I suspect the loudest voices would be from the automakers and dealerships, who make their biggest margin from SUVs and oversized trucks. They have powerful lobbyists and spend a lot on PR, so it often seems like their anti-transit, anti-pedestrian positions are more popular than they are.
I'd love to see a real grassroots effort to tax (toll?) based on GVWR or vehicle length. It would be met with tremendous opposition by special interests, but I could see it succeeding in the right environment. Maybe it could be framed as a rebate for small vehicles, rather than a tax on large ones.
Ticketmaster obviously sucks, and their monopolistic business practices deserve a close look by regulators.
But the core of it is that an unregulated ticket market actually supports these prices. Fans keep showing that they're willing to dig deep and outbid each other to attend these events in person. Ticketmaster realizes this, and have set up a business model that extracts accordingly.
I think this is where us Americans get turned around. We tend to believe that it’s fair to charge the full market value for a thing, but we also have a sense that cultural experiences are "meant" to be shared equitably. But until we actually put a value on the latter, we're only ever going to have the former.
Oh man... this will be so awesome as a pedestrian/cyclist. When I see a Waymo coming, I can actually have some reasonable expectation that it will stop for me!
I'm a MAX apologist, but you're right. It sucks. I live on the yellow line, and I estimate that there's a visibly (or audibly, or orfactorily) unstable person on the train 50% of the time. I'll ride the train by myself sometimes, but always avoid it with friends or family because it's gotten embarrassing at this point.
If there's one good thing that could possibly come out of this AI revolution, it would be the ability for people to automate this across all their feeds. I'd love it if I never had to waste time on toxicity, spam, or propaganda.
Although, recent history would suggest that we'd just end up with even more powerful echo chambers.
I've always been fascinated with these things. Is there any way to make your own H2 to fuel them? I suspect the purity requirements are too high for at-home electrolysis...
> A slight increase in average speed really only makes a significant difference over long drives.
Yes! I feel like I can't shout this loud enough. In addition to maintaining a safe driving distance, just leave a little earlier. The stuff I've seen people do in order to save 20 seconds boggles the mind.
Unfortunately, I think commuters fall into a gamification mindset. They're trying to set a new lap record each day, and you can see the results just by driving (or walking) during rush hour...
The Hawaiian language has a concept called Kaona, which is essentially embedding deeper meanings in contextual word choices. It can go way beyond the literal meaning of the words, and tie into bigger concepts of culture, lineage, and places. It's super cool hearing about it from native speakers.
We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our word and grammar choices.
In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.
Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.
I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.
The original stated goal was to 10x the speed of existing tunnel boring machines by bringing up the cutting head RPMs, automating liner installation, and speeding up spoil removal with electric sleds. Which would seem like a good bet, except that there are a million other bottlenecks to the process. On top of that, it doesn't seem like they even solved their core problems.
It would be cool if they'd post a postmortem or something, but I get the impression that reporting bad news is a good way to get fired in an Elon-run organization.
Just spitballing, but maybe it would be possible with relatively modest advances in ion thrusters, and one (admittedly less-than-modest) breakthrough with fusion.
It's maybe too speculative to even matter, but I don't think it's _crazy_ to imagine a handful of AI-fueled advances in materials discovery during the next decade or two. Possibly enough to unlock laser fusion, or something that could be crammed onto a spacecraft.
Generative CAD has incredible potential. I've had some decent results with OpenSCAD, but it's clear that current models don't have much "common sense" when it comes to how shapes connect.
If code-based CAD tools were more common, and we had a bigger corpus to pull from, these tools would probably be pretty usable. Without this, however, it seems like we'll need to train against simulations of the physical world.
Yep. It has massive ripple effects for manufacturing, especially as more industry transitions away from fossils for heat generation. Energy accounts for around 40% of the opex for steel manufacturing, for instance. Zero chance we build more steel mills if the cost of electricity continues to skyrocket.
The Chinese have the right approach: Bringing the cost-per-watt down using massive deployments of renewables and ultra high voltage transmission. We were already in the backseat, and now we're not even in the same car.
I'd love to see a real grassroots effort to tax (toll?) based on GVWR or vehicle length. It would be met with tremendous opposition by special interests, but I could see it succeeding in the right environment. Maybe it could be framed as a rebate for small vehicles, rather than a tax on large ones.