You wonder whether a multi-billion dollar industry would use a simple online tool to optimize their routes to reduce their 2 biggest costs (fuel and aircraft+crew hours) and service their customers better at the same time?:D
What does it mean that the system is said to be 90% accurate?
If this is indeed a simple accuracy (sensitivity) measure, it means that 1 in 10 readings will be wrong. So, if someone is driving a stolen car, there's a 10% chance the system will incorrectly fail to identify him/her. That's the easy part:)
There are 250M cars in the US, and each year.7M are stolen. Let's assume an average stolen car is driven for a month. That would mean that about 1 in 5000 cars is actually stolen (which is probably a huge overestimate as I would guess most stolen cars are scrapped, exported, or abandoned pretty quickly).
Now, let's assume 50000 cars are scanned, of which 10 are actually stolen. This will give 9 true positives (90% x 10), and 4999 false positives (10%*49990). So the chance that a car is actually stolen would be 9/5008 or about a tenth of a percentage.
The more reasonable assumption is that a wrong scan will give a random different number plate, which most likely does not belong to a stolen car - the chance of getting falsely assigned a stolen car plate is 10% (error rate) *.0002 (prevalence) =.00002. So, the chance of getting flagged in a stolen car is 90% +.00002 =.90002. The chance of getting flagged in a non-stolen car is simply.00002.
Now, out of our 50k scanned cars, we still get about 9 TPs, and now get about 1 (.000002*49990) FP. In other words, it turns out 1 in 10 people are falsely accused (not a very good ratio for drawing guns if you ask me). Of course, this is assuming stolen cars drive the same amount of miles as non-stolen cars. If non-stolen cars drive 10x the miles (ie are 10x as likely to be scanned), because stolen cars are abandoned, scrapped, or exported, this changes to about 50/50.
(the obvious solution, of course, is to manually check plate and car make and color before drawing guns...)
I see the same in higher education. There's a number of things we all need (like an electronic learning environment) but we buy it from vendors like Canvas or Blackboard, which is expensive and inflexible. Same for grading systems, scheduling, course guides, human resource, etc.
I think we should have moved to a cooperative structure for these things long ago and all pay into a group that develops the software and then releases it open source. Since this can be decided at the university system level there's less risk of freeriding, and since universities employ a lot of smart people who like tinkering there will be a lot of community contributions.
Python has been around for a very long time, and frankly, its popularity is inexplicable.
It doesn't do anything that other languages don't, probably better, its syntax is weird, and it uses "significant white space", which most programmers I know do not like.
Not sure if you were serious, but I'll bite.
I've programmed in quite a bunch of languages (in somewhat chronological order, BBC Basic, QBasic, Pascal, Perl, Java, C#, Prolog, C++, Python, R, JS/ES6) and I absolutely prefer python.
The brackets vs whitespace thing is a big red herring. It enforces clean indentation and reduces clutter, which is nice. It makes copy pasting sometimes a bit more difficult, which is annoying. Most of the time, I don't care.
The real benefits of python, imho, are: - a mostly sane language, good OO and functional support without forcing a paradigm on you, - a very good standard library and very good external packages for almost everything, - all the performance you want by dropping a module down to C without the rest of the program noticing.( I don't write a lot of C myself, but I certainly profit from the good folks who wrote parts of the standard library in C and who wrote packages like numpy, spacy, pytorch etc.) - it's relatively free of gotchas or weird syntax and exceptions, invites a clean coding style, and has a very nice community and documentation. - I also believe dynamic typing with type hints is actually superior to static typing, as with C++/Java you write so much useless class and interface boilerplate that only distracts. - I also love the ease of doing things like function pointers, decorators, list/dict expressions and unpacking, generators/iterators, catch-all arguments, etc etc.
Now, all languages are compromises and some languages are better at some of these points, but overall I just love the ease and productivity of working in python.
Yeah, a lot of science funders mandate and/or facilitate open access publishing. The problem is that most of this goes to 'hybrid' journals, which means that the university still needs to pay a subscription to the journal. This leads to the publisher being paid twice (by the taxman): once for publishing (APC), and once for the subscription. It also means there is still no free and open "database" of public knowledge. The current "plan S" goes further than this requiring publication is fully open access journals)
(interestingly, the association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) reached a deal with the big publishers a while ago that allowed Dutch researchers to publish open access for free, in return for keeping our subscriptions to their journals)
I'd suggest being cautious about the "information should be free" politics. It's led to some tragedy, such as Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabling JSTOR by overwhelming its servers, and killing himself rather than face the criminal charges for his abuse. Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit enterprise, generous with its free subscriptions, that _organizes_ the data and makes it searchable and organizes it, it's quite understandable that they charge modest fees to _organize_ the information and make it accessible.
The idea is laudable. But organizing the information, and editing it or providing peer review to provide some credence to the published claims, can be difficult and even impossible without some money in the process. I'll be very interested to see if sch-hub manages to avoid flooding with what is essentially worthless or even fraudulent content.
You're right that it costs money to archive, index, screen (and for journals, type-set and proofread) articles. However, the costs are now really low compared to the printing-press days, and the opportunity cost of keeping the articles behind a pay wall are big.
I'm a scientist at a good research university, so I can access almost all articles anyways through our university subscriptions. However, I very often get stuff from sci-hub just because its easier than dealing with proxies, logging on, etc. But worst of all, I can't do automatic text analysis of all our articles to e.g. write my own alerts, detect trends, search articles, do systematic review, write a machine learning system for filtering relevant articles, etc etc;
Now, the publishers of course try to offer these kinds of services to stay relevant, but (1) no publisher has all the journals, as there is still competition; and (2) as a scientist I think it's really problematic to rely on someone else's black box to decide what 'relevance' means.
So, I fully agree with the principle that science should be open because it was taxpayer funded and the current system just forks over money to Elsevier but for me the opportunities for improving the scientific process once all articles are openly available are at least as important.
Reviewers and editors often don't get paid for their work. It's considered a synergistic activity and is often viewed favorably when applying for grants. The real costs are copy editors, printing costs, and maintaining servers. Arguably, printing costs should be covered by subscribers rather than contributors. I'd like to see restrictions on public funding used to pay for publication in for-profit journals, especially predatory open access journals and publishers with paywalls.
In my field of meteorology, some of the most impactful journals are operated by professional societies like the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and this is how other fields should work as well. I don't like AMS putting papers behind paywalls and charging high prices unless an open access fee is paid, though at least it's only behind the paywall for something like three years. While AMS could be better, it's a very viable alternative to publishers that bury articles behind expensive paywalls in perpetuity. Funding agencies should encourage and insist that results be published in these types of journals.
Same here: most journals originated with our international scientific associations, but got into the hands of international publishers because of the difficulty of publishing and distributing when most of this happened. Impactful journals are generally relatively old as it takes time to build a reputation, so most were established before online publishing and open access were things.
Most of the real work is indeed done without cost to the journal: researching, writing, reviewing, deciding, (substance) editing. The remainder (copy-editing, type setting, indexing/archiving) is indeed done by the journal/publisher, and these costs need to be recouped somehow.
Example: I'm in the process of starting a community-owned open access journal. Renting a server and installing OJS (open journal systems, an FOSS submission management system) is probably around 100$ per year. Our publisher (a university press) does the type setting and indexing/archiving for us for 250$ per article, which is their cost (they don't make a profit). Of course that also pays for a bit of overhead on their side.
So, we can either charge and APC of 250$ per article (which is one tenth of what some commercial journals ask), but we are currently trying to get sponsored by academic institutions: if each chips in 1000$ per year, we quickly have enough funding to allow us to waive the APC (which will help attract submissions, especially while we are still building our reputation / need to get indexed etc).
I am a European left-wing public transportation enthousiast, and I completely agree with the question/premise.
NY has an incredibly high and dense population. The bedrock makes tunneling easy, and the lack of space makes undeground transportation a sensible option. Fares of $2.75 are not ridiculously cheap (e.g. Tokyo fares start at $1.50; London at $3.50; paris $2). So why aren't they making money?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... gives an interesting overview of the profitability of metro systems, expressed in % of cost met by fares (so >100% is profitable, 100% is subsidized). Hong Kong metro, which is not entirely incomparable, somehow is very profitable with mostly cheaper tickets and excellent service. Amsterdam metro, a much smaller place and much more difficult to tunnel, is subsidized but has 88% fare recovery. New York's metro fares cover less than half (47%) of costs.
It's a fair question to ask why that is? Material too old? Too large influence of local politicians to keep unprofitable routes going? Too few people pay the fare?
Quite a number of countries in the world offer university study for low or zero fees. Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands. These countries are of similar levels of wealth to USA.
Note that for the Netherlands, fees are only "low" (2k a year) for EU students. Non-EU students are not subsidized and pay full fees (determined by the institution rather than the government). This is generally around 10k a year, so still low by US standards, but shockingly high by German standards...
If the U.S. education system is broken it is precisely because it will gladly loan anyone money to go to college regardless of their likelihood of being successful there, the ability for their degree to allow them to earn a living or pay back their loan, or any other sensible metric.
As a corollary, tuition has gone up to a level that is nonsensical for the purposes of education. In the Netherlands the real cost of university is about 10k euro per year (of which the taxpayer pays about 80%), depending on study programme (bachelors are cheaper than masters because of scale; medicine is more expensive than history; etc). Now, the global top-10 universiteit are not in the Netherlands, but a number of Dutch universities are in the top-100.
10k a year is something you can save for, or even something you can earn on the side if you are OK with working hard. 60k a year for 3-4 years is not something you can save for as a young person, and not something you can earn waiting tables next to your study. So (unless you have a rich parent) your choices as loans or financial aid.
Of course, what you are paying for is exclusivity, brand name recognition, and an elite network. These might be worth those kinds of sums, especially if you have dreams of grandeur; but if your ambition is a happy middle class life I think going into 6 figure debt is not going to be worth it.
'Trust fund kids' are the ones that the parents know are too incompetent to handle money (e.g. Jerry Brown, CA governor).
If they had 150k, they'd spend it on hookers and blow. That's why the trust has to dribble out a monthly allowance.
Someone claiming 150k$ in a checking account, is either a moron or a troll, depending on if it's true or not.
Or someone who assumes that the stock market will crash quickly, which will force the Fed to lower interest rates again, which will mean almost all asset classes will lose value over the coming month.
Not OP, but I'm pretty sure the answer is 'yes': the whole point is that it is not 299,792,458.00, or 299,792,458.000, but *exactly* 299,792,458, so with as many zeroes after it as you wish that are actually significant.
I was talking with a professor of computer science about whether senior scientists still have time to do actual programming themselves. He told me he programs in a high-level programming language called phd...
Theres no getting in the car with the fuel light on. For most people and most usage cases a daily range of 450km is more than enough. It doesnt really matter if it takes 6 hrs to charge if youre asleep.
The only time charge time matters is when you exceed 450km in a day.
Also remember this article is about Israel. Haifa to Eilat is 450km, and there's pretty much nothing longer you could drive. Any two places excluding the Negev desert you can do round trip, including e.g. Haifa to Beersheba. The borders to Lebanon and Syria are closed. Theoretically you can drive to Jordan and Egypt, but almost no one ever does. So, while in the US 300 miles might not be all one ever drives in a day, in Israel I'm pretty sure it covers most use cases:)
For every 100km travelled in a petrol car...... it takes 26 megajoules to get petrol out of the ground and transport it to the car...... and the car itself uses 142 megajoules to move itself around.
For the same distance in an electric car, using electricity generated in an oil-fired power plant... it takes 74 megajoules to generate and transport the electricity to the car...... which then uses just 38 megajoules to move itself and its passengers
Gasoline engines effectively use only 15% of the fuel energy content to move the vehicle or to power accessories, and diesel engines can reach on-board efficiency of 20%, while electric vehicles have on-board efficiency of over 90%, when counted against stored chemical energy, or around 80%, when counted against required energy to recharge
Typical thermal efficiency for utility-scale electrical generators is around 37% for coal and oil-fired plants[4], and 56 – 60% (LEV) for combined-cycle gas-fired plants.
I couldn't find good statistics on energy costs of mining and transporting coal, pumping up and refining oil, and pumping up gas but I'm sure they're on the wiki somewhere:). Also, no idea of the energy cost of assembling the batteries vs an ICE but I would assume over the total lifetime of the car it should be negligible.
In any case, the most "optimistic" comparison (from the EV point of view) it gets total fossil-to-wheels efficiency of.6*.8=48%. The most pessimistic is.37*.8=30%. The former figure is lower than total ICE efficiency, while the latter figure is comparable. The statistics from the Guardian link above (which have the ICE use 3.7 times the energy per distance traveled) seems to be close to the 20% vs 80% comparison.
All in all, there does seem evidence for assuming that an EV will get better total energy efficiency, but it will be more like 1.5-2x as efficiency and not an order of magnitude better. Of course, an EV fleet gives better options for generating power - ICEs can only use fossil fuels or biofuels (which are problematic in many cases), while EVs can use anything that generates electricity. Especially solar seems a good idea for Israel.
Here's a secret: it's always like that. I think people, especially Americans who don't have much experience, imagine that public transport will magically take them between any two points cheaper, faster and more comfortably than a car. Usually you'd be happy to get any two of those. Outside of urban areas not even that.
Like even in Hong Kong, which you'd think was small enough, public transport is great around Kowloon or HK Island but for something like Sai Kung you'd probably want a car already.
This is not to shit on public transport though, I think it's very important to have a decent system (and for everyone else to use it:D) to reduce congestion and protect the environment and help people who aren't able to drive themselves like children, disabled or poor people.
Living in Europe (and having lived in HK) I'm afraid this is mostly true. Public transportation is almost never optimal because it does not follow the optimal route and doesn't stop where you need it to and/or stops where you don't need it to. Advantages are of course lower energy use per person-mile and less effort required while riding.
I take it as a mark of civilization that I have public transport options available to me, both trams to get around town and trains to go to neighbouring towns, but in my commute I cherish my private transportation. In my case, that's 30 minutes on a bike, which is most of my regular exercise*. The nice thing is that e-bikes (going up to 30 mph now) are making a bike commute a more plausible alternative for people living up to say 20 miles out.
However, a perfect form of transportation for non-local travel is some form of electric self-driving car powered by fairy dust. Until that time, public cars and public transport both have drawbacks...
* and yes it's fine in winter too, the poster somewhere above is just a sissy:)
Sure they can. We have a clever built-in biologic mechanism to transform brain activity into almost unnoticeable air vibrations, and another clever mechanism to transform minute air vibrations back into brain activity.
Problem is of course, most people are not really aware of this mechanism and aren't properly attuned to it, so they emit mostly nonsense and often also fail to properly pick up the thoughts other people try to share with them. It is said that the ancients were much better at it, which is why their world was so much less violent. It would be great if we could train young people to get better at using these mechanisms, but I guess that's why too fruity for most politicians.
The weirdest thing is, you can even use a clever device (called a tele-phone, from fter the greek for remote + air vibrations) to then transform these air vibrations into electric pulses, send them all across the world, and (in)directly connect the brains of people half a world apart!. It's magic! (Or at least indistinguishable from it!)
It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history
The most expensive moral stands are people sacrificing all their wealth, and even their lives, to a moral position. There's a lot of examples of that in history
Mr. Acton's net worth is (currently) 3.6G$, so unless his worth changed a lot since last year, his 850M$ were not even 20% of his worth. And even if he would donate/sacrifice 90% of his wealth, that would be less impressive than someone at the median or poverty line doing the same, since 10% of 3.6G$ is still more than enough money to never lack anything.
Slashdot Mirror
You wonder whether a multi-billion dollar industry would use a simple online tool to optimize their routes to reduce their 2 biggest costs (fuel and aircraft+crew hours) and service their customers better at the same time? :D
What does it mean that the system is said to be 90% accurate?
If this is indeed a simple accuracy (sensitivity) measure, it means that 1 in 10 readings will be wrong. So, if someone is driving a stolen car, there's a 10% chance the system will incorrectly fail to identify him/her. That's the easy part :)
There are 250M cars in the US, and each year .7M are stolen. Let's assume an average stolen car is driven for a month. That would mean that about 1 in 5000 cars is actually stolen (which is probably a huge overestimate as I would guess most stolen cars are scrapped, exported, or abandoned pretty quickly).
Now, let's assume 50000 cars are scanned, of which 10 are actually stolen. This will give 9 true positives (90% x 10), and 4999 false positives (10%*49990). So the chance that a car is actually stolen would be 9/5008 or about a tenth of a percentage.
The more reasonable assumption is that a wrong scan will give a random different number plate, which most likely does not belong to a stolen car - the chance of getting falsely assigned a stolen car plate is 10% (error rate) * .0002 (prevalence) = .00002. So, the chance of getting flagged in a stolen car is 90% + .00002 = .90002. The chance of getting flagged in a non-stolen car is simply .00002.
Now, out of our 50k scanned cars, we still get about 9 TPs, and now get about 1 (.000002*49990) FP. In other words, it turns out 1 in 10 people are falsely accused (not a very good ratio for drawing guns if you ask me). Of course, this is assuming stolen cars drive the same amount of miles as non-stolen cars. If non-stolen cars drive 10x the miles (ie are 10x as likely to be scanned), because stolen cars are abandoned, scrapped, or exported, this changes to about 50/50.
(the obvious solution, of course, is to manually check plate and car make and color before drawing guns...)
I see the same in higher education. There's a number of things we all need (like an electronic learning environment) but we buy it from vendors like Canvas or Blackboard, which is expensive and inflexible. Same for grading systems, scheduling, course guides, human resource, etc.
I think we should have moved to a cooperative structure for these things long ago and all pay into a group that develops the software and then releases it open source. Since this can be decided at the university system level there's less risk of freeriding, and since universities employ a lot of smart people who like tinkering there will be a lot of community contributions.
Python has been around for a very long time, and frankly, its popularity is inexplicable.
It doesn't do anything that other languages don't, probably better, its syntax is weird, and it uses "significant white space", which most programmers I know do not like.
Not sure if you were serious, but I'll bite.
I've programmed in quite a bunch of languages (in somewhat chronological order, BBC Basic, QBasic, Pascal, Perl, Java, C#, Prolog, C++, Python, R, JS/ES6) and I absolutely prefer python.
The brackets vs whitespace thing is a big red herring. It enforces clean indentation and reduces clutter, which is nice. It makes copy pasting sometimes a bit more difficult, which is annoying. Most of the time, I don't care.
The real benefits of python, imho, are:
- a mostly sane language, good OO and functional support without forcing a paradigm on you,
- a very good standard library and very good external packages for almost everything,
- all the performance you want by dropping a module down to C without the rest of the program noticing.( I don't write a lot of C myself, but I certainly profit from the good folks who wrote parts of the standard library in C and who wrote packages like numpy, spacy, pytorch etc.)
- it's relatively free of gotchas or weird syntax and exceptions, invites a clean coding style, and has a very nice community and documentation.
- I also believe dynamic typing with type hints is actually superior to static typing, as with C++/Java you write so much useless class and interface boilerplate that only distracts.
- I also love the ease of doing things like function pointers, decorators, list/dict expressions and unpacking, generators/iterators, catch-all arguments, etc etc.
Now, all languages are compromises and some languages are better at some of these points, but overall I just love the ease and productivity of working in python.
[So long, Guido, and thanks for all the fish!]
Wait, you're saying that if I put a brick on my accelerator and jump out of the car it's not doing autonomous driving? :)
Nothing wrong with the sentence grammatically or semantically (stylistically is a different matter).
Try reading when undrunk. Or after finishing school ;-)
Yeah, a lot of science funders mandate and/or facilitate open access publishing. The problem is that most of this goes to 'hybrid' journals, which means that the university still needs to pay a subscription to the journal. This leads to the publisher being paid twice (by the taxman): once for publishing (APC), and once for the subscription. It also means there is still no free and open "database" of public knowledge. The current "plan S" goes further than this requiring publication is fully open access journals)
(interestingly, the association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) reached a deal with the big publishers a while ago that allowed Dutch researchers to publish open access for free, in return for keeping our subscriptions to their journals)
I'd suggest being cautious about the "information should be free" politics. It's led to some tragedy, such as Aaron Swartz repeatedly disabling JSTOR by overwhelming its servers, and killing himself rather than face the criminal charges for his abuse. Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit enterprise, generous with its free subscriptions, that _organizes_ the data and makes it searchable and organizes it, it's quite understandable that they charge modest fees to _organize_ the information and make it accessible.
The idea is laudable. But organizing the information, and editing it or providing peer review to provide some credence to the published claims, can be difficult and even impossible without some money in the process. I'll be very interested to see if sch-hub manages to avoid flooding with what is essentially worthless or even fraudulent content.
You're right that it costs money to archive, index, screen (and for journals, type-set and proofread) articles. However, the costs are now really low compared to the printing-press days, and the opportunity cost of keeping the articles behind a pay wall are big.
I'm a scientist at a good research university, so I can access almost all articles anyways through our university subscriptions. However, I very often get stuff from sci-hub just because its easier than dealing with proxies, logging on, etc. But worst of all, I can't do automatic text analysis of all our articles to e.g. write my own alerts, detect trends, search articles, do systematic review, write a machine learning system for filtering relevant articles, etc etc;
Now, the publishers of course try to offer these kinds of services to stay relevant, but (1) no publisher has all the journals, as there is still competition; and (2) as a scientist I think it's really problematic to rely on someone else's black box to decide what 'relevance' means.
So, I fully agree with the principle that science should be open because it was taxpayer funded and the current system just forks over money to Elsevier but for me the opportunities for improving the scientific process once all articles are openly available are at least as important.
Reviewers and editors often don't get paid for their work. It's considered a synergistic activity and is often viewed favorably when applying for grants. The real costs are copy editors, printing costs, and maintaining servers. Arguably, printing costs should be covered by subscribers rather than contributors. I'd like to see restrictions on public funding used to pay for publication in for-profit journals, especially predatory open access journals and publishers with paywalls.
In my field of meteorology, some of the most impactful journals are operated by professional societies like the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and this is how other fields should work as well. I don't like AMS putting papers behind paywalls and charging high prices unless an open access fee is paid, though at least it's only behind the paywall for something like three years. While AMS could be better, it's a very viable alternative to publishers that bury articles behind expensive paywalls in perpetuity. Funding agencies should encourage and insist that results be published in these types of journals.
Same here: most journals originated with our international scientific associations, but got into the hands of international publishers because of the difficulty of publishing and distributing when most of this happened. Impactful journals are generally relatively old as it takes time to build a reputation, so most were established before online publishing and open access were things.
Most of the real work is indeed done without cost to the journal: researching, writing, reviewing, deciding, (substance) editing. The remainder (copy-editing, type setting, indexing/archiving) is indeed done by the journal/publisher, and these costs need to be recouped somehow.
Example: I'm in the process of starting a community-owned open access journal. Renting a server and installing OJS (open journal systems, an FOSS submission management system) is probably around 100$ per year. Our publisher (a university press) does the type setting and indexing/archiving for us for 250$ per article, which is their cost (they don't make a profit). Of course that also pays for a bit of overhead on their side.
So, we can either charge and APC of 250$ per article (which is one tenth of what some commercial journals ask), but we are currently trying to get sponsored by academic institutions: if each chips in 1000$ per year, we quickly have enough funding to allow us to waive the APC (which will help attract submissions, especially while we are still building our reputation / need to get indexed etc).
Why is this comment marked troll?
I am a European left-wing public transportation enthousiast, and I completely agree with the question/premise.
NY has an incredibly high and dense population. The bedrock makes tunneling easy, and the lack of space makes undeground transportation a sensible option. Fares of $2.75 are not ridiculously cheap (e.g. Tokyo fares start at $1.50; London at $3.50; paris $2). So why aren't they making money?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... gives an interesting overview of the profitability of metro systems, expressed in % of cost met by fares (so >100% is profitable, 100% is subsidized). Hong Kong metro, which is not entirely incomparable, somehow is very profitable with mostly cheaper tickets and excellent service. Amsterdam metro, a much smaller place and much more difficult to tunnel, is subsidized but has 88% fare recovery. New York's metro fares cover less than half (47%) of costs.
It's a fair question to ask why that is? Material too old? Too large influence of local politicians to keep unprofitable routes going? Too few people pay the fare?
Quite a number of countries in the world offer university study for low or zero fees. Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands. These countries are of similar levels of wealth to USA.
Note that for the Netherlands, fees are only "low" (2k a year) for EU students. Non-EU students are not subsidized and pay full fees (determined by the institution rather than the government). This is generally around 10k a year, so still low by US standards, but shockingly high by German standards...
If the U.S. education system is broken it is precisely because it will gladly loan anyone money to go to college regardless of their likelihood of being successful there, the ability for their degree to allow them to earn a living or pay back their loan, or any other sensible metric.
As a corollary, tuition has gone up to a level that is nonsensical for the purposes of education. In the Netherlands the real cost of university is about 10k euro per year (of which the taxpayer pays about 80%), depending on study programme (bachelors are cheaper than masters because of scale; medicine is more expensive than history; etc). Now, the global top-10 universiteit are not in the Netherlands, but a number of Dutch universities are in the top-100.
10k a year is something you can save for, or even something you can earn on the side if you are OK with working hard. 60k a year for 3-4 years is not something you can save for as a young person, and not something you can earn waiting tables next to your study. So (unless you have a rich parent) your choices as loans or financial aid.
Of course, what you are paying for is exclusivity, brand name recognition, and an elite network. These might be worth those kinds of sums, especially if you have dreams of grandeur; but if your ambition is a happy middle class life I think going into 6 figure debt is not going to be worth it.
'Trust fund kids' are the ones that the parents know are too incompetent to handle money (e.g. Jerry Brown, CA governor).
If they had 150k, they'd spend it on hookers and blow. That's why the trust has to dribble out a monthly allowance.
Someone claiming 150k$ in a checking account, is either a moron or a troll, depending on if it's true or not.
Or someone who assumes that the stock market will crash quickly, which will force the Fed to lower interest rates again, which will mean almost all asset classes will lose value over the coming month.
Not OP, but I'm pretty sure the answer is 'yes': the whole point is that it is not 299,792,458.00, or 299,792,458.000, but *exactly* 299,792,458, so with as many zeroes after it as you wish that are actually significant.
No, by secretary.
I was talking with a professor of computer science about whether senior scientists still have time to do actual programming themselves. He told me he programs in a high-level programming language called phd...
Theres no getting in the car with the fuel light on. For most people and most usage cases a daily range of 450km is more than enough. It doesnt really matter if it takes 6 hrs to charge if youre asleep.
The only time charge time matters is when you exceed 450km in a day.
Also remember this article is about Israel. Haifa to Eilat is 450km, and there's pretty much nothing longer you could drive. Any two places excluding the Negev desert you can do round trip, including e.g. Haifa to Beersheba. The borders to Lebanon and Syria are closed. Theoretically you can drive to Jordan and Egypt, but almost no one ever does. So, while in the US 300 miles might not be all one ever drives in a day, in Israel I'm pretty sure it covers most use cases :)
From https://www.theguardian.com/fo...: (with a nice infographic :) )
For every 100km travelled in a petrol car ... ... it takes 26 megajoules to get petrol out of the ground and transport it to the car ... ... and the car itself uses 142 megajoules to move itself around.
For the same distance in an electric car, using electricity generated in an oil-fired power plant ... it takes 74 megajoules to generate and transport the electricity to the car ... ... which then uses just 38 megajoules to move itself and its passengers
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Passenger car diesel engines have energy efficiency of up to 41% but more typically 30%, and petrol engines of up to 37.3%, but more typically 20%
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Gasoline engines effectively use only 15% of the fuel energy content to move the vehicle or to power accessories, and diesel engines can reach on-board efficiency of 20%, while electric vehicles have on-board efficiency of over 90%, when counted against stored chemical energy, or around 80%, when counted against required energy to recharge
And finally, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...:
Typical thermal efficiency for utility-scale electrical generators is around 37% for coal and oil-fired plants[4], and 56 – 60% (LEV) for combined-cycle gas-fired plants.
I couldn't find good statistics on energy costs of mining and transporting coal, pumping up and refining oil, and pumping up gas but I'm sure they're on the wiki somewhere :). Also, no idea of the energy cost of assembling the batteries vs an ICE but I would assume over the total lifetime of the car it should be negligible.
In any case, the most "optimistic" comparison (from the EV point of view) it gets total fossil-to-wheels efficiency of .6*.8=48%. The most pessimistic is .37*.8=30%. The former figure is lower than total ICE efficiency, while the latter figure is comparable. The statistics from the Guardian link above (which have the ICE use 3.7 times the energy per distance traveled) seems to be close to the 20% vs 80% comparison.
All in all, there does seem evidence for assuming that an EV will get better total energy efficiency, but it will be more like 1.5-2x as efficiency and not an order of magnitude better. Of course, an EV fleet gives better options for generating power - ICEs can only use fossil fuels or biofuels (which are problematic in many cases), while EVs can use anything that generates electricity. Especially solar seems a good idea for Israel.
Here's a secret: it's always like that. I think people, especially Americans who don't have much experience, imagine that public transport will magically take them between any two points cheaper, faster and more comfortably than a car. Usually you'd be happy to get any two of those. Outside of urban areas not even that.
Like even in Hong Kong, which you'd think was small enough, public transport is great around Kowloon or HK Island but for something like Sai Kung you'd probably want a car already.
This is not to shit on public transport though, I think it's very important to have a decent system (and for everyone else to use it :D) to reduce congestion and protect the environment and help people who aren't able to drive themselves like children, disabled or poor people.
Living in Europe (and having lived in HK) I'm afraid this is mostly true. Public transportation is almost never optimal because it does not follow the optimal route and doesn't stop where you need it to and/or stops where you don't need it to. Advantages are of course lower energy use per person-mile and less effort required while riding.
I take it as a mark of civilization that I have public transport options available to me, both trams to get around town and trains to go to neighbouring towns, but in my commute I cherish my private transportation. In my case, that's 30 minutes on a bike, which is most of my regular exercise*. The nice thing is that e-bikes (going up to 30 mph now) are making a bike commute a more plausible alternative for people living up to say 20 miles out.
However, a perfect form of transportation for non-local travel is some form of electric self-driving car powered by fairy dust. Until that time, public cars and public transport both have drawbacks...
* and yes it's fine in winter too, the poster somewhere above is just a sissy :)
Programming, motherfucker, do you speak it?
They claim to value: Responding to change
They really value: Instability and plausible deniability
We fucking do: Programming, motherfucker!
That's the state of the current web. :(
Try browsing with JS and all cross-site requests disabled, you'll quickly find that gopher was more informative than the mess we have now...
I know right? Two links in the summary, both pointing to the silly article. We're map buffs, not RTFA'ers!
https://www.nationalgeographic...
Humans can do this without the machinery
Sure they can. We have a clever built-in biologic mechanism to transform brain activity into almost unnoticeable air vibrations, and another clever mechanism to transform minute air vibrations back into brain activity.
Problem is of course, most people are not really aware of this mechanism and aren't properly attuned to it, so they emit mostly nonsense and often also fail to properly pick up the thoughts other people try to share with them. It is said that the ancients were much better at it, which is why their world was so much less violent. It would be great if we could train young people to get better at using these mechanisms, but I guess that's why too fruity for most politicians.
The weirdest thing is, you can even use a clever device (called a tele-phone, from fter the greek for remote + air vibrations) to then transform these air vibrations into electric pulses, send them all across the world, and (in)directly connect the brains of people half a world apart!. It's magic! (Or at least indistinguishable from it!)
When fruitflies get MAC addresses we know this whole Internet of Things is going too far!
Yeah exactly.
It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history
The most expensive moral stands are people sacrificing all their wealth, and even their lives, to a moral position. There's a lot of examples of that in history
Mr. Acton's net worth is (currently) 3.6G$, so unless his worth changed a lot since last year, his 850M$ were not even 20% of his worth. And even if he would donate/sacrifice 90% of his wealth, that would be less impressive than someone at the median or poverty line doing the same, since 10% of 3.6G$ is still more than enough money to never lack anything.
Some light reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.bbc.com/news/magaz...