Nonesense. Debt, infrastructure, police, etc all cost money. The more wealth there is the more these things cost to maintain it. The more that is produced, the more it costs to produce them. Tax wealth and not income where wealth is all assets no matter their current disposition including liquid assets.
You are absolutely right that production is what drives the economy. The part you are wrong about is the investment part. Investment is a scheme for those who are already wealthy to extract some cream off the top of the work being done by those who engage in production. They are able to do this on such large scale and amass such giant pools of wealth because they aren't required to pay the cost of maintaining all that wealth.
The problem is taxation. Taxation is based on income rather than wealth. Everyone agrees the government should defend property rights so the more property you have and therefore need defended the more tax you should be paying. Keeping a continual exchange of wealth doesn't reduce the cost to maintain it, so it shouldn't reduce the tax on it. Nothing should.
If you aren't producing enough income to offset the cost to maintain your wealth the tax should be reducing your wealth and causing it to go back into the system. If you have a high income and spend every penny, then someone is getting wealthier off you, that person will then pay the tax. Of course as Brewster's millions taught us, it actually isn't very easy to spend money without acquiring any wealth even if you are actively trying. If it is very unfair and counterproductive to punish high earners because they are often high producers. But there is nothing at all wrong with the people who the wealth pools at having to pay the cost to maintain the infrastructure that allows the wealth to be created and maintained. They are the ones who ultimately benefit from that wealth being created.
That is the entire point of the system and how the wealthy avoid paying an equal burden of taxes. The problem is that the cost to maintain society isn't directly related to income, it is directly related to wealth. Your paid off home for example carries a cost to maintain not only from yourself but from society in the form of police and fire protection, roads to transport new appliances and repair parts, it goes on and on and on. Your taxes should be based on how much of societies wealth you hold. At any given point all the wealth is being held by someone or something and that someone or something should pay a tax to offset the cost of society maintaining that wealth for a year. Presumably society will generate enough new wealth to offset that tax. Next year it repeats with the new wealth needing maintained as well.
True. It's just a matter that one must dig to discover the hidden technology that powers super heros in comic books. If only the writers would let scientists know so we could all be super!
Every so often the scientists get lucky and find part of the puzzle. Eventually they'll figure out the real source of superman's powers.
How is this a troll? It's on story topic and within context to the statements in this thread about this being a PR nightmare. Sorry but any story that is only on the geek sites is NOT mainstream and the mainstream public doesn't know or care about them.
Fast and cheap I'm sure. I make a few dollars more these days and spend more on food so I do less McDonalds but I used to do it quite a bit more. You can't make the crap on the McDonalds dollar menu that cheaply at home because you can't buy those ingredients that cheaply.
You can feed a fat person on McDonalds for $2-$5/day and you have a selection. If you want to replicate that feat at home you are going to have to do a lot of work and advanced planning. There isn't going to be much variety on your menu either. You certainly can't do it with burgers.
ummm yeah... all of them. I can walk into any McDonalds in the country and order mcnuggets and they will taste exactly the same, the sauce will be the same, etc. I can order a burger at any of them and the beef will be exactly the same even genetically. The only variation is the level of sloppiness put into slapping the ingredients together on the bun.
"Recipes call for very specific steps, very specific amounts of ingredients, and very specific cooking times and temperatures to achieve the same result every time."
At that point you are talking about every restaurant (at least every one that isn't failing) and it is about consistency and predictable expenses. You suggest in another post that this results in lower quality than found at home and this is not necessarily accurate. Restaurants most definitely do not have to cut corners vs home. By selecting the correct menu and doing adequate prep restaurants can produce the same or better results and do it more consistently. There are definitely restaurants making things out of fancy cookbooks. In my experience it is cooks at home that usually take shortcuts. For instance, cooks at home will used bullion or boxed stock where quality restaurants will make their own. Using a thin commercial stock might not make a difference that stands out enough to tell the difference on its own but lots of small shortcuts add up. Restaurants also often have daily resupply of fresh ingredients where home cooks do not. Almost no home cook keeps their spices fresh because they are expensive and will last a long time. Restaurants will generally make pasta where home cooks usually buy packaged.
Doing things well at home takes longer because people don't actually do prep. They want to do everything at dinner time. Restaurants have learned which parts of the process can be done in advance and which parts are time sensitive. A restaurant that opens at 11 might start prep at 5. That is the secret to getting you your dinner in less than two hours.
That's easy. The difference between the successful revolutions and the unsuccessful ones is economic power and backing. The American Revolution, British, French, etc (there are at least as many nations with successful revolutions that haven't led to dictatorships as there are those that have) were successful and didn't lead to dictatorship because they weren't led by the people fighting but rather were backed by third parties. Usually parties with economic power and social status. For instance, in the American revolution some great freedom type propoganda was used to stir up peasants to fight but it was the wealthy merchant class that wanted and pushed the revolution for better trade and tax terms.
When people talk about the US having been corrupted and now ruled by corporations it cracks me up. The US was ruled by the wealthy merchant class since its inception. Corporations amount to the same hiding behind paper that manages to deceive people into thinking the paper turns the corporation into a seperate thing from the people who reap profits from its actions. Thus people vilify (even in criminal, civil, and tax court) the paper rather than the people who profit from it. The changes in lobbying allowing corporations to fund campaigns directly just allow the handful of people who actually control a corporation to turn the bribes into a tax write-off rather than having to pay the bribes with after tax money. It's nothing more than a tax cut for major dollar politician bribers.
The propaganda spouted by the founding fathers to successfully manipulate people into implementing their agenda was wonderful. But those ideals never ruled in this country.
Which would be fine if new 4g phones supported wimax and if sprint had any wimax coverage. But the wimax coverage is just as crappy as this new 4g lte coverage and overlaps it.
You'd think they'd build 4g lte in at least the major cities where they don't have 4g coverage so that there would be 4g options for most places. As it stands they've spent what is no doubt a great deal of investment capital to bring 4g coverage to those who already have it! If anyone really wanted 4g in these places they are probably already locked in a 4g contract so there won't likely be much revenue coming from this one.
Maybe not realistic in New York or LA but there it is perfectly likely the store will be several miles away from a station in pretty much every other city in the US.
You also wouldn't be able to carry a sheet of standard size plywood on a train or bus even if it were sold at the station. Nor carry that small volume of groceries that represents a typical grocery purchase scenario. Have you ever tried carrying a cartload of groceries at once even from the trunk of your car to your kitchen? I have. Ever buy a TV when you only have public transportation? How about a lamp? Coffee table? End table? Some weights off craigslist? You can do any of that with public transportation. So you either have EVERYTHING delivered which isn't green, cheap, or beneficial at all, or in some cases you can get a cab. Which certainly isn't any of those things either but sometimes less expensive.
With public transportation you have to go to the grocery several times a week. Even with that, I had to get a cab once a month to get large items. Forget a cart load. It isn't fun carrying just what you need for a meal half a mile to the bus station (not at all unusual in medium sized cities). Lets go with chicken. You need onions, a chicken, broth, celery, carrots, buttermilk, and a bottle of wine. Here in Albuquerque that would be as much as an hour wait for the bus on each end. Since you are going to the store closest to the station that is going to be a long ride with all the stopping, about 30 mins. So that is 3 1/2 hrs of transit time and a mile of hauling bags that cut into your hands. That hauling might be in a blizzard, rain, dust storm, etc. And you've got to do it again tomorrow.
Compare that to 15-30 minutes total transit to the grocer of my choice rather than the one close to the station. Buying a month supply of most items with a very short stop on the way home every week or two to refresh produce. The longest haul of supplies is from the driveway to the kitchen. And in general everything costs 30-80% less because of bulk purchase discounts and being able to shop selectively by price rather than just buying wherever is close.
You must be buying new vehicles and paying for dealer maintenance, brand new tires, etc, to come up with numbers anywhere near that high. Delivery and truck drivers typically make a profit on mileage reimbursement.
My vehicle cost $3500. Over its life span I will put another $1000 into it for total vehicle maintenance. $4500. I'll probably put about 150,000 miles on it. So $0.03/mile fixed maintenance costs. I get lousy gas milage so it will cost $62.30 at the current $3.50/gallon to drive to Norfolk based on your 356 mile figure and $10.68 covers the wear and tear. That is $72.98 for the trip. Nowhere near your $350 mark.
If you want to attack artificial numbers in the car travel equation you need to look for the subsidies and where you find those is in oil. Oil and Gas proponents point out the big subsidies on alternative energy solutions when those subsidies are negligible compared to oil and gas subsidies. The real price of that gas is probably closer to $15/gallon. That is $267 in fuel cost for my vehicle rather than $62.30 brining the trip cost to $277.68.
That is the problem if you live in the major metropolitan areas and travel between them. Even stepping down from New York to something like Miami public transportation becomes far less practical and it isn't even on the menu outside metropolitan areas.
It is neither practical nor reasonable to expect the entire population to embrace city living. There are conveniences to be found in cities but the quality of life difference is comparable to factory farmed chickens in tiny quarters vs free range.
Personally I settle somewhere in the middle. Albuquerque. There is a pretty good bus system here but I still went through quite an effort to haul even a weeks worth of groceries, apartment/house/job hunting were a nightmare because things had to be within reasonable walking distance. First I broke down and got a scooter and then the list of things I couldn't carry on that scooter got too long and I got a car. The list of things I can't fit in the car on a regular basis teeters the line between justifying owning an SUV or truck. And that was living right downtown at the core of the transit system.
Trains do not work in the US because of what the US is.
Europeans always forget how incredibly tiny their nations are and how incredibly big the US is. Our population isn't bunched up into a few mega cities like yours is either and there is no reason it should have to be. Some people consider privacy to be more important than the infrastructure advantages in everyone being close together.
Suppose you built a high speed rail between LA and New York. Its fast, 200mph. So it can (ideally) cross the 2378.8 miles in a little under 12hrs if it makes no stops. Wonderful, its faster than I could drive it. But how now that I'm in new york, how do I get to the store that is 5 miles away from the station? Now that I am there, how do I get the shopping cart full of goods back to the train? Do I purchase another couple seats to store it? Will the train wait while I load and unload it? How do I get it to my home in a small town 50 miles from the station? What if my purchase included a piece of plywood and four 3m lengths of pvc for some basic work around the house? And if like many I do that every 3 days?
In the EU you might be considered extremely rural if you live 100km from the nearest reasonable point for a passenger station but it would be considered the suburbs here in the US. You'd have to go quite a bit further to reach rural.
"For a much smaller scale example you could reduce the "indicated air speed" as a pilot would call it of the TGV in France merely by installing gigawatts worth of walmart kitchen fans pointing such that the train gets a nice tailwind. However if you run the numbers it turns out you can get the same performance increase with merely megawatts of extra train power. Similarly, you could invest in terawatts of distributed vacuum pumps, but it turns out you can go just as fast merely by using gigawatts of train power..."
Are you only accounting for the idealized speed objective or are you factoring in the additional engineering complications that go with it. There is no air in a vacuum and no need to design a craft that withstand a 4000mph stream of air. There is a reason aircraft don't travel that fast.
"Well, on the "prove/disprove" front, all this has done is fail to disprove the existence of dark matter. There's a difference between that and actually proving its existence."
Science doesn't prove things exist or don't exist. The only thing science does is collect objective observations and come up with math that predicts what future observations will be given a set of conditions. Someone also makes up an interesting story to goes along with the math but aside from being consistent with the math the story (hypothesis/theory) doesn't really matter that much. Unlike the story, future observations can't break the math (although they can supercede it). Just ask Mr. Newton.
"They already have hearing aids comparable to what was available 5-10yrs ago freely available for $50-300 sold as hunting enhancements.
This is actually great information. Any chance you could give a link to some of these that are reputable (I say reputable, because I know how to google, but I don't know which companies are good)?"
I can only be of limited help here. I've had friends with them but haven't really used them myself. I have put them on and they work. If you google them and read reviews you will find people commenting about how they worked for them as hearing aids.
As I understand it, they are basically sound amplifiers with noise filters. You'll want to stay away from the really cheap units that are http://www.amazon.com/Walkers-Game-Ear-Hd-Digital/dp/B003IXQJYW/ref=pd_sim_sg_5
"So I don't think we can discard optometrists like we did with elevator operators. Not yet, anyway."
Agreed on that point. Near and far sightedness due to eye shape can be tested for and corrected by machine. But there is a lot more that can go wrong with your eyes than that. You mentioned astigmatism is another post for example. If that is all you need you could go to a booth and it could test you and even offer a selection of frames and contacts. Any inaccuracy in a less expensive testing system would be tolerable since contacts and other pre-fab lenses are less precise than the test anyway.
I really didn't want to get into the merits of the manual vs automated test debate (not that you are arguing). The process the doc uses to do the manual test is systematic as well and a machine could flip the lenses and let you push a "better" or "worse" button. That would work for a hearing test as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonesense. Debt, infrastructure, police, etc all cost money. The more wealth there is the more these things cost to maintain it. The more that is produced, the more it costs to produce them. Tax wealth and not income where wealth is all assets no matter their current disposition including liquid assets.
You are absolutely right that production is what drives the economy. The part you are wrong about is the investment part. Investment is a scheme for those who are already wealthy to extract some cream off the top of the work being done by those who engage in production. They are able to do this on such large scale and amass such giant pools of wealth because they aren't required to pay the cost of maintaining all that wealth.
The problem is taxation. Taxation is based on income rather than wealth. Everyone agrees the government should defend property rights so the more property you have and therefore need defended the more tax you should be paying. Keeping a continual exchange of wealth doesn't reduce the cost to maintain it, so it shouldn't reduce the tax on it. Nothing should.
If you aren't producing enough income to offset the cost to maintain your wealth the tax should be reducing your wealth and causing it to go back into the system. If you have a high income and spend every penny, then someone is getting wealthier off you, that person will then pay the tax. Of course as Brewster's millions taught us, it actually isn't very easy to spend money without acquiring any wealth even if you are actively trying. If it is very unfair and counterproductive to punish high earners because they are often high producers. But there is nothing at all wrong with the people who the wealth pools at having to pay the cost to maintain the infrastructure that allows the wealth to be created and maintained. They are the ones who ultimately benefit from that wealth being created.
That is the entire point of the system and how the wealthy avoid paying an equal burden of taxes. The problem is that the cost to maintain society isn't directly related to income, it is directly related to wealth. Your paid off home for example carries a cost to maintain not only from yourself but from society in the form of police and fire protection, roads to transport new appliances and repair parts, it goes on and on and on. Your taxes should be based on how much of societies wealth you hold. At any given point all the wealth is being held by someone or something and that someone or something should pay a tax to offset the cost of society maintaining that wealth for a year. Presumably society will generate enough new wealth to offset that tax. Next year it repeats with the new wealth needing maintained as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman
True. It's just a matter that one must dig to discover the hidden technology that powers super heros in comic books. If only the writers would let scientists know so we could all be super!
Every so often the scientists get lucky and find part of the puzzle. Eventually they'll figure out the real source of superman's powers.
It is my experience that chemists are indeed mislead with regard to the nature of cleavage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleavage_(breasts)
Yes but this will be rediscovered then and only nerds with obscure knowledge will credit the original discovery.
How is this a troll? It's on story topic and within context to the statements in this thread about this being a PR nightmare. Sorry but any story that is only on the geek sites is NOT mainstream and the mainstream public doesn't know or care about them.
Fast and cheap I'm sure. I make a few dollars more these days and spend more on food so I do less McDonalds but I used to do it quite a bit more. You can't make the crap on the McDonalds dollar menu that cheaply at home because you can't buy those ingredients that cheaply.
You can feed a fat person on McDonalds for $2-$5/day and you have a selection. If you want to replicate that feat at home you are going to have to do a lot of work and advanced planning. There isn't going to be much variety on your menu either. You certainly can't do it with burgers.
The manager isn't doing well financially either. Passable. McDonalds managers top at 50k last I checked and many are doing more like 30k
ummm yeah... all of them. I can walk into any McDonalds in the country and order mcnuggets and they will taste exactly the same, the sauce will be the same, etc. I can order a burger at any of them and the beef will be exactly the same even genetically. The only variation is the level of sloppiness put into slapping the ingredients together on the bun.
"Recipes call for very specific steps, very specific amounts of ingredients, and very specific cooking times and temperatures to achieve the same result every time."
At that point you are talking about every restaurant (at least every one that isn't failing) and it is about consistency and predictable expenses. You suggest in another post that this results in lower quality than found at home and this is not necessarily accurate. Restaurants most definitely do not have to cut corners vs home. By selecting the correct menu and doing adequate prep restaurants can produce the same or better results and do it more consistently. There are definitely restaurants making things out of fancy cookbooks. In my experience it is cooks at home that usually take shortcuts. For instance, cooks at home will used bullion or boxed stock where quality restaurants will make their own. Using a thin commercial stock might not make a difference that stands out enough to tell the difference on its own but lots of small shortcuts add up. Restaurants also often have daily resupply of fresh ingredients where home cooks do not. Almost no home cook keeps their spices fresh because they are expensive and will last a long time. Restaurants will generally make pasta where home cooks usually buy packaged.
Doing things well at home takes longer because people don't actually do prep. They want to do everything at dinner time. Restaurants have learned which parts of the process can be done in advance and which parts are time sensitive. A restaurant that opens at 11 might start prep at 5. That is the secret to getting you your dinner in less than two hours.
That's easy. The difference between the successful revolutions and the unsuccessful ones is economic power and backing. The American Revolution, British, French, etc (there are at least as many nations with successful revolutions that haven't led to dictatorships as there are those that have) were successful and didn't lead to dictatorship because they weren't led by the people fighting but rather were backed by third parties. Usually parties with economic power and social status. For instance, in the American revolution some great freedom type propoganda was used to stir up peasants to fight but it was the wealthy merchant class that wanted and pushed the revolution for better trade and tax terms.
When people talk about the US having been corrupted and now ruled by corporations it cracks me up. The US was ruled by the wealthy merchant class since its inception. Corporations amount to the same hiding behind paper that manages to deceive people into thinking the paper turns the corporation into a seperate thing from the people who reap profits from its actions. Thus people vilify (even in criminal, civil, and tax court) the paper rather than the people who profit from it. The changes in lobbying allowing corporations to fund campaigns directly just allow the handful of people who actually control a corporation to turn the bribes into a tax write-off rather than having to pay the bribes with after tax money. It's nothing more than a tax cut for major dollar politician bribers.
The propaganda spouted by the founding fathers to successfully manipulate people into implementing their agenda was wonderful. But those ideals never ruled in this country.
Which would be fine if new 4g phones supported wimax and if sprint had any wimax coverage. But the wimax coverage is just as crappy as this new 4g lte coverage and overlaps it.
You'd think they'd build 4g lte in at least the major cities where they don't have 4g coverage so that there would be 4g options for most places. As it stands they've spent what is no doubt a great deal of investment capital to bring 4g coverage to those who already have it! If anyone really wanted 4g in these places they are probably already locked in a 4g contract so there won't likely be much revenue coming from this one.
Maybe not realistic in New York or LA but there it is perfectly likely the store will be several miles away from a station in pretty much every other city in the US.
You also wouldn't be able to carry a sheet of standard size plywood on a train or bus even if it were sold at the station. Nor carry that small volume of groceries that represents a typical grocery purchase scenario. Have you ever tried carrying a cartload of groceries at once even from the trunk of your car to your kitchen? I have. Ever buy a TV when you only have public transportation? How about a lamp? Coffee table? End table? Some weights off craigslist? You can do any of that with public transportation. So you either have EVERYTHING delivered which isn't green, cheap, or beneficial at all, or in some cases you can get a cab. Which certainly isn't any of those things either but sometimes less expensive.
With public transportation you have to go to the grocery several times a week. Even with that, I had to get a cab once a month to get large items. Forget a cart load. It isn't fun carrying just what you need for a meal half a mile to the bus station (not at all unusual in medium sized cities). Lets go with chicken. You need onions, a chicken, broth, celery, carrots, buttermilk, and a bottle of wine. Here in Albuquerque that would be as much as an hour wait for the bus on each end. Since you are going to the store closest to the station that is going to be a long ride with all the stopping, about 30 mins. So that is 3 1/2 hrs of transit time and a mile of hauling bags that cut into your hands. That hauling might be in a blizzard, rain, dust storm, etc. And you've got to do it again tomorrow.
Compare that to 15-30 minutes total transit to the grocer of my choice rather than the one close to the station. Buying a month supply of most items with a very short stop on the way home every week or two to refresh produce. The longest haul of supplies is from the driveway to the kitchen. And in general everything costs 30-80% less because of bulk purchase discounts and being able to shop selectively by price rather than just buying wherever is close.
You must be buying new vehicles and paying for dealer maintenance, brand new tires, etc, to come up with numbers anywhere near that high. Delivery and truck drivers typically make a profit on mileage reimbursement.
My vehicle cost $3500. Over its life span I will put another $1000 into it for total vehicle maintenance. $4500. I'll probably put about 150,000 miles on it. So $0.03/mile fixed maintenance costs. I get lousy gas milage so it will cost $62.30 at the current $3.50/gallon to drive to Norfolk based on your 356 mile figure and $10.68 covers the wear and tear. That is $72.98 for the trip. Nowhere near your $350 mark.
If you want to attack artificial numbers in the car travel equation you need to look for the subsidies and where you find those is in oil. Oil and Gas proponents point out the big subsidies on alternative energy solutions when those subsidies are negligible compared to oil and gas subsidies. The real price of that gas is probably closer to $15/gallon. That is $267 in fuel cost for my vehicle rather than $62.30 brining the trip cost to $277.68.
Which is kind of the point. Trains only work at rail central.
That is the problem if you live in the major metropolitan areas and travel between them. Even stepping down from New York to something like Miami public transportation becomes far less practical and it isn't even on the menu outside metropolitan areas.
It is neither practical nor reasonable to expect the entire population to embrace city living. There are conveniences to be found in cities but the quality of life difference is comparable to factory farmed chickens in tiny quarters vs free range.
Personally I settle somewhere in the middle. Albuquerque. There is a pretty good bus system here but I still went through quite an effort to haul even a weeks worth of groceries, apartment/house/job hunting were a nightmare because things had to be within reasonable walking distance. First I broke down and got a scooter and then the list of things I couldn't carry on that scooter got too long and I got a car. The list of things I can't fit in the car on a regular basis teeters the line between justifying owning an SUV or truck. And that was living right downtown at the core of the transit system.
Trains do not work in the US because of what the US is.
Europeans always forget how incredibly tiny their nations are and how incredibly big the US is. Our population isn't bunched up into a few mega cities like yours is either and there is no reason it should have to be. Some people consider privacy to be more important than the infrastructure advantages in everyone being close together.
Suppose you built a high speed rail between LA and New York. Its fast, 200mph. So it can (ideally) cross the 2378.8 miles in a little under 12hrs if it makes no stops. Wonderful, its faster than I could drive it. But how now that I'm in new york, how do I get to the store that is 5 miles away from the station? Now that I am there, how do I get the shopping cart full of goods back to the train? Do I purchase another couple seats to store it? Will the train wait while I load and unload it? How do I get it to my home in a small town 50 miles from the station? What if my purchase included a piece of plywood and four 3m lengths of pvc for some basic work around the house? And if like many I do that every 3 days?
In the EU you might be considered extremely rural if you live 100km from the nearest reasonable point for a passenger station but it would be considered the suburbs here in the US. You'd have to go quite a bit further to reach rural.
"For a much smaller scale example you could reduce the "indicated air speed" as a pilot would call it of the TGV in France merely by installing gigawatts worth of walmart kitchen fans pointing such that the train gets a nice tailwind. However if you run the numbers it turns out you can get the same performance increase with merely megawatts of extra train power. Similarly, you could invest in terawatts of distributed vacuum pumps, but it turns out you can go just as fast merely by using gigawatts of train power..."
Are you only accounting for the idealized speed objective or are you factoring in the additional engineering complications that go with it. There is no air in a vacuum and no need to design a craft that withstand a 4000mph stream of air. There is a reason aircraft don't travel that fast.
I just re-read his post and there is nothing in there about disregarding your co-workers experience.
"Well, on the "prove/disprove" front, all this has done is fail to disprove the existence of dark matter. There's a difference between that and actually proving its existence."
Science doesn't prove things exist or don't exist. The only thing science does is collect objective observations and come up with math that predicts what future observations will be given a set of conditions. Someone also makes up an interesting story to goes along with the math but aside from being consistent with the math the story (hypothesis/theory) doesn't really matter that much. Unlike the story, future observations can't break the math (although they can supercede it). Just ask Mr. Newton.
In the US I believe the law is at state level and not federal and so it varies by state.
"They already have hearing aids comparable to what was available 5-10yrs ago freely available for $50-300 sold as hunting enhancements.
This is actually great information. Any chance you could give a link to some of these that are reputable (I say reputable, because I know how to google, but I don't know which companies are good)?"
I can only be of limited help here. I've had friends with them but haven't really used them myself. I have put them on and they work. If you google them and read reviews you will find people commenting about how they worked for them as hearing aids.
As I understand it, they are basically sound amplifiers with noise filters. You'll want to stay away from the really cheap units that are http://www.amazon.com/Walkers-Game-Ear-Hd-Digital/dp/B003IXQJYW/ref=pd_sim_sg_5
"So I don't think we can discard optometrists like we did with elevator operators. Not yet, anyway."
Agreed on that point. Near and far sightedness due to eye shape can be tested for and corrected by machine. But there is a lot more that can go wrong with your eyes than that. You mentioned astigmatism is another post for example. If that is all you need you could go to a booth and it could test you and even offer a selection of frames and contacts. Any inaccuracy in a less expensive testing system would be tolerable since contacts and other pre-fab lenses are less precise than the test anyway.
I really didn't want to get into the merits of the manual vs automated test debate (not that you are arguing). The process the doc uses to do the manual test is systematic as well and a machine could flip the lenses and let you push a "better" or "worse" button. That would work for a hearing test as well.