If bookstores want to stay in business, they need to level the playing field. Requiring sales taxes on internet purchases was a good start, but only a start. For example, Amazon isn't forced by the cities to overbuild its parking lots as brick & mortar bookstores are.
Bookstores also need to adopt Amazon's business model. Amazon has low storage costs (warehouses in rural areas) but has to ship individual packages to each customer, while bookstores have high storage costs but ship everything to the store by freight. Bookstores could downsize their physical presence, keep most of their inventory in inexpensive rural warehouses like Amazon, and offer free overnight or 2-day shipping to the store, no membership required.
So there's still room for innovation, if bookstores are willing to learn from the competition.
We're all socialists whenever it benefits us. Do you favor zoning laws that set minimum parking requirements instead of allowing store owners to decide how many parking spaces to provide for their own customers? If so, then you are a socialist, even if you are able to rationalize such laws.
Traffic jams only exist where the price of accessing the road is below market equilibrium at that particular time and place. That's easy to fix even without self-driving cars, and it would provide a revenue source to increase throughput or lower taxes.
Now imagine a rate structure where I pay for my fixed costs separately from my energy costs. The energy portion would drop to near zero and my motivation to conserve it would do so as well.
If the costs of all negative externalities were included in the rates, then you would voluntarily conserve without any social engineering.
Correcting market failures is always good for the economy, despite what those who oppose carbon taxes would have you believe.
Your phone "sees" way too many towers and yet the towers have to hand off rapidly since you move out of coverage really fast at that speed.
But when you're up high, your phone can see towers farther away and so the towers don't need to hand off as rapidly as they would if you were close to the ground traveling at the same speed.
Mobile phones may still only be used in airplane mode without cellular service.
This limitation and the tedious checkin process and the fact that airports are usually located outside of city centers make bullet trains more attractive to the business traveler than flying for trips up to about 400 miles.
High-speed rail is also very cheap to build. The expected construction cost of $68.4 billion for California's HSR line is much lower than the alternative of building 4,295 new lane-miles of freeway for $119.0 billion plus 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways for an additional $38.6 billion, all just to move the same number of people around. When it's built and the downtown-to-downtown time between San Francisco and Los Angeles is under 3 hours (try that with flying!), people will wonder why anyone would want to fly between those two cities anymore.
Telephone is a many-to-many service, using circuit switching to dramatically reduce the number of necessary wires. Why couldn't power lines, water lines, cable lines, and so on do the same using valves, relays, etc.?
And maybe put a thing on the bottom that shoots fire out of it?
Or maybe a snow cone machine. Better yet, make the thing on the bottom modular so the astronauts can decide whether they need a drink or a frozen treat.
Also, because LEDs come to full brightness faster than sodium lamps, it raises the possibility of using motion sensors to turn them on only when needed, reducing light pollution and energy usage.
Meanwhile, there's some debate about whether street lights reduce crime. They create dark pockets where attackers can hide, and the illumination they provide helps burglars see what they're doing.
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35 cents per transaction isn't too oppressive. And somebody has to pay for the roads, schools, and so on.
If it's at the store, you could just buy it there.
If bookstores want to stay in business, they need to level the playing field. Requiring sales taxes on internet purchases was a good start, but only a start. For example, Amazon isn't forced by the cities to overbuild its parking lots as brick & mortar bookstores are.
Bookstores also need to adopt Amazon's business model. Amazon has low storage costs (warehouses in rural areas) but has to ship individual packages to each customer, while bookstores have high storage costs but ship everything to the store by freight. Bookstores could downsize their physical presence, keep most of their inventory in inexpensive rural warehouses like Amazon, and offer free overnight or 2-day shipping to the store, no membership required.
So there's still room for innovation, if bookstores are willing to learn from the competition.
We're all socialists whenever it benefits us. Do you favor zoning laws that set minimum parking requirements instead of allowing store owners to decide how many parking spaces to provide for their own customers? If so, then you are a socialist, even if you are able to rationalize such laws.
So what you're saying is their jobs will simply go unfilled? Why wouldn't employers instead raise their wages with their tax savings?
Traffic jams only exist where the price of accessing the road is below market equilibrium at that particular time and place. That's easy to fix even without self-driving cars, and it would provide a revenue source to increase throughput or lower taxes.
If you've ever bought a movie on VHS and then again on DVD or Blu-Ray, then you've demonstrated that you're willing to pay twice for the same title.
And there are people who claim that libraries are obsolete.
The summary says, "Bitcoin can never be safe from selfish mining pools larger than 33% of the network." It doesn't say why the 25% figure was chosen.
Term limits, tax rates, the threshold between legal and usurious loans, you name it.
No, it's about arbitrary limits. And the origin of the term is unrelated to software; therefore, it isn't only about software.
Why 25%? This appears to be a violation of the Zero-One-Infinity Rule.
Who claims they don't? Citation needed.
Maybe now cities will start switching from sales taxes to property taxes. Property taxes "encourage cities to make land-use decisions that bolster property values...Sales tax just incentivizes you to put up big-box stores."
I'd rather see my house value go up than see more Wal-Marts. Wouldn't you?
3.7GB for the Raspberry Pi disk image? They should try to get it down below 128MB so they can make a distribution based on OpenWRT.
If the costs of all negative externalities were included in the rates, then you would voluntarily conserve without any social engineering.
Correcting market failures is always good for the economy, despite what those who oppose carbon taxes would have you believe.
Yes, that's the whole idea behind retina displays.
But when you're up high, your phone can see towers farther away and so the towers don't need to hand off as rapidly as they would if you were close to the ground traveling at the same speed.
This limitation and the tedious checkin process and the fact that airports are usually located outside of city centers make bullet trains more attractive to the business traveler than flying for trips up to about 400 miles.
High-speed rail is also very cheap to build. The expected construction cost of $68.4 billion for California's HSR line is much lower than the alternative of building 4,295 new lane-miles of freeway for $119.0 billion plus 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways for an additional $38.6 billion, all just to move the same number of people around. When it's built and the downtown-to-downtown time between San Francisco and Los Angeles is under 3 hours (try that with flying!), people will wonder why anyone would want to fly between those two cities anymore.
There would be one pipe running from the faucet to a local manifold fed by your neighborhood's choice of water companies.
Even better, your pipe could be split and fed into two neighborhood manifolds, and you could choose from the two companies your neighborhood chose.
Telephone is a many-to-many service, using circuit switching to dramatically reduce the number of necessary wires. Why couldn't power lines, water lines, cable lines, and so on do the same using valves, relays, etc.?
Or maybe a snow cone machine. Better yet, make the thing on the bottom modular so the astronauts can decide whether they need a drink or a frozen treat.
Or how to scan and securely shred documents, and how to encrypt them on your hard drive.
And one more potential issue with white LEDs is that white light with a high color temperature disrupts your sleep.
Also, because LEDs come to full brightness faster than sodium lamps, it raises the possibility of using motion sensors to turn them on only when needed, reducing light pollution and energy usage.
Meanwhile, there's some debate about whether street lights reduce crime. They create dark pockets where attackers can hide, and the illumination they provide helps burglars see what they're doing.