I would tend to argue that nobody "needs" to have the shiny new all the time. The only reason you can buy a used mid-range anything for a decent price are because of people who *want* the shiny new all the time (otherwise they would have held onto the items). But I think you are kind of proving my original point which is that buying and/or renting the shiny new all the time is just fine as a form of recreation if you can afford it. But the decision to rent the shiny new vs buy it doesn't really matter. Sometimes there are really good lease deals out there especially on cars because you get a guaranteed price at the end of the lease so you're not taking residual value risk. (An open-end lease on a vehicle would be insane). But you shouldn't put a price on the ephemeral value of ownership for ownership's sake. Assets that depreciate are a much different thing that assets which appreciate. No matter how you look at it you are really just renting the former. OTOH owning the latter is a big deal. It's easy to buy the former and *feel* like you are doing the latter and thus make bad decisions. I'm cautioning against this.
That's an interesting idea. Do you have any practical examples? Nobody knows if you post to Facebook (or/.) from a shiny new iPhone or an old computer in the library.
I don't agree with your point philosophically but I think there is some validity to that argument from a moral perspective.
However, from an economic standpoint, this doesn't work. We just went through a very large recession where many people lost their jobs. There simply wasn't enough work. Now we seem to be in a situation where there may be jobs but the skills aren't necessarily lining up.
If we let large quantities of people starve to death during a downturn we won't have the necessary labor force when the economy rebounds. We need to provide everybody with a basic existence. A full weeks worth of honest work should yield enough rewards for food, functional clothing, and shelter.
Partially out of fairness and partially out of economic necessity, the government protects the weakest members of our society from the strongest. This is fundamentally necessary. One of those protections is certain minimum treatment for employees. There is huge room for debate on what the *right* level of protection is. Make it too low and people die needlessly damaging the economy. Make it too high and there aren't enough incentives.
But there isn't a good argument for zero protection.
In this particular case, though, nobody is saying that Uber can't use contractors. The ruling is that the current situation qualifies as employment.
This is true if people have other opportunities. The problem with your scenario is that from the time they turn down being a contractor until the time that somebody comes along and offers a better deal, people will starve to death. But that's not really what's at issue here.
People can be contractors (as you've chosen to be) or they can be employees. What they can't do is be employees who are treated as contractors to avoid employment laws.
I'm not saying those laws are perfect, but we certain are better off than before employment laws existed, so I have a tough time with the idea of going back.
Nobody is saying that you can't hire contractors. Just that you can't hire employees and call them contractors. Next California will maybe address running a taxi service and calling it car sharing, but don't hold your breath.
Because the worker doesn't have the negotiating power. The current case is the one that proves your point. Some Uber workers want to be contractors, others want to be employees. But it doesn't matter what they want. Uber declared them to be contractors and they have no recourse except the government.
An easier example is if I hold a gun to your head and demand your wallet. Yes you voluntarily gave it to me, but it's still not acceptable. The government is simply defending the powerless here the same way as police defend mugging victims.
I'm not forgetting it. I'm just saying that renting vs. buying you should figure out the net present value of the (negative) cash flows that you will have over the lifetime of use. The fact that you "own" it (whatever that means) doesn't figure into the calculation. On that part we seem to agree.
The one area where I agree with the OP is that if you are using the rental as a means of financial leverage in order to acquire something you can't actually afford, it's probably a terrible idea. If there is any non-trivial risk of default you shouldn't do the transaction at all as the costs of default are quite high.
If these were capital equipment purchased for business purposes (Perhaps you run a business that tests Android apps for a fee), this would be a reasonable accounting method. Assume three year linear depreciation or something along those lines. That's not my point, though.
In your example, I buy the device for $730 knowing that a year later I could sell it for $365. Or I could rent it for $1/day for a year. Both are the same from a financial perspective. In the first scenario somebody will say "ut I own it." Yes and in the second scenario you could rent it for a year for $365 and then buy a used one at the end for $365. You're slightly ahead in the second scenario since you could have earned interest on the $365 in your pocket. Of course in real life, you won't get this deal. The lease will end up costing $1.10 / day or something. Given the two scenarios the outright purchase *feels* better to most people, but it's simply not significantly better if the rental price is reasonable.
The OP to which I was responding was pointing out that, in the rental scenario, you don't *own* anything in the first scenario. My point is that it doesn't make a difference. At any time after purchase the device will have less value than when the purchase was made. Renting from initial time x to x+1 for approximately the depreciation cost during that time is the same, financially, as owning. Since these devices eventually go to zero after some time, lets suppose it's three years, this means that a three-year rental for the full price of the device is no different than owning.
You might say that at the end of the ownership scenario you have a device that's worth nothing where as at the end of the rental you have nothing. And, of course, you can use a device worth nothing. With the rent, you are forced to rent again. But this isn't true as exhibited by the fact that used iPhone 3s are available for free or $5 (essentially free) at the local Salvation Army store.
The only time that owning is beneficial over renting is if the item in question has the potential for capital appreciation (going up in value). Buying a depreciating asset isn't any better financially than renting a depreciating asset at a reasonable price. But it *feels* better which is a problem because it leads to poor decisions.
Buying something for a one-time payment vs. paying a monthly fee *feels* like a smarter financial decision. But it isn't necessarily. Most things that you buy are very non-liquid (hard to sell) and depreciate quickly to zero. If you go out and spend $500 on a phone, you *feel* like you didn't really spend that much money. You used to have $500 in cash and now you have a $500 item, so you really just traded one asset for another of equal value. But this is just a psychological effect. Unless it's a piece of capital equipment that you are going to use for generating revenue, it's really an expense incurred immediately. If you wouldn't do the monthly rental plan, you probably shouldn't purchase the item. So if the offered monthly rental doesn't feel as emotionally good as an outright purchase, that's just psychology. You probably should neither buy nor rent the item.
If you can't put a few dollars away every month you shouldn't be buying iPhones or music subscriptions. I'm sure somebody will respond that having the latest phone is an entitlement and the government should be distributing them to everybody. As a society, we have a real inequality issue and I'm sympathetic to those who can't afford to participate in our shared culture. And that does, these days, include things like newer smartphones. That being said, if you are in that unenviable position, the solution is not to put on a veneer of wealth at the expense of your long-term financial well-being. You still need to live within your means.
There are two components to AppleCare. The loss/damage insurance and the technical support. The shitty Best Buy program to which you refer is usually only the former portion. The latter has no value to/. users. However, I often recommend it to family members. Keeps me from having to help them figure out how to get their photos on to Facebook every time they go to a boring anniversary party.
The solution for carry-on is easy, but it would have to be mandated. Market forces won't work. Require that all airlines add a $35 carry-on fee to every ticket at the time of purchase. Give passengers a choice on travel day of a tag for their bag (so they can put it in overhead) or the $35 back in cash and check the bag. Guarantee that the overheads will be almost empty.
Note that Frontier charges $35 to use the overhead and people absolutely hate it. Feels like a "gotcha" fee. On the other hand even people who would normally rather go face first through a piece of glass than check bags will suddenly be willing to wait at the carousel for their $35.
The difference is huge for business travelers where the $35 line item means a separate expense report for the air travel (yuck) and no personal benefit from checking the bag (save the company money) but a $35 refund to the traveler is pure profit.
I leave out the ethics here, but boarding would be super-fast and there would not be any overhead space issues.
I'm sure that the "wrongly targeted" do use those services, but there isn't much business out there defending the innocent On the other hand, shilling in order to help somebody cover up bad behavior is probably a pretty large market. In this case the definition of bad is that the customer knows that their behavior is so poor that their willing to pay somebody to try to minimize public knowledge of what they did.
And either way, the point is that the human driver helps us make the transition to automated driving. The human driver will have more to do when self-driving is mostly the exception. As self-driving cars become the dominant vehicle on the road, the dynamics will change.
There's no way that a roundabout would ever be cheaper than a four way stop. Most four way stops start out as intersections controlled by either a yield sign or a two-way stop. Then traffic increases and the signs get changed. Ripping up the intersection and replacing it with a roundabout is much more expensive than putting up four signs. Also there isn't often room in residential areas for a roundabout. And what you suggested in terms of safety seems to apply to safety of car drivers, not pedestrians. When you bring pedestrians into the mix, you would have to add a traffic light to get all of the cars to stop. At that point, you might as well use a traffic light.
Yes I saw that in the original comment. Right now, the Google drivers are the only ones in the vehicles. What I'm saying is that will change when the mass-market version comes out.
And even if morning commute times were longer, who cares, as it wouldn't be commute time. You would start working the second you hit the car. Who cares if it takes two hours each way if you have your computer open doing work.
Most certainly not. Eventually there will be a class action suit, though, and a firmware upgrade will allow you to force the car to strictly obey the limits. That will be about the same time that there is saturation of self-driving cars and the sheer number of them that are keeping speed to within 0.01% of the posted limit will ensure that nobody can speed. Municipalities will then all complain of the lost revenue.
You can't program the self-driving car to break the rules as it opens up all kinds of moral and (more importantly, or at least more expensively) legal liability issues. You have a human driver for that situation until the proportion of self-driving cars increases enough to change traffic characteristics.
There's a much easier solution that has already been implemented. In the short-term, the human driver can take over in these situations. In the medium term, we should have more automated traffic enforcement (Here comes my first -1 moderation). You could have self-driving police cars. If the car has to do something aggressive to avoid a crash, ticket the human driver. Takes everything arbitrary out of the system. That and automated speed enforcement. In the long-term, the human drivers will be the exception and held to a very high standard.
One of the examples has to do with following distance and it's not just self-driving cars that have this problem. Human drivers who leave a safe distance have been making this complaint for as long as I've been alive and probably longer.
There *are* situations that self-driving cars are going to force us to confront. But the article doesn't mention any of them. Interweaving at a busy interchange where it's actually not possible for all of the cars to safely get where they need to be. There will be (more) hard data that this system doesn't work during busy times and force a solution.
The state of Florida is spending more than the GDP of some small countries to make a curve on I4 less sharp because human drivers fail to negotiate it at an unacceptable rate. Spend that money on upgrading other intersections, let the self-driving cars regulate speed going into the turn during heavy traffic times. (Enough of them will drive at the suggested 45 mph that it won't be possible to go faster). Put up more signs to remind the human drivers to slow down. If they don't, the flashing lights and expensive ticket will help them remember.
These were "hacked" in the sense that the owner asserted more control of the device against the wishes of the manufacturer. They weren't hacked as in remote exploit took over somebody's machine in order to commit financial crimes.
That seems a reasonable hypothesis except that the group didn't demand cash. They actually agreed to *not* release the data if AM would just go out of business quietly. Doing so may have been a better decision. Return any cash they had to the share holders and walk away.
I'm sure improving convenience helps, but there are some people who can only be influenced by exorbitant fines. My town has not only trash cans but poo bags located like every quarter mile, so there's no reason for not cleaning up other than being a selfish jerk. There are people who don't clean up.
Slashdot Mirror
I would tend to argue that nobody "needs" to have the shiny new all the time. The only reason you can buy a used mid-range anything for a decent price are because of people who *want* the shiny new all the time (otherwise they would have held onto the items). But I think you are kind of proving my original point which is that buying and/or renting the shiny new all the time is just fine as a form of recreation if you can afford it. But the decision to rent the shiny new vs buy it doesn't really matter. Sometimes there are really good lease deals out there especially on cars because you get a guaranteed price at the end of the lease so you're not taking residual value risk. (An open-end lease on a vehicle would be insane). But you shouldn't put a price on the ephemeral value of ownership for ownership's sake. Assets that depreciate are a much different thing that assets which appreciate. No matter how you look at it you are really just renting the former. OTOH owning the latter is a big deal. It's easy to buy the former and *feel* like you are doing the latter and thus make bad decisions. I'm cautioning against this.
That's an interesting idea. Do you have any practical examples? Nobody knows if you post to Facebook (or /.) from a shiny new iPhone or an old computer in the library.
I don't agree with your point philosophically but I think there is some validity to that argument from a moral perspective. However, from an economic standpoint, this doesn't work. We just went through a very large recession where many people lost their jobs. There simply wasn't enough work. Now we seem to be in a situation where there may be jobs but the skills aren't necessarily lining up. If we let large quantities of people starve to death during a downturn we won't have the necessary labor force when the economy rebounds. We need to provide everybody with a basic existence. A full weeks worth of honest work should yield enough rewards for food, functional clothing, and shelter. Partially out of fairness and partially out of economic necessity, the government protects the weakest members of our society from the strongest. This is fundamentally necessary. One of those protections is certain minimum treatment for employees. There is huge room for debate on what the *right* level of protection is. Make it too low and people die needlessly damaging the economy. Make it too high and there aren't enough incentives. But there isn't a good argument for zero protection. In this particular case, though, nobody is saying that Uber can't use contractors. The ruling is that the current situation qualifies as employment.
This is true if people have other opportunities. The problem with your scenario is that from the time they turn down being a contractor until the time that somebody comes along and offers a better deal, people will starve to death. But that's not really what's at issue here. People can be contractors (as you've chosen to be) or they can be employees. What they can't do is be employees who are treated as contractors to avoid employment laws. I'm not saying those laws are perfect, but we certain are better off than before employment laws existed, so I have a tough time with the idea of going back. Nobody is saying that you can't hire contractors. Just that you can't hire employees and call them contractors. Next California will maybe address running a taxi service and calling it car sharing, but don't hold your breath.
By the time you made your post, somebody already had made that comment. Here's the link. http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Because the worker doesn't have the negotiating power. The current case is the one that proves your point. Some Uber workers want to be contractors, others want to be employees. But it doesn't matter what they want. Uber declared them to be contractors and they have no recourse except the government. An easier example is if I hold a gun to your head and demand your wallet. Yes you voluntarily gave it to me, but it's still not acceptable. The government is simply defending the powerless here the same way as police defend mugging victims.
I'm not forgetting it. I'm just saying that renting vs. buying you should figure out the net present value of the (negative) cash flows that you will have over the lifetime of use. The fact that you "own" it (whatever that means) doesn't figure into the calculation. On that part we seem to agree. The one area where I agree with the OP is that if you are using the rental as a means of financial leverage in order to acquire something you can't actually afford, it's probably a terrible idea. If there is any non-trivial risk of default you shouldn't do the transaction at all as the costs of default are quite high.
If these were capital equipment purchased for business purposes (Perhaps you run a business that tests Android apps for a fee), this would be a reasonable accounting method. Assume three year linear depreciation or something along those lines. That's not my point, though. In your example, I buy the device for $730 knowing that a year later I could sell it for $365. Or I could rent it for $1/day for a year. Both are the same from a financial perspective. In the first scenario somebody will say "ut I own it." Yes and in the second scenario you could rent it for a year for $365 and then buy a used one at the end for $365. You're slightly ahead in the second scenario since you could have earned interest on the $365 in your pocket. Of course in real life, you won't get this deal. The lease will end up costing $1.10 / day or something. Given the two scenarios the outright purchase *feels* better to most people, but it's simply not significantly better if the rental price is reasonable. The OP to which I was responding was pointing out that, in the rental scenario, you don't *own* anything in the first scenario. My point is that it doesn't make a difference. At any time after purchase the device will have less value than when the purchase was made. Renting from initial time x to x+1 for approximately the depreciation cost during that time is the same, financially, as owning. Since these devices eventually go to zero after some time, lets suppose it's three years, this means that a three-year rental for the full price of the device is no different than owning. You might say that at the end of the ownership scenario you have a device that's worth nothing where as at the end of the rental you have nothing. And, of course, you can use a device worth nothing. With the rent, you are forced to rent again. But this isn't true as exhibited by the fact that used iPhone 3s are available for free or $5 (essentially free) at the local Salvation Army store. The only time that owning is beneficial over renting is if the item in question has the potential for capital appreciation (going up in value). Buying a depreciating asset isn't any better financially than renting a depreciating asset at a reasonable price. But it *feels* better which is a problem because it leads to poor decisions.
Buying something for a one-time payment vs. paying a monthly fee *feels* like a smarter financial decision. But it isn't necessarily. Most things that you buy are very non-liquid (hard to sell) and depreciate quickly to zero. If you go out and spend $500 on a phone, you *feel* like you didn't really spend that much money. You used to have $500 in cash and now you have a $500 item, so you really just traded one asset for another of equal value. But this is just a psychological effect. Unless it's a piece of capital equipment that you are going to use for generating revenue, it's really an expense incurred immediately. If you wouldn't do the monthly rental plan, you probably shouldn't purchase the item. So if the offered monthly rental doesn't feel as emotionally good as an outright purchase, that's just psychology. You probably should neither buy nor rent the item.
If you can't put a few dollars away every month you shouldn't be buying iPhones or music subscriptions. I'm sure somebody will respond that having the latest phone is an entitlement and the government should be distributing them to everybody. As a society, we have a real inequality issue and I'm sympathetic to those who can't afford to participate in our shared culture. And that does, these days, include things like newer smartphones. That being said, if you are in that unenviable position, the solution is not to put on a veneer of wealth at the expense of your long-term financial well-being. You still need to live within your means.
There are two components to AppleCare. The loss/damage insurance and the technical support. The shitty Best Buy program to which you refer is usually only the former portion. The latter has no value to /. users. However, I often recommend it to family members. Keeps me from having to help them figure out how to get their photos on to Facebook every time they go to a boring anniversary party.
The solution for carry-on is easy, but it would have to be mandated. Market forces won't work. Require that all airlines add a $35 carry-on fee to every ticket at the time of purchase. Give passengers a choice on travel day of a tag for their bag (so they can put it in overhead) or the $35 back in cash and check the bag. Guarantee that the overheads will be almost empty. Note that Frontier charges $35 to use the overhead and people absolutely hate it. Feels like a "gotcha" fee. On the other hand even people who would normally rather go face first through a piece of glass than check bags will suddenly be willing to wait at the carousel for their $35. The difference is huge for business travelers where the $35 line item means a separate expense report for the air travel (yuck) and no personal benefit from checking the bag (save the company money) but a $35 refund to the traveler is pure profit. I leave out the ethics here, but boarding would be super-fast and there would not be any overhead space issues.
I'm sure that the "wrongly targeted" do use those services, but there isn't much business out there defending the innocent On the other hand, shilling in order to help somebody cover up bad behavior is probably a pretty large market. In this case the definition of bad is that the customer knows that their behavior is so poor that their willing to pay somebody to try to minimize public knowledge of what they did.
And either way, the point is that the human driver helps us make the transition to automated driving. The human driver will have more to do when self-driving is mostly the exception. As self-driving cars become the dominant vehicle on the road, the dynamics will change.
There's no way that a roundabout would ever be cheaper than a four way stop. Most four way stops start out as intersections controlled by either a yield sign or a two-way stop. Then traffic increases and the signs get changed. Ripping up the intersection and replacing it with a roundabout is much more expensive than putting up four signs. Also there isn't often room in residential areas for a roundabout. And what you suggested in terms of safety seems to apply to safety of car drivers, not pedestrians. When you bring pedestrians into the mix, you would have to add a traffic light to get all of the cars to stop. At that point, you might as well use a traffic light.
Yes I saw that in the original comment. Right now, the Google drivers are the only ones in the vehicles. What I'm saying is that will change when the mass-market version comes out.
Four way stops are the safest intersection. And much cheaper than traffic lights. They are only 'retarded' if you don't care about pedestrian safety.
And even if morning commute times were longer, who cares, as it wouldn't be commute time. You would start working the second you hit the car. Who cares if it takes two hours each way if you have your computer open doing work.
Most certainly not. Eventually there will be a class action suit, though, and a firmware upgrade will allow you to force the car to strictly obey the limits. That will be about the same time that there is saturation of self-driving cars and the sheer number of them that are keeping speed to within 0.01% of the posted limit will ensure that nobody can speed. Municipalities will then all complain of the lost revenue.
You can't program the self-driving car to break the rules as it opens up all kinds of moral and (more importantly, or at least more expensively) legal liability issues. You have a human driver for that situation until the proportion of self-driving cars increases enough to change traffic characteristics.
There's a much easier solution that has already been implemented. In the short-term, the human driver can take over in these situations. In the medium term, we should have more automated traffic enforcement (Here comes my first -1 moderation). You could have self-driving police cars. If the car has to do something aggressive to avoid a crash, ticket the human driver. Takes everything arbitrary out of the system. That and automated speed enforcement. In the long-term, the human drivers will be the exception and held to a very high standard. One of the examples has to do with following distance and it's not just self-driving cars that have this problem. Human drivers who leave a safe distance have been making this complaint for as long as I've been alive and probably longer. There *are* situations that self-driving cars are going to force us to confront. But the article doesn't mention any of them. Interweaving at a busy interchange where it's actually not possible for all of the cars to safely get where they need to be. There will be (more) hard data that this system doesn't work during busy times and force a solution. The state of Florida is spending more than the GDP of some small countries to make a curve on I4 less sharp because human drivers fail to negotiate it at an unacceptable rate. Spend that money on upgrading other intersections, let the self-driving cars regulate speed going into the turn during heavy traffic times. (Enough of them will drive at the suggested 45 mph that it won't be possible to go faster). Put up more signs to remind the human drivers to slow down. If they don't, the flashing lights and expensive ticket will help them remember.
And you shouldn't be using a single Comcast residential connection for the entire campus!
These were "hacked" in the sense that the owner asserted more control of the device against the wishes of the manufacturer. They weren't hacked as in remote exploit took over somebody's machine in order to commit financial crimes.
That seems a reasonable hypothesis except that the group didn't demand cash. They actually agreed to *not* release the data if AM would just go out of business quietly. Doing so may have been a better decision. Return any cash they had to the share holders and walk away.
I'm sure improving convenience helps, but there are some people who can only be influenced by exorbitant fines. My town has not only trash cans but poo bags located like every quarter mile, so there's no reason for not cleaning up other than being a selfish jerk. There are people who don't clean up.