bmcusick

Exactly right.

And airlines are niche compared to mass market cars too, but they're still a good business!

One thing I think most people don't appreciate is that the switch to self-driving cars will transform America into a mostly-transit society. Once you don't need a car to live from day to day, you sell it. Then you take a self-driving Lyft from your house to the bus depot, train station, or airport.

The market for self-driving busses between cities will grow alongside the market for self-driving cars within cities.

I like the discussion at the end about the difficulties on delivering the busses long distance, and the lack of chargers big enough to recharge them. If the Tesla Semi actually launches at some point, perhaps that will change and we will get city-to-city electric busses too. Battery ranges should improve to the point where that becomes practical over the next few years too.

What a great market that would be for Waymo. Predictable routes of mostly highway driving would be right up their alley.

What is a spy?

They're not a legal immigrant, because they lied on their immigration papers, making their immigration invalid.

If they're an illegal immigrant, their children would be granted citizenship.

If they're a diplomat, their children would not be granted citizenship. The child of the Russian Ambassador does not become a Canadian citizen even if born and raised in Toronto.

I think the government's argument that they're more like a diplomat (an agent of a foreign country) than an undocumented resident (e.g., someone who's entered the country of their own volition for work) is pretty sound.

The idea that humans shouldn’t expand into the cosmos for fear of displacing some xenoplanktons is nuts. I’m not anti-xenoplankton, but I’m very pro-human. We will inherit the stars.

You know what would kill fewer people? Not bombing Yemen.

This article has it completely backwards. As is often the case, (just as Paul Krugman gets basic tech facts wrong) tech people often don't understand economics.

This has ALWAYS been the problem with "ASIC resistant" coins. "ASIC Resistant" just means that you can rent an AWS instance to attack the coin because any generic CPU or GPU will work.

Bitcoin isn't safe just because it's big. It's safe because Bitcoin mining hardware has no purpose other than to mine Bitcoin. Which means the economics are such that Bitcoin mining is only profitable on the fully amortized lifetime cost of the miner, not on the marginal rental cost.

(That's because competition between miners drives the difficulty so high that marginal revenues fall until they equal long-term marginal costs, which are (land rent + labor + fully amortized hardware + electricity))

ASIC driven Proof-of-Work is fine as long as your coin's POW is unique. Only by forcing miners to make a 3-5 year investment in mining hardware can you align the long term incentives of miners and end-users.

There's more to safety statistics than just the mortality rate. We should be able to look at frequency and severity of non-fatal accidents too. Those happen a lot more often.

For example, accidents that occur at 35 MPH or less are much less likely to result in a fatality or major injury, due to the amount of kinetic energy that a human body can safely dissipate. So if Google cars have even slightly better braking or speed control, you're going to see an improvement. Looking at the average speed at which accidents occur would be useful information.

More to the point, the EU didn't say "Google can't monetize Android". It just said that this tying arrangement between Google Search and Android is too anti-competitive.

Android could find other, more transparent and competitive, revenue models.

Yeah, that's why I'm favor of this decision. I think it's reasonable for regulators to have an anti-tying bias and make companies prove that the tying is somehow necessary. Because the alternative to tying (as you say) is a more open, competitive, and transparent "cash for stuff" market.

That's basically what the EU is demanding. The EU has handed down what is an anti-tying decision. "You can't tie Android to Google Search, because that prevents competition in Search."

Okay then, but Google Search is what paid for Android development, so if you can't tie them together, Android needs to seek other sources of funding. The most obvious one is some sort of licensing fee.

(It could also possibly fund itself from search revenue (like Firefox) and App Store fees, although the second one could be broken up by the EU too on anti-tying grounds)

It's no different from when Windows was prevented from tying Windows to Internet Explorer. It opened competition in browsers (and we now have Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Brave, etc.), but it also forced browsers to find independent business models.

Everyone does. Hell, I do too. But it's not realistic to expect this music to keep playing. The ratio of workers to retirees keeps getting worse, from 10:1 in the 1950s to 3:1 today, and falling.

The economy can grow over time, but on any given day it's a fixed pie, and it has to be divided among workers (who are doing the labor now) and retirees (who accumulated the capital in previous decades that today's labor uses to magnify their productivity).

Everyone is feeling squeezed as individuals because of falling incomes, but the real culprit is a falling ratio of income-makers (labor) to income-takers (capital, whether retired individuals or just wealthy).

This cannot last. The ratio of labor income to capital income will eventually be restored (hopefully in a peaceful manner, but we can't rule out alternatives). The reasonable fix will be raising retirement ages, but good luck getting a sufficient raise there to restore a 10:1 ratio.

> In an international partnership between CSIRO, Verily and James Cook University, scientists used specialised technology to release millions of sterilised male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes

This is so stupid. A population will recover from this in a single generation, because the second you stop releasing sterile males, the remaining males (no matter how few) can repopulate the species.

If you want to make a species of mosquitoes extinct (and I'm in favor of this, they serve no irreplaceable environmental purposes), the more effective method would be releasing males that only have male offspring.

Oh, I'm sure that there will be hobbyists who do this. Just like there are people who run Arch on their home PC, or automate their house with Arduinos. The joke about "The Year of the Linux Desktop" is predicting mass consumer adoption. That doesn't seem too likely, unless someone like Apple or Google decides to move their stack over to silicon they can design and control in-house without need for ARM's long term support.