I've got to wonder, if visitation is so expensive, why allow visits at all, unless required by law? And if they are required by law, how the f*ck are they getting away with replacing them with video-phone calls?
The overwhelming problem is that the automobile market is dominated by used cars - and batteries wear out. Even if the price falls to $100/kWh, you're talking $8500 to replace the batteries on a $1000 used car.
That is true, but I was thinking of something more like "I want Netflix and HBO this month, but not Hulu or CBS", And be able to change that at any time by clicking a few checkboxes and agreeing to the new monthly bill.
I could see the various providers doing cross-licensing or just account-management though, so you could have an account with your "always going to want this one" streaming service, and they handle managing all your "secondary" streaming services, as well as aggregating the various video libraries into a single unified browser, watch-list, etc.
It would provide a nice value-added feature to help discourage you from making their service one of the ones you add or drop on a a whim.
Indeed - and that's the rationale often used to tie UBI to eliminating the minimum wage. If nobody *needs* a job, then the power imbalance between low-wage employers and employees is greatly reduced, and artificial market distortions are unnecessary (or at least less so). Few people are going to be willing to work long hours at an abusive, unpleasant job for $4/hour if they aren't depending on it for survival, but they might be willing to work shorter hours at something that's enjoyable or contributes to their community.
Yes, though it's worth mentioning that none of the things on your first list are particularly relevant to the poor.
Again, the point is not that there's an inherent problem with voter ID laws. The problem is that the motive behind voter ID laws is almost always to disenfranchise citizens likely to vote for the opposition.
So long as the real motive behind voter ID laws is to disenfranchize voters, it doesn't matter how many easy solutions there are to avoid it - the laws will be crafted to make sure it happens.
No, I'm not implying anything - I'm stating outright that the market solutions are not meeting my desires as a responsible citizen who thinks violent civil war is something that should be a last resort to overthrow tyrants, rather than something to be actively fostered to settle policy disagreements between opposing sides who have been made into extremists by for-profit echo chambers.
"Market solutions" are only applicable to things that only affect customers. When the consequences of your purchasing decisions impact everyone else as well, then it becomes a government/regulatory issue.
Actually, no it's not. Cuban doctors are recognized around the world as some of the best, and are in high demand especially in emergency relief situations where available resources are scarce.
People aren't fleeing Cuba because of the quality of the health care, they're fleeing because of the political climate and lack of economic mobility. High quality affordable health care is one of the few things Cuba really excels at.
The problem is that the people pushing for voter ID laws are almost always *also* pushing to make those IDs harder for the poor and opposing party members to get.
Make it so that anyone can easily get the necessary ID, and most of the arguments against it go away - but so does the motive for most of the politicians currently pushing for Voter ID laws.
A nice theory, however, it's not applicable to any media service that auto-screens content to improve your engagement by primarily showing you things you already agree with. That doesn't promote debate, it promotes extremism.
That's the difference between social media and real life conversations - real life conversations give you a semi-representative sample of what people believe, and you can have those productive debates (with the risk of physical violence encouraging most people to remain reasonably civil). Social media instead sorts people into groups that say things you "like", producing an echo-chamber to reinforce your pre-existing biases.
Of course people sort themselves in real life too, but if you go to the local skinhead bar, you're fully aware that you're going to a self-sorted establishment to hang out with a like-minded minority. You wouldn't expect the sort of disagreement you'd get voicing the same opinions in a sports bar. Social media though spans such a large population that it can easily provide the illusion that you're actually in the majority.
I would much rather see such auto-grouping abandoned than banning particular opinions - but that would severely impact profits, so I doubt it would happen.
You're right - nobody is cutting 128 cubic feet of wood, nor several strands of twisted or woven fiber, nor an emotional bond.
Where electronics are concerned, the distinction between cord and cable is usually that cords are handled relatively frequently (phone cord, electrical cord, etc), while cables are typically mounted within walls or otherwise out of reach such as high-tension power cables.
At least not user-facing. I could easily see a market forming for a bundling company that lets you just tick all the check boxes for the streaming services you want and sends you a single monthly bill. The Roku folks are probably well-positioned for such a thing - let them handle the nuisance for you, you just pick what you want and pay a single bill.
>paying much more for each piece of content than they previously were,
Are you counting content watched, or content available? It doesn't matter if I get 600 channels for $60, if I only actually watch 6 then I'm paying $10 per channel, everything else is just bundled noise. And a $10 streaming service is likely to have a lot more content available than one cable channel.
And even that misrepresents it. The central questions are how much are you paying per hour of entertainment watched, and how satisfied are you with the quality of entertainment? And as a general rule I'm willing to bet streaming wins hands-down on both counts.
Perhaps. I went many years without watching any though - better things to do with my time. Eventually commercial-free, on-demand streaming with far more interesting programming than available on TV lured me back into the video-entertainment fold, though I still average far less screen-time than before I gave up TV.
True, at least assuming we can keep the cost of electricity down as demand skyrockets. But that only matters to people who can afford the up-front cost of an EV. And if we're talking the extreme second-hand market, which dominates the vehicle market for the lower classes, that means an EV with a viable range has to be available for a few thousand dollars. If batteries didn't wear out, or could be replaced cheaply, that wouldn't be an issue. That's not the current reality though.
And a UBI does nothing to change that. Only difference is that it means the poor can work to get ahead, instead of just to survive, and don't have to worry about having their meager savings being completely wiped out by the interval between when they lose their job and when income assistance and kicks in.
Long-term cost savings don't matter to someone who can't afford the up-front price. We can't get gas cars off the street until the poor have a viable alternative. And 15+ year old second hand EVs are almost certainly going to need batteries replaced to be a viable option.
Two problems with that - battery production can't begin to supply all the batteries needed to let everyone buy EV vehicles instead of gas. Doesn't matter what the price is if you can't meet market demand - and the expected result is that the price will remain high.
And then there's the second-hand market. A large percentage of the population can't afford more than $1000 or so for a car. Add in the cost of replacing an old worn-out high-capacity battery... it's going to be really hard getting anywhere near that.
We're not going to get gasoline cars off the streets until the price of a second-hand EV or hybrid with years of life still in it falls below a few thousand dollars. Since batteries are the limiting factor with that, that means very small batteries until such time as battery production increases at least a thousandfold, and prices fall substantially. With current battery technology, I don't think that can happen.
And why would you expect otherwise? The welfare cliff means that they can sit on their ass and get free health care and a nice range of income supplements or they can go out, bust their ass 40-60 hours per week, and be substantially worse off. What sort of sane person would take that deal?
> someone WILL add a petrol-powered generator of some sort to an all-electric You just described a series hybrid, which is my favorite class of hybrids as well - all the benefits of all-electric for limited-range day-to-day driving, without the high battery-driven price tag, and along with the range and refueling convenience of a gas vehicle for longer trips. And none of the terrible efficiency of the variable-power petrol engines used in normal or parallel-hybrid vehicles (such as Toyota's).
I disagree. Batteries are a huge fraction of the cost of an electric vehicle, and will remain so for the foreseeable future, making them far too expensive for most people to consider. But, reduce the all-electric range from 300 miles to 30, and you can still handle 90% of most people's usage, while reducing the battery cost by 90%. Add in a small high-efficiency 30kW generator (about twice the highway cruising power consumption by an EV), and you eliminate range anxiety, charging inconvenience, etc. That makes EVs practical and affordable for far more people, while potentially reducing greenhouse gas emissions anywhere that coal provides a large fraction of grid power.
That said, that's not how Toyota's hybrid system works,as it still relies on a horribly inefficient variable-power ICE mechanically coupled to the road for the much of its acceleration, which seems to me to largely defeat the point. Still, many of their patents may be applicable to more impressive systems.
Well, we are talking about the Netherlands rather than America... but even in the old USA I really don't think so. Seriously - any middle class person who can arrange to work part time could work only a few hours a week for a $1000/month, but how many people do you see actually trying to do that? Not that many people live below the poverty level by choice, it's really not a very pleasant place to be.
How do you figure? Getting a trickle of free money doesn't remove your incentive to achieve. Would you really just stop working if you started getting a $1000 UBI check every month?
Of course not, not unless you're a complete slacker with low standards. So long as contributing to society lets you improve your standard of living substantially, most people will do so. What removes the incentive to achieve is a system where working harder either has no effect, or actually causes a reduction in your standard of living - the current so-called "welfare cliff" that is faced by virtually anyone trying to get out of poverty in a wealthy nation.
I agree. Nobody should seriously talk about saving lives or preventing death. The most that you can ever hope to accomplish is to delay death a little longer.
The only truly meaningful things to consider are the expected change in life expectancy, and in quality of life.
Given how much of the world's population lives in poverty, and how well both "low consumption of fruit" and "low consumption of grains" correlate with "low consumption of food", I have to wonder if the real problem their study is "revealing" is that malnutrition is bad for you. I see no mention of adjusting for total calorie consumption.
You know what your body sees with fat? More difficult to digest sugar. Fat is a sugar-storage molecule that gets disassembled into the constituent amino acid and sugars during digestion. The process just takes longer and consumes more energy than breaking down starches. Fiber serves a similar role with sugar - it acts as a buffer, absorbing sugars as they're released, and then releasing them more gradually as it passes through your intestines.
Pretty much all of the animal diet is broken down into its constituent components before being used or stored: fiber (mostly undigested, but important to the process as both bulk and buffer), water, sugar, various amino acids (protein), and trace chemicals. The source of those components is probably largely irrelevant so long as the ratios remain roughly the same.
Your body doesn't care whether the protein in your diet comes from meat, or a mix of plants like rice and beans that provide the same selection of amino acids.
And it doesn't really care whether the sugar in your diet comes from starches or fat - what it does care about is how much sugar gets dumped into your bloodstream at once - so a diet rich in fast-digesting starch or simple sugars should probably also be high in fiber and biased towards many small meals and snacks, rather than a few large ones.
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I've got to wonder, if visitation is so expensive, why allow visits at all, unless required by law? And if they are required by law, how the f*ck are they getting away with replacing them with video-phone calls?
The overwhelming problem is that the automobile market is dominated by used cars - and batteries wear out. Even if the price falls to $100/kWh, you're talking $8500 to replace the batteries on a $1000 used car.
That is true, but I was thinking of something more like "I want Netflix and HBO this month, but not Hulu or CBS", And be able to change that at any time by clicking a few checkboxes and agreeing to the new monthly bill.
I could see the various providers doing cross-licensing or just account-management though, so you could have an account with your "always going to want this one" streaming service, and they handle managing all your "secondary" streaming services, as well as aggregating the various video libraries into a single unified browser, watch-list, etc.
It would provide a nice value-added feature to help discourage you from making their service one of the ones you add or drop on a a whim.
Indeed - and that's the rationale often used to tie UBI to eliminating the minimum wage. If nobody *needs* a job, then the power imbalance between low-wage employers and employees is greatly reduced, and artificial market distortions are unnecessary (or at least less so). Few people are going to be willing to work long hours at an abusive, unpleasant job for $4/hour if they aren't depending on it for survival, but they might be willing to work shorter hours at something that's enjoyable or contributes to their community.
Yes, though it's worth mentioning that none of the things on your first list are particularly relevant to the poor.
Again, the point is not that there's an inherent problem with voter ID laws. The problem is that the motive behind voter ID laws is almost always to disenfranchise citizens likely to vote for the opposition.
So long as the real motive behind voter ID laws is to disenfranchize voters, it doesn't matter how many easy solutions there are to avoid it - the laws will be crafted to make sure it happens.
No, I'm not implying anything - I'm stating outright that the market solutions are not meeting my desires as a responsible citizen who thinks violent civil war is something that should be a last resort to overthrow tyrants, rather than something to be actively fostered to settle policy disagreements between opposing sides who have been made into extremists by for-profit echo chambers.
"Market solutions" are only applicable to things that only affect customers. When the consequences of your purchasing decisions impact everyone else as well, then it becomes a government/regulatory issue.
Actually, no it's not. Cuban doctors are recognized around the world as some of the best, and are in high demand especially in emergency relief situations where available resources are scarce.
People aren't fleeing Cuba because of the quality of the health care, they're fleeing because of the political climate and lack of economic mobility. High quality affordable health care is one of the few things Cuba really excels at.
Absolutely.
The problem is that the people pushing for voter ID laws are almost always *also* pushing to make those IDs harder for the poor and opposing party members to get.
Make it so that anyone can easily get the necessary ID, and most of the arguments against it go away - but so does the motive for most of the politicians currently pushing for Voter ID laws.
A nice theory, however, it's not applicable to any media service that auto-screens content to improve your engagement by primarily showing you things you already agree with. That doesn't promote debate, it promotes extremism.
That's the difference between social media and real life conversations - real life conversations give you a semi-representative sample of what people believe, and you can have those productive debates (with the risk of physical violence encouraging most people to remain reasonably civil). Social media instead sorts people into groups that say things you "like", producing an echo-chamber to reinforce your pre-existing biases.
Of course people sort themselves in real life too, but if you go to the local skinhead bar, you're fully aware that you're going to a self-sorted establishment to hang out with a like-minded minority. You wouldn't expect the sort of disagreement you'd get voicing the same opinions in a sports bar. Social media though spans such a large population that it can easily provide the illusion that you're actually in the majority.
I would much rather see such auto-grouping abandoned than banning particular opinions - but that would severely impact profits, so I doubt it would happen.
>it's not really cord cutting either
You're right - nobody is cutting 128 cubic feet of wood, nor several strands of twisted or woven fiber, nor an emotional bond.
Where electronics are concerned, the distinction between cord and cable is usually that cords are handled relatively frequently (phone cord, electrical cord, etc), while cables are typically mounted within walls or otherwise out of reach such as high-tension power cables.
>I don't see this fragmentation is going to last.
At least not user-facing. I could easily see a market forming for a bundling company that lets you just tick all the check boxes for the streaming services you want and sends you a single monthly bill. The Roku folks are probably well-positioned for such a thing - let them handle the nuisance for you, you just pick what you want and pay a single bill.
>paying much more for each piece of content than they previously were,
Are you counting content watched, or content available? It doesn't matter if I get 600 channels for $60, if I only actually watch 6 then I'm paying $10 per channel, everything else is just bundled noise. And a $10 streaming service is likely to have a lot more content available than one cable channel.
And even that misrepresents it. The central questions are how much are you paying per hour of entertainment watched, and how satisfied are you with the quality of entertainment? And as a general rule I'm willing to bet streaming wins hands-down on both counts.
Perhaps. I went many years without watching any though - better things to do with my time. Eventually commercial-free, on-demand streaming with far more interesting programming than available on TV lured me back into the video-entertainment fold, though I still average far less screen-time than before I gave up TV.
True, at least assuming we can keep the cost of electricity down as demand skyrockets. But that only matters to people who can afford the up-front cost of an EV. And if we're talking the extreme second-hand market, which dominates the vehicle market for the lower classes, that means an EV with a viable range has to be available for a few thousand dollars. If batteries didn't wear out, or could be replaced cheaply, that wouldn't be an issue. That's not the current reality though.
And a UBI does nothing to change that. Only difference is that it means the poor can work to get ahead, instead of just to survive, and don't have to worry about having their meager savings being completely wiped out by the interval between when they lose their job and when income assistance and kicks in.
Long-term cost savings don't matter to someone who can't afford the up-front price. We can't get gas cars off the street until the poor have a viable alternative. And 15+ year old second hand EVs are almost certainly going to need batteries replaced to be a viable option.
Two problems with that - battery production can't begin to supply all the batteries needed to let everyone buy EV vehicles instead of gas. Doesn't matter what the price is if you can't meet market demand - and the expected result is that the price will remain high.
And then there's the second-hand market. A large percentage of the population can't afford more than $1000 or so for a car. Add in the cost of replacing an old worn-out high-capacity battery... it's going to be really hard getting anywhere near that.
We're not going to get gasoline cars off the streets until the price of a second-hand EV or hybrid with years of life still in it falls below a few thousand dollars. Since batteries are the limiting factor with that, that means very small batteries until such time as battery production increases at least a thousandfold, and prices fall substantially. With current battery technology, I don't think that can happen.
And why would you expect otherwise? The welfare cliff means that they can sit on their ass and get free health care and a nice range of income supplements or they can go out, bust their ass 40-60 hours per week, and be substantially worse off. What sort of sane person would take that deal?
> someone WILL add a petrol-powered generator of some sort to an all-electric
You just described a series hybrid, which is my favorite class of hybrids as well - all the benefits of all-electric for limited-range day-to-day driving, without the high battery-driven price tag, and along with the range and refueling convenience of a gas vehicle for longer trips. And none of the terrible efficiency of the variable-power petrol engines used in normal or parallel-hybrid vehicles (such as Toyota's).
I disagree. Batteries are a huge fraction of the cost of an electric vehicle, and will remain so for the foreseeable future, making them far too expensive for most people to consider. But, reduce the all-electric range from 300 miles to 30, and you can still handle 90% of most people's usage, while reducing the battery cost by 90%. Add in a small high-efficiency 30kW generator (about twice the highway cruising power consumption by an EV), and you eliminate range anxiety, charging inconvenience, etc. That makes EVs practical and affordable for far more people, while potentially reducing greenhouse gas emissions anywhere that coal provides a large fraction of grid power.
That said, that's not how Toyota's hybrid system works,as it still relies on a horribly inefficient variable-power ICE mechanically coupled to the road for the much of its acceleration, which seems to me to largely defeat the point. Still, many of their patents may be applicable to more impressive systems.
Well, we are talking about the Netherlands rather than America... but even in the old USA I really don't think so. Seriously - any middle class person who can arrange to work part time could work only a few hours a week for a $1000/month, but how many people do you see actually trying to do that? Not that many people live below the poverty level by choice, it's really not a very pleasant place to be.
How do you figure? Getting a trickle of free money doesn't remove your incentive to achieve. Would you really just stop working if you started getting a $1000 UBI check every month?
Of course not, not unless you're a complete slacker with low standards. So long as contributing to society lets you improve your standard of living substantially, most people will do so. What removes the incentive to achieve is a system where working harder either has no effect, or actually causes a reduction in your standard of living - the current so-called "welfare cliff" that is faced by virtually anyone trying to get out of poverty in a wealthy nation.
I agree. Nobody should seriously talk about saving lives or preventing death. The most that you can ever hope to accomplish is to delay death a little longer.
The only truly meaningful things to consider are the expected change in life expectancy, and in quality of life.
Given how much of the world's population lives in poverty, and how well both "low consumption of fruit" and "low consumption of grains" correlate with "low consumption of food", I have to wonder if the real problem their study is "revealing" is that malnutrition is bad for you. I see no mention of adjusting for total calorie consumption.
You know what your body sees with fat? More difficult to digest sugar. Fat is a sugar-storage molecule that gets disassembled into the constituent amino acid and sugars during digestion. The process just takes longer and consumes more energy than breaking down starches. Fiber serves a similar role with sugar - it acts as a buffer, absorbing sugars as they're released, and then releasing them more gradually as it passes through your intestines.
Pretty much all of the animal diet is broken down into its constituent components before being used or stored: fiber (mostly undigested, but important to the process as both bulk and buffer), water, sugar, various amino acids (protein), and trace chemicals. The source of those components is probably largely irrelevant so long as the ratios remain roughly the same.
Your body doesn't care whether the protein in your diet comes from meat, or a mix of plants like rice and beans that provide the same selection of amino acids.
And it doesn't really care whether the sugar in your diet comes from starches or fat - what it does care about is how much sugar gets dumped into your bloodstream at once - so a diet rich in fast-digesting starch or simple sugars should probably also be high in fiber and biased towards many small meals and snacks, rather than a few large ones.