wolframarnold

Yes, it's far too expensive. You can get a rental car for $20/day. The pricing scheme mentioned in the article with $1/trip would be far more attractive, along with drop off flexibility.

The entire mammalian animal kingdom is fully capable of giving birth, autonomously and unassisted (if necessary). Human females, too, can tap into that part of their brains, if you let them, and don't distract or scare them with bright lights, beeping machines, cramped rooms, force them to make complex decisions that require cognitive function. Birth is operating from the mammalian part of the brain, not the pre-frontal cortex. If this wasn't true, mammals wouldn't exist. Think about it. As a male, however, you'd have to have seen it to believe it. I'm a male, and I saw it. It blew my mind.

It's heart-wrenching stories like these that prompted my wife and me to have our daughter at home. It was a beautiful birth. Birth is not a medical emergency, but hospital economic incentives are such that they're always trying to make it one.

That depends on the service. If you can afford outages that may be fair game. But if you have a high traffic service that's running hundreds or thousands of hosts, you can't take them all offline at once. Deploys can take hours, so can rollbacks. In that situation with high SLA requirements you can't really "expect" bad deploys.

I wonder what they used as training data?

Unenforceability of noncompetes + hot tech job market == free career insurance

Interesting. What's the rationale for this?

This is actually BMW's second foray into ride sharing stateside. They ran their Drive Now service in San Francisco for a couple of years. It never took off, because there were too few places to pick up and drop off cars, and their all-electric fleet never solved the fleet management aspect, eg charging, etc. Their mobile app also was clunky at best. Coincidentally Drive Now works fantastically well, eg in Berlin, where you can find a car on pretty much every city block. You drive it where you want to go and can drop it off at any public meter. You only pay the distance traveled, in the neighborhood of 0.40€/km. Typical inner city rides work out to a few bucks. It's cheaper and faster than cabs or Uber. It didn't take off in San Francisco, I would speculate comma because they never cut a deal with the city to let them use any parking meter as drop off point.

You can't build a career on that behavior. Especially if you stick around a place for a decade or so, you'd be surprised whom you run into and whose help you might need down the road. Unless you're leaving town and the industry for good, don't burn bridges.

But you can. The Brazen Head in the Marina, Thai Noodle on Haight and a bunch of places in North Beach will happily serve till 1 AM or later and at a quality that doesn't even compare with fast food. In fact since I've moved to SF, going on ten years now, I've found pretty much most of the rest of the country (NYC and LA excepted) to be quiet a sad food desert.

This is why Google canned the whole idea of requiring a human to be alert and ready to take over. They want to get rid of the steering wheel and pedals, because they found in their extensive road testing that their own employees just didn't pay as much attention as they wanted them to.

This is still facing regulatory hurdles, obviously.

I think that's spot on.

Real Estate: The core Bay Area cities, the pinnacle of which is San Francisco, have not seen substantial real estate slumps in either recession in recent memory (the dot com bust and the mortgage bubble). For outlying areas, like Antioch, the picture was pretty ugly, however. Location matters.

Tech jobs: As someone who joined the Bay Area tech workforce in February 2000, just a few months before the market peaked, my observation has been exactly what you describe: * employed people won't see their salaries drop much, they might even see slight increases * some perks will be cut * income from equity packages will be much lower * there will be some layoffs at established companies * some startups will go bust, others will see their valuation drop and fundraising will be a lot harder * there will be fewer tech people employed overall * new arrivals in the job market (eg new grads) will have a harder time and see substantially lower starting salaries compared to their peers just a year prior. Timing matters.