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A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Well like I said, you're a dumbass who judges people on stereotypes in their head instead of reading what they wrote so go fuck yourself for thinking you know literally anything about me.
If you think I'm a tech bro I will repeat what I've already said, learn how to fucking read. Jesus fucking Christ you're an idiot.
First of all, about ~300 people die from ladder falls a year in the US, and ~35,000 people die from traffic incidents, so no, you absolutely fucking are not more likely to die from a lightbulb unless you're a shut in obsessively changing their light bulbs every 3 months.
Second, engineers invented these little things called LED light bulbs, and you only have to change them once every 10-15 years instead of a couple times a year. There are also these little things called fall arrests harnesses that are mandatory for all up high work in any commercial or industrial setting. And guess what, engineers even invented light bulb changing poles so you never have to be up high.
Now that we're done with your dumb analogy that you didn't think through, back to the topic at hand, as long as cars exist, they will be safer if they're self driving, so present your plausible plan for getting all of the world to give up cars in the next let's say even 20 years, or shut. the. fuck. up.
And thanks for the reminder that even people with extremely similar political views to me, can be arrogant dickbag idiots.
From what I've read from you you're fanboying automated driving quite a lot. See it as the one and true thing to solve all the issues even though I gave you plenty of examples of things it can't solve, even if it did work. You addressed none of them in a convincing manner, instead dug your head in the sand, indicative of a closed world-view.
"techbro" is simply shorthand for that.
Good job missing the point. Then I'll fall off the ladder cleaning windows or shoving winter clothes onto the top shelf of the cabinet. Changing a smoke alarm battery. Point is: Household accidents aren't exactly rare: In 2022, 2.776 people died in Germany due to traffic accidents. Domestic accidents: 15.551.
...and you're going to make people use them how? Put a police officer in every household to make sure people are sticking to occupational safety principles?
I'd say if those companies put even just a tenth of the money they spend on automated driving research into domestic safety, even just ad campaigns, they could save a lot more people. But they of course won't you can't make money with that unless you're the state.
As soon as you give an actually good argument how you're going to replace every car we currently have with an automated one, sure. As soon as you tell me how to square the circle of automated cars not running over pedestrians but still being reliable enough to actually go where you want them to go. As soon as you admit that you've been constantly ignoring those problems because they contradict your faith.
I very much doubt we have the same opinion on whether capital should be running basic infrastructure.
300 people died falling from ladders in the US, while 35,000 died from traffic fatalities. So shut the fuck up with your cherry picked stats and shifting from a single problem (ladders) to all household accidents once you tried to look up stats and realized you were a fucking idiot.
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? You asked for a technology that helps prevent ladder falls, THATS WHAT A FALL ARREST HARNESS IS. YOU FUCKING IDIOT. Here's another one: light bulb changing poles!
Yeah, because you're an idiot who can't fucking read and keeps slotting in a tech bro stereotype. You're a judgemental, inaccurate, dumbass.
You're doing it again: I readily admit that I used the statistics loosely, I didn't even look up numbers, I said "ladder" and meant with that "household accidents", which I knew to be much higher than traffic deaths (at least over here, dunno about the US).
What did you do? Instead of correcting me on the fuzziness but acknowledging that household safety is a bigger issue than traffic safety, you go on "lol you dumb I don't have to engage with your point because you made a spelling mistake".
That's not being smart, that's being a smart-ass. It's not engaging with the argument in honest discussion, but using cheap tricks to deflect. Ben Shapiro would be proud of you.
A safety technology which doesn't get used doesn't increase safety. Or is the existence of autonomous cars making non-autonomous cars safer? Hmm? Basic logic? If you want a technology to solve something, part of the design requirements for that technology is its acceptance, its price, which will dictate how ubiquitous its use will be. Technology cannot be understood apart from its social context.
Yeah, and you were fucking wrong about that too, and just focused on your own area and extrapolating what's going on in your fucking village to the realities around the world. Like I said, arrogant.
It wasn't a spelling mistake, you didn't bother looking up stats and made an argument based on incorrect information. Even the stat you thought you had in your head was for your tiny region of the world only, not the world on global scale.
Yes, and when we're talking about a problem that causes 35,000 deaths a year on top of billions in damages and hundreds of thousands injured and maimed (in the US alone), then there are many avenues to have regulators encourage or enforce the use of that technology. It's also not very expensive. First generation Waymo hardware costs ~$100k, that's easily in the range for autonomous taxi services to pay back within a year of use, give it 10 years for the compute and sensors costs to come down and to get the benefits of manufacturing at scale and it will be easily affordable by average individuals. Another 10 years from then and it will have filtered down into the used and low end markets.
US, 2021: 128,200 household accident deaths, 42,939 traffic.
Those numbers took like 30 seconds to find.
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You said ladder, now you're saying "household accidents", so how are you going to prevent people from falling and hitting their heads on the floor, or falling down their stairs, or poisoning themselves?
Also, in your made up fantasy world, is "whataboutism" still a valid way to argue? In your society are they only allowed to solve one problem at a time? If we're having hundreds of thousands of lives changed and ruined every year by something it's totally not worth solving or addressing because more people are dying in Ukraine right? We need to solve all bigger problems first, and ONLY then can we work on solving traffic fatalities right?
Appropriate that you used the song famous for not understanding what irony actually is.
I already addressed that. I meant household accidents as a whole. You're trying to deflect from the fact that you failed to look up statistics while accusing me of the same.
Have you noticed something about those statistics Germany vs. USA? How the ratio is approximately 3:1 vs. 5:1? And that's with the Autobahn having long stretches with no speed limit? What does Germany do that the US doesn't, that could be copied as tried+true approach to drastically reduce traffic accidents?
Why are you so focussed on self-driving? It's unproven technology, at best. Level 4 tech does not exist, all those accreditations are in places with very questionable regulatory regimes. Audi and Honda have proper Level 3 cars, allowing autonomous driving while in a traffic jam, that's it. That's it, the rest is wishful thinking and "trust us bro we have venture capital" which works in Palo Alto and Shenzen but nowhere else.
AGAIN, because you can't get it through your skull apparently, I am in favour of building more transit and actively vote and letter write and campaign for it. Jesus fucking christ, if you respond one more time without understanding that I'm just blocking you and fucking off because this is insufferable at this point.
But the point is that regardless of what we want, reality is still reality, American suburbanites are still American suburbanites, and 20 years from now there will still be cars on the road, a lot of them.
Because hundreds of thousands of people die from human drivers and far more are injured and maimed, every single year. How is that so fucking hard to understand?
Waymo has driven millions of miles in Phoenix and San Francisco with three incidents that produced minor injuries. Are those extremely limited conditions? Yes, intentionally so. But level 4 driving does exist within those conditions, and the cars training in those conditions are preparing for them to expand to less limited conditions.
And because 20 years from now the public transit utopia that we both want won't exist in the US, but self driving cars might be ubiquitous.
Then why don't you argue in favour of it? I'm not opposed to automated driving, all I'm saying is that it doesn't address what you think it addresses. It mostly addresses money billionaires have burning in their pocket.
That's not an answer. Why, among all the gazillion of approaches to reduce traffic deaths, are you focussed specifically, and quite pin-pointedly so, on self-driving? What makes it so more effective, so more realistic, so more existing, than raised intersections? What makes the rest of the US so fundamentally more backwards than, of all the people, the Mormons?
I'll tell you: Because there's an illness that has befallen US progressivism, and that is to confuse "new" with "good", and "already exists" with "not worth it".
Not with that attitude certainly not, no, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stop talking to me, convince your local city council to build a raised intersection you will have done more for humanity.
I do, frequently, but we're in a thread discussing the merits of autonomous vehicles vs normal car, not the merits of public transit.
Because that's what this fucking thread is about. You want to start a thread on the merits of roundabouts vs cross intersections and you'll see me arguing for roundabouts.
You clearly have not been to the US if you think the Mormons are the most stubborn and backwards part of it. Go to Florida, go to any Trump supporting county, drive from a city to the various suburbs and country homes and see how spread out they are. Look at how half the US votes. Utah and the Mormons are an exception and odd sect that isn't remotely representative of America at large, they also mass built housing for the homeless, something that nowhere else in America has done. And guess what? Utah still has a ton of cars.
And you know what makes self driving cars different from every solution that you mention? They have the potential to be an exact drop in replacement for existing cars and can work absolutely everywhere they do, including all edge cases.
Bruh, you can't fucking read. I've already told you I'm not American and that I do that. Jesus fucking christ your brain is incapable of not just thinking "haha I'm arguing with generic tech bro dufus, let me clown on how tech bro dufus he is ha ha ha"
And the merits are "people don't like it". As evidenced by the very title. You asked me why anyone would destroy an automated car, I gave you an answer, you didn't accept it but neither provided an alternative. Maybe ponder about it a bit more.
No, this thread is not about how cool autonomous driving it, but about a crowd destroying an autonomous car. Why did they do that?
Overall, nice try at diversion, as if any discussion on the internet had ever been limited to the original topic, wait, let me prove it: Hitler! Godwin!. Really you should try to employ less rhetorical tricks. They may work on you, they rarely if ever work on me.
Point taken, but if the Mormons can do it, why can't California? They at least were smart enough to abolish single family home zoning and didn't blink when Musk tried to torpedo California HSR (which is what his hyperloop nonsense is about), but that was the state forcing the municipalities to enact a bare minimum of zoning sanity that they themselves were unwilling to do. I think Portland leads the pack in that regard, at least among the more prominent locations.
Maybe that's exactly the issue: Things like streetcar suburb aren't new. They are what existed until they got outlawed by a failed innovation. Mormons might be conservative enough to look back and say "yep that was better", while California liberals are, just as you, saying "muuuuuuh but we need something shiny and new, old solutions can't fix anything".
And I have the potential to be an exact drop in replacement for Jesus Christ. Why do you insist the fix to the issues be a drop-in replacement? Conservative, afraid of change, much?
Apparently doesn't stop you to be car-brained like an American. As to techbro: Don't act and argue and talk like one and I'll stop calling you that.
Lmfao, so your answer at the end of all this, is "automated cars won't happen because people don't like them"??
And yet your alternative is for every American to give up their car and take public transit. lmfao.
Learn how to read.
Learn how to read.
No. My answer is "automated cars will continue to be opposed by the collective unconscious until urban planning related things that are of importance to it are addressed (such as housing, equity, but also plain liability see asphalt deserts), and at that point autonomous cars will not be needed any more". But that's a mouthful, I thought you intelligent enough to understand it without being spoon-fed given that you claim to be such an advocate for public transit and modern urban planning, being aware of all its its advantages in most exquisite and intricate detail.
Autonomous cars will not, just to open another can of worms, re-establish third places in the urban fabric. Do you know what third places are, their function, their importance, and how car-centric design destroyed them?
Lmfao, ok bud, please point me to the jurisdiction where drivers aren't killing thousands of people a year.
You seem to have forgotten the parts of the discussion where you failed to account for even a modicum of edge cases on an even 20 year timeline.
Everyone getting around by streetcar suburbs made sense 20 years ago too, but I'm glad we didn't stop all road safety engineering on the assumption we'd do it just because it the logical collective thing to do. You're living in a fantasy where you're planning only for the best possible outcome.
We can probably both agree though, that the actual thrashing of the car was an inevitable result of ever growing wealth inequality.
I never said that all cars must be abolished. Go, go back in the discussion and check. The one group I addressed specifically was commuters: It's the biggest group, most easy to address to at least 95%.
If you're talking about the US: No, the US didn't suddenly start to safety engineer, they're still hostile to pedestrians over there. On the contrary, 20 years ago SUVs which make children invisible didn't really exist yet. If you're talking about Europe: We never abolished public transit. We made mistakes weakening it, but we didn't abolish it, and engineering for pedestrian safety goes back to at least the 60s, and by the 70s at least the Netherlands had found their bearings.
Of course. I mean if you want to chauffeur everyone in an individual autonomous taxi during rush hour everyone will need one of those, leased or owned, either way it's going to be expensive so people understand on an instinctive level that those cars aren't a solution while wealth inequality persists. As said: Public transport side-steps that issue. We haven't been able to fix wealth inequality in the last two centuries you won't do it in the next two decades, or at least we shouldn't bet urbanism on that happening.
Meanwhile, roads are up for reconstruction all the time anyways, how about making sure not a single one gets rebuilt along car-brain principles.
Yes, which brings us back to the point that if any cars are on the road, they should be autonomous, because autonomous cars have the potential to be far safer than humans.
Either your point is that all cars can be abolished, or that the deaths that drivers cause don't matter. Either way you're wrong.
Bruh. Seriously. Are you intentionally being dense? The point is not that safety standards suddenly started 20 years ago, it's that pursuing increased automotive safety standards was still a worthwhile effort in parallel with building public transit, because guess what, even Europe has thousand of car deaths a year, and it's worth planning for harm reduction strategies even if we don't get the overall optimum first choice.
They're also going to be far less reliable, we've been over this, an autonomous fire truck won't ram something out of the way because it can't make the call unless we're talking true scifi. The cars that will be left will be mostly driven by professionals which makes the gains marginal. And anyway I'm not fundamentally opposed to autonomous cars, have them if you want to cover those last 0.0001% but if you want to solve 100% with them, well, it won't work. Too expensive.
I already said all that. You're re-erecting strawmen.
Europe already had public transportation and walkable cities. The US doesn't. And over here btw noone (serious) is hailing autonomous driving as a revolution or solution to anything, even though Volkswagen (in the form of Audi) were the first one to produce an actual level 3 vehicle. And waymo etc. know that they couldn't get their purported "level 4" vehicles past regulations so they don't even try, having seen uber crash+burn over here with its skirting of regulations, unlike in the US they're actually getting enforced. And exist/are sensible.
Yeah.
Yeah, see above. Europe doesn't hail autonomous driving as revolutionary because it is a super dense area with a well established train network. Europe is not the whole world. Autonomous driving will develop faster than America will become like Europe, how much money would you be willing to bet otherwise?
Density doesn't have anything to do with it the US is as if not more dense if you subtract all the void in between places. Even taking the void into account the US has twice the population density of Finland (16.4 vs. 33.6 per km^2^) yet Finland manages to have public transport in its urban areas. Places like the east cost are significantly more dense than practically anywhere in Europe. California has practically the same density as Spain.
And it's not like the US don't have an established rail network, either -- they just let it rot and operate it in a way that doesn't make rail a viable alternative to driving or flying. With the same rail policy as Europe there'd be a HSR sleeper train from New York to LA, HSR which also in Europe would have to be constructed, first, all that track from the age of industrialisation doesn't do high speeds.
How much riots, money, and deaths is the US wiling to bet on autonomous driving to avoid raising intersections when the street gets its periodic make-over, anyway? It's upkeep in general that costs money, rebuilding them in a sane way while you're at it costs little more to actually less: Most of their streets are way too wide.