I assumed that we were talking about new cars here... since the issue at hand is price disparity between EV's and conventional automobiles. Not very many people buy brand new cars without getting a loan.

The problem with EV's that cost so much more initially is that it typically takes longer then the duration of the loan you would get for the car before it starts to pay for itself... so your monthly payments on the car are even more than what you would be spending on a conventional automobile *including* gasoline.

This is a self fixing problem

You are right... in the sense that after a sufficient number of generations have passed with people expecting that the next generation will take care of it, the depleting resources of the world will be incapable of supporting what by that time will be a vastly larger population at what would be considered a modern level of industrialization... People will die because resource distribution won't meet people's needs, and all but the richest of our descendants will end up living much like people used to in the 16th or 17th centuries... without any ability to develop technology any further because there won't be enough resources left to do it.

So yeah... it's a self-correcting problem, as long as your idea of a good future for our society is having almost everyone live like the Amish.

... where people could sign up to be drivers for people who wanted to share rides to work during rush hour commutes.

It was expected that passengers would at least be willing to compensate drivers for gasoline used, but there was also a general practice of passengers giving drivers an honorarium for their time, typically once every other week or so. The latter of these two was not actually permitted to be demanded by the driver, but it was still a general practice among club members, so in the long run, it was still profitable for a driver.

When I first saw Uber, I at first thought it that it was basically the same thing... Can someone explain why Uber can be against the law when the aforementioned carpool club was not?

Birds don't comply with FAA rules... and it's not inconceivable that one to have a drone that looks like a bird from a distance.

Of course, then you might also risk having it shot down anyways...

But what happens when technology gets to the point that you can make a drone that believably (to a human being on the ground) looks like a protected species of bird?

It's not an emergency.... Won't be one for my lifetime or my grand kids lifetimes for that matter... Prepare for the future? Sure. However, it's not time to panic about the issue and run out and do something stupid and rash.

Except to the extent that every generation that believes that it's not vital to be doing something about it right now only ends up making things harder for the next generation, because that excuse, even if it true, gives us the best reason in the world to procrastinate. Eventually... not in my lifetime or my grandchildren's lifetime, or maybe even in my grandchilrden's granchildren's lifetime, it *will* be too late to do anything about it... because the energy resources of this planet will be too used up to sustain what we, today, would recognize as a modern level of industrialization, and the technology for alternative energy sources will be too immature to meet the demands of the time because the generations that preceeded them didn't invest the time and energy into it right now that is needed *so* that it can become a viable option in the future.

So whether or not the real danger is imminent, treating it as anything less than something that we should be doing something about right now only means that you won't.

And the kicker is that we have the technology to do it.... today. It's just a lot of hard work, oh... and it's a bit expensive. Of course, the price isn't going to come down unless we are actively pursuing the technologies, and it's not going to get any easier if we just sit around waiting for the next generation to look after it, even if there is enough time.

Even if you ignore the effects of global warming, there are pollution issues as well... and the differences in that *ARE* readily perceivable in a person's lifetime.

Besides... urgent or not, as the saying goes, why put off until tomorrow what you can do today? Of course I understand that it's really hard right now, quite expensive, and anything but convenient to do, but the reality is that something like this will not get any easier with time until people start caring about trying to do something about it (in fact, it's liable to only get harder as time goes by long as people aren't trying to do something about it, simply because of an ever-growing population and constantly growing energy needs). If we start using alternative energy sources now, then it seems to me there's a much better chance that we will be more ready and able to improve the technologies behind them as the demand grows, while if we just remain oil-based, then any possible advances are much more likely to remain undiscovered for much longer.

And at least this candidate cares enough about the issue to try and make a stand for it... and that much should be applauded, IMO. I am not American, but if I were, this position would weigh heavily among the factors that I would consider when I voted.... not necessarily outweighing everything else, but definitely enough to give the matter some serious consideration.

Nothing that is truly worth doing is easy.

But for your lifetime and that of your grandkids it is limitless, in practice

And why should that make it acceptable to not care about the longer term consequences?

Or maybe they understand long-term thinking. Only producing for one platform means you lock your fate to that platform. By supporting multiple platforms, you increase your bargaining power, goodwill from customers (who are often evangelists willing to spend more than others).

Obviously a game company should evolve to meet a changing platform market... but for now, in 2015, the market for Linux games is simply too low, and the royalties won't justify the money spent on making them.

Also, maybe people like making games, like people playing them, and want more people to do that, and want to give their customers what they want, even if it's not the best way to directly make money. That will produce more goodwill and fan support in the long run.

There's that, of course... and I don't intend to dismiss such incentives, but that sort of concurs with the point I was trying to make, which as that targetting Linux as a game platform is going to negatively impact your company's ROI on development, unless your overhead is obscenely low... probably on the order of a one or two-man outfit.

Sure, you can say that's all optimistic bullshit, and maybe, but look at Valve's success as a company that does things with long-term gain over short-term benefit.

In my experience developing games, while the studios and especially the developers may genuinely want to produce good games that people will enjoy playing, in the end, if they can't recover their costs for making those games because they've spent too much on salaries for the time spent supporting platforms with insufficient royalties or revenue to compensate that cost, then the studio can be in danger of going under.

The way you make them care about it is to issue fines. Kind of like how you make people care about shoveling their front walkways in the winter... when they don't do it, you fine them.

If the consumer lives in an apartment where garbage cannot be obviously traced to a single dwelling, then the entire complex is fined... this may eventually translate to increased apartment rents for everyone, but the more people do what they are supposed to do, the less likely that is to occur.

How is that fallacy applicable, exactly? I was talking about keeping ongoing costs down.

As of this current moment the top 15 selling games on steam all have linux support. I guess those developers are all just throwing money away right?

Unfortunately, yes. The money they invested in paying the developers and QA team for making and verifying the Linux port inevitably lowers the studio's ROI. Sure, it can represent some number of additional sales, but because of how small the market is, the royalties from those few additional sales (assuming that you even see any royalties... many of the games that I've worked on at the game studios I've worked at were outsourced to us from other larger studios, and we were just paid a fixed fee for development), are generally not going to outweigh the many thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars that might be spent by the game studio working on the port and just making sure that it behaves as intended.

The only way it makes sense to grab that extra 1.5% sales that Linux *MIGHT* represent is if you can get it at absolutely *NO* extra cost. And that 1.5% is a theoretical maximum, assuming an extraordinaly high penetration level across all Linux users. In practice, the penetration will be just a tiny fraction of even that amount. Sure, the studios will take the Linux market when they can get it for free, but it's generally not something that a studio is going to want to invest effort in. Ultimately, that effort will still only translate to reduced profit because the increase in sales can't justify the amount spent working on the port.

Maybe there are game companies out there that like throwing away money, but in my experience, game industry profits run way too close to the margin to afford to spend any paid developer-time on something so small. If it gets done at all, it's typically by people who have a passion or love for that market, not by game studios, who are generally really just in the business of trying to make money.

That still amounts to people treating different genders unequally, which may be a fault of the child's parents for not simply telling their child that they can be or do anything that they want to, but I would argue that it is just as much a fault of the parents education when they were children themselves.

If we begin by starting to teach people, ideally starting from a fairly young age, to not treat people differently simply because of their gender (or their race, or sexual orientation, etc, for that matter) then the problem ends up really resolving itself over time. It will take a couple of generations for the effects to reach a critical mass, but by trying to target women specifically to enter STEM fields, we are really just reinforcing the problem, because we are treating the different genders differently when there ought to be no reason to, and the problem just perpetuates.... maybe not indefinitely, but certainly for far longer than it ought to.

We need to treat the cause, not just try to reverse the symptoms.