The news is interesting not so much for its contents, but for its illumination of a gap in my knowledge. I'm nowhere near astronomy, so I didn't know that in the past we were _not_ aware of the presence of asymmetric molecules in space. If someone asked, I'd have responded, "sure there are probably asymmetric molecules in space, why not" so in some sense, I might have given a more correct answer than someone who knew more about space. The downside is that when you not only learn from a piece of news, but it highlights a gap in your understanding before, then it's quite humbling. It's a bit like waking up in Vegas, and you're told you divorced while you were drunk, yet you aren't aware of getting married in the first place.
> It's annoying to people like me that come from an engineering/physics background where terms tend to be more standardized.
Having done financial risk management etc. with eng and accounting degrees myself, I can see the pompousness and arbitrariness of much terminology in finance, esp. where consumers need to be misled or peacocking status can be gained by throwing around 'financology' terms. I'm with Paul Wilmott on the arrogance aspect. I can also see a lot of normal things in life as complex financial derivatives that can be deconstructed and recombined with one another, still balked at this notion of self-insurance for the reason you mention. It qualifies as "acceptable risk" and is a modest, fairly constant factor in business rather than rare, high-loss events that warrant for risk pooling, so more similar to material expenses or payroll (some if not most theft is by employees). Supply chain issues and lawsuits on the other hand...
> Probably true but one has to account for all the possible outcomes.
Sure. On the basis of prior probabilities or actual events (assuming Apple Stores register buying intention that evaporates due to lack of stock at the moment). I.e. we apparently agree that it's not correct to just blindly calculate with the retail value.
> Yes Apple is self insured [wikipedia]
These links do little to further the claim that these represent self-insurance. I thought it's something more specific - as your wikipedia link seems to suggest too. With your quite broad definition of self-insurance, everyone is self-insuring left and right. For example, if I'm planning a vacation, but don't immediately reserve my flight, then I run the risk of a price hike. If I still don't act on it (by reserving, or by somehow insuring against the possibility of this loss, incurring some hedging cost in the process) then I could say, with your definition, that I self-insure myself, where my assets, future income or cancellation of flight plans act as backup options. Also, when I skip breakfast and am optimistic that I can go out for lunch at noon, I'm self-insuring myself against starvation by means of calorie reserves.
So I think it's quite meaningless to use this term unless there's wing to wing handling for specifically this risk category , e.g. AAPL formally managing a risk process with components such as FMEA, earmarking and pooling funds, making provisions that alter their periodic P&L, using periodic accruals/deferrals (to account for planned vs materialized losses), and incorporate it into their profitability analysis, profit center accounting or funds transfer pricing, all in the framework of comprehensive internal policies and accounting rules governing it. While all these are feasible, and I have no doubt AAPL does have risk management for diverse events, the link you provided is a wiki page that also talks of self-insurance as a specific concept (as opposed to an informal, uncontrolled way of absorbing residual risks) rather than an explanation on why it could be properly called self-insurance. I don't give a flying rat's ass but interested in learning, as I might be wrong on this, it's just I appreciate tangible backup. I think it's conceivable that with their very high gross margin they don't worry about store stealth to the extent a grocery chain would have to, and I believe most of their risk management priorities rarer and more impactful risks, mostly relating to their supply chain, and perhaps forex losses.
Even if it was a lone wolf operation, it makes no difference at all. Islam is antagonistic toward Western style freedom (girls education, women's rights, and especially gays and Jewish people) and followers of Islam systematically act on this (we call it islamic extremism, they call it the proper way of interpreting the Koran and living a worthy life), and I couldn't care less about which fucking organizational badge or process they operate under, ISIS, mujahedeen, Al Quaeda, intifada, terrorist, lone wolf, disgruntled 3rd generation disintegrated immigrant, shia, sunni, Wahhabists, Salafism etc. etc. it's just various flairs on the same piece of cloth.
Haha Putin props up anything that may destabilize the less barbaric part of Europe, from financing extreme right wing parties to maintaining East European countries on the short leash via energy exports, shooting Syrian rebels instead of ISIS and when they have some free time, invade and annex some parts of real European (rather than Eurasian) countries, shoot down passenger planes and then act surpised when Nato plants some more defenses on its own territory. The only nice thing so far is the freeing of Palmyra, too bad they (and the Western World) let it fall in the first place.
Given that the current iPhone has been around for almost a year, stocks are aplenty and those who go to an Apple store to buy an iPhone are more likely to go to another one or come back the next day than to buy an Android phone, I'd be very surprised if this event actually lead to a significant number of irrevocably lost sales, if any.
Also, no accounting for that, but most anything making into the news is in effect advertisement, and even an incredibly tiny additional curiosity etc. on consumers' part compensates the loss many times around. To the extent that it's not inconceivable for a scrappy company (probably not AAPL) to pull off such a publicity stunt, to increase the perception of value or get free press coverage or going 'viral'.
Also, I think it's not quite accurate to call apple "self-insured" - sure they may not have contracted with an insurance company for such events (I don't know), and sure they have a lot of cash that insulates them from measurable consequences, but these do not a self-insurance make. I think it's simply insurable risk that Apple may have decided to bear, assuming it was even an explicit decision other than just the default way of operating.
Unless supplies are tight and loss of sales is irrecuperable, it's the cost rather than lost sales that matter, so with about 65% gross margin, the loss is around 5k value. However:
1. The thiefs may successfully sell their stash. This may lead to some people not buying from a store as they bought it from the fence. This pushes the actual loss a bit higher (but most likely not to full retail). 2. Such a heist is mildly interesting and entertaining, not to mention newsworthy or even 'viral'. A 0.001% increase of US sales over a single day probably more than offsets the losses.
While I'm in complete agreement with all these, let's consider the point more metaphorically, what is 1 million vs 10 or even a 100 among friends?
For some reason I feel that even at current technological advancement, given enough time and somehow dodging the bullet of making ourselves extinct, it would be possible to send enough bacteria and plants to Mars to slowly terraform it, and/or machine large enough enclosed habitats to make life sustainable. It's probably possible to build a ship with currently known tools and materials that can fly to the nearest known rocky exoplanets, which are 13.8 light years away. A sufficiently large space station can be eventually assembled in orbit and could harbor life for the long centuries the travel takes, and making hundreds of these vessels would protect from the possibility of collisions or some bad virus killing everyone aboard.
While colonizing Mars is a good testing ground, most of the materials and interstellar ship building would of course come from mining the asteroid belt - once there's enough robotics up there, incredibly huge or numerous things can be built. Given enough petri dishes of sperms, eggs and seeding organisms, a dozen couples reaching an exoplanet with heavy machinery to make habitat can spawn a genetically diverse life.
You're missing the point. Let's assume there's some necessary planetary time for complex life to evolve. To be very generous toward your argument, let's start the clock with the Cambrian explosion. Which was 500 million years ago. According to our understanding, intelligent life could have evolved earlier or later than how it happened on our planet. The GP mentions dinosaurs. Maybe they'd have evolved into a civilization, had they not been swept by some cataclism (or their own self-destroying technological civilization, haha). Let's say dinosaours evolved 250 million years ago and were dominant 125 million years ago.
Now, again, generously assuming that civilizations need some specific amount of time to evolve, and we're smack middle of this distribution, we could still draw up e.g. a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 'now', and one standard deviation equalling, say, a 100 million years, but to be favorable to your argument, let's use an approximation that one standard deviation is only 10 million years (a very short period on the planetary scale). It means that 49.99% of all technological civilizations appeared 1000 years or more ahead of us, and of course 1000 years is a long time of technological evolution if we count it from e.g. radio or even steam.
While travel time of light factors in, there's a LOT of stars in the neighborhood of, say, 1000 light-years.
I hope your argument isn't that we humans and our planet Earth is miraculously the fastest possible member of the race toward intelligent life and technological society, give or take a few decades only.
> My personal theory is that the most likely thing for any intelligent and technologically capable alien race to be doing is exactly what *we* are doing.
Exactly - making ourselves go extinct over the cosmological blip of a few hundred years, by systematically undermining our own life conditions (us: global warming); by squandering non-replenishable resources (oil, gas, rare earth elements); by maintaining nation states that act like we don't share a planet (Putin's Russia, North Korea, China, Arab / Islam countries, USA etc.); by creating weapons that allow more and more destructive potential per user (nuclear, biological and autonomous weapons); and by resisting the completion of the surveillance police state and precrime, which are pretty much the only means to ensure that terrorists are killed before they can fake some nuclear attack, setting off WWIII, or release some plague that wipes out half of mankind and destroys economy as we know it.
Once we global-warm, war or terrorism ourselves back into a pre-technological tribe, we'll no longer have the chance for an industrial and thus technological revolution, for we have already used up most of the easily accessible oil and gas; no more radio telescopes sent to space.
Maybe we can't observe other intelligent life simply because chances are, any transmission is puny and fleeting on the cosmological scale, making reception incredibly unlikely. However maybe there are intelligent creatures that enjoyed their brief technological triumph, only to be followed by millions of years of an eternal Stone Age in the optimistic doom scenario when large bodied intelligent creatures can even survive their own technological windfall.
The rare few civilizations that survive the high mortality rate of technological infancy might evolve to such superpowers that they have unimaginable matter manipulation and computational capabilities in their hand. We, at such premature stage, already build vast, large simulations even without really trying (called games or machine learning environments). They (and maybe we) then go on building new universes which themselves beget alife, some of which may become powerful to build their own simulations. Then, we can conclude that believing that we are World #1 is the same anthropocentric view and hubris as geocentrism was a moment ago. Most probably we're currently on the bottom of a deep stack, hoping for adequate power redundancy and backup procedures in all layers above.
In conclusion, most of the fellow technological civilizations are behind us or ahead of us (time), or above us and maybe at some point, below us (simulation stack). All except the last of these are very unlikely to encounter and detect.
The typical person who can afford a 70k car with autopilot isn't you, who go on with this smart economic calculation. For someone who is able and willing to pay for a 70k car, autonomous driving, in some form, is already present. For someone like you who nickel and dime over some dollars per day, it'll take 10-15 years.
And NO self driving taxis in no way obsolete ownership the same way most people don't welcome strangers in their home to eat at their table and sit in their sofas.
A car is not just a fucking, utilitarian transport device. It's also a private space. Privacy is something some people appreciate. An Anon should know better.
> My personal anecdote with a Google car in Austin highlights this: I was crossing a major street (Burnet) from a side street and was two cars behind the Google car. The Google car crossed with a green light and I entered the intersection with a green light. The Google car quickly slowed down and almost stopped in the middle of the lane immediately after crossing the intersection, leaving me and the car in front of me stranded in the intersection as the light proceeded to change. I doubt the Google car driver ever realized the hazard they created.
I don't understand, the error YOU apparently made - entering an obstructed crossing - relates to the fact that a car who was a couple of cars ahead of you was a Google car which may or may not have been on autopilot how?
Yeah the place you describe, which is 3rd World from the sound of it, is probably the next place where 70k Teslas will be prevalent in like 5 years. Or.. there will be a few; owned by guys who are simultaneously rich enough, and in dire need of, a personal, armed bodyguard, so no problem, other cars will yield if shown the barrel o a gun.
> I don't want to sit in a car, bored to tears, when I could be spending my time driving; driving's fun, and it's certainly more fun than sitting and waiting.
I agree with your problem. The solution is, felicitiously, the co-occurring innovation called Virtual Reality. So you just put on your Cardbox, repurpose the car's steering wheel as a gaming control and imagine that you're driving an SUV on Mars or something more fun than urban traffic. The game of course would be smart enough to correlate generative game landscape with the physical sensation, e.g. if there's centripetal force due to a turn, then you'd see a turn in the game as well.
Who cares about it? By the time it were to cause a problem - assuming that autonomous cars in production will use LIDAR, which is a big IF - so many years elapse, and so gradual will be the spectrum clogging, that the software engineers will surely have figured out some software patch.
Also, there's already precedent for the type of spectrum overloading. It's called visible light, a really narrow band of electromagnetic waves, and we as human drivers can cope with the clogging just fine.
And why not share an apartment with a night shift worker, who's sleeping at your place when you work anyway, and off working at night?
Maybe because I don't want to share my fucking privacy with a fucking stranger. Same with the car. If you're comfortable with the idea of sitting in greasy seats or touching controls that some McDonalds customer touched after a good meal, some nose picking and unwashed ass scratching, be my guest. But I don't know why every thread like this has someone who reinvents the idea that maybe car ownership will cease to exist.
You CAN already start a company which maintains a pool of cars from which you can pick one. It's called rent a car. Yet private car ownership hasn't ended. Sure, autonomous cars lower the barrier for rental and possibly less expensive, but it also means that car rental will be exercised with a less affluent population who have worse body hygiene.
But just because YOU have only weak or no preference for private ownership gives you no basis for projecting it onto the larger population. Heck the Teslas that are the only commercial thing that auto-drive aren't bought and kept on the basis of utility; they're bought for a LOT of reasons that are nothing to do with the economizing, financially rational behavior you suggest - in fact, owning a Tesla now is the polar opposite of trying to be economical.
Slashdot Mirror
... in the US maybe
> Enough to change the final results?
Absolutely.
The news is interesting not so much for its contents, but for its illumination of a gap in my knowledge. I'm nowhere near astronomy, so I didn't know that in the past we were _not_ aware of the presence of asymmetric molecules in space. If someone asked, I'd have responded, "sure there are probably asymmetric molecules in space, why not" so in some sense, I might have given a more correct answer than someone who knew more about space. The downside is that when you not only learn from a piece of news, but it highlights a gap in your understanding before, then it's quite humbling. It's a bit like waking up in Vegas, and you're told you divorced while you were drunk, yet you aren't aware of getting married in the first place.
> It's annoying to people like me that come from an engineering/physics background where terms tend to be more standardized.
Having done financial risk management etc. with eng and accounting degrees myself, I can see the pompousness and arbitrariness of much terminology in finance, esp. where consumers need to be misled or peacocking status can be gained by throwing around 'financology' terms. I'm with Paul Wilmott on the arrogance aspect. I can also see a lot of normal things in life as complex financial derivatives that can be deconstructed and recombined with one another, still balked at this notion of self-insurance for the reason you mention. It qualifies as "acceptable risk" and is a modest, fairly constant factor in business rather than rare, high-loss events that warrant for risk pooling, so more similar to material expenses or payroll (some if not most theft is by employees). Supply chain issues and lawsuits on the other hand...
> Probably true but one has to account for all the possible outcomes.
Sure. On the basis of prior probabilities or actual events (assuming Apple Stores register buying intention that evaporates due to lack of stock at the moment). I.e. we apparently agree that it's not correct to just blindly calculate with the retail value.
> Yes Apple is self insured [wikipedia]
These links do little to further the claim that these represent self-insurance. I thought it's something more specific - as your wikipedia link seems to suggest too. With your quite broad definition of self-insurance, everyone is self-insuring left and right. For example, if I'm planning a vacation, but don't immediately reserve my flight, then I run the risk of a price hike. If I still don't act on it (by reserving, or by somehow insuring against the possibility of this loss, incurring some hedging cost in the process) then I could say, with your definition, that I self-insure myself, where my assets, future income or cancellation of flight plans act as backup options. Also, when I skip breakfast and am optimistic that I can go out for lunch at noon, I'm self-insuring myself against starvation by means of calorie reserves.
So I think it's quite meaningless to use this term unless there's wing to wing handling for specifically this risk category , e.g. AAPL formally managing a risk process with components such as FMEA, earmarking and pooling funds, making provisions that alter their periodic P&L, using periodic accruals/deferrals (to account for planned vs materialized losses), and incorporate it into their profitability analysis, profit center accounting or funds transfer pricing, all in the framework of comprehensive internal policies and accounting rules governing it. While all these are feasible, and I have no doubt AAPL does have risk management for diverse events, the link you provided is a wiki page that also talks of self-insurance as a specific concept (as opposed to an informal, uncontrolled way of absorbing residual risks) rather than an explanation on why it could be properly called self-insurance. I don't give a flying rat's ass but interested in learning, as I might be wrong on this, it's just I appreciate tangible backup. I think it's conceivable that with their very high gross margin they don't worry about store stealth to the extent a grocery chain would have to, and I believe most of their risk management priorities rarer and more impactful risks, mostly relating to their supply chain, and perhaps forex losses.
Yes I'm a fan of companies paying their fair share of taxes, whether APPL, GOOG or my little co
Even if it was a lone wolf operation, it makes no difference at all. Islam is antagonistic toward Western style freedom (girls education, women's rights, and especially gays and Jewish people) and followers of Islam systematically act on this (we call it islamic extremism, they call it the proper way of interpreting the Koran and living a worthy life), and I couldn't care less about which fucking organizational badge or process they operate under, ISIS, mujahedeen, Al Quaeda, intifada, terrorist, lone wolf, disgruntled 3rd generation disintegrated immigrant, shia, sunni, Wahhabists, Salafism etc. etc. it's just various flairs on the same piece of cloth.
Haha Putin props up anything that may destabilize the less barbaric part of Europe, from financing extreme right wing parties to maintaining East European countries on the short leash via energy exports, shooting Syrian rebels instead of ISIS and when they have some free time, invade and annex some parts of real European (rather than Eurasian) countries, shoot down passenger planes and then act surpised when Nato plants some more defenses on its own territory. The only nice thing so far is the freeing of Palmyra, too bad they (and the Western World) let it fall in the first place.
Ah don't be concerned about it, Apple isn't much of a fan of paying taxes anyway:
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...
Given that the current iPhone has been around for almost a year, stocks are aplenty and those who go to an Apple store to buy an iPhone are more likely to go to another one or come back the next day than to buy an Android phone, I'd be very surprised if this event actually lead to a significant number of irrevocably lost sales, if any.
Also, no accounting for that, but most anything making into the news is in effect advertisement, and even an incredibly tiny additional curiosity etc. on consumers' part compensates the loss many times around. To the extent that it's not inconceivable for a scrappy company (probably not AAPL) to pull off such a publicity stunt, to increase the perception of value or get free press coverage or going 'viral'.
Also, I think it's not quite accurate to call apple "self-insured" - sure they may not have contracted with an insurance company for such events (I don't know), and sure they have a lot of cash that insulates them from measurable consequences, but these do not a self-insurance make. I think it's simply insurable risk that Apple may have decided to bear, assuming it was even an explicit decision other than just the default way of operating.
Unless supplies are tight and loss of sales is irrecuperable, it's the cost rather than lost sales that matter, so with about 65% gross margin, the loss is around 5k value. However:
1. The thiefs may successfully sell their stash. This may lead to some people not buying from a store as they bought it from the fence. This pushes the actual loss a bit higher (but most likely not to full retail).
2. Such a heist is mildly interesting and entertaining, not to mention newsworthy or even 'viral'. A 0.001% increase of US sales over a single day probably more than offsets the losses.
other than a ./ summary fail???
> There have been no new fundamental discoveries in almost a century now.
Velcro?
While I'm in complete agreement with all these, let's consider the point more metaphorically, what is 1 million vs 10 or even a 100 among friends?
For some reason I feel that even at current technological advancement, given enough time and somehow dodging the bullet of making ourselves extinct, it would be possible to send enough bacteria and plants to Mars to slowly terraform it, and/or machine large enough enclosed habitats to make life sustainable. It's probably possible to build a ship with currently known tools and materials that can fly to the nearest known rocky exoplanets, which are 13.8 light years away. A sufficiently large space station can be eventually assembled in orbit and could harbor life for the long centuries the travel takes, and making hundreds of these vessels would protect from the possibility of collisions or some bad virus killing everyone aboard.
While colonizing Mars is a good testing ground, most of the materials and interstellar ship building would of course come from mining the asteroid belt - once there's enough robotics up there, incredibly huge or numerous things can be built. Given enough petri dishes of sperms, eggs and seeding organisms, a dozen couples reaching an exoplanet with heavy machinery to make habitat can spawn a genetically diverse life.
You're missing the point. Let's assume there's some necessary planetary time for complex life to evolve. To be very generous toward your argument, let's start the clock with the Cambrian explosion. Which was 500 million years ago. According to our understanding, intelligent life could have evolved earlier or later than how it happened on our planet. The GP mentions dinosaurs. Maybe they'd have evolved into a civilization, had they not been swept by some cataclism (or their own self-destroying technological civilization, haha). Let's say dinosaours evolved 250 million years ago and were dominant 125 million years ago.
Now, again, generously assuming that civilizations need some specific amount of time to evolve, and we're smack middle of this distribution, we could still draw up e.g. a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 'now', and one standard deviation equalling, say, a 100 million years, but to be favorable to your argument, let's use an approximation that one standard deviation is only 10 million years (a very short period on the planetary scale). It means that 49.99% of all technological civilizations appeared 1000 years or more ahead of us, and of course 1000 years is a long time of technological evolution if we count it from e.g. radio or even steam.
While travel time of light factors in, there's a LOT of stars in the neighborhood of, say, 1000 light-years.
I hope your argument isn't that we humans and our planet Earth is miraculously the fastest possible member of the race toward intelligent life and technological society, give or take a few decades only.
> My personal theory is that the most likely thing for any intelligent and technologically capable alien race to be doing is exactly what *we* are doing.
Exactly - making ourselves go extinct over the cosmological blip of a few hundred years, by systematically undermining our own life conditions (us: global warming); by squandering non-replenishable resources (oil, gas, rare earth elements); by maintaining nation states that act like we don't share a planet (Putin's Russia, North Korea, China, Arab / Islam countries, USA etc.); by creating weapons that allow more and more destructive potential per user (nuclear, biological and autonomous weapons); and by resisting the completion of the surveillance police state and precrime, which are pretty much the only means to ensure that terrorists are killed before they can fake some nuclear attack, setting off WWIII, or release some plague that wipes out half of mankind and destroys economy as we know it.
Once we global-warm, war or terrorism ourselves back into a pre-technological tribe, we'll no longer have the chance for an industrial and thus technological revolution, for we have already used up most of the easily accessible oil and gas; no more radio telescopes sent to space.
Maybe we can't observe other intelligent life simply because chances are, any transmission is puny and fleeting on the cosmological scale, making reception incredibly unlikely. However maybe there are intelligent creatures that enjoyed their brief technological triumph, only to be followed by millions of years of an eternal Stone Age in the optimistic doom scenario when large bodied intelligent creatures can even survive their own technological windfall.
The rare few civilizations that survive the high mortality rate of technological infancy might evolve to such superpowers that they have unimaginable matter manipulation and computational capabilities in their hand. We, at such premature stage, already build vast, large simulations even without really trying (called games or machine learning environments). They (and maybe we) then go on building new universes which themselves beget alife, some of which may become powerful to build their own simulations. Then, we can conclude that believing that we are World #1 is the same anthropocentric view and hubris as geocentrism was a moment ago. Most probably we're currently on the bottom of a deep stack, hoping for adequate power redundancy and backup procedures in all layers above.
In conclusion, most of the fellow technological civilizations are behind us or ahead of us (time), or above us and maybe at some point, below us (simulation stack). All except the last of these are very unlikely to encounter and detect.
> The shear physics of backing up such a truck to have it mate with the loading dock hasn't even been studied as far as I know
It's not shear physics, it's tensile
What? That transition took around 50 years.
The typical person who can afford a 70k car with autopilot isn't you, who go on with this smart economic calculation. For someone who is able and willing to pay for a 70k car, autonomous driving, in some form, is already present. For someone like you who nickel and dime over some dollars per day, it'll take 10-15 years.
And NO self driving taxis in no way obsolete ownership the same way most people don't welcome strangers in their home to eat at their table and sit in their sofas.
A car is not just a fucking, utilitarian transport device. It's also a private space. Privacy is something some people appreciate. An Anon should know better.
> Beyond that, there's the liability issues.
Man this is so boring, pretty much all threads have people who say, 'but liability!' for at least 10 years.
> My personal anecdote with a Google car in Austin highlights this: I was crossing a major street (Burnet) from a side street and was two cars behind the Google car. The Google car crossed with a green light and I entered the intersection with a green light. The Google car quickly slowed down and almost stopped in the middle of the lane immediately after crossing the intersection, leaving me and the car in front of me stranded in the intersection as the light proceeded to change. I doubt the Google car driver ever realized the hazard they created.
I don't understand, the error YOU apparently made - entering an obstructed crossing - relates to the fact that a car who was a couple of cars ahead of you was a Google car which may or may not have been on autopilot how?
Yeah the place you describe, which is 3rd World from the sound of it, is probably the next place where 70k Teslas will be prevalent in like 5 years. Or.. there will be a few; owned by guys who are simultaneously rich enough, and in dire need of, a personal, armed bodyguard, so no problem, other cars will yield if shown the barrel o a gun.
> I don't want to sit in a car, bored to tears, when I could be spending my time driving; driving's fun, and it's certainly more fun than sitting and waiting.
I agree with your problem. The solution is, felicitiously, the co-occurring innovation called Virtual Reality. So you just put on your Cardbox, repurpose the car's steering wheel as a gaming control and imagine that you're driving an SUV on Mars or something more fun than urban traffic. The game of course would be smart enough to correlate generative game landscape with the physical sensation, e.g. if there's centripetal force due to a turn, then you'd see a turn in the game as well.
Isn't it obvious?
Who cares about it? By the time it were to cause a problem - assuming that autonomous cars in production will use LIDAR, which is a big IF - so many years elapse, and so gradual will be the spectrum clogging, that the software engineers will surely have figured out some software patch.
Also, there's already precedent for the type of spectrum overloading. It's called visible light, a really narrow band of electromagnetic waves, and we as human drivers can cope with the clogging just fine.
And why not share an apartment with a night shift worker, who's sleeping at your place when you work anyway, and off working at night?
Maybe because I don't want to share my fucking privacy with a fucking stranger. Same with the car. If you're comfortable with the idea of sitting in greasy seats or touching controls that some McDonalds customer touched after a good meal, some nose picking and unwashed ass scratching, be my guest. But I don't know why every thread like this has someone who reinvents the idea that maybe car ownership will cease to exist.
You CAN already start a company which maintains a pool of cars from which you can pick one. It's called rent a car. Yet private car ownership hasn't ended. Sure, autonomous cars lower the barrier for rental and possibly less expensive, but it also means that car rental will be exercised with a less affluent population who have worse body hygiene.
But just because YOU have only weak or no preference for private ownership gives you no basis for projecting it onto the larger population. Heck the Teslas that are the only commercial thing that auto-drive aren't bought and kept on the basis of utility; they're bought for a LOT of reasons that are nothing to do with the economizing, financially rational behavior you suggest - in fact, owning a Tesla now is the polar opposite of trying to be economical.