Really wealthy don't care how their house is kept clean. I'm just upper middle class, we have a weekly housekeeper and a Roomba, and use the latter to touch up.
Drivers are a lot more than a status symbol. They're really a fantastic luxury good - the sort of thing that everyone would buy, if they had enough money. This is definitely upper-middle-class fodder right here. I'd buy my wife one tomorrow even if it was $20k more than a non-self-driver, because it means I'd never have to drive her anywhere. (She hates driving, and she's terrible at it, so she only drives herself to work and back.)
I think Stephenson's always written like this. He just had better editors in the past, who would rein in his more autistic measures. Now that he's a big moneymaker, people are afraid to challenge him too much, even though it was the harsh editing that made his prose better.
Just Google it. kaatochacha links one example. There's another here. It's based on per-household information, something I presume is gathered from the utilities themselves. Based on the experiences of those I know who have lived both hot and cold places, the difference is pretty significant. I live in a 60-year-old house that's about 1800 sf. My highest ever power bill was $240 (the month that the temperature never fell below 74 degrees outside, so the A/C was running almost continuously). That's also about the highest natural gas bill I've ever paid to keep the interior of the house at 72 degrees while we were having the coldest weather I've ever experienced here - and I've lived here almost my entire life. (We had 72 continuous hours below freezing!). I'm in the central South. Does that square with your experience re: utility prices? If Californian, never mind.
I do remember friends in college who talked about what sounded like monumentally expensive utility bills, especially the delivery of burner oils, etc. Obviously part of that is cost-of-living related, but it's not like there's no cheap land in the Northeast. If a carbon tax passes, the BTU's will kill you. You'll have to reforest some massive tracts of the Midwest to atone for your carbonic sin.
If he's in the back seat, he might as well be in his bed - any controls are out of his reach. By that logic I should get a DUI if I'm drunk at my own house and fall asleep with my keys in my pocket.
they'd be removed along with their "steel protectors" by a typical snowplough in Finland
IIRC the colder parts of the US just make small cuts in the surface and put reflectors below grade to prevent this problem. I distinctly recall seeing a system in Colorado that guided drivers through left turn lanes not just with paint on the surface but with a series of lights that run in a pattern like airport runway lights to show you both sides of your turn lane in green when it's your turn. (Colorado Springs, IIRC, and ca. 1988, so it's not exactly new tech.)
This is pretty standard in new developments, but would never pay for itself in a lot of older neighborhoods. It also assumes there are no ground factors to worry about, like shrink-swell soils or high water tables.
Coastal areas, perhaps, but most of the South isn't coastal or even tidewater, and flood control dams already exist.
Parts of the West, especially Texas, are in real trouble. Everybody east of the Mississippi? North or south, they all have plenty of rain. In the worst drought I've ever experienced here, they asked us (near the end) to consider cutting back lawn sprinklers to three days a week.
I'm going to have to assume you mean the southwestern US here... I live in the deep South, and we have no shortage at all of fresh water. Of course, that's east of the Mississippi, so it actually rains here.
So long as I don't get caught, I'm already free to steal from you or anyone else. Ask anyone who has had a smartphone or laptop stolen how helpful the police are even when you know the culprit and where the device is.
Also, you're confusing a legal concept with its real world counterpart. Ownership can be defined in many ways. Exclusive possession and use probably covers what most people think of as ownership, even if what the courts enforce is somewhat different.
every kind of capital you can own has this same property: it exists because the government says it exist, and your ownership of it exists because the government says it does.
This is not necessarily true; you can conceal your intellectual property, and ownership of physical assets is certainly not purely dependent on government sanction - e.g. the illicit drug industry, which cannot rely on government mechanisms to secure any transaction but which nonetheless has significant physical possessions. It's just a lot easier to defend your stuff if government hires a bunch of goons to beat up thieves rather than you having to do it yourself.
If you don't call a code on me when I have a "severely blocked airway" I swear I will haunt you from beyond the grave you're putting me in. Just because you're not giving epi/atropine/vasopressin doesn't mean it isn't a code.
I'm not knocking the skills of EMTs - my logic is that you have generally five minutes between cessation of respiration and irreversible brain damage. This may make that fifteen. Unless the crew is passing the house in question when the call goes out, and Grandma is in the foyer, and the university ER is two blocks away, what do you think the odds are that you'll have her from you to a cric monster in fifteen or less?
You're right that this is a promising development. I've spent most of my effort in this thread trying to point out why it's not ready for prime time, since the/. hordes often have a very limited knowledge of how medicine actually works - I'll be hearing people in a few years tell dark stories about how someone made this oxygen-carrying liquid that could replace blood, but the pharma companies killed it because they wanted more people to be disabled or some such.
There are significant physical limitations to such a device because it has to maintain a fairly high flow rate (a peristaltic pump capable of, say, eight liters/min flow) as well as integrating blood supplies coming from various places, all while performing gas exchange.(which requires a reasonably large cylinder) and excluding as much cellular debris as possible.
Your blood doesn't coagulate in the tubes while you're donating because it's not in them long enough to do so. The bag at the end of that tubing is full of anticoagulant.
It's not impossible - cf. the standard cardiopulmonary bypass machine or an ECMO. It's just large, non-portable, requires a specially trained person to run it, and requires complete anticoagulation.
This is a great discovery if it leads to something. As it is, it's an interesting research compound.
Because they are not direct governmental health care costs. They are costs borne by private hospitals that are forced by EMTALA to provide care to anyone who shows up with an "emergency medical condition". The government does much less to fund that deficit than do private insurance companies.
Blood has hemoglobin (and the RBC's it's in) to carry oxygen, and the average adult pair of lungs has a surface area comparable to a tennis court. Different battle.
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Really wealthy don't care how their house is kept clean. I'm just upper middle class, we have a weekly housekeeper and a Roomba, and use the latter to touch up.
"Nailed"? I hope you mean "charged", not "nailed". Because if it was the latter, he needed a better attorney.
Probably not. You've pretty much wiped out cabbies, though. I don't want a bunch of strangers traipsing through my car, potentially tearing it up.
Drivers are a lot more than a status symbol. They're really a fantastic luxury good - the sort of thing that everyone would buy, if they had enough money. This is definitely upper-middle-class fodder right here. I'd buy my wife one tomorrow even if it was $20k more than a non-self-driver, because it means I'd never have to drive her anywhere. (She hates driving, and she's terrible at it, so she only drives herself to work and back.)
Tobacco companies have a lot of expertise in making cigarettes. Economies of scale just might mean they could bury you on price.
I think Stephenson's always written like this. He just had better editors in the past, who would rein in his more autistic measures. Now that he's a big moneymaker, people are afraid to challenge him too much, even though it was the harsh editing that made his prose better.
Just Google it. kaatochacha links one example. There's another here. It's based on per-household information, something I presume is gathered from the utilities themselves. Based on the experiences of those I know who have lived both hot and cold places, the difference is pretty significant. I live in a 60-year-old house that's about 1800 sf. My highest ever power bill was $240 (the month that the temperature never fell below 74 degrees outside, so the A/C was running almost continuously). That's also about the highest natural gas bill I've ever paid to keep the interior of the house at 72 degrees while we were having the coldest weather I've ever experienced here - and I've lived here almost my entire life. (We had 72 continuous hours below freezing!). I'm in the central South. Does that square with your experience re: utility prices? If Californian, never mind.
I do remember friends in college who talked about what sounded like monumentally expensive utility bills, especially the delivery of burner oils, etc. Obviously part of that is cost-of-living related, but it's not like there's no cheap land in the Northeast. If a carbon tax passes, the BTU's will kill you. You'll have to reforest some massive tracts of the Midwest to atone for your carbonic sin.
Air conditioning in hot climates uses less energy than heating in cold ones, at least in the US.
If he's in the back seat, he might as well be in his bed - any controls are out of his reach. By that logic I should get a DUI if I'm drunk at my own house and fall asleep with my keys in my pocket.
they'd be removed along with their "steel protectors" by a typical snowplough in Finland
IIRC the colder parts of the US just make small cuts in the surface and put reflectors below grade to prevent this problem. I distinctly recall seeing a system in Colorado that guided drivers through left turn lanes not just with paint on the surface but with a series of lights that run in a pattern like airport runway lights to show you both sides of your turn lane in green when it's your turn. (Colorado Springs, IIRC, and ca. 1988, so it's not exactly new tech.)
Yield signs have always seemed omnipresent to me, but almost all my car travel has been in the East and South. Are you out West?
Earthquakes aren't the only kind of earth movement. Shrink-swell soils can wreak havoc on pipe systems while being quite benign for wires overhead.
This is pretty standard in new developments, but would never pay for itself in a lot of older neighborhoods. It also assumes there are no ground factors to worry about, like shrink-swell soils or high water tables.
Coastal areas, perhaps, but most of the South isn't coastal or even tidewater, and flood control dams already exist.
Parts of the West, especially Texas, are in real trouble. Everybody east of the Mississippi? North or south, they all have plenty of rain. In the worst drought I've ever experienced here, they asked us (near the end) to consider cutting back lawn sprinklers to three days a week.
I'm going to have to assume you mean the southwestern US here... I live in the deep South, and we have no shortage at all of fresh water. Of course, that's east of the Mississippi, so it actually rains here.
So long as I don't get caught, I'm already free to steal from you or anyone else. Ask anyone who has had a smartphone or laptop stolen how helpful the police are even when you know the culprit and where the device is.
Also, you're confusing a legal concept with its real world counterpart. Ownership can be defined in many ways. Exclusive possession and use probably covers what most people think of as ownership, even if what the courts enforce is somewhat different.
every kind of capital you can own has this same property: it exists because the government says it exist, and your ownership of it exists because the government says it does.
This is not necessarily true; you can conceal your intellectual property, and ownership of physical assets is certainly not purely dependent on government sanction - e.g. the illicit drug industry, which cannot rely on government mechanisms to secure any transaction but which nonetheless has significant physical possessions. It's just a lot easier to defend your stuff if government hires a bunch of goons to beat up thieves rather than you having to do it yourself.
If you don't call a code on me when I have a "severely blocked airway" I swear I will haunt you from beyond the grave you're putting me in. Just because you're not giving epi/atropine/vasopressin doesn't mean it isn't a code.
/. hordes often have a very limited knowledge of how medicine actually works - I'll be hearing people in a few years tell dark stories about how someone made this oxygen-carrying liquid that could replace blood, but the pharma companies killed it because they wanted more people to be disabled or some such.
I'm not knocking the skills of EMTs - my logic is that you have generally five minutes between cessation of respiration and irreversible brain damage. This may make that fifteen. Unless the crew is passing the house in question when the call goes out, and Grandma is in the foyer, and the university ER is two blocks away, what do you think the odds are that you'll have her from you to a cric monster in fifteen or less?
You're right that this is a promising development. I've spent most of my effort in this thread trying to point out why it's not ready for prime time, since the
There are significant physical limitations to such a device because it has to maintain a fairly high flow rate (a peristaltic pump capable of, say, eight liters/min flow) as well as integrating blood supplies coming from various places, all while performing gas exchange.(which requires a reasonably large cylinder) and excluding as much cellular debris as possible.
Your blood doesn't coagulate in the tubes while you're donating because it's not in them long enough to do so. The bag at the end of that tubing is full of anticoagulant.
It's not impossible - cf. the standard cardiopulmonary bypass machine or an ECMO. It's just large, non-portable, requires a specially trained person to run it, and requires complete anticoagulation.
This is a great discovery if it leads to something. As it is, it's an interesting research compound.
I am not suggesting - I am telling you that your situation A is the law in the United States today. Positive, not normative.
That's a cardiopulmonary bypass machine or an ECMO. There's a reason they're big. O2 doesn't diffuse nearly as easily as CO2.
Because they are not direct governmental health care costs. They are costs borne by private hospitals that are forced by EMTALA to provide care to anyone who shows up with an "emergency medical condition". The government does much less to fund that deficit than do private insurance companies.
Yes... so long as you have plenty of blood. We are talking about serious resuscitation here, so that's not a given.
Blood has hemoglobin (and the RBC's it's in) to carry oxygen, and the average adult pair of lungs has a surface area comparable to a tennis court. Different battle.