Surface cars are very efficient and increasingly much, much safer.
Not compared to an aircraft that can go point-to-point. My daily commute when I lived up in the mountains in Los Gatos was about 30 minutes, and it would have been a one minute flight or less.
Roads are not expensive to build in comparison to anything else.
Compare the cost of building roads to the cost of not building roads. QED. Also, the political costs you mention are still costs of building roads. That's a lot of tax money to spend, that air cars wouldn't need.
For a car that refuses to function when it snows.
Where are you getting that from?
Even after the most severe snowstorms, you'd be able to fly over the snow sooner than the roads would be ploughed.
There's quite a bit of work to do yet, but my point is that we're rapidly approaching that tipping point. Surface cars are inefficient and dangerous, and roads are unbelievably expensive to build. We drive along very narrow channels with other vehicles coming towards us at fatal closing speeds, typically with nothing but a painted line to separate us. Daily fatalities in any average city's highway system are routine.
when you consider how much they're going to cost
They'll follow the same cost curve as automobiles did. Only the rich will be able to afford them initially, and they'll sell in the thousands. Then, they'll get cheaper and sell in the hundreds of thousands, and so on. By going robotic, they'll also be more feasible to share than present-day cars are.
We have machines that can scan the inside of our bodies without cutting us open.
I've got an image processing textbook around here somewhere that explains the math of generating images from projections (as CAT and NMR scanners do), and even twenty years later, it still impresses the hell out of me that anyone ever imagined it, let alone actually got it to market.
It's getting closer. Back when Moller started out, we didn't have GPS, for one thing. In the meantime, computing power increased enormously. An iPhone has more computing power than a typical autopilot does. Today, robotic helicopters are routine undergrad engineering class projects.
What will make flying cars feasible is making them fully robotic, so that they can be safely used by a drunk or a child. Get in the vehicle, and just tell it where you want to be; leave it up to the car to get you there. If it comes close enough to any other vehicles, they'll negotiate collision avoidance between them. When you get there, tell the car to go find somewhere to park and wait for you.
They made it possible for us to travel in all but the worst weather, they don't leave piles of shit behind them to feed flies, and they're far less labor-intensive to operate. Horses have a certain nostalgic appeal, but we're a lot better off with them relegated to a hobby.
You mean being scientific about it? And strictly controlling the inputs so that it isn't just garbage in/garbage out? Crazy talk.
As it happens, I know a man who runs a fund that treats its models as disposable components that are expected to fail eventually. They're using genetic algorithms to create their models, and they let the models with the best record over the last six months make the buy/sell/hold decisions.
The problem with economics is that is probably more a sociological study than a idealized science.
Yes and no. There are economists who actually study why people make the choices they do (Smith, Von Mises, Von Hayek, etc.), and there are professional obfuscators (Keynes, Krugman, and nearly any "economist" ever employed by our federal government) whose purpose is to invent absurd rationalizations for power-grabbing and counterfeiting.
Yet we all know the advertising and social herd behavior affect purchases much more than any real needs or demands.
They have an effect, but people still manage to feed, clothe and house themselves far better in a market like ours where there's a plethora of consumer advertising, than in a planned economy where nearly all advertising is government propaganda.
The reason why we have economic problems is the same old one from the beginning of time -- good old fashioned human greed.
There's more to it than that. People will always be trying to increase their wealth. In a free market with the rule of law, they can only do so by producing what other people want to buy. It's when they resort to plunder through fraud (such as by issuing bad checks or fiat currencies), that you get the boom-and-bust cycle.
As for the quants, their opportunities to risk vast amounts of other people's money on their guesses is one of the symptoms of government interference in the equity markets. In a massively over-regulated environment like we have now, there are great advantages to consolidating financial services into bigger and bigger organizations.
It seems that you buy the idea that we have to fight wars to get oil. Consider for a moment what might happen if we didn't do that: whoever has oil to sell would still want to sell it. If the USA weren't interfering in other countries, why would those countries have any reason to withhold it?
This would bug me about as much as the Superconducting Supercollider did. The billions of francs the French government has wasted on this "big science" project would do a lot more good if it remained in the people's hands to spend as they saw fit.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, given the stupidity of your "rah rah markets are over regulated" comment in another thread, you should just STFU.
With thoroughly reasoned arguments like that, you must be bucking for a job in the government.
-jcr
if I don't want to see your name pointlessly
Learn to use a killfile, sunshine.
-jcr
Surface cars are very efficient and increasingly much, much safer.
Not compared to an aircraft that can go point-to-point. My daily commute when I lived up in the mountains in Los Gatos was about 30 minutes, and it would have been a one minute flight or less.
Roads are not expensive to build in comparison to anything else.
Compare the cost of building roads to the cost of not building roads. QED. Also, the political costs you mention are still costs of building roads. That's a lot of tax money to spend, that air cars wouldn't need.
For a car that refuses to function when it snows.
Where are you getting that from?
Even after the most severe snowstorms, you'd be able to fly over the snow sooner than the roads would be ploughed.
-jcr
We're a long, long way from flying cars.
There's quite a bit of work to do yet, but my point is that we're rapidly approaching that tipping point. Surface cars are inefficient and dangerous, and roads are unbelievably expensive to build. We drive along very narrow channels with other vehicles coming towards us at fatal closing speeds, typically with nothing but a painted line to separate us. Daily fatalities in any average city's highway system are routine.
when you consider how much they're going to cost
They'll follow the same cost curve as automobiles did. Only the rich will be able to afford them initially, and they'll sell in the thousands. Then, they'll get cheaper and sell in the hundreds of thousands, and so on. By going robotic, they'll also be more feasible to share than present-day cars are.
-jcr
Better still, they could put autopilots on normal cars
Navigating on the surface is a far more difficult problem than navigating in the air. Adding a dimension gives you a lot more room to maneuver.
-jcr
So the lack of quality advertising caused the product scarcity in the soviet block and the downfall of communism?
No, communism was destroyed by the intrinsic inefficiency of central planning, combined with hostiiity towards individual initiative.
-jcr
We have machines that can scan the inside of our bodies without cutting us open.
I've got an image processing textbook around here somewhere that explains the math of generating images from projections (as CAT and NMR scanners do), and even twenty years later, it still impresses the hell out of me that anyone ever imagined it, let alone actually got it to market.
-jcr
In addition, cars *are* much faster, traffic jams or not.
That, too.
-jcr
I want my flying car, damn it!!
It's getting closer. Back when Moller started out, we didn't have GPS, for one thing. In the meantime, computing power increased enormously. An iPhone has more computing power than a typical autopilot does. Today, robotic helicopters are routine undergrad engineering class projects.
What will make flying cars feasible is making them fully robotic, so that they can be safely used by a drunk or a child. Get in the vehicle, and just tell it where you want to be; leave it up to the car to get you there. If it comes close enough to any other vehicles, they'll negotiate collision avoidance between them. When you get there, tell the car to go find somewhere to park and wait for you.
-jcr
They made it possible for us to travel in all but the worst weather, they don't leave piles of shit behind them to feed flies, and they're far less labor-intensive to operate. Horses have a certain nostalgic appeal, but we're a lot better off with them relegated to a hobby.
-jcr
You mean being scientific about it? And strictly controlling the inputs so that it isn't just garbage in/garbage out? Crazy talk.
As it happens, I know a man who runs a fund that treats its models as disposable components that are expected to fail eventually. They're using genetic algorithms to create their models, and they let the models with the best record over the last six months make the buy/sell/hold decisions.
-jcr
The problem with economics is that is probably more a sociological study than a idealized science.
Yes and no. There are economists who actually study why people make the choices they do (Smith, Von Mises, Von Hayek, etc.), and there are professional obfuscators (Keynes, Krugman, and nearly any "economist" ever employed by our federal government) whose purpose is to invent absurd rationalizations for power-grabbing and counterfeiting.
Yet we all know the advertising and social herd behavior affect purchases much more than any real needs or demands.
They have an effect, but people still manage to feed, clothe and house themselves far better in a market like ours where there's a plethora of consumer advertising, than in a planned economy where nearly all advertising is government propaganda.
-jcr
Many financial products don't add anything to the real economy at all.
I agree. T-bills, for example.
-jcr
The reason why we have economic problems is the same old one from the beginning of time -- good old fashioned human greed.
There's more to it than that. People will always be trying to increase their wealth. In a free market with the rule of law, they can only do so by producing what other people want to buy. It's when they resort to plunder through fraud (such as by issuing bad checks or fiat currencies), that you get the boom-and-bust cycle.
As for the quants, their opportunities to risk vast amounts of other people's money on their guesses is one of the symptoms of government interference in the equity markets. In a massively over-regulated environment like we have now, there are great advantages to consolidating financial services into bigger and bigger organizations.
-jcr
the answer here is almost certain to be
and this assertion is based on what data?
-jcr
If only I had a time machine and a highly extended lifespan, so I could spare a couple thousand hours on it...
-jcr
The functional components are all off-the-shelf TTL ICs.
Well, he is only one person, after all. Even if he was studly enough to build it from vacuum tubes, he probably wouldn't be winding his own filaments.
-jcr
It seems that you buy the idea that we have to fight wars to get oil. Consider for a moment what might happen if we didn't do that: whoever has oil to sell would still want to sell it. If the USA weren't interfering in other countries, why would those countries have any reason to withhold it?
-jcr
I like the fact that Governments put money into pure-science research, because no one else is likely to.
It does not follow that because government funds something, that it would not happen if the government were not the source of the funding.
-jcr
This would bug me about as much as the Superconducting Supercollider did. The billions of francs the French government has wasted on this "big science" project would do a lot more good if it remained in the people's hands to spend as they saw fit.
-jcr
So, if I don't support military adventurism, then in your view, I hate America?
Funny, I'm usually attacked by the left-wing nutjobs, not the neocons.
-jcr
When he actually worked, he worked, he didn't steal shit.
Tell it to Gary Kildall.
-jcr
Are you applying for some kind of non-sequitur prize?
-jcr
Oh, they just want *other* people to pay the taxes that fund their state and country
Would you like some cheese to go with that whine?
-jcr
Hubbard realized that there was money to be made some time before he started his nut-cult.
-jcr