Yep... turns out the only thing worst than two power-mad empires battling for control of the world with their quasi-religious economic ideologies lifted to the point of cultlike unquestioning adherence... is ONE power-mad empire battling for control of the world with it's quasi-religious economic ideology lifted to the point of cultlike unquestioning adherence.
But the Iraq war was worth 1.7 Trillion dollars and counting ? Afghanistan was worth the 1 trillion bill it had run up in 2014 already ? I imagine it's a bit higher now.
For comparison - Bush never actually counted the wars against the deficit (worst accounting ever) - Obama did, figuring if America spends money on this stuff it ought to be written down somewhere. Think about that. It means the wars alone make up a third of the deficite increase written up during his terms (ironically, representing money the guy before him actually spent but didn't write down).
Nearly three trillion dollars spent killing brown people. Another trillion odd paying all the other soldiers and military staff and defense projects and the rest of a killing machine 13 times larger than anybody else has (because twice as large while just as effective would not be as good for hawkish politician's egos and their friend's pocketbooks). What has the military cost, in total, since the ISS was launched ? I can't find a clear figure but even in 1998 when the ISS was first launched the military budget for the year was 399 Billion - FOUR TIMES what the ISS has cost us in TOTAL.
I would argue that if we can afford to spend apparently about half the global GDP on trying to kill each other over 20 years - we can damn well afford to spend a hundred billion on developing the techniques and technologies for long term space exploration - which is the ISS's single most valuable research contribution.
You can't just say "X" is a big number, whether a number is big depends on context. In the context of government spending and priorities, the ISS is near the top of the list of the BEST things ever done with your tax money.
When more people are able to do something than before more people are more free. Unless you are unable to count.
Besides nobody is going to force the change. No law will ban human driving just like no law banned horses. But, like horses, human driven cars will become a toy for crazy rich people. There can be no reduction in anybodies liberty without force. The call a car zervices will simply be able to offer you a far cheaper way to meet transport needs thus freeing up more of your money and giving you the increased freedom of actually having a choice in what you spend it on.
I doubt you are correct. When cars came around - people didn't wait for all the horses to die of old age to replace carriages - they got a car as soon as they were able to. Sure carriages still exist... how often do you see one ? And the horse-to-car transition was slow because early cars were hand-built and extremely expensive. When mass-production came to car building, they took over in a historical blink of an eye.
Expect the same thing - everybody who can will be buying one as soon as they possibly can. It would simply be economic suicide *not* to. And very soon (5 to 10 years at the outside) a human driven car will be like a horse carriage today: a toy for the eccentric rich - and we have every reason to expect it to happen much faster because this time, we already HAVE road infrastructure, mass-production factories and cost-effective construction techniques. There is also far less new technology between this revolution and the last than between cars and horses,most of it is just reapplying existing technologies in a much better way.
Cars had completely replaced horses as a transport technology in about 3 decades from the first prototypes to the point where everybody bought a car instead. We're already at the first prototypes for SDCs - so even if the timeline was the same with none of the accelerating factors I mentioned mattering (which makes no sense whatsoever) there's no sane reason for it to take longer. Meantime if uber-like services become available - people will overwhelmingly just stop buying cars. Cars are probably the worst thing you can possibly spend your money on even now and always have been. A depreciating asset which costs so much that most people can only buy one with debt (even if they buy it second hand)... a liability to acquire a depreciating asset is the most economically stupid decision anybody can make and all but the very stupidest people can work that out. Most people own cars because they need them to get to work - it's a loss leader for income, if the car offers some joy that's a minor compensation for the loss but you can get the same fun a lot cheaper by watching a good movie or getting laid.
If you can get to work (or where-ever else) cheaply and efficiently without having to undergo the stressful horrors of driving in traffic, and watch a movie or get laid during the trip safely without ever having to take out that huge loan to buy a depreciating asset... only a few hard-headed luddites and vanilla-isis like "cars are freedom" redneck-idiots would not see that the massive and obvious advantages of using that option.
Yes, I'm aware it took three decades, but cars had FAR bigger barriers to overcome before they could go mainstream, including figuring out cheap mass-production. Since we've already figured that out this time, the timeframe you should be comparing with is from the introduction of the model-T, which was released in 1908. That already reduces the timeline to 17 years. But the model-T didn't start out with full capacity manufacturing at it's lowest price-point, all those barriers have been crossed long ago, so you can easily slice another 5-7 years off because we'd be introducing SDC's at the relative price-points and manufacturing capacities that Ford didn't reach until the middle of WW1. Except that now there are entirely new ways of transport being opened up - uber-like services with SDCs can offer all the most valuable advantages of owning a car without the massive downsides (like taking out a huge debt to buy a depreciating asset with a constant maintenance cost: something that's economically incredibly stupid and people only do it because they NEED a car to get to work, at best a car is a loss leader). Economically the advantages of using such a services instead of buying is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the economic advantages of a model-T over a horse carriage had been. This will hugely accelerate the process.
Of course as people adopt this, and their cars stand idly they'll all try to sell them, which is likely to plummet the prices of the second hand market (you can expect a small uptick in purchases but only briefly because even at rock-bottom prices it's will still be too expensive) - but this will force the manufacturers of new human driven cars to drive THEIR prices down as well, and very, very soon the best price you can get for a human driven car will be less than the best price you can MAKE one for. When that happens, nobody will want to make one anymore.
Every indicator suggests that within 10 years of introduction the only remaining human driven cars being made will be off the Rolls-Royce every part made by hand as a toy for rich idiots variety.
>. I would like my blood and violence to come with a healthy dose of fiction.
I think I prefer an unhealthy dose myself. I always preferred the uberpowered weapons and cartoonish gameplay of Quake and UT over the realistic FPSs like CS. Gaming was escapism and the violence wasn't supposed to be realistic, just fun and with lots of giant explosions.
Now, in my thirties, I avoid FPSs entirely - I got bored with the entire concept a long time ago. Give me a good RPG like Morrowind or physics sim like KSP instead.
>You can let the car drive itself, so you can be doing other things
According to *last* week's autonomous car scar headline - those things will include a lot of sex. I just don't see how society will not be BETTER off if more people are getting laid more often.
Nope. The main reason for the auto-industry boom in the US in the 50's and 60's is that you didn't have any major competition. The two biggest competing countries had their industries thoroughly destroyed in world war 2 and were still rebuilding. When Japan and Germany properly entered the market again in the 1970's the boom-time ended very quickly.
>Around where i work, all the over 65s visit the bank during lunchtime, Actually they probably don't. By nature of my career I've frequently not been working office hours so I got to observe these things a bit better than most. Banks cut costs by employing fewer people when most are at work. The thing is, if you show up at 8am on a Monday morning- there is a long queue and very few tellers serving them (often just one)... and many of them will still be waiting in line when lunchtime comes around (and the bank adds more tellers for the expected extra lunch-time visitors.
They may BE there when you show up at at lunch, but mostly they've BEEN there for hours already. I know, I've shown up at banks at 8am on a Monday and failed to get helped until after 1pm more than once.
Considering the book in question is still the de facto textbook on the subject at most universities in the world almost 2 decades later... I think that's a pretty damn good definition of an expert. He's not just an expert, he is the expert who taught almost every other expert working today.
That will only be a problem for a brief period. It took less than a decade for cars to make horse-drawn carriages almost entirely disappear. SDCs are likely to do the same to HDCs and likely even faster.
>Only if self driving cars have been made mandatory and the only vehicles on the road are self driving. Otherwise the efficiencies will be eaten up by compromises with human driven cars
There will be nearly no human driven cars and nobody will have to make them mandatory to achieve that (though they could and should because frankly once self driving cars exist human driven cars are by definition too unsafe to be roadworthy). Nobody had to BAN horsedrawn carriages to get rid of them -once cars existed, they went almost entirely extinct through pure economics. Same thing can and WILL almost certainly happen with self driving cars. People simply cannot afford to continue to act against their own convenience and economic interests indefinitely by clinging to an outdated and outperformed technology.
Thats why I said use PlayOnLinux. Automated installs in containers and importantly: wine versions locked for containers. Regressions dont affect you as each program uses whatever wine version it works best with. Wine provided an incredibly powerful feature to prevent ongoing dev from impacting usability and PoL uses that feature by default with no manual effort required. Even if you build a custom container for somethinf without a script that feature is built-in the PoL container wizard. Wine is a developers tool. PlayOnLinux is a user tool built on top of it and I recommend it for anybody who is not avtively porting software with wine.
>Deforestation happens; he talked about over-forestation, are you dense? . OP made two separate points about - one about forestation and one about the price of wood. GP replied to only one of them and you're scolding him based on the other (which he did not reply to - so your response makes no sense). OP never claimed the over-forestation one happened - he claimed the price of wood went up, which it did. My house was built in 1948 as part of a large development to build houses for returning WW2 soldiers. It has Oregon-pine flooring. Back then this was cheap flooring tech for low-cost housing. Today, this old house is actually a very expensive and valuable property, and a huge chunk of that value comes from those floors. Do you have any idea what it would cost to build a large 3-bedroom house with a (very large) lounge with Oregon pine flooring today ? Based on the price of that wood today, more than half the sales price I bought this house for last year is JUST the value of the wood in the floors !
Currently the biggest problem with rail is reliability - fewer points of failure. I use rail for my commute since it's cheaper than driving, less stressful and I can get shit done during the commute - but over the past few weeks trains have frequently been facing huge delays. In this case due to vandalism and arson (Cape Town). A few arsonists made millions of commuters late for work for many weeks but many other (non-deliberate) problems could cause the same.
It's harder to do that with cars - there are always alternative roads so you can't just block one up and cause huge issues, and many individual machines means the impact of a breakage only affects one person instead of thousands.
This is a problem with commuter rail - especially in countries like mine where, for millions of people, it is literally the ONLY viable way for them to get to work because cars are simply too expensive.
That's absolutely false - since you're ignoring the main difference between self driving and these services: self driving can economically be individualized. You don't have to wait an hour for a vehicle that's taking a horribly inefficient route to pick up a bunch of other people, or spend twice as long in it because it's going so many other places first. It picks YOU up, and drops YOU off. If anything it will take LESS time than using your own car does now.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just because the law isn't actively enforced doesn't mean it is any less bad that the law exists, which it does.
Yep... turns out the only thing worst than two power-mad empires battling for control of the world with their quasi-religious economic ideologies lifted to the point of cultlike unquestioning adherence... is ONE power-mad empire battling for control of the world with it's quasi-religious economic ideology lifted to the point of cultlike unquestioning adherence.
>OK, but not really worth $100 billion.
But the Iraq war was worth 1.7 Trillion dollars and counting ? Afghanistan was worth the 1 trillion bill it had run up in 2014 already ? I imagine it's a bit higher now.
For comparison - Bush never actually counted the wars against the deficit (worst accounting ever) - Obama did, figuring if America spends money on this stuff it ought to be written down somewhere. Think about that. It means the wars alone make up a third of the deficite increase written up during his terms (ironically, representing money the guy before him actually spent but didn't write down).
Nearly three trillion dollars spent killing brown people. Another trillion odd paying all the other soldiers and military staff and defense projects and the rest of a killing machine 13 times larger than anybody else has (because twice as large while just as effective would not be as good for hawkish politician's egos and their friend's pocketbooks).
What has the military cost, in total, since the ISS was launched ? I can't find a clear figure but even in 1998 when the ISS was first launched the military budget for the year was 399 Billion - FOUR TIMES what the ISS has cost us in TOTAL.
I would argue that if we can afford to spend apparently about half the global GDP on trying to kill each other over 20 years - we can damn well afford to spend a hundred billion on developing the techniques and technologies for long term space exploration - which is the ISS's single most valuable research contribution.
You can't just say "X" is a big number, whether a number is big depends on context. In the context of government spending and priorities, the ISS is near the top of the list of the BEST things ever done with your tax money.
So. Much. Stupid.
When more people are able to do something than before more people are more free. Unless you are unable to count.
Besides nobody is going to force the change. No law will ban human driving just like no law banned horses. But, like horses, human driven cars will become a toy for crazy rich people. There can be no reduction in anybodies liberty without force. The call a car zervices will simply be able to offer you a far cheaper way to meet transport needs thus freeing up more of your money and giving you the increased freedom of actually having a choice in what you spend it on.
I doubt you are correct. When cars came around - people didn't wait for all the horses to die of old age to replace carriages - they got a car as soon as they were able to. Sure carriages still exist... how often do you see one ? And the horse-to-car transition was slow because early cars were hand-built and extremely expensive. When mass-production came to car building, they took over in a historical blink of an eye.
Expect the same thing - everybody who can will be buying one as soon as they possibly can. It would simply be economic suicide *not* to. And very soon (5 to 10 years at the outside) a human driven car will be like a horse carriage today: a toy for the eccentric rich - and we have every reason to expect it to happen much faster because this time, we already HAVE road infrastructure, mass-production factories and cost-effective construction techniques. There is also far less new technology between this revolution and the last than between cars and horses,most of it is just reapplying existing technologies in a much better way.
Cars had completely replaced horses as a transport technology in about 3 decades from the first prototypes to the point where everybody bought a car instead. We're already at the first prototypes for SDCs - so even if the timeline was the same with none of the accelerating factors I mentioned mattering (which makes no sense whatsoever) there's no sane reason for it to take longer. Meantime if uber-like services become available - people will overwhelmingly just stop buying cars. Cars are probably the worst thing you can possibly spend your money on even now and always have been. A depreciating asset which costs so much that most people can only buy one with debt (even if they buy it second hand)... a liability to acquire a depreciating asset is the most economically stupid decision anybody can make and all but the very stupidest people can work that out.
Most people own cars because they need them to get to work - it's a loss leader for income, if the car offers some joy that's a minor compensation for the loss but you can get the same fun a lot cheaper by watching a good movie or getting laid.
If you can get to work (or where-ever else) cheaply and efficiently without having to undergo the stressful horrors of driving in traffic, and watch a movie or get laid during the trip safely without ever having to take out that huge loan to buy a depreciating asset... only a few hard-headed luddites and vanilla-isis like "cars are freedom" redneck-idiots would not see that the massive and obvious advantages of using that option.
Yes, I'm aware it took three decades, but cars had FAR bigger barriers to overcome before they could go mainstream, including figuring out cheap mass-production. Since we've already figured that out this time, the timeframe you should be comparing with is from the introduction of the model-T, which was released in 1908. That already reduces the timeline to 17 years. But the model-T didn't start out with full capacity manufacturing at it's lowest price-point, all those barriers have been crossed long ago, so you can easily slice another 5-7 years off because we'd be introducing SDC's at the relative price-points and manufacturing capacities that Ford didn't reach until the middle of WW1.
Except that now there are entirely new ways of transport being opened up - uber-like services with SDCs can offer all the most valuable advantages of owning a car without the massive downsides (like taking out a huge debt to buy a depreciating asset with a constant maintenance cost: something that's economically incredibly stupid and people only do it because they NEED a car to get to work, at best a car is a loss leader). Economically the advantages of using such a services instead of buying is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the economic advantages of a model-T over a horse carriage had been. This will hugely accelerate the process.
Of course as people adopt this, and their cars stand idly they'll all try to sell them, which is likely to plummet the prices of the second hand market (you can expect a small uptick in purchases but only briefly because even at rock-bottom prices it's will still be too expensive) - but this will force the manufacturers of new human driven cars to drive THEIR prices down as well, and very, very soon the best price you can get for a human driven car will be less than the best price you can MAKE one for. When that happens, nobody will want to make one anymore.
Every indicator suggests that within 10 years of introduction the only remaining human driven cars being made will be off the Rolls-Royce every part made by hand as a toy for rich idiots variety.
>Wish it weren't so but you are throwing away a good chunk of your hardware performance if you choose Linux for gaming.
Valve has staked their entire business model on you being wrong... and I'm prepared to bet they know more than you about the topic at hand.
Yep
I mostly use busses and trains. It works great. And SDCs will be better because they are private and connected.
>. I would like my blood and violence to come with a healthy dose of fiction.
I think I prefer an unhealthy dose myself. I always preferred the uberpowered weapons and cartoonish gameplay of Quake and UT over the realistic FPSs like CS. Gaming was escapism and the violence wasn't supposed to be realistic, just fun and with lots of giant explosions.
Now, in my thirties, I avoid FPSs entirely - I got bored with the entire concept a long time ago. Give me a good RPG like Morrowind or physics sim like KSP instead.
But even they acknowledge that you lose all your gear and accumulated XP.
We have archeological records of human settlement at cape point 90k years ago. Technically I never said written records :p
It works great for me. Every non native game I play is in a PoL container.
>You can let the car drive itself, so you can be doing other things
According to *last* week's autonomous car scar headline - those things will include a lot of sex. I just don't see how society will not be BETTER off if more people are getting laid more often.
Somebody utterly and completely failed to understand Darwin...
Nope. The main reason for the auto-industry boom in the US in the 50's and 60's is that you didn't have any major competition. The two biggest competing countries had their industries thoroughly destroyed in world war 2 and were still rebuilding. When Japan and Germany properly entered the market again in the 1970's the boom-time ended very quickly.
>Around where i work, all the over 65s visit the bank during lunchtime,
Actually they probably don't. By nature of my career I've frequently not been working office hours so I got to observe these things a bit better than most. Banks cut costs by employing fewer people when most are at work. The thing is, if you show up at 8am on a Monday morning- there is a long queue and very few tellers serving them (often just one)... and many of them will still be waiting in line when lunchtime comes around (and the bank adds more tellers for the expected extra lunch-time visitors.
They may BE there when you show up at at lunch, but mostly they've BEEN there for hours already. I know, I've shown up at banks at 8am on a Monday and failed to get helped until after 1pm more than once.
Considering the book in question is still the de facto textbook on the subject at most universities in the world almost 2 decades later... I think that's a pretty damn good definition of an expert. He's not just an expert, he is the expert who taught almost every other expert working today.
That will only be a problem for a brief period. It took less than a decade for cars to make horse-drawn carriages almost entirely disappear. SDCs are likely to do the same to HDCs and likely even faster.
>Only if self driving cars have been made mandatory and the only vehicles on the road are self driving. Otherwise the efficiencies will be eaten up by compromises with human driven cars
There will be nearly no human driven cars and nobody will have to make them mandatory to achieve that (though they could and should because frankly once self driving cars exist human driven cars are by definition too unsafe to be roadworthy). Nobody had to BAN horsedrawn carriages to get rid of them -once cars existed, they went almost entirely extinct through pure economics.
Same thing can and WILL almost certainly happen with self driving cars. People simply cannot afford to continue to act against their own convenience and economic interests indefinitely by clinging to an outdated and outperformed technology.
Thats why I said use PlayOnLinux. Automated installs in containers and importantly: wine versions locked for containers. Regressions dont affect you as each program uses whatever wine version it works best with. Wine provided an incredibly powerful feature to prevent ongoing dev from impacting usability and PoL uses that feature by default with no manual effort required. Even if you build a custom container for somethinf without a script that feature is built-in the PoL container wizard.
Wine is a developers tool. PlayOnLinux is a user tool built on top of it and I recommend it for anybody who is not avtively porting software with wine.
>Deforestation happens; he talked about over-forestation, are you dense? .
OP made two separate points about - one about forestation and one about the price of wood. GP replied to only one of them and you're scolding him based on the other (which he did not reply to - so your response makes no sense).
OP never claimed the over-forestation one happened - he claimed the price of wood went up, which it did. My house was built in 1948 as part of a large development to build houses for returning WW2 soldiers. It has Oregon-pine flooring. Back then this was cheap flooring tech for low-cost housing. Today, this old house is actually a very expensive and valuable property, and a huge chunk of that value comes from those floors. Do you have any idea what it would cost to build a large 3-bedroom house with a (very large) lounge with Oregon pine flooring today ? Based on the price of that wood today, more than half the sales price I bought this house for last year is JUST the value of the wood in the floors !
Currently the biggest problem with rail is reliability - fewer points of failure. I use rail for my commute since it's cheaper than driving, less stressful and I can get shit done during the commute - but over the past few weeks trains have frequently been facing huge delays. In this case due to vandalism and arson (Cape Town). A few arsonists made millions of commuters late for work for many weeks but many other (non-deliberate) problems could cause the same.
It's harder to do that with cars - there are always alternative roads so you can't just block one up and cause huge issues, and many individual machines means the impact of a breakage only affects one person instead of thousands.
This is a problem with commuter rail - especially in countries like mine where, for millions of people, it is literally the ONLY viable way for them to get to work because cars are simply too expensive.
>the self-driving is an orthogonal factor
That's absolutely false - since you're ignoring the main difference between self driving and these services: self driving can economically be individualized. You don't have to wait an hour for a vehicle that's taking a horribly inefficient route to pick up a bunch of other people, or spend twice as long in it because it's going so many other places first. It picks YOU up, and drops YOU off. If anything it will take LESS time than using your own car does now.