The whole point of spending $5mil at GS was that was supposed to get the BEST advisors.
As to doing the deal, one of the things you expect to get for your $5mil is someone who will advise you that your gut reaction is wrong. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, too.
Oddly enough, right around that time, I was working for an itty-bitty startup, and WE were in negotiations to get bought in a deal that was all stock, and after looking hard and doing our own crappy version of due diligence, we said "No". It was not fun, and not easy. If we had paid someone reputable that kind of money to advise, and they did not tell us "no", I am sure that we would not.
I don't think so. Those are good tires, and the brakes are large. The weight is low-ish and centralized.
How would I know this? I ride a cargo bike, similar tires, similar (smaller) disk brakes, sometimes larger loads, sometimes come down hills at nice speeds (usually limit it to 35mph). Handling is fine; can go no-hands across 3 bumps in succession, or no-hands with a hundred-pound load.
And with tires and shocks like those on an earlier cargo bike, I once hit an unexpected pothole (poor planning on my part) at over 30mph, and the net effect was a loud "bang!" as I bottomed the shocks, and sharp smack in the hands from the impact coming up the handlebars. The bike rode rock-solid straight through it all.
It's car-think, period. A 600 watt motor is an absurd amount of power. A streamlined tricycle (Sinner Mango, something like that) happily cruises at 25mph under human power. Me-on-a-cargo-bicycle exceeds both top speed and range of this joke
If you are worried about your autonomous car losing dick-waggling contests, then perhaps you have forgotten that the point is to get from point A to point B in safety and comfort. The spare time you gain by not driving yourself should more than compensate for a minute or two lost to people who get their jollies from winning a pissing contest with an inanimate driver.
You don't exactly have that right in a car; it can be taken away for a variety of reasons, including boring stuff like failing to renew your driver's license. It's not a "right" if something stupid like that can cause it to evaporate.
You have a right to walk, and probably a right to ride a bicycle (there's some discussion I've seen about bike access to interstate highways in places where there are no alternative routes, based on the right to travel). And just like a bicycle, if there are alternate routes available for non-autonomous driving, you may find (1) your use of interstates officially banned and (2) that it is really damn unpleasant for you on the interstate. Sharing the road with platoons of high-speed drafting robo-cars might be kinda sucky.
Strictly speaking, the parasitic effects are worse than proportional to speed. The power required to overcome wind resistance is cubic in speed (the energy is quadratic in distance, since you get there faster). The knee hits different vehicles at different speeds -- bicycles, it's around 20mph (low-friction tires and drive-train, little aero optimization), cars at somewhat higher speeds. But once most of your friction is from the wind, going faster is very costly.
I think the point of the paper (misrepresented by both the Register and the Slashdot summary) was to cross-check estimates of climate trends that would be occurring, were it not for global warming. Including the global warming data would completely F up their analysis. No conspiracy on the part of the authors at all. This may change estimates of how much things will warm, and it's not clear to me if it reduces them or increases them. (larger cooling trend could cut warming; warming in the face of larger cooling trend could indicate stronger warming response than estimated; warming in the face of larger cooling trend could indicate faster warming response than estimated, which means there's less future-warm in the pipeline, which is good.)
And all the crowd here that thinks that this "disproves" global warming, you guys are a pack of clowns. There's no conspiracy, no cult, only minor course corrections in figuring out what is going on and how our climate is likely to respond. It's one level removed from the spell-checkers -- "ha ha, you have no credibility because you did not lurn to spel rite". As to claiming that doing much to cut CO2 emissions would trash the economy, I can only marvel at your credulous acceptance of economic predictions, as if we are better at that than we are at predicting climate ("DOW 36000!" "Obama's stimulus will cause hyperinflation!" etc.)
Not got any gay friends, do you? Who was it whose remarks on gay marriage forced the issue for Obama?
I am never sure with any of these guys (right or left) when they are pretending to be careless klutzes, whether it is the true buffoon shining through, them just pretending to be a regular guy, or case of an incredibly busy and overworked person not able to keep straight what they should or should not be saying in public. Biden's got a pretty good track record in political office; long lasting, like Paul, but also getting stuff passed, unlike Paul. Palin, in contrast, has a poor track record -- she quit being governor, mid-term. All the rest of it looks bad to me (and since I don't like her, I am pre-disposed to believe it) but could also be a result of political smear campaigns (though it seems to me that they would have to be improbably effective). But she really did quit being governor, and Biden really did serve all those years.
Except for the guy currently running for president, Massachusetts politicians would not be a bad bet (since it's Democrats that run the state, you wouldn't want to pay too much attention to our Republicans anyway). Details here, but in general we score well on most metrics -- low divorce rate, lots of education, healthy population (especially children). Economically, high income, low unemployment, high productivity. What's not clear is whether the high incomes cause the other good stuff, or if the other good stuff attracts/causes the high incomes.
Interesting thing about Texas (and I did live there for about eight years) is whether they have forgotten the lessons that they learned back in the 80s. Back then, I believe it went: "Please God, Just Give Me One More Oil Boom. I Promise Not to Blow It Next Time."
O rly? I had the "luck" to attend a meeting in Raleigh (I know, NORTH Carolina, they have glaciers there, right?) when it dumped 21 inches on them. Pretty awesome. Got diverted to Greensboro, seven of us rented a van (I got to drive, since I had most recent snow driving experience), had to keep it extra days till the airport opened. Hotel the meeting was at, the staff could not get home, and were sleeping in spare rooms. We had a supply of decent food; people stuck at a different hotel had nothing but beans-N-weenies for three days. Took several days to open the airport, there was one lane in, and the runway was still full of ice lumps (the takeoff was clumpity-bump-clumpity-bump, faster and faster, all the way till the wheels left the ground).
So I think 5 inches in SC is a possibility. I've seen one inch in Houston, that was a real party.
Unless you're one of the truly melanin-challenged (e.g., Irish, as noted below) you can develop a decent working tan in the lower latitudes. And it helps if you go out after 3 or before 10, as GP mentions he did, and if you treat the mid-day sun with a little respect. A little Mediterranean blood helps too, but it is not necessary.
You adapt. Not sure how the breathing works, but I grew up in Florida, college and grad school in Houston, and when we lived in California, every time we returned to visit the ancestral home(s), for a day or two my body would go "whoa, wait, what is this shit?" -- and then it would be okay.
I think there are several reasons why a good subway system could be correlated with traffic jams.
1) good subways are installed to alleviate pre-existing traffic jams, so there are already traffic jams
2) good subways are correlated with old cities with weird layouts, so there are traffic jams
3) good subways allow you to sustain more economic activity than could possibly be accommodated with cars alone. Some fraction of those people on the subway are "marginal" subway users, meaning, if the traffic were not so bad, or parking so expensive, or (fill in the blank, in some way, less sucky), they would drive. This means that if you add freeway capacity or remove bottlenecks, some of those people leave the subway and consume all that shiny capacity that you just added, jamming it up all over again.
Full size bikes are actually a problem, and I speak as someone who wishes it were easier. If you look at the "bike cars" run by CalTrain between San Jose and San Francisco, they devote half the floor space (i.e., 3/8 the capacity of one car) to a mere 40 bicycles (8 stacks of 5). That's a big capacity hit (if Caltrain actually ran full of people on a regular basis). The time to load and unload is also an issue; it takes longer, and that can delay trains, which can delay the trains behind them.
I don't do this regularly, so it's not an issue for me personally, but after trying to figure out whether it could (for example) work here in Boston or not, I had to concede that a full-sized bicycle was not just another carry-on item.
In your case, what's the alternative? Buy a car? That's a big pile of money. You could buy multiple good bicycles for the cost of a car -- as I proposed above, one with motor assist (or a small scooter) and enough carrying capacity to haul you and the Brompton both, to get you to the train station near your home. Park the fast bike, carry the folder, use it at the job end. The people I know who own Bromptons rave about them, and I can rave at you about the wonderful usefulness of a cargo bike.
The busses-to-the-burbs go about the same distance as my happy-to-bike-it range, but my bike is cheaper, has more flexible hours, and is (door-to-door) faster. People need not sweat, if they're allergic to exercise; small scooters (electric or infernal combustion) are faster than the bike, have adequate range, and not as likely to cause traffic jams (because they are smaller).
Do you really need electric assist on the folding bike that you use to commute? This seems like one of those best-is-enemy-of-the-adequate situations. Or if you have a hilly commute at the home end, get some sort of a cargo bike with electric assist, carry the folder to the train, take the folder to the train. Note that the combined cost of a cargo bike with e-assist AND a quality folding bicycle ($5k ought to do it) is a fraction of the cost of a new car. Used cars are cheaper, but so are used bikes (and you might wonder, why is it that used cargo bikes and folders don't lose their value as quickly as automobiles?)
And I would view the electric bike as the niche item, not the folder.
What's language got to do with it? There's a whole lot of assumptions embedded in that. My mother-in-law is a 2nd-generation born-in-the-US citizen, but her first language was Spanish. Her mother, born in the US, had an accent till the day she died. Those crafty Canadians speak pretty good English, too.
And there's a difference between being asked to identify yourself, and being hauled in for failing to carry papers. One is annoying, but doesn't require you to do anything that extraordinary. The other is a silly rule which, if you fail to get it right, gives the police the right/ability to hassle you quite a lot under cover of "protecting our borders", even if your record is clean, even if you are a citizen (but one who happens to be dark-skinned or speak with an accent).
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of spending $5mil at GS was that was supposed to get the BEST advisors.
As to doing the deal, one of the things you expect to get for your $5mil is someone who will advise you that your gut reaction is wrong. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, too.
Oddly enough, right around that time, I was working for an itty-bitty startup, and WE were in negotiations to get bought in a deal that was all stock, and after looking hard and doing our own crappy version of due diligence, we said "No". It was not fun, and not easy. If we had paid someone reputable that kind of money to advise, and they did not tell us "no", I am sure that we would not.
I don't think so. Those are good tires, and the brakes are large. The weight is low-ish and centralized.
How would I know this? I ride a cargo bike, similar tires, similar (smaller) disk brakes, sometimes larger loads, sometimes come down hills at nice speeds (usually limit it to 35mph). Handling is fine; can go no-hands across 3 bumps in succession, or no-hands with a hundred-pound load.
And with tires and shocks like those on an earlier cargo bike, I once hit an unexpected pothole (poor planning on my part) at over 30mph, and the net effect was a loud "bang!" as I bottomed the shocks, and sharp smack in the hands from the impact coming up the handlebars. The bike rode rock-solid straight through it all.
It's car-think, period. A 600 watt motor is an absurd amount of power. A streamlined tricycle (Sinner Mango, something like that) happily cruises at 25mph under human power. Me-on-a-cargo-bicycle exceeds both top speed and range of this joke
Roads are not public areas? That's what I thought was being discussed.
If you are worried about your autonomous car losing dick-waggling contests, then perhaps you have forgotten that the point is to get from point A to point B in safety and comfort. The spare time you gain by not driving yourself should more than compensate for a minute or two lost to people who get their jollies from winning a pissing contest with an inanimate driver.
You don't exactly have that right in a car; it can be taken away for a variety of reasons, including boring stuff like failing to renew your driver's license. It's not a "right" if something stupid like that can cause it to evaporate.
You have a right to walk, and probably a right to ride a bicycle (there's some discussion I've seen about bike access to interstate highways in places where there are no alternative routes, based on the right to travel). And just like a bicycle, if there are alternate routes available for non-autonomous driving, you may find (1) your use of interstates officially banned and (2) that it is really damn unpleasant for you on the interstate. Sharing the road with platoons of high-speed drafting robo-cars might be kinda sucky.
All my colleagues who take the express bus to the subway at Alewife (Boston MBTA) would probably disagree with you.
Strictly speaking, the parasitic effects are worse than proportional to speed. The power required to overcome wind resistance is cubic in speed (the energy is quadratic in distance, since you get there faster). The knee hits different vehicles at different speeds -- bicycles, it's around 20mph (low-friction tires and drive-train, little aero optimization), cars at somewhat higher speeds. But once most of your friction is from the wind, going faster is very costly.
I think the point of the paper (misrepresented by both the Register and the Slashdot summary) was to cross-check estimates of climate trends that would be occurring, were it not for global warming. Including the global warming data would completely F up their analysis. No conspiracy on the part of the authors at all. This may change estimates of how much things will warm, and it's not clear to me if it reduces them or increases them. (larger cooling trend could cut warming; warming in the face of larger cooling trend could indicate stronger warming response than estimated; warming in the face of larger cooling trend could indicate faster warming response than estimated, which means there's less future-warm in the pipeline, which is good.)
And all the crowd here that thinks that this "disproves" global warming, you guys are a pack of clowns. There's no conspiracy, no cult, only minor course corrections in figuring out what is going on and how our climate is likely to respond. It's one level removed from the spell-checkers -- "ha ha, you have no credibility because you did not lurn to spel rite". As to claiming that doing much to cut CO2 emissions would trash the economy, I can only marvel at your credulous acceptance of economic predictions, as if we are better at that than we are at predicting climate ("DOW 36000!" "Obama's stimulus will cause hyperinflation!" etc.)
Coincidentally, just today: http://www.advocate.com/print-issue/current-issue/2012/07/06/obama-we-trust?page=0,0
Not got any gay friends, do you? Who was it whose remarks on gay marriage forced the issue for Obama?
I am never sure with any of these guys (right or left) when they are pretending to be careless klutzes, whether it is the true buffoon shining through, them just pretending to be a regular guy, or case of an incredibly busy and overworked person not able to keep straight what they should or should not be saying in public. Biden's got a pretty good track record in political office; long lasting, like Paul, but also getting stuff passed, unlike Paul. Palin, in contrast, has a poor track record -- she quit being governor, mid-term. All the rest of it looks bad to me (and since I don't like her, I am pre-disposed to believe it) but could also be a result of political smear campaigns (though it seems to me that they would have to be improbably effective). But she really did quit being governor, and Biden really did serve all those years.
Romney's track record on this is NOT better, so be careful who and why you choose. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/06/us-usa-campaign-romney-computers-idUSTRE7B500X20111206
Except for the guy currently running for president, Massachusetts politicians would not be a bad bet (since it's Democrats that run the state, you wouldn't want to pay too much attention to our Republicans anyway). Details here, but in general we score well on most metrics -- low divorce rate, lots of education, healthy population (especially children). Economically, high income, low unemployment, high productivity. What's not clear is whether the high incomes cause the other good stuff, or if the other good stuff attracts/causes the high incomes.
Interesting thing about Texas (and I did live there for about eight years) is whether they have forgotten the lessons that they learned back in the 80s. Back then, I believe it went: "Please God, Just Give Me One More Oil Boom. I Promise Not to Blow It Next Time."
O rly? I had the "luck" to attend a meeting in Raleigh (I know, NORTH Carolina, they have glaciers there, right?) when it dumped 21 inches on them. Pretty awesome. Got diverted to Greensboro, seven of us rented a van (I got to drive, since I had most recent snow driving experience), had to keep it extra days till the airport opened. Hotel the meeting was at, the staff could not get home, and were sleeping in spare rooms. We had a supply of decent food; people stuck at a different hotel had nothing but beans-N-weenies for three days. Took several days to open the airport, there was one lane in, and the runway was still full of ice lumps (the takeoff was clumpity-bump-clumpity-bump, faster and faster, all the way till the wheels left the ground).
So I think 5 inches in SC is a possibility. I've seen one inch in Houston, that was a real party.
Unless you're one of the truly melanin-challenged (e.g., Irish, as noted below) you can develop a decent working tan in the lower latitudes. And it helps if you go out after 3 or before 10, as GP mentions he did, and if you treat the mid-day sun with a little respect. A little Mediterranean blood helps too, but it is not necessary.
Try that stunt in Florida and you'll just grow fungus and mildew.
You adapt. Not sure how the breathing works, but I grew up in Florida, college and grad school in Houston, and when we lived in California, every time we returned to visit the ancestral home(s), for a day or two my body would go "whoa, wait, what is this shit?" -- and then it would be okay.
I think there are several reasons why a good subway system could be correlated with traffic jams.
1) good subways are installed to alleviate pre-existing traffic jams, so there are already traffic jams
2) good subways are correlated with old cities with weird layouts, so there are traffic jams
3) good subways allow you to sustain more economic activity than could possibly be accommodated with cars alone. Some fraction of those people on the subway are "marginal" subway users, meaning, if the traffic were not so bad, or parking so expensive, or (fill in the blank, in some way, less sucky), they would drive. This means that if you add freeway capacity or remove bottlenecks, some of those people leave the subway and consume all that shiny capacity that you just added, jamming it up all over again.
Full size bikes are actually a problem, and I speak as someone who wishes it were easier. If you look at the "bike cars" run by CalTrain between San Jose and San Francisco, they devote half the floor space (i.e., 3/8 the capacity of one car) to a mere 40 bicycles (8 stacks of 5). That's a big capacity hit (if Caltrain actually ran full of people on a regular basis). The time to load and unload is also an issue; it takes longer, and that can delay trains, which can delay the trains behind them.
I don't do this regularly, so it's not an issue for me personally, but after trying to figure out whether it could (for example) work here in Boston or not, I had to concede that a full-sized bicycle was not just another carry-on item.
In your case, what's the alternative? Buy a car? That's a big pile of money. You could buy multiple good bicycles for the cost of a car -- as I proposed above, one with motor assist (or a small scooter) and enough carrying capacity to haul you and the Brompton both, to get you to the train station near your home. Park the fast bike, carry the folder, use it at the job end. The people I know who own Bromptons rave about them, and I can rave at you about the wonderful usefulness of a cargo bike.
The busses-to-the-burbs go about the same distance as my happy-to-bike-it range, but my bike is cheaper, has more flexible hours, and is (door-to-door) faster. People need not sweat, if they're allergic to exercise; small scooters (electric or infernal combustion) are faster than the bike, have adequate range, and not as likely to cause traffic jams (because they are smaller).
Problem solved, except for your whiny victim-of-liberals attitude: http://www.mbta.com/riding_the_t/accessible_services/?id=7108
Do you really need electric assist on the folding bike that you use to commute? This seems like one of those best-is-enemy-of-the-adequate situations. Or if you have a hilly commute at the home end, get some sort of a cargo bike with electric assist, carry the folder to the train, take the folder to the train. Note that the combined cost of a cargo bike with e-assist AND a quality folding bicycle ($5k ought to do it) is a fraction of the cost of a new car. Used cars are cheaper, but so are used bikes (and you might wonder, why is it that used cargo bikes and folders don't lose their value as quickly as automobiles?)
And I would view the electric bike as the niche item, not the folder.
Possible failure mode: Electrical signals attract sharks, and they bite it to see if it is tasty.
It's not a crime by an "illegal" alien, though I surely do agree with your point.
What's language got to do with it? There's a whole lot of assumptions embedded in that. My mother-in-law is a 2nd-generation born-in-the-US citizen, but her first language was Spanish. Her mother, born in the US, had an accent till the day she died. Those crafty Canadians speak pretty good English, too.
And there's a difference between being asked to identify yourself, and being hauled in for failing to carry papers. One is annoying, but doesn't require you to do anything that extraordinary. The other is a silly rule which, if you fail to get it right, gives the police the right/ability to hassle you quite a lot under cover of "protecting our borders", even if your record is clean, even if you are a citizen (but one who happens to be dark-skinned or speak with an accent).