Some of us like to jump out of moving vehicles and do a cool roll or flip like in an action movie! This is yet another use case the Silicon Valley technocrats didn't consider...
The value of the land is a function of the amount of money one could make off the land, which is a function of the overall economy. A coffee shop next to lots of office buildings can sell lots of overpriced coffee which affects the value of the land it occupies. If the economy gets bad the coffee shop will likely not make as much money, so the taxes off the land will be less as well.
If you give away the land to someone else, but still own the building on it, the person you gave the land to would have to pay land value tax and they would pass that onto you in rent.
>I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.
Sam is Frodo's servant. Anarchic societies don't have masters and servants. Then the natural question you should ask is why? Frodo is not a noble and Sam is not a slave, so the only reasonable explanation for why Sam is the servant is because Frodo's family is wealthy and Sam is in their employ.
The court telling an artist they're not allowed to sell their videos to the highest bidder seems like a greater infringement on their freedom. What if no one wants to pay for this person's videos except for an AI company? You're basically telling them they're not allowed to profit off of their work.
>The Viet Cong were able to pay those poor men too, but the vast majority of them chose to fight for and to be paid by the south.
If this is true why couldn't the South beat the North, or at least defend itself on its own? After the US left the South Vietnamese folded pretty quickly.
I feel exactly the same way. The Dispossessed was both one of the best and one of the most boring books I've ever read. There are a lot of things I appreciate about it and I'm glad I read it, but damn was it a slog to get through.
You could say that about nearly any good thing in life. Your current job/relationship may be holding you back from an even better one. Those leftovers you grabbed out of the fridge are occupying the space that could be taken by an even better meal. Every minute you spend watching a TV show you've already seen or a videogame you've already played is taking away time from your finite lifespan you could be spending on new, novel experiences.
If there's a better platform for giving you what you want, I'm sure you'd leave Reddit and never look back. If this platform you're imaging doesn't exist, how do you know it even could ever exist?
Why did you "help" (in other words make a post/comment) that person on Reddit? Because you enjoy it, you enjoyed reading posts and comments by strangers, replying to them, and seeing your comments accumulate upvotes and other comments. Reddit gave you that experience for free.
I've yet to read a clear explanation of how "surveillance capitalism" is any different than regular capitalism with computers. As long as people are trying to make money they're going to try and crunch data to do it better. The only way I see to effect a real change in how companies collect and use data is with regulation.
>I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a somewhat comparable user group – say professional taxi drivers – over just a general sampling of the population.
When you say professional taxi drivers, do you mean people who drive for Uber/Lyft? Because that's who these companies are looking to replace.
I disagree. Some people will drunk drive no matter the legal consequences, or in my case, I once rear-ended someone because I was drowsy but kept driving because I wanted to get home (fortunately no one was hurt, and yes, the accident was completely my fault). The comparison should be against the general population of human drivers because that's the reality on the road.
Making something illegal doesn't stop some people from doing it, so it's something that should be considered when looking at the overall safety of human drivers. One benefit of robots driving is that they won't get drunk, get distracted because they had a stressful day, get drowsy but still try to make it home, speed because they're late for an appointment, etc...
>How about we invest in making our cities more pedestrian, bike, and public transportation friendly?
There are tons of companies that would love to help (get paid to) build out public transit infrastructure in cities. You think any major city would have trouble attracting bids to build tram systems, subways, or even buy more busses?
Look at your local leaders, how many of them are pro-public transit? How many of them have a long history of blocking projects because they want to "preserve neighborhood character" or some other lame excuse?
> Keeping autonomous vehicles on the road will result in thousands of edge cases, and without a clear safety benefit (as opposed to Level 1 systems) its better to stop everything and reconsider.
True, but I bet either a Cruise or a Waymo would have stopped rather than hit that woman crossing the street, and they definitely would not have fled the scene like the human driver did.
>more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities
This is a political problem though, it's not something businesses can solve.
That's not hard for me to imagine. Now that I think about it, it should probably be standard for autonomous cars -- if there's an accident or something unexpected it should pull over, unless it can't reach the side of the road without hitting something or someone is trapped under the car.