Although I doubt it was done to solve the problem you outline, many HOV lanes are going to 3+ instead of 2+. So the single guy with a driver is no longer clear to go free...

Not that they will care; if you can afford a driver you can afford the toll easily. But at least they will have to pay going forward.

On the other hand, I find going to 3+ to be a burden on families where a wife and husband work, who may well not be able to afford to pay the full HOV fee every day and will no longer be able to use it for free even though they are using one car instead of two.

And of course, let's not forget the Hitchhikerian:

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
"'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.

Yes, but the Beatles, much like Devastator or Voltron, are far greater and more powerful when combined than the sum of their individual parts.

To be clear, we're not talking about a completely equal income, or anything so communistic. We're talking more like one where the basics are covered, and then your income for work you do, whether that be artistic/performance or something high-skilled, or even service jobs, is entirely discretionary.

Robots aren't going to completely replace skilled human labor, at least not until they can replace us completely - and there will still be work to do for some time. It's just that people who previously were able to work and get by on jobs that did not require particular knowledge or talent are going to be increasingly scarce, and there has to be some way to account for that other than a "let them starve and reduce the surplus population" response.

Well, certainly I should caveat that I mean "in this country, with minimal acceptable living standards."

And yes - insane numbers of people in underdeveloped countries have gone from abject poverty, living in a squalid shack with sketchy food (or on the edge of hunger even), to something better, but that's because their society is nowhere near this stage of development. They'll get there eventually, and good for them - but in the meantime, that still doesn't help someone who lives here, with our cost of living.

Now, certainly people here could probably manage to stay alive on the current actual value of labor, if they were willing to tolerate the same abysmal living conditions, but people today in the US are rightly horrified by such things, and we expect better. Our minimal living standards are high, at least compared to undeveloped or developing world nations - and that's a good thing.

ppppfffft!

Back in the old neighborhood, some of the bedrooms were SMALLER than that...

There has to be more differences in the formulas that just the sweetener me thinks.

I didn't phrase my post at all well, and ended off on a tangent... but this is exactly the question I meant to ask with my subject.

I'm really curious if there are other differences besides just the sweetener between diet and non-diet drinks.

"Annoying documents" don't negate the concepts of libel and slander. Such documents also usually include ideas like "privacy".

I think the biggest problem with usage billing would be "I fell asleep watching ... and now I have to pay for what I didn't see."

It wouldn't surprise me to see a mix of base fee for regular content and then an on-demand fee for "premium" content. Heck. HBO could do that now and sell HBO Now for non-current seasons for some price less than what they would sell it for past seasons and the current new programs.

Hooray for Verizon for trying to challenge the fucked up cable system. Maybe, just maybe, they see end of "cable" as a thing when anything can be streamed instead and want to stave this off by making at least kind of sane channel choices available.

Well, kind of. I think they made a lot of this mess for themselves. I think the TV channel sources saw the cable companies successfully ratchet up the prices continuously and figured they needed to be in on that money bandwagon. Enter in all the must-carry bundles and tier requirements and all the bullshit that got us to 800 channels of nothing for $150/month (and not even HBO, damnit).

And the cable companies didn't care because they could just pass off the costs to their customers through ever higher prices and announce "Wow! We've added even more high value content, ESPN Classic 4 -- all those great historic bocce tournaments from the 1950s".

And both the channel providers and the cable companies got fat and sassy.

And now everyone hates cable, hates paying $150/month for a bunch of channels they never watch and is dropping it as fast as they can.

There are a number of native libraries devoted to quickly defining and presenting working forms in iOS.

For charts, there are a number of really excellent solutions that cost money, but not much and they deliver really nice, dynamic graphs with many options.

If I were doing a heavy enterprise form app I'd still go native.

Except most app developers want to target as many users across as many devices as possible

Say, isn't that what Malware and Spyware authors want too?

It makes very little financial sense to spend months on a native app that runs on handful of devices

"Handful" = > 500 million... that's just for iOS. Android has more.

I'd say 500 million potential customers warrants SOME degree of effort.

Also if it's so easy for me to build out something mediocre in PhoneGap that works for everyone, doesn't that mean the inevitable Chinese clone comes out on my tail all the faster?

> There's about to be not nearly enough comments about shutting up and voting with your dollars.

Why should you expect the two to be mutually exclusive?

You're just a jerk and a corporate toadie.

It's an inevitable consequence of the advance of technology though. Someday we'll have robots doing all the work, and then things will be great (as long as we can share the benefit of that sufficiently) - the trick is getting there, because there's going to be a lot of disruptions and upending of old assumptions, like that everyone has to earn their living entirely from doing work. Make no mistake, automation/robots are going to reduce the value of unskilled labor below survival level - they pretty much already have, we just have propped it up through subsidies and price floors.

It's only going to get worse, too. What happens when we can replace truck drivers with self-driving vehicles? They won't just be cheaper, they'll be more efficient and likely safer than human drivers. Between long haul and local/regional, that's roughly 1% of the entire national workforce according to DOL.

So what can we do? Well, we can try and stop the robots and progress, but that's a dead end. No, what we need to do is switch the tax base to tax the robots, rather than workers, and use the money to create a guaranteed basic income program so everyone can survive, and then let them work on top of that for whatever they can negotiate without price floors (i.e. no minimum wage).

Mexico's birth rate has also fallen dramatically in the past few decades.

In 1970, Mexico had a birth rate of 6.72 births per female, that had been relatively stable around that level for the years prior. After that, it started to drop, and was at 2.22 births per female in 2012. By contrast, the US birth rate was 2.48 in 1970, and has dropped to 1.88 in 2012, below the replacement level of 2.

What happened? Technology, development, access to family planning/birth control/etc. The same thing has happened in every country that develops past a certain point. In some countries the birth rate has gotten so precariously low that it's having profound effects, creating an aging population with less younger workers to pay for it. We've avoided this somewhat as the US, because despite our falling birth rate, we've made up the difference with immigration. Eventually that's going to stop being the case, because we'll run out of poor places for people to immigrate from (which isn't a bad thing necessarily).