357 karma · joined October 7, 2009
A dozen or so members of my family use Swarm just as a casual "look where I am"/"look what I'm eating" thing, but I just cannot fathom what they were thinking with the evolution of the coins thing. Currently, the only thing you can do with coins is buy multipliers that... get you more coins? Wait, what's the point again?
Others have noted other reasons, but I think the biggest reason is that 1st/business class seats are more comfortable than the crappy crowded boarding area. Economy seats, it's the other way around. And as an added bonus, on something like a 787 where the boarding doors are behind business class, boarding first means you're lounging around in the front of the plane being served drinks and addressed by name while behind you the rabble are are being herded like cattle into their tiny seats at the back.
For 3x the price, 1st/business class want luxury, and sitting elbow to elbow with the riffraff in beat up terminal seating isn't that.
600+ seems like a big number until you consider that there are 168,000 gas stations in the US. Large chains have a LONG way to go until they are more than a statistical blip, and this doesn't even take into account the fact that the federal government has, for over a century, cast a very jaundiced eye at any single entity using its market presence to drive competitors out of the retail gasoline business via undercutting on prices. Looking at the FTC ruling on the acquisition of Sunoco's fuel retail locations by 7-11, they monitor competition in fuel retailing VERY closely, to the point of mandating a certain degree of competition in specific markets.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/03/ftc-a...
With the exception of places like Costco and large truck stops, the vast overwhelming majority of gas stations are franchises where the owner is just some local guy selling under the Chevron or Shell or whatever name. This has some promotional value, of course, but the owner sets the prices just like any other station operator. Ultimately, they all buy fuel from the same local refineries or wholesalers, regardless of the name on the fuel truck that delivers it.
Standard Oil encountered some legal issues back in 1911 by using its size and vertical integration to undercut competitors at the retail level. As a result the petroleum production industry is now intentionally very much NOT involved in retail fuel sales.
They make it so because there's excess capacity at night, when most everyone is asleep. This is not an arbitrary decision.
>Ideally cars should charge when the sun is up, in day time
That's not even remotely true. Someday MAYBE, if massive solar deployment shifts our excess capacity from night to daytime, but that's certainly not the case right now.
People are afraid of electricity and don't want to replace a switch. Anyone can replace a light bulb though, so it's default solution for the kind of person that doesn't own a screwdriver. It's definitely an inferior approach, but I suppose it fulfills the needs of a certain segment of the market.
The missing piece of the puzzle that seems to frequently be left out is we KNOW Monty's motivations, knowledge, and how he decides. At the time the problem was formulated, when Let's Make a Deal was still on television, all this was common knowledge: Monty is the host of a game show, he knows where the two goats and the car are, and he decides which door to open by picking one of the unchosen doors he KNOWS has a goat behind it. The problem suffers now, 40-odd years later, by the fact that people often don't know who Monty Hall IS, and the problem is usually worded as if it's still 1963-1976, so this foundational knowledge is missing. There is no QUESTION what Monty Hall knew, or what his motivation on the show was... except people who don't know the game show don't know that.
Granted, the actual game show was a bit more varied, but the presumption in the thought experiment is that Monty ISN'T trying to goad you into un-choosing the correct door, which he frequently did on the show because the tragedy of it was more entertaining than just giving away a car.
Rifles are defined more by what they AREN'T than what they ARE. "Shoulderable", "rifled barrel", 16", and 26" are the points where the federal government classifies a firearm as something different, such as a shotgun or a handgun.
SOURCE: am locksmith
Highly unlikely. Steel-on-steel is used because it lasts for YEARS without needing replacing due to wear.
Isn't MCAS a solution to address greater nose pitch-up due to stronger thrust vectoring effects from the new engines? In a dual engine flameout where all thrust is lost, doesn't thrust vectoring cease to be an issue?
Isn't part of Boeing's marketing strategy that the 737MAX actually DOESN'T require additional training? The entire point of MCAS is to make the larger 737MAX react to control inputs just like a smaller 737, so flight crew can just fly them all "like a 737".
There's also the "license fee" treadmill, where the state sees an easy way to get more money from a captive audience by raising fees. For example in California this year the license renewal fee for being a locksmith went from $45 to $500 every 3 years, and it's still just a paper card they mail you that certifies that you sent them a form and a fingerprint livescan once, usually many years ago.
If the clutch switch was inoperative and the cruise control was engaged, the cruise would not know the engine is disengaged from the transmission and would rev the engine up to redline.
It wasn't subtle at all. The entire design was substandard to begin with and didn't meet code. Suspending a walkway from a piece of square tubing made by welding two pieces of C-channel together was ALREADY pants-on-head retarded, and undersized to boot. Deciding it's OK to hang the lower span off the upper span's substandard tubing was just the last step in a long chain of gross engineering negligence.
Calling it a "subtle" failure is like calling Challenger subtle because it was "just a leaky O-ring", or the Apollo I fire subtle because it was "just a tiny spark". There was a completely avoidable cascade of multi-level failure leading up to all of them.
You can't just divide the cost of a Fury into the cost of an F-22 and assume that's even remotely reasonable as a fieldable proportion. The limiting factor isn't the cost of building the planes, it's the logistics of coming up with with enough fuel, pilots, maintenance, and ground facilities to keep them flying. There's nobody who couldn't afford something better that could afford to field maybe 3:1 vs the F-22.
The salesman for Burt Rutan's little gun-armed midget ARES fighter/attack plane liked to tell people to "imagine how the Falklands War would have been different" if the British Harriers had been faced with waves of hundreds of ARES planes.... completely failing to address the fact that Argentina couldn't possibly train enough qualified pilots to sit in those hundreds of cockpits.