I agree with the other commenters about this being incorrect, but there is in hindsight an even bigger deal -- getting to examine the rocket (not fished out of salt water) after the flight and learn from that is huge and often overlooked.
Do you worry that there is more or less an arms race with competitors like arvie.com, and the entire industry is basically just adding service fees on top the costs of booking a site?
Not sure there is a fair approach beyond a lottery. Parks could embrace demand, and auction the sites off, but that is trading one bias for another.
I don’t think it’s much of an arms race. There are practical limitations to scan frequency that’ll keep most groups operating within the same general constraints.
Added costs/fees are somewhat inevitable. I spent $25 for two small bundles of firewood on my last camping trip. Everyone’s got to make a buck somehow.
I see Campnab as a convenience. Anyone can refresh the booking system manually, but doing so is time consuming. Some folks are happy to pay for that convenience.
Campsite availability is largely a supply and demand problem concentrated around busy centers and amplified during certain times. Drive a little further and go on the weekdays and it isn’t as much of an issue.
Perhaps lotteries would help. Some permits have been switched to this approach. I’m not sure how practical they are to implement across the board, though.
Personally, I don’t think any solution will actually solve this problem. That said, a lot of campsites do sit unused when folks fail to cancel. Reminders a week in advance of a trip could help with this. Some areas also have policies that discourage no-shows.
It does not look like your target market, but I imagine this would be ideal for pet/valuable tracking. Put it in a collar or bike seat and if your fido goes for a stroll and does not come back you can search much faster with an easy drive down the road. Same thing to help find a stolen bike.
If the transmitter could be inductively charged in a dog crate or where I park my bike -- it would be very convenient too. Ping time could be much slower, even once a minute would be plenty fast. Appears you could get 24 hours transmit and gps without too much trouble in a pretty small package.
Shawn from Beep here. It's definitely an interesting area for us. We've created a tracker demo but don't have any information on our site about it yet.
I love the idea of inductively charging the dog tracker when the dog is in bed (though we're unlikely to pull that off anytime soon given the state of wireless charging).
You can do a lot with battery life if you only turn the GPS radio on when the user wants to locate the item. This type of product requires really good network coverage. We could make one last for 4-5 months on a single AAA battery.
If you want it to check in every 10 minutes with GPS data it would only last for 3.5 days. If you get smart with an accelerometer you can push that out to 1-4 weeks or more depending on how much the thing you're tracking moves around.
It's a fun product area with lots of parameters to tweak!
Inside the frame would still work just fine if you used the frame as the antenna and if they want to get it out they have to destroy the bike so they're out a any money they were intending to make anyway.
FWIW this already exists, just over cellular networks instead. Works well enough for the pet use case though: http://www.whistle.com/ is one, I think there are a couple others also.
It was sold to a (wonderful) museum, The Henry Ford (http://www.thehenryford.org/), which every geek should visit at least once.
As an artist walks through an art museum and can see the progression of ideas from antiquity to the present. As an engineer you can walk through the history of technology at The Henry Ford, from a black smithy to a tour of a modern assembly line and most all stops in between.
You would be hard pressed to think of a better home for this machine. 900k is a lot of money, but I am glad it will be in a great museum, rather than at a private collector's home.
I live in a Detroit suburb, a large number of the residents here are engineers, many for GM, Ford and Chrysler, but quite a few for Toyota, Hyundai and other foreign suppliers (like Bosch and Yazaki). I see many domestic, but almost as many imports here.
I think a lot of the stigma is gone, certainly there is considerable pressure for people to drive their employers vehicle to work, but at least in my (relatively upscale) neighborhood, I would feel no social pressure against, and I bet I would have a bunch of engineers come visit, if I dug up a 100k and put a Tesla in my driveway.
Agree. I worked for one of these three companies for a span. While I was there, they did have a rule that if you're not driving their car, you can't park it in the covered parking lot. That was the extent of the backlash, and I've lived in this area most of my life. I think a lot of these stories and anecdotes about tires getting slashed, and people being harassed for driving foreign are not accurate today.
I think part of that might be the crowds you hang with. I would expect petty vandalism more from blue collar types than I would engineers and other professional types.
I've been a contractor for one of the Big 3 at one point in the early 2000's. I was given a Kia at Enterprise to drive, and when I came out on my first day, it was encased with no less than 300 pallets and shrinkwrap.
Apparently, they forgot to tell me that you shouldn't drive a non-UAW vehicle onto the parking lot.
Enterprise's Roadside Assistance guy was not happy with me when he had to help me pull the pallets away so I could get my vehicle out.
I agree that there's not a stigma for driving a foreign car around Detroit anymore.
Interestingly, my father worked for Chrysler outside of Detroit from the late 1950s into the 1970s.
And oddly enough, he drove a VW Beetle in the 1960s. As you can imagine, when things were good, he was just viewed as the eccentric guy who drove a puny foreign car (why would anybody in their right mind do that?).
In the 1970s (and 1980s) doing something similar was probably a moderately dangerous move.
I've been back many times during my life and in the 1990s and onward, I see plenty of foreign cars.
Objective qualifications are not the primary filter. The biggest advantages are from a higher level of networking, your fellow students are generally from a higher income bracket, have better connections, etc. Similarly the best paying firms tend to focus on the more prestigious universities as well.
All of this leads to a situation where wealthy parents have the education and means to ensure that their children have the advantages to give them a better chance of going the more selective universities, adding another level of systemic injustice based on wealth.
You are far more likely to be infected by malaria than ebola. Ebola is scary and makes for great news that draws lots of attention -- but it is largely sensational and not truthfully something you need to rationally fear, unless you work with infected individuals.
No. Based solely on rates in the past, rather than any sort of projection into the future, I'm incredibly unlikely to be likely to be infected by either (note from your link, that of the <2k/yr of malaria in the US we see "almost all in recent travelers").
If I am infected by either, I am overwhelmingly more likely to survive a bout of malaria.
And during an unusual outbreak (which is the case for ebola at present), looking simply at past incidence will underestimate my risk.
It's still probably not a high risk, and there are higher risks (which I try to pay more attention), but I don't think it's wrong to say it poses a greater threat to me (or to the overwhelming majority on this site) than does malaria.
Actually it is very difficult to place any risk estimate on ebola (or any other new viral strain) as we don’t really know much about it.
Imagine that it is 1918 again and someone was trying to make a prediction of the likelihood of influenza becoming a deadly pandemic that would kill 100 million people over the next 18 months. They would look at the past history of influenza and say there is a negligible risk of this happening. Of course now since we know that influenza can become very serious we keep our eyes on it, but for something like ebola we really know very little.
Based on previous outbreaks of things generally I think it's most likely to be correct that this outbreak is also of low risk to the US population at large. Which is not to say that there's not a tremendously high value of information - the next thing we learn could change that (and again, probably won't, but...). I think it does make sense to be paying some attention as random individuals, and more attention as health workers or CDC employees, and I think it is probably still the case that my drive home is more likely to kill me (but I pay a lot of attention to my drive home!).
Humans tend to overestimate the danger of apparent low probability, high impact events (like pandemic ebola) and underestimate the risks involved in mundane events (like driving a car).
Given how infrequent pandemics occur, a better way to judge the risks involved would be to take a much long term view and try to measure the risk of a major pandemic occurring in your lifetime. When you look at the history of plagues over the last 2500 years they are infrequent, but common enough that we can get some handle on the risk. My very rough calculations based on past pandemic frequencies and death rates put the risk at around 1 in 1000 of being killed by a pandemic sometime during your lifetime. This is not huge, but at the same time it is not trivial.
Edit. I added the word apparent to the “…danger of…” as I realise that my wording is confusing without it.
I might have worded it better, but pandemics are actually one of those areas that people get the risks wrong for the opposite reason than usual. While pandemics are considered low frequency, high risk events and so over-worried about, they are actually relatively frequent events on a historical time scale and are not worried about as much as they should be. They are really more in the car crash category not the stuck by lightning category, but we get complacent because a big one has not happened in living memory (unless you count HIV).
Ah, yeah, that is a bit of a different angle on it. Truth be told, I'm not sure whether or not we're underrating the risk. On the one hand, increased travel and population density should see faster spread.
On the other hand we have a lot of changes in our favor: understanding how diseases are spread (starting with germ theory, all the way up through population models), understanding how many more diseases are treated, an astoundingly better ability to communicate, probably a better ability to coordinate...
I don't know how it nets out. The streak we've had should be taken as some evidence that it breaks in our favor. Certainly we should not succumb to the gambler's fallacy, there. However, I think we're well served to keep an eye on things.
Yes it is really difficult to know how the two major forces are tipping the likelihood. We have a better understanding of how contagious disease is spread and on average much better immune systems because of better diets (the average person was starving when most plagues struck in the past). Balancing this is as you mention increased travel and much high population densities. You just have to see the spread of a contagious disease through a modern animal feedlot to know what this does. All of this makes it really hard to know which way the risk has changed.
My biggest fear is a pandemic Rhadinovirus since it is airborne, has a long incubation phase and leukaemia is the outcome [1]. Something like a human pathogenic Ateline or Saimiriine herpesvirus could spread through the human population without us knowing until it is too late.
Interestingly, Saimiriine herpesvirus has recently been linked to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis [2]. All it would take is a more pathogenic strain of this virus and we would be in a lot of problems.
Your chances of recovery from Malaria are far higher than recovering from Ebola. Malaria is more of a regional issue and does not necessarily have the ability to reach pandemic levels where Ebola, because of its communicability, does.
Edit: Though you are correct it is not necessarily something to be freaking-out over at the current moment. That said its a serious problem that we should not assume is benign. We should be working to contain it outside of the US.
I've heard consistently that ebola is incapable of becoming a pandemic in first world countries. This is because it lacks the resiliency to survive outside of the human body for long periods of time.
The problem is a virus have a nasty habit of evolving - just because all the past ebola strains have had a particular property does not mean that any new strain will behave in the same way.
There does seem to be something about the strain in this latest outbreak that is different to past outbreaks.
The odds of any particular mutation are small. The odds of any mutation are high. The odds of a meaningful mutation, somewhere between the two. The fact that we're seeing more spread than usual is already some evidence that this strain has some relevant mutation - though I don't know enough to quantify how much evidence.
No I don’t worry about AIDS becoming airbone, but when you look at the historical record of pandemics they are much more a problem than would appear of first glance. Pandemics that wipe out 1/3 to 1/2 the population and that appear out of nowhere are far too common over the last 2500 years for us to be complacent.
That would be the case if it were not for the fact that it is really good at surviving in the human body.... until the person is dead or until they have developed antibodies to fight it. Some people do survive Ebola (aka the plague or the black plague). But not many. Ebola spreads, and fast at that, in areas where there are high population densities, areas where people are in close contact (areas like NYC). Because of the symptoms, it is possible that someone may be infected, spreading the disease, but think they have the flu or some other common ailment. That is the reason why the hospital in the original article didn't take chances and put the person in involuntary quarantine (the article didn't say it but I can guarantee that is the case (and the patient may not know it because if you had Ebola you would have to be insane to decline care)). The only effective way to fight Ebola is quarantine. You section off an area, don't let anyone in or out, and wait out the sickness until it runs it course. After that you safely and securely destroy everything.
Plague refers to several types of bacterial infections. The Black Death is believed to involved bubonic plague because of the characteristic symptom described in all sorts of records:
I guess a hemorrhagic fever can't be ruled out though.
Ebola, in the form that requires fluid transfer, won't spread all that quickly in the U.S., where people aren't all that skeptical of doctors and tend to react to disease threats by avoiding touching things (as I understand it, burial practices involving touching the bodies are a significant source of infection in the current outbreak).
It's immoral to bring children into this world that you can not take care of. Period. What part of that don't you understand? What part of that simple statement do you want to twist and mangle to suit your worldview?
Are you suggesting that only people who have already saved the couple of hundred thousands of dollars it takes to raise a child should be allowed to have a child?
Or are you prepared to accept that some people with seemingly stable jobs have children and make plans and start saving but that stuff happens and those people end up in difficult situations?
I'm not going to bother responding. I get down modded anyways for perfectly reasonable comments on uncomfortable topics. You can figure out what I have to say from my previous comments.
Pretty harsh standard, especially as "can not take care of" is left undefined and presumed pretty high in this rather affluent culture. There's a vast difference between "incapable of caring for children" vs "earns above the US poverty line, which itself is above some 87% of everyone on the planet" (or even "above my own arbitrary standard which is well into the 90th percentile of world population").
Sure, if you can't care for kids don't make 'em. But if you're going to demonize what sounds like a broad swath of the population, you'd best define the crux of your proposition, to wit "care for".
By take care of, I mean "feed, clothe, educate to higschool level, pay for standard/basic medical care, and provide a relatively safe environment to grow up in". Is that really all that bad of a "requirement"?
If the parents need to ask for assistance from the state for basic things such as the items above, then I'd argue that they're not able to take care of children. Most of the items are given to them by the state anyways, and they still don't "manage".
Obviously that's a rhetorical question. You don't actually want to know, you're just fishing. Because no answer will be sufficient for you, you'll just claim "that doesn't encompass" all poor people.
So, let's skip all that, and you tell me what your actual point/argument is?
