> Sadly, I personally can't see how this remains to be the case any longer... RBR with Newey or Dall'Igna with Ducati have been in championship dry-spells for a really long time (last year's win for RBR was the first championship where Mercedes didn't dominate all season like they have since the introduction of the V6) and have only managed to come 2nd best for some time.
I don't buy this. The basis for TFA and the reason Newey is back in the spotlight is because of this current season. RBR is the only team that has nailed the regulations change. The porpoising issue alone makes this clear.
Good, I'm not selling anything, simply taking a more critical look at the recent past: all I'm seeing is the FIA doing what it always does, reshuffles the pack after the racing gets dull which (inadvertently?)always creates another domination era.
Newey is without a doubt an unrivaled aero-savant, and since they re-introduced ground effects, so of course this was going to favour RBR who owe their entire legacy on making the most out of the aero packages during the Vettel era. I've read this article [0], and I think Toto's case is just one of sour grapes which he and Mercedes benefited from when it went to V6, it still stands to reason that it's more circumstantial than it is a re-birth of Newey's infallibility.
Its interesting because they made Honda decide to stay after being adamant of leaving after having been humiliated for countless years (Alonso: GP2 engine!), which makes me think RBR and Newey knew all along of what was coming and gave them a reason to stay. And in an era in which keeping major manufactures is the name of the game they'll do anything to keep them there at all costs.
> Its interesting because they made Honda decide to stay
Honda is leaving. Red Bull bought a license to keep using their engines, operated by their subsidiary RBPT. Honda still provides some engineering services this year, but from next year onwards RBPT is on their own.
It's a case of the relatively spread out development pattern and associated wide rights of way being advantageous. Minneapolis can tack on fairly substantial bike infrastructure without totally screwing over cars, which would be just as politically difficult in Minneapolis as any other American city.
The Grand Rounds help a lot too. It's a great basis to have inherited from the past.
Your point is valid but the person you replied to was specifically asking about Boston. I admittedly don’t know a lot about the public transit infrastructure in Boston but I have a hard time believing it’s less extensive than e.g. Seattle, where public high school students use the standard bus system, with the school district paying for special limited routes where the normal bus routes lack coverage.
Fair enough. I have never lived in Boston myself, so I can't speak to its specific issues.
Some school systems in the US are subject to judicial desegregation orders, so that the racially-divided neighborhoods do not result in segregated schools. These may require transit routes that are not necessarily coincident with the daily work commute. Some systems also have magnet or specialty schools. Some have even greater ability to choose (or win via lottery) a school other than the nearest to one's home. As a result, the commute for one child could be longer than that for their parents, and using the regular public transit could result in hours on trains and buses. In such cases, a school bus would essentially be an express, with no stops between school and the residential neighborhood.
And, of course, once you run one school bus, that means you now have a school bus infrastructure, which makes it easier to run more buses.
The public transit system is usually designed around moving people between workplaces, mainly in the city core, and homes, which are more evenly distributed. Schools are also more evenly distributed, as villages, towns, smaller cities, and unincorporated townships may have had one or more of their own before being annexed into the metropolitan city. As a result, the nearest transit station to both home and school may be the same station. Or they could be on lines that run nearly parallel before meeting in the downtown hub.
One possible solution to this would be to build a large, unified school near the city's central transit hub. And that would likely be selected by an algorithm as most efficient. But politically, people prefer their schools to be near their homes. And separated by grade levels. With athletic fields and playgrounds. And lots of separate and distinct administrative regions. Again, the technically sensible solution is untenable, because people just want what they like (and what makes them money).
Boston has a pretty good public transit system--at least until it snows when things tend to go to hell. It has its share of problems in general but it's not bad overall.
You need compensation against seeing for very, very big space telescopes, the kind that can resolve a moon in orbit of an expoplanet. IIRC there are reasons against using adaptive optics there, so you might need speckle interferometry there.
I think it's ridiculous that the author poses the question of why anyone would want to live there and then immediately waves it off with "it's a whole other story". So, thanks for sharing at least one detail about why anyone lives there.
There's also a very verbose description of the geographical context of this place... and no map.
It's like the author ran out of time and just submitted the article without changing anything.
Could you clarify why those things are mutually exclusive? And to be clear: I don't know how to feel about Bitcoin and the attention it has received lately.
There's just nothing about the definition of a pyramid scheme that applies to Bitcoin, not even close. There's no organisation, recruiting, directors, membership or promise of payments. It doesn't have to grow forever. It's not illegal. The amount of ignorant Bitcoin comments on HN is just baffling.
There's no organisation, recruiting, directors, membership or promise of payments.
But those definitely exist, just not via any singular organization. There very much is organization and organizations, recruiting, would be directors, unofficial membership in the club of ownership, and lots of promises of payments.
When people make that comparison, what they're really saying is Bitcoin is mostly funny money which above all else has enriched early adopters and will probably lose a lot of late adopters lots of money. It's ceased to even be a useful currency.
You don't have to squint very hard to see the comparison, even if it isn't flattering or technically the same thing as a pyramid scheme. This is from your link:
In a pyramid scheme [Bitcoin], an organization compels individuals who wish to join to make a payment [purchase Bitcoin]. In exchange, the organization promises its new members a share of the money taken from every additional member that they recruit [to the moon]. The directors of the organization (those at the top of the pyramid) also receive a share of these payments. For the directors, the scheme is potentially lucrative—whether or not they do any work, the organization's membership has a strong incentive to continue recruiting and funneling money to the top of the pyramid.
Such organizations seldom involve sales of products or services with value. Without creating any goods or services, the only revenue streams for the scheme are recruiting more members or soliciting more money from current members. The behavior of pyramid schemes follows the mathematics concerning exponential growth quite closely. Each level of the pyramid is much larger than the one before it. For a pyramid scheme to make money for everyone who enrolls in it, it would have to expand indefinitely. This is not possible because the population of Earth is finite. When the scheme inevitably runs out of new recruits, lacking other sources of revenue, it collapses. Because in a geometric series, the biggest terms are at the end, most people will be in the lower levels of the pyramid (and indeed the bottom level is always the biggest single layer).
In a pyramid scheme, people in the upper layers typically profit while people in the lower layers typically lose money. Since at any given time, most of the members in the scheme are at the bottom, most participants in a pyramid scheme will not make any money. In particular, when the scheme collapses, most members will be in the bottom layers and thus will not have any opportunity to profit from the scheme, yet they will have paid to join the scheme. Therefore, a pyramid scheme is characterized by a few people (including the creators of the scheme) making large amounts of money, while most who join the scheme lose money. For this reason, they are considered scams.[2]
Sounds like many cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin is approaching that if it hasn't hit it already.
> In a pyramid scheme [Bitcoin], an organization compels individuals who wish to join to make a payment [purchase Bitcoin]. In exchange, the organization promises its new members a share of the money taken from every additional member that they recruit [to the moon].
There is no such thing. In that respect, Bitcoin is no different from real estate, stock or gold investors which do tend to sometimes promote their investment of choice. Pyramid scheme has a precise definition which does not fit Bitcoin at all and using it to describe Bitcoin is just misleading and intellectually dishonest. If it was a pyramid scheme, it would be deemed illegal in many, many countries. I agree with one thing however: as with every single investment ever, early adopters, which take on more risk, stand to profit more than late adopters.
I don't want to get into the debate on the definition of a pyramid scheme, but what was anyone risking by mining bitcoins for essentially nothing in 2009-2010?
Of course, many of the early adopters got very lucky while taking almost no risk. This happens with gold and oil too. However, those that chose to hodl started taking real risks as soon as Bitcoin hit 1$. Bitcoin hodlers today are obviously taking substantial risk as the price could drop massively at any moment.
I'm certain there's some compelling argument to made about Amazon abusing its market position but this isn't it.
You say "Prime has been proven to be losing money the more a customer buys" like that isn't an obvious consequence of having flat pricing for shipping. The idea that Prime and Amazon's shipping as a whole are a loss leader isn't a new insight.
Ignoring your completely made up percentiles and the fact that you're a right-wing troll, poor people in the US get to call themselves poor because they face real problems where the not-poor don't. Access to healthy food, healthcare, housing, quality education, etc. are all diminished for low-income people.
"Access to healthy food, healthcare, housing, quality education, etc. are all diminished for low-income people."
And non existent for most of the planet.
EDIT: In regards to the numbers not adding up, You do understand that children don't work right? Remove children (the largest generation ever is currently in high school), then the roughly 40% or so of adults that are unemployed, retired or otherwise out of the workforce and it makes more sense. If you aren't convinced take a look at salaries in European nations, if you happen to find some reasonably high ones on average take a look at the population numbers of those nations.
I don't buy this. The basis for TFA and the reason Newey is back in the spotlight is because of this current season. RBR is the only team that has nailed the regulations change. The porpoising issue alone makes this clear.