Your mistake is thinking that your dealership, or your experience with them, is universal.
You probably own some type of mass-market car like a Honda or Chevy or something. Buy yourself a Mercedes or BMW, go get the oil changed at your dealership, *then* come back and tell us that it costs less than $100.
Yep, same here. I just notified someone about this law, complete with a Wikipedia link, on a car forum I read. The question comes up frequently: "will I void my car's warranty if I tint my windows" or something like that. A huge number of people think their warranty will be void if they modify their car even the slightest bit.
You're talking about something entirely different: you're talking about average power consumption. The previous poster was talking about battery life. In my experience, he's full of crap because I have phones significantly older than the model he's talking about, still with original batteries, and they still work fine (albeit with somewhat reduced lifespan, as you'd expect from a 3-year-old battery). He's trying to claim that OEM batteries are dying within a year from normal usage, and that's complete garbage. The phones being power hogs really doesn't have anything to do with that.
We don't need primaries with ranked-choice voting. Just put all the candidates on one ballot. There'd probably still need to be some kind of "weed-out" process so there aren't dozens of candidates, but having 2 or 3 from each major party is not too many. So maybe there could still be some kind of "primaries" to do some weed-out of the really weak candidates (basically a popularity contest to show which candidates just aren't getting any votes before trying to spend all the money needed to go to the general election, and also to build momentum), but no obligation for there to be a single nominee, or any nominees at all: any candidate who doesn't drop out and gets enough signatures by November can get on the ballot.
Yeah well you take the "if I keep trying the same thing over and over, maybe it'll come out differently" approach that insane people take. Taxis have proven themselves to be miserable choices, that's why Uber and Lyft have become so popular. If you can't get your head out of your ass and figure that out, then you're beyond hope. You're just like the dinosaurs in the media industry who just can't figure out why people don't want to watch TV with commercials any more.
Oh please, Uber drivers aren't all "hard working"? Taxi drivers are just corrupt players in a pay-to-play system. Fuck 'em.
And I'm sorry, I am NOT going to sit around for 1 hour waiting for some guy with a stinky cab who can't speak English and insist his card reader is "broken" just to support "the little guy". Not when there's a far superior service available, or I have any alternative at all.
I live in the US. If this is the poster child for corruption, then the whole world is fucked.
The taxi regulations don't work. They give us shitty cabs driven by people who don't speak English, drive around in circles, and take an hour to show up when hailed. This is contrary to the whole idea that we should have fewer cars on the road, and be sharing more (i.e. instead of owning your own car, you should use services for transport when possible): because public transit and cabs don't actually work for people, they're forced to buy and maintain their own cars, so we end up with exactly what we were trying to avoid: too many cars, too much pollution, too much of a cost to society.
By contrast, Uber has actually made it so that some people have decided to give up their cars and use Uber exclusively. This is what regulations should have done in the first place, but utterly failed to do. Don't blame the consumers for the failure of the bureaucrats to craft good regulation.
Yep, this sounds like a very good analysis which it seems very few people have figured out, strangely.
AFAICT, Trump supporters are mostly motivated by the immigration issue, and otherwise are a pretty broad group, comprising both evangelicals and other Christians who are basically looking the other way on Trump's obvious lack of religion, as well as others who are more of a libertarian bent socially and don't care about LGBT stuff (i.e., they really don't care which bathroom trans people use, just like Trump doesn't), but support him for his more nationalistic economics and anti-immigration stance.
Hillary backs socially liberal policies (mainly because it's politically expedient for her--the "limousine liberals" support them now so she does too), but economically she's a neocon and a warhawk.
Sanders' main issue is income inequality, so while he also supports socially liberal policies, he also pushes economic policies that are more to the left, which Hillary simply doesn't.
Sometimes I wonder how things would have been different if Sanders had adopted an anti-immigration (not quite like Trump's "build a wall", but ones that sounds not too extremist) position, but kept everything else the same. Would he have gotten a lot more support from Trump voters? I kinda doubt it because that crowd typically also turns up its nose at many socialist policies (but don't suggest messing with their Social Security!!), but you never know.
Yeah, but in the case of Forbes at least, how is that useful?
Ever since Forbes implemented that blocker (which I can't get around on my work computer anyway), I find that it's been a positive effect on my web-browsing experience by preventing me from wasting my time and polluting my brain by reading Forbes "articles".
This was in northern NJ. The cabs there are atrocious. SanFran cabs are also infamous for being horrible, which is the whole reason Uber did so well there and took off. The ones I used in Phoenix sucked too.
The only place I've seen that had pretty decent cabs (if you're white) is Manhattan, NYC, but that's mainly because there's so many of them, and they're used by so many people, that it's usually pretty easy to get one by standing on the corner. However, black people in Manhattan have to use Uber because the cabbies won't pick them up.
As for license pulling for violations, what happens when the cab is being driven by one of the cabbie's unlicensed relatives? That's pretty common too. (I think one of the other comments here mentioned that one.)
As for accessible taxis, there were none of those in NJ. You must be from NYC or something, where they really do have that stuff. You'll never find an accessible cab in a city like Phoenix either.
Yep, that's why I said they'll be a viable alternative as soon as they figure out how to make ones that don't require any power. There's always issues with that: you have to worry about them being charged up when you want to use them, you have to worry about the battery wearing out, and with headphones (I'm assuming these are earbud-type, not the big cans) weight is an issue, and a battery and BT circuitry are going to take up some space (and if you want more than an hour of listening time, you'll need a bigger battery than on your typical BT earphone used for hands-free talking).
You're an idiot. I was making a comparison that legality and regulation aren't necessarily correct, and it's true for taxis too. The taxi regulations do nothing but artificially reduce competition, and I can't imagine how anyone could argue that's a good thing, and it's proven by how poor taxi service is in so many markets.
Yes, I really do have to wait an hour every time I called a cab. I lived that before in one place, when I was temporarily without a car and before I started using Uber. No, it wasn't on high-usage nights, that's just the way it was.
And your stupid regulations don't work for the other things either. The cabs I've been in were just shitty old Crown Vics; they were not "accessible for the disabled". And they were falling apart, so I call bullshit on your "inspections". There's countless stories about exhausted cab drivers, so #4 is bullshit too. And there's countless stories about black people in NYC being unable to hail a cab, so #5 is total bullshit too.
I'm sorry, that's just plain dumb. If I'm sitting at home, I can be doing a lot of things I enjoy, which do not count as "work". When you're away from home, waiting on a call (especially at some employer's building), you're limited in what you can do for enjoyment. With the Uber guy in ID, he can do whatever he wants and normally does at home, and then has the luxury of taking that call if he wants (or he can just blow it off if he's busy). That's a kind of freedom you don't get with a regular job. And getting hailed 2-3x per hour is an entirely different scenario, because with that kind of frequency, you can't dedicate any time to doing anything more intense than maybe a phone game app because your next call will come in a few minutes. With the Idaho guy, he might not get a call all night because it's such a low-traffic area.
The thing you're missing here is that Uber actually has competition, and drivers aren't prevented from working for the competition at the same exact time they're working for Uber. Lots of Uber drivers also drive for Lyft; they keep two phones in the car, and respond to calls on one or the other service as they come in. (Obviously, they can't actually be driving customers for both services at the same time.)
The competition factor will help prevent the scenario you're predicting. Even if Uber and Lyft decide to collude, in that event there really isn't much preventing someone else from starting up an identical service. It just isn't that hard these days to write an app.
I don't see the problem. $13/hour is much better than what many, many other people earn at other jobs. The minimum wage is only $7.50, and there's plenty of people who earn somewhere between $7.50 and $10/hour in this country.
Maybe you should complain first about the plight of all those people who really are below the poverty line, before worrying about Uber drivers who are above it.
What's more, countless Uber drivers claim that they make more money with Uber than they ever did driving for taxi companies. So what's the problem? You want them to go back to being even poorer than they are now?
Regulations are useless if they make the whole industry useless to customers. Waiting an hour for a cab to arrive (if it comes at all) makes the service completely unusable.
Now you're getting into semantics. In industry, a computerized machine that folds clothes is indeed an "industrial robot". The machine that assembled the circuit boards in your computer and cellphone is commonly called the same. But you're correct, these kinds of machines are special-purpose.
But I disagree about a general purpose robot: the humanoid form is probably the most optimal for several reasons: 1) There's other intelligent lifeforms on this planet, but none of them built any technology. We did, using this form. 2) Our form has arms, with hands, with opposable thumbs (something many other lifeforms like dolphins do not). This allows us to manipulate our environment. Many robotic systems we've built have "arms" that are similar to this somehow. Any general-purpose robot will need to have arms with manipulator hands. 3) Out artificial environment (the buildings we've built, etc.) are all optimized for our form, so any general-purpose robots we build to operate in these human-oriented environments need to also have a roughly human shape and form, so they can fit through the same hallways, use the same doors, etc.
You're wrong, and there's no hyperbole.
Your mistake is thinking that your dealership, or your experience with them, is universal.
You probably own some type of mass-market car like a Honda or Chevy or something. Buy yourself a Mercedes or BMW, go get the oil changed at your dealership, *then* come back and tell us that it costs less than $100.
Yep, same here. I just notified someone about this law, complete with a Wikipedia link, on a car forum I read. The question comes up frequently: "will I void my car's warranty if I tint my windows" or something like that. A huge number of people think their warranty will be void if they modify their car even the slightest bit.
You're talking about something entirely different: you're talking about average power consumption. The previous poster was talking about battery life. In my experience, he's full of crap because I have phones significantly older than the model he's talking about, still with original batteries, and they still work fine (albeit with somewhat reduced lifespan, as you'd expect from a 3-year-old battery). He's trying to claim that OEM batteries are dying within a year from normal usage, and that's complete garbage. The phones being power hogs really doesn't have anything to do with that.
We don't need primaries with ranked-choice voting. Just put all the candidates on one ballot. There'd probably still need to be some kind of "weed-out" process so there aren't dozens of candidates, but having 2 or 3 from each major party is not too many. So maybe there could still be some kind of "primaries" to do some weed-out of the really weak candidates (basically a popularity contest to show which candidates just aren't getting any votes before trying to spend all the money needed to go to the general election, and also to build momentum), but no obligation for there to be a single nominee, or any nominees at all: any candidate who doesn't drop out and gets enough signatures by November can get on the ballot.
Good point, I forgot that.
Such a great name for a ship too.
Yeah well you take the "if I keep trying the same thing over and over, maybe it'll come out differently" approach that insane people take. Taxis have proven themselves to be miserable choices, that's why Uber and Lyft have become so popular. If you can't get your head out of your ass and figure that out, then you're beyond hope. You're just like the dinosaurs in the media industry who just can't figure out why people don't want to watch TV with commercials any more.
And finally, if the taxi drivers don't like the regulation, then THEY can lobby to fix it. They're the ones paying off the politicians anyway.
Oh please, Uber drivers aren't all "hard working"? Taxi drivers are just corrupt players in a pay-to-play system. Fuck 'em.
And I'm sorry, I am NOT going to sit around for 1 hour waiting for some guy with a stinky cab who can't speak English and insist his card reader is "broken" just to support "the little guy". Not when there's a far superior service available, or I have any alternative at all.
I live in the US. If this is the poster child for corruption, then the whole world is fucked.
The taxi regulations don't work. They give us shitty cabs driven by people who don't speak English, drive around in circles, and take an hour to show up when hailed. This is contrary to the whole idea that we should have fewer cars on the road, and be sharing more (i.e. instead of owning your own car, you should use services for transport when possible): because public transit and cabs don't actually work for people, they're forced to buy and maintain their own cars, so we end up with exactly what we were trying to avoid: too many cars, too much pollution, too much of a cost to society.
By contrast, Uber has actually made it so that some people have decided to give up their cars and use Uber exclusively. This is what regulations should have done in the first place, but utterly failed to do. Don't blame the consumers for the failure of the bureaucrats to craft good regulation.
Yep, this sounds like a very good analysis which it seems very few people have figured out, strangely.
AFAICT, Trump supporters are mostly motivated by the immigration issue, and otherwise are a pretty broad group, comprising both evangelicals and other Christians who are basically looking the other way on Trump's obvious lack of religion, as well as others who are more of a libertarian bent socially and don't care about LGBT stuff (i.e., they really don't care which bathroom trans people use, just like Trump doesn't), but support him for his more nationalistic economics and anti-immigration stance.
Hillary backs socially liberal policies (mainly because it's politically expedient for her--the "limousine liberals" support them now so she does too), but economically she's a neocon and a warhawk.
Sanders' main issue is income inequality, so while he also supports socially liberal policies, he also pushes economic policies that are more to the left, which Hillary simply doesn't.
Sometimes I wonder how things would have been different if Sanders had adopted an anti-immigration (not quite like Trump's "build a wall", but ones that sounds not too extremist) position, but kept everything else the same. Would he have gotten a lot more support from Trump voters? I kinda doubt it because that crowd typically also turns up its nose at many socialist policies (but don't suggest messing with their Social Security!!), but you never know.
The southerners might not want them back.
Yeah, but in the case of Forbes at least, how is that useful?
Ever since Forbes implemented that blocker (which I can't get around on my work computer anyway), I find that it's been a positive effect on my web-browsing experience by preventing me from wasting my time and polluting my brain by reading Forbes "articles".
This was in northern NJ. The cabs there are atrocious. SanFran cabs are also infamous for being horrible, which is the whole reason Uber did so well there and took off. The ones I used in Phoenix sucked too.
The only place I've seen that had pretty decent cabs (if you're white) is Manhattan, NYC, but that's mainly because there's so many of them, and they're used by so many people, that it's usually pretty easy to get one by standing on the corner. However, black people in Manhattan have to use Uber because the cabbies won't pick them up.
As for license pulling for violations, what happens when the cab is being driven by one of the cabbie's unlicensed relatives? That's pretty common too. (I think one of the other comments here mentioned that one.)
As for accessible taxis, there were none of those in NJ. You must be from NYC or something, where they really do have that stuff. You'll never find an accessible cab in a city like Phoenix either.
Yep, that's why I said they'll be a viable alternative as soon as they figure out how to make ones that don't require any power. There's always issues with that: you have to worry about them being charged up when you want to use them, you have to worry about the battery wearing out, and with headphones (I'm assuming these are earbud-type, not the big cans) weight is an issue, and a battery and BT circuitry are going to take up some space (and if you want more than an hour of listening time, you'll need a bigger battery than on your typical BT earphone used for hands-free talking).
You're an idiot. I was making a comparison that legality and regulation aren't necessarily correct, and it's true for taxis too. The taxi regulations do nothing but artificially reduce competition, and I can't imagine how anyone could argue that's a good thing, and it's proven by how poor taxi service is in so many markets.
You're full of shit.
Yes, I really do have to wait an hour every time I called a cab. I lived that before in one place, when I was temporarily without a car and before I started using Uber. No, it wasn't on high-usage nights, that's just the way it was.
And your stupid regulations don't work for the other things either. The cabs I've been in were just shitty old Crown Vics; they were not "accessible for the disabled". And they were falling apart, so I call bullshit on your "inspections". There's countless stories about exhausted cab drivers, so #4 is bullshit too. And there's countless stories about black people in NYC being unable to hail a cab, so #5 is total bullshit too.
Because the legality of taxis and the corruption in that industry really doesn't affect my daily life much?? WTF?
I'm sorry, that's just plain dumb. If I'm sitting at home, I can be doing a lot of things I enjoy, which do not count as "work". When you're away from home, waiting on a call (especially at some employer's building), you're limited in what you can do for enjoyment. With the Uber guy in ID, he can do whatever he wants and normally does at home, and then has the luxury of taking that call if he wants (or he can just blow it off if he's busy). That's a kind of freedom you don't get with a regular job. And getting hailed 2-3x per hour is an entirely different scenario, because with that kind of frequency, you can't dedicate any time to doing anything more intense than maybe a phone game app because your next call will come in a few minutes. With the Idaho guy, he might not get a call all night because it's such a low-traffic area.
The thing you're missing here is that Uber actually has competition, and drivers aren't prevented from working for the competition at the same exact time they're working for Uber. Lots of Uber drivers also drive for Lyft; they keep two phones in the car, and respond to calls on one or the other service as they come in. (Obviously, they can't actually be driving customers for both services at the same time.)
The competition factor will help prevent the scenario you're predicting. Even if Uber and Lyft decide to collude, in that event there really isn't much preventing someone else from starting up an identical service. It just isn't that hard these days to write an app.
Detroit is actually a nice place, in the suburbs. It's the city itself that's a disaster.
The concentration camps were legal (and thus brought on by the consent of the people in theory).
I don't see the problem. $13/hour is much better than what many, many other people earn at other jobs. The minimum wage is only $7.50, and there's plenty of people who earn somewhere between $7.50 and $10/hour in this country.
Maybe you should complain first about the plight of all those people who really are below the poverty line, before worrying about Uber drivers who are above it.
What's more, countless Uber drivers claim that they make more money with Uber than they ever did driving for taxi companies. So what's the problem? You want them to go back to being even poorer than they are now?
Regulations are useless if they make the whole industry useless to customers. Waiting an hour for a cab to arrive (if it comes at all) makes the service completely unusable.
Reading posts like this makes me glad I'm not married any more. Such a money drain.
Now you're getting into semantics. In industry, a computerized machine that folds clothes is indeed an "industrial robot". The machine that assembled the circuit boards in your computer and cellphone is commonly called the same. But you're correct, these kinds of machines are special-purpose.
But I disagree about a general purpose robot: the humanoid form is probably the most optimal for several reasons:
1) There's other intelligent lifeforms on this planet, but none of them built any technology. We did, using this form.
2) Our form has arms, with hands, with opposable thumbs (something many other lifeforms like dolphins do not). This allows us to manipulate our environment. Many robotic systems we've built have "arms" that are similar to this somehow. Any general-purpose robot will need to have arms with manipulator hands.
3) Out artificial environment (the buildings we've built, etc.) are all optimized for our form, so any general-purpose robots we build to operate in these human-oriented environments need to also have a roughly human shape and form, so they can fit through the same hallways, use the same doors, etc.