This is an interesting, though rather off-topic conversation starter. I'll toss in my view:
To address the last point first, the consequences of "the community" being accepting of openly misogynistic people is possibly that the FOSS community gains a reputation (which it's already fighting) of being a haven for such people, and that anyone involved with it is like this. This isn't very good for the employment prospects for anyone who is prominently involved in FOSS, or attempts to evangelize its use in their organization. At worst, we could see a schism where FOSS advocates are all seen as misogynistic "neckbeards", and clean-cut "professional software developers" who aren't likely to expose a company to sexual harassment lawsuits are all Microsoft (or other proprietary software) advocates.
The quality of a product really doesn't matter as much as other factors, including public reputation, public image, and inertia. We've seen this over and over with Microsoft software over the years. Even back in the Windows 95/98 days, MS software was seen as "high quality" (even though it blue-screened every 30 minutes). Image is everything. Even outside of computing, there's countless cases of a technically-superior product or standard being sidelined in favor of something inferior, and inside computing cases abound (IE6 for example, being a standard for so long even though it's horrible, largely because of ActiveX even though it's a security nightmare). Most people do not look at technical specs for things; their perspectives involve other variables, especially the people involved in something.
However, the FOSS community has no "gatekeepers" as such, and is not a hierarchal organization. People are free to associate how they will here. But this might be something to think about if you're in charge of a project, and one of your peers is a highly outspoken misogynist or racist: he's going to cast a light on your project by association. There's a good reason companies don't employ people like this; the last thing they need is some news article that goes like this: "John Smith, a vocal advocate of amending the Constitution to make women second-class citizens, and also a lead programmer for XYZ Technologies, on Monday declared that..." Guilt by association and all that.
Now of course, there's a difference between refusing to associate with someone because of their outspoken views, and having a witch-hunt. If you're running some little 5-developer FOSS project on GitHub that no one's heard of, and one of your developers says something slightly misogynistic in an IRC chat, big deal. If you're running a FOSS company with millions in revenue and you hire a CEO who publicly spouts misogynistic views, that's an entirely different thing.
You don't need a beard or a dark complexion to be a terrorist. There's lots of cases of whitebread Americans and Europeans adopting extremist Islam and going to fight for various factions in the middle east.
The thing is, why do we need to be "serious about victory"? Why is this cause so important that we should murder millions of civilians, over an ideology?
It was exactly the same with Vietnam. What did we accomplish there? Nothing, except killing millions. How is Vietnam today? It's actually doing just fine, despite us losing there. Why do we care about how people on the other side of the planet live their lives? If they want to live under Sharia Law, who cares? If the people there are willing to allow them to govern them, and are unwilling to stand up against them, why should we? (The Sunni Muslims who live in the cities ISIS controls actually seem to support them; that's why ISIS is so strong there.) Now obviously, not everyone there likes them: the Kurds especially hate them. But that's fine, we can just equip and train the Kurds and let them keep ISIS contained.
You simply haven't made any kind of case why we should become mass murderers and draw the condemnation of the world for this cause. They are not any kind of serious threat to western nations, and in fact, the way I see it, they're a help: they're drawing away lots of angry Muslims who were born here to Muslim immigrants. Instead of staying here and causing problems (and us being unable to deport them because they're citizens), they're willingly going over there and getting killed by drone bombs or Kurdish or Iraqi militaries. Good riddance. It's kinda like a honeypot.
Finally, what would happen in your scenario anyway? You sound like you've thought it through about as well as Bush thought through his plans for eliminating Saddam in Iraq. What are you going to do after you eliminate ISIS and achieve military victory? We already won militarily in Iraq: there was no "namby pamby" war there, we won completely and decisively, and then look what happened: we got ISIS. This is what happens when you create a power vacuum in a culture you don't understand and try to set up a lame puppet government. Wiping out a city and eliminating ISIS is going to do the same thing.
Um, genocide really isn't considered acceptable these days. Besides, the people they're murdering are mainly the people in the areas they control, who would be nuked in your scenario, so that seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The obvious solution to me seems to be containment. Keep them contained within a certain area and don't let them expand their territory any more. The people under their control will suffer (but hey, at least they won't be irradiated to death), but oh well.
One thing I do wonder, however, is if having ISIS isn't necessarily such a bad thing for western nations. How many thousands of radical Muslims have willingly left western nations and traveled to Syria/Iraq to join ISIS? Last I heard, around 6000 ISIS fighters have already been KIA. Well, that's 6000 that we westerners don't have to live with, plus tens of thousands more that are still living over there and getting killed daily (of course, not all came from western nations, lots are Syrian or Iraqi).
The workplace is special because people go there to earn a living, because without that paycheck they'll be homeless. Not that many people go to work just for the fun of it; most people go because they need money to survive, and would rather be sitting on the beach or hanging out with friends/family or just about anything else.
Because of this, society has decided that some rules are in order to keep being at work any more miserable than it already is, and to ensure people have a fair shot at being gainfully employed without being abused or forced out just because they're the wrong skin color or sex.
What people do on their own time is not subject to the same rules as when they're at work, working for an employer. If you want to be blatantly racist on your own time, you have that right thanks to the First Amendment. You might not make many friends that way, but if you want to be an ass, you can do that. On the job, however, you open the employer up to lawsuits if he doesn't take appropriate measures to stop your behavior on the job, so you'll most likely be fired if you say stupid racist shit there.
A free software github repo is not a workplace, and doesn't resemble one. It's some small project run by some volunteers. That's why this distinction is important.
However, while these morons are free to act as dumb as they want here, everyone else is free to criticize them.
Last I heard, ISIS wasn't just a bunch of wackos out in the desert like when the US was attacking AQ in their caves in Afghanistan, they have control of a bunch of sizable cities in both Syria and Iraq. If you cut their supply lines, you'll be starving all the civilians in those cities. As for "smoking them out into the open", they *are* in the open. They are the effective government in the cities they control. The problem is you can't just bomb them without killing all the civilians they're governing.
So as religion slowly loses foothold in our increasingly secular world, the Caliphate cannot achieve their objective. In the end, if they partially succeed, there will be a new radical Muslim state in the Middle East but I can't see any of the nation states giving land to them.
True, the idea of them establishing a new world-wide caliphate with all other nations submitting to them is simply ridiculous. However they can be successful in establishing a new nation-state in the middle east, and are already partly there. They just don't have firmly drawn borders yet, nor recognition from other nations as a viable nation-state. But there's lots of other places in the world where borders are not firm and are contested (like between China and India, and India and Pakistan), and you don't really need recognition from others to be a nation-state. As for giving land, they don't need that, they can just take it by force, which they have. That's how lots of nations get their land. Russia certainly didn't get Ukraine to willingly give them Crimea, they simply took it (though through some underhanded means). China basically just seized Tibet decades ago.
cannot operate within the economic global framework
North Korea doesn't really operate within the global economic framework either. And ISIS, last I heard, does sell oil on the international market somehow (along with other valuable archaeological artifacts), and uses that money to buy things.
AFAIK, the CIA never lost assassination powers, except for heads of state. That was basically a "gentleman's agreement" anyway; they didn't want more state agents trying to assassinate our President (like JFK), so they stopped assassinating other heads of state.
ISIS leaders probably don't really count in this policy. And the US routinely drone-bombs high-value targets in other countries; they've bombed lots of terrorist leaders in Yemen.
look at ISIS. They are fighting a brutal but futile campaign; even without the west Muslims themselves would refuse to be united under them. But the irrational futility of their actions only feeds their fanaticism.
How is their campaign "futile"? If it weren't for the west's (mainly US's) military support, both direct (drone-bombing) and indirect (helping the Iraqi army and other forces with arms and training), they'd be a lot more successful than they are now. As it stands, they control a huge amount of territory, they have tens of thousands of armed soldiers, they enforce laws, they collect taxes and provide services to people living under their control; how is this "futile"? They don't need to unite all Muslims; no one's done that since Mohammed died. They just need to successfully erect their government and control territory and have popular support from the people under their control, and they've done that. Yeah, it's a horrible government, but so are the governments of North Korea and Myanmar.
The fact that they have survived this long with most Europe virtually recognizing them as a sovereign state
They *are* a sovereign state, by all rights. They control territory with military force, they tax citizens, they provide services, they buy and sell oil resources, they make and enforce laws, they have a standing army; how do they not meet the definition of a sovereign state or legitimate government? Yeah, they suck, they're brutal, etc., but so is North Korea.
This doesn't seem like a hard problem; you should just design your DB schema so that every order has a "shipped-to" address field, where the order was shipped to. The order information shouldn't change, so it obviously shouldn't be pointing to information which can also change. Yes, this duplicates data somewhat, but mailing addresses do not consume a lot of space.
Besides, just because a customer has a preferred ship-to address doesn't mean they'll always want every order shipped there. What if the customer is large and has multiple ship-to addresses? What if they want something shipped someplace odd for some odd reason?
Exactly. While the two parties may differ on certain things, on this issue, they are completely united. Voting Democrat isn't going to help stop domestic spying, because they're just as in favor of it as the Republicans, as seen by how it's been handled by both the Obama and Bush administrations.
Do you even know anything about Uber? Cab companies aren't required to have good cars; most of the cabs I've been in have been shitty old Crown Vics, which are horrible cars. Uber won't let you drive for them with a car that's more than a few years old (2008 IIRC). With Uber, I got to ride in almost-new Mercedes, for half the price of a cab.
And 15 mninutes???? With Uber, where I used to live in NJ, I could get a car within a couple of minutes. Calling a cab required a wait time of 30-60 minutes, and that was in a pretty dense area. This was only 20 or so miles from Manhattan.
A fare posted on the door doesn't help me much, since I don't know beforehand how many stop lights we'll stop at and all that. Uber tells me ahead of time how much the fare will probably be for the trip.
I'd like to know what the shippers have to say about these interceptions.
They probably can't say anything because they've been served with National Security letters and aren't allowed to talk about anything under threat of prosecution or worse.
Do you really think it's beyond a taxi driver to own a GPS Navigator?
Most cabs I've seen either don't have them at all, or the driver has some 10-year-old POS. And then you have to tell him the address; with Uber, you punch it in on your phone, instead of having to spell out some street name for the driver who barely speaks English.
Do you really think no taxi companies have systems that track their drivers and can notify their clients?
No, they don't. Do they have a smartphone app that tells me this information in real-time, and shows me, on a map, where the driver is and how long it is until he reaches me? No, they don't. I have to call them on the phone, and they give me a horribly inaccurate and vague estimate of how long it'll be until he gets there. And then I have no way of knowing whether it's accurate, or comparing drivers, or easily canceling if this driver is taking too long. With Uber, I can easily see if the driver is too far away and I can cancel and try a different driver.
What makes you think an Uber driver will be so much better at this?
Wow, are you stupid? Really, I want to know. Anyone who has the slightest clue about Uber knows that the app they use has built-in GPS navigation, and that the customer usually enters his destination address into his app, so the driver doesn't even have to ask, the app automatically guides him there.
you can see how long it'll take the driver to get to you
This is not technology that is confined to Uber.
It's not? Please enlighten me then, because I've only seen it with Uber and Lyft (I'm sure their other competitors like Sidecar also have it). You're obviously not going to get that when you call up some local cab company on the phone.
Most dealerships I've seen are not set up for painting cars. You have to have a special shop with paint booths for that, and personnel who are trained and experienced in paint-matching and spraying. A regular dealership mechanic does not know how to do that stuff. I have seen at least one dealership which also operated a body shop on premises, but that was unusual. It was in a smaller town, so I guess that's how they kept business going, by both being a dealership and also being a body shop (not just for the cars they sold).
In Manhattan, this isn't a problem. The drivers know where everything is (within Manhattan).
Yes, anywhere else I've been, drivers have no idea where anything is so you have to give them turn-by-turn directions, which is rather annoying: why am I paying so much for someone when I have to do half the work? But not in Manhattan. I'm sure London is the same way, only even better since cab drivers in London aren't even allowed to operate if they don't pass a rigorous test on geographical knowledge.
You could. It would be a bit of a project though. The crawlspace just has dirt on the "floor" and is wide-open to the outside air. So you'd need to build some kind of conditioned enclosure, much like the walls of the house, complete with framing, insulation, moisture barrier, etc., and then either give it its own HVAC, or attach it to the house so it's part of the house's conditioned space (maybe a trap door in the floor).
Sure seems like a whole lot of trouble when you could just get a small-form-factor PC, or even one of those enclosures with 4 hot-swap drives, and hide that behind the TV or something. I really wonder if there isn't something the OP isn't telling us.
I don't know about "easily", but I'm pretty sure many modern home HVAC systems have larger circuits than that, probably 50A. However you still have to worry about the total amperage available to the house: if you put in a 100A circuit for the car, and then you have the stove, HVAC, and dryer on at the same time, you'll blow your main breaker. You'd have to get the utility to put in a bigger service feed for the house.
**No one** ever gets their car painted at a dealership, unless it's one of those rare dealerships that runs an auto-body business on the side. People go to body shops to get their cars painted.
tire changes
Only morons get tires at dealerships. Everyone else goes to a tire shop like Discount Tire because it's much cheaper.
brake maintenance,
Teslas have standard brakes; any independent repair shop can replace the pads and rotors on them.
suspension maintenance,
No one "maintains" their suspension these days. This isn't 1950 any more. When your Tesla is 15-20 years old and the shocks are worn out, I'm sure an independent shop can fix it.
lightbulbs
You need a mechanic to change a light bulb for you?
Teslas use LEDs BTW. LEDs don't burn out easily.
aftermarket stereo
Have you ever even *seen* a Tesla? You can't put aftermarket stereos in them. Everything's integrated into the touchscreen system.
Somehow, GM managed to make their upcoming Bolt even goofier looking than the Leaf.
GM has been making goofy-looking cars for decades now. Styling hasn't been one of their strengths for ages. Just look at all the butt-ugly cars they made in the 90s. Or worse, remember the Pontiac Aztek?
Slashdot Mirror
This is an interesting, though rather off-topic conversation starter. I'll toss in my view:
To address the last point first, the consequences of "the community" being accepting of openly misogynistic people is possibly that the FOSS community gains a reputation (which it's already fighting) of being a haven for such people, and that anyone involved with it is like this. This isn't very good for the employment prospects for anyone who is prominently involved in FOSS, or attempts to evangelize its use in their organization. At worst, we could see a schism where FOSS advocates are all seen as misogynistic "neckbeards", and clean-cut "professional software developers" who aren't likely to expose a company to sexual harassment lawsuits are all Microsoft (or other proprietary software) advocates.
The quality of a product really doesn't matter as much as other factors, including public reputation, public image, and inertia. We've seen this over and over with Microsoft software over the years. Even back in the Windows 95/98 days, MS software was seen as "high quality" (even though it blue-screened every 30 minutes). Image is everything. Even outside of computing, there's countless cases of a technically-superior product or standard being sidelined in favor of something inferior, and inside computing cases abound (IE6 for example, being a standard for so long even though it's horrible, largely because of ActiveX even though it's a security nightmare). Most people do not look at technical specs for things; their perspectives involve other variables, especially the people involved in something.
However, the FOSS community has no "gatekeepers" as such, and is not a hierarchal organization. People are free to associate how they will here. But this might be something to think about if you're in charge of a project, and one of your peers is a highly outspoken misogynist or racist: he's going to cast a light on your project by association. There's a good reason companies don't employ people like this; the last thing they need is some news article that goes like this: "John Smith, a vocal advocate of amending the Constitution to make women second-class citizens, and also a lead programmer for XYZ Technologies, on Monday declared that..." Guilt by association and all that.
Now of course, there's a difference between refusing to associate with someone because of their outspoken views, and having a witch-hunt. If you're running some little 5-developer FOSS project on GitHub that no one's heard of, and one of your developers says something slightly misogynistic in an IRC chat, big deal. If you're running a FOSS company with millions in revenue and you hire a CEO who publicly spouts misogynistic views, that's an entirely different thing.
You don't need a beard or a dark complexion to be a terrorist. There's lots of cases of whitebread Americans and Europeans adopting extremist Islam and going to fight for various factions in the middle east.
So that means you think it's fine if a restaurant posts a sign saying "NO BLACKS".
The thing is, why do we need to be "serious about victory"? Why is this cause so important that we should murder millions of civilians, over an ideology?
It was exactly the same with Vietnam. What did we accomplish there? Nothing, except killing millions. How is Vietnam today? It's actually doing just fine, despite us losing there. Why do we care about how people on the other side of the planet live their lives? If they want to live under Sharia Law, who cares? If the people there are willing to allow them to govern them, and are unwilling to stand up against them, why should we? (The Sunni Muslims who live in the cities ISIS controls actually seem to support them; that's why ISIS is so strong there.) Now obviously, not everyone there likes them: the Kurds especially hate them. But that's fine, we can just equip and train the Kurds and let them keep ISIS contained.
You simply haven't made any kind of case why we should become mass murderers and draw the condemnation of the world for this cause. They are not any kind of serious threat to western nations, and in fact, the way I see it, they're a help: they're drawing away lots of angry Muslims who were born here to Muslim immigrants. Instead of staying here and causing problems (and us being unable to deport them because they're citizens), they're willingly going over there and getting killed by drone bombs or Kurdish or Iraqi militaries. Good riddance. It's kinda like a honeypot.
Finally, what would happen in your scenario anyway? You sound like you've thought it through about as well as Bush thought through his plans for eliminating Saddam in Iraq. What are you going to do after you eliminate ISIS and achieve military victory? We already won militarily in Iraq: there was no "namby pamby" war there, we won completely and decisively, and then look what happened: we got ISIS. This is what happens when you create a power vacuum in a culture you don't understand and try to set up a lame puppet government. Wiping out a city and eliminating ISIS is going to do the same thing.
Um, genocide really isn't considered acceptable these days. Besides, the people they're murdering are mainly the people in the areas they control, who would be nuked in your scenario, so that seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The obvious solution to me seems to be containment. Keep them contained within a certain area and don't let them expand their territory any more. The people under their control will suffer (but hey, at least they won't be irradiated to death), but oh well.
One thing I do wonder, however, is if having ISIS isn't necessarily such a bad thing for western nations. How many thousands of radical Muslims have willingly left western nations and traveled to Syria/Iraq to join ISIS? Last I heard, around 6000 ISIS fighters have already been KIA. Well, that's 6000 that we westerners don't have to live with, plus tens of thousands more that are still living over there and getting killed daily (of course, not all came from western nations, lots are Syrian or Iraqi).
Why is the workplace so special?
The workplace is special because people go there to earn a living, because without that paycheck they'll be homeless. Not that many people go to work just for the fun of it; most people go because they need money to survive, and would rather be sitting on the beach or hanging out with friends/family or just about anything else.
Because of this, society has decided that some rules are in order to keep being at work any more miserable than it already is, and to ensure people have a fair shot at being gainfully employed without being abused or forced out just because they're the wrong skin color or sex.
What people do on their own time is not subject to the same rules as when they're at work, working for an employer. If you want to be blatantly racist on your own time, you have that right thanks to the First Amendment. You might not make many friends that way, but if you want to be an ass, you can do that. On the job, however, you open the employer up to lawsuits if he doesn't take appropriate measures to stop your behavior on the job, so you'll most likely be fired if you say stupid racist shit there.
A free software github repo is not a workplace, and doesn't resemble one. It's some small project run by some volunteers. That's why this distinction is important.
However, while these morons are free to act as dumb as they want here, everyone else is free to criticize them.
Last I heard, ISIS wasn't just a bunch of wackos out in the desert like when the US was attacking AQ in their caves in Afghanistan, they have control of a bunch of sizable cities in both Syria and Iraq. If you cut their supply lines, you'll be starving all the civilians in those cities. As for "smoking them out into the open", they *are* in the open. They are the effective government in the cities they control. The problem is you can't just bomb them without killing all the civilians they're governing.
So as religion slowly loses foothold in our increasingly secular world, the Caliphate cannot achieve their objective. In the end, if they partially succeed, there will be a new radical Muslim state in the Middle East but I can't see any of the nation states giving land to them.
True, the idea of them establishing a new world-wide caliphate with all other nations submitting to them is simply ridiculous. However they can be successful in establishing a new nation-state in the middle east, and are already partly there. They just don't have firmly drawn borders yet, nor recognition from other nations as a viable nation-state. But there's lots of other places in the world where borders are not firm and are contested (like between China and India, and India and Pakistan), and you don't really need recognition from others to be a nation-state. As for giving land, they don't need that, they can just take it by force, which they have. That's how lots of nations get their land. Russia certainly didn't get Ukraine to willingly give them Crimea, they simply took it (though through some underhanded means). China basically just seized Tibet decades ago.
cannot operate within the economic global framework
North Korea doesn't really operate within the global economic framework either. And ISIS, last I heard, does sell oil on the international market somehow (along with other valuable archaeological artifacts), and uses that money to buy things.
AFAIK, the CIA never lost assassination powers, except for heads of state. That was basically a "gentleman's agreement" anyway; they didn't want more state agents trying to assassinate our President (like JFK), so they stopped assassinating other heads of state.
ISIS leaders probably don't really count in this policy. And the US routinely drone-bombs high-value targets in other countries; they've bombed lots of terrorist leaders in Yemen.
look at ISIS. They are fighting a brutal but futile campaign; even without the west Muslims themselves would refuse to be united under them. But the irrational futility of their actions only feeds their fanaticism.
How is their campaign "futile"? If it weren't for the west's (mainly US's) military support, both direct (drone-bombing) and indirect (helping the Iraqi army and other forces with arms and training), they'd be a lot more successful than they are now. As it stands, they control a huge amount of territory, they have tens of thousands of armed soldiers, they enforce laws, they collect taxes and provide services to people living under their control; how is this "futile"? They don't need to unite all Muslims; no one's done that since Mohammed died. They just need to successfully erect their government and control territory and have popular support from the people under their control, and they've done that. Yeah, it's a horrible government, but so are the governments of North Korea and Myanmar.
The fact that they have survived this long with most Europe virtually recognizing them as a sovereign state
They *are* a sovereign state, by all rights. They control territory with military force, they tax citizens, they provide services, they buy and sell oil resources, they make and enforce laws, they have a standing army; how do they not meet the definition of a sovereign state or legitimate government? Yeah, they suck, they're brutal, etc., but so is North Korea.
That's odd, I wonder if that's peculiar to Michigan. In the places I've lived (AZ, NJ, VA), that is definitely not the norm.
This doesn't seem like a hard problem; you should just design your DB schema so that every order has a "shipped-to" address field, where the order was shipped to. The order information shouldn't change, so it obviously shouldn't be pointing to information which can also change. Yes, this duplicates data somewhat, but mailing addresses do not consume a lot of space.
Besides, just because a customer has a preferred ship-to address doesn't mean they'll always want every order shipped there. What if the customer is large and has multiple ship-to addresses? What if they want something shipped someplace odd for some odd reason?
Exactly. While the two parties may differ on certain things, on this issue, they are completely united. Voting Democrat isn't going to help stop domestic spying, because they're just as in favor of it as the Republicans, as seen by how it's been handled by both the Obama and Bush administrations.
Do you even know anything about Uber? Cab companies aren't required to have good cars; most of the cabs I've been in have been shitty old Crown Vics, which are horrible cars. Uber won't let you drive for them with a car that's more than a few years old (2008 IIRC). With Uber, I got to ride in almost-new Mercedes, for half the price of a cab.
And 15 mninutes???? With Uber, where I used to live in NJ, I could get a car within a couple of minutes. Calling a cab required a wait time of 30-60 minutes, and that was in a pretty dense area. This was only 20 or so miles from Manhattan.
A fare posted on the door doesn't help me much, since I don't know beforehand how many stop lights we'll stop at and all that. Uber tells me ahead of time how much the fare will probably be for the trip.
I'd like to know what the shippers have to say about these interceptions.
They probably can't say anything because they've been served with National Security letters and aren't allowed to talk about anything under threat of prosecution or worse.
Could they do this? Surely the government would just send them a National Security letter and force them to comply under threat of being disappeared.
Do you really think it's beyond a taxi driver to own a GPS Navigator?
Most cabs I've seen either don't have them at all, or the driver has some 10-year-old POS. And then you have to tell him the address; with Uber, you punch it in on your phone, instead of having to spell out some street name for the driver who barely speaks English.
Do you really think no taxi companies have systems that track their drivers and can notify their clients?
No, they don't. Do they have a smartphone app that tells me this information in real-time, and shows me, on a map, where the driver is and how long it is until he reaches me? No, they don't. I have to call them on the phone, and they give me a horribly inaccurate and vague estimate of how long it'll be until he gets there. And then I have no way of knowing whether it's accurate, or comparing drivers, or easily canceling if this driver is taking too long. With Uber, I can easily see if the driver is too far away and I can cancel and try a different driver.
What makes you think an Uber driver will be so much better at this?
Wow, are you stupid? Really, I want to know. Anyone who has the slightest clue about Uber knows that the app they use has built-in GPS navigation, and that the customer usually enters his destination address into his app, so the driver doesn't even have to ask, the app automatically guides him there.
you can see how long it'll take the driver to get to you
This is not technology that is confined to Uber.
It's not? Please enlighten me then, because I've only seen it with Uber and Lyft (I'm sure their other competitors like Sidecar also have it). You're obviously not going to get that when you call up some local cab company on the phone.
Most dealerships I've seen are not set up for painting cars. You have to have a special shop with paint booths for that, and personnel who are trained and experienced in paint-matching and spraying. A regular dealership mechanic does not know how to do that stuff. I have seen at least one dealership which also operated a body shop on premises, but that was unusual. It was in a smaller town, so I guess that's how they kept business going, by both being a dealership and also being a body shop (not just for the cars they sold).
no need to tell the driver how to get there
In Manhattan, this isn't a problem. The drivers know where everything is (within Manhattan).
Yes, anywhere else I've been, drivers have no idea where anything is so you have to give them turn-by-turn directions, which is rather annoying: why am I paying so much for someone when I have to do half the work? But not in Manhattan. I'm sure London is the same way, only even better since cab drivers in London aren't even allowed to operate if they don't pass a rigorous test on geographical knowledge.
You could. It would be a bit of a project though. The crawlspace just has dirt on the "floor" and is wide-open to the outside air. So you'd need to build some kind of conditioned enclosure, much like the walls of the house, complete with framing, insulation, moisture barrier, etc., and then either give it its own HVAC, or attach it to the house so it's part of the house's conditioned space (maybe a trap door in the floor).
Sure seems like a whole lot of trouble when you could just get a small-form-factor PC, or even one of those enclosures with 4 hot-swap drives, and hide that behind the TV or something. I really wonder if there isn't something the OP isn't telling us.
I don't know about "easily", but I'm pretty sure many modern home HVAC systems have larger circuits than that, probably 50A. However you still have to worry about the total amperage available to the house: if you put in a 100A circuit for the car, and then you have the stove, HVAC, and dryer on at the same time, you'll blow your main breaker. You'd have to get the utility to put in a bigger service feed for the house.
Teslas will still need paint jobs,
**No one** ever gets their car painted at a dealership, unless it's one of those rare dealerships that runs an auto-body business on the side. People go to body shops to get their cars painted.
tire changes
Only morons get tires at dealerships. Everyone else goes to a tire shop like Discount Tire because it's much cheaper.
brake maintenance,
Teslas have standard brakes; any independent repair shop can replace the pads and rotors on them.
suspension maintenance,
No one "maintains" their suspension these days. This isn't 1950 any more. When your Tesla is 15-20 years old and the shocks are worn out, I'm sure an independent shop can fix it.
lightbulbs
You need a mechanic to change a light bulb for you?
Teslas use LEDs BTW. LEDs don't burn out easily.
aftermarket stereo
Have you ever even *seen* a Tesla? You can't put aftermarket stereos in them. Everything's integrated into the touchscreen system.
repair of dents, crash damage, broken windows
Again, have you never heard of a body shop?
Somehow, GM managed to make their upcoming Bolt even goofier looking than the Leaf.
GM has been making goofy-looking cars for decades now. Styling hasn't been one of their strengths for ages. Just look at all the butt-ugly cars they made in the 90s. Or worse, remember the Pontiac Aztek?