Let's see, violent crime rates were 30 times higher 100 years ago than they are now and total murder rates in the USA are at their second lowest point in the last 50 years (they climbed a fraction since the 2011 low point). When you look at overall violence rates they're at the lowest overall level since accurate records began about 150 years ago.
That violence peak 50 years ago was still lower than murder rates pre-ww2, which was in turn lower than the average rate in the late 19th century, when "hang 'em high" was the order of the day.
Do you really think reinstating violent retributive punishments will reduce violent offending from an already historic low?
" deaths by insane jihaddis running people down with stolen trucks"
You are statistically far more likely to be shot by a toddler holding a handgun in any given year than to ever see the event you described, let alone be targetted by one (For that matter apart from 9/11 you've been more likely to be killed by a domestic terrorist like Tomothy McVeigh, a white supremicist - or even a simple stray bullet(*) than by any kind of foreign terrorist, since the 1960s)
The actual number of people killed by any kind of terrorist action in the USA since 9/11 is an easy one: Zero
And the saudi arabian aircraft hijackers used box cutters to gain control - not guns. Not only that but they assumed that they'd need months of special training to fly such an aircraft, when flying into a building only takes enough knowledge to keep the thing straight/level and not crash before you get there.
(*) "Stray bullets" kill at least 100 people per year in the USA. That's another cost of your obsession with self protection, seeming inability to realise that what goes out of a gun barrel doesn't magically become harmless unicorn poop if it misses the target and the target isn't in front of a large solid object and fixation with trying to shoot at anything without thinking about the consequences. Perhaps if bullets had trackable serial numbers and there were harsh penalties for this kind of thing, death rates might decrease somewhat. A typical handgun bullet fired at a police helicoptor or power pole insulator will land 2-7 miles away and be just as deadly as when it lands as when it was launched.
The problem with "assault weapons" (carbines) is not the weapons.
The problem is the mindset kind of people who are attracted to them, mainly based on how they look.
Carbines are _soley_ intended for military use. Accuracy isn't important so much as being able to make the opponent keep his head down and stationary whilst someone else with an accurate weapon is targetting the opponent.
Wannabe play soldiers carrying around AR15s and their ilk are generally regarded with distain by REAL trained soldiers, especially those who've actually had to deal with the consequences of being on the receiving end of the things. Guns are not shiny toys and play soldiers should stick with wooden guns and bang bang noises.
I'll point out that the violent death rates in comparable western countries which don't allow carrying of handguns in public is around 1/10 of the rates seen in the USA.
And that's AFTER stripping out self inflicted gun deaths (which are 50-100 times higher in the USA than any other western country)
Even with those stripped out, the risk to a USA gun owner of being killed or injured by an attacker is three to five times higher than that of someone who _doesn't_ carry a gun - and more often than not, that death or injury is carried out with the victim's own weapon.
I grew up in a country with per-capita gun ownership rates 5 times higher than the USA - but with strict licensing and a total ban on handguns outside secure target ranges (when transported they must be disassembled and in a locked safe - even then only for transport between the range and a gunsmith. Personal possession of a handgun at home is completely prohibited). The violent crime rate in that country is less than 10% of the USA and non-accidental firearm deaths are so rare as to be national headlines for weeks. Cops have guns in their cars, but the act of unlocking them requires 5 pages of paperwork and they are not allowed to wear or carry siderams on patrol unless thery are a member of a response team, on a response job. The rate of civilian deaths from police is less than 0.5% of the USA and the rate of deaths _of_ police is less than 1% of the USA. (Shooting someone's dog requires a court order unless it happens to be attacking farm animals or people at the time - and attacking means "drawn blood")
But sure, let's rave on about how much safer you feel when carrying a sidearm, instead of looking at actual stats on the issue. It's like how USA media is screaming about school shootings when they were so common 40-50 years ago that they seldom made state news, let alone national media.
The ONLY reason they don't hit pedestrians 99% of the time (or cars) is because our traffic laws are setup with such massive safety margins that it takes a number of serious errors to result in any kind of crash.
The reason those safety margins are there is not for mechanical reasons. It's because people make mistakes all the time. Deciding to strip the margins back by flouting various safety rules is a calculated risk - but unlike casinos (the house always wins), you only need to get unlucky once to kill someone (or yourself).
"The pedestrian in your example, while you were breaking laws, likely saw you and had a chance to avoid you"
Not so long ago in my country, there was CCTV footage posted on TV of a 3 year old child running down the path from her front door and out her front gate towards her parents car parked directly outside the gate (door open, parents waiting). As she exited the gate, she was struck by a cyclist riding on the footpath who knocked her down resulting in her head striking the pavement. Her body then tangled on his pedals and she was dragged about 50 feet along the pavement before falling free.
The cyclist didn't stop. A 30-something man was subsequently arrested and charged with a number of traffic offences, including failing to stop, dangerous driving causing serious injury and riding on the footpath. He got 3 years when convicted and it would have been a MUCH higher sentence except he handed himself in and pleaded guilty.
There's a REASON footpaths are for pedestrians. Not all walkers are aware of what's around them or comprehend a speeding cyclist. Some jurisdictions allow invalid carriages and bicycles ONLY if they do not exceed 5mph.
There are some actions which are just so stupidly reckless and can have such devastating consequences that they deserve heavy penalties on the first offence to ensure people don't even try it in the first place (Eg, lasing traffic, trains or aircraft - In many countries doing that will have you facing 15-20 year jail terms with a 5 year minimum period. If you've ever seen the effect on freeway or surface street traffic when someone starts pointing a laser at vehicles you'll understand why it's at least as dangerous as pointing it aircraft or tossing rocks off overbridges - the instinctive reaction of a driver is to duck & swerve and unlike trains or aircraft there are no large degrees of separation between cars and obstacles. Similar penalties are frequently applied to copper thefts which disable critical transportation safety systems - both to the thieves AND the people handling the stolen copper - it's not about the copper, it's about the danger to life that's been caused)
If you're (illegally) riding on the pavement, distracted and you knock a pedestrian over, then you'd deserve a _lot_ more than 30 days. I've seen people seriously injured and occasionally killed by cyclists. "Criminal intent" comes into it the moment you do something you know is both illegal and dangerous even if you didn't intend to knock someone over.
Only a narcissist or sociopath would try and deflect the consequences of these kinds of activities by claiming the penalties are too severe. If you deliberately put other people in danger and then "accidentally"(*) injure them, society is entitled to impose quite severe punishments in order to ensure that other narcissists or sociopaths get the message that this is _NOT_ an OK activity.
The starting point for flying a heavy drone over a crowd should be 30 days _for the act of doing it_ and then increased from there based on duration or if there is an incident. This kind of incident should attract a minimum term of 3 months, a lifetime flying ban and mandatory compensation orders.
There are federal regulations about flying things (drones, helicoptors, other aircraft) over crowds for a good reason - based on many years of cleaning up after things went wrong, NOT on "what if" scenarios. If he appeals he may find the FAA stepping in and escalating to _federal_ charges or that the appeal judge decides the sentence was clearly unduly lenient as the lesson didn't sink in and rules that an increase in the penalty. Dropping a 1 pound drone on a group of people is on par with throwing a half-brick out of a second floor window into a crowd and many Law enforcement agencies would put classify that as attempted murder even if it wasn't actively targetting any specific individual, or even intended to go out the window in the first place.
His life ruined? He should be glad he's not up on (attempted) manslaughter charges.
(*) Free clue: If the "accident" was avoidable by not flying over a crowd, then it's not an accident. if the "accident" was avoidable by the drunk choosing not to drive, then it's not an accident. If the "accident" was avoidable by not rolling boulders down a hillside, then it's not an accident.
In this case you'd be right - because with synthetic you have the possibility of assembling large lonsdaleite crystals instead of diamond - and lonsdaleite is a LOT stronger than diamond.
Such judgements tend to be overturned quickly and the judge in question sanctioned.
This will become especially true with SDCs because the plethora of sensors and data logging on a SDC will ensure that cases aren't "he said/she said
In the same way, awards against respondents with deep pockets tend to have been arrived at after the deep pockets have expended much time and effort to defend - which means there's an element of punishment for trying to waste the court's time and evade responsibility. When a car _is_ at fault it will be pretty obvious from the logs and spending months in court trying to wear the plaintiffs down won't go down well with a judge.https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/02/23/2220219/self-driving-cars-should-be-liable-for-accidents-not-the-passengers-uk-government#
Death by overwork is so common in Japan that they even have a name for it.
If Matshita Corporation _really_ wanted to make a positive change they'd put in a rule which held managers responsible for holding employees in if they work late.
Management _can_ tell people to go home at the end of the day and if that's what it takes to solve the issue, they should.
Having the corporate structure encourage it would go a long way to solving this problem - as many others have mentioned, the stupidly long hours and requirements to "socialise" out of work hours with binge drinking levels that would make most hardened scotsmen keel over actually _damage_ productivity as well as shortening people's lives.
There's quite a bit of software which pulls this stunt.
It's completely illegal for consumer sales just about everywhere but tends to be in B2B anyway - whilst still illegal in most countries the costs of pursuing it are usually higher than the benefits and regulators for the most part simply can't be bothered with this kind of misleading shit.
Then there's the lifetime warranty that's only valid if you keep paying the maintenance charges - and at the end of 5 years or so, those start increasing by 100%/year.
There are 2 kinds of insurance (more than 2 but I'm keeping it simple)
1: Liability insurance for poor driving
2: Insurance for damage from any other cause.
You're still going to need insurance to cover repairs after the asshole down the street keys your car and you can't get charges pressed (actually the insurance company will get its pound of flesh, but that's not your concern if they pay for the repairs) etc, but this kind of insurance is quite cheap.
It's the first type that's expensive, and that's mostly driven by medical claims, a lot of which are vastly inflated and have a huge element of "he said, she said" in assigning fault.
When the car is documenting every single thing that happened around it at the moment of a crash (assigning fault will be easier) and the impact forces (which means that vastly inflated insurance claims will be challenged), as well as doing a lot more to avoid being in a crash than most humans in the first place (Seriously, most crashes are the result of at least 3 serious driver errors added together, even if poor highway engineering is a contributor), that first part is going to be very low (all insurance is determined by the cost of claims and the statistical chances of claims happening. There's enough competition in the market that no one's raping and pillaging on premiums)
Once it's low enough, then a company like Tesla can afford to self-insure and farm out underwriting to third parties (NO insurance company ever underwrites 100% of its own liabilities, this is all packaged and sold as risk packages)
And in the case of the second item, local scumbags are going to find out very quickly that SDCs record every detail, every minute of the day, even when parked and quiescent - which means identifying whodunnit will be a lot easier (and therefore claiming from THEIR liability insurance)
The existing lidar in my 15 year old car has heaters in it specifically to deal with that kind of instance (funnily enough, so do the wing mirrors and they're hot enough to not just melt ice but to cause noticeble water evaporation if the vehicle is stationary.)
Yes, you need to brush the snow off, but running for five minutes take care of the rest - and in those kind of environments you're a bit of a tool if you don't have your car garaged/covered/ plugged into power to preheat overnight and if you can't do any of that, using a webasto heater to bring the car up to temperature BEFORE trying to crank the engine.
Cars only get unreliable because you LET them get unreliable.
There's a very simple reason they'll be cheaper than taxis: Drivers are the single most expensive part of the package.
Plus, drivers working longer hours make more mistakes and put cars off the road as a result.
SDCs will pretty much come to dominate the market in a very short time thanks to hefty insurance premiums for manually driven ones - and whilst with child seats you might be a corner case the end result is likely to be a 80-90% reduction in urban vehicle ownership _especially_ in Europe.
Nuclear powered hydrogen -> methane -> (long chain hydrocarbon) kerosene production would solve that (using atmospheric CO2)
We already have the technology to do it, just not the political or economic incentives - and that's unlikely to occur with the shitgibbon's cronies crapping all over the environment, but we may have our (as in the species) hands forced by a burgeoning anoxic event long before sea levels change to any meaningful degree.
There's only one AN225, but they're considering completing the other airframe and maybe building a third, thanks to increased heavy lifting requirements.
AN124 lifting capacity is heavily oversubscribed and the vast majority of business is outside the old eastern blocs. Virtually all of that goes through a freight handling contractor in England.
It's worth noting that both the AN124 and 225 are operating in a market completely separated from Airbus and Boeing. Not even the 747-F can take the kinds of loads that these aircraft can handle - and the only thing they really need for modernisation is better engines and glass cockpits, both of which are on the agenda (Antonov don't want to be dependent on russian engines for number of reasons including reliabilty and fuel consumption. Imagine a Trent-1000 or GEnx engined AN225, because that's the kind of thing that can happen in non-serial aircraft production, where the maker is also the operator)
Craftsmen receive a shitload of training, even if it's not a "diploma" at the end.
Good companies and industries recognise that. Some have some up with equivalents to tertiary qualifications that are recognised universally.
The very skilled trades you mention _all_ have significant requirements for safety and technical training. Throwing a HS graduate at any of those fields without several years of training through apprenticeships or other on-the-job training results in _deaths_
As for hours worked: Amen. Any more than 35 hours worked results in documented reductions in throughput and increases in errors. That might be ok if you're a minimum wage oik behind the counter at 7-11, but I'd prefer that my aircraft have their full complement of fasteners, of the right type and tensioned correctly, given that the stress calculations of the airframe are finely put together to give maximum strength without excess weight.
Of course that kind of hting is exactly the area where robots win overall (no mistakes, don't get tired), but the improvement in productivity for that kind of incremental change means that only a few people are surplus to requirements and the increase in production might well mean there's an opening for them fitting cabin seats instead.
"Because the old farts won't port the process to anything new"
This is exactly the reason why manufacturers tend to move assembly lines to new towns or countries. It's an opportunity to get rid of this kind of issue without having the unions go nuts.
Unions are necessary and a good thing to prevent exploitation. A good environment has the company, workers and unions all working together for a common goal.
Unions which obstruct the abliity to make changes in order to stay competitive or to do a better job are a liabliity to the people that employ them (the workers) because the choice of "we need to streamline and cut back the workforce by 30% using a sinking lid policy over the next 15 years" becomes "We're moving the factory to Mexico. You're all redundant"
For those who don't grok the reason: Operating costs.
Fuel and engine maintenance costs are easily far higher for an older aircraft than simply buying a new one and you can't leave aircraft parked around because they cost millions to keep airworthy even if they're not flying. Every minute one isn't in the air or at a gate loading/unloading passengers/freight, it's a liability to the company that owns it.
The thing to bear in mind that what's driving the current boom cycle is mainly orders from outside the USA/EU.
Asian tiger economies had their crash and burn cycle in the 1990s and whilst western ones are now having their wheels fall off in a smilar way (right down to IMF bailouts primarily benefitting banks, not the countries being loaned money) , the asian ones are recovering nicely and having been burned once, the people in charge are not willing to allow it to occur again - unlike western countries who've walked straight back into the same short-cycle goals that caused the crashes in in the first place.
That said, the last 8-9 years have been particularly dire for the aircraft makers, with Boeing avoiding massive cuts in Washington state by doing it in subsidiary companies such as Spirit (the Kansas lines were pretty much obliterated). This has had an interesting benefit of forcing them to streamline everything and leaves them in a good position to fill orders (but of course the problem is when they overproduce and the next bust cycle leaves them with excess inventory)
Slashdot Mirror
Go read e2nz.org, laudafinem.org and related sites.
NZ - 100% pure bullshit.
Let's see, violent crime rates were 30 times higher 100 years ago than they are now and total murder rates in the USA are at their second lowest point in the last 50 years (they climbed a fraction since the 2011 low point). When you look at overall violence rates they're at the lowest overall level since accurate records began about 150 years ago.
That violence peak 50 years ago was still lower than murder rates pre-ww2, which was in turn lower than the average rate in the late 19th century, when "hang 'em high" was the order of the day.
Do you really think reinstating violent retributive punishments will reduce violent offending from an already historic low?
" deaths by insane jihaddis running people down with stolen trucks"
You are statistically far more likely to be shot by a toddler holding a handgun in any given year than to ever see the event you described, let alone be targetted by one (For that matter apart from 9/11 you've been more likely to be killed by a domestic terrorist like Tomothy McVeigh, a white supremicist - or even a simple stray bullet(*) than by any kind of foreign terrorist, since the 1960s)
The actual number of people killed by any kind of terrorist action in the USA since 9/11 is an easy one: Zero
And the saudi arabian aircraft hijackers used box cutters to gain control - not guns. Not only that but they assumed that they'd need months of special training to fly such an aircraft, when flying into a building only takes enough knowledge to keep the thing straight/level and not crash before you get there.
(*) "Stray bullets" kill at least 100 people per year in the USA. That's another cost of your obsession with self protection, seeming inability to realise that what goes out of a gun barrel doesn't magically become harmless unicorn poop if it misses the target and the target isn't in front of a large solid object and fixation with trying to shoot at anything without thinking about the consequences. Perhaps if bullets had trackable serial numbers and there were harsh penalties for this kind of thing, death rates might decrease somewhat. A typical handgun bullet fired at a police helicoptor or power pole insulator will land 2-7 miles away and be just as deadly as when it lands as when it was launched.
The problem with "assault weapons" (carbines) is not the weapons.
The problem is the mindset kind of people who are attracted to them, mainly based on how they look.
Carbines are _soley_ intended for military use. Accuracy isn't important so much as being able to make the opponent keep his head down and stationary whilst someone else with an accurate weapon is targetting the opponent.
Wannabe play soldiers carrying around AR15s and their ilk are generally regarded with distain by REAL trained soldiers, especially those who've actually had to deal with the consequences of being on the receiving end of the things. Guns are not shiny toys and play soldiers should stick with wooden guns and bang bang noises.
I'll point out that the violent death rates in comparable western countries which don't allow carrying of handguns in public is around 1/10 of the rates seen in the USA.
And that's AFTER stripping out self inflicted gun deaths (which are 50-100 times higher in the USA than any other western country)
Even with those stripped out, the risk to a USA gun owner of being killed or injured by an attacker is three to five times higher than that of someone who _doesn't_ carry a gun - and more often than not, that death or injury is carried out with the victim's own weapon.
I grew up in a country with per-capita gun ownership rates 5 times higher than the USA - but with strict licensing and a total ban on handguns outside secure target ranges (when transported they must be disassembled and in a locked safe - even then only for transport between the range and a gunsmith. Personal possession of a handgun at home is completely prohibited). The violent crime rate in that country is less than 10% of the USA and non-accidental firearm deaths are so rare as to be national headlines for weeks. Cops have guns in their cars, but the act of unlocking them requires 5 pages of paperwork and they are not allowed to wear or carry siderams on patrol unless thery are a member of a response team, on a response job. The rate of civilian deaths from police is less than 0.5% of the USA and the rate of deaths _of_ police is less than 1% of the USA. (Shooting someone's dog requires a court order unless it happens to be attacking farm animals or people at the time - and attacking means "drawn blood")
But sure, let's rave on about how much safer you feel when carrying a sidearm, instead of looking at actual stats on the issue. It's like how USA media is screaming about school shootings when they were so common 40-50 years ago that they seldom made state news, let alone national media.
The ONLY reason they don't hit pedestrians 99% of the time (or cars) is because our traffic laws are setup with such massive safety margins that it takes a number of serious errors to result in any kind of crash.
The reason those safety margins are there is not for mechanical reasons. It's because people make mistakes all the time. Deciding to strip the margins back by flouting various safety rules is a calculated risk - but unlike casinos (the house always wins), you only need to get unlucky once to kill someone (or yourself).
Generally I call them "organ donors", but if they're showing signs of taking guests along for that ride then they need to be firmly stopped.
"The pedestrian in your example, while you were breaking laws, likely saw you and had a chance to avoid you"
Not so long ago in my country, there was CCTV footage posted on TV of a 3 year old child running down the path from her front door and out her front gate towards her parents car parked directly outside the gate (door open, parents waiting). As she exited the gate, she was struck by a cyclist riding on the footpath who knocked her down resulting in her head striking the pavement. Her body then tangled on his pedals and she was dragged about 50 feet along the pavement before falling free.
The cyclist didn't stop. A 30-something man was subsequently arrested and charged with a number of traffic offences, including failing to stop, dangerous driving causing serious injury and riding on the footpath. He got 3 years when convicted and it would have been a MUCH higher sentence except he handed himself in and pleaded guilty.
There's a REASON footpaths are for pedestrians. Not all walkers are aware of what's around them or comprehend a speeding cyclist. Some jurisdictions allow invalid carriages and bicycles ONLY if they do not exceed 5mph.
"A friend of mine shot at her ex-boyfriend with a shotgun. Because she didn't hit him, she did less than 30 days in jail."
In most countries, she'd be facing 3-5 years.
There are some actions which are just so stupidly reckless and can have such devastating consequences that they deserve heavy penalties on the first offence to ensure people don't even try it in the first place (Eg, lasing traffic, trains or aircraft - In many countries doing that will have you facing 15-20 year jail terms with a 5 year minimum period. If you've ever seen the effect on freeway or surface street traffic when someone starts pointing a laser at vehicles you'll understand why it's at least as dangerous as pointing it aircraft or tossing rocks off overbridges - the instinctive reaction of a driver is to duck & swerve and unlike trains or aircraft there are no large degrees of separation between cars and obstacles. Similar penalties are frequently applied to copper thefts which disable critical transportation safety systems - both to the thieves AND the people handling the stolen copper - it's not about the copper, it's about the danger to life that's been caused)
If you're (illegally) riding on the pavement, distracted and you knock a pedestrian over, then you'd deserve a _lot_ more than 30 days. I've seen people seriously injured and occasionally killed by cyclists. "Criminal intent" comes into it the moment you do something you know is both illegal and dangerous even if you didn't intend to knock someone over.
Only a narcissist or sociopath would try and deflect the consequences of these kinds of activities by claiming the penalties are too severe. If you deliberately put other people in danger and then "accidentally"(*) injure them, society is entitled to impose quite severe punishments in order to ensure that other narcissists or sociopaths get the message that this is _NOT_ an OK activity.
The starting point for flying a heavy drone over a crowd should be 30 days _for the act of doing it_ and then increased from there based on duration or if there is an incident. This kind of incident should attract a minimum term of 3 months, a lifetime flying ban and mandatory compensation orders.
There are federal regulations about flying things (drones, helicoptors, other aircraft) over crowds for a good reason - based on many years of cleaning up after things went wrong, NOT on "what if" scenarios. If he appeals he may find the FAA stepping in and escalating to _federal_ charges or that the appeal judge decides the sentence was clearly unduly lenient as the lesson didn't sink in and rules that an increase in the penalty. Dropping a 1 pound drone on a group of people is on par with throwing a half-brick out of a second floor window into a crowd and many Law enforcement agencies would put classify that as attempted murder even if it wasn't actively targetting any specific individual, or even intended to go out the window in the first place.
His life ruined? He should be glad he's not up on (attempted) manslaughter charges.
(*) Free clue: If the "accident" was avoidable by not flying over a crowd, then it's not an accident. if the "accident" was avoidable by the drunk choosing not to drive, then it's not an accident. If the "accident" was avoidable by not rolling boulders down a hillside, then it's not an accident.
In this case you'd be right - because with synthetic you have the possibility of assembling large lonsdaleite crystals instead of diamond - and lonsdaleite is a LOT stronger than diamond.
This is being pushed with the dangled possibility that metallic hydrogen is a stable material once formed.
The odds of that are extremely low, but it's a way to sell media reviews.
"legal judgments sometimes ignore facts."
Such judgements tend to be overturned quickly and the judge in question sanctioned.
This will become especially true with SDCs because the plethora of sensors and data logging on a SDC will ensure that cases aren't "he said/she said
In the same way, awards against respondents with deep pockets tend to have been arrived at after the deep pockets have expended much time and effort to defend - which means there's an element of punishment for trying to waste the court's time and evade responsibility. When a car _is_ at fault it will be pretty obvious from the logs and spending months in court trying to wear the plaintiffs down won't go down well with a judge.https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/02/23/2220219/self-driving-cars-should-be-liable-for-accidents-not-the-passengers-uk-government#
Death by overwork is so common in Japan that they even have a name for it.
If Matshita Corporation _really_ wanted to make a positive change they'd put in a rule which held managers responsible for holding employees in if they work late.
Management _can_ tell people to go home at the end of the day and if that's what it takes to solve the issue, they should.
Having the corporate structure encourage it would go a long way to solving this problem - as many others have mentioned, the stupidly long hours and requirements to "socialise" out of work hours with binge drinking levels that would make most hardened scotsmen keel over actually _damage_ productivity as well as shortening people's lives.
There's quite a bit of software which pulls this stunt.
It's completely illegal for consumer sales just about everywhere but tends to be in B2B anyway - whilst still illegal in most countries the costs of pursuing it are usually higher than the benefits and regulators for the most part simply can't be bothered with this kind of misleading shit.
Then there's the lifetime warranty that's only valid if you keep paying the maintenance charges - and at the end of 5 years or so, those start increasing by 100%/year.
There are 2 kinds of insurance (more than 2 but I'm keeping it simple)
1: Liability insurance for poor driving
2: Insurance for damage from any other cause.
You're still going to need insurance to cover repairs after the asshole down the street keys your car and you can't get charges pressed (actually the insurance company will get its pound of flesh, but that's not your concern if they pay for the repairs) etc, but this kind of insurance is quite cheap.
It's the first type that's expensive, and that's mostly driven by medical claims, a lot of which are vastly inflated and have a huge element of "he said, she said" in assigning fault.
When the car is documenting every single thing that happened around it at the moment of a crash (assigning fault will be easier) and the impact forces (which means that vastly inflated insurance claims will be challenged), as well as doing a lot more to avoid being in a crash than most humans in the first place (Seriously, most crashes are the result of at least 3 serious driver errors added together, even if poor highway engineering is a contributor), that first part is going to be very low (all insurance is determined by the cost of claims and the statistical chances of claims happening. There's enough competition in the market that no one's raping and pillaging on premiums)
Once it's low enough, then a company like Tesla can afford to self-insure and farm out underwriting to third parties (NO insurance company ever underwrites 100% of its own liabilities, this is all packaged and sold as risk packages)
And in the case of the second item, local scumbags are going to find out very quickly that SDCs record every detail, every minute of the day, even when parked and quiescent - which means identifying whodunnit will be a lot easier (and therefore claiming from THEIR liability insurance)
Tesla's cars are not SDCs by any stretch of the imagination. They're level 2 automation at best.
Whilst that's a LOT better than most humans most of the time it's not better than most humans all of the time.
The existing lidar in my 15 year old car has heaters in it specifically to deal with that kind of instance (funnily enough, so do the wing mirrors and they're hot enough to not just melt ice but to cause noticeble water evaporation if the vehicle is stationary.)
Yes, you need to brush the snow off, but running for five minutes take care of the rest - and in those kind of environments you're a bit of a tool if you don't have your car garaged/covered/ plugged into power to preheat overnight and if you can't do any of that, using a webasto heater to bring the car up to temperature BEFORE trying to crank the engine.
Cars only get unreliable because you LET them get unreliable.
There's a very simple reason they'll be cheaper than taxis: Drivers are the single most expensive part of the package.
Plus, drivers working longer hours make more mistakes and put cars off the road as a result.
SDCs will pretty much come to dominate the market in a very short time thanks to hefty insurance premiums for manually driven ones - and whilst with child seats you might be a corner case the end result is likely to be a 80-90% reduction in urban vehicle ownership _especially_ in Europe.
Nuclear powered hydrogen -> methane -> (long chain hydrocarbon) kerosene production would solve that (using atmospheric CO2)
We already have the technology to do it, just not the political or economic incentives - and that's unlikely to occur with the shitgibbon's cronies crapping all over the environment, but we may have our (as in the species) hands forced by a burgeoning anoxic event long before sea levels change to any meaningful degree.
There's only one AN225, but they're considering completing the other airframe and maybe building a third, thanks to increased heavy lifting requirements.
AN124 lifting capacity is heavily oversubscribed and the vast majority of business is outside the old eastern blocs. Virtually all of that goes through a freight handling contractor in England.
It's worth noting that both the AN124 and 225 are operating in a market completely separated from Airbus and Boeing. Not even the 747-F can take the kinds of loads that these aircraft can handle - and the only thing they really need for modernisation is better engines and glass cockpits, both of which are on the agenda (Antonov don't want to be dependent on russian engines for number of reasons including reliabilty and fuel consumption. Imagine a Trent-1000 or GEnx engined AN225, because that's the kind of thing that can happen in non-serial aircraft production, where the maker is also the operator)
Craftsmen receive a shitload of training, even if it's not a "diploma" at the end.
Good companies and industries recognise that. Some have some up with equivalents to tertiary qualifications that are recognised universally.
The very skilled trades you mention _all_ have significant requirements for safety and technical training. Throwing a HS graduate at any of those fields without several years of training through apprenticeships or other on-the-job training results in _deaths_
As for hours worked: Amen. Any more than 35 hours worked results in documented reductions in throughput and increases in errors. That might be ok if you're a minimum wage oik behind the counter at 7-11, but I'd prefer that my aircraft have their full complement of fasteners, of the right type and tensioned correctly, given that the stress calculations of the airframe are finely put together to give maximum strength without excess weight.
Of course that kind of hting is exactly the area where robots win overall (no mistakes, don't get tired), but the improvement in productivity for that kind of incremental change means that only a few people are surplus to requirements and the increase in production might well mean there's an opening for them fitting cabin seats instead.
"Because the old farts won't port the process to anything new"
This is exactly the reason why manufacturers tend to move assembly lines to new towns or countries. It's an opportunity to get rid of this kind of issue without having the unions go nuts.
Unions are necessary and a good thing to prevent exploitation. A good environment has the company, workers and unions all working together for a common goal.
Unions which obstruct the abliity to make changes in order to stay competitive or to do a better job are a liabliity to the people that employ them (the workers) because the choice of "we need to streamline and cut back the workforce by 30% using a sinking lid policy over the next 15 years" becomes "We're moving the factory to Mexico. You're all redundant"
For those who don't grok the reason: Operating costs.
Fuel and engine maintenance costs are easily far higher for an older aircraft than simply buying a new one and you can't leave aircraft parked around because they cost millions to keep airworthy even if they're not flying. Every minute one isn't in the air or at a gate loading/unloading passengers/freight, it's a liability to the company that owns it.
The thing to bear in mind that what's driving the current boom cycle is mainly orders from outside the USA/EU.
Asian tiger economies had their crash and burn cycle in the 1990s and whilst western ones are now having their wheels fall off in a smilar way (right down to IMF bailouts primarily benefitting banks, not the countries being loaned money) , the asian ones are recovering nicely and having been burned once, the people in charge are not willing to allow it to occur again - unlike western countries who've walked straight back into the same short-cycle goals that caused the crashes in in the first place.
That said, the last 8-9 years have been particularly dire for the aircraft makers, with Boeing avoiding massive cuts in Washington state by doing it in subsidiary companies such as Spirit (the Kansas lines were pretty much obliterated). This has had an interesting benefit of forcing them to streamline everything and leaves them in a good position to fill orders (but of course the problem is when they overproduce and the next bust cycle leaves them with excess inventory)