Yeah, based on pilot interviews I've watched where they discuss the ejection decision process, this situation was a pretty clear-cut case of "definitely eject immediately". What really impressed me was how quickly he was able to realize there was a mismatch between the HUD data and the ambient sound in the cockpit, consult a second set of instruments, realize what was going on, and make the decision.
I recently watched what appeared to be a USAF ejection seat training video. One of the most interesting things was that most ejection fatalities were attributable to pilots taking too long to make the decision to pull the handles. Essentially, people often thought they had more time to try to save the aircraft than they actually did. Another interesting thing was how surviving pilots described their thought process prior to ejecting. Very by-the-book rather than seat-of-the-pants.
I was hanging out with a buddy while he experimented with this. The quoted fare dropped from over $30 at around 2am (when all bars are legally required to close in my state) to around $20 about 30-40 minutes later.
If a driver does 15 shifts per month (which would be a pretty lazy schedule for most full-time cabbies I've talked to), you're looking at roughly $1500 per month just to use the car. A quick google search indicates that the MSRPs for top-of-the-line Toyota Camrys and Chevy Malibus (just a couple of cars I thought might be well-suited to the task) are around $30,000, which, at 3% over 5 years, would require a monthly payment of about $540. But let's round that up to $600 to cover taxes and anything else that might be rolled into the loan.
As for insurance, I think $200/mo is probably a conservative guess. I pay way less than that as a 20-something male driving a "high risk" vehicle.
That brings us to $800/mo, leaving $700 to cover maintenance. I'm sure maintenance costs would be quite a bit above average given how much the car is driven, but I can't imagine they'd come anywhere near $700/mo, especially in the first five years (the term of the loan). After the car is paid for, you can either continue to drive it if it's cheaper to do that, or you can sell it for a few thousand bucks and start over. Plus, you don't have to buy your own car, since you've already got it, which would save you a few hundred every month.
Not exactly an in-depth look at the issue, but it seem likely that you're better off owning your own vehicle.
Unrelated, but my worry (for the drivers, anyway, both full-time and casual) is that given the low barriers to entry, a lot of people who own vehicles already will see how they can make some decent money on a casual basis with just slightly higher maintenance costs, and before long, there will be enough UberX drivers that the amount of time spent waiting to get a fare will bring the hourly wages down considerably. Maybe they'll limit the number of new drivers after a point or something, I have no idea, but I'd be concerned about that if I were a driver.
Not exactly relevant, but I was chatting with one UberX driver a few weekends ago, and she told me that the company sends each driver a monthly spreadsheet of metrics for that driver, allowing them to track their own performance. I thought that was interesting.
>As for insurance, I think $200/mo is probably a conservative guess
Conservative? I think you are severely underestimating the cost of obtaining insurance that covers the liability of injuring multiple passengers that you are transporting around as a "for hire" driver.
Much like AirBnB, people seem to overlook this cost and responsibility. That will change when an Uber driver slams into another car with 5 passengers, killing someone, or an AirBnB user, there "illegally", burns down an apartment complex. It will be the end of these businesses.
I'm not saying that these models can't work. But right now, much of the cost advantages come from working around regulations.
the ridesharing companies provide insurance on top of personal insurance. Both Uber and Lyft have $1M liability + casualty insurance while you're transporting passengers, and Lyft has $1M policy while you're not (don't know about Uber on that one).
The insurance premiums for these companies (I know Lyft partners with Met Life) probably is adjusted downwards relative to taxis, because of several factors, but the biggest one being that the drivers own their own cars and are out of it if they wreck it, so there's a good reason not to drive dangerously. A larger proportion of Uber and Lyft drivers have been driving american streets for longer periods, and also have educations, for whatever statistical benefit that confers. Finally, the taxis are, in the end, smaller companies, so the rideshares can negotiate better deals and also provide far more statistical data to the adjusters, which enables a narrower margin.
>Both Uber and Lyft have $1M liability + casualty insurance while you're transporting passenger
Well, I'm not going to claim to be an expert on such matters, but I believe $1MM is the minimum that is offered for liability insurance on a driver's policy here in Canada. I'm not sure how far that'd go if you killed multiple passengers in a vehicle accident, especially if you were found negligent.
Again, this isn't to say that these are insurmountable problems, by any means. You can insure anything for the right price. But how many people are actually sufficiently insured? And how many users are checking, or even care? I can't see this not being a problem in the future.
A quick google search indicates that the MSRPs for top-of-the-line Toyota Camrys and Chevy Malibus (just a couple of cars I thought might be well-suited to the task) are around $30,000, which, at 3% over 5 years, would require a monthly payment of about $540
The car you want to be driving for this task, if you are making a new purchase, is a used hybrid. A used honda insight goes for ~$16k, monthly payment on a five-year is $250/month with not very good credit, gets 34mpg while running, and you don't have to really worry too much about making payments in case you lose your job, your car, or both.
Do other cities have limits on the number of cab licenses, like the medallions in NYC? Those are often owned by the large cab companies, and not available to purchase since they are at the cap, so there is not even any option to go it alone.
>The risk of shifting from the 9-to-5 mindset to "getting things done" is that people will end up (and some already are) working 70/80 hours a week and die young of heart attack.
This is the scenario that worries me- a massive race to the bottom in order to get "ahead". Most jobs aren't that important, and don't merit that much of the employee's time. At an e-commerce place I used to work, I overheard a c-level exec tell a guy who was putting in lots of overtime, "Remember, we're not curing cancer here." I think it's great that the exec was encouraging the guy to not place too much importance on his job, but it's too bad that it was necessary in the first place.
I like this advice. I worked with someone who built an aerospace company around an ultra-reliable actuator design he developed with a friend. They had put hardware on dozens of missions, including some inter-planetary missions, before they were acquired a few years later.
A lot of the advice he gave me centered around understanding how supplier contracts are granted / won, and the importance of building relationships and a reputation in the industry. The biggest thing that stuck with me, though, was that it was even possible for a startup company to put hardware in space, let alone mission-critical stuff.
So, I second the "just start" suggestion. Maybe I'll take the same advice myself some day.
This happens to me often. It's also the reason I love the fact that StackOverflow automatically searches for the text in the question title box as you type it in. There have been a few times where I will start to write out a good, descriptive title for my problem, and realize that I've been searching for the wrong things all along.
Since people have been hopeful about finding water there for a while, are there any good estimates for how much exploration mission costs would be reduced by if water were found?
One of the central costs of a round trip to Mars is the fuel for the return flight. With enough water at Mars we can manufacture all the methane/oxygen rocket fuel we need on site.
The Mars Direct mission architecture and the NASA Johnson Space Center's Design Reference Mission derived from Mars Direct both assume we send hydrogen from Earth to manufacture rocket fuel for the return trip at Mars, combining it with atmospheric carbon dioxide into methane and oxygen, and saving 95% of the mass of the fuel versus bringing it all from Earth. They are estimated at $20-30 billion and $50 billion respectively (spread over ten to twenty years), compared with the earlier $450 billion price tag of the Space Exploration Initiative announced by President Bush 1, which was based on bringing all our fuel for the round trip with us from Earth. Not even having to send hydrogen from Earth would cut the cost further.
Methane/oxygen rockets have been rare outside of Russia, but Pratt & Whitney demonstrated a working model of a modded RL10 rocket engine running on methane/oxygen.
More to the point in the context of Mars missions, SpaceX is switching to methane/oxygen for their new Raptor engine.
Liquid hydrogen has what Elon Musk calls the pain-in-the-ass factor. It requires much higher volume tank at much lower temperature, adding lots of mass to the rocket, and it's impossible to effectively seal. RP-1 kerosene has the inconvenience of requiring your planet to have been covered with life a hundred million years ago. So, methane is the liquid fuel of choice for future martians.
Methane, while less dense (thus requiring bigger tanks) has a higher specific energy than kerosene, and thus has a higher ISP (rocket efficiency). Methane is also less sooty and should have better cooling as its a "mild cryogenic" like liquid oxygen.
Basically, it's between LH2 (hydrogen: high ISP, very low density, very very cold) and RP-1 (kerosene: lower ISP, high density, room temp) and may be a good compromise.
And its derivable on Mars. Downside is there's very little flight heritage for a methane engine, so most of this is theoretical.
