Sorry to anger you but I really meant nothing against the tech, just in for a simple laugh.

This is a fun device that can show you what can be done with 3D printed plastic. That said, it's useless. It would be really cool if I could apply 1 pound of force to the crank, turn it a Million times, and have it apply a Million pounds of rotational force at the other end. But it's made of plastic, so it won't do that. Indeed, the fast-rotating parts would wear out before the slow-rotating part made a single turn. So it's not even good as a kind of clock.

All that said, it's a good conversation piece, and probably worth the price for that.

It's OK. I'm from Colorado, I know what you really meant.

driving parts of town they don't know, with random strangers as passengers. Great idea.

Actually it turns out is a pretty great idea, it's called Uber (and Lyft).

It's almost universally loved by customers, because in many cities TAXI DRIVERS don't know where anything is either. In the last several taxis I've been in even giving a well-known place name (like Long Beach in Los Angeles) was ignored as they typed in the exact address into a GPS...

Since an Uber driver will find a way to where I am going the same way a taxi driver would, except there's no chance of error because I enter the place on my own device instead of them typing it in through a shitty GPS UI, an Uber driver is vastly more likely to get me where I am trying to go, sooner.

And given the way most taxi drivers drive I frankly would in fact rather be driven by a teenager.

As for the "random stranger" thing that part simply shows your unending ignorance into how Uber and Lyft actually work. It's not strangers that meet, it's two vetted individuals.

No, it's because often force is the only argument that works with any duration (or effect) on idiots.

Idiots by definition, cannot and will not learn so higher order appeal is lost on them...

Thus has it been historically also.

Sure but those are all individual efforts, not a group of car pools where the organizing group itself takes a cut or facilitates the transfer.

Will they go after the car pools next?

No because those are free. It's the presence of money in any form or amount that triggers the primal instinct by the state (and taxi unions) to control or kill.

What would be nice is a kind of Tinder for car sharing, where you could put in a starting point, and ending point - people could read your profile and see a rough distance from their own starting and ending points, and swipe right if you seemed like someone they would want to ride with...

There would be no money in that (for the drivers anyway) so the taxis/state would lay off.

By the way, you can't make a living wage driving full-time for Uber either

Hey guess what THAT DOESN'T MATTER.

The last Uber driver I had, was also a comedian/writer (Los Angeles). He didn't need a living wage, he wanted a part time job with a ton of flexibility to supplement income.

There are a LOT of people like this (including, perhaps you've heard of them, TEENAGERS). The next time someone says "that doesn't make a living wage" the correct response is to punch them in the mouth.

P.S. on a side note those claiming things like Uber cannot make a living wage are generally ALSO simply too lazy to work the amount required to live on what is offered. I have also met Uber drivers who DO live on uber income only, so your statement that Uber drivers do not make a living wage is false by example.

If the restriction remains after the initial test, it could be a simple way to avoid pseudo-professional drivers, and all the taxi-related legal problems

You don't know much about taxi unions or city regulatory agencies, do you?

In no way does it avoid anything except making 100% a driver cannot make a living through this. So it's a lose-lose.

Although you meant it to be funny your statement is really wrong - I'd say a good 90% of Browncoats didn't find the show until way after it was off the air. A number I know of didn't get into Firefly until well after the movie even...

Slashdot is the ultimate mecca for the "Harbingers of Doom", a site literally ripe with people who will vociferously back the worst of products that obviously have no future. In fact I use this very site myself to predict failure for some things, as there are a lot of repeat posters here that spend 24x7 backing future failed products.

If your kids knock plug out, you still have car next day, it is not necessary at 0% charge, why it should be?

Why should it be anywhere near enough to get you to work and back? For most consumer electric cars today that is the truth.

And what if your kids punch a hole in your gas tank and start playing with matches?

Or what if a velociraptor brought back by time travelers eats the children which prevents the problem to begin with!

Don't be an idiot. Knocking out a plug is several orders of magnitude easier than penetrating a car gasoline tank by accident.

I just bought a Ford C-Max Energi; but I bought it strictly for the green carpool-lane sticker.

In California, if you live in a big house, your marginal cost of electricity is shockingly high. For me, it's $0.33/kilowatt-hour.

My Energi goes 20 miles with a 8 kWh charge. That's $2.64 On gas, it gets about 35 mpg. If gas is $3.50 (current price) that's $2.20.

Now, during mid-day on a sunny day, I can charge it much cheaper on our solar panels (currently we are selling power back to PG&E, but at $0.11/kWh) and I do that. I also charge it at work, where it's 'free'; but I live 50 miles from work so I can't keep the car charged just at work. The 'free' power at work won't last forever, either.

You may ask "why not get a Tesla?" Good question. It turns out that there are (at my company) 3x the number of electric-ish cars as there are charging stations, so we have to swap them out after just a few hours. The Tesla would take all day to charge. Also, the Tesla is such a lumbering overpowered beast that it gets substantially less miles-per-kilowatt-hour.

Thad

No, t turns out most people don't want an EV to be FUNCTIONALLY DIFFERENT than the cars they know. Plugging it in every night is fine- until the night you forget, or the kids knock the plug out. Then you have no car the next day.

A car, for most people, is not something that you can realistically be only one day away from not having the use of, which there is some risk of with an EV, much greater at any rate than a normal car. That's why hybrids sell OK while real EV cars generally have not.

I'll put a side chiding in for super funky dash boards of some EV cars I've been in that are vastly too large for the space the car has.

Some time ago Elon Musk went on a rant about AI's destroying us.

AI's I do not fear, but C++ templates... there he might have something.