Fair enough, it exists in some regard... let's change that to pollution caused by the powerplant of the vehicle.
I'm not wholly informed here, but just by using common sense, I can only imagine we're talking fractions of a percent for brake pad and tyre pollution, so I wouldn't pick that hill to die on personally.
Correct, the potential CO2 emissions are externalised but the electricity can come from wind, sun, nuclear, or even fossil fuel power stations that run more efficiently and cleanly than an ICE.
Also, I'll take the emissions from tires and brake pads over those from an engine for sure.
The UK government is doing the complete opposite in fact. They’ll give you a grant towards the cost of a new EV, a grant for a wall box to be installed at you home, 0% tax on company car benefits if it’s an EV, 0% road tax, etc. They’ve even just moved The ban on new petrol and diesel sales forward to 2030.
Fuel duties help to offset the negative externalities to society of driving, namely CO2 emissions, pollution and congestion. With EVs tou don’t have emissions and pollutions and the health problems they bring so there’s no negatives to offset (ie fuel duty revenue will go down, but so will spending on health and environmental related issues)
There’s still the congestion any vehicle can cause and I think we’ll move to a much different form of vehicle taxation over the next 20 years, perhaps with more toll roads or even surge pricing style taxation for usage of roads.
Seems like a great solution to streamline your personal online presence. If you don’t have a Twitter you could probably do the same thing with GitHub or Instagram
Amazon are currently more focussed on supplying services to developers through AWS, e.g. Rekognition that do one small, technical part of what we do. That and Amazon Go which is a cool concept that works really well for groceries/convenience stores. We're going after everything else and don't see Amazon making any moves to enter this space in the near future.
We've talked to lots of target stores and are live with a number of clients already. The story we hear most frequently is that they've previously tried a number of things to get this type of data but none have been good enough in terms of precision or depth of insight.
Thanks! We've certainly explored that avenue in the past, working with city centres & BIDs to get street footfall data.
We're also talking with malls, who are trying to get footfall traffic data in myriad of different ways already, at differing levels of quality. They may not want to share their information with 3rd parties, but would be able to do trend analysis for their own purposes.
Interesting questions - we haven't actually come across them before so I'm just going on what I learnt from that blog post, and I may not have the greatest appreciation for their specifics.
- Our strategy is to not start with large grocery retailers for the exact reasons they mention. They're slow to implement new tech and slow to change things in stores. Our primary target is mid to large-size speciality retailers, with low conversion rates, where a small change in conversion rate can have a big effect on sales.
- We've honed our camera integration and have made installation easy and fast with existing cameras. Our clients have even done the install themselves before.
- The post talks about the stores needing to actually make use of the data and our plan for this is to help them do the things they change up semi-regularly anyway (product layouts, visual merchandising, window displays)
- With data transfer, we try not to use the stores WiFi if possible, and use 3G dongles instead. We've managed to use new compression algos so we don't use a huge amount of bandwidth
guscost correctly describes the limitations of MAC address tracking. In my experience building Aura Vision [1], we've also discovered MAC tracking is no longer GDPR compliant, because an identifier about a person is stored indefinitely. This gives retailers the ability to measure the same identifier returning. The same goes for Bluetooth/BLE tracking.
We are a CCTV/deep learning system that uses existing infrastructure (think old school grainy security cameras), and we're are also able to capture additional information like age and gender of a person. Unlike other invasive/HD CCTV systems, we don't use facial recognition, and we also work over very wide areas, not just over restricted doorways.
1. This is essentially the same as the T Charge which comes into effect in October this year. Diesel taxis are exempt, which is a shame seeing as they are very high polluters, and also drive around all day long.
2. That would be nice, but 2020 is too soon to be realistic. Unless some of the newer busses have options to operate solely under battery with some modifications.
3. Gov. should absolutely invest in infrastructure.
4. Yes, this. It would be seen as favouring the rich, but there should be an exemption for petrol powered performance cars. Some of the finest examples of human engineering are found in supercars and it would be a shame for them to die out. Tesla is obviously a great example of an electric sports car, but there's something to be said for petrol sports cars. Of course, if all the car companies are working electric mass market cars, they'd probably stop working on petrol high end vehicles anyway.
On this day, it was also featured on Product Hunt and The Next Web leading to around 30k uniques across 2 days. Traffic is now nothing like that unfortunately.
One nice upside is that when I launched, it was picked up by a manager at BT Shop, a fairly large online electronics store in the UK, and I have released a variant of the app which uses their own affiliate scheme and branding. They've integrated this into one of their category pages at https://www.shop.bt.com/category/cables-and-adapters,cables/....
My point was just addressing the main theme of the article which is trying to make out that if we just got rid of these companies, we'd cut emissions by 71%. Well yeh sure, but then the world wouldn't continue to function as normal.
As individuals, we have the same methods as we always have. Don't drive when you can walk, use renewable energy, get an electric car, shop local, etc.
And of course, regulating both "ourselves", such that demand goes away. E.g. banning sales of diesel cars. And regulating businesses so that they aren't polluting unduly on our behalf e.g. carbon capture in power stations.
This article makes out like the companies themselves are directly responsible, rather than the customers of these companies, i.e. you and me. We cause these companies to pollute by creating a market demand for their products or services. Not to say there's not things a company can do to improve it's efficiency, but ultimately, a company isn't going to keep their factories firing away if no one is buying their stuff.
The same argument can be applied when people look at China and think they are the problem because of their high use of coal and manufacturing industry. Well, I'd guess that a lot of their output is going to Western consumers, so again, it is they who are responsible.
London has been doing a great job lately at improving cycle infrastructure. There is a new concept of a "cycle superhighway" - sometimes that means a segregated bike path, like CS3 that goes from The Tower Of London, straight through to Westminster, sometimes it is paint on the ground. However it is much clearer to motorists as they paint the entire line bright blue.
What I've noticed too is you get increasing returns the more you build. Given a scenario where a chosen route is covered 50% by acceptable infrastructure, it makes you think if it's worth taking a bike. Improve some strategic junctions and roads, and the coverage of acceptable infrastructure may increase to 90%, at which point it's a no brainer taking the bike.
The main Olympic Stadium is now used full time by a local Premier League football team, West Ham. The Olympic pool is now a public swimming pool anyone can go in for £5. Not sure about the other venues, but the whole surrounding area is a new park which is very well used. All in all, a pretty successful legacy.
Those areas cover probably max 0.1% of total land area in the USA.
Since these are some of the most sought after real estate areas, it seems these areas would be the preserve of the top 0.1%, or 1%. Back of the napkin maths here I'll admit.
The good news is there's still a huge chunk of the country where you would be considered wealthy by land value prices.
Why do you need to use Turbolinks, when you can just do a normal page load, and set the correct cache headers for your javascript bundles, to stop the browser re-downloading the same script.
What are your reasons for declining to opt-out, out of interest?
I looked into this law (the actual wording of the law itself even) and found it to be mostly harmless. I also came across the wording which nullifies the entire regulation from being enforced if you opt-out after an introduction, which happens in 99% of cases, so I wasn't too worried.
I'm not wholly informed here, but just by using common sense, I can only imagine we're talking fractions of a percent for brake pad and tyre pollution, so I wouldn't pick that hill to die on personally.