domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
ControlsFreak
1hr 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?"
this is true, for strict definitions of "normal" and strict definitions of "enemy". Al Qaeda was a political enemy, was it not?
...More generally, though, I think you're more or less entirely correct in this case. "Resist the Fascists" signaling is mainly signaling; there is not actually a way to hurt the outgroup much worse than previously without getting in too much trouble, and a lot of the signaling is being driven by at least a subconscious understanding that nothing is actually going to happen.
erwgv3g34
2hr ago
It's hilarious how some websites light up his picture as much as possible in an attempt to make him seem white.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
Normal people don’t usually make memes about murdering their political enemies.
ffbtaw2
2hr ago
I still think the risk of ending up permanently maimed but alive is significantly higher than from taking a bullet to the brain or a hail of bullets.
jkf
2hr ago
You might be thinking of Darrell Edward Brooks Jr -- you will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article, and For Some Reason nobody has heard nearly as much about him deliberately driving his own SUV into a Christmas parade and killing several as they have about the Charlottesville guy. (who killed one person in a hostile crowd of counterprotestors, arguably semi-accidentally)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Turn off airbags, unfasten seatbelts, enjoy.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
I would guess they’re into light rail and even buses.
jkf
2hr ago
I've got a framework that has served me well in which:
- cultural generations are 20 years
- the first and last 5 years of these generations exhibit notable similarities with the adjacent generation, but not quite to the point where they may be usefully considered a separate identity (Xennials = not a thing)
So:
- people born from 1940-1945 are most like standard boomers, but depending on their specific peer group may have more of a pre-war outlook
- people born from 1955-1965 are on a spectrum from boomer --> X outlook (basically optimism --> feeling shafted); 1960 is a good inflection point
- similarly, 1975-1980 exhibits a clear X outlook, and as you move past 1980 you people become much more earnest and hipsterish -- by 1985 you are into core timid millenials by and large.
My test for this hypothesis will be "is 2005-2015 core Zoomer, and what are these people like" -- I've got one in the house, and he & his peers do seem to have a different outlook from his older cousins so far -- COVID will clearly be a defining event for these guys, but it remains to be seen exactly how.
yofuckreddit
2hr ago
Do they really do no advanced filtering before donation? I guess I thought they would for some reason.
Supah_Schmendrick
2hr ago
The most famous version of this kind of attack that I can think of was the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice that left 80+ dead after a guy drove a dozen-ton small semitruck down a beachfront promenade.
Edit - whoops, sniped by @ArjinFerman
TitaniumButterfly
2hr ago
It can definitely lower your iron levels, which is usually a good thing.
TitaniumButterfly
2hr ago
Bus drivers recognize them and - oh yeah no way would violence be allowed.
But with municipal-uber, presumably access cards could be issued to people very cheaply and deactivated temporarily or permanently if abused. Sure someone could use someone else's card but then the person loaning it is putting themselves on the hook which seems fine to me. And all of this is before facial recognition.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3hr ago
Trump is supposedly pro-choice as well. It's not really relevant if the Republican majority and think tanks that select the legislation and judicial appointments for him aren't and he just goes along with whatever they want. It may very well be the case that gay marriage is in less danger from Trump than it would be from a different Republican president, but it seems unlikely to make a big difference.
SkoomaDentist
3hr ago
It looks like this classic low budget Finnish comedy skit from the 90s was really more of a documentary.
Lewis2
3hr ago
The Amish don’t believe that they are the only ones who will be saved, though. Also, perhaps unexpectedly, many of the Amish are very much into genetic testing and diversifying their gene pool. Even though they have historically been careful not to allow marriages between remotely close relatives, enough generations of marrying their fourth and fifth cousins have resulted in a noticeably higher birth defect rate.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3hr ago
Go search "Obergefell" in the text of the decision and you'll see multiple instances of asserting that sure the same arguments work just as well against contraception and gay marriage, but they pinky swear to only use them against abortion.
And if that's not strong enough evidence that the Dobbs decision threatens gay marriage, here's David French arguing it doesn't. But, more seriously, searching Dobbs and Obergefell found a news article on a recent dissent by Sotomayor on the topic in addition to multiple analysis articles pointing out that the Dobbs decision threatens those other rights.
Stellula
3hr ago
Are you thinking of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukesha_Christmas_parade_attack?useskin=vector
I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade.
First case that brought this tactic into "public consciousness" I'm aware of is the Nice truck attack of 2016, it triggered a bunch of copycats to the point where, for a while, any European hearing "vehicle drives into crowd" would have "oh, another Islamist terrorist attack" as his first thought.
Partially it has to do with urban design and crowdedness.
For you to really kill a lot of people you need people who either incredibly packed together or otherwised trapped in some kind of mixed use area where you can get with a large car (preferably a truck). Street festivals are a good target for this kind of thing.
Getting an automatic weapon into some sort of enclosed space where you can gun down trapped people is often easier and enables you to better target some specific group of people, making it a much more attractive option IMO.
If the demand for rides out of the urban center (in the morning) were as high as demand for a ride in, then we'd already see equal movement in both directions.
You can algorithmically optimize things all you want, but in the end, it isn't really an improvement unless the car can find a fare relatively quickly and relatively close by. If it has to park downtown for any period of time, it's spending money rather than making money, and it's likely more money than a private commuter would pay for his car since he'd probably have a lease (and the pay structures of most garages make things even more complicated and expensive). If the car drives around to find fares, picks up a fare outside of downtown, or goes to a lot where it can park for free, it's contributing to traffic. Additionally, the optimization is only concerned with losing the least amount of money when the cars don't have passengers. Minimizing traffic doesn't play into the equation.
Consider the following scenario: A downtown area gets 20,000 commuter vehicles per day, and a garage costs $15/day on average. Assuming demand to leave downtown is minimal until later mid-afternoon, the optimal move is to simply have the cars drive around downtown. Perversely, if the cars are electric or hybrid (which they are usually assumed to be), it's in the interest of the car service to create as much traffic as possible. Since the bulk of the energy consumption only occurs when the cars are actually moving, it's best for the companies to ensure that the cars are stopped as much as possible. If people need to leave downtown during the day, then, well, there aren't enough of them to make it worth it to park the cars somewhere.
Deal with the consequences of. Sitting traffic as a passenger isn't exactly much of an improvement when you're trying to get somewhere.
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