Metrik Minute

I recently heard a conversation on the train about MUNI officers citing
people and how this is unfair during hard economic times.  The
peoples’ emotions placed the frustration on the increase in citation
officers. They complained about the immorality of it, esecially during

difficult times like these.

MUNI train - K/T Line Inbound

The conversation started among the disgruntled riders because a couple
of MUNI officers stepped onto the train to check tickets. Immediately
following their appearance a dude tried to abandon ship, only to be
quickly questioned and caught by the agents of paranoia and tickets.
The people on the train got all flustered when they saw that the
agents were actually citing the poor young misunderstood gentleman,
trying his best to just make his way through this tough and merciless
city.  you could see it in his eyes and moving mouth the desperation
to talk his way out of the situation, employing empathy, economic and
minority status, and stupidity.  That or he’s an economist, just like
all of all of us, who calculated his risks by not paying the fare, got
caught, and now is paying his dues because his investment just failed.
To me, this is the Free Market in its purest – young man calculates
his risk, takes a chance, and hopes for the best, relying on his
skills to get him by. Unfortunately, his skills weren’t sharp enough
to out pace the speed of the MUNI centurians.
But such is the “Market”, and MUNI understands this Market, so they
protect their own investment by hiring the enforcers to make sure
their investments in public transportion pay off. It makes sense to
me; I mean, wouldn’t you protect your business if people were stealing
from it or not paying you for your services?

It was him, he did it!!

Here is my assessment of why more enforcement officers have been hired
to enter random trains and buses and make sure people are paying their
tickets.  Times are tough economically. Gas, bills, and debt are up
while jobs, wages, and work hours are down.  The not-so-rich are hit
hardest.  More people are taking public transport instead of driving to save on gas,
toll, and other travel costs.  MUNI ridership is up.  But at the same
time, right in the mix of the downward economic spiral is the cycle of
violence, theft, and general lawlessness.  One of those examples is
the calculated risk of people getting away with not paying the MUNI
fare.  It makes sense because MUNI is notoriously easy to get onto
without paying the fare – just hop on at an above-ground station
during a busy time and blend in with the chaos of the people getting
off.  Easy to pull off, relatively low risk, or used to be, and you
save what is soon going to be two dollars per ride, and during these
times all savings add up.

But see it from MUNI’s point of view; Ridership is up, therefore there
is a demand for more drivers, which meeans that there is a need to pay
people more.  And while theoretically the need to pay for more drivers
and train operators should be offset by more fare from the increase in
riders, it is not because people are cheating the rules and are freeloading.

This is the beauty of the Free Market system – people, organizations,
and businesses can offset the risk in their situations with various
solutions, in this instance hiring more security to make sure people
pay.  The expense of the security just happens to be paid by the
cheaters of the system, and paid they are!.  I asked a security
officer on my way out of the station if he knew whether the policing
has been effective or not, if the revenue from the ridership has been
felt in the company, and what percentege of the revenue has been
coming from citations.  He said that while he wasn’t privy to all the
information on the inside, this program was indeed starting to show
results in terms of higher revenue, though he grumbled that very
little of it was seen by the workers.

That makes sense to me – MUNI has been in serious financial trouble
for a while and has been steadily raising rates.  At the end of this
month its raising its rates from $1.50 to $2.00 in an attempt at
stabilizing. It has been suffering quite a lot lately as city hall has
cut its funds due to a shortage of funds themselves.

This is Amazing. My mind is truly blown and my heart excited. I mean, this is a project of truly Magnetic, I mean Ionic, I mean ginormogantuan proportions. What is it you ask? Good question!

Shai Agassi, who has an impressive track record in both the tech and software fields, has started a new company called BetterPlace.  This company is in the business of electric vehicles, but not necessarily producing them or selling them.  The company is more focused on making electric vehicles viable.  How are they doing this you might ask? (gosh, you – my imaginary audience, sure ask a lot of questions.  Good thing I have a blog to answer them, eh?)

So his idea is to basically outsource the main problems of having an electric vehicle

• Electric Batteries only take you so far before you have to charge
• Charging so far does not have a wide enough infrastructure that people feel confident buying electric cars

He is creating a company that would take care of both of those problems in one fell swoop (I love saying that :)

Imagine driving a long distance on your electric vehicle and running low on juice.  Instead of shutting down for the night, pull into one of his shops in the future infrastructure he is creating, and swapping out your battery.  Yes, thats right, pull the drained one, stick in the freshly charged one, and you’re on the road in less time than it would take you to pump gas.

Now I know what you’re thinking (I RSS to your mind’s blog, in case you didn’t know) – that sounds expensive and complicated.  It sure does, but its not, so you’re wrong, so :P

His idea is that you own the car, but not the batteries that come with the car.  You lease/rent/borrow/steal those batteries from the company, treating batteries much like we treat gas now.  His network of stations owns the batteries, maintains them, makes sure they run, and switches them out for you.  The company takes care of the charging, swapping, and dealing with anything battery.  You own a car that is flexible to the kind of batteries it can take in, leaving room for competition for which company (gas station) you want to have swap batteries for you.

Exciting, isn’t it?  Well it is for me for two reasons

• the battery outsourcing market means that many companies now have the incentive to compete to make the best batteries, and I imagine if this takes off then industry standards will be adapted creating a lot of competition and variety
• competition and energy (<– no pun intended) in the battery market means that an energy supplying market has incentive to co-evolve with this.  That means more solar, or whatever form of renewable energy is great for the region, is going to be needed, and lots of it.

An additional benefit is that now cars can outsource their battery function to companies that do that really well, and can just focus on making great cars, or personal transportation pods.

I’m really freakin’ excited about this because of the implications.  If this works in Israel, where he plans to implement this, and where the government seems to be totally backing his play and removing all the obstackles, then this could have great implications for other countries, namely the U.S.

here is his interview with Yahoo

Alright, talk amongst yourselves.

Say helloW to Google Wave.  This new piece of open source software from Google is going to revolutionize many things. 
- Email
- Twitter
- Blogging
- Apps
- Digital Communication all over
- Wikis

This flexible app (coming soon) is going to have some of the following features:

• Open Source
• Real Time multiple person collaboration
• Easy images upload and edit (also live and multiple person at the same time)
• Embedded Search
• complete tagging, organization, and linking from wave to wave.  Take that, Wikipedia!
• Works in all Browsers
• Private/Public conversations
• Search, Text, and everything else updated withing seconds of creation, and you can see your friends type as they’re typing, SO NO MORE WAITING FOR A FRIEND TO PRESS “ENTER” TO SEE WHAT THEY’RE CHATTING!!!
• Amazing SpellCheck that learns from your habits
• autoblog function – also live updates

Look just check it out for yourself.  I think this will change how the world communicates yet again, and I think this is waaaaaaaay loads more awesome better than Twitter (and I make money teaching Twitter to people!)

The 1:20:11 demo is long, but worth it if you’re really interested.  However, you can also take my word that this is going to be awesome, and you can sign up here to be let know when it releases.