ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
9d ago
I agree with your conclusions from the standpoint of personal ownership as the situation currently is. People do like to have "their" car, even if it's "just in case". While there is some percentage of folks out there who have chosen to forgo personal ownership (or, say, downgraded their household from two to one car), it's not very significant yet. Significant price decreases across the board for autonomous cars won't necessarily change the perspective of the individual, as they'd see a similar price decrease on the side of personal ownership as well.
However, riffing a bit on vague thoughts, what if the demand signal came from businesses? I have a vague thought that, sometimes, services which once made financial sense only for particular, highly-remunerated employees may sort of trickle down the chain as the cost to the business decreases. (E.g., when work phones or flights are really expensive, businesses only pay for them for a small number of employees that are a) worth it to provide the perk and get the employee, and/or b) whose productivity gains would offset the cost.) So, I'm thinking, something like how the NFL has extremely highly-paid employees, some of whom are liable to get themselves into trouble with their cars or whatever. So the league offers a car service that will come pick them up and take them anywhere, at any time. Expensive? Absolutely. Worth it to them? Possibly. Lower down the chain, other companies buy company cars for high-level employees. Could be fleet-owned; could be subsidizing a personal purchase. It's a perk and form of compensation, as well as a bit of confidence that they'll be driving a newer, maintained vehicle, and aren't going to have to take unfortunate days off because of car issues. Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.
Uber is already targeting business. 'Offer commuting services to your employees,' they say. It's a perk to the employee, a way of compensating them; it's cheaper to the business than those other things. There could be perverse incentives, but presumably, the business can say things like, "We'll compensate up to this amount of commute, and if you choose to live further, you'll have to cost share," or something. But they'll get to work every day. It's easy to add in if they need to drive across the city occasionally for business, without jumping all the way to a company car. Maybe when you're negotiating that new lease for office space, you can also say that you only need twenty reserved parking spaces in the building's lot/garage, not a hundred. Uber is betting that they can get to a price point where maybe you used to offer company cars to your C-suite, but now you can offer Uber Business + Commutes to all your VPs as well.
If autonomous vehicles cut the cost of this service down even more, how far down the chain do the perks go? Probably not all the way, not 100%. But can it increase enough to make some money? Uber is betting that it can. Businesses don't care about limit arguments of, "Oh, what if tens of years down the line, the number of autonomous vehicles is approaching 100%; what are urban planners gonna do about deadheading?" They don't care what Autonomous Uber chooses to do with those cars once they've dropped off their employees. If it makes economic sense, they'll just do it. Unless and until, of course, the @Rov_Scam folks start to slap laws around to kill it. That's a problem for the urban planners and Uber to fight about. They just want to attract the best employees and make sure they get to where they need to work every day.
Now, if Uber is right and businesses actually start adopting this sort of thing more, it actually can change some amount of the personal calculation. It's not, "I have to do the math on a cost comparison, and I have to take the risk of surge pricing or delays in getting a driver, and I have to figure out whether the complicated set of tradeoffs allow me to put my personal faith and reputation in this service enough to consider having our household go to one fewer vehicle." Instead, it's, "Well, so my commute is covered. I don't have to think about that. I'm not going to save money by just choosing to not use it. Now, what do we want to have for personally-owned vehicles?"
ControlsFreak
9d ago
The other is that they leave and try to find fares elsewhere. This makes things worse; now we've got rush hours that run in both directions, full of cars deadheading out of town in search of fares or cheaper parking.
Instead of thinking like an urban planner, can we think like an entrepreneur? What business models are possible if you're expecting for there to be a bunch of autonomous cars showing up downtown early in the morning and wanting to head back to the suburbs, making such transit super cheap? Cheap breakfast delivery from your centrally-located kitchen? (Heck, sell the 'premium' autonomous ride into work that comes with breakfast in it for you, having picked it up before it deadheaded your way...) Cheap delivery of business goods to outlying locations? Amazon is currently delivering to your doorstep, but would suburban customers be okay with an autonomous vehicle with a robot arm or something that can at least dump your package at the end of your driveway? Could they design a dual-purpose vehicle that can bring a passenger into the city, turn around, deliver some number of packages in the suburb, then pick up another passenger?
(Note that this is not a sort of argument that we'd get to 100% autonomous vehicles, but just thinking that if there is value in substitution on some margins, this may be a new margin that could be opened up.)
ControlsFreak
10d ago
CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
I got curious in just asking, "What was the largest deportation operation in American history to date," i.e., what's the line he has to beat? Operation Wetback? Wiki says something about a little over a million "returns", but I'm fresh to the immigration lingo and had to look into "returns" vs. "removals". I guess that "returns" can include anyone who is caught, but basically doesn't fight it in court; just says, "Ya got me; take me hoooommmeeeee." Whereas "removals" have formal deportation orders. I believe that a "return" could also include silly examples, like an example of someone I heard about who screwed up and applied for their visa too early (for another country) such that it expired before they got there, but nobody caught it before they flew there, so they were turned back at the airport.
So, I wonder which curve is he getting graded on? Then I found that removals were still stupid low in the years of Operation Wetback compared to more recent times. Returns at that time look to be about 2/3rds of the peak. Eyeballing totals would put the peak in 2000, something like 1.85M (driven by the peak in returns, around 1.7M). Removals peaked in 2013 at about 400k. There's a few more years in the less-immediately-readable more recent yearbook.
Concretely, on what metric would this prediction market resolve?
ControlsFreak
10d ago
I see a lot of discussion here about Ukraine and the future of the conflict, touching on the different parties' interests, positions, negotiating leverage, etc. I'll admit that I often just skim them and don't dive in, but from what I've seen, I don't think there's a lot of discussion of the Center for American Security1 plan. I only mention it because it came up in another recent William Spaniel video, post-election. For those who don't know, William Spaniel is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on the game theory of interstate conflict/bargaining, and he also has a relatively prolific youtube channel. I've been watching it for a while, well before the war stuff mostly took over, just interested in his game theory videos and how to apply that lens to thinking about war. In any event, he doesn't seem to be pro-Trump at all; I'd say he's somewhat anti-Trump, but definitely not rabidly so.
In the linked video, he talks about the developments in Ukraine over the last few months, saying that it is rather plausible to believe that both the Kursk offensive and the recent Russian acceleration could be chalked up to the possibility of an incoming Trump administration, which has stated that it wants to end the war posthaste. Of course, the typical response to the Trump administration's stated goal is that things don't happen just because Prime Minsters Presidents are very keen on it. Neville Chamberlain was very keen on peace (also). And then, depending on the valence of the speaker, they usually assume that this means that Trump will have to throw America's lot in with the Russians, stop supporting Ukraine, and force them to acquiesce to a peace deal. However, Spaniel points out that if this CFAS plan is the route Trump chooses to go, he does have other tools in the toolbox.
My summary of his summary is that Trump can essentially pick any resolution that is at least plausibly in the middle and then use the stick on both sides. If Ukraine doesn't agree to whatever Trump has decreed, then Trump will drop military support for Ukraine. If Russia doesn't agree to whatever Trump has decreed, then Trump will flood Ukraine with even more and better weapons. It's like an attempt to make a reverse prisoners' dilemma. It's not immediately clear how to think through all the plausible negotiating developments, especially Russia's possible options for escalation, and one would have to be somewhat steeped in Spaniel's lines on maps lore to really feel how intuitively plausible it is, but suffice to say that Spaniel, himself, mostly treats it as though, from a mathematical standpoint, it's really plausible enough that he didn't even really go into any caveats (at least in this video) about the difficulties that might arise in the negotiation. He almost treated as though Trump really could simply declare what the resolution will be (so long as it's sufficiently in some range), and the dual threat of America's mighty power (or lack thereof) really could simply make it so (likely modulo a minor amount of horsetrading). It's in that context that he describes the theory of why such a plan, and the prior probability of Trump winning the election, could have played a role in the two sides' strategies over the last few months.
What says The Motte? Is he giving the idea too much credence? Has he missed something? Why hasn't this sort of plan already happened?2 If it does happen, what sort of video will Spaniel be making in a few months after it's done? Will he be talking about what types of commitments will need to be made to "keep it so"? What would those look like?
1 - Part of the "America First Policy Initiative" think tank, if such a term can be applied; not to be confused with the Center for New American Security
2 - I can think of a few theories... perhaps a divided Congress prevented the dual threats from being credible; perhaps only Nixon Trump can go to China Russia and credibly threaten to really turn up the heat; perhaps Russia does have plausible escalation strategies to defang the threat...
ControlsFreak
12d ago
I do wonder if that's part of the shift in the youth vote. Youth tend to be somewhat rebellious. Yet, in almost every online forum, complete ideological purity is demanded, with increasing levels of Obvious Nonsense being declared doctrine, leading to utter hysteria. Any young person who observes that even one item of Obvious Nonsense is, in fact, Obvious Nonsense either learns extremely quickly to somehow suppress their intellect... or they promptly get banned from half the internet.
They say that social death is worse than real death. The internet basically is social life in [Current Year]. Thus, I'd imagine that seeing that even minor observations that Obvious Nonsense is, in fact, Obvious Nonsense gets one banned from half the internet (which is basically akin to social death) is significantly radicalizing, in one way or the other.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
The one thing I didn’t have a response to was when she brought up the fact that she has friends who are “undocumented”.
There are nuanced approaches. I wrote a kind of steelman a few months back. There really are bureaucratic SNAFUs. And the United States Government is truly not kind when an actual SNAFU happens; they are incredibly by-the-book, even when that book is extremely opaque and confusing. Even though there are significant pro-immigrant advocacy organizations out there who will throw every argument they can at the courts on a pro bono basis (yes, they'll throw utterly silly arguments at the wall which should be rejected, too), the courts are for the most part pretty deferential to the gov't in the realm of immigration. The threat of penalties like being banned from the US for ten years can be bandied about for surprisingly minor things.
Now, the trick is to try to divide that group, who mostly are at least trying to do things legally, but who get caught up in some garbage, from the group of folks who are literally just walking across the border, not even trying. Rhetorically, this may get you a long way with your girlfriend. Of course, that trick is surprisingly more difficult to translate into actual policy, and she may honestly be fully justified in thinking that Donald Trump is not going to thread that needle. He may genuinely make things more difficult for some number of sympathetic folks. But of course, now we're getting into the land of tradeoffs, where it's hard to make good estimates. How many people in the 'mostly good' category are really going to suffer? How many people in the 'not even trying' category are going to be kept out? It's probably impossible to predict what fine-grained policy choices will ultimately be made up/down the chain and how those choices will ultimately come out in terms of the tradeoffs.
If you can get her at least this far, and she's capable of understanding that the truly apocalyptic-sounding BS that people are spouting off (e.g., "They're gonna deport all green card holders!") is completely irrelevant and that the most likely outcome is some shifting around of tradeoffs, which may or may not impact her friends... and that you do feel sympathy for any 'mostly good' folks who get further harmed by the tradeoff game, then you're probably in luck. If not, and she simply can't extricate her mind from the most insane propaganda takes? Whelp, you've got decisions to make.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
I'm really not sure why you responded to me in the first place, then. I think you actually have views pretty close to my own, and I also think that you're numerate enough to agree that it was in no way an existential threat. So yeah, uh, why respond to a comment that is just pointing out that it was absolutely not an existential threat?
ControlsFreak
14d ago
I think I bundle your first three points under "more local authority", where I presume the argument is that more local authority means more important local elections, meaning better vetted/better quality candidates. I am sympathetic to this. However, it doesn't seem sufficient. My guess is that if one brought more local authority to other states, they might get better quality local officials, but it's not clear that they would actually execute toward this vision. My further guess is that in order to get the amount of uniformity they seem to have, there would have to be significant state-level carrots/sticks.
So, I guess my question is, what is the long pole in the tent? What carrots/sticks did the State of Florida use to get the local officials to execute? If we brought just those carrots/sticks to another state, would local officials just be too incompetent to execute? If we just brought more local authority and got more capable local officials, would they just not all care to execute in a similar fashion? Or are either sufficient? If we had another state use the same carrots/sticks, would the local officials grudgingly get it done? If we brought more local authority and got more capable local officials, would they just execute in a competent distributed fashion? Or do you truly need both, otherwise it's a hopeless cause?
ControlsFreak
14d ago
I mean, we could relitigate it, again. Suffice to say, I think it very plausibly justifies some version of the lockdowns that happened in 2020 (plausibly not all; it's hard to really go back mentally, put ourselves in those shoes again, and pin things down), but almost certainly does not justify all of the vaccine mandates that happened (or attempted to happen) in 2021. Thankfully, the Supreme Court agreed that the most egregious one didn't pass muster and several others petered out. Especially because after they failed, the sky did not fall, because it was absolutely nowhere near an existential risk. I don't think you understand how gigantic the gap is between "existential risk", what actually happened, or even your characterization of what the biggest fears were.
Do you think that "Sufficiently damaging to the economy, American lives, and functioning of the government" should have at least justified pushing the FDA further out of the way, streamlining the process more, enabling human challenge trials, and just letting people buy/sell the vaccine based on their personalized needs and the price mechanism? It seems to me that such a path would have been vastly more efficient at addressing your concerns, and it could have been done pretty early in 2020, not in 2021 when the cows were completely and totally out of the barn.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
Well, the question is whether the President is in a position to know that wasn't an existential threat. If you're the President and ignorant people think it's an existential threat, but you know that it's not an existential threat, you help them understand that it's not an existential threat. And then we move to the next question of whether you would have "threatened the livelihood of 100,000,000 citizens unless they submitted to an unconstitutional mandate that abrogated their right to bodily autonomy? Even after massive concerns from multiple constitutional scholars?"
ControlsFreak
14d ago
Can you go into some more detail about what the incentives are in Florida and how they lead to this result? I'd love to learn more.
I didn’t post about this, but I did upvote Blackpill posts about Democrat election fraud. I really did expect 3am mystery trucks, election officials putting up paper over the windows and keeping monitors outside, gas/water leaks and restarting the count after monitors had gone home etc etc at about 65-70% certainty. That didn’t eventuate thankfully.
Scoping out, an election needs more than to be an accurate, secure accounting of votes; it needs to have the appearance of such. People need to perceive that it is legitimate. It is very dangerous to have systems which allow people to even think that these things are possible. Not even that they're probable, but are even possible. That I could wake up in the morning with enough states undeclared (by two of the three organizations used to resolve Polymarket) to plausibly swing the result is horrific optics. It allows the imagination to run wild. It lets people think that it is at least possible that there are potential people in potential counties who might have a backup plan to pull these sorts of shenanigans, and who are up in the middle of the night, closely monitoring the developments, carefully calculating whether they can make a difference by implementing their backup plan, cautiously waiting until the perfect moment in the wee hours when just enough people have run out of gas and given in to sleep. That I could wake up and even imagine that such a person might have existed and might have finally given up at 4am, realizing that too much would have to happen in too many different states to make a difference, that it would have been sufficiently hard to pull off or sufficiently hard to hide... just that I could imagine this happening is a huge, dangerous fault line.
@jeroboam is absolutely right on this. Florida has solved this problem, and every swing state which hasn't is playing a treacherous game. They report everywhere, all at once, so there is very little ability to calculate how much risk you might need to take to swing the result. They do so extremely quickly, so folks can be relatively confident that there is constant, alert, bipartisan monitoring of everything that happens in that short window. There is very little room for the imagination to run wild. I did not like the vast majority of the flavors of election denial that occurred in 2020, but it is apparently not that hard to preemptively shut all of that shit down in the future. Both sides really ought to be able to agree on this.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
A relatively small number of deaths can easily cause massive economic problems and overwhelm hospitals leading to all sorts of problems including...you guessed it, more deaths.
If every hospital we have were suddenly carpet bombed tomorrow, would there be some increased follow-on deaths? Absolutely. Would it be an existential threat?! Please.
FYI, this subthread (from birb_cromble) seems to be referring to vaccine mandates rather than lockdowns.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
existential threat
I mean, we had a pretty good idea what the IFR was by that point, so if someone bought this, I think it could only really come down to innumeracy.
ControlsFreak
15d ago
hundreds of different elections
I saw this paper recently. Thought it was interesting.
ControlsFreak
16d ago
I'm feeling some of the vibe I was trying to channel in my not-well-liked, but at least not-hated comment a couple days ago. One perspective on realizing that close elections have some randomness involved is, "HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO CLOSE EVERY LITTLE THING MATTERS I MUST REORGANIZE MY LIFE AROUND PROVIDING AN EXTRA EPSILON IN MY PREFERRED DIRECTION," while another perspective is, "Eh, if it's close enough that a little randomness can change things, the country must be mostly okay-ish with either result, so from a long-term institutional perspective, it'll probably be fine." I'm shooting for the latter, as I think it turns the temperature down a bit.
Of course, one could also think that the country is strongly divided, but I think the country could be strongly divided 60-40, and whether or not it's close enough that some randomness can change things isn't really the best indicator of dividedness (first moment vs. second moment).
ControlsFreak
16d ago
But even then it won't actually be required until 2027; you'll be informed of the noncompliance but allowed to board anyway.
Multiple agents, Hlynka disciples. Honestly, how many people just have a current non-compliant driver's license that is valid for a few more years, and just don't care to waste a day with the sloths and pay for a new one. It's easy enough to still just travel with the non-compliant DL and deal with the problem later. Hell, maybe they have an alternate form of ID that they could use and figure, "Eh, if we get closer and I need to travel, I'll decide if I'll go get a new DL or just take this other ID instead." If (when) word gets out that the signs are a lie and that they'll just hand you a piece of paper trash that won't make it 100ft past security, those agents can very rationally choose to just wait until their current DL expires.
I viscerally feel that there are real stories of difficulties with paperwork. I've experienced it, myself and with my wife. Still going through some with her. But if apathy is sufficient to prevent change, apathy will successfully prevent change.
ControlsFreak
16d ago
On a related note, but different domain, I saw these two threads this morning (...maybe NOAA's advertising budget has been kicked into gear because they have some bureaucratic fight going on...). To the extent that people have some form of equities at risk, accurate probabilistic models can help people properly allocate their assets/risk... and may even allow some folks to make a boatload of money in trying to allocate appropriately at a high level of abstraction. I recall listening to a podcast with a guy who made literal billions of dollars by making huge bets on insurance markets in one of the hurricane seasons not long after Katrina (I can't remember his name off the top of my head now, but IIRC, it was someone who people would plausibly recognize). He did so by trying to have the most accurate weather prediction possible.
Political outcomes feel a bit less directly-related to outcomes than the much more direct hurricane-to-damage relation, because "probability of president" probably needs to be mixed with "probability of Congress" and "conditional probabilities of those results ending up with the gov't taking Action A". Right now, there is still debate on whether we can do any part of that chain, which makes it difficult to intuitively feel a connection.
ControlsFreak
16d ago
Oh man, thanks for finding that link! It's what I was thinking about but couldn't find in this comment a couple days ago.
ControlsFreak
16d ago
Eastern folks sure seem to understand self-immolation style protest.
ControlsFreak
16d ago
We cut people some slack when they get dogpiled and lash out.
Except for some times, when they don't even lash out, they just reply to many of the people who dogpiled them, then you ban them. Even acknowledging that one can't point to anything specific that was actually against the rules.
ControlsFreak
17d ago
I do think there would be some technical challenges to be solved, but I think we have a lot of really useful pieces that could help solve those problems. I'm not going to pretend that I have a fleshed-out whitepaper with full technical specification or anything, but I can give you some of my general thoughts.
A lot of work has gone into anonymization protocols. They're probably not perfect yet. There are all sorts of timing issues or side channel issues and even just the fundamental problem that metadata is hard. But I think progress is being made. To the extent that one is bullish on the idea that real anonymization is plausible in the not-too-distant future for some form of cryptocurrency, I think they can be bullish on something here, too. Moreover, it's not just cryptocurrency where work is being done on anonymization. TOR was a big leap forward on that front, even if there are still some challenges there, too. Again, to the extent one is bearish/bullish on any hope there, I'd expect them to be likewise bearish/bullish here.
Consider some TOR-like properties. A message can be routed through multiple intermediaries, such that those intermediaries mathematically cannot know the content of the message in question. Those intermediaries aren't even really trusted. They can refuse to pass your message along, but you can realize that it hasn't been passed along by the non-response or inappropriate response you receive. I don't think it's too big of a step to imagine that one can leverage intermediaries, even perhaps untrusted ones, in a way such that those intermediaries are mathematically unable to determine the content of your message (who you're voting for or how much you're spending). Those intermediaries can choose things like random delay times, which can help thwart timing attacks. I agree that timing attacks may pose unique challenges, and again, I haven't solved all of them right off the top of my head, but I think the idea would be to try to show some property that so long as some low percentage of those untrusted intermediaries are observing random delays, we could get in front of those problems.
Tornado Cash gave us a significant step toward anonymity in the transactions, as well. The very basic idea is that you dump a bunch of things into a pot, mix them up, divide them out, and make it significantly more difficult to correlate inputs/outputs. Details here are more complicated; I'd say that it's probably still not perfect, but to the extent that there are lessons to be learned, I think we can learn them and continue to iterate. Again, general bearish/bullish sentiments.
Of course, I'd like to also call back to the 'receipt-freeness' business that the digital election nerds really like. The idea is that they want a way that the the final election tally can be 'published', but in a way that is still specially encrypted. Thus, while people can perform the proper cryptographic operations on the output to determine what the result was, no one can determine from the encrypted, published final tally what any of the individual votes are. Even the people who voted do not have sufficient information to prove how they voted, but they do retain sufficient information to prove that their vote was counted correctly in the final tally. Side note here would be that if you have a system where someone can freely rescind their vote later, even if you had someone watching your computer when you initially voted, and even if they kept that piece of information which could be used to prove that the initial vote was correctly counted, they would not have sufficient information to prove that it was not later rescinded. (There are still tricky choices here, perhaps, and I do think more work would need to be done to decide on every detail.) In any event, this would be another check to make sure that intermediaries couldn't just refuse to include your vote.
ControlsFreak
17d ago
I definitely had prediction markets in mind. There have been plenty of conversations in rationalist-adjacent spaces about whether or not you can pump money into prediction markets to change the odds and affect the outcome of an election. It's a weird, indirect thing, though. This is a more direct way of trying to use your money to affect the election. Presumably, it would be a partial substitute for that action. If anything, I wonder if it pulls the money that is more interested in affecting the outcome (possibly trying to make money through influencing federal regulation), while leaving the money that is more interested in predicting/making money directly.
ControlsFreak
18d ago
Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs.
I'm confused. Presumably, these would be substitute goods. That is, suppose someone is spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs right now. Then, an alternate means of political influence arises, say, the money vote. It may, in fact, be plausible that they might even want to increase their total spending, but the nature of substitute goods would imply to me that they would even then spend something more like (made up numbers) 70 units on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs; 60 on the money vote. It seems unlikely that they'd continue spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs... and another 30 on the money vote.
One of the things I actually sort of like about the scheme is that it would be a substitute way of channeling money. Probably one that I'm even a bit more comfortable with than the traditional ways folks use money to buy political influence. We might even get some data about relative values of things, which could help with election design in the future.
Most of the rest of your comment seems almost entirely inapplicable, as it completely ignores the two main features of the proposal - the limited strength of the money vote in comparison to the traditional election, and the strong secrecy. I kinda feel like your response is just sort of irrelevant if it doesn't consider those features.
I'll jump off from this point.
Aside from just being an Elon dream, I think a lot of potential Autonomous Cars As A Service (ACaaS) would seriously consider whether EVs are in their interest (at least in areas where the weather is such that EVs make sense at all). Per-mile energy costs tend to be lower, and I haven't kept up with the stats on current models, but there are simplicity reasons to believe that, for a given level of non-propulsive tech in a car, simply swapping out ICE for electric can plausibly reduce maintenance costs (practical numbers would definitely be needed for battery replacement on a car running taxi service every day compared to a comparable ICE). So, there are inherent reasons for the service providers to want to consider EVs.
Anyway, let's get to building a model. I'll start with the premise that we pretty much just model the vast majority of peak traffic as commuter traffic, the timing/quantity of which we hold essentially fixed. I'll also assume for now that the autonomous taxi service supplies almost all of the commuter traffic. Crucially, this model doesn't really say almost anything about the total number of cars owned or the number that are personally owned. People may still keep the same number of cars at home, in their garage all week, ready to use for the weekends, trips to grandma's, etc. I think there's a lot of confusion in the thread that is flipping back and forth between ownership and utilization. In any event, I think this model is somewhat like what you have in mind in your example.
Now, basically all of the service's EVs have presumably magically found a home to cheaply charge all night, presumably somewhere in the suburbs where it's hopefully cheap. Given the current 200-300mi range, they can basically all come online and 'work' through the morning rush hour(s). I think there are a couple crucial questions, one which you've brought up, but another which I think has been missing. First, "How much do they deadhead during rush hour?" Second, "Do they have to charge to make it through the evening rush hour? If so, what method would they prefer?"
For deadheading, the simplest model is to just to assume that there is approximately zero demand to go in the opposite direction of the main commuter traffic. To a first approximation, a small amount of deadheading has the obvious cost of driving back trading off with a reduction in the number of vehicles the ACaaS has to operate. Presumably, an ACaaS startup will have a nerd in the back room doing calculations with a more detailed model of traffic, and I think this would be a key parameter. Obviously, as you point out elsewhere, as that parameter increases, you run the risk of tipping into two-way congestion, which would also increase the cost of deadheading. But something else to note is that, in this simple model, this parameter is pretty directly correlated to the number of cars that potentially end up somewhere in the urban area through midday. That is, for example, if each autonomous commuter taxi makes one deadhead trip to pick up another commuter, and we assumed that each commuter would have brought one vehicle into the urban area, we've reduced the number of vehicles in the urban area during midday by half. It's very directly (inversely, lol) just a 1/(N+1) relation. At what value of N does two-way congestion really start to become a problem? I haven't the foggiest. Hell, it could even be a non-integer less than one; I have truly no idea.
An important challenge of this model to people who are pro-ACaaS is that they really kind of need to say what sort of N they're expecting, would be okay with, and think is plausible. Else, they need to propose something specific that the model is wrong about that can plausibly make their other claims work. If they're not okay with nonzero N, they better have something good, or we might think they're slipping magic into their imprecise model.
Of course, in the simplest model, we don't super care about congestion in the other direction except to the extent it increases the cost of deadheading. That is, the simplest model is that it was a wide open, completely empty freeway heading back to the suburb, and nobody cares if a bunch of deadheading empty ACaaS are clogging it. One would need more complications in the model to capture anything else.
N is not just limited by cost and two-way congestion considerations; it's also limited by time constraints. If an average round trip takes an hour, for example, you can't make more than a couple within the peak hours. This also leads us to the second question about charging. If you're driving back and forth for N trips for a few hours in the morning, do you need to charge to make it through the rest of your day?
EV owners typically prefer slower charging, as it's cheaper and better for the battery, reducing their lifetime costs (ACaaS operators may also have incentives to just abuse the hell out of their batteries; typical taxis certainly have incentives to abuse the hell out of their cars). Of course, if it's sitting there charging more slowly, it's not making any fares. But if it's lollygagging around in traffic trying not to do anything so as to conserve energy, it's not making any fares either. In this model, there's not many fares to be had at this time, so it's kinda dead time anyway. I think I see three options: 1) Not pay for a spot to park half of the afternoon, just eat the cost of fast charging, then hold up traffic conserving energy, 2) Pay to take up a spot for a while, but get cheaper slower charging, 3) Just drive back out of town to get cheaper slower charging without paying the spot fee.
To flesh out a hopeful possibility for (2), though, as the morning rush tapers off, they could start to duty cycle off for charging. Math would need to be done, but if you need your duty cycle to be Y% through the day, you'll have Y% of your peak capacity available. Hopefully, those nerds in the back will figure out how to get that percentage right so that you have enough charge left in enough tanks to get through the evening peak.
But then, I think the math conclusion is that, during the day, between rush hours, Y% of the autonomous taxis will be roaming for possibly cheap fares (maybe still doing bad energy conservation stuff), whereas (100-Y)% of them will be charging somewhere. So, we won't have peak rush hour quantities of cars on the road all the time throughout the day. Also, even assuming that the entire (100-Y)% of chargers are finding their charge homes in the urban area, that's plausibly still a lot fewer charging parking spaces than would normally be housing the full 100% of peak traffic all day that we currently have. Ya know, if the limit on N will allow it. The hope and promise here over individually-owned vehicles would be that you save on parking, can recoup some costs with deadheading, and even getting some fares on a duty cycle in the afternoon is worth more than having it sit in the parking garage all day while you're working.
Obviously, there are a ton of detailed cost comparisons that would have to be made. But I think that EVs are potentially different from ICEs in that essentially the only sensible model of 'charging' the latter is 'fast charging', at one given price point. I'm sure someone out there will make some models/approximations where they say, "Assume our average charging voltage through the afternoon is V," then proceed to compute duty cycles, cost of charging, impacts on maintenance, expected fares in the slow periods, cost of however many parking/charging spaces they need at that duty cycle, etc.
We'd kinda need to search out the space of at least (N,Y,V). I don't know if there will be any ranges of parameters that work for any models with real-world costs/traffic patterns/etc., and they may all end up with perverse incentives like, "Poke around and hold up traffic all afternoon." But I also kinda don't think I'm comfortable concluding that there is no range of parameters at all where it might make sense. I kinda just think we'd need a more sophisticated model. I also think the most likely conclusion would be, "It does not make sense for ACaaS to grow all the way to the point of providing all of the commuter traffic," and the model would get more complicated still, as one would have to vary the quantity of commuter traffic they think they could capture.
As a note, ChatGPT pulled a number out of its giant inscrutable matrix and estimated that traffic volumes during peak hours are often 30-50% higher than midday, rising above 100% in certain cities like NY/LA/London. I honestly have no other frame of reference in my mind to know if that's a complete fabrication or is in the right order-of-magnitude, but it could give a modeler some start in estimating plausible duty cycles (I mean, not exactly giving us Y, but maybe something like it?). Probably the simplest starting assumption would be that all of that midday traffic is entirely in the urban area, but obviously that's not "correct", and again, one would need a more complicated traffic model.
One final note is that nothing in this simple model has any dynamics. There's no, "Well, A got cheaper, so more people decided to B, so..." It's a purely static model, in line with your scenario.
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