I tend to agree. In this version of "neutrality" we'd have to believe that if MAGA is defeated in the not too distant future (whatever that means) that these people in Silicon Valley would flip to the other side. There's just no way.
The board could argue that it's damaging to the company's brand and long term bottom dollar to charge such usurious fees and fire the CEO for taking such a harsh stance with app developers.
This is such a strange way to think about what was done. Rather than just being happy they kept the pay once option and saying that's good you're imagining critics who how Apple can "shut them down."
I know a little about planes and nothing about ships so maybe this is crazy but it seems to me that if you're moving something that large there should be redundant systems for steering the thing.
Which there are in some places. Where I grew up I'd watch the ships sail into and out of the oil and gas terminals, always accompanied by tugs. More than one in case there's a tug failure.
>Seems to me the only effective and enforceable redundancy that can be easily be imposed by regulation would be mandatory tug boats.
Way it worked in Sydney harbour 20+ years ago when I briefly worked on the wharves/tugs, was that the big ships had to have both local tugs, and a local pilot who would come aboard and run the ship. Which seemed to me to be quite an expensive operation but I honestly cant recall any big nautical disasters in the habour so I guess it works.
I can tell you right now that the kinds of dudes who play high level college ball and then go on to play professional ball were not hustling as kids. Many did grow up in unfortunate circumstances (this is less true as the years go on) however their talents generally were identified early and the track they were on was pretty clear.
I think the simpler answer is that some people are especially poor at risk vs reward analysis. Others enjoy the thrill of getting away with something. It's been 30+ years since Chauncey Billups has had to worry about money. I think your point about friends around them is very fair though. Lots of these guys have hangers on with their hands out and despite making lots of money in their careers they cant just give cash to everyone. So I can imagine them thinking "hey place a bet on my under for the next game because I'm going to go out early" seems like a low risk, not so evil way to put a few dollars in a friend's pocket.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there's basically no chance that flying cars become a meaning part of life in America in my lifetime (I just turned 40).
Reminds me of how Popular Mechanics use to alternate between Flying Cars and return of the Blimps issues.
Scott is a sport pilot enthusiast and approached the evaluation from that perspective. I don't think there are many pilots, myself included, that believe we are on the verge of flying cars for mass transportation. They are expensive to purchase, maintain and impractical for many reasons.
I agree. In the US I have seen simple regional public transportation projects take decades and they are still not complete. A single on/off ramp (literally a quarter mile of road) will take 5 years.
There is just no way a public flying car infrastructure can be built in the US in the next 30-50 years you are alive.
Airplanes don't need roads either, but airports do a lot more than just provide hangars to store them and runways for them to take off and land. There's all kinds of systems to help planes avoid collisions too.
You might think it'll be very easy for flying cars to avoid crashing because they can just fly above and below each other, but that's also more directions for them to crash into each other from, more directions the drivers might have to rely on potentially faulty sensors where their vision is blocked. There might have to be invisible "lanes", maybe even with something like traffic lights, rather than having cars just flying every which way without external coordination.
We would need a lot of landing pads free of nearby hazards (trees, wires, antennas). Those pads generally can't just be added on to existing buildings: most high-rise buildings weren't designed to support the necessary weight, plus roofs are already full of other equipment.
Assuming appropriate sites can be found, there will also be a long permitting process to get construction approval. The latest eVTOL aircraft are quieter than conventional helicopters but still loud so anyone living and working nearby is going to complain. I'm sure they'll also raise environmental impact concerns in many areas because the noise will prevent the endangered yellow-footed salamander from laying eggs or whatever so working through the mandated mitigation process also takes years.
Unless you expect that most people would be fine with an unbounded number of flying cars (presumably at least as noisy as existing ones) without speed limits in their neighborhood, there's going to have to be some sort of infrastructure. Just because they won't literally be roads doesn't mean that the same types of social dynamics won't apply.
Presumably they would need roads in the sense of arbitrary "surfaces" on top of one another, so that you could shift lanes vertically as well as horizontally. And then you would need at least a visual indicator of which lane you're in, maybe even force feedback similar to bott's dots.
Super late to this but I'd take bipedal bots. That's not to say I'm particularly bullish on that idea though. Seems like it might be simpler to build purpose built robots for specific tasks. They'd probably be faster.
I'm not entirely convinced. On one hand for bots you pretty much need AGI which Tesla is near solving. On another hand you need massive battery improvement for flights to move from toy to actually useful. But also there are more than 1 eVTOLS that already been certified for flight.
Bots would admittedly be far more useful in helping with tons of various tasks (I'm sure each task will be a subscription), but eVTOLs would unlock new capability.
I agree with you, but keep in mind that's probably what 40-year-olds in 1903 said about planes after hearing about the Wright brothers. Sometimes things do actually change.
If we assume this means "in the next 50 years", they wouldn't be totally wrong. You could make the case airplanes were only on the cusp of being "a meaning[ful] part of life in America" by 1953 – planes only overtook trains for domestic US travel in 1955, and 1957 for trans-Atlantic.
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