Comment Re:Public transit (Score 1) 389
Charging a "nominal" amount (a quarter per ride or $10 per month) might discourage abuse of the system while still providing much of the benefits of a "free" system.
Charging a "nominal" amount (a quarter per ride or $10 per month) might discourage abuse of the system while still providing much of the benefits of a "free" system.
To be fair, we should also consider how much of the operating costs are involved in collecting the fares. If it is significant, there would be a stronger case for eliminating it.
Another option is to save money on enforcement and accept that there will be some "cheating". Vancouver's Skytrain system has operated for almost 30 years with no fare-gates - it has always been kind of nice to feel that people were trusted to pay their way.
Unfortunately many people felt that there were too many cheaters, so they have decided to put up expensive gates to make cheaters less able to cheat. The expected cost of the gates and related infrastructure are much greater than the estimated amounts "lost" to cheaters, but it makes some people feel better I suppose.
Vancouver seems to have less than 5% losses due to cheating across the system - about $18 million per year, and that the fare gate system will reduce this by about $7 million per year. While the new "Compass" smart-card system will be a pleasure to use in comparison with cash and paper tickets, it is not clear to me that installing turnstiles in all the stations was a cost-effective decision. I think things would have worked fine with a continuation of the historical system of trusting people to have paid their fare when they go get on the train. But I suppose this exercise does provide economic stimulation in the form of jobs for gate installers and the like...
AC travels long distances, DC doesn't without large power losses. AC you have centralized Power Stations, DC you would have Power Generating Station every where. Why would DC be better, or do you like having DC Power Generator every BLOCK?
AC and DC have the same resistive losses at the same voltages. No differences.
It has historically been much easier to transform AC to different voltages, thus has been generally easier to get AC up to the high voltages that make it economical to use it over long distances. In modern times, I think this trend has reversed and DC is now being used preferentially for long distance transmission:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For underwater power cables, HVDC avoids the heavy currents required to charge and discharge the cable capacitance each cycle.
(They're the iPhone of electric cars - they've got the luxury market, it's not clear they'll ever get into the mass market where the real money is.)
I thought the iPhone was making something like 80%+ of the profit of the cell-phone industry?
OK it is not 80%: "Apple made more money than all of its competitors combined, taking in 56 percent of the profit in the mobile device market."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/to...
If you are making the majority of the profit from a market, you aren't doing too badly. Even if you only sell to the "luxury" segment of that market.
Are you personally involved in the Auto industry? Do you live within a 100 miles of Detroit? If the answer to either of these questions is no, with all due respect, Sir, or Madam, you are seriously mistaken.
About what?
I doubt very much that the "other party" would have done things significantly differently. Of course they would have framed it differently. And then THEIR opponents would talk about "corporate welfare" and how the working man was getting a raw deal.
As an aside, how could the UAW block such a purchase? I can only imagine they could do so if they had some financial right to how GM was disposed of, in which case you might say that one of the owners blocked the sale, which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to be allowed to do. If I had come in and said "I'll buy the assets of GM" but did not make an offer that the owners found acceptable, why should them accept it?
These are interesting issues of public policy. What rights and obligations does society have to help/protect business owners and workers? Certainly the community has an interest in who does what. Society is ill-served if large fractions of the population are under-employed or under-paid. Society is ill-served if it is too difficult or not profitable enough to invest in new and continuing businesses.
If you think that these types of interests are easy to balance then I think you aren't thinking enough.
I don't disagree with most of Solandri's arguments - in a properly functioning economy, bankruptcy of one place is not particularly tough on the system as a whole, and the statements about the GM situation have been exaggerated and/or simplistic.
It should be considered however that much of the economic troubles at the time were driven by uncertainty, lack of confidence and liquidity. If the government had not stepped up with the cash infusion as was done, it is not clear that anyone would have stepped up to buy the pieces available in liquidation and kept any of them operating. In "normal" times perhaps there would have been the 80%-90% retention of the employees and subcontractors, but in this case it seems quite possible that without the confidence brought in by the government bailout it could have been the catalyst of a negative feedback loop that would have had huge follow-on negative repercussions.
I do think that the question "would it have been more expensive to let them go under" IS a valid argument/question. In a sense, the system worked as designed - as I understand, GM did file for bankruptcy (chapter 11), and reorganized and ended up with new owners (one of which was the US Gov). Without the involvement of the US Gov, it seems likely that the reorganization would have resulted in much larger disruption to US Gov interests. In this case, the US Gov acted just like some deep pocket investor who thought that they could turn a profit on supplying some capitol.
Poe-tae-toe, poe-taa-to.
The "bailout" (it is reasoned) prevented the factories from shutting their doors and putting a whole wack of people out of work, which would have had tremendous negative consequences for government expenses and revenues.
Should labour and management have made different decisions in the years leading up to this problem? Probably. Is either party blameless? Probably not.
Presumably if it was generally known that the authorities weren't going to investigate any suspicious packages, They would start sending more of them.
This presupposes the existence of enough people in each city to actually be wanting to do this, RIGHT NOW, who are only being prevented by their thoughts that the ever vigilant authorities will prevent their nefarious plans. I just don't buy it. "They" just do not exist in large numbers. If "they" were actually out there, the types of investigation of suspicious packages that is currently done would be totally insufficient to prevent the "thousands per city" type of threat.
the one time you don't react, someone will die and there will be a huge investigation and people being fired with no pension benefits
No one is saying "don't react", they are saying "react appropriately". You put together a well thought out response plan BEFORE the event, then follow it. Such a response plan should not call for busting down the doors with guns blazing on the strength of a single anonymous phone call. Not following the plan is what should result in disciplinary actions.
Maybe you missed the Boston Marathon bombings? The police have a choice. They can ignore warnings, suspicious packages, etc, and we can just accept that major cities are going to lose a few thousand people each year. Or they can react to EACH threat. They don't have 20-20 hindsight.
THOUSANDS of people EACH YEAR in "major cities"? What colour is the sky in your world?
Maybe I have been sleeping - did I miss the announcements of multiple foiled death plots in North America? I guess the police doing all this type of "targeting suspicious activities" could be acting as a deterrent, but I find it hard to believe that in each of our "major cities" there are people crazy enough to want to plot bombings, but at the same time being held back by their fear of the actions of the police.
Given all that we know about GM, can someone explain (aside from the obvious political reasons / TBTF), why this company was bailed out? Romney was correct, it should have been allowed to go bankrupt. In addition, the taxpayer still had to eat a $10 billion loss. GM management was incompetent to the core. This idea is yet another example of it for all of the reasons you list and more.
The question is would letting GM go bankrupt have resulted in more than 10 billion in losses in terms of lost payroll taxes and increased social assistance benefits for all of the GM workers and all of the assorted companies that also would have gone under?
Further down in the linked article is "On all TARP investments to date, including the sale of Treasury’s shares in AIG, the government has recovered a total of $432.7 billion on $421.8 billion disbursed. " so overall, it doesn't look like all the TARP funds were such a bad investment even from a straight purchase-sale calculation.
Of course, it is much harder to figure out if, long term, this was a good policy - would the economy have been better off to "kill off" the sick or better off in "healing" the sick? Have any of the "sick" been healed or are they still "sick"? Have we ensured similar things don't happen in the future?
I don't have high hopes for answers to these sorts of questions.
Well, Stiglitz wasn't taken seriously at the time. You could have shown what Stiglitz said to Alan Greenspan and he would have rejected it, along with most other mainstream economists.
It doesn't matter who debunked the unrealistic assumptions in climate science, since you won't take it seriously anyway. If you don't think the fact that temperatures are 0.5 degree below the predictions that were made 25 years ago and again 13 years ago, is any indication that the models failed, it doesn't matter what evidence I present. That's because you don't care about normal scientific standards that say: if the prediction is consistently wrong, the theory is wrong.
Who's predictions? I would really be interested in links to these findings. Are these 0.5 degrees below predictions outside the range of the predictions (the prediction uncertainties) or just lower than the single value of the "most likely" prediction? For the 25 and 13 year predictions, is this 0.5 degree "error" for just a single year or for all of them?
Most of the "predictions" I have seen have certainly had uncertainties much larger than 0.5 degrees, and many have entire ranges depending on the level of "optimism" or "pessimism" in terms of the model assumptions. Are you saying that the most "optimistic" predictions were 0.5 degrees higher than the actual measurements? Are you saying that the last 25 years of data (or 13) is inconsistent with human driven climate change?
The argument that black cabs are making is that Uber is using a taxi-meter for their fares and its illegal to have a taxi-meter installed (in London) unless you are a black cab.
(I'm making no comment about whether that rule is reasonable, I don't know why it exists other than, presumably, to deter non-black cabs from answering hails - the price needs to be agreed which should be done at booking time)
Black cab drivers are complaining that that law isn't being enforced for Uber, hence their protest. TfL have said that they don't consider using an app, having a meter installed.
At the end of the day this can only be decided by:
a) repealing the law - Uber is welcome to lobby to get that done - but they haven't.
b) bringing a test case - this is where I suspect the black cab drivers problem is. It's probably TfL who has to bring the test case. The courts will then have to decide whether an app is an "installed taxi-meter"
After (or possibly before) b, parliament can decide to clarify the law. Generally parliament doesn't act unless there's a perceived problem though - so it won't be until: 1) The courts rule that an app isn't an installed taxi-meter but parliament decides that they intended to catch the Uber case - the law will be modified to make it explicit that an app counts as a taxi-meter.
2) The courts rule that an app is an installed taxi-meter but parliament decides that that wasn't intended to be caught and clarify the law (probably after lobbying)
3) There are a series of high profile assaults/robberies/etc by Uber drivers so parliament clarifies the law so then TfL prosecutes Uber drivers.
Black-cab and mini-cab services coexist in London. I've used both and no doubt will again in the future.
Uber appears to be treading the line between a mini-cab service (which would be legal) and a black-cab service (which would be illegal). One of the great things about London is that, late at night, when you're the worse for drink, you can get into some random strangers car and be as confident as it's possible to be that that person will deliver the promised service.
There's quite a lot of (TfL) advertising warning people that "unless it's pre-booked it's a stranger's car".
excellent summation!
If a thing's worth having, it's worth cheating for. -- W.C. Fields
