> Jackie Fielder, a progressive San Francisco supervisor who represents the Mission District, has been among the most vocal critics. She introduced a city resolution after Kit Kat’s death that calls for the state Legislature to let voters decide if driverless cars can operate where they live. (Currently, the state regulates autonomous vehicles in California.)
If this had anything to do with safety, this so-called “Progressive” supervisor Jackie Fielder would be investigating what safety features would be feasible on Waymos: emergency stop switches or stop commands, under car cameras, questioning whether the Waymo detected the cat and then just forgot about it when it walked under the car, etc.
Instead, she is using this to secure territory for obviously less safe Uber and Lyft drivers who are represented by the Teamsters. Such a cynical politician.
When a plane crashes no one says “let’s let people decide if planes should be allowed to fly over their houses”, we say “let’s figure out exactly what went wrong and how to make sure it never happens again” and that’s probably why aviation is one of the safest modes of transportation
yes but what is worth more to the sanfranciscon 400000 mostly non-sanfranciscan hu-man deaths, or 1 outrageous death of a beloved san francisco cat
It is of course such an emotional vs rational argument, so extreme, so ridiculous, what can you do but grab a picket sign and say to ban all cars and combustion engines for the sake of poor kit kat. A very easy sell since combustion engines are already viewed as the devil
i’m not convinced yet that autonomous vehicles will actually fix this
the main argument i can see in favor of autonomous vehicles is that they don’t get tired, ill, or drunk, but would they outperform on other kinds of situations across a larger uncontrolled ecosystem? is it worth the expense to develop?
the main reason to develop them is to make military capabilities more mature, which i don’t support. the military would love to have unmanned convoys that are guarded by drones.
that way they can have an easier time doing invasions of sovereign countries
Sorry but cars are the worst form of transportation. Not even a "worst except for all the rest", just straight terrible. The US has finally realized how colossal of a mistake it's made over the past few decades and is starting to fix the problem.
I think that this approach could feasibly lead to something far safer than human drivers (from what I’ve seen they already are safer), so it would be human drivers that we would question the need for at that point
>That's true but there's also a separate element here which is there is an obvious need for aviation and not an obvious need for autonomous vehicles.
At least in America, the need for autonomous vehicles is much, MUCH more obvious than for aviation actually unless you're a 20 year old exclusively city person. In most of the country by area, and at least a good hundred million-ish people by population, being able to have [arbitrary point to point mechanized transportation] is a necessity for normal adult life & work. Right now that equates exclusively to having and being able to drive your own vehicle. There are no other options of any kind unless you are extremely wealthy to the point you can employee an exclusive human brain & body not your own for that role. There are no buses. There are no trains. There are no human driven taxis for that matter. Normal family, friends and neighbors can fill in on an occasional/emergency basis and that's a safety net, but you will be heavily restricted. And tens of millions of people, indeed eventually almost all of us, do not have the ability to safely drive themselves. They are either too young, too old, have some sort of disability preventing it, or have made some poor life choices that nonetheless are compounded upon by this.
Right now it can't be helped, it is what it is, our mechanical technological capability ran ahead of our information processing capability so the human brain and body was called upon to fill in and here we are. The law also reflects that, with far more generosity given to poor and dangerous driving because it's by necessity a quasi-right however much it's called a "privilege". But fully public road autonomous vehicles would change all that. Driving yourself would truly become a hobby practice, not a requirement. Major training could be demanded. If someone has any DUI infractions or the like boom, no more driving privilege. You could be 90 with failing eyesight and reflexes and physically incapable even during the day. And it'd all be ok with everyone still having near identical mobility because they could just fall back on having the car itself take them where they need or want to go on their schedule, same as someone driving today.
That'd be just wildly huge and will only get bigger as America follows the rest of the developed world in terms of aging demographics. This is putting aside all sorts of massive improvements in productivity, lives saved, urban/suburban/rural development, electrification, and probably more we haven't considered. Certainly there are pitfalls to be avoided but it blows my mind anyone could possibly not see all this. The car is one of the most important things in American society and consumes EONS of human time. Literally. An eon is a span of one billion years. Hundreds of millions of people have absolute spent a year or more of their lives behind a steering wheel. It adds up. Anything that shifts that is by definition enormous.
So what we can infer here is that if Waymo ever kills a person, it’s basically over for them in SF. Your plane analogy is apt, because for us to “get there” with autonomous cars, where it’s anywhere and everywhere, we’ll have to be willing to basically die to some degree. Just like in planes.
Progressives always defend legacy obsolete businesses against competition. They tried to stop Uber and Lyft from replacing cabs and now they do the same with Waymo.
Of course they don't. Political labels don't cross national boundaries easily. Even right next door in Canada "conservative" means nothing like it does in the US.
that’s true, but usually there is some kind of foundational need that is being satisfied by the candidate or policies, or in the case of middle class people, some kind of postmodern spectacle as was innovated in the 1930s
Another non-US perspective - you can't tell them how to think about their weird political camps.
We saw this play out with Uber. The "progressive" side wants things to be more regulated and frames it in terms of protecting vulnerable people from unchecked corporate power. The "conservative" side does wants less regulation and more competition to keep things from stagnating economically.
The same thing is happening with AI, and with self driving cars.
It's sort of counterintuitive that on the surface, at least in this case, the "conservative" side is the one welcoming change and the "progressive" side rejects it.
You see this federally in the US. The "conservatives" want to tear down all the institutions, but they'll frame it as a return to traditional values like self sufficiency and freedom. The "progressives" want a return to the Biden era, in the name of people depending on these programs.
How can people not understand this. The entire leftist edifice is carving out more and more pieces for handouts. That’s it. This is arguing for another handout
I guess I'm a bit more generous to them on this point. Ironically, what they are is actually conservatives (in the generic meaning of preserving the status quo, not the American political meaning). What they want is stability and freedom from risk. They have this idea that you should be able to get one job and work it for your entire career, and they often cite the post WWII period as an example of this.
Of course technological progress is anathema to this. Progress is chaos. It causes disruption of entire industries, which TBF does disrupt people's lives. So they enact policies to defend existing industries from competition and fence off who is allowed to do what job with useless credentials and certifications. Essentially trying to preserve the status quo forever. They trade long term progress for short term comfort. The practical economic effect of this is, in fact, a handout to incumbents, and there are plenty of grifters on board for this reason, but it isn't the driving force behind it.
A sad development. At least in the US, the fact that rent is taxable income to the landlord but imputed rent is untaxed is a regressive tax break for property owners (and was apparently a mistake of the original Form 1040; see Lawrence Zelenak, “The Early Income Tax and the Imputed Rental Income of Homeowners” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108377157.008). I wonder what convinced majority-renter Swiss voters to enact such a tax break?
Wages are taxable income to workers but imputed wages are untaxed. That’s a regressive tax break for people who cook their own food and care for their own children.
lol but it’s true. The less productive stuff you do outside the formal economy the more value you get to keep. That’s why digital cash is so problematic
The difference is that you’re comparing labor income (making your own dinner) to rental income from land (imputed rent). Poor people tend to not own property, whereas poor people do tend to make their own meals, so I doubt your claim that taxing home meals would be equally progressive.
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
What was the pitch for DOGE? I get that govt agencies are insanely bloated. I don't get how DOGE intended to fix that even at the start, and the scammy charts they kept publishing weren't giving confidence. Was looking at it optimistically too, cause Musk did debloat Twitter.
> Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing
A reminder that before it was implemented, it was called DOGE. It was never a serious thing, and supporting it may not have been bad, but it was hopelessly naive.
> is sharing a house illegal, or is it only illegal to separate leases for each room?
Too many unrelated people living in a housing unit is illegal. Here’s San Francisco’s version of this law which was used to shut down house sharing companies such as HubHaus; see definition of “family” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...
The article also mentioned dormitory-like “group housing” apartments (which differ from housing units in that they don’t have a separate kitchen for each unit). San Francisco is pretty enlightened in that it allows group housing in many zoning districts, but even they have group housing density limits and now common space requirements which are designed to prevent much group housing (see definition of “group housing” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...).
I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.
> A subway line should be buildable within one political term.
That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich.
The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1].
> The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet.
People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children.
What’s special about the airport is that the City of San Francisco owns and regulates it (as opposed to the streets that are regulated by the state CPUC), and the Board of Supervisors previously were regulatory captured by taxi medallion owners and Teamsters union (https://missionlocal.org/2024/12/waymo-rolls-toward-san-fran...). Specifically, Aaron Peskin (BoS supervisor from 2001–2009, 2015–2025, and board president for the last 2 years) said, “Their entire M.O. is, ‘The state regulates us; we don’t have to work with you, we don’t have to partner with you.’ My response is: There are things we do control. Including where you charge your cars. And the airport. What I intend to do, is condition their deployment and use of the airport property on their meeting a number of conditions around meeting this city’s minimum standards for public safety and transit.” https://missionlocal.org/2023/11/waymo-rebuffed-by-sfo-sf-gu...
I have only seen Charlie Kirk on this interview with California Governor Gavin Newsom. Apparently he was someone who was promoting tolerance to more diverse political points of view. And he made many valid points that made the Governor squirm and agree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XJ6rQDRKGA
> Apparently he was someone who was promoting tolerance to more diverse political points of view.
Definitely:
> "I think the Democrats do not believe in the nuclear family, and they've already destroyed it in the macro, and now they're trying to destroy it in the micro."
And this is what I found in 10 seconds. Really fostering that political diversity. He's just another twitter/youtube pundit in the Fox News classic style, and there's endless hours of him talking just like this.
I think there’s a kernel of truth in what he said, surrounded by some exaggeration. The rural parts of the country, where people get married under 25 years old and have a higher fertility rate, probably do place a higher value on having a family than the urban parts of the country where career is prioritized. Good politicians (like Barack Obama did in his prime) take pains to acknowledge truths from the other side.
> I think there’s a kernel of truth in what he said, surrounded by some exaggeration
lol that just means you agree with him, not that he's encouraging a marketplace of ideas.
Your claim was "he was promoting tolerance to more diverse political points of view". Saying "your political point of view has and is destroying the nuclear family" isn't promoting tolerance of it.
The rural parts of the country, where people get married under 25 years old are overwhelming divorced by 35. If you call that "place a higher value on having a family" than the low divorce rates of educated, high earning women, then we disagree on definitions.
> Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism
I don’t know much about China, but I’m not sure the Chinese model of economic modernization today is much different than post-war US model that worked of defense-led capitalism, strategic resource stockpiles to maintain price stability, and strong antitrust. I think the Chinese economy is probably more free-market (in the sense that it is easier to start a business, and the Econ 101 model of pure competition that drives down prices applies to more markets) than the US is today.
> why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity increases homelessness (especially if you control for public services to counteract the effect)?
May I suggest the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308 that asks almost the same question. The answer is that private land ownership allows landowners to capture economic growth of prosperous places, so wages barely cover rent at the margin. This is particularly relevant to California which passed a disastrous constitutional amendment Proposition 13 (1978) which slashed property taxes from around 2% to 1% and declining, especially for older estates, which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal policy to deal with the problem of rising rents.
What a disappointment that this “Silicon Valley Pain Index”—where the pain consists of things like high rents and homelessness—is headlined with an irrelevant scapegoat of 9 billionaires. The 9 billionaires named in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525) do not own the vast majority of residential zoned land and are not active in land use politics as far as I know. It’s the few hundred thousand millionaires who use regulatory capture (zoning) to prevent abundant multifamily housing.
You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.
If this had anything to do with safety, this so-called “Progressive” supervisor Jackie Fielder would be investigating what safety features would be feasible on Waymos: emergency stop switches or stop commands, under car cameras, questioning whether the Waymo detected the cat and then just forgot about it when it walked under the car, etc.
Instead, she is using this to secure territory for obviously less safe Uber and Lyft drivers who are represented by the Teamsters. Such a cynical politician.
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