That looks like the typical workspace for programmers in NYC. I looked into getting a job there and found out that what you see in that photo is considered perfectly normal there.
Until they have electric cars with a 400 mile range and can recharge to 100% to give me 400 miles again within 30 minutes. that is a gigantic hell no.
The Tesla can already go almost 300 miles and recharge in about an hour at their Supercharger stations. Obviously, the tech to meet your requirements isn't very far away.
The united states would have to invest heavily in light rail that is affordable.
Light rail can't travel between cities. There's a reason it's called "light". It can't travel very fast. You have to use heavy rail for long-distance transport. And we have it already; it's called "Amtrak". No one uses it because it's expensive and slow. Even if you got the cost down, the speed is still so slow that no one wants to bother, as you'll get there almost as fast with a car, but with your car, you don't have to pay $$$ to rent a car at your destination to get around like you do with a train. People only put up with this with planes because air travel is so fast.
Right now amtrack is as much as an airline flight and it takes 3 DAYS to get there because you have to go from detroit to chicago to Washington DC to North Carolina, to Florida.
More rail lines (more direct ones of course) would obviously cut this time down, but it's still never going to be much faster than driving a car. Trains only travel around 75-85mph on regular tracks; all you get with train vs. car is a little more direct path between cities, and avoidance of traffic delays. High-speed rail would be better, but it's still not that fast (Acela isn't even 150mph I don't think), and nowhere near as fast as a plane (400-500mph). So your trans-US trip will still take more than a full day or worse. High-speed rail also has the problem that it never goes that fast between two distant points, because it has to stop at every city in between.
Instead of trains, what we should be building is SkyTran. The energy requirements of this are puny (since the cars are so small and light), and the travel speeds very fast since it goes directly point-to-point.
What prevents regular folks from having them is FAA regs and costs. I would LOVE to have my own Robinson R22 but I can't afford to operate it let alone actually buy one.
Helicopters require a huge amount of training and skill to operate, which costs at least $100k to get all the licenses. R22s are the most difficult to operate and most dangerous, simply because they're so small (the semirigid rotor system doesn't help; the C300's fully-articulated system gives it a much higher weight rating, but the hourly cost is significantly higher even though the engine is the same). You also can't safely operate an R22 in winds gusting over 30 kts, which severely limits its utility.
But the skill thing alone prevents them from being useful as any kind of mass transport, even if the fuel costs weren't a big factor. Most people can't drive cars on roads worth a damn, and constantly have accidents. There's no way that most of the population could handle operating an aircraft (in 3 dimensions rather than 2) safely. Don't forget the atrociously poor maintenance that many cars have. With personal helicopters, they'd be falling out of the air left and right, running into each other, falling on buildings; it'd be a bloodbath.
Horses and buggies never went completely away, did they.
The only people who use either of those are Luddites (Amish), and spoiled rich women who use horses as a hobby.
For something a little more modern, look at steam engines (which replaced horse-driven cross-country transport with the advent of the railroad). No one uses steam engines any more, except for historical railroads (which are basically just museums that travel).
There is no electric motor that can be provide enough power to match a diesel engine in an 18 wheeler truck that is so critical to national trade in every country.
That's funny, electric motors work just fine in railroad locomotives and aircraft carriers.
How about the French? Considering they get almost all their power from nuclear, and also export a lot of power, I'd assume they're the experts in safe nuclear power generation.
You sound like the guy who said there'd never be a worldwide market for more than 5 computers.
1500W per square meter of solar energy hits the Earth on sunny days. There's easily enough power coming from the Sun to supply our current energy needs, the only problem is our collection methods are inefficient and too expensive compared to burning fossil fuels, and our storage methods aren't that great yet. Those problems will disappear with technological advances.
You're stupid. It isn't worth your hard earned cash, so you'll wait and give them your hard earned cash any fucking way?
He's not giving them nearly as much, and, if he just gets them on Netflix or Redbox, he's not giving them much at all, maybe $1 or even less. (Don't forget, if he has several people in the family who watch it together, they only pay that price once, rather than per-person as they would at a theater.) Sure, it's more than nothing, but you can't seriously think that isn't going to affect their finances when more and more people refuse to watch movies in theaters, and just wait for them to come out on video. If a movie hasn't made back its initial investment at the first-run theaters, it's usually considered a "flop"; only low-budget movies are expected to finance themselves entirely by rentals and DVD sales.
No it doesn't. Most cow's milk only lasts a couple weeks or so, even unopened. The exception is that which is "ultrapasteurized"; that stuff can really last a long time. But the cheap stuff in regular grocery stores does not last that long. If you live outside the US, maybe things are different wherever you live and they do a better job of pasteurization there, which might explain why your experience is different.
Being lactose intolerant boesn't mean you can't drink milk, you just have to add lactase drops, or buy milk with it added (I think "Lactaid" is a big brand that caters to the lactose-intolerant crowd).
Credit unions are usually only available to certain people, like employees of big companies or governments, or maybe residents in certain areas (which don't usually include the 'hood).
The smaller banks have been disappearing for quite a while now.
USAA is for military service members only. Some random poor person can't get an account there. They don't even have physical locations; what good is that to some poor person who wants to cash his paycheck?
Does your credit union let anyone join, or do they have selective membership like most?
You've got to be kidding. Poor people don't have employers who do direct deposit, and when they're working 3 jobs, they sure as hell don't have time to do ACH transfers from other accounts, or to do all this research you talk of. You're just another typical right-wing Fox News-watching American who hates poor people.
the choice becomes more and more to live in a hut in the wild, or do business with jerks.
I'm sorry, but avoiding movie theaters is not similar to living in a hut in the wild. There's a lot more social activities to do besides this, and watching a movie in a theater isn't very social anyway since you can't talk to your companion there anyway (without being rude and having people telling you to STFU and maybe getting kicked out if the theater does a decent job with ushering). All in all, going to a theater really kinda sucks as an activity to do with a date when you think about it: you can't talk to him/her, you can't pause it to go to the bathroom or discuss the movie, you might have to deal with rude people who text or talk during the movie, you can't rewind to figure out what someone said, the food is shitty and horrendously overpriced and you don't get much of a choice with it (how many theaters serve sushi or wine?), etc. If you want to watch a movie, you're better off doing it at home. If you want to go somewhere outside the house with a date, there's far better options, such as a walk at your local park, which is free.
Are there still just six companies who are the major info deliverers? Or is it fewer now?
Nothing's stopping me from browsing to bbc.co.uk, rt.com, or aljazeera.com, or countless other blogs and independent news sites. There's more info deliverers now than ever before. Just because most Americans continue to only watch Fox News and CNN doesn't mean those are the only choices, it just further illustrates my point: Americans sit and and bitch and complain, and then continue to patronize the same shitty mega-businesses, even though good alternatives do exist.
If you were talking about ISPs or cellular providers, you'd have a good point: these things are pretty important for modern life (and employment in any kind of decent job or career path). But with movie theaters and news outlets? There only seems to be little choice because people refuse to explore alternatives.
I'm betting that his reason is quite simply that there are no other theaters in his locality.
Quite possibly, but that's no excuse. With some businesses, you really don't have much choice. You can't very well go without electricity or water or sewer service. It's also pretty hard to go far in society now without internet service (which is why this should be regulated as a utility) or a phone. However, this doesn't apply to theaters. You don't need to go to a theater. It's a luxury, nothing more, and an expensive one at that. If the only theater in town might subject you to humiliating interrogations, then you simply don't go there any more.
If you like Italian food and the only Italian restaurant in your town has nasty food with dead flies in it, are you going to keep going there? I wouldn't; I'd stay home and cook my own pasta (and start looking to move elsewhere...). Or I'd go to a different non-Italian restaurant.
Usually, credit unions have some kind of membership rules: you have to be an employee of some big company, or the local government, or whatever entity the CU is affiliated with. Some random poor person can't just walk in off the street and join. The whole idea of a CU, historically, was to provide banking services to a select pool of people who are, on average, financially very stable, so the institution doesn't have to assume the same risk a regular deposit bank does with its customer base.
Can you imagine buying a house with your credit card, and running that balance for decades? That's what it was like -- so be careful what you wish for when pining for the 80s, especially regarding interest rates.
I realize the interest rates were high back then, but house prices also weren't grossly inflated by speculation and a bubble back then the way they are now. Also, the credit card comparison isn't quite fair: yes, the interest rates were high, but mortgage interest has always been simple interest, not compounded as it is with credit cards.
1. They make it so easy to steal identities. A name and a matching social security number is all they ask, extend credit and are willing to eat their financial losses of identity theft. But the people whose identities are stolen have a long and arduous task of cleaning up their credit history. They make so difficult to freeze and lock my credit report to prevent identity theft by huge lobbying effort.
The solution to this should be conceptually simple: a "gang" needs to get together and steal the identities of various rich people, CEOs (especially those in banking), politicians, etc. Give away those identities (name and matching SSN is all that's needed, as you say) on the internet in places where lots of nefarious people will use them.
Why should the banks do anything to change? They have an oligopoly, and if they lose money for any reason, they get a no-strings bailout from the federal government.
The latest news in New York is that governor Cuomo is going to take a homeowners' foreclosure rescue fund and give it to the big banks.
Slashdot Mirror
That looks like the typical workspace for programmers in NYC. I looked into getting a job there and found out that what you see in that photo is considered perfectly normal there.
Until they have electric cars with a 400 mile range and can recharge to 100% to give me 400 miles again within 30 minutes. that is a gigantic hell no.
The Tesla can already go almost 300 miles and recharge in about an hour at their Supercharger stations. Obviously, the tech to meet your requirements isn't very far away.
The united states would have to invest heavily in light rail that is affordable.
Light rail can't travel between cities. There's a reason it's called "light". It can't travel very fast. You have to use heavy rail for long-distance transport. And we have it already; it's called "Amtrak". No one uses it because it's expensive and slow. Even if you got the cost down, the speed is still so slow that no one wants to bother, as you'll get there almost as fast with a car, but with your car, you don't have to pay $$$ to rent a car at your destination to get around like you do with a train. People only put up with this with planes because air travel is so fast.
Right now amtrack is as much as an airline flight and it takes 3 DAYS to get there because you have to go from detroit to chicago to Washington DC to North Carolina, to Florida.
More rail lines (more direct ones of course) would obviously cut this time down, but it's still never going to be much faster than driving a car. Trains only travel around 75-85mph on regular tracks; all you get with train vs. car is a little more direct path between cities, and avoidance of traffic delays. High-speed rail would be better, but it's still not that fast (Acela isn't even 150mph I don't think), and nowhere near as fast as a plane (400-500mph). So your trans-US trip will still take more than a full day or worse. High-speed rail also has the problem that it never goes that fast between two distant points, because it has to stop at every city in between.
Instead of trains, what we should be building is SkyTran. The energy requirements of this are puny (since the cars are so small and light), and the travel speeds very fast since it goes directly point-to-point.
What prevents regular folks from having them is FAA regs and costs. I would LOVE to have my own Robinson R22 but I can't afford to operate it let alone actually buy one.
Helicopters require a huge amount of training and skill to operate, which costs at least $100k to get all the licenses. R22s are the most difficult to operate and most dangerous, simply because they're so small (the semirigid rotor system doesn't help; the C300's fully-articulated system gives it a much higher weight rating, but the hourly cost is significantly higher even though the engine is the same). You also can't safely operate an R22 in winds gusting over 30 kts, which severely limits its utility.
But the skill thing alone prevents them from being useful as any kind of mass transport, even if the fuel costs weren't a big factor. Most people can't drive cars on roads worth a damn, and constantly have accidents. There's no way that most of the population could handle operating an aircraft (in 3 dimensions rather than 2) safely. Don't forget the atrociously poor maintenance that many cars have. With personal helicopters, they'd be falling out of the air left and right, running into each other, falling on buildings; it'd be a bloodbath.
Horses and buggies never went completely away, did they.
The only people who use either of those are Luddites (Amish), and spoiled rich women who use horses as a hobby.
For something a little more modern, look at steam engines (which replaced horse-driven cross-country transport with the advent of the railroad). No one uses steam engines any more, except for historical railroads (which are basically just museums that travel).
There is no electric motor that can be provide enough power to match a diesel engine in an 18 wheeler truck that is so critical to national trade in every country.
That's funny, electric motors work just fine in railroad locomotives and aircraft carriers.
How about the French? Considering they get almost all their power from nuclear, and also export a lot of power, I'd assume they're the experts in safe nuclear power generation.
Well, there are those people who insist we no longer live in "modern society", but instead "postmodern".
And for MANY, MANY reasons, it never could be.
You sound like the guy who said there'd never be a worldwide market for more than 5 computers.
1500W per square meter of solar energy hits the Earth on sunny days. There's easily enough power coming from the Sun to supply our current energy needs, the only problem is our collection methods are inefficient and too expensive compared to burning fossil fuels, and our storage methods aren't that great yet. Those problems will disappear with technological advances.
Are you in the US? That sounds like a great recipe for a lawsuit here.
You're stupid. It isn't worth your hard earned cash, so you'll wait and give them your hard earned cash any fucking way?
He's not giving them nearly as much, and, if he just gets them on Netflix or Redbox, he's not giving them much at all, maybe $1 or even less. (Don't forget, if he has several people in the family who watch it together, they only pay that price once, rather than per-person as they would at a theater.) Sure, it's more than nothing, but you can't seriously think that isn't going to affect their finances when more and more people refuse to watch movies in theaters, and just wait for them to come out on video. If a movie hasn't made back its initial investment at the first-run theaters, it's usually considered a "flop"; only low-budget movies are expected to finance themselves entirely by rentals and DVD sales.
Liberals vary a lot, especially by region. The ones on the West Coast generally don't care much about unions; that's the northeast and Rust Belt ones.
No it doesn't. Most cow's milk only lasts a couple weeks or so, even unopened. The exception is that which is "ultrapasteurized"; that stuff can really last a long time. But the cheap stuff in regular grocery stores does not last that long. If you live outside the US, maybe things are different wherever you live and they do a better job of pasteurization there, which might explain why your experience is different.
Being lactose intolerant boesn't mean you can't drink milk, you just have to add lactase drops, or buy milk with it added (I think "Lactaid" is a big brand that caters to the lactose-intolerant crowd).
You don't have to plan for it. If you normally use almond/rice/soy milk, you'll have it on-hand anyway. It's usually cheaper than regular milk too.
Credit unions are usually only available to certain people, like employees of big companies or governments, or maybe residents in certain areas (which don't usually include the 'hood).
The smaller banks have been disappearing for quite a while now.
When you're sick enough to (feel you) need medication, stay at home.
Don't spread germs all over the workplace / auditorium / public mass transport.
Have fun being unemployed.
If you get rice milk or almond milk, you don't have that problem. It stays fresh for months if you don't open the package.
USAA is for military service members only. Some random poor person can't get an account there. They don't even have physical locations; what good is that to some poor person who wants to cash his paycheck?
Does your credit union let anyone join, or do they have selective membership like most?
You've got to be kidding. Poor people don't have employers who do direct deposit, and when they're working 3 jobs, they sure as hell don't have time to do ACH transfers from other accounts, or to do all this research you talk of. You're just another typical right-wing Fox News-watching American who hates poor people.
the choice becomes more and more to live in a hut in the wild, or do business with jerks.
I'm sorry, but avoiding movie theaters is not similar to living in a hut in the wild. There's a lot more social activities to do besides this, and watching a movie in a theater isn't very social anyway since you can't talk to your companion there anyway (without being rude and having people telling you to STFU and maybe getting kicked out if the theater does a decent job with ushering). All in all, going to a theater really kinda sucks as an activity to do with a date when you think about it: you can't talk to him/her, you can't pause it to go to the bathroom or discuss the movie, you might have to deal with rude people who text or talk during the movie, you can't rewind to figure out what someone said, the food is shitty and horrendously overpriced and you don't get much of a choice with it (how many theaters serve sushi or wine?), etc. If you want to watch a movie, you're better off doing it at home. If you want to go somewhere outside the house with a date, there's far better options, such as a walk at your local park, which is free.
Are there still just six companies who are the major info deliverers? Or is it fewer now?
Nothing's stopping me from browsing to bbc.co.uk, rt.com, or aljazeera.com, or countless other blogs and independent news sites. There's more info deliverers now than ever before. Just because most Americans continue to only watch Fox News and CNN doesn't mean those are the only choices, it just further illustrates my point: Americans sit and and bitch and complain, and then continue to patronize the same shitty mega-businesses, even though good alternatives do exist.
If you were talking about ISPs or cellular providers, you'd have a good point: these things are pretty important for modern life (and employment in any kind of decent job or career path). But with movie theaters and news outlets? There only seems to be little choice because people refuse to explore alternatives.
I'm betting that his reason is quite simply that there are no other theaters in his locality.
Quite possibly, but that's no excuse. With some businesses, you really don't have much choice. You can't very well go without electricity or water or sewer service. It's also pretty hard to go far in society now without internet service (which is why this should be regulated as a utility) or a phone. However, this doesn't apply to theaters. You don't need to go to a theater. It's a luxury, nothing more, and an expensive one at that. If the only theater in town might subject you to humiliating interrogations, then you simply don't go there any more.
If you like Italian food and the only Italian restaurant in your town has nasty food with dead flies in it, are you going to keep going there? I wouldn't; I'd stay home and cook my own pasta (and start looking to move elsewhere...). Or I'd go to a different non-Italian restaurant.
Not a bank. That's a credit union.
Usually, credit unions have some kind of membership rules: you have to be an employee of some big company, or the local government, or whatever entity the CU is affiliated with. Some random poor person can't just walk in off the street and join. The whole idea of a CU, historically, was to provide banking services to a select pool of people who are, on average, financially very stable, so the institution doesn't have to assume the same risk a regular deposit bank does with its customer base.
Can you imagine buying a house with your credit card, and running that balance for decades? That's what it was like -- so be careful what you wish for when pining for the 80s, especially regarding interest rates.
I realize the interest rates were high back then, but house prices also weren't grossly inflated by speculation and a bubble back then the way they are now. Also, the credit card comparison isn't quite fair: yes, the interest rates were high, but mortgage interest has always been simple interest, not compounded as it is with credit cards.
Unless things have changed, most credit unions have membership requirements, such as being an employee of some big company they're affiliated with.
I declined and walked out a few years back when I realized what they were asking of me and asking me to sign
Can you elaborate?
1. They make it so easy to steal identities. A name and a matching social security number is all they ask, extend credit and are willing to eat their financial losses of identity theft. But the people whose identities are stolen have a long and arduous task of cleaning up their credit history. They make so difficult to freeze and lock my credit report to prevent identity theft by huge lobbying effort.
The solution to this should be conceptually simple: a "gang" needs to get together and steal the identities of various rich people, CEOs (especially those in banking), politicians, etc. Give away those identities (name and matching SSN is all that's needed, as you say) on the internet in places where lots of nefarious people will use them.
Why should the banks do anything to change? They have an oligopoly, and if they lose money for any reason, they get a no-strings bailout from the federal government.
The latest news in New York is that governor Cuomo is going to take a homeowners' foreclosure rescue fund and give it to the big banks.