"That's not entirely true. It would probably be cost prohibitive but it should be possible to create a system that routes the exhaust to a compression chamber and stores the co2 as compressed gas creating a system that has zero emissions"
Not just cost prohibitive, but you'll use _at least_ 50% more fuel.
This is exactly what "carbon sequestration" schemes on power stations are about and exactly why they'll fail.
" just replace the control system with one that doesn't care about emissions"
Carmakers have been taking proactive steps for a while to counter that kind of thing (such as detecting fake oxygen sensor emulators, etc)
In places like London and Paris which are struggling with very high pollution levels I can see the authoriities using automated identification systems to track down and deal with this kind of problem. A badly tuned car (or one with emissions controls removed) may not be a problem in rural or suburban settings but in a conurbation there are enough of them to make for major issues.
All drivers speed up/slow down by about 5mph over a 2 minute cycle on steady roads. I notice it when I set cruise control at the prevailing speed and then just observe.
Some are worse than others. They're usually oscillating around a target speed and treating the gas pedal as a binary object.
As a passenger in a work car, I once demanded a cow-orker stop and either let me out, or let me drive because of that behaviour. It was about 10 minutes after telling him to pick a speed and stay at it.
"Conventional taxis don't have to go out of business - that's a strawman/misnomer."
Back in the 1950s, the town I grew up in (75k people) had 2 dozen taxi companies all competing heavily.
They ALL went out of business and were (eventually) replaced by a single "cooperative" taxi company in the late 1950s - which was granted a legal monopoly simply so that the town would continue to have a taxi service. Unsurprisingly, taxi rates rose - but they continued to rise every year. On top of that drivers who hated the co-op (or each other) still had to drive for the company (but they did have more-or-less guaranteed employment)
In the early 1990s that monopoly was abolished. 4 new companies sprang up overnight as drivers forked off from the co-op, taxi rates halved. By 2005 none of those 4 companies existed, but there was still more than one outfit in town and rates stayed relatively low.
Uber (and lyft) is a disruptive influence in the market, but neither is nearly as disruptive as breaking a supply monopoly.
In the UK the issue is Hackney cabs (taxis you can hail on the street, usually black cabs) vs private care hire (must be prebooked, aka minicabs).
Hackney cab drivers tend to be self-employed but the rates are regulated, there are substantial barriers to market entry and drivers who attempted to adopt new technology (such as booking apps) were abused and sometimes physically attacked by other hackney drivers who wanted to keep the status quo.
In the UK, Uber is just another minicab service (drivers must be appropriately licensed and insured), but that hasn't stopped black cab drivers embarking on highly disruptive demonstrations (such as blocking major arterial roads with their cabs en masse) in order to protest it. The effect of those actions is best summarised as "Streisand effect" - and many people who're already irritated at cabbies because significant numbers of them ignore their legal obligations (cabbies _must_ accept a fare within 12 miles and allow animals in the vehicle, etc) started making a point of using Uber because the traffic disruptions severely pissed them off.
I can remember when Linux distros went SysV over BSDinit.
I resisted it for _years_ and the arguments against it were quite similar to those against systemd.
Having sat down and analysed it, I realised that SysV, whilst scary-looking was much better than BSDinit because you didn't end up with big hairy rc.* files.
If you approach systemd as sysV "improved" then it's a bit easier to deal with. That said: the author's history and attitude to bug reports would make me _strongly_ sympathetic to forking the thing.
> Device Driver Development Volunteers (that's a BIG, BIG, BIG, BIG item)
The BSD efforts were essentially closed shops and the BSD license allows taking from the commons and privatising the result.
Linux was _much_ more collaborative and open with one of the main reasons being the GPL "cancer" that forces_ modifications of past work to be made available if the product is shipped to 3rd parties.
Interestingly it was that "cancer" which put a lot of hardware makers off working with GPL and is what microsoft railed against in the Halloween documents.
Some hardware makers tried to steal GPL code and got found out. Most of the rest realised that making the drivers open sold more stuff than not making it open.
The biggest advantage of newer chips is that they do the same job using less power.
My 9-year old fileserver pulls 450W. Replacing the motherboard with a quad-core C200-atom or equivalent would drop that by 300W - and pay for itself in 3-4 months just in reduced electricity charges.
"If the BBC has to provide unrestricted access to the whole of Europe at the price the UK viewer pays"
If the fees go too high, media will simply withdraw from covering the events. It's happened before and it's never worked out well for those trying to dictate the pricing.
"In the common market we are supposed to be able to buy from any EU country"
I've run into a large number of vendors who claim to have "exclusive distribution rights for XYZ country" and threaten legal action when I tell them I'm purchasing from elsewhere in the EU for substantially less than what they want to charge.
None of them have ever followed through once I've pointed out that "exclusive supply agreements" amount to illegal restraint of trade across the single market, although one attempted to bluster that he'd have the "USA supplier" refuse to supply the german retailer. I pointed out that should he do that, the result would be that he'd find himself facing criminal charges, jail time, unlimited fines and a possible import ban across the EU on the manufacturer concerned.
Geographic restrictions in the EU are currently only legal on media (for "cultural reasons") and it's heavily exploited by the multinationals (for maximum profit, not culture). The anomaly has become more and more glaringly obvious with the homogenisation of EU cultures, widespread internal migration and the advent of Internet sales/distribution.
"Currently, ANYTHING on Youtube involving music is blocked because GEMA (the German equivalent of RIAA) can't reach an agreement with Google. "
This is no different to the issues involving newspapers.
Google is perfectly entitled to say "OK, whatever. We're not covering this market as they did with newspapers. The difference is that GEMA don't care that it substantially impacts their bottom line in a negative sense because they're ideologically driven and isolated from the economic realities of the member companies.
> In a pure free market, you don't charge based on what people can pay.
Nor do you use cost-plus, that's a characteristic of a monopsomy-dominated market (where the customer dictates prices to several suppliers).
99.9% of consumer and business goods sales (not services) are based on "what the market will bear"
Which is not what the customer CAN pay, it's what the customer WILL pay.
One example: Phone covers bought in china for US$0.75 each selling for UKP15 (about $30) in Victoria Railway Station. The same covers are UKP10 in other parts of London yet the vendor in the station does a brisk trade. People are willing to pay for the convenience of not walking around the corner, or impulse buying.
> How would you like it if you went into mcdonalds, and they said nice rollex, and charged you $100 per burger.
How would you like it if you went into a McD's in Lille and paid 50% more than 20 miles away across the border in Brussels? (which is what happens at the moment)
American posters don't get how fragmented the EU market is and life is much simpler for interstate vendors as the consumer is required to declare and pay sales tax for "exported" items.
It's worth noting that Australia declared DVD region-coding an illegal restraint of trade for that very reason.
Not that it stops media cartels(*) from continuing their carving up of the world into geographic distribution areas even if the countries affected declare the practice as illegal.
(*) These exist in just about every form of media with print being the most obvious one.
"Licencing will have to be for the whole EU or nothing"
This runs smack into the issue that sales tax (VAT) varies in every country and must be paid by the supplier at the prevailing rate for the customer's country AND the supplier must VAT-register in each country (which is a horrendous bureaucratic nightmare)
Many smaller suppliers locked down sales to specific countries to avoid the headaches.
"no matter what lane you are, if you're going the speed limit the only traffic you'd be obstructing would be traffic going above the speed limit."
Just about every set of road rules in the world says "keep right(*) unless passing". Cruising up the middle lane of the highway is "failing to keep right" (*) and can be prosecuted as careless driving, even if there's no other traffic on the road - in practice such people are rolling roadblocks because it's usually illegal to pass them on the right(*) and as such they turn a three lane road into a 1 or 2 lane one.
Many countries also have laws on the books such that if you're travelling slowly and have more than N cars behind, you _must_ pull over and allow them to pass.
(*) s/right/left/g for countries which drive on the left side of the road.
Uber has not been shut down in any part of the UK.
It operates as a licensed private car hire service ("minicabs") and drivers must possess appropriate licensing for commercial work plus have a criminal record check.
The problem arises where Uber is touting drivers "for hire" when they're not licenses for hire work - which in most cases invalidates their insurance.
Aspartamine has been linked to methanol poisoning under some very specific circumstances:
1: Victim regularly drank a _lot_ of diet cola (as in 4-6 litres/day or more) 2: Loading dock practices at the supply chain leading to the victim resulted in bottles of diet cola being left in direct sunlight for prolonged periods and then in a hot warehouse environment exceeding 40C (This was texas, it gets hot there in summer and that's also the reason for the high cola consumption)
Under those circumstances enough aspartamine broke down _in the bottle_ that the victim suffered serious health problems due to chronic methanol exposure.
Once the source was recognised, she stopped drinking diet cola (switched to water and tea) and health returned to more-or-less normal (there are some long term effects) within a few months.
As I said, this is very specific circumstance. There are very few extreme consumption examples like this and as I understand it handling procedures have been changed to try and prevent repeats.
"We as consumers demand that food prices be kept low"
No. Definitely not.
What dictates the sale price of luxury goods like strawberries is the large buyers (supermarkets) - and they're not above cancelling a large order halfway through the growing season when everything's already committed to the contract, then making an offer of 1/2 or less what's required to cover costs.
Contrary to the claims from the greek poster, virtually all UK strawberries sold in-season are locally grown. Imports only happen when there's no local crop available.
Even with UK labour rates(*), farmers manage to turn a profit AND the price is held to levels where consumers don't really regard them as a luxury item.
(*) The immigration service heavily target farms for illegal labourers. There's a ~$10,000 penalty PER WORKER for any illegals found onsite plus extra punitive penalties if the farmer is deemed to have run insufficient checks on employability. There are separate (extremely high) penalties if workers are found to be exploited(**) or paid below minimum wage.
(**) Such things as being in onsite accomodation with high rental costs or various "company store" tactics.
"People who live in section 8 housing, have an EBT card and get a welfare check are not going travel up and down the East coast all summer harvesting produce."
They will if you pay them enough.
The point is that farm wages usually work out lower than welfare when the extra costs of accomodation and travel are factored in (and american "welfare" is regarded as extremely hostile by other western countries).
Hiring illegals is cheaper than paying higher rates to legal workers and the way to stop it happening is to impose penalties so high that it _will_ shut the business down if caught. The current USA setup puts virtually the entire blame on the illegal worker, not on the employer and that's arguably the wrong way around.
Once upon a time - within living memory - strawberries were a highly expensive luxury food and people ate them as a treat a couple of times per year.
It takes industrial scale growing to bring them down to an (expensive) commodity item and exploitative labour rates plus abusive large customers (supermarket chains) dictating sale prices so low that it's impossible to find workers to do the job whilst still making a profit.
Once it gets to the point where your choice is "lose money by harvesting or lose more money by not harvesting", the correct answer is "harvest, but get out of that line of business immediately".
It _is_ possible to make growing strawberries less backbreaking using hydroponics and polytunnels - and this produces higher quality fruit which is more amenable to mechanical picking as a nice side effect, at vastly lower costs in water, fertilisers and pest control. It'll be interesting to see if american produce farmers follow the paths taken in other parts of the world as cheap, abusable labour disappears.
My housemate used IIc and other systems by the simple expedient of having one monitor at work and another at home.
He did the same thing years later with a tiny 386-based system, justifying it by pointing out that the entire setup was both more powerful than and half the price of comparable "laptops".
System portability in the days before widespread Internet was _extremely_ useful.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's not entirely true. It would probably be cost prohibitive but it should be possible to create a system that routes the exhaust to a compression chamber and stores the co2 as compressed gas creating a system that has zero emissions"
Not just cost prohibitive, but you'll use _at least_ 50% more fuel.
This is exactly what "carbon sequestration" schemes on power stations are about and exactly why they'll fail.
" just replace the control system with one that doesn't care about emissions"
Carmakers have been taking proactive steps for a while to counter that kind of thing (such as detecting fake oxygen sensor emulators, etc)
In places like London and Paris which are struggling with very high pollution levels I can see the authoriities using automated identification systems to track down and deal with this kind of problem. A badly tuned car (or one with emissions controls removed) may not be a problem in rural or suburban settings but in a conurbation there are enough of them to make for major issues.
All drivers speed up/slow down by about 5mph over a 2 minute cycle on steady roads. I notice it when I set cruise control at the prevailing speed and then just observe.
Some are worse than others. They're usually oscillating around a target speed and treating the gas pedal as a binary object.
As a passenger in a work car, I once demanded a cow-orker stop and either let me out, or let me drive because of that behaviour. It was about 10 minutes after telling him to pick a speed and stay at it.
"Conventional taxis don't have to go out of business - that's a strawman/misnomer."
Back in the 1950s, the town I grew up in (75k people) had 2 dozen taxi companies all competing heavily.
They ALL went out of business and were (eventually) replaced by a single "cooperative" taxi company in the late 1950s - which was granted a legal monopoly simply so that the town would continue to have a taxi service. Unsurprisingly, taxi rates rose - but they continued to rise every year. On top of that drivers who hated the co-op (or each other) still had to drive for the company (but they did have more-or-less guaranteed employment)
In the early 1990s that monopoly was abolished. 4 new companies sprang up overnight as drivers forked off from the co-op, taxi rates halved. By 2005 none of those 4 companies existed, but there was still more than one outfit in town and rates stayed relatively low.
Uber (and lyft) is a disruptive influence in the market, but neither is nearly as disruptive as breaking a supply monopoly.
In the UK the issue is Hackney cabs (taxis you can hail on the street, usually black cabs) vs private care hire (must be prebooked, aka minicabs).
Hackney cab drivers tend to be self-employed but the rates are regulated, there are substantial barriers to market entry and drivers who attempted to adopt new technology (such as booking apps) were abused and sometimes physically attacked by other hackney drivers who wanted to keep the status quo.
In the UK, Uber is just another minicab service (drivers must be appropriately licensed and insured), but that hasn't stopped black cab drivers embarking on highly disruptive demonstrations (such as blocking major arterial roads with their cabs en masse) in order to protest it. The effect of those actions is best summarised as "Streisand effect" - and many people who're already irritated at cabbies because significant numbers of them ignore their legal obligations (cabbies _must_ accept a fare within 12 miles and allow animals in the vehicle, etc) started making a point of using Uber because the traffic disruptions severely pissed them off.
I can remember when Linux distros went SysV over BSDinit.
I resisted it for _years_ and the arguments against it were quite similar to those against systemd.
Having sat down and analysed it, I realised that SysV, whilst scary-looking was much better than BSDinit because you didn't end up with big hairy rc.* files.
If you approach systemd as sysV "improved" then it's a bit easier to deal with. That said: the author's history and attitude to bug reports would make me _strongly_ sympathetic to forking the thing.
> "they were better at turning away new users than they were at BSD advocacy."
Mod parent up. This is exactly the problem.
Linux was for getting things done. BSD proponents mostly raved about code purity.
> Device Driver Development Volunteers (that's a BIG, BIG, BIG, BIG item)
The BSD efforts were essentially closed shops and the BSD license allows taking from the commons and privatising the result.
Linux was _much_ more collaborative and open with one of the main reasons being the GPL "cancer" that forces_ modifications of past work to be made available if the product is shipped to 3rd parties.
Interestingly it was that "cancer" which put a lot of hardware makers off working with GPL and is what microsoft railed against in the Halloween documents.
Some hardware makers tried to steal GPL code and got found out. Most of the rest realised that making the drivers open sold more stuff than not making it open.
Why focus on clock speeds like that?
The biggest advantage of newer chips is that they do the same job using less power.
My 9-year old fileserver pulls 450W. Replacing the motherboard with a quad-core C200-atom or equivalent would drop that by 300W - and pay for itself in 3-4 months just in reduced electricity charges.
"If the BBC has to provide unrestricted access to the whole of Europe at the price the UK viewer pays"
If the fees go too high, media will simply withdraw from covering the events. It's happened before and it's never worked out well for those trying to dictate the pricing.
"In the common market we are supposed to be able to buy from any EU country"
I've run into a large number of vendors who claim to have "exclusive distribution rights for XYZ country" and threaten legal action when I tell them I'm purchasing from elsewhere in the EU for substantially less than what they want to charge.
None of them have ever followed through once I've pointed out that "exclusive supply agreements" amount to illegal restraint of trade across the single market, although one attempted to bluster that he'd have the "USA supplier" refuse to supply the german retailer. I pointed out that should he do that, the result would be that he'd find himself facing criminal charges, jail time, unlimited fines and a possible import ban across the EU on the manufacturer concerned.
Geographic restrictions in the EU are currently only legal on media (for "cultural reasons") and it's heavily exploited by the multinationals (for maximum profit, not culture). The anomaly has become more and more glaringly obvious with the homogenisation of EU cultures, widespread internal migration and the advent of Internet sales/distribution.
"Currently, ANYTHING on Youtube involving music is blocked because GEMA (the German equivalent of RIAA) can't reach an agreement with Google. "
This is no different to the issues involving newspapers.
Google is perfectly entitled to say "OK, whatever. We're not covering this market as they did with newspapers. The difference is that GEMA don't care that it substantially impacts their bottom line in a negative sense because they're ideologically driven and isolated from the economic realities of the member companies.
> In a pure free market, you don't charge based on what people can pay.
Nor do you use cost-plus, that's a characteristic of a monopsomy-dominated market (where the customer dictates prices to several suppliers).
99.9% of consumer and business goods sales (not services) are based on "what the market will bear"
Which is not what the customer CAN pay, it's what the customer WILL pay.
One example:
Phone covers bought in china for US$0.75 each selling for UKP15 (about $30) in Victoria Railway Station. The same covers are UKP10 in other parts of London yet the vendor in the station does a brisk trade. People are willing to pay for the convenience of not walking around the corner, or impulse buying.
> How would you like it if you went into mcdonalds, and they said nice rollex, and charged you $100 per burger.
How would you like it if you went into a McD's in Lille and paid 50% more than 20 miles away across the border in Brussels? (which is what happens at the moment)
American posters don't get how fragmented the EU market is and life is much simpler for interstate vendors as the consumer is required to declare and pay sales tax for "exported" items.
It shouldn't be this way, but it is.
It's worth noting that Australia declared DVD region-coding an illegal restraint of trade for that very reason.
Not that it stops media cartels(*) from continuing their carving up of the world into geographic distribution areas even if the countries affected declare the practice as illegal.
(*) These exist in just about every form of media with print being the most obvious one.
"Licencing will have to be for the whole EU or nothing"
This runs smack into the issue that sales tax (VAT) varies in every country and must be paid by the supplier at the prevailing rate for the customer's country AND the supplier must VAT-register in each country (which is a horrendous bureaucratic nightmare)
Many smaller suppliers locked down sales to specific countries to avoid the headaches.
"no matter what lane you are, if you're going the speed limit the only traffic you'd be obstructing would be traffic going above the speed limit."
Just about every set of road rules in the world says "keep right(*) unless passing". Cruising up the middle lane of the highway is "failing to keep right" (*) and can be prosecuted as careless driving, even if there's no other traffic on the road - in practice such people are rolling roadblocks because it's usually illegal to pass them on the right(*) and as such they turn a three lane road into a 1 or 2 lane one.
Many countries also have laws on the books such that if you're travelling slowly and have more than N cars behind, you _must_ pull over and allow them to pass.
(*) s/right/left/g for countries which drive on the left side of the road.
Uber has not been shut down in any part of the UK.
It operates as a licensed private car hire service ("minicabs") and drivers must possess appropriate licensing for commercial work plus have a criminal record check.
The problem arises where Uber is touting drivers "for hire" when they're not licenses for hire work - which in most cases invalidates their insurance.
I'm pushing 50 and have been using computers since I was 7 years old (mainframe access originally)
Am I more native than someone in his 20s who's only really started using systems since age 15-18 or so?
This is one of those buzzwords which is hard to nail down and as such discrimination suits would have trouble.
Aspartamine has been linked to methanol poisoning under some very specific circumstances:
1: Victim regularly drank a _lot_ of diet cola (as in 4-6 litres/day or more)
2: Loading dock practices at the supply chain leading to the victim resulted in bottles of diet cola being left in direct sunlight for prolonged periods and then in a hot warehouse environment exceeding 40C (This was texas, it gets hot there in summer and that's also the reason for the high cola consumption)
Under those circumstances enough aspartamine broke down _in the bottle_ that the victim suffered serious health problems due to chronic methanol exposure.
Once the source was recognised, she stopped drinking diet cola (switched to water and tea) and health returned to more-or-less normal (there are some long term effects) within a few months.
As I said, this is very specific circumstance. There are very few extreme consumption examples like this and as I understand it handling procedures have been changed to try and prevent repeats.
"We as consumers demand that food prices be kept low"
No. Definitely not.
What dictates the sale price of luxury goods like strawberries is the large buyers (supermarkets) - and they're not above cancelling a large order halfway through the growing season when everything's already committed to the contract, then making an offer of 1/2 or less what's required to cover costs.
"Cause nobody's gonna do any sorting at night in the field with all those insects rushing at the light and all that nectar in the air."
The bare fact that strawberries are being grown in such a way shows how badly run USA produce farming is and how much it could be improved.
http://www.tidec.org/sites/def...
Contrary to the claims from the greek poster, virtually all UK strawberries sold in-season are locally grown.
Imports only happen when there's no local crop available.
Even with UK labour rates(*), farmers manage to turn a profit AND the price is held to levels where consumers don't really regard them as a luxury item.
(*) The immigration service heavily target farms for illegal labourers. There's a ~$10,000 penalty PER WORKER for any illegals found onsite plus extra punitive penalties if the farmer is deemed to have run insufficient checks on employability. There are separate (extremely high) penalties if workers are found to be exploited(**) or paid below minimum wage.
(**) Such things as being in onsite accomodation with high rental costs or various "company store" tactics.
"People who live in section 8 housing, have an EBT card and get a welfare check are not going travel up and down the East coast all summer harvesting produce."
They will if you pay them enough.
The point is that farm wages usually work out lower than welfare when the extra costs of accomodation and travel are factored in (and american "welfare" is regarded as extremely hostile by other western countries).
Hiring illegals is cheaper than paying higher rates to legal workers and the way to stop it happening is to impose penalties so high that it _will_ shut the business down if caught. The current USA setup puts virtually the entire blame on the illegal worker, not on the employer and that's arguably the wrong way around.
"The reason the price of strawberries is a problem to American farmers is if they raise the price the Mexicans will take the market."
Not for long.
Lobbyists will get the USA to declare that Mexico is "dumping" (despite evidence to the contrary) and institute punitive tariffs.
This has happened before (beef industry). The USA may rave on about free trade but it's one of the more protectionist countries in existence.
Once upon a time - within living memory - strawberries were a highly expensive luxury food and people ate them as a treat a couple of times per year.
It takes industrial scale growing to bring them down to an (expensive) commodity item and exploitative labour rates plus abusive large customers (supermarket chains) dictating sale prices so low that it's impossible to find workers to do the job whilst still making a profit.
Once it gets to the point where your choice is "lose money by harvesting or lose more money by not harvesting", the correct answer is "harvest, but get out of that line of business immediately".
It _is_ possible to make growing strawberries less backbreaking using hydroponics and polytunnels - and this produces higher quality fruit which is more amenable to mechanical picking as a nice side effect, at vastly lower costs in water, fertilisers and pest control. It'll be interesting to see if american produce farmers follow the paths taken in other parts of the world as cheap, abusable labour disappears.
My housemate used IIc and other systems by the simple expedient of having one monitor at work and another at home.
He did the same thing years later with a tiny 386-based system, justifying it by pointing out that the entire setup was both more powerful than and half the price of comparable "laptops".
System portability in the days before widespread Internet was _extremely_ useful.