They mean someone who's extremely passionate about this could identify the car brand or exact model in question just by listening to the sound the lock makes from the posted video. You know, like the experts who can identify a wine by smelling it, or a violin just by listening to it.
I wouldn't know, and don't want to investigate. I try to stay generic, grammatically it's fine. I'm sure it can be grating to some but I'm not using this as a trigger word.
Their charging network and carbon credits revenue were probably the more valuable parts of the company. Tesla's current promise and foundation for that valuation is that they'll deliver fully autonomous driving.
But Musk has enough avenues to spin things left and right and bury any losses in the process his DOGE assault helped a lot bury some things already) so he'll do that. He's a showman and he'll manage to steal the show for as long as it takes.
I don't blame Apple for trying to straddle the line that makes everyone equally unhappy. But I steer away from autocorrect entirely so I'm not irritated daily by this like others may be.
Talking about autocorrect and irritation, I remember a situation where someone caused a minor international incident by writing that something "caused a lot of irritation". The word they were aiming for before autocorrect chimed in was "iterations" (on a document). I'd rather make my own mistakes than constantly have to fight an autocorrect system.
"30kW per day" makes no sense. It's like saying "100km/h per day". W is a unit of power, Wh is a unit of energy.
It's unintuitive because a guy named Watt decided "Joule per second" is Watt, so the intuitive units Joule and Joule per second got turned on their head to W times hour and Watt. This is opposite to usual intuition of distance and speed for example, km and km/h. If I redefined the km/h to a "tick", then a km would become "tick times hour".
If you want a "better than nothing" but imperfect analogy, Wh is how much water you have in a bottle, and W is how quickly you can get the water out.
And yet all utilities of the world decided to use kWh as the thing to measure. Also basically all smart measurement devices settled on this being the default to show. Exactly in the way he used it here, kw per day, kw per week, kw per month, kw per year.
This discussion seems super silly, considering he's just using the measurement that the industry adopted decades ago...
Are y'all just coming out of a time travel device from the 70s or something?
> Are y'all just coming out of a time travel device from the 70s or something?
I'll put aside the two-bit attitude and that you don't know that power (W) and energy (Wh) were measured in the exact same way in the "70s or something" (just ask your grandparents).
> the world decided to use kWh as the thing to measure
> kw per day, kw per week, kw per month, kw per year.
There is no such thing as "kw per day". You switched between units from one sentence to the next? The world indeed measures kWh per day, not kW per day. The lazy use kW per day as a shorthand and drop the "hour" to speak faster. The less educated measure "kW/day" because they don't understand the concepts and just parrot a common mistake. When they say "kW/day" what they should actually say is "kWh/day". It's where the unintuitive part comes in, they omit the "hour" or assume kWh is the same as kW/h, like km/h, instead of kW times h.
> This discussion seems super silly, considering he's just using the measurement that the industry adopted decades ago...
The industry adopted the correct measurement units decades before your grandparents were born. You just have a hard time understanding because it's easier to do cheap snark.
Unlike those people from the 70s or something, y'all live in a world with all the information you could want at your fingertips, you even have machines (AI) that digest it for you, and you even had me bothering to give an explanation a kid could process. To be unapologetically ignorant today is the same as being intellectually incompetent, ffsm8.
A general purpose computing device is unavoidable, it's exceedingly difficult to build anything close to it. Encrypted storage is trivial without dedicated hardware, using open, validated software solutions. Even better, if bugs or backdoors are found you don't need to throw out your encrypted stick, just update the software or reencrypt.
Because what I said above might sound like black magic to anyone who knows nothing about the topic I will expand.
The CPU on which the software runs gets far more scrutiny than the obscure encryption engine on the USB stick. And it's possible to validate the software encryption with minimal effort. Verify the output with various software implementations of the same algorithm, ran on different CPUs. They have to be compatible and can't all have the same bug or backdoor.
An encrypted stick is impossible to validate by the end user. They have no access to the CPU encryption engine or the raw storage so can't know the algorithm implementation, or the output to disk format which is probably proprietary.
It was only a matter of time and I said (half) jokingly at the time that Uber is breaking the dam for everyone else to follow. Any regulated system will have its day in front of "disruptors" where the disruption is simply ignoring the regulation with some flimsy excuse, supported by the money and lack of morals of VCs and startup combinators.
Uber took an axe to taxi drivers which weren't a popular group to begin with so that was easy. With the "disruption" perfected, next up are doctors, nurses, lawyers, electricians, cooks, engineers, the sky is the limit.
Taxi drivers were not more "regulated" in any meaningful way, in fact oversight of them was significantly worse than the community-driven Uber rating system (not that that doesn't also have flaws).
Some regulation is bad, some regulation is good. There's basically nothing at all that's good about guild systems and I will celebrate each of them facing open market competition.
> Taxi drivers were not more "regulated" in any meaningful way, in fact oversight of them was significantly worse than the community-driven Uber rating system (not that that doesn't also have flaws).
You are defaulting to the US here (and I doubt Taxi regulation in the US is that homologous either tbh given the complexity of 50 states and then cities on top of that).
Taking the country I'm most familiar with (the UK), Taxis fall into two categories (only one of which is technically a taxi by law if not convention - Hackney and private hire vehicles) bothare licensed in different but similar ways by the licensing authorities (usually the local council but not always), some of those laws go back centuries.
Also worth noting, in the UK Uber does operate under the Private Hire Vehicle laws and does have to comply with applicable licensing same as any other "taxi" (private hire vehicle) operator.
They tried to argue otherwise and lost (at the UK Supreme Court so it's essentially settled case law) so they are classed as a PHV Operator and must ensure they only use a properly licensed PHV vehicle and drivers and can't pull the "but they are independent contractors" card out when it explodes in their faces.
It was a little more nuanced than that. The actual case was about whether a private hire operator accepting a booking had to contract with the customer as principal, rather than merely acting as an agent arranging a contract between the customer and driver (which was essentially Uber's argument).
The (UK) Supreme Court said "nah, it's you, nice try though".
They actually lost thrice - in 2017 TFL pulled their PHV licence because Uber London Limited wasn't considered to be a 'fit and proper person', Uber thought they could brazen it out only to find that TFL is beholden only to the Mayor and they ended up having to come back on bended knee, and then it was further refused in 2019 but returned on appeal - https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Uber-v-T...), which lists significant failings by Uber that they had since remedied.
The third outing with the Supreme Court was about employment rights - were the drivers workers, or genuine independent contractors for whom Uber are merely acting as a booking agent (which the Uber model relies almost entirely on).
The Employment Tribunal, The Employment Appeal Tribunal, The Court of Appeal and finally the Supreme Court all said "nah fam, you ain't fooling nobody" and the original ET was especially scathing:
> It seems to us that the Respondents' general case and the written terms on which they rely do not correspond with the practical reality. The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common 'platform' is to our minds faintly ridiculous. In each case the 'business' consists of a man with a car seeking to make a living by driving it.
Aye, it's been interesting (by which I mean highly entertaining) to watch them run face first into the pole repeatedly since their attitude of "We got away with this elsewhere" worked until it didn't.
They did get away with it in London. They broke laws, argued unfaithfully in court, got denied a license, got an extended probationary period from a magistrate, and finally are operating in the clear.
Very very few other businesses get to act so brazenly and dangerously, then get an extended period of time and support to do the bare minimum to qualify as compliant.
I think it's fair to say regulation existed and exists in the West for taxi drivers. I understand their point to be the degree. I've taken many taxis in the UK and prior to Uber, the experience sucked outside of a black cab (which are very expensive). Ditto for New Zealand, Australia, Italy, France, Greece, etc. I'm lucky to be well travelled and I can say that sentiment for taxi drivers was terrible prior to Uber. Regulation existed, but that didn't stop drivers from being terrible in many ways.
Uber made it very clear who the terrible drivers were. It turned it into a real service industry where good service was expected. Suddenly scammers couldn't hide behind anonymity. To this day I would rather pay 2x as much for an Uber than take a regular taxi. That's how much they sucked.
I once had a 6 foot 7 taxi driver in Croatia try to shake me down for twice the agreed amount of cash. He tried to take away my phone and force me physically to give him more money. I had no information on him or desire to stay longer to press charges and waste my vacation.
I got a fond appreciation of uber and other marketplaces that provide accountability using technology ever since.
> Taxi drivers were not more "regulated" in any meaningful way, in fact oversight of them was significantly worse than the community-driven Uber rating system (not that that doesn't also have flaws).
Taxis have standardized rates set by the municipality and use standardized meters that are periodically inspected. Ride sharing apps have dynamic pricing and no transparency.
Taxis have (almost) no transparency. Outside of a few limited places where there are fixed fees for certain routes, you never know how much you're going to have to pay when you get in. With ride share apps the pricing is upfront and transparent.
In certain cases the literal definition of "upfront" is practically useless. You can check the price of a ride app before your flight and by the time you land it can double. This never happen(s/ed) with taxis. Alleged surge pricing is not transparent. After eliminating taxis, ride app companies create duopolies that can arbitrarily increase ride prices and lobby more effectively against worker rights.
Except when the "meter is broken" or they take the scenic route. My grandmother with dementia routinely got charged double or triple the expected rate for trips to medical appointments, until we figured out what was going on and started booking her rideshares.
Just curious what happens if there is a major event going on in the proximity of one of the doctors appointments?
It could turn out to be 2-3x the "normal" cost due to surge pricing. This often happens to people who go out drinking and think "I'll just grab an Uber later".
Recently heard someone complaining about the $45 cost to go 3 miles.
*Sidenote: people with dementia should probably have someone in the car with them to be sure they get to the appointments. That solves the issue of shady people taking advantage of them for the most part.
To clarify I was referring to her getting upcharged by unscrupulous taxi drivers, not rideshares. Rideshares were an improvement since we could book her a ride with a known up-front cost, and get pick-up/ drop-off notifications.
> *Sidenote: people with dementia should probably have someone in the car with them to be sure they get to the appointments. That solves the issue of shady people taking advantage of them for the most part.
Her dementia was still fairly mild at that point, she could easily manage taking a taxi from A to B, she just wouldn't push back if the guy said it was $30 when it should have been $10. It's tricky to figure out the right supports and boundaries at that stage, especially for elderly people used to being self-sufficient. Convincing her to stop driving was hard enough...
>To clarify I was referring to her getting upcharged by unscrupulous taxi drivers, not rideshares. Rideshares were an improvement since we could book her a ride with a known up-front cost, and get pick-up/ drop-off notifications.
Understood, IMHO...it is easier to find a reputable taxi company than it is to predict surge pricing. Or at least it used to be when you had a choice.
It has been my observation that the companies all had plans to "disrupt"...but it seems they never had a solid "profitable" plan past when the VC money ran out.
Aside from turning employees into contractors...most of which have not done the math on how much they are losing through having to use your own car with no employee benefits. Doordash/Uber start looking a lot less attractive if you figure in the $.65/mile costs (fuel, repairs, insurance, car purchase price) that you would be paid by most govt or "real" companies.
Almost everyone I know who does Doordash makes about $20/hr (which isn't good anyways) and they are not figuring in the costs of the vehicle.
Lots of people in the US need to own a car already and the vehicle still depreciates sitting in their driveway. The correct calculation there is the marginal cost (faster depreciation rate, gas) versus the income from a ride-sharing app. But yes buying a vehicle specifically to do delivery or ride-sharing is a bad decision.
Depreciation of the vehicle due to time is only a very small part of the costs. Mileage is way, way more important. (Of course Uber requires a certain age of car so that is a restriction).
Maintenance and fuel are a much larger part of the total costs. It is very easy to math out if you break down by the "recommended service intervals" which are largely based on mileage (fluids do require changing with time intervals but normal driving usually matches up with the mileage).
The myth that a car sitting still is losing money has been sold by the insurance companies. It is only cheaper to buy a new car vs fixing one if you account for the loss if someone runs into you and totals the car. My car which I have maintained and is 14 years old is worth way more to me than the amount that is placed on it by people who have it in their interest to say it is worthless due to age.
Sidenote: I tracked all my miles, costs and income while delivering pizzas many years ago. These costs vary greatly depending on the car. The 89 subaru justy I purchased to deliver was $.25/mile whereas my 93 mazda 626 was closer to $.60 (2004 pricing). My current car is ~$.60/mile also.
Currently, the IRS mileage rates for business is $.70/mile, do any of the gig economies pay this? [1]
You can go online and see what people are actually willing to pay for older, low-mileage cars. It's not much of a premium over similar cars with typical mileage. You can't really blame insurance companies when the valuations are determined by what people are actually paying for used vehicles. Sure, you might do an impeccable job of maintaining your car, but a future buyer has to go off of a mechanic's assessment, plus they won't have a manufacturer warranty to fall back on. There's also the issue that newer models generally have better fuel economy, more safety features, etc. Cars have actually gotten cheaper over time after accounting for new features and reliability improvements, which puts additional downwards pressure on the price of used vehicles.
> Currently, the IRS mileage rates for business is $.70/mile, do any of the gig economies pay this? [1]
I used to get paid that rate at my old job and it was an amazing deal, it was way over my actual costs for the vehicle. With a small fuel-efficient car I was covering my gas, insurance, and depreciation with a few trips each year. It was effectively my work paying for a free car I'd get to use the rest of the time.
That's the issue with using one number as a very rough estimate, it has to account for everything from contractors driving work trucks to someone commuting in a Model 3.
My wife volunteers during tax seasons to do tax returns for low income people. It always depresses her when people on the lower runs of the ladder come in and have been doing uber, lyft, doordash, etc or some combination and have nothing more than a hand wave estimate of how many miles they drove. She is the one who has to tell them just guesstimating is not allowed and what might have been a $1000 check back to them is instead a $2000 check they need to write to the government. 9 times out of ten they say, "but I don't have that money" and it crushes her. More than a few get mad at her for not being willing to just enter their guesstimate into the form.
I'm not sure if it is because uber (or whomever they work for) didn't make it clear enough to track it properly or if they simply didn't take it seriously.
Imagine cheating someone out of supposedly $8,000 and instead putting them into the hole $2,000. Someone who is living paycheck to paycheck.
Yeah I'm the sleaze...
"Sorry, you could've had a large windfall and finally fixed that AC system -- but in my personal opinion, as a tax preparer with over 2 hours of online training -- you didn't keep proper documentation, sorry!
This trend was started in health care by private equity with no inspiration from Uber. Check your local dentists, eye doctors, veterinarians, urgent cares, maybe even hospitals. You'll find very few that are not owned by some large private equity firm these days, who run everything at the highest margins possible. And once you eliminate any higher quality / higher paying positions in an area, moving to pricing on demand and getting rid of full time positions entirely comes next.
Many that haven't succumbed to PE yet know what it brings and appreciate the opportunity to speak to the issue themselves. Many of the best really wish more customers were paying attention and giving them credit for their choice not to sell out.
Meanwhile, many that haven't will either justify their corporate ownership or just kind of dodge the issue.
You can ask other providers for gossip and insight about ones you're curious about -- especially other providers in fields that are connected/adjacent but not directly competitive. The true locals are generally delighted to call out the sell outs.
TBF it’s also an engine to push for regulations review. Awful lot of regulations are written for an age that no longer exists and just as many are to make management easier therefore startups pushing the boundaries actually are a correcting mechanism.
Unfortunately some harm can be inflicted bur IMHO it’s better than the alternative.
There was an “Uber for X” wave that didn’t really amount to anything. Stuff like home repairs was a big one. My take was that driving (and delivery) is a rare service that above some basic competence (and I’d say below another) is a pure commodity. For most things, quality is a differentiator, and anyone good would never give up a percentage to an app, so only the worst providers would sign up. My intuition is that nursing would work this way.
I think your intuition about quality and who signs up is correct, but doesn't insulate as much as you're assuming. For one thing, corporations have a nearly unlimited appetite for converting employees to contractors. For another, the economy has produced a large number of desperate people willing to do pure commodity work.
One reason "Uber for X" appears not to have materialized is that the platforms themselves are commoditized, not just the labor. Retailers like Lowe's and Wayfair have built assembly/installation services behind a checkout upsell. They run portals distributing work to their "network of local contractors" .
I got a window into this world through an acquaintance. He has a truck and light trade skills, but mental and reputational legacies of past addiction lock him out of the "anyone good" market. He's on a half dozen platforms, trying to stitch a living doing sink or toilet installs for Lowe's and building bookcases for Wayfair. A negative review gets you demoted from the choice gigs, or even kicked from the platform entirely. It's bleak.
They aren’t attacking regulation but full time employment. They spent a tremendous amount of money in CA to pass a law that’s nearly unable to be repealed to avoid having their gig folks count as employees. That’s the attack - everyone being a 1099. Not regulated industries.
Well, at least on case of taxi drivers "the flimsy excuse" phrasing applies more to existing regulation than not following it.
Not sure about the nurses, but my grandmothers were able to afford live-in caretakers in old age, without any government help or having much money, because these are completely unregulated (outside the US; or the regulation is not enforced)... We found good ones thru word of mouth, exactly the approach apps can scale
Being long degeneracy ( https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy ) really seems to be the correct market position. Turns out laws really are optional, if you're brazen enough.
Uber "deregulating" everything, means Uber taxing everything... because everything will go through it... and you know the EEE thingy right? better prices until you kill industry, then rise prices...
The good thing is that we will not be fooled this time while checking the dead bird thing...
Not only were taxi drivers not popular but it also wasn't and isn't obvious to most people exactly how or why they were regulated. Especially to people outside of major urban areas.
> it had already been decommissioned prior to the collapse
The telescope was decommissioned one month before the collapse. The funding issues, lack of sufficient maintenance, and the inevitable decay that led to the collapse took a few decades more than that.
> Yes, decommissioning does indicate funding is being cut, but it was unrelated to the collapse.
The collapse was a direct consequence of the funding being cut. Maintenance was not performed on issues that were observed many years before exactly on the sockets that failed.
> Unfortunately, Arecibo received no such inspections.
With or without the inspections, the problems Arecibo faced were of a more serious nature. They are hinted in one of the findings: the non-replacement, repair or bypass of the sockets where large slips were observed.
The telescope received minimal funding for maintenance over the two decades prior to the collapse despite signs of increasing damage observed in the various inspections. A lot of factors probably contributed to this (political climate, the dropping importance of Arecibo compared to other science instruments and missions, and so on) but the result was that the structure was left with slow but sure decay.
I met a couple of people who worked with the telescope including on location and they told me that the general feeling among the people who had this on their minds (most people who ever had anything to do with Arecibo cared about the science not the instrument) was that the decay was slow but certain and catastrophic failure was bound to happen sooner or later. Like a car receiving no maintenance despite the check engine light being on for a decade.
The telescope received minimal funding because stakeholders couldn't make a good case for more. The results the facility could produce weren't seen as justifying the expense. In that light, that it was operated at all was more than one might reasonably have expected. The alternative was to just shut it down earlier. They squeezed the last drops of output before the old thing was allowed to die.
Sometimes with facilities like this you have to make the call that it's over.
Yes-ish? Funding was far more plentiful when the telescope was being designed and built, and in its early decades. I know zero details about that era - but I strongly suspect it suffered from "just focus on the cool parts" syndrome. And if it'd been designed and built correctly, or the problem caught and corrected back then, it would very likely still be standing.
Which is not to say it'd still be receiving operational funding, nor that its potential scientific contributions would be particularly worthwhile.
It was built in the ‘60s and started losing its relevance and funding in the 2-3 decades before the collapse. A lot of time for issues to develop, be noticed, but not have enough money to fix.
Read through the Thornton Thomasetti Forensic Report (linked above).
If the original builders had cared about the boring parts, then pre-WWII QC technology could easily have spotted the extremely shoddy workmanship in the zinc spelter sockets, while those were originally being fabricated.
Similar for designing larger safety margins into the whole cable system. Even PHB's can understand that "Hurricane Snaps Cables, Telescope Collapses" headlines could make them look really bad.
Microsoft remembers that just a few short decades ago you'd pay a coin that was usually worth more than today's quarter to play at the arcade and got far less than an hour for it. You owned nothing and were happy for it.
A lot of big tech companies want to bring back those time because they believe the few decades in between where people owned and controlled their devices and software in a very open computing ecosystem were a mistake. So the aim now is to give you a device you pay for and use but never fully control, and software or media that you rent but never own.
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