Actually, most aircraft that are used for learning to fly, don't have autopilots.
If you think that an aircraft with a Cat III autoland is being piloted by someone who just learned how to fly, you are crazy. Initial pilot training is done in aircraft without autopilots, or without using the one that is there, because initial pilot training is when a pilot learns how to fly, not how to manage the most complex and failure prone systems in the aircraft. Most initial training is done in aircraft where the "U" in "GUMP" (undercarriage, i.e. "landing gear" for non-pilots here) has the response "down and welded" and not "down and locked" because having to learn to manage the landing gear while learning what a flare and rollout are is just too much too fast.
Pilots learning how to fly don't even LAND until a few hours in, much less learn how to set up a Cat III approach to do it for them.
So what I said is fact. Most of the time taken in learning to fly AIRCRAFT WITH AUTOPILOTS is not learning how to use it, it's learning how to know when to turn it off, and then how to turn it off in any of a half a dozen or more ways.
For a system that is supposed to be leading the way to a perfect future of AV, there's sure a lot of training on what to do when it goes wrong and how to kill it. And even then, pilots die when the autopilot chokes and they can't override it. An autopilot that has a runaway trim failure can make the plane nearly unflyable, and if it does it too close to the ground, it makes the plane a coffin.
In fact, the G1000 aircraft I fly has a prohibition against turning on the autopilot until we're 800 AGL or more, just because there are too many ways for the autopilot to fail during takeoff, and too many times that is has failed and taken the plane back into the ground. This is a system that is an example of how well autonomous vehicles will work.
As for not learning "how to use the autopilot", you'd be correct, but that is a massive mistake.
Stop it. I didn't say they didn't learn how to use the autopilot, I was talking about the fact that a very large part of the training to upgrade into a cockpit with an autopilot was how to disable it. Of course they learn how to use it, and it would be a much greater mistake not to teach them that George can kill them unless they know how to disable him fast.
The autopilot in that system is amazingly basic and it should be easy to disable.
The POINT is that is isn't the poster child for perfection in AV that you are making it out to be. Autopilots MUST be easy to disable not because they are "amazingly basic", but because they can fail in amazingly fatal ways if you can't shut them off as soon as you detect a problem. They aren't proving how safe automobile "autopilots" will be. If anything, they prove that the price of safety is eternal vigilance. And training. The pilot who turns on the autopilot and then pulls out the latest John LeCarre novel is looking for a very expensive way to die.
This problem won't exist with cars.
Oh, my God. You are one person who should know how hard aviation autopilots are to deal with and their safety issues, and you claim it won't happen in cars. This will be true because there will be so MANY of those cars on the roads, and of course the auto manufacturers aren't going to try to cut corners and save money on safety systems.
Build 30 million of something in a year and suddenly spending $10 billion to develop it properly becomes reasonable.
And saving $100 per unit at 30 million units is a whopping $3 BILLION dollars. Car companies will have no incentive to scrimp?
Try a Global Hawk:
You started talking about business and commercial jet autopilots where tens or hundreds of lives are at stake and saying how perfect and safe such systems are, and now you want to change to unmanned vehicles
I think people have joked so much about the light pole just jumping out in front of you that they are actually beginning to believe that can actually happen.
While light poles will not "jump out" in front of a car, that little old lady who steps out into the street can step in front of your car before it is physically able to stop, whether computer or human controlled. The claim that the car can just "come to an ABS-assisted stop" to avoid hitting her is naive at best.
Sure, someone might throw themselves off an overpass immediately in front of you and they're gonna die, but a human would have hit them too.
It doesn't take falling from an overpass for someone to be in your path with almost no notice at all, and it is disingenuous to pretend that such a fall is the only way someone could appear in the path of an AV and be hit.
For an AV to achieve the claims of safety that are being made for it, the computer would have to be able to predict that the person walking along the sidewalk just a few feet ahead of it will NOT make a 90 degree turn and step into the roadway, or it will have to stop every time there is a potential hazard such as that. Yes, I've seen pedestrians who look for all the world like they're heading down the sidewalk for some unknown destination ahead of them, who suddenly turn and step into the crosswalk in just one step. On some intersections where there is a light or other pole located on the corner, they actually disappear behind the pole for a fraction of a second and you don't see them again until they step into the road from behind it.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I've seen them step into the crosswalk and then stop while they chat with their friends who are still on the curb. When will they start to cross again? You think you'll see them turn and then start to walk, but some of them actually just start walking backwards into traffic.
It's dishonest to try painting the objections to claims of AV perfection as requiring "500 orphans beamed around your car". Deal with reality and watch what happens on a real day and then explain how the AV will manage to "come to an ABS-assisted stop" before hitting someone every time. The only way it can guarantee that is for it to never move at all.
So there will be a significant incentive to municipalities to get sections of their roads "AI" ready.
There will, however, be just as little money to do that as there is to maintain them currently. The cost of getting roads "AI ready" will fall, in any case, on the taxpayer, the vast majority of whom will not be able to afford to own an AV.
Initially you will be mixed in with human driven cars, but then over time priority lanes and pathing will be given to the self driving cars
And the money for creating new lanes just for the few who own AV will come from the general taxpayer, too.
once self driving cars hit critical mass the trunk roads will be self drive only.
It will never happen. There will be too many taxpayers who don't own the cars who have just as much right to use the main roads as anyone else. Forcing those people off the main roads will only cripple the non-main roads as they will be forced to pick up the long-distance travelers and deal with the local users both.
But the main roads with the bulk traffic will be autonomous.
I remember when we were being told that every car would be a flying car. I remember when AT&T was telling us that video phone calls would be the normal way of communicating -- using wired phone lines.
Every new technology has acolytes who make stupendous claims in the face of reality, and the vast majority of those claims never come true.
Today you'll find autoland in both business jets and almost all airliners. It really isn't that hard.
You will find it in a small fraction of the aircraft flying today, at a small fraction of the airports. It requires special certification for the aircraft and the pilot and the airport.
It is not a commodity item that Joe Pilot can have Frank Mechanic install in his C182 and then pass control of the airplane over to Joe Junior the eight year old prodigy.
Nobody has EVER suggested removing the pilot controls from the aircraft that have Cat III systems, nor does the FAA allow the pilots to snooze while the plane is landing.
Using such systems does not make getting the pilot license easier, either. A large part of the training for pilots of those aircraft is not "how to use the autopilot", it is "how to disable the autopilot when it fails". For a system that is supposed to be so perfect at controlling things that it is the poster child for autonomous vehicles, there are an awful lot of ways built into the system to disable it when it chokes. As I recall, the C182 I fly that has a G1000 glass cockpit has at least nine different ways of disabling the autopilot, and at least two of those methods are part of every pre-flight check before every flight just to make sure they still work.
Some of those "autopiloted" aircraft have nothing more complex than a wing leveler -- a servo control to keep the airplane from uncommanded turns -- and even those with a more complicated "George" that can program a climb need to have a pilot in the loop to increase power while George tries so hard to keep the climb rate at the programmed setting that he pulls the stick back and airspeed drops below the stall.
The people who use aircraft autopilots as examples of why autonomous vehicles will be so great always forget the fact that an aircraft on an "airborne superhighway" comes no closer vertically than 1000 feet of another one, and controllers get hives when they're less than 1/2 mile apart horizontally. A ground-based superhighway has vehicles within ten feet of each other quite often, sometimes stopping at unexpected times, and needing to merge streams of traffic that are already almost bumper-to-bumper.
No, I'm sorry, the aviation autopilot is a much simpler device and is not the proof-of-concept for AV cars.
It's easy! Just count arms, legs and heads, and divide by five.
News Item: "AP Next year's paralympics competition has been cancelled due to low numbers of participants and spectators.... A quick survey of raised hands in the audience when asked 'would you attend next year' supports the declining numbers..."
On the actual topic, this is not a "count". It is a statistical measurement. You "count" the number of things your statistical operations identify as "person", but it's still statistics. That would make it an inappropriate way of conducting a census, for one thing.
I think it was W.C.Fields who said "I feel sorry for people that don't drink, when they get up in the morning, that is the best they'll feel all day..."
Enjoying how much better you feel when the hangover wears off is like the old joke about the guy who is hitting himself in the head with a hammer. When he's asked why he's doing that, he says "because it feels so good when I stop."
I never claimed that. I only said that cities, through their laws, encourage drunk driving. I'm certain that isn't the intent, only the effect.
They take no actions to encourage drunk driving. In fact, they hire many police to arrest people who do break that law. That means they take explicit steps to discourage it.
You started with the premise that cities have zoning laws to encourage driving. That premise is wrong. If anything, the zoning laws encourage parking. Therefore the remainder of the argument is false.
And they encourage people to drive and send their money to out-of-state car companies and oil companies, so parking lots are bad for the local economy.
What an amazing web you are trying to weave. Simply fascinating how far afield you go, and how many patently absurd assumptions you are making.
And a LOT of tax revenue.
Developing a space to include parking and a business does not cost tax revenue, it creates tax revenue. Property taxes are based on assessed value, not on space occupied. Allocating a "cost" to money that is never earned is a specious argument. It is the same nonsense that is used to claim that an increase in tax funding for a program is actually a cut because the increase wasn't as big as the program asked for.
If that's true, then business owners don't need to be forced to provide parking.
Business owners don't want to spend the money for parking spaces when they can just share the on-street limited supply. They don't care if the neighbors don't like their customers taking up all the spaces, because the neighbors are unlikely to be a large number of customers to begin with, nor will they require parking should they be.
That's partially true, but it completely ignores the demand side.
It is factually true -- shortages exist only because there is insufficient supply. That is almost a tautology. Yes, I ignore the "demand side", because the zoning laws are created to handle the "supply side". They are NOT created to "encourage drunk driving".
"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." --Ronald Reagan
Government is neither promoting drunk driving nor creating that problem. Drunk driving is a problem created by people who make poor choices, and those decisions often impact many other people.
I agree, that isn't the main purpose. But the intention is not relevant, only the effect is.
No, when you claim that the intent of the city is to promote drunk driving, the intent of the laws you use to justify the claim are critically important.
That's a rather clumsy and expensive way to prevent a shortage:
No, it is a rather simple and objective way of dealing with the problem. It costs the city nothing other than enforcement; the cost applies to the business owner who benefits from having more parking.
When you understand that shortages occur when prices are held artificially low,
Shortages exist when there is insufficient supply. There is a lack of physical space for on-street parking, thus a business with many customers can easily outpace the supply, even if the price is ridiculously high.
Do you think I said bars should be prohibited from having parking lots?
Either we extend the argument about the city promoting drunk driving to its natural conclusion by agreeing that the city should not promote drunk driving (by prohibiting parking at any place that facilitates the use of alcohol), or that it is not important that the city is promoting drunk driving. One way argues for prohibition on parking for some businesses, the other makes the discussion about city zoning laws irrelevant to the overall topic. You pick.
Or we could choose to recognize that the claim that the city is promoting drunk driving is patent nonsense, which is the truth.
I'd think it is weird if someone I took on a date was more interested in getting drunk than being on the date. Says a lot about her, I think, and it would be a good sign that we weren't compatible enough to go on a second one. If she's not trying to get drunk, then there is nothing weird at all in her having a glass of wine or beer with her meal.
If all you're trying to do is get in her pants by getting her drunk, and you think you'll enjoy it more if you are drunk, too, then what does that say about her? Why bother feeding her if all you want is sex and she won't give it to you unless she's drunk? Take her and a bottle home, and then tell her the next morning that yes, you did take her to a really expensive place and she loved the steak and lobster. She won't remember.
and you being a stick in the mud and having only iced tea...?
If she thinks you are a "stick in the mud" for choosing not to drink alcohol while you are responsible for her safety, well, that says a lot about your personality when you are sober and nothing about your ability to hold your liquor. If she's trying to get you drunk so she can stand to have sex with you, well, it's a match made in heaven and I hope you aren't an early arrival.
If you understood the purpose behind zoning laws and the requirement for parking at a business, you'd know that the zoning laws are not trying to create "cheap, abundant parking" nor are they trying to "induce driving". They are intended to prevent the lack of parking caused by a business trying to rely on shared on-street public parking for all of its customers. It is an acknowledgement that people WILL drive to a business and will want to park nearby while they conduct business there. It is a law to protect OTHER PEOPLE from the effects of a business.
Bars facilitate drinking.
Bars facilitate a lot of things. They do not force anyone to drink.
Using your logic, grocery stores facilitate drinking because they sell beer and wine (and in some states, hard liquor). Many restaurants facilitate drinking because they have licensed service. Hardware stores facilitate drinking because they sell Sterno, and some people just love their squeeze. Should all of these places be prohibited from having parking lots just because they provide access to alcohol? The rocket scientists who claim that the city is promoting drunk driving should be denouncing ALL of those venues and their "cheap abundant parking", because they should all be coming to the same conclusion about all of them.
And, if you're so against any drinking at all and driving,
If you want to avoid being arrested for DUI, the answer is simple. If you never want to have to worry about "am I too impaired to be safe", the answer is simple. If you want to eliminate an unnecessary hazard to safe driving, the answer is simple.
If you want to categorize those statements as being "so against any drinking at all", nobody can stop you.
then why is is even legal to have a bar with a parking lot for the patrons to come in?
Because even your own example of being on a date and you thinking that you need to get liquored up so you can get her pants off demonstrates that not every patron of a place that serves alcohol is then going to drive home. But on a more general note, it is because there is a defined legal limit below which one is not guilty of DUI, and we have the freedom to choose how closely we approach that limit (or even to exceed it). The fact you have the freedom to choose does not mean you should rail against those who tell you that making a simple choice simplifies the matter immensely.
And, on an even more general level, the bar has a parking lot because some zoning laws demand that places of business have parking for their customers.
Be realistic. People go out..they have a few...they have to get themselves and their cars HOME for the next day.
Now please join the realistic amongst us that understand that the choice to drink alcohol is a choice, not a mandate, and that if you want to avoid... reread first paragraph... the choice is simple. Be realistic enough to know that choices often have consequences. And be realistic enough to know that some choices are just stupid when making the right choice is so easy.
The trick is to not be too impaired to drive safely.
It should not take a "trick" to not be too impaired to drive. In fact, it doesn't.
If you're out on the town for a night of drinking, and you look around for a designated driver and don't see one, guess what? YOU'RE IT.
EVERYONE drinks....at least in my crowd.
So you are in a crowd of people who all make bad decisions about their own lives. I hope this never comes back to haunt you.
Really. Getting the call that Bob didn't make it home last night because he was so hammered he drove into a bridge abutment and nobody thought enough of him to be the designated driver for the group and get him home safely would haunt most people. At least people for whom Bob really was a friend. And the call that some drunk just ran over your husband as he was crossing the street will haunt you, too. If Bob's just someone to go drinking with, well, more alcohol for everyone else, eh?
Demanding of someone that, due to a night of excessive drinking, they starve themselves to death, or even just spend time in jail
Who is being forced to "starve themselves to death"? And should someone who chooses to participate in "excessive drinking" and then chooses to drive not spend some time in jail to help teach him not to make such inane choices?
or through a driving while suspended - which in practice is what people do instead of starving themselves to death)
Uhhh. People actually say "I choose not to starve myself to death" and their only option is drive with a suspended license? Does driving somehow satisfy the body's need for nutrition? Or is this just an example of what they call a false dichotomy?
get a cab. take the bus. walk. arrange for a friend to drive, before or after. sleep it off at the location. get a hotel. prop yourself up on the side of the wall. all options infinitely better than driving drunk
You're attacking the wrong end of the equation. The answer is much simpler with many fewer life implications. Just don't drink before you drive. That solves the driving while drunk problem without keeping anyone from driving.
The only people that "not drinking" keeps from driving are those who are so scared of driving that they need a couple "for the road" to "screw up their courage" to get behind the wheel in the first place. If not drinking keeps them off the road, I'll count that as a plus.
Clearly, you are someone who either never drinks or doesn't drive.
Clearly, I am someone who does drink alcohol and does drive. I have, however, chosen never to do them at the same time, or in close proximity. That's because I have realized that having a drink is much less of a necessity than being able to drive myself home.
Having a screaming child in the back seat is more detrimental to your driving than one glass of wine.
The difference is that you can easily choose not to drink and there are no negative consequences from that choice. Your friends may think you are Debbie Downer at the party, but then, you're going to be the one they call to come bail them out when they get arrested for DUI because they know you're the one who is sober enough to come get them.
On the other hand, there are serious consequences if you are someplace with a "screaming child" and you need to drive them home, and you choose to drive safely by leaving the child on the side of the road.
Risk management requires evaluating the risks, the hazards, and the mitigating circumstances. Sometimes the answer is "go" because while there are still hazards the cost of "no go" outweighs them. That's why the low cost of "don't drink" cannot change a "no go" into a "go", while the high cost of child abandonment can.
So, you're saying that no one should ever have a drink with a meal when dining out? I mean, you're driving your date out to a meal and you never get to have drinks with her that evening till you get home?
Is that such a horrible thing? You tell her that you're more concerned about getting her home safely than enjoying the effects of alcohol, and that you'd rather not take the unnecessary risk. Do the women you date prefer that you don't value their lives over a drink?
Or that maybe we shouldn't even have bars that serve drinks, that have parking lots for the patrons to park in, knowing they'll all be driving home?
Funny. You just talked about a situation where the woman was not driving home yet was in a place that both served drinks and had a parking lot. I guess the assumption that everyone in a bar is driving themselves home is a bit of a mistake.
That's just not reality man...
Reality is that you are responsible for your own choices, which might mean, at times, that you choose to forgo alcohol before choosing to operate heavy machinery.
More like it is so rare AND so many people die that the news organizations play it over and over and Over and OVER and OVER!!!
It isn't because it is so rare, it is because an airplane "disaster" is almost always a case of people dying, or being in grave danger, who were not in control of their fate and were required to "trust the system" that pilot training and standards, and aircraft maintenance, were being upheld.
Yes, they can "control their fate" in the gross sense of "don't fly", but once you decide to fly you are in the hands of a pilot you have most likely never met. You hope the company is obeying airworthiness directives. Did everyone who is shipping cargo on that plane obey the prohibitions on unflyable cargo, and was it stowed properly?
From that view, airplane crashes are "failures of the system" and that makes them news. You almost never hear about an airplane crash that involves a private pilot, outside the local news where the pilot used to live, unless there is a "failure of the system" that creates other fatalities, or chances of same. Otherwise, the "failure" involved is the one person who made his own choices and failed because of his own failure.
That's how most car accidents are today. Someone failed under their own steam. Joe Idiot fell asleep and ran into a tree. It's news when Joe Idiot takes out innocent bystander, because bystander was trusting in the system.
Fast forward to when the system is autonomous. Today, autonomous failures are not reported often because big companies are spending big money on keeping them quiet. When the freeways are filled with these things, any crash will become a failure of the system and it won't be kept quiet for long.
Sure there is, because someone would do it, raising wages for all. It becomes a competitive environment.
The company that does it has no incentive to do so, unless they have opening they cannot fill. If they do, then they have incentive to pay more irrespective of the change in tax costs, and they would already be doing so.
Once that company fills all it's openings, the other companies have no incentive to raise wages because they're the only ones hiring -- if they are.
If altruism were economic law, the US Labor Relations Board would not exists.
While true, the question becomes, what kind of world do we wish to live in?
A realistic one.
Do we really want the majority of the capital held by very few people with everyone else a virtual slave to that capital?
I'm sorry, what? I'm talking about a very specific issue of whether an employer has incentive to pass a savings on employee cost onto the employee or back to the people who invested their money in the company. Leaping from that to a statement about "everyone" is silly.
I hope you're wrong, because with that worldview you have no incentive to do the right thing.
I'm sorry, again? Losing customers because you have poor service is incentive to provide better service. Paying people above market rates doesn't do anything for the customer except increase costs, and thus prices.
If people or companies can't change and become better to earn your goodwill back, then why bother changing?
What incentive does McDonalds have to make better food if you won't give them another try?
You changed it from Walmart to McDonalds, but I'll play along.
When did it become my job to make sure McDonalds makes "better food"? Why should I care what McDonalds produces if I am not going to buy anything from them? Are you saying I should continue to buy things from a company I think is ethically bankrupt? What incentive do they have to change if I just keep shopping there as if nothing happened?
I did my part. I told them what was wrong and why they weren't seeing me again. The incentive to change is that they won't do the same thing to current customers and lose them, too.
They don't have to do it, they do it because they know that treating employees well is good business.
I assume you were already treating them well. Well enough that they chose to work for you, at the wages you were paying. Weren't you? If suddenly the cost of an employee dropped by $5/hr each, there is no incentive to give that to the employee and not return it to the stockholders or investors.
If Walmart tomorrow decided to raise the base pay there to $15/hr, two things would happen.
A whole lot of people would suddenly have a different view of Walmart, and they'd get a million applications the next day.
Obviously Wal-mart does not need a million more applications for the jobs they have, or they'd be paying more in an attempt at attracting them. If you can't get the employees you need at the current rate of pay, that is incentive to raise the rate of pay.
I dare say that Wal-mart has enough applications for the positions they need to fill. And that if an employee is not performing they have little incentive to keep them on, they'll just hire a replacement. Yes, a replacement costs money, but so does giving every employee a raise just because the cost of the employees has gone down.
They would be able to hire and retain good employees who care about the company and their corporate imagine would instantly improve by a mile.
That you think people would have their opinions of Walmart bought by handing out money, well. People are fickle, and buying goodwill is a losing proposition in the long run. Some people might change their mind about the elephant in the room that shoves local businesses out of town and cuts quality of every product it sells by forcing suppliers to cut their prices to the bone, but I don't think many people would.
I would not, for one. The day they tried charging me for the free reusable shopping bag they had given me just two weeks before, and neither the manager who was watching my discussion with the clerk nor the corporate ethics office cared, they lost my custom forever. I would not change my opinion of the company just because they started paying the greeter $50/hr. My opinion isn't for sale.
The point is, you personally might think it is a good idea to start paying your employees more were you to get a $5/hr discount on their benefits, but most employers would realize it is not a justifiable cost. In any case, the taxes paid "on behalf of" an employee are not taxes paid by the employee.
If they are private groups, then why do my tax dollars fund their internal popularity contests (aka primary elections)?
Because poll taxes were deemed unconstitutional a long time ago, and you can't force someone to pay for the right to vote.
And it isn't an entirely internal affair when you are forced to let anyone who chooses to do so vote in your election. Now, if registering temporarily as a Republican so you can vote in the "private internal Republican primary" had any lasting, or even ANY, consequences, there might be an argument. But there are too many Democrats I have heard brag about registering as a Republican so they can "help" the Republicans "pick a better candidate" to ever believe there is anything "internal" or "private" about any primary.
That way a lot of people will start to wonder why their favorite candidate doesn't get to debate the D and R nominees on TV.
It is ridiculous to believe that an independent candidate will be allowed into a Democrat or Republican candidate debate. Such debates are not intended to be open-ended first-come first-podiumed affairs. They are the debates for the party nomination process, not the overall election.
When it comes time for the general debates between all the candidates, that is when you should be calling for an all-inclusive process. That's the only time when people should be wondering why "their" candidate doesn't get to debate the "D and R" nominees. Before that, the floor is open for the Ds to debate the Ds and the Rs to debate the Rs, and if the Is want to debate Is they can put that debate together themselves.
Now, if the question is "should the Rs be mandated to seat all R candidates in every R debate (and Ds likewise)" then I'd still answer "no". There needs to be a line somewhere. I understand that if your candidate is on the wrong side of the line you're unhappy, but the line has to be and someone will always be on the wrong side of it. I also understand the attractiveness of someone like Bernie Sanders to some people, but when someone campaigns using the slogan "because fuck this shit" he has put himself where he wants to be.
Parties are only allowed one nomination for Primary, and primaries are completely (non-partisan) open.
The PURPOSE and REASON for a primary is for the parties to select the candidate they put forward for the general election. Limit the primaries to one candidate for each party, and allow everyone to vote for anyone, and you need to explain how this differs from the general election. If you want to eliminate primaries altogether, just say so.
And that doesn't answer the question "why should Democrats be allowed to select the Republican candidate and vice versa?" Why should people who deliberately choose no party affiliation have ANY say in what candidates the parties put forward?
This means that the party must present its best candidate (and only one) at the primary.
And that candidate is selected specifically how? By the party leadership? Is that better than allowing the party members to select from the several options? I suggest that it is not, simply because it will result in people voting for the lesser of two evils where they consider even the lesser evil to be needlessly moreso than the candidate that would have won the primary -- had there been one.
Why should the American voter be forced to pay for a partisan election?
I agree. Reinstate the poll tax, and only those people who want to vote will be required to pay for it. In this case it isn't a way of keeping people from voting, it's how the election itself is funded. And then people who live in more affluent areas can choose to pay a higher poll tax to pay for more efficient voting systems while those in poorer areas get the voting system they choose to pay for. Really?
If I could, I'd give the whole $20/hr to the employee,
Very altruistic, but illogical and unnecessary. If your employee is willing to work for you for $15/hr, why would you pay him $20/hr? Just because you have the money? You might. I don't know. But a rational businessman would see that his costs for labor have dropped and he can cut prices and increase sales, or maintain prices and return the profit to the investors and shareholders. In a big company, it isn't your money to just hand out as you wish, it's the company's money and there has to be a reason to spend it.
So as to not make "pay no taxes" a *complete* lie.
No, they realize that there is a context when talking about what people pay in income taxes so that the statement "pay no taxes" means "pay no income taxes". They aren't talking about sales taxes, for example, when they say "pay no taxes", nor do they expect you to jump up and down and say "but they pay property taxes and gas taxes and...". Nor are people who complain that "the rich" don't pay "their fair share" talking about gasoline or sales taxes. They're talking about income tax. The context is important.
But then you point out another bit of truth: "the company pays on your behalf". So that tax is not paid by the employee, it is paid by the company on the behalf of the employee. Not the same as the employee paying it. Even if you consider that whatever the company pays on the behalf of or because of the employee could be paid to the employee in wages. Were the social security and other taxes paid by the company to be eliminated, it is unlikely the employee would be paid more. Why would he? He's working for the money he's getting now, why would there be an automatic raise?
No, your duty is to drive a safe speed and pay attention.
I'm doing that.
And yes, to continue following the safety rules. What you don't seem to get is that in reality swerving kills somebody that should have lived,
You speak in such absolutes. "Swerving kills somebody". No, it doesn't necessarily kill anyone. If I swerve over into an empty oncoming lane, I've killed NOBODY. There is no magic "action at a distance" where somebody dies just because I've broken a relatively minor traffic law.
and doesn't save anybody because stopping is more effective.
If you are physically able to stop in time, yes. If you aren't, then swerving is more effective. That's why a blanket "never swerve" is inappropriate.
It isn't "save a child" vs "dent a fender," it is "do what you're supposed to do that is known to reduce fatalities"
You to think that general probabilities rule the world, and then when faced with a specific situation that requires a specific decision to be made, you should ignore all the other factors and stick with the table of probabilities.
Do you also refuse to use an umbrella while walking in a rain storm because the morning weather report said there was only a 20% chance of rain?
And no, if you could "see and keep track of vehicles coming my way in the other lane" you would have "seen and kept track of" the child
You have never driven in the real world. Your arguments are based on probabilities and wishful thinking about a perfect world. The world where computers will make the correct choice 100% of the time and have perfect ability to carry them out.
Any time that you have time to "swerve" safely, you would have time instead to make a legal lane change if that will solve the problem,
A legal lane change requires a relatively long period of signalling the intent ("failure to signal a lane change" is a traffic violation in most places, rarely ticketed on its own but a traffic rule nonetheless), and would be prohibited in many cases by local limitations such as "do not pass" or simply a solid white line separating two adjoining lanes. Swerving safely can be done "now"; changing lanes has to wait until you've obeyed the signalling requirement and may not be allowed by law even then.
You're not allowed to drive faster than you can react to things in your lane,
Uhh, what a strange planet you live on. On Earth there is no such law. There is "too fast for conditions" which involves consideration of the general condition of the roadway, but it would be impossible to go anywhere at all if the law required that you must not drive faster than you can react to the sudden appearance of an obstacle three feet in front of you without hitting it. And if you don't know that this can happen, then you don't have sufficient experience driving to be discussing it.
What will happen is, you'll swerve and hit a vehicle,
Not always, and never when I have done it. There simply was nothing there to hit other than the obstacle, and I didn't hit it. I would have had I followed your admonition to "NEVER SWERVE, STAY IN YOUR LANE AND STOP".
Your absolutism combined with lack of real world experience makes you dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, most aircraft that are used for learning to fly, don't have autopilots.
If you think that an aircraft with a Cat III autoland is being piloted by someone who just learned how to fly, you are crazy. Initial pilot training is done in aircraft without autopilots, or without using the one that is there, because initial pilot training is when a pilot learns how to fly, not how to manage the most complex and failure prone systems in the aircraft. Most initial training is done in aircraft where the "U" in "GUMP" (undercarriage, i.e. "landing gear" for non-pilots here) has the response "down and welded" and not "down and locked" because having to learn to manage the landing gear while learning what a flare and rollout are is just too much too fast.
Pilots learning how to fly don't even LAND until a few hours in, much less learn how to set up a Cat III approach to do it for them.
So what I said is fact. Most of the time taken in learning to fly AIRCRAFT WITH AUTOPILOTS is not learning how to use it, it's learning how to know when to turn it off, and then how to turn it off in any of a half a dozen or more ways.
For a system that is supposed to be leading the way to a perfect future of AV, there's sure a lot of training on what to do when it goes wrong and how to kill it. And even then, pilots die when the autopilot chokes and they can't override it. An autopilot that has a runaway trim failure can make the plane nearly unflyable, and if it does it too close to the ground, it makes the plane a coffin.
In fact, the G1000 aircraft I fly has a prohibition against turning on the autopilot until we're 800 AGL or more, just because there are too many ways for the autopilot to fail during takeoff, and too many times that is has failed and taken the plane back into the ground. This is a system that is an example of how well autonomous vehicles will work.
As for not learning "how to use the autopilot", you'd be correct, but that is a massive mistake.
Stop it. I didn't say they didn't learn how to use the autopilot, I was talking about the fact that a very large part of the training to upgrade into a cockpit with an autopilot was how to disable it. Of course they learn how to use it, and it would be a much greater mistake not to teach them that George can kill them unless they know how to disable him fast.
The autopilot in that system is amazingly basic and it should be easy to disable.
The POINT is that is isn't the poster child for perfection in AV that you are making it out to be. Autopilots MUST be easy to disable not because they are "amazingly basic", but because they can fail in amazingly fatal ways if you can't shut them off as soon as you detect a problem. They aren't proving how safe automobile "autopilots" will be. If anything, they prove that the price of safety is eternal vigilance. And training. The pilot who turns on the autopilot and then pulls out the latest John LeCarre novel is looking for a very expensive way to die.
This problem won't exist with cars.
Oh, my God. You are one person who should know how hard aviation autopilots are to deal with and their safety issues, and you claim it won't happen in cars. This will be true because there will be so MANY of those cars on the roads, and of course the auto manufacturers aren't going to try to cut corners and save money on safety systems.
Build 30 million of something in a year and suddenly spending $10 billion to develop it properly becomes reasonable.
And saving $100 per unit at 30 million units is a whopping $3 BILLION dollars. Car companies will have no incentive to scrimp?
Try a Global Hawk:
You started talking about business and commercial jet autopilots where tens or hundreds of lives are at stake and saying how perfect and safe such systems are, and now you want to change to unmanned vehicles
I think people have joked so much about the light pole just jumping out in front of you that they are actually beginning to believe that can actually happen.
While light poles will not "jump out" in front of a car, that little old lady who steps out into the street can step in front of your car before it is physically able to stop, whether computer or human controlled. The claim that the car can just "come to an ABS-assisted stop" to avoid hitting her is naive at best.
Sure, someone might throw themselves off an overpass immediately in front of you and they're gonna die, but a human would have hit them too.
It doesn't take falling from an overpass for someone to be in your path with almost no notice at all, and it is disingenuous to pretend that such a fall is the only way someone could appear in the path of an AV and be hit.
For an AV to achieve the claims of safety that are being made for it, the computer would have to be able to predict that the person walking along the sidewalk just a few feet ahead of it will NOT make a 90 degree turn and step into the roadway, or it will have to stop every time there is a potential hazard such as that. Yes, I've seen pedestrians who look for all the world like they're heading down the sidewalk for some unknown destination ahead of them, who suddenly turn and step into the crosswalk in just one step. On some intersections where there is a light or other pole located on the corner, they actually disappear behind the pole for a fraction of a second and you don't see them again until they step into the road from behind it.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I've seen them step into the crosswalk and then stop while they chat with their friends who are still on the curb. When will they start to cross again? You think you'll see them turn and then start to walk, but some of them actually just start walking backwards into traffic.
It's dishonest to try painting the objections to claims of AV perfection as requiring "500 orphans beamed around your car". Deal with reality and watch what happens on a real day and then explain how the AV will manage to "come to an ABS-assisted stop" before hitting someone every time. The only way it can guarantee that is for it to never move at all.
So there will be a significant incentive to municipalities to get sections of their roads "AI" ready.
There will, however, be just as little money to do that as there is to maintain them currently. The cost of getting roads "AI ready" will fall, in any case, on the taxpayer, the vast majority of whom will not be able to afford to own an AV.
Initially you will be mixed in with human driven cars, but then over time priority lanes and pathing will be given to the self driving cars
And the money for creating new lanes just for the few who own AV will come from the general taxpayer, too.
once self driving cars hit critical mass the trunk roads will be self drive only.
It will never happen. There will be too many taxpayers who don't own the cars who have just as much right to use the main roads as anyone else. Forcing those people off the main roads will only cripple the non-main roads as they will be forced to pick up the long-distance travelers and deal with the local users both.
But the main roads with the bulk traffic will be autonomous.
I remember when we were being told that every car would be a flying car. I remember when AT&T was telling us that video phone calls would be the normal way of communicating -- using wired phone lines.
Every new technology has acolytes who make stupendous claims in the face of reality, and the vast majority of those claims never come true.
Today you'll find autoland in both business jets and almost all airliners. It really isn't that hard.
You will find it in a small fraction of the aircraft flying today, at a small fraction of the airports. It requires special certification for the aircraft and the pilot and the airport. It is not a commodity item that Joe Pilot can have Frank Mechanic install in his C182 and then pass control of the airplane over to Joe Junior the eight year old prodigy. Nobody has EVER suggested removing the pilot controls from the aircraft that have Cat III systems, nor does the FAA allow the pilots to snooze while the plane is landing.
Using such systems does not make getting the pilot license easier, either. A large part of the training for pilots of those aircraft is not "how to use the autopilot", it is "how to disable the autopilot when it fails". For a system that is supposed to be so perfect at controlling things that it is the poster child for autonomous vehicles, there are an awful lot of ways built into the system to disable it when it chokes. As I recall, the C182 I fly that has a G1000 glass cockpit has at least nine different ways of disabling the autopilot, and at least two of those methods are part of every pre-flight check before every flight just to make sure they still work.
Some of those "autopiloted" aircraft have nothing more complex than a wing leveler -- a servo control to keep the airplane from uncommanded turns -- and even those with a more complicated "George" that can program a climb need to have a pilot in the loop to increase power while George tries so hard to keep the climb rate at the programmed setting that he pulls the stick back and airspeed drops below the stall.
The people who use aircraft autopilots as examples of why autonomous vehicles will be so great always forget the fact that an aircraft on an "airborne superhighway" comes no closer vertically than 1000 feet of another one, and controllers get hives when they're less than 1/2 mile apart horizontally. A ground-based superhighway has vehicles within ten feet of each other quite often, sometimes stopping at unexpected times, and needing to merge streams of traffic that are already almost bumper-to-bumper.
No, I'm sorry, the aviation autopilot is a much simpler device and is not the proof-of-concept for AV cars.
It's easy! Just count arms, legs and heads, and divide by five.
News Item: "AP Next year's paralympics competition has been cancelled due to low numbers of participants and spectators. ... A quick survey of raised hands in the audience when asked 'would you attend next year' supports the declining numbers ..."
On the actual topic, this is not a "count". It is a statistical measurement. You "count" the number of things your statistical operations identify as "person", but it's still statistics. That would make it an inappropriate way of conducting a census, for one thing.
I think it was W.C.Fields who said "I feel sorry for people that don't drink, when they get up in the morning, that is the best they'll feel all day..."
Enjoying how much better you feel when the hangover wears off is like the old joke about the guy who is hitting himself in the head with a hammer. When he's asked why he's doing that, he says "because it feels so good when I stop."
I never claimed that. I only said that cities, through their laws, encourage drunk driving. I'm certain that isn't the intent, only the effect.
They take no actions to encourage drunk driving. In fact, they hire many police to arrest people who do break that law. That means they take explicit steps to discourage it.
You started with the premise that cities have zoning laws to encourage driving. That premise is wrong. If anything, the zoning laws encourage parking. Therefore the remainder of the argument is false.
And they encourage people to drive and send their money to out-of-state car companies and oil companies, so parking lots are bad for the local economy.
What an amazing web you are trying to weave. Simply fascinating how far afield you go, and how many patently absurd assumptions you are making.
And a LOT of tax revenue.
Developing a space to include parking and a business does not cost tax revenue, it creates tax revenue. Property taxes are based on assessed value, not on space occupied. Allocating a "cost" to money that is never earned is a specious argument. It is the same nonsense that is used to claim that an increase in tax funding for a program is actually a cut because the increase wasn't as big as the program asked for.
If that's true, then business owners don't need to be forced to provide parking.
Business owners don't want to spend the money for parking spaces when they can just share the on-street limited supply. They don't care if the neighbors don't like their customers taking up all the spaces, because the neighbors are unlikely to be a large number of customers to begin with, nor will they require parking should they be.
That's partially true, but it completely ignores the demand side.
It is factually true -- shortages exist only because there is insufficient supply. That is almost a tautology. Yes, I ignore the "demand side", because the zoning laws are created to handle the "supply side". They are NOT created to "encourage drunk driving".
"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." --Ronald Reagan
Government is neither promoting drunk driving nor creating that problem. Drunk driving is a problem created by people who make poor choices, and those decisions often impact many other people.
I agree, that isn't the main purpose. But the intention is not relevant, only the effect is.
No, when you claim that the intent of the city is to promote drunk driving, the intent of the laws you use to justify the claim are critically important.
That's a rather clumsy and expensive way to prevent a shortage:
No, it is a rather simple and objective way of dealing with the problem. It costs the city nothing other than enforcement; the cost applies to the business owner who benefits from having more parking.
When you understand that shortages occur when prices are held artificially low,
Shortages exist when there is insufficient supply. There is a lack of physical space for on-street parking, thus a business with many customers can easily outpace the supply, even if the price is ridiculously high.
Do you think I said bars should be prohibited from having parking lots?
Either we extend the argument about the city promoting drunk driving to its natural conclusion by agreeing that the city should not promote drunk driving (by prohibiting parking at any place that facilitates the use of alcohol), or that it is not important that the city is promoting drunk driving. One way argues for prohibition on parking for some businesses, the other makes the discussion about city zoning laws irrelevant to the overall topic. You pick.
Or we could choose to recognize that the claim that the city is promoting drunk driving is patent nonsense, which is the truth.
But no one wants to drink alone,
She's not alone. She's on a date -- with you.
so would be weird for her to be drinking
I'd think it is weird if someone I took on a date was more interested in getting drunk than being on the date. Says a lot about her, I think, and it would be a good sign that we weren't compatible enough to go on a second one. If she's not trying to get drunk, then there is nothing weird at all in her having a glass of wine or beer with her meal.
If all you're trying to do is get in her pants by getting her drunk, and you think you'll enjoy it more if you are drunk, too, then what does that say about her? Why bother feeding her if all you want is sex and she won't give it to you unless she's drunk? Take her and a bottle home, and then tell her the next morning that yes, you did take her to a really expensive place and she loved the steak and lobster. She won't remember.
and you being a stick in the mud and having only iced tea...?
If she thinks you are a "stick in the mud" for choosing not to drink alcohol while you are responsible for her safety, well, that says a lot about your personality when you are sober and nothing about your ability to hold your liquor. If she's trying to get you drunk so she can stand to have sex with you, well, it's a match made in heaven and I hope you aren't an early arrival.
Cheap, abundant parking induces driving.
If you understood the purpose behind zoning laws and the requirement for parking at a business, you'd know that the zoning laws are not trying to create "cheap, abundant parking" nor are they trying to "induce driving". They are intended to prevent the lack of parking caused by a business trying to rely on shared on-street public parking for all of its customers. It is an acknowledgement that people WILL drive to a business and will want to park nearby while they conduct business there. It is a law to protect OTHER PEOPLE from the effects of a business.
Bars facilitate drinking.
Bars facilitate a lot of things. They do not force anyone to drink.
Using your logic, grocery stores facilitate drinking because they sell beer and wine (and in some states, hard liquor). Many restaurants facilitate drinking because they have licensed service. Hardware stores facilitate drinking because they sell Sterno, and some people just love their squeeze. Should all of these places be prohibited from having parking lots just because they provide access to alcohol? The rocket scientists who claim that the city is promoting drunk driving should be denouncing ALL of those venues and their "cheap abundant parking", because they should all be coming to the same conclusion about all of them.
And, if you're so against any drinking at all and driving,
If you want to avoid being arrested for DUI, the answer is simple. If you never want to have to worry about "am I too impaired to be safe", the answer is simple. If you want to eliminate an unnecessary hazard to safe driving, the answer is simple.
If you want to categorize those statements as being "so against any drinking at all", nobody can stop you.
then why is is even legal to have a bar with a parking lot for the patrons to come in?
Because even your own example of being on a date and you thinking that you need to get liquored up so you can get her pants off demonstrates that not every patron of a place that serves alcohol is then going to drive home. But on a more general note, it is because there is a defined legal limit below which one is not guilty of DUI, and we have the freedom to choose how closely we approach that limit (or even to exceed it). The fact you have the freedom to choose does not mean you should rail against those who tell you that making a simple choice simplifies the matter immensely.
And, on an even more general level, the bar has a parking lot because some zoning laws demand that places of business have parking for their customers.
Be realistic. People go out..they have a few...they have to get themselves and their cars HOME for the next day.
Now please join the realistic amongst us that understand that the choice to drink alcohol is a choice, not a mandate, and that if you want to avoid ... reread first paragraph ... the choice is simple. Be realistic enough to know that choices often have consequences. And be realistic enough to know that some choices are just stupid when making the right choice is so easy.
The trick is to not be too impaired to drive safely.
It should not take a "trick" to not be too impaired to drive. In fact, it doesn't.
Hmm...never one around when you need one.
If you're out on the town for a night of drinking, and you look around for a designated driver and don't see one, guess what? YOU'RE IT.
EVERYONE drinks....at least in my crowd.
So you are in a crowd of people who all make bad decisions about their own lives. I hope this never comes back to haunt you.
Really. Getting the call that Bob didn't make it home last night because he was so hammered he drove into a bridge abutment and nobody thought enough of him to be the designated driver for the group and get him home safely would haunt most people. At least people for whom Bob really was a friend. And the call that some drunk just ran over your husband as he was crossing the street will haunt you, too. If Bob's just someone to go drinking with, well, more alcohol for everyone else, eh?
Demanding of someone that, due to a night of excessive drinking, they starve themselves to death, or even just spend time in jail
Who is being forced to "starve themselves to death"? And should someone who chooses to participate in "excessive drinking" and then chooses to drive not spend some time in jail to help teach him not to make such inane choices?
or through a driving while suspended - which in practice is what people do instead of starving themselves to death)
Uhhh. People actually say "I choose not to starve myself to death" and their only option is drive with a suspended license? Does driving somehow satisfy the body's need for nutrition? Or is this just an example of what they call a false dichotomy?
get a cab. take the bus. walk. arrange for a friend to drive, before or after. sleep it off at the location. get a hotel. prop yourself up on the side of the wall. all options infinitely better than driving drunk
You're attacking the wrong end of the equation. The answer is much simpler with many fewer life implications. Just don't drink before you drive. That solves the driving while drunk problem without keeping anyone from driving.
The only people that "not drinking" keeps from driving are those who are so scared of driving that they need a couple "for the road" to "screw up their courage" to get behind the wheel in the first place. If not drinking keeps them off the road, I'll count that as a plus.
Clearly, you are someone who either never drinks or doesn't drive.
Clearly, I am someone who does drink alcohol and does drive. I have, however, chosen never to do them at the same time, or in close proximity. That's because I have realized that having a drink is much less of a necessity than being able to drive myself home.
Having a screaming child in the back seat is more detrimental to your driving than one glass of wine.
The difference is that you can easily choose not to drink and there are no negative consequences from that choice. Your friends may think you are Debbie Downer at the party, but then, you're going to be the one they call to come bail them out when they get arrested for DUI because they know you're the one who is sober enough to come get them.
On the other hand, there are serious consequences if you are someplace with a "screaming child" and you need to drive them home, and you choose to drive safely by leaving the child on the side of the road.
Risk management requires evaluating the risks, the hazards, and the mitigating circumstances. Sometimes the answer is "go" because while there are still hazards the cost of "no go" outweighs them. That's why the low cost of "don't drink" cannot change a "no go" into a "go", while the high cost of child abandonment can.
So, you're saying that no one should ever have a drink with a meal when dining out? I mean, you're driving your date out to a meal and you never get to have drinks with her that evening till you get home?
Is that such a horrible thing? You tell her that you're more concerned about getting her home safely than enjoying the effects of alcohol, and that you'd rather not take the unnecessary risk. Do the women you date prefer that you don't value their lives over a drink?
Or that maybe we shouldn't even have bars that serve drinks, that have parking lots for the patrons to park in, knowing they'll all be driving home?
Funny. You just talked about a situation where the woman was not driving home yet was in a place that both served drinks and had a parking lot. I guess the assumption that everyone in a bar is driving themselves home is a bit of a mistake.
That's just not reality man...
Reality is that you are responsible for your own choices, which might mean, at times, that you choose to forgo alcohol before choosing to operate heavy machinery.
More like it is so rare AND so many people die that the news organizations play it over and over and Over and OVER and OVER!!!
It isn't because it is so rare, it is because an airplane "disaster" is almost always a case of people dying, or being in grave danger, who were not in control of their fate and were required to "trust the system" that pilot training and standards, and aircraft maintenance, were being upheld.
Yes, they can "control their fate" in the gross sense of "don't fly", but once you decide to fly you are in the hands of a pilot you have most likely never met. You hope the company is obeying airworthiness directives. Did everyone who is shipping cargo on that plane obey the prohibitions on unflyable cargo, and was it stowed properly?
From that view, airplane crashes are "failures of the system" and that makes them news. You almost never hear about an airplane crash that involves a private pilot, outside the local news where the pilot used to live, unless there is a "failure of the system" that creates other fatalities, or chances of same. Otherwise, the "failure" involved is the one person who made his own choices and failed because of his own failure.
That's how most car accidents are today. Someone failed under their own steam. Joe Idiot fell asleep and ran into a tree. It's news when Joe Idiot takes out innocent bystander, because bystander was trusting in the system.
Fast forward to when the system is autonomous. Today, autonomous failures are not reported often because big companies are spending big money on keeping them quiet. When the freeways are filled with these things, any crash will become a failure of the system and it won't be kept quiet for long.
Sure there is, because someone would do it, raising wages for all. It becomes a competitive environment.
The company that does it has no incentive to do so, unless they have opening they cannot fill. If they do, then they have incentive to pay more irrespective of the change in tax costs, and they would already be doing so.
Once that company fills all it's openings, the other companies have no incentive to raise wages because they're the only ones hiring -- if they are.
If altruism were economic law, the US Labor Relations Board would not exists.
While true, the question becomes, what kind of world do we wish to live in?
A realistic one.
Do we really want the majority of the capital held by very few people with everyone else a virtual slave to that capital?
I'm sorry, what? I'm talking about a very specific issue of whether an employer has incentive to pass a savings on employee cost onto the employee or back to the people who invested their money in the company. Leaping from that to a statement about "everyone" is silly.
I hope you're wrong, because with that worldview you have no incentive to do the right thing.
I'm sorry, again? Losing customers because you have poor service is incentive to provide better service. Paying people above market rates doesn't do anything for the customer except increase costs, and thus prices.
If people or companies can't change and become better to earn your goodwill back, then why bother changing? What incentive does McDonalds have to make better food if you won't give them another try?
You changed it from Walmart to McDonalds, but I'll play along. When did it become my job to make sure McDonalds makes "better food"? Why should I care what McDonalds produces if I am not going to buy anything from them? Are you saying I should continue to buy things from a company I think is ethically bankrupt? What incentive do they have to change if I just keep shopping there as if nothing happened?
I did my part. I told them what was wrong and why they weren't seeing me again. The incentive to change is that they won't do the same thing to current customers and lose them, too.
They don't have to do it, they do it because they know that treating employees well is good business.
I assume you were already treating them well. Well enough that they chose to work for you, at the wages you were paying. Weren't you? If suddenly the cost of an employee dropped by $5/hr each, there is no incentive to give that to the employee and not return it to the stockholders or investors.
If Walmart tomorrow decided to raise the base pay there to $15/hr, two things would happen. A whole lot of people would suddenly have a different view of Walmart, and they'd get a million applications the next day.
Obviously Wal-mart does not need a million more applications for the jobs they have, or they'd be paying more in an attempt at attracting them. If you can't get the employees you need at the current rate of pay, that is incentive to raise the rate of pay.
I dare say that Wal-mart has enough applications for the positions they need to fill. And that if an employee is not performing they have little incentive to keep them on, they'll just hire a replacement. Yes, a replacement costs money, but so does giving every employee a raise just because the cost of the employees has gone down.
They would be able to hire and retain good employees who care about the company and their corporate imagine would instantly improve by a mile.
That you think people would have their opinions of Walmart bought by handing out money, well. People are fickle, and buying goodwill is a losing proposition in the long run. Some people might change their mind about the elephant in the room that shoves local businesses out of town and cuts quality of every product it sells by forcing suppliers to cut their prices to the bone, but I don't think many people would.
I would not, for one. The day they tried charging me for the free reusable shopping bag they had given me just two weeks before, and neither the manager who was watching my discussion with the clerk nor the corporate ethics office cared, they lost my custom forever. I would not change my opinion of the company just because they started paying the greeter $50/hr. My opinion isn't for sale.
The point is, you personally might think it is a good idea to start paying your employees more were you to get a $5/hr discount on their benefits, but most employers would realize it is not a justifiable cost. In any case, the taxes paid "on behalf of" an employee are not taxes paid by the employee.
If they are private groups, then why do my tax dollars fund their internal popularity contests (aka primary elections)?
Because poll taxes were deemed unconstitutional a long time ago, and you can't force someone to pay for the right to vote.
And it isn't an entirely internal affair when you are forced to let anyone who chooses to do so vote in your election. Now, if registering temporarily as a Republican so you can vote in the "private internal Republican primary" had any lasting, or even ANY, consequences, there might be an argument. But there are too many Democrats I have heard brag about registering as a Republican so they can "help" the Republicans "pick a better candidate" to ever believe there is anything "internal" or "private" about any primary.
That way a lot of people will start to wonder why their favorite candidate doesn't get to debate the D and R nominees on TV.
It is ridiculous to believe that an independent candidate will be allowed into a Democrat or Republican candidate debate. Such debates are not intended to be open-ended first-come first-podiumed affairs. They are the debates for the party nomination process, not the overall election.
When it comes time for the general debates between all the candidates, that is when you should be calling for an all-inclusive process. That's the only time when people should be wondering why "their" candidate doesn't get to debate the "D and R" nominees. Before that, the floor is open for the Ds to debate the Ds and the Rs to debate the Rs, and if the Is want to debate Is they can put that debate together themselves.
Now, if the question is "should the Rs be mandated to seat all R candidates in every R debate (and Ds likewise)" then I'd still answer "no". There needs to be a line somewhere. I understand that if your candidate is on the wrong side of the line you're unhappy, but the line has to be and someone will always be on the wrong side of it. I also understand the attractiveness of someone like Bernie Sanders to some people, but when someone campaigns using the slogan "because fuck this shit" he has put himself where he wants to be.
Parties are only allowed one nomination for Primary, and primaries are completely (non-partisan) open.
The PURPOSE and REASON for a primary is for the parties to select the candidate they put forward for the general election. Limit the primaries to one candidate for each party, and allow everyone to vote for anyone, and you need to explain how this differs from the general election. If you want to eliminate primaries altogether, just say so.
And that doesn't answer the question "why should Democrats be allowed to select the Republican candidate and vice versa?" Why should people who deliberately choose no party affiliation have ANY say in what candidates the parties put forward?
This means that the party must present its best candidate (and only one) at the primary.
And that candidate is selected specifically how? By the party leadership? Is that better than allowing the party members to select from the several options? I suggest that it is not, simply because it will result in people voting for the lesser of two evils where they consider even the lesser evil to be needlessly moreso than the candidate that would have won the primary -- had there been one.
Why should the American voter be forced to pay for a partisan election?
I agree. Reinstate the poll tax, and only those people who want to vote will be required to pay for it. In this case it isn't a way of keeping people from voting, it's how the election itself is funded. And then people who live in more affluent areas can choose to pay a higher poll tax to pay for more efficient voting systems while those in poorer areas get the voting system they choose to pay for. Really?
If I could, I'd give the whole $20/hr to the employee,
Very altruistic, but illogical and unnecessary. If your employee is willing to work for you for $15/hr, why would you pay him $20/hr? Just because you have the money? You might. I don't know. But a rational businessman would see that his costs for labor have dropped and he can cut prices and increase sales, or maintain prices and return the profit to the investors and shareholders. In a big company, it isn't your money to just hand out as you wish, it's the company's money and there has to be a reason to spend it.
That's not cynical, that's good business.
So as to not make "pay no taxes" a *complete* lie.
No, they realize that there is a context when talking about what people pay in income taxes so that the statement "pay no taxes" means "pay no income taxes". They aren't talking about sales taxes, for example, when they say "pay no taxes", nor do they expect you to jump up and down and say "but they pay property taxes and gas taxes and ...". Nor are people who complain that "the rich" don't pay "their fair share" talking about gasoline or sales taxes. They're talking about income tax. The context is important.
But then you point out another bit of truth: "the company pays on your behalf". So that tax is not paid by the employee, it is paid by the company on the behalf of the employee. Not the same as the employee paying it. Even if you consider that whatever the company pays on the behalf of or because of the employee could be paid to the employee in wages. Were the social security and other taxes paid by the company to be eliminated, it is unlikely the employee would be paid more. Why would he? He's working for the money he's getting now, why would there be an automatic raise?
No, your duty is to drive a safe speed and pay attention.
I'm doing that.
And yes, to continue following the safety rules. What you don't seem to get is that in reality swerving kills somebody that should have lived,
You speak in such absolutes. "Swerving kills somebody". No, it doesn't necessarily kill anyone. If I swerve over into an empty oncoming lane, I've killed NOBODY. There is no magic "action at a distance" where somebody dies just because I've broken a relatively minor traffic law.
and doesn't save anybody because stopping is more effective.
If you are physically able to stop in time, yes. If you aren't, then swerving is more effective. That's why a blanket "never swerve" is inappropriate.
It isn't "save a child" vs "dent a fender," it is "do what you're supposed to do that is known to reduce fatalities"
You to think that general probabilities rule the world, and then when faced with a specific situation that requires a specific decision to be made, you should ignore all the other factors and stick with the table of probabilities. Do you also refuse to use an umbrella while walking in a rain storm because the morning weather report said there was only a 20% chance of rain?
And no, if you could "see and keep track of vehicles coming my way in the other lane" you would have "seen and kept track of" the child
You have never driven in the real world. Your arguments are based on probabilities and wishful thinking about a perfect world. The world where computers will make the correct choice 100% of the time and have perfect ability to carry them out.
Any time that you have time to "swerve" safely, you would have time instead to make a legal lane change if that will solve the problem,
A legal lane change requires a relatively long period of signalling the intent ("failure to signal a lane change" is a traffic violation in most places, rarely ticketed on its own but a traffic rule nonetheless), and would be prohibited in many cases by local limitations such as "do not pass" or simply a solid white line separating two adjoining lanes. Swerving safely can be done "now"; changing lanes has to wait until you've obeyed the signalling requirement and may not be allowed by law even then.
You're not allowed to drive faster than you can react to things in your lane,
Uhh, what a strange planet you live on. On Earth there is no such law. There is "too fast for conditions" which involves consideration of the general condition of the roadway, but it would be impossible to go anywhere at all if the law required that you must not drive faster than you can react to the sudden appearance of an obstacle three feet in front of you without hitting it. And if you don't know that this can happen, then you don't have sufficient experience driving to be discussing it.
What will happen is, you'll swerve and hit a vehicle,
Not always, and never when I have done it. There simply was nothing there to hit other than the obstacle, and I didn't hit it. I would have had I followed your admonition to "NEVER SWERVE, STAY IN YOUR LANE AND STOP".
Your absolutism combined with lack of real world experience makes you dangerous.