Weird. Recruiters were calling me last month for some well paid contract gigs there.
And what does it mean to build an entire skyscraper for themselves? I thought these things were leased out by floor to multiple companies.
Flying taxis are actually a lot less crazy of an idea, although it is still very difficult technology that will cost a lot of money. Kitty Hawk's Cora is going to act like a sky shuttle for tourist locations in New Zealand and plans to begin testing soon (it will probably be delayed, but the technological viability is there). There are obviously technological challenges to be solved in that space, but the biggest one is probably noise. Kitty Hawk also has the Heaviside which is very quiet (only unmanned tests so far, but it's legit). But this is a single-person short-range toy for rich people. There is also the Lilium "jet" which is an industry favorite, and the Opener Blackfly. Fun fact: Larry Page owns most of the companies I just listed and is kind of obsessed with flying cars.
People have run the numbers. You can build an eVTOL aircraft with enough range to work for something like Uber Elevate is designing. But they are ignoring noise, and I believe that is going to be the chasm they cannot cross because the public will not allow that much noise pollution (they are really fucking loud - if you live somewhere with helicopters imagine them lower, whinier, and all the time).
I think flying taxis are technologically sound but will never get approval from the public, which is actually why we don't have supersonic flight (yep - the main barrier is actually it's too fucking loud for people to allow it and many laws have been written making it illegal to fly over anything but the ocean, although there were other problems with the Concorde as well).
Uber Elevate is meant to be a carrot to convince investors they are onto something big to float the stock price. It's much more viable than self-driving cars within the next decade, but I would not count on anything happening in the US within the next 5 years apart from aircraft testing.
Blah blah blah, it's mostly smoke and mirrors.
The videos always show some guy in a business suit flying some laser straight path right to the building, not being buffeted around by the wind reflected off of the buildings and one engine out from a pigeon that got sucked into the motor.
But if it’s really just too loud, isn’t there some way to muffle the sound? I suspect it would be expensive but certainly not ridiculously so.
My hunch, although nobody can say definitively, is it is physically impossible to make these quiet enough to be acceptable for mass use. But aerodynamics has as much trial-and-error as it does theory so maybe a genius will come up with something novel.
You only need to look at the opposition to runway or operating hours expansion around airports. And this is even truer if there's a perception that it's all mostly for the benefit of "the rich."
Some will argue that most people already have to tolerate road traffic today to greater or lesser degrees. That may be true but I don't see a lot of people throwing their hands up and saying "Oh well, it's already pretty noisy. Who cares about a bunch of aircraft whizzing around my house."
And you probably shouldn't understate the safety aspect and the level of pushback after the first few accidents.
There is, as is the case with everything about Uber, no meaningful moat. There are a lot of companies and teams pouring rivers of gold into the problem, many of whom are already profitable from other businesses and who can raise debt at relatively low cost (vs diluting shareholders again, and again, and again).
The carmakers will have their own services. Google will. Everyone else who rounds up a few shekels from friends and family will do it in their hometown. The taxi companies will, so will the livery companies. Car financiers will pile in with monthly payment schemes "but with an app!". There'll be ten "AirBNB for Uber" startups enthusiastically shanking each other with VC shivs.
When the dust settles it will at best be a game won by those who were already profitable coming in, at worst a game of musical bankruptcies.
Nothing about self-driving cars will save Uber. Only raising their price to cover the cost of every ride and accepting a dramatic reduction in topline revenue will do so.
I somewhat agree that self-driving cars isn't an obvious solution for Uber when you think about it, because it basically makes the entire business of Uber a stepping stone towards a completely different company. That is to say the majority of everything Uber has built would no longer be relevant. Of course, I suspect Travis always knew this and really it was actually Uber itself that was always bullshit (or at least by the time the company became a unicorn, nobody really knew anything when they were still a glorified limo company) and self-driving cars always the real endgame. The problem was it didn't go according to plan.
Considering the relationship Travis and Anthony Levandowky established and the whole history there (Uber legitimately tried to defend Anthony from the Waymo lawsuit until it was blindingly obvious they could no longer do so), I think Travis was dead serious about self-driving cars for a long time. The problem is Travis is a great entrepreneur and businessman, but robotics is an unforgiving field.
It's easy to sell an idea. "Wouldn't self-driving cars be great?" And honestly 5 years ago I felt like it might be possible, and many other seasoned roboticists legitimately got on-board (so not just for the money, although some did and I don't blame them because holy shit I have seen some of those offers and they were insane). But at this point, and this is very much an open debate, I believe you need to solve general AI before you can have a meaningful self-driving car product.
Everything above applies for L4 autonomy, anything that requires driver attention (such as Tesla's Autopilot) or extremely limited use-cases (such as GM's SuperCruise, which is 100% independent from GM's self-driving car division called Cruise) is a completely different discussion.
Trains. That have right of way. Their own trains, that they own, on their own rail, that they own, liberally covered with communications towers and sensors (many of which my father put up during his time there).
It's about as close to the simplest version of self-driving there is. And they weren't hurting for smarts: they raided quite a few universities for even vaguely relevant talent.
They did it, though. Level 4 autonomous trains. It cost them a billion dollars and six years just for one crack at the software. Before that at least a decade of work for who knows how much money.
But: trains. That's the functional state of the art worldwide. Trains.
Earlier announcement (2014) that they were planning to do so: https://www.railjournal.com/signalling/rio-tinto-gets-set-fo...
Note that the original contract with Ansaldo for development was approximately half what it wound up being. That they will admit to. And I suspect leaves out a lot of the work around the lines which can be used for autonomous and non-autonomous purposes.
But then it goes back further, to this article from 2008: https://www.railwaygazette.com/news/rio-tinto-to-go-driverle...
Predicting that autonomous trains would be done in 5 years. That is, they expected to be finished by 2013 ... when the next contract was signed.
I won't be surprised if it's announced a few more times in the coming years.
Mine automation is a big deal, Rio Tinto have spent heavily on it. Not just trains, they also have spent a lot on developing autonomous mine trucks. The pit is covered with a lot of beacons to help the trucks position themselves and they use regular scans of the site to update the map. I'm not sure how far they got with those.
BHP-Billiton seems not to have gone as far, but they have spent a lot of money in remote operations: having the control centres for multiple mines consolidated into special-purpose offices in Perth etc. Cameras everywhere, das blinkenlights, the whole shebang.
It's not really worth taking any of these ideas seriously. All they illustrate is that Uber doesn't believe their core business is viable.
They'll get around $9 million simply for building their complex:
https://dallascityhall.com/government/Council%20Meeting%20Do...
2) No FTE associated benefits (health insurance, 401K, etc.)
3) Easier to terminate
4) (Arguably) Can grind harder
Hopefully, some of the recently laid-off employees can get re-hired as 1099-contractors. Sometimes working as a 1099 can actually be more lucrative (sometimes much more) than being a FTE.
If you have a spouse to provide benefits and hire an accountant to setup things properly, you can make very good money as a contractor. Even better if you can work part time for several with a high rate and juggle them around - then you start outsourcing some labor, and before you know it you have a consulting business.
If going the contractor route--and if the pay is six 000s+--I would highly recommend getting an LLC and all the great tax benefits that provides. Easily adds 5-10% (if not 20%+) to your bottom line.
You will most certainly be a W2 contractor through some middleman who takes a nice cut. Even for higher-end consulting talent. No big company is willing to risk contractor misclassification lawsuits anymore.
However I’m not an accountant so that’s only what I heard from my clients when I asked them why for example they don’t hire a full time employee for a long term project.
Why wouldn’t an employee add to the value of a piece of software?
Also why would a contractor paid 10k add 10k to the value of the project and not 0? Or 100k?
Would a company having a bigger than avg contractor-to-employee ratio be a red flag? As to be overvaluing their assets?
I may be inaccurate on the precise accounting terminology, but essentially a full time employee is a recurring cost, while a contractor is a non-recurring cost, and this makes your books look a lot better to those who aren't paying close attention.
During that period of time, it certainly felt that your job was a lot safer if you were a consultant vs FT. They also paid those contractors by the day, not the hour, and it also felt like they kept the FT'ers around for the "free" labor they provided for weekend work- How I even investigated that 70% number is that I was in theory at least relatively high up the totem pole, but got doing real drudgery type weekend work- checkouts after network upgrades and such since my team had so few FT people. I then mucked around with our api a bit and got the actual numbers and saw this wasn't a unique phenomenon to my team.