2,378 karma · joined September 22, 2022
I believe your experience is with the top end of the distribution.
Just wait till Google spins it off to private equity; it'll be barley running bits of vehicles patched together by the cheapest mechanics they can find.
Enjoy it while you can; I'd love to give it a go myself, but even though I live in a city where they are supposedly in commercial operation, I can't get one to either of the two houses on either side of town that I currently split my time between. I have a buddy who lives a few blocks from one of their zones who walked over just so he could try it out. As of now, our sub-standard, minimally-invested-in-this-century bus system is actually much better suited to my needs.
The state legislatures might be all for it, but I can say as someone who lives in South Texas, the actual communities are up in arms against datacenters. Of course there's lots of irony in that one of the reasons the datacenters like the area is that there is a gas pipeline that the locals welcomed that can be used to run turbines.
Kinda hard to do that when you've locked all your money up in a retirement vehicle that doesn't let you withdraw until age 59.5.
I didn't really get an explicit yes or no out of the above, but I take it to mean no? That's the interesting question to me - who would be allowed to join such a community, and if someone was discovered to be undesirable for one reason or another, what would be done with them?
The only site I'm familiar with that has somewhat decent self-limiting functions built in is HN's no procrastination settings. But that's of course because HN isn't run to make money, but as a hobby.
Do you keep a car in your garage?
Regarding Musk's "hardcore" ultimatum at Twitter.
[0]https://www.vanityfair.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-ultimatum
This would seem to agree with "not everyone has to have children" - mathematically speaking you can quite simply put a couple zeros into the equation and still arrive at 2.1
> Sounds like a "you" problem.
I have no problem with the situation at all as I have never in my life had an interest in having children. I'm not sure I even see the changes in birthrate as a problem; people can adapt to demographic changes. But if it is a problem, then it must be some sort of systemic one and I doubt the answer is to try and apply pressure to individuals to have children by telling them to think of the economy or that it is some sort of societal obligation.
I remember perhaps a decade ago, a coworker and I were watching a clip of Zuckerberg walking up to a group of employees and they started clapping for him. I mentioned how odd it was to see, and he thought it was perfectly natural to applaud the CEO of your company. We never applauded when our boss showed up, and I've never really been sure where the line is for which authority I'm supposed to cheer for merely from being in their presence. I haven't thought about it too much since then, but obviously it's stuck with me.
As a society, we've all had our lips pretty firmly pressed onto the asses of the oligarchs for quite awhile, so it seems pretty natural that they think it's the natural order of things.