That's interesting because the conservative mentality is to make everyone dependent on Big Oil and subsidized roads, and to take away the right of business owners to decide how much parking to provide for their customers. And thanks to zoning laws, it's no longer practical for many people to go to the store for a gallon of milk without carrying some form of government ID with you. Is that freedom?
I think true freedom is when you can walk and bike everywhere you need to be.
The first major assumption is that a family pays $500/month to lease a car every month. Most sensible families have a $30k car paid off in 5 years and drive it another 5.
$30k amortized over 10 years at 7% interest (a conservative estimate of how much that money would earn from a good stock index fund) is $348 per month of $4,176 per year.
Then add to that the cost of gasoline, insurance, registration, maintenance, and any parking fees. (Although parking is highly subsidized especially in cities where the cost of land is high, so it's difficult to calculate the value of this subsidy, but see below.)
Then the cost of your garage and driveway, both the construction cost and the real estate taxes.
And the street in front of your home is probably wider than it needs to be in order to make room for parking. Guess who pays for that?
To paraphrase Professor Donald Shoup, it's sad how we expect people to pay rent while cars should be parked rent-free!
A second major assumption is that the cost of ride sharing currently covers the full purchase price, maintenance, and depreciation of the driver's vehicle. I do not know that this is the case.
If the cost of ride sharing doesn't cover these costs, then who's paying the subsidy?
And then you're limiting the rating's potential usefulness to people who have watched one of the two movies already, and is deciding whether to watch the second...
If Bob likes movie "A" more than "B" and Susan likes "B" more than "C", then Condorcet would rank them like this: A > B > C
This can expand to any number of movies. Then someone only has to find a movie in the list that they're thinking about watching and another that they've already watched (perhaps one in the same genre) and look at their relative placements in the list (their percent rankings) to see which one people think is better. In that way it works the same as the 5-star rating system but now when you're voting you don't need to spend time deciding whether it's a 3- or 4-star movie while trying to be consistent with the way you've voted on other movies in the past. Too much effort!
Because there are lots of movies I neither like nor despise... and there are movies I like and movies I really, really like. None of that can be expressed with a "like/hate" or "good/bad" 2-point scale.
Let's say you watched two movies in a row and you really liked both a lot. Under a 5-star system you would rate them both a "5", which means you cannot express through the rating which one you liked more. But instead of a 5-star rating, if you were asked to choose whether you liked the second one more (thumbs up) or less (thumbs down) than the first movie, you could provide that missing information.
Now instead of everyone deciding for themselves what two or four stars means, people can just decide whether they liked the movie or not. It's simple. I like that.
The next step is some kind of contextual ranking. It could be as simple as "I liked this movie ( ) more than ( ) less than [insert last movie seen here]". Then Netflix could use the Condorcet Method to rank all movies in order from worst to best, and assign each movie a percentile ranking based on its position in the list. Now instead of ranking clustered around the 1-star and 5-star mark, we would see a flat distribution that adds resolution at both poles.
Trolling is posting with the intention of generate responses.
Encouraging discussion is trolling?
No, trolling is posting something you yourself don't believe with the intention of generating responses. If you aren't misrepresenting yourself, then you can't possibly be a troll.
You're talking about an unregulated market, not a free market. A free market is one that's free of market failures (monopolies, asymmetrical information, negative externalities, etc.) but that requires enforcement. An unregulated market has no enforcement.
If you don't enforce the number of parking spaces, a restaurant will put in 10 spaces and their customers will park in the neighboring businesses' spaces.
If the neighboring business is unwilling to capitalize on the parking shortage, then they deserve to fail. The role of government is not to force businesses to succeed.
Stop paying people to drive everywhere. Stop telling businesses how many parking spaces they have to provide for their own customers. Stop making poor, compact neighborhood subsidize urban sprawl. And then internalize the negative externality of burning fossil fuels, perhaps with a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend so it isn't a burden on the poor.
I think the market can solve the problem, if we would let it.
The CO2 we exhale has always been circulating between the soil, the water, the air, and the plants and animals we eat. That's all carbon-neutral. But the CO2 from fossil fuels had been dormant outside of that cycle until we burned those fuels and released the CO2, and it isn't easily made inert again (re-sequestered). That's the reason why the CO2 ratio in the atmosphere is increasing, and that's the source of climate change, not the air we exhale. This is an important distinction that's lost on climate deniers.
In my area, pedestrians walk on the sidewalk, not in the road. And once drivers pay 100% of the cost of the roads instead of less than half like they do today, then we can think about how to charge bicyclists. Perhaps through a tire tax?
Online retailers already pay shipping fees which pay for the necessary infrastructure to get their products into the hands of their customers. This isn't tax avoidance by online retailers, the online sales tax is just a money grab by the states.
If online retailers are at a disadvantage, it's because the cities they are located in impose oppressive regulations on them that force their prices up and don't apply to online retailers. Regulations like minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, height limits, minimum parking requirements, and so on. You know, the same laws that make housing unaffordable just to benefit current property owners, Big Oil, and so on. The same laws that give food trucks an advantage over brick and mortar restaurants. These laws MADE Amazon!
Every state is free to drop their sales tax and enjoy a competitive advantage over other states. Every city is free to eliminate regulations that restrict commerce and limit the tax efficiency of each parcel of land. I just wish cities and states were allowed to go bankrupt under the weight of their own laws.
It was that firing a contractor was marked as opt-in instead of opt-out.
I think it was that keeping the contractor was opt-in. In other words, the default auction is to fire the contractor unless the manager explicitly does something (opt-in) to keep him or her, like renewing the contract.
People don't cause traffic congestion, town planners do.
You are partially correct. See my comment above about how parking attracts traffic.
Also traffic congestion is not directly related to parking...
The business association in my town are worried that replacing street parking with bike lanes will drive down traffic to their stores. Maybe you can help calm their fears!
...and in some cases is actually the opposite.
That's true, charging below market equilibrium for parking (this is the definition of a shortage) will result in people circling the block looking for an open space.
Isn't it funny how the people who cause traffic congestion are the first to complain about it?
And then those same people also tend to complain about insufficient parking, as if accommodating cars doesn't encourage people to drive and create even more traffic!
The way we (ab)use zoning laws to force developers to build more parking than the market wants, and then we complain about all the traffic, is like living next door to a swamp and complaining about all the mosquitoes!
Testing won't detect all substandard students, nor will it catch only substandard students. There will always be false positives and false negatives. So it isn't quite the panacea you think it is.
Your map doesn't specify which stops are express stops, so it must be incomplete because only a total idiot designs a train system with all local trains.
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If the USA truly had a conscience, the government would grant Native Americans property rights to help them pull themselves out of poverty.
But keeping non-whites poor and segregated seems to be more important. Why do you think zoning laws exist?
Does the USA have guilt? Not nearly enough!
This is a great milestone on the way to the feature we all want where the car avoids parking fees by reparking itself every 2 hours!
That's interesting because the conservative mentality is to make everyone dependent on Big Oil and subsidized roads, and to take away the right of business owners to decide how much parking to provide for their customers. And thanks to zoning laws, it's no longer practical for many people to go to the store for a gallon of milk without carrying some form of government ID with you. Is that freedom?
I think true freedom is when you can walk and bike everywhere you need to be.
$30k amortized over 10 years at 7% interest (a conservative estimate of how much that money would earn from a good stock index fund) is $348 per month of $4,176 per year.
Then add to that the cost of gasoline, insurance, registration, maintenance, and any parking fees. (Although parking is highly subsidized especially in cities where the cost of land is high, so it's difficult to calculate the value of this subsidy, but see below.)
Then the cost of your garage and driveway, both the construction cost and the real estate taxes.
And the street in front of your home is probably wider than it needs to be in order to make room for parking. Guess who pays for that?
To paraphrase Professor Donald Shoup, it's sad how we expect people to pay rent while cars should be parked rent-free!
If the cost of ride sharing doesn't cover these costs, then who's paying the subsidy?
If Bob likes movie "A" more than "B" and Susan likes "B" more than "C", then Condorcet would rank them like this: A > B > C
This can expand to any number of movies. Then someone only has to find a movie in the list that they're thinking about watching and another that they've already watched (perhaps one in the same genre) and look at their relative placements in the list (their percent rankings) to see which one people think is better. In that way it works the same as the 5-star rating system but now when you're voting you don't need to spend time deciding whether it's a 3- or 4-star movie while trying to be consistent with the way you've voted on other movies in the past. Too much effort!
Let's say you watched two movies in a row and you really liked both a lot. Under a 5-star system you would rate them both a "5", which means you cannot express through the rating which one you liked more. But instead of a 5-star rating, if you were asked to choose whether you liked the second one more (thumbs up) or less (thumbs down) than the first movie, you could provide that missing information.
Now instead of everyone deciding for themselves what two or four stars means, people can just decide whether they liked the movie or not. It's simple. I like that.
The next step is some kind of contextual ranking. It could be as simple as "I liked this movie ( ) more than ( ) less than [insert last movie seen here]". Then Netflix could use the Condorcet Method to rank all movies in order from worst to best, and assign each movie a percentile ranking based on its position in the list. Now instead of ranking clustered around the 1-star and 5-star mark, we would see a flat distribution that adds resolution at both poles.
How would you distinguish between trolling and devil's advocacy? Does devil's advocacy require explaining that you're being the devil's advocate?
I wonder if the use of the word "trolling" is just a way of dismissing someone with better reasoning skills than your own.
Encouraging discussion is trolling?
No, trolling is posting something you yourself don't believe with the intention of generating responses. If you aren't misrepresenting yourself, then you can't possibly be a troll.
You're talking about an unregulated market, not a free market. A free market is one that's free of market failures (monopolies, asymmetrical information, negative externalities, etc.) but that requires enforcement. An unregulated market has no enforcement.
This is a case where the hyperloop might actually be useful.
If the neighboring business is unwilling to capitalize on the parking shortage, then they deserve to fail. The role of government is not to force businesses to succeed.
Stop paying people to drive everywhere. Stop telling businesses how many parking spaces they have to provide for their own customers. Stop making poor, compact neighborhood subsidize urban sprawl. And then internalize the negative externality of burning fossil fuels, perhaps with a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend so it isn't a burden on the poor.
I think the market can solve the problem, if we would let it.
Why not opt-in instead? As in, companies cannot sell your personal information without your express permission.
How are recyclables collected from the home? Separate trash barrels for each material type?
The CO2 we exhale has always been circulating between the soil, the water, the air, and the plants and animals we eat. That's all carbon-neutral. But the CO2 from fossil fuels had been dormant outside of that cycle until we burned those fuels and released the CO2, and it isn't easily made inert again (re-sequestered). That's the reason why the CO2 ratio in the atmosphere is increasing, and that's the source of climate change, not the air we exhale. This is an important distinction that's lost on climate deniers.
In my area, pedestrians walk on the sidewalk, not in the road. And once drivers pay 100% of the cost of the roads instead of less than half like they do today, then we can think about how to charge bicyclists. Perhaps through a tire tax?
Online retailers already pay shipping fees which pay for the necessary infrastructure to get their products into the hands of their customers. This isn't tax avoidance by online retailers, the online sales tax is just a money grab by the states.
If online retailers are at a disadvantage, it's because the cities they are located in impose oppressive regulations on them that force their prices up and don't apply to online retailers. Regulations like minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, height limits, minimum parking requirements, and so on. You know, the same laws that make housing unaffordable just to benefit current property owners, Big Oil, and so on. The same laws that give food trucks an advantage over brick and mortar restaurants. These laws MADE Amazon!
Every state is free to drop their sales tax and enjoy a competitive advantage over other states. Every city is free to eliminate regulations that restrict commerce and limit the tax efficiency of each parcel of land. I just wish cities and states were allowed to go bankrupt under the weight of their own laws.
I think it was that keeping the contractor was opt-in. In other words, the default auction is to fire the contractor unless the manager explicitly does something (opt-in) to keep him or her, like renewing the contract.
You are partially correct. See my comment above about how parking attracts traffic.
The business association in my town are worried that replacing street parking with bike lanes will drive down traffic to their stores. Maybe you can help calm their fears!
That's true, charging below market equilibrium for parking (this is the definition of a shortage) will result in people circling the block looking for an open space.
Isn't it funny how the people who cause traffic congestion are the first to complain about it?
And then those same people also tend to complain about insufficient parking, as if accommodating cars doesn't encourage people to drive and create even more traffic!
The way we (ab)use zoning laws to force developers to build more parking than the market wants, and then we complain about all the traffic, is like living next door to a swamp and complaining about all the mosquitoes!
And the Universe responded by making bigger and better idiots.
Testing won't detect all substandard students, nor will it catch only substandard students. There will always be false positives and false negatives. So it isn't quite the panacea you think it is.
Your map doesn't specify which stops are express stops, so it must be incomplete because only a total idiot designs a train system with all local trains.
It's a pretty snug fit. I think you're more likely to pull the entire connector up from the PCB than you are to snap off the inner tongue.