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"Sure their airplanes take off and ours don't. But our airplanes are much cheaper to manufacture and I swear to god they're going to start flying soon. So we're the real technology leaders."
Maybe Tesla starts doing driverless trips in a year or two and then we can argue about the economics. But so far they haven’t earned the right to make these arguments.
What is the question here? Whether one technology is "better" than other? Or whether Tesla FSD serves some market segment? For the latter isn't it relevant whether there's people for whom Waymo price > WTP Waymo > WTP Tesla FSD > Tesla FSD Price?
Sorry, that's my summary of a common argument among Tesla fans purporting to show that Waymo's approach is a dead end and Tesla is destined to dominate the robotaxi market.
That’s the basis of most product innovation, delivering 80% of the value for 20% of the cost.
Over the medium term, Waymo will look more and more like Tesla rather than the other way around.
Waymo’s stack makes extensive use of modern deep learning techniques.
The goal is not getting this to work with 1 car in 1 place, it's to get it to work with many millions of cars approximately anywhere. Last time I checked both of them seem far from reaching the goal.
Going from one vehicle to many vehicles (or one depot or ops center to many) takes time and money but isn't conceptually difficult. Going from "technology doesn't work" to "technology works" might be very difficult.
Serious question: why are we taking anything Waymo says seriously if they won’t release the data regarding human interventions?
I would like to have that data (and have asked them for it several times) but it can’t possibly be worse than Tesla’s technology, which requires monitoring 100 percent of the time.
i mean, if the argument is that Waymo is *only* "ahead" of Tesla, and not that it's fundamentally differentiated in some technological way...then eventually you have to ask if cost advantage Tesla has being vertically integrated will eventually matter, no? Vertical integration
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Yes.
You just described what naysayers have said about every major technological innovation.
People thought cells phones would go nowhere because of dropped calls. 
The ultimate judge of the peace in this technological bickering is profitability, is Waymo profitable? We don't know and there's no way to guesstimate. It's a black box.
At stated, yes, sometimes people do correctly argue that the much cheaper but less advanced technology is going to win out through quicker adoption and scaling, and hope to deliver missing features later. Not sure it applies here though.
don't worry, you still have the CEO alienating at least half of the consumer base that should help
You're right the argument seems spurious.
But, in principle, one can make a nuanced argument about how close two approaches are to some Pareto/tradeoff boundary.
In some rare cases the currently-worse approach is actually ahead in some longer-term sense.
Show me those Waymo videos on some non-urban core winter driving. I want that 2-4 hour trip that might not justify a flight and makes all that fixed rail investment look stupid. Not a taxi in a place I have no desire to live.
It sounds like the robotaxi company and the cars-for-purchase company are both making the correct tradeoff for their respective business models.
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So I generally agree with your argument… This was the first steel man. I’ve heard that resonated with me: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inv
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Sourced from across X
my cofounder presented a study that showed teenagers learn better if they can sleep in a little more, and the school came back with “well we can’t adjust it now, we have a contract with the bus drivers”
oh, so the school is for the benefit of the bus drivers??
much like the
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Lomez
@L0m3z
The dread of school could be mitigated 75% by just letting kids sleep in. Teenagers need so much more sleep and without adequate amounts turn into depressive, irritable basket cases.
When I am education czar, the kids are going to get their sleep x.com/captivedreamer…
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I am flabbergasted by how people who manage to owe more on their student loans after two decades than the original principal deal with other loans
Do you just make minimum payments on your credit card too and then wonder why the numbers get bigger every month?
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Laura Miers
@LauraMiers
Americans with student loans are out here begging people to listen because we are spending DECADES paying on these loans, but the balances never move. I have paid my entire loan balance from 2006 + $10,000, & I still owe more than the original loan. THIS IS CALLED USURY, & it is
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With decades of law enforcement experience, including leadership roles in safety and autonomous vehicle policy, Gary McCarthy, our Head of First Responder Policy, brings invaluable expertise to the 's (AVIA) Law Enforcement and First Responder Engagement Council.
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Off to the pub after I community noted the Supreme Leader of Iran 
