You can't put your house on public land or in the middle of a road.

Cars get in the way of anybody else using a location, *including other cars!!!!*. Yet for some reason any attempt to move them out of the way causes insane illogical reactions such as yours. Very sad and maybe the underlying cause of the obesity epidemic. The fear of having to walk is unbelievable and is warping people's minds.

It does seem very likely that the amount of CO2 you produce for the rest of your life is greater than the amount produced if you dropped dead right now and decomposed. And if you always include the decomposition after death, living longer obviously generates more CO2.

I'm unsure about the rate, especially if nothing is done to slow the decomposition. Possibly you will produce CO2 and methane much quicker for a few days.

Serious note: CO2 from living sources that get all their energy from plants or animals who eat plants are not a problem, as this is a short-term closed cycle. But then you don't get to make funny jokes.

Having a large metal machine occupying space that could be used for other purposes is restricting people's freedom to use that space. But somehow "freedom" only applies to those large metal machines.

It's obviously lack of walking. People in America were eating piles of (possibly worse) junk food in the 50's and 60's, and everybody watched TV for hours a day, and way fewer went to the gym. But people walked to work or the train station or the park, and kids walked to school or at least the bus stop. Today just looking the population of places people walk (NYC) should make it obvious. You think NYC does not have lots and lots of junk food?

Unfortunately people are so in love with their cars they refuse to see it. The reaction to even the most mild attempt to restrict the ability to drive your personal car as close as possible to any location is pretty telling.

Actually your decomposition produces more carbon dioxide and methane.

I live in rural Maine and it was taking 7-9 days, now down to 5-7. Same day or even next-day delivery here would really change life.

Is it possible to use the patients own stem cells? Would that solve the immunosuppressment problems?

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.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.