“cars kill or injure 5.4 million cats a year in the United States, with 5,399,999 coming at the hands of human drivers. I found estimates of hundreds of cats killed by drivers each year in San Francisco. I’d guess that buses and trains—some of Waymo critics’ preferred transportation option—have probably squashed their share of critters.
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“[H]uman drivers killed 43 people in San Francisco last year, including 24 pedestrians, 16 people in cars and three bicyclists. None were killed by Waymos.” Many women and schoolchildren rely on them because of safety concerns, as a Google search of “taxi drivers and sexual abuse” will reveal.
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A study by Swiss Re, an insurance company with the obvious financial incentive to understand the relative benefits and risks, found the following, per Reinsurance News: “The Waymo Driver exhibited significantly better safety performance, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human-driven vehicles.”
Waymo’s data find 11 times fewer serious-injury crashes. Most crashes involving a Waymo were due to other vehicles hitting their taxis. That makes perfect sense given their Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is continuously learning, whereas as it’s increasingly difficult to teach some human drivers not to get behind the wheel after downing some martinis.”
“An obscure federal rule is slowing the self-driving revolution. When trucks break down, operators are required to place reflective warning cones and road flares around the truck to warn other motorists. The regulations are exacting: Within 10 minutes of stopping, three warning signals must be set in specific locations around the truck.
Aurora asked the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) to allow warning beacons to be fixed to the truck itself—and activated when a truck becomes disabled. The warning beacons would face both forward and backward, would be more visible than cones (particularly at night), and wouldn’t burn out like road flares. Drivers of nonautonomous vehicles could also benefit from that rule change, as they would no longer have to walk into traffic to place the required safety signals.
In December 2024, however, the DOT denied Aurora’s request for an exemption to the existing rules, even though regulators admitted in the Federal Register that no evidence indicated the truck-mounted beacons would be less safe. Such a study is now underway, but it’s unclear how long it will take to draw any conclusions.”
The guy who killed Kirk was less a hardened leftist and more a young guy with psychological problems who was radicalized by memes wafting in his direction. The guys who tried to kill Trump were nutcases. People with psychological problems are motivated by stupid shit to do something crazy. Toning down the rhetoric may help, but that’s hard when the president is abusing his power and breaking the Constitution left and right. Accurately describing what the president is doing sounds like heated rhetoric when it is not.
After WWII, the other manufacturing centers of the world were rebuilding from the war, leaving the U.S. as a manufacturing superpower. Post-war Americans had pent up demand and bought lots of goods. This allowed U.S. manufacturing to flourish. Later, those countries rebuilt and third world countries developed manufacturing. Allowing low-value manufacturing to be done in places like China allowed the U.S. to invest the money made into high-value things. Now, manufacturing is highly automated, so if low-value manufacturing returned, it would make everything more expensive and not bring many jobs because manufacturing doesn’t require many laborers.
“Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston.
On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed “Aurora Driver.” Aurora’s new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.”
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“Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.”
“America’s ports have fallen behind. Not a single one ranks in the top 50 worldwide.
A big reason is that dock unions stop innovation.
This fall, the International Longshoremen’s Association shut down East and Gulf coast ports, striking for a raise and a ban on automation. They got the raise.
Now union president Harold Daggett says longshoremen will strike again in January if they don’t get that ban on automation.
His statement in my new video makes it clear that he knows how badly his strike would damage other Americans.
“Guys who sell cars can’t sell cars, because the cars ain’t coming in off the ships. They get laid off,” says Daggett. “Construction workers get laid off because materials aren’t coming in. The steel’s not coming in. The lumber’s not coming in. They lose their job.”
Obviously, labor leaders aren’t necessarily “pro-worker,” says Mercatus Center economist Liya Palagashvili.
“They’re saying, ‘We don’t care if these other jobs are destroyed as long as we get what we want.'”
Daggett is unusually clueless. He doesn’t understand that a ban on automation will also hurt his members.
As Palagashvili puts it, “They’ll save some jobs today, but they’ll destroy a lot more jobs in the future.”
That’s because today’s shippers have options. Daggett’s union only controls East and Gulf coast ports. Shippers can deliver their products to ports that accept automation.
“We’re going to see less activity in ‘Stone Age’ ports,” says Palagashvili.
“Stone Age?”
“They want to ban automated opening and closing of port doors,” she points out, requiring workers to pull heavy doors themselves.”
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“”Some port jobs will definitely be lost,” she says, “but that’s not a bad thing. Look at it historically; we had hundreds of thousands of blacksmiths and candlemakers and watchmakers.”
Obviously, those and other jobs were destroyed by new technology. But unemployment didn’t surge. New jobs emerged—jobs people at the time didn’t imagine: programmers, mechanics, electricians, medical technicians.
That’s capitalism’s “creative destruction.” It constantly creates new jobs. That makes most everyone richer.”
“whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank’s most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which “reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction,” the World Bank notes.”
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“The problem is that American ports need more automation just to catch up with what’s considered normal in the rest of the world. For example, automated cranes in use at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands since the 1990s are 80 percent faster than the human-operated cranes used at the port in Oakland, California, according to an estimate by one trade publication.
It’s worth noting that the lack of automation, and the resulting inefficiencies, at American ports was a major factor in the supply chain issues that popped up during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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“Additionally, the tradeoff between automation and jobs is not a zero-sum game. A study published in 2022 found that the partial automation of the Port of Los Angeles had resulted in “significant gains in throughput, productivity, and efficiency, resulting in more hours than ever for workers.” As with other forms of automation, some job losses are inevitable, but efficiency gains benefit dockworkers too—and the truckers, manufacturers, and others in the supply chain who are waiting for goods to be loaded or unloaded.
Indeed, if maximizing the number of union jobs at ports was the highest value to society, Daggett and the ILA might want to change their demands. Why not demand a ban on cranes, forklifts, and tractor-trailers too? It would take a lot more workers to unload a freighter if everything had to be lifted by hand, after all.”
“Government favoritism in the form of subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions allocates resources (labor and capital) differently than the way resources are allocated by consumers spending their own money. Ordinarily, businesses—spending their investors’ money—compete for these consumer dollars. Industrial policy rests on the assumption that such market outcomes don’t adequately support higher causes such as national security. If that’s true, it’s all the justification industrial policy needs. Nothing needs to be said about jobs.”
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“As Noah Smith reminded his readers in a recent blog post, “Most of the actual production work will be done by robots, because we are a rich country with very high labor costs and lots of abundant capital and technology. Automated manufacturing is what we specialize in, not labor-intensive manufacturing.””
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“Be wary of those who push industrial policy as a means of job creation. It’s a short-sighted approach that distracts us from the more important question, which is whether hindering the market allocation of resources is truly justified for national security or other valid reasons.”
“For existing operators, they find that automation had real costs. Operators in a city that transitioned to mechanical switching were substantially less likely to have any job 10 years later than operators in cities that were slower to automate; those that did find work tended to find worse, lower-paying jobs.
But Feigenbaum and Gross also examine the results for young white women coming of age during automation, who just a few years earlier would’ve been ideal candidates for telephone operator jobs. Remarkably, they find little or no negative effects at all: they were just as likely to find work as they would have been before, and job openings in fields like secretarial work and restaurants increased even as telephone operation was automated away. Some of those jobs (like restaurant work) paid less, but others were competitive with telephone operation.
This is just one case, and economists have a long way to go in understanding how automation affects workers — a question that is more important than ever with the rapid progress in AI. But telephone operation appears like a mostly heartening example. Even though a job that once employed 2 percent of all working women was automated away, new workers entering the labor market were not significantly worse off.”