If the vehicle weighs significantly less, why should they pay the same as one that weighs more when it's proven that heavier vehicles damage roads a lot more than light ones? The only way for people to "pay their own way" for road repairs would be for a scheme that charges some formula of weight and distance (and as such a bike or small car would pay very little compared to big truck)
Of course we could also stop and think about what the fuel taxes are actually for. Are they to: a) discourage use of lots of a non-renewable and polluting resource b) fund road maintenance c) increase overall government revenue? If primarily a) then we should raise the fuel tax to encourage cleaner alternatives (while maintaining a neutral revenue) if primarily b) we should eliminate them and come up with a different method, perhaps a fee at registration renewal that calculates based on weight and mileage? if primarily c) than we should eliminate them and raise funds in a more equitable way such as a general income tax increase.
Of course the truth is that it isn't any one of those, it's a combination of all three, and probably needs a combination of approaches to get to the ideal goal. Unfortunately the route they're taking is likely to hinder the adoption of fuel efficient vehicles, as many of them are only marginally affordable as it is (when compared to cheaper traditional vehicles), increasing their cost/km may put them back to a point where it's cheaper to just buy the gas-guzzler with the lower up-front costs, more expensive fuel, but no other sur-tax.
My 1983 mercedes S-class, when I drove it in 2003 got 9L/100km (that's 26MPG US) so that was a 20 year old car at the time, and that was 10 years ago, and that was a boat of a car. Of course the other thing the environmental nazis always glaze over is the environmental cost of destroying one perfectly good car and making a new one. That isn't a net zero process either! I always figured that keeping that car on the road was probably way better for the environment than upgrading every 5 years like the auto-dealers want you to.
most tills already have a "cash" vs "credit" button of some form to indicate how the customer paid. Why not just program the "cash" button to do the rounding automatically and then your tills still balance just as well as they ever did (which as you pointed out, isn't all that well, but this shouldn't have to change it any)
You don't need to think about it that way. don't move the decimal place at all, just stop counting 100ths and only count 10ths. Prices would look like $1.2 instead of $1.23 or $1.18 Should be no psychological damage there. Think about it, when the penny was first minted, it actually bought things. but it just doesn't anymore, nothing is worth so little anymore that the 100ths of a dollar are really relevant, count everything in 10ths instead of 100ths, and move on. maybe in a few more years once nothing costs less than about $10 we can drop the decimals altogether and just use whole numbers. We don't need to change our whole system, just drop the 100ths. no more re-working of anything required.
Of course that would have been a much better solution than ditching the penny, they should have ditched the penny and the nickle and adjusted all prices by one decimal place. Start pricing things as $1.2 instead of $1.23 or $1.18 And just realize that nothing in society costs so little anymore as for that 2nd decimal place to truly be relevant (when we first started minting the penny, it actually bought things, now even the smallest purchase is bound to be at least $0.50 I'd think.)
The key here may be that it's a bank. While stores don't have to take large amounts of coin, I believe banks do (otherwise there'd be no way to get rid of your large stockpile of coin) (though I believe the bank can force you to roll them yourself)
Sure you might not be able to make a mortgage payment with it, but I think they'd have to let you deposit it, and then you could make the payment from your account right away, so net result is the same.
My cost of living increase was 1% over 5 years... the official cost of living index was significantly higher, and even that's been gamed to remove things that have gone up too fast (like fuel, and utilities, which make up a large portion of my costs)
Or if you are sensible in how you calculate your prices...
I've seen a few retailers (extremely rare) that include the tax in their prices (very sensible) but I've also seen a fair number of retailers that have calculated their prices so that when you add tax the total always works out to a nice round number. (eg, in Alberta we have no provincial tax, only the federal GST of 5%, so a retailer that makes all their prices things like $0.95 or $0.96 after tax round to $1.00 and $9.52 or $9.53 after tax rounds to $10.00) It's nice in that customers aren't fiddling for change, and it probably makes their book keeping and coin handling much simpler too. (admittedly these are usually fast food kiosks where people pick from a relatively limited number of items, and where speed of the transaction is of paramount importance, so reducing awkward change is in the retailers best interest)
I was shocked when I went to the states a couple years back and found retailers still accepted cheques there, good luck finding one in Canada that will! (How would you know the cheque is good anyway?) I Canada most retailers give you 3 choices, cash, credit, or debit. (and to be honest, I can't remember the last time I chose cash...)
I wish they'd accept a company ID swipe, and do payroll deduction.
Now that is a plan that would make sense! think of how much it would save them in cash handling, not to mention it would be easier for the employees as they wouldn't have to think about how much money they brought with them.
This was something that greatly confused me on a recent trip to the UK, Where I live I barely ever need to carry cash, as a result, when going to the UK I only converted a small amount of $ to £ as I didn't expect to use cash that much anyway (I was in the UK for 2 weeks, and if I remember correctly we had about £200 cash total between my wife and I, with plans to eat out for all meals, and do a lot of sight seeing, museums, shows, etc) .
At home I can't remember the last time I paid for anything with cash, but in the UK I unfortunately discovered almost everywhere I went that I simply couldn't use my VISA which I expected would be nearly universal.
By the end of the trip when I got back to Heathrow we were down to £5.36 in cash and I was quite relieved to have made it through (sure I could have taken out more somewhere, but the fees to do so would have been a LOT more than the conversion I paid at home) (we went through the shops in the airport and tried to figure out what the best bang for out buck was in sweets for that last £5.36 so as not to have any left over when we got home!)
Which is why most places raise their "normal" price to be the credit card price and offer a "discount" for cash. fits the letter of the agreement perfectly fine, but amounts to exactly the same thing. I've many times encountered a place where the price says $100, I pull out my visa and the business owner cringes and says, "If you pay cash I'll give it to you for $95"
Interestingly enough though, one of the stores I shop at (moderate sized chain retailer) used to offer a cash discount but discontinued it with the logic that the extra charges they had to pay for the credit cards were more than made up for by the extra labour expenses of handling cash vs electronic transactions.
As far as the other manufacturers, there's nothing to gain from confusing customers.
Well that's rather simplistic. Hyundai isn't even the first example that usually comes up. The Crysler 300 is well known to be a Bentley look-a-like, Cadillac has been trying to rip off BMW designs, some Jeep and Land cruiser designs are almost indistinguishable, And that's without looking at things like crossovers where to be honest I have trouble telling EVERY manufacturer apart!
Banning bulbs with poor efficiency is synonymous with banning incandescents. The fact that we "could have had super-efficient incandescents" is irrelevant because we don't actually have them. So the difference is the same. When I go to the store to buy a bulb, I don't care what wording was used in the bill, I only care what bulbs are on the shelf for me to buy. Right now, if you remove the "poor efficiency bulbs" you have no dimmable bulbs left. I don't care what bulbs COULD have existed, only what bulbs I can buy. Unfortunately manufacturers have decided that what they have now is "good enough" for dimmable, and market them as such, even though they don't do it adequately.
please post the model number of the dimmer, because my 5 Philips LED bulbs in my family room on a Lutron dimmer don't go below about 20% before flicking out, and worse yet, if you have them right at 20% or so and the freezer kicks in, they turn off and don't come back on until you adjust the dimmer again.
Depends on the use. In my kitchen I want white light, as bright as possible, so I can see where I'm putting sharp objects in relation to my hands and the food I'm preparing, bathrooms too. In my living room and in my theatre area I like the "warmer" yellow colour in dimmable bulbs as an ambiance thing. of course I say dimmable, because I want to be able to turn them up bright some times so I can see what I'm doing too. (Too bad neither CFL, nor LED bulbs are dimmable (regardless of what they say on the package, or what the dimmer switch says on it's package)
What you neglect to mention is that dimmable CFLs (And dimmable LEDs too) are a myth. They don't actually exist. Sure some of them claim on the packaging to dim, but when you get them home, and connected, you find that they dim form 100% all the way down to about 70%, and then shut off. (The LEDs seem to go down to about 20%, Incandecents dim the full range down to 0%) additionally the selection is only a handful of bulbs, and they are all at least twice the physical size of an incandecent bulb, so they don't fit in any fixtures.
And before you blame my dimmers, or the specific bulbs, this is experience from 3 different brands of CFL "dimmables", 2 different brands of LED "dimmables" all on 3 different dimmer switches (1 of which was specifically bought to be CFL compatible, the other specifically to be LED compatible, both of which worked exactly the same as the old dimmer switch from the 1970s)
Meanwhile legislators are in the process of banning incandecent bulbs when there is as of yet NO replacement for many very common applications.
This is hard to say for sure. If people are busy, productive, educated, and at least middle class, they don't tend to have a lot of children, but if you get to a time when robots do more of the work, and people start having more free time, a living wage may not be enough to keep the bored from doing what bored couples tend to do... reproduce. Now if people are convinced to fill their time with other things, they may not follow that route, but it's not as simple as saying that you need to make sure they have enough money.
There will come a time when robots and computers can handle all of our needs, and many of our wants without us needing to do the work. Eventually there is no reason why any person will need to work. Unfortunately, the way things are set up now when something is done more efficiently due to technology, the added profit goes to the top, and the no longer required worker gets a pink slip and no income. How we manage a transition from a jobs based economy, to a post-scarcity society will be very interesting.
You put it very well.
If we manage it well, perhaps we'd only have to work a day a week like in the Jetsons;). Or maybe not even have to work unless we wanted to.
If we don't, it's not going to be so great.
Unfortunately my suspicion is that it will be managed "not going to be so great" until it gets so bad that we end up with outright revolution and war. After which the eventual end result will probably be much more like the good sci-fi writers predicted, with no work needed and humans free to pursue arts and exploration, knowledge, and the betterment of themselves.
The good news is that the end result will likely be quite good, and that we probably have a good bunch of years yet before we hit bottom, the bad news is that I just can't conceive of any likely way to get from where we are now, to where we need to be without going through a very dark period indeed, one which could last a very long time.
What you're describing is no more an issue for self driving cars as it is for humans driving the cars. So I don't see how it is in any way a "new" problem just because we use a self driving car.
A driverless car will not be practical if it can't read street signs. Either every single street sign needs to be changed to work with driverless cars, or more likely, the cars need to read the existing signs, same as the human does.
That's not a problem. The point of the article though seems to be about laws not keeping up, and I've been saying this for years. With all the recent changes to legislation, we're quickly heading for a future where the car drives itself, but you must sit in the driver's seat while it does so, and you must not touch a book, newspaper, cell phone, or anything else, must not close your eyes, or have consumed any alcohol previously. None of these driving laws have exceptions written for self driving cars, and so far, you are still considered the driver, even if the car does it it's self. I sure hope the legislation catches up before I get a self driving car, or commuting will be the absolute most boring thing anyone can do.
Slashdot Mirror
If the vehicle weighs significantly less, why should they pay the same as one that weighs more when it's proven that heavier vehicles damage roads a lot more than light ones?
The only way for people to "pay their own way" for road repairs would be for a scheme that charges some formula of weight and distance (and as such a bike or small car would pay very little compared to big truck)
Of course we could also stop and think about what the fuel taxes are actually for. Are they to: a) discourage use of lots of a non-renewable and polluting resource b) fund road maintenance c) increase overall government revenue?
If primarily a) then we should raise the fuel tax to encourage cleaner alternatives (while maintaining a neutral revenue) if primarily b) we should eliminate them and come up with a different method, perhaps a fee at registration renewal that calculates based on weight and mileage? if primarily c) than we should eliminate them and raise funds in a more equitable way such as a general income tax increase.
Of course the truth is that it isn't any one of those, it's a combination of all three, and probably needs a combination of approaches to get to the ideal goal. Unfortunately the route they're taking is likely to hinder the adoption of fuel efficient vehicles, as many of them are only marginally affordable as it is (when compared to cheaper traditional vehicles), increasing their cost/km may put them back to a point where it's cheaper to just buy the gas-guzzler with the lower up-front costs, more expensive fuel, but no other sur-tax.
My 1983 mercedes S-class, when I drove it in 2003 got 9L/100km (that's 26MPG US) so that was a 20 year old car at the time, and that was 10 years ago, and that was a boat of a car.
Of course the other thing the environmental nazis always glaze over is the environmental cost of destroying one perfectly good car and making a new one. That isn't a net zero process either!
I always figured that keeping that car on the road was probably way better for the environment than upgrading every 5 years like the auto-dealers want you to.
take a dime, leave a dime?
most tills already have a "cash" vs "credit" button of some form to indicate how the customer paid. Why not just program the "cash" button to do the rounding automatically and then your tills still balance just as well as they ever did (which as you pointed out, isn't all that well, but this shouldn't have to change it any)
You don't need to think about it that way. don't move the decimal place at all, just stop counting 100ths and only count 10ths.
Prices would look like $1.2 instead of $1.23 or $1.18 Should be no psychological damage there.
Think about it, when the penny was first minted, it actually bought things. but it just doesn't anymore, nothing is worth so little anymore that the 100ths of a dollar are really relevant, count everything in 10ths instead of 100ths, and move on. maybe in a few more years once nothing costs less than about $10 we can drop the decimals altogether and just use whole numbers.
We don't need to change our whole system, just drop the 100ths. no more re-working of anything required.
Some parts of Canada still allow you to pay for your fuel AFTER you fill up...
Of course that would have been a much better solution than ditching the penny, they should have ditched the penny and the nickle and adjusted all prices by one decimal place. Start pricing things as $1.2 instead of $1.23 or $1.18 And just realize that nothing in society costs so little anymore as for that 2nd decimal place to truly be relevant (when we first started minting the penny, it actually bought things, now even the smallest purchase is bound to be at least $0.50 I'd think.)
The key here may be that it's a bank.
While stores don't have to take large amounts of coin, I believe banks do (otherwise there'd be no way to get rid of your large stockpile of coin) (though I believe the bank can force you to roll them yourself)
Sure you might not be able to make a mortgage payment with it, but I think they'd have to let you deposit it, and then you could make the payment from your account right away, so net result is the same.
My cost of living increase was 1% over 5 years... the official cost of living index was significantly higher, and even that's been gamed to remove things that have gone up too fast (like fuel, and utilities, which make up a large portion of my costs)
I love corporate math....
Or if you are sensible in how you calculate your prices...
I've seen a few retailers (extremely rare) that include the tax in their prices (very sensible) but I've also seen a fair number of retailers that have calculated their prices so that when you add tax the total always works out to a nice round number. (eg, in Alberta we have no provincial tax, only the federal GST of 5%, so a retailer that makes all their prices things like $0.95 or $0.96 after tax round to $1.00 and $9.52 or $9.53 after tax rounds to $10.00) It's nice in that customers aren't fiddling for change, and it probably makes their book keeping and coin handling much simpler too. (admittedly these are usually fast food kiosks where people pick from a relatively limited number of items, and where speed of the transaction is of paramount importance, so reducing awkward change is in the retailers best interest)
I was shocked when I went to the states a couple years back and found retailers still accepted cheques there, good luck finding one in Canada that will!
(How would you know the cheque is good anyway?) I Canada most retailers give you 3 choices, cash, credit, or debit. (and to be honest, I can't remember the last time I chose cash...)
I wish they'd accept a company ID swipe, and do payroll deduction.
Now that is a plan that would make sense! think of how much it would save them in cash handling, not to mention it would be easier for the employees as they wouldn't have to think about how much money they brought with them.
Canada already has a $0.50 piece, they're just incredibly rare.
This was something that greatly confused me on a recent trip to the UK, Where I live I barely ever need to carry cash, as a result, when going to the UK I only converted a small amount of $ to £ as I didn't expect to use cash that much anyway (I was in the UK for 2 weeks, and if I remember correctly we had about £200 cash total between my wife and I, with plans to eat out for all meals, and do a lot of sight seeing, museums, shows, etc) .
At home I can't remember the last time I paid for anything with cash, but in the UK I unfortunately discovered almost everywhere I went that I simply couldn't use my VISA which I expected would be nearly universal.
By the end of the trip when I got back to Heathrow we were down to £5.36 in cash and I was quite relieved to have made it through (sure I could have taken out more somewhere, but the fees to do so would have been a LOT more than the conversion I paid at home) (we went through the shops in the airport and tried to figure out what the best bang for out buck was in sweets for that last £5.36 so as not to have any left over when we got home!)
Which is why most places raise their "normal" price to be the credit card price and offer a "discount" for cash.
fits the letter of the agreement perfectly fine, but amounts to exactly the same thing. I've many times encountered a place where the price says $100, I pull out my visa and the business owner cringes and says, "If you pay cash I'll give it to you for $95"
Interestingly enough though, one of the stores I shop at (moderate sized chain retailer) used to offer a cash discount but discontinued it with the logic that the extra charges they had to pay for the credit cards were more than made up for by the extra labour expenses of handling cash vs electronic transactions.
Knowing what time it is implies you are looking for quitting time. If you work 24/7 you don't need to know what time it is!
Now get back to work!
As far as the other manufacturers, there's nothing to gain from confusing customers.
Well that's rather simplistic. Hyundai isn't even the first example that usually comes up.
The Crysler 300 is well known to be a Bentley look-a-like, Cadillac has been trying to rip off BMW designs, some Jeep and Land cruiser designs are almost indistinguishable, And that's without looking at things like crossovers where to be honest I have trouble telling EVERY manufacturer apart!
Banning bulbs with poor efficiency is synonymous with banning incandescents. The fact that we "could have had super-efficient incandescents" is irrelevant because we don't actually have them. So the difference is the same. When I go to the store to buy a bulb, I don't care what wording was used in the bill, I only care what bulbs are on the shelf for me to buy. Right now, if you remove the "poor efficiency bulbs" you have no dimmable bulbs left. I don't care what bulbs COULD have existed, only what bulbs I can buy. Unfortunately manufacturers have decided that what they have now is "good enough" for dimmable, and market them as such, even though they don't do it adequately.
please post the model number of the dimmer, because my 5 Philips LED bulbs in my family room on a Lutron dimmer don't go below about 20% before flicking out, and worse yet, if you have them right at 20% or so and the freezer kicks in, they turn off and don't come back on until you adjust the dimmer again.
Depends on the use. In my kitchen I want white light, as bright as possible, so I can see where I'm putting sharp objects in relation to my hands and the food I'm preparing, bathrooms too. In my living room and in my theatre area I like the "warmer" yellow colour in dimmable bulbs as an ambiance thing. of course I say dimmable, because I want to be able to turn them up bright some times so I can see what I'm doing too. (Too bad neither CFL, nor LED bulbs are dimmable (regardless of what they say on the package, or what the dimmer switch says on it's package)
What you neglect to mention is that dimmable CFLs (And dimmable LEDs too) are a myth. They don't actually exist. Sure some of them claim on the packaging to dim, but when you get them home, and connected, you find that they dim form 100% all the way down to about 70%, and then shut off. (The LEDs seem to go down to about 20%, Incandecents dim the full range down to 0%) additionally the selection is only a handful of bulbs, and they are all at least twice the physical size of an incandecent bulb, so they don't fit in any fixtures.
And before you blame my dimmers, or the specific bulbs, this is experience from 3 different brands of CFL "dimmables", 2 different brands of LED "dimmables" all on 3 different dimmer switches (1 of which was specifically bought to be CFL compatible, the other specifically to be LED compatible, both of which worked exactly the same as the old dimmer switch from the 1970s)
Meanwhile legislators are in the process of banning incandecent bulbs when there is as of yet NO replacement for many very common applications.
This is hard to say for sure. If people are busy, productive, educated, and at least middle class, they don't tend to have a lot of children, but if you get to a time when robots do more of the work, and people start having more free time, a living wage may not be enough to keep the bored from doing what bored couples tend to do... reproduce. Now if people are convinced to fill their time with other things, they may not follow that route, but it's not as simple as saying that you need to make sure they have enough money.
There will come a time when robots and computers can handle all of our needs, and many of our wants without us needing to do the work. Eventually there is no reason why any person will need to work. Unfortunately, the way things are set up now when something is done more efficiently due to technology, the added profit goes to the top, and the no longer required worker gets a pink slip and no income. How we manage a transition from a jobs based economy, to a post-scarcity society will be very interesting.
You put it very well.
If we manage it well, perhaps we'd only have to work a day a week like in the Jetsons ;). Or maybe not even have to work unless we wanted to.
If we don't, it's not going to be so great.
Unfortunately my suspicion is that it will be managed "not going to be so great" until it gets so bad that we end up with outright revolution and war. After which the eventual end result will probably be much more like the good sci-fi writers predicted, with no work needed and humans free to pursue arts and exploration, knowledge, and the betterment of themselves.
The good news is that the end result will likely be quite good, and that we probably have a good bunch of years yet before we hit bottom, the bad news is that I just can't conceive of any likely way to get from where we are now, to where we need to be without going through a very dark period indeed, one which could last a very long time.
What you're describing is no more an issue for self driving cars as it is for humans driving the cars. So I don't see how it is in any way a "new" problem just because we use a self driving car.
A driverless car will not be practical if it can't read street signs. Either every single street sign needs to be changed to work with driverless cars, or more likely, the cars need to read the existing signs, same as the human does.
That's not a problem. The point of the article though seems to be about laws not keeping up, and I've been saying this for years. With all the recent changes to legislation, we're quickly heading for a future where the car drives itself, but you must sit in the driver's seat while it does so, and you must not touch a book, newspaper, cell phone, or anything else, must not close your eyes, or have consumed any alcohol previously. None of these driving laws have exceptions written for self driving cars, and so far, you are still considered the driver, even if the car does it it's self. I sure hope the legislation catches up before I get a self driving car, or commuting will be the absolute most boring thing anyone can do.