Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners works outside the home, they still have to do the housework when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that would have been the job of the one staying at home.
The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come from somewhere.
Linux kernel drivers often end up being GPL'd, but out of tree. This is because Linux releases many very useful (and sometimes critical to the use-case!) functions behind a GPL-license API restriction. This is EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.
Are you sure this is exactly what it means? You're basically saying that if I start hacking on a driver that consumes such an API tonight, I must release it as GPL somewhere publicly the moment I start consuming the API? I can't even work on it for a bit privately?
I'm surprised if so, because usually these sorts of licenses only apply if you're redistributing the code, not if you're just using it privately.
In my experience in corporate environments, that ability to forward to new participants with most of the context is really useful. If few people are going to read the history anyways, then in my opinion this edge case is valuable enough to tip in the scales.
I agree the difficulty quoting sucks, but that's mostly because of the switch from top posting to bottom posting. When people copy-and-paste the bit they are replying to and stay in the top posting paradigm things aren't so bad.
According to this article, a rather weak argument about people not liking to wake up before sunrise based on questionable correlation of commute times to sunrise times, ignoring factors such as average commute lengths, dominant (historical) industries, effective natural light at different times in modern housing.
From that it makes an (incorrect) assumption about the value of AM sunlight over PM sunlight and declares that all-year DST is pointless.
In my opinion the only argument against all-year DST which holds any water at all, and even then not much, is the concern about kids going to school in the dark. However, since many places don't have enough winter daylight to go around, trade-offs need to be made and kids are probably better off on-net having daylight time during their free time instead of while eating their toast inside and commuting to school.
Kids being forced to start school in basically the middle of the night is another especially American phenomenon that requires a separate solution, I feel.
I think the hypothesis was more true in the past, but mostly because both the necessary dependencies it is based on are less true today than in the past, and the products and services are more complex today.
Back when anybody could start building furniture the cost of entry was low and competition high. Switching costs were also low.
The cost of entry for a smartphone which is truly different are astronomical, many previously unregulated products are now strictly regulated, so costs of entry is no longer low and therefore competition is also low. For many services like software switching costs are very high. Firms need to be large to produce the complex products which introduces internal inefficiencies which are hard to avoid.
I think the author is missing the forest for the trees when they try to construct a taxonomy of 'elites'.
Firstly, there is little reason to believe that per-capita is the correct way to think about surplus elites. It's just as plausible that there is an absolute threshold above which the surplus meet together in, for example, the student union building and start causing problems.
Secondly,
> First, virtually all of the people who fail to attain their dream jobs can secure perfectly decent employment in some other line of work.
It's easy to say there's no surplus in any particular sub-group because they can always go to some other sub-group. But if most acceptable sub-groups are 'full', then it's not possible in general. Further, as a first approximation the 30% getting college degrees are the top 30% generally so it's not surprising that they could find _a_ job. That job being in some other line of work might be a problem, especially if it's several steps down from what they've believed they were owed all their life.
To use the article's example, a PhD in History may never have been likely to result in becoming a working historian, but it may have led to managing a factory or branch office. It's pretty obvious that is no longer true and it's likely that the wider job prospects of a History PhD holder has declined.
Further, the article foolishly equates becoming an actor or poet with academic achievement or business success. That entirely ignores that it's been well known forever that life success as an actor or poet is rare. The same cannot be said about getting a PhD.
Harberger taxes seem like a spherical cow solution.
It works in abstract economic theory, but encounters serious problems when you introduce pragmatic complications like cash-flow, malicious actors, non-rational actors, asymmetric value, transaction costs, lumpy probability distributions, and other things. Fixes to those various problems can be bolted on, but the end result loses much of the theoretical advantages which made Harberger taxes appealing in the first place.
In practice the spiteful billionaire will monthly send you offers $10K over the higher of your estimate or fair market value. So you'd be moving every month and incurring all the moving costs continually, or just continually dealing with the legal dealings of such an offer.
The transaction closes and the billionaire just sells the house at a small loss. The situation is asymmetric because the billionaire never actually uses the house.
At 100 people, every desk-job company is already a remote company, even if they don't know it yet.
Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't do it for small things. For decades now those situations would be handled by a phone call or email.
Meeting in the coffee room to chat becomes rare because schedules and tastes (eg. office coffee versus off-site coffee, bagged lunches versus going out) differ. Also there's too many people and too much churn to really get to know anybody.
Arranging meeting times becomes difficult outside smaller 5-10 person units so asynchronous communication becomes predominant.
What I've seen work is not trying to co-locate a full team at all. Doing so only leads to silos and hiring difficulties. Instead have small offices which people from a small geographic area use. Those people will be on different teams and in different departments -- which is good for inter-team communication and synergy. This is exactly what offices normally miss because teams are co-located resulting in a relatively high 'distance' to build a rapport between teams.
Your average, rather small, gasoline pump 'charges' an ICE at an average speed around 4000 KW, effectively 1200 KW after accounting for moderate efficiency -- hybrids will get better. Good EV charging today is a peak around 300 KW with a much lower average.
Honestly, _averaging_ 300 KW is probably within a factor of 2 of the highest we'll do for light vehicles given economic (how much electric distribution infrastructure can an 8-32 stall charging station have?) and practical (how heavy and stiff can the charging cable be?) limits.
It's unlikely EV charging speed will ever match existing ICEs. Relatively long recharge times are an intrinsic trade-off of BEV technology which needs to be engineered around, mostly by having enormous and heavy batteries.
Or you could have drop in batteries? You pull up to a charging station, they take your battery and replace it with one charged to 100%.
Does this require further work? Yes of course. We are definitely not there yet, and we may never get there. But let's not pretend that this is an insurmountable problem.
Battery swapping has so many serious pragmatic problems I don't think we'll ever see it offered at scale for public use. It could be a fit for large private fleets however.
On the engineering side:
- Swapping requires standardization of batteries across models and manufacturers. To accommodate different vehicles the batteries will need to be rather small so most vehicles will need multiple swapped every time
- Requires more space and weight because the battery cannot be structural. This will reduce the overall range of EVs
- Connectors for high voltage, signalling, cooling fluid, and high strength mechanical rated for thousands of cycles in the face of road grime and poorly maintained swap robots will not be small. Cooling system contamination will be a serious concern.
On the financial side:
- Batteries are expensive, how do you track and reclaim them across the entire continent? What about theft? Destruction insurance?
- With swappable batteries the incentive is to store them at 100% then run them 100% to 0%, which is especially bad for battery longevity
- How do you deal with batteries swapped at different 'swap' networks?
On the user side:
- What if the swap station is out of batteries when you need them? Are you always gambling on holiday weekends that you won't need to sit for hours charging (if that is even possible!)?
- Since some batteries will be more worn than others, how do you deal with constant variability of range because maybe last week you got a new set of batteries and next week you'll get an older set with only 80% capacity left.
- Are you allowed to charge at home? How is the wear from that charged?
- Did I buy a battery with my car, or are cars no longer batteries included? If my car came with a battery, how do I know I get it back? Do I get paid for the wear other users put on it? Do I need to retrieve my battery from the same station on the way home after a road trip?
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others. Most of these issues are solvable with unlikely levels of corporate cooperation or immense levels of excess capital expenditure. However, they all cost money and will reduce the economic viability of battery-swap EVs versus every other vehicle type.
The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come from somewhere.
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