I'm working in natural language processing for generating parallel equivalent text in multiple languages.

That's a bit circular though, because my difficulty is properly defining the problem, or rather the set of all subproblems, and the solution(s). It's easy to implement once you know what you're doing, but if we all knew what we were doing, there'd be much less buggy software out there....

...and at the planning stage, you are still trying to break down the problem. The core concept behind team thinking is that individually, we often fail to analyse the situation completely, and input from others can show holes in our reasoning and things we've failed to properly consider. The whole, hopefully, is greater than the sum of its parts.

I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.

I, for one, welcome our blue and black SystemD overlords.

Isn't that what Smart Podium does?

You realise that most pubs could make just as much profit if they only opened for a few hours at the weekend, right? Midweek drinkers barely cover staff costs.

That's the key phrase -- don't reinvent the wheel. But is coding "inventing" or "building"? Because sometimes it's quicker to build your own wheel or whittle your own peg than go out and hunt down one the right size for your needs.

Paying for downtime is the elephant in the room in terms of "minimum wage". Cleaners, for instance, typically get minimum wage. But they work for two hours in the morning, then another two hours in the early evening. They're working part-time in a job that is as invasive as a full-time job.

Imagine your company was making cutbacks, and they asked you to cut your hours in half, at the same pro-rata salary. But your day was cut in two, with half your hours before 9:30 and half your hours from 4:30 pm onwards. Your days would be ruined by commuting etc, and you would be unhappy... and yet we force that on people whose hourly rate is already pitiful in comparison to ours.

Given the recent flap about it, I think the way to convince the USA to have paid sick leave is to scream "BUT WHAT IF HE HAS EBOLA?!?!?"

If everyone could get a taxi at peak time, would they get home quicker? No, because you'd have gridlock. This is one of the things that city planners take into account when managing taxi licensing.

Public transport is an efficient solution at peak time. It may not seem like it -- what with waiting times, multiple stops, the need to walk a bit and connect -- but mass transit is the only way to keep that many people moving. 25 years ago New York was famous worldwide for its traffic jams -- you don't want that again.

Taxis are useful at times of lower demand, when public transport becomes inefficient.

Unlimited cars leads to a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario. I'd tell you to stop being so selfish, but even enlightened self-interested says you should just get a damn bus.

Professional drivers need to get peak-time business to account for slack time at off-peak hours. If Uber drivers can cherry pick the fares at peak time, undercutting the full-time drivers, there's no incentive for drivers to make themselves available off-peak.

Licensing incorporates a social contract -- it's much like pubs. Where I live, a pub has to apply for certain hours. They can't shut up early whenever business is slack -- they've been given the license to make sure supply matches demand. The number of licenses is restricted so that the business can survive. Quid pro quo.