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How is it misleading? Taking the total cost to operate and dividing by the number of rides tells you what it costs per ride.

I’d be more interested to know how so many people are paying less than $1 for a mini trip when the fare is closer to $3.


Because it makes in implicit comparison with a hypothetical transportation mode with zero dollars of government subsidy.

The automobile analogue to fares is gas taxes, so the first crack at a true comparison is to compare the Caltrans budget to gas tax receipts.


Subsidies for public goods create economic multiples. It’s not plainly obvious that it’s bad to subsidize a trip by $10. And compared to what? How much is interstate infrastructure subsidized per trip? Or airline infrastructure?

I think most economists would contend that the value of the subsidies is largely captured by landowners. Public investment, private profits.

is it though?

the person riding transit benefits themselves, and their landlord, and the people driving.

they also benefit their workplace, by both working there, and not having to store a car there, and then anywhere they spend money at their destination, or the transit stops they used.

the value of the transit line is all over the place


Largely it is, according to both classical economic theory and modern empirical studies.

Often called 'land value uplift' these days, or 'unearned increment'/'land monopoly rents' in days gone by.

Theoretically in a free market, the landlords will be able to increase rent in proportion to the 'market value' of the convenience to the tenants (short commutes, etc). Likewise, homeowners will sell for a higher price - capturing the value that would be conferred to new owners. A city with good transport demands higher rents in outer suburbs serviced by that transport.

Your workplace likely also rents their premises too. They now have a convenient train station 5 minutes' walk away - and guess what, their landlord ups the rents too. Once again, in proportion to the 'market value' of the convenience to the workplace. The nearby cafes will now increase their coffee price to cover their increased rent.

Although this is the position of most economists, politicians are often reluctant to draw attention to it. Instead, where I live, they use models like commute time saved per person' x 'number of people' x 'average hourly wage'.

You can verify all of this yourself by viewing residential and commercial rental listings in your city.

Many economists have proposed solutions to this problem, often in the form of land value taxes.


and that's why property tax exists (land value tax would be better, but anyway).

They're discarding the cost per mile to a driver. If you add that back (and especially if you add externalities back) driving is more expensive.

> tweak the Jev prompt a little until the issue goes away

But makes issues for someone (or everyone) else?


Weird, electrical grids didn’t exist before the internet?

They sent the data along the lines. Initially that was just the frquency. Drooped low? Ramp it up, running high, turn it down. That is effectively a spring mass damper system and it always had instability conditions that caused problems. They begand to modulate additional data, including voice, analog over the lines to add additional controls. As more people joined, and load became less predictable even that wasn't enough. Every endpoint now measures load at something like 30hz and that won't fit across the lines. They added separate dedicated fiber or microwave along towers. Those still get used. Probably sometimes unencrypted still. They are targets I'm sure. Then we have renewables and nuclear with their mostly inflexible power supply, that makes it harder to stabilize yet. The control loop stuff is often physically separate, but that is the older stuff and less secure. The data from all those houses still has to get onto the logically/physically isolated control network somehow, so that is a vulnerability too. Anyone with a zigbee radio cam see the encrypted packets.

People buying less shit on Amazon (or e-commerce in general) would be side benefit. So much waste.

Companies that are online have more economic opportunity. They are going to outcompete brick-and-mortar retailers regardless if you think that it's consumeristic or wasteful

Even putting that aside, economic growth (like the growth e-commerce has provided) is generally positive for a population


This smells wrong to me. You already have people working at the water treatment plant. You don’t need it connected to the internet?

Most water treatment works are unmanned most of the time. You don't need 24/7 staffing or even close.

But more to the point, a modern water network has a huge number of nodes. If you can't centrally aggregate and control in a control room the costs and complexity explode, probably also the error rate.

Even if you demand a full air gap, the solution here can't be to get rid of computers or networks. They are much, much too valuable. Luckily industrial control is full of very low hanging fruits.


There is lots of infrastructure related to water that doesn't have someone physically there 24/7 as it would not be feasible to do so as 99.9% of the time there is nothing to do. So you need some sort of remote alarm system that can be monitored.

at least disconnect the poison valve

You don’t need to run your app in the background. You can register your app as some extension to handle photo backups/cloud storage and you just setup a request to upload to a particular url when a new photo is added, iOS will background those requests and retry them and what not.

Except they always strip mine the business. Cut the quality and push unnecessary shit. But, hey, you can fill out your forms on an iPad instead of pen and paper. Very cool.

Why do you need to sell a private practice? There’s no brand to sell, it’s just you and that will be gone.

PE is scourge in this space. They’ve probably taken over every dental office already and now they push unnecessary procedures and whatever your insurance will bear just because.


They sell because it’s their retirement nest egg.

Most private practices are small groups, not individuals. It absolutely sucks to have to find a new doctor who’s a good fit for you, when you’ve been seeing the same person for years or even decades. Usually when your doctor retires you rely on them to make a recommendation for a replacement. Usually that’s another partner in their same practice. At the very least, you (historically) expect them to sell the practice to someone they think is a worthy successor. Patients are fairly sticky.

And many of these PE sales require the selling partner to stay on for at least a year or two to ease the patients through the transition and so the patients get used to the changes before the doctor actually retires. That way, sticking around after the doctor retires doesn’t feel like such an upheaval.


>At the very least, you (historically) expect them to sell the practice to someone they think is a worthy successor.

PE isn’t that.


Yes, obviously. But historically that was the case, so it’s what patients mostly expect. Hence the loyalty after the sale, and the value to PE.

If there is truly nothing as you say, there is nothing for PE to buy, and no problem. If there is nothing to sell of value, what stops new dentists from seamlessly opening an office?

Maybe in your neck of the woods vets operate out of the trunk of their cars, but all the ones I've ever engaged had offices, expensive medical equipment, an office building, and trained staff.

It is a brand and a book of customers someone has built up with surprising stickiness.

Kind of silly. You have to pay somehow. Either pony up cash or pay with your eyeballs or data. But I doubt paying will give you privacy either.

I think few will argue it's ethically or legally fine for my website to pay by installing a keylogger through a zero-click Chromium RCE, burying it in the EULA.

Ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking, and surveillance that Stasi would have wet dreams about.

>Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription

The overwhelming majority of users do not pay and use the free service.


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