What a great turn of phrase. It’s a very succinct way of summing up an attitude (or part of an attitude) that I have felt has become more and more a part of the technorati mindset. Well said.
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You aren’t going to reduce an hour-long commute to 10 minutes with just self-driving cars. The only way that would happen is to drastically increase the speed limit. Most roads aren’t designed to allow traffic to go that fast.
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It’s actually going to go the opposite way. With working from home people will move out of cities into the countryside.
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Most forms of public transportation are subsidized by the government in the USA. A great deal from government grants, President Trump wanted a big infrastructure bill, but the Democrats wouldn’t work with him on it.
But if the commute would normally be 15 minutes, but for traffic congestion and impatient drivers - self-driving cars could potentially handle the process better by normalizing the flow of traffic and making it more efficient.
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Thanks, though perhaps more accurate would be: “exasperation”.
They don’t work with the left, either; if your concern is actually improving conditions for individuals in a broad (some might say social-ist) sense, you can do a lot better than partied parsimony.
This is little more than a slight lowering of the socioeconomic bar to the same phenomenon that’s been a cliche for decades that led to the feral resentment of Portlanders in Oregon and some places in Colorado. Have fun when the failure to battle exploitive ISPs strands you after your satellite provider changes its terms of service.
Again, to me, this buys so little, especially in dense areas, and at potentially such high cost to liberty under a surveillance-capital regime, to say nothing of money/price both to municipalities and to riders. How many times have I nearly been run over by a moron burning rubber from a stop-light, only to catch up to them at another one later on, a problem not of impatience but of the simple requirement for cross-traffic and pedestrians. That’s not going away with management. Another example: the illusion that LA highways would run smoothly if only the off-/on-ramps were “managed” into controlled flow speeds ignores the fact that cars are the wrong solution anyway, and that the highways are only so overloaded because every other means of transport’s infrastructure is so neglected (for its part, LA is making strides, slowly and painfully, toward establishing viable public transit, at last). Studies show that, once sufficiently overbuilt, even more roads actually worsen, not improve, traffic flows: there’s no managing your way out of that from a logistic standpoint just through marginal improvements to driving behavior. My point is just that while you do have a point in practice its relevance is limited and the costs of it far outweigh its benefits in a great many contexts for given instances, IMO.
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I would be very pleased if one result of COVID was creating a flow of people back in to relatively rural areas, which have suffered significant economic destruction in the last 50 years.
I’ve lived most of my life in relatively rural areas, and have watched several shrivel to nothingness. With industries like coal contracting, and farming becoming centralized, there’s little reason for the town of 250 that used to house a grain elevator, some stores and a couple schools for the farming population to exist.
It probably sounds snooty, but I would move to an enclave in Nebraska or Iowa where the primary industry is “remote work” if the opportunity presented itself.
I’m not convinced such a migration will happen, because I think 95% of the people who live in cities prefer urban life.
I also don’t think there will be many jobs which will be 100% remote. It wouldn’t be easy to live in Nebraska and remain employed by a company in Chicago if they expect employees to be in the office one week a month.
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You don’t need to increase the speed limit, if the limiting factor is egotistical idiots constantly trying to cut each other up in heavy traffic and causing traffic jams.
If the vehicles can communicate with each other and automatically make room at the right time, the traffic will flow faster. Still not the speed limit at rush hour, but significantly faster than with humans at the wheel.
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It was a great show, wasn’t it, but the notion of streaming your operating system will protect you from ransomware amuses me. Having a cloud-based operating system will not stop virusses from being able to compromise the underlying OS you use to load the cloud-based one and, once that has been compomised, it’ll only be a matter of time before ransomware authors figure out how to jump into your cloud session. I could be wrong but don’t we already have virusses that can break into virtual machines which, it seems to me, is all cloud-based operating systems really are
I am more than happy to accept I’m wrong if it turn out I am but it seems that, even with Windows Virtual Desktop, ransomware might not go away entirely.
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