domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4hr ago
I used to have the same view, but then I started traveling more. My backpack is now my mobile office and it works fine.
It is a tradeoff, I acknowledge that.
ControlsFreak
4hr 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.)
Skulldrinker
4hr ago
Trump was Hitler and we got Wokeist nonsense.
Wokist nonsense was plenty present before Trump. I suppose it was juuuuuuust sub-normie, but anyone at least moderately online was either a participant in it or deeply hated it.
Lizzardspawn
4hr ago
I think that we should create a CDS - car derangement syndrome, similar to TDS. To me it seems that those are the types of people that just plain hate cars and are latching on everything to make the anti car case.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4hr ago
His hypothetical involves no speed control.
Getting into doomer territory, car makers might... increase speed limits to ridiculous levels
fmaa
4hr ago
As someone without a car living in a city with functional public transport, a big feature of cars I'm envious of is their function as a mobile personal space. A car doesn't just get you places, it's a tiny room you can bring with you. People frequently use this as both temporary and permanent storage, and imo there are emotional benefits to spending your commute in a place that's yours.
Losing this is by far the biggest tradeoff I see.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
4hr ago
Yeah, the idea is that new blood is less polluted. You're dumping all of that on whoever gets your blood, but I think if you're in that situation, that's the least of your worries.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
5hr ago
But this doesn't scale, does it? How many people can achieve amazing wealth?
erwgv3g34
5hr ago
That luxury has been reserved for the rich ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See "When Did Healthy Communities Become Illegal?" by Charles Tuttle.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
In fact, self driving cars should save urbanism by getting rid of all those horrid parking lots and parking garages. Infill replacing surface parking will bring up density and also close the gap between existing businesses that are surrounded by seas of parking.
Except all the cars in those lots are now on the road, with nobody in them. The streets are the new parking lots. This wouldn't be a good thing.
faceh
5hr ago
I think it presents an interesting calculation though.
It makes it more palatable to sacrifice your 20's and 30's in the pursuit of wealth (rather than social life, sex, etc. etc.) and then, once you achieve amazing wealth, spend some portion of that to get yourself back to the vitality of your 20's (or close to it) and make up for your lost time, with a LOT more money than you'd usually have.
If money can buy back some time and health, it makes it much more palatable to sacrifice those earlier on.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
I already addressed this, but, aside from economic concerns, the biggest downside to this idea is that it would massively increase traffic. With few exceptions, cars only contribute to traffic when someone is actually trying to get from Point A to Point B. When I drive to work, I'm creating traffic between my house and my office, but after that my car is just sitting in the parking lot all day. If cars are a service I'm start creating traffic as soon as I summon the car, which now has to get to my house from wherever it is. And once I get to the office it's unlikely that there is going to be anyone here who happens to need a ride, so it now has to create more traffic while it either finds a passenger or heads back to home base.
Now consider a typical urban rush hour. All the cars that would normally just disappear into garages for the day are now driving around looking for fares. Or driving back out to lots in the suburbs. Now, in addition to the typical morning rush, we have to contend with a corresponding late-morning rush that consists entirely of empty vehicles. Imagine what it would be like if even a quarter of the cars that are currently parked were out on the street and you have an idea of what this would be like.
faceh
5hr ago
ALLEGEDLY it helps clear out toxins, heavy metals, and other 'forever' chemicals that the body can't otherwise process.
I believe it.
Also supposed to help with blood pressure, which anecdotally seems to be the case for me (I give blood, sometimes double red, on a very regular basis).
jeroboam
5hr ago
Supposedly it's good for you, although that seems awfully convenient doesn't it? What if the research showed the opposite effect. I doubt it would get published.
The primary mechanism for benefits would appear to be reducing iron levels in males. But it also apparently burns 600 calories, so it's a great way to stay trim for the summer bikini season ladies!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
This would be solved by introducing a huge amount of Cars-As-A-Service. I believe Elon has already published this idea on the Tesla website.
The idea would be that very few people outside of enthusiasts actually own a car. Everyone else simply pays $50/month (or whatever the price point is) to have on demand access to a Tesla. It's not an uber pool where you share, it's a private car that carries you to/from anywhere even if that anywhere is very far away. You get it in, get to your destination, get out, and the thing just flies off to whomever needs it next. Utilitarian all the way, no "joy of driving" here.
This would do a lot in the way of reducing the need for parking across the board in urban centers because most of these cars would never actually "park" in the sense we think of today. If they aren't moving to serve customers, they're self-refueling or limping back to some sort of service factory for repairs and what not.
The couple tradeoffs I can think of;
- People still want to own cars because cars are emotional attachments and status symbols. They're number 2 in this category besides houses.
- Privacy issues start to become far more real. 100% chance trip telemetry - associated with an account that includes some sort of identifiable info - is constantly logged. A car is downstream from a horse and a horse = freedom to move. The price and convenience tradeoff is for the customer to make - unless human piloted cars are banned from urban centers. And this is the complexity of the system; for it to work, there may be a fundamental personal choice tradeoff. That's the harder barrier to overcome. Noise pollution etc. are all details that can be worked out later.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
I think that if autonomous cars are ever widely adopted, the idea that they can also be a valet service will die pretty quickly. Imagine a typical Wal-Mart on a typical day. The vast majority of people park in an available space and walk to the store, then walk back out to their car. Now imagine if everyone were dropped off at the entrance. Now imagine if everyone summoned their car to the entrance as soon as they hit the checkout line. Now imagine both happening at once, all day, every day. The road in front of the entrance would be a nightmare. Now imagine that instead of the dropoff area being a private road with a large, adjacent lot, it's a public through street where the nearest parking is blocks away, and the cheapest parking is miles away. Imagine what an already busy downtown street would look like if 500 office workers all summoned their cars to pick them up at 5 after 5.
This is the kind of idea that sounds good when you assume the current traffic environment stays the same and you're the only one doing it. It changes greatly when everyone is doing it. If autonomous vehicles are ever widely adopted, I imagine there will be legislation prohibiting deadheading, with possible limited exceptions for people with disabilities.
veqq
5hr ago
Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization is precisely about this. Here's a book review which answers your question: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-energy-and-civilization-by
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5hr ago
A partial explanation that is boring and, therefore, higher in explanatory value;
Some of these PMC white women simply enjoying politicizing their sexual fetishes. Remember when Fifty Shades of Grey was crowned the king of "Mommy Porn?" The oft cited statistic (maybe internet levels of quality, however) is that 80% of women have entertained some sort of submissive sexual fantasy. If you get to transform this into a publicly acceptable display of political "outrage" it's like getting to partially entertain your fantasy every day and get positive feedback for it.
I know this is flows to/from the deeper waters of The Last Psychiatrist, but I am earnest in my belief that it explains some of the hyperbolic emotional broadcasting. I'll emphasize, however, that it's partial at best. Not everything derives from our naughty thoughts and childhood experience (fuck you, Freud).
2020, the year COVID hit: 906 deaths
2021: 1,355 deaths
2022, when the conservative government ended lockdowns: 10,301 deaths
Your comparison is hopelessly confounded by the fact that Australia, unlike the overwhelming majority of countries which enforced lockdowns, is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders, which has far more explanatory power in explaining the country's low rate of Covid deaths than does the strictness of their lockdowns. It's true that Australia ended lockdowns in 2022. It's also true that 2022 was the year the country first reopened its borders after Covid. I guess you could say that these are "deaths caused by a conservative policy" - but are you seriously proposing that Australia ought to have kept its borders shut to immigrants and tourists permanently? All to prevent a few thousand old people dying from Covid every year? A significant proportion of whom, if not an actual majority, would have died of flu or pneumonia within the period if Covid hadn't got them?
I don't think I've ever seen a source that listed less than 90% immunity from the vaccine - what exactly is your standard here?
The vaccines were very effective at preventing serious illness, but practically useless at preventing transmission. Users on this forum have been gaslit for years with politicians and representatives from the pharmaceutical industry claiming after the fact "we never said that the vaccines would prevent transmission!" but we were there and yes they did and we have receipts.
7 million Covid deaths in 4 years VS 42 million AIDS death in 40 years
Not a like with like comparison. By a very wide margin, the vast majority of people who died of AIDS were otherwise healthy adults or young adults between the ages of 15-49 (https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids). By contrast, 75% of people who died from Covid were aged 65+, and more than 50% were older than 75 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge). For a very high proportion of these people, if Covid hadn't gotten them in the last four and a half years, something else would have. Thus your comparison fails from a QALY perspective. A young American man in his twenties dropping dead from an infectious disease is unusual; an immunocompromised 85-year-old dying of a respiratory illness is not even news.
Dean
6hr ago
And I approve! It was meant to be a joke, but I realize now it might have seemed a bit mean-spirited, which I apologize for.
It's actually as short as it is because I cut off a bit of a nerd spiel. One of my favored commentators for analyzing video games (specifically Elden Ring) was- for some unfathomable reason- only posting on Tumblr. It was just that level of 'niche access' and 'you have to really be dedicated to this topic' that I now associated with Tumblr, for its highs and its lows.
5434a
6hr ago
Isn't donating blood supposed to be good for your health too? Within limits, obviously.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
6hr ago
Another part of the answer is status.
While smartphones may be counted as a necessity, you will be perfectly fine getting a $200 Chinese phone, yet iPhones have a huge demand. Same pattern with many, many other goods.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr ago
It all feels fairly high-decoupling to me, which was a surprise, as I'd assumed it was a solidly blue tribe rather than grey tribe show.
Once again, there's no grey tribe - there's just a particular disaffected part of the blue tribe.
Grant_us_eyes
6hr ago
I assumed he was being sensible and complaining about the largest sources of high-speed cars - IE, interstate traffic. Hence, you focus your sound-mitigation efforts there.
Off interstate/highway, you simply use speed control to keep the sound down. Perfect? No. But hardly the dystopic landscape the video likely paints.
There would likely be a lot fewer of them. Instead of owning a car people could use cars as a service.
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