Well, obviously the number of autonomous vehicles involved in accidents is going to be lower, but that's because barely any of them exist compared to the vast majority of people driving their cars. If you had statistics on proportions though, that might be a different story.
You missed "per distance travelled" - that partially normalises the results. You still have to adjust for situation and road type (which Tesla conveniently doesn't do in their advertised numbers) for a better result.
This industry is evil, and I can't fathom what kind of a market would exist for driverless cars. KITT is science fiction. In reality, human drivers are almost always going to be safer. I would never trust my life or those I care about to ride inside a computer-operated vehicle.
Those that do are making a costly mistake. Any robot-assisted car still requires a human driver to be paying attention to the road, but by definition, because the robot does most of the driving, the human failsafe is going lulled into a false sense of security, or bored by effectively driving without actually driving. They will slack, and when the critical moment of awareness from the human is needed, he will be caught off guard, as opposed to the actual human driver who was aware the entire time, because he always had to be.
More to the point, even if I had a 100% guarantee of safety, I would never want to have the joys of driving taken away from me in the first place! Driving is liberating. It's power. It's the freedom to go anywhere and do anything. It's, dare I say, cathartic.
And for those that are unable to drive, Uber & Lyft exist to fill in the gap. They are themselves a relatively new technology, just under a decade old, and you can always find a quick, affordable ride on demand to just about anywhere.
What gap in the market would a self-driving car even fulfill?
This is yet another example of the arrogance of big tech, pushing out unsafe and socially deleterious products in the hopes of a get rich quick scheme. It's no different to what social media did a decade ago or what "generative a.i." is doing now.
I mentally roll my eyes every time the press love to use the word "historic" to describe an event. I suppose it makes the narrative more dramatic, but it's such an empty buzzword and a cliche. Technically, everything is historic, because anything and everything that happens is future history.
No. That's why we have these things called "separation of power," and "checks and balances."
No single branch of government is all powerful. In fact, it is a testament to the strength of the constitutional republic the founders built, that even with a man like Donald Trump abusing his powers and a media bolstering his lies, ultimately he was forced to step down, and though justice is slow, he is finally seeing justice for his many crimes.
The US government barely survived an incompetent carnival barker, let's not give the founders too much credit.
The system they set up has far too much ambiguity and survives only as long as honorable people are in the correct places at the correct times and _just_ barely enough were, this time, to prevent it all from completely crashing down.
> [...] ultimately he was forced to step down, and though justice is slow, he is finally seeing justice for his many crimes.
I mean I'll take it, but he's only being prosecuted for a small fraction of the shit he did, even if we ignore his whole life before the presidency. Our justice system has been openly corrupted by the rich and the powerful.
And if the executive branch decides to ignore the ruling, there isn't anything the Supreme Court can do about it.
See: Worcester v. Georgia
This is one of the problems with a Supreme Court that is making rulings that the majority of people don't agree with. If the Supreme Court loses its legitimacy and the other branches simply start ignoring it, it will take a lot of work to get any power back.
You guys aren't wrong. I believe it was Ben Franklin who famously said, when asked of the new government in the US, what kind it was, he replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." Any democracy is, obviously, only as just or as free as its electorate. As George Carlin pointed out in one of his standups, "If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Garbage in, garbage out."
My point is, however, that one man alone cannot be strong enough to bring it all down. There is enough distribution of power for the system to be robust. By irony, the very political tribalism which is ubiquitously hated and lamented by pundits itself creates a sort of political competition; there is very high incentive to hold the other party or incumbent(s) accountable when they abuse their power or make mistakes, as this benefits themselves politically. Of course, the downside to this system, as we've witnessed in recent years, is that both parties are quick to criticize the other side for their sins, but once in power they commit the very same sins with no self-awareness of the hypocrisy. Although, I wonder how much of that is due to McConnell and the GOP's loose morals, vs. the GOP itself being nigh unrecognizable from what it once was. The party of Reagan, Bush, and Romney is no more; the latter of which I was just reading, described in the press as a "pariah within his own party."
How is it that anyone still endures ads on the internet in the year 2023? Isn't this a forum full of tech geeks? You guys do know you can download Brave browser for free, and that automatically blocks all ads on mobile. Or your choice of any other adblocker.
The problem with the web today isn't ads and cookies--even most cookie banners nowadays make it easier with a button up front to "reject all" rather than individually de-selecting them. And if you really hate the banners, you can tell your browser to automatically accept them to hide them from popping up.
The problem is that every single website is super zoomed in with massive pictures, fonts, headers, footers, etc. that make the page a gigantic vertical scroll where you can't scan the page to read anything.
It doesn't matter how simplistic and barebones the site is, they'll still make you scroll for miles jut to read 2 lines of text with 3 hyperlinks.
It used to be before that you could avoid the disaster of a mobile website by requesting the desktop site, but now there are no desktop sites anymore. The desktop site is the mobile site. They are one and the same, thanks to the monster of "responsive design."
These asshole developers think they're being clever by making the page different based on different screen widths, but it's actually way worse.
Say I wanted to read a page on my phone, but it's annoying as fuck since, like I said, it's all zoomed in and requires so much scrolling my thumb would fall off. So, naturally, I change orientation to horizontal to fit more stuff on screen and reduce the amount of necessary scrolling.
WRONG!!
You see, now you've just changed the screen size, so the site automatically resizes everything to be way bigger, so you can rest assured the site will still be just as much of an awful pain to scroll through even in horizontal mode.
Does anybody remember how much easier it used to be to read websites when you had to pinch to zoom in/out? It was so easy to see the whole page at a glance, pinch in on what you want to read or click on, and then there you go.
Not to mention, actual computers--laptop, desktop, even tablet--were actually fucking usable, since those are the main devices anybody would ever actually want to surf the web on. I wouldn't want to read anything on a small phone screen for more than a few minutes, unless that's all I am able to use.
Phones are meant to be used on the go. They were never the primary device, but always a compromise. You compromise the experience in order to gain mobility. Hence the name, "mobile phone."
But at some point people decided, let's just pretend mobile phones are the only devices that exist, because now they're commonplace, apparently that means the huge market of everybody else doesn't matter anymore, oh and also let's make our mobile websites broken on mobile phones.
I can't tell you how many times major, mainstream websites such as reddit and others have been downright broken on my iPhone. Buttons don't work, or entire layouts appear incorrectly.
But even when they do work correctly, they still don't work well, because the "mobile-friendly" site was always the same as what was the "desktop site." The myth that there is a separate kind of site optimized for mobile users is bullshit. The desktop/laptop/tablet-optimized site IS the mobile-optimized site.
If something is super zoomed in and super vertical, that is a paint to navigate on desktops just as much as it is a pain on smartphones.
And it's not just my iPhone which is outdated. I've tried the brand new smartphones (really more like mini-tablets with cellular than a phone) and they're just as terrible to experience. (In fact, they're a lot worse! You can't hold the phone in one hand and reach from the top to the bottom of the screen. The large screens make usability harder.)
What's the point of massive screen sizes (hardware) when the websites (software) are so big, they nullify that extra screen space and in fact make the area of usable screen feel smaller?
That would be like having a book so large, the pages are the size of a door. But then you only print a single word on every page. It makes no sense!
Why can't web designers just make their sites zoomed out by default, and then let us choose to zoom in if we need to?
Why can't web designers have unfixed widths? The kind that automatically adapt text to fill whatever screen size you have. Not a fraction of the screen, but the full screen. Instead of always being skinny and narrow with tons of wasted whitespace on every device.
