There are a few reasons why monopolies, or heavily regulated/coordinated franchise systems, are useful for bus service. Here are a few that come to mind:
Transfers. I live in Birmingham (UK), which does not have a monopoly bus system, and if you want to go somewhere that requires you to use more than one bus route, you have to pay each time you board the bus -- you cannot pay once and get a ticket that lets you transfer from one route to another! It seems like it should be possible for the bus companies to work out some kind of joint agreement, but for cash fares, they have not. A monopoly makes transferring from one route to another possible.
Serving low-volume routes. Under a free-market system, there will be strong competition for high volume routes, and nobody bothering to serve low-density areas. A monopoly can cross-subsidise the low-volume routes with revenue from the high-volume ones and maintain service to everyone.
Clear and integrated responsibility for all infrastructure. It is the fashion here in the UK to divide up responsibility for everything: several companies run buses, a different company maintains the shelters, another one provides passenger information services, another one maintains the ticket machines. (I am not kidding. Once in London I needed to buy a bus ticket and I had to try four different machines before I found one that was working. When I got on the bus, I mentioned this to the driver and asked if he could file a broken-equipment report. He abruptly said, not his problem, the ticket machines are owned by a different company and there was nothing he could do.) This was probably done in the name of efficient outsourcing, but I think it results in disconnection among all of the different aspects of providing an integrated service.
Service speed. If you have multiple companies serving one route, buses have an incentive to drive slowly to maximise their opportunities to pick up passengers. A monopoly doesn't care so much and has more of an incentive to run faster.
Ok, I'll bite. I think they are for checking that trucks do not exceed the weight limits that are in place to prevent them from chewing up the highways.
Would large arrays of wind turbines potentially have any adverse affects on bird migrations, or even just birds in general?
In the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds reviews applications for permission to build wind farms, and 93% of the time, they see no problems. They do object to 7% of the applications.
Wind power advocates often point out that more birds are killed by cats and by flying into windows (by several orders of magnitude) than by wind farms. Here's a comparison from How Stuff Works that shows wind farms killing tens of thousands of birds as compared with cars, windows, cats, and other bird risks killing tens or hundreds of millions.
Unfortunately this enables coercion and vote-selling, as does any system that gives the voter a receipt that can be linked to how they voted. An Evil Election Stealer can say, if you vote for candidate X, everything will be fine. But please tell us the code that the voting machine gave you, so we can be sure you did what we told you to do.
Yes indeed, ecosystems change. They sure do. The problem is that if global average temperatures rise significantly, then the new changed ecosystems will tend to have less of the things that we find very convenient, such as places to grow huge fields of wheat, and more of the things that we don't really want, like malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Enormous hunk of ice sits quietly where it is while penguins still shiver = natural process = not news
Enormous hunk of ice breaks off and floats off towards South America, penguins wonder if they should have brought sunscreen = natural process (maybe) = news (definitely)
Changes in state are news. The bigger they are the more newsworthy they are. This is true whether the change is a natural process or not, and changes are especially newsworthy if there is some suspicion that they might not be entirely natural, because then we get to ask whodunit.
So let me get this straight, if there is a french version available then it is illegal to sell a non-french version?
The thing is, it's probably not French vs non-French, it's French vs multilingual. Normally a company publishes either (1) a unilingual (probably English) version, or (2) a multilingual version with all available languages on the same CD/DVD for the customer to choose among at install time. But it's common to release a unilingual version first, then work on translation and release multilingual versions later. This law means that if a company does that, then when the multilingual version is available Quebec retailers must take any remaining copies of the English-only version off the shelves and sell the multilingual version instead. Or perhaps alongside the English version; the article isn't crystal clear about whether retailers are safe by simply selling both versions side-by-side.
I would add: in the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a charity that does what it sounds like it does, officially supports wind farms. They do review planning applications for wind farms and object to about 7%, but they have no problem with 93% of proposed wind farms.
If another country (or terrorist) wanted to seriously hurt the US, they'd just have to target a broad swath of these offshore windmills. A pretty easy target I'd think?
No, not an easy target. There would be many windmills spread over large areas, and they are basically big-assed steel tubes standing in the sea -- inconvenient to get to, and not particularly easy to damage. Taking out even ten or twenty turbines in a wind farm of hundreds would take a lot of work and have very little impact. Cabling will be all on the sea floor, which makes it hard to attack.
A gas or nuclear power plant on land is a more concentrated target and is far easier to get access to. And most importantly, a terrorist's goal is to cause fear, not damage. Offshore wind turbines are not good targets because they don't blow up dramatically and they don't endanger anyone nearby. A gas or nuclear plant on land is easier to get to, explodes more dramatically, and endangers people. So offshore wind farms are better from a security point of view. (But you are quite correct that overall energy supply should be diversified, not reliant on any single source.)
basing merit pay on test performance will do very little to improve education if the tests are deeply flawed.
Agreed, but I would add that it's certainly possible to test problem-solving ability, reasoning, and critical thinking. It just requires putting some proper effort into thinking up appropriate questions.
I'm not sure I understand the dinosaur-human problem, unless the issue is that those who see a problem don't accept geological evidence as being useful in the discussion. (If that is the case then there's really no common basis on which to have a discussion.)
Geological evidence indicates that there was a period of about 64 million years during which all the dinosaurs were dead and all the humans had not yet been born. Therefore I can say with great confidence that dinosaurs and humans never met. (That 64 million year period is not simply a void, of course: we see no fossils of dinosaurs, and no fossils of humans, but we do see fossils of lots of other kinds of creatures.) This is like saying that I can be quite sure that my grandfather never met Christopher Columbus, without asking either of them about it, because I know there was a 415-year period during which Columbus was dead and my grandfather had not yet been born. Now, maybe I'm slightly mistaken about when Columbus died, and maybe my grandfather lied about his birthdate in order to join the army, so maybe the gap is really 410 years, or 420, but I'm still pretty confident they never met. And maybe the last dinosaurs died 64 million years ago, or 60 million, or 70 million, but I'm still pretty confident that they never met.
> Private schools take those who pay. They have no IQ test as part of the application.
An income test is sufficient to select students who are likely to succeed in school. An IQ test is unnecessary.
Parents who can afford to pay for private school are likely to have above-average income and above-average social status. Parents with above-average income and status are likely to have above-average education themselves, and to value education. They are then likely to pass that value on to their children, to encourage their children to read, to make them do their homework, to take them to museums, and to discuss things with their children when the children ask "why?" Their homes are more likely to be stable and secure environments, which is important for children to perform better at school.
In the ancient world, travel by water was easier and faster than travel by land. That's why most cities are located on the shores of lakes, seas, or rivers. It wasn't until the Roman Empire built long-distance roads that land travel was even close to competitive with sea travel.
So the argument given is incorrect. If the Mediterranean had been dry, travel would have been hard and we would expect the cities of the region to have had limited contact with each other. If the Mediterranean was a water body, we would expect the cities around it to have had quite a lot of contact and to have exchanged technology to a significant degree. The latter is indeed what we see in real life.
As a tax for keeping roads up, it's very inefficient. Over 50% of the money goes towards servicing the toll collection system; not the road the toll's for.
I agree wholeheartedly, though I am tempted to say [citation needed] on the 50% figure. But this highlights the beauty of the gasoline tax: it's fair, simple to collect, hard to avoid, and it spreads the burden over the year so it is relatively painless. People who drive more, pay more, and you waste very little on transaction costs.
The only other fair usage fee for road use that I can think of would be an "odometer tax": pay for your road use according to your odometer reading, just like you pay for your electricity use by your electric meter reading. But that would be much more expensive to collect, and easy for people to avoid.
If, however, plug-in hybrids ever become a significant fraction of the cars on the road, then there will have to be a "gasoline tax" equivalent on electricity!
From the fine article: "There's moderate demand for ads based on ethnic information, but the companies acknowledge that determining ethnicity is more challenging than figuring out gender and age range."
I imagine "challenging" here may include legally challenging as much as technically challenging; I can imagine a risk of discrimination lawsuits from advertising certain products more heavily to blacks than to whites.
It's changed. From the fine article: "We are in the depths of a very low solar minimum right now and as a result the ionosphere is lower and less dense than, we believe, at any other time in the history of the space age..."
I do read the business pages fairly often, but I'm afraid I don't recall any details of reporting on Canadian communications satellites. I turned to Wikipedia but I know Wikipedia is not always complete or up to date so am happy to be corrected. Can you remind us of the names of the Canadian companies that are making the vast majority of communications satellites or commercial long-term systems?
I call bullshit. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that Telesat is the only Canadian satellite company (and it's nearly 2/3 owned by Loral, an American company). Telesat's Wikipedia page indicates that it operates 12 satellites. By way of comparison, Motorola built 66 Iridium satellites in the USA, just as an example of one project. I do not believe that "the vast majority of communications satellites are actually made in Canada".
As a retail customer, you do indeed get the same physical product (methane molecules or electrons) delivered to your house no matter who your supplier is. The system relies on the concept of "the grid" as the common and cooperative distribution system, and the fact that the product is completely standardized. Customers draw product from the grid, and the suppliers feed enough product into the grid to match what their customers draw out. Customers don't necessarily receive the physical molecules of gas that were put in to the system by "their" supplier, but that doesn't actually matter since all gas is the same, and all electrons are the same. The supplier-customer relationship is really just an accounting exercise, and everything works as long as the total consumption by all customers is balanced by the total input by all suppliers.
One of the things that makes this possible is that there is complete separation of "the grid", the delivery network infrastructure, from the suppliers of the product. Here in the UK, the company that maintains the grid (gas and electricity) in most places is imaginatively named "National Grid" (a publicly-traded company). There are also other regional grid-maintainers in other areas, operating as regional monopolies. Retail customers never deal with National Grid directly, except to report emergencies like a gas leak or a power outage. Retail customers deal with suppliers, and pay a fixed monthly or quarterly charge (most of which presumably gets passed on to National Grid to keep the networks up) plus the charge for the amount of electricity or gas actually used.
And there's one more layer in there, because the suppliers are not the only generators, and in fact might not actually be generators at all. There are multiple companies that generate electricity, sell it to suppliers, and feed it into the grid. So some "suppliers" are really only billing operations: they don't operate any generating plants or maintain any wires, they just buy from generating companies which pump energy into the grid, and sell to retail customers that extract energy from the grid, and the "supplier" just maintains a relationship with the retail customer. And although we say the supplier buys gas and sells it to customers, it may all just be contracts on paper, the supplier doesn't necessarily have any actual tanks of gas of its own anywhere.
You asked about renewable energy... I buy my electricity from a company called Good Energy, which supplies electricity that is generated 100% from renewable sources. That doesn't mean that every electron in my house can physically be traced back to a windmill in Cornwall, though. It just means that Good Energy feeds into the grid the same amount of electricity that I and all of their other customers use.
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There are a few reasons why monopolies, or heavily regulated/coordinated franchise systems, are useful for bus service. Here are a few that come to mind:
Transfers. I live in Birmingham (UK), which does not have a monopoly bus system, and if you want to go somewhere that requires you to use more than one bus route, you have to pay each time you board the bus -- you cannot pay once and get a ticket that lets you transfer from one route to another! It seems like it should be possible for the bus companies to work out some kind of joint agreement, but for cash fares, they have not. A monopoly makes transferring from one route to another possible.
Serving low-volume routes. Under a free-market system, there will be strong competition for high volume routes, and nobody bothering to serve low-density areas. A monopoly can cross-subsidise the low-volume routes with revenue from the high-volume ones and maintain service to everyone.
Clear and integrated responsibility for all infrastructure. It is the fashion here in the UK to divide up responsibility for everything: several companies run buses, a different company maintains the shelters, another one provides passenger information services, another one maintains the ticket machines. (I am not kidding. Once in London I needed to buy a bus ticket and I had to try four different machines before I found one that was working. When I got on the bus, I mentioned this to the driver and asked if he could file a broken-equipment report. He abruptly said, not his problem, the ticket machines are owned by a different company and there was nothing he could do.) This was probably done in the name of efficient outsourcing, but I think it results in disconnection among all of the different aspects of providing an integrated service.
Service speed. If you have multiple companies serving one route, buses have an incentive to drive slowly to maximise their opportunities to pick up passengers. A monopoly doesn't care so much and has more of an incentive to run faster.
Ok, I'll bite. I think they are for checking that trucks do not exceed the weight limits that are in place to prevent them from chewing up the highways.
What do *you* think they are there for?
Missing linky from previous post: http://science.howstuffworks.com/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm/printable
Would large arrays of wind turbines potentially have any adverse affects on bird migrations, or even just birds in general?
In the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds reviews applications for permission to build wind farms, and 93% of the time, they see no problems. They do object to 7% of the applications.
Wind power advocates often point out that more birds are killed by cats and by flying into windows (by several orders of magnitude) than by wind farms. Here's a comparison from How Stuff Works that shows wind farms killing tens of thousands of birds as compared with cars, windows, cats, and other bird risks killing tens or hundreds of millions.
Wow, if it is such a great investment, how much have you loaned them?
As an individual investor, I can't. Tesla isn't publicly traded yet. But I would rather buy shares in Tesla than in GM or Chrysler!
Unfortunately this enables coercion and vote-selling, as does any system that gives the voter a receipt that can be linked to how they voted. An Evil Election Stealer can say, if you vote for candidate X, everything will be fine. But please tell us the code that the voting machine gave you, so we can be sure you did what we told you to do.
Yes indeed, ecosystems change. They sure do. The problem is that if global average temperatures rise significantly, then the new changed ecosystems will tend to have less of the things that we find very convenient, such as places to grow huge fields of wheat, and more of the things that we don't really want, like malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Enormous hunk of ice sits quietly where it is while penguins still shiver = natural process = not news
Enormous hunk of ice breaks off and floats off towards South America, penguins wonder if they should have brought sunscreen = natural process (maybe) = news (definitely)
Changes in state are news. The bigger they are the more newsworthy they are. This is true whether the change is a natural process or not, and changes are especially newsworthy if there is some suspicion that they might not be entirely natural, because then we get to ask whodunit.
So let me get this straight, if there is a french version available then it is illegal to sell a non-french version?
The thing is, it's probably not French vs non-French, it's French vs multilingual. Normally a company publishes either (1) a unilingual (probably English) version, or (2) a multilingual version with all available languages on the same CD/DVD for the customer to choose among at install time. But it's common to release a unilingual version first, then work on translation and release multilingual versions later. This law means that if a company does that, then when the multilingual version is available Quebec retailers must take any remaining copies of the English-only version off the shelves and sell the multilingual version instead. Or perhaps alongside the English version; the article isn't crystal clear about whether retailers are safe by simply selling both versions side-by-side.
I would add: in the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a charity that does what it sounds like it does, officially supports wind farms. They do review planning applications for wind farms and object to about 7%, but they have no problem with 93% of proposed wind farms.
If another country (or terrorist) wanted to seriously hurt the US, they'd just have to target a broad swath of these offshore windmills. A pretty easy target I'd think?
No, not an easy target. There would be many windmills spread over large areas, and they are basically big-assed steel tubes standing in the sea -- inconvenient to get to, and not particularly easy to damage. Taking out even ten or twenty turbines in a wind farm of hundreds would take a lot of work and have very little impact. Cabling will be all on the sea floor, which makes it hard to attack.
A gas or nuclear power plant on land is a more concentrated target and is far easier to get access to. And most importantly, a terrorist's goal is to cause fear, not damage. Offshore wind turbines are not good targets because they don't blow up dramatically and they don't endanger anyone nearby. A gas or nuclear plant on land is easier to get to, explodes more dramatically, and endangers people. So offshore wind farms are better from a security point of view. (But you are quite correct that overall energy supply should be diversified, not reliant on any single source.)
the frame is made from trees from the period but the only difference between the canvas and existing paintings
Actually, paintings from that era were often done on wooden panels. Canvas didn't take over as the most common surface for paintings until "the 16th century in Italy and the 17th century in Northern Europe."
basing merit pay on test performance will do very little to improve education if the tests are deeply flawed.
Agreed, but I would add that it's certainly possible to test problem-solving ability, reasoning, and critical thinking. It just requires putting some proper effort into thinking up appropriate questions.
I'm not sure I understand the dinosaur-human problem, unless the issue is that those who see a problem don't accept geological evidence as being useful in the discussion. (If that is the case then there's really no common basis on which to have a discussion.)
Geological evidence indicates that there was a period of about 64 million years during which all the dinosaurs were dead and all the humans had not yet been born. Therefore I can say with great confidence that dinosaurs and humans never met. (That 64 million year period is not simply a void, of course: we see no fossils of dinosaurs, and no fossils of humans, but we do see fossils of lots of other kinds of creatures.) This is like saying that I can be quite sure that my grandfather never met Christopher Columbus, without asking either of them about it, because I know there was a 415-year period during which Columbus was dead and my grandfather had not yet been born. Now, maybe I'm slightly mistaken about when Columbus died, and maybe my grandfather lied about his birthdate in order to join the army, so maybe the gap is really 410 years, or 420, but I'm still pretty confident they never met. And maybe the last dinosaurs died 64 million years ago, or 60 million, or 70 million, but I'm still pretty confident that they never met.
> Private schools take those who pay. They have no IQ test as part of the application.
An income test is sufficient to select students who are likely to succeed in school. An IQ test is unnecessary.
Parents who can afford to pay for private school are likely to have above-average income and above-average social status. Parents with above-average income and status are likely to have above-average education themselves, and to value education. They are then likely to pass that value on to their children, to encourage their children to read, to make them do their homework, to take them to museums, and to discuss things with their children when the children ask "why?" Their homes are more likely to be stable and secure environments, which is important for children to perform better at school.
In the ancient world, travel by water was easier and faster than travel by land. That's why most cities are located on the shores of lakes, seas, or rivers. It wasn't until the Roman Empire built long-distance roads that land travel was even close to competitive with sea travel.
So the argument given is incorrect. If the Mediterranean had been dry, travel would have been hard and we would expect the cities of the region to have had limited contact with each other. If the Mediterranean was a water body, we would expect the cities around it to have had quite a lot of contact and to have exchanged technology to a significant degree. The latter is indeed what we see in real life.
As a tax for keeping roads up, it's very inefficient. Over 50% of the money goes towards servicing the toll collection system; not the road the toll's for.
I agree wholeheartedly, though I am tempted to say [citation needed] on the 50% figure. But this highlights the beauty of the gasoline tax: it's fair, simple to collect, hard to avoid, and it spreads the burden over the year so it is relatively painless. People who drive more, pay more, and you waste very little on transaction costs.
The only other fair usage fee for road use that I can think of would be an "odometer tax": pay for your road use according to your odometer reading, just like you pay for your electricity use by your electric meter reading. But that would be much more expensive to collect, and easy for people to avoid.
If, however, plug-in hybrids ever become a significant fraction of the cars on the road, then there will have to be a "gasoline tax" equivalent on electricity!
A lot of stuff is included in Windows. I don't know how much of it is OS and how much of it is extra software.
That's what the anti-trust tribunal said.
From the fine article: "There's moderate demand for ads based on ethnic information, but the companies acknowledge that determining ethnicity is more challenging than figuring out gender and age range."
I imagine "challenging" here may include legally challenging as much as technically challenging; I can imagine a risk of discrimination lawsuits from advertising certain products more heavily to blacks than to whites.
Or maybe from the computer's point of view, we all look alike to them.
3) It takes a GOVERNMENT to build multiple copies and revisions and tests to make it bigger/better.
...and to collect enough material to fulfill the requirements of step 1.
Just because something is bad doesn't make it terrorism.
Fox News needs to know this.
It's changed. From the fine article: "We are in the depths of a very low solar minimum right now and as a result the ionosphere is lower and less dense than, we believe, at any other time in the history of the space age..."
I do read the business pages fairly often, but I'm afraid I don't recall any details of reporting on Canadian communications satellites. I turned to Wikipedia but I know Wikipedia is not always complete or up to date so am happy to be corrected. Can you remind us of the names of the Canadian companies that are making the vast majority of communications satellites or commercial long-term systems?
I call bullshit. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that Telesat is the only Canadian satellite company (and it's nearly 2/3 owned by Loral, an American company). Telesat's Wikipedia page indicates that it operates 12 satellites. By way of comparison, Motorola built 66 Iridium satellites in the USA, just as an example of one project. I do not believe that "the vast majority of communications satellites are actually made in Canada".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communication_satellite_companies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesat
As a retail customer, you do indeed get the same physical product (methane molecules or electrons) delivered to your house no matter who your supplier is. The system relies on the concept of "the grid" as the common and cooperative distribution system, and the fact that the product is completely standardized. Customers draw product from the grid, and the suppliers feed enough product into the grid to match what their customers draw out. Customers don't necessarily receive the physical molecules of gas that were put in to the system by "their" supplier, but that doesn't actually matter since all gas is the same, and all electrons are the same. The supplier-customer relationship is really just an accounting exercise, and everything works as long as the total consumption by all customers is balanced by the total input by all suppliers.
One of the things that makes this possible is that there is complete separation of "the grid", the delivery network infrastructure, from the suppliers of the product. Here in the UK, the company that maintains the grid (gas and electricity) in most places is imaginatively named "National Grid" (a publicly-traded company). There are also other regional grid-maintainers in other areas, operating as regional monopolies. Retail customers never deal with National Grid directly, except to report emergencies like a gas leak or a power outage. Retail customers deal with suppliers, and pay a fixed monthly or quarterly charge (most of which presumably gets passed on to National Grid to keep the networks up) plus the charge for the amount of electricity or gas actually used.
And there's one more layer in there, because the suppliers are not the only generators, and in fact might not actually be generators at all. There are multiple companies that generate electricity, sell it to suppliers, and feed it into the grid. So some "suppliers" are really only billing operations: they don't operate any generating plants or maintain any wires, they just buy from generating companies which pump energy into the grid, and sell to retail customers that extract energy from the grid, and the "supplier" just maintains a relationship with the retail customer. And although we say the supplier buys gas and sells it to customers, it may all just be contracts on paper, the supplier doesn't necessarily have any actual tanks of gas of its own anywhere.
You asked about renewable energy... I buy my electricity from a company called Good Energy, which supplies electricity that is generated 100% from renewable sources. That doesn't mean that every electron in my house can physically be traced back to a windmill in Cornwall, though. It just means that Good Energy feeds into the grid the same amount of electricity that I and all of their other customers use.