James Henry Hammond, South Carolina senator and plantation owner: “Our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people." and “None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South.”
George Fitzhugh, Virginia slaveholder: “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”
John C. Calhoun, South Carolina slaveholder, former vice president, and U.S. senator: “I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the [enslaved American] laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age.”
Do other countries' state healthcare system costs count towards their labor share of income? If not, it seems sensible not to account for them that way in the US, or you're creating a much more serious apples and oranges problem for international statistics (which are often cited/compared for these figures)...
It's a class thing more than a geography thing. Culturally working-class urban Americans are chatty in almost every American city, save the most recently-urbanized ones (like PHX -- and even there there Latinos are chatty even if whitey ain't...)
Reading a bunch of these posts, a similar thought occurred to me. When I lived for a short time in Manhattan, I found the friendliest / most chatty were always working class types that ran small businesses or worked in the trades. I wonder if it is nothing more than these people are much more exposed to "strangers" through their professions. As a result, they are much less afraid to open a conversation.
I thought Uber & Lyft prevented this sort of thing? I'm not sure I understand how/why this exists now -- or given that it does, why it wasn’t a thing years ago -- but I just used it and it works. It's great!
Underrated comment in this thread, which is full of asserts of universal abstractions and patterns which are not universal. (And of course this insight applies to all kinds of written communication, diagrammatic or prose...)
What are the chances some non-trivial proportion of the millions of cars on the road will not have their LIDAR designed, built, installed or calibrated correctly? I suspect this is going to be a recognized public health issue in a decade or two. (It will likely be an issue well before that, but unrecognized...)
There is an incentive to use higher power. Push the edge of safety limits to achieve higher performance from lower cost devices, for example.
It occurs to me there is an opportunity here. Passive lidar detectors sampling fleets of vehicles in the real world, measuring compliance and detecting outliers, would be interesting. A well placed, stationary device could sample thousands of vehicles every day. Patterns will emerge among manufacturers. Failure modes will be seen.
Cursory queries on this reveal nothing. Apparently, no one is doing this. We're all relying on front end certification and compliance. No thought given to the real world of design flaws, damage, faulty repairs, unanticipated failure modes, etc.
Apparently there are lidar jammers. I bet those are rigorously compliant with Class 1 safety regs... No one manufacturing those is ever going to think; "hey, why not a 50W pulse train?"
For everyone of those safety measures to be intentionally bypassed or ignored, the numbers are assuredly non-zero.
But is it going to raise to a level of concern? I don't think we're going to see a ton of cars with blinding lasers installed, unless they are installed to intentionally blind people.
If you have used face I'd, or someone has used a face detection on modern smart phone on you, or if you've pulled up to a modern intersection, you've been blasted with lasers. It may come one day where that's the largest concern but today it's not my primary problem and investing in FUD isn't going to bring any benefits.
Underrated observation. The low-hanging fruit is all in the office/home-to-takeoff and touchdown-to-office/home blocks on each end, not the time in the air. The commute, checkin, security, airport transit, boarding, and taxiing are the time-sinks worth optimizing.
That's a real service.
Some airports, including LAX and London Heathrow, allow a "tarmac transfer", where the limo goes directly to the plane. [1][2] Cost is $200 to $1000. That could save an hour or more at each end.
VIP Terminal Access: Skip the standard queues and enter exclusive VIP terminals where you’ll receive expedited passport control, security checks, and personalized services, all while enjoying luxury amenities. Avoid long security lines with expedited security processing, ensuring you spend minimal time in the airport.
Which already is a bad signal for the article's argument. We already have a way to significantly reduce that travel time and it's a niche.
Could Boom Supersonic or whoever actually survive selling only to a hundred Taylor Swifts? How are they going to keep the lights on for the 30 years those jets fully saturate the market?
I'm not sure this is true. In Atlanta, on a very busy two-lane city-street commute into work, I follow traffic laws scrupulously, and have excellent driving skills, but I take every advantage I can that's not illegal or antisocial -- e.g., I always pass people going slower than me, preemptively change lanes to avoid buses and cars I can tell are slow or turning, take small shortcuts that add many more turns to the trip -- which means lots of lane changes, etc. My wife, on the exact same route and time, does not do any of this; she just follows the car in front of her until she arrives. My driving shaves a solid 10+ minutes off of her 40-minute commute this way. That's significant (>25%), and adds up to 20 minutes more time at home with my kids, etc.
And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.
I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.
Both slurm, and even more so HTCondor, power most of the major computationally-expensive physics projects worldwide (all the LHC experiments, LIGO, IceCube, etc.)
George Fitzhugh, Virginia slaveholder: “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”
John C. Calhoun, South Carolina slaveholder, former vice president, and U.S. senator: “I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the [enslaved American] laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age.”
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