from my experience it's more of a business guy/executive thing, they see Microsoft as a reliable, low-risk vendor which can speak their language. "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" type thing
I guess it's not so much Europe but "non IT-core companies" might prefer it, also the convenience of having everything into the same bill (workstation licenses, cloud, etc)
It certainly matters: "average driver" does not exist, and 95% of the drivers beat the average.
So a claim how autonomous driving system beats the average would only tell us that it beats 5% of the human drivers.
Now, the way stats are massaged here is not even about "drivers", but miles driven, and this language is even worse. We'd need to make sure we are looking at human-driven miles in the same area, same roads, with similar cars.
>To be fair, if 5% of drivers cause 95% of crashes then the average driver is still terrible.
>The median one might be better, but does it even matter? The average driver is still wreaking havoc.
Yes it matters. To be acceptable this technology needs to be at least in the same ballpark as a median-ish person on a median-ish day. Not some nonexistent average that is pulled down by the 1/X people who are drunk and the 1/Y who are from Socal and driving in Maine in a blizzard.
The fact that you basically never hear of "average non criminal driver" or "median law abiding driver" and that there is no real attempt at even standardizing a concept of normal drivers not engaged in bad behavior just reeks.
It's like the door is intentionally being left open for the same slight of hand as when people peddle some policy goal having to do with school shootings and back it up with statistics that are mostly normal crime. Or they are peddling some devious tax that will screw a whole lot of people, and they justify it with an average that's dragged way up by a few oddballs, or dragged way down by a bunch of zeros. Seems like the safety crowd and and self-interested industry are setting up to play off each other in a "recyclable plastic" sort of way.
Second off, what are you talking about that the "average driver is wreaking havoc"? The average driver is filing a collision claim every 15-20yr depending on who's numbers you believe. While I don't know the distance between average and median, either is a fairly high bar that Waymo and friends have to meet.
But the point is if we get all the median and better drivers off the road and replace them with autonomous vehicles, yet keep the worst 5% on the roads too, we are potentially worse off.
While it’s a different country my experience in Ireland and the Netherlands has been that there’s this bizarre contempt for builders. Like “I build homes and sell them to people for money” basically makes you satan incarnate. So housebuilding is bogged down in x% social, y% “affordable” (because apparently the goal of making all housing affordable by actually building enough is unthinkable) and very little gets built .
In Amsterdam the Green Party is celebrating making homes more affordable to buy…. By kicking out the people who were renting them. And they continue to say only 20% of developments can be market rate, aka for everyone. When you’re new to the city because you just got a job at booking.com or whatever you only can hope to get a flat in that 20% - the rest isn’t for the likes of you!
The Netherlands is a different kind of environment because there is a calculated policy of not doing anything that could reduce home values. This trickles through all policies for any action that could meaningfully solve the housing crisis.
I exaggerate but the tax structure is such that it encourages using your home as an investment vehicle. We'll see where things go with it but proposed changes to box 3 rules taxing unrealized gains may effectively destroy the possibility of saving any money in something that isn't your primary residence or a pension...
Both of you are really just beating around the bush of this whole issue in basically the same way as the very people you are complaining about, albeit at a different position. You both have a very elitist mentality towards this issue, i.e., “those peasants should move out of the way for superior people like me”, when what you are both describing is ironically failure of the privileged and powerful to understand what is causing the problems, conflicts, and tension; their own behaviors, actions, and mentalities.
Maybe the indigenous population you have contempt for wanting to preserve their communities and cultures don’t want your colonialist mindset of “those savages are not utilizing the land as I wish, so we can just overrule, overrun, and take it from them. How dare they not avert their eyes, for I have a job at booking.com or I go to UT/work at Oracle/Tesla.
It’s funny how you types never suggest that newcomers, i.e., colonizers, pay a high price for their colonization and that go to the indigenous, even if just to compensate them for the imposition and abuse. You always seem to insist on wanting to kick the indigenous from atop your high horse and demand they make way to your superiority as you abuse and exploit them. You’re not any different than any other past form of this colonist mentality, you want to steal from and abuse the indigenous.
I think it's funny how you think I would be "colonizing" the same neighborhood I literally grew up in.
I grew up in Austin. A bunch of people had kids there in the 1970's and 80's. More than where there before. So even if literally nobody had moved to Austin, there would still be a housing crisis without letting people build new housing.
Unsurprisingly, literally just letting the market respond to demand makes things more affordable for everyone. Yea, some people I don't like might move to Austin. They're probably not all bad. That's what multiculturalism is about.
Ah yes, the well-known "indigenous population" of the Netherlands, one of the highest-GDP places in the world at present and of course a country with its own actual colonialist past. Do you really think these "indigenous" noble savages can't afford to pay for their own rents on a market-rate basis? They're keeping outsiders away (unless they pay outsized luxury prices, of course) out of pure unchecked privilege, not for any kind of high-minded culture preservation.
Given the $112 subsidies per year above, that would add $2 per pound of beef, that would slightly raise the price not balloon it to 30-40 as poster claimed. So he was bullshitting.
Average includes vegans, and I'm pretty sure they eat it less than once per week. It’s just how much meat divided by population. The previous comment shows that the consumption is not anywhere close to equally distributed.
The subsidies are also paid by vegans. Both the average meat consumption and average subsidy can be multiplied by the total population to get the total.
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