In New York, less than half of the cost of roads is borne by drivers via the gas tax. In California, drivers pay less than a quarter of the cost.
There are no states in the US where gas taxes cover more than 60% of the cost of roads.
This is another form of racism/classism. White people have no problem paying for white people transport (cars!). They object to "city" transport which often carries poor and other-colored people.
If only there was a way to charge for the privilege of driving on the road. Maybe we could stamp out steel plates to affix to vehicles. Those plates could signify that the owner has paid an annual fee for using the road.
As I understand it, cars can be fairly expensive. Maybe some kind of tax on the sale of each one could bring in a few bucks.
Here at HN, your point could
convince a lot of people
if you gave some solid references
to original sources for your
statements about costs and how
they are covered.
I'm in NYS and have been for 20+ years,
and what I've seen in the last time
or two I renewed the license on my
car was that I paid a surtax
to support the commuter trains,
the MTA. So, it looks like
the car owners are supporting
the trains whether they use the
trains or not. Only once did I
ever get on one of those trains.
And I'm proud to say that I've
never been on a NYC subway.
E.g., I live on a nice street in
the suburbs. There is maintenance
on the streets and snow plowing in
the winters. My impression is that
my local town is paying for that
out of real estate taxes -- if so, then that's
fair since everyone in the suburbs
needs the streets, even if they shop
at Amazon and get deliveries
via FedEx or some such.
But passenger
trains? People in the suburbs
don't need passenger trains so much, and
even if they do they still need
the local streets to go
between the trains and the doors.
So, again, using real estate taxes
to pay for the local streets
is fair enough.
I don't have good data on what the
costs are for Federal highways, bridges,
trains, capex, opex, and
how those costs are being
covered,
but my impression is
that the gas taxes and tolls pay
for what the cars and trucks use
and that in the US it's just
hopeless for the train tickets
to pay for what the trains cost --
but again that's just my impression.
Since I'm not in either the car or
train business, I haven't gotten
the data.
But if you are for trains and want
to convince people, then having
the data on costs and how
they are being covered
would help, really, is crucial.
Uh, writing this, it occurs to me
that to be fair the Federal gas taxes
should need to cover only
the Federally supported highways
and bridges, e.g., the Interstate
highways. In that case, sure,
local real estate taxes
and not Federal gas taxes
may be the main source of funding
for local streets.
If you consider that passenger trains remove other people from the road, drivers actually do benefit from their construction. It's not necessary for the train to serve you personally for it to be beneficial. It just has to remove enough people from the road that driving is easier for you.
The comment you're replying to did say "classist" as well. I'm sure you're aware of the US's unequal spread of wealth among different racial groups in its population... You are not personally being called racist.
People in the US are generally completely unaware of how subsidized their drive-everywhere, segregated-zoning lifestyles are. Land use choices have very real effects and in the vast majority of the US, you HAVE to own a car or you are completely handicapped in terms of access to jobs and services.
Public transit infrastructure proposals in the US are routinely downscaled/defeated because a lot of people think that anything other than building roads = money pit subsidies for the dumb uneducated poor people who live in the city.
If you don't agree with the egalitarian side of the argument for making cars less necessary to living in America, you should at least be able to see the hypocrisy of the general attitude towards transit given the fact that gas taxes and other car-related usage fees that fund roads don't come anywhere near making the road network "pay for itself".
I suspect that as Millennials age and gain political power, given their left-leaning politics and greater preference for urban living, this situation will change to look more like Canada does now, which is similarly car-dependent but also generally has cities with more reasonable public transit options.
RI receives a substantial sum of taxes (income, property, sales), and the residents also support (and grow) other RI businesses. It's a pretty good deal, when the realistic alternative is that those individuals will neither live nor work in RI.
Realistically, Pawtucket will not attract many new residents while allowing some existing RI residents to improve their earnings marginally. There's nothing wrong with people making more money by commuting farther, but the increase in tax base is not likely to be large at the same time those individual increases are being heavily subsidized by existing RI businesses and citizens.
Most of your physical security comes from two things:
1) the fact that the rest of us lock our doors, so most ne'er-do-wells have accepted the notion that closed doors tend to be locked. It's a form of herd immunity that protects you so long as only a small number of people behave like you.
2) the shift from cash to electronic money, meaning that physical theft is less lucrative than it once was (and meaning that most money is protected by entities that invest meaningfully in security.)
You're a free rider, benefiting from effort made by others, while being a (small) net negative to society. You're welcome for the security we've provided for you.
I strongly disagree. it would have been useful f they'd stuck to problems without well-known solutions.
Sadly, they also mixed in issues which are easily solved, or in a particularly egregious case, where they just complain about a bug. As though MySQL never had a bug. That was silly.
My read of it was: Postgres annoyed us a few times, and we got fed up with its, so now something different will annoy us. Please look forward to our blog post in 4 years about how we're using X instead of MySQL/Schemaless because those were also imperfect.
I got a similar impression... though with Uber's scale, funding and resources, they probably could have worked with and through their issues with Postgres. I'm actually surprised they didn't take a multi-pronged approach to their issues. Since they're using Schemaless, I'm curious why they didn't go for one of the many non-sql databases that may well be a much closer match to their use case.
It seems to me that Cassandra (C*) may have been a better match to their needs... yes it means more administrative and application tuning, but would definitely scale to meet their needs. RethinkDB would also likely be a better match to what they are wanting to do.
That said, I've been holding out for some time on PostgreSQL's in the box replication story to take root and mature. There are definitely more mature features and solutions to sharding and replication around MySQL, I just tend to find MySQL to be brittle and every time I've ever worked with it, I have at least a half dozen WTF moments... from binary data handling/indexing, foreign key syntax, ANSI out of spec, and others. PostgreSQL has some great features, and once the replication issues settle in, it will become the default choice for a lot of projects in a lot of organizations. Though, mySQL/maria and even MS-SQL are currently better options for many SQL use cases.
I'll preface what I'm about to say with "I have never worked for Uber and I don't know terribly much about their internal structure", but from my interviews with Uber and a few of their hires I know, it seems that they tend towards hiring totally independent teams from the existing staff when tackling big projects...including hiring an outsider manager to hire a whole team. I won't speculate as to the reasons for this publicly but I've drawn some interesting conclusions from this.
A multi-pronged approach that might involve multiple stakeholders just doesn't seem like their way of doing things.
But, what is the current replication setup that comes with postgres that is well documented with the PostgreSQL (current-version) documentation... the past, when I've looked there's mention of 2-3 solutions (none in-the-box) and others that require at least a 5-figure support contract.
Compare to MongoDB, RethinkDB, MS-SQL and others where the tooling for replication comes in the box. Yes, to of the examples are "no-sql" but even the mysql replication is in the box and supported as such.
The narrative that "everybody cheats" is just something that cheaters tell themselves, so they can pretend that their behavior was warranted.
That said, it's worth discussing these things before applying to a company, because dishonesty creates massive risk in the company, so if you hear and answer that sounds like 'downandout's, you need to devalue that company, because their lack of ethics creates risk for that particular company, and it creates reputational risk for you.
Sorry, but, many of these companies are not as ethical as you claim.
Xiaomi sent user data to China without consent. [1]
Palantir proposed an illegal campaign agaisnt Wikileaks [2] and its very industry is by its nature fairly dubious and shady, though that doesn't mean it's doing things that are strictly illegal aside from what is known.
Snapchat ignored and didn't fix various privacy and security issues. [3]
Pintrest operates in a dubious copyright gray area. [4]
Spotify pays artists very little and most money gets sent to record labels. Even labels see almost nothing. [5]
Like Uber, Lyft engages in unethical treatment of its workers. [6]
I can go on. The badness of these things varies significantly. Not all of them indicate a company is totally unethical. But I think the assertion "most Silicon Valley companies are doing at least some illegal, scammy, or otherwise unethical things in order to get ahead" is completely true.
It's unethical to exploit artists for the profit of streaming companies and record labels while simultaneously hailing yourself as a godsend for said artists.
First, I don't think anyone that read my comment would objectively say that I was endorsing such behavior, as you seem to imply in your comment (for the record, I wasn't). Second...you're honestly saying that CreditKarma, Buzzfeed, and Vice didn't grow through spamming? CreditKarma (and everyone else in the free credit space) contracts with affiliate networks to drive new customers, whose affiliates do every shady thing imaginable (and then some) to get commissions. "Free credit" offers thrive in these networks - they occupy the top spots in the best performing offers lists because they pay $20+ to affiliates for each "free" signup - and they are primarily promoted through fake job offers on Craigslist and other job boards. Affiliates tell people they're hired for XYZ job - they just need to complete a credit check by going to <insert affiliate link here>. CreditKarma probably isn't directly doing this, but they know full well that their affiliates are.
Buzzfeed spams the crap out of Facebook. Eventbrite & Vice had some spamming issues in the beginning as well. I'm not sure about Snapchat's growth story - they may have been a rare example of natural growth, along with Google. Most of the rest of those you're talking about aren't really the kinds of pure internet plays that are relevant to this discussion. No amount of spamming would have made Xiaomi, Palantir, SpaceX, DJI, etc any more successful, so they didn't employ these techniques.
You made an "edgy" but incorrect generalization based on sparse anecdata. It was good for your comment karma, but it's silly to stand by it.
AirBNB's CAN-SPAM violating email was clearly unethical. A media company showing up on Facebook more than you would prefer is, at worst, mildly annoying. There's an important difference.
Ethical people do not need to leave Silicon Valley. Dishonesty is not prerequisite to success. Your claims are wrong.
>Ethical people do not need to leave Silicon Valley. Dishonesty is not prerequisite to success. Your claims are wrong.
Again, you're implying things that I simply didn't say.
>A media company showing up on Facebook more than you would prefer is, at worst, mildly annoying
You're right, that's not spam, but that's not what I was referring to either. I'm not going to write a massive explanation here of the specific Facebook spamming techniques employed by Buzzfeed et al, but suffice it to say that they are actively and aggressively spamming to "prime the viral pump" with certain stories.
I paused at that one because I don't like the state's intelligence arm, or it's sub-contractors.
However, I decided it was ethical for the context of this conversation, because to my knowledge they don't lie to grow revenue. They claim they'll charge a huge pile of money to analyze data, and that's precisely what they do.
Until the past couple of years they were almost entirely dependent on government contracts from shady three-letter agencies, and most of the work required a security clearance (now it's a little closer to 50/50 government contracts and Fortune 100-type companies). Not to mention they were literally funded with millions of dollars from the CIA's venture capital arm. Suppose they had been shady - I'm not sure we'd know about it. You probably should have had an 'inconclusive' group somewhere in the middle and they would have at least fit there.
Vice is incredibly shady and unethical in my opinion. They champion local DIY scenes and lament the loss of music venues yet their new offices are directly responsible for the closure of 3 venues in NYC (they were all part of the industrial zone in Williamsburg where Vice chose as HQ). They don't publish stories that conflict with their branding partners corporate narrative. I know people who have been fired because they wrote poorly of their brand partners.
There are no states in the US where gas taxes cover more than 60% of the cost of roads.
This is another form of racism/classism. White people have no problem paying for white people transport (cars!). They object to "city" transport which often carries poor and other-colored people.