10 or 20 years from now when you’re taking a nap or jerking off or eating fried chicken or playing Call of Duty while a self-driving car (you can call it an “automated transportation pod” if the word “car” triggers you) takes your extremely drunk self right to your front door you’ll think it’s fine.
You can’t have this both ways.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…
“That’s weather not climate!”
When there’s a wildfire somewhere…
“That’s global warming!”
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.
If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.
The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.
The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.
Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.
Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.
Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.
Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
The main subs or sublemmies or whatever they’re called on here have enough users that it’s a perfect alternative to Reddit.
Little niche subreddits, like my favorite gaybros and askgaybros, just a few dozen users and I’m going back to Reddit for that.
The problem is that Lemmy never hit that critical threshold of users where I can just stop using Reddit.
Like one of my favorite subreddits - gaybros and askgaybros - zero activity on the fediverse, so I’m going back to Reddit for that.
Does cutting their fleet mean they stopped operating or they reduced the size of their fleet?
One of the crashes was a car running a red light and hitting the Cruise vehicle.
Cruise and Waymo have self-driving cars, without safety drivers, driving around cities right now.
We know what hardware it takes - More than just cameras and some premapping is required.
I thought after 2008 that we had finally gotten over our large car addiction.
They’re so addicted to SUVs now that Ford doesn’t even make a car other than the Mustang. Their entire lineup is SUVs.
If they weren’t paid there would just be way more sponsorship deals and ad reads.
YouTube has some competitors…
Twitch - Not for general purpose video uploads and sort of stingy with how much you can upload. Twitch only saves highlights and YouTube saves everything you’ve ever uploaded.
Tiktok - Chinese spyware. Every video is vertical. Every video has stupid songs playing in the background and that TikTok logo. Not really for long form videos or anything serious.
Vimeo - You pay them to upload your video.
I’m glad they stopped recommending things to me with my history off. I just want to see my subscriptions I don’t want to see what the algorithm thinks I want to see.
The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.
When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.
Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.
The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?
What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.
Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.
They’re all Chrome for Christ’s sake! Edge? Opera? Brave? They’re the same browser! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!
I do appreciate that Firefox exists so that we have a choice to use something that isn’t Chromium and mainly controlled by Google.
But from a business perspective, as Adobe, why would they devote developer time to supporting Firefox? Just to not piss off some nerds that care about that type of shit? What’s that like 1% of the population?
Here are the subs I used to go to…
When I go back to Reddit, on desktop, all of those are operating as they normally do, with no perceptible change on the amount of posts.
There’s two problems…
There is no easy to use singular Reddit replacement. (The fediverse is not easy to use to normal people.)
Reddit is such a large social media site now that all the nerds getting angry and leaving doesn’t matter. 10 years ago this change would have killed Reddit, but now that normal people like my mom are on Reddit they don’t give a shit about using the official Reddit app, in fact they were probably already using it.
The problem is most people don’t live in 15 minute cities and it’s impossible to turn the suburbs into 15 minute cities as most things are just physically too far apart.
If you live in a gigantic McMansion neighborhood that takes 5 minutes to get out of by car and then your job is an additional 20 miles away there is no bus or train solution - you’ll have to have a car.
Funny you should mention living in your car. I used to have a 40 mi commute from my suburban town, each way, to work. I lived slightly north of Baltimore and commuted to just outside of DC. I would spend an hour minimum each way driving. When traffic was bad easy 2 hours. I did this for 4 years and it was soul destroying, but it was an extremely lucrative job.
Then I found a job in my little suburb that pays about the same amount of money and it’s close enough I can ride my bike to, which I do sometimes when it’s not hot, by car it’s only about 5 minutes. The extra time I’ve gotten back has been amazing and looking back I would have taken 20% pay cut to not have to do that horrible commute.
That is not a solution for everyone as there aren’t enough jobs in the suburbs to support the population. They’re called bedroom communities for a reason.
I’m really not pro or anti car. I just think you have to be realistic. The realistic part is the suburbs are just too spaced out and too far from jobs to have a functioning mass transit system.