Comment Re:Well Duh (Score 1) 454
Is there a "Well Duh" tag somewhere?
It's like late night informercials. You might see right through this, but someone is buying it.
Is there a "Well Duh" tag somewhere?
It's like late night informercials. You might see right through this, but someone is buying it.
[...] the crash would be listed as "alcohol involved" and "speed related", despite neither of those being the cause.
Neither driver would be intoxicated.
That's a lie. I've not seen anyone state that, and certainly not me.
In my original quote which you first replied to:
If we are still going to have human drivers, then we will need more road capacity, more safety feature, heavier and more expensive cars to withstand accidents, etc.
Moving on:
Most of the rest of us are pointing out the benefit that it will greatly increase road capacity.
Unless it doesn't actually do that.
That's because you can be unsafe and not crash. You are defining "unsafe" as someone who has crashed. Not as someone driving poorly and unsafely.
No, to me "unsafe" means elevated risk of harm from an activity beyond the expectations for that activity. So one important way to study what is unsafe is to look at what sort of groups or behaviors are involved in harmful consequences.
You have very high expectations for risk from automobile accidents, but why should the rest of us share your expectations?
I'll present a US-centric case and examine mortality rates (since those are well documented). If the only way we could die was by accidents or injuries (including suicides and homicides), then we would have an average life expectancy (once you get past the dangerous years of childhood) of almost 1700 years (due to a 60 deaths per 100,000 people in the US). That increases to roughly 2500 years, if we exclude intentional causes of death (40 deaths per 100,000 people). Of this, motor vehicle deaths make up 10.8 deaths per 100,000 people. So if we could eliminate that as a cause of death we'd increase human life expectancy by a considerable amount 300 years for the former case and 800 for the latter.
But we don't live in that sort of world where it makes sense to go hardcore on reducing highway deaths. Instead we live in a world where the US has a death rate of 800 per 100,000 people and even complete elimination of highway deaths won't have much effect on our lifespan since most deaths are due to illnesses that come upon us when we get older.
Second, there is this unwarranted assertion that we can make self-driving vehicles substantially safer than any human driver. You present no argument for this other than to assert that the best of human drivers are "unsafe". However, if that were true, then you would expect that the most unsafe drivers, the drunk drivers and those who who can't maintain a valid driver's license would have a far smaller share of the highway deaths than they actually do. Everyone should be contributing significantly, not just the very worst.
Our progression in the last 100 years is more than 1000 fold all previous years combined so imagine what we can do in the next 1000 years.
Will there even be an organism recognizable as human in another 1000 years? There's more than one way for humanity to cease to exist.
The number of unsafe licensed drivers exceeds the number safe human drivers by many orders of magnitudes.
Probably "exceeds" by -90% (yes, negative). I gather somewhere between a third and half of all US highway deaths involve people driving while intoxicated or driving without a valid driver's license. That's not a large portion of the drivers in the US.
Ah, so it's all about having the freedom to drive, not about the number of dead people, safety, efficiency, or the "best" solution. If Khallow can't drive down the road naked, smeared in jello, then it's a bad solution.
Freedom is an important part of that and yes, I do consider safety much less important than freedom. But I also think the safety and lane capacity arguments are way overplayed here.
The other is pure economic pragmatism, such patterns can only work so long before you cut off your feet. They tend to make a few people richer in the short term but as more and more companies/industries do it they start finding their customer base evaporating too, at which point earnings get eaten from the bottom up.
There are two things to note here. First, developed world labor is going to experience that competition no matter what is done. Second, customer base isn't evaporating in the developing world. Those economies are doing just fine.
Climate on the other hand measures changes over vast periods of time, 50 years, 100 years, 10,000 years, etc. Those are easier to guess because they're at a global "macro" level.
And they're harder to guess because one has to wait 50, 100, or 10,000 years to see if the predictions come true. Climate predictions don't suffer from the chaotic behavior of weather, but they do suffer from systemic bias of the climate modelers.
Superfund is actually an example of lack of strong environmental law.
No. Try again. Just because it's not effective in outcome doesn't mean it's not strong environmental law. And once again, this has nothing to do with the status of corporations in the US.
Every attempt to escape Earth's gravity well, every satellite placed in orbit, every trip to the moon, every science package launched into space, every orbital space station placed in orbit, every lander sent to Mars, and all the other space engineering research and theoretical physics research being conducted by some of the brightest minds on the planet will eventually lead to the new ideas and technologies needed to successfully mine asteroids, colonize the solar system, and expand space exploration.
Unless, of course, it doesn't. I figure most of this tech will have to be reinvented by whoever actually does stuff in space. That means I don't think this stuff is particularly useful in anyone's lifetime, much less our own.
Why is the US government, through NASA, funding projects to mine asteroids when the legal status of such objects places them in them as international heritage???
There is no such legal status by most of the serious players in space, particularly, the US, Russia, or China.
The bottom line here, this is not something that can be negotiated by governments, each individual has a stake in this.
The individual doesn't have a stake. Possession is nine tenths the law. And there is no legal or power projection infrastructure for the individual to make a claim on any pebbles in space. This type of bullshit claim is easy to handle by just ignoring it.
Either way you cut it, it's just another tax that gets paid by the end consumer, a big fat windfall for consolidated revenue.
Except that it isn't a tax.
I think a much better way would be for companies to bid based on the value they bring to the end consumer public
Which the current method provides. After all, why would the company or its end consumers pay this "tax", if a valuable service isn't being provided?
"Show business is just like high school, except you get paid." - Martin Mull
