18-24 month product cycle. Consumer PCs are more bleeding edge and are more likely to contain cheapo parts choosen for availability or cost reasons.
In effect, "consumer" PCs and "business" PCs are completely different products.
Upgrading actually doesn't cost alot in real terms, because you avoid having to maintain maintenance contracts for old equipment. Extending the maintenance contracts to 6-7 years easily approaches the cost of replacing the equipment.
In the environment that I describe, staffing and keeping parts inventory for a repair depot for older, out of warranty hardware isn't feasible.
Even a small business can pay Dell another $60 for a "Gold" contract and get a reasonably competent tech within 2-5 minutes.
Bigger customers will have a dedicated rep, and will be able to just order replacement parts.
White box builders are a fucked business model... most can't afford to service customers with 50+ workstations.
I worked at a place that sold the first retail PC under $500 in college. Some Packard Bell 300Mhz Cyrix thing.
Our store sold about 3,000 of them (they were stacked in a big pyramid in the middle of the store and sold out), and ended up getting over 1,200 back due to defects of some sort.
We actually rented a warehouse to handle the repair of them, and while trying to cannibalize parts (as getting warranty parts took about 3 months) we noticed that each machine had different parts. Some had top of the line memory (PC100 i think), others had old SIMMs with DIMM adapter thingys.
PB literally stuck whatever was in parts bin in these machines. Absolutely amazing!
Those numbers are probably based upon survey results from consumers or support calls, so I wouldn't give too much creedence to them.
Consumers aren't going to be able to distinguish hardware problems from software ones.
I'd be more interested in seeing warranty claim data from business customers. I think that actual hardware failures within a 4-year cycle for IBM/HP/Dell "business" PCs would be somewhere in the 3-5% range.
Deployment and provisioning costs are generally greater than the actual equipment. In some environments, after you factor in software, maintenance & installation, the real cost of a PC on a desk approaches $4,000 or more.
Crappy hardware means more replacements, more downtime for workers and more time reimaging and coordinating the scheduling techs or CEs to replace broken equipment. That translates to more staff and more money.
After you factor in salary, benefits, training, telecom costs and equipment, adding another helpdesk employee can easily cost an extra $60,000/yr. Annual raises & insurance costs drive that figure up every year as well.
If you're in an environment like mine where you do phased replacements of 10,000 PCs/yr, that's adding another $6/pc, which is a significantly more than the $3-4/pc that you could have spent on better hardware to begin with.
And I turned out ok.
A laptop for middle school is a waste of time & money unless there is some unusual justification -- kids can learn computers just fine with a desktop.
Alot of these mandatory laptop schemes have more to do with getting more school funding and handing out patronage to friends and family in the laptop reseller business.
The problem is that back in 1998 or 1999, foam panel insulation was introduced to replace some sort of freon (or other CFC) spray foam insulation, because the manufacture of most CFCs is banned in most of the world.
The foam panels on Columbia took out critical tiles on the leading edge of the wing. Previous shuttle tile damage had been limited to less critical sections.
The Columbia disaster is a classic example of what happens when external events and political pressures interfere with the engineering process.
If this radical new technology is anything like the new, improved, "Deep Blue" search backing IBMs support pages, its a real piece of junk, almost like Altavista circa 1998.
You're an idiot who's going to either one of those old bitter IT dorks or working at Sears after the layoff.
Technology companies get rich by reinventing the wheel every ten years. They take advantage of douchebags like you who are willing to devote 80 hour weeks to learning the latest tech fad that tech companies and book publishers push. How many times has XML been reinvented?
If you want to be one of those bitter old fools bemoaning the long lost days of Perl & C++ on RH 5, fifteen years from now, good for you. I'll take the raise.
That won't help you. When the bubble pops, lots of major lenders will go bust, and loan standards will go back to the way they were back in the good old days - 20-25% down, point penalties for 30 yr loans vs. 15 yr loans, etc.
So you still won't be able to afford anything.
I'm glad that I'm not the only one to notice and be annoyed by it. I find the compulsion to substitute "ph" for "f" everywhere even more obnixous.
The worst is the growth of "dark" words, darkmail, darknet, darkphish, argh... enough already!
Well, "Darkmail" sounds pretty badass... I'm sure that if I warn the boss about the darkmail menace he'll give me money!
Sure -- the chinese wall issue is already addressed by worker contracts. The financial sector isn't pushing for this kind of regulation.
The people pushing these kinds of regulations are companies like Wal-Mart that have had anti-fraternization and anti-union policies for years that have been thrown out of state court.
In my area, a 45 year old widow and part-time Wal-Mart employee married a coworker and was fired for violating the anti-fraternization policy. She ended up suing and getting a substantial payout.
I'll bet you that if you google around, you'll find that lobbyists for the fast food and big box retail are behind this policy.
Where do you think all of the migration South and West came from? In 1960 Palo Alto was orange groves and garlic farms. Boulder was a ranch town, not the epicenter of creeping sprawl.
Communities revolve around families and center around church and school. In the Northeast, the church had a huge networks of schools and churches all targeted at different ethnic communities. I'll bet you $5 that any Irish or Italian born into a working/middle class family before 1965 went to a catholic school.
In the late 60s state legislation and Federal funding started beefing up public schools and property taxes. At the same time, mandatory bussing to support Brown vs. Board of Education led cities and towns to build mega-schools where everyone went to the same place. Small-midsize northeast cites would move to a single high school serving 5,000-10,000 kids.
The result is that the real cost of sending kids to parochial school became too high due to the high property taxes, and that combined with the move from community-based schools to bussing or large scale schools smashed the communities that church was built around.
Drive through any northeast city and you'll notice a ton of Catholic churches, many abandoned today. They built so many churches because communities grew around them... the Germans in an area would go to one church, the Italians to another, and the Poles to yet another. The heart of the community was built around families whose children went to the church school.
As the communities that formed around church and school were weakened, alot of things happened... People moved away, they changed churches and vibrant urban neighborhoods slowly devolved as absentee landlords began to outnumber homeowners.
My family is a great example. We're Irish Catholics from NYC. My mother's side of the family, including extended family, lived within a 10 block area for three generations. Except for the last generation to grow up, which is scattered across the country. My father's side has only been here in the US for 50 years, but his family all stayed in the NY metro area, while all of the kids moved away.
I'd recommend reading "Bowling Alone"... (http://www.bowlingalone.com/) it documents how organized social activity has essentially died in America in the last 20-50 years. One notable exception is evangelical churches.