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I’m not sure you’re familiar with the way the industry works. Builders and investors are very rarely the same people. Builders don’t care if the buyer is going to live there or rent the property.
The fact that the entire condo market is built with investor sized units would suggest otherwise (or suggest that builders build what the market demands and if the market is all investors they will build investor focused units).
This is also quite the take — it’s very rare to see anyone advocate for more urban sprawl or suggest that building more housing units drives up prices.
I agree, not sure where you saw that. Was it where I said that green belt policies are “very necessary”?
Land is the only finite resource in the equation, so making less efficient use of it in the hope that prices will come down is… Well, I’ll need you to explain how that math is supposed to work.
The point is that policies that combat urban sprawl have also increased financialization of the housing market, both my making housing a more limited commodity (which incentivizes investors to buy), and by making it impossible to build a house unless you’re a large corporation that can afford to build a multi-tenant building.
We unquestionably need to combat urban sprawl, but we should also be addressing the effects that those corrections are having on the housing market by de-incentivizing investors and profiteering.
That release valve you speak of is unsustainable due to infrastructure and transportation costs. It only works up to some level of sprawl.
Completely agree. Greenbelt policies are necessary for environmental and infrastructure reasons, they just also cause problems from a housing affordability / market elasticity standpoint, which we haven’t addressed at all.
Correct, which is why it has to be public investment. We need massive multi unit buildouts funded by new public spending. All of it durable, cheap affordable housing. This will not only act on prices via increasing supply, it will also act by bidding prices down because the prices will not be maximizing profits. Whoever wants a place to live, should be able to afford one of thes units. Let the market sort out prices and availability of more premium options.
I do generally agree with this approach, though I think that a) as long as units are up for private ownership, it will make sense for investors to buy them up and hold them, you do also need to pair this with both vacant property taxes and ban investors from buying government built housing.
And b) it also won’t work if the government only builds out the bottom of the market. Like we’re seeing right now with the condo market, if you just build shitty units that people don’t actually want to live in, then people won’t really consider them part of the same market and any effects their supply has won’t spread widely. If the government actually builds out livable Habitat 67 style buildings and units that middle class people would want to live in then it will be most effective.
Supply needs to increase, but it can literally never increase enough given its current structure of investors and profiteering.
As long as houses are bought by investors (anyone with two houses), then it means that normal people will be priced out as the investors push prices up higher than they should be. If house prices drop they’ll invest in building less housing. This is compounded by most new housing being multi-unit buildings that a single person cannot build on their own. When we had urban sprawl, you could still buy cheap land on the outskirts and build your own house if investors stopped building new developments, but with (very necessary) greenbelt policies, it eliminates that release valve, putting the housing market basically entirely in control of investors who’ll keep it inflated to profit themselves.
I’m not google, you can figure this out for yourself:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-lot-more-than-waymos-software-data-shows/
you are literally doing what i mean when i say you are making assumptions with no evidence. there is, again, no reason to believe that “driving more efficiently” will result from mass-adoption of automated vehicles–and even granting they do, your assumption that this wouldn’t be gobbled up by induced demand is intuitively disprovable. even the argumentation here parallels other cases where induced demand happens! “build[ing] new roads or widen[ing] existing ones” is a measure that is almost always justified by an underlying belief that we need to improve efficiency and productivity in existing traffic flows,[^1] and obviously traffic flow does not improve in such cases.
I’m doing nothing other than questioning where the induced demand is coming from. What is inducing if not increased efficiency?
The whole point of induced demand in highways is that when you add capacity in the form of lanes it induces demand. So if our highways are already full and if that capacity isn’t coming from increased EV efficiency then where is it coming from? If there’s no increase in road capacity then what is inducing demand?
but granting that you’re correct on all of that somehow: more efficiency (and less congestion) would be worse than inducing demand. “efficiency” in the case of traffic means more traffic flow at faster speeds, which is less safe for everyone—not more.[^2] in general: people drive faster, more recklessly, and less attentively when you give them more space to work with (especially on open roadways with no calming measures like freeways, which are the sorts of roads autonomous vehicles seem to do best on). there is no reason to believe they would do this better in an autonomous vehicle, which if anything incentivizes many of those behaviors by giving people a false sense of security (in part because of advertising and overhyping to that end!).
You are describing how humans drive, not AVs. AVs always obey the speed limit and traffic calming signs.
you asserted these as “other secondary effects to AVs”–i’m not sure why you would do that and then be surprised when people challenge your assertion. but i’m glad we agree: these don’t exist, and they’re not benefits of mass adoption nor would they likely occur in a mass adoption scenario.
We haven’t agreed on anything,I said I was open to your reasoning as to why those effects wouldn’t happen, then you didn’t provide any.
the vast majority of road safety is a product of engineering and not a product of human driving ability, what car you drive or its capabilities, or other variables of that nature. almost all of the problems with, for example, American roadways are design problems that incentivize unsafe behaviors in the first place (and as a result inform everything from the ubiquity of speeding to downstream consumer preferences in cars). to put it bluntly: you cannot and will not fix road safety through automated vehicles, doubly so with your specific touted advantages in this conversation.
You think you can eliminate all accidents through road design?
You are literally ignoring every single accident caused by distracted driving, impatient driving, impaired driving, tired driving etc.
Yeah, road design in America should be better, AVs should still also replace crappy wreckless humans. Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
this is at obvious odds with the current state of self-driving technology itself–which is (as i noted in the other comment) subject to routine overhyping and also has rather minimal oversight and regulation generally
All cool tech things are overhyped. If you judgement for whether or not a technology is going to be useful is “if it sounds at all overhyped then it will flop” then you would never predict any technology would change the world ever.
And no, quite frankly those assertions are objectively false. Waymo and Cruise’s driverless programs are both monitored by the DMV which is why they revoked Cruise’s license when they found them hiding crash data. Waymo has never been found to do so or even accused of doing so. Notice that in the lawsuit you linked, Waymo was happy to publish accident and safety data but did not want to publish data about how it’s vehicles handle edge cases, which would give their rivals information on how they operate, and the courts agreed with them.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-lot-more-than-waymos-software-data-shows/
Since their inception, Waymo vehicles have driven 5.3 million driverless miles in Phoenix, 1.8 million driverless miles in San Francisco, and a few thousand driverless miles in Los Angeles through the end of October 2023. And during all those miles, there were three crashes serious enough to cause injuries:
In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup. A Waymo passenger was not wearing a seatbelt (they were sitting on the buckled seatbelt instead) and sustained injuries that Waymo described as minor. In August, a Waymo at an intersection “began to proceed forward” but then “slowed to a stop” and was hit from behind by an SUV. The SUV left the scene without exchanging information, and a Waymo passenger reported minor injuries. In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind. Again, there was an injury, but Waymo described it as minor. The two Arizona injuries over 5.3 million miles works out to 0.38 injuries per million vehicle miles. One San Francisco injury over 1.75 million miles equals 0.57 injuries per million vehicle miles. An important question is whether that’s more or less than you’d expect from a human-driven vehicle.
After making certain adjustments—including the fact that driverless Waymo vehicles do not travel on freeways—Waymo calculates that comparable human drivers reported 1.29 injury crashes per million miles in Phoenix and 3.79 injury crashes per million miles in San Francisco. In other words, human drivers get into injury crashes three times as often as Waymo in the Phoenix area and six times as often in San Francisco.
Waymo argues that these figures actually understate the gap because human drivers don’t report all crashes. Independent studies have estimated that about a third of injury crashes go unreported. After adjusting for these and other reporting biases, Waymo estimates that human-driven vehicles actually get into five times as many injury crashes in Phoenix and nine times as many in San Francisco.
To help evaluate the study, I talked to David Zuby, the chief research officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The IIHS is a well-respected nonprofit that is funded by the insurance industry, which has a strong interest in promoting automotive safety.
While Zuby had some quibbles with some details of Waymo’s methodology, he was generally positive about the study. Zuby agrees with Waymo that human drivers underreport crashes relative to Waymo. But it’s hard to estimate this underreporting rate with any precision. Ultimately, Zuby believes that the true rate of crashes for human-driven vehicles lies somewhere between Waymo’s adjusted and unadjusted figures.
they can. induced demand is omnipresent in basically all vehicular infrastructure and vehicular improvements and there’s no reason to think this would differ with autonomous vehicles
Yes, I have no doubt there would be induced demand, but that extra demand wouldn’t be at the cost of anything. Induced demand is a problem when we, for instance, build new roads or widen existing ones, because then more people drive and they clog up the same as they were before. That’s a bad thing because the cost of adding this capacity is that we have to tear down nature and existing city to add lanes, and then we have more capacity that sits at a standstill leading to more emissions.
But if AVs add more capacity to our roads, that will be entirely because they are driving more efficiently. We’ll have the same amount of cars on the road at any given time, they’ll just be moving faster on average rather than idling in traffic jams made by humans. Which means that there will be only relatively minor emissions increases during peak times, fewer emissions emitted during non peak, and we won’t be tearing anything down to build more giant highways.
okay but: literally none of this follows from mass-adoption of autonomous vehicles. this is a logical leap you are making with no supporting evidence—there is, and i cannot stress this enough, no evidence that if mass-adoption occurs any of this will follow
You’re asking for something that does not exist. How am I supposed to provide you evidence proving what the results of mass adoption of AVs will be when there has never been a mass adoption of AVs.
and in general the technology is subject to far more fabulism and exaggeration (like this!) than legitimate technological advancement or improvement of society.
Again, it’s never actually been rolled out on a mass scale. It’s a technology still being actively developed. Neither of us know what the end results will be, but I put forth plausible reasoning to my speculation, if you have plausible reasoning why those things won’t come to pass I’m all ears. For instance, what is your reasoning for believing that AVs could never be fundamentally safer than human drivers who are frequently tired, angry, distracted, impaired, impatient, etc?
And here we see decades of automobile industry propaganda in action. There is only the car, or no mobility whatsoever.
Please cite where I said that.
You remember how everybody was just trapped inside their houses for centuries until the Ford factories started cranking out Model Ts?
Um, yes. Obviously not remember directly, but that is what is in history books.
Most Americans lived in small rural communities and seldom left their farm and immediate community. When they travelled at all it would be by horse and buggy, and would take forever to get to the nearest train station, and then forever from the end of the line to wherever they had to go. If people lived farther away you would see them once every couple of years and otherwise letter write them. Cars fundamentally changed how much the average person travels in their life by huge orders of magnitude, and society is now oriented around individual families and communities being much more spread out. I think this is flawed, but I also think it’s unlikely to change given the realities of basic things like housing costs making it unaffordable to live where your parents did.
We should build out robust train networks to reduce as many cars as possible, but at the same time the idea that you’ll eliminate cars completely is quite frankly, completely divorced from reality. I personally do not own a car and have spent a used car amount of money on a cargo bike to avoid having to buy a car. But guess what? There is still a very clear limit on the size of object I can transport (smaller than virtually any piece of furniture), it’s unpleasant to infeasible to use in the rain depending on the load, and it is flat out unusable in the winter with snow and ice, so I end up using a car share service semi-regularly. I’ve thought about putting on bigger wheels, extending the bed, adding better suspension, a roof, and another set of wheels for balance, but now I’ve invented a car. And that’s not to mention driving out to nature preserves for camping, hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking etc. nor visiting family and friends who live out in the country not near any bus stops or train stations.
As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers, and literally no one has ever presented a remotely feasible and practical plan for eliminating cars.
This is a fundamentally flawed argument.
First of all, if people are getting to where they want to go faster, easier, and happier, that is a good thing. If you want to argue that everyone needs to be a hermit who never leaves home and orders everything on Amazon then you will never get your way because people fundamentally want to travel to see the outdoors and nature around them, to see their family and friends, and just to adventure. Eliminating vehicle deaths by making travel impossible is not a noble goal.
Secondly, it’s based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do. Road congestion in most major cities is already the limiting factor that pushes people to bike, walk, or take transit. Even if AVs make it easier and cheaper to take car, you’re still not going to do it during rush hour when you can bike.
Thirdly, it’s based on the idea that AVs are only going to be slightly safer than human drivers. We have no reason to think that’s the case. Humans are fucking terrible drivers, and it’s highly likely that AVs will be several orders of magnitude safer than the average human driver.
Fourthly, it ignores other secondary effects to AVs, like suddenly not needing nearly as much parking, freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move, and their increased patience not causing constant traffic jams because they tailgated someone and then slammed on the brakes.
On Friday, an emotional Merrick collapsed shortly after speaking to media about what she called “a gross miscarriage of justice” following the acquittal of a Manitoba corrections officer charged in the 2021 death of William Ahmo, a First Nations man who was an inmate at the Headingley Correctional Centre.
A case in which Manitoba Provincial Court judge Tony Cellitti ruled:
“A proper and more fulsome assessment of Mr. Ahmo by medical personnel might very well have disclosed concerns, but in my view a closer assessment was not possible given that Mr. Ahmo continued to struggle and resist.”
i.e. this man caused his own death by struggling for his life while being choked to death.
No wonder she was upset.
That’s wild that people would report a dispassionate explanation of the factors that led to the currently increased levels of antisemitism, written in response to an article asking how we got to currently increased levels of antisemitism.
My great grandparents fled Poland while it was Germany because they were Jewish. You don’t have to hate Jewish people to see how many dumb and misguided people in the world there are, and how many of them will invariably link the actions of an explicitly Jewish state with the Jewish people.
The famed director also questions, as others have, why Israelis and Jewish people are automatically associated with the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Why, when we put Netanyahu on trial, do I too often hear the trial of Israel, or even the trial of the Jews, instead of simply putting the extreme right on trial,” Hazanavicius asks.
a) this happens with literally every country on earth. Even your farthest left Americans still get associated with the far right nutjobs, by virtue of both being American and the human mind inherently being biased towards categorization / chunking.
b) because many of the actions that make people angry are being carried out by the IDF, and all Israelis have to serve in the IDF, making every Israeli seem complicit.
c) because Israel is not just a state filled with citizens. It is explicitly the state of the Jewish people, to the point of being an apartheid state that treats non-Jewish citizens worse, so it’s actions end up associated not just with Israelis but with Jewish people on the whole.
d) because Israelis have repeatedly elected Netanyahu to power for several decades. Regardless of him not winning a majority of the popular vote, having one guy as your country’s leader for that long (especially through repeated elections as opposed to a dictatorship), will automatically associate his actions with those of the citizens in the eyes of the rest of the world.
e) because large influential parts of the Jewish diaspora (especially in the United States), have been extremely and militantly supportive of Israel no matter what it does. Just look at the ADL and AIPAC that think that the act of comparing the actions of the Israeli government to the acts of the Nazi government to be inherently anti-Semitic. They’re quite frankly nationalist nut jobs who are trying to censor any criticism of Israel, and in the process they’ve made it look like there is actually a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
“Why couldn’t a Jewish asshole just be an asshole? Why does every Jew who says or does something stupid have to take all his people with him? Why do I feel like, for a while now, Jews are the coolest enemies to hate? Much cooler than the Russians or the Chinese, for example.”
Maybe when Israel stops killing and abusing civilians on the scale of the Russians or Chinese, again, explicitly in the name of the Jewish people, the villainous characterizations would stop.
- Make a country associated explicitly and exclusively with a religion
- have that country commit atrocities
- watch there be an increase in deserved hate towards that country and undeserved hate towards the people of the religion it’s associated with
I don’t understand why people find the above process confusing. Do you really not understand how the average person works and thinks? Have you really not seen roughly this same pattern play out repeatedly?
Fucking dumb policy, but inevitable given the US’ stance.
North American leftist politicians:
- Let’s ban all the cheap electric vehicles because consumers want to buy them too badly.
Also North American leftist politicians:
- WhY iSnT tHe Ev ReVoLuTiOn wOrKiNg?
Subsidize North American manufacturers equally to Chinese ones and then let them fail if they can’t compete / intentionally keep trying to sabotage the EV market by only producing giant expensive EVs.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/06/biden-trump-race-rebecca-solnit
The press is being chicken little, and writing hundreds of articles about Biden sounding hoarse and none about the lies Trump spewed or the fascism that he’s promising.
Who the fuck cares what the economic analysis is?
Fighting climate change is going to hurt economically, either do an analysis comparing the current plan to an alternative one, or don’t bother doing it.
Publishing an analysis that says ‘the carbon tax hurts the economy’ just gives dumbass conservatives something to bitch and complain about.
Regardless, compare whatever painful number is there to the trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars that severe climate change will cost us and you’ll see that the plan still makes sense.
I don’t understand how conservatives can be so fucking stupid that they don’t understand that our entire planet and biosphere crumbling and dying beneath us will cost the economy.
Because an object is good at representing a noun, not a verb, and when expressing logical flows and concepts, despite what Java will tell you, not everything is in fact, a noun.
I.e. in OOP languages that do not support functional programming as first class (like Java), you end up with a ton of overhead and unnecessary complications and objects named like generatorFactoryServiceCreatorFactory because the language forces you to creat a noun (object) to take an action rather than just create a verb (function) and pass that around.
Answer: there’d be far less software in the world, it would all be more archaic and less useful, and our phones and laptops would just sit at 2% utilization most of the time.
There’s an opportunity cost to everything, including fussing over whether that value can be stored as an int instead of a double to save 8 bits of space. High level languages let developers express their feature and business logic faster, with fewer bugs, and much lower ongoing maintenance costs.
Yeah man, me too.
I went to school for electrical engineering, my first job was at an architecture firm designing the electrical stuff for buildings (including making all the electrical drawings for bank branches so we had some professional crossover 😋), and I ended up teaching myself software to automate a bunch of our designs and processes. I was literally directly making building design and construction more efficient … Buuuut… The arch industry pays poorly and I realized they was no way of ever owning a house at the pace I was going so I left for software and doubled my salary in like 2 years. I went from senior electrical engineer to intermediate software engineer and saw a 50% increase… All in a country experiencing a massive potentially existential housing crisis, and the industry pay disparity directly incentivized me to stop working on it and go work doing mostly bullshit software work.
The software industry is grossly overpaid for how hard we work and for how critical our relative contributions are to society, though even in the software industry the pay is incredibly distorted. Orders of magnitude more money goes to random social media bullshit and VC startups that go nowhere than to mission critical teams doing stuff like maintaining security and access control software.
Everyone: “Hey NDP, if you want to actually win a general election you need to be pragmatic about your talking points and messaging and not just alienate people with academic talk.”
NDP: “Best I can do is attack the only effective policy we have for fighting climate change to try and split the left vote.”
The NDP supporting the Conservatives’ plan of “nothing” is a fucking cowardly embarrassment. Yes your job is to listen, and you can do that by reading their written submissions for comprehensive action to reduce their emissions in accordance with targets.
You do not figure that out in a “meeting”, you figure that out through weeks of sober impact assessment and planning. This is political farce that is threatening to doom our future for fucking domestic politics.
- @masterspace@lemmy.ca to
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“It’s a structure that has proven to be necessary because of our low population and geographic dispersion,” said Martin Pelletier, senior portfolio manager at Wellington-Altus Private Counsel, referring to oligopolies in general.
No it’s fucking not, that’s absolute fucking horse shit.
That means consumers will continue to grumble about their limited options, and investors can feast on attractive stocks.
That means that the rich will continue enriching themselves at the expense of consumers’ wallets, the quality of products and services they receive, and literally their lives and livelihoods.
This author is a huge fucking piece of shit. Most of what they’re writing is true, but their gleeful characterization of their gluttonous depravity absolutely boils the blood. In a just society they would be thrown in prison for profiting off an oligopoly, not given a fat dividend for doing nothing. Fucking investor pieces of shit.
When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old? I’m sure some of them played FPS games, but there is no way they were the majority.
Think about it this way, it’s not that the majority of people playing those games are boomers, but the majority of games that boomers play are those games.
Also, this has caused me to look up the formal definition of Gen X vs Boomer, and I did not realize that everyone born after 1964 is considered Gen X. In my head Gen X went from ~1975-1990, everyone before that being a boomer, so assuming other people have the same conception of boomer in their head, then the majority of people able to afford gaming PCs in the mid 90s would be boomers…
They also do just go boom and have stuff like the BFG …
Doug Ford is such a huge piece of shit.