Greece != Rome. By the time of that steam engine Greece was a Roman province and that was early AD and not 400 BC.
The Roman empire was based on slavery to it's very roots. They conquered to gain slaves to do work for them. When that cycle stopped is when Rome started to collapse.
They also had no concept of the scientific method and knowledge was coveted by individual guilds. That meant that even with a steam engine there would have been no industrial revolution.
Nobody has ever claimed the Volt has a lower TCO than the Prius execpt for people looking to trash it.
Odd, one of the Volt supporters in this very thread tried to make that claim (using wrong numbers but still).
When the Prius came out, it was not a lower TCO than other cars on the market either. Now, 10 years later, it's approaching parity and it is successful as such.
First of all, the TCO difference for the Prius were much smaller and for some segments the TCO was in fact positive (ie: heavy city driving). The Prius always had an actual market while the Volt does not.
Second of all, magnitude matters. Paying $5k extra is acceptable to many people. Paying $20k extra is not.
The cost of the Volt WILL come down in subsequent model years as the technology improves.
Assuming GM doesn't go bankrupt again or doesn't kill the whole project from lack of profitability and then go bankrupt again.
GM couldn't care less about you right now
Given TFA, it seems that they should have.
Soon, in a few years, you will be seriously considering purchasing an EREV.
Nope, doubt I ever will. See, I like cities and so I tend to live in them. Perfect for an electric car you say. Except in cities you live in these things called apartments and use this thing called street parking. So charging an electric car is impossible. Although my old job did have electric car spots but all the non-plugin Prius drivers took them so that was a bust.
Granted I haven't used my car in months now, thank you functional public transportation, so I'm not much of a customer demographic for car companies anymore period. TCO wise getting a zipcar membership would make more sense right now.
In terms of how much you pay which is what most people care about. That's, btw, if you don't put a single ounce of gasoline in the Volt. Even in it's best potential environment and usage it'd still cost more overall than a Prius. There is no way to make up the cost premium of the Volt through the cost savings of not buying gasoline.
It is not possible to run a Prius (again, excluding the new plug-in version which isn't really out yet) without using gas. It is possible to run a Volt without using gas. Why does everyone overlook this one simple detail?
So? Why would I want to pay more to use a less convenient form of energy?
And how many years will it take you to drive 150k miles of electric on the Volt? Remember you gotta recharge for hours every 30 miles or so. Don't forget that after 10 years you need to spend $10+k to have the batteries replaced.
Electricity also isn't free so you need to cut those gasoline savings down a bit to make up for it.
I get around $0.05 savings/mile for a Volt versus a Prius for the first 30 miles assuming some rather inexpensive electricity. At 150k miles that only $6000 in savings so you're still out the extra $20k you paid for the Volt. Worse, at 30 miles per day it has taken you 13 years to get that many miles. So 3 years ago you had to pay another $10k to get new batteries.
So basically at it's current price the Volt is worthless from every economical perspective one can think of.
And as others have said in this very thread, it doesn't matter. Even if neither car is used for more than 30 miles per day the Prius still comes out ahead.
Even the most ideal Volt user in the world would be better off buying a Prius.
Your numbers are way way way off. You probably missed a decimal point, it's $0.09 less (at best) per mile and not $0.90. Not counting maintenance and so on.
That changes your examples significantly.
Now your hypothetical ideal Volt candidate only saves $985.50 per year. And pays $20000 more for the car. In other words even the ideal user would lose money by buying a volt because they'd never make up the cost premium
So yes, the comparison is very simple. The Volt sucks and no one should buy one.
Sigh. Cloud means many things. Please stop buying into the market speak that there is this single entity or system or idea called "the cloud."
Netflix is a cloud based service provider. They do not host data for you and the data is not yours. You rent access to their data.
That is very different from Amazon or iTunes which also store similar data on the cloud. But they claim to "sell" this data to you and then simply host a copy for you (for easy access).
That in turn is different from, say, DropBox who host data provided by you on the cloud for easy access and sharing.
Each of these is a different type of service and should be considered individually for the problem at hand. The person I replied to originally appeared to lump all cloud services together (given the tone of first post and his reply), not comprehend the differences, not understand what netflix actually did and not be able to judge a service on it's own merits.
You seem confused. None of that matters to the discussion. Netflix is not a data storage service. It's not a cloud storage system for your digital good's. It's a service. As long as you pay you get access to whatever they happen to have. Nothing on Netflix is yours in any meaning of the word except maybe your ratings/comments. Nor are you forced to use only them. They're also incredibly inexpensive.
Now Amazon or Itunes are a different type of beast but we're not talking about those.
So as I already said, you do the math over what you value and then decide what you want prefer to buy (and what streaming is good enough for). Or you decide that the lack of video quality and dvd extras makes it unusable for you.
if they choose to drop some titles or if their license ends, the titles are no longer available.
So? How many titles do you watch more than once? How much did all those titles cost you? Is having to, gasp, find another source for an occasional title that is dropped seriously going to cost you more than buying all those titles to begin with? Do you really need to have access to 1600 titles at a second's notice?
Sounds like you've got an irrational hatred of cloud services that is, ahem, clouding your rational judgement.
No, companies simply realized that they can now sell twice as much stuff to people for the same price and people will in fact buy it. Thus the same number of people work except they now produce twice as much. Consumerism at it's finest.
The majority wants what's best for most people, the minority wants what's best for only a few.
Utter BS.
The majority wants what they're been convinced by a minority would be best for them. It's been that way since the first Greek democracy where the best public orator got the population to follow him. In the end a minority has all the power, the question is just how difficult you make it for them to gain and use that power.
That is the issue that the founding fathers tried to solve.
The point is that the risks aren't known for such treatments, if they were it'd be science not snake oil, and salesman always lie. Hell, the risks for many prescriptions aren't even known fully and those have had an order of magnitude more verifiable studies. People are also easy to convince. Have fun proving it after you're maimed or dead.
Do seriously you think Pharmaceutical companies wouldn't lie, cheat, bribe and probably kill to make their "unproven drugs" look good? Who cares if it kills a100k people as long as they make a buck in the process and the litigation costs less than their profits.
There's a reason we have so many laws against fraud, con man and so on.
If a "terminal" patient is offered a treatment which is 99% likely to kill them, and 1% likely to make them better or cure them, it should be their choice to weigh those risks/benefits.
Steve Jobs took that option, it possibly killed him. A kid I know lost his whole eye socket because his parents took that option.
This isn't only about terminal patients, this is about unpleasant proven medication versus pleasant unproven snake oil. Except by the time you're done with the snake oil the actual treatments may no longer be able to save you or the side effects might be a lot worse. Most disease don't sit still while you dick around with fifty treatments.
I don't believe a word of the explanation of how it works, but I believe it does work for some people, just as the placebo effect does.
Which means it doesn't work since the same effect can be gotten from any placebo. Or from doing nothing at all. Amazingly our bodies can heal n their own which is why drug studies are such complicated things to do correctly.
It's a myth that you simply dump something out as "Open Source" and it will magically be supported by some group of volunteers. Most, if not virtually all, open source projects have paid people at companies doing much of the development. Often companies dedicated to that product although those using it contribute as well.
As best I can tell no one else is really using WebOS and HP just said they're not going to provide development effort for it.
I suspect there'll be enough "volunteers" to act as free support bitches and keep WebOS technically alive but for all practical purposes this means it's never going to be on anything but life support.
No it's not if you're disabled. Unless you like walking five blocks to the subway, climbing four flights of stairs, walking another two blocks in transfers, another four staircases and then another five blocks when you get to your location. Or spending three hours on a bus and still having to walk five blocks to and from the bus.
Oh wait, you can't walk more than fifty feet? Well sucks to be you.
There's a reason NYC provides (read: is legally forced to provide) free shared van service for disabled people. It's slow as shit even by NYC standards but it's there for a reason.
Your own comment said that lack of sleep is linked to heart disease. As a result your claim was that those with sleep issues would have a higher death rate due to the induced heart disease. However, by controlling for heart disease the study removes that from being a factor.
In other words, your argument that the study was invalid because lack of sleep is strongly linked to increased heart disease was wrong.
Now you can make the claim, as I did in another post, that there are factors caused by lack of sleep they didn't control for (ie: not heart disease, liver failure, diabetes, asthma, obesity, etc, etc.) but heart disease is not one of them.
Cancer is an interesting one. They do observe more cancer in the drug users than the non-drug users. On the surface you could argue that supports your views however they also note that multiple controlled randomized studies show a link between these drugs and cancer.
They tried to do that under the assumption that in general a lack of sleep probably doesn't kill you. The hypertension, or diabetes, or heart disease, or liver failure or obesity is that kills you. They did control for differences in those factors and found no change in their results.
Of course, the increased rate of crashing your car into to a wall at 90mph due to insomnia wouldn't be taken into account.
And for them it's more reliable to use a cloud provider than to have everything on a 10 year old computer in a corner, running windows 2k with no backup options. Or a machine in some data center that no one has touched in equally long. Many people make very good money rescuing such companies from the disasters they have wrought onto themselves when those servers finally die.
It's not even that "cloud" is a new concept for such companies. Those companies have had "cloud" options for decades. Back when they required a special router modem that dialed into the "cloud" provider's servers.
There's the ones hosting websites, the ones proving api based web services, the ones providing data analysis services, the one providing data hosting services. Actually any startup that isn't using Big Data (tm) to get extra attention is going to have issues nowadays.
Then there's the ones who care about not losing data, care about up time, care about scalability and so on.
Not to mention time, dealing with AWS virtual servers is so much easier than a physical server. Cloning an actual server takes time, money and effort.Cloning a AWS server takes a few clicks.
Of course there's also costs, collocating isn't cheap and you still need a third party to do backups with. Not to mention that cloud charges per month while having your own server is an upfront cost. Starups aim to have more later instead of now.
When people talk about poor people who do not have the time or energy to prepare meals, we are talking about these people.
Stop trying to retcon the debate to make yourself look like less of an idiot. You made claims which in no way involved this 13% of Americans and then had your ass handed to you. Accept it and shut up before the hole you're digging reaches China.
...woosh. That's the sound of the parent's post and what the people you were talking to were saying flying way way over your head.
When they say Skype, they mean Skype for VIDEO chat. Get it now?
Then again you're apparently the sort of person who ridicules others instead of wondering why they're saying something so I doubt there's much point in writing this post.
As the AC said, I was calling you specifically an idiot. Most every non-fat poor family I knew, including my own, was perfectly able to use a refrigerator and microwave. So does everyone else I know at work who prefers not to spend $15/day on lunch.
And congratulations on finally getting the point, the reason these people eat such crappy food isn't because they're poor or busy. It's because they're horribly lazy. That's the whole point. It's cheaper to cook your own food and it only take a couple hours a week to do. Yet these people don't do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Greece != Rome. By the time of that steam engine Greece was a Roman province and that was early AD and not 400 BC.
The Roman empire was based on slavery to it's very roots. They conquered to gain slaves to do work for them. When that cycle stopped is when Rome started to collapse.
They also had no concept of the scientific method and knowledge was coveted by individual guilds. That meant that even with a steam engine there would have been no industrial revolution.
Nobody has ever claimed the Volt has a lower TCO than the Prius execpt for people looking to trash it.
Odd, one of the Volt supporters in this very thread tried to make that claim (using wrong numbers but still).
When the Prius came out, it was not a lower TCO than other cars on the market either. Now, 10 years later, it's approaching parity and it is successful as such.
First of all, the TCO difference for the Prius were much smaller and for some segments the TCO was in fact positive (ie: heavy city driving). The Prius always had an actual market while the Volt does not.
Second of all, magnitude matters. Paying $5k extra is acceptable to many people. Paying $20k extra is not.
The cost of the Volt WILL come down in subsequent model years as the technology improves.
Assuming GM doesn't go bankrupt again or doesn't kill the whole project from lack of profitability and then go bankrupt again.
GM couldn't care less about you right now
Given TFA, it seems that they should have.
Soon, in a few years, you will be seriously considering purchasing an EREV.
Nope, doubt I ever will. See, I like cities and so I tend to live in them. Perfect for an electric car you say. Except in cities you live in these things called apartments and use this thing called street parking. So charging an electric car is impossible. Although my old job did have electric car spots but all the non-plugin Prius drivers took them so that was a bust.
Granted I haven't used my car in months now, thank you functional public transportation, so I'm not much of a customer demographic for car companies anymore period. TCO wise getting a zipcar membership would make more sense right now.
What does it comes out ahead in?
In terms of how much you pay which is what most people care about. That's, btw, if you don't put a single ounce of gasoline in the Volt. Even in it's best potential environment and usage it'd still cost more overall than a Prius. There is no way to make up the cost premium of the Volt through the cost savings of not buying gasoline.
It is not possible to run a Prius (again, excluding the new plug-in version which isn't really out yet) without using gas. It is possible to run a Volt without using gas. Why does everyone overlook this one simple detail?
So? Why would I want to pay more to use a less convenient form of energy?
And how many years will it take you to drive 150k miles of electric on the Volt? Remember you gotta recharge for hours every 30 miles or so. Don't forget that after 10 years you need to spend $10+k to have the batteries replaced.
Electricity also isn't free so you need to cut those gasoline savings down a bit to make up for it.
I get around $0.05 savings/mile for a Volt versus a Prius for the first 30 miles assuming some rather inexpensive electricity. At 150k miles that only $6000 in savings so you're still out the extra $20k you paid for the Volt. Worse, at 30 miles per day it has taken you 13 years to get that many miles. So 3 years ago you had to pay another $10k to get new batteries.
So basically at it's current price the Volt is worthless from every economical perspective one can think of.
And as others have said in this very thread, it doesn't matter. Even if neither car is used for more than 30 miles per day the Prius still comes out ahead.
Even the most ideal Volt user in the world would be better off buying a Prius.
Your numbers are way way way off. You probably missed a decimal point, it's $0.09 less (at best) per mile and not $0.90. Not counting maintenance and so on.
That changes your examples significantly.
Now your hypothetical ideal Volt candidate only saves $985.50 per year. And pays $20000 more for the car. In other words even the ideal user would lose money by buying a volt because they'd never make up the cost premium
So yes, the comparison is very simple. The Volt sucks and no one should buy one.
Sigh. Cloud means many things. Please stop buying into the market speak that there is this single entity or system or idea called "the cloud."
Netflix is a cloud based service provider. They do not host data for you and the data is not yours. You rent access to their data.
That is very different from Amazon or iTunes which also store similar data on the cloud. But they claim to "sell" this data to you and then simply host a copy for you (for easy access).
That in turn is different from, say, DropBox who host data provided by you on the cloud for easy access and sharing.
Each of these is a different type of service and should be considered individually for the problem at hand. The person I replied to originally appeared to lump all cloud services together (given the tone of first post and his reply), not comprehend the differences, not understand what netflix actually did and not be able to judge a service on it's own merits.
You seem confused. None of that matters to the discussion. Netflix is not a data storage service. It's not a cloud storage system for your digital good's. It's a service. As long as you pay you get access to whatever they happen to have. Nothing on Netflix is yours in any meaning of the word except maybe your ratings/comments. Nor are you forced to use only them. They're also incredibly inexpensive.
Now Amazon or Itunes are a different type of beast but we're not talking about those.
So as I already said, you do the math over what you value and then decide what you want prefer to buy (and what streaming is good enough for). Or you decide that the lack of video quality and dvd extras makes it unusable for you.
Nice try douche.
Thank you.
if they choose to drop some titles or if their license ends, the titles are no longer available.
So? How many titles do you watch more than once? How much did all those titles cost you? Is having to, gasp, find another source for an occasional title that is dropped seriously going to cost you more than buying all those titles to begin with? Do you really need to have access to 1600 titles at a second's notice?
Sounds like you've got an irrational hatred of cloud services that is, ahem, clouding your rational judgement.
No, companies simply realized that they can now sell twice as much stuff to people for the same price and people will in fact buy it. Thus the same number of people work except they now produce twice as much. Consumerism at it's finest.
The majority wants what's best for most people, the minority wants what's best for only a few.
Utter BS.
The majority wants what they're been convinced by a minority would be best for them. It's been that way since the first Greek democracy where the best public orator got the population to follow him. In the end a minority has all the power, the question is just how difficult you make it for them to gain and use that power.
That is the issue that the founding fathers tried to solve.
The point is that the risks aren't known for such treatments, if they were it'd be science not snake oil, and salesman always lie. Hell, the risks for many prescriptions aren't even known fully and those have had an order of magnitude more verifiable studies. People are also easy to convince. Have fun proving it after you're maimed or dead.
Do seriously you think Pharmaceutical companies wouldn't lie, cheat, bribe and probably kill to make their "unproven drugs" look good? Who cares if it kills a100k people as long as they make a buck in the process and the litigation costs less than their profits.
There's a reason we have so many laws against fraud, con man and so on.
If a "terminal" patient is offered a treatment which is 99% likely to kill them, and 1% likely to make them better or cure them, it should be their choice to weigh those risks/benefits.
Steve Jobs took that option, it possibly killed him. A kid I know lost his whole eye socket because his parents took that option.
This isn't only about terminal patients, this is about unpleasant proven medication versus pleasant unproven snake oil. Except by the time you're done with the snake oil the actual treatments may no longer be able to save you or the side effects might be a lot worse. Most disease don't sit still while you dick around with fifty treatments.
I don't believe a word of the explanation of how it works, but I believe it does work for some people, just as the placebo effect does.
Which means it doesn't work since the same effect can be gotten from any placebo. Or from doing nothing at all. Amazingly our bodies can heal n their own which is why drug studies are such complicated things to do correctly.
So there should be no laws against fraud at all?
It's a myth that you simply dump something out as "Open Source" and it will magically be supported by some group of volunteers. Most, if not virtually all, open source projects have paid people at companies doing much of the development. Often companies dedicated to that product although those using it contribute as well.
As best I can tell no one else is really using WebOS and HP just said they're not going to provide development effort for it.
I suspect there'll be enough "volunteers" to act as free support bitches and keep WebOS technically alive but for all practical purposes this means it's never going to be on anything but life support.
but the public transit is awesome in NYC
No it's not if you're disabled. Unless you like walking five blocks to the subway, climbing four flights of stairs, walking another two blocks in transfers, another four staircases and then another five blocks when you get to your location. Or spending three hours on a bus and still having to walk five blocks to and from the bus.
Oh wait, you can't walk more than fifty feet? Well sucks to be you.
There's a reason NYC provides (read: is legally forced to provide) free shared van service for disabled people. It's slow as shit even by NYC standards but it's there for a reason.
Your own comment said that lack of sleep is linked to heart disease. As a result your claim was that those with sleep issues would have a higher death rate due to the induced heart disease. However, by controlling for heart disease the study removes that from being a factor.
In other words, your argument that the study was invalid because lack of sleep is strongly linked to increased heart disease was wrong.
Now you can make the claim, as I did in another post, that there are factors caused by lack of sleep they didn't control for (ie: not heart disease, liver failure, diabetes, asthma, obesity, etc, etc.) but heart disease is not one of them.
Cancer is an interesting one. They do observe more cancer in the drug users than the non-drug users. On the surface you could argue that supports your views however they also note that multiple controlled randomized studies show a link between these drugs and cancer.
They tried to do that under the assumption that in general a lack of sleep probably doesn't kill you. The hypertension, or diabetes, or heart disease, or liver failure or obesity is that kills you. They did control for differences in those factors and found no change in their results.
Of course, the increased rate of crashing your car into to a wall at 90mph due to insomnia wouldn't be taken into account.
Listen to your own advice and read the paper yourself before commenting.
They specifically compensated later on for difference in heart disease, asthma so on. The impact on the final result was minimal.
And for them it's more reliable to use a cloud provider than to have everything on a 10 year old computer in a corner, running windows 2k with no backup options. Or a machine in some data center that no one has touched in equally long. Many people make very good money rescuing such companies from the disasters they have wrought onto themselves when those servers finally die.
It's not even that "cloud" is a new concept for such companies. Those companies have had "cloud" options for decades. Back when they required a special router modem that dialed into the "cloud" provider's servers.
There's the ones hosting websites, the ones proving api based web services, the ones providing data analysis services, the one providing data hosting services. Actually any startup that isn't using Big Data (tm) to get extra attention is going to have issues nowadays.
Then there's the ones who care about not losing data, care about up time, care about scalability and so on.
Not to mention time, dealing with AWS virtual servers is so much easier than a physical server. Cloning an actual server takes time, money and effort.Cloning a AWS server takes a few clicks.
Of course there's also costs, collocating isn't cheap and you still need a third party to do backups with. Not to mention that cloud charges per month while having your own server is an upfront cost. Starups aim to have more later instead of now.
When people talk about poor people who do not have the time or energy to prepare meals, we are talking about these people.
Stop trying to retcon the debate to make yourself look like less of an idiot. You made claims which in no way involved this 13% of Americans and then had your ass handed to you. Accept it and shut up before the hole you're digging reaches China.
...woosh. That's the sound of the parent's post and what the people you were talking to were saying flying way way over your head.
When they say Skype, they mean Skype for VIDEO chat. Get it now?
Then again you're apparently the sort of person who ridicules others instead of wondering why they're saying something so I doubt there's much point in writing this post.
As the AC said, I was calling you specifically an idiot. Most every non-fat poor family I knew, including my own, was perfectly able to use a refrigerator and microwave. So does everyone else I know at work who prefers not to spend $15/day on lunch.
And congratulations on finally getting the point, the reason these people eat such crappy food isn't because they're poor or busy. It's because they're horribly lazy. That's the whole point. It's cheaper to cook your own food and it only take a couple hours a week to do. Yet these people don't do so.
Guess I wasn't paying enough attention!
Good thing you agree.
It's even easier than that. You cook in bulk once (or twice) a week, refrigerate/freeze and then microwave (or reheat on the stove) during the week.