A few months ago when I was in Phoenix, when there was a high demand during some downtown ballgame, I requested an Uber through the Uber app in the usual way. After waiting longer than usual, instead of a normal Uber, a Waymo car showed up, sub-contracted THROUGH Uber. In other words, Uber hired a Waymo to fulfil my ride request.

I'm comfortable riding in Waymos, so I was OK with that (bonus IMO), but this could be annoying for people who are not comfortable riding in robotaxis, to have a robotaxi shoved at them without notification. It looks like we aren't far from a future where even people who try to avoid robotaxis won't be able to, because companies like Uber are just going to start using them.

American codes also have healthy safety margins. Wire sizes are approved based on worst case assumptions, and are often sized based on maximum tolerable voltage drop (i.e. lights dimming when you run the microwave), rather than concerns about wire overloading.

The risk is there, but assuming the devices are limited to a certain size, the risk of wire overloading should be minimal.

More precisely, rural electrification in the US is largely the product of the REA (rural electrification administration) created by FDR during the new deal. It offered financing, blueprints, and technical advice, but did not actually perform electrification. It encouraged formation of user-own co-ops, most of which operate to this day. It also did very little in the way of subsidies or public ownership or investment, beyond providing financing. It's a model that works and should be repeated, but just because it was "federal help" does not imply that all federal help is good or smart.

The modern approach of stimulating development by handing out public money is very problematic. One, because we can't balance the budget and we don't have the public money in the first place. Two, either there aren't enough strings attached so it becomes corrupt (like broadband subsidies that disappear into a black hole), or there are too many strings attached and the money never gets spent or it becomes a different kind of grift (like the NEVI which allocated billions of dollars but only a tiny fraction of chargers were built even many years later).

The government is bad at executing. If the government wants to encourage EV adoption it should do something like the REA and encourage the formation of co-ops and private charging companies by paving the way for them, removing regulatory barriers (not adding a thousand like NEVI), and promulgating standards and blueprints.

That's a good point. Nintendo switch uses SD cards in a special cartridge.

It's disappointing that there was never any good high-resolution physical video media. Unlike CDs, which were good enough for eternity, DVDs fall short for video.

No, HD-DVD and Bluray don't count...both of them were too expensive, too limited and too encumbered by the format war between them, and never became as attractive as DVD. DVD is popular because it's cheap and easy to work with, but it's held back my the legacy MPEG2 codec requirements of the DVD format.

All the world really needed or wanted, was simply an incrementally updated "DVD2" format, that leverages modern codecs to put high-definition content on existing, dirt-cheap DVD-9 discs...giving us 9GB of high-definition video on cheap, reliable commodity hardware, backward compatible with existing DVDs, and then we would be good with that forever, just like we are good with audio CDs forever...but we can't have nice things because mega media corporations, copyright and patent law, and lobbying, so BluRay and HD-DVD will both die, and there will be no suitable final form physical video format.

There have been university-level demonstrations where people unroll Scotch tape in a vacuum chamber and generate enough X-rays to image people's finger bones. Considering a roll of Scotch tape is maybe a couple dollars, this seems competitive with normal Xray sources.

The poster is actually correct. Adding additional modes of traffic does NOT necessarily reduce car congestion. No matter what, if you give away roadway capacity for free, the free roadway capacity will be fully consumed. This is the efficient market at work; any free good will be consumed until it's gone. So the actual model is that people (not just in the US, but demonstrably all over the world) will drive cars until the roads become congested to the point of misery. The only way out of that, is to stop giving away roadway capacity for free through congestion charges.

Trip demand is quite elastic, despite what people say, the data shows it clearly. NYC has the biggest subway system in the world; the roads are still congested during peak times. Paris has multiple subway systems, trams, pedestrianization, cable cars, buses, and the roads are still congested during peak times. Japan has the best urban rail network in the word; roads are still congested during peak times.

Bike lanes, rail, and walkability won't necessarily improve car congestion. It DOES increase people moved, and it DOES reduce trip times, and it DOES provide options besides sitting in traffic, and it DOES improve economic productivity. But unless you take specific measures like congestion charges, high taxes on large vehicles, high parking fees, etc, the roadways are always going to be congested.

The real problem with the cigarettes analogy is that cigarettes were not regulated based on harm to the user. They were regulated based on harm to others.

I remember this because I lived through it. Nobody ever got anywhere telling people cigarettes were bad for them or that they were going to cause them cancer. Making those arguments just made people smoke even more resolved to smoke, because nobody wants to be as square or a health-nut. Nobody cared, and there would never have been any regulation on that basis.

Cigarettes were finally regulated because they *cause harm to others*. And they didn't even go after the smokers, but they regulated on behalf of the non-smokers. That's why you got non-smoking sections, and no smoking in public places like airports, but still allowed in private business, then eventually you got no smoking indoors, then you got laws against smoking when kids are in the car, and finally you got laws against smoking around pretty much anybody. It was all based around harm to others. This is a much harder argument to make about "ultraprocessed" foods, whatever that even means.

There's also the fact that cigarettes are PROVABLY addictive, so marketing them was seen as exploitive, especially to children, so the taxes and advertising regulations were based on that percieved exploitation of getting somebody addicted to something. This is also hard to make for "ultraprocessed foods", whatever that is.

This. It's important to make a distinction between what feels unsafe and what actually is unsafe. Any driver that's honking at you, by definition sees you. The bad accidents happen by people who are on their phone and don't even see you, much less have time to be angry at you or honk at you. It's always important to drive, walk and roll in such a way as to be seen. Between being honked at and being dead, I'll always take being honked at.

At a recent conference in Phoenix, I watched a coffee place from a distance. I observed people lining up in a line to order coffee on a touchscreen. There was no human interaction. But there was still a human; he was behind the touchscreen wiping down machines, cleaning, and juggling supplies.

Robots were being used, but instead of using robots to do the drudgework of cleaning, prepping, and fairly mechanistically brewing coffee, and having a human up front interacting with customers, instead we had a human in the back doing drudgework and a robot up front interacting with the customers.

I understand the human is the expensive part of the operation, so companies just want to replace humans with robots wherever they can, however, I don't think society is thinking it through very well. Humans also add value that robots can't. Instead of using robots to replace low-human-value tasks (automated dishwasher, automated coffee brewer), and letting humans keep doing human things, they are replacing the human things with robots.

When we invented dishwashers and coffee machines, it was OK, because it was robots helping humans be a barista. Now, it's humans helping robots be a barista. The first one seems fine; the second one seems pretty doomed. Robots serving humans can work. Humans serving robots just doesn't seem likely to ever work out.

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"

This is bot correct at all. You may be thinking about a different project.

California's high-speed rail is first-class HSR, using normal HSR trains from Siemens, and it has a good alignment that directly connects multiple population centers. There are many ways you can criticize CAHSR, but it's definitely HSR.

The problem with CAHSR, to be fair, is that they bit off a huge megaproject all at once, without a clear funding path. Argument 1 is that they should have started by building a single link between two biggest cities, like the French advised them to do at the beginning, then built it out from there.

The counter Argument 2 is that there are already rail links between those two cities, the land and existing infrastructure problems between those two cities are by far the hardest of the entire alignment, plus, the real problem in California is they need to provide alternatives to I-5, which is a traffic crisis impacting a lot of the state. Also, the marginal benefits per dollar go up the more cities you connect due to network effects. So, like it or not, California voters approved CAHSR only under the condition that it connect the major CA cities in the central valley and provide an alternative to I-5. When it's built, it will be brilliant. But they didn't go about it in the "how to show earliest results possible" way. The built in the "what makes the most long-term sense for the state" way.

It's a really good megaproject. It's main problem is that until now, it hasn't had megaproject funding. The election of Trump counter-intuitively gave CAHSR a huge tailwind. For one thing, they stopped even asking for federal money, and have opened up other funding sources to keep construction going. For another, they are in way too deep to stop it now. They have no choice but to complete at least the initial operating segment.

As of mid-2025 official CAHSR report
Structures: 55 complete (60%), 32 underway, 5 not started.
Guideway: 72 miles complete (61%), 28 underway, 19 not started.
Right-of-way parcels: 99% delivered overall for CP1–CP4 (2,276 of 2,294).
463 miles of the entire 494-mile Phase 1 SF–Anaheim system are environmentally cleared (construction-ready).

Forget the cost in terms of dollars...the traffic congestion and parking won't sustain economic growth, not at any cost, past a certain point, by pure simple geometric math. If every apartment in Manhattan had a single surface parking spot, the resulting parking lot would be bigger than Manhattan itself. The corollary: you simply can't have a strong urban economy if you rely on universal car transport. There are two choices for cities: Hard-cap your economic growth at a low level, at the same time permanently putting your city at the limit of traffic misery it can never escape from, or take mass transit seriously as the transportation backbone, and not as an afterthought or a charity effort.

As long as there are roads and cars, people are going to drive cars, but that can't be your only option, or even the primary option, in any healthy city economy.

The ease of doing this is not just a theory; Prime Minister Abe was assassinated in 2022 in Japan by a homemade shotgun and homemade black powder. No 3D printer was used, needed or wanted; just metal pipe from the hardware store. Such basic firearms are just as effective as they were thousands of years ago...and clearly effective enough to assassinate a prime minister in the 21st century.