I don't - we were discussing self-driving car-on-demand services, not rentals as you're thinking of them.
A car-on-demand service would work more like Uber, and to be viable has to be a lot cheaper. Cheaper than the cost of driving your own car in city conditins in fact (which, is by far the most expensive kind of driving there is - city stop/go driving uses more fuel and does more damage than any other kind of driving).
I would say the same about basing your vehicle purchase on only 2% of the time. But if you cannot come up with a better way to do the 2% an 80% saving on the cost of the other 98% is enough to do that and still save money
>I agree that military spending could go down but just throwing more money at healthcare doesn't seem like a good long term solution.
Luckily, we won't have to - maybe initially to make the original capital investment, but single payer is just cheaper at every single level. If nothing else - we can save every penny in profits ever recorded by an insurance company since a single payer system means we only need to pay doctors and nurses and pharmacists. Insurance profits are a broken window fallacy anyway. Since people can afford regular doctors visits we can do cheap preventative care and early detection - which reduces the price of treatment massively, you simply have far fewer serious things to treat.
But seriously - I would very much prefer to live in a society when the schools and the hospitals have all the money they need and the military has to hold a bake sale to buy bullets.
To me - just being able to do something more fun than driving to work (watching a movie, reading a book) would be so great a reduction in stress that it would take truly terrible company to somehow be worse than that.
I looked it up. There was between 100-thousand and 200-thousand horses in New York in 1900, nobody knows the exact number but let's use the upper-estimate (your value). New York population in 1900: 3.4 million.
So at the height of New York horse ownership, if every horse had been private owned- only one in every 17 people would have owned a horse, and of course a lot of those horses were not owned by one private individual, more often one person own many horses, so far fewer than every 17th person could possibly have owned one. And of course that's generously using the upper estimate - the real number would be even lower.
Now what you say about corporations is true - and a valid concern, but there are ways to around that which don't require sacrificing the benefits. Like a regulatory environment which would benefit smaller businesses serving your region over large nation-wide corporations or franchises (there are other ways for those who hate regulations - it's just one example).
You may very well find it's cheaper then to buy a car just for THOSE trips and not use it for commutes. The reduced travel would make the car much cheaper to drive, much cheaper to maintain too (long distance driving is far less damaging to a car than the stop-and-go travel of city driving) - and since you no longer care about the commute you can buy a more specialized vehicle, selecting features you are likely to want and abandoning others that would be crucial in the city but doesn't much matter for your long-distance trips. Perhaps off-road capabilities rather than heated seats. In fact, with the money you save on the commute - you could probably afford a much nicer car for those once-a-week trips.
One-size-fits-all is rarely the most sensible economic decision. It only works when the various use-cases are close enough together that the benefits of specialized technology do not outweigh the cost of buying specialized devices. A fridge/freezer actually costs MORE than a fridge AND a freezer in the long run since a large chest freezer lets you buy in bulk - and that will save you the price difference very quickly.
Right now, you are almost certainly correct that a separate leisure vehicle would add so much cost, and so little value as to be a waste of money. Your mistake is assuming that a massive reduction in commuting cost would not greatly alter that outcome.
I wouldn't be surprised. Canada's reputation for politeness is quite well deserved, and one of the number one things that make driving safer is doing it politely. But sadly, most of the world is not like Canada in this respect - and technology tends to be a LOT easier to change than people.
No, you're a moron because you assume that your personal desire apply to so many other people that there will always be a viable market in selling to you. You're also a moron because you said - and I quote - that you 'consider all possible uses' when buying a vehicle - that's just dumb.
If I can save 80% of the cost on 90% of the use - I would be a moron TOO if I didn't consider alternative ways of dealing with the other 10% of use-cases, rather than forgoing that 80% saving.
Actually - most people did not own horses - certainly not in the cities. There was an entire industry of livery stables where people rented them on demand and a massive taxi industry using horse-drawn carriages as well.
A horse was expensive to keep, required a stable, somewhere to feed it and significant care: the vast majority of people could not afford one.
I have to wonder where you live. Because in ten years of driving I have never gone a day without seeing at least 3 accidents, and I doubt I've gone a week without seeing at least one where it was absolutely obvious that nobody inside the vehicle could possibly have survived.
We'll just ignore that a home is an appreciating asset and a car is a depreciating asset and pretend that doesn't entirely invalidate ever using them as a comparison to each other in any reasoning whatsoever.
So you're a moron. Most people aren't - at least not as much as you. The reality is- when there are few enough morons left who think like you, you will be forced to adapt because nobody will be able to make a profit catering to your moron-niche market.
You've just committed the ultimate in dumb-ass reasoning: you've extrapolated from a sample size of one to the market at large. That always works out so very well.
Cars are in no way critical to personal freedom. Unless you stupidly imagine that nobody had any personal freedom until the 1920s (before which only a tiny number of people ever saw a car let alone drove one).
Cars didn't even increase personal freedom. No. Not even a little.
All it offered was an illusion of more freedom and the only thing they are critical for is maintaining that illusion.
Infallible ? No. Less fallible than human drivers ? Guaranteed.
Because that's an incredibly low bar. Human drivers are shit. You don't even have to make a GOOD self driving car to be better than humans - and the standards being chased are so far beyond human ability its not even a comparison.
You could probably MATCH human capacity at driving with a 100-line python script written by a first-year literature student on the very first computer he has ever touched.
Since we explain everything here with a car analogy, let me explain cars to him with a sex analogy.
When you only think about the personal pleasure of driving (for you - I and many other people hate every second we have to spend doing it) - you're thinking like somebody masturbating. It only affects yourself, the risk of injuring yourself is minimal and while I some people may judge you and think it's a sad way to get your pleasure - we have no cause to actually try and stop you doing it.
But driving is not, at all, like masturbation. Driving is like having sex -there are other people involved, there are risks to all of them - and unless all the people involved consented you aren't allowed to do it. Among the many reasons for that - is the fact that you aren't allowed to subject OTHER people to risks they didn't consent to. And driving isn't just having sex - it's a fucking orgy involving hundreds or even thousands of other people.
We have every right to institute things to minimize the risks involved - hence we have traffic signals, laws of the road, speed limits and licensing requirements. If the possibility comes to almost entirely eradicate that risk by removing fallible human judgement from the equation - we as the other thousand participants have every right to demand that. Just like the participants in a thousand-man orgy would have every right to demand you wear a condom and no amount of you saying it wil reduce your personal pleasure would justify not wearing one if the other people involved demand it.
Seriously. I am in the fortunate position of having a rare and extremely sought after skillset - and my number one demand in job negotiations over my last 4 jobs was: if you expect me to work standard office hours I demand an extra 25% salary over your offer. If you allow me to avoid rush hour - I don't need that. Why because working standard office hours means I have an hour commute each way - so to be at the office for 8 hours I have to be away from my family for 10 - and I demand recompense for that time. So far, they've all agreed that flexible working hours was the smarter option.
But- most people are not in the kind of position I am in - most people do not, when jobhunting, have 4 to 5 offers in their mailbox after 2 weeks and the capacity to twist arms before accepting one.
Most people have to suffer that 25% loss in personal time with no recompense. And if you aren't factoring that into your calculations then your calculations are bullshit. At least if somebody else is driving you can do something during that time - read a good book, watch a movie etc. etc.
The reason to get good quality insurance is not the risk of fucking YOURSELF up - if that was all, nowhere would insurance be legally required. The reason is in case you drive into some rich asshole's porsche-powered limo and suddenly face a debt of two-thousand times your annual salary which you're children will still be paying off decades after you die.
Ironically - literally the only time ever that a 'socialist urban planner' seriously tried to enforce a particular migration pattern it was in the opposite direction to what he claimed. The only one that seriously tried was Pol Pot. The K'mer Rouge did force a migration: they were forcing people OUT of the cities on the premise that everybody HAS to be a farmer.
To be fair though - the article's premise is on-demand self-driving cars. Which makes any issues with charging, battery cost etc. entirely dissapear since you're not buying the car. You're just renting it for a brief period. Sure somebody has to pay that investment - but that person gets to fold it into a bulk-purchase as part of the initial capital-outlay for a profit-making business. Your argument then is like if somebody had said "Nobody will ever ride the train because it's way too expensive to lay the tracks" - yet trains were a major part of transport infrastructure for over a century, because the people riding the train weren't the ones who had lay the tracks, and none of them had to cover more than a infinitesimally tiny fraction of the cost of those tracks. A cost you can spread over a very large customer base becomes insignificant to any particular one of them - and doesn't prevent the service from being more valuable.
And charge times just isn't a factor since the renting company needs a large fleet anyway - you only need about a 10% extra capacity to ensure you always have a car with charge when the next customer requests one.
If self-driving car services do develop as expected, it's entirely possible that a car will lose all atraction very soon. As it stands a car is not an asset - it's a depreciating liability that involves a constant cost. Nobody buys a car because it's valuable to them (although a lot of people THINK they do) it's not possible since a car is NOT valuable to anybody - it is a net negative expense. We make that expense for the same reason we spend money on food- because we don't have any choice in the matter. The moment there is a better choice, it will take extreme stubborness and mathematical stupidity to keep making the bad one. Of course there are no shortage of stubborn idiots in the world -but they can only keep an industry going for so long. Unlike, say, homeopathy the ICE industry isn't selling something fairly cheap (and cheaper than the competitors whose product has actual value) - and, much like homeopathy, at that point they are selling nothing but a placebo. An illusion of freedom and control which, like the illusion of medicine, may make you feel better but isn't actually worth it - since you can get the EXACT same feeling for a fraction of the cost by playing need for speed.
Yes it is a check on democracy, and that isn't a bad thing. Just because they feared a different kind of populist to the one who got elected, doesn't make anything I said untrue.
>The correct solution is a representative parliament. Like the UK but without the house of Lords. Anyone who can get a reasonable percentage of votes gets in. Like South Africa has ? That has it's own problems - you MUST combine that with people who are elected by specific counties -or the people in washington will feel entirely cut off from their voters and feel loyalty only to the party. A 50/50 version of each is a much smarter system (like South Africa does on the local government level). Another thing you really don't want to copy from the UK is their single biggest mistake: the first-past-the-post system. That has frequently allowed a party with only a tiny minority of votes to gain absolute power in government. The Tories right now have full control of government and only got about 35% of the vote, it's not even the worst - the record happened in the early 20th century when a UK party managed to get full control of government with a mere 17% of the actual votes !
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I don't - we were discussing self-driving car-on-demand services, not rentals as you're thinking of them.
A car-on-demand service would work more like Uber, and to be viable has to be a lot cheaper. Cheaper than the cost of driving your own car in city conditins in fact (which, is by far the most expensive kind of driving there is - city stop/go driving uses more fuel and does more damage than any other kind of driving).
I would say the same about basing your vehicle purchase on only 2% of the time. But if you cannot come up with a better way to do the 2% an 80% saving on the cost of the other 98% is enough to do that and still save money
I didn't ever actually suggest that. I suggested renting for commute and buying for vacation.
>I agree that military spending could go down but just throwing more money at healthcare doesn't seem like a good long term solution.
Luckily, we won't have to - maybe initially to make the original capital investment, but single payer is just cheaper at every single level. If nothing else - we can save every penny in profits ever recorded by an insurance company since a single payer system means we only need to pay doctors and nurses and pharmacists.
Insurance profits are a broken window fallacy anyway.
Since people can afford regular doctors visits we can do cheap preventative care and early detection - which reduces the price of treatment massively, you simply have far fewer serious things to treat.
But seriously - I would very much prefer to live in a society when the schools and the hospitals have all the money they need and the military has to hold a bake sale to buy bullets.
To me - just being able to do something more fun than driving to work (watching a movie, reading a book) would be so great a reduction in stress that it would take truly terrible company to somehow be worse than that.
Well the contradiction to your first sentence is right there in the second sentence.
Technology on the other hand - as long as you are within the laws of physics - that just takes a determined engineer.
I looked it up. There was between 100-thousand and 200-thousand horses in New York in 1900, nobody knows the exact number but let's use the upper-estimate (your value).
New York population in 1900: 3.4 million.
So at the height of New York horse ownership, if every horse had been private owned- only one in every 17 people would have owned a horse, and of course a lot of those horses were not owned by one private individual, more often one person own many horses, so far fewer than every 17th person could possibly have owned one.
And of course that's generously using the upper estimate - the real number would be even lower.
Now what you say about corporations is true - and a valid concern, but there are ways to around that which don't require sacrificing the benefits. Like a regulatory environment which would benefit smaller businesses serving your region over large nation-wide corporations or franchises (there are other ways for those who hate regulations - it's just one example).
You may very well find it's cheaper then to buy a car just for THOSE trips and not use it for commutes. The reduced travel would make the car much cheaper to drive, much cheaper to maintain too (long distance driving is far less damaging to a car than the stop-and-go travel of city driving) - and since you no longer care about the commute you can buy a more specialized vehicle, selecting features you are likely to want and abandoning others that would be crucial in the city but doesn't much matter for your long-distance trips. Perhaps off-road capabilities rather than heated seats. In fact, with the money you save on the commute - you could probably afford a much nicer car for those once-a-week trips.
One-size-fits-all is rarely the most sensible economic decision. It only works when the various use-cases are close enough together that the benefits of specialized technology do not outweigh the cost of buying specialized devices. A fridge/freezer actually costs MORE than a fridge AND a freezer in the long run since a large chest freezer lets you buy in bulk - and that will save you the price difference very quickly.
Right now, you are almost certainly correct that a separate leisure vehicle would add so much cost, and so little value as to be a waste of money. Your mistake is assuming that a massive reduction in commuting cost would not greatly alter that outcome.
I wouldn't be surprised. Canada's reputation for politeness is quite well deserved, and one of the number one things that make driving safer is doing it politely. But sadly, most of the world is not like Canada in this respect - and technology tends to be a LOT easier to change than people.
No, you're a moron because you assume that your personal desire apply to so many other people that there will always be a viable market in selling to you. You're also a moron because you said - and I quote - that you 'consider all possible uses' when buying a vehicle - that's just dumb.
If I can save 80% of the cost on 90% of the use - I would be a moron TOO if I didn't consider alternative ways of dealing with the other 10% of use-cases, rather than forgoing that 80% saving.
Actually - most people did not own horses - certainly not in the cities. There was an entire industry of livery stables where people rented them on demand and a massive taxi industry using horse-drawn carriages as well.
A horse was expensive to keep, required a stable, somewhere to feed it and significant care: the vast majority of people could not afford one.
I have to wonder where you live. Because in ten years of driving I have never gone a day without seeing at least 3 accidents, and I doubt I've gone a week without seeing at least one where it was absolutely obvious that nobody inside the vehicle could possibly have survived.
We'll just ignore that a home is an appreciating asset and a car is a depreciating asset and pretend that doesn't entirely invalidate ever using them as a comparison to each other in any reasoning whatsoever.
So you're a moron. Most people aren't - at least not as much as you. The reality is- when there are few enough morons left who think like you, you will be forced to adapt because nobody will be able to make a profit catering to your moron-niche market.
You've just committed the ultimate in dumb-ass reasoning: you've extrapolated from a sample size of one to the market at large. That always works out so very well.
Cars are in no way critical to personal freedom.
Unless you stupidly imagine that nobody had any personal freedom until the 1920s (before which only a tiny number of people ever saw a car let alone drove one).
Cars didn't even increase personal freedom. No. Not even a little.
All it offered was an illusion of more freedom and the only thing they are critical for is maintaining that illusion.
So you're willing to bet the industry will survive based on nothing more plausible than the entire population committing the sunk-cost fallacy ?
I don't think that's a smart bet myself.
Infallible ? No.
Less fallible than human drivers ? Guaranteed.
Because that's an incredibly low bar. Human drivers are shit. You don't even have to make a GOOD self driving car to be better than humans - and the standards being chased are so far beyond human ability its not even a comparison.
You could probably MATCH human capacity at driving with a 100-line python script written by a first-year literature student on the very first computer he has ever touched.
Since we explain everything here with a car analogy, let me explain cars to him with a sex analogy.
When you only think about the personal pleasure of driving (for you - I and many other people hate every second we have to spend doing it) - you're thinking like somebody masturbating. It only affects yourself, the risk of injuring yourself is minimal and while I some people may judge you and think it's a sad way to get your pleasure - we have no cause to actually try and stop you doing it.
But driving is not, at all, like masturbation. Driving is like having sex -there are other people involved, there are risks to all of them - and unless all the people involved consented you aren't allowed to do it. Among the many reasons for that - is the fact that you aren't allowed to subject OTHER people to risks they didn't consent to. And driving isn't just having sex - it's a fucking orgy involving hundreds or even thousands of other people.
We have every right to institute things to minimize the risks involved - hence we have traffic signals, laws of the road, speed limits and licensing requirements.
If the possibility comes to almost entirely eradicate that risk by removing fallible human judgement from the equation - we as the other thousand participants have every right to demand that. Just like the participants in a thousand-man orgy would have every right to demand you wear a condom and no amount of you saying it wil reduce your personal pleasure would justify not wearing one if the other people involved demand it.
So instead they wait 2 hours stuck in traffic.
Seriously. I am in the fortunate position of having a rare and extremely sought after skillset - and my number one demand in job negotiations over my last 4 jobs was: if you expect me to work standard office hours I demand an extra 25% salary over your offer. If you allow me to avoid rush hour - I don't need that.
Why because working standard office hours means I have an hour commute each way - so to be at the office for 8 hours I have to be away from my family for 10 - and I demand recompense for that time.
So far, they've all agreed that flexible working hours was the smarter option.
But- most people are not in the kind of position I am in - most people do not, when jobhunting, have 4 to 5 offers in their mailbox after 2 weeks and the capacity to twist arms before accepting one.
Most people have to suffer that 25% loss in personal time with no recompense. And if you aren't factoring that into your calculations then your calculations are bullshit. At least if somebody else is driving you can do something during that time - read a good book, watch a movie etc. etc.
> "Sin N Stroll"
Is that like a more relaxed version of the pump-and-dump ?
The reason to get good quality insurance is not the risk of fucking YOURSELF up - if that was all, nowhere would insurance be legally required.
The reason is in case you drive into some rich asshole's porsche-powered limo and suddenly face a debt of two-thousand times your annual salary which you're children will still be paying off decades after you die.
Ironically - literally the only time ever that a 'socialist urban planner' seriously tried to enforce a particular migration pattern it was in the opposite direction to what he claimed. The only one that seriously tried was Pol Pot. The K'mer Rouge did force a migration: they were forcing people OUT of the cities on the premise that everybody HAS to be a farmer.
Well I assume professional castrators charge money for their services ?
To be fair though - the article's premise is on-demand self-driving cars. Which makes any issues with charging, battery cost etc. entirely dissapear since you're not buying the car. You're just renting it for a brief period. Sure somebody has to pay that investment - but that person gets to fold it into a bulk-purchase as part of the initial capital-outlay for a profit-making business. Your argument then is like if somebody had said "Nobody will ever ride the train because it's way too expensive to lay the tracks" - yet trains were a major part of transport infrastructure for over a century, because the people riding the train weren't the ones who had lay the tracks, and none of them had to cover more than a infinitesimally tiny fraction of the cost of those tracks.
A cost you can spread over a very large customer base becomes insignificant to any particular one of them - and doesn't prevent the service from being more valuable.
And charge times just isn't a factor since the renting company needs a large fleet anyway - you only need about a 10% extra capacity to ensure you always have a car with charge when the next customer requests one.
If self-driving car services do develop as expected, it's entirely possible that a car will lose all atraction very soon. As it stands a car is not an asset - it's a depreciating liability that involves a constant cost. Nobody buys a car because it's valuable to them (although a lot of people THINK they do) it's not possible since a car is NOT valuable to anybody - it is a net negative expense. We make that expense for the same reason we spend money on food- because we don't have any choice in the matter.
The moment there is a better choice, it will take extreme stubborness and mathematical stupidity to keep making the bad one.
Of course there are no shortage of stubborn idiots in the world -but they can only keep an industry going for so long. Unlike, say, homeopathy the ICE industry isn't selling something fairly cheap (and cheaper than the competitors whose product has actual value) - and, much like homeopathy, at that point they are selling nothing but a placebo. An illusion of freedom and control which, like the illusion of medicine, may make you feel better but isn't actually worth it - since you can get the EXACT same feeling for a fraction of the cost by playing need for speed.
Yes it is a check on democracy, and that isn't a bad thing. Just because they feared a different kind of populist to the one who got elected, doesn't make anything I said untrue.
>The correct solution is a representative parliament. Like the UK but without the house of Lords. Anyone who can get a reasonable percentage of votes gets in.
Like South Africa has ? That has it's own problems - you MUST combine that with people who are elected by specific counties -or the people in washington will feel entirely cut off from their voters and feel loyalty only to the party. A 50/50 version of each is a much smarter system (like South Africa does on the local government level). Another thing you really don't want to copy from the UK is their single biggest mistake: the first-past-the-post system. That has frequently allowed a party with only a tiny minority of votes to gain absolute power in government. The Tories right now have full control of government and only got about 35% of the vote, it's not even the worst - the record happened in the early 20th century when a UK party managed to get full control of government with a mere 17% of the actual votes !