The solution is simple: Tax carbon emissions, and apply tariffs to goods from countries that don't. Then let the markets sort it out. There's no need to argue about which energy sources are better; that's the sort of optimization that markets are great at.
And of course the solution will be to increase the size of government in order to tackle this difficult problem.
Consider the increase in government we'll need to build massive coastal dikes, relocate 50% of the population, relocate a significant percentage of agricultural production[1], and deal with the security threats caused by big population crises elsewhere[2]. And those are just the foreseeable problems.
Tackling the climate change problem now can probably be done with relatively minimal government intervention. Institute a heavy carbon tax and phase it in over the course of a few years, and then let the market sort it out. To prevent the carbon tax from pushing emissions offshore, institute additional tariffs on goods, services and energy from any country without an equivalent scheme.
Waiting for climate change to raise sea levels, change weather patterns and destabilize marginal economies and then trying to manage the effects of those changes will require much bigger government than would striking at the root of the problem. Fans of small government should be agitating for carbon taxes and carbon tariffs now.
[1] I don't know that the amount of arable land will decrease, but it will probably move.
[2] ISIS probably couldn't have arisen without the massive population upset caused by the years'-long drought in Syria, which was at least partially-caused by climate change.
Kiddie porn is a special case, and rightfully so. Outside of that, none of the major providers is going to hand over any data without a court order, and they do a much better job of ensuring availability and security than you do.
What I'm talking about is more akin to rate-limiting brute force attacks on passwords, or not returning the error codes that enable the million message attack on RSA.
If what Google says is true - that the files were accidentally marked as malware, phishing, or spam - then they were giving users a pretty terrible error message saying user documents violated the TOS.
Why not spell it out - hey, we flagged this file for malware, phishing, or spam. At least then the user doesn't think that *they* did something bad by violating the TOS.
I don't know if it was the case here, but it's often a good idea not to provide detailed information, because that helps people who are trying to figure out how to sneak stuff past the filters. That doesn't quite explain this case because if the attacker understands that "ToS violation" means "we detected your malware" then nothing was gained. But it's likely we don't have the whole story here, and there may be additional elements that make it make sense.
Or maybe not. It's impossible to say with the available information.
"the cloud" is really just "someone else's computer" and if you store data on it, that other entity can deny you access to it.
OTOH, nothing guarantees that you have access to data stored on your computer, either. Various sorts of downtime can and do occur. In the worst case, you may lose your drive and find that it's all gone, unless you're unusually assiduous about backups.
For the average person, and in the long run, it's likely that storing your data in a professionally managed data center where it's replicated and backed up automatically will give you greater total availability and much greater protection against loss.
Of course, availability isn't the only metric to consider. Privacy may be a concern. Even if the cloud service operator can be trusted not to misuse their access to your data, you also have to trust them to keep all attackers out. And in most jurisdictions law enforcement can force them to hand over your data after appropriate due process. Encryption can address these issues, but that's a pain... and may dramatically reduce long-term availability unless you're better at key management than most people.
Don't worry. all the other car makers are getting into electric cars. Musk's goal with Tesla is to save humanity by getting us off oil, and that is mostly done now. He can safely let Tesla die knowing that he achieved his goal.
I think his goal is more likely to make money, otherwise he would have been selling the previous models at below cost.
The goals of making money and getting us off oil are not mutually exclusive, they're complementary. In order to make really big changes in the world, you have to create a self-sustaining enterprise, which means you need profit.
Do you think his goal will be achieved if Tesla were to die tomorrow, before the majority of cars are mainstream? I think that would hurt things more than help.
I don't think it would do more than set things back by three or four years. All the automakers are moving towards electrics. Volkswagen in particular is going all in over the next few years, in large part to shake off the stink of their diesel emissions fraud. Many governments around the world have enacted plans to ban all non-EV auto sales by specific dates in the not-too-distant future.
I don't think we'd be where we are, with essentially the whole world convinced that EVs are practical, effective vehicle for at least some use cases, and likely to be practical for all in the next decade or so, without Tesla blazing the trail. So while Tesla failing now would set us back a bit, Tesla really has accomplished Musk's primary goal for the company.
But I don't believe Tesla is going to fail. They have problems to solve, but they'll solve them, and there's plenty of capital available if they need another infusion to work through the problems. That there are problems is no surprise; lots of people shook their heads when Tesla announced their plans for ramping up production. "Aggressive" doesn't begin to describe it. So maybe it'll go a little slower than planned, that won't kill the company. They already have a big lead on the competition, and this delay isn't going to be enough to erase that.
Fake.
Look at the shadows in item 2. Not to mention where the snow ploughs would put the snow.
Not fake. These are photos of the Yuki-no-Otani Snow Canyon in northern Japan. Snowfall in the area is 1200-1500 inches annually. And they don't use snow plows, they use huge snow blowers. Here's an article about it, including a picture of one of the snow blowers in operation: https://www.atlasobscura.com/a....
A true recursive implementation would be a bug in a bug tracking algorithm that reports itself.
Only if bug tracking algorithms report bugs, rather than tracking them. Either of "A bug in a bug tracking algorithm that tracks itself" or "A bug in a bug reporting algorithm that reports itself" would work.
It wasn't about slavery on the Northern side, no. But the motivation to secede absolutely was all about slavery on the Southern side.
Oh, the proximate causes were a couple of generations of increasing tension and disagreement with the North, but the root of nearly all of that tension was slavery, especially the ongoing efforts of the North to ensure that new states entering the union were not slave states, thus gradually eroding the power of the slaveholding bloc. The final straw was the election in 1860 of Abraham Lincoln and the associated rise of the Republican party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party (not necessarily an abolition party, since a lot of the party was Free Soiler, rather than abolitionist). That made it clear that the slaveholding states were on the path to being a permanent and decreasing minority in both houses, and that eventually the abolitionists would be powerful enough to abolish slavery.
The South's economy and culture were built on and around the institution of slavery, so accepting the big political change was tantamount to accepting the eventual elimination of slavery and the concomitant destruction of Southern economy and culture. They also realized that the North was becoming more populous and more economically powerful than the South (which hadn't been true for most of the history of the United States up to that point!) and that that trend was going to continue and even accelerate. So, if they were going to secede before slavery was abolished and their slave-based way of life destroyed, they had better do it right away while they still had a prayer of being able to make it stick.
Of course, all they ultimately succeeded in doing was accelerating the destruction of their economy and culture, and getting a lot of people killed. And for that matter, the Northern abolitionists didn't really succeed at ending slavery, either. That would take most of another century (though some would argue it's still not done, though I think that's stretching the definition of "slavery" beyond the breaking point).
But, guillotines weren't needed to end the Gilded Age, and I see no reason why you think they're necessary to end the new gilded age. Market forces have done the job in the the past
Market forces did not end the Gilded Age, it was ended by two world wars and significant inflation (in part for countries to pay of debts from the wars). These were major shocks to accrued wealth globally, breaking apart, or inflating away the value of, most family fortunes. Sure there were no Guillotines, but I don't think we want to go through the disasters of the 10's , 30's and 40's again just to get some wealth distribution back.
I disagree, though it's hard to be completely sure. I think things were already winding down, unionization was on the rise, many of the big monopolies (e.g. Standard Oil) were already fragmented.
In the areas of the world where corruption runs rampant and citizens are enslaved by the wealthy elite in power
In the regions like that which are nominally democratic, it seems like it's on the citizenry to take back control, primarily by demanding that corruption be punished and individual rights be maintained. In non-democratic regions, well, revolution just might be the only option. If so, though, the revolutionaries should be very sure that they know what the replacement is going to look like and how it's going to avoid the earlier problems before they begin. There's a long history of revolutions replacing a system with something that is no better, or is even worse.
The comparison with the Gilded Age is apt, I think. The Gilded Age was the culmination of the weath concentration effect of the Industrial Revolution. Large changes in technology create massive increases in productivity, and when that happens most of the benefit accrues to those in the best position to grab it, which is the founders of the companies enabled by the new technologies and the existing owners of capital. This is what we saw in the 19th century and into the early 20th, and it's what we're seeing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
But, guillotines weren't needed to end the Gilded Age, and I see no reason why you think they're necessary to end the new gilded age. Market forces have done the job in the the past and (with two caveats, which I'll get into below), I see no reason to think they won't do so again.
What happens is that as the new technologies and new production methods get established, they become commoditized. When that happens, consolidation reverses and competition builds. Competition among equals drives tight profit margins and pushes wages up, since the competitors are using similar processes and workers have portable skills that can move between them (individual bargaining). In addition, as job roles become more well-defined, collective bargaining makes more and more sense.
The two caveats are both ways in which this time may truly be different. The first is the way that automation, especially strong AI, when it is finally achieved, has the potential to eliminate not just some jobs, but nearly all of them. In theory, there's nothing that humans can do that robots cannot except, perhaps, be human. So it's possible in the most extreme outcome (well, the *most* extreme outcome involves the robots getting rid of the humans, but we'll ignore that one) the only jobs left are service jobs, because people like to be served by people. Less extreme outcomes could still see us in a post-scarcity world where very few people are needed to work.
IMO, the effects of that caveat do not require guillotines. It will become obvious that there is both a huge surplus of labor and a surplus of production, and the answer will be to tax the owners of the automated production systems to fund a generous basic income -- and then figure out how human society adapts to a life of nearly 100% leisure. As long as the voters are in control that's what will happen. And voters are in control. All of the lobbying in the world is useless in the face of sufficiently-focused voters, and massive unemployment and underemployment will motivate the voters.
The other caveat is that several of the new Internet Age wealth concentration machines (including the one that pays my bills) seem to benefit enormously from network effects. For example, it's very difficult for multiple players to compete in the social media space, because everyone wants to be where all of their friends are. We have some fragmentation in that space, but it's fragmentation more than competition, because the "competitors" are all occupying different niches. There's some room for competition in search engines, ad networks, mobile operating systems, etc., but there's also a strong tendency towards consolidation that I don't think we've seen before. Online retail seems powerfully biased towards a single competitor model.
My opinion is that this second caveat also does not require guillotines. I think there are enough different areas, and I think enough consumers are sufficiently uncomfortable with doing everything with one company that enough diversity will be driven, and enough competition will exist. If necessary, we may need to enact legislation to impose some limits that consumers don't impose through market means. Time will tell.
Bottom line; I see no compelling reason to believe that this time is different in any way that requires violence.
Sounds like you're dealing with people who have a little bit of experience, but aren't what I'd consider "old programmers". Or they're just bad, old programmers, I suppose.
On top of that, most people who would have gray hair today got weeded out by the dotcom crash.
That doesn't make sense, and doesn't fit with my experience.
The people who got weeded out by the crash were the ones who were attracted into the career by the boom, so when the crash dropped the number of job openings back to around what it was before the boom, they were the junior, inexperienced people who got the axe in companies that just scaled back, and they were the people who didn't have the resumes to find new jobs when their companies imploded entirely.
I'd been in the business for better than a decade when the bust hit, and the only effect I felt was a few years of stagnating wage growth. The same was true of everyone else I know who was in my situation.
And torment me by stubbornly refusing to follow software design standards.
That's because your software design standards are wrong. Obviously.
:-)
I'm joking... but you might actually take a look at what they have to say. Most older programmers have long given up caring much about conventions, other than to insist that things be consistent, because consistency matters far more than the details of whatever convention is adopted. If you find a lot of experienced people actually disregarding your standards, it's likely that they're actively bad.
We already drive cars with bombs attached to the steering wheel (airbags) and it hasn't helped.
Those make us safer, and therefore more likely to get in an accident.
I get that you're disagreeing that they make us safer but (a) perception is what matters and (b) the facts actually do show that they make us safer, so perception is even correct.
Take away peoples' right to sue the crap out of whatever driver hits them if they're texting while crossing the street, and they'll stop.
That's not enough. These people clearly don't believe they'll get hit, which means they either believe they have magical invulnerability or because they believe that drivers will take responsibility for avoiding hitting them. If they believed that drivers only avoided hitting them because the drivers were afraid of the ensuing lawsuit, you might have a point. But drivers also fear various forms of criminal charges.
So to make your plan work you'd need to remove both civil and criminal liabilities for drivers who injure or kill texting pedestrians. It would be effective at convincing pedestrians to avoid texting, but, much like my proposal to reduce vehicular accidents by removing all driver seat belts and air bags and affixing a razor-sharp spear point to the center of the steering wheel, aimed directly at the driver's chest, there would be some down sides.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution is simple: Tax carbon emissions, and apply tariffs to goods from countries that don't. Then let the markets sort it out. There's no need to argue about which energy sources are better; that's the sort of optimization that markets are great at.
And of course the solution will be to increase the size of government in order to tackle this difficult problem.
Consider the increase in government we'll need to build massive coastal dikes, relocate 50% of the population, relocate a significant percentage of agricultural production[1], and deal with the security threats caused by big population crises elsewhere[2]. And those are just the foreseeable problems.
Tackling the climate change problem now can probably be done with relatively minimal government intervention. Institute a heavy carbon tax and phase it in over the course of a few years, and then let the market sort it out. To prevent the carbon tax from pushing emissions offshore, institute additional tariffs on goods, services and energy from any country without an equivalent scheme.
Waiting for climate change to raise sea levels, change weather patterns and destabilize marginal economies and then trying to manage the effects of those changes will require much bigger government than would striking at the root of the problem. Fans of small government should be agitating for carbon taxes and carbon tariffs now.
[1] I don't know that the amount of arable land will decrease, but it will probably move.
[2] ISIS probably couldn't have arisen without the massive population upset caused by the years'-long drought in Syria, which was at least partially-caused by climate change.
Meh.
Kiddie porn is a special case, and rightfully so. Outside of that, none of the major providers is going to hand over any data without a court order, and they do a much better job of ensuring availability and security than you do.
Ah, yes, security through obscurity.
No, that's not what it's about. At all.
What I'm talking about is more akin to rate-limiting brute force attacks on passwords, or not returning the error codes that enable the million message attack on RSA.
If what Google says is true - that the files were accidentally marked as malware, phishing, or spam - then they were giving users a pretty terrible error message saying user documents violated the TOS. Why not spell it out - hey, we flagged this file for malware, phishing, or spam. At least then the user doesn't think that *they* did something bad by violating the TOS.
I don't know if it was the case here, but it's often a good idea not to provide detailed information, because that helps people who are trying to figure out how to sneak stuff past the filters. That doesn't quite explain this case because if the attacker understands that "ToS violation" means "we detected your malware" then nothing was gained. But it's likely we don't have the whole story here, and there may be additional elements that make it make sense.
Or maybe not. It's impossible to say with the available information.
Yep, as usual - backup your files. That's all you need.
... but hardly anyone does.
"the cloud" is really just "someone else's computer" and if you store data on it, that other entity can deny you access to it.
OTOH, nothing guarantees that you have access to data stored on your computer, either. Various sorts of downtime can and do occur. In the worst case, you may lose your drive and find that it's all gone, unless you're unusually assiduous about backups.
For the average person, and in the long run, it's likely that storing your data in a professionally managed data center where it's replicated and backed up automatically will give you greater total availability and much greater protection against loss.
Of course, availability isn't the only metric to consider. Privacy may be a concern. Even if the cloud service operator can be trusted not to misuse their access to your data, you also have to trust them to keep all attackers out. And in most jurisdictions law enforcement can force them to hand over your data after appropriate due process. Encryption can address these issues, but that's a pain... and may dramatically reduce long-term availability unless you're better at key management than most people.
They abandoned fiber when the FCC told them that could no longer use internet traffic monitoring to target ads to the end customer.
Cite? Everything I'd seen from Google Fiber, from the beginning, is that they were explicitly not monitoring traffic.
Don't worry. all the other car makers are getting into electric cars. Musk's goal with Tesla is to save humanity by getting us off oil, and that is mostly done now. He can safely let Tesla die knowing that he achieved his goal.
I think his goal is more likely to make money, otherwise he would have been selling the previous models at below cost.
The goals of making money and getting us off oil are not mutually exclusive, they're complementary. In order to make really big changes in the world, you have to create a self-sustaining enterprise, which means you need profit.
Do you think his goal will be achieved if Tesla were to die tomorrow, before the majority of cars are mainstream? I think that would hurt things more than help.
I don't think it would do more than set things back by three or four years. All the automakers are moving towards electrics. Volkswagen in particular is going all in over the next few years, in large part to shake off the stink of their diesel emissions fraud. Many governments around the world have enacted plans to ban all non-EV auto sales by specific dates in the not-too-distant future.
I don't think we'd be where we are, with essentially the whole world convinced that EVs are practical, effective vehicle for at least some use cases, and likely to be practical for all in the next decade or so, without Tesla blazing the trail. So while Tesla failing now would set us back a bit, Tesla really has accomplished Musk's primary goal for the company.
But I don't believe Tesla is going to fail. They have problems to solve, but they'll solve them, and there's plenty of capital available if they need another infusion to work through the problems. That there are problems is no surprise; lots of people shook their heads when Tesla announced their plans for ramping up production. "Aggressive" doesn't begin to describe it. So maybe it'll go a little slower than planned, that won't kill the company. They already have a big lead on the competition, and this delay isn't going to be enough to erase that.
Fake. Look at the shadows in item 2. Not to mention where the snow ploughs would put the snow.
Not fake. These are photos of the Yuki-no-Otani Snow Canyon in northern Japan. Snowfall in the area is 1200-1500 inches annually. And they don't use snow plows, they use huge snow blowers. Here's an article about it, including a picture of one of the snow blowers in operation: https://www.atlasobscura.com/a....
A true recursive implementation would be a bug in a bug tracking algorithm that reports itself.
Only if bug tracking algorithms report bugs, rather than tracking them. Either of "A bug in a bug tracking algorithm that tracks itself" or "A bug in a bug reporting algorithm that reports itself" would work.
News flash, it was never about slavery.
It wasn't about slavery on the Northern side, no. But the motivation to secede absolutely was all about slavery on the Southern side.
Oh, the proximate causes were a couple of generations of increasing tension and disagreement with the North, but the root of nearly all of that tension was slavery, especially the ongoing efforts of the North to ensure that new states entering the union were not slave states, thus gradually eroding the power of the slaveholding bloc. The final straw was the election in 1860 of Abraham Lincoln and the associated rise of the Republican party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party (not necessarily an abolition party, since a lot of the party was Free Soiler, rather than abolitionist). That made it clear that the slaveholding states were on the path to being a permanent and decreasing minority in both houses, and that eventually the abolitionists would be powerful enough to abolish slavery.
The South's economy and culture were built on and around the institution of slavery, so accepting the big political change was tantamount to accepting the eventual elimination of slavery and the concomitant destruction of Southern economy and culture. They also realized that the North was becoming more populous and more economically powerful than the South (which hadn't been true for most of the history of the United States up to that point!) and that that trend was going to continue and even accelerate. So, if they were going to secede before slavery was abolished and their slave-based way of life destroyed, they had better do it right away while they still had a prayer of being able to make it stick.
Of course, all they ultimately succeeded in doing was accelerating the destruction of their economy and culture, and getting a lot of people killed. And for that matter, the Northern abolitionists didn't really succeed at ending slavery, either. That would take most of another century (though some would argue it's still not done, though I think that's stretching the definition of "slavery" beyond the breaking point).
If they didn't want retail it's odd they bought a chain of grocery stores?
It's also odd that they are building their own distribution network, to replace UPS.
I think it's clear that Amazon has absolutely no intention of getting out of retail.
But, guillotines weren't needed to end the Gilded Age, and I see no reason why you think they're necessary to end the new gilded age. Market forces have done the job in the the past
Market forces did not end the Gilded Age, it was ended by two world wars and significant inflation (in part for countries to pay of debts from the wars). These were major shocks to accrued wealth globally, breaking apart, or inflating away the value of, most family fortunes. Sure there were no Guillotines, but I don't think we want to go through the disasters of the 10's , 30's and 40's again just to get some wealth distribution back.
I disagree, though it's hard to be completely sure. I think things were already winding down, unionization was on the rise, many of the big monopolies (e.g. Standard Oil) were already fragmented.
In the areas of the world where corruption runs rampant and citizens are enslaved by the wealthy elite in power
In the regions like that which are nominally democratic, it seems like it's on the citizenry to take back control, primarily by demanding that corruption be punished and individual rights be maintained. In non-democratic regions, well, revolution just might be the only option. If so, though, the revolutionaries should be very sure that they know what the replacement is going to look like and how it's going to avoid the earlier problems before they begin. There's a long history of revolutions replacing a system with something that is no better, or is even worse.
They will never release control with out a fight.
What do you base that on?
The comparison with the Gilded Age is apt, I think. The Gilded Age was the culmination of the weath concentration effect of the Industrial Revolution. Large changes in technology create massive increases in productivity, and when that happens most of the benefit accrues to those in the best position to grab it, which is the founders of the companies enabled by the new technologies and the existing owners of capital. This is what we saw in the 19th century and into the early 20th, and it's what we're seeing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
But, guillotines weren't needed to end the Gilded Age, and I see no reason why you think they're necessary to end the new gilded age. Market forces have done the job in the the past and (with two caveats, which I'll get into below), I see no reason to think they won't do so again.
What happens is that as the new technologies and new production methods get established, they become commoditized. When that happens, consolidation reverses and competition builds. Competition among equals drives tight profit margins and pushes wages up, since the competitors are using similar processes and workers have portable skills that can move between them (individual bargaining). In addition, as job roles become more well-defined, collective bargaining makes more and more sense.
The two caveats are both ways in which this time may truly be different. The first is the way that automation, especially strong AI, when it is finally achieved, has the potential to eliminate not just some jobs, but nearly all of them. In theory, there's nothing that humans can do that robots cannot except, perhaps, be human. So it's possible in the most extreme outcome (well, the *most* extreme outcome involves the robots getting rid of the humans, but we'll ignore that one) the only jobs left are service jobs, because people like to be served by people. Less extreme outcomes could still see us in a post-scarcity world where very few people are needed to work.
IMO, the effects of that caveat do not require guillotines. It will become obvious that there is both a huge surplus of labor and a surplus of production, and the answer will be to tax the owners of the automated production systems to fund a generous basic income -- and then figure out how human society adapts to a life of nearly 100% leisure. As long as the voters are in control that's what will happen. And voters are in control. All of the lobbying in the world is useless in the face of sufficiently-focused voters, and massive unemployment and underemployment will motivate the voters.
The other caveat is that several of the new Internet Age wealth concentration machines (including the one that pays my bills) seem to benefit enormously from network effects. For example, it's very difficult for multiple players to compete in the social media space, because everyone wants to be where all of their friends are. We have some fragmentation in that space, but it's fragmentation more than competition, because the "competitors" are all occupying different niches. There's some room for competition in search engines, ad networks, mobile operating systems, etc., but there's also a strong tendency towards consolidation that I don't think we've seen before. Online retail seems powerfully biased towards a single competitor model.
My opinion is that this second caveat also does not require guillotines. I think there are enough different areas, and I think enough consumers are sufficiently uncomfortable with doing everything with one company that enough diversity will be driven, and enough competition will exist. If necessary, we may need to enact legislation to impose some limits that consumers don't impose through market means. Time will tell.
Bottom line; I see no compelling reason to believe that this time is different in any way that requires violence.
Sounds like you're dealing with people who have a little bit of experience, but aren't what I'd consider "old programmers". Or they're just bad, old programmers, I suppose.
Interesting. I didn't realize Tesla recovered waste heat for cabin heating. That does make a lot of sense, even if it's not a huge amount of heat.
But drivers also fear various forms of criminal charges.
Let's not forget that most people legitimately _don't_ want to cause the death of strangers.
Apparently I needed sarcasm tags :-)
Elon Musk lives here and gave NO FUCKING POWER SHIT TO ANYONE IN AMERICA.
Puerto Rico is in America.
The people back then that got the axe...at least some portion of them would be seniors and tech leads now if that didn't happen.
Okay. Perhaps we just have different perceptions of when people typically "gray".
On top of that, most people who would have gray hair today got weeded out by the dotcom crash.
That doesn't make sense, and doesn't fit with my experience.
The people who got weeded out by the crash were the ones who were attracted into the career by the boom, so when the crash dropped the number of job openings back to around what it was before the boom, they were the junior, inexperienced people who got the axe in companies that just scaled back, and they were the people who didn't have the resumes to find new jobs when their companies imploded entirely.
I'd been in the business for better than a decade when the bust hit, and the only effect I felt was a few years of stagnating wage growth. The same was true of everyone else I know who was in my situation.
And torment me by stubbornly refusing to follow software design standards.
That's because your software design standards are wrong. Obviously.
:-)
I'm joking... but you might actually take a look at what they have to say. Most older programmers have long given up caring much about conventions, other than to insist that things be consistent, because consistency matters far more than the details of whatever convention is adopted. If you find a lot of experienced people actually disregarding your standards, it's likely that they're actively bad.
We already drive cars with bombs attached to the steering wheel (airbags) and it hasn't helped.
Those make us safer, and therefore more likely to get in an accident.
I get that you're disagreeing that they make us safer but (a) perception is what matters and (b) the facts actually do show that they make us safer, so perception is even correct.
Take away peoples' right to sue the crap out of whatever driver hits them if they're texting while crossing the street, and they'll stop.
That's not enough. These people clearly don't believe they'll get hit, which means they either believe they have magical invulnerability or because they believe that drivers will take responsibility for avoiding hitting them. If they believed that drivers only avoided hitting them because the drivers were afraid of the ensuing lawsuit, you might have a point. But drivers also fear various forms of criminal charges.
So to make your plan work you'd need to remove both civil and criminal liabilities for drivers who injure or kill texting pedestrians. It would be effective at convincing pedestrians to avoid texting, but, much like my proposal to reduce vehicular accidents by removing all driver seat belts and air bags and affixing a razor-sharp spear point to the center of the steering wheel, aimed directly at the driver's chest, there would be some down sides.