Yea his reasoning is kind of odd... especially since the self-driving cars that have already been tested for food delivery... are technically 'drones' themselves...
Before you bother with flight at all, note that there is an immediate efficiency to be gained, by building driver-less motorcycle trikes for food delivery. Less weight, better fuel efficiency than a car. And we haven't even gotten self-driving cars to work 100% of the time yet...
The entire desire for airborne commercial/residential drone delivery is terribly misguided IMO. It is very hazardous from a liability standpoint.
It is somewhat like saying "since helicopters are easy to build now, we should get rid of all the cars and just use helicopters instead".
Helicopters are wonderful things, but only if you 1) have a very high priority task that can bear a high cost, or 2) if you are really really rich and like burning money.
UPS/FedEX should work like this too. Do Residential deliveries at night, and instead of someone walking the package to my porch, the UPS truck just calls me as it rolls up to my place, and I walk outside and get my own mail.
Yea but--even if they got an advance warning--a lot of people would be watching the end of their favorite tv show instead, taking a dump, talking on the phone or whatever and not show up at the curb.
And anyway (where I live, midwest US) DHL drivers sometimes do this, if they have your phone number and are delivering a package that is signature required. They call or text you a few minutes ahead of their arrival.
Some years back there used to be a (US?) print magazine titled "Game Developer Magazine". It existed from 1994 to 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I read it at the time because of a general interest in programming and computer games. I didn't ever really expect to get a job doing it. And reading that magazine didn't really change that expectation...
There was basically about three kinds of articles they generally had:
--One was about new game hardware, software or related tech coming soon.
--One was called "Post Mortem" where after a game was released, they would have a manager talk about all the major problems they had along the way.
--The last was general management articles about running computer game production.
From reading this magazine occasionally for a couple years I gathered two things:
1. Many people who got hired to code were recent college grads in LA or Austin TX, who really just took the job to put something on their resumes. The lower coding jobs were low salary and long hours with little benefits, and they left as soon as they found anything better.
2. There were constant problems with employee turnover. Many articles were about how to set up content management systems so that it was as easy as possible to get new people up to speed and working productively.
I often wondered who the target audience for this magazine really was. From reading it, working at a game company really didn't sound like much of a dream job.
At the grocery store company (in the central USA) where I work, a number of the ~twenty-somethings are doing "gigs", but not for any happy reason.
All of them live on their own--so they need a full-time income--but none of them can find a starting job that is full-time.
And getting one part time job is easy, but most part-time jobs refuse to give fixed hours anymore, so it's nearly impossible to get two part-time jobs at different places.
So they are working one 'normal' part-time job (at the store, for 20-25 hours a week) and doing odd jobs on various phone/web app companies online. The online work is low-skill stuff like yard work, house cleaning, dog walking and so on.
...And many of them try to push that work off the app when they can; to avoid the app fees and so they can skim on taxes as well...
So the truth with most of these people is that they're doing online gig work not because it's better than a part-time job, but because they can't find any full-time job, and because they can't find two part-time jobs that will schedule around each other.
I am not an economist, but I don't know that this is exactly a good sign.
The problem today with having digital electronics as a hobby is not hardware-related, it's simply thinking up useful things to do. How many times have you seen someone ask "I got this Arduino/Rasberry Pi (as a gift, in a contest, some other way), what can I do with it?"... If you can buy from China sources, the prices of most common components is very very inexpensive. Chinese Arduino clones cost $2-$3, and for just a few dollars more you can get boards with other processors that are much faster and have more memory--assuming you write a program that needs either of those things. Display screens cost $3, basic GPS chips cost $1, various wifi/wireless chips cost $3, CCD cameras cost $3, laser rangefinders cost $8, a cell phone radio (requires a SIM) costs $8.
I do think that the main reason for the popularity of Arduino is that both the hardware and the software were made specifically to be easy to use.
Interest/sales of a given processor or IC tend to pick up a lot after there is an Arduino IDE board definition or library for it.
I suspect that people assume that if they cannot get the "professional" dev environment to work, they assume they can still get it to work in the Arduino IDE.
I had mine set to upgrade automatically. It did so to ver 66, and now no video will play on any website, at all, even if I want them to. If I click on them, they show a loading icon, then disappear.
The only plugin I have is noscript, but even with that disabled, no videos work at all (and I had lots of sites cleared in NoScript before, to where the videos would play)...
Voluntarily breaking picasa links is annoying, but then again, Google insists on caching Pintrest pages -- which pretty much result in a whole page of broken image links 100% of the time that you click on one in the results, no matter if the page is from six days ago or six years ago.
I understand the transitory nature of what Pintrest provides--but it's silly for Google to bother to include Pintrest pages at all, for the same reason.
Now there is two ways to delete your facebook account:
1. Proclaim yourself to be a Nazi, who advocates -- well, I don't know really. I think just saying that you are a Nazi might be enough? And a swastika picture I guess. (-how do you make that ASCII swastika again?-)
2. Proclaim yourself to suspect medical vaccines may sometimes be of questionable usefulness.
People in the US generally don't bother with buying unlocked phones from outside sources since technical standards at many cell service providers prevent bringing your own device. And even of the companies that allow it (T-Mobile and AT&T) they will often try to hassle you into upgrading your account, since you aren't using the 'limited' device they sold the account with.
The greater evil here is that Google has sold Android under the feel-good banner of open-source, while allowing phone manufacturers and networks to lock it with their shit-ware intact. And Google is no help with jail-breaking phones, they just shrug and say there's nothing they can do. If Google made a universal unlocking tool, a lot of these "problems" of Android crap-ware would disappear overnight.
Google does their own level of tracking and isn't likely to give that up.... And they like the fees they get from locking it up for cell phone companies.... And so (unfortunately for Google) as iPhones have gotten cheaper, this is becoming a larger and larger selling point in favor of going iPhone and not dealing with Android bullshit at all.
Soy might be decent livestock feed, but you aren't livestock, even if you wish you were.
They used to say it was "just like cows' milk", until a few infants died from being fed exclusively soy milk. So now they don't say that...
And then they found out that if you give toddlers a lot of soy milk, they tend to develop allergies to soy. So now they say not to do that...
But they are still saying that it's perfectly good for adults... despite a number of common health problems that adults get if they drink a lot of it...
???
Does this sound like the warning label of a food that is "perfectly safe"?
Vegan socialist sites are still pushing soy-based-everything, saying how great it is. Except for, well, you know. The infants and children it's already killed and damaged.
If any corporate-made food had done that, they'd insist that it was evil and harmful and should be taken off the market.
College is not about "how to learn". Like the entire modern educational system, it is almost entirely based on memorization abilities.
Someone very intelligent but with a poor memory is almost guaranteed to fail, and someone with low intelligence but excellent memory is almost guaranteed to succeed.
College is paying a lot of money to jump through hoops for a sheepskin. It may be a requirement of your desired career, but it does not magically improve you at all.
Send your dog to college and see if he comes home quoting Shakespeare.
, ,,
How colleges prepare students for jobs that don't exist yet, is--------they don't.
A good college is generally 5 years behind tech/science/business trends, and most colleges are ~10+ years behind.
Want proof? Consider the "blockchain" trend.
Bitcoin began just about nine years ago, and only a few colleges offer courses in blockchain tech at all, and those were created in just the last 2-3 years.
Ironically, the best colleges to go to for current content is the little pay-to-play diploma mills. They have to sell courses based on content, and not on a prestigious university name.
The iPhone is looking more and more reasonable every day.
The best thing that Google could do for Android at this point is to create a universal unlocker / re-locker that worked with all versions of Android going forward, and legally require that licensees not interfere with it.
If Google is afraid to strip the shit-ware out, then at least publish the tools so that end users can do it themselves.
Some years ago Reason magazine did a story on the history of Dvorak.
What they found was that most of the early studies showing Dvorak keyboards to be superior, were done by Dvorak himself,,, who was trying to sell his patented keyboard to the US Navy.
If it works better for you that's great--but the Navy was not impressed and didn't buy it.
https://reason.com/archives/19...
I would agree that on technical grounds, Dvorak sounds like a big improvement over querty... but the few modern studies I've read of showed no clear benefit.
For me QUERTY is good enough, but I hate flat keyboards. I gotta have split or my wrists ache from doing the butterfly thing.
Right now I am still using a gen-1 MS Natural keyboard, but it is the last one I have.:>| The later 'media' models were not as good IMO.
Kinesys makes a split model that looks good.
I like the Ergodox too, but the modifier key thing scares me. I'd prefer it with just a plain querty layout.
Really though,,,, I am wondering when voice-recognition typing died?
Seems like 10-15 years ago there was a few companies trying to make it work as well as possible, but stories now are rare.
By now a keyboard should be kept next to the punch cards in the modern cabinet of curiosities...
Sure it got where it was supposed to go--but it cost $175K, was only ~7 feet long, only averaged ~1 mph, and--last but not least--it has nowhere for busty vixens to tan their ta-tas and sip wine coolers.
Fumed silica is powdered sand. It has a number of uses, one common one is for fillers in other solidifying liquids such as rubber, glue and paint. 'Food-safe' (sterile) fumed silica is a common food ingredient/thickener. You can buy bags of it on ebay.
Fumed silica bounces. If you hit a bag of fumed silica with your hand, you can feel it vibrate after for a bit, as if it is rubber.
Oh--and also it can kill you (if you breathe it)... but then again, what fun stuff doesn't do that?
I tend to think that something like a UBI (perhaps including food and housing credit) is the best solution. My reasoning is as follows:
Suppose there comes a time when there is a huge population of employable adults, but only a relatively small of highly technical, highly complicated jobs to be done (commanding robot swarms or whatever, to make enough basic supplies of everything, for everybody).
And so there is only jobs for 1% of everybody...
You don't want everybody applying for those jobs, just because most people probably are not qualified for them.
It's much more efficient to pay everyone a UBI and offer the jobs for a higher-than-UBI pay rate, and then only the people who think they might be qualified (and interested) will bother to apply.
A person's interest level in their job is a big factor in how well they do it; it relates to how much attention they maintain and how willing they are to try to improve their performance.
The more critical a given job is, the better off a company is hiring someone that really enjoys doing it, and doing it well. You don't want to hire someone who is just there for the money.
--Also, the UBI works better for all of the "lower achievers", since they can pursue any particular interest as they please.
For example:
Let's say a guy on the UBI decides that he wants {one certain thing} more than anything else in the world. Say, a BMW sedan, for an example.
And let's say that the highest-paying jobs pay millions of dollars a year, but the lower-paying ones only pay $25K a year.
He can take any lower-paying job to save money towards {that one thing he desires}, while being able to depend on the UBI to cover anything else.
He can't afford everything on his UBI+lower-wage working income, but he gets to work straight toward the one thing he has decided that he wants.
I think that we are still quite a few years away from any broad-based situation such as this however. At least 50 years, maybe 100+. Or more.
Also a lot of society would need time to adjust to the concept of being the "idle class". Japanese are famous for their dedication, but many other people around the world consider their job to be a measure of their self-worth. "Being a bum" would take some time to get used to...
Legalese: bicycles are not federally regulated, but there is a technical definition that the CPSC uses when defining them, and that most states use as well.
Now then...
1) In pretty much all US jurisdictions the ONLY non-motor-vehicle device that can be used on public roads is bicycles*, and these electric scooters would not technically qualify as bicycles under the Federal CPSC definition. So they would not be legal for adults to use on public roads, at all...
*(-draft animals and drawn carts and wagons are still legal too, on most US roads but not all roads-)
2) Also in most US jurisdictions, the ONLY powered devices that can be used on sidewalks is mobility devices for assisting the handicapped, and they have their own set of requirements under the Federal ADA regulations. Among those requirements is that the person using them is medically handicapped...
3) The last option is if the scooters were declared as motor vehicles--but for that to happen, they would need to meet the Federal DOT regulations for one class of motor vehicles already defined, and the scooters would need to be issued VIN numbers (a standard format serial number issued by the Federal Dept of Transportation). And since the scooters cannot technically qualify as any class of motor vehicle, they can't do this either.
These scooters are only considered to be "motorized toys", and are only legal to use on private property--just like pocket bikes. Absent any special law to exempt them, they cannot legally be used on public sidewalks OR public roads.
This is also the reason that a few communities had to enact special laws for people to use Segways when they first came out.
Nowadays there are some handicapped people using Segways, and in that instance they could qualify for sidewalk use as in point #2 above.
This is 100% truth. And it's really rather sad that someone in such a position of power doesn't understand it.
The financial cost of a thing is usually a pretty good measure of how much resources were used in its construction... Like for example: if you compare a wooden rowboat to a 200-foot luxury yacht. The one that costs more, costs more because it uses a lot more resources.
It is even a usually good predictor of how much resources will be used because of its construction, even if the item doesn't consume much resources itself. For example: a pretentious modern artist paints a $10 canvas black, and sells it for $50 million dollars. He is probably going to go out and spend some of that money on things he really doesn't need--like maybe, a 200-foot luxury yacht.
It's not wrong to want to make an efficient choice or protect the environment, but when you impose extra costs onto one thing (regular motor cars) and reduce the cost on another thing (give subsidies to electric cars) you've still done nothing to change the underlying truth of the matter. You aren't changing the efficiencies, you are only changing people's perception of the efficiencies. And you are probably doing MORE damage to the environment than if you had not tampered with the prices at all, because you have disconnected the cost of your favored item from the actual costs on resources that it imposes.
"EV's with subsidies" is not a good thing for the environment. If EV's were more efficient overall than the cars already in use, they wouldn't need subsidies to appeal more to consumer opinion.
...but (maybe just for me?) at least 1/3 of the time, they are a link to a story on the NYT website. And I rarely visit the NYT site on my own, otherwise.
A few years back I ordered something small that cost $12 or so. I think it was some kind of Park bicycle wrench.
What they sent me was this: https://www.amazon.com/YELLOW-...
An air-conditioning test and charging manifold, that was priced $175 at the time.
I got on the website and requested a return and explained what happened, and then for the next few days started getting two different sets of messages.
One set was the usual automated set that said I had to return the item by a certain number of days or I would get charged for it.
The other set was real people responding, telling me that I wouldn't get charged for it and that I didn't need to return the item and that I could dispose of it as I pleased.
When I asked why they didn't want it returned, the real person said that some items are hazardous enough that if they make a mistake and send one out, they will not accept if back for any reason. I said that I had only opened the shipping box and not the sealed item box itself, and he said that didn't matter. I could keep it since they would just destroy it if it was returned, and the company didn't want to pay the return shipping cost just to destroy it. I never got charged for it either.
I gave it to my AC repair guy, since AC maintenance is not a hobby of mine and it's not good for much else.
Ever since then I have wondered however,,,, what is the most-expensive thing that Amazon has given away just because they shipped the totally-wrong item? I don't know how happy they'd be to talk about that, but it would be an interesting read...
The central concept of mass-transit is fundamentally flawed and this should be factored into decisions for its expansion.
Mass-transit suffers from a major utilization problem in that to be attractive to riders, it must be reasonably fast, but also be easily accessible.
A mass-transit system with a small number of stops can run faster, but many people will refuse to use it due to the lack of accessibility.
The problem is that the more stops that are added to increase the accessibility, the slower overall the speed becomes until it isn't attractive anymore for that reason. The main problem with mass-transit is inherent to the concept and cannot be solved.
Contrast that with individual transportation: imagine a vehicle similar to an enclosed, 3-wheel motorcycle, seating 1 or 2 people.
It could cost much less than a car, it could take up less space to operate and park, the lower weight would cause less road damage, and the fuel efficiency could be greatly improved beyond what most motorcycles provide now. The remaining problems with individual transportation are technological, and improvements can be found.
When most people advocate for more mass-transit, the gist of their argument is not about really solving anything. It's mostly about "we've wasted money for this long, we can't stop now!"... Perhaps it is time to take a longer view?
Slashdot Mirror
Before you bother with flight at all, note that there is an immediate efficiency to be gained, by building driver-less motorcycle trikes for food delivery. Less weight, better fuel efficiency than a car. And we haven't even gotten self-driving cars to work 100% of the time yet...
The entire desire for airborne commercial/residential drone delivery is terribly misguided IMO. It is very hazardous from a liability standpoint.
It is somewhat like saying "since helicopters are easy to build now, we should get rid of all the cars and just use helicopters instead".
Helicopters are wonderful things, but only if you 1) have a very high priority task that can bear a high cost, or 2) if you are really really rich and like burning money.
UPS/FedEX should work like this too. Do Residential deliveries at night, and instead of someone walking the package to my porch, the UPS truck just calls me as it rolls up to my place, and I walk outside and get my own mail.
Yea but--even if they got an advance warning--a lot of people would be watching the end of their favorite tv show instead, taking a dump, talking on the phone or whatever and not show up at the curb.
And anyway (where I live, midwest US) DHL drivers sometimes do this, if they have your phone number and are delivering a package that is signature required. They call or text you a few minutes ahead of their arrival.
Some years back there used to be a (US?) print magazine titled "Game Developer Magazine". It existed from 1994 to 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I read it at the time because of a general interest in programming and computer games. I didn't ever really expect to get a job doing it. And reading that magazine didn't really change that expectation...
There was basically about three kinds of articles they generally had:
--One was about new game hardware, software or related tech coming soon.
--One was called "Post Mortem" where after a game was released, they would have a manager talk about all the major problems they had along the way.
--The last was general management articles about running computer game production.
From reading this magazine occasionally for a couple years I gathered two things:
1. Many people who got hired to code were recent college grads in LA or Austin TX, who really just took the job to put something on their resumes. The lower coding jobs were low salary and long hours with little benefits, and they left as soon as they found anything better.
2. There were constant problems with employee turnover. Many articles were about how to set up content management systems so that it was as easy as possible to get new people up to speed and working productively.
I often wondered who the target audience for this magazine really was. From reading it, working at a game company really didn't sound like much of a dream job.
At the grocery store company (in the central USA) where I work, a number of the ~twenty-somethings are doing "gigs", but not for any happy reason.
...And many of them try to push that work off the app when they can; to avoid the app fees and so they can skim on taxes as well...
All of them live on their own--so they need a full-time income--but none of them can find a starting job that is full-time.
And getting one part time job is easy, but most part-time jobs refuse to give fixed hours anymore, so it's nearly impossible to get two part-time jobs at different places.
So they are working one 'normal' part-time job (at the store, for 20-25 hours a week) and doing odd jobs on various phone/web app companies online. The online work is low-skill stuff like yard work, house cleaning, dog walking and so on.
So the truth with most of these people is that they're doing online gig work not because it's better than a part-time job, but because they can't find any full-time job, and because they can't find two part-time jobs that will schedule around each other.
I am not an economist, but I don't know that this is exactly a good sign.
The problem today with having digital electronics as a hobby is not hardware-related, it's simply thinking up useful things to do. How many times have you seen someone ask "I got this Arduino/Rasberry Pi (as a gift, in a contest, some other way), what can I do with it?"... If you can buy from China sources, the prices of most common components is very very inexpensive. Chinese Arduino clones cost $2-$3, and for just a few dollars more you can get boards with other processors that are much faster and have more memory--assuming you write a program that needs either of those things. Display screens cost $3, basic GPS chips cost $1, various wifi/wireless chips cost $3, CCD cameras cost $3, laser rangefinders cost $8, a cell phone radio (requires a SIM) costs $8.
I do think that the main reason for the popularity of Arduino is that both the hardware and the software were made specifically to be easy to use.
Interest/sales of a given processor or IC tend to pick up a lot after there is an Arduino IDE board definition or library for it.
I suspect that people assume that if they cannot get the "professional" dev environment to work, they assume they can still get it to work in the Arduino IDE.
Everything working again. I was gettin kinda jittery without my cat videos and rule #34 children's cartoons.
It was a nice idea, but NoScript does the job pretty well already quite frankly.
I had mine set to upgrade automatically. It did so to ver 66, and now no video will play on any website, at all, even if I want them to. If I click on them, they show a loading icon, then disappear.
The only plugin I have is noscript, but even with that disabled, no videos work at all (and I had lots of sites cleared in NoScript before, to where the videos would play)...
Ummm... how do I revert back to version 65?
Voluntarily breaking picasa links is annoying, but then again, Google insists on caching Pintrest pages -- which pretty much result in a whole page of broken image links 100% of the time that you click on one in the results, no matter if the page is from six days ago or six years ago.
I understand the transitory nature of what Pintrest provides--but it's silly for Google to bother to include Pintrest pages at all, for the same reason.
Now there is two ways to delete your facebook account:
1. Proclaim yourself to be a Nazi, who advocates -- well, I don't know really. I think just saying that you are a Nazi might be enough? And a swastika picture I guess. (-how do you make that ASCII swastika again?-)
2. Proclaim yourself to suspect medical vaccines may sometimes be of questionable usefulness.
They had a chance to make their moral stand, and they backed down.
( -a moral stand is when you defend assholes doing something legal, even when they are still being assholes- )
People in the US generally don't bother with buying unlocked phones from outside sources since technical standards at many cell service providers prevent bringing your own device. And even of the companies that allow it (T-Mobile and AT&T) they will often try to hassle you into upgrading your account, since you aren't using the 'limited' device they sold the account with.
The greater evil here is that Google has sold Android under the feel-good banner of open-source, while allowing phone manufacturers and networks to lock it with their shit-ware intact. And Google is no help with jail-breaking phones, they just shrug and say there's nothing they can do. If Google made a universal unlocking tool, a lot of these "problems" of Android crap-ware would disappear overnight.
Google does their own level of tracking and isn't likely to give that up.... And they like the fees they get from locking it up for cell phone companies.... And so (unfortunately for Google) as iPhones have gotten cheaper, this is becoming a larger and larger selling point in favor of going iPhone and not dealing with Android bullshit at all.
Soy might be decent livestock feed, but you aren't livestock, even if you wish you were.
They used to say it was "just like cows' milk", until a few infants died from being fed exclusively soy milk. So now they don't say that...
And then they found out that if you give toddlers a lot of soy milk, they tend to develop allergies to soy. So now they say not to do that...
But they are still saying that it's perfectly good for adults... despite a number of common health problems that adults get if they drink a lot of it...
???
Does this sound like the warning label of a food that is "perfectly safe"?
Vegan socialist sites are still pushing soy-based-everything, saying how great it is. Except for, well, you know. The infants and children it's already killed and damaged.
If any corporate-made food had done that, they'd insist that it was evil and harmful and should be taken off the market.
College is not about "how to learn". Like the entire modern educational system, it is almost entirely based on memorization abilities.
,
.
Someone very intelligent but with a poor memory is almost guaranteed to fail, and someone with low intelligence but excellent memory is almost guaranteed to succeed.
College is paying a lot of money to jump through hoops for a sheepskin. It may be a requirement of your desired career, but it does not magically improve you at all.
Send your dog to college and see if he comes home quoting Shakespeare.
, ,
How colleges prepare students for jobs that don't exist yet, is-------- they don't
A good college is generally 5 years behind tech/science/business trends, and most colleges are ~10+ years behind.
Want proof? Consider the "blockchain" trend.
Bitcoin began just about nine years ago, and only a few colleges offer courses in blockchain tech at all, and those were created in just the last 2-3 years.
Ironically, the best colleges to go to for current content is the little pay-to-play diploma mills. They have to sell courses based on content, and not on a prestigious university name.
Most of the data is probably going to point to more Police Academy sequels, but I'm still hoping that a follow-up to Popeye isn't off the table yet.
The iPhone is looking more and more reasonable every day.
The best thing that Google could do for Android at this point is to create a universal unlocker / re-locker that worked with all versions of Android going forward, and legally require that licensees not interfere with it.
If Google is afraid to strip the shit-ware out, then at least publish the tools so that end users can do it themselves.
Some years ago Reason magazine did a story on the history of Dvorak.
What they found was that most of the early studies showing Dvorak keyboards to be superior, were done by Dvorak himself,,, who was trying to sell his patented keyboard to the US Navy.
If it works better for you that's great--but the Navy was not impressed and didn't buy it.
https://reason.com/archives/19...
I would agree that on technical grounds, Dvorak sounds like a big improvement over querty... but the few modern studies I've read of showed no clear benefit.
For me QUERTY is good enough, but I hate flat keyboards. I gotta have split or my wrists ache from doing the butterfly thing.
:>| The later 'media' models were not as good IMO.
Right now I am still using a gen-1 MS Natural keyboard, but it is the last one I have.
Kinesys makes a split model that looks good.
I like the Ergodox too, but the modifier key thing scares me. I'd prefer it with just a plain querty layout.
Really though,,,, I am wondering when voice-recognition typing died?
Seems like 10-15 years ago there was a few companies trying to make it work as well as possible, but stories now are rare.
By now a keyboard should be kept next to the punch cards in the modern cabinet of curiosities...
Sure it got where it was supposed to go--but it cost $175K, was only ~7 feet long, only averaged ~1 mph, and--last but not least--it has nowhere for busty vixens to tan their ta-tas and sip wine coolers.
Fumed silica is powdered sand. It has a number of uses, one common one is for fillers in other solidifying liquids such as rubber, glue and paint. 'Food-safe' (sterile) fumed silica is a common food ingredient/thickener. You can buy bags of it on ebay.
... but then again, what fun stuff doesn't do that?
Fumed silica bounces. If you hit a bag of fumed silica with your hand, you can feel it vibrate after for a bit, as if it is rubber.
Oh--and also it can kill you (if you breathe it)
Artificial Incineration you say?...
I tend to think that something like a UBI (perhaps including food and housing credit) is the best solution. My reasoning is as follows:
Suppose there comes a time when there is a huge population of employable adults, but only a relatively small of highly technical, highly complicated jobs to be done (commanding robot swarms or whatever, to make enough basic supplies of everything, for everybody).
And so there is only jobs for 1% of everybody...
You don't want everybody applying for those jobs, just because most people probably are not qualified for them.
It's much more efficient to pay everyone a UBI and offer the jobs for a higher-than-UBI pay rate, and then only the people who think they might be qualified ( and interested ) will bother to apply.
A person's interest level in their job is a big factor in how well they do it; it relates to how much attention they maintain and how willing they are to try to improve their performance.
The more critical a given job is, the better off a company is hiring someone that really enjoys doing it, and doing it well. You don't want to hire someone who is just there for the money.
--Also, the UBI works better for all of the "lower achievers", since they can pursue any particular interest as they please.
For example:
Let's say a guy on the UBI decides that he wants {one certain thing} more than anything else in the world. Say, a BMW sedan, for an example.
And let's say that the highest-paying jobs pay millions of dollars a year, but the lower-paying ones only pay $25K a year.
He can take any lower-paying job to save money towards {that one thing he desires}, while being able to depend on the UBI to cover anything else.
He can't afford everything on his UBI+lower-wage working income, but he gets to work straight toward the one thing he has decided that he wants.
I think that we are still quite a few years away from any broad-based situation such as this however. At least 50 years, maybe 100+. Or more.
Also a lot of society would need time to adjust to the concept of being the "idle class". Japanese are famous for their dedication, but many other people around the world consider their job to be a measure of their self-worth. "Being a bum" would take some time to get used to...
Legalese: bicycles are not federally regulated, but there is a technical definition that the CPSC uses when defining them, and that most states use as well.
Now then...
1) In pretty much all US jurisdictions the ONLY non-motor-vehicle device that can be used on public roads is bicycles*, and these electric scooters would not technically qualify as bicycles under the Federal CPSC definition. So they would not be legal for adults to use on public roads, at all...
*(-draft animals and drawn carts and wagons are still legal too, on most US roads but not all roads-)
2) Also in most US jurisdictions, the ONLY powered devices that can be used on sidewalks is mobility devices for assisting the handicapped, and they have their own set of requirements under the Federal ADA regulations. Among those requirements is that the person using them is medically handicapped...
3) The last option is if the scooters were declared as motor vehicles--but for that to happen, they would need to meet the Federal DOT regulations for one class of motor vehicles already defined, and the scooters would need to be issued VIN numbers (a standard format serial number issued by the Federal Dept of Transportation). And since the scooters cannot technically qualify as any class of motor vehicle, they can't do this either.
These scooters are only considered to be "motorized toys", and are only legal to use on private property--just like pocket bikes. Absent any special law to exempt them, they cannot legally be used on public sidewalks OR public roads.
This is also the reason that a few communities had to enact special laws for people to use Segways when they first came out.
Nowadays there are some handicapped people using Segways, and in that instance they could qualify for sidewalk use as in point #2 above.
This is 100% truth. And it's really rather sad that someone in such a position of power doesn't understand it.
The financial cost of a thing is usually a pretty good measure of how much resources were used in its construction... Like for example: if you compare a wooden rowboat to a 200-foot luxury yacht. The one that costs more, costs more because it uses a lot more resources.
It is even a usually good predictor of how much resources will be used because of its construction, even if the item doesn't consume much resources itself. For example: a pretentious modern artist paints a $10 canvas black, and sells it for $50 million dollars. He is probably going to go out and spend some of that money on things he really doesn't need--like maybe, a 200-foot luxury yacht.
It's not wrong to want to make an efficient choice or protect the environment, but when you impose extra costs onto one thing (regular motor cars) and reduce the cost on another thing (give subsidies to electric cars) you've still done nothing to change the underlying truth of the matter. You aren't changing the efficiencies, you are only changing people's perception of the efficiencies. And you are probably doing MORE damage to the environment than if you had not tampered with the prices at all, because you have disconnected the cost of your favored item from the actual costs on resources that it imposes.
"EV's with subsidies" is not a good thing for the environment. If EV's were more efficient overall than the cars already in use, they wouldn't need subsidies to appeal more to consumer opinion.
...but (maybe just for me?) at least 1/3 of the time, they are a link to a story on the NYT website. And I rarely visit the NYT site on my own, otherwise.
A few years back I ordered something small that cost $12 or so. I think it was some kind of Park bicycle wrench.
What they sent me was this:
https://www.amazon.com/YELLOW-...
An air-conditioning test and charging manifold, that was priced $175 at the time.
I got on the website and requested a return and explained what happened, and then for the next few days started getting two different sets of messages.
One set was the usual automated set that said I had to return the item by a certain number of days or I would get charged for it.
The other set was real people responding, telling me that I wouldn't get charged for it and that I didn't need to return the item and that I could dispose of it as I pleased.
When I asked why they didn't want it returned, the real person said that some items are hazardous enough that if they make a mistake and send one out, they will not accept if back for any reason. I said that I had only opened the shipping box and not the sealed item box itself, and he said that didn't matter. I could keep it since they would just destroy it if it was returned, and the company didn't want to pay the return shipping cost just to destroy it. I never got charged for it either.
I gave it to my AC repair guy, since AC maintenance is not a hobby of mine and it's not good for much else.
Ever since then I have wondered however,,,, what is the most-expensive thing that Amazon has given away just because they shipped the totally-wrong item? I don't know how happy they'd be to talk about that, but it would be an interesting read...
The central concept of mass-transit is fundamentally flawed and this should be factored into decisions for its expansion.
Mass-transit suffers from a major utilization problem in that to be attractive to riders, it must be reasonably fast, but also be easily accessible.
A mass-transit system with a small number of stops can run faster, but many people will refuse to use it due to the lack of accessibility.
The problem is that the more stops that are added to increase the accessibility, the slower overall the speed becomes until it isn't attractive anymore for that reason.
The main problem with mass-transit is inherent to the concept and cannot be solved.
Contrast that with individual transportation: imagine a vehicle similar to an enclosed, 3-wheel motorcycle, seating 1 or 2 people.
It could cost much less than a car, it could take up less space to operate and park, the lower weight would cause less road damage, and the fuel efficiency could be greatly improved beyond what most motorcycles provide now.
The remaining problems with individual transportation are technological, and improvements can be found.
When most people advocate for more mass-transit, the gist of their argument is not about really solving anything. It's mostly about "we've wasted money for this long, we can't stop now!"... Perhaps it is time to take a longer view?