This is probably false. Religiosity is strongly and negatively correlated with IQ, and IQ is heritable.

You have a good understanding of the feminine mind. Years ago I built a toilet seat lowering mechanism out of an old hydraulic hinge. I would raise it to pee, and then just walk away. The toilet seat would lower on it's own over the next five minutes. I expected my wife to be happy about it, but instead she was upset. To her, the point was not that the toilet seat was lowered, but that *I* lowered it, as a conscious and deliberate act of love and commitment.

Fine with me. The sooner the better.

If you want to actually control your own car, you should go to a private closed circuit track. The public roads are not the place for that.

What you are missing is that the "capacity" is not a constant. Self-driving cars can drive much closer together, and can react much faster to changing conditions. They will also operate with more information about traffic conditions ahead. Google has estimated that their cars can increase the capacity of a lane of highway by at least a factor of five.

My wife could use this to make me wash the dishes.

Except that altruism is not logical.

Yes, it is too bad we were ordained by God to police the world. It would be so much better if there was some sort of organization that could represent the collective will of the nations of the world in situations like this. Maybe we could set up something like that. New York City might be a good place.

Because personal references were a terrible way to judge credit worthiness. Credit scores based on your actual credit history are far more reliable.

1. This is not "dubious". It is based on plenty of solid evidence.
2. The subprime mess was caused (in part) by government pressure to ignore proven credit criteria, along with incentives for banks to not care about the default rate because the risk was borne by quasi-governmental institutions like Fannie Mae, that had an implicit guarantee of a taxpayer bailout.

There was a much better article about this in the Economist a few months back. The banks don't ask you for a list of your Facebook friends. It doesn't work like that. They get the information as part of your score from credit agencies. You will never even know it is happening. But I don't see why this is worse than other things they consider, like your zipcode or marital status. You are judged by the company you keep. Deal with it.

Maybe they use a camera with a wide angle, or multiple cameras/radars, or some other obvious solution to an obvious problem.

No. I am saying 300K miles as a mixture of highway and test track. There has been plenty of both.

Yes it is! Many of those miles are not cruising the freeway, but on a test track under conditions that were designed to cause an accident. Test dummies have been used to simulate pedestrians stepping into traffic. Other cars pull in front, or cut off the Google car, or drop objects onto the road. The self driving cars have been able to avoid thousands of accidents where a human would likely not have been able to react in time.

The Google cars have backup cameras, radar, and bump sensors. They have been specifically designed and tested to not run over kids/pets while backing, under many different light and weather conditions. So your scenario is very unlikely to happen.

A much more likely scenario: After self driving cars are common, some human driver backs over a kid, and people ask why we should continue to allow humans to drive.

I completely disagree. I have worked at many tech companies over a thirty year career, and my experience has been the exact opposite. Many companies bend over backwards to hire more women programmers and engineers. I have heard many male engineers say that they would prefer a more gender balanced workplace, and have never heard any say they wouldn't like that. When I have hired women, the male engineers have always treated them with decency and professional respect.

On the other hand, I have never had any problem hiring saleswomen, or even female forklift drivers. The shipping crew at my last employer was 60% female, despite the crude sexism of their male coworkers that complained about too many "bitches" in the warehouse.

I think the dearth of female programmers is simply that women are not attracted to a career that involves sitting in a cubicle interacting with a computer. Women have broken into many male dominated professions. A majority of new lawyers are women. Nearly half of medical students are women. Unlike programming, those careers are perceived to have a lot of human interaction.