For sure. And that's why I think it's important to distinguish harm caused despite good intentions and reasonable practices being followed from harm caused because someone did not follow reasonable practices or actively chose to cut corners.

Just my personal opinion, but given the track record in this particular industry, I think there should be demonstrable intent by decision-makers to follow good practices, not merely a lack of evidence of intent to circumvent or cut corners. This is expected in other regulated industries, compliance failures are a big deal, and for good reason. I see no reason why similar standards could not be imposed on those developing and operating autonomous vehicles, and every reason they should be given the inherent risks involved.

Maybe this will be an area where the US simply gets left behind because of the pro-car and litigious culture that seems to dominate discussions there.

Reading online discussions about driving -- admittedly a hazardous pastime if you want any facts to inform a debate -- you routinely see people from the US casually defending practices that are literally illegal and socially shunned in much of the world because they're so obviously dangerous. Combine that with the insanely oversized vehicles that a lot of drivers in the US apparently want to have and the car-centric environments that make alternative ways of getting around much less common and much less available, and that's how you get accident stats that are already far worse than much of the developed world.

But the people who will defend taking a hand off the wheel to pick up their can of drink while chatting with their partner on a call home all while driving their truck at 30mph down a narrow road full of parked cars past a school bus with kids getting out are probably going to object to being told their driving is objectively awful and far more likely to cause a death than the new self-driving technologies we're discussing here. You just don't see that kind of hubris, at least not to anything like the same degree, in most other places, so we might see more acceptance of self-driving vehicles elsewhere too.

IMHO the only sensible answer to is separate responsibility in the sense that a tragedy happened and someone has to try to help the survivors as best they can from responsibility in the sense that someone behaved inappropriately and that resulted in an avoidable tragedy happening in the first place.

It is inevitable that technology like this will result in harm to human beings sooner or later. Maybe one day we'll evolve a system that really is close to 100% safe, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. So it's vital to consider intent. Did the people developing the technology try to do things right and prioritise safety?

If they behaved properly and made reasonable decisions, a tragic accident might be just that. There's nothing to be gained from penalising people who were genuinely trying to make things better, made reasonable decisions, and had no intent to do anything wrong. There's still a question of how to look after the survivors who are affected. That should probably be a purely civil matter in law, and since nothing can undo the real damage, the reality is we're mostly talking about financial compensation here.

But if someone did choose to cut corners, or fail to follow approved procedures, or wilfully ignore new information that should have made something safer, particularly in the interests of personal gain or corporate profits, now we're into a whole different area. This is criminal territory, and I suspect it's going to be important for the decision-makers at the technology companies to have some personal skin in the game. There are professional ethics that apply to people like doctors and engineers and pilots, and they are personally responsible for complying with the rules of their profession. Probably there should be something similar for others who are involved with safety-critical technologies, including self-driving vehicles.

The perfect vs good argument is the pragmatic one for moral hazards like this. IMHO the best scenario as self-driving vehicles become mainstream technology is probably a culture like air travel: when there is some kind of accident, the priority is to learn from it and determine how to avoid the same problem happening again, and everyone takes the procedures and checks that have been established that way very seriously. That is necessarily going to require the active support of governments and regulators as well as the makers of the technology itself, and I hope the litigious culture in places like the US can allow it.

True, and that system does work pretty well.

Of course, it's not the whole story. Vietnam is far from the only time the US got up to some unilateral shenanigans (i.e. bypassing all that nice world institutions stuff).

The US has a long and copious history of invading other countries, destabilizing governments (democratic and otherwise) and assination plots of everyone up to and including heads of state, and there's no shortage of it after WWII.

The outright annexation did stop post WWII. Well, except for a bunch of Pacific islands, which was done with UN endorsement.

The recommendation was not to expose babies to tree nuts in any form because so-exposed babies seemed to be more likely to develop nut allergies. It turns out that was due to recall bias and the opposite is actually true.

Assuming you are older than 25, you (and I) were probably exposed to peanut butter, along with other common food allergens, on purpose by our parents around four or five months old. As I recall (can't confirm) that was the general recommendation prior to 2000. Around 2000 the EU said five months and the US said 36. Current guidelines are 4-6 months.

I do think there is a bit of a difference between the agenda of a limited term presidency of extremists and the agenda of the Chinese communist party though.

The US has invaded all of its neighbours, most multiple times. Many of those neighbours got annexed and remain so. There was even a whole holy destiny religious thing to justify it. You didn't have to be a neighbour though, the US would invade you no matter where in the world you were.

Are. It's not in the past. Since WWII the US decided all the other powers should give up their colonies and the US and USSR would have "spheres of influence" instead. So not outright annexation, but if you don't do as you're told, more invasions.

It's not "a limited term presidency of extremists." The current bunch are just less subtle. They're also more talk and less invading, so far.

Now?

It didn't explode out of nowhere. Some people have always been allergic to nuts. Pediatricians jumped the gun a bit around 2000 based on poor evidence and started recommending completely avoiding exposing high risk babies to nuts until they were three years old (in the US). This turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do and produced a generation of kids with much more severe nut allergies. More kids with more severe allergies caused even more restriction on exposure.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

As I replied to you elsewhere, yes, the per capita rate is imporant, but Americans insist on making absolute comparisons.

The absolute comparison also isn't entirely irrelevant. The article uses electrical generation as a proxy for GDP, a widely used practice and one that probably underestimates China if anything. So total electrical generation indicates the economic power represented by a particular political entity. Monaco and Liechenstein are not superpowers even though their GDP/capita are more than twice the US's and the threat of sanctions from Ireland doesn't carry the same weight as those from the US.

No, they were still terrible. But they were all there was.

Perhaps you've never had or don't remember the experience of carefully checking the polarity and voltage on a wall wart barrel jack and then holding your breath as you plugged it into your expensive gizmo.

Many cell phone chargers will charge a laptop. You can charge a Macbook pro using an iPhone charger.

But sure, you might have one of the old 15 W phone chargers. So chargers state their power output and the USB spec limits the current so any up to spec charger that advertises 36 W (12 V @ 3A) or more should charge any laptop, unless you've got something super weird.

USB guarantees negotiationless current at 5V and 0.5 A. Raspberry Pi decided to use an optional negotiationless mode instead of implementing PD like they should have.

You're very unlikely to find a 15W+ charger that doesn't offer the optional 5V 3A though. No, the Pi 4 doesn't require 4 A, which is not a supported configuraiton under the USB spec, even with PD.

The little two-shot moka pots are great for camping too.