I don't know the answer, but wouldn't that be a good thing? The fleet average is weighted by units sold, so it would take a lot of Teslas to make up for the Yukons.
There are quite a lot of patents worth that kind of cash
Not really. After 4 years, that would be $1.6 billion dollars per year. Five years after that, it'd be $51.2 billion per year (or more than Apple is expected to profit this year). Two years later, it'd be $204.8 billion per year (or more than Apple's total expected revenue this year).
No, there aren't many patents worth several generations of exponential cost.
There will always be pathological cases such as yours that skew the findings. The average American drives 13,500 miles per year. Lets assume a worst-case scenario where one person drives a different car and you don't have multiple people sharing a single car (and thereby putting more than the average number of miles on it). Your numbers would indicate that you get about 24MPG. Into 13,500 miles, that gives $2,250 per year in fuel costs per person. At 35.5MPG, that would be $1,520. I appreciate the time value of money, and enjoy spend $730 a year less of it.
That all assumes that gas prices never go European. At the UK average price of $10/gallon, your car would cost the average drive $5,625 a year in fuel. A car meeting the proposed standard would cost $3,802, or $1823 a year less.
In your perfect world, your clunker is cheaper to drive (even though it's dumping 27% more pollutants into the air per mile and making the air suckier for everyone). In the real world, 35.5MPG cars are cheaper for the average driver.
That surprises me. Why is your bike's mileage so poor? We just drove a 4,000 (unloaded) minivan cross country and got 25MPG average, giving it 20x (!!!) better weight-to-mileage ratio. Your bike would need to get at least 250MPG to be half as fuel efficient as our giant sailboat-of-a-van with a cargo carrier on top and 4 screaming kids.
Suppose there are two cars that irreparably die at exactly 100,000 miles, and that gas stays at its artificially and temporarily low $4 a gallon. If Car A gets 28MPG, and Car B gets 35.5MPG but costs $3000 more, then you'll end up paying the same ($purchase_price + $fuel_price) for each.
If you exactly that to a perfectly reasonable 150,000 miles, then Car A would have to get at least 30.2MPG to make it a better deal. If gas goes to $10 a gallon like it is in UK, then Car A would have to get 33.1MPG to make it cheaper than Car B.
Basically, your math only holds for cars that aren't driven. If you actually use the multi-thousand-dollar vehicle you purchase, better gas mileage directly converts to cheaper per mile to operate.
The idea is that Car Company Foo's average MPG - fleet-wide - should be at least 35.5MPG. Sales of your 60MPG car help offset their 25MPG pickups. It does not mean that every single new car must average exactly 35.5MPG.
No, I just don't believe that speciation is evidence for true macro evolution:
Of course not, because "macro evolution" doesn't exist outside Young Earth Creationist talking points. In biology, there isn't "micro evolution" and "macro evolution"; there's only "evolution" (which is supremely well documented, including speciation).
I have a full-color (4 cartridge) laser printer that I virtually never need to change the toner on, and when I do it's invariably the black cartridge.
I have an HP Color LaserJet 2600n and it's been brilliant. Except that after not using it for a couple of months, all three color toner cartridges mysteriously ran dry at the exact same time and had to be replaced before I could print a greyscale document. I was glad to find half-price 3rd party refills online; I just hope they don't turn out to suck.
The problem is that you put a 3-year-old on a 6-hour-flight.
How do you get home for family emergencies? "Excuse me, Mom, but can you but grandpa's corpse on ice for a week while I drive from San Francisco to Buffalo for the funeral? I'd hate to mildly inconvenience some thin-skinned jackass for a couple of hours."
You don't need a big standing army when you have nukes.
If a country were declare war on us, I would much rather fight it on their soil then ours. I think we spend too much on an oversized military, sure, but there's a happy medium between "largest and most expensive military in the history of the world" and "defending Manhattan, one street at at time".
And frankly, your take on nukes would scare the crap out of me if it weren't just the uninformed ramblings of a commenter on a blog post. Ideally, your army is just strong enough to beat the other guy's in a battle with a minimal loss of lives on both sides. Your idea leaves us with nothing between between our battalion subduing theirs and turning their capital city into a parking lot. How exactly do you plan for us to use our nukes? What's the appropriate level of retaliation for, say, taking over our embassy? How many megatons would be a proportional response to that? And how do you phrase the treaties with the world's other nuclear powers: "look, we're only using ours to get revenge on people who hurt us. We're cool with you, so please don't get mad, alright?"
That's the policy everywhere I've lived in the US, too, except that there are personal belief and medical necessity exemptions. The former is an obvious loophole; the anti-vax idiots just claim that they're religiously opposed to shots or something like that. The second is kind of problematic and I'm not sure how to solve it. There are certain people that can't receive particular vaccines for immune deficiency or allergy reasons. That's fine. The problem is that any doctor seems to be able to issue these exemptions. That unfortunately currently includes chiropractors, who seem to be opposed to vaccines for trade reasons (because chiropractic theory and disease theory aren't compatible).
The obvious first step would be to limit medical exemption forms to only being issued by MDs (and maybe DOs? I think they're also pro-science), but then you'll have the chiropractic lobby complaining that they're being treated as second-class citizens.
For the record, I love me a good chiropractor for back pain relief. They just don't have any business involving themselves in the vaccine non-controversy.
And then our insurance rates or cement prices still go up, and you're still looking for someone else to pay through some circuitous route where the costs will be magnified considerably, while providing worse care than pretty much every other 1st world country in the world.
That's almost universally how it's handled today in America. If I got hit by a car, their insurance is responsible for my medical bills, regardless of how much or how little insurance I have on my own.
To be clear, the gamble was that we wouldn't suddenly develop cancer during the short non-covered window. My family has regular health screenings, all of our immunizations, no pre-existing conditions, etc. The downside to the risk is obvious, but the upside is that we could use the money we would've put toward COBRA coverage or a personal policy toward the cross-country move we were making. Switching jobs and paying rent and mortgage on two places at the same time makes for a pretty tight budget.
There's no "sort of". It was an educated gamble, though. My wife and I have some money saved back and can afford to pay for the little stuff outright. At our ages and health conditions, it was exceedingly unlikely that we'd experience a catastrophic illness in that small time window. I'm still exceedingly happy to be back on a health plan in the very near future.
The urban legend (unproven AFAIK) was that Gary Kildall used that stunt to prove that Microsoft ripped of CP/M. From an article in Spectrum:
In 2006, science fiction writer and technology reporter Jerry Pournelle said on “This Week in Tech,” an Internet radio show, that this secret command triggered the display of a copyright notice for DRI and Kildall’s full name. According to Pournelle, Kildall had demonstrated this command to him by typing it into DOS; it produced the notice and thus proved that DOS was copied from CP/M.
This story, circulated for years, has a few problems. First, no one knows the secret command; Pournelle claims he wrote the command down but has never shown it to anyone. In addition, such a message would be easily seen by opening the binary files in a simple text editor unless the message was encrypted. CP/M had to fit on a floppy disk that held only 160 kilobytes; Kildall’s achievement was squeezing an entire operating system into such a small footprint. But it is difficult to imagine he could do this and also squeeze in an undetectable encryption routine. And although we’re now in an era of hackers breaking into heavily secured computers, no one has ever cracked DOS to find this secret command.
But I set out to look for it anyway. I used a utility program developed at SAFE to extract strings of text from binary files. Not only did Kildall’s name not show up in any QDOS or MS-DOS text strings, it did not show up in CP/M either. The term “Digital Research” did appear in copyright notices in the CP/M binary files, but not in MS-DOS or QDOS binary files.
If Jerry Pournelle did indeed see a hidden message revealed by a secret command, it was not in MS-DOS.
Furthermore, it is a medical procedure being performed on someone who is not you, therefore you have no say in the matter.
While not disagreeing with your conclusion, that's faulty logic. Society absolutely can (and does) decide which medical procedures to allow. For instance, witness the current nearly-universal condemnation of female circumcision. It's performed on young women with their consent, or at least the consent of their parents/guardians, but is still decried as barbaric and unacceptable.
I don't intend to compare abortion with female circumcision. I just want to point out that there's already accepted precedent for what you say we (as a society) shouldn't be doing. I've heard many convincing reasons why abortion should be kept legal and accessible, but this isn't one of them.
I guess it depends where you live. In SF, that's good pay for a senior developer working normal office hours. You'd want substantially more plus great stock options for twice the work time.
It's crazy, working 12 or 16 hours a day, and that five days or maybe six a week? If you have no social life, earn $10k+ a month
There's no way I'd work more than - say - 45 hours a week for that salary. If you want to own my nights and weekends, I'll have to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Time-And-A-Half. I don't mean that I'd never work long hours under urgent conditions. I have, and I will again. But any company who seriously wanted me to pull 60 hours a week on a regular basis would quickly discover that I put a pretty high dollar value on my free time.
I rather doubt that macintosh laptops have any kind of corner on the app market, to say the least.
In math and science, they do. All the good stuff there is derived from ancient Unix-native codebases; in this context, a Mac is a nice, modern Unix system that can run their analytics.
If you think contractors don't get any benefits, then I would have to believe that you're pretty naive.
None of the contractors I know - myself included - get much beyond their (usually pretty decent) paychecks. A contractor with benefits is usually known as a full-time employee. But at any rate, higher compensation makes the marginal costs of a Mac laptop even smaller in proportion.
Penny wise and pound foolish does not mean throwing cash at the project until something sticks.
But it does mean not getting bogged down in trying to minimize every imaginable expense, at the cost of forcing something unwanted onto your employees. There's a reason why almost every corporation I know of lets their IT and creative staff - at the very minimum - choose between a Mac or a PC. It's easier (and cheaper!) to let employees work with the gear they know, they like, and that they're comfortable with. That's good financial management.
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I don't know the answer, but wouldn't that be a good thing? The fleet average is weighted by units sold, so it would take a lot of Teslas to make up for the Yukons.
There are quite a lot of patents worth that kind of cash
Not really. After 4 years, that would be $1.6 billion dollars per year. Five years after that, it'd be $51.2 billion per year (or more than Apple is expected to profit this year). Two years later, it'd be $204.8 billion per year (or more than Apple's total expected revenue this year).
No, there aren't many patents worth several generations of exponential cost.
This would put patent renewal in the hands of the wealthiest, further tipping the balance in the favor of the rich.
If a patent's cost doubled every year, few companies would renew many times past the $100,000,000 mark.
So in the worst case, you get more use and enjoyment out of the exact same capital investment. I'm not really seeing a downside to this. :-)
There will always be pathological cases such as yours that skew the findings. The average American drives 13,500 miles per year. Lets assume a worst-case scenario where one person drives a different car and you don't have multiple people sharing a single car (and thereby putting more than the average number of miles on it). Your numbers would indicate that you get about 24MPG. Into 13,500 miles, that gives $2,250 per year in fuel costs per person. At 35.5MPG, that would be $1,520. I appreciate the time value of money, and enjoy spend $730 a year less of it.
That all assumes that gas prices never go European. At the UK average price of $10/gallon, your car would cost the average drive $5,625 a year in fuel. A car meeting the proposed standard would cost $3,802, or $1823 a year less.
In your perfect world, your clunker is cheaper to drive (even though it's dumping 27% more pollutants into the air per mile and making the air suckier for everyone). In the real world, 35.5MPG cars are cheaper for the average driver.
That surprises me. Why is your bike's mileage so poor? We just drove a 4,000 (unloaded) minivan cross country and got 25MPG average, giving it 20x (!!!) better weight-to-mileage ratio. Your bike would need to get at least 250MPG to be half as fuel efficient as our giant sailboat-of-a-van with a cargo carrier on top and 4 screaming kids.
Suppose there are two cars that irreparably die at exactly 100,000 miles, and that gas stays at its artificially and temporarily low $4 a gallon. If Car A gets 28MPG, and Car B gets 35.5MPG but costs $3000 more, then you'll end up paying the same ($purchase_price + $fuel_price) for each.
If you exactly that to a perfectly reasonable 150,000 miles, then Car A would have to get at least 30.2MPG to make it a better deal. If gas goes to $10 a gallon like it is in UK, then Car A would have to get 33.1MPG to make it cheaper than Car B.
Basically, your math only holds for cars that aren't driven. If you actually use the multi-thousand-dollar vehicle you purchase, better gas mileage directly converts to cheaper per mile to operate.
The idea is that Car Company Foo's average MPG - fleet-wide - should be at least 35.5MPG. Sales of your 60MPG car help offset their 25MPG pickups. It does not mean that every single new car must average exactly 35.5MPG.
No, I just don't believe that speciation is evidence for true macro evolution:
Of course not, because "macro evolution" doesn't exist outside Young Earth Creationist talking points. In biology, there isn't "micro evolution" and "macro evolution"; there's only "evolution" (which is supremely well documented, including speciation).
I have a full-color (4 cartridge) laser printer that I virtually never need to change the toner on, and when I do it's invariably the black cartridge.
I have an HP Color LaserJet 2600n and it's been brilliant. Except that after not using it for a couple of months, all three color toner cartridges mysteriously ran dry at the exact same time and had to be replaced before I could print a greyscale document. I was glad to find half-price 3rd party refills online; I just hope they don't turn out to suck.
The problem is that you put a 3-year-old on a 6-hour-flight.
How do you get home for family emergencies? "Excuse me, Mom, but can you but grandpa's corpse on ice for a week while I drive from San Francisco to Buffalo for the funeral? I'd hate to mildly inconvenience some thin-skinned jackass for a couple of hours."
You don't need a big standing army when you have nukes.
If a country were declare war on us, I would much rather fight it on their soil then ours. I think we spend too much on an oversized military, sure, but there's a happy medium between "largest and most expensive military in the history of the world" and "defending Manhattan, one street at at time".
And frankly, your take on nukes would scare the crap out of me if it weren't just the uninformed ramblings of a commenter on a blog post. Ideally, your army is just strong enough to beat the other guy's in a battle with a minimal loss of lives on both sides. Your idea leaves us with nothing between between our battalion subduing theirs and turning their capital city into a parking lot. How exactly do you plan for us to use our nukes? What's the appropriate level of retaliation for, say, taking over our embassy? How many megatons would be a proportional response to that? And how do you phrase the treaties with the world's other nuclear powers: "look, we're only using ours to get revenge on people who hurt us. We're cool with you, so please don't get mad, alright?"
I don't think you've thought this through.
You're going to shit your pants when you find out what table salt is made of.
That's the policy everywhere I've lived in the US, too, except that there are personal belief and medical necessity exemptions. The former is an obvious loophole; the anti-vax idiots just claim that they're religiously opposed to shots or something like that. The second is kind of problematic and I'm not sure how to solve it. There are certain people that can't receive particular vaccines for immune deficiency or allergy reasons. That's fine. The problem is that any doctor seems to be able to issue these exemptions. That unfortunately currently includes chiropractors, who seem to be opposed to vaccines for trade reasons (because chiropractic theory and disease theory aren't compatible).
The obvious first step would be to limit medical exemption forms to only being issued by MDs (and maybe DOs? I think they're also pro-science), but then you'll have the chiropractic lobby complaining that they're being treated as second-class citizens.
For the record, I love me a good chiropractor for back pain relief. They just don't have any business involving themselves in the vaccine non-controversy.
And then our insurance rates or cement prices still go up, and you're still looking for someone else to pay through some circuitous route where the costs will be magnified considerably, while providing worse care than pretty much every other 1st world country in the world.
That's almost universally how it's handled today in America. If I got hit by a car, their insurance is responsible for my medical bills, regardless of how much or how little insurance I have on my own.
Cold air, meet hot air.
To be clear, the gamble was that we wouldn't suddenly develop cancer during the short non-covered window. My family has regular health screenings, all of our immunizations, no pre-existing conditions, etc. The downside to the risk is obvious, but the upside is that we could use the money we would've put toward COBRA coverage or a personal policy toward the cross-country move we were making. Switching jobs and paying rent and mortgage on two places at the same time makes for a pretty tight budget.
There's no "sort of". It was an educated gamble, though. My wife and I have some money saved back and can afford to pay for the little stuff outright. At our ages and health conditions, it was exceedingly unlikely that we'd experience a catastrophic illness in that small time window. I'm still exceedingly happy to be back on a health plan in the very near future.
My health plan is to avoid getting sick.
I wouldn't do that long-term, though. I'm only temporarily contracting and start a full time job with insurance benefits in two weeks.
The urban legend (unproven AFAIK) was that Gary Kildall used that stunt to prove that Microsoft ripped of CP/M. From an article in Spectrum:
In 2006, science fiction writer and technology reporter Jerry Pournelle said on “This Week in Tech,” an Internet radio show, that this secret command triggered the display of a copyright notice for DRI and Kildall’s full name. According to Pournelle, Kildall had demonstrated this command to him by typing it into DOS; it produced the notice and thus proved that DOS was copied from CP/M.
This story, circulated for years, has a few problems. First, no one knows the secret command; Pournelle claims he wrote the command down but has never shown it to anyone. In addition, such a message would be easily seen by opening the binary files in a simple text editor unless the message was encrypted. CP/M had to fit on a floppy disk that held only 160 kilobytes; Kildall’s achievement was squeezing an entire operating system into such a small footprint. But it is difficult to imagine he could do this and also squeeze in an undetectable encryption routine. And although we’re now in an era of hackers breaking into heavily secured computers, no one has ever cracked DOS to find this secret command.
But I set out to look for it anyway. I used a utility program developed at SAFE to extract strings of text from binary files. Not only did Kildall’s name not show up in any QDOS or MS-DOS text strings, it did not show up in CP/M either. The term “Digital Research” did appear in copyright notices in the CP/M binary files, but not in MS-DOS or QDOS binary files.
If Jerry Pournelle did indeed see a hidden message revealed by a secret command, it was not in MS-DOS.
Furthermore, it is a medical procedure being performed on someone who is not you, therefore you have no say in the matter.
While not disagreeing with your conclusion, that's faulty logic. Society absolutely can (and does) decide which medical procedures to allow. For instance, witness the current nearly-universal condemnation of female circumcision. It's performed on young women with their consent, or at least the consent of their parents/guardians, but is still decried as barbaric and unacceptable.
I don't intend to compare abortion with female circumcision. I just want to point out that there's already accepted precedent for what you say we (as a society) shouldn't be doing. I've heard many convincing reasons why abortion should be kept legal and accessible, but this isn't one of them.
I guess it depends where you live. In SF, that's good pay for a senior developer working normal office hours. You'd want substantially more plus great stock options for twice the work time.
So what specific parts did you disagree with? I'm a Nintendo fan, but I'd have to agree he's pretty much dead-on correct.
It's crazy, working 12 or 16 hours a day, and that five days or maybe six a week? If you have no social life, earn $10k+ a month
There's no way I'd work more than - say - 45 hours a week for that salary. If you want to own my nights and weekends, I'll have to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Time-And-A-Half. I don't mean that I'd never work long hours under urgent conditions. I have, and I will again. But any company who seriously wanted me to pull 60 hours a week on a regular basis would quickly discover that I put a pretty high dollar value on my free time.
I rather doubt that macintosh laptops have any kind of corner on the app market, to say the least.
In math and science, they do. All the good stuff there is derived from ancient Unix-native codebases; in this context, a Mac is a nice, modern Unix system that can run their analytics.
If you think contractors don't get any benefits, then I would have to believe that you're pretty naive.
None of the contractors I know - myself included - get much beyond their (usually pretty decent) paychecks. A contractor with benefits is usually known as a full-time employee. But at any rate, higher compensation makes the marginal costs of a Mac laptop even smaller in proportion.
Penny wise and pound foolish does not mean throwing cash at the project until something sticks.
But it does mean not getting bogged down in trying to minimize every imaginable expense, at the cost of forcing something unwanted onto your employees. There's a reason why almost every corporation I know of lets their IT and creative staff - at the very minimum - choose between a Mac or a PC. It's easier (and cheaper!) to let employees work with the gear they know, they like, and that they're comfortable with. That's good financial management.