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Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

timharford.com

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Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#261

Post by zenexer »

Armisael16 wrote: post #169
mattlondon wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this sounds to me like a lot of "whatabout"ing. "I can't drive anything that does less then 3s 0-60s because ". If you want a fast car, just come out and say it. Driving a high performance car can be exhilarating - I have a second/weekend fast car for precisely the reason that I enjoy it, but I don't pretend it is required or that it is particularly responsible or socially acceptable to boot it away from the lig…

The person I was responding to said the difference was impossible to notice on public roads. I gave an example of a situation where it is noticeable and everyone decided that I meant it was a situation where it’s necessary (despite explicitly saying that it isn’t necessary). It’s the kind of thread that makes me really wish people on the internet would read what’s written, not what they’d like to think was written.

I still don’t really understand how you can end up in that situation. It seems contrived. With proper driving technique, it shouldn’t be possible. Granted, mistakes happen, but I’ve never been in a situation where the difference was noticeable or relevant.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#262

Post by ClumsyPilot »

gorgoiler wrote: post #206
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China…

How heavy is an EV bus? Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class. Would a bus be even more so, to the point of being dangerously massive?

"being dangerously massive?"

What does this mean? Do you expect a bus to weigh more than a fully loaded truck? Trucks in uk weight up to 44 tons, the largest double-decker bus is 12.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#263

Post by zbrozek »

mattlondon wrote: post #164
zbrozek wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I borrowed (actually traded; swapping with my truck) a ~2016 Prius for a month and hated driving it. Merging is slow; I ended up flooring it and only reaching ~50 mph by the end of the onramp. Bay area ramps are, however, very short. Try the SB 101 Rengstorff ramp in Mountain View, it's horrible. In fact, that very ramp is why I replaced my 2002 Saturn LW200 with a 2010 BMW 135i in 2012. The Prius also can't maintain…

Sounds like the car you drove was defective. I have an auris which is mechanically identical to a Prius. I have not driven those exact roads but I have never struggled going up hills and it will hit 60mph from a standstill in just under 10s, so with a rolling start of say 20-30 getting onto the onramp you are at 60 or so in 6 or 7 seconds. If your onramps are so short that you can't drive for 6 or 7 seconds before me…

Maybe, but I doubt it. It wasn't throwing any codes and I notice other Priuses also sagging by 5-8 mph on uphill sections of 280. Nowadays I habitually change lanes if I see a Prius in front of me just prior to an incline.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#264

Post by drivebycomment »

He is right that LIFO (last in first out) queue is more efficient when there's more demand than queue throughout. But the fairness isn't just a problem with the sense of justice. As indicated, with a fixed timeout, LIFO will cause more spurious timeouts when FIFO wouldn't. The best of all worlds, if the speed of light or transition between different queues isn't an issue, is to have a centralized queue management forming a super queue. Some stores do this already, creating a single queue that dispatches shoppers to a checkout counter. Doing this cuts down the average wait time, and makes people "give up" more willingly under heavy load, since the queue would look much longer.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#265

Post by anamax »

lucian1900 wrote: post #255
anamax wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Such automation wouldn’t be sustainable under capitalism because the rate of profit would drop even further I get that you don't like profits (even though investment to do automation requires profits), but automation reduces costs which INCREASES profits and/or reduces prices.

One enterprise automating increases its competitive advantage for a while, thus temporarily increasing its profits. However, over time, all enterprises will either automate or fail. Since profits are a portion of the value generated by labour, as the proportion of costs attributed to labour drop, so do profits. There are secondary effects as well, as workers lose their jobs, their wages fall through competition and t…

> Since profits are a portion of the value generated by labour

That's simply not true. Profits = revenue - costs. Revenue, what buyers pay, is based on perceived value. That perceived value may come from labor, but it can also come from some mechanical transformation (ie automation). It can even come from something else, such as color. (I'm assuming that red paint costs the same as blue and takes no more labor to apply.)

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#266

Post by pandaman »

zenexer wrote: post #261
Armisael16 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person I was responding to said the difference was impossible to notice on public roads. I gave an example of a situation where it is noticeable and everyone decided that I meant it was a situation where it’s necessary (despite explicitly saying that it isn’t necessary). It’s the kind of thread that makes me really wish people on the internet would read what’s written, not what they’d like to think was written.

I still don’t really understand how you can end up in that situation. It seems contrived. With proper driving technique, it shouldn’t be possible. Granted, mistakes happen, but I’ve never been in a situation where the difference was noticeable or relevant.

The argument here is about comfort, not impossibility. Someone who is comfortable driving a 5s 0-60 car just won't buy a 10s 0-60 replacement. Not because it is impossible to get to places in the latter but because it's uncomfortable.

If you want these people to replace their 5s cars with hybrids you need to offer 5s hybrids.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#267

Post by brewdad »

pandaman wrote: post #133
zenexer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration? It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideratio…

You don't have metered on-ramps? These are ones with a traffic light at the start where one has to come to stop at the light and then accelerate to match your speed with the traffic.

In my area, if the ramp meters are on, traffic on the highway isn't moving faster than 35mph and might very well be at a dead stop. Why would I need hyper-acceleration?

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#268

Post by HideousKojima »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #195
HideousKojima wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When some starve and others hoard food, is property more important than hunger? Yes, because destroying private property rights will lead to further famines. It's something called second-order effects, which Communists seem utterly incapable of understanding. >The famines were environmental, for centuries. None were ever on the scale of those caused by the Soviets, Mao, and others, so they clearly weren't just envir…

">When some starve and others hoard food, is property more important than hunger? Yes, because destroying private property rights will lead to further famines. It's something called second-order effects" There is this really interesting second order effect I heard about, very few people know about it - apparently masses of starving people might not just quietly watch their family succumb to famine, sometimes they sta…

>sometimes they start cutting off heads of whoever is in charge

I wish they'd actually done so to Stalin, seeing as he was the one in charge and his policies were the cause of the famine. Instead, it seems like the majority swallowed his propaganda blaming the kulaks hook, line, and sinker.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#269

Post by renewiltord »

Half of these things feel like you can have way better solutions:

- Spot price the gallon and set the minimum order increment to 5 gallons. Pre-purchase and then arrive to collect or pay the spot price at the time of arrival

- Switch the stall queue to a ticket system. You buy your thing and plug in a contact number (or wait). You are either notified by phone (or by voice when you’re there). Lots of food courts already do this.

- There’s no reason to buy coal mines. You can just political currency instead of normal currency. If your time is worthless or you have cultivated political currency for a while, the former is incredibly cheap

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#270

Post by renewiltord »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #245
bobthepanda wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a local US government, you probably have trouble keeping the lights on, let alone justifying CapEx on more buses. King County in Seattle recently costed a transition to all-electric: the conclusion was that it would cost 41% more than sticking with the current hybrids, and would be equivalent to reducing service by 237,000 hours annually. https://seattletransitblog.com/2020/11/02/metros-fleet-all-e...

Have they included emissions and healthcare considerations in those cost estimates?

Well, one would imagine that the externalities are mitigated by the fact that they are spread. AGW isn’t even bad for that region: abundant water, solid local government, improved arable land.
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