...I am of course speaking about PV on vehicle when I say not worth the bother.
PV for homes can of course be a worthwhile thing because the panels are usually much larger and be properly oriented to maximize exposure. They are also not required to withstand the rigors of being attached to a moving/flexing object.
the best PV panels on the market today--sized for an SUV roof--will add only a trivial amount of power over the course a sunny day. It's typically not worth the cost to bother with PV like that unless you don't have access to other forms of power.
That exact argument could be said for 2002... so has it even come close to true?
People don't like carpools or mass transit... sometimes for the same reasons.
Car Pool - Rigid Schedule, runs once once per day - Goes where you need - Have to deal with people - May get answer if you change your mind at the last minute
Mass Transit - Rigid Schedule, but runs multiple times per day - Doesn't always go where you need, so you have to deal with "last mile" - Have to deal with people--but much easier to be anti-social with strangers on bus/train than in an SUV of co-workers - Doesn't care if you change your mind at the last minute
The only SUV you *might* average close to 28MPG to (and that is not a hybrid) is something like a FWD 4-cyl Ford Escape with a 5-spd manual transmission. I barely averaged 28MPG in my Ford Taurus and VW Jetta FWD sedans with a 70/30 split of highway/city, so I don't see how you are AVERAGING 28MPG in an SUV unless you're driving a nice steady 50MPG everywhere you go. This is especially true with 10% Ethanol gas these days.
No truck based SUV is going to _AVERAGE_ that kind of mileage or frankly even hope to achieve it as a peak outside of going downhill. A modern Unibody "SUV" might be able to average that if you are FWD and highway--I'm thinking Chevy Equinox, the Escape I mentioned, and the like. AWD/4WD kills mileage.
The vast, vast, vast majority of SUV's that I see in the parking lots around me have a receiver hitch that is factory perfect... not a single scuff or scratch to the paint...
So they're towing huh? I don't think so...
Meanwhile my 2003 Civic tows a little trailer every few weeks.
The excuse that towing requires an SUV/truck is tired. And anyway, if you've got enough money to afford a boat/RV, why not have a smaller car available for your commute?
I've owned pickups, large and small cars, large and small suvs, and full sized vans in my life time, so I feel qualified to look at the spectrum and give responses to your points...
They stopped making the Crown Vic, that means 3 child families must use SUVs and Vans.
- Modern cars are often rather small, making them worthless for big trips with young children (try to fit two decent strollers in the trunk of something that isn't a Crown Vic, I dare you).
3 kids fit in the back of my 2003 Civic. If I owned an Accord or even a larger sedan it would be no issue having them back there. My aunt and uncle have three kids--two boys and girl--these boys are huge, 6'2" for one of them... their ONLY car was a '96 Honda Accord, this lasted them the teenage years of their kids... and no, they didn't live in the city or a place with public transport.. they just all got on the car and went where they needed. For vacations they had one of those racks that went on the roof to hold a carrier.
I'll grant you that the monstrous shopping cart / child carriers that I see today with bicycle sized wheels will probably not fit so well, but a "normal" stroller will fit just fine.
- The towing capacity of the average modern car is about 1000 lbs (many actually explicitly state NO towing WHATSOEVER). This means that families owning a house, where every couple of months you want to haul a large item home will need to oftentimes rent another vehicle for that purpose. Why not just buy a more versatile vehicle to start with?
Why not rent a van for 0.0001% of the time you need "haul a large item"... hell Home Depot will GIVE YOU their van for FREE as long as you spend $100 on their credit card. Or buy a mini-van which is still more reasonable than a truck-based SUV when it comes to weight on the road and fuel economy. BTW, my Civic does just fine towing a 4x6 trailer behind it with a Class-1 hitch.
- Modern cars have small engines. This is great around the town, but on the highway, mileage suffers horribly. SUVs get much better highway mileage (not better than cars, but not all that far away) because they often put an appropriately sized engine in them.
Good god man I KNOW you're full of shit when say SUV's get better mileage than cars on the highway, that's literally full-on batshit crazy with that statement. My Civic gets 38MPG on the highway, I got maybe 21-22MPG in my Blazer, a truck based SUV does significantly worse, upper teens if you're sticking to low 60MPG range.
- Some modern cars (not all) do not support roof racks. So you can't even use it to bring a bicycle with you (since you can't tow with it, either) on a small fun trip.
Find me ANY modern car that can't support a Class-I trailer hit........ YOU CAN'T. I saw a g-damn SMART CAR driving a trailer the other day. So every vehicle can support a Class-I hitch meaning bicycles are not an issue. I also believe your roof rack statement is based on your opinion and has no root in fact. I have been able to find roof racks for the past 2-3 sedan's I've owned... Thule and the other rack manufacturers are quite capable of figuring out how to make these things work and they know smaller car owners want the racks.
- If you like to do your own repair work, modern cars are hell on earth due to their cramped engine compartments, unibody construction, and independent suspension (of course, most SUVs have that nowadays too, but not *all* are terrible to work on the way it generally is with cars).
I find it FAR easier to work on my 4-cyl Civic then on ANY car, truck or SUV I've owned in the past... it's lower, the engine compartment is less cramped, the things you may want to deal with are actually easier to access like O2 sensors, spark plugs, etc. You need ligher-duty tools to lift a small sedan than a truck.
Try getting the plugs out of your 3V 5.4L v8 Ford and let me know how it goes--what a PITA that is! My Blazer required removing the freaking front wheels
If he's got witnesses and better photos, I'd like to think McDonald's will want to settle this fast, particularly with the employee being involved.
Looks (from the pics) like a couple of white collar euro thugs--I'm sure there's an American/Canadian equivalent, it just seems like the majority of aggressive adult "bullies" I see with stylish clothing, gelled hair and tans, also seem to have heavy european accents... which just goes to show you that at the end of the day you can be as intelligent or rich as you want, but when you're immersed in real life, it's the one with (or controlling) the most physical power who rules (or survives).
Facebook will be "over" when a replacement has started to seriously pull away it's users. At the moment this is not happening.
I know there is always a desire to be counter-culture, but the reality is that Facebook is a popular site used by millions (billions?). Many of these people are using it like a virtual public park--you show up, you meet friends, you spread information, tell jokes, share pictures and stories--This is not a new concept of course, it just happens to be that Facebook is doing "best" at the moment.
I suppose some of what has made them "best" is that they provided an easy to use, easy to search interface with a lot of options. Now what we're facing there is the real-world analog of that public park posting advertising signs and billboards all over the place--some users will find it distasteful and want to leave, others will learn to ignore it and continue on. There is a reason that millions of dollars are paid for advertising signs at hockey rinks and road sides, which is that advertising works!
"You can see this in online dating profiles where you will have someone who specifies a massive list of must and must nots for their potential partner"
Oh I don't know, I did pretty well with this one:
Shut up! I'm not interested! These are just some of the things you'll be hearing if you answer this ad. PS: No dogs
I would say it could, in part, be the fact that some people recognize that cell phones and the internet are active only so long as things are running smoothly.
Disaster--either weather, social, political, or economic, can take them down in short order.
Ham is broadcast, so as long as you have some power you can send your message out to potentially hundreds, or thousands, of ears.
The other part for me is that cell phones, mobile data, GPS, etc have all become so simple, so inexpensive, and so common, that that there is simply no excitement or feeling of being on the cutting edge anymore with these devices... 10 years ago GPS in your hand was "wow, check that out"... having a mobile data connection "woah, you can get on the web from here??"... having a handheld computing device, like the old Zarus, was "wow that runs Linux?"... now everyone can walk into their local store and have all that and more for what passes as a reasonable price...
As old tech as ham may seem to be, for me it still retains that feeling of "I'm doing something interesting"... Not to mention you're in a somewhat focused community of like minded individuals, not unlike being a member of a topic-specific internet forum.
...spend years maintaining decades old code, never really getting to build anything yourself, gaining no new or relevant experience to so called cutting edge... probably working with derelict ancient hardware as well...
The trouble is that the companies that want to maintain Cobol systems are typically CHEAP companies... insurance companies, banks, etc... these people won't spend a dime on IT unless it returns a quarter or is absolutely necessary to operating the business.
I applied for a job like that 10 years ago at a life insurance company keeping their mainframe running and linked to newer processes... I was a relatively new college grad, 2 years out and working for a semi-conductor company... I remember thinking it would be great job security (because my industry tended to be steadily being outsourced to either India or China, and still is)... but then I heard their wage... it was $10K less than the lowest offer I had received anywhere else 2 years prior... I know a few people who work there, they were telling me about how great it was to work there because they receive a 3-4% raise every year... yeah that's wonderful, except that after 10 years you're earning what I was making my 2nd year out of school...
Good stuff, thank you for posting. I've been backing up in a similar way using Thunderbird, I agree it's sometimes flaky, but organizing into folders/labels seemed to be working--however maybe I'm missing something and don't know it.
...now backing up Calendar, Contacts and Documents... not quite as simple?
...and the other big issue of course is that if you are using your actual Gmail address you'd better start changing things fast.
...or how about Google Voice? I ported my 10 year old number there, if that were cut off it (no more forwarding or VM) I would be royally screwed...
The more I think about it, I have all my eggs in on basket and that's not good!:)
I think the point is, if you are already paying $6/day for a latte, can you really claim to be outraged over a $6/mo increase for a service like Netflix that many people use quite extensively?
Frankly I think it IS a good analogy... comparing something as overpriced and superfluous as a latte is the perfect thing to compare a service like Netflix to. Sure, you don't NEED either one of them, but which one provides you more enjoyment over a given period of time?
I was happy paying $10/mo for unlimited streaming and 1-DVD at a time, the thing is that I almost never cycled DVDs, the one I have now was shipped to me back in April, and the one before that was from 2010.
For customers like me they had next to no cost for the DVD portion of my account, yet they were getting the $2/mo. Now they are making $2/mo less off people like me.
For their sake I hope their number crunching works out because they will have a number of customers who opt to pay LESS money each month, but possibly cost them less then the $2/mo... they will have people like you who cancel... and they will have a few who agree to the extra $6/mo...
I've been a customer since 2006, I enjoy their service, but in all honestly I have no particular loyalty to their brand. If Amazon's streaming service offered as much content as Netflix I'd seriously consider using them exclusively. Or, if my cable provider offered the same content as Netflix Watch Instantly, even with a $7-10/mo fixed fee, I'd probably go with them just for the sake of being able to watch on my TV w/o switching inputs from the cable box.
I see that as the make or break for the great Netflix hype--if they can partner w/ a cable provider to provide the streaming via the cable STB and for an increased monthly fee, that will explode Netflix's potential even beyond the current hype. If they can't, well, then it's just a matter of time before someone dethrones them or they find themselves in a sea of copycats.
What they did BEST was the mail order DVD biz and that's what allowed them to kill the Blockbuster and Walmart competitions, those other guys simply couldn't do it as efficiently as Netflix. Well, now it's just a bunch of servers and a UI. Much easier to dethrone that.
I was thinking it sounds like "fire those involved and make it very clear too all remaining employees that those involved were fired and are unlikely to get another job in the medical field after being terminated for a HIPPA violation...
...HUD adds cost/complexity to build and repairs, but isn't necessarily perceived by the general public as that great of a feature (maybe just because not enough people have experienced it?)...When it really comes down to it, how often does the average driver actually look at their speedometer (when they haven't just passed a cop)?...showing the current radio station is nice, but with the proliferation of HD radio, satellite, CD text, iPods, etc, suddenly that's an awful lot of data to be putting into the driver's field of view, whether or not it's slightly opaque.
Mass transit or whatnot is clearly superior to an infinite number of monkeys driving cars at the same time.
On paper that seems correct... until you find yourself waiting in a queue with those monkey's to get onto a train/bus/subway which is already full of those monkeys and piloted by a monkey (or a computer programmed by monkeys)... suddenly you find yourself saying, I'd rather sit in traffic for an hour then next to these monkeys.
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...I am of course speaking about PV on vehicle when I say not worth the bother.
PV for homes can of course be a worthwhile thing because the panels are usually much larger and be properly oriented to maximize exposure. They are also not required to withstand the rigors of being attached to a moving/flexing object.
the best PV panels on the market today--sized for an SUV roof--will add only a trivial amount of power over the course a sunny day. It's typically not worth the cost to bother with PV like that unless you don't have access to other forms of power.
That exact argument could be said for 2002... so has it even come close to true?
People don't like carpools or mass transit... sometimes for the same reasons.
Car Pool
- Rigid Schedule, runs once once per day
- Goes where you need
- Have to deal with people
- May get answer if you change your mind at the last minute
Mass Transit
- Rigid Schedule, but runs multiple times per day
- Doesn't always go where you need, so you have to deal with "last mile"
- Have to deal with people--but much easier to be anti-social with strangers on bus/train than in an SUV of co-workers
- Doesn't care if you change your mind at the last minute
Trust me, this guy will never make money on this.
I don't see that the Diesel Jetta is $5000 more than the equivalent gasoline Jetta. Where did you get your number?
Try www.vw.com ... it's all there in easy to read font.
I own an SUV. I average about 28MPG with it
I call BS on this until you provide details.
The only SUV you *might* average close to 28MPG to (and that is not a hybrid) is something like a FWD 4-cyl Ford Escape with a 5-spd manual transmission. I barely averaged 28MPG in my Ford Taurus and VW Jetta FWD sedans with a 70/30 split of highway/city, so I don't see how you are AVERAGING 28MPG in an SUV unless you're driving a nice steady 50MPG everywhere you go. This is especially true with 10% Ethanol gas these days.
No truck based SUV is going to _AVERAGE_ that kind of mileage or frankly even hope to achieve it as a peak outside of going downhill. A modern Unibody "SUV" might be able to average that if you are FWD and highway--I'm thinking Chevy Equinox, the Escape I mentioned, and the like. AWD/4WD kills mileage.
The vast, vast, vast majority of SUV's that I see in the parking lots around me have a receiver hitch that is factory perfect... not a single scuff or scratch to the paint...
So they're towing huh? I don't think so...
Meanwhile my 2003 Civic tows a little trailer every few weeks.
The excuse that towing requires an SUV/truck is tired. And anyway, if you've got enough money to afford a boat/RV, why not have a smaller car available for your commute?
I've owned pickups, large and small cars, large and small suvs, and full sized vans in my life time, so I feel qualified to look at the spectrum and give responses to your points...
They stopped making the Crown Vic, that means 3 child families must use SUVs and Vans.
- Modern cars are often rather small, making them worthless for big trips with young children (try to fit two decent strollers in the trunk of something that isn't a Crown Vic, I dare you).
3 kids fit in the back of my 2003 Civic. If I owned an Accord or even a larger sedan it would be no issue having them back there. My aunt and uncle have three kids--two boys and girl--these boys are huge, 6'2" for one of them... their ONLY car was a '96 Honda Accord, this lasted them the teenage years of their kids... and no, they didn't live in the city or a place with public transport.. they just all got on the car and went where they needed. For vacations they had one of those racks that went on the roof to hold a carrier.
I'll grant you that the monstrous shopping cart / child carriers that I see today with bicycle sized wheels will probably not fit so well, but a "normal" stroller will fit just fine.
- The towing capacity of the average modern car is about 1000 lbs (many actually explicitly state NO towing WHATSOEVER). This means that families owning a house, where every couple of months you want to haul a large item home will need to oftentimes rent another vehicle for that purpose. Why not just buy a more versatile vehicle to start with?
Why not rent a van for 0.0001% of the time you need "haul a large item"... hell Home Depot will GIVE YOU their van for FREE as long as you spend $100 on their credit card. Or buy a mini-van which is still more reasonable than a truck-based SUV when it comes to weight on the road and fuel economy. BTW, my Civic does just fine towing a 4x6 trailer behind it with a Class-1 hitch.
- Modern cars have small engines. This is great around the town, but on the highway, mileage suffers horribly. SUVs get much better highway mileage (not better than cars, but not all that far away) because they often put an appropriately sized engine in them.
Good god man I KNOW you're full of shit when say SUV's get better mileage than cars on the highway, that's literally full-on batshit crazy with that statement. My Civic gets 38MPG on the highway, I got maybe 21-22MPG in my Blazer, a truck based SUV does significantly worse, upper teens if you're sticking to low 60MPG range.
- Some modern cars (not all) do not support roof racks. So you can't even use it to bring a bicycle with you (since you can't tow with it, either) on a small fun trip.
Find me ANY modern car that can't support a Class-I trailer hit........ YOU CAN'T. I saw a g-damn SMART CAR driving a trailer the other day. So every vehicle can support a Class-I hitch meaning bicycles are not an issue. I also believe your roof rack statement is based on your opinion and has no root in fact. I have been able to find roof racks for the past 2-3 sedan's I've owned... Thule and the other rack manufacturers are quite capable of figuring out how to make these things work and they know smaller car owners want the racks.
- If you like to do your own repair work, modern cars are hell on earth due to their cramped engine compartments, unibody construction, and independent suspension (of course, most SUVs have that nowadays too, but not *all* are terrible to work on the way it generally is with cars).
I find it FAR easier to work on my 4-cyl Civic then on ANY car, truck or SUV I've owned in the past... it's lower, the engine compartment is less cramped, the things you may want to deal with are actually easier to access like O2 sensors, spark plugs, etc. You need ligher-duty tools to lift a small sedan than a truck.
Try getting the plugs out of your 3V 5.4L v8 Ford and let me know how it goes--what a PITA that is! My Blazer required removing the freaking front wheels
This is the Internet age [bash.org], after all.
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If he's got witnesses and better photos, I'd like to think McDonald's will want to settle this fast, particularly with the employee being involved.
Looks (from the pics) like a couple of white collar euro thugs--I'm sure there's an American/Canadian equivalent, it just seems like the majority of aggressive adult "bullies" I see with stylish clothing, gelled hair and tans, also seem to have heavy european accents... which just goes to show you that at the end of the day you can be as intelligent or rich as you want, but when you're immersed in real life, it's the one with (or controlling) the most physical power who rules (or survives).
"Agung Pratama Sevenfoldism, showed his date of birth as 1997 and said he had been a manager at Chevron in 2010."
I'm pretty sure the manager at my local gas station is 13 too... so what's the big deal?
Facebook will be "over" when a replacement has started to seriously pull away it's users. At the moment this is not happening.
I know there is always a desire to be counter-culture, but the reality is that Facebook is a popular site used by millions (billions?). Many of these people are using it like a virtual public park--you show up, you meet friends, you spread information, tell jokes, share pictures and stories--This is not a new concept of course, it just happens to be that Facebook is doing "best" at the moment.
I suppose some of what has made them "best" is that they provided an easy to use, easy to search interface with a lot of options. Now what we're facing there is the real-world analog of that public park posting advertising signs and billboards all over the place--some users will find it distasteful and want to leave, others will learn to ignore it and continue on. There is a reason that millions of dollars are paid for advertising signs at hockey rinks and road sides, which is that advertising works!
"You can see this in online dating profiles where you will have someone who specifies a massive list of must and must nots for their potential partner"
Oh I don't know, I did pretty well with this one:
Shut up!
I'm not interested!
These are just some of the things you'll be hearing if you answer this ad.
PS: No dogs
"All women want bastards"
"Unless he's a 4 bagger"
OK, I started this post because I had no idea what that was... then I looked online, and I'm assuming this is what you mean? --
One bag over his/her head.
Second bag over yours.
Third bag over the dog's head so it doesn't howl.
Fourth bag by the door in case anyone barges in.
I would say it could, in part, be the fact that some people recognize that cell phones and the internet are active only so long as things are running smoothly.
Disaster--either weather, social, political, or economic, can take them down in short order.
Ham is broadcast, so as long as you have some power you can send your message out to potentially hundreds, or thousands, of ears.
The other part for me is that cell phones, mobile data, GPS, etc have all become so simple, so inexpensive, and so common, that that there is simply no excitement or feeling of being on the cutting edge anymore with these devices... 10 years ago GPS in your hand was "wow, check that out"... having a mobile data connection "woah, you can get on the web from here??"... having a handheld computing device, like the old Zarus, was "wow that runs Linux?"... now everyone can walk into their local store and have all that and more for what passes as a reasonable price...
As old tech as ham may seem to be, for me it still retains that feeling of "I'm doing something interesting"... Not to mention you're in a somewhat focused community of like minded individuals, not unlike being a member of a topic-specific internet forum.
...spend years maintaining decades old code, never really getting to build anything yourself, gaining no new or relevant experience to so called cutting edge... probably working with derelict ancient hardware as well...
The trouble is that the companies that want to maintain Cobol systems are typically CHEAP companies... insurance companies, banks, etc... these people won't spend a dime on IT unless it returns a quarter or is absolutely necessary to operating the business.
I applied for a job like that 10 years ago at a life insurance company keeping their mainframe running and linked to newer processes... I was a relatively new college grad, 2 years out and working for a semi-conductor company... I remember thinking it would be great job security (because my industry tended to be steadily being outsourced to either India or China, and still is)... but then I heard their wage... it was $10K less than the lowest offer I had received anywhere else 2 years prior... I know a few people who work there, they were telling me about how great it was to work there because they receive a 3-4% raise every year... yeah that's wonderful, except that after 10 years you're earning what I was making my 2nd year out of school...
Good stuff, thank you for posting. I've been backing up in a similar way using Thunderbird, I agree it's sometimes flaky, but organizing into folders/labels seemed to be working--however maybe I'm missing something and don't know it.
...now backing up Calendar, Contacts and Documents... not quite as simple?
The more I think about it, I have all my eggs in on basket and that's not good! :)
I think the point is, if you are already paying $6/day for a latte, can you really claim to be outraged over a $6/mo increase for a service like Netflix that many people use quite extensively?
Frankly I think it IS a good analogy... comparing something as overpriced and superfluous as a latte is the perfect thing to compare a service like Netflix to. Sure, you don't NEED either one of them, but which one provides you more enjoyment over a given period of time?
...or in my case a reduced customer.
I was happy paying $10/mo for unlimited streaming and 1-DVD at a time, the thing is that I almost never cycled DVDs, the one I have now was shipped to me back in April, and the one before that was from 2010.
For customers like me they had next to no cost for the DVD portion of my account, yet they were getting the $2/mo. Now they are making $2/mo less off people like me.
For their sake I hope their number crunching works out because they will have a number of customers who opt to pay LESS money each month, but possibly cost them less then the $2/mo... they will have people like you who cancel... and they will have a few who agree to the extra $6/mo...
I've been a customer since 2006, I enjoy their service, but in all honestly I have no particular loyalty to their brand. If Amazon's streaming service offered as much content as Netflix I'd seriously consider using them exclusively. Or, if my cable provider offered the same content as Netflix Watch Instantly, even with a $7-10/mo fixed fee, I'd probably go with them just for the sake of being able to watch on my TV w/o switching inputs from the cable box.
I see that as the make or break for the great Netflix hype--if they can partner w/ a cable provider to provide the streaming via the cable STB and for an increased monthly fee, that will explode Netflix's potential even beyond the current hype. If they can't, well, then it's just a matter of time before someone dethrones them or they find themselves in a sea of copycats.
What they did BEST was the mail order DVD biz and that's what allowed them to kill the Blockbuster and Walmart competitions, those other guys simply couldn't do it as efficiently as Netflix. Well, now it's just a bunch of servers and a UI. Much easier to dethrone that.
ugg... to...
I was thinking it sounds like "fire those involved and make it very clear too all remaining employees that those involved were fired and are unlikely to get another job in the medical field after being terminated for a HIPPA violation...
...HUD adds cost/complexity to build and repairs, but isn't necessarily perceived by the general public as that great of a feature (maybe just because not enough people have experienced it?) ...When it really comes down to it, how often does the average driver actually look at their speedometer (when they haven't just passed a cop)? ...showing the current radio station is nice, but with the proliferation of HD radio, satellite, CD text, iPods, etc, suddenly that's an awful lot of data to be putting into the driver's field of view, whether or not it's slightly opaque.
We had this same problem in the 1950s and 60s... of course back then not EVERYONE drove like an idiot, so it wasn't so bad.
Mass transit or whatnot is clearly superior to an infinite number of monkeys driving cars at the same time.
On paper that seems correct... until you find yourself waiting in a queue with those monkey's to get onto a train/bus/subway which is already full of those monkeys and piloted by a monkey (or a computer programmed by monkeys)... suddenly you find yourself saying, I'd rather sit in traffic for an hour then next to these monkeys.