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Is it as good as four candles?
It’s a load of billhooks
Been saving this.I’m waiting for the road.cc round up of squirrel related xmas gifts
Car crashes into Optician’s shop – round upMan released under investigation after car crashes into Birmingham opticians
Tadley: Man injured after suspected drink driver crashes into shop (picture)
Watch the moment car ploughs through railings, hits vehicle then smashes into optician’s
Two teenage girls ages 15 and 16 were arrested in connection with the incident
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/watch-moment-car-ploughs-through-23478423
Car crashes into a new optician’s shop set to open in Harborough town centre
The motorist, who had been parked outside Henry Smith & Hamylton Opticians on the town’s High Street, was left shocked but escaped injury and no one else was hurt in the incident
My Peugeot has a kill switch, it operates at random and inconvenient times.It’s testing whether you have the required level of calmness to be a good driver
PS maybe find a better phrase, like no-kill switch?A less-kill switch?
I’m not in favour of kill-switches in cars as it provides too big a target once a flaw is found. It’d be easy for eco-protestors/terrorists to bring a city to a standstill by triggering all the kill-switches at once.stop threatening us with a good time!
It’s November 1893 – “we can’t invent this, someone might abuse it” as it applies to cars?
PS maybe find a better phrase, like no-kill switch?
It would most likely give me a chuckle to see a whole city in gridlock if someone did stop all the vehicles at once, but I’m not sure that the emergency services would be too happy about it (the roads would be impassable even if their vehicles had no such device).
It’s not so much an invention as applying existing tech in a foolhardy manner – like installing a big on-off switch on the outside of power stations.
I’m not in favour of kill
I’m not in favour of kill-switches in cars as it provides too big a target once a flaw is found. It’d be easy for eco-protestors/terrorists to bring a city to a standstill by triggering all the kill-switches at once.
Also, it’s a technological solution to a law enforcement issue with the tech gadget in possession of the suspect – that’s generally a bad idea as it allows people to tinker with it and bypass it.
I do like the idea of mandatory black boxes in vehicles though, but the focus should be on detection of health issues if the driving standard starts to decline sharply, or providing incentives for careful, considerate driving.
Rich_cb wrote:
As to your plumbing example, assuming that there is still a market for small scale plumbers, if your highly efficient plumber is sufficiently more efficient than their rivals then eventually they’ll increase market share until, either they dislodge the big companies or the big companies copy their efficiencies. Either way efficiency wins.That’s how it should happen in theory, but in practise the size of a business or at least its market share are far more important than its efficiency. Many small businesses find it very difficult to compete as they likely don’t get to make deals with suppliers (due to the power imbalance between large suppliers and small businesses) whereas the largest companies will get big discounts or often be able to dictate what the suppliers can charge them (c.f. supermarkets and dairy farmers). This leads to the real problem of businesses becoming almost monopolies which is the usual aim for Capitalist businesses.
I agree about the need for regulation and legislation to curb the rampant expansion of dominant businesses, but again, the largest corporations will be able to wield their power over politicians and political systems. There’s the issue with regulatory capture which means that the interests of the corporation will override the interests of the public. (e.g. corporations exploiting tax/accountancy loopholes to avoid paying taxes)
The Capitalist theory is that efficiency will win, but that’s not what happens in real life and there needs to be much stricter controls in place to try to re-balance markets as the size of the business is far more important than efficiency.
Being charitable, is it just that people:
– like being higher up than others (psychological need)
– like having an “outlook” (e.g. looking out further) (psychological need)
– do SUVs* – while actually being even more space inefficient – offer more space *around* the front seats, for a feeling of spaciousness?
– people very often gauge the value of things by what they cost, and these cost more – ergo they’re “better”.
– once some people you know / aspire to have something, you’re afraid of being the one without (more psychological needs)* SUV – quite rightly there’s debate about an expansive term (expansive by design, once it was known and manufactures realised people wanted “that”). Without making this circular are we OK with “larger / heavier / higher front than the previous generation ones”? Else we’ll be here all night…
Small vans provide all the benefits of SUVs apart from the social signalling. Vans are seen as being a working class vehicle and I suppose driving an SUV is like a peacock brandishing their huge tail – over-sized and not very practical.
“Capitalism” is simply about making profit. It might drive efficiency … in making money. (Even that needs qualification of course because we’re humans with all kinds of other goals and quirky heuristics, not “econs”. Also I don’t know if there is any space where we approach the ideal of the free market – without a whole bunch of other rules.)The making of profit can drive other kinds of efficiency – we obviously need some kind of feedback loop to motivate that. (But noting Jevons paradox – if the overall goal is “making profit” then improving efficiency may drive increased consumption which will tend to compensate).
It can mean using less resources, or reducing ecological damage. But that is not a given without adding other rules into the mix though (e.g. regulation).
The big problem with Capitalism is that it’s built upon a couple of incorrect assumptions.
Firstly, there’s the idea of a “free market” which requires people to have equal access to information in order to function correctly. Unfortunately, this is not at all what happens and most people have extremely limited access to the relevant information (often that information is kept internal to the business) whilst businesses have a huge incentive to mislead people as much as possible (see marketing/advertising).
Secondly, there’s the idea of traders having equal opportunity/power and that’s clearly incorrect as wealthy people have a massive advantage over the less wealthy. This also plays out with large companies having a big advantage over smaller ones.
The end result of these two issues is that wealth tends to get concentrated into fewer people’s hands and the inequality gap widens. The only way these two trends can continue is through authoritarianism and subjugation of the non-wealthy.
Rich_cb wrote:
Capitalism is driven by profit. While that can encourage exploitation of resources it also ruthlessly seeks out efficiencies. It is that efficiency that makes capitalism a better fit for reducing environmental harm than its alternatives.Unfortunately, those “efficiencies” are often basics such as paying workers a suitable wage or providing a safe working environment etc. A lot of the time, Capitalism is more concerned with shuffling money around in a shell game to avoid paying taxes rather than operating efficiently. Also, a lot of the profit is derived by ignoring external costs or at least pushing those external costs onto others (e.g. dumping sewage into rivers is cheaper than treating and disposing it in a responsible fashion).
Also, I would say that Capitalism is more based on people using their wealth and land ownership to exploit people who are in need of money/land. Profit is often the difference between paying employees what they are worth vs paying them the bare minimum that you can get away with.
Additionally, efficiency is far less important than the size of the business. You could be the most efficient plumber in all the land, but lose out to a large company that just employs a bunch of mediocre plumbers. There’s also the issue with barriers to entry for markets – this is often controlled by mega-corporations that lobby to get laws introduced that would penalise small companies and thus ensure that the dominant companies can maintain their market dominance. Usually it’s nothing about efficiency, but far more about power imbalance.
I can’t see that Capitalism has any mechanism to control environmental plundering – we’re going to have to rely on international cooperation, lawmakers and public opinion.
Capitalism drives exploitationI agree that what he writes is tripe- it’s essentially the basis of ‘everything will be all right if we buy a Tesla and we can all drive around everywhere at 100mph’, because all the targets are repeatedly moved so they’re more than 5 years away and therefore don’t exist
Kicking the can down the road seems to be quite popular – we’ve been doing that for half a century.
Aren’t Tefal a company that make frying pans?Yes
Tried it on Windows.Ω
That’s an Omega not an Ellipsis.
It’s Alt-0133
…
Yeah, I found that out too after trying it on a Windows PC.
I’m going to stick with my copy/paste method – works almost everywhere.
Atmospheric CO2 concentration integrates sources and sinks. The rate of increase continues to increase (d2[CO2]/dt2 +ve). Chris Packham’s view (Channel 4) that it has become ‘ethically correct to break the law’ in seeking action on reducing ecological degradation is an interesting public development.This graph probably shows the situation more clearly (from https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_trend.html):
I’d agree with Chris Packham. The law is mainly serving unethical interests such as protecting the assets of companies that make profit from destroying the climate. It’s unsustainable and we all know it.