Assuming an equal number of passengers and approximately the same energy pert ton with Methane and Kerosene, the rocket would use 24x the fuel. Since fuel is about 40% of the cost of an airline ticket, it seems reasonable that 24 * 0.4 = 9.6 the cost of an airline ticket even if fuel is the only cost and the company wants to break even. I don't know how many passengers the BFR carries, though. I don't think it will be the propulsion system.
Apart from the massive lack of nasty emissions in precisely the places where people want to breathe and fuel economy?
Or the higher torque engines. Or the quieter ride. Or the fact that you don't wake up your neighbors if you come or go late at night. Or not having to get gasoline on your hands when filling the tank. Or lower maintenance costs. And the emissions thing.
If you buy a huge Highlander 2wd vehicle for driving on roads, you aren't really interested in any intrinsic vehicle characteristics but only how you (think) others will perceive you. I can't think of a less practical vehicle. 4wd Highlander is pretty capable off-road and for towing something like a boat. 2wd, better stay on dry pavement. Cargo capacity. Well you'd be way better with a minivan. A 2wd Highlander serves the same market as people who wear North Face jackets but have never been out of the city.
So you are saying electric generation gets 50% of its power from dirty sources and 50% from clean. ICE cars get 100% dirty. So although you seem to be against electric cars, the fact is that its a 50% improvement even if electricity generation doesn't get cleaner which it most certainly will.
Which is a great solution. Talking about it gives people the idea that maybe they should look at alternatives while not actually causing interruption in daily life. Also once everybody is talking about it, somebody will do it, and we'll see what happens. Talking about stuff before doing it is a really good idea as that gives you a chance to get feedback and refine the idea.
The problem with this is, as the original poster pointed out, electrics are expensive. And a *big* electric is *very* expensive. Al electric Hummer would be great because it could have like 2 tons of batteries and a long range. But probably you're looking at 50k just for the batteries and that makes is unaffordable for many.
Don't charge for the purchase of the car, just charge an insane gas tax. And if you drive into California, you have to stop at the border and pay the tax on any gas in your tank.
They may be (individually) willing to give up things to make it go away. But some things can't be accomplished through a bunch of individual decisions. If you give up your gas car, now you just don't have good transportation and there is still smog. You live in a place hostile to your situation. On the other hand, if you ban gas cars, the city changes to become toward not having a gas car and it's a pleasant place for everybody. You'll have fabulous public transportation, chargers at every parking spot, and all of those gas stations will become lush urban parks that sooth the soul while freshening the air.
Yeah, I have no idea where the idea came from that IKEA furniture is hard to put together. However, it often requires *two* people for the larger pieces. And I can certainly see wanting to hire help sometimes.
Although I hope this isn't completely representative of our future, real mobile homes mean a very mobile workforce. One of the complaints we often see about economically depressed areas is "why don't people just move." They can't if they are tied to a house. Here, people really can follow work.
As an AC has pointed out, Dasani does do work to make their water *taste* better. First, you have to Chlorinate tap water to keep people from getting sick. But the Chlorine really tastes awful. So they filter it out right before bottling. The bottles have to be air tight to keep bacteria from growing. But removing the Chlorine removes minerals. Distilled water doesn't taste good either. So then they add back a tasty blend of minerals. Why we can't have machines to do this at home, I don't know. There are RO filters out there but they tend to do your whole house which is a huge problem as you now may get bacteria growing in the indoor plumbing. You can buy crappy brita filters (and I also have a filter in my refrigerator). They suck as they tend to leech charcoal into the water.
What would work well is a device that did RO filtering and mineral injection right at the tap. They could even use proprietary mineral cartridges like printers do in order to make a huge profit on consumables.
Until you posted, there's not a single link in the entire thread. No, I didn't read the reviews to look for deleted reviews. Not a single news outlet has written about this in a week. https://www.google.com/search?... Amazon is sticking to their story and nobody with circulation has challenged them on it. I don't know why. Amazon also lets people vote on whether reviews are helpful, a form of meta-moderating. But that's probably falling down as well. Amazon is somewhat of the only moderator here and just like we at/. love to criticize the mods (I did it in my first post in this thread), people are criticizing Amazon. They also criticize football umpires. And that's fair. But remember football officials are trying to create a "fair" game. Amazon is not. Their trying to have happy customers.
If nobody is buying it, then why do they need reviews to assist people in buying it?
It's not that nobody is buying it. Let's say that Amazon starts carrying a brand of dog food that was previously available exclusively at Whole Foods. Now you can order it online. Plenty of people have been *buying* it, but they don't have any verified purchasers because people haven't been buying it from Amazon. Amazon doesn't grab reviews from third-party sites, you have to write them at Amazon. So day one, it is a new product that has been popular other places, but never sold on Amazon. For those first reviews, you have to accept whoever writes them. Once you have a large enough set of reviews, you may want to drop the non-verified reviews. But (unless it's a polarizing book), the non-verified reviews and verified reviews should be about the same so doing so doesn't change anything and there isn't a lot of motivation. It might add some credibility to the review system to be more consistent, but in the end, they are *not* trying to provide the most helpful reviews. That's the job of somebody like consumer reports. They are trying to provide the set of reviews that are most helpful to the *pool of potential purchasers*. In *many* cases, these two things would produce the exact same result, but here we have an example where they diverge.
I did expand and re-read the thread. I see that the OP is making that claim but with no citation. I tried to Google a source to see if the claim was true or false as that's not what I had read in the news. I was unable to find a source backing up the original claim. So if the original statement is true, I'd love to see a source and would be happy to stand corrected. But as of now, there is only a claim and all of the sources I can find say that Amazon is only deleting non-verified purchasers.
I was talking about the same problem as the article. Google is changing the behavior of Chrome to discourage people from using.dev for their local-only resources that ought to be.example,.invalid, or.localhost and the tone of most of the comments seems to be outrage. I can't fathom why anybody would be upset about the change as I don't see how one could seriously advocate for misusing TLDs and I pointed out the danger of doing so.
For some products, I imagine that they will take whatever reviews they can get. There may just not be enough verified purchasers out there. After all if Amazon just started carrying a product, they won't have any verified purchasers. So they have to accept any reviews. Once there are enough sales (assuming the initial reviews were positive enough to generate any), they may want to switch to verified purchaser reviews. Hillary has people who love her (and buy the book) and who hate here (who would never buy her book). If you allow anybody to review, the reviews will just be 48.2 positive to 46.1 negative and not based at all on the content. Once you switch to verified purchasers, you have people who are already pre-inclined to like Hillary so the reviews are basically an echo chamber. Now if you are looking to do *research,* neither one of these is ideal. If you're looking to *sell* books, then whenever you have an author about whom people have strong opinions, you want to restrict reviews to those who actually purchased the book because (1) it will result in an overall better review (so you sell more copies) and (2) anybody who is considering buying the book really only wants to hear reviews from others who like the author. The only two reviews that are meaningful are "I like Hillary and thought the book was great" and "I like Hillary but the book sucks." "I hate Hillary" has no value to any prospective purchaser. I have no idea why anybody would expect Amazon to do anything other than exactly what they did here.
No, they deleted reviews written by people who hadn't actually *bought* the book. You can't have read the book if you didn't *buy* it. No idea how this flamebait got modded up.
I don't know. His sitting in the glass conference room looking harmless almost worked. The CEO almost walked past. In fact if you have a shirt and tie, except in the smallest of companies, you could probably occupy a conference room all day and not draw any attention.
This seems to be the general hope that somehow DRM will fail and go away. Nothing wrong with wishing for that but it's a far-fetched dream at best. Current DRM systems for streaming content work very well. You turn on your TV and you can watch HBO or Amazon Prime or anything else without even knowing that there is DRM at play. At $10/month for unlimited streaming you can't even buy one movie for that price or even a ticket to a theater.
If we care about "cultural imprisonment" then what we should (a) work to shorten the length of copyright and (b) require that DRM-free versions of content be provided when the copyright expires. Prior to the digital age we had books which had an implicit form of DRM. (Photocopying was more expensive than just buying a copy). And we had *libraries*. So another requirement might be that (c) The DRM works well in a library setting.
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Assuming an equal number of passengers and approximately the same energy pert ton with Methane and Kerosene, the rocket would use 24x the fuel. Since fuel is about 40% of the cost of an airline ticket, it seems reasonable that 24 * 0.4 = 9.6 the cost of an airline ticket even if fuel is the only cost and the company wants to break even. I don't know how many passengers the BFR carries, though. I don't think it will be the propulsion system.
It is for the working *poor*!
Apart from the massive lack of nasty emissions in precisely the places where people want to breathe and fuel economy?
Or the higher torque engines. Or the quieter ride. Or the fact that you don't wake up your neighbors if you come or go late at night. Or not having to get gasoline on your hands when filling the tank. Or lower maintenance costs. And the emissions thing.
If you buy a huge Highlander 2wd vehicle for driving on roads, you aren't really interested in any intrinsic vehicle characteristics but only how you (think) others will perceive you. I can't think of a less practical vehicle. 4wd Highlander is pretty capable off-road and for towing something like a boat. 2wd, better stay on dry pavement. Cargo capacity. Well you'd be way better with a minivan. A 2wd Highlander serves the same market as people who wear North Face jackets but have never been out of the city.
So you are saying electric generation gets 50% of its power from dirty sources and 50% from clean. ICE cars get 100% dirty. So although you seem to be against electric cars, the fact is that its a 50% improvement even if electricity generation doesn't get cleaner which it most certainly will.
Which is a great solution. Talking about it gives people the idea that maybe they should look at alternatives while not actually causing interruption in daily life. Also once everybody is talking about it, somebody will do it, and we'll see what happens. Talking about stuff before doing it is a really good idea as that gives you a chance to get feedback and refine the idea.
The problem with this is, as the original poster pointed out, electrics are expensive. And a *big* electric is *very* expensive. Al electric Hummer would be great because it could have like 2 tons of batteries and a long range. But probably you're looking at 50k just for the batteries and that makes is unaffordable for many.
Don't charge for the purchase of the car, just charge an insane gas tax. And if you drive into California, you have to stop at the border and pay the tax on any gas in your tank.
They may be (individually) willing to give up things to make it go away. But some things can't be accomplished through a bunch of individual decisions. If you give up your gas car, now you just don't have good transportation and there is still smog. You live in a place hostile to your situation. On the other hand, if you ban gas cars, the city changes to become toward not having a gas car and it's a pleasant place for everybody. You'll have fabulous public transportation, chargers at every parking spot, and all of those gas stations will become lush urban parks that sooth the soul while freshening the air.
Yeah, I have no idea where the idea came from that IKEA furniture is hard to put together. However, it often requires *two* people for the larger pieces. And I can certainly see wanting to hire help sometimes.
No you didn't say that. You said "small as possible."
Although I hope this isn't completely representative of our future, real mobile homes mean a very mobile workforce. One of the complaints we often see about economically depressed areas is "why don't people just move." They can't if they are tied to a house. Here, people really can follow work.
Replying to myself, it does look like these contraptions exist. https://www.amazon.com/iSpring...
Bottles that end up as landfill waste.
As an AC has pointed out, Dasani does do work to make their water *taste* better. First, you have to Chlorinate tap water to keep people from getting sick. But the Chlorine really tastes awful. So they filter it out right before bottling. The bottles have to be air tight to keep bacteria from growing. But removing the Chlorine removes minerals. Distilled water doesn't taste good either. So then they add back a tasty blend of minerals. Why we can't have machines to do this at home, I don't know. There are RO filters out there but they tend to do your whole house which is a huge problem as you now may get bacteria growing in the indoor plumbing. You can buy crappy brita filters (and I also have a filter in my refrigerator). They suck as they tend to leech charcoal into the water. What would work well is a device that did RO filtering and mineral injection right at the tap. They could even use proprietary mineral cartridges like printers do in order to make a huge profit on consumables.
Until you posted, there's not a single link in the entire thread. No, I didn't read the reviews to look for deleted reviews. Not a single news outlet has written about this in a week. https://www.google.com/search?... Amazon is sticking to their story and nobody with circulation has challenged them on it. I don't know why. Amazon also lets people vote on whether reviews are helpful, a form of meta-moderating. But that's probably falling down as well. Amazon is somewhat of the only moderator here and just like we at /. love to criticize the mods (I did it in my first post in this thread), people are criticizing Amazon. They also criticize football umpires. And that's fair. But remember football officials are trying to create a "fair" game. Amazon is not. Their trying to have happy customers.
If nobody is buying it, then why do they need reviews to assist people in buying it?
It's not that nobody is buying it. Let's say that Amazon starts carrying a brand of dog food that was previously available exclusively at Whole Foods. Now you can order it online. Plenty of people have been *buying* it, but they don't have any verified purchasers because people haven't been buying it from Amazon. Amazon doesn't grab reviews from third-party sites, you have to write them at Amazon. So day one, it is a new product that has been popular other places, but never sold on Amazon. For those first reviews, you have to accept whoever writes them. Once you have a large enough set of reviews, you may want to drop the non-verified reviews. But (unless it's a polarizing book), the non-verified reviews and verified reviews should be about the same so doing so doesn't change anything and there isn't a lot of motivation. It might add some credibility to the review system to be more consistent, but in the end, they are *not* trying to provide the most helpful reviews. That's the job of somebody like consumer reports. They are trying to provide the set of reviews that are most helpful to the *pool of potential purchasers*. In *many* cases, these two things would produce the exact same result, but here we have an example where they diverge.
I did expand and re-read the thread. I see that the OP is making that claim but with no citation. I tried to Google a source to see if the claim was true or false as that's not what I had read in the news. I was unable to find a source backing up the original claim. So if the original statement is true, I'd love to see a source and would be happy to stand corrected. But as of now, there is only a claim and all of the sources I can find say that Amazon is only deleting non-verified purchasers.
I was talking about the same problem as the article. Google is changing the behavior of Chrome to discourage people from using .dev for their local-only resources that ought to be .example, .invalid, or .localhost and the tone of most of the comments seems to be outrage. I can't fathom why anybody would be upset about the change as I don't see how one could seriously advocate for misusing TLDs and I pointed out the danger of doing so.
For some products, I imagine that they will take whatever reviews they can get. There may just not be enough verified purchasers out there. After all if Amazon just started carrying a product, they won't have any verified purchasers. So they have to accept any reviews. Once there are enough sales (assuming the initial reviews were positive enough to generate any), they may want to switch to verified purchaser reviews. Hillary has people who love her (and buy the book) and who hate here (who would never buy her book). If you allow anybody to review, the reviews will just be 48.2 positive to 46.1 negative and not based at all on the content. Once you switch to verified purchasers, you have people who are already pre-inclined to like Hillary so the reviews are basically an echo chamber. Now if you are looking to do *research,* neither one of these is ideal. If you're looking to *sell* books, then whenever you have an author about whom people have strong opinions, you want to restrict reviews to those who actually purchased the book because (1) it will result in an overall better review (so you sell more copies) and (2) anybody who is considering buying the book really only wants to hear reviews from others who like the author. The only two reviews that are meaningful are "I like Hillary and thought the book was great" and "I like Hillary but the book sucks." "I hate Hillary" has no value to any prospective purchaser. I have no idea why anybody would expect Amazon to do anything other than exactly what they did here.
Then I really have no idea what you are trying to say!
No, they deleted reviews written by people who hadn't actually *bought* the book. You can't have read the book if you didn't *buy* it. No idea how this flamebait got modded up.
I don't know. His sitting in the glass conference room looking harmless almost worked. The CEO almost walked past. In fact if you have a shirt and tie, except in the smallest of companies, you could probably occupy a conference room all day and not draw any attention.
This seems to be the general hope that somehow DRM will fail and go away. Nothing wrong with wishing for that but it's a far-fetched dream at best. Current DRM systems for streaming content work very well. You turn on your TV and you can watch HBO or Amazon Prime or anything else without even knowing that there is DRM at play. At $10/month for unlimited streaming you can't even buy one movie for that price or even a ticket to a theater.
If we care about "cultural imprisonment" then what we should (a) work to shorten the length of copyright and (b) require that DRM-free versions of content be provided when the copyright expires. Prior to the digital age we had books which had an implicit form of DRM. (Photocopying was more expensive than just buying a copy). And we had *libraries*. So another requirement might be that (c) The DRM works well in a library setting.