Thursday, July 18, 2019

July 18th Links

  • The 2018 Monocle Survey determined the world's most livable city was Munich, followed by Tokyo, Vienna and Zurich. A total of four German cities were on the list of the 25 most livable cities, 15 out of the 25 were European, 3 each from Japan and Australia, and one from North America (Vancouver). No cities from South America, South Asia, or Africa made it into the list. [Wiki]
  • To the owner, he/she has taken great car of this vehicle. It's in perfect shape, drives perfect, looks great, etc. To get a similar vehicle that is just as nice inside, outside, and driving.. he/she would likely need to spend $10k or more. So, cut the price to $8k to account for miles and call it good. However, for the rest of humanity, it is a vehicle with a ton of miles. Sure it looks great, drives great, etc. but we don't know what hidden thing might be wrong with it. We can get a lower mileage example for the same price that is nearly in as good a condition. So to account for miles... $5k. Maybe $6k because the condition is so good. The owner isn't hitting the Crack pipe... he/she, um, just doesn't know what he has. [Jalopnik]
  • As a friend of mine says, what business gets $1.95 million of your money and won't even assign you an account manager? Now Amazon will, but they'll charge $1600 + 0.3% of your previous months sales for it. For us, we would need to pay about $2625/month on average, just to be heard. Without an account manager, you can regularly expect to wait months for Amazon to address problems with your account. Amazon's power over online merchants is not just in sales, but also in the way that sellers are treated. [Hart]
  • If I may be so humble as to suggest that a contest of mechanical hubris be more heavily weighted towards cam content, or perhaps even include the number of superchargers or turbochargers in one's domain. A simple equation such as (Ca x Cy) + 10T + 20S = Mhf, Where: Ca = number of cams, Cy = number of cylinders, T = number of turbos, S = number of superchargers, Mhf = total mechanical hubris factor. The equation only works if the score of each engine is calculated separately and their total is summed. The above equation yields the following results: a pushrod V8 gets a score of 8, a quad cam V8 Maserati engine gets a score of 32, a straight eight, supercharged, double overhead cam Alfa engine gets a score of 36. Perhaps this is all a bit elitist of me in my mechanical ivory tower, but in my mind an engine with two cams should have twice the score as an engine with one cam and you will notice that an engine with no cams gets no score. This eliminates all two stroke engines (on purpose), hell, I've got about a dozen chainsaws but these can not possibly equal the Mhf of a Ferrari V12. As an unintended side effect this also eliminates some very cool two stroke motorcycles and some wonderful old Saabs. If one wanted to get fancier with the equation you could start weighting other mechanical complexities more heavily... such as number of valves over two per cylinder, or engines with more than eight cylinders, or Wankel engines, or heaven forbid – engines with air cooled horizontally opposed cylinders! [BaT]
  • Keeping the REV-1 to low speeds and out of the way of cars should help Refraction move to market. It's now working with two Ann Arbor restaurants, making deliveries to the startup's employees and hoping to expand to the general public in the coming months. To make that happen, Johnson-Roberson and Vasudevan have a teleoperation setup that lets them control the vehicle remotely, using a system designed for a racing videogame. When one of their five REV-1s encounters an unprotected left turn, someone at the office will take over and handle it manually (the vehicle can also make three right turns to avoid the left). [Wired]
  • There are more cells in our bodies than stars in our galaxy, and they are far more tightly coupled in their interactions compared to point-like sources of gravity. Computing the true effect of any given drug on a human body is apparently expensive enough that our simulation uses heuristic shortcuts to determine the outcome. [Marginal Revolution]
  • Overall, Spain was richer and more functional than I expected. The grocery stores are very well-stocked; the worst grocery store I saw in Spain offered higher quality, more variety, and lower prices than the best grocery store I saw in Denmark, Sweden, or Norway. Restaurants are cheap, even in the tourist areas. Almost all workers I encountered did their jobs with a friendly and professional attitude. There is near-zero violent crime, though many locals warned us about pickpockets. [Caplan]

2 comments:

eahilf said...

Nearly every German city is now undergoing accelerating disastrous demographic change -- und München ist keine Ausnahme -- a while ago a short video made the rounds of some guy walking down a pedestrian mall in München, secretly filming people he encountered, and you saw a shockingly large number of Africans and muslims, including women in burkas -- at the end he says: 'Tja, liebe Leute -- das ist München'.

When Germans speak of "Berliner Verhältnisse" it means lots of poverty, including a large/disproportionate number of poorly educated, largely unemployable migrants or people mit Migrationshintergrund, bad schools, and generally bad government -- soon this will be the norm everywhere.

Germany is a federation of states (Bundesländer) -- Bavaria is the richest, and München is the richest city in Bayern -- there is a kind of revenue and financial burden sharing, and Bavarians have for years resented having to subsidize the shithole of Berlin.

eahilf said...

München:

https://twitter.com/Junge_Freiheit/status/1159011393271664641