I wonder what the math is on the 0.1%'s money. If the 0.1% became significantly more generous with their money, how much would that actually benefit everyone else?
When that article laid out that it was talking about a survey I sat down and thought about what kind of distribution there likely is. My first guess was:
f(x) = 500 / (1-x)
where x is 0..1 (excl. 1), 0 being the poorest person and the one right before 1 the richest.
This yields 88.8% being owned by the richest 20% when using 1mio slices (the only reason I'm not trying to integrate symbolically is that I'm too lazy to try to revive my college math skills).
This is strikingly close to the 84% that the article claims is reality.
So, what's wrong with this then now?
The journalist writes that it "should" be different but doesn't provide for an explanation that says why the distribution should be following a different mathematical formula (and which).
Thanks for your reply. You're giving me some food for thought.
To be clear, I'm poor, i.e. I've failed both at wealth creation and ownership so far. I'll think about how (much) wealth creation can 'distort' the geometric formula.
Bit of a conspiracy theory sort of question, but... is there any reason to believe that maybe self-driving car technology is being backed by the military-industrial complex as a way to run R&D for military automation and related technologies? That could explain why there was a sudden spike in interest in this technology several years ago, and it could also explain why enormous amounts of hype are continually being generated for a technology that is probably still quite far away from being approved for fully automated road use.
No, it's the other way around — the private industry's self-driving car technology is based on research funded and carried out by the military-industrial complex. See: Uber's takeover of the CMU robotics lab (NREC).
There's no conspiracy about it - that is exactly what happened, and it happened right out in the open, in the form of the DARPA Grand Challenge races in 2004-2007. The explicitly stated goal of those races was to motivate research into autonomous vehicles that would enable the US military to begin converting its ground vehicles to autonomous operation. The much-hyped commercial applications are a spin-off.
The DARPA challenge is somewhat of an orthogonal use case. The DARPA challenge was based off of an autonomous vehicle that doesn't have extensively pre-mapped roads; it is in rough terrain. The vehicle had to alter its route on-the-fly if it encountered impassable obstacles. It also didn't have to concern itself with traffic. I presume the use case is getting materiel to troops without risking human drivers. This is important considering IEDs were a major source of injury and death for coalition troops in the most recent wars.
Google/Waymo and its successors are using pre-mapped courses with many heuristics and edge case tweaks. Routes are generated from existing resources (Google Maps, etc). Much effort is devoted to avoiding other vehicles and pedestrians. Much of the rules are based off of U.S. traffic rules, such as speed limits, stop signs, traffic signals, and lane markings.
They both share technology (computer vision, momentum/traction control), but I conjecture the bulk of the work for commercial autonomous driving was not related to the DARPA challenge and wasn't paid by its grants.
That was true for the first two Grand Challenges, but once that prize was claimed DARPA simply cranked up the difficulty level; the 2007 race was all about navigation in urban environments, and compliance with traffic laws was a condition of success.
Sure, of course you're right that "the bulk of the work" is not related. But it's also no secret that the "sudden spike in interest in this technology" lucker referred to above happened because the US government paid for it to happen, as a means of advancing military vehicle automation technology.
It's interesting what a difference there is in people's perspectives. To me, Reddit seems excruciatingly polite and well-mannered, often to the point of dishonesty. This is probably because I've been to 4chan and similar places.
As a frequent channer I find Reddit a hugbox of insulating opinions and gaming the karma system (To the point where commentary can be as trite as shitty dad-tier jokes). The benefit of 4chan and company is that once the identity is stripped away (and a filter for callous remarks created) a user is actually free to speak their mind.
Sometimes this develops into meaningful posts, othertimes it ends up as a mess of shitposting. But the freedom is there and it is wonderful.
If that someone is working for the campaign of a politician/party which supports NSA spying on Americans, he or she has no right to privacy in my eyes. The way I see it, if you want me to respect your privacy, you have to respect mine.
'Secret law' is not law at all, and I consider it the duty of every American to expose and, if necessary, disobey it. Any legal professional participating in 'secret law' should be disbarred.
I think tomp is pointing out that doing something equivalent to circumcision to a female baby would be illegal. Rightly so, in my opinion. I strongly believe that male circumcision should be illegal as well.
There's also the issue of self-driving car hype vs. the actual progress of the technology. Despite a growing number of successes in the field, I still can't really imagine that we are anywhere close to having self-driving cars that could be trusted to maneuver around public roads without human supervision.
I'm mostly with you on this one. I like mass transit. It's a fun opportunity to people-watch. What I don't like is riding with smelly and/or loud and/or violent people. I don't care how people dress, though, as long as it's not unhygienic.
I think that the reason why there is so little enforcement of any conduct rules might be more practical than political, though. To effectively enforce conduct rules would probably require there to be an extra government employee on each bus or train. The driver can't really be expected to do it, nor would it be a good idea to try to get them to split their attention in such a way.
I find it more plausible that tech billionaires are just more likely, as a group, to believe in technocrat rule, etc. than are people who are not tech billionaires. Being an immigrant from Communist countries or a child of such immigrants is just as likely or more likely to make one despise top-down solutions as it is to make one favor them. People with such backgrounds have direct experience of the sorts of problems that arise from heavy-handed government involvement in society. Based on what I've seen, I speculate that financially successful immigrants from Communist countries actually tend, as a group, to favor hands-off government.
