I don't think that's exactly true of dot com and '08. In both cases the developing bubbles were identified and widely discussed in the years prior to the burst. The surprise in '08 was not that there was a bubble in real estate, but rather that a massive fraction of the financial system was built on leveraging that sector. To paraphrase Buffett, you don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out.
This is a pessimistic, anti-progress perspective. As you point out, there are plenty of other problems in the recycling chain. But this is a small step in the right direction. And the investment here is pretty small too. $1.2m probably covered a handful of engineers for around a year plus the cost of tooling. Given that Heinz sells a lot of ketchup, I would expect that the impact/dollar here is pretty high.
Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.
:) Funny rhetoric, but there's no fact or argument there.
The application of ridicule and dimissal to everything associated with progressivism is a common pattern these days. Effectively, it's reactionary; the reactionaries have done a great job at spreading their messaging and demonizing their perceived enemies, and at the same time making people argue for their own powerlessness.
Demonization, despair (powerlessness), and ridicule are tools for people whose agenda loses on the merits.
My bet is that jurisdictions with Extended Producer Responsibility laws were going to charge them money to clear up their mess and it became a sensible business decision to make this change to save them money.
But you don't know that. All the previous equipment obsoloeted and tosssed somewhere. All the previous workers retrained or fired. It could be far worse. Trusting plastic makers to tell you the truth about plastic recycling is like trusting WWE to tell you the truth about sport.
It isn't anti-progress. It's identifying a lack of it. A step in the right direction would be developments that either definitely lead to more recycling in practice, or a reduction in materials used.
Yeah -- it's sort of like those people who complain about the plastic lining on compostable coffee cups making them pointless.
Like if a 100% plastic and a 1% plastic end up in a landfill or elsewhere the 1% coffee cup is just going to two orders of magnitude less damage than the pure plastic one, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good but OP does have a point about the oil lobby push but that is a separate but related issue.
nah, it's all a scam and that they can get you back into the scam so easily with a little bit of marketing is a serious indictment of our education system and the ability of our population to reason effectively.
I think that comment actually misses Susan Cain's point entirely. Here's a quote from Ms. Cain:
"Shyness and introversion are not the same thing. Shy people fear negative judgment, while introverts simply prefer less stimulation; shyness is inherently painful, and introversion is not." [1]
If you accept that definition of shyness, then it is necessarily bad. Living with fear and pain is bad. Missing opportunities to connect with people because of a remote possibility of being hurt is bad. Simply wanting more time to yourself is not.
Regarding fault, it doesn't really matter who's to blame (and I didn't see anything in the article about fault). As an example, some people are born with type 1 diabetes and have to constantly manage their blood sugar levels. It's not their fault that they were born with this disease, but it's their problem to manage it. The same goes for shyness. Your shyness may not be your fault, but you're the only one that's hurt by it.
What? While I absolutely agree that introversion and shyness are not the same thing (although they probably often reinforce each other) I've never heard and deeply disagrees with that definition of shyness. Shyness has nothing to do with fearing negative judgment.
Wikipedia says: In humans, shyness (also called diffidence) is a social psychology term used to describe the feeling of apprehension, lack of comfort, or awkwardness experienced when a person is in proximity to, approaching, or being approached by other people, especially in new situations or with unfamiliar people.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyness
That is a much better description in my eyes.
And shyness itself isn't by definition a bad thing. Depends on context and what is valued in society. That said I really believe that being able to challenge your shyness is valuable (needs practice) and that you should be aware of what opportunities you might dismiss because of your shyness.
"Shy people fear negative judgment" is a bit facile on its own; it was sort of mentioned in passing in her TED talk. But it's actually not far from my understanding of the subject. (IANA psychologist, though.)
The wikipedia quote you gave lists apprehension, discomfort, and awkwardness as the feelings that are symptomatic of shyness. Those feelings strongly imply a fear of something—some negative consequence that might result from a given social interaction. If that weren't the case, why would you feel apprehensive, uncomfortable, or awkward?
Many people recognize their anxiety, even if they don't label it, but either don't notice or actively deny that there might be an underlying belief that causes it. Beliefs can be things like, "She's going to notice how awkward I am," or, "I have no idea what to do in this situation," or, "If I screw this up I'll never live it down." An eye-opener for me was reading an inventory in a social anxiety book and seeing exactly how many of the distorted thoughts I accepted about myself without even knowing it.
It's also worth mentioning that cognitive behavioral therapy is largely about becoming aware of these anxiety-provoking beliefs and developing different responses to them. If anyone reading this is interested in trying to reduce their shyness, I recommend researching this approach.
If that weren't the case, why would you feel apprehensive, uncomfortable, or awkward?
Because it is irrational? People can have phobias against pretty much anything, even if you know that the fear is irrational and groundless you can still be petrified by it.
Shyness is particularly common among small children, I don't think they fear negative judgment.
Yes, it's irrational, but usually if you ask someone to really unpack why they fear X, they can explain an exact scenario. Often just the process of explaining it oneself helps you get over the fear.
Children certainly fear negative judgement. Think how many times they hear the word "no" and get a nasty look from their parents.
This was an interesting point in the context of comparing YC to a large company:
Comparing himself to an air-traffic controller, Graham says much of his time is spend making introductions and helping the YC community solve problems within the network
Most of the large companies I've worked with are missing somebody in the "air-traffic controller" role. It can be very difficult for individual employees to understand all the resources that are available within the company, or who they should contact with a particular question. YC might actually have an advantage in this area.
> Most of the large companies I've worked with are missing somebody in the "air-traffic controller" role.
I've worked for 3 large companies, and have had the opposite experience. The problem is that everyone is trying to be an air-traffic controller. So much so, that honest work is being avoided.
Deep corporate hierarchies encourage politics and associated power struggles. Part of moving up in that environment is to have others perceive you as an "air-traffic controller" of a segment of the company, a master of your domain. This sometimes results in people in "manager" roles with 1 or 2 direct reports, where the "manager" does no actual work, but spends inordinate amounts of time coordinating with other teams or politicking. Honest work avoided.
I'm not excusing that behaviour but if you've spent enough time at a big company, you'll see motivations for it.
Contrast that to pg's air-traffic controller role in the YC network, providing value to all the startup people he connects.
It will be interesting to see how well pg's positive influence scales as YC continues to grow.
One reason for this is that many companies review and reward employees based on their "influence" or "visibility" -- what better way to maximize both than be in the air-traffic controller role?
I can attest to this firsthand at both Microsoft and IBM.
We're also working on software to make this process better. Garry built a private version of Facebook for YC founders which is tremendously useful. We have ideas for more software to make the knowledge contained within the alumni network more accessible.
I'm curious about the software, because in my experience these kinds of things are doomed projects.
Yahoo had at least four internal websites devoted to companywide skill-sharing. Google had a couple of these too. I don't recall them ever being useful.
They are started by naive new engineers who get frustrated because they can't get anything done. They think everyone's going to be thrilled to create a profile, say publicly what they are good at, and to answer questions from effective strangers. But it never works.
A year later they have personal relationships within the company, and know how to use those instead. And this is what motivates people to really help.
So do you think software is going to work better within the YC community? Maybe there's some communal spirit there that can overcome that tendency, due to all the dinners together or everyone knowing the YC partners. Or maybe your network is just small enough, and has higher-than-average quality people, so people would care about their reputation for helping strangers.
Agreed. Seen so many of these initiatives come and go at various companies.
The only thing that worked, and people reverted back to wasn't the "sexiest" of solutions - An email list. Data gets pushed to you, you don't have to be logged into a specific application or site to view it.
Setup some tags in the subject header, and some rules to filter on those tags.
Github in a way solves a lot of these issues of finding the right person because it revolves around the work (i.e. code) and skills and not the person and position.
Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.
I'm sorry but this is a way of speaking that doesn't necessarily imply he believes in an evolution capable of cognition. It's a short hand for saying "humans evolved in situations so unlike the situation they have today, that the traits they evolved are no longer best-suited for survival in today's world"
I would give the benefit of the doubt for the sentence the GP quoted, but then the author actually tries to justify the fact that evolution couldn't have computed it even if it wanted to:
"Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction"
Now that's just begging for people to completely misunderstand how evolution works.
I'm even more sorry that this way of speaking is so utterly prevalent in science reporting.
That, plus the tendency of people from other specialties cough astrophysicists especially cough to wax lyrical and ascribe amazing powers to 'evolution' and the casual observer would be entirely forgiven for thinking that anyone talking about "intelligent design" must be talking about evolution and that those are simply two terms for the same thing.
Before you start flaming me, my issue is not with Science! but it is with how Science! is reported on, which involves both watering down the message (turning everything into a Kipling-esque "Just so story"), and gussying up the message to make it seem more important (gotta get that funding somehow).
It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the traits related to cognition. Our "selfish genes" do not tell us how to think; instead cognition represents a delegation of authority from the genes to the carrier. We are attracted to porn, yes, but we are also aware that we are attracted to porn. Thus as some citizens descended into opium stupor, others observed that descent and made conscious choices to avoid it. As a result, human society did not devolve into one big opium den. Just like it will not devolve into one big World of Warcraft game.
The real reason we have not heard from aliens is that the distances are physically impossible to bridge.
Can we please drop this hyperbolic platitude that "ideas are worthless." You need to have ideas. That's how you decide what to do. In the case that the author describes, your ideas will help you decide what type of "smart nerds" you need to find. After all, there are as many different types of nerds as there are topics to study in depth.
The real problem is thinking that you're just one big idea away from a successful company. A successful company is made up of thousands of ideas and many man-years of execution. The real value creation happens when you have infrastructure in place to separate the good ideas from the bad ones.
So it's true that a single untested idea isn't worth much, but a huge collection of validated ideas really is valuable.
Yeah, it's exactly because of the mentality of "ideas are worthless" that has dominated Silicon Valley that there's such a profound lack of imagination in today's technology world. It's perfectly fine to build things because they're "cool," and it's equally OK to follow the herd with some social analytics bullshit startup or an Instagram meets Path for Video type of thing, but know that when you want to do those things the idea is worthless not because ideas are worthless, but because that idea is worthless - and you can still be successful without a worthy idea.
We're quick to jump on ideas without implementation as being worthless, but is it because it's so nonsensical to have an implementation without an idea? If we could have such a thing, we'd probably deem that pretty worthless too: a software application that doesn't actually do anything in particular, just kind of meanders around, even if it's very well coded and documented.
Yes, but complaining about this is like complaining about the cost and inconvenience of getting vaccinated for polio: If the cure seems worse than the disease, it might be because you don't clearly remember what the disease was like.
I assure you that however clued in we all are on HN, the OP is right: The notion of the "top-secret killer idea for a website" is alive and well outside of geek culture, having captured much of the aura surrounding its much older cousin, the "brilliant idea for a movie that will make me rich in Hollywood unless it gets STOLEN". As a web-publishing consultant I had several people ask me to sign NDAs in the first half hour of the sales process, sometimes before they would even tell me why they called, because they were terribly frightened that their brilliant concept ("It's a review site. For local hobby shops. On the internet.") was going to get "stolen" by someone who would go on to reap the millions that were rightfully theirs.
> a huge collection of validated ideas really is valuable
What definition of "validated ideas" are we using?
My definition is "customers are spending real money on product".
There are other valuable points before that occurs but they're less valuable and much of the "value add" to get to that point consists of design and development, not biz dev, deals, and so on.
And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold
Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer.
The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%
This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.
If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now.
Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly, like taxicabs do now.
But it's also possible that cars would simply be built with more reliable components and more durable materials, like current aircraft and public transit vehicles are.
It's not cost-effective to build an ultra-reliable car that's sitting idle 96% of the time, but the economics would surely change if the utilization rate is much higher.
The thing is, taxis _don't_ wear out as fast as you'd think.
I remember talking to an old-school cab driver a while back, when I noticed his odo had ~650,000km (~400k miles) on it. We chatted a bit about it, and when I asked "So how long do cabs last" he said "3 good crashes." It doesn't which of the locally popular cab models you buy and it doesn't matter how far you drive them - you might need to fit a reconditioned diff or gearbox or even motor, but all of that is "routine maintenance" from his point of view. Its after the third time you've crunched it hard into something that it's time to get rid of it...
Yeah, but if you replace the diff, gearbox, and motor, how much of the cab is really left (mechanically speaking)? Replacing the engine is, from an engine-maker's perspective, the same as buying a new car.
Yeah, but from the cab owners perspective, $600 for a reconditioned diff or $1200 for a reco motor is a lot less hassle/expense than $40k for a new car, then getting all the cab-specific fitout done to it...
(Yeah, that's what the base model cars used for cabs cost here. Google Holden Commodore or Ford Falcon prices. New car prices in Australia seem stupidly high to people used to American car prices...)
Why the downvotes? I'm serious. If cars start lasting 600k+ miles and are shared by multiple drivers and families, car companies will ‘need’ to recoup their losses. Expect prices of car components (the stuff that wears out) to skyrocket, and patent litigation to get rid of the after-market/3rd-party compatible components.
I don't think you even have to imagine any malice or profit-protection on the part of the manufacturer to see that.
The simple fact that current cheaper parts are going to be replaced with higher-quality parts is going to cause a corresponding rise in maintenance and replacement costs.
Maybe. Keep n mind these's a lot of parts of a differential (or motor) that _dont_ need replacing when reconditioning. In a diff, there's maybe 9 bearings, the pinion and crownwheel, and maybe the 4 spur gears. If you start with an undamaged but worn out diff, replacing those parts effectively gives you a brand new diff. The bearings are standard industrial parts worth maybe $40 or $50 ( at retail prices) and the auto manufacturers can't affect the cost/margin on them. The crownwheels, pinions, and spur gears are already all available from aftermarket manufacturers for any model likely to be used as a cab (at least here in Australia).
cars wear out from two things
1) age
2) use
A car, left sitting in the driveway for 30 years, unused and unmaintained, is unlikely to work very well or for very long. Rubber components like hoses, wire insulation, weather stripping etc become brittle and break.
As some other posters mention, cabs with 650,000 miles are not unheard of. I had a Toyota Landcruiser with 450,000km on the second engine, over 900,000km on the body.
A car that got 20x use would not wear out 20x as fast because a large part of a car wearing out is just age, not miles.
There's a Volkswagen Gol here in Uruguay with a million kilometers, and it's not an unheard-of amount
Cars are the most expensive in the world here, so we tend to keep then way long past their expiration date - as an example, I own a 1994 Maruti with 200.000 km, they aren't designed to last that long ! Japanese cars are the most coveted because they do last a million kilometers if cared for properly.
Sadly, there's a ban on used car imports (The vice-president's campaign was funded by the new cars importer association).
A million kilometers is considerably less than a million miles. A million kilometers is about 621 thousand miles. That's a lot, but it's much less than a million miles.
With my comment, I just wanted to add one more anecdotal point :)
I'm aware of the difference between miles and km (though I instinctively tend to minimize it and believe the difference is less than it really is)
I know of that Volkswagen because a million km is headline-grabbing here (on the "anecdotes" section), there are probably cars with a million miles but 1,609,344 km is not a headline-significant number, much like 621,371 miles isn't for the US.
I did actually find this quite helpful, as a Canadian I usually gloss over the km/mile conversion with a nice 1 km ~= 1 mile, as with most things you talk about (speed < 60, distances less than 100) the difference is fairly miniscule (and handwavey!). I didn't realize 1million miles is only 621,000 km! Thanks from an ignorant Canadian :)
As another Canadian, it's annoying to have you link your ignorance to your nationality. I'm confident that the vast majority of Canadians know that a mile is, very roughly, around 50% longer than a kilometer.
And if you think the difference is miniscule in normal usage, you just try driving 59 MILES per hour on a city street with a 50km/h limit, and see how the cops feel about that. (I say 59 because my lived experience is that everyone drives 10 over, and the cops don't ticket at 9 over; your city may vary)
Or try estimating when you're going to arrive at a meeting that's 100 MILES away on the highway, when you think "oh, 100 km, I can go 110 on the highway, plus the time to get out the door, call it an hour".
Even at walking speeds, 2 miles of walking is going to feel different than 2 km of walking.
Whether urban legend or not, supposedly there's a mercedes "million miles" club. They did famously buy back a mercedes that had over 2 million miles on the clock that's in their museum now
Rust qualifies somewhat under #2, but not completely. Rust isn't 100% preventable in some areas. I live in Michigan and because we use salt on our roads, if you're not washing the vehicle (along with the undercarriage in particular), you will inevitably get rust. On my last vehicle the engine mounts (which were part of the frame -- unibody) rusted. There was pretty much no way to fix the car soundly. If I had washed the underbody frequently enough I could have saved it, but there is a cost associated with that as well.
I recently saw something pointing out another wrinkle about taxis -- per mile, their engines go between hot and cold a whole lot less, so there's less stress from thermal expansion. Once they're on, they pretty much stay on for at least the driver's normal workday.
I don't know how much difference this actually makes, but common knowledge amongst the people I know seems to be that the most stressful time for a normal engine is starting up.
It's not just common knowledge, it's the truth. And it makes a huge difference.
When an engine starts up, all the oil is sitting in the bottom. In a good condition engine, the oil pump starts giving meaningful pressure the moment the starter turns, and starts pumping fresh oil throughout the engine.
However, when cold, an engine has the wrong tolerances to account for when the materials heat up and the materials expand. So the oil pressure isn't quite right.
As the engine ages this problem gets worse, so each startup cycle gets progressively worse. This is why a car with a worn engine will show the 'oil pressure' light for an increasingly long time after it's started.
The length of service life for an engine will come down to
a) operating hours (not just distance)
b) operator abuse (revving while cold, excessive RPMs throughout use)
c) service attention (oil changes, filter changes, coolant changes)
d) duty cycles (how many times it heats up and down).
The worst thing you can do for a car is a lot of short trips with a big enough spacing to let the engine cool, and aggressive driving while the engine is still cold.
An F1 engine is seized when cold, it requires several hours of warm water and oil to be pumped around to bring up the metals to the operating temperature.
Modern engines can go a very long way if cared for properly.
I think it's safe to assume that cars driven 20 times as much wear out somewhere faster then the normal rate, but less then 20 times as fast. Some of the wear is due to time, some due to thermal cycling (turning on and off, which happens a lot less for the high-use vehicle) and only some is linear with use.
If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now.
This is just a matter of the practical design choices. Any machinery that is in heavy use usually gets fitted, appropriately, with more robust set of parts which last many times longer before wearing out.
Current consumer cars have bearings, joints, and moving parts that are carefully optimized to match the expected usage pattern (which is mostly idle) for a designated period of time and nothing more. That's why older cars can sometimes run for ages. Decades ago we didn't know how to make extremely light-weight parts from least amount of steel with a calculable expiry time of, for example, 40 thousand miles so engineers had to fit cars with slightly heavier and more expensive parts to make sure they didn't break too easily. Think about fitting bearings and joints from a heavy van into a light Japanese small car. Or consider old 70's-80's Saabs and Volvos that can last nearly forever.
Likewise for fluids and lubrication, it's easier to clock high mileages with a car that is mostly in use throughout the day rather than with one that is used a couple of times a day for commuting. The engine wearout is at its peak during the first miles after a cold start.
Also, the 1970s and 1980s were a low point for cars in general -- lots of new environmental regulations were kicking in (including a whale oil issue which was discussed on hacker news), causing objectively worse reliability for many cars in the 1970s and 1980s vs. the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1990s the Japanese and German manufacturers seem to have resolved things, and by the 1990s, the US automakers.
Yes, cars may still sit around doing nothing at night, but the number of cars for peak traffic will drop significantly because of the gains in utilization. Imagine you want to ride share with your friends, one car will ferry people to and fro the highway which will be almost impeccably timed with your friends arrival at a waiting area just off the freeway. You'll get in the car and continue to work, after you arrive at work that car will go pickup someone in the city who works a bit later and grab a couple of their friends on the way.
When you combine this technology with social networks and mobile the improvements to efficiency, cost, and quality of life will be astounding. This isn't going to be an overnight thing but I see this kind of thing becoming prevalent probably 5 to 10 years after the first driverless cars become publicly available.
Driverless cars would be worth it simply for the reduction in drunk driving.
Driverless cars would be awesome simply for the increase in drunk driving. This is a really good point actually, you could go out for the night and still drive home.
Drink driving laws have had a huge negative impact on country living in rural Ireland, where the main social outlet is the local pub, and there isn't a taxi in the village.
I was thinking along these lines on a similar thread recently. The particular thread implied that the cost would be much lower, because there was no driver involved. I agree that it would be lower, but not orders of magnitude lower, because the demand shape will be exactly the same - or even more pronounced.
My hypothesis is that the driver is probably about 10-20% of the cost of a fare, the rest is the capital cost of the vehicle + licensing fees + insurance, and the marginal cost of maintenance and fuel. Because inevitably cars sit around most of the time, then the price of 5-6 busy hours of the day has to make up for the rest of the time.
Further, with a disruptive business idea like this, I could easily see an auction-style interface for the vehicle booking, which would give a much better revenue curve (we are talking about Google). In that case, the peak-demand period would probably exceed the current (regulated) taxi fares. But the plus side of that is that a midnight ride would be very cheap due to lack of demand and simultaneous lack of a need to pay drivers more money to work nightshifts.
I wonder what sort of population density and usage pattern you'd need before that worked in your favour?
If my apartment complex had a few dozen cars shared between a few hundred apartments, perhaps the car I take to go shopping could pick up the next door kid from soccer on the way back, then a different car might pick me up at the shops when I'm done, after dropping some other neighbour at the movies...
(I guess I'm now describing taxis. I wonder what the difference between this, and a taxi network of driverless cars is?)
Anybody got both Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk's numbers in their speed dial?
What if a "disrupt the cab industry" company got together with a "low moving part, high reliability electric car maker" to do an end-run around the expected auto industry opposition...
A fleet of driverless electric taxis, all routed by smartphone apps and behavioural prediction...
Then, when everybody is impressed with how well they work, you start selling fleets of them to Apple/Google/Oracle/SouthBayTechFirmDeJour - every evening a train of autonomous cars starts arriving and emptying out your campus 4 people per car heading for nearby/on-the-way destinations, all of a sudden those 20 hectares of parking lot can become cube farms or data centres...
During the middle of the day and all night, you lease the capacity to FedEx or UPS...
As long as we're hitting this one out the ballpark we can imagine all the online services getting in on the action: like the OKCupid speed date commute, the Yelp surprise me whats for dinner restaurant ride, or the Groupon deal of the day carpool.
Limited range cars with long recharge times would be a poor operating fit for economics that favor high utilization. There'd be too much downtime during peak times of day.
Maybe it could be coupled with swappable battery pack stations that the autotaxis could visit to get a freshly charged pack. A geographically focused taxi company could have the financial resources to invest in the battery depot, which would also solve the standardization problem.
Sorry, that's been solved. There are efforts to implementing this exact network of fuelling stations (battery swapping) for electric cars, and Better Place is a shining example from Isreal:
On the other hand, if you find yourself running low on juice, either because you're on a long trip or because you didn't plan ahead, it's not a problem. You just swap cars like the Pony Express swapped horses.
Lower utilization is balanced by lower energy costs than gasoline (but you're right, swappable batteries would help too).
And I assume you will install and deinstall the carseat each time? A huge portion of cars are used to transport kids, and it's not practical to remove the carseat each time.
You can't have a car with a loaner carseats either since they have to be individually adjusted to the kid.
Every single time people talk about cars, and public transportation they always forget about kids. I see it over and over. Come on people - expand your worldview a little.
I would expect that eventually the safety of automated cars will far exceed current levels and therefore child car seats won't be required in the same way that no-one uses a car seat on a train (or even a bus actually, which is presumably much more dangerous than a train)
This just opens the market up to build a carseat that solves this problem. How about a regular seat that can be folded out or transformed into a seat suitable for children?
Where I live, a certain percentage of taxis have big trunks, for people with baggage (they can request that when they call for it).
Why not have a percentage of driverless cars pre-equipped with carseats? You'd just have to configure once the age of your kids, then when you call a car (using e.g. a smartphone app), you just say for who it is ("Siri, I need a car for john, mary and me") and the right type will come.
The car seat needs to be individually adjusted, especially for younger kids (different heights needs the straps in different slots, although the fine tuning can often be done on the spot).
And you're going to need every combination of ages, people have more than one child.
There are approximately 10 different car seat configurations for the various age ranges (5 actual car seats). And assuming up to 3 kids would require 1000 different cars.
There is rear facing (with 3 heights), front facing strapped (4 heights), front facing buckled, booster, and booster without back. (Although many car seats can handle 2 types in one seat. But it requires you to reinstall it.)
They buy 3 since virtually all can convert between two levels (any two adjacent levels). A rare (and expensive and heavy) few can do 3 levels in one.
But converting the seat requires rethreading the straps and other adjustments - it can take an hour to install some types if you are not familiar with it.
I'm not sure how it applies to other countries, but here at least you have to have special car seats for all children until they're aged 12. It's insane, but that's the fabulous new law they enacted. So, yeah in some cases, some parents really are buying that many seats.
Considering that there are 5 different types of car seats, and they can be adjusted to about 10 different configurations that's not going to be an easy task.
The people who design car seats these days know that their customers would rather spend an hour rethreading/reinstalling their car seat every six months than spend over $200 on the seat. But if there were a large fleet of shared cars on the road, and if some entrepreneur came out with a $1000 car seat that could be readjusted in seconds for a child of any size, then the owners of the fleet would have an incentive to loan out those seats along with the cars.
> if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day
I got the image of cars migrating across the Eurasia, taking Chinese to work, then Indians, then Middle-easterns, etc.
It's interesting to look at these renderings in the context of the story from a couple of days ago about working out at the office (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314922).
Treadmills in a conference room are certainly better than sitting all day. But instead of a treadmill, I'd rather just work in an office where I could go outside and take a walk. I hope more companies will start thinking about office design in the way that Apple has, even if they do it on a smaller scale.
When I worked at Apple, I lived about half a mile from campus. I'd often go a week without even getting into my car; I could walk to everything important, including grocery stores. There were three very good bookstores within a 20 minute walk [now all out of business, btw].
I can't imagine life not being that way. I live in NYC and can walk to everything important, or take a short subway ride to anything else. I've gone months without getting in a car- if I ever move I think I'd miss that a lot.
Wow, someone from Victoria! That's a rarity. I went to UVic and lived in Vic for about three years. Getting around in Vic without a car is definitely a little more difficult, mostly because the bus service is so cruddy.
Still, I miss Victoria. I try to get back every year for the Beerfest.
It is the same way in Chicago as well. I went 2 years without driving a car at all, but obviously taxis were a necessity.
I was actually penalized when I renewed auto insurance for not carrying it for 2 years, despite not owning a car nor driving at all.
Robust public transportation should be a huge initiative for all major cities, and even more so ones that are growing quickly. The efficiencies, environmental impact, and convenience for citizens are too much to ignore.
Same here, in Raleigh, NC. Haven't had a car in years. Its been the best decision I've ever made for my own peace of mind.
If you're willing to walk a bit and take some buses, you don't need a car. And you find really cool places while walking that else you'd never know existed.
I worked down the street from Apple in the late '80s, early '90s, at a place on DeAnza a little south of McClellan, and lived in the apartments that border Stelling and the 280, so biked through that area a lot.
What were the three bookstores? I only remember "A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books" being reasonably close to that area.
I really can't imagine myself living in a place where I'm required by circumstance to drive everywhere. Walking, public transport, taxis and Zipcar cover all the bases.
