So you're saying Amtrak is worse than Comcast. Yes?

If psychic ability were real, it would be an enormously successful survival trait.

The fact that *everyone* doesn't have it is 'kinda suggestive...

You're obviously more familiar with economics than I am - I've got a question, help me out.

What's the best value for inflation?

Meaning, what's the numerical value that we should be shooting for, for best results?

If it's complicated, then what's the formula for the complicated value? If you have time, how "flat" is that calculation? (Meaning: is it a spike or a gently rising/falling mesa? How important is it to hit the best value exactly?)

The calculation of inflation doesn't depend on human behaviour, does it?

So tell me - what's the best value for inflation?

Also, looking at this graph of Q-ratio, I notice that Q-ratio does not predict the 1992 crash or the 2009 crash (reputed to be a bigger crash than the great depression).

For this hypothesis, what observations would invalidate the predictions made by this theory?

But maybe I'm not spending enough time looking at the numbers, maybe I'm not reading deeply enough.

Perhaps we should look at the "percent from its arithmetic mean", or maybe the "change from its geometric mean", or the "real S&P composite and the Q-ratio adjusted to its arithmetic mean", or the "net worth over market values outstanding"...

All of which can be found on this fine article.

If we look at the numbers in enough ways, I'm sure we'll find something that has a P < 0.05, then we can publish!

Economics is a weird and wonderful science.

Always looking backwards, always telling us *why* something happened, never making future predictions.

In the days since Adam Smith penned his first thoughts on economics, engineers have taken us to the moon, physicists have split the atom, doctors invented antibiotics, philosophers invented human rights, chemists invented plastics, farmers quadrupled the per-acre food yield, programmers invented the internet, and much *much* more.

And economists, always backwards looking, now think that the Q-value might explain past crashes.

What a world we live in!

It only preserves their ads when they're coming from the same server or domain . . . of course, there would then be an arms race between the ad companies and blockers for obfuscation, a la 1980s copy protection . . .

hawk

Well, chalk one up for electrics, I guess.

Tesla's working on automated full-service battery swapping stations. And apparently also on charging cords that can plug themselves in:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1...

Robots of that sort already exist, so you can see the sort of thing he's probably referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That's what the Amazon drones are for. The truck just has to cruise through the neighborhood. Meanwhile, small drone aircraft that it carries will work to carry packages out of the truck and to front doors. A human will still be needed for heavy or bulky packages, or for deliveries that have to be brought inside or where there's no convenient place for the drone to land to deposit them, but those packages and destinations can be separated from the others at the local depot, and all put on a smaller number of trucks, therefore needing a smaller number of humans. You won't need a human for every truck if you work out the routes each day based on the nature of the packages you've got and where you're taking them.

I've often wondered if we are the first species to achieve intelligence on Earth.

Bonobos are pretty smart, and a rough estimate might put them about 5 million years behind us on the evolutionary scale.

Taking that as a rough guide (no more rough than the Drake equation), suppose humans decided to leave the planet, and suppose Bonobos evolved to our level of technology. Would they find evidence of us?

Five million years is a pretty long time: everything on the surface would be eroded away, the seafloor would get covered in quite a bit of muck, any underground bunker would collapse. Overall I don't think there's be any reason for them to suspect that we were once here.

Then reverse that and suppose that some *other* species evolved into intelligence more than 5 million years ago and left. Would we see any evidence?

The results of non-natural nuclear reactors might indicate something was happening, but note that we haven't examined all the radioactive ore deposits on the planet yet - maybe we haven't found their "Yucca Mountain" installation yet. (Or then again, maybe we did.)

If we wanted to leave a message for the next round of intelligent life, the best bet would be somewhere in space. The Lagrange points perhaps, or maybe the moon. Or maybe on a large asteroid - something that's big enough to be seen by early astronomers, and small enough to land and take off from without much difficulty.

Note in the image of Ceres from the link there's a crater that comes up before the white spot that's distinctly hexagonal in nature. In fact, it 'kinda looks like a regular hexagon. It's visible at the 10:00 position starting in the 3rd frame, and sweeps by before the bright spots come into view.

Just sayin'.

I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you want legal advice from me, pay my retainer. If you get your legal advice from slashdot, you deserver whatever happens . . .

Anyway, I've read much of the below. If you are in this situation, and it's not worth paying a lawyer who practices in this area, what you're doing isn't that important.

I don't work in IP at the moment, but there is enough misinformation below to keep several lawyers busy.

There is a reason for hiring a professional programmer instead of doing it yourself. Similarly, there is a reason to hire an actual lawyer rather than misinformation of the internet . . .

hawk, esq.

No-fault is about taking money away from lawyers, who used to litigate each and every auto accident as a lawsuit in court before the insurers would pay. Eventually the insurers decided that they spent more on lawyers than accident payments, and they had no reason to do so.

If you want to go back to the way things were, you are welcome to spend lots of time and money in court for trivial things, and see how you like it. I will provide you with expert witness testimony for $7.50/minute plus expenses. The lawyers charge more.

In general your insurer can figure out for themselves if you were at fault or not, and AAA insurance usually tells me when they think I was, or wasn't, when they set rates.

If we don't have more than two children per couple, the human race would've died out a long time ago.

I think the proper way to state that is "If we didn't in the past", not "If we don't". If we were to have 2 children per couple (approximately, the real value is enough children to replace each individual but not more) from this day on, it would not be necessary to adjust the number upward to avoid a population bottleneck for tens of thousands of years.

The Northern California Amtrak is actually pretty good for commuting from Sacramento to the Bay Area and back because the right of way is 4 tracks wide in critical places and it has priority over other trains for much of the time.

Acela in the Boston/NY/DC corridor is also good, because the right of way is 4 tracks or more for most of the way, and it has a track to itself along a lot of the route. Other railroads run on parallel tracks.

For the most part, though, Amtrak suffers from not having exclusive track. It runs on freight lines that host cars so heavy that the rail bends an inch when the wheels are on top of it (I've seen this first hand).

And Germany is a nation the size of New Mexico with an economy the 5th largest in the world. Starting pretty much from zero 70 years ago.

Maybe having good trains is part of that.