That's why you don't drive 100 mph, mm away from a line of stopped/stopped cars or next to a crowded street corner.
Your examples are ones of exactly the type of behavior insurance companies are trying to disincentivize. Namely, fail-deadly behavior that puts you in a position where you have to be attentive to avoid a collision when other actors don't do exactly as they should. Your error was putting yourself in that position in the first place.
> That's why you don't drive 100 mph, mm away from a line of stopped/stopped cars or next to a crowded street corner.
Wow, you were there?
Forgive the sarcasm but you're speaking as though you were when in fact you are utterly clueless about the rest of the circumstances, and you probably are unfamiliar with the local territory.
> Your examples are ones of exactly the type of behavior insurance companies are trying to disincentivize.
Well, let's just say you are dead-wrong about that.
> Namely, fail-deadly behavior that puts you in a position where you have to be attentive to avoid a collision when other actors don't do exactly as they should. Your error was putting yourself in that position in the first place.
Classic strawman, you made up an extension to the situation and then you valiantly knock it down.
Well done. Really, what would it take to get you to re-phrase your comment into something like:
"Forgive me for asking because I don't understand how these situations came to pass in the first place?"
And then I would have answered:
The tourist was a Japanese dude who was standing right next to one of the most busy streets in Amsterdam, I was doing about 50 kph, right along with the rest of the traffic there (and considerably slower than the taxis overtaking the rest of the traffic) when a guy stepped backwards of the curb while looking through the lens of his camera. Obviously he lost is balance and I stopped the car mere centimeters from his fallen body wrecking a set of nearly new tires in the process. We shook hands and that was that, I'm sure he's going to be a bit more careful in the future while walking and looking through his camera at the same time. The alternative - to swerve - was not an option because of the higher speed traffic in the tram lane and it wouldn't have worked anyway. Good I keep my cars in excellent shape and kudos to whoever designed the brake system on the Citroen DS.
The toddler was a much slower affair, this was in a street with slanted parking (quite common in the old south part of the city), this little tike had escaped from his mum and came out from in between two cars well under mirror height. I wasn't going very fast and fortunately there was a large open space on the other side of the road (super market loading area or something to that effect, I forgot) and so I had plenty of room to swerve when I saw something move. At first I thought it was a dog. An emergency stop there would have been too late, he practically rolled out under the car.
> Well done. Really, what would it take to get you to re-phrase your comment into something like:
> "Forgive me for asking because I don't understand how these situations came to pass in the first place?"
To be honest, I don't think anything would.
Simply stated, I have met too many people (friends, family and coworkers) who tell me well-crafted stories about how they came to be in a car accident, or almost-accident. These stories invariably cast the teller as the victim who could do nothing to prevent the accident (aside from driving more slowly or following at a greater distance). When I later ride with them, I find that they tailgate, speed and roll through stop signs.
Perhaps I was too quick to judge. Maybe you're among the 1% of 'attentive drivers' who actually drive well. I'm just so tired of hearing the excuses of the other 99% that I lumped you in with them.
If you really are that 1%, then I have to say I'm truly am sorry. I hope you are. Because if you aren't, you're probably feeling smug about putting me in my place and will feel justified in driving recklessly in the future.
That's a pretty big straw man. Even at 8mph if a toddler wanders into the road you are going to have a pretty big jolt from slamming on the brakes. If you've never been driving at or below posted and safe speeds in a neighborhood and still had to slam on the brakes because a child's ball bounces into the street (invariably followed by the child), you are quite lucky.
Even with 100 feet to spare, you still slam on the brakes because when a kid wanders into the road, that's what is safest.
Even if I would have braked I would have hit the little guy. So I just swerved to the other side of the road. If it had been packed with cars I would have probably killed him, there was absolutely no way the car was going to stop in time. Very bad experience. I got out very fast to scoop the little man+bike out of traffic and hand him back to his mom, we were both shaking like leafs. They're so quick.
Good point! But that makes me think that maybe taking the average of a bunch of P/E ratios is mathematically stupid to begin with. I mean, you could have one with earnings of .00000001 which would make the P/E ratio enormous, or with earnings of -.0000001 which would make the P/E ration enormously negative. Or you could have earnings of exactly zero which would give you a NaN. So maybe this is just is an indication that the median P/E is a much more meaningful quantity than the average. Maybe taking the average of a bunch of ratios is meaningless, in general. Or maybe they are adding up total price of all stocks on the exchange / total earnings of all stocks on the exchange. In that case, you could get the result that the "mean" was much lower than the average, if there were a small number of stocks that were losing bucketloads of money.
> Are U&L still ignoring rules designed to provide access to those with disabilities?
In my city one of the options (besides SUV, black car, etc) is for persons with disabilities. The app seems to have some options to switch between requesting a driver with a wheelchair-compatible car and the city's own paratransit service. I've never used it myself, so I can't comment on the implementation.
Sounds like it does most of what ride-share services do.
Does Flywheel allow you to rate individual drivers/cars (and prevent being matched to creepy drivers or dirty cars on future rides)? I think that's actually one of the biggest value-adds of Uber/Lyft/Sidecar--direct feedback about drivers which tends to retain good drivers and reject bad ones.
You can rate your ride, I have no idea what happens to the feedback.
The uber/lyft rating system is a little broken these days since many drivers will ask you to exchange 5-star ratings with them (you have a rating too). When a bad driver is a 4.8 and a good driver is a 4.9 it's hard for me to tell what I am getting into.
Depends on the airport. Some airports are vicious about enforcing Uber bans (and the drivers quickly figure this out), so drivers will call to confirm your location if the pin is near the airport.
On the other hand, most airports have some sort of public transportation heading in a not-airport direction...
Part of the problem is that there simply isn't as much money to be made in digital as there was in analog. A digital camera doesn't need film, but film (and film processing) accounted for much of Kodak's profits for many years. So it's not just a simple matter of "make digital cameras instead of analog ones".
Also, remember that Kodak was very big into digital imaging, and was considered the leader in the field of high-end digital cameras. That is, until the Nikon D1 came along around 1999. Even then, Kodak sensors were common among the next few generations of DSLRs.
> [...] compared to the exorbitant rates [...] $8-10 shipping and handling for standard shipping [...]
So here's the thing: It actually does cost $8-10 to ship most of the types of things you can buy on Amazon. I don't know what Amazon pays for shipping, but I would be surprised if FedEx/UPS/OnTrac will even look at an Amazon box for less than $3-5 (to say nothing of transporting it).
Amazon Prime is predicated on the idea that you'll make Amazon your default retailer after paying for prime.
Being a customer's default retailer is a powerful position for two reasons. First, many customers don't shop around for the lowest price on each item (they shop for lowest basket price), so your margins don't get squeezed quite as much. Second, you don't need to advertise (as much) to these people, so it reduces your marketing spend.
So reverse Costco by mail? (Costco makes all of its money on memberships; margins are fixed at a low rate on all products. The loyalty factor is still there though)
Well, either it's intentionally lining someone's pockets, or the TSA are so badly administrated that they're leaking/losing money somewhere. Given the history of administrative errors, I'd be more likely to wager that it is the latter case.
Your examples are ones of exactly the type of behavior insurance companies are trying to disincentivize. Namely, fail-deadly behavior that puts you in a position where you have to be attentive to avoid a collision when other actors don't do exactly as they should. Your error was putting yourself in that position in the first place.