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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

>What we are seeing with some of these big tech companies is that they are transitioning from an exciting growth story into an extractive dividend story in a way that's becoming harmful to consumers.

Alphabet is rolling out autonomous driving vehicles in many cities around the USA, potentially getting rid of the need to drive a car in 90% of today's use cases.

How is this not still an exciting growth story? My kids might never need to drive a vehicle, even though we live in a car dependent suburb.

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Some cute tech projects do not justify a massive monopoly. Google is financing Waymo using the ~300 billion dollar it extracts annually from consumers via ad spending. I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.

A product/service that can drastically reduce the top cause of injury and death, as well as give safe mobility to so many who do not currently have it is not a "cute tech project".

>I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.

Alphabet's entire revenue divided by the total amount of goods and services sold is miniscule, so I don't see how it could be mathematically possible to pay substantially less on anything you buy.

>and have the free market sort out self-driving cars.

This is the free market sorting out self-driving cars.

Google is one of many monopolies that are collectively bleeding society dry. Of course, the others should be broken up as well.

Waymo is currently financed by a monopolist and has negligible revenue itself, so it is not part of the free market.

Self-driving cars are an absurdly inefficient way to reduce traffic deaths that exists only because it makes substantially more money for shareholders than the alternatives. You are being witheld a good and cheap solution now for the promise of a worse and expensive solution some time in the future. All the while people keep dying.

Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available. As for people who can't drive for whatever reason, they already have taxi apps. And don't think for a second that self-driving taxis will be cheaper in the long term than regular ones, only the margins will go up.

> Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving into a subscription service will mean mobility becomes harder for many people, as dirt-cheap used cars slowly stop being available.

Too many people are in the "You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy" camp.

Apparently the thought of lifelong indenture is a plus to these people :-/

* a good and cheap solution *

You mean public transport? I live in a country with one of the best public transport systems in the world. I enjoy it, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that it is cheap. It is not, very much NOT. All the big Czech cities spend between 25 and 35 per cent of their municipal budgets on public transport, and those are mostly already mature systems where the most expensive work like laying track is already amortized. New trams and buses, repairs, drivers wages, electricity, nothing is cheap nowadays.

Sure, an American city can decide to build a new tram or subway system from scratch, but don't promise anyone that it is going to be cheap. It won't, doubly so if the mayors stipulate high wages for the workers, like NYC does.

And even the best public transport system fails at the peripheries, where density of the population drops under a limit of viability. Then you have two buses a day even here in CZ.

Compared to every person owning their own car, but now it has a bunch of extra sensors and a cloud subscription? And the city still needs to build and maintain the roads.

Or a bunch of robotaxis, which reduce the up-front cost and amount of parking needed, but the operational and infrastructure costs remain.

I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.

Waymo is a real solution to reducing injuries from distracted and drunk drivers, as well as reducing insurance costs. Obviously, if Waymo is the only game in town, then prices will be high but hopefully there will be competition. Owning a car 24/7 along with space to store it and insure it is not necessarily always cheaper than renting it per trip.

A robotic car can be utilized for far more hours per day amortizing its costs over far more trips making each trip cost less. Which, if there is competition, should result in lower prices.

> I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.

Car Country was designed by the US car lobby. Political will of the voters? Oh yeah sure, now a century into it that’s also not palatable for home owners and the like.

I am not excited about my transportation becoming a subscription service, likely through regulatory capture. It will almost certainly mean less freedom of choice for me.

I am a fan of kids being able to roam freely because we don’t have to worry about people in their huge pickup trucks and SUVs looking down at their phone mowing down people and not even noticing.

It will certainly mean more freedom for those who don’t want or can’t use a giant vehicle to move around.

I trust automated vehicles with cameras and LIDAR to do a much better job of avoiding collisions.

what i personally find most insightful about this website is how the techbro culture will do anything except consider the needs of the many. why bother with good transit when we can automate cars? why bother with copyright when we can just steal content at a scale that few can comprehend.

The “needs”, or rather revealed preferences of many, is to live in detached single family homes on minimum 3,000 sq ft lots, with space for personal car storage.

There is no way public transit works in that kind of non dense living arrangement.

Do you have data to show Americans want to live in Manhattan/Tokyo style or even European style 4 story apartment/shared wall buildings?

Population trends in the US show me the suburbs are far more popular, at least among those who end up having children.

You are not a transport planner and it shows.

People in the US don’t magically “want” giant pickup trucks and pedestrian killing SUVs. They want cheap and practical vehicles, neither of which are available in large quantities. Notice how the advertising for pickups works? Straight, white, rural men in jeans telling you how your expensive pickup can drive off road? And then you read the manual and warranty where that exact usage is either forbidden or discouraged.

Same with the suburbs. Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives

Where is your data showing that people “prefer” this?

My data is the far lower prices for equivalent sized townhouses (homes that share walls) compared to detached single family houses, the increasing volumes of larger vehicles sold over smaller vehicles, and higher proportions of children in suburban areas compared to urban areas.

People like space, people like choosing who to share space with, and people like feeling more powerful (sitting higher up in bigger vehicles).

In my area, Zillow shows sold home prices for comparable townhomes vs detached SFH at roughly 30% lower price per square foot. People are willing to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars to not share walls.

>Those we designed and pushed by the car lobby and the US made it illegal or very unprofitable to build any alternatives

The US (federal government) didn't make it illegal or unprofitable to build more dense housing.

Local city and county level voters made it illegal and unprofitable, because more dense housing means poorer people, and poorer people means schools with kids who have poorer parents, which typically means a peer group that may not perform as well.

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