Huh... unfortunately the change is a bit late for Sony Online Entertainment which was sold off in 2015 and renamed "Daybreak Games". Then came the layoffs.
Speaking of NHTSA, I was at a conference a month or so ago that was jam packed full of futurists who were under the impression that Uber, Google, and Tesla were just a couple years away from launching saturation-ready fully autonomous vehicles. Then David Friedman, former interim head of NHTSA, gets up to speak in the keynote and burst their bubbles. He basically said that AVs have got to be nearly perfect or (1) people will sue the companies for everything their worth when an injury/fatality happens and (2) the tech is nowhere near affordable or ready to meet this requirement. The crowd went silent.
Thank you for asking "How close is close enough?". It's the most important question in all of AV and here's the answer: "It has to be nearly perfect. Being 10x better than the current driving population is not good enough."
We're near 40,000 road deaths per year in America. Now imagine that in 15 years, Tesla, Waymo, and Uber together took over the entire auto industry with Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles and replaced every vehicle on the road with their identically-performing AVs. In that first year, road deaths drop to 4,000. From a safety standpoint, that's genuine and unquestionable success.
From a legal standpoint, each of those companies are responsible for 1,333 deaths of men, women, and children. They will each have to deal with 1,333 multi-million dollar wrongful death suits. They will receive no credit from the government for the good they've done because that's now how law works. After your first murder, you don't get to go before judge and jury and say, "But look at all these OTHER people I DIDN'T murder." As a driver, you don't get to run over a child in a school zone with the defense, "Your honor, I drive through here every day. I've NOT killed a child 300,000 times. Please weigh all that good against this one tiny death."
That's what happens when you centralize such massive amounts of liability. That's what no one's talking about in the open because that discussion alone would put the very realistic expectations (if not mandate) of autonomous vehicles being nearly perfect before they're allowed to be deployed in large numbers.
Or they'll all come with disclaimers saying, "The occupants of the vehicle are responsible for their own safety and must be willing to take the wheel in the event of an emergency," at which point people ignore AVs altogether because the only reason people are interested in the them in the first place is because they don't want to pay attention to the road.
V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid) is not new. It's been hyped for years and will continue to be hyped because it helps (1) sell EVs and (2) rooftop solar. The problem is that the communication standard (ISO 15118) just to get vehicles to communicate with EV supply equipment isn't even adopted by the majority of big EV charger companies. It's adopted in "roadmap", but cars cannot yet speak to the grid. Moreover, the entire goal of V2G is being oversold to employers who are being told, "Hey, if there's a power issue, you can just tap all the EVs your employees have plugged in," to which all the employees will eventually respond, "Like Hell you will. I need that juice to drive home!"
Lastly, let's just do what we all know we should do: spend excess energy on distilling water and then splitting it into oxygen and hydrogen (hydrolyzer). Store that hydrogen as a battery (fuel cell) or sell off the excess. No need to mind rare earth metals and deal with their eventual disposal. Just stay clean in the process.
This is 100% correct. It's best described as an automated, membership-based bicycle rental service (contrary to what all the bikeshare systems told the angry bike rental companies when they hit the scene in the late 2000s/early 2010s).
Agreed. It's a bikeshare system. Someone pays a base level (or gets it sponsored) to get the bikes in an area. People get memberships to use the bikes and most often pay a fee for going over a certain time.
I've never even read/heard it called the "Uber for bikes".
Well, ya. Of course they're going to be bored if they've experienced one of the greatest advancements in mankind's history from pre-school onward. It's "normal" to them. Worse yet, it's not like they stumbled upon the internet or smart devices on their own. These parents shove these things into their kids' hands just like the previous generation was done with console video games and the generation before that was sat down in front of televisions.
What do you expect to happen? Better yet, let's get critical: What would you have preferred happen?
Transportation professional here. This is the most correct analysis I've read in this Slashdot discussion. The pedestrian harbors some fault for jaywalking and not yielding to cross-traffic, however that doesn't justify or forgive a collision from an automobile on the road since the driver has multiple versions of due care responsibility while operating the vehicle. Not killing people while driving a car is a burden of the revocable privilege of operating a motor vehicle on the road.
The next topic is "who" literally is at fault. Here's how I see the order of blame (civil liability) going:
Human Driver
- Obviously looking away.
- May be thrown under the bus by Uber (unless he was doing business-relevant things).
- Has already been thrown under the bus by the Tempe Chief of Police (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe-police-chief-says-early-probe-12765481.php)
- No civil lawyer in his/her right mind would go after the Human Driver. All company drivers are insured and certified by their employers and thus the employer takes on the liability.
If liability were to stay with a person designated as the "driver" of the autonomous vehicle, then you can forget people buying autonomous vehicles for themselves in any appreciable numbers. And companies who would otherwise use autonomous vehicles to reduce the cost of their transit/taxi systems would never invest in them because they would have to pay for a fully-competent driver anyway.
Sensor Manufacturer
- Was there a fault in the hardware or firmware that prevented the pedestrian from being sensed/measured/seen? (Expect Uber's lawyers to take this route first.)
If liability were to be put on the sensor manufacturers, you would probably see a number of LiDAR, RADAR, etc. manufacturers declare that their sensors are not to be used on autonomous vehicles so as to avoid legal/liability entanglements. The remaining companies would be able to jack up their prices with less competition and the cost of autonomous vehicle research, production, and implementation would increase drastically.
Uber
- Did programmers not teach the system that the shape of the broadside of a pedestrian walking a bicycle is not another vehicle continuing in the same direction?
- Was there a fault in the predictive movement formulae that didn't allow the system to recognize the trajectory of the pedestrian?
- Did Uber deploy software or hardware they knew to be faulty or insufficient for the task at hand?
- Did Uber require the driver to take his eyes off the road to perform tasks while driving?
- Did Uber affect the working status of the hardware/software while the vehicle was in motion?
- Was Uber negligent in selecting and training this driver?
If liability were to be put on the business owner of the autonomous vehicles, then you would have (financially) massive companies like Google, Uber, Tesla, and the big auto manufacturers put their entire businesses at risk because they have deep pockets and lawyers LOVE deep pockets. Even if Uber is involved in 20 deadly collisions per year, "small" $10 million settlements would end their autonomous vehicle efforts pretty damn quick.
Lastly, if passengers entering an autonomous vehicle by their nature of entering the vehicle tacitly approve/agree to a liability waiver, there would be no (easy) recourse for compensation. This would be the worst of all possible solutions because it would ensure that people simply wouldn't get into those cars.
This is likely going to be a massive, massive case (and settlement and fines) and will result in very significant precedence regarding the determination of fault in collisions involving autonomous vehicles. That is, unless Uber goes to the family of the victim, gets them to sign an NDA'd settlement for something small enough not to bother Uber but big enough to change their lives forever.
Same here. I think cryptocurrency is a fleeting scam with little real world potential (let alone current utility)... and STILL I think this smells like a dark prank or frame job.
The idea that you 50-year-old coal miners can be or WANT TO BE retrained to do anything else is either naive, dismissive, or both. It's policy-maker hand-waving that makes everyone feel nice inside because "Who wouldn't want to be trained to be a computer programmer after working 30 year in the mines?" Except for the extreme exceptions, though, it's just not happening. People don't work like that.
If you want to minimize tears and do your best to ensure that families don't fall into poverty, you literally need to pay attention to the human life cycle. "Dying" industries (coal, etc.) need to be helped along as their older generations enter retirement and the children of the workers are educated and prepared to join a non-dying industry.
It's better in this case, but the word "rideshare" had already been used for decades by the federal government and the Transportation Demand Management industry as a blanket reference to carpool, vanpool, bus, train, and (at times) travel by bike and by foot. Uber and Lyft knew this and co-opted the name to make themselves seem "green" when using their service for a single passenger is literally worse than driving somewhere alone.
I'm genuinely curious as to whether this decision came from public pressure, social pressure, legal pressure, or the that very minor sense of integrity that says that even if we allow individuals to have more than one voice, they shouldn't be allowed to use all of them at literally the exact same time.
Unless there's a piece of software that can automate the screaming of one particular statement in timed intervals to circumvent these new rules, of course.
With oil, the cost is the greenhouse gas effect, smog, and non-GHG emissions that are bad for breathing.
With battery electric vehicles, the batteries and the source of power are the issue. And the only reason you need SO MANY batteries is because the batteries are just a storage vessel. There's no on-board power generation.
With hydrogen, there's potential, but it's still complex. Hydrolyzers take up a bunch of power to split H2O and then require high-pressure containment to hold the hydrogen. Sure, you could use wind/solar to power the hydrolyzer or even use excess grid power from renewables to store that power in hydrogen, but you still need oodles of distilled water and then need to transport the hydrogen. I can foresee 100 years from now there being warm ocean platforms that distill water on the fly and use wind/solar to power hydrolysis and then pipe/ship out hydrogen... but the system certainly doesn't exist today.
I see a lot of commentary in these Damore threads suggesting that everyone who leans left politically must believe that the irrational, authoritarian form of progressivism is the way forward. Similarly, others are accusing defenders of Damore's memo as being regressive neckbeards.
It's not that simple nor is the argument along the line of political leanings. It's about speed and collateral damage.
Nearly a decade ago, the Tea Party Movement began its own irrational and loud stranglehold on conservative politics. There were loyalty oaths and identity politics. The Republican party is still trying to re-discover itself and its integrity having sold itself to the more ignorant side of populism.
Today, following almost the same exact playbook, there is a very vocal minority of the liberal-leaning part of America who is choosing activism over advocacy, punishment over education, and change now without consideration for collateral damage. Again, the face of irrational populism peaks over the the horizon.
These are the same beasts with different goals. Both are repulsed by the long-game of social change. They refuse to accept that society changes at the speed of generations. They don't want to accept that engineers are grown from a young age, not simply given jobs. They don't care that reducing deficit first comes with a better-educated populace and thus a better workforce. They want what they want NOW. They want to show short term gains because all will be damned if they didn't make their mark on this world before they shuffle this mortal coil.
But then there are the mature conservatives and the mature liberals who know that it simply takes time to coexist and progress together. It takes time to convince people to compromise and it takes time for those who refuse to compromise to die off. And when you force try to force people to change under threat of loss of loss of livelihood or try to shoe-horn in a solution that benefits the very few without consideration for the many, you will get widespread resentment, rebellion, and reaction. And the cycle will continue.
Or we can simply teach our young parents that they should foster the spark of nerd they see in their daughters as they would an ember in tinder instead of immediately reaching for the Barbies and pom-poms. They should step in to prevent the mockery of nerds, gamers, and computer users so that there is less social resentment harbored by those who choose to be so engrossed in the loving blue glow of a monitor. And then allow those better-adjusted, better-educated, and more equitably educated children grow up and show their actual demand in their chosen fields of work.
Or we can just keep trying to force it and fighting about it.
I work in sustainable transportation. It's literally my job to get people to do anything but drive in a car alone. And you're right. Especially if you're in America and Amtrak is your only train commute option, carpooling with just one other person will likely be more attractive than taking the train. Here are the issues with America's passenger rail system...
Most of the rail where you find passenger rail lines (Amtrak with extra luggage space) and commuter rail lines (more seats, no luggage space) is actually owned by freight companies. Those freight companies are kind enough to allow access to the rail (for a fee), but the freight always gets priority. Moreover, since the freight trains are 10s to a hundred cars long, they can't risk clutter at road intersections, so they blast their horns for miles out.
Those blasting horns ensure that there's minimal development near the rail which means that the most job and home density is far from rail. This creates a "first/last mile" issue where even if you take the train to/from work, you still need another form of reliable public transportation to go between home and the origin rail station and the destination rail station and work.
And this is where light rail and street cars make massive sense. They're quiet. They're small. They're electric. They're everything you want! But they cost money and that money comes from the very same local budgets that fund freeway expansions. The public, knowing only their cars and cinematic representations of the 1980s New York subway, would prefer to stay jammed in traffic than sit next to someone on a train. That is until the driving commute becomes so expensive that they have to give rail a chance.
My favorite rail retrofit is LA Metro's Gold Line in Pasadena. (https://i2.wp.com/la.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2011/04/Screen-shot-2011-04-06-at-9.36.57-PM.png) It literally on the center divider of THREE different freeways showing everyone on the road "LOOK! We're going the same way... but I'm faster!".
Why the hell would searching "Are Jews evil?" a bad thing? Is it showing one of those Google answer summaries saying, "Yes"? Chances are that it's not and that it's showing the historical issues of antisemitism, prejudice, stereotyping, and scapegoating.
I'd be more concerned if the widely spread issues of antisemitism weren't being combated by people going to Google and asking if what they've been told as children or are being told by their peers is true.
I searched "Is God..." and the first option is "Is God Real?". Great question!
I searched "Are all criminals... " and the first suggestion was "Are all criminals mentally ill?" The second was "Are all criminals bad?" Again, great questions!
Questions are good. Especially when they are intended to seek truth and combat prejudice.
Really? I thought the space shuttle's being launched on recoverable boosters and space-born crane then returning as genuinely reusable multi-human mini-van was pretty darn neat when it was used 36 years ago.
But ya... transporting a non-living payload into orbit is neat, too. 1960s neat.
I don't have any mod points right now, so I'll just comment in support. I've been waiting for a year for the GTX 1060 (3GB or 6GB -- almost don't care) back down to reasonable prices (let alone 1-year-old tech prices). I'm watching PCPartPicker's price tracker (https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/gtx1060/) as well as NowInStock's (https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/gtx1060/) in anticipation of the bigger reaction to Cryptocurrency prices crashing further (https://coinmarketcap.com/).
I've read about people being ready to jump on the eBay cards that will be hitting the auctions as a result, but I'm not willing to trust cards that have probably been run at max OC with bad fans for months on end.
Unfortunately, neither the numbers nor human behavior pan out as such. If everyone were to have affordable access to drivesless vehicles, there would be even more congestion on the road, not less. People would send their cars around for the most mundane of exercises like picking up a sweater they forgot at a friends house or down to the corner store when they SHOULD have walked.
Moreover, if there's no parking for these vehicles, they will have to idle in circulation. Circulating vehicles ARE congestion and with increased numbers on the road doing NOTHING, they would be consuming fuel (regardless of the fuel source) and generating tire noise (the loudest noise modern automobiles make at speed).
If you want this reduced parking, reduced congestion fantasy to happen (I sure do!), then do what has proven to work time and time again-- walk, bike, take a bus or train, or share a drive you would normally take alone with someone else.
Capitalism Corollary: Market competition by profit motive provides the best product for the best price to the market consumer.
1. The goal of capitalist endeavors is to bring in the maximum profit.
2. High profit is attained providing the best product and maximizing market share.
3. MAXIMUM profit is attained via 100% share.
4. 100% market control is anti-competitive thus reducing the value of the competitive market to the consumer.
The solution (thus far accepted) is to accept that people will seek out 100% market share and to break them up and say, "OK! Let's run the race again under these new controls!"
In my experience, critics criticize and rarely praise. That's all they do. They pontificate, infer, imply, and judge whether or not a a particular work satisfies their subscribed beliefs or preferences. In fact the production and distribution of criticism (be it political, entertainment, or otherwise) is an ends to itself. People like to read what other people think about something to steer (or intentionally bolster) their own presuppositions.
But never have I heard of critic responses being cited as predictors of how much an product will appeal. That's the job of market analysts.
Thus, critics and their opinions don't need to be "connected" with the patterns of mass appeal. They could be entirely correct about Bright by saying the acting is of "moderate quality", the theme is "low brow", and there's "no expectation created in the story-telling's abrupt ending that there might be an elaboration on the universe for those low-brow film enjoyers in the future".
But unless they say, "No one's going to watch this because...", they're not attempting to predict anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh... unfortunately the change is a bit late for Sony Online Entertainment which was sold off in 2015 and renamed "Daybreak Games". Then came the layoffs.
Something about that line stinks. I did a quick Google Search to check its veracity. (https://goo.gl/p6ni4E)
... in next weeks’
It looks like "someone" made the claim and every single newsbot out there reproduiced it on their respective sites... and JUST that line.
TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s president says if negotiations fail, Islamic Republic will enrich uranium ‘more than before
That's it. There are hundreds of articles out there made up of that one line.
Thank you for pointing that out. Too many people take entrepreneur and CEO speak for truth.
Speaking of NHTSA, I was at a conference a month or so ago that was jam packed full of futurists who were under the impression that Uber, Google, and Tesla were just a couple years away from launching saturation-ready fully autonomous vehicles. Then David Friedman, former interim head of NHTSA, gets up to speak in the keynote and burst their bubbles. He basically said that AVs have got to be nearly perfect or (1) people will sue the companies for everything their worth when an injury/fatality happens and (2) the tech is nowhere near affordable or ready to meet this requirement. The crowd went silent.
Thank you for asking "How close is close enough?". It's the most important question in all of AV and here's the answer: "It has to be nearly perfect. Being 10x better than the current driving population is not good enough."
We're near 40,000 road deaths per year in America. Now imagine that in 15 years, Tesla, Waymo, and Uber together took over the entire auto industry with Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles and replaced every vehicle on the road with their identically-performing AVs. In that first year, road deaths drop to 4,000. From a safety standpoint, that's genuine and unquestionable success.
From a legal standpoint, each of those companies are responsible for 1,333 deaths of men, women, and children. They will each have to deal with 1,333 multi-million dollar wrongful death suits. They will receive no credit from the government for the good they've done because that's now how law works. After your first murder, you don't get to go before judge and jury and say, "But look at all these OTHER people I DIDN'T murder." As a driver, you don't get to run over a child in a school zone with the defense, "Your honor, I drive through here every day. I've NOT killed a child 300,000 times. Please weigh all that good against this one tiny death."
That's what happens when you centralize such massive amounts of liability. That's what no one's talking about in the open because that discussion alone would put the very realistic expectations (if not mandate) of autonomous vehicles being nearly perfect before they're allowed to be deployed in large numbers.
Or they'll all come with disclaimers saying, "The occupants of the vehicle are responsible for their own safety and must be willing to take the wheel in the event of an emergency," at which point people ignore AVs altogether because the only reason people are interested in the them in the first place is because they don't want to pay attention to the road.
First time or repeat?
V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid) is not new. It's been hyped for years and will continue to be hyped because it helps (1) sell EVs and (2) rooftop solar. The problem is that the communication standard (ISO 15118) just to get vehicles to communicate with EV supply equipment isn't even adopted by the majority of big EV charger companies. It's adopted in "roadmap", but cars cannot yet speak to the grid. Moreover, the entire goal of V2G is being oversold to employers who are being told, "Hey, if there's a power issue, you can just tap all the EVs your employees have plugged in," to which all the employees will eventually respond, "Like Hell you will. I need that juice to drive home!"
Lastly, let's just do what we all know we should do: spend excess energy on distilling water and then splitting it into oxygen and hydrogen (hydrolyzer). Store that hydrogen as a battery (fuel cell) or sell off the excess. No need to mind rare earth metals and deal with their eventual disposal. Just stay clean in the process.
This is 100% correct. It's best described as an automated, membership-based bicycle rental service (contrary to what all the bikeshare systems told the angry bike rental companies when they hit the scene in the late 2000s/early 2010s).
Agreed. It's a bikeshare system. Someone pays a base level (or gets it sponsored) to get the bikes in an area. People get memberships to use the bikes and most often pay a fee for going over a certain time.
I've never even read/heard it called the "Uber for bikes".
Well, ya. Of course they're going to be bored if they've experienced one of the greatest advancements in mankind's history from pre-school onward. It's "normal" to them. Worse yet, it's not like they stumbled upon the internet or smart devices on their own. These parents shove these things into their kids' hands just like the previous generation was done with console video games and the generation before that was sat down in front of televisions.
What do you expect to happen? Better yet, let's get critical: What would you have preferred happen?
Transportation professional here. This is the most correct analysis I've read in this Slashdot discussion. The pedestrian harbors some fault for jaywalking and not yielding to cross-traffic, however that doesn't justify or forgive a collision from an automobile on the road since the driver has multiple versions of due care responsibility while operating the vehicle. Not killing people while driving a car is a burden of the revocable privilege of operating a motor vehicle on the road.
The next topic is "who" literally is at fault. Here's how I see the order of blame (civil liability) going:
Human Driver
- Obviously looking away.
- May be thrown under the bus by Uber (unless he was doing business-relevant things).
- Has already been thrown under the bus by the Tempe Chief of Police (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe-police-chief-says-early-probe-12765481.php)
- No civil lawyer in his/her right mind would go after the Human Driver. All company drivers are insured and certified by their employers and thus the employer takes on the liability.
If liability were to stay with a person designated as the "driver" of the autonomous vehicle, then you can forget people buying autonomous vehicles for themselves in any appreciable numbers. And companies who would otherwise use autonomous vehicles to reduce the cost of their transit/taxi systems would never invest in them because they would have to pay for a fully-competent driver anyway.
Sensor Manufacturer
- Was there a fault in the hardware or firmware that prevented the pedestrian from being sensed/measured/seen? (Expect Uber's lawyers to take this route first.)
If liability were to be put on the sensor manufacturers, you would probably see a number of LiDAR, RADAR, etc. manufacturers declare that their sensors are not to be used on autonomous vehicles so as to avoid legal/liability entanglements. The remaining companies would be able to jack up their prices with less competition and the cost of autonomous vehicle research, production, and implementation would increase drastically.
Uber
- Did programmers not teach the system that the shape of the broadside of a pedestrian walking a bicycle is not another vehicle continuing in the same direction?
- Was there a fault in the predictive movement formulae that didn't allow the system to recognize the trajectory of the pedestrian?
- Did Uber deploy software or hardware they knew to be faulty or insufficient for the task at hand?
- Did Uber require the driver to take his eyes off the road to perform tasks while driving?
- Did Uber affect the working status of the hardware/software while the vehicle was in motion?
- Was Uber negligent in selecting and training this driver?
If liability were to be put on the business owner of the autonomous vehicles, then you would have (financially) massive companies like Google, Uber, Tesla, and the big auto manufacturers put their entire businesses at risk because they have deep pockets and lawyers LOVE deep pockets. Even if Uber is involved in 20 deadly collisions per year, "small" $10 million settlements would end their autonomous vehicle efforts pretty damn quick.
Lastly, if passengers entering an autonomous vehicle by their nature of entering the vehicle tacitly approve/agree to a liability waiver, there would be no (easy) recourse for compensation. This would be the worst of all possible solutions because it would ensure that people simply wouldn't get into those cars.
This is likely going to be a massive, massive case (and settlement and fines) and will result in very significant precedence regarding the determination of fault in collisions involving autonomous vehicles. That is, unless Uber goes to the family of the victim, gets them to sign an NDA'd settlement for something small enough not to bother Uber but big enough to change their lives forever.
Same here. I think cryptocurrency is a fleeting scam with little real world potential (let alone current utility)... and STILL I think this smells like a dark prank or frame job.
Very slick, Officer AC. Very slick indeed.
The idea that you 50-year-old coal miners can be or WANT TO BE retrained to do anything else is either naive, dismissive, or both. It's policy-maker hand-waving that makes everyone feel nice inside because "Who wouldn't want to be trained to be a computer programmer after working 30 year in the mines?" Except for the extreme exceptions, though, it's just not happening. People don't work like that.
If you want to minimize tears and do your best to ensure that families don't fall into poverty, you literally need to pay attention to the human life cycle. "Dying" industries (coal, etc.) need to be helped along as their older generations enter retirement and the children of the workers are educated and prepared to join a non-dying industry.
It's better in this case, but the word "rideshare" had already been used for decades by the federal government and the Transportation Demand Management industry as a blanket reference to carpool, vanpool, bus, train, and (at times) travel by bike and by foot. Uber and Lyft knew this and co-opted the name to make themselves seem "green" when using their service for a single passenger is literally worse than driving somewhere alone.
http://actweb.org/public_polic...
I'm genuinely curious as to whether this decision came from public pressure, social pressure, legal pressure, or the that very minor sense of integrity that says that even if we allow individuals to have more than one voice, they shouldn't be allowed to use all of them at literally the exact same time.
Unless there's a piece of software that can automate the screaming of one particular statement in timed intervals to circumvent these new rules, of course.
With oil, the cost is the greenhouse gas effect, smog, and non-GHG emissions that are bad for breathing.
With battery electric vehicles, the batteries and the source of power are the issue. And the only reason you need SO MANY batteries is because the batteries are just a storage vessel. There's no on-board power generation.
With hydrogen, there's potential, but it's still complex. Hydrolyzers take up a bunch of power to split H2O and then require high-pressure containment to hold the hydrogen. Sure, you could use wind/solar to power the hydrolyzer or even use excess grid power from renewables to store that power in hydrogen, but you still need oodles of distilled water and then need to transport the hydrogen. I can foresee 100 years from now there being warm ocean platforms that distill water on the fly and use wind/solar to power hydrolysis and then pipe/ship out hydrogen... but the system certainly doesn't exist today.
I see a lot of commentary in these Damore threads suggesting that everyone who leans left politically must believe that the irrational, authoritarian form of progressivism is the way forward. Similarly, others are accusing defenders of Damore's memo as being regressive neckbeards.
It's not that simple nor is the argument along the line of political leanings. It's about speed and collateral damage.
Nearly a decade ago, the Tea Party Movement began its own irrational and loud stranglehold on conservative politics. There were loyalty oaths and identity politics. The Republican party is still trying to re-discover itself and its integrity having sold itself to the more ignorant side of populism.
Today, following almost the same exact playbook, there is a very vocal minority of the liberal-leaning part of America who is choosing activism over advocacy, punishment over education, and change now without consideration for collateral damage. Again, the face of irrational populism peaks over the the horizon.
These are the same beasts with different goals. Both are repulsed by the long-game of social change. They refuse to accept that society changes at the speed of generations. They don't want to accept that engineers are grown from a young age, not simply given jobs. They don't care that reducing deficit first comes with a better-educated populace and thus a better workforce. They want what they want NOW. They want to show short term gains because all will be damned if they didn't make their mark on this world before they shuffle this mortal coil.
But then there are the mature conservatives and the mature liberals who know that it simply takes time to coexist and progress together. It takes time to convince people to compromise and it takes time for those who refuse to compromise to die off. And when you force try to force people to change under threat of loss of loss of livelihood or try to shoe-horn in a solution that benefits the very few without consideration for the many, you will get widespread resentment, rebellion, and reaction. And the cycle will continue.
Or we can simply teach our young parents that they should foster the spark of nerd they see in their daughters as they would an ember in tinder instead of immediately reaching for the Barbies and pom-poms. They should step in to prevent the mockery of nerds, gamers, and computer users so that there is less social resentment harbored by those who choose to be so engrossed in the loving blue glow of a monitor. And then allow those better-adjusted, better-educated, and more equitably educated children grow up and show their actual demand in their chosen fields of work.
Or we can just keep trying to force it and fighting about it.
I work in sustainable transportation. It's literally my job to get people to do anything but drive in a car alone. And you're right. Especially if you're in America and Amtrak is your only train commute option, carpooling with just one other person will likely be more attractive than taking the train. Here are the issues with America's passenger rail system...
Most of the rail where you find passenger rail lines (Amtrak with extra luggage space) and commuter rail lines (more seats, no luggage space) is actually owned by freight companies. Those freight companies are kind enough to allow access to the rail (for a fee), but the freight always gets priority. Moreover, since the freight trains are 10s to a hundred cars long, they can't risk clutter at road intersections, so they blast their horns for miles out.
Those blasting horns ensure that there's minimal development near the rail which means that the most job and home density is far from rail. This creates a "first/last mile" issue where even if you take the train to/from work, you still need another form of reliable public transportation to go between home and the origin rail station and the destination rail station and work.
And this is where light rail and street cars make massive sense. They're quiet. They're small. They're electric. They're everything you want! But they cost money and that money comes from the very same local budgets that fund freeway expansions. The public, knowing only their cars and cinematic representations of the 1980s New York subway, would prefer to stay jammed in traffic than sit next to someone on a train. That is until the driving commute becomes so expensive that they have to give rail a chance.
My favorite rail retrofit is LA Metro's Gold Line in Pasadena. (https://i2.wp.com/la.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2011/04/Screen-shot-2011-04-06-at-9.36.57-PM.png) It literally on the center divider of THREE different freeways showing everyone on the road "LOOK! We're going the same way... but I'm faster!".
Why the hell would searching "Are Jews evil?" a bad thing? Is it showing one of those Google answer summaries saying, "Yes"? Chances are that it's not and that it's showing the historical issues of antisemitism, prejudice, stereotyping, and scapegoating.
I'd be more concerned if the widely spread issues of antisemitism weren't being combated by people going to Google and asking if what they've been told as children or are being told by their peers is true.
I searched "Is God..." and the first option is "Is God Real?". Great question!
I searched "Are all criminals... " and the first suggestion was "Are all criminals mentally ill?" The second was "Are all criminals bad?" Again, great questions!
Questions are good. Especially when they are intended to seek truth and combat prejudice.
Really? I thought the space shuttle's being launched on recoverable boosters and space-born crane then returning as genuinely reusable multi-human mini-van was pretty darn neat when it was used 36 years ago.
But ya... transporting a non-living payload into orbit is neat, too. 1960s neat.
I don't have any mod points right now, so I'll just comment in support. I've been waiting for a year for the GTX 1060 (3GB or 6GB -- almost don't care) back down to reasonable prices (let alone 1-year-old tech prices). I'm watching PCPartPicker's price tracker (https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/gtx1060/) as well as NowInStock's (https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/gtx1060/) in anticipation of the bigger reaction to Cryptocurrency prices crashing further (https://coinmarketcap.com/).
I've read about people being ready to jump on the eBay cards that will be hitting the auctions as a result, but I'm not willing to trust cards that have probably been run at max OC with bad fans for months on end.
Unfortunately, neither the numbers nor human behavior pan out as such. If everyone were to have affordable access to drivesless vehicles, there would be even more congestion on the road, not less. People would send their cars around for the most mundane of exercises like picking up a sweater they forgot at a friends house or down to the corner store when they SHOULD have walked.
Moreover, if there's no parking for these vehicles, they will have to idle in circulation. Circulating vehicles ARE congestion and with increased numbers on the road doing NOTHING, they would be consuming fuel (regardless of the fuel source) and generating tire noise (the loudest noise modern automobiles make at speed).
If you want this reduced parking, reduced congestion fantasy to happen (I sure do!), then do what has proven to work time and time again-- walk, bike, take a bus or train, or share a drive you would normally take alone with someone else.
It's kinda the issue inherent in capitalism.
Capitalism Corollary: Market competition by profit motive provides the best product for the best price to the market consumer.
1. The goal of capitalist endeavors is to bring in the maximum profit.
2. High profit is attained providing the best product and maximizing market share.
3. MAXIMUM profit is attained via 100% share.
4. 100% market control is anti-competitive thus reducing the value of the competitive market to the consumer.
The solution (thus far accepted) is to accept that people will seek out 100% market share and to break them up and say, "OK! Let's run the race again under these new controls!"
In my experience, critics criticize and rarely praise. That's all they do. They pontificate, infer, imply, and judge whether or not a a particular work satisfies their subscribed beliefs or preferences. In fact the production and distribution of criticism (be it political, entertainment, or otherwise) is an ends to itself. People like to read what other people think about something to steer (or intentionally bolster) their own presuppositions.
But never have I heard of critic responses being cited as predictors of how much an product will appeal. That's the job of market analysts.
Thus, critics and their opinions don't need to be "connected" with the patterns of mass appeal. They could be entirely correct about Bright by saying the acting is of "moderate quality", the theme is "low brow", and there's "no expectation created in the story-telling's abrupt ending that there might be an elaboration on the universe for those low-brow film enjoyers in the future".
But unless they say, "No one's going to watch this because...", they're not attempting to predict anything.