I should first note that I'm a big fan of waymo and want autonomous to succeed generally.
I take both waymo's and lyft/uber all the time in sf and waymo's are way slower. I'd estimate it at 10-15% slower. Once the novelty of a waymo wears off you realize that they drive like a high anxiety teenager and going 15 mph on a 15 mph road, coming to gentle full stop at every stop sign, and being very tentative on turns and passing people all add up to a very slow ride.
The calmness is a major selling point for me, personally. Beyond just the safety aspect, I can't count how many times I've gotten nauseous from Uber and taxi drivers swerving and accelerating/stopping abruptly, often for no actual speed gain.
Cars of all kinds, really. But It seems to be more common in either crappy old gas cars or Teslas. I know Teslas have weird brake settings, but every ride I've experienced this has definitely been from aggressive and reckless driving.
Kidding but not kidding. Easily half my Uber rides have been legit scary. Yellow cabs only slightly better.
How does Waymo do for cleanliness and odor? That would be another selling point vs regular Uber/Lyft and many yellow cabs. These days they all seem to douse the interior with cheap cologne.
I stopped using Lyft after two close calls with drivers who must have faked their papers. One Lyft drive ran a red light into a postal truck at an otherwise empty intersection causing the front to fall off, like that Australian ship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
Stopping at a stop sign isn't just stopping at a stop sign. The way you pull up to it conveys a rough picture of your intentions to other drivers, or at least the ones that are on the ball. Good drivers actively time their arrival to avoid potential confusion with other traffic.
The sad truth about Waymo is that they have to aim for a 0 (or extremely close to 0) accident rate for PR/regulatory reasons, especially so for accidents caused by Waymo, and that's always going to heavily influence the way they drive.
Uber drivers cause accidents sometimes, just like all drivers do. Whenever this happens, we generally blame the driver and not Uber. It's a completely unremarkable event that the media will not pick up on, because everybody knows that car accidents are just a fact of life.
If a Waymo causes just one fatal accident, people will be up in arms and demand a ban on self driving. That means they have to be extremely conservative in how they drive, especially as more and more of them appear and the probability of one causing an accident goes up due to simple statistics.
There is a simpler explanation: every Waymo vehicle is effectively the same. If one makes a mistake, every vehicle will likely keep making the same mistake over and over again, until it's fixed. If the mistake causes harm, there is often a clear causal link from a flaw in the system to the harm, which can be a pretty good incentive to fix it.
Human drivers are all different. They also learn from their mistakes and change unpredictably over time. Humans can get away with all kinds of unsafe behavior, because bad outcomes are unlikely in any particular situation. If something bad happens, it could easily be a one-off issue. And even with systemic issues, it's easier to change the environment / regulations / vehicles than the drivers.
That's a product decision, though. They want people to feel safe, and to build a sustained record for being safe. They could easily hit the pedal if they wanted to.
"Lawful to a fault teenager" is not what people want in a taxi driver. That type of chauffeur doesn't make people feel safe. It makes them on edge. But unfortunately that's the kind of AI chauffeur regulators want.
I agree it's the "right" way to do it from a PR perspective though.
Having more people drive like Waymo would likely result in faster travel times for all. It’s a well studied phenomenon. In cities the intersections are a bottleneck and driving at slower average speed often means stopping less often.
Also, don’t you think it’s weird that you complain that the car goes 15 on a road with speed limit equal to 15?
I'd rather do that than fear for my life when an uber driver decides that the 65mph speed limit should be understood as 85mph. Waymo doesn't even get on the freeway.
They stay with you if you choose. What's kind of sentimental and nice is that the area code stays with you as marker of where you're originally from no matter where you go. It says "this is where I was from as a teenager when I was first allowed a cell phone."
I don't know if this coincided with trend of getting an area code tattoo to signify where you're from, but that also is something that is done by some.
I remember the happy days when a telephone number (also an email) was a ephemeral, changeable thing. Not a permanent unchanging form of ID.
Alas, if you move out of the country for a period of time, it is a challenge to maintain the host country phone service. So there are no guarantees that you can hold on to that signifier of "this is where I was the last time I wanted to get a new phone subscription".
When was that? My parent’s landline number stayed unchanged for 20 years. Through moves, too (with the caveat they stayed in the service area of the CO.)
I'm sorry this isn't true. Your name wasn't on the line when you took the investment, and the OP pointed out with his "5 startups in 10 years" line, it's very easy for early employees to walk away. That isn't as available to founders.
There is much more burden (reputational, financial, emotional) on the founders.
I've been a founder, and I've been a key early employee. It is very different.
That's a legitimate question I haven't done the research on this. It would seem though that usually it's a municipal employee, probably a union job, so probably paid pretty well (relative to say an uber driver). Also that cost for the driver would be double if you half the size of the bus and run them twice as much which would be a better experience for passengers. It would seem like the cost of drivers could be a real impact but this is me being handwavy I haven't crunched any numbers.
It's completely false. Bus wages and pensions are the majority of expenses and BY FAR the largest line item.
The average bus only drives less than miles in cities like NYC, Chicago, and LA per day.
They get >6 MPGe. Fuel is about $65 per day or less. The cost of the vehicle financed probably averages less than that - and should definitely be less than $85 per day. Maintenance and insurance are peanuts. Parking should be quite expensive, but they usually have pieces of land worth tons of money they already own and aren't going to sell. Practically, it's close to $0.
A driver for 12 hours per day costs >$360 without factoring in pensions. With a pension it's >$450.
The reality of the situation is bus fare is currently less than $2. If you get rid of the driver, it's gonna cost a lot less than $2. If you can make trollies ubiquitous, a huge potion of the population isn't going to take taxis anymore (or drive themselves).
According to the NYC MTA[1], there are close to 6k buses in the fleet with 1.2M riders per day. That's over 200 riders per bus per day. With each paying a $2.75 fare, you are making about enough to cover your estimated costs.
I think the problem is not the cost of the bus but the organisation of the city's infrastructure. The bus could be a viable option for a lot more people -- far more than 200 per bus per day -- they just don't structure the roadways to maximise bus use but rather to minimise it. If there isn't a dedicated lane for buses (physically separated since NYPD cannot or will not enforce painted separation) then buses will go at least as slow as traffic, along with regular stopping, making it a less attractive option to driving or cabbing. It's pointless to operate the system this way and very cheap to fix it, where fixing it would make everyone's lives so much better as explained in this video with the extreme example of the Bahamas [2]
"Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling."
"They are not brought in to solve problems"
I've known people that worked for consultancies and the biggest value add they think they have brought is when the problem is the rivalries, politics, and squabbaling has led to inaction and they've needed outside support to come in who don't care about these things.
Perhaps we should hope for companies to have leadership teams where they are able to cut through this intransigence, but unfortunately all too often with old companies stuck in their ways this isn't the case.
They might see their role as brilliant mediators facilitating action by settling feuds using 2x2 matrices, but I think that's naive at best, disingenuous at worst.
They care about the agenda of the person they've been hired by. Usually a C-level agenda-setter or someone influential in the org, and often a McK "alum".
And speaking of action, they have zero stake in the actual implementation of what they proselytize.
All this isn't to say that they don't provide value. Exchange of money is usually is a reasonable signal of providing value, and these firms and its employees do reliably well in that area. However, the narratives around what value strategy consultants provide I find to be truthy, but not actually true.
I can vouch for this. I've done software consulting in corporates a few times throughout my career. Probably the highest value things I've done have been those times the team's organisational structure was a bit broken, and nobody in the company had the visibility, audacity and cover to call it out.
One team had no clear leadership, and there was an important milestone coming up that the team didn't seem to be orienting around. I started kicking up a fuss in meetings by constantly asking "Is this important for our April launch?". I know I upset at least one person, but with some help from management we ended up collectively getting the launch back on track.
At another company my perspective was relayed through my consulting company to the client's upper management, and that ended up being used to fire someone. It doesn't feel good - he was a nice guy. But he was genuinely useless. He spent about 90% of his attention brown nosing to upper management. Once or twice he even actively sabotaged the team in small ways so he could be seen stepping in and fixing the problem. I think they wanted to get rid of him anyway but they didn't have legal cover.
There's absolutely value for companies in having outside consultants sit amongst a team. But its a subtle kind of value. I thought I was brought in to write code. Hah!
I should clarify “value” is subjective. Value in this context doesn’t necessarily mean good, of value to society, aligned with your values, etc. Just that one party is willing to part with cash in exchange for something of value to them (presumably of value to them – unless they’re on drugs).
They’re providing value, just not to the company at large. But the specific person that hired them, and pays them with company fund, you can bet your ass they’re getting value.
I don't think they were saying they are mediators or settle feuds. I'm sure a bunch of people at the companies are pissed at the conclusions they come to. It's moreso though that precisely because they aren't tied to any feudal relationships within the organization they're able to be more impartial with their research and cut through bureaucracy.
Certainly though if all they're doing is parroting back conclusions backed by "research" that the exec who hired them wants to hear then they aren't providing much value, other than perhaps providing air cover when some decision, any decision, is better than no decision and gridlock.
"An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap."
This isn't true. You will have put money into the property to keep its value up, also writing off all of those expenses, so that you can still rent it out.
>You will have put money into the property to keep its value up
You're ignoring what was written: if the building has value 0, then it is not maintained to keep the value up. Of you kept the value up, then it would not have an effective price of 0.
Of course most people put money into properties exactly to keep value up.
>also writing off all of those expenses
Writing off expenses does not make them free - you are still paying for them - out of otherwise profit. It just means you get taxed on net profit instead of taxed on property gross income. But you are still losing money.
Writing off expenses is not some free money giveaway.
The point was to illustrate that OP ignored costs involved for landlords in the thought experiment.
oh it's certainly not free money (queue the seinfeld episode of kramer telling jerry to "write it off") but the discussion is about taxes or lacktherof. In no other investment that I know of are you allowed this double write-off: you can write off both the investment as it depreciates and the costs to make sure it doesn't depreciate.
"Few rental properties will have under a 3.7% ROI"
This is a leveraged investment (meaning you have a mortage). What that means is for your 20% down payment (the actual money you invest), that 3.7% writeoff on income can be an 18.5% cash on cash yield (ROI) in which you pay no taxes, ever. Few properties on the market can get you a better yield than that. If your ultimate yield is less than that you can roll those losses over year over year, so that then later if/when you get more yield you still* don't have to pay any taxes. It's a really big tax loophole and is the reason Donald Trump pays almost nothing in taxes (and he admitted as much in the presidential debate).
*I own 3 properties in buffalo, one of the best rent to value markets in the US, and it's hard to find better yield than that even in that market. https://simplepassivecashflow.com/rv/
My guess would be that parents are constantly taking photos and getting in the way of kids playing, or their performance, and it's to encourage parents to just enjoy their kids. This sounds like a pretty good rule to me. I'd have to guess that during their childhood your children will have multiple orders of magnitude more photos taken of them. I'd only worry memories will be lost by an overwhelming amount of media being saved about them.
I think that a general law against posting pictures of kids on the internet could just work. It's not just perverts, kids cannot consent to having their images stored in photographic databases forever and being IDed off facial recognition.
Weirdest quote the TC article was "In the meantime, Tiger Global, which prides itself on its due diligence"
They are notorious for outsourcing their due diligence and often not even paying attention to it. They pride themselves on moving fast, not diligence.
I liked the investment thesis of "get founders money and get out of their way" and hopefully other VCs learned something from it, but they certainly lacked a lot of control in how they operated.
> I liked the investment thesis of "get founders money and get out of their way"
It's a great theory. I read somewhere Masayoshi Son looks in founder's eyes to decide if they are trustworthy, same with George W Bush who would look into other leader's eyes to decide if they are someone he can do business with.
I don't mean about looking someone in the eye, but I do mean cutting through a multiple months long dance to get someone money when they are in a full sprint growing their business, or sitting on their board and meddling when you don't have experience operating a company. I think VCs can learn something from that.
For those who don't get the reference, in 2001 President George W. Bush had this to say about Vladimir Putin:
"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."
Of course it is, if other side knows this they will train and react in a way to appease. And a KGB apparatchik should know a trick or two about psychology, manipulation etc. Especially quirks of US president, the counterparty in global political games.
He may be internally with himself still working the same 'patriotic' game, but currently in some very f**ed up psychotic way.
But to be honest, I don't believe it - he stole half of Russia, continued and improved system of state-managed corruption and theft, russian population is a poor miserable one more than ever. He clearly doesn't care for murdering fellow close slavs, and other russians neither. But billion dollar worth pallaces and superyachts are fine for 'great leader' I presume.
Actions speak for themselves more than some shallow talks or staged trained looks.
Or maybe its just the good old 'power corrupts' theme. He certainly is just a mere shadow of his former self, at least the part public can see.
I am skeptical any one person , even a typical president can take that kind of decision on their own, however objective or well rounded the metric it could be .
There are teams of career diplomats and intelligence professionals and variety of external stakeholders including business lobbyists, other foreign diplomats and those equations go into a diplomatic decision to publicly endorse someone.
Bush was very much establishment and not an unpredictable wrecking ball like Trump, that was unimaginable 20 years back.
More likely the decision was taken at the point to publicly support Putin and bush articulated it in this rather poor fashion.
The intelligencer community at the time may have had hope that the other power in Russia like the oligarchs to keep Putin in line. Remember this was before Georgia , Chechen and Crimea ; Putin hadn’t yet developed the reputation and consolidation of power he has today.
Considering that Putin never really lied about his goals, despite being extremely under handed and secret with his methods, W's judgement wasn't too far off I'd say.
There seems to be a lot of disagreement and bad judgement around "best interests of his (Putin's) country".
I take both waymo's and lyft/uber all the time in sf and waymo's are way slower. I'd estimate it at 10-15% slower. Once the novelty of a waymo wears off you realize that they drive like a high anxiety teenager and going 15 mph on a 15 mph road, coming to gentle full stop at every stop sign, and being very tentative on turns and passing people all add up to a very slow ride.
You're right though it definitely feels safer.