what make you think the same risk assessors will allow a robot car onto a public street unrestricted?
They won't today. They will once the preponderance of evidence shows that humans are not as safe as robots, or at worst when humans cause more problems throwing the e-switch than robots cause without it.
I think you could bat this down with a rule dictating ownership percentage of a parent corporation based on revenues of child corporation or somesuch. It's not like corporate accounting isn't already a nightmare. (I'm an advocate of getting rid of corporate taxes, BTW... too many funny games going on - just tax the owners.)
Maybe you would also like to be more specific? I'm talking about such obscure nations as Italy and France. Italy has strong worker protections and 39% youth unemployment. France has 25% youth unemployment. The EU in general has stronger worker protections and higher youth unemployment than the US (~10%). You don't get something for nothing, and you can't wave a magic wand and make your country prosperous.
We have civil unrest in the US, too - lest I be accused of casting stones from a glass house. But we also have strong worker protections (except when compared to Europe), minimum wage, and a continuing problem with racially segregated neighborhoods. Most of our civil disturbances have been race related.
And I think you'll find that some of those nations are dealing with civil unrest as a result of some of these policies, which have resulted in massive youth unemployment. I mentioned tradeoffs - that's one of them.
Thanks, those are good links. The "Debunking Economics" book looks like it is mostly critiquing classical theories which rely on equilibrium, as well as viewing debt as equivalent to expanding the money supply. I obviously haven't read it, but it could certainly have merit. On the surface, I agree with those things. One should probably still read some entry level econ 101 type stuff so that they at least understand supply and demand before delving into mathematical relationships. The other, "The Anti-Textbook" also looks interesting, though I don't think reading it would significantly change the content of my post. My post wasn't full of wonky mathematical formulas and predictions - just the very basics of supply and demand. If you don't know those basics, these books really won't make any sense at all.
I should know better than to bring it up as it's a lightning rod. I simply meant that when Common Core popped up on the pop radar, I looked into it. While digging around, I was absolutely horrified at the state of education in academia. Common Core's emphasis on data should help this situation, but unfortunately the rot starts at the top and Common Core only addresses the bottom.
Simple: By increasing the money supply. Currently we do this through printing money and issuing debt. They are currently keeping the fed rate very low to keep inflation going. No one wants deflation because then hoarding cash becomes a viable investment strategy, which is good for no one.
A 15 year old in 8th grade is a whole bunch of challenges for everyone, as is a 20 year old in 12th grade.
I don't actually think that will be the big problem. I think there will be enough students that they can be handled as a group. I think the larger problem is that, in some districts, the average black student will be behind the average white student. This creates problems with both perception - which is easily dismissed but hard to actually deal with - and also makes it difficult to tease out institutional racism. The upshot is that if the system works, after a generation or two the system will be self-healing.
So all you'd end up doing is exiting smarter students early, dumbing down the process for everyone else.
I agree that this would occur, but I debate that the status quo is desirable. Is it really beneficial to keep students in high school once they have reached proficiency in college-level courses? And if so, then why do we stop compulsory education at 12th grade? Maybe times have changed and we should stop at an associate's degree?
Maybe this is a good idea, but my guess is that the top 5% actually end up raising up the entire top 20% just by being there,
I think in practice the AP kids are more or less walled off from the slower kids. The top 5 or 20% helps the school's scores, but I doubt they are doing much for the other students that aren't also in the AP courses. In my state (PA), the AP kids (well, "gifted"...) are even a protected class of special education.
I could be way off base, but I'd like to see this at least run as an experiment. You could hardly do any worse than our neighboring Philadelphia School District using the status quo, so I'm not terribly worried about experimenting on the kids.
I think throwing shit at the wall is largely a byproduct of the teacher education system.
I completely agree.
We've been teaching people to read and write en masse for a couple of hundred years now, is it *that* hard? Based on the historical essays written by elementary school students 75-100 years ago that turn up in the paper every so often, I'm guessing we were doing a fine job of it back then -- and that was probably with worse raw material than we have now, more immigrants, more illiterate or uneducated parents, and at least as much poverty as now (certainly more material deprivation).
One argument that I've heard - and I have to admit that there may be some merit to it - is that women had very few career choices at the time. Since teaching was almost exclusively a woman's job, it represented pretty much the top position that a woman in the workforce could attain. As a result, you had the best and brightest working women doing the teaching. Now, they are doctors and lawyers. I don't know if I buy it and I've never seen data to support or refute the notion.
"Adidas could sell their shoes at the current price and instead of retaining that giant profit, they could use that money to give to their employees. they could actually pay a higher wage and still make a profit without raising prices. just not as much profit."
OK, so now Nike comes in and makes more profit. Their stock price goes up. Adidas goes down. Nike finds it far easier to raise capital and takes market share from Adidas. Or they simply buy Adidas and now the "good" company with the high wages is completely gone.
Now we could talk about changing the incentives. Corporations are just a figment of our collective imaginations - in reality they are a way to protect owners from liability. We initially found them useful for getting large, risky projects done like bridges. We've continued to expand their scope and now view them as some sort of natural beast, but they are entirely creations of the government. We could, for instance, declare that corporations are all half-owned by employees. Poof! Just by definition. It would be very interesting to see how that would play out.
You might be surprised, but I actually agree with you that "free trade" is not healthy. I like free markets, but free trade can distort free markets.
In order to have a free market you need free movement of capital, free movement of goods, and free movement of labor. We have capital and goods covered with these free trade agreements, but we mostly ignore labor. I think the free trade agreements need to be adjusted to account for things like different labor markets. I don't know what the mechanism should be - perhaps some kind of a credits system - but almost any system would be better than just ripping out a third of the free market.
I'm not an economist and I agree that it is, at best, an observational science. With that said, the comment that I was referring to was either hastily composed or very, very naive.
Given the political pressure to "solve" the underachievement problem, racial politics and the left-leaning nature of the educational system I don't see any of this changing.
I don't see it changing either. All I ask is that we use real data to achieve hard goals. If you want to close the achievement gap, then use methods which have been proven to work - don't just throw a bunch of shit at the wall.
My personal preference would be to stop measuring progress by age and instead measure progress by how students do after they leave a school. Get rid of artificial age thresholds and hold slower students in the school longer than faster students. If some kids go off to college (or whatever proxy you prefer) at 15 and others at 20, that's just fine - so long as the 20-year-olds have the same skill-set as the 15-year-olds.
We have built-in inflation thanks to the Federal Reserve System, so no we are unlikely to have deflation. If we do, things have gone very wrong.
Supply will periodically exceed demand, but then prices will drop below the level that companies can sustain and supply will become more constrained. If the market is fairly free, supply and demand should more or less align.
Similarly, your labor is only worth what it is worth. You can artificially prop it up, but this will distort the markets in a less-efficient direction. You get higher wages, but probably more unemployment and higher prices for all. As a whole, we are less well-off. Sometimes we decide that the trade-off is worth it (minimum wage). But it is incorrect to assume there is no trade-off.
Measuring the effectiveness of a new method of teaching is fairly straightforward compared to very complex scientific fields. I don't think you are being intellectually honest. If you make the claim that some new method is superior to the existing method, then partner with a large school system and test your thesis on a statistically significant subset of the student population. Even the most basic variables are not controlled for currently: they convert the whole school/school system all at once, they provide training to teachers for the new method but do not train re-train teachers on the existing method, etc. This is not rocket science.
Furthermore, if you can't measure your method's improvement then it might as well not exist. It's a religion or a philosophy, and we shouldn't be throwing tax dollars at it.
I would love to know why Adidas can't afford to pay decent wages?
This comment is hard to reply to, but I'll try.
The best thing to do would pick up an economics textbook used by any entry-level Macro Econ 101 course.
Basically, you have it backwards. We don't want companies maximizing pay - we want them minimizing cost. Cheaper shoes are good for everyone who buys shoes. The incentive structure for the company is such that they need to keep their production costs as low as possible. They also have incentives to meet demand. In a competitive environment, this meshing of supply and demand means we don't run into shoe shortages and there are plenty of affordable shoes to choose from. Jobs the wages associated will follow similar supply and demand rules. You can fiddle with the system if you want and pin wages, but this obviously effects the demand curve in a direction that you likely aren't going to be pleased with. Left alone, they system will dither (sometimes wildly) around the point of highest efficiency. For shoes, this is probably what we want. For food... well, the dithering is probably not desirable so we can probably afford to trade away some efficiency to avoid periods of starvation.
Now imagine your economic system, where we change the incentive structure to maximize wages. I'd like you to describe how this would work. I think by explaining it, you would find some holes all by yourself without any debate from me.
As far as fads go, I am not sure your point is valid. Teachers are trained to use different methodology to reach all kids. What works for one, may not work for another. You may think what they are doing is a "fad" but in reality, it's simply a tool to reach a goal.
I have absolutely no problem with trying to reach kids through different methods. (I do have a problem with trying to teach all kids all methods, but that's another conversation.) But where is the empirical evidence that these methods actually work? Sometimes there will be a limited and flawed study. Usually a case study in a single school district with no control group.
I suggest spending some time in a classroom before dumping on teachers.
I am NOT dumping on teachers. Most of the teachers that I have encountered are great. Not all, but most. They work really, really hard and care deeply for the children. They have gone through a lot of training and education - probably more than they need to, but they stuck with it. Because of the silly pay curve, most endure very low salaries until well into their career.
That makes it all the more frustrating that they are part of a larger dysfunctional system. They are forced to learn and use unproven methods, based on the winds of time. The incentive structure is all screwed up, so they are forced to blow through topics so that they cover everything on a standardized test, rather than spend more time on things when they see a deficit. They are held to unreasonable expectations for results from students who do not have the home support to deliver in the time given. We are lucky that in my district they have so far protected art and music - but most districts aren't willing to take the tax hit that we do.
All I'm asking is that the academic side of education - the universities - start practicing what they preach and use sound data to test their hypotheses. Education should not still be a philosophy in this day and age. It should be de rigueur to run controlled experiments in large school systems.
But unlike most professional fields, they do not have a track record that I am comfortable with. From my limited investigations prompted by the whole "common core" movement, it seems that the entire field of education is one of competing philosophies, with very little if any empirical data to back up any position. When they get their act together and realize that we've progressed beyond the 19th century in the applied sciences I will "leave teaching to the teachers". Until then, anything stated as "fact" by the "experts" in education should be met with severe cynicism - they are probably just following the latest fad.
I was only offering that as a example of why some trains get automated while others don't. The reasons are risk based rather than age.
No, not in Singapore I don't think. The technology when they first put in the MRT in the 80s wasn't up to the task. The new lines and old lines are similar infrastructure-wise. All the tracks are either elevated or in tunnels. The tunnel stations all have double doors to keep air conditioning in, but they have the secondary benefit of keeping people off of the tracks. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually update the older systems to run fully automated. Even DC has a mostly-auto mode - but of the shitty 80s variety and it is unreliable... though to be fair that is partly due to neglect.
As to your suggestion that the train would keep moving if someone got hit, I presume that someone would hit the e-stop button. Or, for less than the cost of an engineer you could hire a security guard or even full-blown cop to babysit. Sensors could also be employed to keep an eye out for obstructions or collisions. An automated train is a far, far easier problem than an automated car.
So even in your perfect universe, you are nowhere near the 80000 people per hour the best subway trains are moving.
Well, you certainly win the argument I wasn't making! I never said cars were capable of the same throughput as mass transit.
If you want scale, Trains are the only solution that works.
I agree, are you sure you are replying to the right guy? I'm not making any sort of counter argument. I was simply defending the invention of automated cars as being more efficient than non-automated cars. That's better, no matter how you try to imagine that it will make your life worse.
One that comes to mind right now is my Smart TV, which is absolutely shit and works worse then my regular TV because it's always trying to do updates, or contact a server which it can't find and popping up a note on screen while I'm trying to watch TV.
That's an example of a shitty product, not an example of where a technology made an overall system worse. Technology has improved television incredibly, by any measure. The TVs are higher resolution, lighter, flatter, larger, consume less energy, instantly turn on (except for your crappy one), can do 3d, have a bazillion channels plus any video on the internet - the change from when I was born in the 70s to now is staggering. And yes, they can run computer applications - if in your case poorly. They still are far more powerful than even a supercomputer in the 80s - even your crappy one.
So sure technology can help, but it's not the automatic answer for every problem in the universe.
But it is the answer to almost every problem that humans have in dealing with limited resources. More efficient cars can only help.
There's no stats required. A car is fixed size, so you know the upper limit of cars that that fit on a road at any given time.
I completely disagree. This is such a complex system that you cannot hope to model the effects in your head. Even the issue of the capacity of roads is in play once automation kicks in. Speed, lane width, following distance, utilization of secondary roads, routing and scheduling, people's habits and expectations - everything is in play.
Most importantly, population is increasing. Urbanization is increasing. The number of cars on the road is increasing. Housing developments are being built in the 'burbs. Thus traffic is going to be worse one way or another.
Let's put this another way - where is there an example of computers applied to a problem which made the overall system worse? Why would transportation be such an exception?
I'm pretty sure it's just an age thing. I remember they were concerned about safety, but in the end the newer trains ended up being automated. The lines from the 80s are not. Trains don't exactly stop on a dime, so if someone jumps on the tracks or a car blocks a crossing, there's not much to be done by an engineer anyway. Most (as in the vast majority) of the deaths by train now are trespassing/suicides and grade-level crossings despite having a human at the controls.
Where is the ground-level track in Singapore? I haven't been there in probably 10 years, but I don't remember seeing anything except subways and elevated tracks.
Hope is not lost! There is still time! President Trump will seal off our dangerous southern border and he'll intern all of our Muslims. Finally America will resemble the kind of safe country that our founding fathers envisioned.
I might not be the best example of an Uber user, but I've found it to be pretty nice. My use cases: 1. Needed to catch a bus, wouldn't make it if I wait for the train. Parking near the station is over $20/day. Taxi service couldn't tell me when exactly they would get here. Uber app showed me the closest driver and estimated the time and cost of the trip. Sold. 2. (The more common situation) Took the train into town. Missed last train. Take a couple of buses trough sketchy areas over an hour or taxi/Uber it in about 30 minutes. Cabs that time of night are often hard to find and a bit of a gamble in the "smells like vomit" department. If a bunch of us are out, we can specify a 3rd-row-seat Uber SUV and split the fare. Sold. 3. We want to go out to a restaurant in the 'burbs somewhere. Public transit and cabs are scarce or shitty. Sold.
I don't think it's a deep mystery. A deep mystery is why the cab companies haven't contracted someone to make a competing dispatch app for them.
Slashdot Mirror
what make you think the same risk assessors will allow a robot car onto a public street unrestricted?
They won't today. They will once the preponderance of evidence shows that humans are not as safe as robots, or at worst when humans cause more problems throwing the e-switch than robots cause without it.
I think you could bat this down with a rule dictating ownership percentage of a parent corporation based on revenues of child corporation or somesuch. It's not like corporate accounting isn't already a nightmare. (I'm an advocate of getting rid of corporate taxes, BTW... too many funny games going on - just tax the owners.)
Maybe you would also like to be more specific? I'm talking about such obscure nations as Italy and France. Italy has strong worker protections and 39% youth unemployment. France has 25% youth unemployment. The EU in general has stronger worker protections and higher youth unemployment than the US (~10%). You don't get something for nothing, and you can't wave a magic wand and make your country prosperous.
We have civil unrest in the US, too - lest I be accused of casting stones from a glass house. But we also have strong worker protections (except when compared to Europe), minimum wage, and a continuing problem with racially segregated neighborhoods. Most of our civil disturbances have been race related.
And I think you'll find that some of those nations are dealing with civil unrest as a result of some of these policies, which have resulted in massive youth unemployment. I mentioned tradeoffs - that's one of them.
Thanks, those are good links. The "Debunking Economics" book looks like it is mostly critiquing classical theories which rely on equilibrium, as well as viewing debt as equivalent to expanding the money supply. I obviously haven't read it, but it could certainly have merit. On the surface, I agree with those things. One should probably still read some entry level econ 101 type stuff so that they at least understand supply and demand before delving into mathematical relationships. The other, "The Anti-Textbook" also looks interesting, though I don't think reading it would significantly change the content of my post. My post wasn't full of wonky mathematical formulas and predictions - just the very basics of supply and demand. If you don't know those basics, these books really won't make any sense at all.
I should know better than to bring it up as it's a lightning rod. I simply meant that when Common Core popped up on the pop radar, I looked into it. While digging around, I was absolutely horrified at the state of education in academia. Common Core's emphasis on data should help this situation, but unfortunately the rot starts at the top and Common Core only addresses the bottom.
I understand it far more than I would like to now. Please re-read my comment, it was not a criticism of common core.
Simple: By increasing the money supply. Currently we do this through printing money and issuing debt. They are currently keeping the fed rate very low to keep inflation going. No one wants deflation because then hoarding cash becomes a viable investment strategy, which is good for no one.
I know, that's where I ended up. Open up some of those "studies" and groan along with me. Let me know if you find a good one.
A 15 year old in 8th grade is a whole bunch of challenges for everyone, as is a 20 year old in 12th grade.
I don't actually think that will be the big problem. I think there will be enough students that they can be handled as a group. I think the larger problem is that, in some districts, the average black student will be behind the average white student. This creates problems with both perception - which is easily dismissed but hard to actually deal with - and also makes it difficult to tease out institutional racism. The upshot is that if the system works, after a generation or two the system will be self-healing.
So all you'd end up doing is exiting smarter students early, dumbing down the process for everyone else.
I agree that this would occur, but I debate that the status quo is desirable. Is it really beneficial to keep students in high school once they have reached proficiency in college-level courses? And if so, then why do we stop compulsory education at 12th grade? Maybe times have changed and we should stop at an associate's degree?
Maybe this is a good idea, but my guess is that the top 5% actually end up raising up the entire top 20% just by being there,
I think in practice the AP kids are more or less walled off from the slower kids. The top 5 or 20% helps the school's scores, but I doubt they are doing much for the other students that aren't also in the AP courses. In my state (PA), the AP kids (well, "gifted"...) are even a protected class of special education.
I could be way off base, but I'd like to see this at least run as an experiment. You could hardly do any worse than our neighboring Philadelphia School District using the status quo, so I'm not terribly worried about experimenting on the kids.
I think throwing shit at the wall is largely a byproduct of the teacher education system.
I completely agree.
We've been teaching people to read and write en masse for a couple of hundred years now, is it *that* hard? Based on the historical essays written by elementary school students 75-100 years ago that turn up in the paper every so often, I'm guessing we were doing a fine job of it back then -- and that was probably with worse raw material than we have now, more immigrants, more illiterate or uneducated parents, and at least as much poverty as now (certainly more material deprivation).
One argument that I've heard - and I have to admit that there may be some merit to it - is that women had very few career choices at the time. Since teaching was almost exclusively a woman's job, it represented pretty much the top position that a woman in the workforce could attain. As a result, you had the best and brightest working women doing the teaching. Now, they are doctors and lawyers. I don't know if I buy it and I've never seen data to support or refute the notion.
Why did you delete this part from my quote: "If we do, things have gone very wrong."
It seems to me that the Great Depression counts as "gone very wrong".
Let's examine what you've posited.
"Adidas could sell their shoes at the current price and instead of retaining that giant profit, they could use that money to give to their employees. they could actually pay a higher wage and still make a profit without raising prices. just not as much profit."
OK, so now Nike comes in and makes more profit. Their stock price goes up. Adidas goes down. Nike finds it far easier to raise capital and takes market share from Adidas. Or they simply buy Adidas and now the "good" company with the high wages is completely gone.
Now we could talk about changing the incentives. Corporations are just a figment of our collective imaginations - in reality they are a way to protect owners from liability. We initially found them useful for getting large, risky projects done like bridges. We've continued to expand their scope and now view them as some sort of natural beast, but they are entirely creations of the government. We could, for instance, declare that corporations are all half-owned by employees. Poof! Just by definition. It would be very interesting to see how that would play out.
You might be surprised, but I actually agree with you that "free trade" is not healthy. I like free markets, but free trade can distort free markets.
In order to have a free market you need free movement of capital, free movement of goods, and free movement of labor. We have capital and goods covered with these free trade agreements, but we mostly ignore labor. I think the free trade agreements need to be adjusted to account for things like different labor markets. I don't know what the mechanism should be - perhaps some kind of a credits system - but almost any system would be better than just ripping out a third of the free market.
I'm not an economist and I agree that it is, at best, an observational science. With that said, the comment that I was referring to was either hastily composed or very, very naive.
Given the political pressure to "solve" the underachievement problem, racial politics and the left-leaning nature of the educational system I don't see any of this changing.
I don't see it changing either. All I ask is that we use real data to achieve hard goals. If you want to close the achievement gap, then use methods which have been proven to work - don't just throw a bunch of shit at the wall.
My personal preference would be to stop measuring progress by age and instead measure progress by how students do after they leave a school. Get rid of artificial age thresholds and hold slower students in the school longer than faster students. If some kids go off to college (or whatever proxy you prefer) at 15 and others at 20, that's just fine - so long as the 20-year-olds have the same skill-set as the 15-year-olds.
We have built-in inflation thanks to the Federal Reserve System, so no we are unlikely to have deflation. If we do, things have gone very wrong.
Supply will periodically exceed demand, but then prices will drop below the level that companies can sustain and supply will become more constrained. If the market is fairly free, supply and demand should more or less align.
Similarly, your labor is only worth what it is worth. You can artificially prop it up, but this will distort the markets in a less-efficient direction. You get higher wages, but probably more unemployment and higher prices for all. As a whole, we are less well-off. Sometimes we decide that the trade-off is worth it (minimum wage). But it is incorrect to assume there is no trade-off.
Measuring the effectiveness of a new method of teaching is fairly straightforward compared to very complex scientific fields. I don't think you are being intellectually honest. If you make the claim that some new method is superior to the existing method, then partner with a large school system and test your thesis on a statistically significant subset of the student population. Even the most basic variables are not controlled for currently: they convert the whole school/school system all at once, they provide training to teachers for the new method but do not train re-train teachers on the existing method, etc. This is not rocket science.
Furthermore, if you can't measure your method's improvement then it might as well not exist. It's a religion or a philosophy, and we shouldn't be throwing tax dollars at it.
I would love to know why Adidas can't afford to pay decent wages?
This comment is hard to reply to, but I'll try.
The best thing to do would pick up an economics textbook used by any entry-level Macro Econ 101 course.
Basically, you have it backwards. We don't want companies maximizing pay - we want them minimizing cost. Cheaper shoes are good for everyone who buys shoes. The incentive structure for the company is such that they need to keep their production costs as low as possible. They also have incentives to meet demand. In a competitive environment, this meshing of supply and demand means we don't run into shoe shortages and there are plenty of affordable shoes to choose from. Jobs the wages associated will follow similar supply and demand rules. You can fiddle with the system if you want and pin wages, but this obviously effects the demand curve in a direction that you likely aren't going to be pleased with. Left alone, they system will dither (sometimes wildly) around the point of highest efficiency. For shoes, this is probably what we want. For food... well, the dithering is probably not desirable so we can probably afford to trade away some efficiency to avoid periods of starvation.
Now imagine your economic system, where we change the incentive structure to maximize wages. I'd like you to describe how this would work. I think by explaining it, you would find some holes all by yourself without any debate from me.
As far as fads go, I am not sure your point is valid. Teachers are trained to use different methodology to reach all kids. What works for one, may not work for another. You may think what they are doing is a "fad" but in reality, it's simply a tool to reach a goal.
I have absolutely no problem with trying to reach kids through different methods. (I do have a problem with trying to teach all kids all methods, but that's another conversation.) But where is the empirical evidence that these methods actually work? Sometimes there will be a limited and flawed study. Usually a case study in a single school district with no control group.
I suggest spending some time in a classroom before dumping on teachers.
I am NOT dumping on teachers. Most of the teachers that I have encountered are great. Not all, but most. They work really, really hard and care deeply for the children. They have gone through a lot of training and education - probably more than they need to, but they stuck with it. Because of the silly pay curve, most endure very low salaries until well into their career.
That makes it all the more frustrating that they are part of a larger dysfunctional system. They are forced to learn and use unproven methods, based on the winds of time. The incentive structure is all screwed up, so they are forced to blow through topics so that they cover everything on a standardized test, rather than spend more time on things when they see a deficit. They are held to unreasonable expectations for results from students who do not have the home support to deliver in the time given. We are lucky that in my district they have so far protected art and music - but most districts aren't willing to take the tax hit that we do.
All I'm asking is that the academic side of education - the universities - start practicing what they preach and use sound data to test their hypotheses. Education should not still be a philosophy in this day and age. It should be de rigueur to run controlled experiments in large school systems.
How about we leaving the teaching to the teachers
I would love to do that. Honestly.
But unlike most professional fields, they do not have a track record that I am comfortable with. From my limited investigations prompted by the whole "common core" movement, it seems that the entire field of education is one of competing philosophies, with very little if any empirical data to back up any position. When they get their act together and realize that we've progressed beyond the 19th century in the applied sciences I will "leave teaching to the teachers". Until then, anything stated as "fact" by the "experts" in education should be met with severe cynicism - they are probably just following the latest fad.
I was only offering that as a example of why some trains get automated while others don't. The reasons are risk based rather than age.
No, not in Singapore I don't think. The technology when they first put in the MRT in the 80s wasn't up to the task. The new lines and old lines are similar infrastructure-wise. All the tracks are either elevated or in tunnels. The tunnel stations all have double doors to keep air conditioning in, but they have the secondary benefit of keeping people off of the tracks. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually update the older systems to run fully automated. Even DC has a mostly-auto mode - but of the shitty 80s variety and it is unreliable... though to be fair that is partly due to neglect.
As to your suggestion that the train would keep moving if someone got hit, I presume that someone would hit the e-stop button. Or, for less than the cost of an engineer you could hire a security guard or even full-blown cop to babysit. Sensors could also be employed to keep an eye out for obstructions or collisions. An automated train is a far, far easier problem than an automated car.
So even in your perfect universe, you are nowhere near the 80000 people per hour the best subway trains are moving.
Well, you certainly win the argument I wasn't making! I never said cars were capable of the same throughput as mass transit.
If you want scale, Trains are the only solution that works.
I agree, are you sure you are replying to the right guy? I'm not making any sort of counter argument. I was simply defending the invention of automated cars as being more efficient than non-automated cars. That's better, no matter how you try to imagine that it will make your life worse.
One that comes to mind right now is my Smart TV, which is absolutely shit and works worse then my regular TV because it's always trying to do updates, or contact a server which it can't find and popping up a note on screen while I'm trying to watch TV.
That's an example of a shitty product, not an example of where a technology made an overall system worse. Technology has improved television incredibly, by any measure. The TVs are higher resolution, lighter, flatter, larger, consume less energy, instantly turn on (except for your crappy one), can do 3d, have a bazillion channels plus any video on the internet - the change from when I was born in the 70s to now is staggering. And yes, they can run computer applications - if in your case poorly. They still are far more powerful than even a supercomputer in the 80s - even your crappy one.
So sure technology can help, but it's not the automatic answer for every problem in the universe.
But it is the answer to almost every problem that humans have in dealing with limited resources. More efficient cars can only help.
There's no stats required. A car is fixed size, so you know the upper limit of cars that that fit on a road at any given time.
I completely disagree. This is such a complex system that you cannot hope to model the effects in your head. Even the issue of the capacity of roads is in play once automation kicks in. Speed, lane width, following distance, utilization of secondary roads, routing and scheduling, people's habits and expectations - everything is in play.
Most importantly, population is increasing. Urbanization is increasing. The number of cars on the road is increasing. Housing developments are being built in the 'burbs. Thus traffic is going to be worse one way or another.
Let's put this another way - where is there an example of computers applied to a problem which made the overall system worse? Why would transportation be such an exception?
I'm pretty sure it's just an age thing. I remember they were concerned about safety, but in the end the newer trains ended up being automated. The lines from the 80s are not. Trains don't exactly stop on a dime, so if someone jumps on the tracks or a car blocks a crossing, there's not much to be done by an engineer anyway. Most (as in the vast majority) of the deaths by train now are trespassing/suicides and grade-level crossings despite having a human at the controls.
Where is the ground-level track in Singapore? I haven't been there in probably 10 years, but I don't remember seeing anything except subways and elevated tracks.
Hope is not lost! There is still time! President Trump will seal off our dangerous southern border and he'll intern all of our Muslims. Finally America will resemble the kind of safe country that our founding fathers envisioned.
I might not be the best example of an Uber user, but I've found it to be pretty nice. My use cases:
1. Needed to catch a bus, wouldn't make it if I wait for the train. Parking near the station is over $20/day. Taxi service couldn't tell me when exactly they would get here. Uber app showed me the closest driver and estimated the time and cost of the trip. Sold.
2. (The more common situation) Took the train into town. Missed last train. Take a couple of buses trough sketchy areas over an hour or taxi/Uber it in about 30 minutes. Cabs that time of night are often hard to find and a bit of a gamble in the "smells like vomit" department. If a bunch of us are out, we can specify a 3rd-row-seat Uber SUV and split the fare. Sold.
3. We want to go out to a restaurant in the 'burbs somewhere. Public transit and cabs are scarce or shitty. Sold.
I don't think it's a deep mystery. A deep mystery is why the cab companies haven't contracted someone to make a competing dispatch app for them.