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Admin
Hmm, so let me see if I understand the scenario you're describing. I don't live in Seattle so I'm just going by your account here.
The city set up a system where they taxed people driving cars and used this money to subsidize the buses. This made it more expensive to drive and cheaper to take the bus, which created an incentive to use buses, thus reducing traffic congestion. Then Mr Eyman & Co managed to reduce the car taxes, which forced the subsidies to go down, so more people drove and fewer took the bus, thus increasing traffic congestion. Is that basically it?
So to put it another way, the government imposed a tax on cars so that only the relatively rich could afford to drive, and forced the poor to take the bus. Apparently the poor would prefer to drive, as evidenced from the fact that once the government-imposed penalty for driving was removed, poor people started driving. Despite the higher traffic congestion, the poor find it more convenient to drive their own cars rather than take the bus, probably because of the greater comfort and flexibility that this gives.
(We have a bus service in my town. I never use it. It's far more convenient to hop in my car and go where I want to go when I want to go there, rather than having to accomodate the bus schedule. Plus I can load as much as I want into my vehicle and take as long loading and unloading as I please. Etc.)
So you're saying that in your ideal world, the government will impose restrictions on the poor to prevent them from inconveniencing the rich. If only we could force all the poor onto mass transit, then the roads would be emptier and the rich could drive around without the smelly lower classes getting in their way.
Or maybe you prefer to ride the bus. Okay, fine. But why should I, who prefer to take my own car, be forced to subsidize your bus fare? You're saying I should bribe you to ride the bus so that I'll have less traffic to deal with? Well, maybe so. But why is it the responsibility of the government to decide on the amount of the bribe I should pay, and to force me to pay it under penalty of fines and imprisonment? Why not make it a charity? Let drivers donate however much they want to support the bus system. If you say that wouldn't work because it wouldn't raise enough money, then that must mean that the majority of motorists don't believe the bribe is worth it, so it's not a matter of "the people" getting together to do something, it's the elites ramming something down the people's throats.
Admin
Admin
I am loving the ideological bitchfest.
It is outside of the scope of this site but ideological bullshit about transport policy is a fantastic source of WTFs. The trouble with ideologues is that they can't accept that reality does not always conform to their simplistic dogmas. People argue against proven successful systems because they do not fit their ideology and defend proven failed systems because their simplistic ideology suggests that they "must work" despite the evidence. To some extent, the more successful a system is that seems not to fit their ideology, the more they will fear and oppose it.
It is a bit like some twerp who only knows one programming language or operating system insisting that this one is superior and appropriate in all situations, even when it clearly isn't appropriate for all uses, and who reacts with genuine terror when any project built on anything else looks like it is doing well.
What the extreme ideological free-marketeers fail to understand is that public transport and transport infrastructure are not, at heart, business ventures, even though many businesses do exist to service their needs. They are really enablers for business. Their job is not to make money. Their job is to allow other businesses and individuals to make money by shipping goods and getting between homes, workplaces and places of commerce. Few free-marketeers would suggest abolishing or privatising the military because it makes no profit, they see that profit is not the point of the military. The military exists (in part) to keep the rest of the country free to make a profit. Despite this, many fail to see that transport is much the same. It takes a hit so that the economy as a whole can prosper. Once one realises that normal free market rules don't apply in this situation, one can relax and ride the bus without fearing that the ghost of Karl Marx is going to board at the next stop and run the bus non-stop to Leningrad. Once relaxed, it is possible to look at which policies work best in which situations and pick the right ones for the situation you find yourself in. Unfortunately, that requires a flexibility of mindset that extreme ideologues lack. Hence the bizarre phenomenon of the ideological "bus hater". Such ideology, no matter how righteously Capitalist in intention, is no use to those businesses losing money because their staff and logistics are held up by sub-standard transport systems being prevented from improvement by irrelevant ideological objections.
Admin
Well, you don't have to. But then you have to deal with the consequences of this decision, which is higher levels of traffic.
Honestly, this idiotic idea of yours that you are somehow an island, and your actions don't affect anyone else has to end. This is a society, not just a bunch of people who happen to live near each other. If you want that, go start it somewhere else. But don't fuck with already functioning systems, like Seattle transit used to be, just to placate some "feeling" you have, or feed your ideology.
Admin
When the only tool you have is hammer (web cam) then everything starts looking like a nail.
Admin
Hmm. To the best of my knowledge, the Deepwater Horizon accident was not a deliberate plot by BP to kill their own employees, but was an accident. This is not in the same category as Pol Pot or Hitler who deliberately killed people.
But I see your point. The profit motive in capitalist societies results in careless industrial accidents of the sort that would never occur in a socialist society. Like, who could even imagine an accident like Chernobyl happening in a socialist country! It was clearly the result of greedy capitalists. Oh, wait ...
Still, I think the death toll runs something like:
Hitler: 11 million (just counting the death camps, not all the casualties of WW2)
Stalin: 22 million
Mao: 50 million
Deepwater Horizon: 11
Eleven? Is that all? What a bunch of amateurs. Stalin would have been depressed if a whole hour went by that he didn't kill eleven of his real or imagined enemies.
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Just as a note, UPS and FedEx both sub-contract to the USPS whenever it's not profitable to them to deliver somewhere. Which is part of the reason they are profitable.
I have no idea why I even got into this...
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I hope in the future I will be able to send a text message to some Georgia DOT phone number and get an automated response with a still picture of each sign.
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Also, slavery in the US may have killed a couple people maybe. But bringing it all back to the original topic:
Georgia DOT: 140 billion murdered.
Admin
Silly me, I thought the subway system was supposed to discharge congestion. Now they need a system to reduce congestion in the subway. What's next, bicycle traffic jams?
Admin
Probably couldn't figure out how to price it to make a profit. The holy grail of all private enterprise is the "thing you have to buy every day"; be it tolls, drugs, gasoline, printer ink, food, and etc.
For example, drug companies: They don't want a cure for anything, because they can only cure a disease once. Instead, they want palliatives, that you have to buy every day for the rest of your life.
Your toll booth idea was great...but product management could only sell it once.
Admin
Remember, an SMS message is at most 140 bytes long. Its real cost is probably around one thousandth of a cent. Yet in most countries (I don't know if it's still the case in the US), for quite a long time now, companies have been charging in the order of 10-20 cents/message. They sell wireless Internet plans with a data cap of 5GB for a not-that-high price, so clearly it's not about infrastructure and maintenance costs. SMSs should be basically free.
This situation has happened in many countries for many decades, most of which have quite a few competing companies. So why are so many people paying 10 thousand times their real cost? Because that's how much customers are willing to pay. Free market competition at work for ya.
Admin
Remember, an SMS message is at most 140 bytes long. Its real cost is probably around one thousandth of a cent. Yet in most countries (I don't know if it's still the case in the US), for quite a long time now, companies have been charging in the order of 10-20 cents/message. They sell wireless Internet plans with a data cap of 5GB for a not-that-high price, so clearly it's not about infrastructure and maintenance costs. SMSs should be basically free.
This situation has happened in many countries for many decades, most of which have quite a few competing companies. So why are so many people paying 10 thousand times their real cost? Because that's how much customers are willing to pay. Free market competition at work for ya.
Admin
Remember, an SMS message is at most 140 bytes long. Its real cost is probably around one thousandth of a cent. Yet in most countries (I don't know if it's still the case in the US), for quite a long time now, companies have been charging in the order of 10-20 cents/message. They sell wireless Internet plans with a data cap of 5GB for a not-that-high price, so clearly it's not about infrastructure and maintenance costs. SMSs should be basically free.
This situation has happened in many countries for many decades, most of which have quite a few competing companies. So why are so many people paying 10 thousand times their real cost? Because that's how much customers are willing to pay. Free market competition at work for ya.
Admin
Remember, an SMS message is at most 140 bytes long. Its real cost is probably around one thousandth of a cent. Yet in most countries (I don't know if it's still the case in the US), for quite a long time now, companies have been charging in the order of 10-20 cents/message. They sell wireless Internet plans with a data cap of 5GB for a not-that-high price, so clearly it's not about infrastructure and maintenance costs. SMSs should be basically free.
This situation has happened in many countries for many decades, most of which have quite a few competing companies. So why are so many people paying 10 thousand times their real cost? Because that's how much customers are willing to pay. Free market competition at work for ya.
Admin
Admin
No, that's not it at all. The state (not any city) DOT has car an annual tab fee. A lot of the revenue from that used to go into transit subsidies. Most people (including those who commute by bus) have cars, so they end up paying the fee every year, thus helping keep the buses running, which reduced traffic congestion. Then Mr Eyman & Co managed to reduce the car taxes, which forced the subsidies to go down, so less people were able to ride the bus due to reduced capacity and had no choice but to drive instead, thus increasing traffic congestion.
Wrong. It's not as if the car tab fees were exorbitant. Even for high-end cars, they tended to be a few hundred per year. Amortized over 12 months, that's really not much. But multiply it by a few million cars in the state and you're talking about some significant money.
Wrong. The tax was not on driving, but on vehicle licensing (basically equivalent to a tax on owning the car in the first place.) This change did not cause a significant increase in sales of new vehicles. Removing bus routes and decreasing frequency greatly increased the number of cars on the road by removing the option to ride the bus. This shows that people would prefer to take the bus, particularly while commuting, probably because of the greater comfort and flexibility that this gives. (Ever try and read a book or take a catnap while driving to work? It doesn't work so well.)
Sure, and if you're hauling cargo around, that's one thing. But when you're commuting, (a significant percentage of people around here live in a different town than they work in,) that's a very different matter.
Not at all. As a professional computer programmer, I would probably be described by an outside observer as "the rich", or at least "upper middle-class". So would most of my coworkers. Enough of us ride the bus that our company has a system in place to obtain transit passes in bulk at a discount.
The problem, as I pointed out earlier, is that a lot of people don't know how to think beyond a single degree of cause and effect. Increased congestion not only causes time that could otherwise be put to use profitably to be wasted sitting in traffic, it also costs money directly due to burning extra gas while not getting anywhere. With the price of gas, the loss over the course of a year turns out to be significantly greater than the amount of money saved in taxes. So the cost of cutting taxes is losing hours sitting in traffic and paying oil companies for the privilege! But your average commuter doesn't possess the problem-solving skills to reason out something like that. (The reasons behind that are complicated and contentious and end up touching on education, nature vs. nurture, and all sorts of other issues that are completely off-topic here, so let's not even get into that. But we still know it's true.) All they see is "less taxes paid = more money for me."
It's an example of the Tragedy of the Commons. If you let people decide individually how to maintain a shared resource, it will end up being wasted, to the detriment of everyone involved, even if everyone acts in their own perfectly rational self-interest. And when applied to the real world, in which most people don't even understand how to act in their own perfectly rational self-interest, it gets worse quickly.
Admin
Horribly shitty internet, too many posts. If only an admin would be kind enough to remove them. Been trying to post this one for five minutes too. Captcha: odio.
Admin
So yes, thats working out great for me. Try again.
Admin
What? I don't get it. What is "an only vehicle"?
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blink
Where do you live? Because you can't get that anywhere in the US, AFAIK...
Admin
I didn't know you could still get a phone plan that charged for individual sms messages... The more you know :)
Admin
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This approach avoids a whole lot of failure modes that might show a different price on the web site than appears on the sign. If you see anything at all, it's the correct price.
Admin
Tomorrow, can we go back to bashing windows, vb and php? The comments from all of these shit-house ideologues is threatening to force me into a coma.
Admin
In the free market, the buyer and seller agree on the price. It could be anything, as long as they both agree. You don't agree? No sale.
Now you may or may not like that, but either way, that's the free market. Priced at what the buyer is willing to pay and the seller is willing to accept.
Other systems don't depend on agreement, they depend on force. And if you like the men with guns enforcing the (probably bribed) committee's edicts, the free market is not for you.
Admin
Now I know you hate the idea of anyone making more than serf wages -- even yourself -- so when those obscene profits start pouring in you can donate your share to your favorite socialist charity. Here it is! Your opportunity to do good! Go forth and prosper!
(Let me know if you run into any barriers along the way. Be sure to take note whether those barriers come from the free market, or from government.)
Admin
Actually they was going to let the users "see the rates" as they would when driving on the road, so this of course does make sense. If it was done some other way then lag and what not could cause discrepancies between the data and that would open a whole can of law-suit-worms.
Admin
Yes, that's how it works in Ayn Rand Fantasyland. In real life, the "free market" also works by force, but of a subtler variety. There is no agreement on prices, because true agreement is bilateral--it requires negotiation. (When was the last time you haggled anyone down on the price of anything?) Instead, the rule is "seller sets a price, take it or leave it, and if you don't like it, tough, because the competition--if any exists--is charging the same price."
And when it comes to basic, survival-level needs, such as food or medical care, "leave it" is simply not a choice, so you are literally forced by threat of physical harm to pay whatever the seller is asking. It doesn't involve guns, because it doesn't need to.
Barriers to entry, just off the top of my head:
Admin
That is an assumption, not supported by Mason's account or your argument.
Also, I notice that you have leapt fearlessly to the already falsified idea that you would be subsidising bus fares. As Mason's account already made clear, as a person who prefers to drive, you would pay less and have less traffic.
I am mystified why you should choose to argue from a false position: perhaps you are motivated to reject all facts that are not consistent with your own political ideology.
Admin
Captcha: "Lawrenceville Suwannee Rd $0.16"
Admin
Now you can see the lighting conditions too!
However, they should in addition add a file containing only the prices in text format (and no HTML or pictures anything like that) for simpler and faster access.
However I still dislike this kind of varying rates system that requires you to view them like this, anyways
Admin
Sometimes –OK, most of the time– we developers want the mos elegant and sophisticated solution. Yes, they could have made a VPN between the network dealing with signs and fares, and have a web site periodically poll the fare system. Or they could have a trigger that invoked a private web service (again via VPN) on the web site as soon as a fare changes. We can come up with all sorts of solutions that are simple, elegant, and for once, right.
But not as simple and quick to implement as pointing a camera at a sign.
Admin
You seem to have an interesting definition of the word "simplest". I'll agree it's not the most efficient way but think in terms of what it took to put it together. Very little, I would imagine, using off-the-shelf components.
Any other solution involving writing or changing code and adding extra data feeds would almost certainly be less simple.
Admin
Hey, don't knock it, I use exactly this system to allow global single sign-on with my SecurID, which is back in my office at work.
Admin
Extra bonus for trying to view the cam at night. [image]
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But they still have bewildering pricing plans. The free market has spotted that customers don't understand the array of options, and thus merrily uses that to increase their profitability. There's no explicit collusion: there's no need. (But at least they're not bankers or insurers…)
Admin
"Special Note: Camera views may vary depending on time of day."
[image]Lemme just get my deconvolution filter...
Admin
Well they have a rather clever obfuscation method that goes under the name darkness. It's been around for long, and it's really weird that it's not used more often. Unfortunately due to limitations of earths rotation it is not yet 100% effective. Perhaps they should put sunglasses in front of the camera.
http://bayimg.com/OApnHaADF
Admin
feugiat > But they WANT people to know when it's cheap to use the road, so they can distribute the load
Admin
Oh, and Look how well it fares during different wheather conditions and/or times :o
[image]I, for one, raise my hat to the brilliance
Admin
Sorry, that position is already taken:
http://smp.uq.edu.au/content/pitch-drop-experiment
Who is this Akismet guy who is telling me that I'm a spammer? Ima gonna cut you, sucker.
Admin
Serious reply to a joke: That's fine and all, except by definition this kind of laissez faire free-market capitalism only works when consumers have perfect information. Intentionally obfuscating the information would break the system.
Admin
And you'll get a glimpse of the actual, current traffic on the road for free. Perhaps they wanted a webcam viewing the road anyways.
Admin
Why are they charging in dollars? Currency of georgia is Lari.
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Or it's a security feature -- the evil crackers can only get to the camera, not to the actual sign.
Admin
That is kinda funny because I did cut and paste the URL.....
come to think of it, I bet I deleted the 'g' trying to get rid of a newline.