Outside of cities, I can't see the economics of this working.
We recently crossed a threshold where more than half the world's population lives in urban areas. Just sayin'
The other reason why I don't think personal cars are completely doomed is families.
I'm with you there. My wife is the queen of having bags of stuff in her trunk, mostly purchases which need to be returned. She's never sure when she'll be flying by a store she needs to stop into.
I also pretty sure Zimmer is drinking his own Kool-Aid. I really doubt truly autonomous vehicles will be on the road that soon, let alone dominating. Autonomous driving is really, really hard and getting to the point where you're absolutely, positively sure you'll never need a driver is a really high bar. Then it takes people 10 years to trade in their cars for a new generation so don't expect our new robot overlords for at least another two decades.
Stop trying to solve problems that only exist in San Francisco. Thanks.
(Full disclosure: I've lived in the Bay Area for 25+ years and work in the tech industry.)
I've never really wanted a car when I lived in Boston. I don't want one when I visit NYC (especially Manhattan). Didn't particularly want one on London, Paris, or Rome either. I can't imagine I'd want one in Beijing or Tokyo. I'm seeing a trend here.
I find as I grow older (I'm in my 50s), the romance of owning a car is really diminishing. I no longer identify as powerful and free because I have a car. My kids are the same way, they kinda don't care whether they own a car or even have a driver's license. Maybe the Bay Area is weird but I think this is far from unique.
So, Charter, a cable company, has an operating income around 10 percent, before interest. AT&T, a landline phone, and wireless phone company, has an operating income which bounces around from 10 to 20 percent. Those operating margins are good, but not 'hugely profitable'.
Thanks for the data. IIRC, the median net margin for public companies is in the 7% range. 10%-20% is relatively high. Walmart's 2-3% is wafer thin. Apple's 25% is virtually unmatched.
If people only knew how little it costs per household
You're confusing "price" with "cost". The two are only loosely coupled. In a competitive market, the price tends to approach the marginal cost but there are lots of other factors which can make the price go up, down, or sideways.
I think YOUR understanding of all you can eat buffet is skewed, not the other people that you so righteously called out...
I think every buffet assumes people will load up on shrimp, bacon, all the good expensive stuff. Pretty much every buffet I've been to also has a policy that if you're there for more than, say 4 hours, they can toss you out. It's all you can eat in one sitting not all you can eat assuming you show up at opening and hang around until midnight.
Now, most buffets don't make a huge deal of this because it's rarely a problem. That doesn't mean they won't the second time you do it.
(Two heaping plates of bacon? I'd keel over before finishing the second one. Problem self-solving.)
Maybe a few upstream routers *might* need replacing to handle higher throughput. But only because of poor planning. Nothing to do with the cost of delivery.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. AT&T didn't plan poorly, they planned realistically. They almost certainly provisioned their router, downlinks and everything behind that based on a data cap and statistical duty cycle (that is, assuming I have 12 Mbps but only use it 10% of the time). I'm fine with this, I knew that when I signed up. If they built out assuming everyone used their lines all the time, they'd have to provision a much larger uplink and downlink. Most of the time that link would be largely idle. That's an expensive waste.
If I pay to use as much as I want, I should be able to use how much I want. If I pay for 24/7/365 unlimited service, I should be able to use the connection 24/7/365.
As others have mentioned, AT&T, my provider, long ago stopped talking about unlimited plans. It's very clear I'm not paying for an all you can eat buffet. I'm reasonably sure your provider does the same.
For fun, call them up. I expect they are quite willing to offer 24/7 guaranteed bandwidth and response time with 100% utilization. I'm also guessing it's at between 10 and 100 times more expensive as what you're getting now. I know it would be for me. I pay something like $50/month for 12 Mbps with some data cap I never hit. A dedicated line is something like $5,000/month, last time I looked (admittedly a long time ago).
You're going to have to explain why. Do their costs go up if the rate goes from 15Mbps to 30Mbps? It's using the same equipment...
How could it not? They will need more upstream equipment, higher transit costs, etc. etc. Quantifying it would be hard but that's why they have armies of accountants.
If you don't like it, sorry...If you want to move to a place where you don't have to live with other people, you're going to have to find a different planet.
Really? There's no potential middle ground between what we have today and start colonizing Proxima Centuri (using all private funds)?
The state should do BOTH.It should look after ALL.
If you want an IT jobs program, or general jobs program, go ahead and lobby for it. I don't see any reason to bring UC into the discussion, just like I don't buy the argument we shouldn't cut defense spending because it will cost jobs.
Because with the people out of a job, you will lose more than you gained by keeping them.
I don't see how you figure this. Would you care to explain?
Like I wrote yesterday, UCSF is not a jobs program. It's a graduate university training doctors, nurses, dentists, and pharmacists. That's their mission and primary purpose. They should, quite properly, be spending their money lecturers, professors, and facilities and as little as they can get away with on overhead like IT and security. As a taxpayer and UC tuition payer, that's exactly what I want them to do.
In most cases though, the average applicant does not have nearly the leverage in such a negotiation that the company has.
I've got exactly as much leverage as the company. Either of us can refuse the offer or negotiate price.
The thing you have to realize is I'm not competing with the company, the company and I are trying to negotiate a deal we both like. Who I'm competing with are all the other people applying for the job. I've got to make my offer better than any of theirs, or be more willing to accept a worse offer than any of them. When there are 100 people competing for an opening, that becomes really hard to do. So it's not really the company's fault or responsibility at that point, what's causing the lack of leverage is the other 99 blokes.
No amount of money could make me train a replacement
Funny, a few years ago some ex-colleagues of mine were in exactly that position: their jobs were transferred to India and they were asked to hang around for a few months as a transition. I was thinking to myself "Self, how much would they need to pay you to stick around rather than walk now?" The answer I got was they'd need to about double my salary. But I'm in the happy position that I think I can get a new job in a few weeks if I need to.
Turns out the company made the same calculation. That's exactly what the retention package was. My bros were astounded but decided they could live with themselves. They took the cash, then sat around drinking coffee and interviewing for a few months. I'm sad they lost their jobs but happy they all landed on their feet.
In a battle of Good versus Evil, Evil usually wins unless Good is very, very careful.
I'm going off topic here but I don't believe that. Good loses battles but Evil is losing the war. On a whole, the world today is more prosperous, free, educated, safe, healthy, knowledgeable, connected, and tolerant that it's ever been in all of history. That's a massive victory for Good, especially in the last 200 years. It's not perfect but it's never been better.
I respectfully disagree. The older I get, the fewer reasons I see to make a distinction between "us" and "them" other than selfishness.
My ancestors fought and died to establish a government of, by, and for the people.
Your ancestors and mine fought and died to protect our inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to protect these rights, we institute governments. Government is a means, not an end. But I split hairs...
The purpose of the government is to serve the citizens of the country. The purpose of the economy is to serve the citizens, not the other way around.
Yes, and in this case, the state government is serving the people by running a public university dedicated to teaching medical skills. Running an IT jobs program and spending more than necessary on IT staff does not serve the students or taxpayers of California. You may want more IT training and jobs in the US but that's not UCSF's mission or expertise. They quite reasonably decided to let someone else handle that and focus on their core job.
This university should lose it's state and federal funding for doing something like this.
Really? A graduate school focused on medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and dentistry decided to cut their IT overhead by outsourcing? As a California taxpayer and parent of two UC students, that sounds like a really great idea. I'd much rather they spent their budget on professors, TAs, teaching equipment, and the like. They're a university, not an IT jobs program.
This is ONLY because the system has been rigged by the two parties to be a two party system.
Imagine for a second, that NO party affiliation marking for office holders appeared on the ballot, and all you saw were names.
So, instead of Hillary Clinton (D) - it was just "Hillary Clinton"
We used to have this system and it lasted what, three elections?
There's actually a less nefarious reason for the two party system. It's consequence of having a 50%+1 voting system, at least in theory. This is why I'm a fan of alternate voting systems like instant runoff or ranked-choice voting.
We all have biases and priors. Good on you for admitting it.
I'm going to re-arrange the order of some of your points to make a clearer response.
Municipalities require licensing for taxi services because the taxi drivers are conducting the actual business transaction -- agreeing to transport the customer for a price, whether pre-agreed or subject to a meter reading, at the point of pickup within the municipality.
Most of the risk, both financial and otherwise, falls on the drivers.
I think in those respects, taxis and ride sharing are essentially identical. Your transaction is with the driver, brokered via Uber/Lyft/etc. The driver, as a contractor, takes the financial risk if they are trying to drive as a full time job. They may or may not make enough money depending on how many rides they get, how many hours they can work, and so forth. The beauty of the ride sharing model is the risk is much lower than driving a taxi since you're using a vehicle you've already purchased. A taxi driver has to shell out for a new vehicle which is only used for taxi service. That's a huge capital requirement.
[Taxi] Passengers, however, are unscreened and unknown. They might come in from a phone call, or they might hail a taxi on the street.
Quite true. This strikes me as a benefit of ride sharing. The driver has a much better idea of who's getting in the car, making the driver safer.
Most municipalities also require background checks for the drivers and company owners, and have safety requirements for the vehicles, as [a means to ensure customer safety | a revenue generator].
As a passenger, I want some assurance the vehicle I'm about to enter is safe, and the driver hasn't been in a string of accidents. Where we're about to disagree is how best to ensure that. I believe it is illegitimate for cities to use taxi safety inspections fees as a revenue source. Inspections should be charged on a cost-recovery basis and no more. No tears from me if cities lose a revenue stream they shouldn't have.
So, along come Uber, Lyft and their ilk, conducting the transactions online (thus, outside the municipality) and essentially reversing the standard cabbie/passenger dynamic: the passengers are pre-identified (to sign up, they needed a cell phone, a credit card and a valid address to go with it), and the drivers are unknown (except to the companies, which do little or no effective screening). The vehicles used are unlikely to meet the requirements for taxi use, and are often flat-out unsafe for drivers, passengers, or bystanders.
And this is where we part ways. I have no idea why you think drivers are anonymous, the ride sharing apps show me their names, pictures, and tons of feedback on how they behave. I know way more about ride sharing drivers than I ever do about a taxi driver.
I'm also not sure why you think the vehicles are unsafe. These are the same cars millions of people drive every day. We don't see mass carnage to drivers, passengers, or bystanders. OK, well, yes we do, but it's an acceptable level of carnage (proof by demonstration). My point is, we accept that risk and outcome every day in millions of drives and I don't see why we need a different level of safety just because some cash is changing hands. Further, in the years in which ride sharing has been a thing, I don't think we've seen significant safety problems. We don't need a solution for non-problems.
Municipalities are not happy about this, for both safety and financial reasons. Taxi owners and drivers, most of whom have invested considerable time and money to clear regulatory hurdles, are understandably upset at this end run around the law.
Let's break this down because you just made a whole bunch of points. I'd like to stick to safety. Customers, drivers, and ride sharing brokers wi
It is...impossible for Uber to prevent this extra cost from impacting their business model.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Their business model, near as I understand it, is to broker transactions between independent drivers who supply their own vehicles and riders who want a ride, taking a cut from each ride as a brokerage fee. How does an added fee make that impossible?
I'm sure this will have some affect on their financial model (what they want their gross margin, net margin, earnings, etc.) to be. Is that what you meant? If so, I don't get the significance of your point. Yes, it will affect the numbers but not by any significant amount.
I have a system which started out on Win7. Due to a flaky SSD, I had to re-install the OS a few times and have always had issues with getting the file permissions right afterwards.
Being another sucker for free upgrades, I upgraded to Win10 a few weeks ago. The upgrade worked, sorta, but still had problems. The biggest one was my backup software would freeze the system solid. I figured this was just another symptom of why one never upgrades systems, the upgraded system never works right.
Finally I tried the windows re-install process. It worked like a champ. Everything is running smoothly now, much better than it did before. That's a great feature.
I'm still getting used to some of the other file organization things but largely it seems good. There's one thing they added to the window manager: when I use windows-left or windows-right, it automatically figures out I probably wanted some other window to take the other half of the screen and basically tiles them. This is in fact exactly what I want. It's a nice bell.
Yes, well maybe the aircraft's signature was too low for the threat system to engage them, but if you want to increase the signature of the stealthy aircraft there are lots of easy ways,
...snip...
So, a story about something that isn't a real problem and instead suggests a badly planned training exercise re-cast as an opportunity to say how great their aircraft are.
If we take the story at face value, yeah this is a good thing. OTOH, we've had stealth fighters for some time now, I would have thought we'd worked out procedures for training with them a long time ago.
Why shouldn't a business give something back to society?
Businesses do: they produce insanely great products people clamor to buy. People don't buy products unless they thing the product is more valuable than their cash. Clearly this is the case with Apple. Why should they do more?
If you really demand something, how about they cut their prices and let consumers decide what to do with the surplus?
Whatever the drug companies think is bad for their business, must be good for the consumers.
I'm with you if you narrow "Whatever" to "Competition". I've never heard of a company which really liked competition. Companies, as rational actors, really like choking off competition using crony deals. Political donations are a good investment with a surprisingly high rate of return.
(As a counterexample of your assertion, companies will complain price ceilings are bad for them. They're right and they're bad for consumers too.)
We the people need to loudly object to any sort of sweetheart deal being given to a company (tax breaks, import tariffs, insurance subsidies, export financing, barriers to entry) which helps one company at the expense of the general public, even if that deal looks like it's in our local interest (i.e. a deal to lure a company into town or keep them from leaving).
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Outside of cities, I can't see the economics of this working.
We recently crossed a threshold where more than half the world's population lives in urban areas. Just sayin'
The other reason why I don't think personal cars are completely doomed is families.
I'm with you there. My wife is the queen of having bags of stuff in her trunk, mostly purchases which need to be returned. She's never sure when she'll be flying by a store she needs to stop into.
I also pretty sure Zimmer is drinking his own Kool-Aid. I really doubt truly autonomous vehicles will be on the road that soon, let alone dominating. Autonomous driving is really, really hard and getting to the point where you're absolutely, positively sure you'll never need a driver is a really high bar. Then it takes people 10 years to trade in their cars for a new generation so don't expect our new robot overlords for at least another two decades.
Stop trying to solve problems that only exist in San Francisco. Thanks.
(Full disclosure: I've lived in the Bay Area for 25+ years and work in the tech industry.)
I've never really wanted a car when I lived in Boston. I don't want one when I visit NYC (especially Manhattan). Didn't particularly want one on London, Paris, or Rome either. I can't imagine I'd want one in Beijing or Tokyo. I'm seeing a trend here.
I find as I grow older (I'm in my 50s), the romance of owning a car is really diminishing. I no longer identify as powerful and free because I have a car. My kids are the same way, they kinda don't care whether they own a car or even have a driver's license. Maybe the Bay Area is weird but I think this is far from unique.
So, Charter, a cable company, has an operating income around 10 percent, before interest. AT&T, a landline phone, and wireless phone company, has an operating income which bounces around from 10 to 20 percent. Those operating margins are good, but not 'hugely profitable'.
Thanks for the data. IIRC, the median net margin for public companies is in the 7% range. 10%-20% is relatively high. Walmart's 2-3% is wafer thin. Apple's 25% is virtually unmatched.
If people only knew how little it costs per household
You're confusing "price" with "cost". The two are only loosely coupled. In a competitive market, the price tends to approach the marginal cost but there are lots of other factors which can make the price go up, down, or sideways.
I think YOUR understanding of all you can eat buffet is skewed, not the other people that you so righteously called out...
I think every buffet assumes people will load up on shrimp, bacon, all the good expensive stuff. Pretty much every buffet I've been to also has a policy that if you're there for more than, say 4 hours, they can toss you out. It's all you can eat in one sitting not all you can eat assuming you show up at opening and hang around until midnight.
Now, most buffets don't make a huge deal of this because it's rarely a problem. That doesn't mean they won't the second time you do it.
(Two heaping plates of bacon? I'd keel over before finishing the second one. Problem self-solving.)
Maybe a few upstream routers *might* need replacing to handle higher throughput. But only because of poor planning. Nothing to do with the cost of delivery.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. AT&T didn't plan poorly, they planned realistically. They almost certainly provisioned their router, downlinks and everything behind that based on a data cap and statistical duty cycle (that is, assuming I have 12 Mbps but only use it 10% of the time). I'm fine with this, I knew that when I signed up. If they built out assuming everyone used their lines all the time, they'd have to provision a much larger uplink and downlink. Most of the time that link would be largely idle. That's an expensive waste.
If I pay to use as much as I want, I should be able to use how much I want. If I pay for 24/7/365 unlimited service, I should be able to use the connection 24/7/365.
As others have mentioned, AT&T, my provider, long ago stopped talking about unlimited plans. It's very clear I'm not paying for an all you can eat buffet. I'm reasonably sure your provider does the same.
For fun, call them up. I expect they are quite willing to offer 24/7 guaranteed bandwidth and response time with 100% utilization. I'm also guessing it's at between 10 and 100 times more expensive as what you're getting now. I know it would be for me. I pay something like $50/month for 12 Mbps with some data cap I never hit. A dedicated line is something like $5,000/month, last time I looked (admittedly a long time ago).
You're going to have to explain why. Do their costs go up if the rate goes from 15Mbps to 30Mbps? It's using the same equipment...
How could it not? They will need more upstream equipment, higher transit costs, etc. etc. Quantifying it would be hard but that's why they have armies of accountants.
If you don't like it, sorry...If you want to move to a place where you don't have to live with other people, you're going to have to find a different planet.
Really? There's no potential middle ground between what we have today and start colonizing Proxima Centuri (using all private funds)?
The state should do BOTH.It should look after ALL.
If you want an IT jobs program, or general jobs program, go ahead and lobby for it. I don't see any reason to bring UC into the discussion, just like I don't buy the argument we shouldn't cut defense spending because it will cost jobs.
Because with the people out of a job, you will lose more than you gained by keeping them.
I don't see how you figure this. Would you care to explain?
You're saying a federally subsidized organization shouldn't care about anyone but its own students?
Well, they should probably be respectful of the US taxpayers and try to reduce the amount of subsidy they need.
Like I wrote yesterday, UCSF is not a jobs program. It's a graduate university training doctors, nurses, dentists, and pharmacists. That's their mission and primary purpose. They should, quite properly, be spending their money lecturers, professors, and facilities and as little as they can get away with on overhead like IT and security. As a taxpayer and UC tuition payer, that's exactly what I want them to do.
In most cases though, the average applicant does not have nearly the leverage in such a negotiation that the company has.
I've got exactly as much leverage as the company. Either of us can refuse the offer or negotiate price.
The thing you have to realize is I'm not competing with the company, the company and I are trying to negotiate a deal we both like. Who I'm competing with are all the other people applying for the job. I've got to make my offer better than any of theirs, or be more willing to accept a worse offer than any of them. When there are 100 people competing for an opening, that becomes really hard to do. So it's not really the company's fault or responsibility at that point, what's causing the lack of leverage is the other 99 blokes.
No amount of money could make me train a replacement
Funny, a few years ago some ex-colleagues of mine were in exactly that position: their jobs were transferred to India and they were asked to hang around for a few months as a transition. I was thinking to myself "Self, how much would they need to pay you to stick around rather than walk now?" The answer I got was they'd need to about double my salary. But I'm in the happy position that I think I can get a new job in a few weeks if I need to.
Turns out the company made the same calculation. That's exactly what the retention package was. My bros were astounded but decided they could live with themselves. They took the cash, then sat around drinking coffee and interviewing for a few months. I'm sad they lost their jobs but happy they all landed on their feet.
In a battle of Good versus Evil, Evil usually wins unless Good is very, very careful.
I'm going off topic here but I don't believe that. Good loses battles but Evil is losing the war. On a whole, the world today is more prosperous, free, educated, safe, healthy, knowledgeable, connected, and tolerant that it's ever been in all of history. That's a massive victory for Good, especially in the last 200 years. It's not perfect but it's never been better.
Nationalism is a very rational argument.
I respectfully disagree. The older I get, the fewer reasons I see to make a distinction between "us" and "them" other than selfishness.
My ancestors fought and died to establish a government of, by, and for the people.
Your ancestors and mine fought and died to protect our inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to protect these rights, we institute governments. Government is a means, not an end. But I split hairs...
The purpose of the government is to serve the citizens of the country. The purpose of the economy is to serve the citizens, not the other way around.
Yes, and in this case, the state government is serving the people by running a public university dedicated to teaching medical skills. Running an IT jobs program and spending more than necessary on IT staff does not serve the students or taxpayers of California. You may want more IT training and jobs in the US but that's not UCSF's mission or expertise. They quite reasonably decided to let someone else handle that and focus on their core job.
Passing savings on? What kind of commie talk is this. Real capitalism is asking the highest price the market will bear.
And real free markets is refusing to pay a dime more than you absolutely must.
This university should lose it's state and federal funding for doing something like this.
Really? A graduate school focused on medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and dentistry decided to cut their IT overhead by outsourcing? As a California taxpayer and parent of two UC students, that sounds like a really great idea. I'd much rather they spent their budget on professors, TAs, teaching equipment, and the like. They're a university, not an IT jobs program.
This is ONLY because the system has been rigged by the two parties to be a two party system.
Imagine for a second, that NO party affiliation marking for office holders appeared on the ballot, and all you saw were names.
So, instead of Hillary Clinton (D) - it was just "Hillary Clinton"
We used to have this system and it lasted what, three elections?
There's actually a less nefarious reason for the two party system. It's consequence of having a 50%+1 voting system, at least in theory. This is why I'm a fan of alternate voting systems like instant runoff or ranked-choice voting.
I am biased, but there is logic behind my bias.
We all have biases and priors. Good on you for admitting it.
I'm going to re-arrange the order of some of your points to make a clearer response.
Municipalities require licensing for taxi services because the taxi drivers are conducting the actual business transaction -- agreeing to transport the customer for a price, whether pre-agreed or subject to a meter reading, at the point of pickup within the municipality. Most of the risk, both financial and otherwise, falls on the drivers.
I think in those respects, taxis and ride sharing are essentially identical. Your transaction is with the driver, brokered via Uber/Lyft/etc. The driver, as a contractor, takes the financial risk if they are trying to drive as a full time job. They may or may not make enough money depending on how many rides they get, how many hours they can work, and so forth. The beauty of the ride sharing model is the risk is much lower than driving a taxi since you're using a vehicle you've already purchased. A taxi driver has to shell out for a new vehicle which is only used for taxi service. That's a huge capital requirement.
[Taxi] Passengers, however, are unscreened and unknown. They might come in from a phone call, or they might hail a taxi on the street.
Quite true. This strikes me as a benefit of ride sharing. The driver has a much better idea of who's getting in the car, making the driver safer.
Most municipalities also require background checks for the drivers and company owners, and have safety requirements for the vehicles, as [a means to ensure customer safety | a revenue generator].
As a passenger, I want some assurance the vehicle I'm about to enter is safe, and the driver hasn't been in a string of accidents. Where we're about to disagree is how best to ensure that. I believe it is illegitimate for cities to use taxi safety inspections fees as a revenue source. Inspections should be charged on a cost-recovery basis and no more. No tears from me if cities lose a revenue stream they shouldn't have.
So, along come Uber, Lyft and their ilk, conducting the transactions online (thus, outside the municipality) and essentially reversing the standard cabbie/passenger dynamic: the passengers are pre-identified (to sign up, they needed a cell phone, a credit card and a valid address to go with it), and the drivers are unknown (except to the companies, which do little or no effective screening). The vehicles used are unlikely to meet the requirements for taxi use, and are often flat-out unsafe for drivers, passengers, or bystanders.
And this is where we part ways. I have no idea why you think drivers are anonymous, the ride sharing apps show me their names, pictures, and tons of feedback on how they behave. I know way more about ride sharing drivers than I ever do about a taxi driver.
I'm also not sure why you think the vehicles are unsafe. These are the same cars millions of people drive every day. We don't see mass carnage to drivers, passengers, or bystanders. OK, well, yes we do, but it's an acceptable level of carnage (proof by demonstration). My point is, we accept that risk and outcome every day in millions of drives and I don't see why we need a different level of safety just because some cash is changing hands. Further, in the years in which ride sharing has been a thing, I don't think we've seen significant safety problems. We don't need a solution for non-problems.
Municipalities are not happy about this, for both safety and financial reasons. Taxi owners and drivers, most of whom have invested considerable time and money to clear regulatory hurdles, are understandably upset at this end run around the law.
Let's break this down because you just made a whole bunch of points. I'd like to stick to safety. Customers, drivers, and ride sharing brokers wi
It is...impossible for Uber to prevent this extra cost from impacting their business model.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Their business model, near as I understand it, is to broker transactions between independent drivers who supply their own vehicles and riders who want a ride, taking a cut from each ride as a brokerage fee. How does an added fee make that impossible?
I'm sure this will have some affect on their financial model (what they want their gross margin, net margin, earnings, etc.) to be. Is that what you meant? If so, I don't get the significance of your point. Yes, it will affect the numbers but not by any significant amount.
I have a system which started out on Win7. Due to a flaky SSD, I had to re-install the OS a few times and have always had issues with getting the file permissions right afterwards.
Being another sucker for free upgrades, I upgraded to Win10 a few weeks ago. The upgrade worked, sorta, but still had problems. The biggest one was my backup software would freeze the system solid. I figured this was just another symptom of why one never upgrades systems, the upgraded system never works right.
Finally I tried the windows re-install process. It worked like a champ. Everything is running smoothly now, much better than it did before. That's a great feature.
I'm still getting used to some of the other file organization things but largely it seems good. There's one thing they added to the window manager: when I use windows-left or windows-right, it automatically figures out I probably wanted some other window to take the other half of the screen and basically tiles them. This is in fact exactly what I want. It's a nice bell.
Yes, well maybe the aircraft's signature was too low for the threat system to engage them, but if you want to increase the signature of the stealthy aircraft there are lots of easy ways,
...snip...
So, a story about something that isn't a real problem and instead suggests a badly planned training exercise re-cast as an opportunity to say how great their aircraft are.
If we take the story at face value, yeah this is a good thing. OTOH, we've had stealth fighters for some time now, I would have thought we'd worked out procedures for training with them a long time ago.
Why shouldn't a business give something back to society?
Businesses do: they produce insanely great products people clamor to buy. People don't buy products unless they thing the product is more valuable than their cash. Clearly this is the case with Apple. Why should they do more?
If you really demand something, how about they cut their prices and let consumers decide what to do with the surplus?
Whatever the drug companies think is bad for their business, must be good for the consumers.
I'm with you if you narrow "Whatever" to "Competition". I've never heard of a company which really liked competition. Companies, as rational actors, really like choking off competition using crony deals. Political donations are a good investment with a surprisingly high rate of return.
(As a counterexample of your assertion, companies will complain price ceilings are bad for them. They're right and they're bad for consumers too.)
We the people need to loudly object to any sort of sweetheart deal being given to a company (tax breaks, import tariffs, insurance subsidies, export financing, barriers to entry) which helps one company at the expense of the general public, even if that deal looks like it's in our local interest (i.e. a deal to lure a company into town or keep them from leaving).