You need to think bigger. Once we have separate lanes just for the waymos, we don't need them to be regular roadways. We can scale up the waymo even more and size the lane exactly to the vehicle, maybe even radically redesign the road surface for lower rolling resistance. What a future it will be.
By forming those waymos like aerodynamic bullets, they could reach ridiculously high speeds on those special lanes. Something like 200 mph should be possible.
Maybe the waymos could be powered by overhead wires?
I'm having a hard time even picturing such a thing, but I have no doubt that Waymo could manage to operate them in cities across the nation, with sufficient re-training.
Now, sir, you're in pure fantasy land. Next you'll be asking for columns of them chained together to carry hundreds of people together, stopping at designated locations.
You joke, but the reality is going to be dynamic self-driving buses that don't have preset routes or stops but respond to instant demand.
You'll pay $$$ for a nonstop ride into midtown in a dedicated vehicle, or $ for a short dedicated ride to a self-driving bus you only need to wait a few minutes for, and which will drop you off on your destination block.
So yes -- self-driving buses seamlessly integrated into ride sharing are certainly going to be a major part of 21st century urban transportation. Which will save a ton of time compared to current buses.
I could also see potential efficiencies to scheduling your bus stops in advance, maybe with some configuration to set how far you're willing to walk, how long you're willing to wait, how long a grace period you want in the event that you're running late, what time you need to arrive by, how many seats you need, and whether or not you need access to luggage/bike storage. (Each of these values would of course impact the cost of your trip; in the worst case scenario, if your configuration couldn't be reconciled with enough other people's to fit you into an efficient bus ride, then you might just be offered a regular car ride.)
You could even set that up on a recurring schedule, sort of like a school bus system that dynamically adjusts to everyone's locations and requirements and instantly remaps routes as passengers are added and removed to the schedule.
I would like that just as much as the next guy but the problem of public transport cannot be addressed until you first address the problem of anti social behavior on public transport.
That’s just being around people. We gotta live together as people; the idea that we can atomize ourselves away from the society we live in is more disastrous to the shared social fabric than any amount of people listening to music without headphones.
One of the big, big advantages of Waymo is not being in a car with a stranger. I know quite a few women who don’t mind paying extra for Waymo over Uber/Lyft.
Far more people might able to afford a Waymo than a personal (in person) chauffeur.
Contrast Apple TV with YouTube; or Crunchyroll vs Youtube. Then step it up to BD. There is such a huge difference between 4K “fast”, 4K “main”, and the 4K “high” used on BDs.
“Strong moderation” and “manual checks” and pro-active age verification are exactly the burdens that would prevent someone from running a small community forum.
You do not need age verification in the vast majority of cases.
Moderation is part and parcel of running forums and all platforms and software provide tools for this, it's nothing new. If someone is not prepared to read submissions or to react quickly when one is flagged then perhaps running a forum is too much of a commitment for them but I would not blame the law.
In fact I believe that forum operators in the UK already got in legal trouble in the past, long before the Online Safety Act, because they ignored flagging reports.
Not the OP but I don’t recall the actual law saying 24/7 moderation was required.
Given the UK already has a “watershed” time where terrestrial TV can broadcast mature content between set hours (from 9pm), I cannot see why the same expectation shouldn’t exist that moderation isn’t happening outside of reasonable hours.
Typically with laws in the UK (and EU too) is to use more generalised language to allow the law a little more flexibility to apply correctly for more nuanced circumstances. Such as what is practical for a small forum to achieve when its specialty isn’t anything to do with adult content.
You’ll definitely find examples where such laws are abused from time to time. But they’re uncommon enough that they make national news and create an uproar. Thus the case goes nowhere due to the political embarrassment that department draws to itself.
Though to be clear, I’m not defending this particular law. It’s stupid and shouldn’t exist.
Reacting quickly means what's proportionate and reasonable. This is quite standard wording for a law.
The Act (section 10 about illegal content) says that "In determining what is proportionate for the purposes of this section, the following factors, in particular, are relevant—
(a) all the findings of the most recent illegal content risk assessment
(b) the size and capacity of the provider of a service."
"24 hour coverage" is the maximum that can be achieved so it's not going to be proportionate in many, if not most, cases. People have to ask themselves if it is proportionate for a one-man gardening forum to react within 5 minutes at 3am, and the answer is not going to be "yes".
Obviously you can also automatically hide a flagged submission until it is reviewed or have keywords-based checks, etc. I believe these are a common functionalities and they will likely develop more (and yes, a consequence might be to push more people towards big platforms).
People need to have a calm analysis, not hysteria or politically-induced obtuseness whatever one might think of this Act. If they are a small and not in the UK they can probably completely ignore in any case.
I'm not an expert, but isn't that exactly what rich people who live off interest rates do? Why is bad when a country does the same? I understand the risks mentioned, but why are they acceptable when people with capital does that?
Lets take the extreme, lets assume that Norway is an island and has a $50t wealth for 5m people. $10m each. Assume 2% return on that wealth, $200k a year income. Great, everyone is happy.
Who empties the bins? Or repairs the road?
You end up importing those people from elsewhere, just like the wealthy parasites do. Oil countries like Qatar are like this. It's not a good thing.
A centi-millionaire, in Qatar, Norway or New York, can live for free without doing any work, and will see their wealth grow about $10m a year off the backs of other people, people who won't earn anywhere near $10m in a lifetime.
Other people who aren't as wealthy do the work.
Imagine you are on an island with 10 billionaire CEOs and 10 people who have no net worth but know how to fish, cook, build etc.
It doesn't matter how rich the billionaires are, their wealth is worthless, the person with the skills is whats valuable.
The real numbers are $340,000 per person in the fund, which at a safe withdrawal rate would be $10-13,000 per year if turned into an income stream. So not exactly fuck you money, and there's a very long way to go before they have problems with bin collection.
It's questionable the amount of fun. Norway has fairly high depression rates and doing almost anything is very expensive. Even fully employed Norwegians on average go out to eat only a couple of times a year. They also travel less and have comparatively fewer recreational activities. I'm pretty sure that anyone living almost entirely on government assistance isn't doing much else but existing.
Welfare states work best when the majority of the population has that attitude. It keeps the most people in the “producer” column and fewer people in the “being supported” column.
These are better covered by Gilead’s actual press releases, of which this is a very poor summary.
For pricing, Gilead will likely carry over its policy for Truvada, by charging fairly high rates to western countries (with vouchers available) to subsidize its operations in Africa, where it will be provided cheaply or freely.
(Disclosure: I’m an investor. I truly believe that if any company can be morally good, Gilead qualifies.)
> I truly believe that if any company can be morally good, Gilead qualifies.
The primary reason Gilead exists in my memory is the headline years back about their exorbitantly high prices for a life saving hepatitis C drug and the resulting questions this was raising in congress ($84K for a 12 week supply) [0].
While it may be admirable that they are providing these drugs freely to countries in need, I’d be more hesitant to accept at face value the claim that US prices in particular are somehow reasonable on that basis. I also question the framing that those high prices are necessarily high. I’m less familiar with how they’ve priced things in recent years.
They created a way to live with AIDS. They were the first. They did it in the 90s, where even working on this had significant stigma still. Friends are alive because of them.
That is not how marginal tax rates work. Each income band is taxed at the rate for that band. It’s why it’s called “marginal” - because the rate change happens at the margin between brackets.
You are taxed 0% on your first £12571. You are taxed 20% on your next £37669, or, £7359.80 on £50270 of income. If you then earned one more pound, or £50271, you would owe £0.40 (40%) on that one additional pound only, for a total of £7361.20. There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.
> There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less
If you go from £99,999 to £100,000 and have pre-school aged children, you lose £2000 in tax-free childcare per child. If you have 2 children, that extra penny cost you £4000, 3 children, £6000, you take home less, fact.
Combined with the 60% marginal rate, you now have to get to £110,000 just earn the same you did at £99,999 and then there's the side point that a couple can earn £99,999 each, or £198,999.98 and still benefit from it while any single parent who hits £100,000 loses it completely, so a single parent high earner loses out vs a couple. I'm not a single parent but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.
EDIT: and that person who hit £100,000 has the extra burden of having to file a tax return from now on simply because they hit an arbitrary number, and despite being on PAYE, though perhaps some people love doing tax returns, so not necessarily a negative point.
Also at £100k you start to lose your tax-free personal allowance. The commitment of successive governments to avoid raising taxes on "ordinary working people" has created a bizarrely inconsistent tax regime for above-average earners, where people earning £65k could end up paying a much higher marginal rate than people earning £165k.
Yes, once you go from 99,999 to 100,000 you lose 2000 per pre-school aged child you have and have to file your own tax returns for the privilege despite being PAYE.
Annoying that those are, it’s probably more accurate to say you don’t qualify for benefits when you earn considerably more than the median wage (£38k).
Also, if you’re paying a decent amount in to your pension your effective salary is lowered and won’t hit that child benefit threshold until your salary exceeds £60k or more, and you still get to keep all of that money.
Tax free childcare is already extremely lacking in my opinion, if you want professionals to work, it shouldn't be extortionate to have your children in nursery, and costing you 2000 per child per year for one parent earning 100,000 when two parents can earn 99,999 each is also ridiculous.
The real kicker is the 99,999->100,000 trap where you lose all tax free childcare care allowance, £2000 per year per child, it's assessed quarterly, and if you exceed it by a single penny, not only do you lose it, they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.
>>they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.
So this might or might not be in line with official guidance but I was exactly in this situation and I expected to earn around £99k last tax year then I was given an unexpected £4k bonus in my march salary, and I wasn't told about it until it was in my account already so it was too late to put it into pension. I asked HMRC about it and they said as long as I was being truthful at every quarterly questionnaire where they ask if you expect to make over £100k and I told them the situation changed as soon as I became aware of it I don't have to pay anything back for the free childcare hours. I asked my accountant and she said since I have it in writing it should be fine(but HMRC can always change their mind so who the hell knows).
Compare that to the insane situation of the benefit for carers where people are being asked to repay benefits going back years if they went over the threshold by a single pound - I imagine HMRC is being incentivieed to go after benefit takers more than other areas like childcare hours, for various more or less political reasons.
That sounds extraordinarily linient of them, but I suspect as you say, it's political.
I take it you lost your allowance for the rest of the year due to the bonus?
Luckily for me the childcare tax people contacted me about it the first time it could have become an issue because I received a bonus at the start of a tax year, so I adjusted my pension contributions for the rest of the year lowering my take home. By this point though I'd already been taxed that marginal 60% thanks to the bonus being paid to me, like yourself without being notified.
Don't quote me but I don't think this is quite true if you take tax credits and other "benefits" into account - especially when it comes to child support.
Moreover they generally make the argument, have marginal tax rates explained and then rapidly go off looking for some specific welfare policy where this is sort of true.
Because if they knew about the welfare policy before they started typing, they would've actually mentioned it then - it's a specific problem, with several obvious solutions (i.e. don't means test at all or taper off more gently) unrelated to the concept of tax brackets (and potentially not related to the actual bracket index values themselves.
