You have to read the next article (it's the link at the bottom), which then describes in detail how one driver can indeed remove traffic jams. The first article explains how traffic jams form, so you can understand in the second article why a certain behaviour fixes the problem.
I always assumed it was just best practice to not drive up anyone's rear end due to the issue of stopping distance. I never thought about it as regulating traffic flow.
A tactic particularly well-loved by those with small government tendencies for everything except the military. Not only do you get to hide exactly how that money you keep giving to the military is being spent, but you then get to use the same budget as an argument when claiming how inefficient government is...
Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".
One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.
To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).
Well, in investing there is the concept of the sophisticated investor, where you're supposed to be capable of determining all by yourself if you're being had, provided all of the relevant information is being provided. Caveat emptor and all of that, so typical consumer protection type laws don't apply. I believe the idea behind this is to allow investors to make risky decisions, because that's kind of what professional investors are supposed to do. Still sucks when your superannuation disappears because a so-called sophisticated investor proves to be anything but.
Rental demand is fairly inelastic though - everyone needs a roof over their head. The main force keeping prices down is competition, not the fact that landlords are being kind. If land taxes are increased, then all landlords will raise their prices, and the market will bear it - the other choice is to end up living in the street.
The advantage of the LVT is that in theory the market could bear the price increase because there will be a corresponding drop in the salary tax that most renters are paying. The idea is that the government effectively takes a large slice of the profit from rent, instead of it all going to landlords. The problem of course is that this creates a disincentive for landlords to invest in property, reducing supply, and now we go back to high prices because of market forces.
There is no simple solution to the high price of land, except by increasing supply or reducing demand. In other words, building more housing (which requires us to encourage landlords, not discourage them), or reduce the population. Just think, in a world with half the population of today, we would drastically reduce the percentage of salary devoted to housing. Not bad really.
So what, you're postulating that US citizens justly deserve to be killed by police 79 time more than their British counterparts? I mean the police is only supposed to kill to protect their, or a bystander's, life. We know from the few times that police-caused deaths have been caught on video in the US that this is often not at all the case. The guy shot down as he walks down the middle of the road. The guy who's neck gets broken in a police van, the young kid shot down in a park because he's playing with a toy gun. The guy that is choked to death because he's selling loose cigarettes in the street.
Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others.
So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.
Ahhh, a most timely article, from my perspective. I've recently being writing a computer game for my first computer, which was a contemporary of the trash-80 (http://www.compucolor.org/emu/ccemu.html). The guy that made the emulator was working for NVIDIA last time I talked to him, and he thoughtfully provided most of the programming manuals for Compucolor II on the site.
Why? Well I was mostly expired from a story in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" where he talks about being bored with physics, and he gets back into it by playing around with toy problems that he had to work out from first principles (the way that the wobble in a spinning plate precesses around the axis). So I've started programming in an emulator of this old 1980s computer. It seems to be working for me too - I'm finding myself to be much more engaged in my day job since I've started.
Same here, that growing feeling that we have lost something during the 90's when home-computers were replaced by 'business PCs' drove me to write an emulator to preserve some of the magic in the past few months: http://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/, here's how to write a 'Hello World!' program on it in BASIC, FORTH, machine code and assembler: http://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/p035_helloworld.html
In my opinion, the RaspberryPi is the closest thing to a home-computer we have today, it encourages to learn, experiment and create things, it would be nice if it had a simpler, more home-computer-like standard operating system though. Linux (or any other current desktop or mobile OS) is simply too complex and scary. In contrast to that, smartphones and tablets are closed ecosystems optimized for consumption. I don't see how these closed-off platforms encourage kids to explore and learn to create something on their own.
I would actually love to re-case an RPi in it's own retro keyboard unit and turn it into a proper TV-computer of old. Alas I don't really have anything in the way of that kind of solder/hardware skills.
EDIT: Actually, following some of my own links, it looks like someone's beat me to it: http://www.fuze.co.uk/
It's not about BASIC though - it really is about the fact that computers literally booted into a REPL. That REPL being a BASIC REPL was probably something that set people back - I remember having a really hard time grokking how the computer knew in what order Pascal programmes had to be executed.
The thing is, that's not really true. Developers made it possible for advertisers to insert their adverts into web resources. Advertisers decided to use that power to track users through cookies, tracking pixels, localStorage and various Javascript tricks. Yes, there were no doubt a few developers working for the ad companies, but they are far outweighed by the mass of developers that work for content sites.
Marketers did not build the tracking systems. Developers built them and then website owners decided they were happy to deploy them. Everyone had to accept the proposal at least implicitly for us to get to where we are today.
You could say that Google, specifically, has so much power in web-advertising that no content site could walk away from them if they don't like how they behave but I don't think this is the case.
So, you think your partner is cheating on you with their ex. You know they got a taxi from your apartment last Sunday at 6pm, you look up the data, and sure enough, the taxi went to the ex's address, and not home as your partner claimed.
Or, you arrive at work late, claiming that you stopped off at a client's before heading in to work, but your employer can now verify that you actually got the taxi from your home address.
I'm assuming in these examples that you just need to know pick-up OR drop-off - if you need both, then I agree with you that it's not much of a concern.
