sonori

I’m more skeptical than most that self driving will be properly solved anytime in the next few decades, but I really doubt the article’s claims that it will be able to claim much modeshare from bikes and transit.

Firstly, we already have and have had autonomous vehicles for nearly as long as we have had vehicles, their called taxis and carpools. Making these potentially cheaper, though in practice I doubt it since a taxi’s costs are spread over all its users while a car has to be paid by just you, does not change the fact that they are less convienent than being able to show up and hop on like a bus, or the immunity to traffic delays of rail. Indeed the proposed system of distant out of city parking lots would take more planning than just parking your own vehicle today in most places, as you have to call or order ahead with AVs to have them ready for instead of waking to your car and jumping in. Similarly, getting stuck in traffic does not get much more fun simply because someone else is driving, especially if you can’t even talk to them.

The arguement for them replacing bikes is even worse, because one of the few things proper self driving vehicles are already pretty good at thanks to 360 ultrasonic and lidar sensors at is not blindly running down bikes, and a future with widespread adoption would also imply that most other vehicles have similar driver assistance tech, and as such more people will feel safe biking even in places with shit bike infrastructure. Meanwhile most people who were going to use a bike for a trip will not choose driving over bikeing just because they can get someone else to come pick them up.

I could see it having an effect on modeshare in places with really shit and infrequent transit, but the whole point of rapid transit is that it is more rapid than taking a car. If your transit system is slower and worse than waiting ten minutes in the rain for an Uber, fix your terrible transit system, because that really should be a low bar to clear.

Someone else this time. The company is called Confident Health and seems to do primarily drug and alcohol addiction counseling in a limited number of states. It also seems to be security negligence instead of a major revenue stream.

Standard procedure to reduce copycat killings and be respectful to the families of the victims killed on stream. Imagine why people in the US might want a hypothetical livestream by the Sandy Hook shooter of them shooting a bunch of kids taken down.

Seemed like appropriate enough music for me, although on second thought I can’t imagine the Empire ever having to halfass a port because their nominal ally stopped them from using their infrastructure.

Politically, major outside military forces like aircraft carriers tend to be viewed at a stabilizing force in the local region, but more to the point Redrum and I were talking about Isreal’s primarily being useful politically rather than militarily to destabilize and break up leftist and Soviet groups in the region.

Except OPEC still had significant power and influence in the US well after the Yom Kippur war ended in 1973, and said war didn’t even involve the majority of the OPEC member countries.

I think the US becoming the largest oil producer in the world might have had more to do with the decline in OPEC’s influence on the US but what do I know?

Yes, but it’s presence in the region being a destabilizing force is a very different thing to being primarily an unsinkable aircraft carrier as the commenter I responded to described it.

I mean Saudi Arabia also does all those things, most of them far better than Israel ever could due to geography, and at a far lower cost. If Isreal snapped out of existence tomorrow, between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Greece European and North American power projection in the Middle East and North Africa remains almost entirely unchanged.

Honestly the military benefits of supporting Isreal while real are definitely not as important as the domestic political benefits to the US, which is to say that the conservatives like Isreal because it provides a nice place to deport all the Jews to while also maintaining precedent for an enthnostate with race based citizenship, and the Democrats like it because they get a lot of gifts, friends, and in their minds potential voters, all for doing exactly what the conservatives want them to do.

37 times and counting. Part of the joke is that they just change a few words to localize each shooting, as no one has done anything at all to address the issue since they first published the original article in 2014.

Average percentage of the building process, pg 3 so about 20% in the US, maybe more if you accept the interior finish. That being said I am highly skeptical this changes the needle, especially in the third world, because almost always if you have the land to build a shack, the cost of the shack isn’t going to keep you on the street.

Fundamentally, developers intuitively understand that building will be just about as profitable in ten years as now, but if you build to much now you will have an ‘oversupply crisis’ and the price as well as the associated profit margin will go down. Similarly, if you build a new building and are selling units very quickly, that means you’re below market price and should raise the price until they just barely sell, because that price jump will more than cover the cost of that apartment being empty for a few months or even years.

This all applies wether you’re in a shanty town in Brazil or in downtown Vancouver, and since even if you snapped your fingers and the cost to build in that shantytown halved it wouldn’t really change, I am really skeptical that even a highly transformative technology could change things, much less an expensive replacement for a few pallets of cinder blocks, a few friends, some drinks, and a weekend.

What you need is something like plentiful public housing providing a minimum quality of house at cost that the market must do better than, but groups like the IMF tend to despise countries doing things like that, because it’s a highly profitable investment when private foreigners do it but a reckless waste of money if the government tries to do the same thing.

Well if we make building an already solidly profitable lot half a percent more profitable then suddenly all the developers will start selling units for far under market rate, obviously. It’s not like developers will continue to sit on land instead of risking completely supplying the market and thus causing unit prices and profit margins to fall, after all they can now add another closet to each floor instead of an interwoven staircase./s