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Comment Re:Pedestrian or vehicle accidents? (Score 5, Informative) 207

[ Disclaimer: I'm a Tesla driver, since 2018, and have FSD on my car ]

Tesla's FSD and Waymo's approach are wildly different, enough so that you can't really compare them. The biggest two differences are: 1) Musk's cheap, so Teslas only use cameras to figure out what's going on around them; Waymos use cameras, ultrasonic sensors, radar, and lidar; 2) Waymos are only deployed on specific roads and streets that have been very heavily surveyed and Waymos have been trained on.

I trust Tesla's FSD about as far as I can throw it, and while it's been helpful and prevented an accident or two for me when I've been distracted, it's basically a glorified lane assist and cruise control. I'd not hesitate to fall asleep in the back of a driverless Waymo.

Comment Re: Just stop ... (Score 1) 122

Latest estimate I could find is that in San Francisco alone, Lyft gives something like 170,000 rides. Every day.

People forget that California is a huge market. There's a reason why when California changes its emission standards for vehicles, large automakers don't just go "well, fuck you, I'm not going to sell cars in California." It's a market that is extremely painful to walk away from, and virtually no major company has done that (two exceptions, before someone "well actually"s me: Firearms companies and insurance companies. But those market segments are meaningfully different -- insurance companies were simply seeing a bad market given fires and earthquakes, and California wants firearm companies to not do business in the state).

I'll acknowledge that Uber and Lyft did threaten to leave the state right before Proposition 22 was passed, giving them legal cover to continue to treat their employees unfairly. I suspect they'll threaten to do that again. They will not. I ain't losing sleep over that.

Comment Re:Just stop ... (Score 1) 122

Yeah, that's true. And as a Lyft customer, that's a huge concern of mine. I live in the San Francisco area, so deep in California, and I worry that at some point Lyft will respond to this by moving all the cars and drivers they use to give people like me rides to Nevada.

The wait time for a driver to come from Nevada is going to suck

Comment Re:He acts like he's not the problem. (Score 2) 38

(generic gender) dude, have you even worked at a company before?

It's incredibly common to have people work at a place despite despising the CEO. I suspect that's actually the default. In the last 20 years, I've worked in exactly one place where I liked or admired the CEO, and a bunch of places, including my current employer, where I was fairly allergic to the CEO.

Comment Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score 1) 200

(Note: I'm against the profligate financial support the US is providing Israel, for a variety of reason)

The problem with the idea of "stop sending billions to Israel" is that it's not actually that we send, you know, truckloads of cash to Israel for it to spend wherever it wants. Most of our aid to Israel is in the form of arms and equipment that is specifically to be purchased from US companies -- so most of that money actually ends up staying in the US, and if you were to take that money off the table, then several large US contractors -- and thousands of employees -- would then feel that pinch.

(Not that that makes it a bad idea, mind you)

Comment Re:Decreased obesity (Score 1) 132

Y'know, it feels intuitive to assume that going through some sort of Massively Traumatic Event (e.g. WW2 or Great Depression) would have depressed survivability, but apparently that's -- again, totally counter-intuitively -- not necessarily supported by studies.

For example, this study comparing Holocaust Survivors lifespans to control group in Israel demonstrated that while Holocaust survivors had more chronic health conditions, "mean age at death was significantly higher in the survivor group compared with the control group."

I've seen some hypothesis that these sorts of massive events sadly cull the population, on average leaving a population that will actually be hardier than otherwise, which ... both makes sense and is a bummer.

Comment Re:China is terrible (Score 1) 55

Technically, but I think it's still an important point to make, you don't actually need approval from the authorities to drive a car, you just need it to drive a car on public streets. If you want to take your car to a private raceway, or if you have a large enough property where you could drive a car on it, you don't need any sort of approval for that.

So that's meaningfully different from this kind of rule, where you can't even fly a drone on your own private property.

Comment Re:Oh look. (Score 4, Insightful) 347

(Disclaimer: I'm an Israeli, though rather opposed to the genocidal attempt at ethnic cleansing currently being conducted by my country. That said, keep that in mind in terms of potential bias in this post).

It's not precisely correct to say that the US has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel. it's a bit more of a 'closed ecosystem' than that -- the vast majority of financial support the US has provided Israel has been in the form of weapons and munitions, which Israel has then purchased from US companies. In other words, while in some respects this absolutely is financial and military support of Israel, in addition to that it's also a vast transfer of tax revenues from us (I'm a tax-paying US citizen these days) to the military-industrial complex and more specifically American companies.

So most of this money has stayed in the US, it's just been transferred from the people and their representative government to commercial entities.

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