Is that not what's happening? The state, not the federal government, is collecting this bicycle tax. Is that not local enough for you? So then maybe counties do it... then I can't commute to work because, while my county may have paths, I have to commute to, or through, one that doesn't. The smaller the locality - city, towns... and here we have a lot of unincorporated land that is in a county, but not part of a city, these things wouldn't get developed. If you're talking about a park, then the city or town, or even people in a given sub-division can pay for it, but when you're talking about things like roads and, yes, bike paths, then the granularity needs to be much larger. Like roadways, ideally the state makes sure there are main connections throughout the state; counties could then collect an extra tax and add smaller ones to make getting around easier, and towns could then do their own - but having every little locality just completely do their own thing removes a significant part of the benefits.
It's like the government regulating interstate commerce. If every state chose a different broadcast system, if they all chose different railway gauges, different road widths, if half the states had people driving on the left, or they all used different currency, then it would suck. Likewise, at a lower level, if every locality had their own bike paths, but none of the connected to each other, then that would suck.
As a libertarian, I substantially agree with what you say about "modern" libertarians. Frankly, the efficacy of privatizing things like roads (and bike paths) is non-existent, and people need to get over it - if you want nice things, you need to pay for it. There's a happy medium somewhere in there, where you have really nice, well maintained infrastructure; nice, clean roads; and the relative safety of police and fire departments. There's also the realization that someone with little money or means deserves just as much police protection as I do.
Theft is when someone take from you and gives you nothing in return.
But this is a silly "definition." If you forced me to buy something from you at gun-point, it's still theft. There are groups of people who will do things like wait until someone is on vacation and then paint their house or repave the driveway - and demand compensation when the people get home. It's a scam, and they argue that, even if you didn't want it, they spent their time and money to do the job and they deserve compensation. This is what taxation is like - we pay for things we didn't ask for and, despite common wisdom, redistribution of income is a common (and debatably unfair) outcome.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I favor use taxes. You use the roads, you pay for it (some factor of vehicle weight times miles driven). I'd happily pay a $15 tax on my bicycle purchase if it meant safe and largely ubiquitous bike lanes. I'd even pay that every year if I had a bicycle. I wouldn't be happy about it if they just added it on to my property taxes and I didn't even own a bike. That's what the problem with most taxes are.
This is the problem - why would a tax like this ever be repealed if it's actually working the way it was meant?
On the other hand, there have been tons of "temporary" taxes passed in my state and county that voters always seem to renew before they expire, and then they vote new taxes on top of that.
My personal take is that, really, the only "valid" taxes are use taxes... if you use a vehicle, you should help pay for the roads; ideally it's commensurate with the weight of your vehicle times the miles you drive. Police and fire departments funded by property tax (which makes some sense - the more you have to protect, the more you pay). In this case, if I paid a $15 tax and it gave me safe, well maintained bike lanes, I'd have no problem paying it even every year. But if this is just a money grab, and they don't use that money to help cyclists, then I could understand the complaints.
I generally consider myself a realist libertarian... I have a huge problem with a lot of taxation, but the suggestions that everything can be privatized are just not tenable. I'd happily pay a $15 premium if it meant more, or safer, bike lanes. The government isn't always maliciously evil.
I think you're just splitting hairs - how is Windows 10 "unusable" out of the box? I'm no MS fanboy, and I freely admit Windows 10 has problems - but given all the working around I've always had to do with every OS I've ever installed, I've never understood the hate.
OK, I am talking about Windows 10 here, although I also had 8.1 Pro that I added a "classic shell" to before I upgraded to Windows 10. I guess my take is that I've always had to tweak every OS to get it to the state that was tolerable for me, including various Linux flavors and Mac OS. So I start on the install by saying "no" to everything MS wants to to do to send back information to them. I remove all the default tiles from the start menu and only add what I want after installing. Like EVERY OTHER OS I install Chrome to use as my default browser.
I guess I'm simply cognizant of the fact that MS will keep trying to steer me towards MS products and just ignore it now. Yes, MS, I really DO want to set Chrome as my default browser. I also have disabled internet searches from Cortana - I only use it to quick launch some things that I may not use that often, the same way I do in Ubuntu's search.
Once you do all the tweaking, Windows 10 is no worse than Windows 7 for most people, and in some ways it is better. Often, when I point this out to people they say "but I shouldn't have to do all that tweaking," and they're right - but, as I mentioned, it seems I always have to do that kind of tweaking on pretty much every OS.
Yeah, I get it - they seem to have not finished actually moving their tools to a Windows 10 "paradigm," so you still have the older versions of the control panel in order to do some things, and the newer settings to do some things, and there's definitely a loss of coherence, and it's noticeable. But how often are users tweaking settings? It's one of those things that, as soon as you install Windows 10, or update certain drivers, or whatnot, you might have to search for a few settings to make things work. But then rest of the time, the 99% of the time, you're just using stuff just like you did with Windows 7 or XP.
I personally like Windows 10 - if there are any complaints, it's the telemetry, and I often use Linux when I don't feel like having everything tracked. I've also got some other annoyances (the clock is always wrong in Windows 10 after I had been using Linux... I have to turn "Automatically set the time" off and on again to get it right). I also had an issue where Cortana stopped helping me find local files when I had all the web search stuff turned off. For example, if you want "notepad" and you start typing "n" into the search, it just fails after the first letter.
So I'm not claiming it's perfect, but I've never felt anything was, and I just don't see as being a whole lot worse than anything else.
Yes, I'm a luddite - My masters degree was in C.S. studying computer graphics; I was doing VR 25 years ago, I got a job in the entertainment industry doing virtual sets and augmented reality. It's not that I think the technology isn't cool, it's that it's pointless and expensive for the vast majority of consumers at this point in time. Like most of this kind of technology, you have to thank the people with more money than sense for paying for the R&D that will eventually lead to something people might actually find value in.
I do assume people will pay for that - people with more money than sense, as I originally stated. The thing I'm trying to say is that I don't understand how these VR companies are surprised that these things aren't selling well. There are very few people with both the resources and desire to buy these at the current prices.
They drive their VW minibusses to rallies to protest emissions, the auto industry, and oil companies. Meanwhile, the guest speaker (Al Gore) flew in his private jet, but it's OK because he bought carbon offsets.
Of course not, but what is your "solution" to this problem? Have all the oil companies just stop drilling? Let's see what happens then.
This "complaint" is like complaining when Exxon-Mobile has a $20b profit in a quarter... it's not their fault we use so much gasoline. The profit margin on gasoline is much smaller than most commodities, but you can't help but make a profit when we use nearly 400 million gallons of gasoline every day (and that's just the U.S.). So let's blame the company for using their product.
Right... but that just wraps us around back to the question of why anyone thought that people would pay more than it costs for a game console to play a severely limited set of games that few people would play for more than an hour or so at a time.
That's why I didn't call it completely useless, I called it "largely" useless. Why are they surprised the mainstream buyer isn't shelling out $400+ for these things?
No, it actually is quite comparable. Not necessarily the technology - VR certainly gives you a lot more than plain old 3D, but the fact that manufacturers are pushing this (currently very expensive) technology and marketing as the next big thing when there's little use for it for most people right now makes it quite similar to what 3D gave us - expensive, awkward, limited use, and ultimately something, IMO, gamers aren't going to spend many hours using at a time - which is how most of the hard core gamers are now. Imagine wearing that crap for three or four hours. Right now it's a toy... if you have money burning a hole in your pocket, feel free to spend $400+ on something of limited use that will be outdated and obsoleted by something 1/4 the cost when VR becomes mainstream. These things are for the kind of people that will pay 10x the cost of the latest gadget on EBay because they simply can't wait for supply to catch up with demand.
Actually, I'm kind of in that "developer" category that I mentioned, only tangentially and not by my choice. IOW, I have seen some pretty cool things, and we actually are developing with the Unreal engine for some of our television show properties... and I'm sure it's going to be a big thing, but it's simply not surprising that people aren't paying $400+ for VR, and no one where I work has any idea how to monetize it anyway.
It's like 3D TV... an expensive and largely useless toy that really only irrationally exuberant developers and people with more money than common sense will buy.
Why? I don't really get the hatred these days. Their approach in the past has been incredibly sleazy - the per processor licensing, the bundling; but these days they are a typical software company that makes some products that are pretty useful to people. I won't fight over the privacy concerns - a lot of vendors fall flat in that regard, and concerned people can take steps to limit the "damage," but as far as the quality of end user software is concerned, I've not found anything open source that's better - I've only found open source that's usable as an alternative. We're talking functionality here, not ideals.
I get it - I use both; I'm running Linux as I'm typing this. I generally only boot to Windows to play certain games or for certain types of projects I need to work on for my job, but I really don't get the zealotry behind all the MS hate - they are, right now, no better or worse than any of the big IT corporations.
Seems to me that, if they follow past models, Windows would tell you it's not licensed but still allow you to use it. It might not update at that point. In a subscription model, perhaps it would do something like go 30 days with warnings before disabling itself.
Yes, that's true, but shouldn't I expect bug fixes for my one time payment? They sold me a broken product! As far as security goes, I assume we're talking about viruses and trojans; I suppose it's fair to suggest that people pay for additions to their virus and malware protection to account for new threats, but paying for bug fixes has always been a load of BS.
Yes... my dad has been using computers since before the IBM PC in his business, and every once in a while complains he can't use an old program or retrieve old data from a long forgotten format.
Agreed. My father is still in business doing accounting (he's 87); been using computers for accounting work for his one man operation since before the IBM PC. He's constantly complaining about the forced upgrades the software he uses requires. Every year it's a new version to account for new rules and forms, and he needs to keep his accounting records for a long time (more than the 7 years generally recommended to the general public). He's one of the old farts that still holds GUI interfaces in disdain, as he was able to boot up so quickly and just get to work, and then, without even exiting the software, just hit the power switch to turn it off at the end of the day. From his limited perspective on the matter, he doesn't understand the benefits of what Windows bought to PC users, like not requiring a different printer driver for every application instead of just one for Windows - his tax software is largely similar to what it was 30 years ago - a bunch of fill in the blank prompts, for the most part. They didn't need to upgrade anything, or now, for some reason, require Windows 10. Still, now he can have some backwards compatibility if ever needs to go back that far without needing another computer and without losing the benefits of a modern OS.
Just ask anyone who could barely walk into the Chiropractor's office, and walk out pain-free with a smile. I don't know about the diets they extol, or any other homeopathic remedies they might have, I know people who've been really happy after their "adjustments."
Slashdot Mirror
Except the TFS says "checked" luggage, not carry-on.
Is that not what's happening? The state, not the federal government, is collecting this bicycle tax. Is that not local enough for you? So then maybe counties do it... then I can't commute to work because, while my county may have paths, I have to commute to, or through, one that doesn't. The smaller the locality - city, towns... and here we have a lot of unincorporated land that is in a county, but not part of a city, these things wouldn't get developed. If you're talking about a park, then the city or town, or even people in a given sub-division can pay for it, but when you're talking about things like roads and, yes, bike paths, then the granularity needs to be much larger. Like roadways, ideally the state makes sure there are main connections throughout the state; counties could then collect an extra tax and add smaller ones to make getting around easier, and towns could then do their own - but having every little locality just completely do their own thing removes a significant part of the benefits.
It's like the government regulating interstate commerce. If every state chose a different broadcast system, if they all chose different railway gauges, different road widths, if half the states had people driving on the left, or they all used different currency, then it would suck. Likewise, at a lower level, if every locality had their own bike paths, but none of the connected to each other, then that would suck.
As a libertarian, I substantially agree with what you say about "modern" libertarians. Frankly, the efficacy of privatizing things like roads (and bike paths) is non-existent, and people need to get over it - if you want nice things, you need to pay for it. There's a happy medium somewhere in there, where you have really nice, well maintained infrastructure; nice, clean roads; and the relative safety of police and fire departments. There's also the realization that someone with little money or means deserves just as much police protection as I do.
Theft is when someone take from you and gives you nothing in return.
But this is a silly "definition." If you forced me to buy something from you at gun-point, it's still theft. There are groups of people who will do things like wait until someone is on vacation and then paint their house or repave the driveway - and demand compensation when the people get home. It's a scam, and they argue that, even if you didn't want it, they spent their time and money to do the job and they deserve compensation. This is what taxation is like - we pay for things we didn't ask for and, despite common wisdom, redistribution of income is a common (and debatably unfair) outcome.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I favor use taxes. You use the roads, you pay for it (some factor of vehicle weight times miles driven). I'd happily pay a $15 tax on my bicycle purchase if it meant safe and largely ubiquitous bike lanes. I'd even pay that every year if I had a bicycle. I wouldn't be happy about it if they just added it on to my property taxes and I didn't even own a bike. That's what the problem with most taxes are.
This is the problem - why would a tax like this ever be repealed if it's actually working the way it was meant?
On the other hand, there have been tons of "temporary" taxes passed in my state and county that voters always seem to renew before they expire, and then they vote new taxes on top of that.
My personal take is that, really, the only "valid" taxes are use taxes... if you use a vehicle, you should help pay for the roads; ideally it's commensurate with the weight of your vehicle times the miles you drive. Police and fire departments funded by property tax (which makes some sense - the more you have to protect, the more you pay). In this case, if I paid a $15 tax and it gave me safe, well maintained bike lanes, I'd have no problem paying it even every year. But if this is just a money grab, and they don't use that money to help cyclists, then I could understand the complaints.
I generally consider myself a realist libertarian... I have a huge problem with a lot of taxation, but the suggestions that everything can be privatized are just not tenable. I'd happily pay a $15 premium if it meant more, or safer, bike lanes. The government isn't always maliciously evil.
I think you're just splitting hairs - how is Windows 10 "unusable" out of the box? I'm no MS fanboy, and I freely admit Windows 10 has problems - but given all the working around I've always had to do with every OS I've ever installed, I've never understood the hate.
OK, I am talking about Windows 10 here, although I also had 8.1 Pro that I added a "classic shell" to before I upgraded to Windows 10. I guess my take is that I've always had to tweak every OS to get it to the state that was tolerable for me, including various Linux flavors and Mac OS. So I start on the install by saying "no" to everything MS wants to to do to send back information to them. I remove all the default tiles from the start menu and only add what I want after installing. Like EVERY OTHER OS I install Chrome to use as my default browser.
I guess I'm simply cognizant of the fact that MS will keep trying to steer me towards MS products and just ignore it now. Yes, MS, I really DO want to set Chrome as my default browser. I also have disabled internet searches from Cortana - I only use it to quick launch some things that I may not use that often, the same way I do in Ubuntu's search.
Once you do all the tweaking, Windows 10 is no worse than Windows 7 for most people, and in some ways it is better. Often, when I point this out to people they say "but I shouldn't have to do all that tweaking," and they're right - but, as I mentioned, it seems I always have to do that kind of tweaking on pretty much every OS.
Yeah, I get it - they seem to have not finished actually moving their tools to a Windows 10 "paradigm," so you still have the older versions of the control panel in order to do some things, and the newer settings to do some things, and there's definitely a loss of coherence, and it's noticeable. But how often are users tweaking settings? It's one of those things that, as soon as you install Windows 10, or update certain drivers, or whatnot, you might have to search for a few settings to make things work. But then rest of the time, the 99% of the time, you're just using stuff just like you did with Windows 7 or XP.
I personally like Windows 10 - if there are any complaints, it's the telemetry, and I often use Linux when I don't feel like having everything tracked. I've also got some other annoyances (the clock is always wrong in Windows 10 after I had been using Linux... I have to turn "Automatically set the time" off and on again to get it right). I also had an issue where Cortana stopped helping me find local files when I had all the web search stuff turned off. For example, if you want "notepad" and you start typing "n" into the search, it just fails after the first letter.
So I'm not claiming it's perfect, but I've never felt anything was, and I just don't see as being a whole lot worse than anything else.
Yes, I'm a luddite - My masters degree was in C.S. studying computer graphics; I was doing VR 25 years ago, I got a job in the entertainment industry doing virtual sets and augmented reality. It's not that I think the technology isn't cool, it's that it's pointless and expensive for the vast majority of consumers at this point in time. Like most of this kind of technology, you have to thank the people with more money than sense for paying for the R&D that will eventually lead to something people might actually find value in.
I do assume people will pay for that - people with more money than sense, as I originally stated. The thing I'm trying to say is that I don't understand how these VR companies are surprised that these things aren't selling well. There are very few people with both the resources and desire to buy these at the current prices.
They drive their VW minibusses to rallies to protest emissions, the auto industry, and oil companies. Meanwhile, the guest speaker (Al Gore) flew in his private jet, but it's OK because he bought carbon offsets.
Of course not, but what is your "solution" to this problem? Have all the oil companies just stop drilling? Let's see what happens then.
This "complaint" is like complaining when Exxon-Mobile has a $20b profit in a quarter... it's not their fault we use so much gasoline. The profit margin on gasoline is much smaller than most commodities, but you can't help but make a profit when we use nearly 400 million gallons of gasoline every day (and that's just the U.S.). So let's blame the company for using their product.
Right... but that just wraps us around back to the question of why anyone thought that people would pay more than it costs for a game console to play a severely limited set of games that few people would play for more than an hour or so at a time.
That's why I didn't call it completely useless, I called it "largely" useless. Why are they surprised the mainstream buyer isn't shelling out $400+ for these things?
No, it actually is quite comparable. Not necessarily the technology - VR certainly gives you a lot more than plain old 3D, but the fact that manufacturers are pushing this (currently very expensive) technology and marketing as the next big thing when there's little use for it for most people right now makes it quite similar to what 3D gave us - expensive, awkward, limited use, and ultimately something, IMO, gamers aren't going to spend many hours using at a time - which is how most of the hard core gamers are now. Imagine wearing that crap for three or four hours. Right now it's a toy... if you have money burning a hole in your pocket, feel free to spend $400+ on something of limited use that will be outdated and obsoleted by something 1/4 the cost when VR becomes mainstream. These things are for the kind of people that will pay 10x the cost of the latest gadget on EBay because they simply can't wait for supply to catch up with demand.
Actually, I'm kind of in that "developer" category that I mentioned, only tangentially and not by my choice. IOW, I have seen some pretty cool things, and we actually are developing with the Unreal engine for some of our television show properties... and I'm sure it's going to be a big thing, but it's simply not surprising that people aren't paying $400+ for VR, and no one where I work has any idea how to monetize it anyway.
It's like 3D TV... an expensive and largely useless toy that really only irrationally exuberant developers and people with more money than common sense will buy.
When they stop offering it NOT bundled, you might have a point.
Why? I don't really get the hatred these days. Their approach in the past has been incredibly sleazy - the per processor licensing, the bundling; but these days they are a typical software company that makes some products that are pretty useful to people. I won't fight over the privacy concerns - a lot of vendors fall flat in that regard, and concerned people can take steps to limit the "damage," but as far as the quality of end user software is concerned, I've not found anything open source that's better - I've only found open source that's usable as an alternative. We're talking functionality here, not ideals.
I get it - I use both; I'm running Linux as I'm typing this. I generally only boot to Windows to play certain games or for certain types of projects I need to work on for my job, but I really don't get the zealotry behind all the MS hate - they are, right now, no better or worse than any of the big IT corporations.
Seems to me that, if they follow past models, Windows would tell you it's not licensed but still allow you to use it. It might not update at that point. In a subscription model, perhaps it would do something like go 30 days with warnings before disabling itself.
Yes, that's true, but shouldn't I expect bug fixes for my one time payment? They sold me a broken product! As far as security goes, I assume we're talking about viruses and trojans; I suppose it's fair to suggest that people pay for additions to their virus and malware protection to account for new threats, but paying for bug fixes has always been a load of BS.
Yes... my dad has been using computers since before the IBM PC in his business, and every once in a while complains he can't use an old program or retrieve old data from a long forgotten format.
Agreed. My father is still in business doing accounting (he's 87); been using computers for accounting work for his one man operation since before the IBM PC. He's constantly complaining about the forced upgrades the software he uses requires. Every year it's a new version to account for new rules and forms, and he needs to keep his accounting records for a long time (more than the 7 years generally recommended to the general public). He's one of the old farts that still holds GUI interfaces in disdain, as he was able to boot up so quickly and just get to work, and then, without even exiting the software, just hit the power switch to turn it off at the end of the day. From his limited perspective on the matter, he doesn't understand the benefits of what Windows bought to PC users, like not requiring a different printer driver for every application instead of just one for Windows - his tax software is largely similar to what it was 30 years ago - a bunch of fill in the blank prompts, for the most part. They didn't need to upgrade anything, or now, for some reason, require Windows 10. Still, now he can have some backwards compatibility if ever needs to go back that far without needing another computer and without losing the benefits of a modern OS.
Is that how many units they're going to ship?
Just ask anyone who could barely walk into the Chiropractor's office, and walk out pain-free with a smile. I don't know about the diets they extol, or any other homeopathic remedies they might have, I know people who've been really happy after their "adjustments."