domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
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
6hr 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
6hr 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.
6hr 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
7hr 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.
Grant_us_eyes
7hr ago
I did add alot of prefaces and assumptions to my argument, yes. I personally doubt we'll be seeing functioning, self-driving cars any time soon.
Redot
With the limited amount time that I have recently, playing around with Redot feels like something more doable than slogging through bigger Highspace features I got stuck on, so it looks like this is what I'll be doing until my brain resets and/or I'll have more time to push through the block there. Contrary to @Southkraut's pessimism, it looks like they're pulling through. Last week I took it for a spin and saw that everything seems to work pretty much like with old Godot, so I dusted off some old projects to see what I can do with them. Ages ago I took a GPU programming course, and made a little simulation of a swarm chasing the player, while respecting some basic rules of physics (like collisions with each other). This was still done in Unity, and while it mostly worked, I started running into some performance issues as complexity grew.
Years later GPU programming is still a niche, but it looks like there's more experience around it, and I can strip-mine other projects for insights. Specifically what I'd like to do is see if I can adapt this into Redot, and push my old simulation to really high numbers (aiming for millions, go big or go home).
@Southkraut, you mentioned you probably wouldn't have time over the past week, but I'll traditionally ask how are you doing anyway. Also, last week you said:
Looking back upon my Unity project and comparing it to my current Godot/Stride iterations, I am struck by one fundamental difference that wasn't even intentional. My old project is primarily a physics simulation, and whatever abstract logic or behavior happens is a consequence of physical entities interacting. In the new version, everything is abstract entities that possibly project into the physical realm. Huh. I'll need to do some more thinking about this.
Can you elaborate on this. I think I know what you mean, but I don't know what consequences, if any, it would have on picking an Engine, for example.
Also, congrats on the new job! I recall you posted about being burned out with the old one a while back. I've been in a similar position not long ago, so I'm glad to hear you took matters into your own hands, and hope the new job is a better fit.
roystgnr
7hr ago
It's not a discrete "rapid shutdown mode", it's just the smooth Gompertz-Makeham curve. Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).
Come up with a medical revolution that cures 50% of death? You'd think that would double lifespans but no, it just buys everyone 8 more years. Exponentials are wild.
AverageMinimax
7hr ago
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers
So it seems that they are effectively "Just Bikes" instead of "Not Just Bikes", right?
Astranagant
7hr ago
This is exactly wrong in my experience, my social group are late-20s early-30s, and the least intelligent ended up in labouring and other outdoorsy jobs and as a consequence aged way faster than those who hid from the sun in an office all day.
AvocadoPanic
7hr ago
Is buying blood of teenage boys better than other 'fluids'?
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
8hr ago
That I didn't know.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
Johnson is notable insofar as he spent his 20s and 30s sacrificing his health to make a bunch of money. And now he's burning that money to regain health and youth and is, through absurd amounts of effort, at least partially successful.
Judging by the pictures in Time, he looks like the biggest fitness freak in the world, which he probably is. He looks about 10 years younger and will probably be one of these old guys that have a crystal-clear memory and can put on their socks standing up until they keel over in their nineties.
Which is not a bad thing at all, but it's a very long way from immortality.
arsv
8hr ago
Getting into doomer territory, ... They (the car makers) might also get public transit banned
Not sure why he's making a distinction between self-driving cars and public transit. Self-driving cars are a form of public transit. They are not private vehicles, they owned and operated in a way that's quite similar to busses. In a way, a self-driving car is just a better bus.
There are issues that are specific to self-driving cars due to their personal nature compared to conventional mass transit, which are mostly related to privacy. It's much easier to track you in your "personal bus" than it is in a bus with 20+ other people. But he barely touches on it, and also, conventional mass transit would be quickly losing much of the advantage in that respect anyway due to technological progress in surveillance technology.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
homophobic joke about it not being blood deleted
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
This video popped up in my feed and I hated it. It's not wholly bad, but NJB is arguing in bad faith, using the good old Gish Gallop to overwhelm the viewer. Here's how I would structure a movie about self-driving cars:
- Adding an auto-pilot to your own car will not change the cities much, so it's not really a qualitative change
- To replace private car ownership with a shared pool of autonomous cars, they have to be cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. We'll examine the best-case outcome later, but here's why reaching it is a tall order:
- it's hard to make them cheap: blah
- it's hard to make them safe and fast: blah
- it's hard to keep them clean: blah
- it's hard to make the ubiquitous: blah
- But let's imagine autonomous cars are cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. How will our cities be reshaped by them?
- since cars drive at inhuman speeds, they need a grade-separated road network that excludes pedestrians and drivers
- since they are ubiquitous, this road network has to reach all destinations to be safe
- since they are cheap, this road network can't be built underground and will need to be based on the existing road network
- etc.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
9hr ago
If you follow the logical conclusion of the above, this is even better - you can have the luxury of your own personal vehicular conveyance without the need to actually park it nearby your destination! Simply roll up, get out, and tell your car to either keep driving or find the nearest parking location. Tap a button on your phone, summon your car to wherever you ended up. All of a sudden, the need for immeadiate parking is killed, and the state mandated and required need for parking that drives current urban development has no leg to stand on, and we can all go back to the wonderful idyllic standard of walkable town centers of the early 20th century. Yay.
NJB's video is terrible, but he makes at least a couple good points:
- you'll still want your car to arrive quickly, so this means that at rush hour cars will have to drive downtown en-masse and either find some parking or keep driving around the block
- while you won't need a parking space next to your house, the demand for roads will only increase: instead of having to use a school bus or their parent's car the kids now will be able to drive to school, to the mall, to their friend's house etc.
Bryan Johnson has actually done it, both him towards his father and his son towards him. I'm actually really interested in this, because people are already getting my relatively pretty healthy blood for free (which is good), and I'd love to be able to use it to improve my dad's health.
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!
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