Drunk drivers and human mistakes are two things I accept in traffic (or rather - laws and human behavior both show we don’t accept them). It’s factored into my risk.
And FSD isn’t orders of magnitude safer. They are barely as good as human drivers and only in some conditions.
For the worst situations they aren’t comparable at all (since they won’t drive at all)
This must be repeated over and over for some reason: people will never accept self driving cars that are just as good or bad as human drivers. Nor should we. It’s a much too low bar.
Self driving cars will need to be orders of magnitude safer than human drivers to be even remotely acceptable.
If it's consistently as good as an average human that's still better than an average human. That's because robots don't get tired, hungover, angry, bored, drunk, or get an eyelash in their eye at a really bad time.
Yes. But again people won’t accept that. People will rather be killed more often by drivers that feel guilt, go to prison, have strokes or poor eyesight than less often by a machine that does not have all of those flaws but also none of the feelings and responsibilities.
I’d be thrilled if self-driving cars could meet that bar, because then I can feel at least as comfortable napping in the car as I do driving it. And unlike humans, I have the expectation that my car learns when other cars crash, so I have a lot of reason to expect that once the system rolls out it will continue to improve.
I hate almost everything about Tesla and their business model but the idea of full automatic driving, once vetted to even a bare minimum level of approximate human parity, is enough to make me consider one anyway.
You are in between two walls and there are two straight lanes. Lane 1 has Tesla FSD coming in at full speed. Lane 2 has a human driver coming in at full speed. You can choose to be in one lane. The FSD and the human can both see you only 50 mts out and if they brake as soon as they see you, you will survive.
Well, a Model S can just barely stop in 50 meters at 60mph, while some other luxury and sporty cars in the segment can stop in 35 meters or less. And that’s only 60mph, hardly “top speed” or even a normal highway speed. So regardless of driver assistance features, I’d choose a car that at least has a chance to even physically stop assuming instant reflexes. 50 meters is probably a much too small distance for this thought experiment.
I don't know my cars that well, but an alert driver will take at least 300ms to begin reacting. That's over 8m at 60mph (not sure why we're combining unit systems here). So I'll stand in front of the Model S in this particular scenario and hope to get away with 'mere' broken legs/pelvis. Give the human more time and is probably take the human, not because that's necessarily the more reliable option, but because its distribution of outcomes is more well known to me.
Yes, because mortgage rate is essentally set by supply of funds buying mortgage bonds and demand of people getting mortgages.
The Central Bank could just buy the mortgage bonds by putting the mortgage on the asset side of the book and issuing currency on the liability side of the book. The Bank of Canada only does this to manipulate the overnight interest rate, on Government of Canada bonds. However, all rules have been thrown out the window these days.
There's perhaps some regional confusion here. In the U.S, with conventional 30-year fixed mortgages, amortization and term are the same (30 years). There are also adjustable-rate mortgages which have a different term, eg. a 7/1 ARM has a fixed rate for 7 years, adjust annually thereafter, and is paid off in 30 years. Although ARMs are occasionally pushed by banks, most finance sites recommend against them and savvy buyers usually steer clear, because lots of buyers got in a lot of trouble from 07-09 because of them.
I gather, from this thread, that this is not the case in Canada and some other locales. But in the U.S, if you have a fixed-rate mortgage, your interest rate is fixed for the full length of the loan. It sounds like the OP is from Europe, where I guess things work similarly.
Companies which have offices will out-compete the rate of innovation for remote only.
Marissa Mayer, coming from Google, the first thing she did when she took the helm at Yahoo was reverse the WFH policy because execs realized it was a huge productivity loss.
Employee salaries are a huge expense because housing near San Francisco or New York City or wherever is expensive, so you have to pay those salaries to get people to sign up. If you can hire someone in Arkansas (who frankly would rather keep living there then move to SF) you can pay half the salary or less.
By a long shot, the largest expense for large companies in employee salaries - rent, by comparison, is a drop in the bucket. What follows is that companies should be most concerned about employee and team productivity rather then office expenses.
Salaries do get affected by WFH policies, since if you move to a cheaper state/country, a company will often do a pay adjustment. So, from a cost savings perspective, it becomes a question of how much a company thinks being in the Bay Area brings in terms of attracting talent, vs how much they can save by having their employees work from Pennsylvania or Canada or India.
I know companies in Canada that are way ahead of the curve on this: they've been consulting for American companies for years, meaning they can afford way more person hours than american counterparts given a US dollar contract size solely because of the salary gap difference.
I am skeptical that the labor market for high quality tech talent is as large in the rest of the country or that it is that tied to COL. The US vs not US gap seems much larger than the HCOL vs LCOL for senior IC jobs.
Maybe not 10 months ago, but a lot of people have dispersed to various places in the US, and that may continue as companies relax their in-person work requirements. Talent still has its concentration points, but its less concentrated than it was, and I expect that trend to continue.
The US vs. not-US gap is certainly larger, but I expect that US-based companies would much rather hire someone 3 timezones away than 8 or 12. Having to be on conference calls at 7am or 8pm gets old real quick.
Do you know of any remote-first tech company that pays Bay Area salaries regardless of location?
I haven’t heard of one, and I would think this would be a huge selling point so anyone doing it would want to advertise it to engineers.
On the other hand there are plenty of companies transparent about their policy to match pay to cost of living, for instance gitlab publishes their conversion percentages for different cities. Many places in the US they pay ~60% of Bay Area.
There's like a $25k difference between Google L4 in the Bay vs in Boulder and with considerably less average years of experience. That's less than the COL difference.
> companies should be most concerned about employee and team productivity rather then office expenses.
Can companies measure productivity of knowledge workers to that granularity?
Office expenses make a relatively small fraction of employee overall expenses. Say 10% to be extremely generous. NYC five-borough average back in 2015 was around $15K per year [1]. A fully-burdened employee expense is around 2X base salary, so a $100K salary position clocks in around $200K fully-burdened, or around 7.5% of that 2015 NYC average figure. I don't currently see companies wholesale changing employment strategies for 10% differentials.
I'm not sure companies can measure productivity down to that expense detail level for knowledge workers.
True, but if giving up that office also means you're more amenable to hiring employees in LCoL areas for 30% less, then you start to see some savings. Ditto if some of your existing employees move somewhere cheaper and you cut their pay a bit.
It seems like this argument is easily dismissed when you look at the push away from offices and cubicles into cramped tables with no visual separation. Fitting more people into less space has been the trend for a while, despite study after study demonstrating that it’s less productive.
It's very difficult for a corporation to measure changes in employee or team productivity in many white collar professions ..specifically software development.
I personally don't know of any large corporations that track it well enough on a corporation wide level to be able to tell you if any change significantly affected developer productivity.
But the check they write every month for rent is very easily measured and reduced.
Also I was specifically told by the VP who was in charge of making the decision for his division why he was doing it, and it was costs savings.
