Mercedes EVs can go faster for $60 a month

To me, it could look like a bunch of people join a company through an app or something and receive voting shares they keep as long as they are participating.

Members would contribute various kinds of property and only members can vote on who gets to use what, for how long, and what, if anything gets sold to fund the company. At least initially, it would probably also have to be funded by members working regular jobs and contributing cash to the company but pretty shortly afterwards the idea would be to have the business making money on it's own by selling things the members make and want to sell.

The cash would then be used to buy anything the members vote to buy. Which then becomes part of the property pool people can vote on using.

As long as the members are geographically distributed, the company would also need to pay for shipping stuff around when it's time to change who is using what.

If it is profitable enough, then it might be able to provide most or all of what the members need to live their best lives. Short of that, it may at least be able to create a micro version of UBI or something.

There are a lot more details to work out than those of course. I do actually want to see if this approach can do something to help people live they way they want to. However, it's hard to imagine any communists or socialists wanting to join such a company if it is run by someone with a capitalist mindset. Even if that person's motives are pure and clear. Naturally, even if I was administrating such a system, I wouldn't allow myself voting powers in it but I suspect still that wouldn't be enough.

So it's really matured in the same direction only further.

The most effective & consistent mass-production processes do not always produce components as identical as would be ideal, and not all equal in ultimate performance capability, especially in the most demanding applications.

This can be expected to be more problematic when production is first initiated, whether there are bugs to be worked out, or optimizations have yet to be accomplished.

With resistors the percent deviation from the target ohm value is a simple tolerance rating.

Not everyone needs resistors within 1 percent of their labeled value, but those that do can not settle for anything less.

When initial production results in a maximum deviation of 20%, during QC/QA each component (or batch) can be measured and binned into the 1%, 5%, 10% and 20% tolerance ratings.

And most importantly priced accordingly.

Interestingly, if the binning is most comprehensive, then the consumer of the 20% parts never gets a component closer than 10% of the nominal value.

Vacuum tubes are not quite so simple as resistors, but it was well-established that the military would gladly overpay for the very top-performing tubes meeting the tightest tolerances.

In earlier decades military tubes were often physically enhanced and produced separately from the lesser consumer versions.

By the 1950's things were very mature in this respect.

And it can be a lot less costly to manufacture everything the same.

So binning it was, to select the closest conformers, which were then labeled with military part numbers destined for a supply chain where price is not as significant as it is for consumers.

The remaining tubes then were marked with everyday consumer part numbers.

This really became prominent for dual-use items like radio tubes.

Once the manufacturing process was fully optimized and every tube met the most stringent specifications, the cost to make each tube can decline dramatically.

At the same time, freshly made tubes were no longer individually labeled, they then all went into one bin.

So the most overspending customers could be supplied the same parts at higher prices than everyone else from that point without anyone knowing the difference.

Unless the customer really checked the performance independently in great detail.

Depending on the customer ordering the parts, they would be labeled accordingly right before shipping, sometimes with a little more QA and/or written guarantee but not any additional costly manufacturing QC which might have been necessary at the begining of production. They could then better meet fluctuating demand between premium payers versus consumer usage from the same manufacturing line and a single ultimate bin. And with a different part number to inhibit direct substitution even after identical performance could be recognized in some cases.

So this was well underway before solid-state semiconductors became a commodity.

As the processes improve it ended up with price-sensitive consumers who figured out when the lesser-priced CPU's had become as high-performance as the premium-labeled "alternative".

With the complexity of modern CPU's it was basically trivial to circumvent this consumer effort with the last-minute fusing & labeling approach seen today.

We've come such a long way it's not like the 1950's at all.

Lots fewer consumers expect to get their money's worth, and some vendors are only looking for these type customers any more.

Eventually all they make is i7's and if you don't want to pay the price, they further customize the component to be especially crummy, just for you.

>Or a train. Massive numbers of passengers.

>cars seem useful in low-density, very spread out regions.

Well, while I'm here already . . .

Urban trains can be counter-productive in unintended ways.

The electric "mass-transit" Metrorail in Houston runs at street-level on many streets that were originally designed for horse & carriage.

Taking up space that was previously available for freer movement of buses, but worse with the rail crossings which almost always require more passengers in cars to idle much longer while waiting than there are passengers on the trains at the time.

Electric buses would have been much better and less wasteful of finite resources.

The light rail was originally intended for ambitious people who could not afford cars to have a quick commute to downtown jobs, reach Texas Medical Center & Astrodome area to the south, and higher education to the north.

"Massive" numbers of passengers outside of rush hours mainly only occur during Rodeo time or other special events where massive numbers of visitors come from out-of-town.

The rest of the time passengers are quite sparse, somewhat divided between workers & students versus those carless and/or on the streets whose ambitions do not include either. Some of these passengers can be quite predatory on ordinary citizens, and this gives them more efficient ways to travel or gather in places where prospective victims can more likely be found at different times, and a quick way to escape after a crime has been committed:

https://abc13.com/metrorail-violence-light-rail-harris-count... >6th violent incident on or near METRORail in 2 months

I still ride it weekly but never would bring my laptop or even cellphone outside of rush hours since there are always at least one or two questionable characters and that's the only time they are usually well outnumbered by ordinary riders.

But the collisions are quite common and these could have been more amenable to better engineering planning:

3 MAY 2023 "Video of the crash". Notice how the bystander throws up his hands knowingly right after the 1 minute mark:

https://abc13.com/houston-news-ambulance-turns-in-front-of-m... >On Tuesday, METRO said the investigation is over, and no one is being cited for the crash that resulted in multiple people being hurt. ABC13 also called HFD on Tuesday to ask, specifically, if the ambulance driver is still operating ambulances. But they are still citing an open investigation, an investigation we know is closed.

For both of these parties this time liability is limited, same range as for buses:

>Why METRO bus crash victim has to pay up - despite being innocent https://abc13.com/metro-bus-crash-houston-tort-claims-act/62... >Even if everything goes his way, Leger will still be out hundreds of thousands of dollars because he was hit by a bus. >That's because METRO's buses and the rail is protected by the Texas Tort Claims Act. >It caps their expenses regardless of if the victim dies or is severely maimed at $100,000 per person or $300,000 total. >"If a negligent METRO bus driver runs a red light and hits a van that has 14 children from a daycare and kills them, the most that METRO would ever be responsible for is $300,000," said Matt Willis, Leger's attorney.

If the full monetary damages of every incident were to have been recoverable, Metrorail might have been bankrupt long ago. But they still have money to burn going forward:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Met... >Unfortunately, we're already all too familiar with low ridership on light rail. The $1.4 billion Green and Purple lines have dismally low patronage.

A while ago there was an article posted on HN about an old Japanese rail line that still maintained an end-of-the line terminal which was now only used by one passenger. This seemed to be a benevolent gesture. I was thinking how much more benevolent could it be in Houston where they built new rail lines for almost nobody to use very much?

>So how should Metro redeploy that $2.45 billion light rail budget instead?

Sometimes (or even with some currencies) there can be more environmental emissions earning the money to begin with compared to spending it wisely later. Depends on the scale and how wisely:

>For future planning purposes and MetroNext, it really does not matter if autonomous vehicles become available in 5 years or decades in the future. Anything built in the MetroNext plan can be expected to be in service to the year 2100 and beyond. MetroNext needs to be ready for autonomous transit, if and when it comes. The plan also needs to maximize mobility benefits of transit investments if autonomous transit is slow to develop or has a minimal impact. Practically, that means concrete guideways with rubber-tired vehicles than can evolve as the technology does.

IIRC rubber tires are a more modern & versatile technology than rail.

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2017/12/2... >Some drivers said Metro should turn its efforts internally instead of policing drivers. >“Why don’t they ticket their own drivers for blocking intersections or not blowing the horn?” said Salvadore Martin, who drives downtown daily. >Other drivers said Houston should have anticipated safety problems with a street-level rail system from the beginning.

Engineers are usually aware of things like this more so than bureaucrats, but you can't fix stupid either way.

>“This is why you build a subway,” said Georgine McDonald, another driver in the area.

Not in downtown Houston, 20,000 leagues under the bayou floodwaters ring any bells?

Naturally Houston has the most light rail collisions under a number of terms, averaging about 90 per year in recent times:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/lig...

https://abc13.com/metro-traffic-accidents-pedestrians-killed...

>"Everyday people go in front of that train thinking they can beat it," >Those near misses happen all the time. >If anyone should know better, it's Jim Robinson, the chairman of METRO's public safety committee. >"I was thinking about something else and almost stepped off in front of a train," Robinson said. "It got my attention when he blew his whistle." >"There's still work to do," Robinson said.

https://driversedguru.com/drivers-ed-training-exercises/stag...

In all my decades of driving I have never seen anyone do this other than myself. People are so committed to passing they literally run people off the road while going head on with tractor trailers and family cars. I've thought I was going to see people die more than once. It's insane how ignorant and self centered people get behind the wheel.