Google had mandatory return-to-office...

That’s the best feature of Apple Maps. Google hides a ton of businesses, even at max zoom.

Yes, they unironically are 15 minute cities. A typical suburbanite will never have to spend more than 15 minutes traveling for a routine errand.

Just because you don’t like how they do it doesn’t mean that they don’t do it.

Be careful what you wish for.

Under a fair weight tax scheme, a passenger of a fully loaded bus would pay more than a solo driver of a Hummer EV (one of the heaviest SUVs on the market).

Some data on bus weights [1]:

      Transit Bus Type           Passengers         Curb Weight (lb)   Fully‐Loaded Weight (lb)
                            Max Seated Max Total 
  2‐axle 35‐foot               27 – 40   46 – 72     15,450 – 28,510       23,360 – 39,020
  2‐axle 40‐foot               35 – 44   61 – 92     20,520 – 32,520       30,600 – 44,100
  2‐axle 45‐foot               44 – 46   80 – 86     30,130 – 30,450       41,480 – 42,530
  3‐axle 45‐foot Double‐deck   79 – 82   116 – 122   36,560 – 37,930       54,670 – 55,850
  3‐axle 60‐foot Articulated   41 – 61   89 – 123    37,920 – 49,520       55,975 – 64,690

The Hummer EV's curb weight is 9063 lbs (add 150 lbs for an average driver) and it has two axles for a loaded axle weight of 4607 lbs.

A three axle articulated bus with 123 passengers has a loaded axle weight of 21,563 lbs using the data from the table above.

This means that the bus has ~4.7 times the load per axle as the SUV, so per the fourth power law, it does 488 times as much damage to the road as the SUV. Since it carries 123 people, that means that each bus passenger is doing ~4 times as much damage to the road as the SUV driver.

[1] https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/docs/TCRPJ-11Task... (Table 7/Page 25)

I think that rather than use this source as a way to highlight issues with a strict interpretation of the 4th-power law, you should have commented how your source says you should not use a strict interpretation of the 4th-power law.

For example, it highlights how the damage also depends on the road construction, with highways and major arterials built to a higher standard.

As a general rule, a fully-loaded 123 passenger bus is running on an arterial, not a residential street like someone driving their Hummer EV home does, so you can't compare the road damage simply by axle weight.

Your source even highlights how "it is possible for fewer, heavier buses to damage pavement less than more, lighter buses."

That's all part of larger cost/benefit analysis, like how building for a longer service life for the bus means using heavier parts, which increases the weight, or how running fewer, larger buses reduces emissions per passenger-mile.

The owner of the Hummer EV does a different cost/benefit analysis, with some of the costs born by the government and thus shared across the taxpayers. Without extra fees for heavier vehicle owners, they end up paying the same as light vehicle owners despite the higher negative impacts of their heavy vehicles.

This is not apples-to-apples, because buses don't drive on all of the roads, whereas cars drive on (presumably) any road. The total mileage of roads used for bus routes is a small fraction of all road mileage, even where bus systems are extensive. So more roads must be maintained for cars. Road damage is also affected by vehicle speed, acceleration, braking and so forth; buses drive regular routes at regulated speeds and do not brake very hard.

Does all that take into consideration the number of tires per axel, and size of the contact patch for each axel?

I would assume that road damage is proportional to surface pressure at the contact patch, so greater contact patch means less damage. As a result you can have a heavier vehicle do less damage than a lighter vehicle with the same number of axels, if the number and size of tires on the larger vehicle is greater than the smaller vehicle.

Most busses I see around run large truck tires, and normally have 4 tires on the rear axel vs the normal 2 you’ll find on a Hummer. So a bus spreads it weight over 6 tires rather than 4, and if we generously assume the Hummer tires and bus tires have the same contact patch, that means a bus can be 50% heavier than the Hummer, but not cause any additional damage.

I know loading regulations are normally done based on axel number, rather than tire number. But I assume that’s mostly down to ease of regulation, rather than axel count being the most accurate way to calculate road damage. Indeed the document you link too even breaks down loading limits based on number of axels, but also single tire limits, which maybe different depending on pressure of the tire.

Edit: I also note that U.S. buses seem to be much heavier than necessary. As a point of comparison a two axel double decker, New Routemaster in London[1], which carries up to 87 people, has a curb weight of only 28,000lbs, which would give it a fully laden weight of only 29,000lbs. That’s substantially less than equivalent buses in that document.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Routemaster

Now consider how many hummers you'd need to transport 123 people.

Ironically, they did open by writing, "Be careful what you wish for."

The point is you’d have to create an exception. The rule doesn’t work naturally, which implies it might be flawed.

You think any rule should have a one flat rate. One size fits all?

To be fair, rule should have different multipliers. Small rate for small car and buses, huge rate for trucks. Easy.

> You think any rule should have a one flat rate. One size fits all?

No, but it's more elegant and less gameable that way. Otherwise, we wind up with the Section 179 problem [1].

[1] https://over6000pounds.com/electric-vehicles-that-unlock-the...

I don’t understand why we can’t have this, and exemptions for public transit, or human transportation companies providing municipal services?

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If a solution isn’t as elegant as possible, but significantly reduces the amount of SUVs on the roads, it’s a good thing - period.

The tax would be divided by occupancy

The current "iPhone" is a low-cost parts bin model that was first introduced as the iPhone 5C. The current iPhone should be compared to phones in that family (5C, XR, SE, 8, and 11-15), not to the actual iPhone family (Original, 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 7, X, XS, and 11-15 Pro).

Still, the $999 price started with the iPhone X (2017), they have been keeping it for 6 years. I know because I'm finally upgrading my old iPhone X for the iPhone 15 Pro, and it surprised me that it would be "cheaper" this time (inflation-adjusted).

You're clearly not very well traveled if you think that the east coast is a bastion of intellectualism while the rest of the country is innumerate.

The struggling student interviewed in the article lives on the east coast!

They drive more conservatively than the most conservative human driver, mainly because they don’t try at all to cooperate with other vehicles. It’s clearly due to technical reasons, not because they’re being more safe.

For example, if they need to make a lane change for a turn on a congested street, they will wait for someone to let them in rather than “pushing” their way in like a human driver (especially a bus driver) would. When that inevitably doesn’t happen, they are forced to go around the block and try again.

That exact behavior happened during the “Uber” ride I took on a Waymo, and it is possible they have improved since then.

Today it's a lagoon and a field so it's even more of a waste of space.

The hilarious thing is that when TSMC was founded they had to train EVERYONE. Taiwan had zero chip fabrication talent. All of the specialists at the time, even the founder of TSMC, were in the US. For them to complain that it's impossible to train a workforce is laughable and is most likely just racism/nationalism.

To be fair the expertise needed to produce chips in 1987 and 2023 is radically different.

The continuity of knowledge transitioning from one generation of production to the next shouldn’t be underrated. If you started in 1987 with state-of-the-art knowledge and kept up with the advances, your knowledge would have transformed over the years.

Of course, if you’re just getting started now, the knowledge from 1987 is of little use (not entirely useless though) and indeed drastically different from 2023 SotA.

In the description, they say they charge extra fees:

*******

▶ Mandatory fees

You’ll be asked to pay the following charges at check-in or check-out:

• A damage deposit of $350 will be collected by credit card. You should be reimbursed within 7 days of check-out. Your deposit will be refunded in full by credit card, subject to an inspection of the property.

• A resort fee of $40.16 per night

• There will be taxes and fees that need to be paid at the front desk

▶ Optional Extra

• This property allows pets however there is a $350 pet deposit per stay. 50 USD is kept for a deep cleaning fee, and the remainder is refunded if there is no pet damage.

• Parking $78 for 24 hrs and $93 for oversized. no in and out

I think the issue is that Airbnb claimed and advertised they would begin offering true pricing that included all fees displayed upfront so you could compare all the bookings against each other in the search engine and not buried in the terms and conditions:

https://mashable.com/article/airbnb-actual-price-listing-fee...

It's insanity to have to search through each listing and add random fees to compare the prices of different listings against each other. I don't think the OP disputes that this appears in the terms and conditions.