Comment stage management (Score 2) 154
The moment would have been perfect if he'd just dropped the mic.
The moment would have been perfect if he'd just dropped the mic.
Uber is fast, clean, polite, and - most importantly - reliable.
Except for the Uber drivers who assault, rape, or kidnap passengers.
http://www.people.com/article/...
There has been an effort pushed by cabdrivers in Chicago to do exactly what you describe. It has been resisted by the city's Taxi Authority, which despite what people here might think, are definitely not in bed with the drivers. In fact, the city government HATES cab drivers. They make their lives miserable in ways you can't imagine. Minor parking violations can go $800-1500. The city treats cabbies like dirt.
You're absolutely right. I apologize to Noah Haders for saying that the misattributed quote proved he was an asshole. He's an asshole for other reasons.
Is there really that many people who can't find a cab? If so, there should be more cabs.
Depends on where you're at, and that's the whole point. If you're on Michigan Avenue at 11:30am, you could toss a pebble in the air and it will probably come down on a cab. If your grandmother on the Northwest Side wants to take a cab to the doctor, she might have to wait an hour.
The idea is how to get the right number of cabs, and because of uneven distribution of demand (and supply) it's not something that the "free market" will fix. That's why you find so many more Uber drivers in certain neighborhoods and none in others, even adjusting for property values and crime statistics.
Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.
Maybe it should be clarified here that when you see someone claim that it's not the government charging $200,000 for a taxi medallion, that's just the going price on the secondary market. You know, good old capitalism, where people are bidding up the price of a necessarily limited commodity.
The taxi authority looks at population, traffic flow and transportation needs and comes up with a number of taxis that they think should be on the street. Every year, they add new medallions into the system, usually with a lottery. The idea is not so much to protect the cab drivers (cities don't care about cab drivers. If they did, they wouldn't make the minor traffic fines, like your cab being 10 inches over the line of a designated taxi waiting zone, as much as $500 (which practically wipes out the cab driver's week), but to keep the number of taxis from getting so crazy that you have cabs clogging up city centers, fighting for fares.
Another think medallions are used for is to ensure that someone in an underserved part of the city can get a cab. In my city, certain medallions are required for certain times to initiate or terminate a certain percentage of fares in certain parts of the city.
My wife's 'vette has a hud in it and the first thing I do when I drive the car is turn the hud off. When flying the best advice is to keep your head 'out of the cockpit', in other words scanning the skies around you. New pilots' are always glued to the instruments, mature pilots eyes are focused outside except for quick scans of the instruments.
Your wife has a flying car? That is so cool.
I would have the slightest shred of sympathy if taxi unions hadn't used their protectionist racket to provide the nastiest most unpleasant rider experience.
What was the last time you took a taxi, and in what town? Maybe I notice because I drove a cab some decades ago, but I take cabs in almost every city I travel to - and I travel a lot - and I can't remember the last time I had a rude cab driver.
Maybe the reason your experiences (if they're real experiences and not just more bullshit) with cabs are bad is because cab drivers - being human - tend to treat people the way they are treated, and maybe you're an asshole.
In fact, to support this possibility, I'm going to quote from another one of your comments a few levels down from this one:
You have proven to us that the Statists dont give a fuck about the facts, that we have to argue endlessly in circles with you. Go fuck yourselves.
Yep, you're an asshole. I believe I have proven my hypothesis.
Standards of cleanliness? In what city? I would never wear white in a cab. A lot of cab drivers also stink almost as bad as your average pan-handler.
When I was in grad school, I drove a taxi. This is a pretty long time ago, but let me tell you, y'all passengers don't always smell so great, either. I remember an August day when a guy got in my cab at O'Hare just drenched in Calvin Klein cologne (which was a fad at the time and smelled like a skunk in a whorehouse). I had to drive him all the way downtown, with my eyes watering and me choking. I had the AC on full because it was hot and finally by about Belmont I just said, "fuck it" and opened my window, wanting to stick my head out like a labrador retriever. This is before they forced cabs to have the plastic barrier between the driver and passenger.
The worst part is he gave me a two dollar tip. Another Gordon Gecko yuppie throwing nickels around like they were manhole covers.
Uber drivers are subsidized by everybody else. Taxi drivers have to pay high insurance rates because the act of driving a long distance every day for a ton of strangers is a job that inherently leads to a much higher statistical rate of payouts. If they're driving as a taxi on regular car insurance, it's you that's paying the bill for their swindle of the insurance system.
I don't mind fireworks and I used to love setting them off (especially in model cars and school toilets). But now I've got a 15 year old border collie who hates those things. She'll face down pit bulls, coyotes and patiently lets kids crawl all over her, but when the fireworks start, she shrinks into the closet, shaking, and tries to dig her way through the rug hoping to create a hole big enough to hide in.
Plus, every year the Fourth of July seems to last longer. Now it starts somewhere around June 20th and runs through at least to the second week of July. And there will still be explosions going off way past midnight on the 4th (though given that this is Chicago, it might be gunfire - it was the home of Al Capone after all). Two years ago, I went out at about 10pm and coming down my street was a Mercedes full of what looked like wealthy frat boys with one having his arm out the window drunkenly firing an H&K into the air.
I am fond of the Fourth of July, but I'd rather watch a professional fireworks display from the relative safety of my porch (I can see the big Grant Park display from there).
Yeah, wouldn't that be great if I had linked it in my first post, and then if you had actually read my post well enough to see it?
I've been waiting my entire life since childhood to see a truly epic car wars game
Make it an open world, with the cops chasing you and races and billboards to smash, and I'll give you all my money.
Put in DJ Atomika, and I'll borrow money and give that to you, too.
How do you come to that assumption?
By linking to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject?
A nuclear warhead has lots of trouble to even "hit" an asteroid.
Essentially every space mission we have launched for the past several decades has had to navigate with a far more precision than that needed to get close to an asteroid and activate a single trigger event when close by.
We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).
I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.
But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.
What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
