Looks like you don't "get" math. The examples chosen give airplanes the benefit of the doubt.

1 - "Cherry picking" an average auto speed of 50 mph actually favors airplanes. If one assumed 25 mph, it'd be 4M hours/fatality instead of 2M.
2 - Gulfstream isn't pertinent here since the original article was about 2-seat propeller airplanes. Also, notice there are a *lot* more Cessna-class planes out there than bizjets, and that's what the statistics reflect. Picking a Cessna 182 (4 places, 160 mph, very typical little plane) instead of a more-comparable Cessna 152 (2 places, 125 mph) likewise gives planes the benefit of the doubt.
3 - Even *if* all airplanes all did average 600 mph (actually, even jetliners typically fly rather slower than that), autos would still be 1.7x safer per hour.

Citation needed. This is a forum for geeks, so numbers matter.

Entertainment, you know. Even if a lot of $ is involved, sports are fundamentally about humans performing, under performing, making errors, screwing up, cheating, etc. Let's just call the referee another yet another part of that.

If you have money riding on a game, that's on you. The outcome is always subject to the fickle finger of fate.

If it's corruption of the referee you're worried about, what about corrupt players, management, etc? Make them into robots, too?

As a business move, is government contracting really a good business for Google? They just got done (wisely) paring down distracting side ventures.How does this advance their core business?

Yes, government contracting can be profitable, but not the kind of profitable that Google's used to. Plus, government work comes with lots of cumbersome strings attached.

See the above reply chain for corrected numbers.

Remember that the accident rates typically quoted for airplanes is actually for commercial jets, which are indeed spectacularly safe. General aviation (i.e. small planes) is orders of magnitude more dangerous. To wit. zero people in the US died in commercial jets last year vs. something like 400 in little planes, despite the jets' obviously much, much higher passenger mileage.

I don't see how you're reading that article to come up with that, so I'll put some simple numbers on the table:

Something like a Cessna 182 cruises around 160mph, so 100K hours/fatality x 160 mph = 16M miles/fatality, ~6x worse than auto traffic's 100M.

Or, converting auto traffic miles into hours: 100M miles per fatality / 50 mph = 2M hours per fatality, 20x better than general aviation's 100K.

It's pointless to debate whether the 6x or 20x figure is the most applicable, but either way: flying small planes is much more dangerous than driving cars. Given over 35K US traffic deaths per year, that would multiply out to a lot of deaths if 2-seat planes were rolled out in a big way.

I stand corrected that general aviation death rate is 1 per 100K hours. I also got the traffic death rate 100x too high. It is actually roughly 1 death per 100M miles.

However, this article conveniently converts the traffic death rate into hours and still ends up with general aviation deaths 19x higher than traffic per hour. Ant that's very generously assuming that average traffic speed is 50 mph. Again, general aviation includes bizjets, etc, so the accident rate for tiny planes is surely higher than that. And the traffic accident rate is already pretty scary.

Still, ~20x risk doesn't inspire confidence.

What could possibly go wrong with widespread deployment of that?

The US has around 1.1 - 1.3 fatal accidents per 100K miles for general aviation. For comparison, motor vehicles have about 1.2 deaths per MILLION miles.

General aviation includes larger planes like bizjets, basically everything except airliners & freightliners, so you can be sure the accident rates is much higher for tiny planes, e.g. several tens of thousands of miles per death. Even if automated control reduced the accident rate some, that's still crazy high.

I think I'll just stick to cliff diving.

Emergency response: this is what researchers put on their grant proposals when the actual end-game is an unpalatable one.

Actual emergency responders would be technology-enabled supermen if the had even 1% of the tech that's supposedly developed for them.

Seems to me that we, the consumer suckers, are the ones getting double-dipped. I was pretty clearly under the impression that I already pay for high-speed internet access, including YouTube, Netflix, ...

You mean like Google did to Microsoft Office with Google Docs? Years later, that's still costing MS big-time.. way more than they'll ever make from Bing. Didn't cost Google much, but it sure put MS on notice.

There's lots more where that came from.

OP says " one percent of men ..., a leading cause of cancer deaths"

So the 1% is a "leading" cause?! What about the 99%?

The story here is actually that some highly-skilled, white-collar jobs got automated out of existence.

Figuring out what the traffic will bear has been going on since forever. Used to be done by people, now software automates it and maybe takes more factors into account.

Pointless theoretical argument. Companies don't advertise jobs in those kinds of magazines. Period. They do advertise other things, but those are not protected against discrimination like jobs and real estate are.

And, yes, most HR and real estate people do indeed consider the mix of media buys when planning advertising campaigns. That's because back in the days when companies did advertise jobs in newspapers & magazines, there were discrimination lawsuits because a pattern of job advertising venue choices in effect discriminated against a protected class. You or I may personally take issue with outcome-based rulings and laws like that, but that is the law at this time.

Somebody let the rabble in.

Brill's article is a brilliant game of self-deception and self-aggrandizement. If you read the original article, his thesis is basically that: after the war, universities started admitting students based on intellectual merit instead of their parent's social or financial situation. This led to a large supply of brilliant and educated people like Brill who gave corporations the mental horsepower to overpower the system.

Ahem. Sounds more like the storyline of the crack epidemic as told by the government, i.e. cheap, plentiful drugs overpower societal controls, aided and abetted by misguided, high-powered individuals. Brill is suggesting that universities graduated mainly high-class idiots until he and his generation came along. According to Brill, this movement was caused by powerful, well-meaning people who forgot that My Fair Lady is fiction, thought that they could mold smart boys into gentlemen. (Not trying to exclude girls & women here, but the white-male privilege thing was still going strong at the time.)

BUT, maybe Brill is on to something: his new generation of non-old-boys-club graduates were not only smart, but free from the old-boy social restrictions on behavior. These were people who were not bound by--and probably scorned--the rules of gentlemanly behavior. They didn't have to worry about being shunned by "society" when they pulled nakedly sharp moves with bad societal consequences. Or at least they didn't have to worry so much about what people would say if they got exposed.

I wasn't there, but I get the impression that there was an unwritten code of behavior among the powerful until Brill's generation came along. It was unwritten, but it was a powerful force that limited government & business action as surely as the constitution. That's gone now.

In its place, we now have "greed is good." Except in jest, stating that in public would have gotten you kicked out of any respectable gentlemen's club (no, not a strip joint -- an upper-class, male-only social club) 60 years ago. Yes, greed is an energy that has power, but it ends up consuming everything, much like anger is an energy but only in small doses. And greed has indeed consumed us.

The constitution and the government built upon it are no substitute for basic social norms. I'll bet that guys who wrote the constitution just assumed a certain social code (we do know these were religious men) as a backdrop to a constitutional republic, didn't even think that "men of good will" could rise to prominence without it.

Doesn't pass the smell test. That's more than a lifetime of driving. How many drivers over 30 do you know who never had a fender bender?