Comment Re:This should not be acceptble... (Score 1) 124
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If you set it to "85th percentile of observed traffic" you are selecting 15% to be targets of fines. Why 15 and not 20, or 10?
States with "reasonable and prudent" rather than "explicit speed limits" do a more logically consistent job here. Reasonable and prudent is what we're really looking for - everyone choose a speed that is safe for the conditions of the road, the vehicle, and the surrounding traffic.
The problem is that it's difficult to fine people for that, because it is partly subjective and different for every driver and weather conditions. It's much easier to set an explicit speed limit and then measure speeds. Explicit speed limits exist for the convenience of the courts, with safety of the road users as a distant secondary objective.
If you want to improve safety, then look into "traffic calming" measures. In particular those that cause drivers to perceive higher risk (and research into conditions where drivers falsely perceive lower risk). Even just drawing the lines narrower on a wide street can have an effect. If you design the road right, drivers will naturally choose the right speed for the environment without any need for a road nanny.
While I agree that I don't understand how this is price fixing, I'm not sure your argument is valid. Standard Oil is a pretty well-known example of producers colluding to keep the price up, but they still kept it low enough that people found a ton of ways to make use of oil from transportation to heating to labor productivity. Using the "loss of demand" measurement we would probably have missed it.
I think the issue here isn't collusion per se, but rather that an information disparity exists and disadvantages tenants and is being perceived as "price fixing" because there really isn't any other mechanism currently to deal with the problem.
One alternative solution would be to level the playing field by finding some way to make tenants and landlords alike have access to the same level and quality of information. I would suggest perhaps all rents and rent offers should be published in a way that anyone can apply their own algorithm on either side of the negotiation.
If a person got sevely sick or died after believing lies that seems less important than if the wrong song played in the background of the youtube video?
About 20 years ago Lee Smolin published "The Trouble with Physics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics) and Peter Woit published "Not even Wrong" where they described the core problem with String theory as people attached to the community to the general public of interest (i guess mostly scientists).
Since then, things have shifted a little bit, and the mindset is
changing. That does not mean that everything is peacy already - people who got their professorships 20 years ago may be heads of chairs right now.
I also am fully convinced (as a former experimental physicist who has nothing to do with particle physics) that sometimes it is necessary to follow and explore theories which do not result in immediate predictions. You only will know later if it did not work, and in the current interpretation on youtube there is a lot of hindsight.
That is a sign of the sucess of the language. It means that there are a lot of envitonments in which it runs productively with a well defined scope, very often embedded into an bigger system or package.
Which is exactly the problem. It is a very big and important project and in the current organization structure it seems to have a bus quota of one.
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve. -- Robert Frost