Adjusting for inflation, yes that will be the case. The price of insurance can't be less than the cost of dealing with all of the accidents that the insurance policies have to cover. If self-driving cars greatly reduce the rate of accidents then the cost of insurance will fall. I'm sure there will be some companies that are greedy and want to pocket the savings for themselves, but there will be greedy companies that want to poach their customers and who are willing to pocket just a little bit less.

Would you willingly pay your current insurance rates if another company were offering you the same coverage for lower cost? Do you regularly pay more for goods or services than you have to? If your answer is "no" then capitalism is working because you as a customer ultimately get to decide where you spend your money and if you're like everyone else and want to keep as much of that money as you can then it will incentivize companies to compete on price.

What would cause it to become unsustainable when it currently is? It will definitely be cheaper for a lot of people to get a car that is incapable of manual control, but insurance will also become cheaper for good drivers as a large chunk of what they pay is to cover for the bad drivers. I think future generations will largely avoid learn to drive unless they need to as a part of their job because a long commute isn't nearly as bad if a person doesn't need to operate a vehicle in traffic. But as self-driving cars get better and come into use, the accident rates will decrease and that will make insurance cheaper

They do that with everything. I remember when JMS said the studios pulled the same shit with Babylon 5 because they would find ways to attach unrelated production costs to the project so that it never made money. Anyone working in or with Hollywood that isn't asking for a percentage of revenue is just asking to get fucked over by Hollywood accountants. The government doesn't care if actors or directors get fucked over as long as taxes get paid so don't expect them to care about the problem or try to fix it with legislation.

A few days ago there was a story about how an AI store was failing horribly. It can't do that, but at the same time will destroy us? It's pretty clear that no one has any actual answers or little interest in being honest about the exact capabilities of AI when their bottom line depends on hype or their job position relies on prognosticating doom.

You're discounting the ability of the actor to bring something to the role that the director couldn't envision themselves. The whole point of having casting auditions is so the director can find an actor that either fits their own idea of the part or blows them away with something transformative that they could not have envisioned before seeing it. Not every actor is capable of that and not every part calls for it, but when it does happen it creates something best described as the magic of cinema. If this weren't the case, the phrase "Hello, Clarice" would be completely meaningless to everyone who reads this post, and yet there are some for whom it is not merely memorable, but evokes an entire range of emotions and even causes them to read it in a different voice. Tell me that Anthony Hopkins was just a middle man with a straight face.

That ship has already sailed for Blizzard. Their present success rests entirely on par performance, but I can't think of anything they've done recently that's excited me. The only genre where someone else hasn't come along and done better is RTS, but Blizzard themselves haven't made a new game of that type since StarCraft 2. Perhaps the same could be said for MMOs as nothing ever "killed" WoW, but the player base for that has diminished significantly since its heyday even if they can keep milking what they do have.

Eventually the remaining fab goodwill will run out and they'll have nothing left. I can see why they would want a union right now with Microsoft looking for anything they can cut, but if they aren't selling enough copies a union won't save them.

Perhaps /. is using AIs to generate the summaries now and they're not much better at that than they are at running stores.

I'm assuming that he meant the sensor, but I'm not a digital camera expert.

This is a case where even if the AI hallucinates results, they are unlikely to be any more egregious than those hallucinated by the humans being replaced.

That's my thought as well. Also, it's not cheaper than getting two separate devices so there's no cost advantage.

I've never been a fan of foldable phones so I'm not the target market for this anyway, but what allure does this product have for anyone who wants to buy one? This product category feels more like a status symbol than serving any legitimate mainstream need. Niche product categories are fine, but Apple has never been a company excited to spend their time making something that only sells a few hundred thousand units per year.

I think we're having a semantic argument. Demand isn't being caused by adding more roads, the demand already exists and people aren't making trips because the cost of doing so is too high to justify. Hence the example that adding more bike racks does not induce more people to ride their bike to work when the racks are already underutilized. If someone added a 10 lane highway between two cities in remote Alaska would they magically fill up. Of course not. But why did they fail to induce demand in the same way that building more lanes in LA or Houston magically seems to do. The demand was already there and adding more lanes better lets people make the trips they already wanted to make but were otherwise avoiding.

Urbanists have adopted the foolish belief that by not expanding roads it will somehow magically get people to use public transportation. I suppose they're correct to the extent that if you make something suck badly enough no one will want to use it it unless the absolutely have to (see public transportation in most of the U.S.) but by similar logic reducing the number of hospitals would surely result in fewer people needing to go to the ER. We build other infrastructure to satisfy the wants and needs of the population it serves. Roads should be the same.

Induced demand is just flat out wrong. Here's an easy example. If the building I work I were to double the number of bike racks in front of it, would it increase the number of people who bike to work?

The reality is that there would be twice as many empty bike racks in front of the building. Why did they fail to induce demand in this case? People (mostly) do t drive just for the sake of driving. They do so because the trip serves some purpose. If the trip is too costly in terms of time taken then people are less likely to make it. Increased usage of rod capacity is merely a recognition of latent demand for less expensive travel. This follows typical human behavior where lower costs tends to lead to higher consumption.

I don't think communists have ever promoted the idea of induced demand. This seems to have sprung up in urbanism communities that have an absolute disdain for cars. There might be an overlap in these communities, but I've only ever stumbled across it there. The only way to increase the number of people who would bike to work is if the racks are already full and some people who would otherwise bike to work elect not to because they might not be able to find a spot to park their bike. Same exact thing with roads. Some people put off trips they might otherwise make because they don't expect to be able to make them as quickly as they'd like.

I never wanted any of the "smart" shit on my television in the first place. If they disable everything and leave me with a "dumb" display I'll be all the happier for it.

Just tell people it's like having a Flock camera in their living room. For whatever reason the same people who put up with all of the other spying shit seem to hate Flock cameras, so the best way to convince them that this is a problem is to liken it to that.

Do you regularly go to film festivals? The people who regularly do are the sort of people who tend to follow the industry closely and know a lot about upcoming films in much the same way that posters here follow rumors about unreleased tech products. For them the prospect of being one of a few hundred people who get to screen something that no one else has seen before or even heard about is going to be an alluring proposition, in much the same way that plenty of people here would jump at the opportunity to beta test some secret new tech product that's been kept under wraps during development. Maybe it will be a waste of time, but the potential is what draws us in.