13thLetter

Interesting, thank you very much for that link.

I gotta say, though... Back in the day, I was really interested in skeptic culture, which at that point was focused on debunking UFO sightings. Often, airline pilots were the ones who reported UFOs. And the pilots' drone reports in that newspaper article really feel familiar to the old UFO reports in their vagueness and impossibility to confirm, without useful radar information or photographs. This one in particular set off screaming alarm bells for me:

"In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone with a 10-to-15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration."

10-to-15 foot wingspan? 5,500 feet up? Really? And nobody could track down this enormous mystery aircraft operating high above one of the most tightly controlled airspaces in the world and almost colliding with an airliner?

Of course, none of this says that a drone and an airplane couldn't get into a fatal collision at some point -- it's a serious danger we should consider ways to avoid -- but there's just something about these reports that feels terribly off.

The article states that there were "several recent close calls involving remote-controlled drones and commercial aircraft" but provides no details. Anyone have links to more information?

I've heard of an issue, singular, with a NYC company flying drones too high and into controlled airspace, but wasn't aware that there had been any genuine close encounters between a plane and a drone.

It's great that this may soon be resolved once and for all -- assuming the Supreme Court doesn't put the brakes on -- but it's nightmarish that it has been dragging on since, literally, 2005. We've got to find some way to speed the legal system up; that might make it so you don't have to be Google to win an important case, too.

I have to wonder if this "hack" would be so enthusiastically complimented for its cleverness were it not expressing such a popular opinion.

> The producers also admire the hack.

The producers know that if they publicly complained they would be torn apart on social media and in the press.

If that definition is so widely open to interpretation that people with opposing views can't even talk to each other about it without misunderstandings, perhaps we shouldn't use that definition. Let's stick to the dictionary definition instead.

I'm sorry, but according to whom? Not the dictionary, or Wikipedia.

Yes. And that's also the only thing that stops China, Russia, and Europe from targeted killings in the United States.

The original comment suggests that it quite definitely is a trope.

(Which is fine, of course. But let's not kid ourselves that we're breaking media stereotypes that were gone years ago.)

> If "ballsy" is a positive description and you literally don't have balls, then it can be seen as obliquely ruling you out from ever really behaving in that way.

Well, lots of things "can be seen" in lots of different ways; that doesn't speak to how reasonable such behavior is. If you said Merry Christmas to me, I "could see" it as religious bigotry, were I so inclined.

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln..."

Is it necessary to bring it up every time he's mentioned anywhere, as has happened in this comments section?

> Yes, he's presumably trying to be lighthearted and cute and speak in a way that might connect with reluctant colleagues. But it's still awfully condescending.

He said that literally sixty years ago. Is every historical figure who didn't have the good fortune to live in our modern era of tolerance to be disavowed?

If you don't mind the endemic poverty and lack of basic human rights, of course.

But what if I find "br" inappropriate?

> I'm not sure that there is a "high ground" for complicated issues like this.

Well... yes, there is? In a situation where the facts are reasonably clear, such as this one, the "high ground" would be the one that's most in alignment with those facts.

Global poverty is both complicated, and isn't as bad as it used to be. There's no need to pick one or the other.

> Here the idea is that Seattle would run its own voucher program to subsidize rents for low-income people.

The problem with subsidy programs like that is that the rents then simply go up by the amount of the subsidy.

> Back to the original point of the article it is important that international standards limiting such devastating weapons be enacted and enforced.

One of the reasons I'm skeptical about the importance of this is, I guess I still don't understand what the nightmare scenario is. You call these weapons "devastating" and say that they will lead to even more death and suffering than currently existing weapons. How? An autonomous robot with a gun can't kill you any more dead than a human with a gun, and as Assad and Putin have demonstrated the lack of robots didn't keep them from just sending humans instead.

And what I'm saying is that people -- real people, not some unnamed "person" from some unspecified country or culture who may exist at some point in the future -- are already turning to violence as a solution, without the need for robots. Bashir Assad doesn't have killer robots and neither does Vladimir Putin and neither do the mullahs of Iran, but somehow they're managing.

It's hard not to think that a lot of the theatrical upset about "killer robots" is because these are weapons mostly deployed by the United States and a few other Western nations against opponents who don't have a real military defense against them. When you can't respond with warfare, there's always lawfare.

(Cynical, perhaps, but if you watch the UN human rights council for even five minutes cynicism seems quite appropriate.)

Are you saying that human intelligence agencies would never go after innocent people and human military forces would never carry out violent collective punishment against a civilian population? Think carefully...

There's this weird blind spot in the robot weapons debate where we shudder in fear of robots committing acts that are already being committed in job lots by humans every day. We don't need machines to be inhumane! The problem is not weapons, the problem is human beings choosing to do bad things, and scapegoating robots will do absolutely nothing to fix that.

> Radical greens are not really that powerful.

But then why did Germany shut down all its nuclear power plants, plants which already existed and were running without major problems?

Radical greens are not powerful in the sense of having direct political power, but they are extremely powerful in that the radical green memeplex (nuclear is bad, GMOs are bad, pollution is getting worse, recycling is a moral obligation, humanity is generally a blight on the planet) is hardened conventional wisdom in most, if not all, Western nations.

It won't "pop" because that's not how economics works.

If the alarmists are correct and peak fossil fuels is just around the corner, then after the peak the cost of fossil fuels will gradually go up until alternatives -- alternatives that we know about and can make use of relatively quickly -- make more economic sense. At some point, certain sources of oil will become economically viable which aren't now. At a higher point, it will make more sense to create synfuels, or switch to natural gas, or to build more solar or wind plants and all-electric cars. Will this be economically worse than just using cheap fossil fuels? Yes (assuming that the pricey energy doesn't motivate breakthrough technology such as fusion power or really good solar.) Will the world end or even change dramatically? No.

Heck, it's an insane, absurd speculation, but maybe at some point energy will become so expensive we'll even come to our senses, stop listening to Greenpeace, and build nuclear plants to use that 10,000 years of uranium. Weirder things have happened.

There's also the problem that if your birth rate is below replacement your population gets old and shrinks and dies. This is a bad thing in the long term, and getting out of that situation is turning into a major challenge worldwide. We need to be very careful that we haven't swung this pendulum way too far in the wrong direction.

> I honestly wonder if people would be so dismissive of this if they were subjected to the same levels of harassment that some people are getting.

As the Pew link posted earlier pointed out, men get harassed more than women on the internet. So, looks like the answer is yes.

It's not the articles's fault that it wasn't about a topic that interests you.

There is no reason whatsoever to imagine such a correlation. Despite the standard narrative, it really is possible to be wrong about things for reasons besides racism!

And perhaps the ability to go wherever you want, whenever you want, in comfort, as opposed to having to wait for a bus or ride a bicycle in the snow, is worth more to the people in the aggregate than a little extra space saved by not parking cars. You're assuming everyone has the same preferences that you do.

(And anyway, since we're talking autonomous vehicles here, you could park them together in central locations and then even the space argument mostly goes away.)

Just from looking around here, it appears they found it via the link from Hacker News. :(

Perhaps people will decide that the flexibility and comfort of private vehicles, especially in a context like the one described where they create much less noise and pollution, is worth them taking up a little more space.

It's easy to fall into the trap of deciding that buses/bicycles are somehow morally better (or worse) than private cars. This is not so -- we should dispassionately judge the tradeoffs instead, ideally with an eye towards allowing individual people to make the choices that fit their needs best.