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PoliGAF 2017 |OT2| Well, maybe McMaster isn't a traitor.
- Thread starter ItWasMeantToBe19
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Again, this is a horrible plan since many parts of the US have to rely on cars for transportation with no alternative.
Baron von Loathsome
Member
Not to mention that, in some parts of the country, going from town to town without a car can be a serious pain.
I've been comparing car culture and gun culture for a while (the illusion of control people build around them, the culture of independence, and so on), and I hadn't even considered the argument about rural areas some of you made here.
I absolutely love driving. It's one of my favorite things to do. But the minute there's a feasible movement on banning human-driven cars (in the cities, at least), I'm on board.
I'm open to the arguments about it affecting the poor adversely, though. That should have occurred to me already, bleh.
I absolutely love driving. It's one of my favorite things to do. But the minute there's a feasible movement on banning human-driven cars (in the cities, at least), I'm on board.
I'm open to the arguments about it affecting the poor adversely, though. That should have occurred to me already, bleh.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Very true. I live in one right now. I have a 45 minute commute to literally the middle of nowhere. Nobody's going to build and maintain a mass transit system that works here, and the population isn't large enough to support regular ridesharing (not to mention the cost).
neurosisxeno
Member
There's a difference between getting rid of human-driven cars and banning cars in favor of mass transit. Self-driving cars are an inevitability, the problem is just get them to be reasonably priced. In probably 15-20 years I could see self-driving cars being the norm, since it would allow people to take long trips and just relax. Realistically they could make it so certain areas allow you to control the vehicle, or allow human-driven cars to continue if you have a specific license. Self-driving cars are also very likely to be much more energy efficient, nobody is trying to make a self-driving Humvee or F250. It will be something like a Tesla or Prius.
Emerson
May contain jokes =>
You're gonna make me sound like a fucking Republican but I do not want to live in a country where things like cars are outright banned.
I want the freedom to drive my own car down the highway if I want. These ideas as laws would be even harder to pass than a gun ban in this country.
I want the freedom to drive my own car down the highway if I want. These ideas as laws would be even harder to pass than a gun ban in this country.
aka. everything
neurosisxeno
Member
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
Look at him trotting out a fact he learned today. So cute.
NYCmetsfan
Banned
except its not a fact. he was a slaver owner.
he's conflating the nullification crisis with the reasons for the civil war
AntraxSuicide
Banned
It's only more eco-friendly, but it's not to a decent enough degree to matter without switching to better forms anyway. A world where we all switch to buses or rail (in their current states) will still end up going pear-shaped, and thus if we need to switch to eco-friendly transportation anyway, there's nothing stopping cars from making that switch too (as they are now).
All you need is a reason, which will already become apparent in places that handle a lot of people. There's literally no reason to legislate anything to do with cars; self-driving cars will become the norm in like a decade all on their own. Insurance will still be required on them but will effectively be 100% profit (self-driving cars don't really crash so you never have to pay out), so insurance companies will likely jack up rates on manually-driven cars. As long as the cars are still a major mode of transport, you don't fuck up the economic situation of rural poor people who will still be able to find a good used car for less than 5 figures (which probably would be harder in a heavily legislated anti-car world).
There's also a bit of an ableist problem; you'd certainly have to do a bit of walking/biking in any slightly rural community (I live in a college town and I'm still a few miles from the nearest bus stop) and depending on your physical condition, you may not care for a place where you can't just drive a modified car instead.
I love car discussions because they bring up amazing phrases like "isn't that volatile."
Ideally I would like my transportation to be zero percent volatile. Just because you made an engine literally powered by hitting stuff until it explodes doesn't mean it's like a marvel of safety. Be real, it hits stuff until that stuff explodes. We can probably come up with safer things than manually exploding gasoline.
Commercial self-driving taxi systems would save rural poor people a ton of money because they'd no longer have to pay full price for a vehicle they use approximately 1% of the time and keep parked the other 99% of the time, assuming all liability and maintenance but getting no benefit.
It's even better for rural poor people because pickup trucks are even more subject to this problem. It's rarely the ideal vehicle but in the circumstances in which it is ideal nothing else will do, so everybody needs access to one, which means a huge number of people own them and plenty of people own them as a second vehicle. Robot Lyft can eliminate this necessity.
I feel like this is literally my point. People love cars even though they kill people and destroy the planet. That's bad. Legislation is the only sensible solution.
People don't replace their cars that often. Even if we had an EV self-driving Honda Civic by 2020 there would be heavily polluting, dangerous cars on the road for like 30 more years after that without legislative interference. That's a lot of unnecessary dead people and pollution!
Plus, as you yourself observed, people have weird destructive obsessions with their red convertible death machines, so it's probably unwise to assume that they will just rationally choose to phase out their car use and switch to more sustainable cars for economic reasons.
In a universe in which most cars are self-driving taxis, cars don't have to be designed agnostically. They can be designed with specialized roles like "taking somebody to the supermarket and coming back with groceries" or "going to work, carrying only one small bag" or, in this case, "taking a car-seat-bound child to a designated location."
Then they can just send the appropriate car for the situation.
Before car designs evolve they can just fake it by letting you request a car seat in your robot taxi.
This plan...uses cars.
I need Foffy in here to back me up. He's the only other one crazy enough to agree with me on this. Since speculawyer is permabanned.
I mean that he died before the Civil War.
RustyNails
Member
Wonderful.
I dont know if Trump tweeted this. The grammar, including punctuation is above 5th grade pass.
Atomic Playboy
Member
Can I assume you're from the densely-populated Atlantic Northeast? Because in the Pacific Northwest, that idea makes no sense. It's fine for metropolitan areas, sure, but our major cities are hundreds of miles apart from each other, with a lot of nature in the middle that is one of the major perks of living here. How do people access areas off the beaten path in a market-driven system where those areas aren't profitable to provide access to? "No more hikes kids, suddenly it costs $10,000 to drive to the wilderness."
And, as someone else suggested, kids. Kids are a pretty major pain in the ass when traveling now; carting around a car seat to install on every single vehicle you get into is a completely non-viable solution. I mean, unless you had a single company producing every car and car seat so everything was universal and it was literally a 3 second "snap into place" operation... but monopolies are bad. And even then, you're still carting around a car seat with you.
And would this be Federal or State driven? Because I live in one state and work in another (border town). How do I handle competing regulations on allowable transportation? These states weren't willing to work together to get a new bridge built between them, I don't trust them to drive sustainable transport options between them.
The logistics of phasing out cars in densely-populated urban areas make sense (I live in one and I'm mostly in favor of increased mass transit options). But you will never, ever, ever see the banning of private automobiles. And the market wouldn't want it. The auto industry is not going to voluntarily forego thousands or millions of private sales because other things are slightly more convenient for day-to-day commuting. You focus on making cars more efficient, promoting alternative and renewable energy sources as opposed to gasoline, and building up the mass transit infrastructure where it makes sense. But don't approach things with the elitist view of "the way I live is the way that everyone else should live regardless of their specific situation being completely different than mine." Because that just comes across as remarkably arrogant.
neurosisxeno
Member
No way in hell he wrote it.
I'm also wondering, since Trump has publicly shown his admiration for Andrew Jackson many times, has anyone ever asked him how opinion on the Trail of Tears or just anything about Jackson's borderline inhumane treatment of non-whites?
I spent most of my life in Hawaii or California. Which means I spent a lot of my life driving, which is why I want to eliminate it so aggressively.
...you drive to those places with your robot taxi and schedule a pickup for later?
The taxi companies would presumably provide them. This would just make more sense for them, since they'd get more benefit out of them, and they would never have to uninstall or reinstall them. They just only send taxis with car seats to people who want them.
They manage transport between them right now. If you don't trust them, you should probably move!
I mean, I think the way of living that kills less people is actually better. I'll cop to that.
Car ownership is actively dangerous and causes deaths and injuries. I want less deaths and injuries.
I get that lots of people have basically decided, eh, deaths and injuries are fine with me. But I think that's wrong! I don't think it's arrogant of me to think that. I think it's kind of messed up that people are so resistant to the idea that we should kill less people because it might be inconvenient or complicated for them personally!
BlastProcessing
Member
Wonderful.
I need more presidential revisionist histories.
Would Garfield have allowed Pearl Harbor to happen?
Would Carter have stopped New Coke?
Another issue I have with the taxi only idea is that a single leg of a trip now has two or three for the car: it had to come from its home station or wherever it is to pick me up, then it has to take me to my destination, then it goes back home to charge or picks up someone else. Seems inefficient. But I suppose having my cars just sit most of the time is inefficient in a different way.
A question I have about this idealized self-driving car utopia some people have.
Have you at all considered the security concerns with the cars themselves? I mean, haven't there been numerous reports of how various smart/internet appliances have had glaring security flaws and turned into parts of botnets or into listening devices and the like? Wouldn't that be a problem for these cars?
Companies already stop supporting software of devices only a few years old. Like, look at Nest, they dropped support of and disabled their home hub thing, screwing users of it. I can't honestly see a car company supporting software in cars for ages. So does that mean we'd have to start replacing a car as often one does a cellphone?
Whenever I see people talk glowingly of a smartcar future, I never see talk of these problems. They seem like major, major hurdles to me. So what's the proposed idea to this? Legislation that forces companies to support them? That may help a bit but given how often there are problems and holes in programming, I still don't like the idea of leaving driving to all the cars and taking humans out of the equation.
(I'm just really curious about this, as I said above, I have never seen talk about it. I feel like its ignored. Maybe I've just not seen it?)
Have you at all considered the security concerns with the cars themselves? I mean, haven't there been numerous reports of how various smart/internet appliances have had glaring security flaws and turned into parts of botnets or into listening devices and the like? Wouldn't that be a problem for these cars?
Companies already stop supporting software of devices only a few years old. Like, look at Nest, they dropped support of and disabled their home hub thing, screwing users of it. I can't honestly see a car company supporting software in cars for ages. So does that mean we'd have to start replacing a car as often one does a cellphone?
Whenever I see people talk glowingly of a smartcar future, I never see talk of these problems. They seem like major, major hurdles to me. So what's the proposed idea to this? Legislation that forces companies to support them? That may help a bit but given how often there are problems and holes in programming, I still don't like the idea of leaving driving to all the cars and taking humans out of the equation.
(I'm just really curious about this, as I said above, I have never seen talk about it. I feel like its ignored. Maybe I've just not seen it?)
There was gold in thar hills, I'm sure Trump can identify with that.
Young conservatives defending the Choctaw and Cherokee clearances is a real thing, and people might as well wake up to it, because it's on the highest echelons of the government now.
Currently, car manufactures are required to support cars for 7 years. Generally that's been about replacement parts and such. That was why GM refused to sell EV1s to anyone and instead destroyed them, because they'd already lost a lot of money and didn't want to have to keep supply lines open.
Actually wasn't aware they were required, that's good to know. Still, I don't exactly put much trust in their software being secure and problem-free. Also maybe I'd like to keep my car beyond 7 years. Hell, my current car is a decade old. If it was self-driving and suddenly a critical error or security flaw came up that could be exploited, I'd be up the creek.
How would Reagan have stopped The Great Recession?
As you point out, there are already plenty of stories about car hacking now. If a hacker wanted to kill you by hacking into your car today, they probably could do it. Increasing the automation probably doesn't change that. Similarly, plenty of vital infrastructure is vulnerable to hackers now but they rarely actually get hacked.
Software support is an interesting point but in robot taxi world the robot taxi companies will just have to solve it.
In terms of human participation, even at our current level of development, robots are way way better drivers than humans. They have LIDAR, for example, which evolution failed to provide us.
AntraxSuicide
Banned
So this is basically just you looking for a justification of a phobia, I guess. The odds of your car blowing up are less than the odds of you getting struck by lightning (and they get lower every year). When I say gas isn't that volatile, I mean in comparison to basically anything else. I think you're more likely to get run over by a bus than you are to see one burn up or explode. Cars have things called fuel-pump kill switches that make it so that there's barely any gas in an accident (just what's in the line mostly), and it takes a shit-ton of effort to even get it burning, much less for it to explode.
I feel like I'm talking to someone who's super afraid of flying or something if you're bringing up gas as a reason to be scared of cars.
So you'll have to actually define this more specifically because I'm currently driving a vehicle that, over its time in my ownership, has cost me about $700 a year (not counting insurance). If you can beat that (and let me tell you, you can pay less than I did), then I'm more open to this for rural people.
Also, define "full price." I'm thinking of the King of the Hill episode where Hank thinks that he's been getting good deals his whole life by paying sticker price. Suckers pay sticker price.
This is true no matter what unless you do a buyback program for everyone's vehicles. And much like eminent domain, the US government doesn't get to wheel and deal; they'll be paying Blue Book value at a minimum, so that's like several billion dollars you need.
This probably isn't true. People like their cars because they like freedom and all that. If economically incentivized to just not drive manually, they'd mostly do it (for the same reason driving a stick is funner than automatic, but since more people prefer the convenience even if it comes with boredom, we get mostly automatics). Car culture folks would still drive manually of course, but the people that read Jalopnik aren't a huge majority.
This is essentially fan-fiction. Rural areas already don't really have the population to have fleets of cars driving around them just waiting to quickly take people to other places. They're not going to have 10 different kinds of cars on the chance someone needs that particular one. According to the FHWA, the average American drives 13K miles per year. In my hometown, this translates to roughly 5K miles that my hometown drives per day (about 4 miles a day on average times 1200 people). You're going to need to back up the idea that you can guarantee the roving cars to immediately drive these 5K miles whenever the people in that town decide they want to go somewhere.
RustyNails
Member
It would be a typical Trump non answer defense that will blow up on twitter the following day.
"I mean it was horrible but the cherokees had to go you know. It was horrible. I wouldn't have done it. But you gotta respect the law. You're either a country of laws or you're not" etc
I feel going "eh there's already holes, let's give them more potential avenues" isn't (corrected myself, meant isn't) a smart idea, personally.
And at least if something goes awry with my car I'm at the wheel still and, assuming I'm a good driver anyway (which admittedly many aren't), can at least handle it. And I'll go with human intuition over driving AI every time.
I do see things eventually going the way of self driving cars, mind, much as I dislike it. But I see it having major problems that, as I said, I rarely see touched upon.
Emerson
May contain jokes =>
It's all fan fiction. It's impossible fantasy horseshit that would never work much less be efficient.
AntraxSuicide
Banned
rokkerkory
Member
Guys what happened to kellyanne conway? Dont hear a peep from her anymore?
whyamihere
Banned
New GA6 poll (Anzalone)
https://twitter.com/ossoff/status/859229421412257792
Ossoff (D): 48
Handel (R): 47
Undecided: 5
https://twitter.com/ossoff/status/859229421412257792
Ossoff (D): 48
Handel (R): 47
Undecided: 5
AntraxSuicide
Banned
I assume they're only counting votes between Ossoff and Handel to force someone over 50?
whyamihere
Banned
It's a runoff so Ossoff and Handel are the only options. Besides a write in.
Dubbedinenglish
Banned
Bernie to win
shinra-bansho
Member
Or those shitty foot powered kid scooter things.
Don't take this the wrong way, but this sentence sums up why I believe we'll eventually need to ban or heavily restrict car ownership.
Economic forces can't arbitrage someone out of a position that economic forces didn't arbitrage them into.
AntraxSuicide
Banned
Right, but I was thinking they'd ignore the write-ins (some states do this unless you get enough signatures to have your votes counted).
BlastProcessing
Member
I'm honestly surprised that you are so willing to accept the Silicon Valley technolibertarian future. I would never trust those chuckle fucks to create a safe and fair system. You might as well put the Tobacco industry in charge of healthcare.
Also, if you are primarily focused on banning shit to save human lives, we're going to need to have a talk about sugar.
BlastProcessing
Member
It's a hard thing to win at!
But seriously, do you trust those tech companies to do this right? Companies like Uber and Google are stampeding over each other to win the ability to refashion American infrastructure in their own image. It's not something I would trust to go particularly well.
The point is it's like maximally non-libertarian.
Like I said in my first post I'm fine with the government just providing the taxis, but I tend to favor the utility model because you know how people are about full state control of the economy, they get all butt hurt.
shinra-bansho
Member
Why do you care if I want to drive. Fascist.
BlastProcessing
Member
Shit's going down in New Orleans. Confederate's are camping the Jefferson Davis Memorial to keep it from being removed.
@The_Gambit
A truck with dozens of anti-monument protesters reading FUCK OFF NAZI SCUM just arrived at Jeff Davis. Pro-monument folks sorta stunned
@The_Gambit
Anti-monument protesters now doing Nine Inch Nails karaoke to the Confederate protesters
@The_Gambit
Monument getting shovey as people chant FUCK OFF NAZI SCUM.
@The_Gambit
And someone just threw bottle at my head BRAWL
A truck with dozens of anti-monument protesters reading FUCK OFF NAZI SCUM just arrived at Jeff Davis. Pro-monument folks sorta stunned
@The_Gambit
Anti-monument protesters now doing Nine Inch Nails karaoke to the Confederate protesters
@The_Gambit
Monument getting shovey as people chant FUCK OFF NAZI SCUM.
@The_Gambit
And someone just threw bottle at my head BRAWL
I mean, I worked in Silicon Valley (or adjacent). So maybe I have a different perspective than most people. The Silicon Valley system is ultimately built on the foundation of exploiting people who believe in the value of the work. That does impose some limits on how obviously evil you can be.
I don't trust SilVal to do things perfectly. But, like, the status quo is also managed by large corporations. They're just shittier corporations. I'll take Google's world over General Motors's world any day.
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