> This is why I have doubts about self driving cars, it changes the accountability from the driver to the manufacturer. And I have a hard time believing the manufacturer would want that liability, no matter how well they sold.
Under current laws, perhaps. But you can always change the laws to redirect or even remove liability.
For example, in BC, we recently switched to "no-fault insurance", which is really a no-fault legal framework for traffic accidents. For example, if you are rear-ended, you can not sue the driver who hit you, or anyone for that matter. The government will take care of your injuries (on paper, but people's experiences vary), pay you a small amount of compensation, and that's it. The driver who hit you will have no liability at all, aside from somewhat increased insurance premiums. The government-run insurance company everyone has to buy from won't have any liability either, aside from what I mentioned above. You will get what little they are required to provide you, but you can't sue them for damages beyond that.
At least, you may still be able to sue if the driver has committed a criminal offence (e.g. impaired driving).
This drastic change was brought upon for us to save, on average, a few hundred dollars per year in car insurance fees. So now we pay slightly less, but the only insurance we can buy won't come close to making us whole, and we are legally prevented from seeking any other recourse, even for life-altering injuries or death.
So, rest assured, if manufacturers' liability becomes a serious concern, it will be dealt with, one way or another. Bigger changes have happened for smaller reasons.
>So now [...] the only insurance we can buy won't come close to making us whole
"So"? I don't see what one thing has to do with the other. Why would a lack of liability imply an insurance that doesn't fully compensate a claim? It's not a given, for example for insurance against natural events.
EDIT: Sorry, I think I misread your question. Let me answer it more directly:
Driver insurance in BC is offered by ICBC, a "crown corporation", i.e. a monopoly run by the government. You have to buy this insurance to drive in BC. This insurance gives you some benefits (healthcare and some small compensation) in case you get in an accident. As a matter of fact, those benefits are often not enough to make you whole. They pay much less for pain and suffering, loss of income, etc. than a court would grant you if you could sue. But – you can't sue anymore. So, who is there to make sure that the government-run insurance monopoly will make you whole? Nobody. Because you don't have the legal right to be made whole anymore. And since there are no checks on the government, the government does not pay enough. Because, why would they, if they don't have to? They only have to pay you as much as their policy says they should pay you. You can not challenge the policy on the basis that it does not make you whole, because you don't have the right to be made whole anymore.
--- Original comment:
Natural events are nobody's fault, that's why you aren't made whole, that's why you can't sue anyone for them, with or without insurance. [ETA: you can only sue your private insurance company for what they promised you, which may or may not make you whole, depending on coverage].
BC government made the "idiot rear ending you" scenario into a "natural event", so to speak, so that you can't sue the idiot, or their insurance, or anyone, to recover damages. You will only get what the government-run insurance monopoly will give you, which is not much.
This isn't directly about insurance. This is about the government declaring that liability for most traffic accidents does not exist anymore. Which is the part that is relevant to this conversation. If liability can be extinguished wholesale for all drivers like this, then this can surely be done for self-driving cars. Not saying that it's a good idea, just that this option is on the table.
The old system was horrible though, you had to sue to get compensation, and could get sued for a fender-bender. The old system was _great_ for lawyers.
In the old system, you only had to sue for compensation if / when the government wasn't offering you what you were due. It was entirely the government's choice to drag so many cases through the courts instead of paying. But at least the judicial system eventually made you whole, if you were able to navigate it. If the government cared about us so much that they wanted to fix the system, they could have simply chosen to pay what was due from the start, saving everyone the time and the legal expenses. But they didn't.
Fraud was another concern. Huge payouts from parking lot whiplash were indeed not uncommon, with the help of lawyers. However, I fail to see how the new system was the best solution for that. They went from one extreme, where fraud was rampant, to another extreme, where we have no rights. At least the first extreme cost us only a few hundred bucks per year on average. The new extreme saves you a bit of money but leaves people injured for life with no meaningful compensation for the harm done to them.
Kind of beside the point though, regarding self-driving cars.
Clearly, eh? Spoken like someone who didn't get debilitating whiplash for years from being rear ended on a highway. My friend's vestibular system has been shot for 8 years and counting from that accident, and she still can't drive / bike / do much requiring balance/hand-eye coordination anymore. She was "lucky" this accident happened under the old system, she will at least get compensation ("will", because it's only now getting to trial, because the government insurance wouldn't pay what is due on its own, and the same government wouldn't fund the courts to provide a speedier resolution). If this accident happened today, she would have gotten peanuts that aren't enough to even offset the increased costs of life, let alone get any meaningful compensation for pain and suffering.
Do you want to tell me more about how you saving ~$500/year outweighs people like her being absolutely shafted under the new system? Please don't, I don't care. That's not why I commented.
The main purpose of my original comment wasn't to say that the new ICBC system is shitty – enough was said about that elsewhere already. It was to illustrate with a real life example that laws regarding liability can and are changed in very significant ways when the situation calls for it. Petty political reasons being as good a call as any, apparently, so I'm not worried about self-driving cars being stiffled by that. There's a sprinkle of "be careful what you wish for" in there as well, for those who see manufacturers' liability as a problem.
You could spend the rest of your life, writing anecdotes and stories, but how it will be meaningful in determining the net sum of upsides and downsides…?
That's an interesting, well sourced article, I'm glad I've read it. I honestly didn't know that the full-size straw-airplanes were fakes from a movie. They're the face of this metaphor.
That said, the article would have been a lot better without moralizing about harmful colonialism, or claiming that this metaphor is supposedly an insult.
The purpose of this metaphor was never to gain historical insights, or to teach a lesson about colonialism, or to judge the Polynesian natives from 80 years ago, it's to teach a lesson about modern practices of software development (or science I guess). It's a fable.
You can replace the Polynesians in the fable with anyone else, and the payload of the fable does not change. Because the payload of it has nothing to do with the Polynesians. I personally didn't remember that this metaphor was specifically about Polynesians and the war supplies. I remembered it being about some abstract tribes, possibly Africans and humanitarian aid supplies. Did someone explain it to me the wrong way, or was it me who assumed wrong from the fake photos? I dunno. It does not matter. I wasn't relying on this fable for anything other than a software development lesson. It was not a covert tool to justify colonialism, or to assert intellectual superiority over some historical tribes on the other side of the globe.
It's definitely good to know the historical truth – as I said, I genuinely do appreciate all the exposition in this article. But, if you package that together with the moralizing, it comes off as yet more culture war BS that I am so sick of.
The difference in motivation is very important. If you write with the primary goal to expose historical inaccuracies – that's great. Then I can trust you. But if you write with the primary goal to stop people from using offensive (in your view) metaphors, then the historical inaccuracies are just a convenient tool, a talking point, for you to achieve your real goal. Because if this metaphor was actually historically true, you would probably still find it offensive. And so if that's your goal, then I can't trust you to provide historical accuracy. I will suspect you of presenting selective evidence, and other tricks to further your goal. That is why your moralizing detracts from the article.
Welp, unfortunately it's too late to fix my comment.
I didn't mix them up on purpose, and I won't pretend to be an expert on the taxonomy of the various Pacific Islander ethnicities.
Yes, the article does mention Melanesians by name. So what. It mentions other important things and people by name that I don't remember either. So what. Those exact names and identities are not important, neither to my point, nor to the point the article is making.
I think it is strongly indicative that your underlying bias so colored your reading of the article that you made a very basic factual error. I would encourage you to read it again with a more open mind.
It wasn't any more "rude" than repeatedly throwing vague insults and insinuations at me without providing the real reason. But I don't see you caring about that. We both know why. Because "rudeness" is not your real concern, your real concern is the same as the other culture warrior, and you're avoiding stating it directly for the same reasons – it's entirely unfounded and indefensible. So instead you go with vague nastyness that you think could be mistaken for something profound and is therefore above criticism (it can't, and it isn't).
If by any chance that is not what you meant to come off as, you may want to reconsider low-effort passive aggressive one liners as your communication medium.
On the contrary, I'd say it proves their point. They don't know or care whether it's about Polynesians or Melanesians (and I don't think you care either - would you have considered their comment fine if they'd named the correct group of people?). It doesn't matter.
You’re dead wrong, I do care. It does matter. I disagree with the comment but I would not have responded this way if it hadn’t made such a blatant factual error. If we’re going to make assumptions about the internal mental state of other commenters, would you have said the same thing if he misidentified, say, Germans for French? I don’t think you would have.
> would you have said the same thing if he misidentified, say, Germans for French?
In a context like this? Yes. I struggle to think of a phrase that bears the same relation to France or Germany, but can't think I'd care more. (I think I heard once that the "let them eat cake" princess was actually in Spain rather than France? But no-one cares)
Just saying "speculation" doesn't really paint the picture of what's going on. In 2010-s everyone here blamed foreign speculators hiding in the shadows, but we live in a different, worse, world now.
This country's housing and immigration & temp. resident policies are absolutely out of sync, intentionally. In 2021 they've changed the rules to add hundreds of thousands of people overnight, but did not build anywhere close to the corresponding amount of housing. Then they did it next year again, and again, and again, and they're still doing it, and the next government plans to continue doing it.
This isn't mere speculation. This is deliberate policy to manufacture a housing crisis. To not only keep the pre-existing crisis going, but to deliberately and methodically escalate it. Politicians profit both from their own investment properties and from bribes (ahem campaign contributions, speaking fees, board positions, ...) paid to them by all kinds of businesses who profit from oversupply of labour and undersupply of housing.
"Speculation" implies taking significant risk, often in an under-regulated market. But the current situation is nothing like that – there is barely any risk, when both the supply (zoning & construction) and demand (population growth) sides of the market are heavily regulated with the intent to raise prices. Capital is all you need to reap the profits, pretty much.
Asking as someone not that familiar with Canadian politics, is this "the next government" as in the Liberal one that would replace Trudeau after his resignation, or the (likely) Conservative one that would be in power after the general election?
The latter. Conservatives have shown no serious interest in reducing immigration. Their politicians get all the same profits from the crisis, plus the votes of socially conservative immigrants on top. Canadian politics is full of weird alliances.
> That puts paramotoring in the same safety category as hang gliding and base jumping in my mind.
Base jumping is NOT in the same category as the other two. It is riskier by one or two (or more) orders of magnitude, depending on how you count.
> I.e. it is far too dangerous an activity to be doing regularly.
That is not how risk works in paramotoring / paragliding / hang gliding. Doing it regularly means you're more "current" – less likely to make bad decisions, due to regularly exercising pilot skills. This more than offsets the increased risk from increased number of flights.
Paramotoring, like paragliding and hang gliding, can be extremely safe – with proper skills, weather conditions, and equipment. Accidents usually happen when people decide to go beyond safe conditions, e.g. fly in too thermic / too windy conditions.
Something to keep in mind is that paramotors are the easiest way to fly. And the easiest option always attracts the kind of people who look to expend the minimum amount of effort to get what they want. This attitude, predictably, results in more accidents – for this particular subgroup, not for all paramotor pilots.
In these sports, the pilots rely on their self discipline to stay safe. This is the real reason why these sports can never go mainstream – the actual skills are easy to learn, but the discipline is not.
> in time it does work out largely in that direction
To be fair, that's usually thanks to government interventions and regulations, not thanks to free market staying free.
Markets fail for very known, very well described reasons. When they do, they rarely recover on their own, and the abusive rent seekers only become more entrenched with time (again, in the absence of regulations to curb that).
In this startup community we see a lot of "disruption" (free-market-success) stories, but in the broader world, things don't usually work out that way, and when they do, it's often just to replace one rent seeker with another.
Definitely, my intent wasn’t to hand wave away the role government plays there. The lag that is inherent in some regulatory departments though seems too long and it’s the working class that suffers to most. I think FAA and NASA are good examples of largely well-run departments while the SEC, EPA, and FDA appear to be largely a sham who really let corporations get away with literal murder to the detriment of the greater good. Things have to get extremely bad before they are able to do anything perhaps because their authority is stripped.
> It feels like the real problem in this industry is lack of competition. There’s a chicken and egg problem: planes are expensive because so few people buy them, but so few people buy them because they’re expensive.
Lack of competition is not the root cause. It's all the regulations. Certifying a new GA airplane takes a lot of time, and costs a fortune. This translates to high development costs, and certification costs, and ALSO is a huge barrier to entry for new companies, and a significant barrier for existing companies to develop new modern designs.
I could potentially muster enough resources to design and build an ultralight aircraft (that does not need any certifications), but a type-certified aircraft even as simple as a Cessna 152? Forget about it.
You could argue whether those certifications are worth it for safety, e.g. by comparing Canada's much more generous ultralight aircraft max weight allowance compared to US, or looking at the change in accident rates in European countries that recently deregulated ultralight aircraft, but whether it's worth it or not, regulation is the single most impactful market force driving the cost of GA aircraft.
Lack of competition is also sometimes directly enforced by the government. For example, several countries mandate the use of FLARM, a proprietary collision avoidance system for light aircraft. Governments gave this company a monopoly without requiring their protocol to be made interoperable, open source, and dis-encumbered from patents.
I do believe that’s a factor (and mentioned it further down) but there are shockingly few companies that build planes.
The regulatory cost is amortized over the number of planes built. If people bought planes the way they buy cars, they’d cost far less. Hence the chicken/egg problem I mentioned.
One key difference I see between something like this and an ultralight is the danger to people on the ground. A few thousand pounds moving at up to 200mph or so (potentially 300+ after structural failure) is a lot of kinetic energy.
Definitely not "key". On the ground fatalities are very rare, perhaps 1%-2% of all general aviation fatalities [1].
One massive restriction on ultralight airplanes is that you can't carry passengers. Again, on paper, because of risk, but it ends up having some controversial effects. If you want to occasionally carry passengers, as many pilots do, you can't fly a cheap, simple, light, and slow ultralight aircraft. No, the regulations push you to fly a more expensive, complex, heavier, and faster one that is type-certified, but requires higher skill and currency (regularly recurring flight experience) to operate safely.
Given that pilot error is far and away the main cause of general aviation crashes, that push does not seem very wise, safety-wise, even disregarding the question of costs.
> A few thousand pounds moving at up to 200mph or so (potentially 300+ after structural failure) is a lot of kinetic energy.
Also, FTR, Cessna 152, a type-certified two seater, weights 1670 lbs gross, cruises at 120mph, and if it ever hits the ground wrong, it very likely won't be because it broke up in mid-air and plummeted at terminal velocity onto someone's house, but because the pilot stalled it at low altitude while turning from base to final, crashing onto airport property or an empty field nearby.
> One massive restriction on ultralight airplanes is that you can't carry passengers. Again, on paper, because of risk, but it ends up having some controversial effects. If you want to occasionally carry passengers, as many pilots do, you can't fly a cheap, simple, light, and slow ultralight aircraft.
Ineresting. I get a ride as a passenger in an ultralight two-seater. The pilot was a Vietnam vet. It was in Virginia, and we overflew part of the Great Dismal Swamp, which has alligators.
Nice! If it was a two seater, it does not legally qualify as an ultralight in the US, see FAR 103.1(a) [1]. Back in the day, some older ultralights were designed with a very wide seat ("loveseat"), that physically but not legally allowed the pilot to take a passenger. Not sure if that's the case here. If the aircraft actually had two distinct seats, one clearly intended for a passenger, then it may have been a homebuilt aircraft, registered in the "experimental" category (FAR 21.191). Just like ultralights, these also operate without a type certificate, but upon completion of the build, the builder needs to provide a bunch of logs / photos / etc. documenting the construction process for the FAA to approve the aircraft for flights. Because such aircraft are designed to be built/assembled mostly (51%) by regular people (not at the factory), they often look very basic, just like proper ultralights, but they can be heavier, faster, carry passengers, etc.
I see, so thus guy was probably licensed to carry passengers. Thanks.
The seating arrangement was pilot in the front, passenger behind. When my son (about 8) get off his ride and was asked if he enjoyed it, he said "I prefer planes with doors".
I’m fairly certain there’s little difference between being hit by a 2 ton car going at 100mph and a 4 ton aircraft going at 200mph. Either way you splatter.
The clear difference is that cars have a limited, well known and clearly visible area where they are dangerous, planes could land on your face while you are having a picnic at the middle of the park.
> I believe Fuschia and usage of Dart for projects like Flutter grew out this back-and-forth legal rigamarole between Google and Oracle over Java.
I'm guessing nowadays Kotlin plays this role? Its multi-platform nature means that the Android world can eventually be detached from the JVM backend, if I understand correctly.
Indeed, people keep telling Kotlin was a way out of the lawsuit, while forgetting Kotlin, Gradle, Android Studio, and whole whole Android SDK run on Java / JVM.
Even with ART, Kotlin withouth the richness of the Java ecosystem at Maven Central is worthless, hence why after the whole Kotlin push, now ART is modular and updated to more recent versions, currently Java 17 LTS. Via Play Store updates from Android 12 onwards.
Kotlin was pushed by a couple of folks with managment powers, given the team marriage with JetBrains, and a way to push common interests with Android tooling.
In the mid to long term I think Kotlin and KMP are likely to be where Google puts its effort. Flutter is likely toast but it will be some time before KMP is polished enough to replace it.
I like Flutter a lot and I think right now it's much more capable and mature than KMP is. The problem is Google is in aggressive cost cutting mode and it's not clear how Flutter contributes to their bottom line in a meaningful way. It's not hard to make the business case that they should shift the considerable resources they now invest in Flutter to focus on Kotlin/Compose and let JetBrains do the heavy cross-platform lifting.
I hope this doesn't happen but as long as Google is willing to cut engineering resources even while they're recording record profits it's hard to be confident.
> it's not clear how Flutter contributes to their bottom line in a meaningful way... focus on Kotlin/Compose and let JetBrains do the heavy cross-platform lifting.
Why do you think Kotlin MP would contribute to JetBrains' bottom line when at the same time you think Flutter does NOT contribute enough to Google's?
I get it, Google's bottom line is on another level, but at the same time, if someone can afford to invest on technologies that do not bring in any profit, that's Google if it thinks it increases its reach, which Flutter/Dart do in a way that Kotlin cannot, given Google controls them but not Kotlin (though you could make a case Google effectively controls Kotlin, at least somewhat?).
I'm not 100% sure that they used drop stitch, but the company Prospective Concepts developed a few more modern designs of inflatable wings for various applications.
Personally I think this is a technological dead-end, at least for the civil aviation use cases that I understand. The only advantage of an inflatable system is compactness / portability, but since the Inflatoplane, that's been solved in many other ways by rogallo wings, hang glider type wings, paragliders, parachutes, various types of fold-out rigid wings, etc.
And all of the other properties of inflatable wings aren't advantageous other. They're not simpler, lighter, stronger, more durable, or more reliable than the alternative best option, and they don't seem to have a particularly good mix of useful properties to win against the other best alternative for any given use case, even if you assume modern materials and modern techniques.
Under current laws, perhaps. But you can always change the laws to redirect or even remove liability.
For example, in BC, we recently switched to "no-fault insurance", which is really a no-fault legal framework for traffic accidents. For example, if you are rear-ended, you can not sue the driver who hit you, or anyone for that matter. The government will take care of your injuries (on paper, but people's experiences vary), pay you a small amount of compensation, and that's it. The driver who hit you will have no liability at all, aside from somewhat increased insurance premiums. The government-run insurance company everyone has to buy from won't have any liability either, aside from what I mentioned above. You will get what little they are required to provide you, but you can't sue them for damages beyond that.
At least, you may still be able to sue if the driver has committed a criminal offence (e.g. impaired driving).
Don't believe me? https://www.icbc.com/claims/injury/if-you-want-to-take-legal...
This drastic change was brought upon for us to save, on average, a few hundred dollars per year in car insurance fees. So now we pay slightly less, but the only insurance we can buy won't come close to making us whole, and we are legally prevented from seeking any other recourse, even for life-altering injuries or death.
So, rest assured, if manufacturers' liability becomes a serious concern, it will be dealt with, one way or another. Bigger changes have happened for smaller reasons.