I grew up in suburbs, and the mail carrier did what you describe. That’s because it wasn’t one of those perfect little suburban housing development places. It was just houses with yards. And we all had our mailboxes up on the house, not out by the street. They had to walk up to our porch anyway, might as well walk to the neighbor while they’re already out of the truck.
By contrast, look at this place.
I found it by just zooming in on New Jersey randomly in Google Maps because I knew such a place would exist there. So so many houses, all evenly spaced, in a maze, and they all have their mailboxes up on the street. Given this arrangement, I see no better way to deliver here other than driving from box to box and just reaching out the window. Even riding a different vehicle, like a cargo bike, you would still go from box to box. Getting out and walking here is going to be very inefficient. Not getting out of the truck also means the mail carrier can avoid hazards like cartoon dogs that like to bite them in the ass.
Small, efficient(both in terms to delivery and on fuel - they run pretty much all day on five litres), still fast enough to ride on the road when you need to(or outrun a cartoon dog), relatively all-terrain, easy to train people on, and with the pannier bags, you can carry basically an entire suburb’s worth of mail pretty easily.
And it’s a proven solution, the former has already been in use for decades, and the latter is new, but has passed it’s trials and real-world implementation with flying colours.
It would, yes - but I can’t imagine it’s much better getting in and out of a truck that’s spending much of it’s time open, like they currently do, so can’t maintain heat. You can always wrap up in cold-weather gear, I’d think - I mean, motorbike riders already do.
That said, wrapping up warm wouldn’t make snow and ice on the ground go away, which could present a problem, not so sure about that. But I figure folks there are experienced enough with that sort of shit - certainly more than me - to figure something out.
Don’t electric powered cars and stuff have issues with cold weather before gas powered stuff? Or is that just a myth?
Honestly yeah, I see a few problems with it but none seem insurmountable. I maintain I’m a fan of electric mail trikes.
Here in the city seems like our model is, more smaller post offices acting as hubs allowing postal routes themselves to be walked with a non powered little cart.
Not a myth by any means, but there are ways around it, battery heaters, and so on. Large batteries already need cooling, after all, so you can also use that to maintain the temp in cold weather, I’d think.
And yeah, the trikes are really good! They do have a few drawbacks - they’re less suitable for the regular post deliveries, due to the difference in duty cycle before you have to head back to recharge - but for the more targeted nature of small package delivery, they’re perfect.
That’s similar to how we do, but just replace the cart with the bikes. Like, my local post office will collect all the mail for this area, collected and sorted already, which is then picked up by the postie(s) on the bike(s), while smaller packages are picked up by posties on trikes from the same spot.
While I would personally declare the whole restaurant a public nuisance, it’s pretty funny that just their drive-thru alone could cause this much damage.
That is an badass move by that person, but also suuuuper dangerous as the people involved in these stupid “convoys” are the same type of people eager to have an excuse to commit vehicular assault & homicide against protestors.
The CEO, no, that’s silly. I mean, if your code crashes, do you expect the CEO of your company to take the heat even though he’s never seen it or laid hands on it?
It’s the company as a legal entity is taking legal responsibility, as is reasonable. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not sure how individual liability will break down between people working on the project, but it’s safe to assume the company itself will be responsible for all damages, payouts, etc for any accident or incident resulting from the driver assist system. It cannot, obviously, go to jail, however who goes to jail at the company(if anyone does, and that’s a big if) that worked on the project is a question for a legal professional.
It’s actually a bigger thing than you think - to this point, companies have treated that responsibility like Kryptonite, even to the point, in some cases, of claiming that the accident didn’t happen while Autopilot was engaged, because the system decided the situation was unrecoverable and turned itself off milliseconds to seconds before the crash. Depending on how things shake out, it could be a huge upheaval in the AV industry.
If that crash is directly responsible for the premature death of a human being, yes. Clearly, the current law does not allow for that. And yes, that CEO isn’t directly responsible. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about creating rules/laws to achieve certain goals within our society.
If the people who run companies are held personally responsible for the harms caused by those companies, we will see companies doing less harm. As long as a company can poison an entire town and only face a penalty of fines, even large ones, we’re going to keep seeing companies poison towns. If the board of directors faces personal ruin if their company does substantial harm, you can be sure as fuck they are not going to let their company release any product that isn’t extremely safe.
Structure the law carefully so that doesn’t happen. Just one quick idea, you could create a direct linkage between how much money people are making as employees and/or shareholders with the amount of responsibility they are for the crimes the company commits. Do they still want to put up a fall guy? They’re going to have to give them a lot of money and shares. Oh, and now I guess that fall guy is literally in charge now since they have so many shares.
Back to the original story. So Mercedes accepts responsibility of there’s a problem with this system. Given the current actual state of law, I assume that means they’ll just be financially responsible for damage to the car, and damage the car causes, if it’s in the automatic driving mode.
If there is a crash some investigator will come and determine if the car was in that mode, or not, at the time of the crash. Could someone tamper with the car such that it will report it was in that mode, even if it wasn’t? Could they do it in a way that investigators would not realize tampering had occurred? Taken to the extreme conclusion. You can already murder someone with a car and get away with it. Will you now be able to intentionally murder someone with a Mercedes and have the company take the fall?
I assure you, playing it out was never part of this Quixotic windmill-tilt of a thread.
Yes, because that’s fucking absurd. The law doesn’t allow for it because it doesn’t allow you to arbitrarily punish people you don’t like, for things they didn’t do, and had no actual responsibility for.
Then find me one. Find me an automaker CEO who ordered their employees to build death machines. And I mean, that order - not any equivocation about how “Oh, but they’re effectively this” or “But what really happened in my opinion was that”, I mean actually ordered them to build death machines, in those words, or close enough to for a person on the street to understand it without needing it explained. Hell, Automotive CEOs don’t even direct what cars are being build or developed, that’s way further down the chain, so I’m sure it’s going to be a fun search.
