Automobile Conversation Part 1 of 2 ft. Paris Marx

There's no such thing as a self-driving car. There is such a thing as a self-crashing car. If you ever ask someone working on self-driving cars how often they get into accidents, they'll usually answer something like, "Our vehicles have only been in of at-fault crashes in the last two years despite driving of miles." But that "at-fault" part is doing a lot of work. Because, in reality, they would have been in several hundred crashes but were simply found not-at-fault because the vehicle did something that was dangerous and induced an accident but was technically legal. If you then look at how many times the vehicles WANTED to do something that would get them into a crash but the human operator intervened, it's an order of magnitude higher than the crash numbers. If I showed you a person and told you they had gotten in 300 car crashes over the past year and almost gotten into a crash 1,000 more times but someone else in the car stopped them, but were only found at-fault for one or two of them, there are many things you would call such a person but "safe" and "a good driver" are none of them. It's a hammer problem; when all you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails. The IT industry has had as its main application for decades now the creation, collation, and archiving of large data sets for purposes of bureaucracy and projection/prediction. The industry's three greatest tools developed to achieve these ends, fast & efficient indexed databases, heuristically optimized search algorithms, and the neural networks that train and create said algorithms (which I always must point out function nothing like actual neurons), are the pinnacle of the industry, its most profitable endeavor, and the type of software most people in the industry have training in. They are the metaphorical hammer in this case. Tools that were designed for handling databases have been brigaded into driving a car. When you state it like that, the very idea that it would work seems silly.

A significant contributor to increased pedestrian death rates is a corresponding increase in vehicle weight, particularly among trucks and SUVs. 3,000 lbs. compact cars and 6,000 lbs. trucks hit differently at the same speed.

Alice's casual reference to Robert Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism" appeared to be rare mistake: the concept of the metropolitan rebound of imperial violence resulting or contributing to fascism is commonly attributed to Aimé Césaire and his "Discourse on Colonialism", not to Paxton.

Absolute all timer episode. If anyone is interested they should check out podcast War on Cars. Urbanism is a slippery slope folks and big warning you can't turn it off once you see how unequal and fucked up our cities are

Just to comment on the whole "cars are normalised" thing, it is absolutely a fact. Just admitting I cycle means I'll immediately be treated to some lovely story about some thing some cyclist did once and even as a trained philosopher who moonlights as one of those weird MMT maniacs, nothing gets me weird looks faster, even among relatively left wing people, than admitting I'd happily ban cars in cities.

You should never throw out the SEC with the ba'ath water...

You can’t do Car Talk because it’s a regional name to Boston for talking about cars.

A woman is someone who be shopping

HORSELESS AGE

As an agoraphobe, I see no problem with technological abundance that protects me from ever having to interact with another person! As long as the pod is comfortable, I'll weld the damn door shut myself. In regards to Silicon Valley's dearth of historical context... Welcome to the educational nightmare that is tech education in the US, where the 'good' schools make you take like one humanities course and one social science course to graduate and encourage you to spend your free time either coding or networking. I've had coworkers whose sole humanities education at the university level was a history class about witchcraft (which, to be fair, I would totally have taken too) or whose social science education consisted of a sociology course on social behaviors surrounding sports (again, probably a cool class. That's not the point). I've worked in tech for slightly more than a decade now, and I can say that it is tragically common to be the only person in a meeting who has any real curiosity about the world outside a computer (unless the world outside that computer consists of other computers). Preferred news sources, if any, tend to be uniform and driven by a hive-mind, and the capacity of any individual to parse or validate what their news is telling them verges on "not at all" in most cases. Obviously, there are exceptions, but the general template I see of a programmer coming fresh out of education is someone who has minimal liberal arts education, little to no understanding of politics or history, prefers not to know what the news is, unless it is tech-related, and has been taught from day one to view the courses they took attached to tech as the only worthwhile ones. Often, they also spent a couple summers interning at a company with a culture that reflected the same. It's a deeply unhealthy (in every sense) bubble of alternative reality. Most of the exceptions I encounter are people who were self-taught and either didn't attend university at all or who majored in something other than CS/Business (or the dread double major of CS and Business).

The cadre of SEC regulators is basically what they have for taxing derivatives in the US lol… just issue vague statements and then leave it to the lawyers interpret (and bill for their expertise)

ban all cars including electric incliding self driving all this stuff. ban.

once again I am asking when will the Master and Commander bonus episode be... wait wrong podcast, carry on.