The next step in Smart Grid is going to evoke national controversy: a smart meter that can selectively turn on and off each user's major appliances.
If it were possible, I would program my A/C to raise (or the furnace to lower) the thermostat by a degree or two when rates are high, and to lock out the washer and dryer and dishwasher until rates fall, and likewise lower the water heater temperature slightly. Maybe even program the lights to dim and the computers to go into power saving mode. What's so controversial about that?
Is that true where employers aren't forced by cities to overbuild their parking lots? Or where freeways pay for themselves 100% from gas taxes and other user fees instead of less than half?
Or is the fact that "most jobs are far from the stations" a result of the kind of Big Government authoritarianism favored by the right?
You are correct that somebody needs a civics lesson, to learn whose job the U.S. Constitution says is to "recommend to [Congress'] Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient".
[Including the 5% fee in the credit card transaction] is a violation of the CC company rules. If you charge extra for CCs, then they will revoke your merchant card account.
So instead of charging 5% to use a credit card, raise the price by 5% and offer a 5% discount for paying in cash. The credit card companies don't mind when you do this.
So I went to the motorists.org link to try to find evidence to support your claim that "The best result for speed for survival is in the 5-15 mph speeding range." I couldn't find that evidence. I even clicked on the first link, but it basically said neither raising nor lowering the speed limit has much of an effect on actual driving speeds.
I suppose that article disproves my concern that allowing the fastest 15% of drivers to determine the speed limit is a bad idea, but it also does nothing to support yours that the antiquated 85th percentile rule is still a good idea.
I'm telling you what the traffic safety experts recommend after years of study.
The 85th percentile rule is based on a study done in 1964 by David Solomon, back when car crashes were much less livable and people had drive more carefully. Have any studies been done recently to demonstrate that the 85th percentile rule is still pertinent today?
I'd like to look at the data. Could you provide a link to this information?
It doesn't surprise me how Arizona drivers reacted. I used to live there. Road rage is all too common there. I used to ride my bike to school, and people would throw things at me as they drove by.
Arizona drivers are a spiteful, entitlist bunch, even more than usual. So the kind of aggression you described is entirely in character for Arizona drivers. It's the wild west out there!
No. JPEG is 8-bit color, while RAW is typically 12 or 14 bits with expanded dynamic range and gamut. This makes RAW useful in case you get the exposure or the white balance wrong, among other things.
The law says if you're on a 2-lane road and five or more vehicles are formed in a line behind you, you have to pull off where it's safe and let traffic pass. It also says if you're driving slowly, you should be in the rightmost lane. And implied is that you're allowed to drive slowly if it's necessary for safety or to be in compliance with the law.
The law does NOT say you can't ride a slow-moving tractor or a bicycle or a buggy on the road. So the idea to "Pull over all the slow cars and ticket them" is ridiculous.
If you look at speeding and likelihood of surviving, those speeding are more likely to live. The best result for speed for survival is in the 5-15 mph speeding range.
I'd like to look at the data. Could you provide a link to this information?
The rules in Texas at the time...were that the speed limit must be based off the 85% speed, as measured by best practices. Dallas didn't do this, and instead just set limits based on what they think the roads should be marked at. And thus, the limits themselves were illegally low.
Do you think the fastest 15% of the people on the road (the speeders) should determine the speed limit? That sounds like an extremely bad idea to me.
Pull over all the slow cars and ticket them...
And all the farmers driving their tractors on the road. And bicyclists. And the Amish.
Studies have shown that while this sort of thing reduces T-bone incidents (which were rare to begin with), they cause a much greater increase in rear-end accidents because people wind up slamming on the breaks to avoid the sudden red light.
That's true, but understand that T-bone collisions tend to be much more severe than rear-end collisions.
Anyway, this is why red light cameras should also be speed cameras, to help prevent tailgating which is the main cause of rear-end collisions.
there's a difference between speed limits being low and speeding causing accidents.
True, but if you'll recall, the claim was, "Speeding in-of-itself is rarely a safety concern." Safety is determined not just by the frequency of crashes but also the severity of the crashes. The severity is proportional to the kinetic energy, which in turn is proportional to the square of the velocity. So the original claim is obviously false.
It doesn't matter what the speed limit is if they are vehicles that aren't adhering to it (either going too fast or too slow) as that's what tends to disrupt traffic and cause accidents more than the speed itself.
If people stopped tailgating and otherwise driving recklessly, crashes involving slow-moving vehicles would go way down. Traffic cameras can help, if you believe the fines are a deterrent to speeding.
An officer with a speed camera can potentially save lives by stopping an incapacitated driver. The camera does nothing except get the municipality another cheque.
The camera also uses the pocketbook to encourage people to drive more safely. It can do this much more efficiently than a police officer.
Moreover, cities don't force Amazon to build abundant, cheap customer parking as they do to brick and mortar stores, so that's another cost Amazon doesn't have to pay.
And, cities gave big-box stores deed restrictions as a way to prevent competition from other brick and mortar stores.
So I wouldn't give Amazon or big-box stores so much credit for their own success. It's the gross incompetence of city planners that has been destroying small business for decades.
So when the price rises in response to demand, it's surge pricing if the seller chose the new price but it isn't surge pricing if the buyers chose it through a bidding process? I see where you're coming from, but the distinction seems frivolous when the end result is the same.
In practice, the result is that the provider is strongly encouraged to under-provision their network so they can charge extreme rates for normal use, citing "high" utilization as an excuse.
Is it still surge pricing if the surge price is charged all the time?
Ebay...isn't surge pricing in any stretch of the imagination.
What definition of "surge pricing" are you using that excludes eBay? Please paste the link, because I think you're making stuff up.
One definition of surge pricing is that it "occurs when a company raises the price of its offering if there is an increase in demand." And that's exactly how an auction works: the price rises until supply and demand are in equilibrium.
So please provide a link for a definition that excludes eBay, if you can.
Go look at teh stories about uber and surge pricing. You'll see a lot of time when it had to be turned off because of bad PR.
That's a good example of the "bandwagon fallacy." You're arguing that because people are opposed to something, it must be bad. But because argument from fallacy is also a fallacy, we'll have to agree to disagree on this point.
On the subject of bad PR, here is an interesting article about how a city shot themselves in the foot after a hurricane because they were offended by the high price of resupplying ice to the residents.
The problem with dynamic phone tariffs is that it incentives companies to never upgrade their infrastructure.
Could you elaborate on why high surge prices won't encourage other companies to start providing service? Because that doesn't make any kind of sense to me.
Surge pricing is how eBay works, and it has had great results in San Francisco, so we know from experience that surge pricing is a good thing, as long as the price is set at market equilibrium. The real problem with dynamic phone tariffs, if any, lies elsewhere.
More per customer, yes. But when you're bleeding customers because you haven't invested in the network in order to keep prices low, that's little consolation.
So I wouldn't worry. The problem will solve itself, if we allow it to.
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If it were possible, I would program my A/C to raise (or the furnace to lower) the thermostat by a degree or two when rates are high, and to lock out the washer and dryer and dishwasher until rates fall, and likewise lower the water heater temperature slightly. Maybe even program the lights to dim and the computers to go into power saving mode. What's so controversial about that?
No, they didn't. I had a T/S 1000 (essentially a ZX-81) and it worked just fine without a cassette deck.
Is that true where employers aren't forced by cities to overbuild their parking lots? Or where freeways pay for themselves 100% from gas taxes and other user fees instead of less than half?
Or is the fact that "most jobs are far from the stations" a result of the kind of Big Government authoritarianism favored by the right?
And also because it crashed a lot.
You are correct that somebody needs a civics lesson, to learn whose job the U.S. Constitution says is to "recommend to [Congress'] Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient".
So instead of charging 5% to use a credit card, raise the price by 5% and offer a 5% discount for paying in cash. The credit card companies don't mind when you do this.
Is that why the Cayman Islands with their 0% corporate tax rate is such a hotbed of innovation?
So I went to the motorists.org link to try to find evidence to support your claim that "The best result for speed for survival is in the 5-15 mph speeding range." I couldn't find that evidence. I even clicked on the first link, but it basically said neither raising nor lowering the speed limit has much of an effect on actual driving speeds.
I suppose that article disproves my concern that allowing the fastest 15% of drivers to determine the speed limit is a bad idea, but it also does nothing to support yours that the antiquated 85th percentile rule is still a good idea.
Let's call it a draw.
The 85th percentile rule is based on a study done in 1964 by David Solomon, back when car crashes were much less livable and people had drive more carefully. Have any studies been done recently to demonstrate that the 85th percentile rule is still pertinent today?
Instead of telling me to google it, could you point to a specific study?
It doesn't surprise me how Arizona drivers reacted. I used to live there. Road rage is all too common there. I used to ride my bike to school, and people would throw things at me as they drove by.
Arizona drivers are a spiteful, entitlist bunch, even more than usual. So the kind of aggression you described is entirely in character for Arizona drivers. It's the wild west out there!
No. JPEG is 8-bit color, while RAW is typically 12 or 14 bits with expanded dynamic range and gamut. This makes RAW useful in case you get the exposure or the white balance wrong, among other things.
The law says if you're on a 2-lane road and five or more vehicles are formed in a line behind you, you have to pull off where it's safe and let traffic pass. It also says if you're driving slowly, you should be in the rightmost lane. And implied is that you're allowed to drive slowly if it's necessary for safety or to be in compliance with the law.
The law does NOT say you can't ride a slow-moving tractor or a bicycle or a buggy on the road. So the idea to "Pull over all the slow cars and ticket them" is ridiculous.
I'd like to look at the data. Could you provide a link to this information?
Do you think the fastest 15% of the people on the road (the speeders) should determine the speed limit? That sounds like an extremely bad idea to me.
And all the farmers driving their tractors on the road. And bicyclists. And the Amish.
That's true, but understand that T-bone collisions tend to be much more severe than rear-end collisions.
Anyway, this is why red light cameras should also be speed cameras, to help prevent tailgating which is the main cause of rear-end collisions.
True, but if you'll recall, the claim was, "Speeding in-of-itself is rarely a safety concern." Safety is determined not just by the frequency of crashes but also the severity of the crashes. The severity is proportional to the kinetic energy, which in turn is proportional to the square of the velocity. So the original claim is obviously false.
If people stopped tailgating and otherwise driving recklessly, crashes involving slow-moving vehicles would go way down. Traffic cameras can help, if you believe the fines are a deterrent to speeding.
The camera also uses the pocketbook to encourage people to drive more safely. It can do this much more efficiently than a police officer.
Moreover, cities don't force Amazon to build abundant, cheap customer parking as they do to brick and mortar stores, so that's another cost Amazon doesn't have to pay.
And, cities gave big-box stores deed restrictions as a way to prevent competition from other brick and mortar stores.
So I wouldn't give Amazon or big-box stores so much credit for their own success. It's the gross incompetence of city planners that has been destroying small business for decades.
And for another layer of redundancy, the plane or the iPad should detect that it isn't accelerating at the expected rate.
So when the price rises in response to demand, it's surge pricing if the seller chose the new price but it isn't surge pricing if the buyers chose it through a bidding process? I see where you're coming from, but the distinction seems frivolous when the end result is the same.
Is it still surge pricing if the surge price is charged all the time?
What definition of "surge pricing" are you using that excludes eBay? Please paste the link, because I think you're making stuff up.
One definition of surge pricing is that it "occurs when a company raises the price of its offering if there is an increase in demand." And that's exactly how an auction works: the price rises until supply and demand are in equilibrium.
So please provide a link for a definition that excludes eBay, if you can.
That's a good example of the "bandwagon fallacy." You're arguing that because people are opposed to something, it must be bad. But because argument from fallacy is also a fallacy, we'll have to agree to disagree on this point.
On the subject of bad PR, here is an interesting article about how a city shot themselves in the foot after a hurricane because they were offended by the high price of resupplying ice to the residents.
Could you elaborate on why high surge prices won't encourage other companies to start providing service? Because that doesn't make any kind of sense to me.
Well, that's not the fault of surge pricing.
Surge pricing is how eBay works, and it has had great results in San Francisco, so we know from experience that surge pricing is a good thing, as long as the price is set at market equilibrium. The real problem with dynamic phone tariffs, if any, lies elsewhere.
More per customer, yes. But when you're bleeding customers because you haven't invested in the network in order to keep prices low, that's little consolation.
So I wouldn't worry. The problem will solve itself, if we allow it to.
It's either that, or get NO service during a disaster. Think very, very carefully before you decide which option is better.
I backed the original campaign, but they never sent a link to the video. I feel cheated by getting it from Slashdot.