What's wrong is to have state-sponsored open primaries. That's fundamentally anti-democratic. Why should the state organize primaries for only 2 parties? There are dozens of small parties out there which would like to receive the same treatment. Parties should organize primaries themselves.
Why is it set up this way? If we start the Slashdot Party and it gets really really popular, will we displace one of the two? Are the Dems and Reps actually enshrined by name in legislation?
Yeah.. THIS!! I'm an Independent voter in Nevada, up until the middle of BushyJr's second term I was a life-long Republican.. The Republican party has gotten so FAR from its roots, I couldn't remain a "member"... Since I am no longer a Republican, I'm prohibited from voting for ANY candidate in our primary yesterday other than the non-partisan races, like Judge, Sheriff, etc.. This is a crock of SHIT, so I now do not vote in primary elections.. There were several Republican candidates for state and national office that I'd loved to have voted for, but the State of Nevada has seen fit to prohibit me from voting for them, unless I attach a label to my name.. I'M NOT A REPUBLICAN NOR A DEMOCRAT, I'M AN AMERICAN....
The USA is the only place I am aware of where the "public" has any say in how a political party decides who will run under their banner. In most places I am familiar with, only the card-carrying members of "Party X" get to decide who will be running. Since I am not a member of Party X, I don't pay membership dues or attend conventions, why should I have any say in what Party X does in terms of putting people on the ballot?
Similarly, why is "the state" running (and paying for running) these primary elections? Shouldn't that be something that the political parties run and fund themselves? Do only the Dems and the Reps get this treatment, or does the US Libertarian Party, and the US Communist Party also get their candidate selection process funded by the public?
"The forced movement to the right is only going to mean less compromise..."
Exactly. Because the Democrats never see the need to compromise. They will plow ahead with their agenda (as always) and the media will spin it in their favor.
I was very disappointed that the Democrats did try to compromise on health care reform back when they had the votes to push through whatever they wanted. The removal of the public payer option (ie let people pay into the medicare system if they wanted) was an error. Instead they compromised and passed a marginal reform that still has "the other side" out of their minds with woe. If the other side is going to piss and moan about socialized medicine no matter what, why didn't they actually pass a socialized medicine bill?
Anyhow, from my viewpoint, the Dems have done a lot of compromising, to little effect. Probably however, I am viewing the world through a biased filter. I do feel that pretty much everyone is being pretty ineffective in actually working towards reasonable solutions to problems rather than spending all their efforts demonizing the "other side".
Anyone who makes a business of organising a carpool is a taxi dispach service. Anyone who drives a carpool 8+h a day is a taxi driver.
Don't' like it? Don't make a business of it.
How about 4 hours per day? 1? What if I do it once? What if I pick up a hich-hiker and he offers me some cash? To pay for gas? A doughnut? Where-ever you draw the line, the position is arbitrary as all of this exists on a continuum.
Commercial insurance doesn't offer any more protection or security than personal insurance does. They charge more because they can, not because it conveys any real benefit.
In a competitive market, the differences in price between "personal" and "commercial" insurance prices would depend primarily on the statistics - I would not be surprised to find that for a taxi-like business there are more insurance claims per policy per year than for personal insurance claims, if only due to the greater number of miles driven.
I wish countries would use public money to produce some ebooks for their schools. They could distribute it free as an epub file and there would be no royalties or copyright to care about, no heavy schoolbags, or parents / schools who have to buy them. Just some epubs on the end of a link, free to download and use on any tablet or ereader that supports the format.
It seems beyond bizarre that countries are able to specify in exacting detail what content books should contain and are able to write examination papers that test those subjects but they outsource the actual production (and copyright) of textbooks to somebody else.
Hear, hear! (or is that "Here, here!", or maybe "Hear, here!". Certainly not "Here, hear!", yes?)
I thought they just had to have a certain fleet average fuel economy,
Given that European and Japanese cars are massively more economical than American ones, it certainly isn't that. The gas 500s do 59MPG (Imp) and the diesels 76MPG (Imp).
Yeah, it looks like California has further requirements of selling a certain fraction of zero-emission vehicles, or buying appropriate offsets. Seems as though Fiat is being treated just like all the other car manufacturers, but complaining about it more.
But they dont HAVE to do any of it, except with a gun to their head. They're not an EV company, they're a car company that is extorted into making EVs. The power of the dollar and the power of the gun are not the same thing, unless I suppose you live in California.
I thought they just had to have a certain fleet average fuel economy, rather than a certain number of electric vehicles. Why are no other companies complaining about how hard this is? Did the other companies just do something else like get better fuel economies on their gas guzzlers? Is everyone else making electric cars without "losing money on each one", or are they just keeping quiet about it?
There is no regulation requiring electric alternatives be less than n% more than gas. There's no way to even enforce it. The Fiat has to be sold for $30k at a loss but the Tesla can go for $80k because the government things its so much nicer? No, Fiat just knows they are competing with the Nissan Leaf and no one would buy their car for 50% more than the Leaf is going for. He just wants to whine and make it sound like the government is ruining him, not that he's being beat in the market.
And as for that Executive Order, its directed at the California government as a goal to strive towards. You are trying to make it sound like he has passed some sort of law directed at car manufacturers which would be illegal, and impossible as there's no legal definition for "cost competitive". http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=...
There is no law requiring a Fiat 500e to be sold for less than 200% the price of a regular 500.
You mean the article is misleading? Doesn't give a proper context? And a company is trying to blame someone else for their difficulties?
Charging a "nominal" amount (a quarter per ride or $10 per month) might discourage abuse of the system while still providing much of the benefits of a "free" system.
To be fair, we should also consider how much of the operating costs are involved in collecting the fares. If it is significant, there would be a stronger case for eliminating it.
Another option is to save money on enforcement and accept that there will be some "cheating". Vancouver's Skytrain system has operated for almost 30 years with no fare-gates - it has always been kind of nice to feel that people were trusted to pay their way.
Unfortunately many people felt that there were too many cheaters, so they have decided to put up expensive gates to make cheaters less able to cheat. The expected cost of the gates and related infrastructure are much greater than the estimated amounts "lost" to cheaters, but it makes some people feel better I suppose.
Vancouver seems to have less than 5% losses due to cheating across the system - about $18 million per year, and that the fare gate system will reduce this by about $7 million per year. While the new "Compass" smart-card system will be a pleasure to use in comparison with cash and paper tickets, it is not clear to me that installing turnstiles in all the stations was a cost-effective decision. I think things would have worked fine with a continuation of the historical system of trusting people to have paid their fare when they go get on the train. But I suppose this exercise does provide economic stimulation in the form of jobs for gate installers and the like...
AC travels long distances, DC doesn't without large power losses. AC you have centralized Power Stations, DC you would have Power Generating Station every where. Why would DC be better, or do you like having DC Power Generator every BLOCK?
AC and DC have the same resistive losses at the same voltages. No differences.
It has historically been much easier to transform AC to different voltages, thus has been generally easier to get AC up to the high voltages that make it economical to use it over long distances. In modern times, I think this trend has reversed and DC is now being used preferentially for long distance transmission:
(They're the iPhone of electric cars - they've got the luxury market, it's not clear they'll ever get into the mass market where the real money is.).
I thought the iPhone was making something like 80%+ of the profit of the cell-phone industry?
OK it is not 80%: "Apple made more money than all of its competitors combined, taking in 56 percent of the profit in the mobile device market." http://www.forbes.com/sites/to...
If you are making the majority of the profit from a market, you aren't doing too badly. Even if you only sell to the "luxury" segment of that market.
Are you personally involved in the Auto industry? Do you live within a 100 miles of Detroit? If the answer to either of these questions is no, with all due respect, Sir, or Madam, you are seriously mistaken.
I doubt very much that the "other party" would have done things significantly differently. Of course they would have framed it differently. And then THEIR opponents would talk about "corporate welfare" and how the working man was getting a raw deal.
As an aside, how could the UAW block such a purchase? I can only imagine they could do so if they had some financial right to how GM was disposed of, in which case you might say that one of the owners blocked the sale, which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to be allowed to do. If I had come in and said "I'll buy the assets of GM" but did not make an offer that the owners found acceptable, why should them accept it?
These are interesting issues of public policy. What rights and obligations does society have to help/protect business owners and workers? Certainly the community has an interest in who does what. Society is ill-served if large fractions of the population are under-employed or under-paid. Society is ill-served if it is too difficult or not profitable enough to invest in new and continuing businesses.
If you think that these types of interests are easy to balance then I think you aren't thinking enough.
I don't disagree with most of Solandri's arguments - in a properly functioning economy, bankruptcy of one place is not particularly tough on the system as a whole, and the statements about the GM situation have been exaggerated and/or simplistic.
It should be considered however that much of the economic troubles at the time were driven by uncertainty, lack of confidence and liquidity. If the government had not stepped up with the cash infusion as was done, it is not clear that anyone would have stepped up to buy the pieces available in liquidation and kept any of them operating. In "normal" times perhaps there would have been the 80%-90% retention of the employees and subcontractors, but in this case it seems quite possible that without the confidence brought in by the government bailout it could have been the catalyst of a negative feedback loop that would have had huge follow-on negative repercussions.
I do think that the question "would it have been more expensive to let them go under" IS a valid argument/question. In a sense, the system worked as designed - as I understand, GM did file for bankruptcy (chapter 11), and reorganized and ended up with new owners (one of which was the US Gov). Without the involvement of the US Gov, it seems likely that the reorganization would have resulted in much larger disruption to US Gov interests. In this case, the US Gov acted just like some deep pocket investor who thought that they could turn a profit on supplying some capitol.
The "bailout" (it is reasoned) prevented the factories from shutting their doors and putting a whole wack of people out of work, which would have had tremendous negative consequences for government expenses and revenues.
Should labour and management have made different decisions in the years leading up to this problem? Probably. Is either party blameless? Probably not.
Presumably if it was generally known that the authorities weren't going to investigate any suspicious packages, They would start sending more of them.
This presupposes the existence of enough people in each city to actually be wanting to do this, RIGHT NOW, who are only being prevented by their thoughts that the ever vigilant authorities will prevent their nefarious plans. I just don't buy it. "They" just do not exist in large numbers. If "they" were actually out there, the types of investigation of suspicious packages that is currently done would be totally insufficient to prevent the "thousands per city" type of threat.
the one time you don't react, someone will die and there will be a huge investigation and people being fired with no pension benefits
No one is saying "don't react", they are saying "react appropriately". You put together a well thought out response plan BEFORE the event, then follow it. Such a response plan should not call for busting down the doors with guns blazing on the strength of a single anonymous phone call. Not following the plan is what should result in disciplinary actions.
Maybe you missed the Boston Marathon bombings? The police have a choice. They can ignore warnings, suspicious packages, etc, and we can just accept that major cities are going to lose a few thousand people each year. Or they can react to EACH threat. They don't have 20-20 hindsight.
THOUSANDS of people EACH YEAR in "major cities"? What colour is the sky in your world?
Maybe I have been sleeping - did I miss the announcements of multiple foiled death plots in North America? I guess the police doing all this type of "targeting suspicious activities" could be acting as a deterrent, but I find it hard to believe that in each of our "major cities" there are people crazy enough to want to plot bombings, but at the same time being held back by their fear of the actions of the police.
Slashdot Mirror
Open boarder either way?
I like it. I can move to Baja with my US dollars and live like a king.
But... you can't own property within 50 miles of the coast unless you are a natural Mexican citizen.
Rent.
What's wrong is to have state-sponsored open primaries. That's fundamentally anti-democratic. Why should the state organize primaries for only 2 parties? There are dozens of small parties out there which would like to receive the same treatment.
Parties should organize primaries themselves.
Why is it set up this way? If we start the Slashdot Party and it gets really really popular, will we displace one of the two? Are the Dems and Reps actually enshrined by name in legislation?
Yeah.. THIS!! I'm an Independent voter in Nevada, up until the middle of BushyJr's second term I was a life-long Republican.. The Republican party has gotten so FAR from its roots, I couldn't remain a "member"... Since I am no longer a Republican, I'm prohibited from voting for ANY candidate in our primary yesterday other than the non-partisan races, like Judge, Sheriff, etc.. This is a crock of SHIT, so I now do not vote in primary elections.. There were several Republican candidates for state and national office that I'd loved to have voted for, but the State of Nevada has seen fit to prohibit me from voting for them, unless I attach a label to my name.. I'M NOT A REPUBLICAN NOR A DEMOCRAT, I'M AN AMERICAN....
The USA is the only place I am aware of where the "public" has any say in how a political party decides who will run under their banner. In most places I am familiar with, only the card-carrying members of "Party X" get to decide who will be running. Since I am not a member of Party X, I don't pay membership dues or attend conventions, why should I have any say in what Party X does in terms of putting people on the ballot?
Similarly, why is "the state" running (and paying for running) these primary elections? Shouldn't that be something that the political parties run and fund themselves? Do only the Dems and the Reps get this treatment, or does the US Libertarian Party, and the US Communist Party also get their candidate selection process funded by the public?
"The forced movement to the right is only going to mean less compromise..."
Exactly. Because the Democrats never see the need to compromise. They will plow ahead with their agenda (as always) and the media will spin it in their favor.
I was very disappointed that the Democrats did try to compromise on health care reform back when they had the votes to push through whatever they wanted. The removal of the public payer option (ie let people pay into the medicare system if they wanted) was an error. Instead they compromised and passed a marginal reform that still has "the other side" out of their minds with woe. If the other side is going to piss and moan about socialized medicine no matter what, why didn't they actually pass a socialized medicine bill?
Anyhow, from my viewpoint, the Dems have done a lot of compromising, to little effect. Probably however, I am viewing the world through a biased filter. I do feel that pretty much everyone is being pretty ineffective in actually working towards reasonable solutions to problems rather than spending all their efforts demonizing the "other side".
Anyone who makes a business of organising a carpool is a taxi dispach service. Anyone who drives a carpool 8+h a day is a taxi driver.
Don't' like it? Don't make a business of it.
How about 4 hours per day? 1? What if I do it once? What if I pick up a hich-hiker and he offers me some cash? To pay for gas? A doughnut? Where-ever you draw the line, the position is arbitrary as all of this exists on a continuum.
Well the protest backfired - drove more people than ever to download Uber in London
http://order-order.com/2014/06...
"Uber is reporting an 850% increase in app downloads today"
Oops. I thought that might happen.
Commercial insurance doesn't offer any more protection or security than personal insurance does. They charge more because they can, not because it conveys any real benefit.
In a competitive market, the differences in price between "personal" and "commercial" insurance prices would depend primarily on the statistics - I would not be surprised to find that for a taxi-like business there are more insurance claims per policy per year than for personal insurance claims, if only due to the greater number of miles driven.
I wish countries would use public money to produce some ebooks for their schools. They could distribute it free as an epub file and there would be no royalties or copyright to care about, no heavy schoolbags, or parents / schools who have to buy them. Just some epubs on the end of a link, free to download and use on any tablet or ereader that supports the format.
It seems beyond bizarre that countries are able to specify in exacting detail what content books should contain and are able to write examination papers that test those subjects but they outsource the actual production (and copyright) of textbooks to somebody else.
Hear, hear! (or is that "Here, here!", or maybe "Hear, here!". Certainly not "Here, hear!", yes?)
Best calculus book ever was Calculus Made Easy. It really makes the subject as clear as possible. Everything since is filler.
That does look like a great text. 2nd edition in 1914!
Most criminals are black. That's more than just a coincidence.
Worldwide? I would guess that most criminals are Asian in "ethnicity".
I thought they just had to have a certain fleet average fuel economy,
Given that European and Japanese cars are massively more economical than American ones, it certainly isn't that. The gas 500s do 59MPG (Imp) and the diesels 76MPG (Imp).
Yeah, it looks like California has further requirements of selling a certain fraction of zero-emission vehicles, or buying appropriate offsets. Seems as though Fiat is being treated just like all the other car manufacturers, but complaining about it more.
But they dont HAVE to do any of it, except with a gun to their head. They're not an EV company, they're a car company that is extorted into making EVs. The power of the dollar and the power of the gun are not the same thing, unless I suppose you live in California.
I thought they just had to have a certain fleet average fuel economy, rather than a certain number of electric vehicles. Why are no other companies complaining about how hard this is? Did the other companies just do something else like get better fuel economies on their gas guzzlers? Is everyone else making electric cars without "losing money on each one", or are they just keeping quiet about it?
There is no regulation requiring electric alternatives be less than n% more than gas. There's no way to even enforce it. The Fiat has to be sold for $30k at a loss but the Tesla can go for $80k because the government things its so much nicer? No, Fiat just knows they are competing with the Nissan Leaf and no one would buy their car for 50% more than the Leaf is going for. He just wants to whine and make it sound like the government is ruining him, not that he's being beat in the market.
And as for that Executive Order, its directed at the California government as a goal to strive towards. You are trying to make it sound like he has passed some sort of law directed at car manufacturers which would be illegal, and impossible as there's no legal definition for "cost competitive".
http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=...
There is no law requiring a Fiat 500e to be sold for less than 200% the price of a regular 500.
You mean the article is misleading? Doesn't give a proper context? And a company is trying to blame someone else for their difficulties?
I am shocked! Shocked I tell you!
Charging a "nominal" amount (a quarter per ride or $10 per month) might discourage abuse of the system while still providing much of the benefits of a "free" system.
To be fair, we should also consider how much of the operating costs are involved in collecting the fares. If it is significant, there would be a stronger case for eliminating it.
Another option is to save money on enforcement and accept that there will be some "cheating". Vancouver's Skytrain system has operated for almost 30 years with no fare-gates - it has always been kind of nice to feel that people were trusted to pay their way.
Unfortunately many people felt that there were too many cheaters, so they have decided to put up expensive gates to make cheaters less able to cheat. The expected cost of the gates and related infrastructure are much greater than the estimated amounts "lost" to cheaters, but it makes some people feel better I suppose.
Vancouver seems to have less than 5% losses due to cheating across the system - about $18 million per year, and that the fare gate system will reduce this by about $7 million per year. While the new "Compass" smart-card system will be a pleasure to use in comparison with cash and paper tickets, it is not clear to me that installing turnstiles in all the stations was a cost-effective decision. I think things would have worked fine with a continuation of the historical system of trusting people to have paid their fare when they go get on the train. But I suppose this exercise does provide economic stimulation in the form of jobs for gate installers and the like...
https://buzzer.translink.ca/20...
AC travels long distances, DC doesn't without large power losses. AC you have centralized Power Stations, DC you would have Power Generating Station every where. Why would DC be better, or do you like having DC Power Generator every BLOCK?
AC and DC have the same resistive losses at the same voltages. No differences.
It has historically been much easier to transform AC to different voltages, thus has been generally easier to get AC up to the high voltages that make it economical to use it over long distances. In modern times, I think this trend has reversed and DC is now being used preferentially for long distance transmission:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For underwater power cables, HVDC avoids the heavy currents required to charge and discharge the cable capacitance each cycle.
(They're the iPhone of electric cars - they've got the luxury market, it's not clear they'll ever get into the mass market where the real money is.) .
I thought the iPhone was making something like 80%+ of the profit of the cell-phone industry?
OK it is not 80%: "Apple made more money than all of its competitors combined, taking in 56 percent of the profit in the mobile device market."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/to...
If you are making the majority of the profit from a market, you aren't doing too badly. Even if you only sell to the "luxury" segment of that market.
Are you personally involved in the Auto industry? Do you live within a 100 miles of Detroit? If the answer to either of these questions is no, with all due respect, Sir, or Madam, you are seriously mistaken.
About what?
I doubt very much that the "other party" would have done things significantly differently. Of course they would have framed it differently. And then THEIR opponents would talk about "corporate welfare" and how the working man was getting a raw deal.
As an aside, how could the UAW block such a purchase? I can only imagine they could do so if they had some financial right to how GM was disposed of, in which case you might say that one of the owners blocked the sale, which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to be allowed to do. If I had come in and said "I'll buy the assets of GM" but did not make an offer that the owners found acceptable, why should them accept it?
These are interesting issues of public policy. What rights and obligations does society have to help/protect business owners and workers? Certainly the community has an interest in who does what. Society is ill-served if large fractions of the population are under-employed or under-paid. Society is ill-served if it is too difficult or not profitable enough to invest in new and continuing businesses.
If you think that these types of interests are easy to balance then I think you aren't thinking enough.
I don't disagree with most of Solandri's arguments - in a properly functioning economy, bankruptcy of one place is not particularly tough on the system as a whole, and the statements about the GM situation have been exaggerated and/or simplistic.
It should be considered however that much of the economic troubles at the time were driven by uncertainty, lack of confidence and liquidity. If the government had not stepped up with the cash infusion as was done, it is not clear that anyone would have stepped up to buy the pieces available in liquidation and kept any of them operating. In "normal" times perhaps there would have been the 80%-90% retention of the employees and subcontractors, but in this case it seems quite possible that without the confidence brought in by the government bailout it could have been the catalyst of a negative feedback loop that would have had huge follow-on negative repercussions.
I do think that the question "would it have been more expensive to let them go under" IS a valid argument/question. In a sense, the system worked as designed - as I understand, GM did file for bankruptcy (chapter 11), and reorganized and ended up with new owners (one of which was the US Gov). Without the involvement of the US Gov, it seems likely that the reorganization would have resulted in much larger disruption to US Gov interests. In this case, the US Gov acted just like some deep pocket investor who thought that they could turn a profit on supplying some capitol.
Poe-tae-toe, poe-taa-to.
The "bailout" (it is reasoned) prevented the factories from shutting their doors and putting a whole wack of people out of work, which would have had tremendous negative consequences for government expenses and revenues.
Should labour and management have made different decisions in the years leading up to this problem? Probably. Is either party blameless? Probably not.
Presumably if it was generally known that the authorities weren't going to investigate any suspicious packages, They would start sending more of them.
This presupposes the existence of enough people in each city to actually be wanting to do this, RIGHT NOW, who are only being prevented by their thoughts that the ever vigilant authorities will prevent their nefarious plans. I just don't buy it. "They" just do not exist in large numbers. If "they" were actually out there, the types of investigation of suspicious packages that is currently done would be totally insufficient to prevent the "thousands per city" type of threat.
the one time you don't react, someone will die and there will be a huge investigation and people being fired with no pension benefits
No one is saying "don't react", they are saying "react appropriately". You put together a well thought out response plan BEFORE the event, then follow it. Such a response plan should not call for busting down the doors with guns blazing on the strength of a single anonymous phone call. Not following the plan is what should result in disciplinary actions.
Maybe you missed the Boston Marathon bombings? The police have a choice. They can ignore warnings, suspicious packages, etc, and we can just accept that major cities are going to lose a few thousand people each year. Or they can react to EACH threat. They don't have 20-20 hindsight.
THOUSANDS of people EACH YEAR in "major cities"? What colour is the sky in your world?
Maybe I have been sleeping - did I miss the announcements of multiple foiled death plots in North America? I guess the police doing all this type of "targeting suspicious activities" could be acting as a deterrent, but I find it hard to believe that in each of our "major cities" there are people crazy enough to want to plot bombings, but at the same time being held back by their fear of the actions of the police.