ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
3d ago
If
the rule you followedall the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?
When something bad happens, it allows the organization responsible to say, "well, we have a training program in place, so we did our due diligence and are not responsible." See also diversity and sexual harassment training sessions. At worst the organizational fix is to just hire a new set of training consultants to revise the training program.
ThenElection
3d ago
Something like 2/3 of operating costs of public transit in the USA is labor costs. If you can replace most of those with AVs, you can get more bus routes, without any radical assumptions or requirements for the broader transit system.
ThenElection
3d ago
My suspicion is that the issue is less about how an actual, well-constructed UBI would be corrupted/abused (as you say, it's difficult), but in that most actual "UBI" programs wouldn't be an actual, well-constructed UBI. In practice, it wouldn't be rolled out universally (even if universality was a genuine aspiration), and that would allow for politicians to pick and choose the constituencies that benefit. And so you get the government creating a "UBI" targeting black pregnant trans artists.
ThenElection
3d ago
Citation needed for inflammatory claim
Sure.
https://sftransitriders.org/on-mayor-luries-plan-to-allow-waymo-on-market-street/
ThenElection
3d ago
One of the weird things about American politics is that "public transit advocates" have a hate-on for autonomous vehicles. This is despite the fact that AVs would allow running far more bus routes, more cheaply, than today.
I can't decide if this is because public transit advocacy today is mostly about an aesthetic aversion to cars and roads, or if it's because coalitional politics demands that public transit advocacy simultaneously look to protect make work union jobs.
ThenElection
3d ago
One thing that makes it a bit worse than regular make work corruption: public transit is useful in a place like DC. WMATA's existence makes it so a more reliable, cleaner, effective replacement can't take its place. Just handing out bags of cash to favored groups would in some ways be better, because at least private companies could run the existing profitable routes.
ThenElection
4d ago
"Actually Indian" can be your new tag.
ThenElection
4d ago
UBI is definitionally giving income to people without conditions. Requiring them to work an (even fake) job is a very different thing, proponents of which (a "Job Guarantee") have a long history of feuding with UBI advocates. You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.
ThenElection
4d ago
Vietnam is also right next door to a regional hegemon (which has invaded it, in living memory) which also has the ability to immiserate it and militarily dominate it. And although it avoids poking the dragon when it can, it still is able to maintain real and significant independence.
I don't doubt that the US could turn Canada into a frozen hellscape if it were sufficiently motivated. But that threat isn't enough to get infinite pliability from Canadians, just as the Chinese threat of the same isn't enough to get infinite pliability from the Vietnamese. Both middle powers perceive that their respective hegemons are balancing multiple objectives and believe (correctly, in the Viet case) that the costs to other objectives prevent the maximal response.
ThenElection
4d ago
A theory I played with was that it was intended as a distraction from Venezuela. Greenland is far more ridiculous than Venezuela, so you make a bunch of noise about it and then later walk it back, and everyone's forgotten about Venezuela.
The issue with that theory is that... Venezuela seems like a success? Why would you want to distract from it? It can be a feather in your cap, not something to bury with the next noise cycle.
ThenElection
4d ago
What would the US do to stop them? Mass seizure of financial assets? A blockade? Decapitation strike? Invasion?
There is still an order, which is the order of reality. And although the US is very powerful, it's not infinitely powerful. All of those would rapidly result in the whole world looking for a better deal with a new protector.
ThenElection
5d ago
Storm Horncastle. She appears to be Norwegian; not an adopted name.
ThenElection
5d ago
I have lived in China, and I like it a lot. Some of its tier 1 cities are quite livable, and there are smaller towns that are also quite nice as well.
The core issue is that... It's not a democracy. Not in a moralistic sense, but it ends up making bad decisions, and then follows through with them come hell or high water. It was genuinely impressive how they marshalled society to get to (near) zero COVID for years, but it was a stupid goal that hurt its economy. It could similarly do something really stupid re:Taiwan, and it can persist in that decision for years.
It also has severe fertility issues, but that seems a broader issue affecting all the East Asian countries. You might hope that its authoritarianism would give it more capability to address that issue, but so far we're not seeing anything too effective coming out of it.
ThenElection
5d ago
Shapiro, when asked about Harris:
"Kamala Harris? Who's that? Oh yeah, I think we might have met at a fundraiser once, didn't leave much impression. Did she ever end up getting that job she was applying for?"
Yeah, it's not realistic to think labor costs would literally go to zero. Did some research and public transit labor and associated costs in the US are likely around 50B annually; for comparison, Alphabet's workforce is around 100B (though of course the vast majority aren't working on AVs).
LIDARs are expensive, but probably a lower proportion of the cost of the vehicle for a bus than for a regular car (even if buses require more sensors).
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