is not scary yellow chinese, and brown indians you need to worry about dude. Please put your priorities straight
HN user
luses
oh so your a filthy commie, an evil domestic terrorist. dont you know they're the job creators? you should be grateful for your stable bed and stop being greedy.
imagine the horror of free loaders eating free lunches, living in affordable apartments close to school, and riding high speed rail each weekend to visit nature. will anyone think of our lords? and what about my iphone? obviously phones will cease to exist once we implement these communist pipe dreams. just look at china, they've got all of this and they clearly hate it. no phones, no brand clothes, oh the terror. you should be locked up in an insane asylum immediately
this argument ignores basic opportunity costs. taxing that wealth allows the state to redirect labor and materials production and distribution toward high-utility public goods: high-speed rail, dense urban cores, and affordable housing. instead of subsidizing insolvent suburbs, we could be modernizing the logistics network and actually growing the real economy.
worse, you completely miss the political dimension. hoarded wealth buys the lobbying power to prevent these necessary structural changes. you are engaging in the exact kind of apologetics that has led to american infrastructure collapsing while the capital class extracts rent. thinking that resource allocation is a 'no-op' is economically illiterate
you're exactly right. the fixation on human vs AV error rates completely misses the point. even if we achieve 'perfect' AVs, mixing heavy machinery with children guarantees conflict. physics dictate cars can't stop instantly. the only solution is removing cars, not better drivers.
most commenters here are ignoring the structural incentives. the long term threat of waymo isn't safety, its the enclosure of public infrastructure. these companies are building a permission structure to lobby personal vehicles and public transit off the road.
transportation demand is inelastic. if we allow a transition where mobility is captured by private platforms, the consumer loses all leverage. the endgame is the american healthcare model: capture the market, kill alternatives, and extract max rent because the user has no choice. we need dense urban cores and mass transit, not a dependency on rent seeking oligopolies