I made the switch from Perl to php mostly because php executed a lot faster (without having to figure out any weird stuff like modperl) and I loved the little convenience functions just built-in like “strtoupper” and the date formatting stuff!
Also, I realized a side effect of a hypothetical world where everybody rode in robotaxis/waymos/even ubers is we’d effectively get congestion pricing everywhere (due to “surge” pricing), and the use of roads would actually fit into regular supply and demand market forces!
Also, when I am not driving my car I park it, it is not adding to congestion. Waymo Taxis roam the streets in SF adding to congestion. I cant see how congestion can be reduced...the worst congestion happens during rush hour...replacing personal cars with a Waymo will have no effect.
You can only fit 3 cars across on most side streets near me. You have more space, but does it really create better flow?
Many of these side streets and neighbourhoods are designed and modified NOT to flow, because then people would use them to get to work. Would this change that?
While I admit I see these more in the ‘burbs, this is becoming more widespread and is no longer exclusive to them.
It does increase throughput. And it’s not relevant to a weighing of reducing ridesharing and increasing lanes—both would induce demand.
And as another person said, a single streetside-parked car has made that entire street more dangerous for bikers. Take out streetside parking and you can add lanes for cars, light rail, busses, bikes or even just widen sidewalks and add more trees.
Parked cars add to congestion far more uselessly than taxis, ride sharing vehicles or AVs.
Streets with parked cars are residential and don’t need better throughput. They need safety rails so little kids can exist without being run over. They need to be exempt from gps routing so people can quietly live their lives.
In some places throughput isn’t needed… safety is.
You could widen sidewalks, place bike lanes, or plant trees in those parking spaces for the equivalent effect. Also the residential dichotomy isn’t true for lots of areas of the city. I live next to an office building, for example.
Unless every passenger pickup is at the location of the last drop off and the timing is perfect, some portion of robotaxi driving must be empty as the taxi drives to the next pickup or at least goes somewhere to park. And I'm honestly not sure Waymos are smart enough to know where it is and isn't legal to park for some unknown period of time while waiting for the next trip, so that might not even be an option.
Contrast this with personal vehicles, which are always transporting at least one person to their destination. It seems essentially impossible that robotaxis could result in less congestion unless people share robotaxis significantly more frequently than they do personal cars or regular taxis.
I'm immediately suspicious of any chain that links "denser environments" to "less congestion", since everywhere I've ever been, the densest environments have the most congestion.
It's a bit like adding extra lanes, to some degree, demand expands to meet capacity (But I mantain that in this case the net effect is possitive)
There would be less space to be congested by fewer vehicles, but in this context, less congestion also means fewer people experience the congestion directly (because it also works to disincentivize car usage), but those affected have it the same or worse.
I wouldn't take my car to a large city center if I can at all avoid it, which seems to be the common reaction. These people are "transparent" to the congestion—they don't add to it and (mostly) aren't affected by it.
If it’s parked on the street, that is taking up a lane that could be carrying traffic. (And in some cities it’s common for parallel street parking to turn into a lane from 4-8 PM or similar)
Robo-taxis can pack significantly more densely into a dedicated parking space than regular cars. Snout to butt and no room side to side, as there's no need for maneuvering. A robo-taxi parking lot just becomes a dense FIFO queue.
Ah, thanks for the feedback… I’n just using a geo IP lookup by peoples IP for the first “very rough” location, but I hadn’t considered that even a 7 mile radius can not be very anonymous in rural areas! Hmm.. is there a larger radius you feel you’d be comfortable with? Like 50 miles?
Yeah, I believe that I'd be comfortable with 20 - that would encompass half a dozen small towns instead of just one, and at that range I know half a dozen tech folks in the area, so it feels less targeted.
Not arguing too hard but people do have to spend some money to live regardless… it could be said people are less careful with their money when they feel like it’s losing value, so they spend more and save less. Yes it results in more spending but on what?
I'm not trying to strawman the opposing side, but I always found it ironic that many of the cryptocurrency proponents I talk to think that starting a business is amazing and innovation is important, but also hate inflation, which encourages those two things.
> Not arguing too hard but people do have to spend some money to live regardless…
This isn't about a decision to buy bread and milk for your breakfast. It's about the decision on whether you invest in a grocery store vs let your money sit in a bank. If doing nothing is more profitable than doing something then society as a whole will gravitate towards generating no economic activity. This has disastrous consequences because the majority of people in a society do not have the luxury of having investments to live off their dividends.
> If doing nothing is more profitable than doing something then society as a whole will gravitate towards generating no economic activity.
You're operating off a false premise. Do you think all economic activity would be less profitable than the interest rate offered by deflation?
The whole point of investing in any business is to make a return. Giving businesses competition in the form of deflationary currencies will not eradicate businesses from being formed, and there's no evidence to suggest these businesses will be less profitable than holding a deflationary currency.
We see this in various cryptocurrencies claiming to be deflationary with the concept of 'yield', which shows investing to be a function of their wealth, interest, and expectation of return. Inflation does not need to be in the equation for this type of development.
I think those values would make it viable for a few routes, but what really matters is long term savings. Like if they can fly supersonic overland and increase fuel efficiency more than traditional sub-sonic jet engines.
To me it seems if those numbers can't get better then the endeavor is not going to pay off the investment for the few routes that would be able to work at those numbers.
I had an idea for this you might want to consider adding: store the passwords/keys in the client, no server… but then shamir’s secret sharing to shard them along your contacts.
So when you open the app it asks you to choose five (?) friends you trust (who don’t know each other) from your contacts and it’ll ask them to install the app to help you store your secrets.
Then if you ever lose your phone or whatever when you reinstall the app you just have to remember at least three (?) of the five people you trusted and then will be able to restore your keys!
It would also ping the other contacts when open to make sure they still have your shards and redistribute them as you add/change/delete them.
