My vote is 'any 1 election runoff system'[score, star, approval, ranked choice, ...]. Every 1ER is better than first past the post. It would be nice if vote nerds would shut the frak up about this one is better than that on. Open primaries; top 4 or 5 go through to the general; general uses any 1ER. Were I writing a law to put this in place, I would say we should revisit which 1ER after X number of years or Y voting cycles.
My neighborhood is shown in this video multiple times. Number of times I have seen an AV act dangerously? Zero. Number of times an SUV has hit me while I was legally in a crosswalk lifting me off my feet and throwing me through the air? more than zero. Number of times I have seen an AV parked in the box on a red light? Zero. Number of times I have seen a human parked in the box on a red light? All the time, every frackin day.
Are AVs perfect? Nope but they might already be safer drivers than the median driver in SF. There have been 310 pedestrian deaths in SF over the past 10 years. Number of deaths the NHTSA has attributed to full self driving vehicles? Zero.
Given there's over a million registered vehicles in SF, and only ~300 fully autonomous vehicles in SF, if there's only 310 pedestrian deaths over the past 10 years, with all else being equal, you'd definitely expect the vast majority of those deaths to be from normal vehicles, given that there's you know, over a million of them, and only ~300 AVs.
As AVs are .0299% of the vehicles on the road, all else being equal, they'd account for .00929 deaths per year. You can't really point at the lack of deaths at this point as proof of anything.
According to the DMV of CA in 2023 there were 453,180 including motorcycles and trailers. Most vehicles are used very little or not at all where as autonomous vehicles are used most of the time. Also, the NHTSA numbers are for all AVs everywhere in the US so your astonishingly numbers precise are way off.
Still, as a pedestrian, I am pretty happy the AVs are not parking in the crosswalks all the time.
You need to look at per mile driven rather than just number of vehicles because the AVs are much higher utilization. The states confirm that per mile driven, AVs are much safer.
Also anyone that has walked near one can easily tell. The AVs actually yield to pedestrians, especially if you step near the crosswalk unlike many SF drivers.
Not to discredit your numbers, but the video mentions deaths and injuries in the US attributed to self-driving - it's a real thing. Do companies have a long way to go before these things are ready for the streets? Absolutely.
Just don't export that kind of road behaviour to other countries, please.
That's another important point he makes: these self-driving cars will probably not be retrained for every single country, so you risk exporting the dangerous behaviour of American drivers to other countries.
A better solution is less cars, more other modes of transportation.
And the other side of the coin is if you are a driver who isn’t a brainless idiot, who hasn’t ever been in an accident, self driving cars are worse than your average performance even if they are better than the median american idiot.
What amazes me is that none of the stories I have read address the decrease in health costs these changes will bring. “An EPA analysis showed that the Clean Air Act’s benefits outweigh its costs by a factor of 30.” [0] Nor has any one talked about how this will drive adoptions of other transportation methods including public transportation. If we fully baked in the actual costs, health and environmental, I suspect gasoline would cost much, much more.
Balance sheet accounting vs total cost to society when extenalities are included is a huge source of problems.
A good to know is California has some programs where they will buy back your older vehicle and pay you a grant of you replace it with a new or used low emissions vehicle. You can also get public transit vouchers instead I think.
Note. Low emissions includes hybrids. And some used EV's are really affordable.
How far does this go? Should we charge taxes on sugar due to health care costs? What about taxes on fiber due to increase wear on sewers?
Go to electric. What about the environmental impact on battery creation/recycling/maintenance? Or the electricity to power them (until nuclear comes online)?
This line of argumentation can go on endlessly. How about instead let’s reduce taxes and try focusing on lowering the cost of living for middle and lower income brackets.
Many countries introduce taxes on sugary drinks and snacks with varying outcomes[0]. These type of things only go endlessly if you have all or nothing thinking and taxes like this are meant to shape behavior so unless you want people shitting less then no you don't need to tax fiber.
My concern is the behavior shaping is not a simple, single variable equation. Many times these policies have knock on effects that produce a worse outcome for those struggling.
We have data on this in the form of cigarette taxes that show good outcomes in preventing people from starting smoking and bad outcomes for existing smokers since they don't quit due to increased prices and just keep smoking while paying more so that this could go either way. So I understand your concern. I just take issue with the reasoning "this can go on endlessly!"
Sounds like utopic thinking seeking an unattainable perfection.
What happens when taxes are so high, we have an egress of businesses from regions within the US causing collapse of local communities like saw with Detroit?
I'm in general against using the reductio ad absurdism to suggest we can't do something positive because there is an absurd inevitable point at which it stops being positive.
The point is, when navigating a highly dimensional design space it's ok to use a gradient descent / greedy optimization approach. If step 1 works then proceed to step 2, if step 1 did not work then we learned something and can pick a different step. Fix whatever went wrong in making the mistake with picking step 1 as the current top priority. It makes no sense to say that we can't make step 1 because step 1001 might be bad.
On the point of taxation, I personally dislike tax precisely because I think the money is not allocated in anything close to priority order. If it was we would be living in a vastly different world.
>Sounds like utopic thinking seeking an unattainable perfection.
Like you just magically saying "let's cut taxes and reduce cost of living"?
>we have an egress of businesses from regions within the US causing collapse of local communities like saw with Detroit?
If all you're worried about is big business, don't worry. They already leaving. Communities are already collapsing. And we voted for it, so hey. Democracy works right?
Reducing taxes should push for local and federal governments to become more efficient and waste less.
We’re at an incredible deficit as a nation, interest alone on that deficit outpacing defense spending.
Creating additional taxes, which will potentially slow growth/gdp, will only harm our efforts to resolve our woeful financial situation as a nation. Additional taxes further pushes business out of the country, leading to a spiral to insolvency.
Californian’s should be asking, where do these taxes go? Not to solving homelessness or violent crime. Not to resolving catastrophic water issues (reservoirs drying up), or fixing brownouts across the region.
Felonies are down in California, year over year, for the past decade. Reservioirs are above historical averages. Homelessness is a problem, but people freak out when you address real solutions, like minimum wage changes. Brownouts and blackouts are far less likely than they were a decade or two ago. Thanks to green tech like solar panels and batteries.
Thanks to Enron being stopped from causing artificial blackouts by creating electrical supply constraints through shutting off power plants. And they could profit from it by purchasing contracts that made money if electricity costs went higher. Then sold those off before they then told them to turn the power plants back on. Cost California billions. See “Enron, the smartest guys in the room”
Sugar tax doesn't work well. The fiber thing sounds like a joke? Pollution from producing electricity sounds like a great thing to tax. What makes you treat that as an idea so obviously bad you don't need to say why? And the impact of manufacturing already is addressed in a lot of ways, even if it could be better.
It's a very similar story, actually: as China industrialized, it has very similarly realized that curtailing air pollution is an extremely important issue with benefits that outweigh costs.
It has continually tightened standards and its overall air quality is improving (although it still has notable areas where more improvement is needed)
Exactly. The USA brags about its environmental improvements but fails to mention it exported plenty of manufacturing to do that. Come the summer when the media highlights the smog over Beijing, The West ownes a good chunk of that violation of Mother Nature.
China, etc is cheaper not only because of the cost of labor but because of lack of environmental protections.
We know now that while these laws have local impacts they clearly also have global impacts and they are not always positive.
Attempting to use the local success of the EPA Clean Air Act to justify a flat 16%+ increase in the price of a widely used and important commodity is inappropriate.
>Nor has any one talked about how this will drive adoptions of other transportation methods including public transportation
How is the high speed rail in California going? Asking for a friend. Is California able to build public transport fast? To make it safe? Is is able to keep the vagrants, homeless, smelly, and crazy away so to make it palatable for the good standing citizens to use them?
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