My line of thinking was that the distance from the average American house to a Walmart is probably not significantly greater than the distance from the average British house to a Tesco - customers have to be able to drive to either in a reasonable time, after all. While the logistics involved in getting items to the stores from central warehousing locations may be made more difficult by the scale of the US, the infrastructure delivering items from the stores would probably only need to operate within a 10-15 mile radius in either country, because if your nearest branch is much further than that from where you live, you're probably not going to bother going there. That's why I commented specifically on the fact that it relies on pre-existing locations in my previous post.
I was thinking of it in terms of the less pedestrian-friendly US style city, as you correctly surmised, but back when I lived in London I still probably would've found such a service a little strange - if I needed a few things right then, I'd just carry them back with me; if I were doing a week's worth of shopping I'd find it more convenient to order online and have them come the next day.
I guess it works well, or they wouldn't offer the service, it just struck me as odd.
Grocery delivery tends to operate differently from normal online shopping. Because the deliveries are short distance and handled by the same company that are actually selling the products, it's much more like a personal courier service - they tend to offer one-hour timeslots in which the delivery will arrive. Your collection idea would work too, but I can't imagine it taking less than 30 minutes total even with a fairly short round trip; half an hour driving to the store, loading the bags, and driving home again doesn't sound any more convenient than a maximum of an hour (since they might well come before the end of the timeslot) sitting at home doing whatever I'd be doing anyway.
The ubiquitous delivery services in the UK seem to do a decent job of this - the vast majority of things are no closer to their use by date than I'd expect had I done the shopping myself (although admittedly if I do shop in person I don't spend time going through looking for that one container beyond all the others that won't go bad for a decade), and those that do only have a day or two are marked as such, with the option to send them back with the delivery guy for a refund.
$14 is steep; the services in the UK (which numerous posters have already mentioned the existence of) charge about £3 to £5, which equates to around $5 to $8. Since deliveries of this type rely on a pre-existing network of stores, with small vans doing the last few miles to the home, I would think that the larger size and lower population density of the US should have a minimal impact on delivery pricing.
So you have to go to the store and do the shopping, but then they take it to your house? You don't just order online? Or have I totally missed what you were saying?
Seems like a strange premise, at least to me. Marginally useful for people such as yourself without a car, I guess, but you still have to get a bus to and from the place, which is hardly convenient even in cities with excellent public transport. Not lugging the bags back is a small mercy, I guess, but hardly making the best use of a delivery infrastructure. As someone else pointed out, one of the biggest advantages by far of grocery delivery is the website learning what you usually order, so the whole process is done in ten minutes.
I was thinking precisely the same thing. It doesn't explain the older study's conclusions, though: "...an additional study conducted by the government in 2009, found that home prices were either unaffected or rose based on proximity to renewable energy sources like wind power turbines and solar panels." - unless I'm misunderstanding, that's talking about solar/wind facilities nearby, not installed on the house in question as in the Berkeley study. I can't work out why that would raise property prices; it's not like you have to take your Prius to the nearest power plant to pick up a jug of fresh-squeezed eco-energy, after all. All I can think is that maybe there's a common cause. Good conditions for power generation could coincide with desirable features for a property location, I guess.
Around 10,000 students total, groups of 20-40 in the higher-level undergrad classes I was referring to. I know it's not a system that everyone has access to (more's the pity), but it seemed worth pointing out that my personal experience goes against your general assertion that 'chalk and talk' is a bad way to learn.
HELL, I have an older friend who bought a "netbook" recently, the damn thing lags on FACEBOOK for crying out loud! I saw his status yesterday, "might have to give up Facebook, it takes a few seconds for each word to appear..." while he types his status...let alone video calling, GPS abilities, geocaching...
Statements like that do nothing to advance the discussion, because it simply doesn't make sense. Either your friend got a faulty machine that needs to be replaced, or he's been installing every piece of crapware he saw since he bought it. In either case, it's not an issue of the platform. I'll concede that the iPad is thinner, lighter, faster-booting, and so forth - if you want to make an argument, base it on these facts, not on some ridiculous story about netbooks which apparently have less power than a machine from the mid-90s.
As a counter-anecdote: I've had an Asus Eee 901 for two years, it was cheaper then than an iPad is now, is robust enough to have survived being carried about daily (and is small and light enough that doing so is feasible), and is perfectly capable of editing/compiling the code I work on, doing light-to-moderate Matlab work, browsing the web, watching videos, and pretty much any other day-to-day task which doesn't involve heavy graphical or calculation work. I'd actually quite like an iPad, it's a nice looking device in a sleek package, but the simple fact is that the lockdown makes it infeasible for the work I'd need it for - saying categorically that netbooks have no place is simply untrue.
Different people learn optimally in different ways, of course, but I've found that what you say only really applies for easy to moderately difficult material. Sure, a bad professor may be no real help, and sure, a good book may be a fine way to learn about sorting algorithms, but I can quite categorically tell you that I wouldn't have anything like the understanding I do now of (for example) general relativity if it weren't for a good professor putting it in to words, gauging our reactions, and pointing out the common pitfalls and easy-to-miss complexities.
Vastly better than parents who don't care, I absolutely agree, but in my observation the style of parenting you mention is still not a panacea to aspire to. It's anecdote against anecdote here, I know, but I've seen far too many people from families like that either burn themselves out or go crazy when the supervision is removed. They're working to impress their parents, or to fulfil an obsessive need to achieve for achievements sake, or even simply to avoid having to write their essay again after it was torn up. From what I see, and I know I'm making serious generalisations here, it makes for amazing test scores and musical prodigies, but not for especially well-rounded or happy people. I'm in no way excusing the lazy majority, or belittling the value of raw academic achievement, but the people who seem the most truly successful to me are the ones who were encouraged to take an interest, not told to take an interest.
Tearing up an essay with sloppy penmanship can quite easily teach a child anything from "Don't tell my parents when I've got an essay to write" to "Presentation outweighs content" to "My essays must be perfect, even to the exclusion of my social life". I'd much rather be the child whose parents explained to them that "Good presentation shows a measure of respect, and certainly helps people to take your work more seriously, but if your content is undeniably amazing you'll probably get a bit of leeway on the handwriting. Better to have both, but if it comes down to it the real value is in the latter.".
To quote the NYT website: "Home delivery Subscribers get free All Digital Access. Includes unlimited access to NYTimes.com and the NYTimes tablet and smartphone apps.". That's the $34.99 package; the $15 package only includes NYTimes.com and smartphone access.
Which is interesting, given the argument so often put forward that US telecom companies suck in comparison to those in many other countries due to North America's much lower population density.
I'd hardly say that's "to their credit"; they sent out a totally spurious claim and as soon as they saw that they could be taken apart in court, they 'graciously' decided to retract it. That's not doing the right thing, it's covering their own asses. Oh, and they tried to get the copy of the takedown message removed, too, of course...
That's the half price introductory offer I mentioned. And I was comparing Mon-Fri delivery to seven days a week digital, because the Mon-Fri delivery includes seven days a week of digital access - that was the point I was making.
Not to mention that saying "Maybe the absurdly high cost was worth it after all." implies they wouldn't have got the same income from the project if it'd only cost them, say, a million. Unless my sarcasm detector is just miscalibrated again...
What exactly are you referring to, this one-off cost?
I may have been unclear, but the remainder of that paragraph: "In this case, it's the fact that smartphone+tablet costs more than just one or the other. Charge a small fee for the app if you must (although honestly I'd be surprised if the dev costs are more than negligible), but don't charge me extra every damn month for something you only needed to pay for once." was referring to the one-off cost of developing the iOS and Android applications to view the content. Obviously collecting the news every day is a recurring cost, and that's what users pay a recurring subscription for; what I object to is that once you've paid $'x' per month for access to the content, they then charge you $'x+y' per month for access to the content on a particular device. I understand paying continually for the content, I'll pay once for the app if I must, but what I object to is being charged continually, over and above the cost of the content, for the use of the mobile app on a given platform.
Regarding Spotify, I was referring to the fact that they charge £4.99/month for unlimited access on Windows/Linux/OSX devices (thus covering the recurring cost of the actual licensing, as well as bandwidth and server costs) but £9.99/month for 'Premium', with Android/iOS access, higher bitrates, and offline sync. I'd expect that the offline sync compensates for the increased bandwidth used by the higher bitrate, making the costs there no higher than the lower tier paid package, but maybe I'm wrong. Do the mobile apps forego P2P completely, or do they still take advantage of it for download without contributing to upload? If it's the latter, then the extra load on Spotify's servers should be negligible unless a very significant proportion of their users are on the mobile apps at a given time. Anyhow, I'll concede that it's less clear cut than I may have implied (and certainly less clear cut than the NYT, I agree).
In case anyone was wondering: Monday-Friday paper subscription, including full digital access, is $7.40/week, totalling $384.80/year. Full digital access alone is $34.99/month, or $419.88/year. Five paper copies a week, including delivery, apparently come to -$35.08/year, so it looks like they should be paying you at least $0.13 per copy to take them off the news stands.
There are introductory discounts running ($0.99 for the first four weeks of digital subscription, half price for the first 12 weeks of paper) but I've ignored them on the basis that they're short term. That said, taking advantage of them would actually increase the discrepancy a little, making print+digital an even better option.
Sure, you can pay less in total to get either the smartphone subscription or the tablet one, and you have to pay a decent amount more if you want the weekend papers too (although not so much if you only want the weekend ones), but that doesn't change the fact that if you want the all-access digital package, they're charging extra for the privilege of not having a hard copy sent out every day.
Considering that the all-digital subscriptions (at least at list price) cost more than print+digital, I can't imagine that 100,000 people in their right minds would purchase the former. That was the bit that struck me as strangest of all - I would've understood them using Apple-style upselling, setting the price points so one is only just higher than the next to make the 'premium' plans seem like particularly good value, but going as far as to make it cheaper to dump a paper copy in the recycling every day seems very odd.
Also, as I mentioned on the Spotify thread last week, I can't stand this habit that companies are getting into of charging an increased recurring fee on a subscription for something that presents them with a one-off cost. In this case, it's the fact that smartphone+tablet costs more than just one or the other. Charge a small fee for the app if you must (although honestly I'd be surprised if the dev costs are more than negligible), but don't charge me extra every damn month for something you only needed to pay for once.
As I've said (somewhat unpopularity) several times before: overselling is not inherently a bad thing, it's a necessity for efficient use of resources. Similarly, bandwidth caps are not an inherently bad thing, since they help to make the usage of the shared resource fair. What is very bad is (a) calling a capped service 'unlimited' and (b) setting the caps in the hope of limiting usage and running up overage charges, rather than using a straightforward formula based on total capacity divided by number of users, maybe averaged over a few months worth of billing.
I have to say this doesn't mirror my experience. When I was living in London last year I was on their 50Mbps service (partly because it was the only one without throttling or transfer limits, partly because BT wanted some absurd amount of money for the privilege of flicking a switch at the exchange to allow us to pay them a monthly subscription) and it did what it said on the tin - a house of four fairly heavy users managed to get speeds consistently within about 15% of that advertised, which is perfectly acceptable to me, especially bearing in mind how much extra it would cost to get a line with an SLA.
I still think they're utter asshats for the Phorm debacle, and their throttling on the lower tier services sounds pretty onerous, but having paid for the unthrottled service, I was fairly pleased.
Temperature's clearly an interesting one, psychologically; I have the opposite experience - grew up with (mostly) metric in the UK, use imperial day-to-day living in the US - and I don't think I'll ever be able to judge Fahrenheit temperatures without doing a rough conversion back to Celsius. Maybe it's the combination of an offset and a different scaling that makes it difficult, maybe it's the fact that you can't visualise it like you can a gallon or a foot, but whatever the reason I don't think I could ever get used to it.
Road signs are in miles, beer comes in pints (proper ones, too, none of this 473ml rubbish) but that's it, officially speaking; packaging and so forth is all in metric. Obviously there are plenty of people who still think in Imperial, and strangely much more so than most other countries I've visited (maybe just that I have more experience with older British people, maybe it was more ingrained; it's not something I've though a lot about), but in terms of official business the change has long since succeeded, and in terms of public perception it crawls further towards metric with every generation. For what it's worth, I'm from the UK and when you say 'gallon' my brain says 'about 4 litres'.
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My line of thinking was that the distance from the average American house to a Walmart is probably not significantly greater than the distance from the average British house to a Tesco - customers have to be able to drive to either in a reasonable time, after all. While the logistics involved in getting items to the stores from central warehousing locations may be made more difficult by the scale of the US, the infrastructure delivering items from the stores would probably only need to operate within a 10-15 mile radius in either country, because if your nearest branch is much further than that from where you live, you're probably not going to bother going there. That's why I commented specifically on the fact that it relies on pre-existing locations in my previous post.
I was thinking of it in terms of the less pedestrian-friendly US style city, as you correctly surmised, but back when I lived in London I still probably would've found such a service a little strange - if I needed a few things right then, I'd just carry them back with me; if I were doing a week's worth of shopping I'd find it more convenient to order online and have them come the next day.
I guess it works well, or they wouldn't offer the service, it just struck me as odd.
Grocery delivery tends to operate differently from normal online shopping. Because the deliveries are short distance and handled by the same company that are actually selling the products, it's much more like a personal courier service - they tend to offer one-hour timeslots in which the delivery will arrive. Your collection idea would work too, but I can't imagine it taking less than 30 minutes total even with a fairly short round trip; half an hour driving to the store, loading the bags, and driving home again doesn't sound any more convenient than a maximum of an hour (since they might well come before the end of the timeslot) sitting at home doing whatever I'd be doing anyway.
The ubiquitous delivery services in the UK seem to do a decent job of this - the vast majority of things are no closer to their use by date than I'd expect had I done the shopping myself (although admittedly if I do shop in person I don't spend time going through looking for that one container beyond all the others that won't go bad for a decade), and those that do only have a day or two are marked as such, with the option to send them back with the delivery guy for a refund.
$14 is steep; the services in the UK (which numerous posters have already mentioned the existence of) charge about £3 to £5, which equates to around $5 to $8. Since deliveries of this type rely on a pre-existing network of stores, with small vans doing the last few miles to the home, I would think that the larger size and lower population density of the US should have a minimal impact on delivery pricing.
So you have to go to the store and do the shopping, but then they take it to your house? You don't just order online? Or have I totally missed what you were saying?
Seems like a strange premise, at least to me. Marginally useful for people such as yourself without a car, I guess, but you still have to get a bus to and from the place, which is hardly convenient even in cities with excellent public transport. Not lugging the bags back is a small mercy, I guess, but hardly making the best use of a delivery infrastructure. As someone else pointed out, one of the biggest advantages by far of grocery delivery is the website learning what you usually order, so the whole process is done in ten minutes.
I was thinking precisely the same thing. It doesn't explain the older study's conclusions, though: "...an additional study conducted by the government in 2009, found that home prices were either unaffected or rose based on proximity to renewable energy sources like wind power turbines and solar panels." - unless I'm misunderstanding, that's talking about solar/wind facilities nearby, not installed on the house in question as in the Berkeley study. I can't work out why that would raise property prices; it's not like you have to take your Prius to the nearest power plant to pick up a jug of fresh-squeezed eco-energy, after all. All I can think is that maybe there's a common cause. Good conditions for power generation could coincide with desirable features for a property location, I guess.
Wonderful to see the patent system doing its job to promote innovation, isn't it?
Around 10,000 students total, groups of 20-40 in the higher-level undergrad classes I was referring to. I know it's not a system that everyone has access to (more's the pity), but it seemed worth pointing out that my personal experience goes against your general assertion that 'chalk and talk' is a bad way to learn.
HELL, I have an older friend who bought a "netbook" recently, the damn thing lags on FACEBOOK for crying out loud! I saw his status yesterday, "might have to give up Facebook, it takes a few seconds for each word to appear..." while he types his status...let alone video calling, GPS abilities, geocaching...
Statements like that do nothing to advance the discussion, because it simply doesn't make sense. Either your friend got a faulty machine that needs to be replaced, or he's been installing every piece of crapware he saw since he bought it. In either case, it's not an issue of the platform. I'll concede that the iPad is thinner, lighter, faster-booting, and so forth - if you want to make an argument, base it on these facts, not on some ridiculous story about netbooks which apparently have less power than a machine from the mid-90s.
As a counter-anecdote: I've had an Asus Eee 901 for two years, it was cheaper then than an iPad is now, is robust enough to have survived being carried about daily (and is small and light enough that doing so is feasible), and is perfectly capable of editing/compiling the code I work on, doing light-to-moderate Matlab work, browsing the web, watching videos, and pretty much any other day-to-day task which doesn't involve heavy graphical or calculation work. I'd actually quite like an iPad, it's a nice looking device in a sleek package, but the simple fact is that the lockdown makes it infeasible for the work I'd need it for - saying categorically that netbooks have no place is simply untrue.
Different people learn optimally in different ways, of course, but I've found that what you say only really applies for easy to moderately difficult material. Sure, a bad professor may be no real help, and sure, a good book may be a fine way to learn about sorting algorithms, but I can quite categorically tell you that I wouldn't have anything like the understanding I do now of (for example) general relativity if it weren't for a good professor putting it in to words, gauging our reactions, and pointing out the common pitfalls and easy-to-miss complexities.
Vastly better than parents who don't care, I absolutely agree, but in my observation the style of parenting you mention is still not a panacea to aspire to. It's anecdote against anecdote here, I know, but I've seen far too many people from families like that either burn themselves out or go crazy when the supervision is removed. They're working to impress their parents, or to fulfil an obsessive need to achieve for achievements sake, or even simply to avoid having to write their essay again after it was torn up. From what I see, and I know I'm making serious generalisations here, it makes for amazing test scores and musical prodigies, but not for especially well-rounded or happy people. I'm in no way excusing the lazy majority, or belittling the value of raw academic achievement, but the people who seem the most truly successful to me are the ones who were encouraged to take an interest, not told to take an interest.
Tearing up an essay with sloppy penmanship can quite easily teach a child anything from "Don't tell my parents when I've got an essay to write" to "Presentation outweighs content" to "My essays must be perfect, even to the exclusion of my social life". I'd much rather be the child whose parents explained to them that "Good presentation shows a measure of respect, and certainly helps people to take your work more seriously, but if your content is undeniably amazing you'll probably get a bit of leeway on the handwriting. Better to have both, but if it comes down to it the real value is in the latter.".
To quote the NYT website: "Home delivery Subscribers get free All Digital Access. Includes unlimited access to NYTimes.com and the NYTimes tablet and smartphone apps.". That's the $34.99 package; the $15 package only includes NYTimes.com and smartphone access.
Which is interesting, given the argument so often put forward that US telecom companies suck in comparison to those in many other countries due to North America's much lower population density.
I'd hardly say that's "to their credit"; they sent out a totally spurious claim and as soon as they saw that they could be taken apart in court, they 'graciously' decided to retract it. That's not doing the right thing, it's covering their own asses. Oh, and they tried to get the copy of the takedown message removed, too, of course...
That's the half price introductory offer I mentioned. And I was comparing Mon-Fri delivery to seven days a week digital, because the Mon-Fri delivery includes seven days a week of digital access - that was the point I was making.
Not to mention that saying "Maybe the absurdly high cost was worth it after all." implies they wouldn't have got the same income from the project if it'd only cost them, say, a million. Unless my sarcasm detector is just miscalibrated again...
What exactly are you referring to, this one-off cost?
I may have been unclear, but the remainder of that paragraph: "In this case, it's the fact that smartphone+tablet costs more than just one or the other. Charge a small fee for the app if you must (although honestly I'd be surprised if the dev costs are more than negligible), but don't charge me extra every damn month for something you only needed to pay for once." was referring to the one-off cost of developing the iOS and Android applications to view the content. Obviously collecting the news every day is a recurring cost, and that's what users pay a recurring subscription for; what I object to is that once you've paid $'x' per month for access to the content, they then charge you $'x+y' per month for access to the content on a particular device. I understand paying continually for the content, I'll pay once for the app if I must, but what I object to is being charged continually, over and above the cost of the content, for the use of the mobile app on a given platform.
Regarding Spotify, I was referring to the fact that they charge £4.99/month for unlimited access on Windows/Linux/OSX devices (thus covering the recurring cost of the actual licensing, as well as bandwidth and server costs) but £9.99/month for 'Premium', with Android/iOS access, higher bitrates, and offline sync. I'd expect that the offline sync compensates for the increased bandwidth used by the higher bitrate, making the costs there no higher than the lower tier paid package, but maybe I'm wrong. Do the mobile apps forego P2P completely, or do they still take advantage of it for download without contributing to upload? If it's the latter, then the extra load on Spotify's servers should be negligible unless a very significant proportion of their users are on the mobile apps at a given time. Anyhow, I'll concede that it's less clear cut than I may have implied (and certainly less clear cut than the NYT, I agree).
In case anyone was wondering: Monday-Friday paper subscription, including full digital access, is $7.40/week, totalling $384.80/year. Full digital access alone is $34.99/month, or $419.88/year. Five paper copies a week, including delivery, apparently come to -$35.08/year, so it looks like they should be paying you at least $0.13 per copy to take them off the news stands.
There are introductory discounts running ($0.99 for the first four weeks of digital subscription, half price for the first 12 weeks of paper) but I've ignored them on the basis that they're short term. That said, taking advantage of them would actually increase the discrepancy a little, making print+digital an even better option.
Sure, you can pay less in total to get either the smartphone subscription or the tablet one, and you have to pay a decent amount more if you want the weekend papers too (although not so much if you only want the weekend ones), but that doesn't change the fact that if you want the all-access digital package, they're charging extra for the privilege of not having a hard copy sent out every day.
Considering that the all-digital subscriptions (at least at list price) cost more than print+digital, I can't imagine that 100,000 people in their right minds would purchase the former. That was the bit that struck me as strangest of all - I would've understood them using Apple-style upselling, setting the price points so one is only just higher than the next to make the 'premium' plans seem like particularly good value, but going as far as to make it cheaper to dump a paper copy in the recycling every day seems very odd.
Also, as I mentioned on the Spotify thread last week, I can't stand this habit that companies are getting into of charging an increased recurring fee on a subscription for something that presents them with a one-off cost. In this case, it's the fact that smartphone+tablet costs more than just one or the other. Charge a small fee for the app if you must (although honestly I'd be surprised if the dev costs are more than negligible), but don't charge me extra every damn month for something you only needed to pay for once.
As I've said (somewhat unpopularity) several times before: overselling is not inherently a bad thing, it's a necessity for efficient use of resources. Similarly, bandwidth caps are not an inherently bad thing, since they help to make the usage of the shared resource fair. What is very bad is (a) calling a capped service 'unlimited' and (b) setting the caps in the hope of limiting usage and running up overage charges, rather than using a straightforward formula based on total capacity divided by number of users, maybe averaged over a few months worth of billing.
I have to say this doesn't mirror my experience. When I was living in London last year I was on their 50Mbps service (partly because it was the only one without throttling or transfer limits, partly because BT wanted some absurd amount of money for the privilege of flicking a switch at the exchange to allow us to pay them a monthly subscription) and it did what it said on the tin - a house of four fairly heavy users managed to get speeds consistently within about 15% of that advertised, which is perfectly acceptable to me, especially bearing in mind how much extra it would cost to get a line with an SLA.
I still think they're utter asshats for the Phorm debacle, and their throttling on the lower tier services sounds pretty onerous, but having paid for the unthrottled service, I was fairly pleased.
Temperature's clearly an interesting one, psychologically; I have the opposite experience - grew up with (mostly) metric in the UK, use imperial day-to-day living in the US - and I don't think I'll ever be able to judge Fahrenheit temperatures without doing a rough conversion back to Celsius. Maybe it's the combination of an offset and a different scaling that makes it difficult, maybe it's the fact that you can't visualise it like you can a gallon or a foot, but whatever the reason I don't think I could ever get used to it.
Road signs are in miles, beer comes in pints (proper ones, too, none of this 473ml rubbish) but that's it, officially speaking; packaging and so forth is all in metric. Obviously there are plenty of people who still think in Imperial, and strangely much more so than most other countries I've visited (maybe just that I have more experience with older British people, maybe it was more ingrained; it's not something I've though a lot about), but in terms of official business the change has long since succeeded, and in terms of public perception it crawls further towards metric with every generation. For what it's worth, I'm from the UK and when you say 'gallon' my brain says 'about 4 litres'.