To me this doesn't seem like a disaster but just the kind of thing that happens as you role out a service and expose it to new challenges.
Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.
The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.
In ATL this happens often enough that it's not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don't do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to drive through deep water.
We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!
To be fair if you take Elon Musk at his word the Cybertruck is supposed to have hermetically sealed powertrain components and be capable of exactly this.
The powertrain is one thing, the more critical issue is the car's structure, including the ventilation system, all sorts of gaps - and also, all hollow spaces, in which you need to balance weep holes (to prevent water condensation and subsequent rusting or weird issues regarding temperature changes) against the ability for external water to end up there at all.
Getting that right is a very expensive job and that's why you usually only see true (i.e. no visit to a shop needed afterwards) wade ability on large military vehicles and custom RV builds.
Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure needed to deal with snow (though honestly this isn't much $ in the total budget).
Which is to say cities need to figure out what is the best use of their efforts/money. It is wrong to fault Atlanta for not dealing with this. If you live there you as a voter should learn all the pros and cons (I suspect there are some unexpected environmental ones) and consider if you should vote for a change or just deal with it. The rest of us won't don't live there though should keep our fingers out of their local issues.
I’ve lived in Atlanta for many years, grew up with family in northeast, so I know how to drive in snow and have seen how Boston, New York and Atlanta all deal with it. Atlanta has a very very small fleet to clear snow and ice because the cost of maintaining a large fleet just isn’t worth the low frequency they’re needed. So it’s common for bad ice to shutdown the city for 1-2 days. That’s a valid trade off.
Every once in a while Atlanta would get a bad one and people would start complaining about needing a bigger fleet, then a couple weeks after it’s over just forget about it.
And, in the north, you have snowstorms. I'm glad to not be in a situation where you were pretty much expected to drive into office jobs every day whatever the conditions any longer. But that used to be the case barring the rare state of emergency.
Yes, there were certainly plows. But driving was still somewhat dangerous and you saw cars off roads on a regular basis. Driving into work on one of those daysz, I picked a pregnant woman off the median of a road whose car had gotten stuck.
And when it does happen: A Waymo should not fucking drive through it.
I remember once when the mall in my hometown flooded. It was at the top of a hill.
IIRC: The top of that hill received something like 6" of rain in less than 15 minutes, in a very "Fuck you in particular" sort of way.
The vaguely-greater surrounding area was fine. It was a very localized event.
They were not prepared for this. It was a mess.
And gosh: The streets near there flooded, too. The drainage systems were simply not up to the task.
It had never happened before, and it has never happened since, but: Quite clearly, it happens.
(I don't understand your deflection here, at all. If your main point is that "If cities were designed better, then the deficiencies of autonomous cars wouldn't be a big deal for those autonomous cars at all" then I might reasonably conclude that you're just not particularly observant of the world.)
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edit: People also screw things up. We (people) drive through flooded roads sometimes -- we even do it on purpose from time to time, even though the guidance is to avoid it.
Some other times, we get surprised by flooded roads. Especially at night, they can be hard to detect. We screw things up. We take risks. Sometimes, those risks even work out OK.
But back in context: Waymo. Waymo is an autonomous taxi cab. It works on regular public streets, and on a long-enough timeline: Some of those streets will be flooded.
I probably never want my taxi driver to try to ferry me through a flooded roadway, whether it has a human brain or a computer brain calling the shots.
(I did get to spend a week getting ferried ~daily through flooded roads in a Jeep once in an unrelated flood, but by a high-ranking deputy Sheriff was (who would not become confused by a power outage[1]), and this Jeep was a proper cop car with the lights and the logos. We had some mutual problems that needed solved that involved public safety, and both of us were being paid to solve those problems. That worked fine, I knew what I was getting into before we set forth, and we'd have had extraordinary support if anything went very wrong.)
Yeah you can start by not building _more_ in the flood plain.
And if you do, then don't build architecture that is incapable of just accepting the temporarily higher ground water. We know how to basement just make the basement high enough to tower over the flood.
Oh, no cheap ground-level storefront windows? Welp, guess those have to be elevated above sufficiently voluminous drainage channels (the former streets).
> Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs.
That doesn't mitigate much. The mass of a paper and matchsticks "house" just isn't enough to resist it getting torn apart - if not by the wind, then by debris.
The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit is steel bar reinforced concrete or very, very solidly built brick-and-mortar. But that is expensive to build.
> It's uneconomical to hurricane-proof all housing in Florida.
Given the yearly news about record breaking destruction... I'd say it is uneconomical to build in Florida at all. The only thing keeping some regions (in addition to FL and other hurricane hotspots, add California for fires and potentially earthquakes) afloat is politicians bribing populations by promising government bailouts or by forcing insurance companies to offer coverage by law even if it is extremely expensive.
The amount of waste and human suffering generated because of these perverse incentives is staggering.
The news tends to exaggerate a bit (quite a bit) for effect. Where the storm hits is devastating, but a mile away can be basically fine. So percentage wise very little of Florida gets destroyed, but of the part that gets flattened, it may be entirely destroyed. Same thing can happen periodically near virtually any body of water or stream. But hurricanes are something that can be observed and predicted in advance instead of being out of nowhere like flooding
> But hurricanes are something that can be observed and predicted in advance instead of being out of nowhere like flooding
Yeah in advance enough to prevent loss of human life, but still, if you're hit, everything you own is gone. There just is not enough time to pack up more than maybe your laptops, phones, a bag of clothes and your most important paperwork.
Explain to the class where the water is gonna get all that momentum from. Florida is flat.
The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.
Between the requirements imposed by needing to resist hurricane winds and the slab ties it's "good enough" that there's a 99.9999% chance the building will stay on it's foundation long enough for something else to be the problem.
> The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.
FEMA has a flood rating specifically for exactly this situation: V. They have this because it carries additional hazards beyond normal flooding seen with storms.
> Coastal areas with a 1% or greater chance of flooding and an additional hazard associated with storm waves. These areas have a 26% chance of flooding over the life of a 30‐year mortgage.
And here's a video about researchers at the Oregon State University's Wave Lab studying this exact thing:
Once again, this sort of reddit-esque penchant for projecting general guidance and engineering standards into specific situations misses the mark.
Someone in a subdivision that's a few miles inland with a mangrove swamp between it and the ocean anyway has to care about New Orleans style flooding, not "what sea state is my picture window rated for" flooding.
Like there's a reason that Florida building code just says tie it down and call it good. It's just not necessary nor economically worthwhile to try and make structures shrug off the surf. Sure, literally on the coast type stuff will get rekt (most of that stuff is concrete now though) but the average modular home subdivision doesn't need special requirements above and beyond what it takes to shrug off the wind.
When it comes to wind loading the code is basically a fight between evil civil engineers who want the state jackboot to force you to buy their service and the hardware makers (Simpson and the like) who'd prefer you reference a conservatively pre-computed table and install that much of their hardware.
There are many reasons to shit on Florida but their building code is pretty top notch (and this makes it expensive but everything has tradeoffs).
I live in Tampa Bay, so I'm quite familiar. It's pretty rare to have a V rating, precisely for many of the reasons you mentioned. But, at the same time, handwaving it away as unimportant is also silly. It's an immensely more dangerous situation to be in flooding with moving water, as opposed to just rising water conditions. If nothing else, it's important to know for evacuation purposes. I would never willingly stay in a V-rated zone if there was a chance of storm surge. Then again, I didn't buy the V-rated house I wanted and instead found a house 40 feet above sea level, so maybe that's just my risk profile.
And I didn't disagree with you regarding building. You were wrong about storm surge always being static -- it mostly is, but importantly sometimes isn't. But you weren't wrong that there's not a lot to do about it. This is one of those situations where nature will win if it wants to. Best thing you can do is just not be there when it does.
If people are going to build cheap houses, it makes sense to spend a little bit more on adding the hurricane ties (it's not like they're expensive or difficult to use). It might not be perfect, but it's surely better than just relying on gravity.
On one hand, sure, but on the other, Earth doesn't care what we expect. And humans don't build rationally most of the time. Most cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.
Flooding we experience is largely due to destruction of wetlands that used to act as a buffer for excess water during storms, and paving over land for cars making the surface impenetrable.
It would be a massive waste of resources to build out every city with a drainage system capable of handling any amount of rain. Houston had ~30 inches of water dumped on it during a somewhat recent hurricane, designing and building infrastructure for that level of storm is not realistic. I’m not familiar with storm sewer capacity design, but I’m confident they aren’t designed to flawlessly handle a 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 year event.
It's not even amounts of rain that are necessarily the problem.
In my area, big rainstorms sometimes include hail, and if some of the hail/debris is big enough to block sewer grates, then the deluge of water will quickly sweep hail and other debris into the partial blockage until the grates are thoroughly clogged.
I'm not sure how you could adequately design against that while not having storm water grates that are hazardous to people/animals/etc.
>one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
In some cities, certain streets are designed to flood during heavy rain, and are an integral part of routing the water away from neighborhoods and businesses, and into the drainage systems.
SV is the most cloistered place I've ever seen. I'm comfortable assuming that nobody in any position of power at Waymo ever thought to themselves "gee maybe the weather is different in this new city we're deploying to, perhaps we should test that"
As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think deeply about how different locations have present different challenges, including different weather.
Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.
Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.
I worked in the field, not at Waymo. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of weather, along with hundreds of other factors, many much less obvious.
The engineers whose expertise you assume away are actually debating corner cases like the one we saw of someone carrying a bicycle on their skateboard.
In fact the companies run test campaigns in shitty weather all over the country on purpose, at great expense.
Public transit is a function of city design, less so much the presence of public transit. If you can’t walk to a stop, or if your destination isn’t reasonably accessible from that network, it won’t be used for that trip.
While it sucks for many other reasons, autonomous vehicles are actually a very good solution to public transit in most American cities. What I envisage is a dense grid of virtual bus stops in N square miles surrounding a rapid transit stop. You hail using an app, and a minibus (8-20 pax) adjusts its route to collect you and get you to that rapid transit station. The inverse happens for people arriving at that station, where routes are planned as the train approaches, so people heading to the same general area can be directed to the same minibus.
Who is "we?" The cost to develop self driving cars is not exactly being felt by society at large.
It certainly isn't stopping anyone from improving public transit, but it seems like you believe it's this and not any one of a bajillion actual factors to blame.
This is not true. If a king has all the money, then whatever the king wants is what society builds. The use of resources by tech companies to build self-driving cars uses resources for things that might otherwise have gone to some other approach.
Google's use of resources does not occur in a vacuum. Moreover, if cities decided to pass laws that would slowly transition all road infra away from private vehicles to shared public transit, then Google would lobby against that.
For public transit to function well (i.e. competitively with private vehicles), traffic needs to be much reduced (e.g., imagine no traffic lights and no traffic). Google's private cars on the roads do not move us in that direction. There is no doubt that they are technologically impressive, but they do not provide greater utility than investing in shared infrastructure would.
Last mile is still a thing. We need long distance public transit, regional public transit, local public transit (buses, trams, cable cars, ...) and we also need hyperlocal public transit (taxis, autonomous vehicles/"peoplemovers").
if you want people to use public transit, you need to make it not be a mobile homeless shelter. otherwise everyone who can afford to will insist on a private transport
Public transit and public places will continue to decline in cleanliness and quality for as long as the rich suck resources out of local municipalities.
They do the same things with public schools (pulling educated teachers to teach in private institutions) and with medical care (pulling physicians into private concierge practice).
If all the rich people had to take public transit and send their kids to public schools, they'd start investing money and (human) energy / capital in making the public infra better.
The investment of resources by rich people into their own private enclaves is entirely rational and can be solved only by wealth taxes that preclude such action (by making it impossible).
They depend on public investment to build and support road infrastructure. If one accepts your point of view, these companies depend on massive government subsidies. Or perhaps they should pay for the construction and upkeep of the roads their vehicles use.
All companies (and indeed individuals) rely on and benefit from various public goods, such as roads, law and order, and an educated populace. They pay for these public goods through taxes.
These robot vehicles pay road use taxes, like other vehicles do. And when used commercially, they pay taxi tariffs. There's even an EV-specific road tariff in CA to make up for the lack of gasoline tax revenue.
I'm not sure why you would assume to the contrary.
True. While we're at it, let's not fixing roads as well. Also electric cars. Also what's the deal with space exploration? Fix what's on earth first please.
There's a long tail of unpredictable events in the AV industry that you end up seeing, especially since the cars in aggregate end up driving more than one could over a lifetime.
At a previous employer, we've seen anything from cars getting mooned, a SUV slowly driving past the AV, the rear window roll down, and someone poke their head out and start throwing dollar bills at the AV, a convention of people dressed up in animal costumes, the "Miami left," and so on.
So it's much less of "maybe we should test that" and more of "we don't know what we don't know, so let's gather some data." In practice, the cars have lidar so they won't crash into solid objects that aren't recognized, they just end up getting stuck in embarrassing situations like these.
I haven't encountered one as a driver either, but I'm pretty sure "Don't drive into roads with water on them" was a basic safety question on the permit test.
You haven't been driving for 25 years anywhere east of the Mississippi river if you've never encountered road flooding. Accepting they can't predict everything sounds reasonable. Failing to account for a routine occurrence is negligent.
My guess is this was brought up but getting the product out there was more important to the business so it got ignored.
Now that it's a problem for them, they get to hide behind an "oops sorry, let's fix the really obvious thing now", almost like taking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to malicious levels.
This jives with CRUD software in general, where people are not usually rewarded for preventing future issues and instead rewarded for waiting until it's a visible problem and then fixing it.
This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.
They can, and I bet they have! But they cannot afford a test track that accurately reproduces every condition exactly as it will be encountered in the real world. At some point, it is judicious to test with real-world conditions, and simulating only gets you so far.
They can simulate "driving out of a raging fire" but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy "world model simulation" doesn't actually mean much
IMO there is a lot of daylight between “is not perfectly capable of simulating all situations and always used perfectly to the full capabilities of the system” and “doesn’t mean much”.
No simulation is perfect, so ideally you have a feedback look constantly looking at new real-world data as it comes in and finding where the simulation has errors, and updating the simulation to improve the correlation between the simulation and the real world over time.
My guess is they did have flooded street sims but the correlation was much lower than expected, or the details of the situation being simulated (lighting, building locations, how dirty the water is, ...) were sufficiently different from the situation that was encountered that the sim based training didn't generalize to the new context.
"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "
I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.
Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.
P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.
It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what's way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox.
But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they'll be back without problems.
Well fortunately the rest of the planet is a lot more similar to Arizona than Venus or the moon of the bottom of the Ocean, and they're already doing quite well in like 25 other markets, so...
~80% of the population of the US lives east of the Mississippi, where road flooding is a dirt common event. Waymo's been smart so far to cherry pick markets that cater to their vehicles obvious limitations. That doesn't exempt them from criticism for failing to account for routine conditions in new areas they've chosen to move into. Additionally "doing quite well" is incoherent given it's been 17 years and Waymo is still unprofitable.
Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?
This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.
Yeah, it makes me wonder about their planned rollout to more of Southern California, where flooded roads aren't uncommon, especially in some of the valleys.
To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels.
Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.
Just because there are real world failures doesn't mean they didn't do simulations. It could just mean the simulation didn't account for something different in the real world.
The website for software engineers is assuming that a production failure means nobody did any testing before prod...
So what you're saying is that something far worse happened here. They did test for flooded streets but some slight difference caused the model to fail in real life.
To be fair, there will always be something that fails. So the more important question is probably the frequency and severity of those failures.
It may not be usual in Atlanta itself, but living on the Southeastern coast within a mile or two of the water, for 30+ years, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. I’ve got old photos around of kayaking through downtown Charleston during college, for instance, where the street flooding is not only usual but a many times per season occurrence. Lots of seaside areas have the same issue.
That is wild. What happens to all of the flooded property? Do they tear-down and rebuild everything after every major flood? Or massive rennovations? It cannot believe this is truly possible as flood insurance would become impossible expensive.
I just moved from an apartment right next to where this Waymo got stuck: https://old.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/1tj00sl/flooding_i... and I can say that that particular intersection floods about every time it rains hard. That being said, yesterday's rain was particularly heavy and I hadn't seen that intersection flood that bad since before Waymo started being rolled out here
It’s been clear for a while to anyone without money riding on this that the relatively “easy” part fooled a lot of people into assuming that the last push to full self driving wouldn’t be radically greater challenge.
An alternate viewpoint is that it looks like after 20 years they still haven't even started solving weather issues that you encounter anywhere outside a California climate.
Roundabouts with with 5-10 bicycles going in and out from the different roads all the time during rushhour (Copenhagen, Denmark)? I would love to see them looking for people’s tiny hand gestures and not just get stuck in our traffic over here.
Take a look at `2313 NW Military Hwy # 100, San Antonio, TX 78231`
This is an intersection I myself felt daunting my first few years driving. It is within Waymo's San Antonio coverage, and they seem to be handling that just fine.
However, they had to pause them recently related to a lost car, due to, drum roll please... flooding.
The huge disadvantage they have over people is that their cars cost $250k, require a workforce of people to retrieve and repair them, maintain them, clean them, monitor them, etc. They are more expensive to operate than a normal car with a human driver, so far. The break-even point requires a lot of problems to be solved, and even then, the upside is not looking to be astronomical in the best case.
Not at all — they're working on cheaper cars that they're testing in SF, and they will probably only roll out Waymo to the wealthiest markets in the US. Think airport rides to JFK instead of a taxi that works anywhere in the country. They will be very profitable.
Waymo is talking about scaling up operations globally and the market is competitive, the cost 100% does matter.
They need large Chinese production lines for lidar, integration kits for cars plus the in car computing, repair pipelines for both sensors and cars, real estate to park cars, the infrastructure/processes to clean and charge them quickly, teams of remote drivers, insurance policies, etc. Then they need to compete with mature decentralized Uber and taxi fleets who push their car/maintenance costs onto drivers, while Waymo grows adoption of their mobile app where prices will matter if they aren't as perfectly reliable and low risk as hiring a human. The self driving novelty effect won't last forever
All of that requires large capital expenditure and careful business models
Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed.
You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.
That's easier to stay that when it's an R&D project doing pilot runs in a small set of cities. When you need tell shareholders you want to run a fleet of 100k cars then those numbers start becoming very serious.
Waymo also took $11B from outside investors, so it's just not Alphabet taking the risk
Not comparable at all. Autonomous driving isn't obviously a viable business. It's not because computer programs can't drive well, it's because the and workforce infrastructure required to maintain and operate the expensive fleet may be less efficient than a human maintaining their own vehicle.
Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?
I'm implying that drivers are more efficient at cleaning and maintaining, refueling, storing, repairing, and replacing their cars they own than the complex systems of personnel maintaining a much more expensive fleet of cars they don't own or give a shit about.
Are you also implying that people who maintain vehicles for a living do a worse job at it than the owners doing it themselves? I would say the opposite is true.
Plenty of companies around the world have well-maintained fleets of vehicles. Trucking businesses, bus companies, train companies, even some taxi companies with salaried drivers, ...
No, I'm implying that people who maintain their own cars do it more efficiently. The simple stuff like cleaning has to be done by someone. It's not about doing a "worse job," it's about doing a more expensive job.
Waymo is replacing human drivers with a capital-intensive fleet business, a substantially more expensive vehicle, and still a large number of remote assistance staff, fleet operators, safety engineers, incident response, operations staff, etc.
But I'm not saying they can't beat a human driver, I'm just saying it hasn't been proven that they will. It may only be that the highest demand markets will provide a sufficient enough utilization to make it economically viable.
> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
This is also a huge disadvantage because any flaws in the software that don’t show up in a slow rollout will be present in every single car.
It’s a contrived example, but say a new billboard campaign rolls out that causes every car to immediately veer away from it.
Waymo has had a ton of problems like their fleets getting stuck circling a particular block or neighborhood. That's been a thing for years. There was a story about it happening in a new city, just a week or two ago.
Even fairly far into their roll-out they clearly didn't do any simulations of the vehicle getting pulled over or interacting with police, and that sort of thing continued to be a problem for a while. I remember footage of a Waymo just driving off after being 'pulled over.'
These self-driving companies need to be held to the same legal standards as any other driver. Right now it's the wild west and people have literally been killed because the only people writing the regulations are their lobbyists.
My friend, have you seen the standard that human drivers are held to? One accident, one infraction should probably cancel your driver's license, at least for some amount of time, but we just say oops, pay $150 and keep going.
Do you know how many people die in car accidents each year? More than are killed by guns (you know, tools which are designed for killing people). It's insane that we let humans drive at all. Waymo's safety record is fine.
> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
Sure, because human drivers famously have to be taught with each new generation that driving into six feet of water is a bad plan.
Have you ever seen transplants to a colder climate trying to navigate icy road conditions?
This is a valid point that self-driving cars solving the issue once and losslessly deploying the solution to it's fleet is a massive improvement over humans each individually applying the "live and learn" strategy.
To me it looks like it's a problem with the "default attitude" (can't think of a better name) of the Waymo driving software. When a human sees that the road surface ahead is in some unknown condition (flooded, covered in lava, whatever) they usually default to caution - better stop and check first. While Waymo apparently defaults to blithely driving ahead, after all its maps tell it that there's a road ahead and it didn't detect any known obstacle, so what could possibly go wrong?
Oh come on. Not even driving anywhere in Europe; higher difficulty levels would be Turkey , India, Russia, Egypt. Add countryside for extra points. Add harvest season in countryside for unique achievement. Add rainy/snowy season in countryside to master this game.
We already have a huge number of safety regulations for cars, that take into account all these various things. There's also insurance that covers flood damage and cars. These are the things that red flag something you need to test, if you want to take over driving the car.
> The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
That is not a given when dealing with "machine learning".
They will need to have metrics for all these scenarious and ensure when they solve the 20th problem down the line this one does not regress, but instead it becomes more and more generalized.
Sounds like they need to employ more "neurodivergents" to make these robots work correctly, before they are all Silent Greened, and it is only the CEOs left bashing each other's heads in with rocks.
I love when people bring this up. When was the last time anyone here had to pass an actual driving test, like where you have to physically drive a car? For me, age 16, which was more years ago than I like to count.
How many licenses do we revoke for violating traffic laws? Getting into a car crash? Injuring someone in a car crash? Killing someone in a car crash? Not nearly enough! We are so lax about driving it's insane. But you want to hold these robot cars to some much higher standard? I mean, ok, but how much higher? It's a really freaking low bar right now
We're talking about a piece of software being unable to determine if something is flooded or not. 99% of humans presented with the same visual ques would be able to determine its flooded.
This is what I'm waiting parity with. I don't see how that's an unfair ask, especially considering Atlanta floods fairly regularly, its not entirely uncommon.
That's great. Would you your country's test covers 100% of the situations a driver might encounter?
Even without knowing the details, I can confidently tell you they don't.
Does it teach you how to recover the car when the tires blow out? How about it is raining? How to react when a car is coming straight at you in the wrong way? How about when a dog jumps out?
It's about many things, including reaction speed, visual awareness, specific expertise and informed decision making wrt braking or acceleration power. All of these are better in a modern self-driving car (I do not know whether Tesla falls into this category) than in a human.
Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes.
Reaction speed does not matter if the driver can anticipate things before they happen. Actually I think what makes a good driver is ones ability to anticipate.
I don't think computers are anywhere near a human in that regard.
>visual awareness
A point cloud and some computer vision is not "visual awareness". Your statistics is also biased is of its source.
But in very controlled environments and for sedentary pace of driving, yes, self driving cars could be better than average drivers.
80-90% reduction, over the course of 170 million miles driven on the famously very controlled city streets of LA, SF, Austin and Phoenix.
On average, I wouldn't expect the regulatory agencies to be very friendly toward outright fraudulent reporting from Waymo. On the very outside, maybe these 80-90% reductions are optimistic roundups from 50-65% reductions. Or do you believe that Waymo is secretly running people down and scooping corpses into their trunks?
And to me it seems like you're justifying a lack of oversight and dangers of this technology for what purpose exactly? Why are you defending a corporation?
Are you talking about automobile technology in general? Human operated vehicles kill a lot of people each year. People get tiny slaps on the wrist for breaking the law on the roads, crashing into other cars, crashing into pedestrians. It's actually really hard to lose your driver's license. We can probably give Waymo a little leeway for driving into a puddle that's deeper than it estimated
I can already see the horrified passengers in a robo-taxi going full "military-survival" mode, driving at rally speed over fast flooding back-roads, evaluating moral dilemmas like ("If i stop and pick up one more, i become a lorry on a rail at the next flood intersection").
Surprisingly good at things that get you otherwise killed.
Like - it auto-backs up once it detects ground rumbles of the ground moving during a mud avalanche.
> Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.
They should have done that flood training when they weren't putting people's lives at risk. It's not as if this was a situation that no one could have anticipated would arise. Over half of all drownings in a flood happen because of people driving into them. They're just lucky that they stopped service before they had more blood on their hands, but the fact that they were willing to experiment on the public first is concerning.
As far as I know, nobody has been hurt from floods while in a Waymo. They hide their safety data from the public though (https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca...) so it's hard to say for sure. They've certainly been involved in crashes, killed pets (I actually give them a pass on the bodega cat), run over elementary school children, etc. Waymo has said it's only a matter of time until they kill someone and they've got plans for how to handle deaths caused by their cars, but they expect the public to accept those deaths.
This feels disingenuous to the extreme. Yes, chances are that some people will die run over by a Waymo. Put enough miles in one and someone will die eventually. Compare the numbers to human drivers. Would you, if they had LESS fatality rates than human drivers, say that the difference is "lives saved"? - I don't think you would. In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!"
Especially your example with "run over elementary school children" is duplicitous. They showed how much less dangerous the impact from the Waymo was.
> In 5 years, after someone is eventually fatally injured you'll just jump up and say "AHA! Told you Waymos are unsafe!"
That'll depend on the circumstances. If someone is killed because of a mistake a human wouldn't have made (like driving into oncoming traffic or down a light rail track) it'll be entirely their fault. Even if they do something humans sometimes do but never should like running a red light I'd argue that it makes them unsafe. To our knowledge they've only been involved in one human fatality so far but it wasn't their fault so I don't blame them for that.
These people, even the drunk guy, weren't cruising down the tracks without a care in the world. They either stopped on tracks or were pushed onto them.
I was skeptical about the guy who claimed to be "blinded by the sun" and searched for more info only to find that people get hit by the light rail in Sandy Utah with alarming frequency. Not even just in cars. Pedestrians, people on bikes, people in wheelchairs, I'm starting to think it's cursed.
If your premise is "robotaxis are so much better than human drivers" then this is almost a disaster. This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather. It does not bode well for their expansion plans.
Better is an arbitrary statement. By number of jobs robots lose, by number of sexual assaults by taxi drivers they win. Pick the wights for very factors and you can select anything as the best in category.
> This is only the 10th city they've deployed to, all in the south, and nowhere there's significantly inclement weather
You may be relieved to hear Waymo is rolling out to Portland, Oregon. It's not in the south, and with over 150 rainy days per year, it ranks among the rainiest US cities.
Rain is one thing, but despite the rain Oregon is almost dead-last among all the states in terms of flood risk. It gets constant drizzles, not sporadic deluges.
Born and raised in GA, it wasn’t until I moved to CA, the bay specifically, after college that I realized things like flood warnings multiple times a month and, flooded out roads during the summer weren’t just part of life lolll
My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”
When Waymo came here and also when Tesla started doing self driving (I drive a Tesla with FSD ) majority of the time, I was constantly seeing things that were GA specific that these systems were just clearly not trained to handle.
The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”
> My ex moved to ATL from Seattle, and it was just WILD watching her go… “you guys have RAIN, here… like it comes down HARD”
So it makes sense to first rollout to a place with frequent, lighter rain - no? As an outsider, Waymo's approach seems to be solving challenges step-by-step, and the criticism in this thread is asking why it hasn't already solved the hardest cases.
> The data was there but it wouldn’t surprise me if the folks building these ADAS systems had just no clue what to do to handle cases like “ice storm caused all the roads to be iced over and now there’s no lane markings” and “flash flood comes out of no where” and “it’s so dark there no street lights for a couple of miles”
I wouldn't be surprised if Waymos are confidently driving into flooded roads because they "know" where the markings are without sensing the markings. Lidar-based GPS + SLAM are now very good at calculating location, as long as features like buildings or trees are still present.
You don't understand! Google is trying to do something difficult, and because they haven't solved all possible theoretical problems with it, they should just give up and go home and never try anything difficult ever.
This is a common retort used to cut cost and push things out the door in tech during mvp. However, given most of the world doesn’t look like the west coast, maybe having human drivers would’ve been a good idea until a couple of seasons had passed.
Also they could’ve tested this in other places too?
I'll be relieved when I hear that they did it without killing anyone. Considering they didn't bother to work out how to handle floods before they put people's lives at risk everywhere else, it's not all that reassuring that they're now going to YOLO it in Portland
Over a given driving distance, compared to humans, Waymos produce a 90% reduction in serious injury, 90% reduction in pedestrian strikes, 83% reduction in airbag deployments, 85% reduction in cyclist strikes [1].
We currently sit in the ballpark of 300,000 pedestrian deaths per year worldwide [2]. You should be relieved every time they deploy to a new city.
Well, only one Waymo got stuck in that flood, while at least two human-driven cars did, so by pure counting metrics they are better lol. But in my experience driving around them Waymos are much much better than most Atlanta drivers, not that that's a high bar
I'm not sure why you would say there's no significant inclement weather in Atlanta. The flooding this week was not super common, but also not unheard of. It rains here a LOT in the summer
The part of that people aren't considering is that it's very common to get brief, intense thunderstorms that dump a lot of rain quickly. They won't flood the whole city obviously but there's _always_ pockets that have very short-lived, localized flooding on the roads. So it's not a "oh what are the odds of that happening" kind of thing.
Agreed, this happens here every year, it's why we built O4W park the way it is, and built many other drainage structures similarly. We have a real runoff problem. Waymo picked a great city to train the cars on weird weather and weirder roads. :D
I would assume that after the very first instance you would start moving to fix it. To be in a position where you have to roll back your plans doesn't seem like a simple "delay."
The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?
> The question is: why haven't you fixed this already?
Since you're of the opinion that this is taking too long, what do you think is a reasonable time for a fix, and why? I'm assuming Waymo didn't have a team of flood-detection experts twiddling their thumbs waiting to be prompted into action.
How high the bar is isn't worth arguing about. The question is do self driving cars clear it?
Those who work on self driving cars say they have cleared it - but they have an obvious bias. Nobody independent has done a full study of this, so we have no particular reason to believe them, but we also shouldn't completely discount them (when the truth is in their favor everyone with a bias will tell it, and some people are even able to overcome their bias when the truth is against them)
I'd argue against adding most of these. While a delete/trash function makes sense for a tool aimed at freeing up disk space, adding features like opening files with $EDITOR, open(1), or mediainfo crosses the line into file manager territory (like ranger or yazi). It feels like it goes against the "tiny" and minimal core philosophy of the tool. Do one thing well!
I think “do one thing well” depends on how you define the “thing”.
For something interactive, the “thing” can be the whole workflow, not just one step of it — similar to how a browser isn’t just fetching HTML, but making the web usable.
Nethack/Slashem too in case of Roguelikes. Nethack adds tons of Terry Pratchett references as and homage and it's cool but Slashem has tons of weapons, classes, objects, environments...
And supertux2 has both the main campaingn add tons of downloadable ones too.
Ditto with Oolite, tons of community content.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon it's a fork and still has tons of contents and it might be the most playable FLOSS game in Android among Unciv. Oh, and it can be run on potatos.
A couple of months back I was looking for a fun quick project and also was having space issues on my Mac.
So github copilot and I wrote a little disk usage exploration tool in rust with very few dependencies.
It's called "syz" and I pronounce it "size" since it's all about exploring disk usage and figuring out what to trim.
Someone I respect started using it and reached out saying he liked it so I figured I'd dust it off and share it here!
After `cargo install syz`, use the `syz` command to enter the interactive cli starting at the current directory. Then use arrow keys to navigate directories and compare their recursive sizes.
My son just started using 2B on his Android. I mentioned that it was an impressively compact model and next thing I knew he had figured out how to use it on his inexpensive 2024 Motorolla and was using it to practice reading and writing in foreign languages.
- making new friends does take a massive amount of time
I think the solution to this is to enjoy the journey. There's not a line that someone needs to cross before you can enjoy spending time with them. Just reach out and learn and enjoy people from the beginning.
>It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain.
And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -- Benjamin Franklin
The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
FWIW, the context of the Franklin quote is him defending the ability of the legislature to tax a family that was trying to bribe/lobby the governor to do otherwise.
The quote is in defense of the government: WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
That context didn't change the meaning at all for me.
Probably because Franklin most certainly thought himself to be writing on behalf of the people and was making a direct appeal that they assert their right to govern themselves rather than letting powerful private interests do as they wished.
That's not equally relevant everywhere the quote gets used, but it seems pretty relevant here, no?
the phrase fits the modern usage, even if it's been decontextualized. kinda like "who watches the watchmen?" originally being about cheating wives bribing the folks keeping her locked up in the house.
This dynamic always happens with quotes and attempts to deploy the founding fathers in arguments. Most of the founding fathers (except Thomas Paine) were terrible, horrible, no good people. I’d have been a loyalist in that era.
Maybe I'm just America Pilled but I'll support almost anyone against a hereditary monarchy. The idea should be fundamentally disgusting to any self-respecting human being.
There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy, nor any so effective at destruction as a malevolent one.
If our democracy is sufficiently broken, if supermajority voter policy preferences continue to be dismissed by both parties, it might be that we just cannot survive under the old Constitutional order. The Right's open move towards a post-democratic future, and the proceduralist Center's continued failure to fully utilize their popular mandate to fix things that need fixing, implicitly authorizes a Left to develop that is more obsessed with expression of the popular will and with good governance, than it is with a 250 year old bureaucratic structure and "norms". Norms of restraint are a consensual exercise, and cannot persist unilaterally.
The way things are going, the trajectory, make even most 20th century hereditary monarchies look pretty decent. Especially ones that devolve most power to parliamentary bodies.
> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy
Autocracies have lots of issues around eg building a sufficiently capable bureaucracy that isn't too corrupt to do things. It can make it harder, not easier. Democracy can lean on democratic legitimacy, constitutional traditions, and a history of allowing power transitions without anyone losing their heads or launching a civil war over it. Those are all really useful things that autocracies have to cope without. It's not like it's easy mode.
All of those can be mooted by the sort of dysfunction currently on offer.
Almost every bill for the past 15 years has been filibustered. More than half the Supreme Court is part of an organized partisan conspiracy, and a third has worked specifically fighting election laws to advantage their guy. The DHS stands as a rogue paramilitary that can be deployed when politically convenient as de facto martial law, the DOJ openly persecuting ethnically defined political opponents and daring Congress to do anything about it, when they're not trying to charge Congresspeople with crimes. People are being disappeared into concentration camps. We are unilaterally withdrawing from the military and economic empire that has served us since the 1940's, in the name of ethnic hatreds and Hitlerian brinksmanship. The economy now has more to do with the Fed chair than any pathetic exchange of goods and services we can string together.
This doesn't end well, and it's broken enough already that a return to Biden/Obama/Clinton type leadership couldn't possibly hope to fix it unless they can lock down leadership for the next couple generations; More damage can be done in a month than they can fix in four years. "Just win every election from now until the end of time" isn't a real strategy.
I don't know what comes next, but if we choose to burn the house down today rather than practice good maintenance, the next homeowner cannot succeed by employing good maintenance.
Similarly, if the neighbor burns your house down deliberately because he hates you, and you start the rebuild process without doing anything about your neighbor's existence, you shouldn't be surprised if you end up with more ashes.
> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy
This is untrue.
The world is so complex that a single person or group can adapt and develop fast enough. We've seen what happens to planned economies. Their ineffectiveness is not due to malevolence.
Distribution of power not only serves as a protection to autocratic takeover but allows the system to be more flexible. The concentration of power can make some things more efficient but you trade flexibility.
Aside, the original meaning of Franklin's words are less-inspiring but perhaps more-interesting.
He's saying the local democratic legislature must not give up its "freedom" to pass laws taxing the powerful Penn dynasty which almost owns Pennsylvania.
He wants to reject a deal offered by the Penns: A big lump of money for temporary military security now, in exchange for an agreement that they can never be taxed ever again.
That's not an aside. The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. People invoke it without ever asking themselves if its true because they think of it as the hard won wisdom of a great man.
> The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben.
It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions.
Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of today's problems which we're handling in a much worse manner than him back then.
If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake).
And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.
It's not that security is fake, it's that giving up liberty doesn't naturally produce more security, and pursuing greater liberty doesn't necessarily erode security either.
It's not like pre-Revolutionary America was a notably secure place that inevitably see-sawed into a freer but insecure place afterwards.
Equally, the idea that there is a tradeoff in some particular situation is frequently asserted without evidence. The quote from the article is "It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties."
That is 1) presented without evidence and 2) almost certainly false. It is not always the case.
Number 4 is completely possible. It's just that people in power don't like it because it means they have less power. They want to pretend that only options 1 and 3 are available and ignore that they are actually offering option 2.
Your argument is with GP who proposed that the security might be false.
But I will say I don't think you should say "options," but rather "possibilities." "Options" implies that all four are actually available. I don't think you get to assume that 4 is possible without offering evidence.
It depends on context for sure. Without a specific case study you can't really say.
However, in general, they are not exclusive. This has been demonstrated fairly often. In fact, it is often the case that maximizing liberty leads to more security.
We concurrently see failures on both the "attempts to preserve liberty" and "attempts to preserve security" front, so let's stop arguing about abstract principles.
Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful.
It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
> discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground
Does anyone actually have any idea what's actually happening "on the ground?"
> without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force
There are three weapons for every man, woman, and child in the USA. You may enjoy more of this protection than you realize.
> While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
80% of murders happen after an argument. More suicides happen by firearm than murders by a factor of 2:1. States with lower population densities like Alaska have 6x the suicide rate of states with higher densities like New York. There's a reason people aren't given these statistics.
> You may enjoy more of this protection than you realize.
Americans are not safer then people in other comparable countries. They get shot more often.
In particular, they are much more likely to be shot by cops. And one of the hardest thing a layer can do is to prosecute a cop for it - they are simply untouchable unless stars align just right.
I would like it a lot better without the mention to the "West", which, as usual, is a code word for: "I want to pretend my point extend outside the USA but I have absolutely no knowledge of how true that is. I don't intend to do any research because that would demand efforts from me so bear with my casual imperialism". Queue the purely American historical lesson following.
I guess it's cue like on cue but it's late on a Sunday. You will have to excuse my brain.
It wasn't a nitpick by the way. I deeply resent American using "the West" like if my own country and culture was somehow fungible in their experience. They are not. We don't have that much in common. That doesn't include a legal tradition, or a conception of what freedom of speech should be, neither does it include values or history.
Edit: Enjoy downvoting me. It doesn't make what I said any less true. If you think the various European countries can be grouped with the US in a coherent whole, you are deeply deluding yourselves. They can't even be lumped together.
Where have you seen it used outside of Americans pretending their culture is somehow a standard and NATO apologists? The world doesn't even exist as such in my own language. It's a staple on Hacker News and nearly always for the bad reasons. I'm supposed to politely nod and shut up when people are casually erasing my culture?
The Western Roman Empire has nothing to do with "the West". I think it's fascinating that that's even suggested.
I lived in Germany for a while. Germany is definitely a part of "the West", have been the defining border with "the East" in the Cold War. Germans do not share a cultural viewpoint about liberty and security with the USA. So claiming that westerners "prefer liberty over security" while also including Germans (and others) in the definition of "the West" is absolutely erasing their culture.
> The Western Roman Empire has nothing to do with "the West". I think it's fascinating that that's even suggested.
I got that bit from wikipedia, it amused me.
As for germans, if they do not share such a viewpoint (and now I want evidence either way), the claim about the west is merely wrong, not "cultural erasure".
I mean, at some level, every single human is different, at another level we're all the same. I'm not sure what we're proving here.
The original claim was something about liberty and security and no one in this chain seems interested in bringing in any actual specifics about who thinks what where.
I (British/Australian) use it, but not in a cultural sense. I use "the West" when talking about military or economic matters.
I generally prefer the term "Anglosphere" to refer to only the bits of "the West" that share that cultural viewpoint when I'm discussing cultural matters. It's not perfect, but it's useful.
Given the widening gap between the USA and Europe (and Canada) in economic and military matters, I'm not sure how much longer "the West" is going to be useful.
What are you talking about? Nobody is erasing your culture except for maybe you because you aren’t even talking about your culture. You’re just ranting about Americans.
Just look around the world; they are the norm: East Asia (Japan, South Korea, China - Taiwan, Hong Kong, June 4 on the mainland); North America; South America, almost all of the region; Europe; Australia, NZ, Indonesia, the Phillipines; South Asia (India, and I think they are enshrined if not enforced in Pakistan and some others).
What's mostly missing is the Middle East, Central Asia, parts of SE Asia, and large parts of Africa - though there are Benin, Botswana, Kenya, and many others iirc.
No it's not. There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism, there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam, there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized. That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically (and hence militarily), because it was the first place where people had enough rights for something resembling a modern economy to develop.
> That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically
I tend to agree, though it's of course hard to prove. However, I'm talking about the present, not the past.
> There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism
I said it is "very widespread", not everywhere. Perhaps the confusion is the word Universal: that doesn't mean everyone believes it (false for any belief), but that everyone has the rights, whether or not they know or can exercise them. It's the concept that starts the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and all have inalienable rights.
> there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized
I am talking about the present, where it's adopted in East Asia (including in China - Taiwan, Hong Kong (though suppressed now), June 4 on the mainland), throughout Latin America, Europe of course, parts of Africa, the Anglo world, etc.
> there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam,
There is no country called 'Islam'; if we go by scripture, nobody has human rights. The idea that all practicioners of Islam have the same beliefs is as true as saying all practicioners of Christianity do - and look at HN.
In Indonesia, the largest majority Muslim country, there are human rights, also in India, with the largest Muslim population (but not the majority). I think Pakistan and some South Asian countries probably have them enshrined.
As opposed to slaves in non-western nations? May I remind that slavery was not exclusively a western thing, and that there are more slaves today than there ever was, in absolute terms, almost none in western nations.
Things people did, sure, but not why they did them here and not there is a bit trickier. There's a variety of theories, easy access to coal is my favorite, but some people like to blame the magna carta or something.
Check out Destiny Disrupted. It covers how the Middle East and China both had technology opportunities much earlier but were missing the right economic incentives at the time to handle the disruption to the labor force that came with the Industrial Revolution.
Essentially the major societies before ended up in local maximums because they didn’t have the ruthlessness of capitalism or the economic desperation to adopt technologies that in the short term would unemploy large portions of society and wipe out old power structures.
Jared diamonds an idiot and “guns germs and steel” is among the worst books written in human history - right up there with Republic and whatever the hell sam Harris is doing.
It's not an unusual claim: Freedom breeds innovation - people are not only free to think for themselves, to ignore the orthodoxy and established power, but they are raised and encouraged to do it and admired for it (to a degree).
I think it's accurate to say that all the wealthiest (per capita) economies in history - i.e., the wealthiest economies over the last ten years - are in free societies.
Yes, but: crucially, not in the USA. The EU human rights framework includes non-citizens, because they are still humans. The US constitutional rights framework does not include non-citizens, which is why ICE have free rein to abuse them.
> “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
No, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security".
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile.
Also totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.
When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime.
I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus.
All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.
For those unfamiliar it's worth learning about Blackstone's Ratio. Blackstone was extremely influential to the writers of the US constitution.
I think it should come natural to engineers because I see it as similar to failure engineering, but for the legal system. When you engineer a bridge, building, or even a program you build failure modes into them. Not to cause them to fail but to control fails. A simple version is "fail open" vs "fail closed". A bank safe that fails, fails closed. It is locked and you need to drill it open. Same with an encrypted harddrive but no drill... But a locked door in a public building will typically want to fail opened, least you trap people inside during a fire. A more complex example is the root of a conspiracy. When a tall building collapses you tend to want it to fall in on itself so it doesn't take out neighboring skyscrapers...
So Blackstone's Ratio (and Franklin's recounting) is similar. It asks "which mode of failure is better? That innocent man are condemned or that guilty men go free?" This is a question we must all ask ourselves least we back ourselves into a corner. There's no perfect solution. We don't want failure, we should reduce it as much as possible, but if/when it fails, which outcome do you prefer?
I'll link the wiki but the topic is so famous you'll find a million and I'm pretty sure it's taught in every law school in America
> It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
While I agree with Henry, and intend for _my_ life and social impact to fall there, "where the U.S. was intended to fall" is a misnomer here. That quote was one man's opinion. The U.S. is millions of living beings who, if they have liberty, should get to do whatever they want with it (which in itself is an oxymoron).
we could have liberty and privacy and security if the people in charge wanted us to. But they don't and they've convinced enough people that they don't either.
If the police actually did their job, took property crimes seriously and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously, then we really wouldn't have to be setting up our own surveillance to make up for lacking local government services. But here we are, I'm not sure why libertarians think we don't have a right to defend ourselves (using new tech to make up for a lack of policing) when the city won't?
I frankly see it as a liberty to be able to use this tech, and it would be tyranny to prevent us from using it.
> and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously
Wuh? I was a paramedic who probably has responded to nearly 1,000 fentanyl abuse patients.
I've never seen one who is all busy-beavering looking for homes to surreptitiously spy in kids bedrooms.
Symptoms of fentanyl use include: extreme drowsiness, poor responsiveness, nodding off, profound confusion and inability to focus on even simple acts, delayed reactions, poor body control.
The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality.
I live in a dense neighborhood, and my kid's bedroom is on the bottom floor. So when they are scalking around looking for something to steal sot hey can buy more drugs, it happens anyways. I'm sure that stealing things is their actual focus, its just an accident of house construction that they wind up at my kid's bedroom window.
> The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality.
This is why I hate the far right and the far left. The far left is like "we should just let the fent users steal all of our stuff because they are humans to! Let them poop freely on the sidewalks!", the far right are like "Those are all illegal immigrants lets deport them to El Salvadore". As a moderate, I hate both sides. It is just too bad that Trump is in power right now so the far left gets a huge electoral boost in local elections.
Unfortunately for us all, the assault on liberty even done of the “normies” have started noticing recent, is only the latter stages of this assault on on America that has been going on for arguably 180 years ago.
Many in American history have noted that America is a kind of natural fortress protected by ocean moats. What that assumption just did not take into account is how America’s enemies would take action against America with that assumption taken as granted. It has come in the form of endless amounts of infiltration, subversion, corruption, and pollution… as any half-witted strategist and saboteur would have done. America was simply not sophisticated enough to realize that massive threat, because the leaders relied on that assumption that the USA is an impenetrable fort; never considering what happens if your fort is infiltrated through the many different means you open yourself up to being infiltrated.
America, a genuine America or whatever one can scrape together to consider as such, not just one that emulates and imitates like some kind of container cult, is really not long for this world. Another 20 years and Americas simile stops existing in anything but name only, if that, since there’s not even any reason or incentive anymore to keep the name out the branding at that point.
What do we call this place post America? Maybe we just come right out and just call it Oceania.
The problem is there are two Americas, and always have been. At one point they were clearly separated and had a civil war, but really they exist in overlapping spaces all the time. One is the America of the Declaration of Independence and all the propaganda believed by flag-saluting schoolchildren - some of that is real some of the time. The other is the America that South America is more familiar with, the country responsible for banana republics and endless War on Drugs violence, the America of plantations and exploitation.
The problem America(complimentary) is currently facing is the rebound of America(derogatory). It has elected its own Peron, and is turning into a dysfunctional South American country, driven by exactly the same forces.
The most bootlicking anglos in the world are the Australians , despite the extreme competition that NZ and the UK give them. The Orwellian definition IS the real name.
Presumably they haven't had the chance to do a lot of flood training but now they have that chance.
The huge advantage they have over people in general is that ideally if they figure this out then it will stay figured out. Then they can slowly role out and watch for the next hitches from new situations.
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