I like that and I'd probably support some version of such a plan. But there are issues, especially where I live.
Population density is quite thin out here in the desert. Also, since we don't offer a social net like in Holland, you'd need to police it against people literally sleeping in them or simply destroying them. Not to mention using them for nefarious activities. I'm not being alarmist, just saying there's a real cost to dealing with such aspects when people are spread out as thin as they are here. Maybe once we know what the cost is we'd find that the funds would be better spent setting up more shelters WITH bathrooms? Not saying this is the case. But that's exactly my original point: all these solutions are nuanced and need to be seen for what they are; addressing deep rooted social issues, with no solution being perfect and tons of choices that need to be made. Even if someone knew the perfect solution, finding how to bring it about is what matters. And that's bound to be imperfect, since that is what we live in.
I... don't believe that? I mean, I've used public bathrooms... and I've used tech worker bathrooms. Yes, maintenance is required. that's part of provisioning a restroom. I... do not believe that the homeless are significantly worse than the techworkers (once you factor in just how often the techworker bathrooms are cleaned, I think we might be the bigger problem here?)
I mean, certainly cleaning is the major cost of provisioning a public bathroom, and that needs to be carefully considered during the design of such things. but I don't think that makes public restrooms impossible, just more expensive.
eh, but if this problem gets bad enough, it will kill amazon. If I order a certain brand of stuff off of amazon and I get something I can't use often enough, I'm going to order from another store.
Right now, I'm paying a premium for the convenience of amazon. I'm willing to pay a reasonably large premium for convenience; taking that premium is a sustainable business, but if I'm paying a premium, I expect the product I ordered.
But you know what? safeway is just down the way, and they do deliveries, too. CVS does deliveries, and doesn't seem to have this issue.
I mean, sure, an everything store is great, but if you have enough quality issues, I'm going to go back to maintaining accounts at each vendor.
(all that said, the problem is below my threshold right now. I have been sent the wrong product, but... it doesn't happen often.)
I personally trust all of amazon fresh enough to feed me? but yeah, it's probably good advice to not put things that come from the rest of amazon in your mouth.
It's so weird to me, though 'cause here I am, totally willing to pay extra for convenience, and amazon seems to be throwing that premium away.
Clearly, it's not an impossible problem to solve, 'cause basically every other major retailer (and for that matter, nearly all minor retailers) has solved it. It's only the places where they try to both sell their own stuff and be a marketplace of shady third party sellers where I have problems, and even then, most places that try to do both do a better job of segregating the real business from the 'let's compete with ebay' business than amazon does.
I mean, it seems to me like this would be costing amazon money both in the short and long term. If I were an amazon shareholder, I'd demand they drop the third-party garbage until they figured out how to solve the problem as well as target does.
I definitely agree that this could potentially cause long-term damage. Amazon could be one bad counterfeit away from destroying its brand. Brand trust ultimately matters for consumers making a default choice of what to buy or where to shop.
To take an extreme example, as fears surrounding the Coronavirus spike, people are trying to buy 3M masks from Home Depot, not Amazon. It tells me consumers already have a trust issue building with Amazon when they are buying a product that needs to work.
>Hypothetically speaking, would you rather read about the recent US impeachment proceedings in Korean or in English? You know, the language most widely spoken in the US?
So, I mean, I agree with your point. but as an aside, I think it would be really interesting to see the perspective of a Spanish historian on the recent events in my country
Homeowners generally don't fight nearly as hard against new office buildings. The bay area, for example, wouldn't have a housing problem if we built apartments like we build offices, and our traffic problem would decrease.
The problem is that the home value model of homeowner motivation fits the data much better than any other model.
Show me a bay area "homeowners for better public transit" rally and maybe I'll change my mind.
The bay area is such an outlier that I almost feel like it should be exempt from broader 'housing cost' discussions. Fixing the bay area housing crisis is a whole other set of concerns.
No one in our area wants more office space. I don't know that there's much of a demand for new office space, the buildings we have are full of vacancies.
>The bay area is such an outlier that I almost feel like it should be exempt from broader 'housing cost' discussions. Fixing the bay area housing crisis is a whole other set of concerns.
I think it's pretty similar to most other places that were built low density that now have high demand. We need to change the rules to allow high density, and we need public transit.
>No one in our area wants more office space. I don't know that there's much of a demand for new office space, the buildings we have are full of vacancies.
I... kinda do? back in the days after the crash, I would rent industrial spaces as workshops for my business. I had 1/4 of an industrial condo down the way from the hacker dojo at one point. It was a lot of fun, and only possible 'cause there was a lot of space and it was cheap. I mean, yes, yes, I should have bought. but my point is just that having space is... pretty nice.
That, and at work I'm crammed into this open office; they allocate more space to my car in the parking lot than they allocate to me - I think we'd all enjoy a few more sqft.
Both of these cities (and metros) are low density (1,049.64 people per sq. km). They're filled with complaints about traffic and growth.
NIMBYs don't want to build up. In Boise, condos are almost exclusively limited to 6 stories, max. Three quarters of downtown is parking lots or roads.
Folks from outer burbs (Meridian and Eagle) don't want to lose parking, and transit is terrible. A bus runs the 5km between Downtown Boise and the airport every 40 minutes.
I think the housing crisis is uniquely painful in the States because of the weird confluence between investing and culture around urban cores, inner burbs, and outer burbs.
The Bay Area is where it's worst, but it's essentially the same problem there as it elsewhere. Also, what people do down there has a ripple effect everywhere else. Where I live in Bend, Oregon, we see a lot of people moving up from California who either 1) made out like bandits because of scarce housing, prop 13, etc... and can afford to sell out and live like kings because housing is "cheap" here (for them, not for the rest of us), or 2) can't hope to afford a home there, so move somewhere like here seeking that opportunity.
Funny to see Bend pop up, since I was just looking at houses there on Zillow today and I came away pretty shocked. I work in Silicon Valley but I already own a house in South Central Oregon because I'll never be able to afford one in California. The only problem is that it's rural enough that I can't get any kind of internet other than satellite.
I've been half-seriously looking at houses in Bend or Klamath Falls where I could work full-time remote, but there aren't a lot of houses that I could afford in Bend! It's nothing like the Bay Area, but the percentage of $1m+ houses was really surprising to me, and when you look at the price history, it's a very recent phenomenon.
Happy to talk to you about Bend if you're curious; my email is in my profile.
Bend is very different from K-falls, these days. And yeah, the prices here bounce around a lot - they were the fastest in the US going up before the previous bubble popped, then they cratered, now they're skyrocketing again. I'd consider waiting...
Yeah, I've spent a day in Bend here and there and lots of time in K-Falls since it's the nearest town to me and "different" barely even begins to capture it. Klamath county certainly has its charms, but a bastion of civilization it is not.
Thanks for the link! Haven't read the whole story in the link yet, but it's definitely not the first I've read about the Tableland. I'm halfway between Chiloquin and Sprague River so that's practically my back yard. The stories abound. I haven't decided just how true some of them are yet.
I'm just close enough to civilization to buy power from the grid, but nothing else. I'm going to wait at least a year or two to see if Musk's Starlink project delivers. If it lives up to its full potential I might be able to work from the boonies.
Bend's layout also has some constraints as well with National Forest and BLM land surrounding it :-/ That and every Californian wants to pack into the West-side of town so prices get super wonky.
This model does depend on the idea that most homeowners think that public transit will bring poor people and/or crime and thus would lower property values. There are lots of examples of homeowners blocking transit and then complaining about traffic.
There's a lot of evidence for this in the '70s; this was super tied up with wanting an ethnically and economically homogeneous neighborhood. it explains a lot about where VTA goes (and why we have VTA in the south bay and not BART) The evidence for this is not as strong now.
>because public transit tends to increase nearby property values
Do you have references? my impression is the opposite.
Do you think having a bus stop out front would make the average suburbanite want to pay more or less for their house? My guess is quite a bit less, but I also don't have references to back up my impression.
(I mean, I think this is changing in the most urban areas. But I think that in the case of the homes of a majority of Americans, nearby transit lowers the sale value of a home rather than raising it.)
If people were purely economically rational actors, maybe. If they own a home they already have adequate transportation for themselves 99% of the time (only exceptions I am aware of are aging suburban populace who can no longer drive) and often don't want to pay for what they don't need or believe the expense will be greater than the gain. Maybe if traffic reaches a critical mass such that transit becomes the quicker option and roads aren't remotely viable.
Second there is an all too common ugly undercurrent of bigotry viewing it as bringing "undesirables" that they worry will lower it or negatively effect their lifestyle.
If we're talking about social ties, you should probably be looking at the number of people who attend church weekly. I don't think there's a big social ties difference between going to church twice a year and not going at all, and it looks like your link only goes back to the '90s for 'goes to religious observance nearly every week' and 'has been in the last seven days'
For that matter, I know a handful of people (my grandparents age) who aren't really religious but that go to church most weeks 'cause it's a nice social thing.
I dunno. Americans seem to want these giant 4x4s even when they leave the city twice a year; they'd be better off (certainly safer... most trucks are more dangerous for other people and for the occupants) if they had a little car for city driving and rented the off road cargo hauler when they needed it.
A city-only car would be totally useful for people who live in cities; you just rent something when you want to go to the boonies.
Heck, most BEVs are that way now; I've got like 120 miles of range on mine, which is fine almost all the time. the two or three times a year I need something with more range or with more cargo capacity or what have you, I borrow or rent.
I think that the economics of the first level5 cars might be similar to current BEVs, in that you can only go where there is infrastructure. which is where most of us go most of the time.
Sure there are niche markets where fully self-driving and self-driving only cars may make sense.
But they still need to handle fault cases: e.g. they cannot only rely on a beacon sent by traffic lights because that beacon or the whole traffic light might out of order. So, imho, while smart infrastructure may help self-driving cars and traffic management it does not allow you to avoid the "hard work", which to make sure self-driving cars will behave safely and reasonably completely on their own.
eh, my argument is that as long as they are intelligent enough to safely get to the side of the road, I think there's a very large number of people who would be okay with a car that "broke down" every 10K miles if it was otherwise great. (heck, I've been in some sort of breakdown or accident in an uber more often than that, even not counting app failures, so people would probably tolerate a lot more than that if the things were really self-driving.)
Note, you still have the safety problems to solve. You need to know how to get out of the road if the road infrastructure is on the blink. I'm just saying that "I don't know what to do so I will pull over" as long as it doesn't happen too often, is an acceptable answer.
more to the point, for "full self driving" even with infrastructure, the "don't hit unexpected pedestrians" technology needs to get way better. You probably can regulate transponders in cars. You probably can't regulate transponders on children.
Yes. Can you estimate how much these companies have received funding compared to self-driving tech companies/projects? My wild guess (based only on the general visibility) is that it amounts pretty much to a rounding error.
sure, but I think the truck convoy companies are run a little bit more like regular companies than startups? they have a reasonable near-term goal and sales pipeline. Like, I think if you have a couple modern trucks you can go have peloton install their system and you can use it right now.
Yes, but what we are missing is a platform[1] where I can join a random convoy going the same direction than me. And pay something for the lead car or offer myself as a lead car in case I feel like driving and earning some money. This would be in startup territory for me that would deserve more VC money than autonomous technology. At least just now.
[1] I assume also some regulatory developments for this are missing in addition to platform and universal tech kit for private cars. In case such platform already exists and all regulatory hurdles have been tackled, then I miss only widespread adoption and marketing...
Actually, I think there's a huge opportunity for the incumbent car manufacturers there. Considering how much identification many consumers have with their car brands, this could work out well (maybe even better) if it were only compatible with cars from the same manufacturer.
I mean, you could do a retrofit kit for regular cars, too... but that seems harder to get exactly right (I mean, considering the cost of a fuckup) and would require a bunch of new marketing infrastructure, whereas if Ford, say, just bought peloton and said "hey, make this work across our model lines" - well, that'd be a pretty good argument for buying a ford.
eh, something that only works in cities would be pretty nice for more than half of us. If you need an off road vehicle twice a year, you rent one; we have that technology already.
(I mean, we're still a long ways away from level 5 in the city.. I'm just saying, something that was level 5 only on pavement and only in the city would be damn useful; and good enough for more than half of us.)
Seems like it would mostly be the manufacturers that would have to insure the cars, at least for the expensive part (liability)
For me? I'm a self-driving skeptic, but... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it, (I mean, a reasonable amount of insurance, at least a statistical life worth) I'd ride in the thing. I think that's an honest signal.
>... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it,
Its not just the manufacturers, who is underwriting all that insurance?
Ford sells approximately 2.3M vehicles per year, imagine if 50% of self-driving...over a 5 year period that 5.5M cars...if each one needs to carry a potential 1M policy thats an incredible amount of liability on someone's balance sheet. (even if you say the policy is only 100K thats still $576B in liability)
Thats only for Ford, add in all vehicles manufacturers and extend that to 10-15 years into the future and thats an incredible amount.
However there is nothing to say that a new laws won't be passed to allow manufacturers to escape liability. Most likely this is what will happen (see vaccine courts, etc)
But all of those cars are insured (and that insurance is underwritten) today. So the liability already lives on the balance sheet of insurance companies. Maybe the specific companies change...
eh, right now most people are massively underinsured; minimum coverage in California is like $35k, and most insurance companies won't sell you a plan with more than a half million of liability (at least not without an umbrella policy) - if we stop subsidizing driving through pushing costs on to victims of accidents, the cost of driving will go up. But yeah, it should be about the cost of a good umbrella policy+auto policy is now, modulo any savings if the self-driving car gets in fewer accidents.
but note, we're paying most of that already in the form of people who are killed and under-compensated by under-insured drivers. Increasing liability insurance minimums would roll that cost that is currently born entirely by the victim into the cost of operating a car, which is where it ought to be.
>Probably that with sufficient land you can sustain yourself regardless of what happens with the outside world. Sustenance farming as a baseline of human need.
Producing enough in the growing season to sustain yourself through the off season is... no small amount of work. You need a reasonably large amount of capital in the form of tools and knowledge to have a reasonable shot at doing so with only your labor. And unless you have a lot of capital in the form of advanced machines, it would be a huge amount of labor.
But that's not the real problem; the real problem is how chancy farming is. Too much rain? no food this year. Not enough rain? no food this year. I mean, there are a lot of things technology can do (like, say, tile drainage and irrigation) that make the growing conditions wider, those things can require significant capital and/or labor, and even then, you can have too much or too little rain. Even if you do everything right, if you are depending on growing your own food, there's a reasonable chance of not getting significant calories for a year or two just 'cause the weather was bad.
Most of our farm subsidies go to crop insurance; the government essentially sees to it that our farmers are made whole if it rains too much or too little, which makes farming a lot more certain, and helps ensure our overproduction of food. (note, I totally support my tax dollars being used for this; If there's anything the world should overproduce, it's food.)
