institutional finance is america's most powerful lobbyist. in the sense of the fund managers, the little RIAs, the grandmas holding SPY. they ARE the voters.
so to me, aside from making money, making money this way, for a lot of people, protects them from the political grandstanding and their fast demise in their absence.
This. They're letting wall street in on it so wall street goes to bat for it. It's the big boy version of how some widget manufacturer will revise a product to necessitate or cut out a trade lobby depending on whether they want those people to go to bat for it, or make all the people who don't wanna pay rent to those people go to bat for it.
And it will be 100% the kids fault, but the headlines will look terrible.
Kids can be naive and reckless, and the result makes them look downright suicidal with the things they do. They will dart into traffic, and even if the Waymo has single-digit millisecond reaction times, people will still blame the Waymo.
I wouldn't be so certain on the fault front. I share the SF streets with Waymos on the daily, and they are extremely far from perfect drivers.