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User: beelsebob

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  1. Yes, competition is bad and you're much better off with a monopoly that abuses its customers with high prices and poor service.

    You say this like you're being sarcastic, but at the same time, you seem to be supporting a company that's well on its way to establishing a taxi monopoly by abusing the shit out of capitalism...

  2. Re:Alas for the poor driver on Uber Banned in Germany and France, and Faces Lawsuits in Multiple States (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think it's rather the reverse. If you're going to classify us as contractors, you need to give us all the benefits that independent business men have. Uber drivers should be able to set their own price, accept tips for their work that don't go to uber, etc.

    The only interaction at that point between uber and the driver should be "Uber: we're going to charge you a finders fee of $x per mile for a passenger; Driver: Okay, I'm willing to pay you that".

  3. Re:What I think? on Universal Basic Income Programs Arrive (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    There really are some choices that simply are not available to them.

    A trivial example. If you live in a family that earns very little, then you might completely reasonably consider the cost of college level education impossible to cover. Sure, you can get a loan, but you again, completely reasonably might consider that too much of a risk to take on since you have no good expectation of ever being able to pay it back.

    A more subtle example. Poor families often can't afford the absolute basics - a bed for example. A child that spends their entire life either sleeping on a mattress on the floor will get poor quality sleep. Poor quality sleep is well known to have a causation into both poor decision making, and low achievement levels in education. Those effects lead on to a much higher chance of being poor in later life.

    Missing a bed is just one of many factors that can lead to that kind of thing. Other examples might include a single mother being under constant load and hence not providing consistent meal times. Lack of money not providing consistently good quality nutrition. Lack of money resulting in poor quality or unwashed clothes. All of these (and many other small, subtle things), lead to poor children having shorter attention spans, lower ability to learn, and worse decision making.

    Sure, that low education level, and poor decision making then lead to a further generation of poor people, but you can't solve the problem by simply yelling at them "BE LESS STUPID" - they're making dumb decisions for a reason. You have to address the root cause.

  4. Re:No one hurt . on Tesla: Model X Accident Caused By Driver Error, Not Autopilot (computerworld.com) · · Score: 1

    While you're technically correct (the best kind of correct) the intention was obvious - no shipping EV has a gearbox that actually changes gear ratio while you're driving.

  5. Yes - Toyota went for years claiming "oh, our cars are mostly driven by 60 year old women who don't know what they're doing" before an example became apparent where the police could prove unequivocally that the driver was doing everything they could to stop the car, while it was convinced it wanted to go as fast as it possibly could.

  6. But they also weigh something. Making triple redundant systems for every safety critical feature of the car adds a lot of weight through death by a thousand cuts. Weight makes a worse car.

  7. Re:No one hurt . on Tesla: Model X Accident Caused By Driver Error, Not Autopilot (computerworld.com) · · Score: 1

    Given that no current EV on the market has a gearbox at all, that seems pretty tricky :P

  8. Re:What I think? on Universal Basic Income Programs Arrive (theguardian.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1) the huge majority of people that are poor today are poor because they made/make shitty life choices.

    That's a very strange assumption to make. Do you have evidence to back it up?

    I'd contest that the huge majority of people that are poor today are poor because they were born into poor environments, and that being born into poor environments have well known socio-economic effects that result in people incapable of making good life choices.

    You have the right correlation, but the causation is backwards.

  9. Re:What I think? on Universal Basic Income Programs Arrive (theguardian.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm confused on this point. What are the huge bureaucratic overhead costs associated with someone leaving the unemployment/welfare system? Honestly, I don't know. It seems simpler to me in terms of overhead for someone to simply take up a job and stop the requests for welfare payments. The overhead would seem to be in their continuing to submit requests for payments at ever renewal stage, providing documentation that they've been out looking, etc., etc.

    Overhead 1, you've picked out already: Fraud. People claim the benefit when they're not entitled to it.
    Overhead 2: Employing people to sit in an office pushing paper, accepting "I want to sign on" and "I want to sign off" forms.
    Overhead 3: Employing people to audit who's signed on, to try to minimise overhead 1.
    Overhead 4: Employing people to audit the more complex tax forms that are necessary because of all the possible ways that you can get income, and all the different ways they can be correlated
    Overhead 5: Maintaining buildings for all the above people to work in.
    Overhead 6: Maintaining computer systems to track who's signed on, or not, what they're entitled to etc.
    Overhead 7: Overloading the courts with "this guy fraudulently claimed this benefit" issues.

    There's probably a whole bunch of overheads I haven't even thought of too, but these alone are pretty substantial.

  10. Re:What I think? on Universal Basic Income Programs Arrive (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    If you go and do a bunch of research, what you discover is that the projected cost of universal basic income is roughly the same as the projected cost of all the patchwork of handouts in pretty much every country that's considered it.

    There are savings in 1) fraud, which can no longer happen, and 2) administration, that balance out the cost of just giving it to everyone.

  11. Re: This sort of thing is why people like Trump on IT Layoffs At Insurance Firm Are A 'Never-Ending Funeral' (computerworld.com) · · Score: 1

    On top of that, let's make it so that if a qualified American applies for the job after an H1B has been hired, the H1B is immediately displaced from the job and that American is hired in his place.

    That right there is a guarantee that you won't get any skilled immigration into America. No one is going to take the risk of flying halfway round the world to work for {Google | Apple | Microsoft | Facebook} if they will suddenly be told "okay, bye, go back home at your own expense" as soon as an American shows up.

    Let's limit an H1B worker to a single employer for a maximum of 36 months, after which they have to return to their home country and must wait through a waiting period of 3 years before they can again work as an H1B.

    They already are limited to 36 months, though you can apply for one (and only one in your entire life time) extension for another 36 months. At that point, the company must again fulfil the same criteria as they did when they initially hired you. The reason you don't want to just send them home forever, is because the entire point of the system is that it's good for the economy to get highly skilled workers into the country. You absolutely want them to come, and stay.

    The problem is not that H1B workers stay in the country after their H1B on an extension or a green card.

    The problem is that companies are currently hiring them into generic consulting roles, rather than very specific jobs, and then outsourcing those consultants to other companies to allow them to dump Americans for jobs they can do.

    Work across state lines is prohibited, that means they can not join conference calls or communicate work results directly to coworkers across state lines.

    Again - that defeats the point of the program. Putting ridiculous limitations on this just negates the positive effect on the economy.

    Here's an alternative ruleset that might help more than what you're proposing:
    1) Disallow companies from hiring H1Bs into roles selling services to other companies, require them to work on goods sold by the hiring company only.
    Or
    2) When an employee is contracted out to another company, require that the same requirements are placed on the contract as are placed on the initial hiring of the H1B - require that the H1B is paid at least as much as the average American wage for an *employee* in the job they're being contracted out to.

  12. Re:Gaming notebook... oxymoron... on True Desktop Class Nvidia GTX 10-Series Cards Coming To Notebooks In Few Months (pcgamer.com) · · Score: 1

    Bullshit.

    The best laptop GPU available in 2011 was a radeon 5670m. That thing gets less than 10 frames per second in GTA V even on the lowest detail settings available.

  13. Re: Hydrogen a rotten method of storing power on Tesla Co-Founder Says Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are a 'Scam' (electrek.co) · · Score: 2

    The reason they're not talking about how you generate the electricity is because you have to do that step whether you use that electricity to directly charge your car, or whether you use it to split water. The loss is the same at that stage between EVs and HFCVs. Where the losses differ is in what the article talks about - splitting hydrogen loses you 60% of your energy, compressing it loses you another chunk, burning it in a fuel cell loses you yet another chunk. It's much more efficient to just store it in a battery.

  14. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy on Tesla Co-Founder Says Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are a 'Scam' (electrek.co) · · Score: 1

    Not really a significant issue. Once range gets over a certain limit, you won't be able to drive that limit without stopping for a night, and inherently being able to charge. The only question at that point is what the limit is.

    My bet is on somewhere around 350 miles, as this lets you drive 5 hours in the morning, stop for lunch, DC charge for half an hour while you eat (assuming a very good DC charger in the future), drive another 5 hours, stop for dinner, DC charge for half an hour while you eat, rince repeat.

    Alternatively, it lets you do the more recommended, driver for 2 hours, take a 10 minute loo break, and DC charge. rince, repeat.

  15. Re:The question is whether the solution is scalabl on Nevada Startup Stores Energy With Trains (fortune.com) · · Score: 2

    Because pumped water storage isn't 80% efficient.

  16. Re:The question is whether the solution is scalabl on Nevada Startup Stores Energy With Trains (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    You don't need to store a lot of them. Assuming that you can somehow build a single strong boxcar out of lead (more likely it would be many cars, but we'll use that for the sake of argument), you would end up pushing 3.4Gg up the hill. Nevada has 10,000ft mountains at its western edge. If you could push that weight to near the top of those mountains you would be storing about 9GJ, or about 7.5GW/h (assuming 12 hours of high usage and 12 hours of low during a day). That's a similar level of production to 7 or 8 nuclear plants from pushing just one single lead box the size of a train car up a mountain.

    Now I'm not saying that a single lead box, pushed up a 10,000ft mountain is the optimal way to design this system, but the fact that the maths works out to so well just for that demonstrates that you do not need to store a lot of trains at the top of your mountain.

  17. Re:Mechanical storage on Nevada Startup Stores Energy With Trains (fortune.com) · · Score: 2

    Yeh, I'm not convinced there's energy storage potential when you have to use massive amounts of energy to keep the superconductor cool.

  18. Re:When I was a kid... on Nevada Startup Stores Energy With Trains (fortune.com) · · Score: 2

    No, that's a completely valid idea - in fact, it's what people actually did before refrigeration existed to store frozen fish:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  19. Re:why on Nevada Startup Stores Energy With Trains (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    Simple - some "obvious" things aren't obvious at all.

  20. Re:Remember where the responsibility is on A Third Of Cash Is Held By 5 US Tech Companies (siliconbeat.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, the point is that there are far more citizens who are not either founders or shareholders in corporations than there are in the other camp.

    The government has a duty to those people as well as to the ones who do own companies. That is being taken vastly out of balance in the US.

  21. Re:Remember where the responsibility is on A Third Of Cash Is Held By 5 US Tech Companies (siliconbeat.com) · · Score: 1

    Meanwhile, if you want quite literally a mobster, vote Trump. The guy literally has documented connections to Fat Tony.

  22. Re:Remember where the responsibility is on A Third Of Cash Is Held By 5 US Tech Companies (siliconbeat.com) · · Score: 2

    Trump absolutely has a proven track record of evil. I mean, the guy has documented connections to Fat Tony. He's quite literally a mobster.

    If you want to watch him acting like the evil dick he is for a while, try this https://www.youtube.com/watch?....

  23. The issue with stopping parents rights the second a child's health is put at risk, is that it invites over officious idiocy from child services, like "oh my god, I saw some snot dribbling from their nose once, therefore you're not cleaning them regularly enough, and their health is at risk!"

    As with all politics, it's about scale. In this case, it's pretty clear that depriving children of vaccines is a pretty ridiculous risk to expose a child to without very good reason, and a ridiculous risk to expose other people who can't be vaccinated to as well, but blanket statements about "if it affects the child's health it should be done forcefully" are not helpful.

  24. Prius C curb weight - 2496lb
    Range Rover curb weight - 4918lb
    F150 curb weight - 4049lb
    Force Cayenne curb weight - 4488lb

  25. Re:Does The Paper Account For Regenerative Braking on Scientists: Electric Vehicles Produce As Many Toxins As Dirty Diesels (dailymail.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    I have first hand knowledge of owning an eGolf. The amount of regeneration depends (in that vehicle) on the charge state of the battery. If you're below about 70% charge, then under normal circumstances, all braking is regenerative. Above that charge level, or when you use particularly heavy braking, and the actual disks will get used a certain amount.