Call me pessimistic, but as the sidewalk pattern becomes more common for IoT, I wouldn’t be surprised if a “malfunctioning radio” just results in the device not working properly.
Make it a roundabout with protected pedestrian crossings. That forces drivers to be looking at the conflict point with pedestrians as they manoeuvre the roundabout.
I was very impressed in Denmark, where that roundabout approach worked very well. Every car slowed down & stopped for me at the crosswalks.
It turned out that that was because they installed a cobblestone speed bump in front of every crosswalk. Cars slowed down even if no pedestrians were around, because otherwise they were going to pop a tire. It made walking so much safer than anywhere else I've been.
Those don't fix it in my experience. There's one about a quarter mile from where I'm sitting right now and I avoid it when walking because of how dangerous it is. Yes, they will see you crossing... as they almost hit you. They recently redid it to be a bit safer for driving on (before people were unclear on how many lanes it had and which lanes could turn where) but it doesn't seem to have improved the pedestrian experience much.
in practice i find this does not work well at all… for some reason in roundabouts is when cars most feel justified in running down a pedestrian in a crosswalk. sometimes i think they’re just afraid to slow bc of the cars behind them
If you do not wait in the intersection itself then you would never get a chance to turn in many intersections. The only solution is to always wait in the intersection itself.
Not true at any company or university lab I have worked at recently. Particularly research labs and professors have switched to just accepting academic emails recently which I somewhat oppose personally.
In an actual emergency, cell towers may not function.
AM has significantly further range too and is pretty easy to standup as a backup for an area.
It’s also incredibly common for road conditions to still be shared over AM - you see this a lot while driving with all the “advisory - tune to …. AM” signs everywhere.
Okay, true in theory, but I still question how much difference it makes. In a situation so bad that it knocks out all the cell towers, landlines, cable TV, and broadband, people aren't flocking to their cars to check every AM frequency for instructions. They're panicking and looting the nearest grocery store either way.
And if it's not a cell-tower-destroying emergency, those terrible, low-power, scratchy AM stations are 1000x less efficient to get road condition news out there than Google Maps. I've tried to tune to one maybe twice in my life and learned nothing of use. Honestly, it would be a better use of government money if we shut them down. If there are areas that one of those stations effectively reaches that isn't reached by cell signals, use the money from not operating them in the other 90% of America to pay some wireless company to put in a few towers there and allow anyone to roam (at 3G speeds). That would actually save 100x the lives the AM stations ever will, since an AM station can't help you call 911 when you crash your car on a lonely mountain road.
This is what I always think. People will spend $10,000 on engineering time (2 engineers working ~1.5 weeks) to save $500, that then turns into a COST later because they have to spend more on maintenance.
Yeah feels a bit disingenuous to title the article “70%”. While correct, it elicits the thought of a much more interesting migration than what actually happened.
This has been described as similar to Uber/Lyft surging but it’s different in a few critical ways that I suspect consumers are less tolerant of.
When Uber/Lyft are surging it incentivise more drivers to go to the surge area. This raises supply and the surge rate decreases. Drivers are distributed automatically where they are needed. Overall trips taken should be higher compared with a no surging model. So it shifts both the demand (higher ride price) and the supply curves dynamically. That’s an easier model to market to customers as there is at least some logical sense behind it.
However in Wendys case dynamic pricing has no effect on supply. It just modifies the demand curve.
Fundamentally they are betting that their food demand is inelastic enough that they’ll make more money overall. That just feels more exploitative and is going to be harder to market.
> Fundamentally they are betting that their food demand is inelastic enough that they’ll make more money overall. That just feels more exploitative and is going to be harder to market.
Yeah, I have no idea how they can sell this to the consumer. I have to pay more for food at supper time? Why would I want to pay for that? You're asking me to eat earlier or later to soften the demand curve, but why am I choosing fast food if I don't want convenience?
>Fundamentally they are betting that their food demand is inelastic enough that they’ll make more money overall. That just feels more exploitative and is going to be harder to market.
To be fair I think it's less exploitive than Ubers prices surging during a terror attack..
This is a wild proposition.
Were taxis running directly after 9/11?
This is sort of a problem if a society depends on them as a piece of critical infrastructure. If a city owns a bus route and needs to evacuate a population, they can just do it by edict.
No one is considering this edge case and how it should be handled at Uber. A company or community that has pride in what they offer would probably provide rides for free during such an anomaly. This is a drawback on the scalability of technology as we currently implement it.
I’ve done something similar in one of our production services. There was a problem with extremely long GC pauses during Gen2 garbage collection (.NET uses a multigenerational GC design). Pauses could be many seconds long or more than a minute in extreme cases.
We found the underlying issue that caused memory pressure in the Gen2 region but the fix was to change some very fundamental aspects of the service and would need to have some significant refactoring. Since this was a legacy service (.net framework) that we were refactoring anyway to run in new .NET (5+), we decided to ignore the issue.
Instead we adjusted the GC to just never do the expensive Gen2 collections (GCLatencyMode) and moved the service to run on higher memory VMs. It would hit OOM every 3 days or so, so we just set instances to auto-restart once a day.
Then 1 year later we deployed the replacement for the legacy service and the problem was solved.
It’s pretty simple - software engineering compensation can be 2x-4x or more in the US compared to other western democracies. Money circumvents a lot of the problems you describe.
