Oh please, your modest increase in registration fees do not cover all the externalities of cars. Cars still enjoy TONS of subsidies, including free parking, free highways, etc. In fact, 60% of the surface areas of most cities in NA are devoted to cars.

It’s hilarious that you think you’re fighting “Big Corporate Lobbying” by defending EVs. I don’t know where you get that I’m in favor of ICEs. I am against car dependence entirely. You’re being brainwashed into thinking environmentalism is just about buying another expensive product instead of fighting the car lobby entirely.

Honest answer: no. What about me sounds like a bot? Because I use jargon?

Yeah you’re subsidizing other people to drive their car more, and you’re being incentivized to drive more.

That sounds sensible. Car use is heavily subsidized, so someone is paying for those miles. It makes sense that a greater proportion of that cost falls on the driver.

There is obviously a LOT of car infrastructure that is not used by commercial trucks: residential streets and parking lots account for most road surface area. There are also many other externalities besides maintenance like pollution and accidents. By not properly taxing distance driven, we are essentially subsidizing car use.

Distance based taxes are economically better because they internalize the externalities of driving. That is, driving more benefits the driver but is paid for by the general tax pool. This means people are encouraged to drive more than they should because the true costs are borne by society as a whole (including non-drivers) and not the individual driving.

One thing to note is that car infrastructure maintenance (e.g. upkeeping roads and bridges) is often paid for in substantial part through a gas tax. Electric cars don’t pay the gas tax, so they are essentially freeloading. In the future, this may change, but this is one reason why EVs are currently cheaper than ICEs.

Yes I noticed that too about the tech layoffs. Especially nowadays, corporations seem extremely uninterested in competing to make newer better products.

I think maybe we mean the same thing when you say “Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology”. The Nintendo Switch was never a technological marvel, even when it was first released. It’s an attractively assembled collection of other people’s technology. The Switch is “innovative” in a way, mostly in functional product design, but it’s not science.

Ah I see. Insofar as UI/UX research resembles science, and it certainly often does, I agree that it would be better if it was public not private. But as much as I dislike corporations patting themselves on the back, I just don’t think it’s realistic to say they never innovate anything ever in designing a product.

Here’s an example: every part of the first iPhone in 2007 was already invented before its release. None of the core technology was new. But I think it’s hard to deny that Apple innovated in packaging it together in a useful attractive product.

As you can see from my original comment, I’m no knee-jerk defender of private sector innovation, but I don’t think I agree with this. I love open source software, but the UI is often clunky and unintuitive, like Gimp or LibreOffice. Even when it’s good, it’s often because it mimics the major commercial software.

The heuristic I have is, when the end result benefits from communal information sharing, public is hands down better than private. We have an opioid crisis today because privatized proprietary medical research didn’t receive the same scrutiny from the scientific community as public research. Science and secrecy are incompatible.

But when the end result benefits from a small group of opinionated people getting their way, private can sometimes be better. And good design is more like the latter.

Typically, universities own the patents to any ideas developed using university resources, including the research work one does as a professor. The university can also give a cut to professors.

There is truth but also some corporate myth making here. The main elements of the modern GUI was presented during the so-called Mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart would later work at Parc to make working prototypes of his ideas he already developed at the Stanford Research Institute. Now the corporate side of the history dominates the story. Same with Ethernet, which was an extension of a researcher’s dissertation work. This sort of corporate historical revisionism is exactly what I’m addressing.

I would go further: the idea that great research comes out of the private sector is a myth perpetuated by self-aggrandizing corporate heads. Even most AI research is the result of decades of academic work on cognitive science coming out of universities. (The big exception is transformer technology coming out of Google.) mRNA vaccines are based on publicly funded university research too. All the tech in smartphones like GPS and wifi comes from publicly funded research. The fact is, science works best when it’s open and publicly accountable, which is why things like peer review exist. Privatized knowledge generation is at a disadvantage compared to everyone openly working together.

The private sector is very good at the consumer facing portion of innovation, like user experience, graphical interfaces, and design. But the core technologies, with rare exception, almost never came out of the Silicon Valley.

I’m having a hard time parsing your sentence. Who is the “they” in the main clause?

You make it sound like the American left pushes a lot of symbolic issues. Which ones are you thinking of?

Hot take: the American left loses on the material issues because it has lost on solidarity, symbolism, ideology. Don’t you know that healthcare and vacation days will “hurt the economy”? There are many poor working class people who still oppose Obamacare even though they directly benefit from it. The material gains matter a lot less if people reject the ideas behind them.

I’m not sure if the timing of Labor Day is important, but I wouldn’t underestimate the power of symbols.

The real holy grail would be all this open source. “Free for now” doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Many vacancy taxes already exist all around the world. There is not a single one that taxes normal short vacancies. It is just false that this increases costs for all landlords. The vast VAST majority of landlords will never pay it.

On the other hand, the increase in supply due to the tax can be noticeable, which has a much bigger effect lowering prices.

If the landlord can increase rent by $100 and the market will bear that, why is the lack of a vacancy tax stopping them? Landlords charge the maximum that the market can bear.

Most vacancy taxes around the world only kick in after a period of vacancy, say 6 months.

Lots. Toasters, refrigerators, robot vacuums, thermostats, smart home lights, etc.

The reason why self-driving cars are extra tricky is both because they have a much more complex task and the negative consequences are sky high. If a robot vacuum screws up, it’s not a big deal. This is why it’s totally irresponsible to advertise something as having “full” autonomy when the stakes are so high.