"Finds its way in"? You may have noticed that the folks behind the French attack were born there.
As a society, France isn't doing a very good job of helping immigrants feel like Frenchman -- even two or three generations out. Meaning you get folks who feel like second-class citizens, easy to radicalize and recruit.
And, for that matter, the US has no small problem with homegrown terrorism either. Hello, Oklahoma City bombing. Hello, burning churches. Looking at terrorism as a problem that comes from outside is understating the issue.
You might try actually looking at some faces for the 360. Hint: They're still centered on the middle of the physical display. Looking at my wrist right now, it's 27 minutes after the hour and all that's cut off is some of the dashes marking minutes; the hand itself is still on-screen, but I expect that at 1:30 proper a few pixels for the edge of that hand might be cut off.
And, y'know what? I can't say that disturbs me overmuch. If (as they claim) this design feature avoids the need for a larger bezel while allowing an accurate light-level sensor, I'll keep it.
[At the end of typing the post, it's:30 after; looking at my wrist, the very tip of the minute hand is indeed occluded -- which answers your prior claims: No dead space, no distortion].
I'd be curious to see if any of the low-cost ink manufacturers for fountain pen ink branch into inkjets, with this development. Both being water-based and having constraints around lubrication, flow, penetration, dry time, etc., I wouldn't be surprised if there were a fair bit of room for knowledge (and chemistry R&D, for a shop with a wide enough range of ink properties) to translate.
Buying bottled ink is already the cost-effective option for folks writing the old-fashioned way -- the equivalent to a sub-$20 4.5oz bottle of waterproof fountain pen ink (current price for a large bottle of Noodler's Heart of Darkness, 8/4/2015, is $19) would, if purchased in rollerball refills, be in the range of 76 to 82 pen refills, priced from $1.66 to $3.20 each; going the bottled route is vastly saner for folks who are willing to buy several years' worth of ink at one go.
(Up-front costs to use bottled ink aren't that high either -- excellent sub-$30 pens include the TWSBI Eco, Pilot Metropolitan and Lamy Vista).
But then -- with an extra-expensive printer, perhaps simply voiding the warranty if someone used a competing ink would be enough to prevent customers from trying to cut costs there. Hmm.
Chinese government corruption has moved away from the central government to the local governments. It's not fair or accurate to say that there hasn't been progress made.
And that has been Tesla's argument for the last ten years, yet they still lose about $9,000 on each car they make.
"On" each car, or "for" each car?
"On" makes it sound like their marginal costs are negative -- that, literally, producing one more car increases their losses by $9K. Were it "for" each car, then they're losing money only after fixed costs, R&D, etc. are taken into account.
That latter makes considerably more sense -- folks can legitimately decide to back a company investing in itself rather than taking out a profit; indeed, Amazon has done that for years.
please enlighten us as to why the fountain pin and/or feathered quill is superior to the free pens I get from the bank?
Y'know, I actually don't mind giving this a serious answer.
You don't need pressure to write with a fountain pen -- at all. (The modern competitor is a rollerball, not a ballpoint; rollerballs don't give you amount of flexibility on nib grind or opportunities for flex and shading effects that you get with a fountain, but at least you're not forced to use tons of pressure). Allows different, more comfortable grips.
Also, they're refillable with water-based inks -- meaning that they're not disposable, and that you have a huge amount of choice in terms of color and properties of your ink. Want an ink that's still viscous in below-freezing weather? I've got a bottle on my desk! Want an ink that changes from yellow to red depending on how much you're putting down on the paper? That too! Want an ink that responds to ultraviolet and is completely waterproof you can mix in with other inks that are water-soluable, so you can see where writing that's been washed away used to be under a blacklight?
Far opposite from the truth. I'm no vegan myself -- but growing meat animals requires vastly more inputs (grain, water, etc) than would be needed if skipping the (delicious) intermediate step. Humans consume less grains in sum when consuming them directly, rather than via an intermediate layer.
Well it is interesting in so far as knowing when the companies think they need to have human operators still.
Actually, having a licensed human operator ready to take over is a legal precondition for putting an autonomous car on the road (in all US states where they're legal at all).
Prepare for another culture-shock, my dear passport-less American. Tokyo has competing privately-owned subway lines. Japan's wonderful highspeed trains are privately-owned too.
Which shock would this be, exactly? Major American cities used to have competing privately-owned commuter rail lines as well -- mostly torn down in the first half of the 1900s in favor of the highway model. This is by no means a surprise to anyone who knows even local transportation history.
If a government is doing it, it can not be smart...
You lecture me about fallacies, and then pull out that?! I find it hard to believe that you're actually interested in making a good-faith attempt at a meeting of the minds.
(lest see, how liberals who like to say that "you have rights for your opinion" and then mumble "but only, if we agree" assholes are going to react:)
Since you asked -- having a right to an opinion doesn't mean having a right to be protected from social consequences from your actions taken in airing that opinion.
Which is to say -- you're allowed to be an ass in public. Other people are allowed to be an ass to you in public as well; such is the market of public ideas. Mistaking people who don't want to be friends with you / listen to you / do business with you in response to your positions with people who would censor you (that is, invoke government action in response to your speech or act to make make that speech illegal) is a mistake.
You might ponder what it means that you believe in what you're saying enough to shout it from the world only from a position of anonymity (or, in Cito's case, pseudonymity). If there are people you respect for holding their convictions, did they do likewise?
So, in addition to "affordable" housing, in your ideal world, the poor will also be provided (by someone) with "affordable" Priuses?
Perhaps you've heard of this thing called "transit"?
Which, when done right, gets used by everyone, not just the poor. It was not so long ago a culture shock for me, as a Texan, when my (New-York-based) CEO would take the subway; now, as a transplant to Chicago, I'm very much happier not owning a car at all; my work is a 10-minute walk (hooray for urban high-rise living!), Costco a 20-minute bike ride (hooray for cargo bikes!), my more distant friends in town (or the corporate office, if I need to visit it for some reason) a $2.50, 40-minute train ride, during which my time is free to read, make notes, or otherwise do as I please.
Back to point -- no, setting up your urban environment in such a way that the poor need to drive expensive-to-maintain, expensive-to-fuel vehicles a long distance is not a necessity. Transit systems are subsidized at a higher rate than roads, but not by as much as you might think -- use taxes on highways are under 50% of their costs -- and adding capacity to a roadway system in an urban environment is prohibitively expensive -- particularly compared to adding capacity to preexisting urban rail. And if you look at the economic payoff from that subsidy -- by way of increasing folks' access to jobs -- it's an extremely clear win.
Smart urban planning -- to avoid the need for commutes in the first place by making housing as dense, and nearby to shopping and employment, as possible -- is, of course, even better.
(Back on the "expensive" part of long commutes -- you might find The True Cost of Commuting a worthwhile read, in terms of putting some actual numbers into play).
New York is another. Ultra-high-density communities may not be common in the US -- but the ones that do are exist are, well, kinda' a big deal.
But -- oh, yeah! -- we were talking about city planning as relates to lower-income folks. And the thing is, even though you and I might consider it impossible to get to work, buy groceries, &c. in much of the country without a car, there are still people doing that by necessity. My brother-in-law used to take his bicycle on the bus and sleep on a bench until his shift started, because the bus routes he needed shut down long before his shift started. When city planning is done in a way that assumes everyone is going to have a car, what you get is people left behind by the system. If you're lucky, they can manage to hold down jobs anyhow -- if you aren't, you have more folks who need safety-net features much more expensive than public transportation.
Don't know why I want to feed the troll -- and explicitly not accepting the assertions I don't challenge here, but...
You talk about "traffic flow" -- but think about this for a minute. You're proposing to take a very high-population, dense chunk of city -- plugged into the rest of that city's transportation network -- and move it out into the middle of nowhere.
Have you looked at the level of car ownership in high-density areas recently -- particularly in lower-income high-density areas? How exactly do you expect folks to get to work or school when they're suddenly no longer in an area with transit access? (And without that, how do you expect folks to work, or go to school to improve their circumstances? Would you rather be buying the same number of heads worth of homeless shelter, and getting no tax base at all)?
Hell. I'm in the rich part (financial district) of downtown Chicago, and less than half my neighbors if that own cars if that; being in walking distance from work (and directly next to a stop for every single L line) is why people pay to live in the Loop. Owning a vehicle is expensive in a city -- heck, parking wherever you're going to is expensive in and of itself, as is having a place to park that vehicle at home (in my building, a parking spot costs about $30k to buy, or rents for upward of $200/mo). You can't take folks who can't afford decent housing unassisted, move them away from their jobs, and expect them all to be able to buy, maintain and fuel vehicles -- and park those vehicles near their jobs in the city -- when they were only barely making ends meet beforehand. It's insane.
Pardon? States other than NJ or OR still require there to be a person on site who can hit the kill switch for the pumps. (I don't know if helping folks with disabilities pump their gas is legally mandatory, and if in so in which states, but this is likewise common even in "self-serve" stations).
"Attendant" is not synonymous with "full-service".
More like $20, and that's for people who don't look up how much they were actually charged.
And cash, not a voucher. I'm a former T-Mobile customer, and they looked up my new contact information and got in touch to let me know that this was available (how to ask them to research my actual charges, vs how to accept the default amount).
A lot of these settlements are BS, but you might do a bit of homework for claiming that this is just more of the same.
Did you miss the part where (per said driver's assertion) Sidecar paid a better post-deduction base rate even without the temporary promotion?
Also, it's not exactly like there are substantial costs associated with switching which service a driver chooses to work from. If rational economic decisions were being followed, one would expect a driver to want to double their money while it was possible to do so, and then switch back to a different service if that paid better the rest of the time.
Except that drivers aren't making more money with Uber or Lyft.
Saturday night I took a Sidecar home, and our driver was talking about how Sidecar is currently offering better base rates (after accounting for deductions -- Uber shows drivers the price a customer is paying before their cut is taken out), and currently offering double payouts from their marketing budget as a limited-time promotion to attract more drivers.
The premise that Uber or Lyft pays better is, presently, false.
There is no law barring employment for felons â" on the contrary, the state goes out of its way to encourage employers to hire them, to reduce recidivism.
...but they do a rather bad job of it, as a great many of your larger employers have a zero-tolerance policy.
To be born and raised in the USA â" the country, to which millions of people dream of migrating (legally and otherwise) â" and waste your youthful years on crime?
The advice the OP is asking for applies to other folks as well. One of my friends has a felony record for running web hosting for a brothel a friend of his owned, and otherwise offering services and support to a business which was to the best of his knowledge strictly offering services between consenting adults... and not turning her in when he changed his mind about being willing to continue to provide that support. That folks who don't follow a libertarian philosophy could see that as a lapse of ethics is certainly granted -- but a lapse that should mean that 4/5ths of employment prospects are permanently off the table? That's harsh.
That said -- he's working today, for an employer well aware of the entirety of his background (including his meticulous attention to detail and corner cases in software design and development). So, yes -- fewer options, but some do still exist.
From my perspective, it tends to be the people who say they support "family values" that actually support legal and social measures that keep families small.
Look at who it is defending zoning laws enforcing "single-family household" status as excluding larger chosen (non-blood-related) families, and compare to who it is embracing legal and social norms that allow maximum flexibility in assembling a strong, self-supporting structure from such components as available. Look at who is trying to restrict legal marriage and adoption and who is trying to extend it. Look at the group voting for judges that view large aggregated families-of-choice as evidence of perversion -- from which children should be protected -- and the group voting for judges who view a large, stable support network built from people who love and care for each other as precisely that. I'm all for "family values", in by that one means values that support large and strong families... but if I say "family values" in public to a random stranger, what's going to come to their mind is not the same as what I'm actually referring to.
I say this as someone who is overwhelmingly happy to have participated in the upbringing of children -- two of whom are now legal adults -- in whose genes I have no role, but to whose memes and ethics I am gratified to have contributed. I'm glad to have contributed to the financial stability of their household; I'm glad to have been another person there to help with homework and listen to their stories and serve as a role model and help keep things running. The people who say they support "family values" but who would have broken apart that family? I cannot, at such short notice, find words for the damage I see being done -- or attempted -- in the name of "family values".
*sigh*.
And yes, I know that you're acknowledging much of the above, and that a great deal of my rant (perhaps all of it) doesn't apply to you. Please forgive that. I don't believe your assertion that anyone (for a statistically significant value of same) views state programs as an adequate replacement for having a genuine support structure... but would suggest that, perhaps, there are those who would like those who don't have a support structure to have somewhere to turn.
I've known too many people whose blood families weren't a healthy place for them -- physical abuse and the like. Several of those people were welcomed into a family of choice that gave them the support that they needed -- but not everyone can be that lucky, and establishing social policy in a way that only helps those who are already fortunate... well, there's a lot of that done already, and a lot of people it leaves behind.
Finding road edge boundaries in snow, at least, is actually a place where existing self-driving car systems do better than humans already. Keep in mind that they're not limited to the visual end of the EM spectrum.
For the rest, I'll defer to empirical studies on effectiveness under varying conditions. It's easy to think of corner cases -- but the real question, corner cases or no, is whether the average amount of liability incurred per hour of driving is greater or less than a human at the wheel.
I guess, if you like the state or insurance companies telling you when and where you may travel.
The power of the state is one thing. On the other hand, doing harm to others without means to provide recompense is legitimately immoral even under reasonable Libertarian frameworks.
Motor vehicle insurance allows the externalities which would otherwise be created by individuals defaulting rather than being able to pay off debts they incurred to be priced by the market -- quite transparently, given as the profit margins are known and available to customers as well as shareholders. If you can't pay for the harm you're doing to others by an action, even as aggregated and normalized by the insurance industry, can you truly morally justify that act?
How isn't it verifiable? The whole thing that made this extra, extra evil was that they were deanonymizing their clients for everyone to see. Run a web server? Access it from your phone, see if your subscriber ID is still there in a header.
Slashdot Mirror
"Finds its way in"? You may have noticed that the folks behind the French attack were born there.
As a society, France isn't doing a very good job of helping immigrants feel like Frenchman -- even two or three generations out. Meaning you get folks who feel like second-class citizens, easy to radicalize and recruit.
And, for that matter, the US has no small problem with homegrown terrorism either. Hello, Oklahoma City bombing. Hello, burning churches. Looking at terrorism as a problem that comes from outside is understating the issue.
You might try actually looking at some faces for the 360. Hint: They're still centered on the middle of the physical display. Looking at my wrist right now, it's 27 minutes after the hour and all that's cut off is some of the dashes marking minutes; the hand itself is still on-screen, but I expect that at 1:30 proper a few pixels for the edge of that hand might be cut off.
And, y'know what? I can't say that disturbs me overmuch. If (as they claim) this design feature avoids the need for a larger bezel while allowing an accurate light-level sensor, I'll keep it.
[At the end of typing the post, it's :30 after; looking at my wrist, the very tip of the minute hand is indeed occluded -- which answers your prior claims: No dead space, no distortion].
I'd be curious to see if any of the low-cost ink manufacturers for fountain pen ink branch into inkjets, with this development. Both being water-based and having constraints around lubrication, flow, penetration, dry time, etc., I wouldn't be surprised if there were a fair bit of room for knowledge (and chemistry R&D, for a shop with a wide enough range of ink properties) to translate.
Buying bottled ink is already the cost-effective option for folks writing the old-fashioned way -- the equivalent to a sub-$20 4.5oz bottle of waterproof fountain pen ink (current price for a large bottle of Noodler's Heart of Darkness, 8/4/2015, is $19) would, if purchased in rollerball refills, be in the range of 76 to 82 pen refills, priced from $1.66 to $3.20 each; going the bottled route is vastly saner for folks who are willing to buy several years' worth of ink at one go.
(Up-front costs to use bottled ink aren't that high either -- excellent sub-$30 pens include the TWSBI Eco, Pilot Metropolitan and Lamy Vista).
But then -- with an extra-expensive printer, perhaps simply voiding the warranty if someone used a competing ink would be enough to prevent customers from trying to cut costs there. Hmm.
Chinese government corruption has moved away from the central government to the local governments. It's not fair or accurate to say that there hasn't been progress made.
"On" each car, or "for" each car?
"On" makes it sound like their marginal costs are negative -- that, literally, producing one more car increases their losses by $9K. Were it "for" each car, then they're losing money only after fixed costs, R&D, etc. are taken into account.
That latter makes considerably more sense -- folks can legitimately decide to back a company investing in itself rather than taking out a profit; indeed, Amazon has done that for years.
Tried Parker Quink, or the Noodler's Bernanke series? Both are quick-drying.
I'm actually a right-handed overwriter (rare thing that is), so I feel at least some subset of your pain.
Y'know, I actually don't mind giving this a serious answer.
You don't need pressure to write with a fountain pen -- at all. (The modern competitor is a rollerball, not a ballpoint; rollerballs don't give you amount of flexibility on nib grind or opportunities for flex and shading effects that you get with a fountain, but at least you're not forced to use tons of pressure). Allows different, more comfortable grips.
Also, they're refillable with water-based inks -- meaning that they're not disposable, and that you have a huge amount of choice in terms of color and properties of your ink. Want an ink that's still viscous in below-freezing weather? I've got a bottle on my desk! Want an ink that changes from yellow to red depending on how much you're putting down on the paper? That too! Want an ink that responds to ultraviolet and is completely waterproof you can mix in with other inks that are water-soluable, so you can see where writing that's been washed away used to be under a blacklight?
Lots of room for geekery. :)
We can make modern flex nibs better than the old ones!
(Good flexible fountain pen nibs are pretty much all circa 1950s or prior right now; it's a sad, sad state of affairs).
Far opposite from the truth. I'm no vegan myself -- but growing meat animals requires vastly more inputs (grain, water, etc) than would be needed if skipping the (delicious) intermediate step. Humans consume less grains in sum when consuming them directly, rather than via an intermediate layer.
Actually, having a licensed human operator ready to take over is a legal precondition for putting an autonomous car on the road (in all US states where they're legal at all).
Which shock would this be, exactly? Major American cities used to have competing privately-owned commuter rail lines as well -- mostly torn down in the first half of the 1900s in favor of the highway model. This is by no means a surprise to anyone who knows even local transportation history.
You lecture me about fallacies, and then pull out that?! I find it hard to believe that you're actually interested in making a good-faith attempt at a meeting of the minds.
Since you asked -- having a right to an opinion doesn't mean having a right to be protected from social consequences from your actions taken in airing that opinion.
Which is to say -- you're allowed to be an ass in public. Other people are allowed to be an ass to you in public as well; such is the market of public ideas. Mistaking people who don't want to be friends with you / listen to you / do business with you in response to your positions with people who would censor you (that is, invoke government action in response to your speech or act to make make that speech illegal) is a mistake.
You might ponder what it means that you believe in what you're saying enough to shout it from the world only from a position of anonymity (or, in Cito's case, pseudonymity). If there are people you respect for holding their convictions, did they do likewise?
Perhaps you've heard of this thing called "transit"?
Which, when done right, gets used by everyone, not just the poor. It was not so long ago a culture shock for me, as a Texan, when my (New-York-based) CEO would take the subway; now, as a transplant to Chicago, I'm very much happier not owning a car at all; my work is a 10-minute walk (hooray for urban high-rise living!), Costco a 20-minute bike ride (hooray for cargo bikes!), my more distant friends in town (or the corporate office, if I need to visit it for some reason) a $2.50, 40-minute train ride, during which my time is free to read, make notes, or otherwise do as I please.
Back to point -- no, setting up your urban environment in such a way that the poor need to drive expensive-to-maintain, expensive-to-fuel vehicles a long distance is not a necessity. Transit systems are subsidized at a higher rate than roads, but not by as much as you might think -- use taxes on highways are under 50% of their costs -- and adding capacity to a roadway system in an urban environment is prohibitively expensive -- particularly compared to adding capacity to preexisting urban rail. And if you look at the economic payoff from that subsidy -- by way of increasing folks' access to jobs -- it's an extremely clear win.
Smart urban planning -- to avoid the need for commutes in the first place by making housing as dense, and nearby to shopping and employment, as possible -- is, of course, even better.
(Back on the "expensive" part of long commutes -- you might find The True Cost of Commuting a worthwhile read, in terms of putting some actual numbers into play).
New York is another. Ultra-high-density communities may not be common in the US -- but the ones that do are exist are, well, kinda' a big deal.
But -- oh, yeah! -- we were talking about city planning as relates to lower-income folks. And the thing is, even though you and I might consider it impossible to get to work, buy groceries, &c. in much of the country without a car, there are still people doing that by necessity. My brother-in-law used to take his bicycle on the bus and sleep on a bench until his shift started, because the bus routes he needed shut down long before his shift started. When city planning is done in a way that assumes everyone is going to have a car, what you get is people left behind by the system. If you're lucky, they can manage to hold down jobs anyhow -- if you aren't, you have more folks who need safety-net features much more expensive than public transportation.
Don't know why I want to feed the troll -- and explicitly not accepting the assertions I don't challenge here, but...
You talk about "traffic flow" -- but think about this for a minute. You're proposing to take a very high-population, dense chunk of city -- plugged into the rest of that city's transportation network -- and move it out into the middle of nowhere.
Have you looked at the level of car ownership in high-density areas recently -- particularly in lower-income high-density areas? How exactly do you expect folks to get to work or school when they're suddenly no longer in an area with transit access? (And without that, how do you expect folks to work, or go to school to improve their circumstances? Would you rather be buying the same number of heads worth of homeless shelter, and getting no tax base at all)?
Hell. I'm in the rich part (financial district) of downtown Chicago, and less than half my neighbors if that own cars if that; being in walking distance from work (and directly next to a stop for every single L line) is why people pay to live in the Loop. Owning a vehicle is expensive in a city -- heck, parking wherever you're going to is expensive in and of itself, as is having a place to park that vehicle at home (in my building, a parking spot costs about $30k to buy, or rents for upward of $200/mo). You can't take folks who can't afford decent housing unassisted, move them away from their jobs, and expect them all to be able to buy, maintain and fuel vehicles -- and park those vehicles near their jobs in the city -- when they were only barely making ends meet beforehand. It's insane.
Pardon? States other than NJ or OR still require there to be a person on site who can hit the kill switch for the pumps. (I don't know if helping folks with disabilities pump their gas is legally mandatory, and if in so in which states, but this is likewise common even in "self-serve" stations).
"Attendant" is not synonymous with "full-service".
Care to cite where the Bible tells people to only help the deserving poor?
More like $20, and that's for people who don't look up how much they were actually charged.
And cash, not a voucher. I'm a former T-Mobile customer, and they looked up my new contact information and got in touch to let me know that this was available (how to ask them to research my actual charges, vs how to accept the default amount).
A lot of these settlements are BS, but you might do a bit of homework for claiming that this is just more of the same.
Did you miss the part where (per said driver's assertion) Sidecar paid a better post-deduction base rate even without the temporary promotion?
Also, it's not exactly like there are substantial costs associated with switching which service a driver chooses to work from. If rational economic decisions were being followed, one would expect a driver to want to double their money while it was possible to do so, and then switch back to a different service if that paid better the rest of the time.
Except that drivers aren't making more money with Uber or Lyft.
Saturday night I took a Sidecar home, and our driver was talking about how Sidecar is currently offering better base rates (after accounting for deductions -- Uber shows drivers the price a customer is paying before their cut is taken out), and currently offering double payouts from their marketing budget as a limited-time promotion to attract more drivers.
The premise that Uber or Lyft pays better is, presently, false.
The advice the OP is asking for applies to other folks as well. One of my friends has a felony record for running web hosting for a brothel a friend of his owned, and otherwise offering services and support to a business which was to the best of his knowledge strictly offering services between consenting adults... and not turning her in when he changed his mind about being willing to continue to provide that support. That folks who don't follow a libertarian philosophy could see that as a lapse of ethics is certainly granted -- but a lapse that should mean that 4/5ths of employment prospects are permanently off the table? That's harsh.
That said -- he's working today, for an employer well aware of the entirety of his background (including his meticulous attention to detail and corner cases in software design and development). So, yes -- fewer options, but some do still exist.
From my perspective, it tends to be the people who say they support "family values" that actually support legal and social measures that keep families small.
Look at who it is defending zoning laws enforcing "single-family household" status as excluding larger chosen (non-blood-related) families, and compare to who it is embracing legal and social norms that allow maximum flexibility in assembling a strong, self-supporting structure from such components as available. Look at who is trying to restrict legal marriage and adoption and who is trying to extend it. Look at the group voting for judges that view large aggregated families-of-choice as evidence of perversion -- from which children should be protected -- and the group voting for judges who view a large, stable support network built from people who love and care for each other as precisely that. I'm all for "family values", in by that one means values that support large and strong families... but if I say "family values" in public to a random stranger, what's going to come to their mind is not the same as what I'm actually referring to.
I say this as someone who is overwhelmingly happy to have participated in the upbringing of children -- two of whom are now legal adults -- in whose genes I have no role, but to whose memes and ethics I am gratified to have contributed. I'm glad to have contributed to the financial stability of their household; I'm glad to have been another person there to help with homework and listen to their stories and serve as a role model and help keep things running. The people who say they support "family values" but who would have broken apart that family? I cannot, at such short notice, find words for the damage I see being done -- or attempted -- in the name of "family values".
*sigh*.
And yes, I know that you're acknowledging much of the above, and that a great deal of my rant (perhaps all of it) doesn't apply to you. Please forgive that. I don't believe your assertion that anyone (for a statistically significant value of same) views state programs as an adequate replacement for having a genuine support structure... but would suggest that, perhaps, there are those who would like those who don't have a support structure to have somewhere to turn.
I've known too many people whose blood families weren't a healthy place for them -- physical abuse and the like. Several of those people were welcomed into a family of choice that gave them the support that they needed -- but not everyone can be that lucky, and establishing social policy in a way that only helps those who are already fortunate... well, there's a lot of that done already, and a lot of people it leaves behind.
Finding road edge boundaries in snow, at least, is actually a place where existing self-driving car systems do better than humans already. Keep in mind that they're not limited to the visual end of the EM spectrum.
For the rest, I'll defer to empirical studies on effectiveness under varying conditions. It's easy to think of corner cases -- but the real question, corner cases or no, is whether the average amount of liability incurred per hour of driving is greater or less than a human at the wheel.
The power of the state is one thing. On the other hand, doing harm to others without means to provide recompense is legitimately immoral even under reasonable Libertarian frameworks.
Motor vehicle insurance allows the externalities which would otherwise be created by individuals defaulting rather than being able to pay off debts they incurred to be priced by the market -- quite transparently, given as the profit margins are known and available to customers as well as shareholders. If you can't pay for the harm you're doing to others by an action, even as aggregated and normalized by the insurance industry, can you truly morally justify that act?
How isn't it verifiable? The whole thing that made this extra, extra evil was that they were deanonymizing their clients for everyone to see. Run a web server? Access it from your phone, see if your subscriber ID is still there in a header.