Lives on the line? On average, existing cars kill more than 100 people each day on American roads. The current system of human-driving cars has killed one million Americans over the past couple of generations, mostly from human error. To save lives we need to push forward on self-driving tech.
No, on average existing drivers kill more than 100 people each day [source?].
There's no proof yet that self driving cars are safer than human drivers. And more importantly there's a big difference between being safer on average than a human driver, and being safer than the average human driver.
And when will we actually start saving lives? How many humans are going to be killed by bad self-driving technology before we hit the break-even point? No one can even say! Self-driving advocates never seem concerned with the real-world present day costs of the technology, only the futuristic possible scenarios. You have to weight both sides of the equation.
What if we required everyone who received a DUI to only operate self driving cars for a period of 2 years?
Some of the alcoholics in my family drive about as safely as your average toddler. It takes years for them to collect enough accidents and DUI's to be forcibly taken off the road.
I feel like the break even point has already been reached for my family. But I'm fine if safe drivers don't want to turn over their domain to AI for another few decades.
Maybe AI vehicles could be required to be painted Bright Yellow like a Taxi Cab, or have other really obvious markings so that other drivers on the road knew to take extra caution with them? Just like an "AI Student Driver" program, that we all work together to get through safely. The AI could maybe just be allowed in rural areas, and kept out of the urban hellscapes of LA, BAY AREA, and NYC traffic.
> What if we required everyone who received a DUI to only operate self driving cars for a period of 2 years?
What if we required every car to have a breathalyzer ignition control?
We'd cut fatal crashes by a quarter, for far less then the cost of equipping every car with LIDAR.
For some reason, this idea never gets traction with the self-driving crowd. It may be because safety is not their first concern - watching Netflix while your car drives you around is.
Ok, you go volunteer on a test track then. While you’re at it, you should volunteer for medical testing, do you know how many people die each year from various diseases?! Maybe the needed progress will come soon, or maybe not, but since your only justification is the magnitude of the present problem I’m sure that you won’t object.
Because sick people are desperate we actually make it quite hard for them to volunteer for things like risky medical tests. Requiring more animal or smaller pilot studies first. I don't know the numbers well enough to know whether this is a net win for humanity, but just like any technology development project, the longer your dev cycles the slower things go.
Did you read the report? The problem is that PROMISED pension benefits have grown, there's no funding problem if the amount of promised benefits grew with the economy or with revenue.
It is misleading to fully assign spending outcomes to the sitting president-- Congress has far more control over spending than the White House. Clinton was anti-deficit but he also had the most conservative Congress in modern times after 1994 sending him appropriations bills. Obama had a similar dynamic after 2010. In both cases GOP Congresses imposed hard spending caps-- in fact, in 1994 they even clawed back spending from 1993.
The difference is that the Republicans use "fiscal conservatism" to really mean "Current President we don't like shouldn't get as much money".
And then they give all the money to the Republican Presidents when they come into power (see Tax cuts, which I personally consider to be lavish spending)
There's definitely a large group of Americans (likely a minority, but still a large group) who genuinely care about the debt, deficit, and balancing the budget. But there's really no major powers in Washington who actually do care. (And the few Senators who do care are nutjobs IMO. Its difficult to find a "reasonable" deficit hawk who doesn't believe in "Gold Standard " or other crap)
I'm talking about simple, and reasonable ways to get rid of the deficit here: increase taxes slightly, reduce spending where we can. Is it really that hard? Alas, no one I'm aware of is for both increasing taxes and cutting spending.
Apparently, cutting spending puts you in the group of nutjobs who believe that cutting taxes magically increases revenues due to "economic growth".
Increasing taxes (which is championed by the left) also puts you in with the Bernie Bros who then spend all the money made on free college education for everyone, and other such projects we can't afford.
Personally I think there may be better ways to spend money, but it's interesting that tuition-free college, which is the norm in europe, is considered something the US "can't afford" while a 700 billion dollar increase in military spending is passed without blinking an eye by people who've spent 8 years complaining about deficit.
The huge money sink in the US budget is undoubtedly the military. After the current increase the US probably spends more on military than the next 13 or 14 countries combined. If that can be reduced to spending about 2.5x what China spends(still overkill considering the allies the US has) then you have about 350 billion a year to either spend or reduce the deficit with. More than enough to eliminate child hunger, healthcare problems and infrastructure issues.
There are other cultural issues stopping tuition-free college in the USA. At best, tuition-free community college is the best we might be able to hope for.
Case in point: Europeans don't have for-profit companies extracting wealth from uneducated Americans.
There's fundamental problems to the US's education system at play here. We can't throw money at the problem and hope for it to work. We have to culturally fix those issues.
Tuition was free for in-state students during America's peak post war years in California and other places. It's not like it's completely alien to America. Nobody is advocating "throwing money" at the issue but you can't just sit around waiting for cultural change without doing anything about it.
State-based tuition would work out in America, but case in point on how awful our educational infrastructure is:
National Accreditation is basically a joke. Only regional accreditation matters. If people actually want to have "free college for everyone in the USA", step one would be to actually DEFINE a college education on the national level.
Which the USA does NOT have yet. We are very far away from the point of "sink money into this project". Ever talk education in the USA? How did "Common Core" do? The political culture is incredibly sensitive and paranoid about education changes.
Just think about how such a "free tuition" project would work. You'd have to have a national team standardize a curriculum. You'd have to then inspect various colleges to make sure they're up to standard. The ones that aren't up to standard lose federal money (aka: free tuition money), so it would be a death-spell for any school who fails.
Its not compatible with US Culture. US Citizens are too particular about how their children are taught, and would never accept people from far away telling them that... well... Thomas Jefferson is a founding father (https://thinkprogress.org/texas-board-of-education-cuts-thom...) or that the Earth is older than 6000 years old, or that Radioactive dating works.
Education barely even is a money problem. Its mostly political. Frankly though, I'd prefer if we fixed our High Schools first. Clearly a high school education isn't enough for most jobs anymore.
Correct, the owner's insurance policy is the primary coverage when the owner lends their car to a 3rd party. Obviously in the case of a moving violation the driver is at fault and receives the penalty, but damage is still covered by the owner's policy. In the case where the other driver is at fault, that car's owner's insurance is liable.
As autonomy is implemented and refined, and safety improves dramatically, new regulatory and economic models will emerge. This will spark design innovation. No doubt both single rider and shuttle-bus options will emerge, with much lighter builds as crashes decrease.
Imagine if you'd limited Elon Musk's PayPal wealth with such confiscation taxes. We'd literally have no SpaceX or Tesla. Why should society put so much trust that politicians can allocate resources in a fair and economically beneficial manner?
We'd certainly have no SpaceX if the government didn't have a large budget for subsidising space companies and paying for their services (which was an order of magnitude larger again during the Space Race when there wasn't any market for any kind of space launch).
As far as I'm aware, Musk can and does pay tax on his earnings
I guess that's why Musk is paying big moneys to political campaigns of McCain and others to win legislative favors and maintain good relation with gov't.
It's something of a moot point when I'm really arguing NASA wouldn't exist to pay for launches without tax dollars, but the non-binding launch contracts were structured like a research subsidy with many of the payments being associated with hitting r&d milestones rather than with an obligation to actually render services, and encouragement to go and find other customers. Nothing unusual about that: it's the way the space industry works.
That's not a subsidy. That's progress payments. Many industries other than space have progress payments.
In fact you see some private contracts which are exactly like that NASA contract: "We want to pay you to create a much cheaper product than we can already buy, and here are some early progress payments so you don't have to finance it yourself."
You may think this is a moot point, that's totally fine. The difference between subsidies or not is important to others.
You'll find private sector contracts which pay in instalments for hitting milestones, but not ones which give companies hundreds of millions of non-reimbursable research dollars without the obligation to buy or sell any actual services or transfer IP or equity. Phase I of COTS was a series of grants for hitting planning milestones with a right to terminate before Phase II. The procurement contracts were separate and subsequent to this.
No its not clear enough actually, the tax benefits could have also been passed on, so please provide supporting evidence of his personal profit. Otherwise we can continue to assume you are a paranoid skeptic.
I also find the idea that the exceedingly wealthy can effectively buy their way out of our tax system. Even if in this case all the money did actually go to causes of his choosing it's not a just system and I'm saddened you are being down-voted for just having a contrary opinion.
Maybe he didn't want his money going to buy more cluster munitions, depleted uranium bombs, clean water act rollbacks, napalms, etc etc?
I hate taxes as well & under our current "leaders"... seeing that they are putting the entire economy at risk with their military over spending... then I would love to figure out how to maximally avoid taxes as well.
Avoiding taxes does not lead to less military spending. Amazon and GE usually pay less federal taxes than the average US citizen but have plenty of lobbyists shoving money into politicians' pockets, just like most defense contractors.
You're better off fighting the influence of money in politics if you want your taxes to be well spent
Do you have any basis for that belief? It seems equally plausible that he wanted as much as possible going to the foundation in order to optimize its philanthropic potential.
I feel like you’re trying to equate avoiding taxes with self enrichment. That’s true if you avoid taxes to then keep the money. But if you avoid taxes by giving everything to charity, that’s not avoiding taxes anymore: those are deductibles for a reason!
The question is: did he end up keeping more money now, than he would have, had he just kept everything and paid the due taxes? The article seems to suggest that, no, he didn’t.
> “Chuck hates taxes. He believes people can do more with money than governments can,”
For a long time he withheld taxation money that could have gone to education and infrastructure. The fact that he gave money away when it was most convenient to him WHILE NORMAL PEOPLE HAD TO PAY EVERY TIME, ON TIME, does not excuse his despicable behavior.
That's kind of like saying taking a pay cut or working part time is tax avoidance. "Normal people" can also avoid taxes by giving their income to charity if they want.
From reading your posts it seems like you jumped to a conclusion without understanding the situation.
Except that I never said taking a pay cut or working part time were tax avoidance. Also, normal people don't usually set up tax-exempt foundations that hire them as "board members" to "give their money away".
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-roc...