trymas

ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.

Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.

Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.

Seeding superlogical wouldn’t make a dent to his “10 digit bank account”. Probably not much more expensive than airplane hobby.

He has the freedom of choice, like no other.

I wouldn't want to be a kid, elderly, sick, blind, disabled in USA.

> There’s no point spending money on something that only 15% of the population will even consider using

Induced demand.

Though seriously you had everything: trains, trams/streetcars, great towns - now say it's impossible (after 80-100 years of lobbying and crazy subsidies).

I bet if "right" startup popped up that by accident would be public transport adjacent - atitude would shift on a dime. I saw a bunch of articles about pedestrian accessibility improvements, due to delivery bots[0]. Apparently it may be easier to improve things for businesses instead of people.

[0] first article I've found: https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/could-delivery-robots-hel...

Cars are the very bottom, by very considerable margin. You need to prove otherwise.

Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)?

As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact.

I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.

But when it’s non-car transit suddenly it’s too much money, not profitable, nimby, etc.

When cars enjoy fuel subsidies , (mostly) free roads and endless expansion.

Update: some car brains over the world decided that even bike lanes are an issue. When bike lanes have bigger throughput, costs don’t even make a dent compared to roads, maintenance is negligible, etc.

Genuinely and not trolling.

Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts.

My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens.

If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM.

Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car.

With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.

How about if autonomous cars would be bigger, so from same apartment block people could ride-share to same office downtown?

What if those cars would be on rails - imagine how simpler the autonomous part would be? Lower friction and fuel costs savings will be a bonus.

/s on my part obviously.

Though my bet would be, if USA will go ultra protectionist in this regard - in 10-20 years most world will run Chinese LLMs and hardware for this purpose.

I own a physical book, I don't own the IP of it. As long as I own the book - I can freely read it's contents 100 years from now.

If I own[1] DRM protected ebook on a Kindle. Tomorrow I may not have that book on my Kindle (and I will not be refunded, because fuck the plebs) or may not be able to open it even if I have the file, that I bought with my money.

[1] I paid money for it, just like the physical one.

IMHO it’s a matter of time until we (consumers) will get the hardware (maybe coupled maybe even more novel techniques). Though I expect it will take another 10 years or more.

I don’t remember the exact details, because I have watched it long time ago, but they don’t need an exact match. Actually it’s more scary - if your distant cousin has DNA “in the system” - you are in it too.

This 1M DNAs may “help” match an order of magnitude more people.

- I don’t use most social media and even if I did I don’t follow (and definitely do not want to) hierarchies of various corporations;

- Twitter is hostile platform (thanks xcancel);

- Who the hell is Tibo? And to be brief I don’t want to care who he is.

I was trying to figure out status with Fable couple weeks ago, checked their news and blog pages - nothing. Was given some links to twitter threads about it instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

Also, what is HIPPA?

Older post, but Uncle Bob seems unhinged.

They had the buffer! She’s top level medical doctor with top health insurance for her family, shelling out who knows how many thousands of dollars a month for it.

Those payments must have covered them, but they were denied instead.

American health insurance is a total scam.

UPDATE: also a minor proof in the days of wealth accumulation to the top 0.00001%, that (seemingly) wealthy Californian doctors and entrepreneurs are much much closer to bankruptcy than many of us could think.

IMHO it's not healthy for anyone. From kids, to retired pensioners not knowing what to do with their time, to profesionalls doing linkedin "hacking" and "networking" on twitter, etc.

2. Continuing from first point - see linked graph in parent comment. Light rail has an order of magnitude capacity per lane compared to cars. For 20 lane highway you'll need 2 lines of light rail or 1 lane of "heavy rail" (as per graph). Insane difference!

3. There's a reason "one more lane" is a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...

Current situation with prevalent "private travel", i.e. cars in USA (and probably "the west" overall??) IS due to corporate and political interests.

Car manufacturers, "big oil", road construction companies, politicians collecting taxes from cars (fuel sales, road use, cars themselves[0] and car parking), banks leasing money to buy and maintain cars, insurance, landlords owning car parks, etc.

They are very very interested that private car ownership wouldn't go away and are fighting it tooth and nail. You need to own multiple cars per household spend thousands on leasing, hundreds on parking, to just go to work and of course there's fuel.

Though somewhere like London, Paris or Tokyo - why would you want to do daily commute in a car? If you are a billionaire, driven by personal driver in your Bentley or Land Rover - sure, but otherwise metro is cheaper by an order of magnitude and I'd bet often times much faster too. In those places rich and heads of state take trams and metros.

I probably not need to remind you that "richest man" lobbied some failing projects to upsell his car sales, instead of allowing high speed rail to be developed.

[0] this of course depends from country to country and from state to state.

IMHO it's a bit moot to delve into extremes. Average car occupancy is around 1.5 passengers. I'd bet that such number is far from average for average bus/train/tram/metro. I also probably won't make a mistake stating that "Average car" in USA is either a very big SUV or even bigger "truck" (which probably has a footprint as half of a bus). You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.

I also thought that there will be reply like yours, though you answered your own problem:

> To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.

Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones. I am not from USA and seemingly prevalent single use zoning[1] is very foreign to me. It all comes down to efficient urbant planning.

[1] correct me if I am wrong on this.