This is fascinating. Did they give any reasoning for why they thought the US military could pull this off? Texas today has about the same population as Iraq did in 2003, has three major metro areas instead of one, and is probably as heavily armed. If the military couldn't realistically occupy Iraq, why think they could occupy Texas? And occupying the entire US is 10x the size of the Texas problem.
Not to mention that Texans could inflict a lot more pain on the rest of the US than Iraq could. Blowing up a few pipelines in Iraq -- just enough to keep them from operating reliably -- put a modest dent in global crude oil supply. Blowing up the right pipelines leaving Texas put a much bigger dent in the supply of finished petroleum products and natural gas across the Southeast, up the Atlantic Coast, and to Southern California.
For June 29, in a column titled "Politics", I would have picked Arizona v. Arizona instead of Michigan v. EPA. Coal-fired power plants are going to be cleaned up eventually (or shut down). The Court said the EPA didn't do its work properly, not that it was overreaching its authority. Putting their stamp of approval on extensive governing by citizen initiative is much more a political decision, at least IMO. Also interesting from a cultural perspective, since Kennedy -- the only justice left that was elevated from outside the northeast urban corridor, and from a state with a long initiative history -- was the swing vote.
I feel so old. There have been few times since I was 15 that I didn't need to be out of bed by 6:15 or so. I've always been an eight-and-a-half hours of sleeping guy, which put me to bed by 10:00 or so. When I was younger, I was willing to make the effort to stay up. These days, not so much.
I've been playing with my new SiliconDust set top box this week. Three independent high-def video windows at once on my computer monitor. Lord knows what I would have given for this kind of capability back in the day, when I was more interested in college football and the important games overlapped on different networks more.
...where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in... the statehouses?
Of course, that's not a particularly sound plan in initiative states. In 2016, Colorado will vote on a state single-payer health insurance plan. I expect it to fail, but it got enough signatures to get on the ballot in a remarkably short time. The important thing is that it's a much more liberal proposal than could be seriously considered in the legislature. Colorado will probably also vote yet again on a personhood-begins-at-conception amendment sometime in the next few years. That's a much more conservative proposal than could be seriously considered in the legislature. In Arizona, the legislature basically has to keep their hands off of initiative-passed statutes. A couple of conservative Arizona legislators are advocating legalization of marijuana by the legislature in order to moot the need for an initiative and retain some control.
Some things seem like a shoo-in. Within a few years, I expect to see marijuana legalization, independent redistricting schemes, and universal vote-by-mail be the rule rather than the exception in western states. Most of it will be done by initiative, or by the legislature acting out of fear of initiatives.
Short-barreled rifles and shotguns are legal in most states (New York and California being among the exceptions). You have to get a special federal permit and pay a federal tax on the weapon. If you live in a state where there are no state laws against them, gun shops will know the whole permitting process and be happy to sell you one. Regulation of such weapons dates to 1934, when they were among the weapons of choice for organized crime.
Arizona. The redistricting commission initiative passed in 2000, 56% to 44%. "Don't trust the legislature" may be a western conservative thing, though.
But she hates the government because it’s large and inefficient and wastes “her” money on stupid projects.
This reminds me of the budget exercise we put new members of the General Assembly through when I worked on the state legislative budget staff. Essentially, we built up the General Fund budget by program: K-12 education, Medicaid, law enforcement (including courts and prisons), higher-ed, and other human services like child welfare that draw very large matching federal grants. At that point, a bit over 95% of all GF spending was accounted for. "Where," we would ask politely, "would you like us to focus our attention on cutting or growing?"
For the federal budget, it's DoD, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP, a handful of safety-net programs, and interest on the debt. That's on-budget spending; there's also the DoD's off-budget spending, which has been in the same ballpark as the entire food stamp (SNAP) program in recent years. If you're going to make a dent in federal spending on a scale that people will notice their taxes going down as a result, you've got to cut the big programs. Letting the national forests burn by wiping out the fire-fighting expenditures -- to choose an example that Paul Ryan came very close to proposing a few years back -- is just noise.
This Cleveland State University study [PDF] has interesting data on sales from 1986-2010. Shotgun sales show a slow but steady increase. Rifles also show a steady increase, with small peaks in 1993 and 2009. Handgun sales vary enormously, with large peaks in 1993 and 2009. The study doesn't break things down any farther by type. I'll just casually note -- and duck while doing so -- that handgun sales went up sharply during that period the year after a Democrat won the White House. Initially won -- there's no bump after Clinton won reelection.
Hedons are also probably subject to the hyperbolic discounting that James mentions. Tell the typical 20-something hormone-charged man who's not getting any "You can have sex once this week, or you can have sex twice during the same week next year." Heck, I've known guys who make seriously bad decisions -- admittedly, under the influence of alcohol -- rather than wait 24 hours.
Not so much what I'm watching as how. Long story short, last week I got a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime set top box, which plays to apps over the local area network instead of directly to a monitor. Yesterday I got the CableCard from Comcast necessary to handle encrypted digital channels. Initial review follows...
Activating things was the usual cable company adventure. Comcast has an 877 number where the people answering the phone only do CableCard activation, which was helpful. By the third call, and after considerable poking around, I had all of the information necessary for the tech to send out the commands. (Imagine a medium where people could write a description of all the info you needed, and where to find it, and it was kept up to date. Nah, that's crazy thinking.) A few minutes later the box could be manually tuned (carrier plus stream). I watched most of the Broncos-Bengals game at my desk, full-screen and high-definition. It looked good.
Somewhat later the box had gotten the local "linear" channel lineup so I could switch to SiliconDust's provided player application. It's pretty basic -- limited channel guide, simple resizing. An almost identical Android app is available at the Play Store for 99 cents. No problems watching the HD stream on my phone as I wondered around the house.
The device also functions as a DLNA-compliant video source on your local area network. VLC, the swiss army knife of media playback applications, supports DLNA. VLC sees the box; it switches the channels; it plays the video. VLC also provides me with all the functions that become necessary when you play video on a monitor that is set up to look good for computer stuff -- brightness, contrast, gamma, scaling, cropping, etc. Or in my case, dynamic range compression for the audio -- not too loud, not too soft, not too much variation.
The SiliconDust box has three independent tuners. I've verified that It can deliver two streams simultaneously. At some point I'll haul out another device and test that it will handle three.
I suspect -- but am willing to be convinced otherwise -- that one of your horses has already left the barn. There are now more handguns than rifles in the US. The number of handguns sold now exceeds the number of all other firearms combined. Maybe this should be unsurprising. The number of hunters has been declining for years, and the urban/suburban population continues to grow relative to the rural population. If we've reached the point where the "basic" use for firearms is urban/suburban self-protection, and the "basic" firearm is a semi-automatic (in some way) handgun, you've set yourself a tough task.
IIRC, the first time the militias were called up was Washington and the Whisky Rebellion, the regular Army being otherwise busy. It was so popular that the states where the call went out had to impose drafts, and people spent money to get out of serving. A handful of states have state guards separate from the National Guard. The Texas State Guard is the only approved militia in that state, has just over 2,000 members, and is an explicitly unarmed organization.
I think you're trying to create something entirely different that comes dangerously close to being a poll-tax-like infringement, as in "Community service is a requirement for handgun ownership."
In some ways, the media is caught in a tough position. I know lots of people who own guns, but they're all reasonable people with reasonable purposes [1] and none of them get covered by the media. The people who get covered are those who belong to self-styled militias, or whose position is that the country has become so dangerous that everyone should carry all the time. They're visually interesting -- much more so than most people whose position is that all civilian guns ought to be taken away -- so they play well on TV. The militia types are interesting in light of Oscar's footnote #5. They're not interested in community building or being supervised, most of them believe that the government(s) are on the verge of imposing some sort of permanent martial law.
[1] One of them is a woman who spent some years doing computer forensics to put child pornographers in jail. At some point, the local police chief approached her and said words to the effect of "We'd be more comfortable if you got a good handgun and learned to use it. Some of the people you helped put in jail are finishing their sentences and have mental health issues. We can't escort you all the time, so we'd like there to be a plan B."
...then cites RedState being unable to find anyone to run their website for free.
I walked around with a silly smile for most of a day after that particular story broke. I still wonder if anyone pointed out to their faces that the cost of operating RedState being so small relative to the amount of money the big donors and super-PACs had said a great deal about how RedState's views and/or importance were seen.
Douthat picks Trump's policy positions very carefully, though. From the other side, Trump's a man who has said we wasted four trillion dollars in the Middle East [1], that we should spend more on Social Security and Medicare as currently structured, that US taxes ought to be more progressive, pointed out that the rest of the world has had good experiences with single payer health care, and is okay with affirmative action.
I've become more convinced about the "middle American radical" theory of Trump's support. Douthat doesn't dare accept that, since those people aren't supportive of a whole lot that he thinks are important parts of conservatism in America today.
[1] That's bigger than the biggest estimates I recall seeing from other sources, which was three trillion and was a present value that included money we have yet to spend re-outfitting the armed forces and taking care of veterans.
Yeah, but like all engineering problems, designed with applications in mind. Certainly there's an arguable case that while civilian long weapons can be used to kill people, that's not what they were designed to do. They're hard to conceal, they're difficult to carry while doing anything else, they're hard to manipulate effectively inside buildings or in most crowded situations, and while they're accurate at long distances you have to go through a clumsy process of aiming them to make use of that. In many cases where someone makes long term plans to use one in a "standard" interior or urban setting, the first thing they do is saw off most of the barrel and stock.
But it’s myth made of the stuff our our lives today, rather than the stuff of the lives of Greeks living 2500 years ago.
Is it? The trappings are different, sure, but the story remains the same. Per lots of comments below, the physics in Star Wars is so different than what we understand about how the universe works that "magic" is a better description. Jedi and Sith powers are not that much different in scale than those exhibited by the Greek gods when they're on Earth. Or the powers elves and Norse gods had on Earth in the stories that Tolkien based his work on. Greek heroes sailed between ports in days/weeks/perhaps months. In the Norse stories, they sailed between ports in days/weeks/perhaps months. In Star Wars, they "sail" between ports in... days/weeks/perhaps months. The opening lines may say galaxy, but for practical purposes the scope is the Mediterranean or the North Sea.
There seems to be a rather timeless scale for the stories that most people love.
On a separate note, the places that often still have mixed used corner stores are also normally noted a ‘food deserts’
The Kroger chain in Denver has opened a full-blown suburban supermarket (sans most of the parking spaces) on the ground floor of a new Lodo development, with a four-story 314-unit apartment complex sitting on top of it. Studio apartments start at just under $1,500 per month. It will be interesting to see how it does.
G1: Arapaho opposes the CWR for the same reason most of the Mountain West does: it gives the EPA the implicit authority to shut down the agriculture industry in each of them. Colorado, for example, has on the order of 6,000 miles of irrigation ditches that could be regulated under the rule -- they don't meet the conditions for an exception.
Good for you for taking care of yourself. My weight gain came later, and I've never torn up any joints like that, but my knees would be happier if I dropped 30 pounds. Being in my 60s, I think it's harder than ever to make the changes.
My upbringing would be closer to "there's no such thing as demeaning work," I think. Throwing hay bales up on the wagon may be hard, dirty, somewhat dangerous, and not pay for sh*t, but it's not demeaning.
And was mechanized decades ago, because it got to be difficult to find people who would do it for less than the costs of the equipment.
Bicyclists too. I've had cars in electric mode sneak up behind me at traffic lights. It's not a problem when we're moving at any speed because there's enough tire noise for me to hear them.
So here's my example of a hard problem for autonomous cars. It happened to me at least once each session when I was working for the state legislature. Taking a day off during the session isn't really an option, no matter what the weather forecast...
About noon it starts to snow. Hard. By the time I could leave at 4:30 or so, there's eight inches already on everything. Still snowing heavily, so visibility is a couple hundred yards tops. All the main roads are slick as hell because the snow's been packed down before the plows could get out. No lane or other road markings visible. Interstates are parking lots. Lesser-traveled streets are passable, if you know how to start and stop in that much snow. Successful navigation means knowing not just where the roads go in an x-y space, but also knowing where the steeper bits are. I got home in an hour (my neighbor spent four from roughly the same starting point), but that was possible only because I spent years and years learning how to drive in the snow.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Linky Friday #147: New Year Edition”
This is fascinating. Did they give any reasoning for why they thought the US military could pull this off? Texas today has about the same population as Iraq did in 2003, has three major metro areas instead of one, and is probably as heavily armed. If the military couldn't realistically occupy Iraq, why think they could occupy Texas? And occupying the entire US is 10x the size of the Texas problem.
Not to mention that Texans could inflict a lot more pain on the rest of the US than Iraq could. Blowing up a few pipelines in Iraq -- just enough to keep them from operating reliably -- put a modest dent in global crude oil supply. Blowing up the right pipelines leaving Texas put a much bigger dent in the supply of finished petroleum products and natural gas across the Southeast, up the Atlantic Coast, and to Southern California.
On “2015: The Year In Review”
For June 29, in a column titled "Politics", I would have picked Arizona v. Arizona instead of Michigan v. EPA. Coal-fired power plants are going to be cleaned up eventually (or shut down). The Court said the EPA didn't do its work properly, not that it was overreaching its authority. Putting their stamp of approval on extensive governing by citizen initiative is much more a political decision, at least IMO. Also interesting from a cultural perspective, since Kennedy -- the only justice left that was elevated from outside the northeast urban corridor, and from a state with a long initiative history -- was the swing vote.
On “Weekend!”
I feel so old. There have been few times since I was 15 that I didn't need to be out of bed by 6:15 or so. I've always been an eight-and-a-half hours of sleeping guy, which put me to bed by 10:00 or so. When I was younger, I was willing to make the effort to stay up. These days, not so much.
I've been playing with my new SiliconDust set top box this week. Three independent high-def video windows at once on my computer monitor. Lord knows what I would have given for this kind of capability back in the day, when I was more interested in college football and the important games overlapped on different networks more.
On “David Frum: Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election?”
...where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in... the statehouses?
Of course, that's not a particularly sound plan in initiative states. In 2016, Colorado will vote on a state single-payer health insurance plan. I expect it to fail, but it got enough signatures to get on the ballot in a remarkably short time. The important thing is that it's a much more liberal proposal than could be seriously considered in the legislature. Colorado will probably also vote yet again on a personhood-begins-at-conception amendment sometime in the next few years. That's a much more conservative proposal than could be seriously considered in the legislature. In Arizona, the legislature basically has to keep their hands off of initiative-passed statutes. A couple of conservative Arizona legislators are advocating legalization of marijuana by the legislature in order to moot the need for an initiative and retain some control.
Some things seem like a shoo-in. Within a few years, I expect to see marijuana legalization, independent redistricting schemes, and universal vote-by-mail be the rule rather than the exception in western states. Most of it will be done by initiative, or by the legislature acting out of fear of initiatives.
On “Reflections on Gun Control”
Short-barreled rifles and shotguns are legal in most states (New York and California being among the exceptions). You have to get a special federal permit and pay a federal tax on the weapon. If you live in a state where there are no state laws against them, gun shops will know the whole permitting process and be happy to sell you one. Regulation of such weapons dates to 1934, when they were among the weapons of choice for organized crime.
On “Broken Elephants, Part I: Donald Trump and the Triumph of the Conservative Media Machine”
Arizona. The redistricting commission initiative passed in 2000, 56% to 44%. "Don't trust the legislature" may be a western conservative thing, though.
"
But she hates the government because it’s large and inefficient and wastes “her” money on stupid projects.
This reminds me of the budget exercise we put new members of the General Assembly through when I worked on the state legislative budget staff. Essentially, we built up the General Fund budget by program: K-12 education, Medicaid, law enforcement (including courts and prisons), higher-ed, and other human services like child welfare that draw very large matching federal grants. At that point, a bit over 95% of all GF spending was accounted for. "Where," we would ask politely, "would you like us to focus our attention on cutting or growing?"
For the federal budget, it's DoD, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP, a handful of safety-net programs, and interest on the debt. That's on-budget spending; there's also the DoD's off-budget spending, which has been in the same ballpark as the entire food stamp (SNAP) program in recent years. If you're going to make a dent in federal spending on a scale that people will notice their taxes going down as a result, you've got to cut the big programs. Letting the national forests burn by wiping out the fire-fighting expenditures -- to choose an example that Paul Ryan came very close to proposing a few years back -- is just noise.
On “Reflections on Gun Control”
This Cleveland State University study [PDF] has interesting data on sales from 1986-2010. Shotgun sales show a slow but steady increase. Rifles also show a steady increase, with small peaks in 1993 and 2009. Handgun sales vary enormously, with large peaks in 1993 and 2009. The study doesn't break things down any farther by type. I'll just casually note -- and duck while doing so -- that handgun sales went up sharply during that period the year after a Democrat won the White House. Initially won -- there's no bump after Clinton won reelection.
"
@burt-likko
Do you think Heller and McDonald ultimately put us in strict scrutiny territory?
On “Market Failure 6: Behavioural Economics (A mind is a terrible thing to trust)”
Hedons are also probably subject to the hyperbolic discounting that James mentions. Tell the typical 20-something hormone-charged man who's not getting any "You can have sex once this week, or you can have sex twice during the same week next year." Heck, I've known guys who make seriously bad decisions -- admittedly, under the influence of alcohol -- rather than wait 24 hours.
On “Sunday!”
Not so much what I'm watching as how. Long story short, last week I got a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime set top box, which plays to apps over the local area network instead of directly to a monitor. Yesterday I got the CableCard from Comcast necessary to handle encrypted digital channels. Initial review follows...
Activating things was the usual cable company adventure. Comcast has an 877 number where the people answering the phone only do CableCard activation, which was helpful. By the third call, and after considerable poking around, I had all of the information necessary for the tech to send out the commands. (Imagine a medium where people could write a description of all the info you needed, and where to find it, and it was kept up to date. Nah, that's crazy thinking.) A few minutes later the box could be manually tuned (carrier plus stream). I watched most of the Broncos-Bengals game at my desk, full-screen and high-definition. It looked good.
Somewhat later the box had gotten the local "linear" channel lineup so I could switch to SiliconDust's provided player application. It's pretty basic -- limited channel guide, simple resizing. An almost identical Android app is available at the Play Store for 99 cents. No problems watching the HD stream on my phone as I wondered around the house.
The device also functions as a DLNA-compliant video source on your local area network. VLC, the swiss army knife of media playback applications, supports DLNA. VLC sees the box; it switches the channels; it plays the video. VLC also provides me with all the functions that become necessary when you play video on a monitor that is set up to look good for computer stuff -- brightness, contrast, gamma, scaling, cropping, etc. Or in my case, dynamic range compression for the audio -- not too loud, not too soft, not too much variation.
The SiliconDust box has three independent tuners. I've verified that It can deliver two streams simultaneously. At some point I'll haul out another device and test that it will handle three.
On “Reflections on Gun Control”
I suspect -- but am willing to be convinced otherwise -- that one of your horses has already left the barn. There are now more handguns than rifles in the US. The number of handguns sold now exceeds the number of all other firearms combined. Maybe this should be unsurprising. The number of hunters has been declining for years, and the urban/suburban population continues to grow relative to the rural population. If we've reached the point where the "basic" use for firearms is urban/suburban self-protection, and the "basic" firearm is a semi-automatic (in some way) handgun, you've set yourself a tough task.
"
IIRC, the first time the militias were called up was Washington and the Whisky Rebellion, the regular Army being otherwise busy. It was so popular that the states where the call went out had to impose drafts, and people spent money to get out of serving. A handful of states have state guards separate from the National Guard. The Texas State Guard is the only approved militia in that state, has just over 2,000 members, and is an explicitly unarmed organization.
I think you're trying to create something entirely different that comes dangerously close to being a poll-tax-like infringement, as in "Community service is a requirement for handgun ownership."
"
In some ways, the media is caught in a tough position. I know lots of people who own guns, but they're all reasonable people with reasonable purposes [1] and none of them get covered by the media. The people who get covered are those who belong to self-styled militias, or whose position is that the country has become so dangerous that everyone should carry all the time. They're visually interesting -- much more so than most people whose position is that all civilian guns ought to be taken away -- so they play well on TV. The militia types are interesting in light of Oscar's footnote #5. They're not interested in community building or being supervised, most of them believe that the government(s) are on the verge of imposing some sort of permanent martial law.
[1] One of them is a woman who spent some years doing computer forensics to put child pornographers in jail. At some point, the local police chief approached her and said words to the effect of "We'd be more comfortable if you got a good handgun and learned to use it. Some of the people you helped put in jail are finishing their sentences and have mental health issues. We can't escort you all the time, so we'd like there to be a plan B."
On “Linky Friday #146: Crime & Daeshment”
...then cites RedState being unable to find anyone to run their website for free.
I walked around with a silly smile for most of a day after that particular story broke. I still wonder if anyone pointed out to their faces that the cost of operating RedState being so small relative to the amount of money the big donors and super-PACs had said a great deal about how RedState's views and/or importance were seen.
On “Cracks in the Liberal Order”
Douthat picks Trump's policy positions very carefully, though. From the other side, Trump's a man who has said we wasted four trillion dollars in the Middle East [1], that we should spend more on Social Security and Medicare as currently structured, that US taxes ought to be more progressive, pointed out that the rest of the world has had good experiences with single payer health care, and is okay with affirmative action.
I've become more convinced about the "middle American radical" theory of Trump's support. Douthat doesn't dare accept that, since those people aren't supportive of a whole lot that he thinks are important parts of conservatism in America today.
[1] That's bigger than the biggest estimates I recall seeing from other sources, which was three trillion and was a present value that included money we have yet to spend re-outfitting the armed forces and taking care of veterans.
On “Linky Friday #146: Crime & Daeshment”
Yeah, but like all engineering problems, designed with applications in mind. Certainly there's an arguable case that while civilian long weapons can be used to kill people, that's not what they were designed to do. They're hard to conceal, they're difficult to carry while doing anything else, they're hard to manipulate effectively inside buildings or in most crowded situations, and while they're accurate at long distances you have to go through a clumsy process of aiming them to make use of that. In many cases where someone makes long term plans to use one in a "standard" interior or urban setting, the first thing they do is saw off most of the barrel and stock.
Handguns, not so much.
On “The Montauk Catamaran Company Chronicles, 12/2015: More Help Wanted”
Aside from all the reasons that I've sworn off living anywhere near Long Island, it's a real temptation.
On “Star Wars VII and the Ultra-Real”
But it’s myth made of the stuff our our lives today, rather than the stuff of the lives of Greeks living 2500 years ago.
Is it? The trappings are different, sure, but the story remains the same. Per lots of comments below, the physics in Star Wars is so different than what we understand about how the universe works that "magic" is a better description. Jedi and Sith powers are not that much different in scale than those exhibited by the Greek gods when they're on Earth. Or the powers elves and Norse gods had on Earth in the stories that Tolkien based his work on. Greek heroes sailed between ports in days/weeks/perhaps months. In the Norse stories, they sailed between ports in days/weeks/perhaps months. In Star Wars, they "sail" between ports in... days/weeks/perhaps months. The opening lines may say galaxy, but for practical purposes the scope is the Mediterranean or the North Sea.
There seems to be a rather timeless scale for the stories that most people love.
On “Linky Friday #146: Crime & Daeshment”
On a separate note, the places that often still have mixed used corner stores are also normally noted a ‘food deserts’
The Kroger chain in Denver has opened a full-blown suburban supermarket (sans most of the parking spaces) on the ground floor of a new Lodo development, with a four-story 314-unit apartment complex sitting on top of it. Studio apartments start at just under $1,500 per month. It will be interesting to see how it does.
"
G1: Arapaho opposes the CWR for the same reason most of the Mountain West does: it gives the EPA the implicit authority to shut down the agriculture industry in each of them. Colorado, for example, has on the order of 6,000 miles of irrigation ditches that could be regulated under the rule -- they don't meet the conditions for an exception.
On “Swimming like Frankenstein’s Monster”
This is a wonderful bit of writing, Tod.
Good for you for taking care of yourself. My weight gain came later, and I've never torn up any joints like that, but my knees would be happier if I dropped 30 pounds. Being in my 60s, I think it's harder than ever to make the changes.
On “Weirdos at Work”
My upbringing would be closer to "there's no such thing as demeaning work," I think. Throwing hay bales up on the wagon may be hard, dirty, somewhat dangerous, and not pay for sh*t, but it's not demeaning.
And was mechanized decades ago, because it got to be difficult to find people who would do it for less than the costs of the equipment.
On “Who Will Win the Driverless Car War?”
Bicyclists too. I've had cars in electric mode sneak up behind me at traffic lights. It's not a problem when we're moving at any speed because there's enough tire noise for me to hear them.
"
So here's my example of a hard problem for autonomous cars. It happened to me at least once each session when I was working for the state legislature. Taking a day off during the session isn't really an option, no matter what the weather forecast...
About noon it starts to snow. Hard. By the time I could leave at 4:30 or so, there's eight inches already on everything. Still snowing heavily, so visibility is a couple hundred yards tops. All the main roads are slick as hell because the snow's been packed down before the plows could get out. No lane or other road markings visible. Interstates are parking lots. Lesser-traveled streets are passable, if you know how to start and stop in that much snow. Successful navigation means knowing not just where the roads go in an x-y space, but also knowing where the steeper bits are. I got home in an hour (my neighbor spent four from roughly the same starting point), but that was possible only because I spent years and years learning how to drive in the snow.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.