Don't see too many cars on walking paths and sidewalks. The number of e-bikes on walking paths and sidewalks has skyrocketed. It's almost as if someone decided being a pedestrian is a sinful activity, and that every walkway must now be infested with morons on wheels.

Then let me get started on mobility scooters.

I'd just like them banned from walking paths. At least once a day I'm getting some crazy asshole ringing his bell as he comes flying up behind me. I'm not a fan of any kind of bike on walking paths, but at least the people on regular bikes have more control. The worst are probably older riders who often seem like they're barely in control. And the three wheeled ones take up outrageous amounts of space on smaller paths, regularly forcing other users on some of the narrower paths I frequent to get to the side of the road.

It's hard to imagine, short of motor vehicles, anything more hazardous to a pedestrian than some stupid prick on an e-bike.

I haven't read the text of this Swiss law, but if it's anything like USA's, UK's, or EU's laws, then it regulates "providers" and/or "carriers," not software applications themselves.

If you are sending already-made ciphertext through a regulated service, the service won't be in trouble. But if the service offers to encrypt for you, then they will be in trouble.

It just occurred to me that the now-common conflation between web apps and local apps (to a lot of phone users, these two things look the same) matters.

Maybe ASF just likes whiskey.

White oak has more tyloses and a tighter grain structure than other oak varieties, which cause its barrels to be more waterproof. It chars better. And it generally wins most taste tests. It's just perfect for barrel aging.

Save your red oaks for furniture.

No, you just don't understand externalities and the necessary role of government in internalizing them.

Absolutely. We should just apply carbon taxes (and tariffs) to internalize the externality, so the playing field is level, and let the market work.

This is why carbon taxes must be accompanied by carbon tariffs. That also incentivizes the foreign seller to reduce their own emissions (or fake it -- enforcement wouldn't always work, but it only needs to work most of the time).

LOL. I just posted this (about how supermarkets find managing cash painful): https://news.slashdot.org/comm...

I spent some time working on a cash management system for a grocery store chain. It treated cash as inventory so the stores could track movement between registers and back rooms, and could help automate the interaction with the banks to deliver cash to the bank and purchase cash from the banks. Between what retailers euphemistically call "shrinkage" (i.e. theft), the fees paid to the bank for pickup and delivery, the cost of management overhead to try to minimize shrinkage and the opportunity cost of having so much money tied up in stacks of paper and rolls of coins, the stores considered cash not the cheapest way to do business but the most expensive. If it weren't for the fact that refusing cash would alienate a non-trivial minority of their customer base, they'd do it.

Part of the reason for the cash management system was to eliminate that "opportunity cost" bit. They had a lender that was willing to lend them money cheaply using the cash they had sitting in 200 stores as collateral, as long as they had accurate real-time reports of how much cash was held so they could prove their minimum cash inventory (which across so many stores was several million dollars). The intention was then to invest the cheap money in various was to generate ROI. This wouldn't address all the other costs of using cash, but it would at least mitigate the concern that they had millions of dollars in capital just sitting completely idle every day.

All true, which is why China's system isn't completely centralized like that. Centralization is a matter of degree, not a binary on/off switch. The Chinese government mandates the broad strokes, and leaves the detail work decentralized, to be handled by the market. They've got a lot more capitalism in their system at this point than they'd probably care to admit.

Is Amazon fitting the bill for higher insurance rates?

This question surprised me.

Before we tackle the unlikely possibility that this raises insurance rates, your question makes me realize there's another question you might want to try to answer first:

Who do you think currently pays for the insurance on Amazon's vehicles?

And another: do you think that by Amazon making the choice to deploy an additional piece of driver hardware, the insurance-premium-paying party in the above question, would change?

Waymo is currently at 250,000 autonomous rides per week, in six cities, and I mean autonomous in the strict sense of "there are no Waymo employees in the car". They seem to be competing pretty well.

As for how other companies will compete against Tesla in the future when Tesla finally makes good on their ambitious promises.... we'll find out, if and when Tesla finally makes good on their ambitious promises. You shouldn't count those chickens until they've hatched.

As a Brit who has moved overseas, this is extremely obvious when driving in other countries, including other ex-British Empire colony countries.

Its insanely easy to get a license down here in NZ, and it shows with the quality of driving on the road.

"Motorways rarely have hard shoulders".

Yeah, going to have to disagree with this - most motorways have hard shoulders, while the situation of no hard shoulder is much rarer and always called out by signage.

That makes no sense.

Let's look at it from first principles. We as a society have decided that it's in everyone's interest to educate children, so much so that we tax everyone to raise money to spend on education. How does giving parents a choice of which school to send their kids to (assuming the schools are of equal -- or better! -- quality) undermine that societal interest, especially if the voucher amount is less than what the public school system would have spent on the same children?

I have a bias here: My oldest son is neuroatypical and was badly failed by the public school system, even after all of the help that my wife and I could provide. I actually spent a good chunk of his second grade year sitting in the back of his classroom working on my laptop (because I had a job where I could do that) so I could be ready to provide the teacher the support she needed to deal with him. She appreciated it, but I couldn't be there all the time, and in the end it just didn't work.

So, we started looking for alternatives. What we found was a small private school founded and run by a couple of parents who'd had a child in a similar situation. Classes were tiny (no more than 8 children per teacher) and it was staffed with experienced teachers who were frustrated with public school bureaucracy. Probably a third of the kids there were like my son, in that they just couldn't fit into the public school system, the rest were kids of two working parents who appreciated the school's other benefits, primarily "latch key time". The school allowed students to be dropped off as early as 7:30 AM and to stay as late as 5:30 PM (though not both) and the school provided supervision and educational entertainment. The cost (in 1998) was $3000 per year, which covered tuition, fees, meals (two hot meals per day, breakfast and lunch, plus afternoon snacks) and school supplies. At the time our state (Utah) spent about $5000 per student per year, but that didn't include meals or supplies.

My son loved the school, and flourished there. He caught back up and surpassed grade level in all subjects and became an avid reader. Interestingly, the school did not believe in assigning homework to grade-school children, all work was done at school. You might think that was educationally limiting, but the school gave all students the same standardized tests as the public schools every year and consistently outperformed the public schools by a large, large margin.

We didn't need the latch-key time (my wife was a stay-at-home mom and my job gave me flexibility), but we let him stay late a couple days per week because he begged us to.

This private school was better than the public schools in every possible way. Cheaper, academically superior, provided better food and more flexibility for parents (though no buses).

In what world would it not be better to expand that sort of option through vouchers? Had the state offered a $2500 voucher (half of what they spent on public school students), it would have make the private school accessible to many more parents, doing a better job of achieving the social goal of educating children. There actually was a voucher law passed by Utah in that time, but it was struck down by the courts.

What actually happened, though not until after my son had spent three years there, third grade through sixth (they didn't do Junior High), was that the US Air Force and the city forced them to relocate because they were just past the end of an active runway and there was concern that a military jet could crash into the school. But they were operating on razor-thin margins and could not afford to relocate without increasing their fees by 30%, which most of their customers couldn't afford. Vouchers, even at 50% of the public school cost, would have made that affordable. So instead, they closed their doors and the area lost an incredible resource.

I'm not, of course, claiming that my son's school was typical of private schools. But does that really matter? If the state can verify that the schools are doing a good job (standardized testing plus occasional inspections should be sufficient), and if parents prefer them for whatever reason, why not? What is bad about offering a choice? What is bad about giving public schools some competition, hopefully forcing them to provide better services and be more efficient?