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Comment Re:Let's see (Score 1) 34

I'm sure the shareholders will be lining up in droves to accept your offer of 1/25000 of a cent per share.

In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad. :-)

Comment Re:whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also rea (Score 1) 226

This is why Medicare for all, by itself, wouldn't do anything to lower healthcare costs. It would probably reduce the cost and complexity of billing, which would cut overall cost by a few percentage points. To really reduce costs, it would have to force providers to lower costs.

Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.

Branded drugs cost 2-3X as much (though generics are often actually cheaper in the US) than elsewhere), which is an area that is obviously ripe for savings... but there's a risk there because those high prices fund a lot of research (pharma is also not terribly profitable; that revenue mostly gets sunk into new drugs).

Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.

The vast majority of hospitals in the US are non-profits, so that 50% figure is based on relatively thin data. However, those few for-profit hospitals compete directly with lots of non-profits, so their price and cost structures have to be comparable.

One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.

Comment Re: It's bots and ragebait, thats why (Score 1) 86

Meanwhile, every other entry in the feed is an advert.

Every other entry? Try every entry. Something like 1% of my Facebook feed is actual organic content from friends. 14% or so is from groups. The other 85% is ads. And I'm being optimistic when I say that it is only 85%. When I see about the first or second ad, I close Facebook, because it's just going to be ads all the way down after that.

Comment Re:phrasing, subby. (Score 1) 34

There's no need to use the same recovery system for every stage either. That includes the space-based ones. SpaceX's plans for Starship are really based on their goal of going to Mars the first time, and that might work with some tweaks for a few trips to the moon too. The design of the super heavy booster is dictated by the need to refuel Starship in orbit.

The net is more efficient for the first stage and probably a second stage as well. Landing on the moon is best done with a lander designed for that, and if you're serious about regular tirps the transit in between would be best in a space-only vehicle. Eventually you're going to want to build a return booster that runs on stuff you make on the moon too.

I doubt the Chinese will use a reusable booster at all for their first few moon trips, just like the Artemis astronauts aren't going to be launching on Starship.

Comment This seems dubious... (Score 4, Insightful) 44

This seems dubious at multiple levels.

Solar panels: The roof of a trailer is about 450 square feet. In the northeastern U.S., you would average only 3.5 hours of full sun, so you'd get only a little over 13 kW per day.

Tesla semis are pretty efficient, and they use about 1.7 kWh per mile. So in an entire day, covering the entire roof of a trailer with solar panels would add a whopping 7 miles of range, or 15 minutes of extra driving — the equivalent of plugging into a Tesla Megacharger for maybe 30 seconds or so.

Let's optimistically assume that the vehicle can carry 48,000 pounds. If those panels occupy the full roof area, then at about 3 pounds of weight per square foot, those solar panels would weigh 1500 pounds, or about 3% of your cargo, all to reduce your fuel usage by as little as 1% if you're doing long haul at 65 MPH. And that weight number may be wildly optimistic. Trailers like that aren't designed to have weight on the roof, and would require additional structure to hold that extra weight. The real losses could be significantly higher. Unless you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles in a day, the solar panels won't break even. And if you're driving less than a couple of hundred miles per day, there's no reason you can't go electric.

Battery and motor on the trailer: I would expect most trucks to be used primarily for either short-haul or long-haul purposes, not both. If you're doing long-haul, you'd probably be better off with an actual hybrid tractor so that you get the benefit no matter whose trailer you're hauling. If you're doing short-haul, there's likely no reason not to go full electric.

I just don't get it.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 96

Same thing. A distinction without much difference. This is the same as someone claiming that Meta isn't just some rebranding of Facebook.

Facebook doesn't have a separate C-suite (CEO, CFO, etc.) from its parent company. Waymo does. So while Waymo is considered part of Alphabet because it is a majority shareholder, you're kidding yourself if you think it is at all like Meta and Facebook. There may not be a hard line between them, but there's a definite line.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 96

There's an edge case here or an edge case there where something didn't work as expected.

Construction zones and first responders are not an edge case, they are a well-known case. Also, stopping for school busses.

Tell me you don't know how model training works without telling me you don't know how model training works.

Autonomous vehicles (probably not including Tesla) already handle first responders correctly probably 99.99% of the time. They already handle school buses correctly probably 99.99% of the time. So what remains are, by definition, edge cases that for whatever reason require additional handling beyond the basic "Is this an emergency vehicle/school bus? If so, pull over and stop" rule.

For example, one edge case is figuring out how to clear a path for an emergency vehicle when there is no obvious place to pull over because of other cars stopped nearby. Sometimes the correct answer is to actually drive in the direction the emergency vehicle is going until you find a spot to pull over and get out of its way. This isn't intuitively obvious, and a lot of human drivers will struggle with it as well.

For another example, at least one case of Waymo vehicles illegally passing a school bus was caused by a remote operator not noticing that the vehicle had flagged the presence of a school bus and telling the car to proceed anyway. Sometimes, having a human in the loop actually ends up making things worse. :-)

what AV companies will do to prevent bad interactions with emergency vehicles will always be "exactly what we're already doing"

If you turn your brain on, you can think of other solutions. Something like, "have a safety driver."

At that point, what's the point of them being autonomous? At some point, you have to cut them loose and see what mistakes they make, because it is precisely through detecting those mistakes that you figure out what edge cases remain inadequately handled in the model. And understanding how the vehicle attempts to extricate itself from problem situations is critically important in figuring out what additional training needs to be added to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

So basically, your approach likely leads to a future where the models never learn to handle emergency vehicles, because safety drivers keep having to intervene before they can gather adequate data. That approach just doesn't work.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 96

to get to that point you have to pass exams and obtain a driver's license.

I don't recall the actual driving part of the driver test having a part where you drive onto a street that's barely wide enough for one vehicle to pass, let out a passenger, and then have an ambulance suddenly approach from the other direction while you're trying to turn around.

To get to the point of having a license, you have to answer a written question that proves you know to yield to emergency vehicles, prove that you can stay in lanes, stop for stop signs and maybe pedestrians, handle traffic lights correctly, and possibly parallel park, depending on where you took the exam. Autonomous vehicles could do those things reliably 15+ years ago.

In other words, you're greatly overestimating the competence of the average human driver.

Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 175

No but I uh understand the human English language and you mean to imply that is what I am suggesting

You might want to study the English language a bit more. Maybe some history too. The revolutionary US is often held up as an attempt to build a classless society, in contrast to Europe's aristocracy. That's not entirely accurate, the US founders had a bunch of different ideas about classism, and, uh, there's slavery of course, but people like John Adams purposely tried to structure the new government to prevent the class tyranny that the old aristocratic systems suffered from.

TLDR: I was agreeing with you.

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