It's quite similar to the way phones have phased out keyboards though...

It would be good if CEOs switched to scaring employees and appeasing shareholders with threats from AI rather than fake job posts.

My point was that with little to no unoccupied autonomous cars actually driving around, it's disingenuous to say that it's possible to reduce cars' access to public roads without reducing people's access to public roads. Maybe the number of people getting access overall is higher, but they're not all the same people. Using public transport is such an apples-and-oranges difference from driving that a lot of people were probably forced to leave their job and/or move by this change. Congestion charges work by forcing the drivers who can least afford it to stop driving. It reminds me of how in a lot of American cities in the 20th century, ghettoes were razed to build highways or parks or stadiums.

That'll keep those unoccupied autonomous cars from causing traffic now that they have to pay with their...bitcoins? AAA points?

The idea seems much less anti-poor if you simply skim over who is no longer driving, which the people who support congestion charges always do. They're masters of whitewashing and euphemism.

Would you argue that this program didn't take the poorest 10% of drivers off the road?

The possibility of Israel having zero-days for WhatsApp as cyberweapons is a good reason for anyone in Iran's military and leadership to delete WhatsApp. It's not a good reason for ordinary people to do that though.

Iran wants ordinary people to do that because they want to minimize any common means ordinary people might have of organizing right now.

A person who isn't interested in checking the facts is orders of magnitude better controlled than a person who can't.

Worse than that, he's proven that a crime committed over the full course of a single presidential term is one that happens too fast for the law to catch - see the emoluments case against him during his first term.

AirBNB issues are just an ornament on top of the 3-tier wedding cake of today's housing price insanity.

The bottom tier serving as the foundation of this disaster cake is the idea that a house should not just be a place to live, but an investment that should appreciate over time, and thus that there should be a "property ladder." Huge fucking mistake.

Tier 2 is NIMBYs enacting zoning laws that all have the effect of restricting housing supply, which they have done successfully for decades.

And the top tier with your little AirBNB figurines perched on top is the fact that houses are still mostly hand-built one at a time like it's 1959.

And good luck fixing all this when profiting from runaway housing prices is not only big business, but also a huge fraction of voters have most of their net worth tied up in it. Never before has a speculative asset bubble sunk its claws so deep into an economy and society over such a long period of time.

An ICE design engineer I know (who really wants engines that turn most of their input energy directly into waste heat to not be obsolete in cars) likes switchgrass for producing ethanol in the US.

Pension schemes generally work like long-running intergenerational ponzi schemes that won't collapse as long as the next generation is always bigger and/or wealthier than the last. It's not a good system but trading off some "bigger" for some "wealthier" by reducing inequality could mitigate it. Inequality is also the root cause of falling births in developed societies (that the same ownership class that most wants endless population growth prefers to tiptoe around) so it would improve both issues.

Came here to say that the only surprising thing is that it was *sold,* I assumed it was just handed over for free since at least 9/11.

I was thinking the tsetse fly should be another top candidate, in the past they made it almost impossible to keep animals for livestock or transportation in large swathes of Africa, and the control efforts that continue to this day are massively destructive including wantonly burning natural foliage and killing wild animals they could feed on!

https://www.britannica.com/ani...

VW was smart enough not to keep any records of when Winterkorn was informed of the problem and allowed it to continue:

https://www.houstonchronicle.c...
https://www.theguardian.com/bu...

I also remember reading around the time that the scandal broke that Martin Winterkorn was smart enough to not be too specific when he instructed engineers to find a way to make the cars pass emissions within budget or they'd be fired, and that he didn't care how they did it.

Interesting story, I also heard from an engineer at GM who was involved in testing VW's diesels to find out how they were passing emissions with what seemed to be far fewer tradeoffs than any other manufacturer. They didn't figure it out because the cars would go into cheat mode on their testing equipment, and unless you did kind of hybrid dyno run/emissions test to show that power was reduced during the emissions test, or an on-road rolling emissions test to show that real-world emissions were higher (the type that unveiled the cheating) it would be incredibly difficult to find out that the cheat mode even existed.