Agriculture uses about 80 percent of the water in California. It takes a lot of water to make deserts bloom. As far as cities like Cape Town, there is a limit to how many people certain areas can support. Eventually you reach such a high population that the land can't support it without massive projects.

My favorite thing is intersections with 4-way stop signs. Drivers seem to be having a whole lot of trouble with the "left turn always yields" rule. For years now, about every other time I go out I see someone fail at this, and I try not to go out too often.

Look at the [median] person and then realize half the people are dumber than him.

FTFY. Now, if you want to talk about averages, medians, and Gaussian distributions, that's normally all well and good for the population size of the electorate. But I've been on Twitter. The outliers lie really far out.

... with no gas, brakes, or steering wheels.

When we have lots of AVs with V2V then we will be able to do platooning, and then you will be able to put more vehicles on the road even if they are going slower because they will be closer together.

I watched an interview with Bob Lutz a while back where he proposed that the future of the automobile is a bunch of self-driving minivans with legally mandated shape/size envelopes to maximize platooning efficiency, where the only real differences between different marques are minor styling cues and the quality of interiors. I think we're some long way away from that, but I do think that's a plausible (if dark) future for the automobile.

What's so special about members of the armed forces?

Exactly. For example, California has a minimum $800/year sales tax remittance for all businesses. If your sales taxes collected throughout the year add up to less than $800 - you still have to pay $800. Even if you had one sale in the State, for $0.01 in tax - you have to pay $800, minimum. If you're not doing at least $10,000 worth of sales into California, you would be money ahead to ban ALL sales into the State of California.

The problem is not the ice. The car is better at dealing with that than you are. The problem is seeing. Your eyes, for all their faults, are pretty amazing things when backed up by your brain, for which similar statements might be made. The car is better than you are at sensing what it is doing, when a wheel is slipping, and the like, but it's not quite as good at making sense of extremely low-quality input. People are testing autonomous vehicles in poor weather now, but you're right that none of them are really ready to operate in very poor weather conditions today.

Really? You ever try to rig a paper ballot election? You'll find it almost impossible to commit massive fraud, something that's trivial with computer voting.

it takes time to learn a new UI. Most people who make heavy enough use of an app to bother complaining about it stop looking at the UI and learn by muscle memory how to complete tasks. A UI design screws with that.

Computers can only make elections worse, not better.

I registered to vote as
Clovis'); DROP TABLE candidates;

Wait, when are we getting this rational society?

any lockpick or gun manufacturer that advertises and markets their product specifically for use in criminal activities will most definitely be shut down. not sure why the fuck you would compare accidents, it would be more any car manufacturer that advertises a feature to evade police cars so you can drive home drunk or avoid being caught after commiting a robbery and likewise they would be in deep shit real fast.

Us humans can vote for the best AI to rule us. Ya.... no... computers can never be involved in elections :P

Every other year there's some news article about kids throwing cinder blocks off an interstate overpass and killing someone. It's sad, and it happens, but thankfully given that there's ~80 million minors in the US, it's almost a rounding error in the general population.
 
Castro street is mostly one lane in each direction, with bike lane on either side for most of it. What is funny is that the cars, even though they know they have right of way in the car lane, and I am cycling in the bike lane, will creep along behind me riding my bike along at 10mph, because it's a no-pass, and there's not enough margin for error between me in my lane, and the car passing me safely in their lane.
 
That's amazing, I can no longer count the number of times drivers have gotten angry for me taking my lane when it's two lanes in each direction. But it's super easy to slow these things down, they're nowhere near as aggressive as even the most timid human driver, at least when it comes to cyclists. The last thing Google/Waymo wants is a road pizza pedestrian/cyclist in the news, destroying their credibility with the public. But until that day happens, I trust a self-driving car over humans any day.

Actually, I was just watching something fairly recently (this story would be cooler if I could remember what, it was probably Autoline) and somebody was talking about their autonomous vehicle having recently been given the ability to rapidly switch lanes to avoid accidents. There is no reason why they can't make it go to the shoulder.

As for the rest, I think that stuff is coming as well. The vehicle isn't going to decide to harm someone else to save you, but it might decide to harm you to save you from death. That is, if the vehicle determines that it can get your speed down to something reasonable before it spits you off of the road and into a cornfield or even a tree, it may well decide to do that. And I really do believe that it won't be all that long before all vehicles are required to carry a V2V beacon as terms of registration, so your vehicle will be in a good position to determine whether a vehicle which looks like it's going to kill you is actually going to kill you, and thus whether it should consider such drastic actions.

Agreed. All digital voting is the biggest threat to democracy ever seen.

Another advantage we have here (Canada) is simple elections. Federal is one election, Provincial is a completely different election. For both you vote for one member of the legislature. Municipal are on a different day again, but more complex.
Counting almost always is over, or at least close enough to over to call it, the night of the election.

Not that it matters to you, but in any system that is easily cheated there are lots of cheaters who never get caught. And few things are as easy as voting multiple times, or as a non-citizen, than in some state of the U.S.

Even if no-one is cheating now just the fact there is a huge potential to do so means it's hard to rely on election results, and you need those to be very solid in a democracy since so much hinges on electing a representative.

An example of this was the alternative vote in the UK. A concept so simple that a child could grasp it instantly, but somehow voters couldn't grasp it.

Well yes, if they had been able to grasp it they'd have clearly made the same choice as you, wouldn't they?

I might add that it is very quick. Takes about an hour to count all votes in a booth completely by hand. No scanning involved.

My vote and your vote is not going to be tampered with. That's not how election interference is done.
Modern day tampering is done through votes cast by people who do not exist, or cast in the name of people who did not vote, or by people who should not vote.

I can see how a blockchain could help maintain the integrity of vote talleys being transmitted from the polling places to the central location.
I doubt it's necessary, though.
The existing method in my state (probably most states) of ensuring that there's no tampering between polling places, counting places is pretty air-tight, IMHO.
Basically what happens is each individual polling place makes their counts and uploads their counts to a central server. This process is observed by the pollworkers of the political parties participating in the election. Those counts are then posted publically by the state so anyone can do the arithmetic, and each polling place and political party can verify that the votes they counted match the state's total.
The difference between having humans verify counts and computers is that humans are far more paranoid and suspicious than computers.

Voting from home requires that you can guarantee the integrity of everyone's home computer including those who vote, and especially those who did not intend to vote, as in that case a bot could cast for vote in the name of that person from the home computer.

Polling places are necessary. It's the only way to ensure secret ballots.
The purpose of public voting places is to allow secret ballots and to prevent in-person coercion, and voting by impaired persons. With voting from home, or other such non-regulated places, family members, workers, union members, cults, and so on can be coerced because the person doing the coercion can view the ballot being cast.
A real-world example is that of organizations going into nursing/retirement homes and pseudo-assisting with absentee ballots. However, some states are passing laws to prevent that particular abuse by requiring the use of pollworkers to assist with absentee voting from institutions.

All votes counted in front of scrutineers, every time. And then independently tallied.

The USA's love of machinery combined with the complete lack of independent oversight looks like it has been deliberately designed so that it can be rigged.

My top two:

Condorcet voting, perimeter/area ratio limits for districting.

It might cause accidents, but only if a human driver is following them too close and runs into them. Not only will the following vehicle be watching for stuff like that, and not following too closely, but the vehicles will also be communicating about potential panic stops (and the actual panic stop) via V2V.

It will also be made explicitly illegal, and the cops can use the time they used to use catching traffic violators busting people trolling AVs.

I guess that does leave a hole where a party is regularly reserving the opposite vote of what they want, but I would think doing so would confuse the members of the party, and would be a self correcting situation.

And I could probably convince you that it's good for your health if I gave it a fancy name like "parfait" even if it was mostly just sugar.

You need to understand the basic definitions.

Snapchat is the vendor. The advertisers are the ones who pay it. They are the customers. The people who use snapchat to exchange photos and message are called the product. The company will fall at the feet of the customers, and do what they demand.

They will make it annoying and difficult to use. If you are not paying for it, you are NOT the customer.

You're overcomplicating it. We already know Facebook does real time audio survelliance.

We also know that people typically keep their phones on them.

What we don't know is how many of the people we interact with daily have "always on" apps on their digitial devices.

Use seperate seawater lines for non-potable water use... Washroom sink, toilet and shower. Only half the plumbing needs to be redone in plastic... The drainage side stays as is. Maybe start with government built or funded buildings.

When you have a quart of sewage and add a teaspoon of wine, you have a quart of sewage. When you have a quart of wine and you add a teaspoon of sewage, you have a quart of sewage. That's the problem.

The mainstream media, which you could argue is adversarial, but what we have is not adversarial. We have a partisan opposition press which works hand in glove with the Democrats. This totally threatens the First Amendment, because when people figure out, which they have, that they can not only tell you who you must vote for, but they can tell you what truth you're allowed to know or not to know, this is hugely damaging to our Republic. As we have seen in all of this other stuff with Russia, all of the stuff with the Clinton Foundation, all these things. The real question becomes why do we need a First Amendment if they're not going to do their job, which is to be the tribune of the people and instead become the partisans of a political movement.

Ok, that we can agree on. Have computers count the paper slips. Fine. But every single vote has to be able to be counted manually. And I mean that literally to mean "by hand".

The most obvious change needed in the US is that voting needs to not be optional: Bump individual tax rates by 1-2% and make voting get you it back.

We should also look to make the campaign durations shorter so that they don't have the time to get into mud-slinging and filth and focus on issues.

I refuse to consider "positive prejudice" positive. If anything, it's demeaning. I would NOT want to be hired for my skin, age, gender, sexual orientation or anything but my qualification. Being the "quota ni..." is about the WORST kind of workplace situation you could get into, with everyone thinking that you only got the job because of your sex/race/age..., that you drag the whole team down because you only got hired because of your sex/race/age/... and not because you actually can DO it.

How would you feel if you spent long and hard years learning your job and actually being GOOD at it, only to constantly feel like you don't really deserve the job you have and that everyone thinks you only got it because of your sex/race/age... and not your qualification?

Because that's what you do to people if you try this "positive discrimination" bullshit. You antagonize people. And you take away these people's ability to claim their fame, because even in spite of anything they accomplish, there is still that "yeah, but they only got there for their sex/race/..."

You are not a user

You are the product

They will improve the "product". When you pay nothing, you use a platform because most of your moronic friends are too stingy to pay for a real service, you don't get to complain.

They deserve all the indignities being heaped on them.

I am all for a federal referendum process to create legislation and Amendments directly, similar to what California and other states have (150,000 signatures to get on the ballot, and then vote directly on the measure every 2 years). However, for day to day operations of the government, most people are too ill informed to vote with any competence.

That has nothing to do with computers though, paper ballots still work fine for the referendum process.

Last I heard, it's still possible for California to bring in food from other places.