Chinese plan for “traffic-straddling bus” ended after 32 people were arrested
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Yes, but the real message here is "we'd rather you spend your money than save it, so we're going to charge you money to keep it with us"
The whole point of a negative interest rate is to try and drive up spending/investment. If it costs money for banks to keep their deposits in the central bank, then there's (theoretically) more incentive for the banks to loan the money to someone.
It's meant to be a means of economic stimulus, and the government isn't the one setting the negative interest rate, that would be the central bank (in Europe's case, the ECB).
The same would still be true if you kept gold under your mattress.
More typically in modern history, banks can deliver decent rates of return by capitalizing loans with deposits. Risk gets reduced by FDIC or other insurance.
As recently as 2006, savings accounts with zero risk for >80% of the US population paid 4-5% interest.
I was gonna ask how was that "zero risk" possible, but I'm thinking the answer is "it wasn't actually possible as we all found out the following years."
(It might help if you think of risk as a scale, and the "zero" as an arbitrary point in that scale. It's useful to set the "zero" to "the lowest risk you can actually get", even though there might be something with an even lower risk.)
The problems we found out later were with banks packaging loans into more complex securities of and selling them to third parties.
You have "zero risk" with bank deposits because FDIC insures deposits up $250k (today, $100k previously) with the full faith and credit of the US Treasury.
That has always been true. Look, you can't save grain to eat in your old age unless you build a freaking grain silo, and even then the grain rots. Money is just little pieces of paper with value attached, they don't actually have value in itself (the same is true for gold). Whatever happened in the past, e.g. savings account with higher interest rates, was more related to the demand for capital rather than in the intrinsic property of the money itself.
I could be wrong though, but that's the only way negative interests make sense to me.
It makes me wonder if it wasn't a scam at all, but just a really bad idea with believers that wanted to make it real?
It's like murder. There's first degree premeditated murder, crimes of passion, insanity, and manslaughter. Manslaughter can in some cases be charged for gross negligence, or the death can occur as a result of another crime where murder was not the intent.
Scams can be similar. A pure scam is like first degree murder. The scammer(s) plan it as a scam and execute it with intent. But sometimes a failure or misadventure can evolve into a scam.
This happens when those behind it double down in the face of clear evidence of total non-viability. When the tech doesn't work for fundamental reasons, nobody is truly interested, etc., but the operators keep ratcheting up the salesmanship and doubling down, they are heading into scam territory.
You see this a lot with quack medicines backed by people with actual medical degrees. Sometimes a doctor or researcher comes up with an idea and then their ego gets into it. They start fantasizing about being the greatest genius in medicine, the person who cured cancer, etc. So even when the data comes in and shows that their treatment doesn't work any better than placebo they refuse to "see" this. Their ego won't let them and they delude themselves. Over time they devolve much like Walter White from Breaking Bad, going from legitimate doctor to quack. It's rarely a sudden thing.
Your idea for the next breakthrough technology might be the very thing some parasite "angel investor" is looking for to be the crystal at the core of their next big scam. Watch who you team up with.
Another options is you placed them on slightly elevated tracks and add bridges over intersections, the larger problem is they need a lot of space above them which means overpasses etc could limit placement without major investments and it really just reinvents the monorail concept.
So, IMO it's unlikely to work in most cities, but there are a lot of city's and you only need a few. Thus, it probably did not start as a scam even if evolved into it.
I think of it as the Theranos cycle where something seems possibly viable, but not 100% viable. However, with a closer look it's probably not going to work. But, at that point it's only the people doing the investigation that know this, thus making for a good investment scam. AKA getting other people to throw good money after bad let's you extract some value from a failure.
IMO, a better fit would be to scale down and have two way bike lanes and pedestrian traffic beneath them vs. car only traffic. But, scaling these up to say 16' of clearance could also be viable, just more expensive.
Again, these could be built to spin in place they simply can't turn sharply when cars are under them. So, they could do a 90 degree turn as long as they had a separate turn signal or bridge over traffic to do so.
However, even if they where limited to nearly strait lines many city's like NYC for example have a lot of strait lines.
So, yea it would be cheaper to build something that can't turn, but turning radius is simply an engineering trade-off.
Although to be fair, can't you pre-sell condos to finance their construction?
Yep, that is true. On the other hand there are also many laws that try to mitigate the risk of accidents.[] I think the mobility of motor vehicles is a benefit, that outweighs the risk of accidents. I doubt we could manage the logistics of supplying big cities with bikes, trains and horses alone.
[]: That does not solve the problem, that cars are dangerous machinery and some people just shouldn't handle them (despite a drivers license).
My mistake was thinking [] was a single symbol.
The CGI videos of it cornering show the sections bending, which only works in CGI.[2][3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn
[2] https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=131 [3] https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=138
NYT would have written this in the indefinite present: "Chinese plan for “traffic-straddling bus” ends with 32 arrests." Except it didn't end, and the NYT headline says so.
The article as up right now has a title that says it's over, but did not have the same headline when I added my comment :-(. Also says it's effectively over as a result of the arrests which it didn't before. Unfortunately the NYT does not have a policy of always indicating edits. So this may have made my comment look odd.
However FWIW the NYT typically won't use the past tense, and in particular the perfect, for topics which are ongoing. US Civil war? Sure. Bernie Madoff? Possibly, possibly not, depending. People having just been arrested gets a present, or at best imperfect tense.
A traffic straddling bus is one of those "so crazy it just might work" ideas that gets funding.
An elevated rail system seemed so much easier and without the difficulties that this introduced.
But an elevated rail system required significantly more investment thus it had to be city sanctioned in a large way, rather than the minimal investments this required.
Just so it can turn. I think in this specific comparison elevated light rail would be significantly less-disruptive and cheaper too.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2013/02/14/the-ro...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578965/Horses-lef...
[3] https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-in-entertainment/horse-d...
Cars on the other hand, don't do that at all.
Maybe that's the reason why cars are not banned.
Cars produce all sorts of chemical compounds that ruin the air we breath.
I'm not saying cars are innocent here, but at least they don't poop.
Cars do it, but instead of it being a hard to clean mass, it's a nearly-impossible-to-clean toxic gas that kills thousands of people every year.
What I mean is that the "nearly-impossible-to-clean toxic gas" is also "nearly-impossible-to-see" when in the air.
See, that's why they're not banned, because people "Don't see" the problem.
If cars needs to take a sold mass smelly hot dump every few miles too, they were long banned.
It's just not very fast compared to modern cars and quite expensive so not as many people do it.
Edit: Oh one minor mostly common sense note -
You can't ride/drive horses on the motorway and probably shouldn't on faster roads or dual carriageways due to the rest of the traffic going far faster than you.
I think banning them on congested roads will increase the demand for public transport which is what we should have on those road anyway.
Also, in what country did they ban horses?
To use Oxford as a small example of more than a toll, there's a few roads in the city centre that only buses/taxis are allowed to use, and a few roads that only pedestrians can use (with some time-specific exceptions for loading/unloading/etc.). Nobody looks at it and thinks "well now it's not congested we should allow cars again".
Some roads are congested even with private cars banned (e.g. Oxford Street).
> in the end I think what you're suggesting is running around giving tickets to people in traffic jams.
Would that be such a bad thing? Obv. it would need to be a little more formalized than that.
If I were to take public transportation to my job it would take about twice as long and involve me walking 5 miles both ways. And I get in traffic jams daily.
So yeah, if you went around penalizing people for something largely outside their ability to control, there would be riots in the streets.
I'll concede that yeah in that situation (the ban resulting in going from business horses to no horses) was essentially banning them. They're not technically banned as such, but the rules they're under changed too much for them to be viable.
In regard to road rules I'd see a horse as more a downgraded car than an upgraded bike, sorta like a motorbike but slower.
Rule 54: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-about-ani...
> You MUST NOT take a horse onto a footpath or pavement, and you should not take a horse onto a cycle track. Use a bridleway where possible. Equestrian crossings may be provided for horse riders to cross the road and you should use these where available (see Rule 27). You should dismount at level crossings where a ‘horse rider dismount’ sign is displayed.
Oh, you meant the rider. Yeah, that's fine.
there was a fellow arrested in colorado a few years back for that:
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_24052312/cu-bould...
>"Every person having control or charge of a vehicle shall, whenever upon any way and approaching any horse, drive, manage, and control such vehicle in such a manner as to exercise every reasonable precaution to prevent the frightening of such horse, and to insure the safety and protection of any person riding or driving the same."
That's the law (for instance) in New Hampshire. The same article (the very first link when I search for "horse street legal united states") http://cs.thehorse.com/blogs/horses-and-the-law/archive/2012... further states
>Traffic laws in a few states, including Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, specifically state that horses have all the rights and obligations of other vehicles when they are being ridden or driven on a public highway. Everywhere else, except in states like Louisiana where it appears to be illegal to ride a horse on a paved road, riders and drivers probably enjoy similar rights and obligations by implication.
>Some states prohibit specific conduct when riding on a highway: It is illegal to ride a horse at night in New Mexico; to cross bridges at a gait faster than a walk in Idaho, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania; to ride or drive a horse "recklessly" in Nevada; to race or run horses on a highway in Kentucky, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, or New Jersey; to ride on a levee in Kentucky; and to ride on interstate highways in several states. Horses should be ridden on the right-hand side of the road, going with the flow of traffic, almost everywhere except Colorado, where riders must ride on the left.
Sorry but I don't think you know what you're talking about, you're not in the United States, or you failed to specify enough context so that in that limited situation your statement is true. At the very least you failed to make a simple Google search for a sweeping generalization that is demonstrably not true.