Of course, the fact that they had driver's licenses, were insurable as drivers, and that their mistakes weren't his responsibility... had no bearing on his actions being unjustifiably insane?
When you're in customer service, your competition is everyone else who's ever provided service to that person.
That's one of the built in laws of human nature about how people compare service offerings.
I don't care if the products aren't related -- the human mind doesn't care. If you got a great person at Cisco yesterday and a prick at McDonald's today -- you remember Cisco is good and take McDonalds down a notch in your head.
And the next time you get service from a company, you rate them and put them above, below, or in-between those two in your mental list.
(Actually you only remember the really good and the really bad, over the long haul, and anything that bucks the trend from that service provider -- either good or bad -- raises your attention.
A normal transaction is finished when the clerk announces your total price (always higher than just the item's purchase price, due to taxes), and asks for your payment.
That price always includes all of the taxes. If you decide at that point the taxes are too high, you simply decline and walk away.
Sounds about right for government -- underpay the staff for the horrible job that no one wants to do, and then when they all leave, start a training program and charge the taxpayer for it.
Guess what... they're working on doing this to the Air Traffic Controllers right now, too. The safety of your flight and life depends on it, and they want to pay these guys and gals a LOT less than they are today...
Do the math. How many people dead is lowering ATC salaries worth? 'Cause that's what the FAA is calculating right now... how many deaths will the country tolerate... versus how much to pay ATC people.
I'm not an ATC person, just a pilot watching it happen.
And thus, proof positive that if you hire good people, and treat them like morons -- your business suffers, because they end up looking like morons to your customers (or potential customers).
Not into geo-synch orbit, moron. Maybe LEO where it's relative motion will mean roughly 10 minute passes at relatively high speeds over you fixed locations, requiring tracking devices, and only a couple of times a day.
I may agree with you someday, if folks like yourself make REASONABLE (as in "reason") arguments.
The current crop of follow-the-bouncing-fad greenies have no damn idea what they're talking about. They want "green things" and want them NOW, and that's all they care about.
They'll be off chasing some other "shiny" soon, leaving behind those who will actually WORK on the problems.
Good luck to you -- I'm hopeful from past experience (watching the open market create some pretty impressive things that have made lives better) that the right technologies will be used at the right times in history.
Right now, it *might* be the twilight of the internal combustion engine, but the electric-lovers (and all the other alternatives) need to get some real engineering work done to see the world change...
It'll come.
But this "exhuberance" by so many people clueless about this reality bug me:
We're going to make a mess, because we're humans and we consume far more resources than we should.
We (by our nature) can't "save the planet" from us without us deciding that we're over-reproducing and over-populating. I doubt our reproductive instincts will ever allow us to be that cold and calculating and LIKE it. (The Chinese already try to limit reproduction. It doesn't go over well with most humans, in or out of China... for example.)
In another thread in the discussion here, I mention also that I'm skeptical that having an "overnight" switch to say 80% of the automobiles using electric power, will just move the pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant smokestack. If the answer is "electric" then the plant should be nuclear.
I'm thinking in terms of what the fans of the technology want... 80%+ of all cars on the road with batteries. That will be a problem... people are a mess, no matter what.
Okay so leaving the shade-tree mechanics aside, what's the plan for all those batteries when they die?
Haven't seen a plan that doesn't factor a very large recycling fee into the end-of-life plan for an already dead car.
In fact, most greenies are going to dump-and-run on their leases and/or sell the things off when they start to get flaky.
Then the oh-so-concerned fad-drivers of this tech will, then blame it on the "uneducated idiot" who bought their car when "bad stuff" including heavy metals are found leaking from what used to be their batteries in the driveway.
Wait: Heavy metals and other problems from all these batteries will happen. It could be avoided, but it won't be.
Makes an already expensive "fad" car into something un-affordable by the masses, if the costs to take care of the battery plants is pre-paid by the customer.
Particulate matter. That and N0x - the two things that currently have VW's cleanest running diesel cars ever... banned from being imported.
Can't have it both ways, greenies... pick a poison, the energy consumption is NOT going down. Next pick the most efficient solution that has the biggest ROI for today, and it's... gasoline.
You're saying that States that have tailpipe emissions standards aren't meeting them? ("Can't clean up tailpipes.")
Hell, here in Colorado we cleaned up the tailpipes and dropped safety inspections and within two decades the insurance companies forced the legislature to make us a no-fault insurance coverage state.
Meanwhile we still have no standards for emissions from OTR trucks, busses, construction equipment, etc etc etc...
Yes, but doing a direct comparison between Kw/H needed to move something and KW needed to charge something is both a mixture of two different measurements.
And it's not even close to accurate, compared with simply finding out how the battery and the charging circuit works in the vehicle, which would be how any electrical engineer would do it. (If it wasn't the EE designing the charge circuit in the first place.)
I'm not the one saying something has to change. The first to want change has to convince the others, not the other way around -- unless the herd mentality vs. real economics has taken over.
In that case, enjoy the change-over to (insert fad alternative energy source here), dear political lemming-people!
So let's talk turkey here. We all watch patents being busted every day. Know how?
Have a viable product that will more than pay for your legal defense, and settle out of court.
It's about business numbers, not patents. Patents make it more difficult, but if the solution is viable and has a high-enough profit margin while still providing more value to the consumer than the alternatives... it'd be done by now.
Not to mention -- anyone wanting to build cars (including the big 3 and the overseas manufacturers) back then, could have bid for the patents themselves, or developed them sooner. None of them are rocket science.
Why would they not? They did the math and found the ROI to be at least a decade on an electric car back then. Today, it's roughly 6-7 years without tax incentives (which are slowly being taken away, and already aren't as good as the first Prius drivers got).
It's just not fiscally sound yet. People can't afford it. Hydrocarbons will go higher in price until there's a compelling reason ECONOMICALLY to switch, and because of elasticity... the price of electrics will have to be SIGNIFICANTLY lower with a positive ROI before it happens.
Looking over even the worst predictions for peak oil and the taper-off, I'll be long dead before that happens if the greenies don't win the "war on panic" in people's heads who aren't THINKING sometime in the next 30 years.
Think like a business -- would you pay a 50% surcharge for something that promises to save the planet? Only a very few will. Bravo to them, but I'll be waiting until I at least see price parity between the systems. And I don't want price parity by tax breaks, since that's just shifting of wealth and unnecessary meddling by the government.
If the electric (or whatever alternative automotive energy source) fans could actually show a better ROI on gas, people would flock to them in droves.
This is true, but we can only do so much with increasing efficiencies at existing refineries. Gas prices are as much related to crude oil prices as they are in artificial "shortages" caused by lack of refining capability. The three refineries hit by Katrina came back up to production in virtually record-time, but while they were down, refined product levels fell.
There's also quite a bit of crude already available in areas like North Dakota where greenies won't allow any serious pipeline work to be done, even if the oil companies wanted to. (They don't. It's cheaper still to this day to import oil than to build the infrastructure necessary to increase production in areas like North Dakota, especially when the lawsuits start flying.)
Drop all the silly anti-drilling, anti-pipeline, anti-business practices, they'd still import. The infrastructure and transportation systems take time to build from fields to refineries. There's a lot of momentum in the course of the "ship" when it comes to oil refining systems.
Plus internally oil companies have "benefitted" from similar systems we're all learning to know and love (cough) in IT. Fully automate your accounting systems instead of hiring accountants and watch all the managers tweak when one truck driver drops a load of your crude into someone else's pipeline by mistake. The "dashboards" ring out, and all the modern accountants want to do is follow "policy" and not pay the parties involved, even though the driver made an honest mistake delivering a load into the wrong plant.
Back in the 1980's that would have been a manual run ticket correction, re-key-punch by an operator, and the checks would be cut that day.
Oil companies have fucked themselves with technology just as much as "management" has in other industries at this point...
The computers start out not programmed for real-world events like the above, and then everyone who was laid off or took early retirement packages is called back in as "consultants" to fix the system at 4-10x the cost of what they got paid to sit there and run a calculator and write manual tickets with appropriate adjustments for all the lessees on a particular well's production, years ago.
You're saying a laptop battery is $30 and the sizes and quantity needed for an automobile aren't going to scale up in price (and output of pollutants of all sorts) at least linearly?
I'm not involved with the group that wants the world to stop using fossil fuels and trying to sell everyone a bill of goods about how clean the new technologies are, so I don't have to provide anything -- you're supposed to be providing the numbers.
I see a lot of percentages, but no studies that REALLY cover what it takes to scale electrical production and distribution up to the scale needed to handle car charging every car in America. Just a lot of promises.
Been getting those from all sorts of people for my entire life. I'll be happy to see if you can deliver. Wishes aren't a working solution, though. It's a nice platitude to say that something untried on a scale you recommend which has only been done on a tiny scale (ridiculously tiny compared to internal combustion engines) is going to scale and make things better.
Let's see YOUR numbers. I'm content with knowing that costs are going to go up as we pass peak oil. I'll be long dead before fossil fuels run out and I have no children, nor plans to have any.
I was thinking about getting a large SUV and painting the name "Carbon Footprint" on the back in a few years. What'cha think? Like it?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the fact that they had driver's licenses, were insurable as drivers, and that their mistakes weren't his responsibility... had no bearing on his actions being unjustifiably insane?
No one is irreplaceable.
You mean like Obama?
That's how the troops weed out the good leaders and the bad, don't you know? The good ones turn down the perks and live like the rest of the troops.
Makes smelling a brass-ass from a mile away real easy for anyone paying attention.
When you're in customer service, your competition is everyone else who's ever provided service to that person.
That's one of the built in laws of human nature about how people compare service offerings.
I don't care if the products aren't related -- the human mind doesn't care. If you got a great person at Cisco yesterday and a prick at McDonald's today -- you remember Cisco is good and take McDonalds down a notch in your head.
And the next time you get service from a company, you rate them and put them above, below, or in-between those two in your mental list.
(Actually you only remember the really good and the really bad, over the long haul, and anything that bucks the trend from that service provider -- either good or bad -- raises your attention.
Calling Qwest an ISP is like calling McDonalds a restaurant.
Both are correct, but it loses something somewhere along the way.
But it's not true.
A normal transaction is finished when the clerk announces your total price (always higher than just the item's purchase price, due to taxes), and asks for your payment.
That price always includes all of the taxes. If you decide at that point the taxes are too high, you simply decline and walk away.
Those "universal service funds" are great. Haven't seen truly "universal" service anywhere yet, and yet they've been collected for years and years.
Wonder who's making all the interest on 'em?
Sounds about right for government -- underpay the staff for the horrible job that no one wants to do, and then when they all leave, start a training program and charge the taxpayer for it.
Guess what... they're working on doing this to the Air Traffic Controllers right now, too. The safety of your flight and life depends on it, and they want to pay these guys and gals a LOT less than they are today...
Do the math. How many people dead is lowering ATC salaries worth? 'Cause that's what the FAA is calculating right now... how many deaths will the country tolerate... versus how much to pay ATC people.
I'm not an ATC person, just a pilot watching it happen.
There's a benefit to this -- you don't end up with the dimwit customers.
Ask Apple why their prices are higher than everyone else.
Less dimwits means less support costs. Seriously. There's a break-even that can even be calculated, too.
Everything's negotiable.
He saw your FICO score on his screen. Heh.
And thus, proof positive that if you hire good people, and treat them like morons -- your business suffers, because they end up looking like morons to your customers (or potential customers).
Not into geo-synch orbit, moron. Maybe LEO where it's relative motion will mean roughly 10 minute passes at relatively high speeds over you fixed locations, requiring tracking devices, and only a couple of times a day.
I may agree with you someday, if folks like yourself make REASONABLE (as in "reason") arguments.
The current crop of follow-the-bouncing-fad greenies have no damn idea what they're talking about. They want "green things" and want them NOW, and that's all they care about.
They'll be off chasing some other "shiny" soon, leaving behind those who will actually WORK on the problems.
Good luck to you -- I'm hopeful from past experience (watching the open market create some pretty impressive things that have made lives better) that the right technologies will be used at the right times in history.
Right now, it *might* be the twilight of the internal combustion engine, but the electric-lovers (and all the other alternatives) need to get some real engineering work done to see the world change...
It'll come.
But this "exhuberance" by so many people clueless about this reality bug me:
We're going to make a mess, because we're humans and we consume far more resources than we should.
We (by our nature) can't "save the planet" from us without us deciding that we're over-reproducing and over-populating. I doubt our reproductive instincts will ever allow us to be that cold and calculating and LIKE it. (The Chinese already try to limit reproduction. It doesn't go over well with most humans, in or out of China... for example.)
In another thread in the discussion here, I mention also that I'm skeptical that having an "overnight" switch to say 80% of the automobiles using electric power, will just move the pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant smokestack. If the answer is "electric" then the plant should be nuclear.
I'm thinking in terms of what the fans of the technology want... 80%+ of all cars on the road with batteries. That will be a problem... people are a mess, no matter what.
Okay so leaving the shade-tree mechanics aside, what's the plan for all those batteries when they die?
Haven't seen a plan that doesn't factor a very large recycling fee into the end-of-life plan for an already dead car.
In fact, most greenies are going to dump-and-run on their leases and/or sell the things off when they start to get flaky.
Then the oh-so-concerned fad-drivers of this tech will, then blame it on the "uneducated idiot" who bought their car when "bad stuff" including heavy metals are found leaking from what used to be their batteries in the driveway.
Wait: Heavy metals and other problems from all these batteries will happen. It could be avoided, but it won't be.
Makes an already expensive "fad" car into something un-affordable by the masses, if the costs to take care of the battery plants is pre-paid by the customer.
Show me the money, girlfriend.
Particulate matter. That and N0x - the two things that currently have VW's cleanest running diesel cars ever... banned from being imported.
Can't have it both ways, greenies... pick a poison, the energy consumption is NOT going down. Next pick the most efficient solution that has the biggest ROI for today, and it's... gasoline.
You're saying that States that have tailpipe emissions standards aren't meeting them? ("Can't clean up tailpipes.")
Hell, here in Colorado we cleaned up the tailpipes and dropped safety inspections and within two decades the insurance companies forced the legislature to make us a no-fault insurance coverage state.
Meanwhile we still have no standards for emissions from OTR trucks, busses, construction equipment, etc etc etc...
Yes, but doing a direct comparison between Kw/H needed to move something and KW needed to charge something is both a mixture of two different measurements.
And it's not even close to accurate, compared with simply finding out how the battery and the charging circuit works in the vehicle, which would be how any electrical engineer would do it. (If it wasn't the EE designing the charge circuit in the first place.)
I'm not the one saying something has to change. The first to want change has to convince the others, not the other way around -- unless the herd mentality vs. real economics has taken over.
In that case, enjoy the change-over to (insert fad alternative energy source here), dear political lemming-people!
So let's talk turkey here. We all watch patents being busted every day. Know how?
Have a viable product that will more than pay for your legal defense, and settle out of court.
It's about business numbers, not patents. Patents make it more difficult, but if the solution is viable and has a high-enough profit margin while still providing more value to the consumer than the alternatives... it'd be done by now.
Not to mention -- anyone wanting to build cars (including the big 3 and the overseas manufacturers) back then, could have bid for the patents themselves, or developed them sooner. None of them are rocket science.
Why would they not? They did the math and found the ROI to be at least a decade on an electric car back then. Today, it's roughly 6-7 years without tax incentives (which are slowly being taken away, and already aren't as good as the first Prius drivers got).
It's just not fiscally sound yet. People can't afford it. Hydrocarbons will go higher in price until there's a compelling reason ECONOMICALLY to switch, and because of elasticity... the price of electrics will have to be SIGNIFICANTLY lower with a positive ROI before it happens.
Looking over even the worst predictions for peak oil and the taper-off, I'll be long dead before that happens if the greenies don't win the "war on panic" in people's heads who aren't THINKING sometime in the next 30 years.
Think like a business -- would you pay a 50% surcharge for something that promises to save the planet? Only a very few will. Bravo to them, but I'll be waiting until I at least see price parity between the systems. And I don't want price parity by tax breaks, since that's just shifting of wealth and unnecessary meddling by the government.
If the electric (or whatever alternative automotive energy source) fans could actually show a better ROI on gas, people would flock to them in droves.
This is true, but we can only do so much with increasing efficiencies at existing refineries. Gas prices are as much related to crude oil prices as they are in artificial "shortages" caused by lack of refining capability. The three refineries hit by Katrina came back up to production in virtually record-time, but while they were down, refined product levels fell.
There's also quite a bit of crude already available in areas like North Dakota where greenies won't allow any serious pipeline work to be done, even if the oil companies wanted to. (They don't. It's cheaper still to this day to import oil than to build the infrastructure necessary to increase production in areas like North Dakota, especially when the lawsuits start flying.)
Drop all the silly anti-drilling, anti-pipeline, anti-business practices, they'd still import. The infrastructure and transportation systems take time to build from fields to refineries. There's a lot of momentum in the course of the "ship" when it comes to oil refining systems.
Plus internally oil companies have "benefitted" from similar systems we're all learning to know and love (cough) in IT. Fully automate your accounting systems instead of hiring accountants and watch all the managers tweak when one truck driver drops a load of your crude into someone else's pipeline by mistake. The "dashboards" ring out, and all the modern accountants want to do is follow "policy" and not pay the parties involved, even though the driver made an honest mistake delivering a load into the wrong plant.
Back in the 1980's that would have been a manual run ticket correction, re-key-punch by an operator, and the checks would be cut that day.
Oil companies have fucked themselves with technology just as much as "management" has in other industries at this point...
The computers start out not programmed for real-world events like the above, and then everyone who was laid off or took early retirement packages is called back in as "consultants" to fix the system at 4-10x the cost of what they got paid to sit there and run a calculator and write manual tickets with appropriate adjustments for all the lessees on a particular well's production, years ago.
You're saying a laptop battery is $30 and the sizes and quantity needed for an automobile aren't going to scale up in price (and output of pollutants of all sorts) at least linearly?
I'm not involved with the group that wants the world to stop using fossil fuels and trying to sell everyone a bill of goods about how clean the new technologies are, so I don't have to provide anything -- you're supposed to be providing the numbers.
I see a lot of percentages, but no studies that REALLY cover what it takes to scale electrical production and distribution up to the scale needed to handle car charging every car in America. Just a lot of promises.
Been getting those from all sorts of people for my entire life. I'll be happy to see if you can deliver. Wishes aren't a working solution, though. It's a nice platitude to say that something untried on a scale you recommend which has only been done on a tiny scale (ridiculously tiny compared to internal combustion engines) is going to scale and make things better.
Let's see YOUR numbers. I'm content with knowing that costs are going to go up as we pass peak oil. I'll be long dead before fossil fuels run out and I have no children, nor plans to have any.
I was thinking about getting a large SUV and painting the name "Carbon Footprint" on the back in a few years. What'cha think? Like it?
Sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than posting on Slashdot. Too bad I'm too old.
Maybe these guys would take me: 809th Fighter Squadron, Raging Peckers