Hacker News Reader

Comment by johngalt | Hacker News Reader

OT: I've always wondered if powered mini-transportation tools like electric boards and scooters could fix the gaps in mass transit. Make it so that stops are less frequent/further apart, with the assumption that the last few miles can be covered on your personal device. Instead of buses that have to stop every block, they just run express service between major hubs.

Individuals only have to own/maintain only a <$1000 electric scooter with zero emissions. While the big expensive bus is a pooled resource.

View on HN

Some people can't afford a TI-83 for their children if it's a requirement in math class. To assume that everyone taking public transit wants / needs / is able to afford even a $300 device to get them the last mile seems a bit out of touch with the typical mass-transit-dependent demographic.

OT: TI-83 should cost < $20 by now, based on costs of materials and that the r&d has been paid off for years.

It's not like TI is selling exactly the same TI-83 now, and it seems that most of their R&D effort and value comes from software.

You can easily duplicate the hardware these days, or even do everything in software but it seems that high quality CAS software is pretty hard to make.

TI and Mathlab pretty much got a monopoly on that as it seems I haven't seen a single off-brand graphical calculator that actually worked.

Not even sure if anyone besides TI and to lesser extent HP are even making graphical calculators these days (HP ones are (or at least were) substantially more expensive.

So when you have a market monopoly and a product with very little obsolescence (graphical calculators can easily last 10-15 years these days) there's nothing to drive the market down.

The TI-8X series is also one of the few "certified" ones and they also have localized versions that disable certain features for countries that limit the use of "smart calculators" but don't ban them outright.

Huh? The R&D was paid off as soon as it completed. Money from completed projects funds R&D in the present; it doesn't retroactively fund R&D in the past.

Yes,R&D is technically paid off as soon as it completes, but paying off the R&D is an investment and the company obviously wants a return on this investment.

But the price of a calculator is totally unrelated to the cost of the R&D associated with the calculator. The original point was nonsense.

The company wants its return to be as large as possible. Speaking in more sensible terms, they want to get as much money as they can regardless of whether they've reached a magic internal accounting threshold or not. R&D just has no relevance at all to product pricing.

Good point. It certainly wouldn't apply to everyone. Consider it additive. Don't take away the slow and steady stop every block buses. Just add more express options.

While there are many people who couldn't afford the calculator. There are also a lot people who could swing a $300 scooter but not afford a well maintained car. They would certainly enjoy to cut some time off their commute.

You can find used ones for 30-40$. It's also a sad day when those are a requirement, graphical calculators (or any calculator with CAS) were banned for all of me high school exams, and for most of my uni courses as well and I'm thankful for that especially seeing how many people can't plot a function on their own these days.

It's certainly a possible solution to the last mile problem, and one I've considered using myself, but the issue is what do you do with your transport once you arrive at your destination?

If your destination is a home or office, you can just take it inside, but what about a bar or restaurant? Leaving a bicycle outside is an invitation for theft and it's certainly too large to bring inside. Even a longboard isn't exactly simple to tuck under the bar or lean on your table.

Something like a folding bike could work.

A lot of people don't live in a climate that is good for biking / boarding year round.

A lot of people also aren't young and able bodies enough to ride such a thing.

People who aren't able bodied already ride power chairs onto the bus.

And there's a lot of in-betweeners who don't need a wheelchair but also can't really ride an electric skateboard. Like, just about everyone over the age of 50.

(Yes yes, I'm sure you have an anecdote about a 51 year old you know who rides an electric skateboard all the time, but broadly speaking...)

Last-mile solution is exactly how they are marketing them on http://www.boostedboards.com .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com