> when they closed down all the mental institutions.
Why on earth did we do this?
I look back at period pieces - films showcasing the 40s, 50s, etc., and it seems like mental institutions would be a wonderful way to house these folks and keep them fed and warm.
I know there were abuses, but we have cameras now. And that's surely better than leaving them on the streets to freeze to death.
I can't imagine it would cost that much, and it would clean up the streets of drugs and homelessness. And reduce the tax on emergency services responding to calls.
I feel so bad for what we as a society do to these people. When my city closed down the local homeless shelter in midtown, the people on Reddit - supposedly leftists - cheered. I was so sad. These are the same people that call me fascist all the time for being a fiscal moderate and saying we shouldn't build subway to the suburbs. Being humanitarian would cost 1/10,000th of that.
>I look back at period pieces - films showcasing the 40s, 50s, etc., and it seems like mental institutions would be a wonderful way to house these folks and keep them fed and warm
I'm reading this comment as if you had written:
"The TV show Hogan's Heroes makes being a prisoner of war sound like a jolly good time."
Much has been written about this, but from what little I know, they were abusive, and didn't do the job well. And were abused to keep sane people in.
I've heard that the advent of better drugs was also a factor. Prior to those drugs, there was no alternative other than commitment to mental facilities. The drugs gave the promise of a more manageable life - either by the patient or by their family.
What did we replace them with? Prisons.
About 20 years ago I saw a documentary about the use of prisons as a means to get mental health care. It explored the history that led to mental institutions getting shut down, and how prisons are treating the mentally ill. As crazy as it sounds, the prisons are doing a better job - even the inmates agree. Quite a few inmates said that the biggest problem they had was that they would be released from prison and not get access to the care they were receiving (including medications).
It wasn't trying to paint a rosy picture - they actually said this is, in one sense, an abuse of the prison system and that there needs to be a better way to treat them - but the consensus was "Definitely should not revert to the prior mental institutions!"
If you take the average person who doesn’t have a mental illness and has no relationship with anyone who does, the system we have is pretty well optimized for their needs.
We balance many difficult and inherently conflicting goals, such as:
1) minimizing treatment, which is expensive and does have bad side effects
2) sufficiently good access to treatment where it’s economical for prevention
3) fear of being wrongly hospitalized (error, political motivation, etc.)
4) sufficient ability to lock other people up for frightening or violent behavior in public
It’s a tough problem, but I think the tradeoffs are managed near optimally, granting that the rights and interests of the mentally ill don’t matter at all to most public officials or voters.
Except that those same people then complain about how many homeless people there are.
Reagan's destruction of the mental health system was really awful. The system needed improvement and more accountability, but we need it.
I had an adult step-brother too ill with schizophrenia to be cared for at home (he began making violent threats and stealing things, up to and including my mom's car), but under the current threshold for being compelled to take his medication. My mom (his step-mom; an attorney) spent years trying to find ways to get him help, but he bounced in and out of being homeless and ended up being murdered at about age 60 in a halfway house. Just a stupid, tragic waste of a life and all of the resources mis-allocated.
Sadly, it's just another example of how the US is penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to social services.
I also personally know the waste, stupidity, and cruelty of these situations. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the voters know what they want, and preventing these terrible outcomes is not worth the cost to them.
Despite city dwellers hating on cars and wanting complete streets, cars are poised to win even bigger when self driving becomes widespread.
Our roads and highways will metamorphose into logistics corridors and optimal public transit systems.
Everything will be delivered same hour. The cost of this will drop and entire new business models will be built on top of the "direct to you" model.
Self-driving cars will replace public transit. They connect every destination on demand. Short hops, cross-country long-haul. Waymo alikes will become cheaper than the city bus.
Van life will accelerate. People will live in their automated vans and SUVs. They'll become luxury and status items for knowledge workers who are constantly conveying themselves coast to coast, from cozy fire pits by the sea to hidden mountain getaways. Life in America will become one of constant travel, because we can take our life with us without lifting a finger. People will have large home bases in the affordable suburbs - possibly one on each coast. They'll wine and dine in the city, then be off to hike the next day.
Life will turn into adventure and it'll be accessible to almost everyone. Rich, poor. Young, old. Busy, retired.
Nobody will lift a finger for any of this.
We're going to want more roads.
Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
> Bikes don't stand a chance. They're inequitable. Old people, pregnant people, sick people, and children are all left out. They suck in the rain and the snow. You can't move anything of size or scale.
I would invite you to come and have a look in the Netherlands. It’s very common for octogenarians to cycle. My wife cycled up to the day of the birth of our daughter. Children have more independence because they can cycle to football practice on their own. Bike lanes are great for mobility scooters. It rains here, a lot! And it snows. I picked up our Christmas tree with our cargo bike. When I need to transport anything larger I will book a carshare, which are dotted around our neighbourhood.
There are two main reasons for what you describe: very flat terrain in Netherlands and people living in multi-family buildings mostly. Thus people don't ride any substantial distance according to Netherland's own statistics [1] and don't physically exert while doing so.
In the US average commute is 42 miles daily, that's over 67 km, or more than two weeks of riding a Dutch 12-18 y.o. does, or a month of riding of a Dutch 35-50 y.o. I'd like to invite any Dutch, who believes it's the same in the US, to ride 67km daily for 5 days straight, even in their own flat neighborhood. It might enlighten them why cyclists elsewhere wear special clothes too! And this is without hills...
European weather is still mild relative to the US. It will be so long as the Gulf Stream doesn't shut down.
Americans are fatter and less healthy.
Americans are busy and work longer and harder. ("Work hard, play hard.")
Americans buy more stuff. Big stuff. Lots of stuff. Frequently. (This is actually a superpower of our consumer economy.)
We have invested hundreds of trillions of dollars in our infrastructure. We might be able to put in a bike land here or there in a majorly dense city or two, but we're not changing all of this.
And more than anything else, America is fucking huge.
I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us. The proponents in the US trying to make it happen misunderstand the fundamental differences.
Just five years ago I would have said you were selling a monorail fantasy or sight to the blind to us. And an unfortunate few in the US were lapping it up as something we could actually do.
Now that self driving is finally arriving, what I'm saying is that our future is even brighter than most countries. We have the road infra to really make this magic.
I can wake up one day, make my coffee, hop into my car with my wife, and through no effort of my own, wind up at a mountain resort. No security checkpoints. No hassle packing. No screaming babies. We can listen to music, read, cuddle. It's our own space taking us wherever we want at complete and total leisure, affordably, comfortably, privately. We can even detour for food or whatever.
It's going to be pure magic. As big a revolution as the internet was.
> I know you Europeans love your model, but it doesn't apply to us.
lol. You're what we call "carbrained".
Explain how the climate of the coastal West coast is unsuitable for year-round bicycling. Much of it is nicer than the Netherlands and has several times the population.
That's because you're using planned economy principles for your cities.
Remove all zoning but for industrial zoning, and remove prop 13, like it is in most of Europe, and the invisible hand of the market will transform most of cities into medium-density mixed-use like in Europe, though in your case likely accomplished with 5-over-1s instead.
And with increased density, maybe you'd even have space for some public parks again.
You do realize most of the US doesn't live on the West coast, right?
Your sampling is skewed.
It's been freezing cold here and any destination within our major city you want to reach is 30+ minutes away by bike.
The "carbrained" insult is so stupid, btw. Once autonomous vehicles are commonplace you'll either come around or be complaining about it nonstop. Car usage is going to 2-10x.
I cannot fathom the bleak pessimistic perspective of wanting fixed trains and busses over this. Crying babies, rude people.
American transit sucks and it's not getting better. It's tolerable in cities like NYC, but even so it's a far cry from Asia. If you're not American, please don't project. We'll never have that here. We are not dense enough for it.
I don't think this is a crazy take, but it is missing two big factors that self driving maximalists often ignore.
First is the cost of driving. A reasonable rule of thumb is $0.50/mile all in (i.e. including depreciation, repairs, gas, etc) -- you can get down to half that pretty easily and maybe a little lower, but especially if you're spending tons of time in this car you're probably going to want a nice comfy one, which will cost more and depreciate faster. So, these trips you're imagining everyone taking constantly are not going to be accessible to most people. Cars are already the second biggest expense in most Americans' budgets, one which scales with mileage, and which self driving would only increase (have to pay for the lidar, on-device compute, whatever remote service handled edge cases, etc).
The second thing your predictions miss is geometry. Despite the decades of predictions about self-driving cars being able to run safely at much higher speeds and with much tighter tolerances than human-run cars, the tyranny of geometry and stopping distances (which actually won't change much even with millisecond reaction times) means that throughput of car lanes is unlikely to change much (though we could all imagine top-down infrastructural changes helping this a lot, eg coordinated self driving cars and smart roads, those seem unlikely to land anytime soon given American political inclinations). Imagine how spaced-out people are on the highway -- in each lane, 1.6 people (average car occupancy) every football field (300 feet -- safe stopping distance at 70mph). If you're trying to go anywhere more densely packed than that -- e.g., a city, a restaurant, a ball game -- you're going to start to run into capacity constraints. Mass transit, walking, and cycling all can manage an order of magnitude higher throughput.
So while I think your prediction -- that self driving cars will increase demand for road space -- is right, the valence that takes for me is much more negative. The wealthy will be able to take up way more space on the road (e.g., one car each dropping off each kid at each extra curricular activity), condemning the poor to even worse traffic (especially the poor who cannot afford a self driving vehicle, who will not even be able to play candy crush while they're waiting in this traffic). People will continue to suburbanize and atomize, demanding their governments pay for bigger and bigger roads and suburbs, despoiling more of the areas you'd like to hike in, with debt that will keep rolling over to the next generation. Bikes and peds will continue to be marginalized as the norm for how far apart people live will continue to grow, making it even more impossible and dangerous to get anywhere without a car. I hope I'm wrong but this is how mass motorization played out the first time, in the post-war period, and if anything our society is less prepared now to oppose the inequitable, race-to-the-bottom, socialize-your-externalities results of that phase of development.
A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person.
They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world.
Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front.
Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business.
They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web.
To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us.
Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed.
Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads.
Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this.
Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too.
Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics.
This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
I'm glad 95% of URL bars don't just default to Google Search and immediately get hit by ad bidding war taxes. Would certainly suck if you had a well-recognized brand and just wanted your customers to access your website through the URL bar.
72% Chrome --> Google
15% Safari --> Google
5% Edge --> Bing
2% Firefox --> Google
2% Opera --> Google
...
This alone implies a divestiture of Chrome should be in the cards.
Or maybe Google would be so kind to remove queries with URL bar origination from ad sales if there's a registered trademark (within some edit distance) within the query?
In mobile I have been upset by the way AOSP is being deprioritised by Google and the fact they've increasingly moved features into Google play services.
In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors.
In the search space though,
competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed.
Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.
Thing thing that gets me about people who complain about google (generally, not in just the tech bubble), is that 95% of the people complaining have used Google for decades, maybe even spending 2% of their waking life using a Google product...
and have never paid Google a single penny for anything.
That's why Google is so dominant. That's why they are so skilled at data collection. The built a system that converts user data into dollars, so users don't have to pay. And users love, absolutely love, like their first born child and high school sweetheart combined into one, not having to pay for things.
Google is not the reason google sucks. People's unwillingness to compensate for services they use is. And before you comment with how you use Kagi, and Nebula, and Patreon. Yes, thank you. You are in the <0.1% of internet users who get it.
Maybe not directly but if hotels and the like have to pay 15% of their turnover to Google for ads to get visitors, either directly or via booking.com etc, then you end up paying that when you stay there.
That kind of stuff is where Google's billions come from.
Government is not the solution, government is the problem. There is no such thing as a healthy functioning regulatory body - they all regulate too much and some should not exist. Don't call your legislator because the most dangerous words in the English language are, "I'm from the goevrnment and I'm here to help."
The majority of the employees, in particular top management, is Swedish.
2/9 on the board are Chinese (same as Swedes). The rest are westerners.
Volvo produces more cars in Sweden than Apple produces iPhones etc in the US.
But you are correct that ownership of the company is majority Chinese (Li Shufu/Geely specifically) and they can control a lot.
Apple's ownership is more muddy, since the largest owners are big institutional (US) owners - mostly representing owners from who knows where through big funds (including index funds). I think it's fair to say that Apple is owned very globally. In that sense it's not US controlled, but globally controlled.
I think Volvo is still very Swedish, including its products, but also heavily Chinese influenced (and trending up) due to market challenges.
There's probably still some value in associating a large multi national company to a specific country and attributing it certain things due to that, but with these big companies it's becoming less so and definitely more complex. But saying that Volvo is fully Chinese and not Swedish anymore? That seems like fooling oneself.
These are neat in that you can jump on and extend existing wifi infra, but it'd be nice if they also included 5G. I want a product that does both.
It's cool to have your own network in a hotel. But it'd be nice to be able to do that on the road, away from public wifi, internationally, whenever - which hotspots do. But at the same time, it'd be nice to be able to do the WiFi thing too to cut back on data usage. I frequently blow through my hotspot data.
I'd rather this be in one device instead of two. Beggars can't be choosers, though, I suppose?
I’m using a GLinet GL-XE3000 for that and it’s great. Initial setup of the 5G eSIM on a physical SIM took a little searching but it’s been rock solid and having consistent access on the road and hotels has been great for family travel. It has a built-in battery, but I’ve never really tested the duration (I suspect it’s 3-6 hours) as I put it on its AC adapter in the hotel and the n a cigarette lighter adapter in the car, so the battery gets used 15-45 minutes at a time to bridge between those two places.
I like it enough that I might buy a second, more compact unit for when space is more a premium, but I’ve been really happy with this one.
I bought that specific model to provide connectivity for our robotics team’s pit computers. For this need, good antenna performance is key, since different venues differ wildly in WiFi and cell coverage and when we setup the evening before comps, I want the best chance of getting a solid connection and offering it to the pit LAN.
But now that I have it, the device is handy for family travel as well. Put an unlimited data eSIM in the device and everyone has “unlimited” data n the road and when we arrive at a hotel or AirBnB, one person signs it on to wifi and everyone is connected, including tailscale connections to home.
If I was doing personal and work travel only, I’d look for a smaller unit, but still with a decent battery.
> Today, langchain and langgraph have a combined 90M monthly downloads, and 35 percent of the Fortune 500 use our services
What? This seems crazy. Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see the long term billion dollar business op here.
Leftpad also had those stats, iirc.
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