There isn't a CEO on the planet who would allow the costs to go down over time, because it's bad for business.
And there are the customers who will switch at the drop of a hat to a cheaper or better product. It's not one way.
Very few states allow these options currently.
All it takes is one state. And why would human drivers become uninsurable while automatic drivers somehow wouldn't? I'm sensing some ill-thought top-down behavior modification going on here.
Don't underestimate the degree to which the market does NOT cater to niches. If 95% accept such vehicles with open arms for their convenience, the other 5% will be dragged along kicking and screaming whether they like it or not.
There are several things to note about this alleged failure of markets to cater to niches. First, it doesn't happen in the real world. For example, in the auto world, there are plenty of niche automakers and not all of them make ludicrously expensive cars. And if there is a large unmet need, then there's a natural way via the usual manufacturing process to scale a niche automaker to mass production automakers. Most of the brand names in the industry that are more than a few decades old were originally businesses of this sort that underwent that very same transition.
Second, it's worth remembering here that there have long been substantial non-market obstacles to automakers. For example, in the US you have to destroy a few cars in order for them to be determined to be road-worthy.
Third, don't forget the used auto market. After all, we still see Model Ts on the road in the US. Old cars don't magically disappear. And the huge number of self-driving cars will lead to a vast used car market for these vehicles. It wouldn't be that hard to refurbish such a car, especially one which already has the capability in some form, to be human-drivable.
Fourth, don't forget the car manufacturers. By your numbers alone, we have the regular car market dropping to 2% of the current market, while the bitter clingers will be 5% of the current market. Guess which market is still two and a half times as large as the other by vehicle count? And as far as profits go, that larger, human-driver market will tend to be more profitable per vehicle since it has "options" (high profit add-ons like seat warming or fancy paint coatings). A lot of these businesses might go out of business due to the large reduction in market size (of roughly a factor of 15 by your numbers), but not everyone will. And the human-driver market is still bigger than the other both by number of vehicles and profit per vehicle.
After all, you've been preaching here that there are a lot of people ignorant of economics and history, behaving like cardboard villains out of an Ayn Rand novel.
I think we have an example right here with your flake out. It's not about my libertarian leanings or your willful ignorance of economics and history, but the fact that globally, we have been getting wealthier and better off. There are a number of ways we could screw that up and I think Ayn Rand, for all her flaws, did manage to find a few of the dysfunctional ways.
You are ignoring the costs of all this. The economics of it all
I already have noted that transportation is cheap enough that we routinely move enough people, just in the US, to keep up with sea level rise.
What happens to land prices when people en mass are moving to a common area? ( note, how many square miles are there at each latitude? ) They go up. This should not be a surprise, areas where people want to live are more expensive. Now, what happens to land prices when everyone wants to get away from someplace? They go down, Combine needing to sell in a place being vacated and needing to go someplace lots of people are trying to move to with being poor. As a practical matter, it isn't going to happen.
And the obvious rebuttal here is that we already know what happens because we see greater levels of migration today than would be imposed by climate change alone.
Keep in mind that most of humanity will be by the end of the century living in wealthy societies
Planning for a mass dieoff, huh?
No, just pointing out the obvious.
No, it's vastly harder, because we have vastly more stuff. Our paleolithic ancestors could pack all their really valuable possessions around on their backs.
More stuff doesn't mean harder. After all, we have trucks, they didn't, For example, a while ago, I did a 2700 mile move where I loaded everything I had, including a car in a moving business's 18 wheeler. I then flew out and worked for several days before my stuff arrived. It was no more than a man-month (and probably more like half that) of effort by everyone involved in handling my stuff. Meanwhile our hypothetical paleolithic ancestors would have to walk that distance. Even completely unloaded and doing nothing else but walking, it's probably going to take them a year.
To say that it's harder today to move than it was then, is to completely ignore the powerful transportation technologies we have developed.
They didn't have a map, dude. They just went far enough, then stopped. Over time, they eventually spread. That says nothing about how rapidly they could travel.
Unless, of course, you pay attention. Maps? That's technology we've developed for making moves easier.
Private property actually makes that problem of finding a place vastly easier since one can just buy a home rather than fight someone for it.
Yeah, that's what you thought. But they have to be willing to sell. At this point, any sizable number of people trying to relocate is going to have a fight on its hands anyway.
Which in practice has been demonstrated to not be a serious problem. As to "any sizable number of people", somewhere around a tenth to a sixth of the US's population is on the move in a given year. We have yet to start fights over that. That rate of population movement is sufficient to keep ahead globally of the rising seas (it''s a billion people moved every two to three decades).
Keep in mind that most of humanity will be by the end of the century living in wealthy societies that will be more capable of feats of transportation than the US was at the end of the 20th Century.
But a world that is changing rapidly is a calimity to poor people tied to the land, especially in a modern world with national boundaries and private property where you just can't pick up and move like our paleolithic ancestors would have.
Yes, it's vastly easier to move now. Our paleolithic ancestors were tied to the land in a way we just aren't because they couldn't move very far or very fast. For example, last I heard, it was thought that the people who crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas reached the tip of South America a thousand years later. We can drive most of that distance comfortably in about two to three months.
And for most of humanity's history, the nomad still had the territory problem since the lands they moved to typically already had people on them. Private property actually makes that problem of finding a place vastly easier since one can just buy a home rather than fight someone for it. That's vastly more efficient in resources.
Do you think a single person will see a minute in prison for this?
I think a lot of people will see prison for this. Just not the people you're thinking of.
Solar variation is not the cause of the current warming. Got that? Good.
It's not "the" cause, but it is a cause of current warming. It appears to me that we would be among the hottest temperatures for this interglacial period even in the absence of human contribution to global warming.
I don't understand your logic here. Those "conflating factors" in analyzing climate of the 14-19 centuries don't have anything to do with current climate. For that we have measurements of solar activity.
We don't have similar past measurements of solar activity, so we don't actually know the degree of contribution from solar activity to the current degree of warming.
However, here is something to think about. If it were discovered that the solar variation during the Maunder minimum caused the temperature drop of the Little Ice Age, that would make the climate scientists say "oh my god, the highest estimates of warming due to the greenhouse effect are the right ones; it's a lot worse that the conservative estimates."
Or that there was a lot more radiative forcing than expected. In addition, the Maunder minimum happened just prior to the start of the industrial age. The current claimed degree of human-generated warming is based on an assumption of very little increase in solar output from then to now. If the solar output increase is much greater than claimed, then the human-generated contribution has to be smaller as a result.
But, in either case, whether the Maunder minimum does or doesn't explain all or part of the little ice age isn't really relevant to the question of whether we understand current climate, because we don't need proxies for solar activity to understand current climate: we have measurements. Saying "we haven't found a connection between the Maunder minimum and the climate" isn't bias-- it's just a statement of what we don't know.
I see considerable evidence out there, such as the factor of three difference between lowest and highest estimate of the radiative forcing of CO2, to indicate that we don't understand climate well enough. And if we "don't know", then why is there a "best understanding" that conveniently dismissable volcanic activity was responsible for the Little Ice Age? There are a lot of assumptions that all go a politically and ideologically convenient direction.
70% of the cost of your health care bill is either directly, or indirectly caused by insurance. Abolish all insurance that is related to health care, and your health care costs will drop by 70%.
Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. There are two things to note here. First, a huge part of the insurance is to pay for other peoples' inflated health care costs. Insurance would be considerably cheaper, if health care costs were cheaper. A nationalized program doesn't reduce peoples' consumption of health care any more than capped cost insurance does.
And it's worth noting that the rest of the developed world doesn't have health care costs that are 30% of the US's. For example, if we look at Wikipedia, the US clearly spends a third more on health care as a fraction of GDP (almost 18%) than its nearest neighbors (Netherlands, France, and Germany 11-12%). Nobody on that list (OECD countries) manages to achieve a 70% reduction as a fraction of GDP compared to the US. And everyone's health care costs as a fraction of GDP have been going up.
Second, the US has in particular a terrible history of reforming its health care. I wouldn't count on the claimed level of savings merely because of the US's considerable, demonstrated capacity to fuck things up. My view is that you should be able to achieve considerable level of savings adopting an insurance-based health care system, should the US choose to do that.
And compared to the tremendous fraud that occurs in countries without this kind of paper trail, it's probably worth it. Not that things couldn't be improved, but it's not all senseless. Accountability is expensive.
Now, if only they'd do the same for the large scale projects. They can procure a fighter jet with the right kind of screws, but they can't procure a fighter jet that does what they want it to do.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
