In this analogy we could use our shared funds to hire Taylor Swift for 10 subsequent concerts, and the only issue would be who gets to see her first.

Note your parent's statement includes a critical qualifier “helped”. Your parent does never claim that Airbnb was a single cause.

Your theory about NIMBY voters on the other hand does claim a single reason.

Complex problems seldomly have a single cause not a simple solution.

The housing crisis has multiple causes, regulatory framework which benefits existing homeowners is one of them, capitalists treating houses like the stock market is another, and Laissez Faire hotel market did only make it worse (like a gasoline on a burning fire). Now that the thing that made a bad thing worse has been banned, that does not mean the damage it caused has been fixed, nor does it mean that the other causes have been resolved either.

If we take this analogy further, your kids would be the ones working the hardest to bring the food on the table required for this growth, and the adults would consume like 90% of it.

In my circles we actually never use this word because it is basically just a fancy way to say exploitation that makes capitalists feel good about them selves.

If this is true, and Tesla does not do this, that means that somewhere up in Tesla’s chain of command somebody told their workers not to do this. That is, somebody at Tesla made the decision that Tesla cars should not be able to recognize all the traffic signs. If that is the case, this person should be held criminally liable and Tesla cars should be pulled off the market (and the roads) by regulators who are (or should be) concerned about consumer (and road) safety.

I do disagree with you vehemently about Seattle’s light rail being inferior to Portland’s. That may have been true 10 years ago, but it for sure is not true today, especially after the East link opened earlier this year.

That said, Your parent is wildly off the mark (and honestly quite reactionary) in describing harassment from fentanyl addicts. Such harassment is extremely rare, and in the few cases where it does happen it is a failure of public health policy, not transit and accessibility policy.

The robotaxis that do exist only do so in very limited places using very expensive technology (including off-shored service center for intervention) that is not available for the public consumer markets.

And no, robotic cars do not exist. A very limited version of robotaxis do, but they are nowhere near ready for public rollout on all public roads for the consumer market.

Politicians (and grifters alike) like to point to a future technology to solve an existing problem only to delay existing solutions which they don’t want to implement, most often for political reasons.