I was about to argue with you and toss out a bunch of ad hominems on you, but then I looked it up and by golly you’re right. I’m one of the 10,000 today it seems.

Everyone is a tester. Anyone who says otherwise is from Venus or Mars.

Was in Ireland a while back and I hit a guy with my rental car. Just a love tap. Nothing serious and no one was hurt. I was pulling out of a lot and it was really hard to see and I was looking for traffic and inching (centimetering?) out. And I look and there’s suddenly a bloke there, getting pushed a little. He smacks the hood of the car and yells something, then waves his hand at me and keeps walking.

In the States that would have been a lawsuit.

I am both shocked and pleased that Ford did not make this list. Seriously, the brand with the most sold pickup truck doesn’t make a list for just about everything?

Yeah, for sure. Like I said, I get the difference. But ultimately we are talking about injury prevention. If automated cars prevented one less death per mile than human drivers, we would think they are terrible. Even though they saved one life.

And even if they only caused one death per year we’d hear about it and we might still think they are terrible.

That’s the bar that automatic driving has. It messes up once and you never trust it again and the news spins the failure far and wide.

Your uncle doing the same thing just triggers you to yell at him, the guy behind him flips you off, he apologizes, you’re nervous for a while, and you continue your road trip. Even if he killed someone we would blame the one uncle, or some may blame his entire class at worst. But we would not say that no human should drive again until it is fixed like we do with automated cars.

I do get the difference between those, and I do think that they should try to make automated drivers better, but we can at least agree about that premise: automated cars have a seriously unreasonable bar to maintain. Maybe that’s fair, and we will never accept anything but perfect, but then we may never have automated cars. And as someone who drives with humans every day, that makes me very sad.

Maintenance.

What would be the value of life then? I’ll save you the answer: no matter how big the number you say, someone else will say bigger. Until it becomes priceless, which is the answer.

However death and accidental death isn’t always avoidable. And when we pin the fault on someone we cannot expect to say “priceless” is what they owe the victim’s family. So we assign an amount of money or time that hurts, and call it good.

Doesn’t mean life is worth that. And saying so doesn’t help anyone.

Their wealth is almost entirely composed of equity, which topples if the world fails. All the cash they have to build these mansions is derived from this. The value of cash itself is derived from this. The only things of worth in a post-apocalyptic world are the tangible things they bought with cash while it was worth something. Shelter, food generation, defense… those are still worth something, along with more important things: physical skills and practical knowledge.

They will find themselves in their mansion-bunker, surrounded by people who they have paid to be there, in a world where the currency they use to pay them has failed. Do they not see what will happen? Even if their plan involves complete self-isolation, how do they plan on maintaining these massive properties and fixing things when they break? Perhaps they have a plan to close themselves off to some smaller, easier to maintain part of it. But then what is the whole point if all you have is solitary confinement? Even if it all works and they can survive it, they will eventually emerge into a world that has failed, where their wealth means little to nothing and the skills that built that wealth are as useful as ornamental testicles on a monster truck.

Why do they put their money toward projects like this, instead of towards ways to make the world more stable so that it doesn’t fail in the first place. If I had the immense wealth they have, which was completely contingent on the world and people that it stood upon, I would do everything I could to make sure the world would not fall apart. And if it wasn’t enough and it was failing still, I would spend even more until almost nothing was left. Building a fortress in a failing state is stupid, and history can tell you that with 5 minutes of reading.

In all their supposed intelligence, it seems they haven’t thought it through much… or I am missing something glaring.

1990 Ford Thunderbird Super Coupe.

Office chairs and sushi.

When cars first started being mass produced it wasn’t just Ford doing it. There were like 50 manufacturers, big and small.