You can listen to their podcast on AI. They are interested in it and use it they are not AI pilled.

Generally lots of money flowing around bidding up the top companies.

Look at Mr. Billionaire right here.

Also, the reality is, Elon made himself a massive public figure deliberately, he very publicly embraced one side of the culture war and make his opinion on every public constantly. He literally one of the most important people because he literally bought one of the largest media platforms and made sure it fully embraced right wing points of view.

You are complaining why Elon is in public debate and people are so interested. That's because politics is a public argument between different parties, and Elon has used all his influence to support one side of that. And that is the result.

And not just in the US, Elon tried to insert himself into politics of other nations, such as Britain or Germany as well. Making most of the western world angry.

Why are you surprised that he gets treated like a politician when he acting like a politician?

You can't be the CEO of total independent technocratic companies and at the same time be a public ultra-right wing facist supporter who endlessly engages in a public culture war. Specially if those companies are directly linked to him view voting shares that give him ultimate power.

Then he turned full ultra right wing nationalist who engaged in science denial. Supported a president that is unquestionably racists and unquestionably fascists. And he made this clear by doing some Nazi salutes on top of that.

Then he used that influence to sell a completely false idiotic story that cuts to discretionary spending could 'fix' the budget deficit, like a complete idiot who had never watched 2 youtube videos about the US budget. Then used to slash and burn many beneficial programs while having no impact on the deficit what so ever.

He was supposed to be science and engineering progress driven, but then allied himself with ultra-right wing anti-scientific fascists who try to dismantle the whole education system in favor of at best best creationism or more likely nothing at all.

Not sure why its hard to understand. The only people who don't understand are ultra-right wing facists who don't understand why other people don't want to support ultra-right wing facists.

Does that explanation help?

Many people can soon sell their SpaceX stock, I don't think the S&P will safe them later.

The argument here is that political capital and time should be invest to change people mind about self driving cars.

My argument is that political capital and time should be invested in changing people mind about the fundamental approach to land use and transportation.

> is that true/source?

There is a whole field of study on every aspect of this. Basically the medical community, the city planning community, the ecological community and the transport planners (outside of the US) all generally reach the same conclusions.

Bike lands, road diets, and bus lanes, bus priority are very cheap. Basically free. They are mostly political reallocation's of space. The politics are the hardest part, not the cost.

Rezoning is essentially free, or actually produces huge amounts of value. Its very, very well document what the problem with US land use patterns and transportation systems are.

See Strong Towns or Urban3 analysis for example.

Many of the choice that cause a lot of death, like stroads, are also economically idiotic.

> The cost of a single subway line can cost multiple billions of dollars per mile, a high-speed rail line in a single state can cost hundreds of billions of dollars, etc. - and there are a lot of miles in the US, a lot of states, etc.

The US operates on such a low level, there is so much you can do before even getting to those things. Like we are talking minimal competence of running bus lanes in a modern way, or having basic signaling priority.

The cost large infrastructure is a bigger topic, but that's not mostly what I am talking about. Those things are such a insignificant part of US transportation currently it barley worth talking about.

> And the other big difference is about who pays for it - even if billions of dollars are being invested in solving self-driving and electric cars, it's a lot of private money doing that, whereas building public transportation is mostly taxpayer funds.

You are ignoring the larger structure, the road network and the electricity network are deeply political and public. And even beyond that, electric cars have seen political support. But of course the whole reason why so much public investment flows into these things is because the infrastructure is design in a way where there is a gigantic market for cars that you can sell into. The market is downstream of higher level choice in terms of infrastructure and land use. The under taxing and over support of parking alone accounts for many, many billions in subsidies.

But on some level, in the end it comes down to what your society ends up spending totally on transportation and how efficient that is. The investors investing in these things need to make their money back. And the US is generally not very efficient, its just rich enough to care less. If you look at total 'consumption' that looks ok, but then you realize its just a expensive pickup truck that you end up sitting in traffic jams doesn't really improve your live that much.

If you look at how effectively poor people generally get around, the results are not that great. Car dependency cause tons of problems and cost on society and is worst for the poorest.

So I guess I just care less about who provides capital compared to what the outcomes are. The idea that public capital investment is bad and private investment is a universal good that can never be questioned is just not how I think about it.

> in order to wait for public transportation to be solved.

My argument is much wider then just 'public transport'. Its about how all land use and transportation infrastructure is organized.

> And per the OP article, it's more like 94% reduction already with the existing self-driving technology, and it keeps getting better.

Some of that can be questioned but its not my focus. Even if it was 100% reduction, its to narrow of an argument.

Also, nothing new in C is just not happening, there is massive amounts of things that will not switch for decades.

Why not just switch to a slightly different compiler and core, and then you make all your old code safe without verifying it. And your new code in whatever language is also safe.

Also it helps with debugging. Also it helps you enforce security constraints on higher level.

CHERI also gives you features you can build more on-top off.

The silicon area and the performance hit are pretty minor, if it 'just' works for most code and most open source code just works, many people will want to use it.

Yes most bugs are new code, but plenty of bugs aren't and with CHERI I can be much more confident in running all that stuff. Specially older code that isn't as well used and tested as say Linux kernel.

CHERI gives you that and more. But its still very new and radical, and a lot of work needs to happen all over the place to make it practical.

Once you have micro-controllers and software it makes sense in lots of niches, and then it can expand.

For example, Google OpenTitan project. There is no reason not to use Cheri if the open source core supports it.

I generally agree that if it was true that the inequality would lead to consistent floor raising it would be fine, but it doesn't.

The actual way to solve the 'Carnage' is to adopt well proven well studied infrastructure changes. After 40+ years of idiotic car brain policies, some nations have started to push back and actually started to treat road safety more like aviation safety. Constant review and feedback into the profession and infrastructure updates. Vision Zero is approachable even without self driving cars. But even that is looking at the problem in the wrong way.

True improvement comes from modal shift to public transport, along with increasing use in walking and biking. Those mods are saver and healthier by any possible measure, no matter how amazing these self driving machines will be in the future.

This is not only good for less people dying in traffic, its also good for many, many, many other reasons. General population fitness, general health and so on. The list of effects of good urbanism and anti car policy is basically endless.

Cars are the problem, and self driving cars are a solution to part of that problem, and electric cars are a solution to part of that problem. But cars are still overall the actual problem biggest problem. Instead of investing countless billions in these two sub problems, for far, far less money you could do a huge amount to change the actual structure of how transportation works.

Not Just Bikes has a good video on the problem with self driving cars, even if the technology worked as advertised. Its not how we want the future to look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

Putting each human into an individual multi-ton pod is stupid, unnecessary and dangerous even if you plaster unlimited amounts of technology on each pod.

We know how to create massively better societies in every way, its not dispute in people who research these things. Self driving cars can be a tiny part of that, but mostly in rural and suburban regions. In cities they are not needed.

This hyper focus on human car crashes is to narrow and misses a much bigger discussion, but this is a discussion the car industry and the individualistically driven AI people don't want to have.

And you cant rewritte 50 years of C in Rust. And even in Rust you can still run into various issues.

But granted if you have a connection with two ICE depending on each other, this gets more problematic. Believe me I had that multiple times, and I was late but usually the next train is also late so it works out.

You can't plan super time constrained, but mostly for me it has been fine if you go in with that expectation.

Again, not defending this overall, in Switzerland I plan my journey I expect it to be on point, but I just dropped that expectation in Germany. And that fine for many situations, you just have to know that's what it is.

The idea that it makes sense to use moon based He3 compared to using thorium that is already mined in waste quantities is absurd. Thorium is free energy already and the machine that turns it into energy is simpler the any fusion reactor we can come up with.

For pharma, its not universally true. There are few things that can be done better in space, but by far not everything. Research in space makes more sense then actual production. Again even the best case is hard to see how its going to justify the valuation.

> And I bet there are hundreds of other examples.

Hundreds of other even more half baked examples. You need to account for launch cost, space constraints, space environment, landing and recovery. We have been doing this for 40 years and the medicine and fiber are things that have been talked about for 30 years at least.