This is normal for the Economist. I don't really understand why -- they clearly have an American edition (I get their print version in the US and its headlines and organization is totally different than the same edition in the UK), yet they leave all the "colours" and "boffins" in there, when it would be pretty trivial to regionalize the language same as they do the currencies and structure. My assumption is that being a bit eccentric and foreign-seeming is part of their brand.
Can you explain more why you think this? As I see it, cars in general remain very highly negative-externality, and self-driving doesn't change it much.
Regular ICE cars:
- air pollution from tire wear and brake dust
- air pollution from exhaust
- embodied carbon
- noise
- endangering other road users
- traffic congestion
- land use (sprawl)
- long term health impacts (encouraging sedentary lifestyle)
Switch to all-electric and you lose a bit of noise and all the tailpipe emissions, but gain whatever emissions generated the power (sometimes solar, great, but sometimes lignite, boo), whatever environmental damage resulted from the battery materials, and probably marginal worsening of safety as the same ranger requires a heavier vehicle
Switch to self-driving and you may increase safety (feels like Waymo basically yes, Tesla probably no based on their track record with stat manipulation), but also vastly increase use, worsening congestion and land-use. The others stay the same.
So I don't understand why you're saying the externality ratio is good. From my perspective self-driving cars don't really move the needle.
I guess I place a premium on safety over land use and congestion.
I also suspect any future congestion and land-use problems will get better after an initial dip. Urban living becomes more desirable as city parking lots disappear.
If roads are used exclusively for self driving cars, this would probably improve traffic flow. Robot cars multiply current highway and city street capacity by coordination. They can smoothen traffic flow due to hard braking, and drive much closer to each other.
I don't think this is a crazy take, but it is missing two big factors that self driving maximalists often ignore.
First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/mile all in (i.e. including depreciation, repairs, gas, etc) -- you can get down to half that pretty easily and maybe a little lower, but especially if you're spending tons of time in this car you're probably going to want a nice comfy one, which will cost more and depreciate faster. So, these trips you're imagining everyone taking constantly are not going to be accessible to most people. Cars are already the second biggest expense in most Americans' budgets, one which scales with mileage, and which self driving would only increase (have to pay for the lidar, on-device compute, whatever remote service handled edge cases, etc).
The second thing your predictions miss is geometry. Despite the decades of predictions about self-driving cars being able to run safely at much higher speeds and with much tighter tolerances than human-run cars, the tyranny of geometry and stopping distances (which actually won't change much even with millisecond reaction times) means that throughput of car lanes is unlikely to change much (though we could all imagine top-down infrastructural changes helping this a lot, eg coordinated self driving cars and smart roads, those seem unlikely to land anytime soon given American political inclinations). Imagine how spaced-out people are on the highway -- in each lane, 1.6 people (average car occupancy) every football field (300 feet -- safe stopping distance at 70mph). If you're trying to go anywhere more densely packed than that -- e.g., a city, a restaurant, a ball game -- you're going to start to run into capacity constraints. Mass transit, walking, and cycling all can manage an order of magnitude higher throughput.
So while I think your prediction -- that self driving cars will increase demand for road space -- is right, the valence that takes for me is much more negative. The wealthy will be able to take up way more space on the road (e.g., one car each dropping off each kid at each extra curricular activity), condemning the poor to even worse traffic (especially the poor who cannot afford a self driving vehicle, who will not even be able to play candy crush while they're waiting in this traffic). People will continue to suburbanize and atomize, demanding their governments pay for bigger and bigger roads and suburbs, despoiling more of the areas you'd like to hike in, with debt that will keep rolling over to the next generation. Bikes and peds will continue to be marginalized as the norm for how far apart people live will continue to grow, making it even more impossible and dangerous to get anywhere without a car. I hope I'm wrong but this is how mass motorization played out the first time, in the post-war period, and if anything our society is less prepared now to oppose the inequitable, race-to-the-bottom, socialize-your-externalities results of that phase of development.
It's not the discounting that's a problem -- it's the intentionally watching other stores and preventing them from closing the "price gap" with Walmart
> As a result of Food Lion threatening Walmart’s price gap, Pepsi created a plan to nudge Food Lion’s retail prices on Pepsi products upward by reducing promotional payments and allowances to Food Lion and raising other costs for Food Lion
> It's not the discounting that's a problem -- it's the intentionally watching other stores and preventing them from closing the "price gap" with Walmart
This is circular. You are just describing a selective/privileged discount, again.
Food Lion could of course sell some items at a loss (Walmart did this, to gain market share and beat out smaller businesses). Costco continues to sell hot dogs at a loss. But that probably wouldn't work for Pepsi products in this context; fortunately, there are other products beyond Pepsi.
The bright line distinction is Pepsi watching Food Lion's end-consumer pricing and trying to force it up in order to mollify Walmart.
I actually doubt this is remarkable in the world of major producers and retailers (e.g. I've heard anecdotes of brands sending around reps to ensure that their shelves at retail stores are appropriately well lit and placed, so having an agreement on price seems pretty normal). However, it's probably a good case to get the public thinking about the desireability of such an oligopoly -- evidence that it's not merely better economies of scale and logistics that are keeping Walmart's prices low, but also explicit, private deals that feel shadier. I don't know that anyone did anything objectionable here given the norms and incentives in front of them, but it's a bad look for those norms and incentives.
You asked how a price cut translates to raising prices everywhere, and the parent comment answered. Though even without the further raising of prices for the competitors, the effect of many such agreements is that the competitors have a harder time competing, some shut down, and now the Walmart can also charge more because there's less competition.
I cannot understand this sentiment. If you commit a crime in a country and don't pay the fine, why would you be surprised if they made you pay the fine next time you crossed the border? Even if it were a parking ticket I wouldn't find Canada's actions here objectionable, and DUI is a lot more serious than that. Unless I've misunderstood the scenario you're describing.
She didn’t commit the DUI in Canada, she did in the US. We were in the country for three days (Victoria) and didn't even have a car, so she couldn’t have recommitted the offense even if she wanted to, which she obviously wouldn’t want to.
She committed a serious crime and didn't pay the penalty which normally in the US comes with additional criminal penalties for non-payment. They would have been perfectly justified to extradite her and take her to jail.
Also how can you say that she couldn't offend again? She could easily rent or drive another.
I think you don't understand what has happened here. OP's wife has a DUI in the USA. Canada does not normally allow people with a DUI into Canada. In exchange for $250, they allowed her in. This is both a surprise and a nuisance for OP.
It sounded to me like she paid her US fine and thus ceased to be a scofflaw. After further reading it looks like convicted criminals can apply for a temporary residence permit for CAN $239.75.
This may not be needed if 5+ years have passed without further misdeeds and may apply to be deemed rehabilitated.
This covers individual evaluation of your case and may be denied. It probably also serves to keep the riff raff put especially Americans who otherwise may take a day trip to share their further drunken driving adventures with their least lucky Canadian friends.
It is hard to contextualize this as a bribe with poster as a victim when the very reasonable alternative is simple denial.
You have no right to visit Canada and they can charge you as much as they please and its your responsability to do your own homework as far as travel requirements.
- Headline unemployment _is_ "people who want jobs [enough to be looking for them] but can't find one". The metric you linked to is including people outside the labor force and then weighting in a fairly opaque way. Between labor force participation being at the same point as it was 2014-2016 and unemployment being lower, I don't think it's fair to say unemployment stats are misleading. The point about underemployment is still definitely valid though.
- I'm with you that minimum wage should likely be higher, but federal minimum wage has never been intended to be "comfortable wage in a major metro". Major cities have their own minimum wages -- e.g., NYCs is $16/hr. Making $32k a year in NYC would of course not be comfortable, but is doable (eg you can rent a room in an apartment for $1k/mo, live off of oats and rice, etc). It's not intended to be a "head of household" wage, but "the least amount you can ever pay anyone"
Other than these nits I'm with you that stats don't cover the lived experience of all Americans and there's more too it than simply vibes. However I also do think that some of the vibecession is due to increasingly effective media manipulation to squeeze money from consumers. I (coincidentally just now) wrote a blog post explanding on this hypothesis here -
https://medium.com/@digital-cygnet/manipulated-into-malaise-...
i've certainly never been counted towards that unemployment metric any time I've been unemployed. Am I not part of the labor force? The metric only counts people who actively apply for unemployment relief. So either I'm not part of the labor force—doubtful, as I'm employed—or "unemployment" doesn't mean "wants a job and doesn't have one".
Simply: the way the federal government employs the word "unemployment" is, at best, disingenuous; I suspect it is intentional, though, to obscure the intent to leave some part of the population without employment to keep the labor market weak.
In the USA, unemployment is based on a periodic, 60k household survey. You may not have ever been contacted but that's just the nature of sampling. It's true that some countries report unemployment as those who are actually registered as unemployed, but that's not best practice (and a good reason to be careful comparing country unemployment rates)
I agree it's a bad outcome that someone who gets so fed up with the labor market that they stop looking for work no longer counts as unemployed, but that's why we have labor force participation (and why imho that should be reported in headlines along with unemployment, after adjusting for age and education)
It's always interesting when I see this take because I was raised the opposite way and was really surprised to learn a few years back from articles like [1] that some people consider this an etiquette breach.
From what I can tell there are two populations: those who prefer to recline and those who prefer not to. As long as an entire column of seats belongs to one population you're fine (if everyone wants to recline no one loses space, we all just shift around to a configuration in which everyone is more comfortable). But when you have someone more comfortable staying upright sitting behind a recline-preferenced person, that's where issues arise. It's not clear to me whether it's morally wrong for the front person to recline in that case, given that's basically just preferencing the default of "upright", which is arbitrary.
Nothing here should be read as justifying people who don't pay attention to what's going on behind them and/or recline suddenly/aggressively. It's always something that should be done with a glance behind and a smooth, gentle motion. Maybe also a word to the person sitting behind though again I'm not convinced that's a moral imperative.
i do prefer to recline. i choose not to, even though the airline says that i am entitled to, because i know that reclining has a high likelihood of inconveniencing the person behind me (primarily due to loss of legroom and inability to use a laptop).
Same here; except I'll recline after dinner on long-haul flights, because that's the point virtually everyone does, especially when the lights are dimmed. I would never recline on <4 hour flights, and am irked by those who do.
(I wonder if it simply driven by an individualistic vs. collectivist mindset?)
Personally I don't get on a high horse about it and just deal with it, but if the person ahead of me reclines I lose leg room that me reclining does not give back.
Sorry, what's your position here - that any renting of a property is an "economic rent" and thus immoral? That makes little sense to me. I am a renter and glad to be so because I'm not confident I want to live in my current home for the 5-10 years it takes for purchasing it to be worthwhile. The landlord is providing me a service, turning a big, illiquid asset into something that can be accessed with only a 1-year time commitment. This is economically productive (allows me to live somewhere I otherwise wouldn't) and is hence not an "economic rent".
The classic example of an economic rent is a feudal lord putting a chain across a river and charging a toll. This is economically unproductive because it's just putting a price on something that was free (and, you have to assume for the example, non-rivalrous). This is why the sibling comment points out that the rent-seekers in the housing market are more like the people seeking to constrain supply via zoning and regulation.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, or approaching this wrong as someone who doesn't tend to have bad reactions to altitude if I am careful with it. But doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose? Won't your acclimation take a lot longer (or never happen fully?) if you're spending most of your time at sea-level pressure? I imagine these folks would be very comfortable in their houses, but the sudden increase back to 10k feet of pressure whenever they left home would leave them out of breath and susceptible to acute mountain sickness even weeks after they arrived in Colorado. Unless I am misunderstanding how acclimation works, this seems like refusing to rip off the Band-Aid.
There's also the other rich-person-pressure trend of sleeping in hypobaric chambers to simulate altitude and promote red blood cell and lung growth. Seems like probably at least one of these practices is wrong!
The article says that the oxygen is mainly for guests, who aren't going to have time to acclimate. Or the elderly for whom acclimation is much more difficult. It's not trying to be a perfect solution of any kind.
