The only thing I've found worth bothering with at Starbucks is their "blonde" roasts (what everyone else would probably call "medium"). A blonde americano or a Veranda batch brew (I think they still technically offer a pour-over, but none of the employees are capable doing it) are the only things I'll get when Starbucks is my only option.

Pike Place is worse than gas station mystery brew that's been on the warmer for 6 hours.

If you brake, that which was traveling forward wants to keep traveling forward. If anything, I'd expect the outer edges of the door to fly forward, i.e., more open.

Even if you were right, it probably would work only if the door is very open, but not ajar.

Yet traditional cab drivers don't monitor their passengers to make sure they are awake and alert and not reporting any distress the entire trip

Of course not. That's not the scenario. The scenario is waking the driver upon reaching the destination. A taxi driver could physically shake the person.

I can't currently imagine what that would be to get me to go along with the idea you have any claim against them.

Somebody, somewhere can.

The point you're missing is that they don't have to get to an emergency room since an ambulance, unlike an autonomous vehicle, has trained medical personnel on board that can start administering procedures immediately upon arrival.

Also, FYI, despite what you may think, ambulances DO have to follow the speed limit.

It varies by jurisdiction, but no, they don't. At least in California, they can legally exceed the speed limit:

(b) Speed Restriction. In no event shall an ambulance driver exceed a speed of 15 miles per hour while disobeying any official traffic control stop sign or stop signal.

So that means that while going through, say, a red light, not only can they legally go through it, but then can, at most, exceed the speed limit by 15 MPH while doing it.

While NOT "disobeying any official traffic control stop sign or stop signal," they can generally exceed the speed limit even more (but, again, it varies by jurisdiction).

Here is the relevant law for Hollywood, FL:

No ambulance shall exceed the speed of 40 miles per hour except in cases of extreme emergency.

Which means they can exceed the speed limit by 39 MPH for "non-extreme" emergencies.

In New York State:

1104 Authorized Emergency Vehicles - (b) The driver of an authorized emergency vehicle may: 3. Exceed the maximum speed limits so long as he does not endanger life or property;

No specific maximum speed is mentioned.

The autonomous car would have to drive the speed limit and stop for all lights on the way to the hospital adding minutes to the trip.. minutes a passenger who is actually having a medical emergency might not have. The passenger will likely get life saving medical attention faster if the ambulance (that can legally exceed the speed limit and run red lights) travels to the car.

Because if they're actually having a medical emergency and are unconscious and die, the family will sue for negligence, wrongful death, or who knows what.

Gig workers close the doors, not emergency personnel. But yes, there should be a way to close the doors without human assistance.

And thus the beginning of shifting the entire government bureaucracy to AI?

I would mod you up if I could. As an American, I had no idea at all who they are. I suspect most of my countrymen can say the same. Not saying this isn't news and shouldn't be reported, but I guess it will only be a big deal to what I assume are the 100 or so weirdos in the USA who bought their phones and thought they were clever for doing so.

Wrong. Any progressive tax system is a "wealth tax" and the only thing it's a radical departure from is the steaming pile of shit that Rotten Ronnie left for us in the 80's. Go back a little further and you'll see tax brackets as high as 94% during the 1940s.

A wealth cap is simply a progressive tax system where eventually you reach a 100% tax bracket. Frankly I don't see any reason this is inherently a bad thing, especially when you're talking about the top 0.01% hoarders of wealth. Not that it matters much, since none of the people it would possibly apply to actually take a normal salary income. Part of any effective changes like this has to include capturing the real way that these people acquire and store their money, which will never happen.

Or corporate profits, which have more than doubled in the last 10 years.

Arrested on what charge? If they are someone previously caught shoplifting then presumably they have already paid their fine or served their sentence for that crime.

If the shop banned them, then the charge would be trespassing. Shops are private property and can ban people for life even if they've otherwise paid their debt to society.

Right. Which makes Kisai's dismissal of the problem a waste of breath.

A drone is a good idea, actually, but I wouldn't use a laser. An actuated squirt gun filled with epoxy or some other nearly impossible to remove liquid would be easier and work just as well. You could even use regular paint if you wanted to hedge and avoid "destruction of property" charges, instead just be a nuisance, forcing them to waste money and manpower to clean the camera lenses.

The biggest risk of being caught is probably a correlative search, using other nearby recording devices to try and figure out the common suspect who was near all of the destroyed cameras. This is one of the big chilling effects of any surveillance state - even if you aren't caught red-handed in the act of something, it becomes trivial to collect enough circumstantial evidence to build a case against you.

And eventually they'll create drone no-fly zones around every single Flock camera. The drone dead-zone map for the country will look like Swiss cheese, with 50-foot circles scattered over every single city and road.

I'm American and Gen X. The Gen X thing is actually important. We were the original video game kids. We were the first generation to enter the work force where everybody in an office had a PC on their desk. We should be way better at tech stuff than we are. One of my high school classmates, who was a nurse by the way, almost brags that she "can't use a computer at all" and does everything tech related via her phone. This has not always worked in her favor. I have friends around my age who have no idea at all how to send money via Pay Pal, Venmo, etc. One friend who is an attorney and runs a small but reasonably successful legal practice with his wife (also an attorney), just kind of has his eyes glaze over and acts like "it's TOO hard!" if he has to click more than 2 buttons to do anything on a PC. Now if Gen X, again my generation, is like this, imagine how utterly hopeless older generation people are. My late uncle, a silent generation guy, kept creating new accounts on Facebook every time he forgot his password because that was somehow easier for him than trying to get help with the password. Sigh.

So I have a Gne X friend who got scammed a few years ago. We'll call him Adam. Adam's job is an elementary school teacher. His computers skills are very poor. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being great and 1 being terrible, I'd rate him a 2. He's a 3 at absolute best. How bad is he? Attach a USB flash drive to his PC and ask him to save a document to it. He has no understanding at all how to change directories so the document will save to a new place. He got scammed because of his poor computer skills and the fact that he doesn't do his own income taxes, which as I will explain led him to believe a false claim the scammers made and this false claim was what made the scam work.

It was during summer break from teaching and one morning his mind was distracted over some activity he had coming up in a few days. He was on his PC, probably visiting a site he really shouldn't have been on, and some pop up appeared claiming that his PC was under attack, but click on this button and we can help you save it. The distraction thing played a huge role in why he clicked on the button. He clicked on it and immediately got contacted by "Microsoft Support" and got on a phone call with the scammers. They told him some wild tale about his bank account possibly being compromised, so he gave them control over his PC and allowed them access to his online bank account. Some banks have an offer on their websites where you can "apply for a loan in minutes", so with control, the scammers did that. They did not actually get any money but the loan application got approved and that approval changed some sort of total in his account to show the addition of the loan amount. With that change, they convinced him that scammers had deposited money into his account and he would have to pay taxes on that money, so he was in big trouble. That's not how US taxes work. If things worked that way, Elon Musk and others like him could destroy their critics by making massive deposits into the critic's bank account, taking the money back, and laughing as the victim had to pay taxes on a, say, $100 million deposit that is now gone. So the scammers got him to use his bank money to buy Amazon gift cards, which he transferred to them as they assured him it would "protect" his money from a big tax bill. I think that after that they tried to get even more money from him and that finally made him suspicious and the call ended, but his bank account was drained of a little under $20,000. So these scammers pray on people with weak PC skills and little knowledge of how the US income tax system works and that's how they get suckers to give them money.