I have a commute of about the same length which I do by bike. You do have to change clothes, yes, but provided you wear deodorant, odor isn't likely to be an issue.
699 karma · joined April 9, 2012
Another point: You can denigrate the liberal arts all you like ("wasting her time [...] taking yet another history class") and reject the argument that familiarity with them produces more well-rounded individuals, but a big portion of working in any knowledge-based profession will involve writing. I hope this young lady will also be able to have and take advantage of opportunities to become a better writer, because most of those opportunities before turning 18 happen in school.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_comparati...
Whence did the "correct" definition of "literally" arise, and how does this origin differ from that of the "incorrect" definition?
¹Disclaimer: I have no experience with Clojure, working primarily in Scala these days. I do aim for good unit test coverage in Scala just the same as I did when I worked in Java.
¹You can release Control and Shift after typing "U", in which case the character will appear after you type a space. Or, you can hold Control and Shift while typing the code point, in which case the character will appear after you release either modifier key.
There are some hacks to make it work, but Netflix won't support you if you go that route. Basically, you need a specially patched version of Wine which runs Firefox for Windows with the Silverlight plugin. There are PPAs and the like for Ubuntu users, but it's still a bit ugly and hackish.
Clearly, they do it because booking a flight at the airport is absurdly inconvenient and so few people will do it, rather than as a means of defraying the cost of hiring a customer service agent. But that, combined with their nasty reputation of seeking to extract every last dime from your wallet (someone else mentioned Ryanair as being as if Ayn Rand started an airline company, and Spirit certainly seems like that as well) prevents me from being willing to ever book a flight with them. Even though, counting the fees, they've often been the cheapest option on a flight I've needed, I prefer the second-cheapest airline, which is usually Southwest (unless I don't need to check a bag, in which case United usually wins).
Also, the final paragraph in the article makes a good counterpoint to this:
> Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is teaching a course in European intellectual history on Coursera. "People have to get over the idea of signing up for a course and not finishing it," he said. "We all have to get over feeling guilty. There is no right way or wrong way to use an online class. This is a great platform for lifelong learning."
The idea of vat meat is a great one if it turns out it can scale. It will give vegetarians (like me) an additional range of protein sources—not that I'm dissatisfied with what's out there, but I do miss real burgers from time to time. It will also give meat eaters an option that's actually meat, but without the externalities that are endemic in the meat industry (factory farms, poor conditions for animals, methane emissions, low efficiency).
It's unreasonable to expect the world to become vegetarian because of those externalities. And the grass-fed/free-range/cruelty-free kind of thing, while a good step, only addresses some of the externalities, while being intrinsically more expensive. Why not investigate vat meat to see if it's a feasible alternative? Maybe it isn't, and we'll have wasted a bunch of time and money (though I suspect there are implications to this exploration beyond simply food). But maybe it is, and we could fix or ameliorate a bunch of problems without demanding the world switch to soy, seitan, and lentils for their protein (which is not going to happen to the extent it would need to).
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/13/nyregion/lukewarm-response...
Sorry I can't link directly to the info for the United States, but if you look at the data the peak was in 2007. People who analyze this data are predicting the trend to continue. That doesn't mean it will, necessarily, but it seems to me the forces pushing car ownership down aren't going away any time soon.
Everywhere? You can't make generalizations like that, because there isn't a global trend. In developing countries, demand for car ownership is up, because of increasing affluence and the poor state of infrastructure in those countries. In developed countries, demand for car ownership is down, because of halting suburbanization, increasing awareness of expenses and externalities of car ownership, and availability of comparable alternatives. This is most apparent in Europe, but the long-term trend is downward in North America as well.
As for your analogies, they do not seem very apt. A major benefit to cell phone ownership is the ability to be contacted by or to contact people at any time, which a payphone does not provide. A major benefit to washing machine ownership is the ability to do laundry without schlepping your heavy clothes three blocks to the laundromat. The major benefit to car ownership—point to point transportation, on demand—would be provided by a competent robotaxi service. It won't kill car ownership, but for a significant number of people, robotaxis would provide everything they need out of a transportation, at a fraction of the cost.
Contrary to what you've been stating, there is precedent for replacing goods with services. Quite recent precedent, in fact. How many people do you know who subscribe to a service like Netflix? Of those people, do you think their consumption of DVDs (and, prior to that, VHS tapes) went up or down once they got Netflix? What about music: How many people are buying physical CDs these days, do you think, compared to in 2000? Sometimes a centralized service is superior, sometimes it isn't. The market will decide.
Between car ownership and robotaxis, I know which one I'd choose. There are a lot of people in this thread who agree with me. I think your "I don't know, everyone?" is entirely unjustified and I think you're vastly underestimating the frustration and expense involved in car ownership for a large number of people.
I think a lot of the resistance to this is people are worried that the first-line treatment will be things like drugs, which can be expensive (to society, since costs are largely socialized even in the U.S. through the mechanism of health insurance) and have side effects. Look at, say, jrs235's comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5912203 ) elsewhere on this page. That's a valid concern. But obesity also comes with a lot of costs itself. If calorie counting is an effective approach, I think that it could address the problem in a cost-effective way. (And in a software way, too.)
The takeaway of it is: Fast vs. slow isn't an absolute thing. It's about what your market is, and what kind of culture you want your company to have. You can be successful either way.
[1] http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/rulemaking/pdf/Automated_Ve...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_tra...