Yup, I did the same thing when I lived in Manhattan. I lived on the 14th floor and I took the stairs as much as I could. After the first week it was no longer tiring at all - just boring.
I'll leave it to economists to debate whether or not "Reaganomics" had an effect one way or another on incomes, but your analysis seems shallow to me. First of all, it neglects the decade of horrendous economics that preceded him. Second, Reagan only served for 8 years. I've never seen any kind of chart showing a correlation between Reagan's policies and wage stagnation - I suspect he simply happened to be President while larger forces were at work.
I don't think layoffs are a problem at a public company, but revenue decreases seem to elicit a negative response from stockholders. The market punishes companies that are trying to downsize, even if it means better long-term viability. If these layoffs will result in reduced revenue, the market would probably crush the stock price.
Well, a free market involves freedom of movement of three elements: capital, goods, and labor. Here you only have 2 out of 3. The result is an imbalance, and since people don't like letting the labor move around they are trying to correct the imbalance using other incentives.
Yeah, we reluctantly buy Prime as a complement to Netflix (our cable is limited basic only). With the price increase, we'll have to decide if it is worth it. Hulu is $96/year, so that becomes a contender for filling out the Netflix "recent TV show gap".
Well, the unions fight pretty hard on this. NYC has had an automated line (the 7) for a couple of years now, but the union until recently made them man it with two people even though the driver was largely superfluous. The conductor has been superfluous for probably 30 years, but that's another discussion...
Personally, I don't mind taking the automation path slowly. Because of human nature, even a single incident could doom automation - despite the fact that there were dozens of human-caused errors in the meantime. And incidents like those in DC a few years ago show that even automation can be unsafe when stupid people chose to ignore repeated errors - the train-sensing circuit had been on the fritz for 18 months. There's probably a fault in the design of a system that can result in a crash after a single circuit fails, but I don't want to go there unless you do:)
The theory seems sound, but they already do this - we've had two fatal accidents this year alone. I think the reality is that robotic trains are more reliable.
but if one of those trailers hits a vehicle in front of it (or a vehicle hits it) the others are instantly lost as well.
That's true today as well. Inattentive drivers are probably more common than failed sensors, especially if said sensors are redundant and a failure of a single sensor results in the vehicle entering a fail-safe routine.
It's not a good idea to tailgate regardless of how the vehicle is controlled.
The definition of "tailgating" is a function of braking performance and reaction time. It is not tailgating if the safe distance is shorter because of improved reaction time.
Ever drive on I95 through NYC?
:) More like a parking lot than a highway. GPS doesn't work well on the bottom level of the GW bridge, anyway... pretty much useless. I suspect that reliance on GPS cannot happen for these machines. But we don't rely on GPS - we look at exit numbers and such. No reason a computer can't do this. Heck, the government might even install navigation aids for the computers. As you said, people are already doing stupid things on the highways like driving through walls. With over 30,000 dying on the roads each year and thousands more injured, the computers don't exactly have a high bar to overcome.
The insurance stuff is really scary because the companies will insist on it out of technical ignorance
I doubt it - they will rely on actuarial data. If these systems are a liability, you will pay more to have them... like a turbocharger or a penis. They are one of the few industries with almost carte blanche license to discriminate. In general, I agree that statistics are a terrible way to discriminate - but you would have to give up significant privacy if you want personalized rates. Some people do this now voluntarily, by letting the insurance company monitor their driving habits with an on-board data collection device. They already personalize your rates somewhat through your public driving record. In any event, you will pay more once computers are, in aggregate, safer drivers than humans.
Human train engineers make mistakes all the time. Just recently we've had two "going around the corner too fast" fatal incidents. Those are two accidents that would not have happened with a robot at the wheel. Now, you might be correct and the robots might be less able to react to "random" events - but then how rare are random events compared with engineers dozing off, spacing out, or showing up impaired? In any case, most systems still stick a guy up there, even if he doesn't drive the train under normal circumstances... so that probably covers both cases. So sure, you still pay a driver, but you gain safety and you gain the ability to run trains closer together.. capacity.
I can certainly see the same thing happening with semi trailers. Computer reaction times are fantastic, so the semi trailers can tailgate one another for aerodynamic efficiency. If the human can sleep while the vehicle is underway, then driver fatigue no longer needs to be the limiting factor and vehicles can keep their speeds down for further fuel savings. When the truck is ready to exit the easy highway driving, it can alert the operator to take over. If it encounters a situation it can't handle, it can pull over or even panic stop and let the operator take over.
Even for passenger cars, we are seeing baby-steps toward automation. One Infinity, the Q50, no longer uses a steering column... it is fly-by-wire. It will stay in it's lane by itself, stay a safe distance behind the car in front, even take curves. Mercedes has similar technology. BMW has a system to automatically parallel park the car. I expect luxury cars to slowly become self-driving, without people even realizing it, and the technology to trickle down as it becomes more affordable, and as people demand it for insurance rate benefits.
I'm curious why you think this is the case? There are driverless cars right now. They cost millions of dollars, but I've seen a few things drop in price in the technology department in my few decades.
Yes, if we had substantial assets we would have formed a trust. As it is, our home is mostly still owned by the bank and almost all of our liquid assets are in our retirement accounts, which have a clearly defined inheritance path. Our will currently has detailed instructions for setting up the trust, which would only contain the proceeds of the life insurance policy. We will periodically revisit this setup, but it works for us in the short term.
You can do some due diligence and make sure you use a reputable company. This tends to be harder for things like homeowner's insurance than for term life insurance, which is pretty darned straightforward.
Ah, nevermind. I saw the $20 per 100 price on Google shopping. But when I cilck on it, they are just DVD-Rs. Blu Ray seems to be $1, which puts them in a similar price/gig with hard drives. Mods, kill my original post please!:)
I'm very out of touch. I scoffed at first, but BluRay blanks are down to less than 20 cents each. They aren't reusable, but that puts them well below hard disks or tape per gig.
LOL, no I'm afraid that is long gone from my memory. I believe it was mostly getting the color to work in games, and some games ran at a funny speed. Possibly there was other associated weirdness, but I can't remember... I had an Apple IIe and spent my hours going through my college-aged uncle's many cracked games:) I didn't really learn any DOS until high school except for when I'd stare perplexed at his Tandy. I was able to figure out how to get my grandfather's Compaq to spit out stuff on the printer I guess. Maybe I was dorkier than I thought.... I don't recall having any alternative to MS DOS at the time. It did have a cool (for the time) graphical interface that wowed us.
If you have a hundred thousand and start a restaurant, and that hundred grand is all you have, you're an idiot, not brave.
Which is why I will never be as successful as those guys. I'm not an "idiot" as you refer to them. One has failed several times - not quite losing everything, but definitely back to net worth below zero. But if one in ten new businesses succeeds then that means you need to be prepared to start over 10 times. Of course, statistics being what they are, the odds are more favorable to someone with some experience failing - so that's an exaggeration.
Again, "well off" is a relative thing. My friend from corn country grew up in a small, crudely built house (his dad built it with scraps). It was a fire hazard, and in fact they had a few fires. That said, he had a house and they always had wood (or sometimes scrap asphalt roofing) for the stove. I believe they had some semblance of indoor plumbing as well. More objectively, he was certainly not a one percenter growing up.
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Yes, master.
Yup, I did the same thing when I lived in Manhattan. I lived on the 14th floor and I took the stairs as much as I could. After the first week it was no longer tiring at all - just boring.
I have to chuckle at your post, because as I read it I was just demolishing this tray of jelly beans.
I'll leave it to economists to debate whether or not "Reaganomics" had an effect one way or another on incomes, but your analysis seems shallow to me. First of all, it neglects the decade of horrendous economics that preceded him. Second, Reagan only served for 8 years. I've never seen any kind of chart showing a correlation between Reagan's policies and wage stagnation - I suspect he simply happened to be President while larger forces were at work.
Well, either way - shrinking revenue is rarely tolerated on the public markets, and that is exactly what Dell needs to do in order to remain viable.
Mostly I agree, but I'd add that many public companies also need to concentrate on their dividend - so it isn't quite so black and white.
I don't think layoffs are a problem at a public company, but revenue decreases seem to elicit a negative response from stockholders. The market punishes companies that are trying to downsize, even if it means better long-term viability. If these layoffs will result in reduced revenue, the market would probably crush the stock price.
And trust the free market for once.
Well, a free market involves freedom of movement of three elements: capital, goods, and labor. Here you only have 2 out of 3. The result is an imbalance, and since people don't like letting the labor move around they are trying to correct the imbalance using other incentives.
Yeah, we reluctantly buy Prime as a complement to Netflix (our cable is limited basic only). With the price increase, we'll have to decide if it is worth it. Hulu is $96/year, so that becomes a contender for filling out the Netflix "recent TV show gap".
Well, the unions fight pretty hard on this. NYC has had an automated line (the 7) for a couple of years now, but the union until recently made them man it with two people even though the driver was largely superfluous. The conductor has been superfluous for probably 30 years, but that's another discussion...
Personally, I don't mind taking the automation path slowly. Because of human nature, even a single incident could doom automation - despite the fact that there were dozens of human-caused errors in the meantime. And incidents like those in DC a few years ago show that even automation can be unsafe when stupid people chose to ignore repeated errors - the train-sensing circuit had been on the fritz for 18 months. There's probably a fault in the design of a system that can result in a crash after a single circuit fails, but I don't want to go there unless you do :)
Make him sit there, and he'll doze off.
The theory seems sound, but they already do this - we've had two fatal accidents this year alone. I think the reality is that robotic trains are more reliable.
but if one of those trailers hits a vehicle in front of it (or a vehicle hits it) the others are instantly lost as well.
That's true today as well. Inattentive drivers are probably more common than failed sensors, especially if said sensors are redundant and a failure of a single sensor results in the vehicle entering a fail-safe routine.
It's not a good idea to tailgate regardless of how the vehicle is controlled.
The definition of "tailgating" is a function of braking performance and reaction time. It is not tailgating if the safe distance is shorter because of improved reaction time.
Ever drive on I95 through NYC?
:) More like a parking lot than a highway. GPS doesn't work well on the bottom level of the GW bridge, anyway... pretty much useless. I suspect that reliance on GPS cannot happen for these machines. But we don't rely on GPS - we look at exit numbers and such. No reason a computer can't do this. Heck, the government might even install navigation aids for the computers. As you said, people are already doing stupid things on the highways like driving through walls. With over 30,000 dying on the roads each year and thousands more injured, the computers don't exactly have a high bar to overcome.
The insurance stuff is really scary because the companies will insist on it out of technical ignorance
I doubt it - they will rely on actuarial data. If these systems are a liability, you will pay more to have them... like a turbocharger or a penis. They are one of the few industries with almost carte blanche license to discriminate. In general, I agree that statistics are a terrible way to discriminate - but you would have to give up significant privacy if you want personalized rates. Some people do this now voluntarily, by letting the insurance company monitor their driving habits with an on-board data collection device. They already personalize your rates somewhat through your public driving record. In any event, you will pay more once computers are, in aggregate, safer drivers than humans.
Human train engineers make mistakes all the time. Just recently we've had two "going around the corner too fast" fatal incidents. Those are two accidents that would not have happened with a robot at the wheel. Now, you might be correct and the robots might be less able to react to "random" events - but then how rare are random events compared with engineers dozing off, spacing out, or showing up impaired? In any case, most systems still stick a guy up there, even if he doesn't drive the train under normal circumstances... so that probably covers both cases. So sure, you still pay a driver, but you gain safety and you gain the ability to run trains closer together.. capacity.
I can certainly see the same thing happening with semi trailers. Computer reaction times are fantastic, so the semi trailers can tailgate one another for aerodynamic efficiency. If the human can sleep while the vehicle is underway, then driver fatigue no longer needs to be the limiting factor and vehicles can keep their speeds down for further fuel savings. When the truck is ready to exit the easy highway driving, it can alert the operator to take over. If it encounters a situation it can't handle, it can pull over or even panic stop and let the operator take over.
Even for passenger cars, we are seeing baby-steps toward automation. One Infinity, the Q50, no longer uses a steering column... it is fly-by-wire. It will stay in it's lane by itself, stay a safe distance behind the car in front, even take curves. Mercedes has similar technology. BMW has a system to automatically parallel park the car. I expect luxury cars to slowly become self-driving, without people even realizing it, and the technology to trickle down as it becomes more affordable, and as people demand it for insurance rate benefits.
I'm curious why you think this is the case? There are driverless cars right now. They cost millions of dollars, but I've seen a few things drop in price in the technology department in my few decades.
Your opinion is probably shared by many who didn't read TFA.
Yes, if we had substantial assets we would have formed a trust. As it is, our home is mostly still owned by the bank and almost all of our liquid assets are in our retirement accounts, which have a clearly defined inheritance path. Our will currently has detailed instructions for setting up the trust, which would only contain the proceeds of the life insurance policy. We will periodically revisit this setup, but it works for us in the short term.
You can do some due diligence and make sure you use a reputable company. This tends to be harder for things like homeowner's insurance than for term life insurance, which is pretty darned straightforward.
Yes, which is why I have a will which directs my life insurance proceeds into a trust for the kids.
I can't even imagine dumping my kids on my brother without leaving him some life insurance. I mean, if nothing else it is just selfish.
We manage to deal with the incompatibilities between different versions of Office, so I think we could handle LO/OO if my company chose to do so.
Ah, nevermind. I saw the $20 per 100 price on Google shopping. But when I cilck on it, they are just DVD-Rs. Blu Ray seems to be $1, which puts them in a similar price/gig with hard drives. Mods, kill my original post please! :)
I'm very out of touch. I scoffed at first, but BluRay blanks are down to less than 20 cents each. They aren't reusable, but that puts them well below hard disks or tape per gig.
Nothing. The problems were discovered in August and apparently have nothing to do with the temperature.
LOL, no I'm afraid that is long gone from my memory. I believe it was mostly getting the color to work in games, and some games ran at a funny speed. Possibly there was other associated weirdness, but I can't remember... I had an Apple IIe and spent my hours going through my college-aged uncle's many cracked games :) I didn't really learn any DOS until high school except for when I'd stare perplexed at his Tandy. I was able to figure out how to get my grandfather's Compaq to spit out stuff on the printer I guess. Maybe I was dorkier than I thought.... I don't recall having any alternative to MS DOS at the time. It did have a cool (for the time) graphical interface that wowed us.
If you have a hundred thousand and start a restaurant, and that hundred grand is all you have, you're an idiot, not brave.
Which is why I will never be as successful as those guys. I'm not an "idiot" as you refer to them. One has failed several times - not quite losing everything, but definitely back to net worth below zero. But if one in ten new businesses succeeds then that means you need to be prepared to start over 10 times. Of course, statistics being what they are, the odds are more favorable to someone with some experience failing - so that's an exaggeration.
Again, "well off" is a relative thing. My friend from corn country grew up in a small, crudely built house (his dad built it with scraps). It was a fire hazard, and in fact they had a few fires. That said, he had a house and they always had wood (or sometimes scrap asphalt roofing) for the stove. I believe they had some semblance of indoor plumbing as well. More objectively, he was certainly not a one percenter growing up.
Yes, well, that was probably 10 years after the period I was referring to! :)