Even just paying for the roads for these cars to drive on is a challenge with the lack-of-density they require. So many suburbs with large lot sizes just learn to live with the potholes.
that is until autonomous pothole-fixers. Just the other way, looking at the Waymo driving by and with me doing small autonomy myself i was wondering what niche they leave for me, and looking at the road i thought that autonomous pothole-fixers is going to be multi-trillion business.
People writing in other comments about cost of roads, new and repair - it all will change with autonomous road paving hardware.
He is a pro-authoritian-control Democrat, so it is unsurprising that he is more worried about control of information than he is the Constitution. His background is in finance and his political goal is generally management of the country by a monied elite without particular oversight.
He was paid by Goldman Sachs to help Clinton get elected by raising massive amounts of money. During Obama's term he structured the DNC to be about his personal power rather than supporting Democrats across the country, costing Democrats the midterms. As mayor of Chicago he covered up a murder committed by a police officer and refused to comply with transparency laws.
On the other hand, this particular position is probably just part of the Israeli campaign against TikTok: Emanuel volunteered for the IDF and has long been an anti-Palestinian activist.
America has been subject to a thirty-year propaganda war by foreign actors.
Information in America is free as in speech, not free as in beer: money talks louder than truth. That has let billionaires unravel the stabilizing features adopted after the Great Depression that kept capitalism limping along for an extra century.
We aren't concerned only about existing addicts, but potential future addicts. Especially for something like social media with strong network effects, where decreasing use is non-linear.
The question is always:
A. What do people use instead? (banning pot, for example, increases use of heroin and alcohol, which is good for alcohol companies but bad for public health. If banning social media sent kids to 24/7 news channels, it might not help, but I haven't seen evidence of that.)
B. How much is organized crime funded by the increased black market? (In this case, kids are a limited population that doesn't have a lot of money, so the answer is probably "not much".)
Banning substances naturally decreases use, that's obvious, but prohibition criminalizes use, which will always persist. You cannot stop drug use. Drug legalization so far has resulted in declining use of dangerous substances like tobacco and alcohol. Far more young people today choose smoking pot over smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. Many people choose not to drink because they've observed the widespread dangerous effects of it since it's been legal. If heroin was made legal all over the world today, you'd 100% see increased use. But maybe humanity needs to see the consequences in order to respect them? Just like alcohol and cigarettes?
It isn't like the left was doing well in rural America before social media: people in the urban cores just didn't know what was going on there, and they didn't know what was going on the urban cores. But when I was growing up, people thought Bill Clinton was a communist in league with Castro.
There are other ways for money to impact politics beyond individual general elections. As well as funding community organizing and creating long-term propaganda, it's much easier to impact ballot initiatives (paid signature gathering works, for example, where paid canvassers don't.)
