Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Why does THE STATE have to pay for all this? (Score 1) 231

You can lament all you want, Ken Fluffernutter, but I will not work to pay for your vacation. That's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.

No amount of definition twisting and and grandstanding will change the fact that no, I will not pay for your plane tickets and parcel deliveries.

The taxes I pay are extracted from my income. And my income is compensation for the time I spend working away from my family, breaking my back or numbing my brain and a return on the the skills and education I spent years and many thousands of bucks to get. With the costs of living and housing rising sharply, it's difficult enough as it is. I will NOT spend a single dime on taxes to pay for the vacations of other people.

Not happening, Ken. Pay for your own stuff.

Comment Re:Why does THE STATE have to pay for all this? (Score 1) 231

Where did you learn to use a calculator? I didn't even check your sources and values, because the math, logic and subject area knowledge alone are terrible enough.

First, maths: you're off by one order of magnitude. 26,8 billion dollars for 16,4 million flights is 1'634 USD per flight. So it's 1,6k per plane, not 16k.

Second, logic: you've duly noted that only 55% of those 16,4 million flights are passenger flights, but calculate them as if they're all passenger flights with 104 pax average per flight, even compounding rounding errors as you go, omitting the 45% cargo-only flights and pretending that shippers for cargo don't need to pay for air traffic security.

Third, subject area knowledge: there are no true scheduled "passenger-only flights" in commercial aviation. What laypeople call "passenger flights" are actually only flights where some air cargo capacity is used by passengers and their luggage. Especially on transcontinental and long-haul flights, "passenger planes" carry an extraordinary amount of air freight and their profitability is hugely dependent on that as well. Making the airline passengers pay the entire flight security tax of that flight would mean the cargo shippers ride tax-free. That's not what we're after.

Cargo shippers, commercial operators, producers, assemblers, too, have their choice of using long-haul trucking, trains, air freight, boats, pigeon carriers or switching to localized production, bulk transport, to and from just-in-time logistics etc.. If company A wants to avoid setting up a warehouse near their production facilities to store all the bits and pieces they need on-site and with sufficient stock to allow for bulk transport, that's their prerogative. Only they can know if the capital assets locked in raw materials are too much compared to just-in-time logistics buying and transporting only the part that's actually needed right now. And air freight costs and air traffic costs play right into that. If company A wants to do just-in-time logistics and company B and C optimize their logistics, localize their production, keep reserves on site? Guess what, A pays the air traffic safety tax, B and C don't.

Same thing. And we can't count the number of boxes or metric tons of cargo vs. passenger counts and the number and weight of their luggage to even properly estimate the actual cost per passenger.

To re-use your simplification to get the absolute upper bound of that tax: if all those 16,4 million flights were passenger-only, air cargo didn't exist like you pretended, and all the flights had 104 passengers on average, then the cost would be 1,6k per flight or 15,71 USD per flight per passenger. Fifteen bucks per flight, at the very maximum, if air cargo didn't exist or was tax-free. And 104 passengers per plane is an absolutely ridiculously low number that applies only to the US domestic market. It doesn't even include the transcontinental flights coming and going to the US, because those are wide-body twin-aisle aircraft that have a LOT more than 104 seats. The top 10 current wide-body aircraft models for long-haul routes have over 200 (737) or over 800 seats (A380). Except these two extremes, most other types carry between 300 and 400 people. They're not flying 70% empty for that "104 passenger on average" number. If airlines actually allow to fly their planes half-empty, that's not a problem for the taxpayer to fix.

No taxation without representation. No taxation to correct or support voluntary and luxury decisions by others. You want it, you pay for it. End of story.

Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 75

The service worker API is explicitly designed to avoid downasaurs in "offline-first" use cases. It acts as a proxy to serve the shell document, style sheet, scripts, and stale data, even without an Internet connection. That's why I asked what obstacles there are other than a downasaur.

And you have not considered to enter offline-first, the service worker API has to load? Again, Grab has been doing this for 12 years. PWA is not new and they have chosen native apps.

I have not presented my ideas to Grab because I am not a user of Grab. I would imagine that most readers of Slashdot are likewise not users of Grab.

But most of us did not assume to know better than Grab unlike you.

Comment Re:Knee-Jerk reaction. (Score 1) 83

Yes I realize it probably took decades for all those warehouses and neighborhoods to develop around the airport and it would now be hard to relocate - air travel is very safe right up until it isn't.

You do know that Louisville is THE major distribution hub for UPS in the US, right? Even if the UPS warehouses were not already built decades ago, it seems to be pure common sense that UPS would build warehouses to hold cargo . . . for their cargo hub.

Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 75

I was expecting someone who has used the product to help others in this discussion understand why Grab probably chose and continues to choose to develop iOS apps instead of PWAs. The answers might have taken the form:

Probably because in 12 years of developing iOS applications, developing PWAs does not meet their needs. Bear in mind, Grab is spend lots of money for their infrastructure. If PWAs was the best option, they would have chosen it.

A. PWAs weren't capable enough 12 years ago for X, Y, and Z reasons, are now, and the engineering resources to port the native app to a web app would exceed the cost of acquiring and maintaining Macs capable of running the latest macOS

Why are you assuming Grab is still using 12 year old technology? They are developing iOS which means tablets and phones. I seriously doubt anyone is still using 12 year old phones or tablets to use Grab apps.

B. PWAs still aren't capable for X, Y, and Z reasons

Maybe you should do some research. I would venture the #1 reason PWAs are not used is they require a constant internet connection. In the case of Grab that means depending on reliability of Malaysia's mobile networks. While Malaysia does not have the worst score in the world compared to the likes of Pakistan, it is the worst in the region. A native app would only need internet to connect periodically whereas PWAs would never really work.

Let's summarize: You still don't know why a computer with 12 years of experience is doing something. But you're sure you know better. Again, have you presented your ideas to Grab?

Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 75

The alternative is developing a progressive web application (PWA) that runs in Safari instead of a native iOS application.

Considering that Grab has building iOS apps for over 12 years instead of developing PWAs, I would guess they know more about their business than you. Have you presented your ideas to Grab?

Comment Re:What happens to other MD11 pilots? (Score 1) 83

1) Commercial pilots have to be certified to fly models of aircraft. No rules say pilots can only certify on one type of aircraft for their entire career. Some pilots certify on multiple ones. 2) UPS and FedEx fly more than the MD-11 as mentioned in the summary that it was a small part of their fleet.

Comment Todo: (Score 4, Insightful) 54

- Continue pointless noodling about with ui. We haven't really pissed off a significant segment of our dwindling user base in about a year, so go big.
- Sprinkle tripping robots over more features. Think of novel use cases that haven't been tried before. (Let the robot restyle CSS, maybe.)
- Buy at least one random company and integrate it poorly. Have we considered lawn care?
- Volunteers are still stubbornly hanging on. Try to single out hard-to-find talent and use the robots to shit all over their work. Don't be an asshole, that makes them think someone cares. Just make it clear that we value them less than the cost of electricity it costs to replace them, poorly.

Comment Re: I think it's more than slavery (Score 1) 140

Tesla stock is only up a cumulative 6% from the peak it achieved exactly 4 years ago. That is not even close to keeping up with inflation - 18% over the same time period. So if just getting attention from a market flop is a strategy for driving up the share price, I guess it isn't working very well.

Comment Re:Does anyone else worry... (Score 1) 72

You never had any brothers or cousins doing double suplexes to each other after watching WWF? Your anecdotal evidence is discounted by mine. And since mine is real I think I have a case.

1. Wresting was on TV long before video games. 2. Brothers and cousins were hitting each other slingshots and rocks long before TV was invented. 3. Your anecdotal evidence does not "discount" everyone else. It only reflects your ego that you think that it does.

Slashdot Top Deals

Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true. -- Russell

Working...