That's what I was thinking. They can drive themselves right into a metal shipping container. Shut the doors, and that car isn't going to talk to anyone. Pop it onto a truck, and you're going to be able to ship it wherever you need it to go.
However, unless you can remotely turn off it's GPS reporting, it's not likely that thousands could be stolen in a single day. The cops would probably be able to figure out what was going on when the manufacturers tell them that even ten cars all showed up at your warehouse 5 min ago. What sounds far more useful would be to steal a couple dozen cars, have them drive to one location, put a couple hundred pounds of cocaine in the trunk of one of them, and then send them off in all different directions. Let the cops try to chase them all down, and hope your automated drug mule gets to its destination in the confusion.
Terrorism and general shenanigans are also possibilities. Send 10 cars to a roundabout, and just have them endlessly circle. Or 50 empty cars to choke up a drive-through line. Or a toolbooth. Or a major evacuation route during a natural disaster.
If you can automate cars driving around, and someone can remote control them, they absolutely are going to be used for evil.
...and the fact that you can let cattle graze on land that's unsuitable for growing crops.
Sure, you can, but the major issue is that most people don't. The beef industry is dominated by feedlots which are doubly inefficient and bad for the environment. Nothing like using good fertile land to grow food for cows and then using fossil fuels to transport it to them.
How is it not viable? It's very feasible to build 100 planes. It's also feasible to fly them 3-4 times per month. 20 million tons spread across 4000 flights isn't all that much.
As for unintended consequences, we're pretty clear on the atmospheric chemistry aspect. It's going to stay up there for a bit, then mix with water and precipitate out as slightly more acidic rain. There's nothing else that can really happen. You don't seem to understand how much atmosphere we have, and how there is nothing up at 60,000 feet.
It's also a false dichotomy to state that it would be easier to build nuclear reactors. We can do both. However, I think this is actually easier to do than to build enough nuclear reactors to cut our reliance on fossil fuels. Those take decades to plan and build. We could be doing this in a year or two.
Nope. Not at all. On this we agree. But we can't be prosperous if the bulk of the money that would be available to fuel the economy is tied up in the hands of the top 5% of the population.
How we get to prosperity is essentially "the velocity of money". The faster money changes hands, the better the economy.
So how do we pull this money back, and inject it back into the economy? I'll give you a hint - it starts with a T.
Ditto here. They call me when they spot likely fraud on a card, and return the money instantly. If I need a new card, I take a 5 min walk from work to the local branch, and they print one on the spot. Their rates are pretty much the same as the banks, and they have no fees for just about anything.
I've had mixed CU experiences - usually the smaller they are, the more they struggle. Once they get big enough, they tend to have all the bells and whistles that the bigger banks have, with very customer friendly policies. My current one is one of the larger ones in the state, and it's doing pretty much everything right, as far as I can see.
As far as I can tell, it's survive long enough for the execs to cash out, unless they can get self-driving cars working. If they can do that, their profitability goes through the roof.
They've got the app, the brand, the user base, and they're already buying fleets of cars and leasing them to drivers. If they can take all the profits going to the drivers for themselves, that's pretty much a license to print money.
Because forcing people to use run-down and broken public transportation doesn't fix the problem of a systematic, long-term lack of investment in the transportation infrastructure. What fixes that is more money. Where that money comes from used to be the economic engine of the middle class, but that's pretty much gone. Where did the money go? To the 1%. So if we need money to fix problems, that's where it's going to have to come from.
If the rich had been content to be rich, life would go on as usual. But they weren't content with that. They needed to have it all while everyone else got pretty much nothing. Right now, the top 1% richest people in the US own 35% of the wealth. If you look at the top 5% of the richest people in the US, they have 62% of the wealth in the country. That's absurd. And the bottom 40% of people, the bottom half of what used to be the middle class and the poor, own less than 1% of the wealth in the country.
40% of our country collectively owns 1% of the wealth of the whole country. I get that you've got yours and fuck everyone else, but you can't squeeze blood from a stone. It's not "soaking the rich" when they're so wealthy they don't know what to do with it, and we literally can't get any more money out of 40% of the population.
You realize he took a puff, didn't like it, and said he never gets high, don't you? That's what makes this entire thing a stupid farce. Prior to his Joe Rogan appearance, I generally assumed he was a major stoner, due to the crazy shit he comes up with. That's where we learned that he wasn't.
Furthermore, it discounts how religious and conservative a lot of latino immigrants actually are.
That's largely a myth, as far as I can tell. They are culturally religious, not evangelical, and generally not that conservative. I once thought this way too, but more and more I'm finding that it seems to be more of a stereotype than reality. If you come from a poor, sparsely educated country, you tend to be conservative and religious. But once you get some education and some wealth, that tends to get cured fast.
Religion doesn't mean shit when it comes to politics if one party has historically shit on your culture. Non-white voters are solidly ~70% democratic voters at the moment. And if you look at latinos, they're more religious than whites, but less religious than African-Americans. Not exactly good news if republicans think that somehow religious latinos will save them.
Not that republicans can have any claim of being righteous, either. Their entire platform is essentially being the antichrist. It's actually mindblowing how many religious folks can map the republican platform onto their religion, when they two couldn't be further apart.
It's clear that Trump has no decency, but shouldn't some other republicans stand up? It seems they are quite happy to walk down the nature trail to hell (road to authoritarian rule).
And this is where the republican party has lost me for the rest of my life. Until the current crop is dead and gone, there's nothing that is going to bring me back.
The lack of spine and decency is appalling. If you can't put country over party, that's unforgivable in my book. And other than one or two republicans, the entire party is doing that.
What's mindblowing to me is that it's only for very, very short-term gain. Long-term, the republican party is dead demographically. Check out the op-ed from the former vice chair of the CA republican party: Why One Prominent California Republican Has Declared The GOP Dead In Her State. That's the first domino, and it won't take too many more to make the republican party nothing more than a disruptive minority.
The US already slipped below 50% of the babies being born white. There's no path forward for the republican party relying as they have on on toxic racism (and sexism) to secure their base. "There are very fine people on both sides" doesn't play well in the non-white demographics that are soon going to be a majority in the US. If the republicans can't purge and pivot in time for the next generation to see value in their platform, they are done. At the moment, they're making a lot more lifelong democrats than they are making lifelong republicans.
Why do manufacturing imports make the middle class poorer?
They don't by themselves.
It doesn't make financial sense for us to spend $25k making a car that we could import for $20k. That's effectively subsidizing the people who make those cars here. Better would be those people engaged in a trade that we can do better/cheaper here. The issue is that for a large percent of the (former) middle class, we haven't figured out what that trade is, if there even is one.
For awhile, we were transitioning jobs into technology and automation. The major issue with this is that when technological advances allow you to automate everything that your average middle class or lower individual can do, there's nothing for them to do. We're seemingly changing most low-skill jobs into service industry jobs now, which have historically not been good paying jobs. Even if we push through a very big minimum wage increase, $15/hr waiting tables isn't going to replace $30/hr assembly line jobs.
The issue isn't importing a lot of goods. It's not replacing the good paying jobs lost by switching to the cheaper product.
Interestingly, start up that get big enough eventually succumb to the sirens of process over people.
Succumb? No. They realize that relying on individuals is how you go out of business. Processes are stable, and they can undergo a continuous improvement cycle to ensure that they are serving the business well. People aren't necessarily stable, and they can disappear at any time. Or you can find that their skillset no longer is sufficient to support your business.
We all have worked with "that guy" who was foundational to the company. That guy with the institutional knowledge that the company couldn't operate without. The few times I've seen that guy go, it was massively disruptive to the company.
Larger companies understand this and design processes to prevent individuals leaving from massively disrupting the company. Smaller companies often don't understand this, and they need to learn that painful and expensive lesson a few times before they truly do.
I'm all for hiring great people. I'm absolutely not for leaning on them so much that everything collapses when they leave. To prevent that you need processes to capture institutional knowledge and ensure that numerous people have the ability to do subsets of each other's jobs, so that one person leaving doesn't result in a giant hole in what the business can accomplish the next day.
You're technically correct, but missing the bigger picture.
Sure, we can't live in Antarctica permanently. But we haven't spent any of the last 200 years there trying to make the outposts there permanent either. So of course we can't.
If we had wanted to, we probably could have. We could have built giant underground farms with grow lights, dropped in a nuclear power plant, built an underground infrastructure, etc. And we could most likely be pretty self-sufficient there, since it's got oxygen and a lot of ice to melt for water. (I'll note that Mars doesn't have either. At least, not relatively pure water ice, not mixed with perchlorates.)
You can't use Antarctica as proof we can't live permanently on Mars since we didn't try to live permanently there. If we had tried and failed, that would be another story.
Damn, that sucks. If only they were working on a technology to cheaply bore tunnels, so they could make up for a lack of serial performance by making a lot of parallel lines.
You got half the advancement. The other half is incredibly deep expertise with alloy performance in extreme environments from the work done by SpaceX. While going electric and buying Tesla battery packs will indeed allow the competition to catch up to that part of the boring quickly, the potential for them to redesign the cutting heads and cooling system drawing on SpaceX's rocket engine research is something that nobody is going to catch up to quickly, if The Boring Company can make a real advance in that area.
Surface trains already kill a lot of people (and animals) every year, and to add more surface lines requires eminent domain and the destruction of existing buildings and habitats. People die on the order of daily at at-grade railroad crossings. We simply can't improve our rail connections between cities at the surface level. Sure, we could elevate all of the tracks, but that's expensive and really shitty to live near.
Train tracks are a significant barrier for everyone, and the more trains you have, the more of a barrier they become.
Going underground gets rid of all of these problems. If The Boring Company can really get tunnel costs down as far as they think they can, it will indeed revolutionize transport. And if it turns out that people aren't interested in traveling in a high-speed coffin underground, that's fine. We can still replace a lot of our trucking and train shipments, which will free up a lot more space on the surface for the humans.
In one of my astronomy classes back in the day, a student asked "what units" when a professor was talking about star temperatures in the tens of hundred millions. His answer? It doesn't matter.
As to why it doesn't matter, the unit differences are on the same order of magnitude as the uncertainty of the measurements.
Now, this wasn't entirely accurate, but it did help us understand how much ballparking and handwaving there is in astronomy. These things are very big, very hot, and very far away. And often very far in the past. The uncertainty of astronomical measurements is generally unfathomably high if you're used to any earth-based science.
So you're a denier. That's fine. Just embrace the fact that you deny facts.
Here's a protip: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a real thing. If you're not an expert, don't pretend that you know more than the experts. You expose your ignorance when you do that.
Slashdot Mirror
So what's the answer?
That's what I was thinking. They can drive themselves right into a metal shipping container. Shut the doors, and that car isn't going to talk to anyone. Pop it onto a truck, and you're going to be able to ship it wherever you need it to go.
However, unless you can remotely turn off it's GPS reporting, it's not likely that thousands could be stolen in a single day. The cops would probably be able to figure out what was going on when the manufacturers tell them that even ten cars all showed up at your warehouse 5 min ago. What sounds far more useful would be to steal a couple dozen cars, have them drive to one location, put a couple hundred pounds of cocaine in the trunk of one of them, and then send them off in all different directions. Let the cops try to chase them all down, and hope your automated drug mule gets to its destination in the confusion.
Terrorism and general shenanigans are also possibilities. Send 10 cars to a roundabout, and just have them endlessly circle. Or 50 empty cars to choke up a drive-through line. Or a toolbooth. Or a major evacuation route during a natural disaster.
If you can automate cars driving around, and someone can remote control them, they absolutely are going to be used for evil.
...and the fact that you can let cattle graze on land that's unsuitable for growing crops.
Sure, you can, but the major issue is that most people don't. The beef industry is dominated by feedlots which are doubly inefficient and bad for the environment. Nothing like using good fertile land to grow food for cows and then using fossil fuels to transport it to them.
How is it not viable? It's very feasible to build 100 planes. It's also feasible to fly them 3-4 times per month. 20 million tons spread across 4000 flights isn't all that much.
As for unintended consequences, we're pretty clear on the atmospheric chemistry aspect. It's going to stay up there for a bit, then mix with water and precipitate out as slightly more acidic rain. There's nothing else that can really happen. You don't seem to understand how much atmosphere we have, and how there is nothing up at 60,000 feet.
It's also a false dichotomy to state that it would be easier to build nuclear reactors. We can do both. However, I think this is actually easier to do than to build enough nuclear reactors to cut our reliance on fossil fuels. Those take decades to plan and build. We could be doing this in a year or two.
Came here to say the same thing.
What they really need to do, to crank it over 9000, is to just modify passenger jets to do this. Best way will be to put the chemicals in the fuel.
You cannot tax yourself to prosperity.
Nope. Not at all. On this we agree. But we can't be prosperous if the bulk of the money that would be available to fuel the economy is tied up in the hands of the top 5% of the population.
How we get to prosperity is essentially "the velocity of money". The faster money changes hands, the better the economy.
So how do we pull this money back, and inject it back into the economy? I'll give you a hint - it starts with a T.
Thanks. I should have scrolled down before saying, "WTF is this shit?" and clicking. You nailed it.
I can put aside my differences to work on a 99% that includes many people I disagree with.
Damn son. You do realize that the line before that you called liberals racists who hate Christians, right?
Pretty hard to take your claim at face value when you are literally doing the thing you're ranting about others doing.
Ditto here. They call me when they spot likely fraud on a card, and return the money instantly. If I need a new card, I take a 5 min walk from work to the local branch, and they print one on the spot. Their rates are pretty much the same as the banks, and they have no fees for just about anything.
I've had mixed CU experiences - usually the smaller they are, the more they struggle. Once they get big enough, they tend to have all the bells and whistles that the bigger banks have, with very customer friendly policies. My current one is one of the larger ones in the state, and it's doing pretty much everything right, as far as I can see.
As far as I can tell, it's survive long enough for the execs to cash out, unless they can get self-driving cars working. If they can do that, their profitability goes through the roof.
They've got the app, the brand, the user base, and they're already buying fleets of cars and leasing them to drivers. If they can take all the profits going to the drivers for themselves, that's pretty much a license to print money.
Because forcing people to use run-down and broken public transportation doesn't fix the problem of a systematic, long-term lack of investment in the transportation infrastructure. What fixes that is more money. Where that money comes from used to be the economic engine of the middle class, but that's pretty much gone. Where did the money go? To the 1%. So if we need money to fix problems, that's where it's going to have to come from.
If the rich had been content to be rich, life would go on as usual. But they weren't content with that. They needed to have it all while everyone else got pretty much nothing. Right now, the top 1% richest people in the US own 35% of the wealth. If you look at the top 5% of the richest people in the US, they have 62% of the wealth in the country. That's absurd. And the bottom 40% of people, the bottom half of what used to be the middle class and the poor, own less than 1% of the wealth in the country.
40% of our country collectively owns 1% of the wealth of the whole country. I get that you've got yours and fuck everyone else, but you can't squeeze blood from a stone. It's not "soaking the rich" when they're so wealthy they don't know what to do with it, and we literally can't get any more money out of 40% of the population.
You realize he took a puff, didn't like it, and said he never gets high, don't you? That's what makes this entire thing a stupid farce. Prior to his Joe Rogan appearance, I generally assumed he was a major stoner, due to the crazy shit he comes up with. That's where we learned that he wasn't.
Furthermore, it discounts how religious and conservative a lot of latino immigrants actually are.
That's largely a myth, as far as I can tell. They are culturally religious, not evangelical, and generally not that conservative. I once thought this way too, but more and more I'm finding that it seems to be more of a stereotype than reality. If you come from a poor, sparsely educated country, you tend to be conservative and religious. But once you get some education and some wealth, that tends to get cured fast.
Religion doesn't mean shit when it comes to politics if one party has historically shit on your culture. Non-white voters are solidly ~70% democratic voters at the moment. And if you look at latinos, they're more religious than whites, but less religious than African-Americans. Not exactly good news if republicans think that somehow religious latinos will save them.
Not that republicans can have any claim of being righteous, either. Their entire platform is essentially being the antichrist. It's actually mindblowing how many religious folks can map the republican platform onto their religion, when they two couldn't be further apart.
It's clear that Trump has no decency, but shouldn't some other republicans stand up? It seems they are quite happy to walk down the nature trail to hell (road to authoritarian rule).
And this is where the republican party has lost me for the rest of my life. Until the current crop is dead and gone, there's nothing that is going to bring me back.
The lack of spine and decency is appalling. If you can't put country over party, that's unforgivable in my book. And other than one or two republicans, the entire party is doing that.
What's mindblowing to me is that it's only for very, very short-term gain. Long-term, the republican party is dead demographically. Check out the op-ed from the former vice chair of the CA republican party: Why One Prominent California Republican Has Declared The GOP Dead In Her State. That's the first domino, and it won't take too many more to make the republican party nothing more than a disruptive minority.
The US already slipped below 50% of the babies being born white. There's no path forward for the republican party relying as they have on on toxic racism (and sexism) to secure their base. "There are very fine people on both sides" doesn't play well in the non-white demographics that are soon going to be a majority in the US. If the republicans can't purge and pivot in time for the next generation to see value in their platform, they are done. At the moment, they're making a lot more lifelong democrats than they are making lifelong republicans.
Why do manufacturing imports make the middle class poorer?
They don't by themselves.
It doesn't make financial sense for us to spend $25k making a car that we could import for $20k. That's effectively subsidizing the people who make those cars here. Better would be those people engaged in a trade that we can do better/cheaper here. The issue is that for a large percent of the (former) middle class, we haven't figured out what that trade is, if there even is one.
For awhile, we were transitioning jobs into technology and automation. The major issue with this is that when technological advances allow you to automate everything that your average middle class or lower individual can do, there's nothing for them to do. We're seemingly changing most low-skill jobs into service industry jobs now, which have historically not been good paying jobs. Even if we push through a very big minimum wage increase, $15/hr waiting tables isn't going to replace $30/hr assembly line jobs.
The issue isn't importing a lot of goods. It's not replacing the good paying jobs lost by switching to the cheaper product.
Interestingly, start up that get big enough eventually succumb to the sirens of process over people.
Succumb? No. They realize that relying on individuals is how you go out of business. Processes are stable, and they can undergo a continuous improvement cycle to ensure that they are serving the business well. People aren't necessarily stable, and they can disappear at any time. Or you can find that their skillset no longer is sufficient to support your business.
We all have worked with "that guy" who was foundational to the company. That guy with the institutional knowledge that the company couldn't operate without. The few times I've seen that guy go, it was massively disruptive to the company.
Larger companies understand this and design processes to prevent individuals leaving from massively disrupting the company. Smaller companies often don't understand this, and they need to learn that painful and expensive lesson a few times before they truly do.
I'm all for hiring great people. I'm absolutely not for leaning on them so much that everything collapses when they leave. To prevent that you need processes to capture institutional knowledge and ensure that numerous people have the ability to do subsets of each other's jobs, so that one person leaving doesn't result in a giant hole in what the business can accomplish the next day.
You're technically correct, but missing the bigger picture.
Sure, we can't live in Antarctica permanently. But we haven't spent any of the last 200 years there trying to make the outposts there permanent either. So of course we can't.
If we had wanted to, we probably could have. We could have built giant underground farms with grow lights, dropped in a nuclear power plant, built an underground infrastructure, etc. And we could most likely be pretty self-sufficient there, since it's got oxygen and a lot of ice to melt for water. (I'll note that Mars doesn't have either. At least, not relatively pure water ice, not mixed with perchlorates.)
You can't use Antarctica as proof we can't live permanently on Mars since we didn't try to live permanently there. If we had tried and failed, that would be another story.
Damn, that sucks. If only they were working on a technology to cheaply bore tunnels, so they could make up for a lack of serial performance by making a lot of parallel lines.
You got half the advancement. The other half is incredibly deep expertise with alloy performance in extreme environments from the work done by SpaceX. While going electric and buying Tesla battery packs will indeed allow the competition to catch up to that part of the boring quickly, the potential for them to redesign the cutting heads and cooling system drawing on SpaceX's rocket engine research is something that nobody is going to catch up to quickly, if The Boring Company can make a real advance in that area.
No, no we can't.
Surface trains already kill a lot of people (and animals) every year, and to add more surface lines requires eminent domain and the destruction of existing buildings and habitats. People die on the order of daily at at-grade railroad crossings. We simply can't improve our rail connections between cities at the surface level. Sure, we could elevate all of the tracks, but that's expensive and really shitty to live near.
Train tracks are a significant barrier for everyone, and the more trains you have, the more of a barrier they become.
Going underground gets rid of all of these problems. If The Boring Company can really get tunnel costs down as far as they think they can, it will indeed revolutionize transport. And if it turns out that people aren't interested in traveling in a high-speed coffin underground, that's fine. We can still replace a lot of our trucking and train shipments, which will free up a lot more space on the surface for the humans.
Unless you're measuring grams of water, then you're measuring volume.
In one of my astronomy classes back in the day, a student asked "what units" when a professor was talking about star temperatures in the tens of hundred millions. His answer? It doesn't matter.
As to why it doesn't matter, the unit differences are on the same order of magnitude as the uncertainty of the measurements.
Now, this wasn't entirely accurate, but it did help us understand how much ballparking and handwaving there is in astronomy. These things are very big, very hot, and very far away. And often very far in the past. The uncertainty of astronomical measurements is generally unfathomably high if you're used to any earth-based science.
So you're a denier. That's fine. Just embrace the fact that you deny facts.
Here's a protip: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a real thing. If you're not an expert, don't pretend that you know more than the experts. You expose your ignorance when you do that.
And since that proof is they and they deny it exists, what should we call them?
Which was why I was talking about cities and not towns.