Promises are like shit: everybody makes them and most stink badly.

> What does location have to do with this discussion?

They get the degree in USA and return to a place where it's valued more.

> Sorry but that's horseshit.

The thing is, advanced degrees are preferred overseas for even non-R&D positions. It's not about the number of R&D jobs.

There are stupid regulations in our neighborhood holding us back. I'd rather not pay for a battery pack, just the panels. It would cost us roughly half as much. But we also want to use our OWN power if the grid goes down, which it does often, but regulations forbid that: we must buy a battery pack to have that ability.

I realize a battery pack gives us off-hour power if the grid goes down, but since it's only a spare, we don't care that it would only work during the day. It would be enough to keep our food frozen and charge our phones. (Because normally our excess power would go into the grid, the power company could have central batteries to store that power for off-hours.)

Many suspect it's power co's bribing these restrictions in place, not regulation by "devious socialists".

I always thought most Masters and PhD's were foreign students intending on returning home after they graduate. Other nations value those degrees relative to 4-year-degree much more than the USA does, for good or bad.

Big degrees are a status symbol and corporate bragging point in many countries. "We have more PhD's than our competitor" works as a selling point in business-to-business transactions.

US companies generally see them as overqualified for the actual positions they have available, meaning they'd have to pay them more to do rather mundane things, like upgrading their network, and not inventing network protocols or whatnot.

Most work is not cutting edge R&D. Sure, their R&D departments will have advanced degrees, but that's usually a small percent of a typical co's staff.

un-Hinged.

No, because our porn laptops will get eaten.

The idea that a shared taxi fleet would be more profitable than private cars seems very dubious. I would guess there would only be about 1/10 as many taxis as there needs to be private cars so they would have to somehow cost 10x as much as a private car.

The average person will be able to rent a self-driving pickup when/if they need it. This completely removes their pathetic excuse to buy monstrosities that are only used to commute to work.

The gardener will most likely own their vehicle as they use it 100% of the time (even when sitting there holding their equipment, it is being used). There may have to be special licenses so that the private vehicle can be operated on public roads, and it will be self-driving as well.

It should not be hard to set up luxury status-symbol self-driving taxi service. People will be in awe as you arrive in the self-driving Rolls which costs ten times what the Teslas that all the plebes ride in.

As you point out, they are already using minivans when there are few passengers.

However the enormous expense of the human driver is removed if it is self-driving, that is the big difference, even compared to a minivan.

Cities build transit in rings around the city nowadays. See Paris and London, and many others.

I do believe self-driving taxis will be extremely useful to deliver people from/to the train station, and will be very good addition to public transit. It is possible it will lead to the transit stations being further apart and much greater speed between stations, I'm not sure if that is a win or not.

This is a nonsense fantasy idea from Musk. The taxi fleets are NOT going to be individually privately-owned vehicles.

The obvious reason is that destruction of a car is pretty devastating to a private owner. However it is just a line-item to a company that owns a fleet of them.

Robotaxis will also be able to store themselves in very dense parking garages if they become reliable enough that we don't need humans to be able to get into them while stored. This will not work however if there is some requirement to be "fair" about who's car get used to provide a ride, or if the private owner is allowed access to it.

I remember noticing such in their cable channel, but not so much the print edition.

That would be ironic if a sizeable asteroid proved likely to hit earth, but we are just slightly short of enough nukes to deflect it because we flattened Iran's.

Humanity's last Doh!

The prior crew used it to spy on shapely swimmers.