Are you slow? Increasing prices DOES magically create more drivers. If I'm a driver and I can work an hour for $X/fare, or I can work at a different time for $5X/fare, which do you think I'm going to choose? Now if the 5x pay rate is at some horribly inconvenient time I might not take it, but if I don't really care either way, I'm going to try to schedule my working hours so I get paid more.
This is exactly why 2nd and 3rd-shift workers get paid more than 1st shift workers for jobs that require people around the clock (like at hospitals). Most people don't want to work weird hours (late nights etc.), so you bump the pay and you get people who do want to take those hours.
20% cheaper? Try more like 100-150% cheaper. That's how overpriced cabs are over here. I don't know about the UK, but here Uber rides are far cheaper than regular cabs. And to my knowledge, no regulated cabs have any kind of busy/late night pricing like you have in the UK; it's all the same. This is likely why Uber is able to be so much cheaper. Maybe if the taxi regulations changed to be more like yours, Uber wouldn't have such an advantage, but that's completely impossible to do here.
If people get sick of it, they'll stop using Uber and Uber will be forced to change its methods.
It's not like Uber has a monopoly on the taxi market. They don't even have a monopoly on the "ride sharing" market: Lyft is their big competitor, and does pretty much all the same things.
Why should Uber make up the difference? Where are they magically going to come up with all this extra money? Oh, that's easy: they'll be forced to jack up their prices for all the other non-surge times. So now, instead of paying $8 to get a ride somewhere, you'll pay $20. That's just the way it is with regular taxi companies now. Why do you think this is a better model? Why should I be forced to subsidize surge-time riders when I don't use Uber during surge times?
Raising prices on customers during emergency situations - like Sandy - is disgusting and reeks of "price gouging" which, IIRC, is illegal in FL for supplies around tropical storms
So you would prefer that there are few to no drivers available during emergency situations? Without extra pay, why should drivers bother making their services available then, instead of joining the crowd and leaving the area as fast as they can?
As for supplies during storms, when you keep prices the same, then you get people hoarding them even when they don't really need them (or that many), and then people who really do need them can't get them. That's why you see long lines as gas stations at times like this, even though most of those people don't really need to fill up their gas tank at that moment.
The problem is that you're assuming the supply is fixed. It is not. When you have strict price regulation in taxis, you wind up with insufficient drivers at certain times, so you get the "lottery" effect you mention. The whole point with "surge pricing" is that drivers get paid more (sometimes a lot more) to drive during these key times, so that makes more drivers available. With traditional taxis, this doesn't happen: why should a driver bother driving at odd hours if they're not going to get paid more for it?
Surge pricing is Good, but there are also valid laws against Price Gouging during and before an emergency.
Why? The problem here is that you have two bad alternatives: either jack up pricing during the emergency, meaning people have to pay more, or have a lack of drivers during the emergency. Would it make you feel better if there were a fraction as many drivers out there during the emergency, but at least the few people lucky enough to get rides aren't paying too much? What about all the poor sods who are stuck without a ride at all? You can't force people to work; this is why they have surge pricing: it encourages drivers to get out there and drive during these times when otherwise they wouldn't want to, making more drivers available for the riders. Without it, you wind up with a shortage of drivers, which is exactly what you get with traditional taxi companies and regulation.
I've only used Uber a few times, but every time I used it, I was given an estimate of the cost beforehand. The pricing isn't a surprise.
Now of course, if you're in a bind and need a ride NOW, and surge pricing is in effect, you may have little alternative, but that's what you get for making yourself dependent on a for-profit company: when they have you locked in, they screw you over. We see this in the software world all the time, where the term "lock-in" is common. I don't think I need to elaborate on it in this forum. The same principle applies with Uber: if you don't want to get screwed, don't make yourself dependent on a for-profit company. It's very simple. Either get your own car, use public transit, or move to someplace where you aren't dependent on them.
You want to regulate pricing, so that you have a corrupt cartel which keeps competition limited and prices high?
Because that's what we had before Uber came around.
We don't need regulated pricing, we need competition. And that's what we have with Uber and Lyft (who compete against each other). What we need is a few more services like those, and then several apps which do for them what PadMapper does for the rental market, and aggregates them and lets you quickly find out which service will give you the best combination of fare price and convenience (e.g., a cheaper fare probably isn't worth it if you have to wait an hour to get picked up).
All this whining about surge pricing is silly. The pricing is not a surprise: Uber's app tells you before you ride how much it's going to cost. If the price is too high, don't buy it. Most of the time, Uber rides are far cheaper than regular cabs, and you get to ride in a much nicer vehicle. Without surge pricing, drivers wouldn't bother driving during certain times.
That's weird, all the stuff I read about it before said that the problem with the space elevator was that we didn't have a material that could sustain the tension necessary for a cable from ground to GEO, that it was beyond our current materials, however carbon nanotubes were much more than strong enough for it, so the only limiter was getting nanotubes out of the lab and into mass production. They even said that super-long nanotubes weren't necessary, just ones a few centimeters long or so, made into a composite fiber, in order to have the needed tensile strength.
What about on the Moon? Making a space elevator there should be comparatively easy, since the gravity is so low. Or if our probes find any really useful stuff on Vesta or Ceres, that should be even easier since those have barely any gravity at all.
Anyway, surely it shouldn't be too hard to design inexpensive re-entry modules to safely drop platinum ingots to the Earth with, which could be built in space using materials mined there.
A space elevator would solve that problem pretty quickly: for the elevator to work, you need to send as much mass down as you send up, so you'd be able to send a steady stream of valuable stuff safely down to Earth once it's operational, at the same time you're sending people, supplies, and less-valuable materials up.
That's odd that it gets better mileage; on most other cars these days, the autos are getting better fuel economy. Autos typically have taller overdrive gears (since they can downshift in an instant if they need to), and frequently have more gears than manuals.
Yes, probably most of them these days (if they're sports cars or anything close to it, which is probably all you'll find with a manual in the US these days; econocar buyers all get autos these days since automatics get better fuel economy).
It's no different than using a key to start; you depress the clutch and press the start button. I drove one recently for a test-drive, a 2015 Mazda 3.
Heck, the Honda S2000 (manual only on that car) had a pushbutton start way back in the 1990s. I don't believe it was an automatic start though, it was just a pushbutton taking the place of the "start" or "III" position on the key. They only did it on that car because they were aping race cars which have always had pushbutton starters, since using keys in a purpose-built race car is rather stupid.
2 American Marines taking out some wacko in Belgium (not France; it was on the Belgian side of the border) has absolutely nothing to do with tech news, "news for nerds". This is a tech news site. One with poor management, but still a tech news site.
The only problem with the cannibal guy is that he *wasn't* convicted for conspiracy. The jury convicted him, and then the trial court threw it out. He was actually convicted for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (using an NYPD computer database improperly), which isn't really a free-speech issue.
Luckily, that's one place where our legal system isn't completely broken: when some idiotic jury of one's "peers" convicts you for some bogus BS, it's entirely possible for the judge to toss out the conviction, and it does happen from time to time.
I'd like to see a case where merely talking about a crime actually landed someone in jail. The way I understand it, "conspiracy" to commit a crime goes beyond just "talking about" it, because that really is thoughtcrime. "Conspiracy" involves more than that: making actual plans, paying someone to do the deed, having motive, etc. A couple of guys getting drunk and saying they'd like to kill their wives is not "conspiracy".
Absolutely, yes, for #1 and #2. That speech should be completely free. Their actions are still illegal, but not because of any free-speech issues. Directing your underlings to massively pollute is illegal because it's illegal to pollute (whether you're the guy doing the dumping or the guy's boss who pays him to do it), not because speaking is illegal. Screwing over customers is (likely) illegal (depending on the exact points of law and the actions), but writing a memo about how to do it is not, it's free speech. If a banker wants to write a memo telling how to screw customers, but then he never actually screws any customers over, nor do any of his underlings, then he's fine. That's no different than writing a fictional story about committing a murder.
#3 is different because that falls under the "incitement" condition. And it's not about false statements either; you can go to jail for inciting a riot using true statements too. Inciting a riot is illegal, no matter how you do it.
it suggests that his Presidency, rather than being some great revolutionary change, would be four very long years of him shouting crude abuses at Congressional leadership.
I don't see how that's any worse than the leadership we've had for the past 15 years or more (probably more like 30 or more).
He's right. All soldiers receive BAH (basic housing allowance) and BAS (basic allowance for sustenance). A single soldier does not receive those allowances, because they pay for his barracks room and for his meals at the dining facility (but he still technically gets them on his check). Married soldiers get to keep those allotments to choose where they live since the barracks are no place to raise a family.
No, he's not right. Source: you. What you describe amounts to a "marriage bonus", if single and married soldiers are treated differently and single soldiers don't have the option of keeping that money and using it for an apartment off-base.
Just because it isn't formally called a "marriage bonus" doesn't mean it isn't one.
This does make a lot of sense. Humans only turned to agriculture fairly recently in their history (about 10-12k years ago), and before that were in hunter-gatherer tribes, basically just like the Native Americans before colonization. There's a reason they didn't invent agriculture earlier: it's too much work! According to Jared Diamond, humans lost a full 12 inches in height, on average, when they adopted agriculture, because their diet wasn't nearly as good as it was with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The reason they did this was because there were too many humans and not enough wild lands left, so they had to become farmers to survive. The Native Americans didn't have this problem because the Americas hadn't become overpopulated like Europe.
These days, it's not so bad: it doesn't take that much labor to grow lots of food, thanks to mechanization and modern technology and techniques, so we can live in cities and surf the internet in our free time, but in the 1600s and 1700s life was rough and luxuries were few, except for the rich.
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So you're a big believer in cartels and corruption? Got it.
Are you slow? Increasing prices DOES magically create more drivers. If I'm a driver and I can work an hour for $X/fare, or I can work at a different time for $5X/fare, which do you think I'm going to choose? Now if the 5x pay rate is at some horribly inconvenient time I might not take it, but if I don't really care either way, I'm going to try to schedule my working hours so I get paid more.
This is exactly why 2nd and 3rd-shift workers get paid more than 1st shift workers for jobs that require people around the clock (like at hospitals). Most people don't want to work weird hours (late nights etc.), so you bump the pay and you get people who do want to take those hours.
20% cheaper? Try more like 100-150% cheaper. That's how overpriced cabs are over here. I don't know about the UK, but here Uber rides are far cheaper than regular cabs. And to my knowledge, no regulated cabs have any kind of busy/late night pricing like you have in the UK; it's all the same. This is likely why Uber is able to be so much cheaper. Maybe if the taxi regulations changed to be more like yours, Uber wouldn't have such an advantage, but that's completely impossible to do here.
If people get sick of it, they'll stop using Uber and Uber will be forced to change its methods.
It's not like Uber has a monopoly on the taxi market. They don't even have a monopoly on the "ride sharing" market: Lyft is their big competitor, and does pretty much all the same things.
Why should Uber make up the difference? Where are they magically going to come up with all this extra money? Oh, that's easy: they'll be forced to jack up their prices for all the other non-surge times. So now, instead of paying $8 to get a ride somewhere, you'll pay $20. That's just the way it is with regular taxi companies now. Why do you think this is a better model? Why should I be forced to subsidize surge-time riders when I don't use Uber during surge times?
Raising prices on customers during emergency situations - like Sandy - is disgusting and reeks of "price gouging" which, IIRC, is illegal in FL for supplies around tropical storms
So you would prefer that there are few to no drivers available during emergency situations? Without extra pay, why should drivers bother making their services available then, instead of joining the crowd and leaving the area as fast as they can?
As for supplies during storms, when you keep prices the same, then you get people hoarding them even when they don't really need them (or that many), and then people who really do need them can't get them. That's why you see long lines as gas stations at times like this, even though most of those people don't really need to fill up their gas tank at that moment.
The problem is that you're assuming the supply is fixed. It is not. When you have strict price regulation in taxis, you wind up with insufficient drivers at certain times, so you get the "lottery" effect you mention. The whole point with "surge pricing" is that drivers get paid more (sometimes a lot more) to drive during these key times, so that makes more drivers available. With traditional taxis, this doesn't happen: why should a driver bother driving at odd hours if they're not going to get paid more for it?
Surge pricing is Good, but there are also valid laws against Price Gouging during and before an emergency.
Why? The problem here is that you have two bad alternatives: either jack up pricing during the emergency, meaning people have to pay more, or have a lack of drivers during the emergency. Would it make you feel better if there were a fraction as many drivers out there during the emergency, but at least the few people lucky enough to get rides aren't paying too much? What about all the poor sods who are stuck without a ride at all? You can't force people to work; this is why they have surge pricing: it encourages drivers to get out there and drive during these times when otherwise they wouldn't want to, making more drivers available for the riders. Without it, you wind up with a shortage of drivers, which is exactly what you get with traditional taxi companies and regulation.
I've only used Uber a few times, but every time I used it, I was given an estimate of the cost beforehand. The pricing isn't a surprise.
Now of course, if you're in a bind and need a ride NOW, and surge pricing is in effect, you may have little alternative, but that's what you get for making yourself dependent on a for-profit company: when they have you locked in, they screw you over. We see this in the software world all the time, where the term "lock-in" is common. I don't think I need to elaborate on it in this forum. The same principle applies with Uber: if you don't want to get screwed, don't make yourself dependent on a for-profit company. It's very simple. Either get your own car, use public transit, or move to someplace where you aren't dependent on them.
You want to regulate pricing, so that you have a corrupt cartel which keeps competition limited and prices high?
Because that's what we had before Uber came around.
We don't need regulated pricing, we need competition. And that's what we have with Uber and Lyft (who compete against each other). What we need is a few more services like those, and then several apps which do for them what PadMapper does for the rental market, and aggregates them and lets you quickly find out which service will give you the best combination of fare price and convenience (e.g., a cheaper fare probably isn't worth it if you have to wait an hour to get picked up).
All this whining about surge pricing is silly. The pricing is not a surprise: Uber's app tells you before you ride how much it's going to cost. If the price is too high, don't buy it. Most of the time, Uber rides are far cheaper than regular cabs, and you get to ride in a much nicer vehicle. Without surge pricing, drivers wouldn't bother driving during certain times.
Space mining is science fiction. So why are you here?
That's weird, all the stuff I read about it before said that the problem with the space elevator was that we didn't have a material that could sustain the tension necessary for a cable from ground to GEO, that it was beyond our current materials, however carbon nanotubes were much more than strong enough for it, so the only limiter was getting nanotubes out of the lab and into mass production. They even said that super-long nanotubes weren't necessary, just ones a few centimeters long or so, made into a composite fiber, in order to have the needed tensile strength.
What about on the Moon? Making a space elevator there should be comparatively easy, since the gravity is so low. Or if our probes find any really useful stuff on Vesta or Ceres, that should be even easier since those have barely any gravity at all.
Anyway, surely it shouldn't be too hard to design inexpensive re-entry modules to safely drop platinum ingots to the Earth with, which could be built in space using materials mined there.
A space elevator would solve that problem pretty quickly: for the elevator to work, you need to send as much mass down as you send up, so you'd be able to send a steady stream of valuable stuff safely down to Earth once it's operational, at the same time you're sending people, supplies, and less-valuable materials up.
That's odd that it gets better mileage; on most other cars these days, the autos are getting better fuel economy. Autos typically have taller overdrive gears (since they can downshift in an instant if they need to), and frequently have more gears than manuals.
Yes, probably most of them these days (if they're sports cars or anything close to it, which is probably all you'll find with a manual in the US these days; econocar buyers all get autos these days since automatics get better fuel economy).
It's no different than using a key to start; you depress the clutch and press the start button. I drove one recently for a test-drive, a 2015 Mazda 3.
Heck, the Honda S2000 (manual only on that car) had a pushbutton start way back in the 1990s. I don't believe it was an automatic start though, it was just a pushbutton taking the place of the "start" or "III" position on the key. They only did it on that car because they were aping race cars which have always had pushbutton starters, since using keys in a purpose-built race car is rather stupid.
I suppose, but remember what I said about the management of this site. This one is probably a Slashvertisement of sorts.
2 American Marines taking out some wacko in Belgium (not France; it was on the Belgian side of the border) has absolutely nothing to do with tech news, "news for nerds". This is a tech news site. One with poor management, but still a tech news site.
The only problem with the cannibal guy is that he *wasn't* convicted for conspiracy. The jury convicted him, and then the trial court threw it out. He was actually convicted for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (using an NYPD computer database improperly), which isn't really a free-speech issue.
Luckily, that's one place where our legal system isn't completely broken: when some idiotic jury of one's "peers" convicts you for some bogus BS, it's entirely possible for the judge to toss out the conviction, and it does happen from time to time.
No, you're wrong. What you're describing is a de-facto bonus. You're just being a pedantic asshole about it. It's very simple:
single at pay grade A: $X / month
married at pay grade A: $X + $Y / month
that's a bonus, no matter what you want to call it, or what kind of idiotic weasel words you want to use to try to claim it's not.
I don't care how long you've been in the AF. The facts are simple, you don't even deny them, and they prove it's a bonus.
I'd like to see a case where merely talking about a crime actually landed someone in jail. The way I understand it, "conspiracy" to commit a crime goes beyond just "talking about" it, because that really is thoughtcrime. "Conspiracy" involves more than that: making actual plans, paying someone to do the deed, having motive, etc. A couple of guys getting drunk and saying they'd like to kill their wives is not "conspiracy".
I have no idea what you're trying to say here because your writing skills are so poor. Try going to school and learning English.
Absolutely, yes, for #1 and #2. That speech should be completely free. Their actions are still illegal, but not because of any free-speech issues. Directing your underlings to massively pollute is illegal because it's illegal to pollute (whether you're the guy doing the dumping or the guy's boss who pays him to do it), not because speaking is illegal. Screwing over customers is (likely) illegal (depending on the exact points of law and the actions), but writing a memo about how to do it is not, it's free speech. If a banker wants to write a memo telling how to screw customers, but then he never actually screws any customers over, nor do any of his underlings, then he's fine. That's no different than writing a fictional story about committing a murder.
#3 is different because that falls under the "incitement" condition. And it's not about false statements either; you can go to jail for inciting a riot using true statements too. Inciting a riot is illegal, no matter how you do it.
it suggests that his Presidency, rather than being some great revolutionary change, would be four very long years of him shouting crude abuses at Congressional leadership.
I don't see how that's any worse than the leadership we've had for the past 15 years or more (probably more like 30 or more).
At least it'll be entertaining.
He's right. All soldiers receive BAH (basic housing allowance) and BAS (basic allowance for sustenance). A single soldier does not receive those allowances, because they pay for his barracks room and for his meals at the dining facility (but he still technically gets them on his check). Married soldiers get to keep those allotments to choose where they live since the barracks are no place to raise a family.
No, he's not right. Source: you. What you describe amounts to a "marriage bonus", if single and married soldiers are treated differently and single soldiers don't have the option of keeping that money and using it for an apartment off-base.
Just because it isn't formally called a "marriage bonus" doesn't mean it isn't one.
This does make a lot of sense. Humans only turned to agriculture fairly recently in their history (about 10-12k years ago), and before that were in hunter-gatherer tribes, basically just like the Native Americans before colonization. There's a reason they didn't invent agriculture earlier: it's too much work! According to Jared Diamond, humans lost a full 12 inches in height, on average, when they adopted agriculture, because their diet wasn't nearly as good as it was with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The reason they did this was because there were too many humans and not enough wild lands left, so they had to become farmers to survive. The Native Americans didn't have this problem because the Americas hadn't become overpopulated like Europe.
These days, it's not so bad: it doesn't take that much labor to grow lots of food, thanks to mechanization and modern technology and techniques, so we can live in cities and surf the internet in our free time, but in the 1600s and 1700s life was rough and luxuries were few, except for the rich.