We can stop 80% of today's CO2 emissions (at least here in the US) in 15 to 20 years with a concerted large scale government subsidized build-out of capacity at existing nuclear power plants. That is the radical action that we need now.
Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.
Totally agree, but when people cite Germany as being well on their way to using 100% renewables they are missing the facts that Germany has increased its CO2 emissions in the last several years with its shift away from nuclear and they are increasing use of cheap dirty coal to balance the higher costs of renewables.
Renewables alone are going to be insufficient for the world's energy needs. And industrial scale renewables have their own very negative effects on habitats and the environment. Just as shifting food production to biofuels caused food shortages and food riots, there are going to be negative effects if we have to blanket large areas of the planet with solar panels and wind "farms". Just as we found that the downstream effects of hydro-electric dams are often very negative to fisheries, estuaries and sometimes to agriculture.
And I've said it once and I will say it a million times, nuclear is a far better option with far less negative consequences and with even far less risk than even renewables.
How do you emit less CO2 burning more coal? Most or all of these new coal plants are not intended to do underground sequestration as far as I can tell. And the reporting indicates that they expect to increase net coal consumption not just replace older plants. I think cleaner means fewer particulate emissions, which is good for lung diseases and quality of life, but still the plan is to burn more coal and therefore more CO2 which is bad for Global Climate Change.
Since 1997 germany has more than halfed!!! its usage of coal!
Yes, that was good for them back in the 90s, but now coal usage is going up.
They lack coal plants to increase coal usage significantly, if a coal plant is burning at 100% it certainly can not increase its rate of burning.
Burning more coal than actual power is consumed makes no sense either.
However, I did not think about that, they can produce base load with coal where they once used nuclear plants.
And all it takes is a simple search to find Germany is building new coal power plants. Which is my point. By eliminating nuclear and moving more production to coal then they are offsetting all the gains they have made in renewables when they should be keeping nuclear and reducing coal and oil instead.
If you don't believe Bloomberg News, then Try the BBC
The impact on CO2 emissions has been immediate. "There has been an increase of between 5%-7% in CO2 in the past two years," says Prof Claudia Kemfert, head of energy at the German Institute for Economic Research.
And on Japan how can you claim that Japan lacks coal plants? Japan has 18 Coal fired power plants and according to that other article they are planning more.
There is certainly no sustained increase in coal usage in Germany.
That is not what I am reading about Germany. Despite the much hyped gains in renewables, those gains have been offset by the reduction in nuclear and the rise of coal use
And I doubt there is any in Japan either. Japan used oil plants as fall back in power production, not coal plants.
If the plans all come to fruition, Japan's coal-fired power capacity would increase to around 47 gigawatts over the next decade or so, up 21% from the time right before the Fukushima accident.
So, we have increases in coal in Japan and Germany. China is still using coal like gang busters to power the largest industrial economy in the world, but to their credit they are also making a big investments in nuclear, solar, hydro and wind. The US is basically shifting to more natural gas which is better than coal, but nuclear is pretty much stalled and solar and wind are growing at a fast pace relative to their relatively low percentage of the energy mix, but isn't going to make a real dent in CO2 anytime soon unless those renewable growth rates are sustainable... but those growth rates aren't sustainable because all the easier locations for solar and wind are being built out first which should result in a slowdown in the adoption curve in future years unless solar panel prices really plummet and then the economics of it really changes.
Also, I noticed in one of those articles that Japan was promoting coal for developing economies, which would put us even further into a CO2 hole and undermine progress being made elsewhere as developing economies embrace coal as the lowest cost alternative. If the highly stable and developed economies are embracing coal, the developing world is embracing coal, then the current efforts for renewables look like little more than window dressing on the fact that Global Climate change is really being considered as a fait accompli by the world's decision makers.
I take Climate change seriously. I would rather not have the world experience the worst case scenarios, but I think that if we are going to avoid that worst case scenarios, then most environmentalists need to stop opposing nuclear or we might as well just do nothing now and pray for a technological miracle sometime before it is too late. Personally I would rather put forward a viable plan now that includes government subsidies and incentives for big increases in solar and wind, big increases in nuclear and maybe natural gas for the remaining 20% of the mix. I think that moving away from oil and coal and eventually most natural gas is doable. But not if you think that solar panels and wind turbines are going to provide for all our energy needs alone, not at anywhere near these population levels they won't.
The problem is that those concerned about stopping greenhouse gas emissions don't have a viable plan without substantially increasing nuclear power production and instead those most activist about Global Climate Change are also against nuclear and have been successful at turning back the clock on nuclear power in some places.
There is a direct correlation between the reduction in nuclear in Germany and Japan and the increased use of coal. All the gains in Solar and Wind in those countries have been eaten up by the increased use of coal. You can get rid of nuclear and accept Global Warming, or you can actually head off excessive Global Warming with an expansion of nuclear. It is a direct trade and you can't have both without some new technology that we don't have yet.
Personally I would rather just take the models at face value and quadruple our nuclear power electric generating capacity and solve the damn problem without all the shenanigans. Oh yes and some solar panels and a few wind turbines to make some people feel better about it.
Corporate income taxes appear to be less than 10% of Federal tax revenue, compared to around 80% for individual income taxes and payroll taxes. I believe you could eliminate corporate taxes and keep it deficit neutral with a relatively modest increase in higher bracket income taxes on those making over a million dollars per year. Or you could just not worry about the deficit (because the Federal Reserve will fund deficits with new money creation) and do it anyway.
I think some math is certainly in order to come up with some numbers, but personally I would say you could use a good bending over if you are making millions of dollars a year and paying just 20% or even 30% while the rest of society is becoming an inequitable mess. I'm all for lower middle class taxes also, regardless of the effect on the deficit.
You ask the local government. They all do it. They just have different ideas of which ones to fund and which ones not to.
States and the Federal government should just set the corporate tax rate to 0% for all corporations. And increase the tax on higher incomes progressively to pay for it.
All those unproductive and wealth destroying things that corporations both large and small do in order to avoid the high corporate taxes in the United States could be avoided and the increased capital could go back into creating higher paying jobs and profits to shareholders which are all already taxed as income anyway.
Cozying up to your sources is part of the game.... But becoming a propaganda tool is unfortunately where we are at in the American free press. The friendly press even get offices in the government buildings of the agencies they are supposed to be covering. Becoming little more than an extension of the PR department. Cozy indeed. More like Stockholm Syndrome.
Snowden had to go to the British Press to report on the US government because the US press has a track record of killing unfavorable stories about the government... not that that is an endorsement of the British press. They are just as cozy with their government. Just damning for our own government and the state of the free press here in the US.
Originally they were not bad laws, back when there was only 1 or 2 car manufacturers who did not really have to compete, and when there were not many mechanic shops. Now the laws are really just a way to pay middlemen who pay lawmakers.
I think that is probably backwards. These laws would obviously tend to help larger car companies exclude competition. Like many issues of regulatory capture I would deduce that these state franchise laws were actually bought and paid for by big companies like GM, Ford and Chrysler in order to ensure that all those smaller car companies that didn't have robust dealership networks would either be forced out of business or forced to sell out to the big three. It took some serious capital investment and many years to set up dealer networks for Toyota, Honda and other foreign car companies. But they had the backing of their respective countries and large consumer base at home to leverage. Make no mistake these laws may have been passed at the behest of the local dealers, but those dealers were working from the same game plan as the big three.
Experience and credentials always need to be judged against the Job being offered. I agree that merely looking at the number of years of experience in a broadly defined job type is meaningless. The meaningful experience is what a person actually did in their job, not what their job title was.
This is an age old question not necessarily particular to Software Engineering... Are credentials or experience more important?
I would say experience is what you need to do the job, while credentials are often what you need to get the job in the first place and advance your career beyond your current role. I think that holds true for the majority of jobs, but there are plenty of examples and counter-examples of people having success without experience and/or without relevant degree credentials. Career wise I would suggest maximizing the financial return on all your strengths in the near term and either address your weaknesses as best you can or just go around them. Medium to long term always be looking to fill in the gaps in your experience or education that might be relevant to the types of jobs you may want/need in the future.
Once it is clear again that it is illegal and unconstitutional for the government to order people to hand over all their records without a warrant, then companies will again have the right to refuse records requests and privacy agreements become valid contracts again. That at least allows people to again choose companies with better privacy policies which have contractual weight to privacy violations. Right now the government just jots down a few sentences on a piece of paper, hands it to the company and the company is required to give them whatever the government wants without a warrant and the company can't tell you about it, and you can't sue them for violating any privacy provisions of their contract with you even when you find out about it later. Sure some companies will roll over... based on past behavior you can probably expect Verizon and Comcast to just continue the practice under an agreement instead of an order. But there could be some VOIP phone providers that don't play ball with the NSA and will have privacy agreements that say so. Same with other businesses, there will again be some freedom to pick and choose companies based on privacy concerns.
it would simply be to drive them to further clandestine levels to cover up the shit they're doing.
Actually, that is the point. Making them afraid to violate the constitution is victory. Having a law doesn't mean that everyone will actually follow the law, that is naive. Respect for the rule of law means shame for those violating it. The fact that we have Generals, Congressmen and Presidents standing up and saying that the government should have the power to seize any records they want without warrant is itself remarkably dire for Freedom and Liberty.
When Nixon's dirty tricks brigade stole business records from the Democratic Party offices he had shame enough to cover it up and Congress was about to impeach him. Today the president and thousands of people in the Executive branch and contractors have the power to seize all those types of records and more at the touch of a button, but they aren't cowering in dark places but rather when we find out about it they are waving the flag and calling it Apple Pie Patriotism to take what isn't theirs. Shame is exactly what they need.
Our entire government seems to think the constitution can be superseded by any other law whatsoever, as if the constitution being the highest law of the land doesn't actually overrule anything that contradicts it. It's as if the constitution is completely meaningless.
What fewer people seem to realize is that the Constitution is there to keep us safer than we would be otherwise with a government which could use force against the people without restraint. A lawless society isn't a society where there aren't laws, it is a society where there is no respect for the rule of law.
The mass confiscation of business records in the United States is a once in a generation threat to Liberty.
While this is a legitimate concern it's not a problem with Net neutrality, but with advertising standards and defective performance.
I disagree. If we don't have Net Neutrality, then the current advertising is deceptive and fraudulent. If we do have Net Neutrality and a real best effort to address network congestion rather than use network congestion as a payola scheme then there would be no need for the Federal Trade Commission to step in and put a stop to fraudulent advertising.
Not a false dilemma, a false assumption. How do you demonstrate the proposition that a car without manual override controls (beyond just a big red stop button) is both individually and systemically safer than one without?
And what driver is going to wait and see if the car is capable of avoiding an accident if they are going to be the ones liable for that accident and told they must take control of the vehicle if they think the car is about to collide with something? Basically you are talking about taking a sophisticated collision avoidance system and short circuiting that by telling the driver they must take control of the vehicle if they think there is a problem. That could demonstrate that autonomous cars are less safe because people will be turning off the collision avoidance system at exactly the wrong times, but yet they will be reacting more slowly than people without autonomous cars because manual drivers are already actively driving.
What California is doing is starting from the assumption that not having a manual override is less safe, which I believe is a false assumption and actually undermines safety efforts. And it could also undermine efforts to roll out these cars.
I am all for the option of manual controls and would probably choose to have manual controls for a car that I owned, but I think that the more compelling case and safer option will be to remove the manual controls and I think the only way you prove that is by allowing the cars to demonstrate the capability.
Many of the most potentially beneficial things that could happen as a result of autonomous cars are those use cases where a driver isn't always at the wheel ready to take immediate control of the vehicle. Car sharing, taxi services, elimination of drunk driving, transportation for the disabled, highway driving at closer spacing which might make a human operator uncomfortable and prone to take control, congested city driving where vehicles could be routed and dispatched more efficiently or just told to "go park and come pick me up in twenty minutes" are all use cases where you don't want to require that someone is 'at the wheel' at all times.
With the real potential for saving lives and helping improve quality of life robot cars should be allowed to prove themselves with and without old school manual controls and all the legal requirements, increased costs and liability that retaining those controls imply.
No one gets away without it. You prove, by extended experience over a long period of time, that the new technology is superior to the old.
First you have to allow the new technology. Requiring a licensed driver be at the wheel ready to take control of the vehicle at all times is not allowing the new technology it is hobbling it and potentially undermining the most compelling use cases that will save and improve lives. Simply require that the manufacturer demonstrate the ability of the car to drive like any taxi driver would be required to demonstrate an ability to drive to receive a license.
I think California is playing it wrong and unsafe. I agree there needs to be a big red button on cars which brings the vehicle to a safe stop much like there is on passenger trains, but this move by California seems more like something pushed for by entrenched vested interests and not driven by safety considerations. Lives will be saved when we allow cars to go pick up people that can't drive, don't have licenses or don't want to drive themselves. The implication of this move is that a human driver is going to be responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times. Rather it should be the manufacturer of the vehicle which is liable for any defects of the autonomous system when it is driving autonomously. And it should be an option moving forward, even a safety feature, to allow cars without manual driving options except for the big red button.
Fight the local monopolies. That is the only truly important thing right now.
Too late. Net Neutrality is a response to the reality of local monopolies. It is a direct result of the fact that many places have local monopolies or non-competitive (probably colluding) duopolies. If we had healthy competitive markets with five or six providers available to each household, then it would not be necessary to have net neutrality because who would buy service from a provider which had poor connections to the people and services you wanted to communicate with? All we would need would be transparency and truth in advertising... which we don't have either since companies are secretive about the business decisions they are making in order to throttle some communications.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't have time for rational solutions!
Okay then... I propose a tax on solar panels which can be used to subsidize solar panels.
We can stop 80% of today's CO2 emissions (at least here in the US) in 15 to 20 years with a concerted large scale government subsidized build-out of capacity at existing nuclear power plants. That is the radical action that we need now.
Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.
Totally agree, but when people cite Germany as being well on their way to using 100% renewables they are missing the facts that Germany has increased its CO2 emissions in the last several years with its shift away from nuclear and they are increasing use of cheap dirty coal to balance the higher costs of renewables.
Renewables alone are going to be insufficient for the world's energy needs. And industrial scale renewables have their own very negative effects on habitats and the environment. Just as shifting food production to biofuels caused food shortages and food riots, there are going to be negative effects if we have to blanket large areas of the planet with solar panels and wind "farms". Just as we found that the downstream effects of hydro-electric dams are often very negative to fisheries, estuaries and sometimes to agriculture.
And I've said it once and I will say it a million times, nuclear is a far better option with far less negative consequences and with even far less risk than even renewables.
How do you emit less CO2 burning more coal? Most or all of these new coal plants are not intended to do underground sequestration as far as I can tell. And the reporting indicates that they expect to increase net coal consumption not just replace older plants. I think cleaner means fewer particulate emissions, which is good for lung diseases and quality of life, but still the plan is to burn more coal and therefore more CO2 which is bad for Global Climate Change.
Since 1997 germany has more than halfed!!! its usage of coal!
Yes, that was good for them back in the 90s, but now coal usage is going up.
They lack coal plants to increase coal usage significantly, if a coal plant is burning at 100% it certainly can not increase its rate of burning. Burning more coal than actual power is consumed makes no sense either. However, I did not think about that, they can produce base load with coal where they once used nuclear plants.
And all it takes is a simple search to find Germany is building new coal power plants. Which is my point. By eliminating nuclear and moving more production to coal then they are offsetting all the gains they have made in renewables when they should be keeping nuclear and reducing coal and oil instead.
The impact on CO2 emissions has been immediate. "There has been an increase of between 5%-7% in CO2 in the past two years," says Prof Claudia Kemfert, head of energy at the German Institute for Economic Research.
And on Japan how can you claim that Japan lacks coal plants? Japan has 18 Coal fired power plants and according to that other article they are planning more.
There is certainly no sustained increase in coal usage in Germany.
That is not what I am reading about Germany. Despite the much hyped gains in renewables, those gains have been offset by the reduction in nuclear and the rise of coal use
And I doubt there is any in Japan either. Japan used oil plants as fall back in power production, not coal plants.
And that is not what I am reading about in Japan either where there are "Plans by Japanese companies to spend billions of dollars on new coal-fired plants"
If the plans all come to fruition, Japan's coal-fired power capacity would increase to around 47 gigawatts over the next decade or so, up 21% from the time right before the Fukushima accident.
So, we have increases in coal in Japan and Germany. China is still using coal like gang busters to power the largest industrial economy in the world, but to their credit they are also making a big investments in nuclear, solar, hydro and wind. The US is basically shifting to more natural gas which is better than coal, but nuclear is pretty much stalled and solar and wind are growing at a fast pace relative to their relatively low percentage of the energy mix, but isn't going to make a real dent in CO2 anytime soon unless those renewable growth rates are sustainable... but those growth rates aren't sustainable because all the easier locations for solar and wind are being built out first which should result in a slowdown in the adoption curve in future years unless solar panel prices really plummet and then the economics of it really changes.
Also, I noticed in one of those articles that Japan was promoting coal for developing economies, which would put us even further into a CO2 hole and undermine progress being made elsewhere as developing economies embrace coal as the lowest cost alternative. If the highly stable and developed economies are embracing coal, the developing world is embracing coal, then the current efforts for renewables look like little more than window dressing on the fact that Global Climate change is really being considered as a fait accompli by the world's decision makers.
I take Climate change seriously. I would rather not have the world experience the worst case scenarios, but I think that if we are going to avoid that worst case scenarios, then most environmentalists need to stop opposing nuclear or we might as well just do nothing now and pray for a technological miracle sometime before it is too late. Personally I would rather put forward a viable plan now that includes government subsidies and incentives for big increases in solar and wind, big increases in nuclear and maybe natural gas for the remaining 20% of the mix. I think that moving away from oil and coal and eventually most natural gas is doable. But not if you think that solar panels and wind turbines are going to provide for all our energy needs alone, not at anywhere near these population levels they won't.
The problem is that those concerned about stopping greenhouse gas emissions don't have a viable plan without substantially increasing nuclear power production and instead those most activist about Global Climate Change are also against nuclear and have been successful at turning back the clock on nuclear power in some places.
There is a direct correlation between the reduction in nuclear in Germany and Japan and the increased use of coal. All the gains in Solar and Wind in those countries have been eaten up by the increased use of coal. You can get rid of nuclear and accept Global Warming, or you can actually head off excessive Global Warming with an expansion of nuclear. It is a direct trade and you can't have both without some new technology that we don't have yet.
Personally I would rather just take the models at face value and quadruple our nuclear power electric generating capacity and solve the damn problem without all the shenanigans. Oh yes and some solar panels and a few wind turbines to make some people feel better about it.
Corporate income taxes appear to be less than 10% of Federal tax revenue, compared to around 80% for individual income taxes and payroll taxes. I believe you could eliminate corporate taxes and keep it deficit neutral with a relatively modest increase in higher bracket income taxes on those making over a million dollars per year. Or you could just not worry about the deficit (because the Federal Reserve will fund deficits with new money creation) and do it anyway.
I think some math is certainly in order to come up with some numbers, but personally I would say you could use a good bending over if you are making millions of dollars a year and paying just 20% or even 30% while the rest of society is becoming an inequitable mess. I'm all for lower middle class taxes also, regardless of the effect on the deficit.
You ask the local government. They all do it. They just have different ideas of which ones to fund and which ones not to.
States and the Federal government should just set the corporate tax rate to 0% for all corporations. And increase the tax on higher incomes progressively to pay for it.
All those unproductive and wealth destroying things that corporations both large and small do in order to avoid the high corporate taxes in the United States could be avoided and the increased capital could go back into creating higher paying jobs and profits to shareholders which are all already taxed as income anyway.
Cozying up to your sources is part of the game.... But becoming a propaganda tool is unfortunately where we are at in the American free press. The friendly press even get offices in the government buildings of the agencies they are supposed to be covering. Becoming little more than an extension of the PR department. Cozy indeed. More like Stockholm Syndrome.
Snowden had to go to the British Press to report on the US government because the US press has a track record of killing unfavorable stories about the government... not that that is an endorsement of the British press. They are just as cozy with their government. Just damning for our own government and the state of the free press here in the US.
What am I missing here?
Probably a truck load of laws and regulations in each state that raise the costs and barrier to entry for new car dealerships.
Originally they were not bad laws, back when there was only 1 or 2 car manufacturers who did not really have to compete, and when there were not many mechanic shops. Now the laws are really just a way to pay middlemen who pay lawmakers.
I think that is probably backwards. These laws would obviously tend to help larger car companies exclude competition. Like many issues of regulatory capture I would deduce that these state franchise laws were actually bought and paid for by big companies like GM, Ford and Chrysler in order to ensure that all those smaller car companies that didn't have robust dealership networks would either be forced out of business or forced to sell out to the big three. It took some serious capital investment and many years to set up dealer networks for Toyota, Honda and other foreign car companies. But they had the backing of their respective countries and large consumer base at home to leverage. Make no mistake these laws may have been passed at the behest of the local dealers, but those dealers were working from the same game plan as the big three.
Experience and credentials always need to be judged against the Job being offered. I agree that merely looking at the number of years of experience in a broadly defined job type is meaningless. The meaningful experience is what a person actually did in their job, not what their job title was.
This is an age old question not necessarily particular to Software Engineering... Are credentials or experience more important?
I would say experience is what you need to do the job, while credentials are often what you need to get the job in the first place and advance your career beyond your current role. I think that holds true for the majority of jobs, but there are plenty of examples and counter-examples of people having success without experience and/or without relevant degree credentials. Career wise I would suggest maximizing the financial return on all your strengths in the near term and either address your weaknesses as best you can or just go around them. Medium to long term always be looking to fill in the gaps in your experience or education that might be relevant to the types of jobs you may want/need in the future.
Once it is clear again that it is illegal and unconstitutional for the government to order people to hand over all their records without a warrant, then companies will again have the right to refuse records requests and privacy agreements become valid contracts again. That at least allows people to again choose companies with better privacy policies which have contractual weight to privacy violations. Right now the government just jots down a few sentences on a piece of paper, hands it to the company and the company is required to give them whatever the government wants without a warrant and the company can't tell you about it, and you can't sue them for violating any privacy provisions of their contract with you even when you find out about it later. Sure some companies will roll over... based on past behavior you can probably expect Verizon and Comcast to just continue the practice under an agreement instead of an order. But there could be some VOIP phone providers that don't play ball with the NSA and will have privacy agreements that say so. Same with other businesses, there will again be some freedom to pick and choose companies based on privacy concerns.
it would simply be to drive them to further clandestine levels to cover up the shit they're doing.
Actually, that is the point. Making them afraid to violate the constitution is victory. Having a law doesn't mean that everyone will actually follow the law, that is naive. Respect for the rule of law means shame for those violating it. The fact that we have Generals, Congressmen and Presidents standing up and saying that the government should have the power to seize any records they want without warrant is itself remarkably dire for Freedom and Liberty.
When Nixon's dirty tricks brigade stole business records from the Democratic Party offices he had shame enough to cover it up and Congress was about to impeach him. Today the president and thousands of people in the Executive branch and contractors have the power to seize all those types of records and more at the touch of a button, but they aren't cowering in dark places but rather when we find out about it they are waving the flag and calling it Apple Pie Patriotism to take what isn't theirs. Shame is exactly what they need.
Our entire government seems to think the constitution can be superseded by any other law whatsoever, as if the constitution being the highest law of the land doesn't actually overrule anything that contradicts it. It's as if the constitution is completely meaningless.
What fewer people seem to realize is that the Constitution is there to keep us safer than we would be otherwise with a government which could use force against the people without restraint. A lawless society isn't a society where there aren't laws, it is a society where there is no respect for the rule of law.
The mass confiscation of business records in the United States is a once in a generation threat to Liberty.
While this is a legitimate concern it's not a problem with Net neutrality, but with advertising standards and defective performance.
I disagree. If we don't have Net Neutrality, then the current advertising is deceptive and fraudulent. If we do have Net Neutrality and a real best effort to address network congestion rather than use network congestion as a payola scheme then there would be no need for the Federal Trade Commission to step in and put a stop to fraudulent advertising.
Not a false dilemma, a false assumption. How do you demonstrate the proposition that a car without manual override controls (beyond just a big red stop button) is both individually and systemically safer than one without?
And what driver is going to wait and see if the car is capable of avoiding an accident if they are going to be the ones liable for that accident and told they must take control of the vehicle if they think the car is about to collide with something? Basically you are talking about taking a sophisticated collision avoidance system and short circuiting that by telling the driver they must take control of the vehicle if they think there is a problem. That could demonstrate that autonomous cars are less safe because people will be turning off the collision avoidance system at exactly the wrong times, but yet they will be reacting more slowly than people without autonomous cars because manual drivers are already actively driving.
What California is doing is starting from the assumption that not having a manual override is less safe, which I believe is a false assumption and actually undermines safety efforts. And it could also undermine efforts to roll out these cars.
I am all for the option of manual controls and would probably choose to have manual controls for a car that I owned, but I think that the more compelling case and safer option will be to remove the manual controls and I think the only way you prove that is by allowing the cars to demonstrate the capability.
Many of the most potentially beneficial things that could happen as a result of autonomous cars are those use cases where a driver isn't always at the wheel ready to take immediate control of the vehicle. Car sharing, taxi services, elimination of drunk driving, transportation for the disabled, highway driving at closer spacing which might make a human operator uncomfortable and prone to take control, congested city driving where vehicles could be routed and dispatched more efficiently or just told to "go park and come pick me up in twenty minutes" are all use cases where you don't want to require that someone is 'at the wheel' at all times.
With the real potential for saving lives and helping improve quality of life robot cars should be allowed to prove themselves with and without old school manual controls and all the legal requirements, increased costs and liability that retaining those controls imply.
No one gets away without it. You prove, by extended experience over a long period of time, that the new technology is superior to the old.
First you have to allow the new technology. Requiring a licensed driver be at the wheel ready to take control of the vehicle at all times is not allowing the new technology it is hobbling it and potentially undermining the most compelling use cases that will save and improve lives. Simply require that the manufacturer demonstrate the ability of the car to drive like any taxi driver would be required to demonstrate an ability to drive to receive a license.
I think California is playing it wrong and unsafe. I agree there needs to be a big red button on cars which brings the vehicle to a safe stop much like there is on passenger trains, but this move by California seems more like something pushed for by entrenched vested interests and not driven by safety considerations. Lives will be saved when we allow cars to go pick up people that can't drive, don't have licenses or don't want to drive themselves. The implication of this move is that a human driver is going to be responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times. Rather it should be the manufacturer of the vehicle which is liable for any defects of the autonomous system when it is driving autonomously. And it should be an option moving forward, even a safety feature, to allow cars without manual driving options except for the big red button.
Compared with the track record for human drivers which is proven to be completely unsafe?
Fight the local monopolies. That is the only truly important thing right now.
Too late. Net Neutrality is a response to the reality of local monopolies. It is a direct result of the fact that many places have local monopolies or non-competitive (probably colluding) duopolies. If we had healthy competitive markets with five or six providers available to each household, then it would not be necessary to have net neutrality because who would buy service from a provider which had poor connections to the people and services you wanted to communicate with? All we would need would be transparency and truth in advertising... which we don't have either since companies are secretive about the business decisions they are making in order to throttle some communications.