6 ms·

> By “convenient” they mean anonymous people on minimum wage clean up after you. Hey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do

> By “convenient” they mean anonymous people on minimum wage clean up after you. Hey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do worthwhile work. That's how jobs, small businesses, and economic growth happen. > As was quickly pointed out by numerous people this is basically a “bus”. Just, you know, without the poor people. Likewise, this is a good idea. People sharing rides in smaller buses that can service different routes is good. Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more. It gets everyone where they need to go with fewer cars (and therefore pollution and traffic).

dtech 9y ago
> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more I asked someone from my local bus service once. Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service, as the only major saving was fuel cost and the extra services don't provide enough revenue to offset the employee cost (otherwise they could service it with the large normal busses). So basically this becomes viable with increased ticket prices or self-driving busses. The technology isn't quite there yet for the latter, and governments don't like price differentiation in bus lines. * Maintenance cost per line might go slightly down, but apparantly overal it's more expensive because they need to maintain technicians and parts for more models.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > So basically this becomes viable with... Well, some startups think they can make it viable. Either they can or can't, but making fun of them for reinventing "buses" isn't going to help. Likely any company in this space is looking to as many users as possible while breaking even, banking on self-driving tech developing in the meantime. When the vans drive themselves, the economics will change drastically.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    When your biggest expense is employees, it's obvious that you're not going to get anywhere without increasing revenue or decreasing # of employees.
    - brandelune 9y ago
      Decreasing employees, or reducing wages, or renouncing labor regulations that ensure people make a living, etc.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      That's when you don't hire employees but entrepreneurs, you know, gig economy so you only need to pay them for however much rides they manage to get instead of a living wage like old fashioned bus drivers get.
  - kharms 9y ago
    A datapoint: there was a startup in Boston named Bridj that folded because it turned out to not be a viable model.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      ...facebook wasn't the first social network. To be clear, I'm not arguing it's a great idea. I'm arguing that it's not worth dismissing the work as ludicrous. The fact that I'm arguing this on HN of all places makes me wonder what happened to the attitudes of hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs. Let people do something dumb and fail. It's OK to do that sometimes. If it's dumb, don't invest in it.
- snowAbstraction 9y ago
  Two comments: 1. Something between taxis and buses could theoretically be viable. 2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible.
  - seszett 9y ago
    > 2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible. I have never seen that anywhere in Europe or Canada, does that mean there are two different tickets with different prices, and you have to have both if don't know exactly when you're going to take your bus? Also, I wonder how it works with a monthly or yearly pass.
    - fishnchips 9y ago
      FWIW Thameslink does it in the U.K. for one-way tickets.
    - snowAbstraction 9y ago
      In the Twin Cites in Minnesota, USA https://www.metrotransit.org/fares-passes https://www.metrotransit.org/fares-passes has rush hours surcharge for most buses and light rail as well as more expensive express buses.
    - wastedhours 9y ago
      I've seen it in a few places, and it's common on the London Underground where you have a peak/off-peak fare - you're charged for pay as you go and it's your responsibility to know which fare you're going to be charged for the journey. It's also common on the trains, where most have a peak price (usually only in the morning). For season tickets (monthly, yearly), all fares are usually included (i.e. your pass allows you to travel any time, very rare to find an "off peak only" seasonal pass, although some people, like OAPs have them).
      - 9y ago
- thriftwy 9y ago
  > Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service There's a huge number of dollar van systems all around the world, they're usually profitable, sometimes profitable enough to wage wars against competitors. Public buses: Big, amenities, lose public money. Private minibuses: Small, rough, earn profit. Moreover, they can totally turn the table with regards of quality of life. Village where my granma lived had a bus from the city maybe once per for hours. Now it has some bus still, but also a minibus every 15 minutes! That's a game changer.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    Is there anywhere to compare the wages, credentialing, and insurance of those drivers to those of a city's bus system? It's easy to earn a profit when you don't pay taxes or have to worry about liability insurance.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      You say "credentials and insurance" I hear "red tape and rent-seeking". UPD: But yes, they do have some paperwork. Its relevance is open to the debate. However, same applies to any paper coming out of public bus system.
      - barrkel 9y ago
        You say "red tape and rent-seeking", and I hear "fly-by-night operators, fraudsters and scammers".
        thriftwy 9y ago
        How bad your police should be before you can be profitably scammed by a bus?
        Tyrek 9y ago
        Police aren't there to prevent the first offense - only to clean up afterwards. Regulation (read: licensing, etc) is more pre-emptive in heading off some of these issues.
- technotony 9y ago
  > So basically this becomes viable with increased ticket prices or self-driving busses. The technology isn't quite there yet for the latter No, but it will get there so proving the business model/market demand now then buying the tech when it's ready might be worth a vc investing in.
- baybal2 9y ago
  Uber for buses anyone? Back in early nineties in Russia, when the public transport system ceased to exist in almost all second tier cities and below. People were relying in people driving on mini-van taxis that were driving "approximate routes" where the driver was changing his route at will to get more passengers. You was signalling to the driver by hand to be picked up, telling where you go, and he will tell if his current route passes by that place.
  - lykr0n 9y ago
    https://www.chariot.com/ https://www.chariot.com/ seems to try and do this. Get enough people going in the same direction, and they setup a route for you.
- archagon 9y ago
  I was just in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the city is chock-full of these tiny taxi-buses called "marshrutki". You can use the regular public transit card and everything — costs the same as a regular bus IIRC. Seems to work great and has since Soviet times.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Like an Isuzu van[1] with 5 rows of seats? In Greece I think they're called "dolmush" (meaning 'stuffed'), in Kenya "mtatus" (meaning 'worry'). 1 - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isuzu_Elf_Route-van_005.JPG https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isuzu_Elf_Route-va...
    - fapjacks 9y ago
      In southeast Asia: Jitney or Jeepney.
  - wruza 9y ago
    It has to be resurrection of the idea in [probably] better way. These marshrutki were prohibited/heavily restructured long time ago, because everything was wrong with them: drugged drivers, half-working brakes, non-closing doors, refuelling with passengers inside, overloading, uncontrolled cash. These still appear in smaller cities (in much better state), but it is surprising for me to hear about it in SPB. Not a St.Petersburg citizen though, maybe they managed it right way from the start, but these minibuses appeared long since SU (assuming we’re talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZelle ). Transporting system of SU was a thing that I really hated in my partially soviet childhood. “Let’s go to ...” was one of worst things I could hear.
- selimthegrim 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_van https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_van
rayiner 9y ago
> Hey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do worthwhile work. That's how jobs, small businesses, and economic growth happen. It should be at least a little stigmatized. Having upper middle class people be able to afford lots of labor intensive services is a sign of an unhealthy society with too large an income gap.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  In a developing economy like China or India, it does provide a good opportunity to transfer wealth from rich urban dwellers to poor rural residents. It isn’t clear how development could happen otherwise if some weren’t allowed to get rich first, and then pull up the lower classes. As a developed economy, much fewer people can afford house keepers in the USA. Our cleaning tech is better to compensate.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    Minimum wage doesn’t pull anybody up. It is just barely enough to let them survive.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      Nobody is mandating minimum wage here. And housekeeper is not a dead end job. People can small businesses or use good references and clean records (i.e., proven to be trustworthy) to move into all kinds of jobs. Also cleaning houses is great work for responsible teenagers. They don't have to pay mortgages or anything.
      - murph-almighty 9y ago
        At least by me, housekeeping is usually paid in cash and presumably under the table. It's not really going to help Uncle Sam, but I imagine it's helping people who need it stay afloat.
      - meheleventyone 9y ago
        It is when the housekeeping itself becomes part of the gig economy.
saas_co_de 9y ago
The interesting thing is that public transit systems are extremely inefficient. TriMet (Portland, OR) which has a modern mixed bus/light-rail system gets only 20% of expenses from fairs (http://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2018-adopted-budget.pdf http://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2018-adopted-budget.pdf) That is with charging $5/day capped at $100/month, so if fares were to cover the entire cost, the cost would be $500/month. So, public transit provides a bare bones, horribly uncomfortable, and inconvenient transit experience, at a cost that is only slightly lower than a car. And public transit systems are too inefficient to operate outside of high traffic hours at all. If someone in tech can figure out how to offer a shared transit system that people will actually pay for without being forced to that would be a major innovation. No public transit system has ever done it.
- scandox 9y ago
  > No public transit system has ever done it. Wow. Ever? In the history of mankind or just in modern history? Please elaborate, preferably at book length.
- camgunz 9y ago
  Mass transit is generally funded progressively, i.e. people with higher incomes pay proportionately more (via taxes) than those with lower incomes. Are you really arguing to make it regressive? There are no virtues to a regressive structure unless you have some serious animus against lower income people.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    Not arguing anything. Just presenting some facts about the actual system costs and pointing out that there is room for innovation.
- zeveb 9y ago
  In fairness, private transit (e.g. cars) is also extremely inefficient, with gas taxes only paying for roughly half of the cost of roads, signage, lighting, maintenance &c. And then there's the cost in land value of parking lots, the cost to society of car accidents (until very recently, more people died due to car accidents than to guns), the emotional cost of being stuck in a little vehicle for hours upon hours a week. I do wish that public transit were nicer & cleaner. Something like PRT sounds just about perfect.
cisanti 9y ago
The guardian is notoriously left wing newspaper and it will always find a reason to blame all the problems in society for people who are better off.
- Viliam1234 9y ago
  I could forgive the political bias, if the news would try to describe reality and only... you know, focus on certain aspects of reality more, and certain other aspects less. That is, if they would let politics influence their priorities, but not their facts. (Having such newspapers is still suboptimal, but as long as no one is lying, you could at least try to get a more nuanced vision of the world by buying multiple newspapers with competing points of view.) However, Guardian already goes beyond that. > While food replacement beverages have been around for a while in the guise of things like Ensure or Slimfast, they’ve traditionally been targeted at older people and women, that is, people who are basically irrelevant to “tech bros”. Soylent, on the other hand, was made by and designed for young men in tech and had cool branding. Did this scribbler even read the web pages of Slimfast and Soylent? I mean, in the age of internet and google, it should not be that hard to get the most basic information at least approximately right. Unless one is not even trying, and instead optimizes for outrage... The essential difference between Slimfast and Soylent is not that the former is "old women's food" and the latter is "evil white cishet tech bro food". The difference is the former is advertised as something that makes you slim, fast. It's in the very name, how can you miss that, Guardian journalist? And if you look at the box, it says "lose weight, clinically proven". So, you just have to be slightly smarter than the average Guardian journalist to find out that Slimfast is supposed to make you lose weight. Meanwhile Soylent tries to be "a complete blend of everything the body needs", a "complete nutrition" with "zero preparation". This is not a well-guarded secret, I am just reading information from their title web page I found using google. So, the point is that these two products try to achieve a completely different goal. It's not about tech bros refusing to eat food for women, as Guardian suggests. If a newspaper cannot get even this basic information right, the only reason to read it is to get your daily dose of fresh outrage. No thanks.
  - peatmoss 9y ago
    It’s an opinion article, which obviously has an axe to grind. The standards of journalism are, were, and ever will be different for opinion than for reporting. The point of this article was to poke fun at the sometimes silly tech culture. Also, the comparison to Slimfast isn’t that egregious. I mean, Slimfast was always marketed as a way for busy people to conveniently replace meals with a “nutritious” substitute (according to some hand-waving standard of nutrition). Seems a lot like Soylent to me. The Guardian’s reporting is often excellent. Judging the paper on the perceived slights of an opinion piece is just misunderstanding how news works.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more Unions. This will have to wait for self-driving buses, though even then deployment is unlikely.
- pc86 9y ago
  Why don't unions like smaller vehicles? Smaller busses = fewer people per bus = more drivers.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    New York City bus drivers earn $21 to $32 per hour [1]. Bus tickets cost $2.75 to $6.50 [2]. That means a bus needs 3 to 12 passengers' fees, every hour, solely to pay for the driver. [1] https://nypost.com/2016/03/13/nycs-highest-paid-bus-driver-doubled-his-salary-with-ot/ https://nypost.com/2016/03/13/nycs-highest-paid-bus-driver-d... [2] http://web.mta.info/metrocard/mcgtreng.htm http://web.mta.info/metrocard/mcgtreng.htm
Veratyr 9y ago
> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more. It gets everyone where they need to go with fewer cars (and therefore pollution and traffic). I've seen this in Russia and Turkey and it works pretty well. My wife's city (small, distant from Moscow) has a few routes and I don't think we ever waited more than 5 minutes for a bus.
JBlue42 9y ago
We have slightly smaller, limited route buses in the DASH system here in LA. About 50c up front or 33c (or less) bought in advance.

dtech 9y ago

> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more I asked someone from my local bus service once. Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service, as the only major saving was fuel cost and the extra services don't provide enough revenue to offset the employee cost (otherwise they could service it with the large normal busses). So basically this becomes viable with increased ticket prices or self-driving busses. The technology isn't quite there yet for the latter, and governments don't like price differentiation in bus lines. * Maintenance cost per line might go slightly down, but apparantly overal it's more expensive because they need to maintain technicians and parts for more models.

humanrebar 9y ago
> So basically this becomes viable with... Well, some startups think they can make it viable. Either they can or can't, but making fun of them for reinventing "buses" isn't going to help. Likely any company in this space is looking to as many users as possible while breaking even, banking on self-driving tech developing in the meantime. When the vans drive themselves, the economics will change drastically.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  When your biggest expense is employees, it's obvious that you're not going to get anywhere without increasing revenue or decreasing # of employees.
  - brandelune 9y ago
    Decreasing employees, or reducing wages, or renouncing labor regulations that ensure people make a living, etc.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    That's when you don't hire employees but entrepreneurs, you know, gig economy so you only need to pay them for however much rides they manage to get instead of a living wage like old fashioned bus drivers get.
- kharms 9y ago
  A datapoint: there was a startup in Boston named Bridj that folded because it turned out to not be a viable model.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    ...facebook wasn't the first social network. To be clear, I'm not arguing it's a great idea. I'm arguing that it's not worth dismissing the work as ludicrous. The fact that I'm arguing this on HN of all places makes me wonder what happened to the attitudes of hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs. Let people do something dumb and fail. It's OK to do that sometimes. If it's dumb, don't invest in it.
snowAbstraction 9y ago
Two comments: 1. Something between taxis and buses could theoretically be viable. 2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible.
- seszett 9y ago
  > 2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible. I have never seen that anywhere in Europe or Canada, does that mean there are two different tickets with different prices, and you have to have both if don't know exactly when you're going to take your bus? Also, I wonder how it works with a monthly or yearly pass.
  - fishnchips 9y ago
    FWIW Thameslink does it in the U.K. for one-way tickets.
  - snowAbstraction 9y ago
    In the Twin Cites in Minnesota, USA https://www.metrotransit.org/fares-passes https://www.metrotransit.org/fares-passes has rush hours surcharge for most buses and light rail as well as more expensive express buses.
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    I've seen it in a few places, and it's common on the London Underground where you have a peak/off-peak fare - you're charged for pay as you go and it's your responsibility to know which fare you're going to be charged for the journey. It's also common on the trains, where most have a peak price (usually only in the morning). For season tickets (monthly, yearly), all fares are usually included (i.e. your pass allows you to travel any time, very rare to find an "off peak only" seasonal pass, although some people, like OAPs have them).
    - 9y ago
thriftwy 9y ago
> Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service There's a huge number of dollar van systems all around the world, they're usually profitable, sometimes profitable enough to wage wars against competitors. Public buses: Big, amenities, lose public money. Private minibuses: Small, rough, earn profit. Moreover, they can totally turn the table with regards of quality of life. Village where my granma lived had a bus from the city maybe once per for hours. Now it has some bus still, but also a minibus every 15 minutes! That's a game changer.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  Is there anywhere to compare the wages, credentialing, and insurance of those drivers to those of a city's bus system? It's easy to earn a profit when you don't pay taxes or have to worry about liability insurance.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    You say "credentials and insurance" I hear "red tape and rent-seeking". UPD: But yes, they do have some paperwork. Its relevance is open to the debate. However, same applies to any paper coming out of public bus system.
    - barrkel 9y ago
      You say "red tape and rent-seeking", and I hear "fly-by-night operators, fraudsters and scammers".
      - thriftwy 9y ago
        How bad your police should be before you can be profitably scammed by a bus?
        Tyrek 9y ago
        Police aren't there to prevent the first offense - only to clean up afterwards. Regulation (read: licensing, etc) is more pre-emptive in heading off some of these issues.
technotony 9y ago
> So basically this becomes viable with increased ticket prices or self-driving busses. The technology isn't quite there yet for the latter No, but it will get there so proving the business model/market demand now then buying the tech when it's ready might be worth a vc investing in.
baybal2 9y ago
Uber for buses anyone? Back in early nineties in Russia, when the public transport system ceased to exist in almost all second tier cities and below. People were relying in people driving on mini-van taxis that were driving "approximate routes" where the driver was changing his route at will to get more passengers. You was signalling to the driver by hand to be picked up, telling where you go, and he will tell if his current route passes by that place.
- lykr0n 9y ago
  https://www.chariot.com/ https://www.chariot.com/ seems to try and do this. Get enough people going in the same direction, and they setup a route for you.
archagon 9y ago
I was just in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the city is chock-full of these tiny taxi-buses called "marshrutki". You can use the regular public transit card and everything — costs the same as a regular bus IIRC. Seems to work great and has since Soviet times.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Like an Isuzu van[1] with 5 rows of seats? In Greece I think they're called "dolmush" (meaning 'stuffed'), in Kenya "mtatus" (meaning 'worry'). 1 - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isuzu_Elf_Route-van_005.JPG https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isuzu_Elf_Route-va...
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    In southeast Asia: Jitney or Jeepney.
- wruza 9y ago
  It has to be resurrection of the idea in [probably] better way. These marshrutki were prohibited/heavily restructured long time ago, because everything was wrong with them: drugged drivers, half-working brakes, non-closing doors, refuelling with passengers inside, overloading, uncontrolled cash. These still appear in smaller cities (in much better state), but it is surprising for me to hear about it in SPB. Not a St.Petersburg citizen though, maybe they managed it right way from the start, but these minibuses appeared long since SU (assuming we’re talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZelle ). Transporting system of SU was a thing that I really hated in my partially soviet childhood. “Let’s go to ...” was one of worst things I could hear.
selimthegrim 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_van https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_van

rayiner 9y ago

> Hey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do worthwhile work. That's how jobs, small businesses, and economic growth happen. It should be at least a little stigmatized. Having upper middle class people be able to afford lots of labor intensive services is a sign of an unhealthy society with too large an income gap.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
In a developing economy like China or India, it does provide a good opportunity to transfer wealth from rich urban dwellers to poor rural residents. It isn’t clear how development could happen otherwise if some weren’t allowed to get rich first, and then pull up the lower classes. As a developed economy, much fewer people can afford house keepers in the USA. Our cleaning tech is better to compensate.
- falcolas 9y ago
  Minimum wage doesn’t pull anybody up. It is just barely enough to let them survive.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Nobody is mandating minimum wage here. And housekeeper is not a dead end job. People can small businesses or use good references and clean records (i.e., proven to be trustworthy) to move into all kinds of jobs. Also cleaning houses is great work for responsible teenagers. They don't have to pay mortgages or anything.
    - murph-almighty 9y ago
      At least by me, housekeeping is usually paid in cash and presumably under the table. It's not really going to help Uncle Sam, but I imagine it's helping people who need it stay afloat.
    - meheleventyone 9y ago
      It is when the housekeeping itself becomes part of the gig economy.

saas_co_de 9y ago

The interesting thing is that public transit systems are extremely inefficient. TriMet (Portland, OR) which has a modern mixed bus/light-rail system gets only 20% of expenses from fairs (http://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2018-adopted-budget.pdf http://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2018-adopted-budget.pdf) That is with charging $5/day capped at $100/month, so if fares were to cover the entire cost, the cost would be $500/month. So, public transit provides a bare bones, horribly uncomfortable, and inconvenient transit experience, at a cost that is only slightly lower than a car. And public transit systems are too inefficient to operate outside of high traffic hours at all. If someone in tech can figure out how to offer a shared transit system that people will actually pay for without being forced to that would be a major innovation. No public transit system has ever done it.

scandox 9y ago
> No public transit system has ever done it. Wow. Ever? In the history of mankind or just in modern history? Please elaborate, preferably at book length.
camgunz 9y ago
Mass transit is generally funded progressively, i.e. people with higher incomes pay proportionately more (via taxes) than those with lower incomes. Are you really arguing to make it regressive? There are no virtues to a regressive structure unless you have some serious animus against lower income people.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  Not arguing anything. Just presenting some facts about the actual system costs and pointing out that there is room for innovation.
zeveb 9y ago
In fairness, private transit (e.g. cars) is also extremely inefficient, with gas taxes only paying for roughly half of the cost of roads, signage, lighting, maintenance &c. And then there's the cost in land value of parking lots, the cost to society of car accidents (until very recently, more people died due to car accidents than to guns), the emotional cost of being stuck in a little vehicle for hours upon hours a week. I do wish that public transit were nicer & cleaner. Something like PRT sounds just about perfect.

cisanti 9y ago

The guardian is notoriously left wing newspaper and it will always find a reason to blame all the problems in society for people who are better off.

Viliam1234 9y ago
I could forgive the political bias, if the news would try to describe reality and only... you know, focus on certain aspects of reality more, and certain other aspects less. That is, if they would let politics influence their priorities, but not their facts. (Having such newspapers is still suboptimal, but as long as no one is lying, you could at least try to get a more nuanced vision of the world by buying multiple newspapers with competing points of view.) However, Guardian already goes beyond that. > While food replacement beverages have been around for a while in the guise of things like Ensure or Slimfast, they’ve traditionally been targeted at older people and women, that is, people who are basically irrelevant to “tech bros”. Soylent, on the other hand, was made by and designed for young men in tech and had cool branding. Did this scribbler even read the web pages of Slimfast and Soylent? I mean, in the age of internet and google, it should not be that hard to get the most basic information at least approximately right. Unless one is not even trying, and instead optimizes for outrage... The essential difference between Slimfast and Soylent is not that the former is "old women's food" and the latter is "evil white cishet tech bro food". The difference is the former is advertised as something that makes you slim, fast. It's in the very name, how can you miss that, Guardian journalist? And if you look at the box, it says "lose weight, clinically proven". So, you just have to be slightly smarter than the average Guardian journalist to find out that Slimfast is supposed to make you lose weight. Meanwhile Soylent tries to be "a complete blend of everything the body needs", a "complete nutrition" with "zero preparation". This is not a well-guarded secret, I am just reading information from their title web page I found using google. So, the point is that these two products try to achieve a completely different goal. It's not about tech bros refusing to eat food for women, as Guardian suggests. If a newspaper cannot get even this basic information right, the only reason to read it is to get your daily dose of fresh outrage. No thanks.
- peatmoss 9y ago
  It’s an opinion article, which obviously has an axe to grind. The standards of journalism are, were, and ever will be different for opinion than for reporting. The point of this article was to poke fun at the sometimes silly tech culture. Also, the comparison to Slimfast isn’t that egregious. I mean, Slimfast was always marketed as a way for busy people to conveniently replace meals with a “nutritious” substitute (according to some hand-waving standard of nutrition). Seems a lot like Soylent to me. The Guardian’s reporting is often excellent. Judging the paper on the perceived slights of an opinion piece is just misunderstanding how news works.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more Unions. This will have to wait for self-driving buses, though even then deployment is unlikely.

pc86 9y ago
Why don't unions like smaller vehicles? Smaller busses = fewer people per bus = more drivers.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  New York City bus drivers earn $21 to $32 per hour [1]. Bus tickets cost $2.75 to $6.50 [2]. That means a bus needs 3 to 12 passengers' fees, every hour, solely to pay for the driver. [1] https://nypost.com/2016/03/13/nycs-highest-paid-bus-driver-doubled-his-salary-with-ot/ https://nypost.com/2016/03/13/nycs-highest-paid-bus-driver-d... [2] http://web.mta.info/metrocard/mcgtreng.htm http://web.mta.info/metrocard/mcgtreng.htm

Veratyr 9y ago

> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more. It gets everyone where they need to go with fewer cars (and therefore pollution and traffic). I've seen this in Russia and Turkey and it works pretty well. My wife's city (small, distant from Moscow) has a few routes and I don't think we ever waited more than 5 minutes for a bus.

JBlue42 9y ago

We have slightly smaller, limited route buses in the DASH system here in LA. About 50c up front or 33c (or less) bought in advance.