Well it is interesting in so far as knowing when the companies think they need to have human operators still.

Actually, having a licensed human operator ready to take over is a legal precondition for putting an autonomous car on the road (in all US states where they're legal at all).

You missed the point because you were too busy being smart.

But also, there's no plot hole for which no moderately credible explanation can't be concocted after the fact.

Prepare for another culture-shock, my dear passport-less American. Tokyo has competing privately-owned subway lines. Japan's wonderful highspeed trains are privately-owned too.

Which shock would this be, exactly? Major American cities used to have competing privately-owned commuter rail lines as well -- mostly torn down in the first half of the 1900s in favor of the highway model. This is by no means a surprise to anyone who knows even local transportation history.

If a government is doing it, it can not be smart...

You lecture me about fallacies, and then pull out that?! I find it hard to believe that you're actually interested in making a good-faith attempt at a meeting of the minds.

I had to read that twice to make sure it wasn't a Chuck Norris statement.

(lest see, how liberals who like to say that "you have rights for your opinion" and then mumble "but only, if we agree" assholes are going to react :)

Since you asked -- having a right to an opinion doesn't mean having a right to be protected from social consequences from your actions taken in airing that opinion.

Which is to say -- you're allowed to be an ass in public. Other people are allowed to be an ass to you in public as well; such is the market of public ideas. Mistaking people who don't want to be friends with you / listen to you / do business with you in response to your positions with people who would censor you (that is, invoke government action in response to your speech or act to make make that speech illegal) is a mistake.

You might ponder what it means that you believe in what you're saying enough to shout it from the world only from a position of anonymity (or, in Cito's case, pseudonymity). If there are people you respect for holding their convictions, did they do likewise?

So, in addition to "affordable" housing, in your ideal world, the poor will also be provided (by someone) with "affordable" Priuses?

Perhaps you've heard of this thing called "transit"?

Which, when done right, gets used by everyone, not just the poor. It was not so long ago a culture shock for me, as a Texan, when my (New-York-based) CEO would take the subway; now, as a transplant to Chicago, I'm very much happier not owning a car at all; my work is a 10-minute walk (hooray for urban high-rise living!), Costco a 20-minute bike ride (hooray for cargo bikes!), my more distant friends in town (or the corporate office, if I need to visit it for some reason) a $2.50, 40-minute train ride, during which my time is free to read, make notes, or otherwise do as I please.

Back to point -- no, setting up your urban environment in such a way that the poor need to drive expensive-to-maintain, expensive-to-fuel vehicles a long distance is not a necessity. Transit systems are subsidized at a higher rate than roads, but not by as much as you might think -- use taxes on highways are under 50% of their costs -- and adding capacity to a roadway system in an urban environment is prohibitively expensive -- particularly compared to adding capacity to preexisting urban rail. And if you look at the economic payoff from that subsidy -- by way of increasing folks' access to jobs -- it's an extremely clear win.

Smart urban planning -- to avoid the need for commutes in the first place by making housing as dense, and nearby to shopping and employment, as possible -- is, of course, even better.

(Back on the "expensive" part of long commutes -- you might find The True Cost of Commuting a worthwhile read, in terms of putting some actual numbers into play).

Do they also use cell phones that use different browsers than the ones we use here? because on my cell phone the "mobile" website is NEVER the right choice for viewing any webpage, the full site always does a much better job.

Those sites tend to be ones where they skipped making a useful desktop version and only made a crippled mobile version and called it their website. Many very large corporations think this is the way to go these days, but it doesn't make for a better site.

The correct answer is to go the other way, make only a fully functional desktop site, and let mobile users use it without blocking them with crippled "mobile" sites, broken apps, etc.

Don't worry, google are actively striving for feature parity between their mobile and desktop sites. The features that are currently on desktop but not on mobile are quickly being removed to give you a proper mobile experience on your 30" 4k desktop monitor....

apparently slashdot's mobile site passes their tests, and I click "request desktop site" every single time so I can get a useable experience on my phone.

I use chrome on my phone, I've never found a way to get this option to stick, and I'm awful tired of clicking it for every website I visit!

I'm also sick of the sites that ignore that flag and continue to show me their broken useless "mobile" site instead of letting me see the real one.

And that's what makes this so ridiculous. Companies are being rewarded for breaking their websites by offering a useless "mobile version" (like slashdot does) and penalized for a website that just works on every browser ever made.

Slashdot isn't an example of google being lenient, it's an example of google looking for all the wrong things.

What I want google to do is penalize any website that even claims to have a mobile version of it's website, and reward the ones that don't force me to use a substandard site when I visit from my full blown computer that just happens to be in the palm of my hand instead of on a desk.

Except that Google is completely wrong on it's criteria. I built a page on my own server, for only my own use. The page is what I use as my homepage on my phone and has everything I need at my fingertips. I love it on my phone, but also use it on my PC. Google tells me it's not "mobile friendly" and offers me a whole bunch of suggestions on how I can make it "better". Every one of those suggestions would make it useless for me.

Mobile websites, as a general rule, need to completely die. The only one I have ever found that I prefer over the desktop version is XKCD (because I don't have to hover to read the real joke) Of course I use the mobile version of that site on my desktop too. Every other site, I do my best to convince the site to load the desktop version on my phone so I can actually use it.

Interestingly enough, XKCD just happens to be the only website I ever go to where I prefer to use the mobile version instead of the desktop version (on both my phone and PC)
every other site I try my best to avoid the mobile version as it is usually just a crippled version of the site when the full site works just fine on my phone.

I'd rather google did the reverse and penalized sites that have a mobile version, preferring sites that just work in any browser.