245 Comments

Would love to read a series going position-by-position through the cabinet to talk about what levers for progress they can actually pull. Between DOT's scope, energy's arms oversight, and interior's NA affairs I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what each position could do. And you've been a rare font of positivity about the future lately.

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I will add to this, given DoE's actual focus on the nuclear weapons arsenal, I was really befuddled by the early focus from outlets like Politico that Granholm as Secretary of Energy was a smart pick since she has worked closely with the automotive industry and Biden wants to work with them to electrify the vehicle fleet.

As I understand it, DoE has next to no role to play in things like encouraging vehicle emission standards (That's EPA) and no role in electric charging station deployment (But that could be DOT through grants). So I think a Matt write up on DoE is necessary to explain if there's more to this, or if Granholm slots alongside Vilsack and others as really bad picks to reward washed up Democrats from the 2000s.

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I know DOE does some work in battery technology?

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Yes, some, and no one will complain about squeezing out gains in electric vehicle battery technology. But there's a much bigger challenge in EV adoption through consumer sales and building out the infrastructure of charging stations, something DOE has historically played very little role with.

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Also Commerce, where the largest single agency is NOAA because Nixon hated his Secretary of the Interior. One third of Commerce's budget is ocean research, weather forecasting, and the like.

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1/3 . . . wow. Sounds like an org tree of the Fed Gov that highlights where departments are vs. where they ought to be would be helpful.

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I work in federal interagency coordination, and can tell you that the randomness of where individual program offices lie is even more strange that you could imagine. It’s why 99.99% of people commenting on whether person x is “qualified” to run a particular agency are completely out of their depth. You have to know all the different things these agencies do, and where the cross cutting capacities align. The one-word title of the agency doesn’t tell you much. And Secretary’s are not subject matter experts — they need to have the ability to 1) advocate and represent administration priorities for their department in public speaking engagements; 2) understand the political levers and resource pools they need to manipulate within their organization, across the interagency, and with congress so they can advance those objectives. That’s basically it! It’s a rare talent, and Pete has it. You know it when you see it.

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I think there's a lot to dig into with that "ought to be" as well. I think a big part of the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 was about "fixing" what some people saw as a problem that the State Department, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and Department of Commerce each had different parts of the immigration portfolio. But it's not clear that the new arrangement is in fact any better.

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Ooh I would also love this

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Cannot understand the intensity of the Mayor Pete hate from young people ( I went to a rally for him and it was funny how rule following -- no line cutting -- and pretty normie the crowd was, while my husband, who went with me because it was Valentine's Day was a little worried about how it impacted his reputation). I wish him luck and hope somehow we get better bike lanes since we're not likely to get significantly better mass transit and I hate driving a car in traffic.

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My young peers who like Mayor Pete are nice sincere people, and it's making me wonder if the online Twitter crowd hates people who just play by the rules and try hard. Were some people cheering for Cedric Diggory to die because they hate Huffplepuff so much? I don't get it.

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It's a weird intraclass thing specific to the 20 or so schools that produce all the McKinsey consultants but also most of the leftist political commentators

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online left Twitter crowd is largely people who were art kids and/or burnouts in high school -- who might have been smart but didn't want to play the game. Pete meanwhile was in student government, entered essay contests, and was valedictorian (which these days means more figuring out how to game the GPA system rather than just academic excellence). It's not just that he worked hard and played by the rules, but that this type of person always really works the rules.

These two groups are natural enemies. Most people grow out of their high school cliques but extremely online people seem not to -- not sure which way the causation goes there.

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I feel like this analysis requires specific common names to be associated with each personality type, like that article about Karens the other week in the Times. Like, the valedictorian is a Josh, and the antiestablishmentarian is Kate.

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A lot of young progressives take issue with the rules he played by with McKinsey. Corporate downsizing, offshoring, and other policies that have served a small group in this country.

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Has there been any good reporting on what he actually did at McKensey? I feel like most people who talk about his McKinsey experience act as if he did the worst things that McKinsey does (and they do a lot of bad things), but it's a big company that does lots of stuff, some of which is pretty harmless

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They dislike anyone that ran against Bernie, they think anyone associated with the CIA is both evil and has magical powers, and they dislike anyone who’s gay but doesn’t act like it as not promoting intersectionality.

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I think Pete is an exceptional communicator, and actually a very good strategic planner. (One of my lukewarm takes is that Joe Biden's nomination actually confirmed that Pete's calculus in early 2015 to pivot rhetorically to the center was the correct calculation.) But his communication style isn't combative enough to inspire the online, idealistic youth in a partisan age when they're spoiling for a fighter. Maybe that changes as the political climate evolves in 5-10 years. For now, I think a cabinet position is a great spot for him to apply his talents to, I think he'll take a comprehensive and innovative approach to the issues he's able to deal with, and I wish him nothing but success.

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I think the 'rule following' thing is the thing, to be honest! I think someone observed that Mayor Pete is the kind of person who makes your grandparents say 'what a nice young man', and that inspires a lot of resentment; he's clean-cut and a veteran and religious and monogamously married and went to Harvard and speaks however many languages and made a big political point of having returned to his hometown and was elected mayor at like 28; a lot of people might have felt like we were being told to see ourselves in him, and we didn't. He doesn't have visible rough edges.

(It's relevant though that he was a gay man running for president, and how much freedom he would have had to be himself isn't very clear – at one point the NYT did rapid-fire interviews with the candidates where as a light-hearted fluff question at the end they asked everyone their celebrity crush, and Buttigieg demurred. That's when I (also gay) felt the most idpol/solidarity-politics about his candidacy – it felt like we still have a ways to go before full acceptance. Still, even a lot of LGBT people, myself included, were pretty ambivalent about his candidacy, a phenomenon which maybe needs more analysis.)

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I think this is right- dude was the talk of the retirement-age crowd in rural Iowa when I visited there last year in exactly that “what a nice young man” way that you describe.

A lot of people are viscerally annoyed by that shit, and the McKinsey/CIA narrative runs right through the middle of that annoyance because it suggests something more malignant than a garden variety pleaser.

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I think there is a corollary here about young people and Bernie. His seeming lifelong consistent world view is an appealing vision to those who are young and want to believe that the answers they have found will not change as they age, but less appealing to people who have aged and had some of their views modified by how they stack up against life experience.

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This post alone was worth the subscription. Thanks!

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I agree, I did like it a lot and made me happy I subscribed. (Not that the other posts were bad.)

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I was thinking the same thing. (Though I guess one doesn't have to subscribe to read this post.)

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Yeah, I agree--this kind of stuff is the deciding factor in spending $80 a year on a one-person newsletter vs. spending that to get 2-3 bundles of 20-30 writers

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Ah see I meant my comment earnestly though.

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I agree with Jeff

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Dialogue!

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I'm confused--did you interpret my comment to be not earnest? I am sincerely saying that I'd rather pay the price of this substack than 2-3 magazine/newspaper subscriptions because of posts like this (which is why I'm here and not elsewhere)

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20-30 mediocre, kind of stupid writers? I'm good. I unsubscribed from New York Mag the other day. (I would consider paying Chait though.)

And subscriptions to places like the NYTimes are for excellent reporting, not "writers."

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Nominally related but people might be interested - fascinating episode of 99% Invisible called “Missing the Bus” on how just revitalizing the city bus could “do away with traffic jams, make cities more equitable, and help us solve climate change”. (https://castbox.fm/vd/227493439)

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Good recommendation. Also highlights the point I was making that the federal government is just not the central player here. Cities could improve their bus service if they wanted to, it's not a DC issue.

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While cities can improve normal bus service on their own, DC *is* needed in most cases to fund Bus Rapid Transit projects. BRT is far more cost effective than subway, even if you can get the cost of subway construction down (for that matter, if you can get the cost of subway construction down, so too can you reduce the cost of BRT construction). Aside from that, BRT projects can have huge streetscape benefits - subways are just a hole in the ground. Pete Buttigieg probably knows a bit about BRT since there's a new, pretty nice one in Indianapolis.

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Why should DC fund local Bus projects rather than the citizens of the city / region that live there? The nationalization of so many local issues strikes me as odd.

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I'm referring to the capital costs required to build dedicated bus-based infrastructure (buses, stations, dedicated right-of-way), just as the feds fund a portion of the capital costs of road & rail infrastructure. Is it all of these capital expenditures that you object to the feds paying? Perhaps I agree that there's a case to be made for all transportation infrastructure $$ coming out of states' budgets.

But bus infrastructure should be treated the same as road and rail, at whatever level of government. Bus operating costs are a different question altogether and should almost always (except maybe in Covid times!) be a local cost.

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There's a stronger argument for federal funding of highways and rail, given that those methods of transport form part of a broader network that support interstate passenger and freight traffic. Local bus/light rail/subway systems usually don't cross state lines, or if they do it's 2-3 states max (Metro, PATH, PATCO). I'm not sure why states can't build their own local transit infrastructure, and in some cases reliance on federal funding can create weird incentives.

The MBTA (Boston)'s Green Line light rail extension that Matt recently shared a case study on had its early planning botched partly due to a rush to acquire federal funding, contributing to later cost increases. From the MBTA's perspective it's better for it to pay half of a $3 billion project, with the feds picking up the other half, than to pay all of a $2 billion project, but that's clearly not the best outcome for the public at large.

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City streets don't cross state lines either. They're only parts of a broader network in exactly the same way that buses are, except that since sometimes an individual vehicle moves from the city street to the interstate, people treat it as a network, but when an individual human moves from the city bus to the airplane, people treat it as a completely separate trip.

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Mission creep abounds in road and rail, also. But there is some rationale that says railroads and Interstate highways get national funding due to their impact on interstate commerce.

But adding bus routes in downtown Miami should be funded by Miami residents, not people living in Kansas City.

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I'm sure you're aware the federal government enjoys a much greater degree of fiscal freedom of action than local and state governments. So, whether national dollars should be used (at least in part) to fund transit or regional transport needs really boils down to whether or to what extent we as a nation value these things. If we do value them, it makes sense to tap a more robust and reliable source of funding.

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Why do commuter railroads and commuter highways have any more impact on interstate commerce than commuter bus routes? This seems to be an attempt to launder away subsidies to commuters by putting a tiny smattering of interstate travelers onto the commuter routes, which buses just can't even pretend to do.

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I know it's not a DC issue, but I've often wondered to what extent the differing levels of commitment on the part of different national governments play a role in "America as transit desert" (compared to other high income countries). I remember doing a bit of googling one time to compare funding levels between NYC's transit and the equivalent in London, and came away with the impression that Transport for London enjoys much more robust support from the UK government than NYC or other US metro regions receive from Washington.*

Given the enormous cost (especially in America) and complexity of having really solid rail transit (I realize good bus service can be done more cheaply), I suspect it's simply not going to happen in the USA, absent a political sea change that results in a new national consensus on the importance of transit (and indeed HSR), and a resulting increase in dollars from the federal government. I fear this may be especially true in the United States given the reality of financial crowding out effects from the black hole that is state-level healthcare spending.

Anyway, I keep reading that the US has unmet infrastructure needs to the tune of $2 trillion. So, I'd like to see the federal government start plowing an extra one percent of GDP (a bit over 200 billion) annually into this sector, with a healthy share going toward transit and HSR. It's an eminently reasonable number for an economy as large as America's.

*Again, this is my hunch, though I could well be wrong. Maybe the transit systems of London, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin and Seoul really *don't* get much support from their respective national governments.

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“ London, and came away with the impression that Transport for London enjoys much more robust support from the UK government than NYC or other US metro regions receive from Washington.*”

The UK has generally been incredibly centralized. Mayor of all London is a new post within the past two decades (as opposed to the mayor of the City of London which is ancient) and is mostly ceremonial. The British Parliament has literally had over a decade of debate over plans to expand Heathrow airport, as an example. Parliament is routinely involved in things that the Federal government in the US would never deal with.

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It's also probably not surprising that the UK has also seen more demands for autonomy as its centralized. The SNP came out of nowhere after the independence referendum, and there's been a lot of devolution not only in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland but in England as well. Parliament now is involved in a weird mixture of hyper-local and national issues

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No, the SNP was the ruling party in Scotland from 2007--that's why there was an independence referendum.

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Here's the Overcast link if anyone, like me and I think Matthew, uses Overcast! https://overcast.fm/+DDs9qUw

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Good post! Thanks for linking to my article about self-driving cars.

In the arena of self-driving cars, the key agency is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has taken a strongly hands-off approach under Trump. A few things a Biden NHTSA might do are (1) revise the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to revise provisions that currently reply every car to have a steering wheel, mirrors, airbags, etc. that might not make sense for driverless (and possibly passengerless) cars. (2) beef up regulation of driver-assistance systems like Tesla's Autopilot to require driver monitoring or other safety capabilities. (3) Require more reporting of testing activities and accident rates for self-driving cars. Eventually they'll probably want to draft new safety standards for driverless cars but right now it's not clear what those rules might look like and I doubt they'll be finished in Biden's first term.

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A ton of shareholder value currently exists entirely based on the lies about how a self-driving car breakthrough has been right around the corner (like it has been for the last decade). I hope that the NHTSA starts actually cracking down there because at this point Tesla is getting people killed by calling its lane-assist and adaptive cruise control "self driving" and people believing them.

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I agree that Tesla is exaggerating its capabilities. But self-driving car breakthroughs do seem to be right around the corner! Waymo is running a driverless taxi service now and a bunch of companies both in the US and China seem to be pretty close. I don't know exactly what the timetable will look like but I think we're much closer than we were 10 years ago.

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Waymo's driverless taxi service is (still) a publicity stunt. You know why their service is limited to a few select Phoenix suburbs? Because they can't reliably drive when it is raining*. So the service really only works in one of the most arid climates in the country. This blog post from the founder of the failed self-driving truck company, Starsky Robotics, really hits the nail on the head: https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5 - There's a serious s-curve with the development of self-driving technology, and the place where the advancement levels out is just way too far below what is needed to achieve safe self-driving (except in sparse, car-oriented suburbs that average 9 inches of rainfall a year).

Really, the biggest problem with self-driving car technology is that the 95% of driving is completely mundane to the degree that you could almost do full self-driving with just lane assist and cruise control, but the other 5% is so incredibly novel that you basically need to invent Strong AI to be able to effectively solve them. (Or worse, you just decide to release a Level 3 system where it can probably do everything but you need a human driver to be completely attentive and ready to take over at a second's notice when the car inevitably encounters something it wasn't trained for, completely defeating the purpose of self-driving cars.) Waymo thinks that they can just throw more model training at the problem to make it go away, but at this point they're burning massive amounts of energy and computing power into ever-diminishing returns.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/technology/self-driving-cars-coronavirus.html

Who knows if we'll ever see any self-driving cars at the level these companies have been promising. I sincerely doubt it, but I could be wrong. What I do know is, attempting to do any transportation policy planning that expects the eventual existence of self-driving cars would be like doing energy policy that expects cold fusion.

* I had an interesting conversation with an engineer from Google a few years back, discussing the rain thing. I asked if it that problem was because the LIDAR systems couldn't see see pedestrians through the rain or something. He said no, the problem wasn't the LIDAR not being able to see pedestrians through raindrops. It was the system thinking that every single raindrop was a pedestrian.

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It's true that Waymo puts safety drivers into its cars when it's raining. But I don't think that's a sign that rain is an insolvably difficult problem for self-driving cars. Even in a rainstorm, the car generally has a good idea of where objects are around itself.

Waymo is just a big, cautious company trying to take things one step at a time. So for its first few months of operation it's limiting itself to a completely optimal operating environment of "sunny day in the Phoenix suburbs." There's no reason to think they'll get stuck there.

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We'll see. I'll say that if they are still only operating in those conditions two years from now, it's a good sign that they aren't going to get over the hurdle. (And if they are able to expand their operating conditions/environments before then, I'll come back here and reply to admit I was wrong.)

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Fair enough! They have been improving more slowly than I expected a couple of years ago, and I can definitely imagine other companies passing them by.

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I personally believe the issues with weather are overstated because people are forgetting about nighttime driving, which is also hard with cameras and also happens in Phoenix - plus I’ve personally seen their cars operate at night in the Bay Area (where they stick to one corner of Los Altos for some reason).

But it’s definitely important and they should not just be testing it in simulation. I really think self driving cars are overrated because they’re still cars though… cars are bad!

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What about snow? Or is that just a no-go.

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I don't think anyone has "solved" snow yet. There are actually two issues with snow. One is that it makes the roads slippery. The other is that it makes everything look different. It'll take extra work to deal with both of them but I don't see any reason to think they're insoluble.

The fact that leading self-driving companies are starting with taxi services means that problems like this don't need to be solved right away. Once Waymo expands to the entire Phoenix metro area, they can start offering service in LA, Las Vegas, San Diego, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, Orlando, etc. Expanding to all of those cities will take a few years and it could probably be a big, profitable business in its own right even if it takes several more years to figure out Boston or Minneapolis.

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I think a lot of marketing hype gets mixed up with technological solutions. There are certainly breakthroughs in self-driving vehicles, but that is not the same thing as passenger vehicles zipping around cities on their own. There are still some very large unsolved problems in that space. But you can already get from Copenhagen airport to the city center in a fully automated train, for example. And it is totally with the realm of possibility that large stretches of long-haul trucking routes can be automated (with humans in the loop, but not 1:1 with trucks) in the near future. Airplanes also fly themselves to a surprising/scary degree now.

The hype is necessary though, to get enough money behind the technology transfer (e.g., from labs to factories). Matt mentioned solid-state batteries; the breakthroughs already happened, many of them decades ago. But there was no market for them, so funding stopped at basic science. Now that the automotive industry is into electric vehicles, money is pouring into engineering solutions and breakthroughs are happening on technology transfer, up-scaling and manufacturing. (Which is really exciting for people like me who were working on the fundamental side 20 years ago and then watched the technology stall for years.)

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Passenger vehicles are zipping around the Phoenix suburbs on their own right now!

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As someone below enumerated, those trials are far more controlled than they appear. There are also humans sitting behind virtual controls that have to take over when the car cannot make a decision, which happens a lot (how often, exactly, they won't tell us). Currently technology is nowhere near good enough to let a fully automated car lose in a jungle like Paris and is unlikely to get there anytime soon.

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Yes, but that represents tremendous progress, and may be enough to create a niche for nearly-driverless cars in certain (more easily controlled) circumstances. It's not all or nothing.

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I believe you could get from Copenhagen airport to city center in a fully automated train 35 years ago. Or maybe it was only Vancouver. Still, self-driving trains are an old and very well-solved problem.

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Exactly! If you got your news from Elon Musk's Twitter feed, you'd think that self-driving vehicle technology was willed into existence 10 years ago (and that he invented it). In reality, it really got going back to the Cold War and especially during the Space Race.

Modern self-driving cars are essentially implementations of technology that has been developed over decades, but that can now be miniaturized (to fit in a car rather than an airplane or train). The size of the potential market is tantalizing enough that Big Tech is now throwing its weight behind it and so the hype machine kicks in and suddenly implementing forty year-old algorithms to make a taxi drive by itself, most of the time, in ideal conditions seems like the Moon Landing.

For the record, I think self-driving cars are super cool and want them to exist. The people working on them are very smart and are effecting breakthroughs both on the applied and fundamental side. I certainly hope I'm wrong, but my feeling is that we've created unrealistic expectations for what will be widely available in the next 20 years.

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There is an important difference between the self-driving train technology of the 1980s and the first self-driving cars in the DARPA challenge in 2005. If a train is in a closed environment (like a subway, or an airport people mover) then all it needs to do to be safe for self-driving is detect whether one of the doors is propped open, and know what acceleration and deceleration profile will get it from one station to the next. For a car (either on-road or off-road), it needs to have real-time information about obstacles in front of it, which are constantly changing, and it needs to update its plans in light of those obstacles. Trains don't need to steer, while cars constantly do.

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I am an optimist for self-driving cars, but I am a complete sceptic on their impact.

Anyone who has driven an Uber understands one basic fact about humanity that driverless cars can't solve.

People are nasty. There is no way driverless taxis will be a thing. Once two or three rides have been given, the average car will resemble a public restroom at at football stadium.

I know people talk about solving the cleaning problem, but I don't see it without basically turning a car into a hard plastic (think city bus) environment which requires disinfecting every two hours.

I suspect most driverless cars will just be privately owned, and not a big factor on public transport.

There might be an opening for small private networks of driverless cars. Perhaps several families or a business might own one to share.

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Ride-hail companies know who their passengers are, and they can easily install internal cameras in the cars. So it shouldn't be too difficult to have a remote human being check in after each ride to see if the last passenger trashed the vehicle. If they did, the vehicle can go back to HQ for a cleaning and the passenger can be charged a cleaning fee. This just doesn't seem like a very big deal.

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The amount of Uber users who engage in that kind of behavior now, when the company already knows all their info AND there's a driver in the car, doesn't bode well for how they would behave when there's only a camera watching (and unless that camera also has smell sensors, it's probably gonna miss some of the grosser activities that will occur in the car).

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I really appreciate no. 13 and 14. I’m a huge Pete fan and wildly supported his campaign while it was active. I also have many friends in the Bernie/Warren camps that disappointed me by how unreasonably hostile they were to my guy. (Like no problem if he’s not your first choice but please lay off the rat emoji. It’s too much!) I think you’re right about what he represents to them. And no, it’s not obvious to everyone -at least not to me- but that’s why I’m more than happy to pay to read your work! Thanks so much for this emergency post. I’m ridiculously excited about the announcement.

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Bernie/Warren fans are the worst. Well actually Trump True-Believes are the worst, but they aren't far behind.

At one time I did like Warren, but somewhere she took a hard turn left from being pro-working class to being pro-woking class.

Her student loan thing really turned me off. I was on board with her anti-monopoly, pro-minimum wage/labor union stuff.

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I think Warren fans were not like Sanders fans - really much better, less hostile, less tribal, more realistic about policy progress. That's probably also why they abandoned her.

The point where I thought Warren jumped the shark was abolishing ICE. What an idiotic stance. It's a shibboleth, nothing more. That showed how cynical she is. She was blatantly aping the dumbest parts of the left. That also showed how bad her political judgement really is.

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And I sort of think that warrant fans of merged with Bernie fans, and gotten worse as time has gone by

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It was like in one weekend she jumped the shark.

She went woke and broke all in the same weekend.

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I know we're hesitant to reach for social justice explanations here, but I do think Pete being gay (at a time when being a gay white man, like being Jewish, is taken online to be safer than it really is) has something to do with all of the hate he gets. Certainly some of the things people say about him—for instance, that he makes up/exaggerates his stories of youthful self-hatred in order to manipulate people, or that they show some lack of character or gumption—they would not say about racial minorities, and rightly so. Am I reaching?

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I think there is some of that. My views on why Pete generates a strong response

Negative response

1. Matt's reason which is correct for white left wing opposition.

2. Anti-Youth sentiment: his resume really is thin for someone who ran for POTUS

3. Doesn't seem to actively appeal to non-whites. Not sure he doesn't try but it is true he hasn't shown an apptitude.

4. Comes off like the scholar-McKinsey guy he is: this alienates a small but vocal twitter contingent. People who went to selective universities, knew guys like Pete and instinctively dislike them or wanted jobs that he got and didn't qualify because they didn't have the polish he did.

Positive Pete Crowd

1. Matt's expanation that he is a continuation of the pragmatic Clinton/Obama Wing, which naturally pro-Clinton/Obama types like

2. Civil Rights break through POTUS

3. The Tech/Urban Professional wing of the Party likes his McKinsey style resume/demeanor.

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I don’t know if this fits into (1) but 4) a politician who is going to look for positive sum solutions wherever possible instead of resorting to ideological answers is IMO in short supply and Pete’s resume and rhetoric suggest that he’ll be that.

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I think 4 folds into one but I'm glad you spelled it out that way. I was struggling to articulate it.

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Meant to add, as a boring normal Democrat, I'm fine with Pete and would vote for him in any general election.

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Dec 16, 2020
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No kidding, there were some super weird takes along those lines: https://twitter.com/c_cauterucci/status/1111332556589490176 (and I like CC a lot of the time!)

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I kinda wonder if gay men are the next traditionally hard-democratic group that might start splintering and sending significant numbers of votes to the GOP. This is definitely wild speculation, not something I can back with facts, but it feels like there is increasing hostility to them in the GLBTQ "alliance" (which is nuts, they must be by far the largest group in that alliance), and there is definitely a subculture of gay men who are macho and probably somewhat hawkish and higher-income and might find a lot of GOP policies natural.

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Just a note, we are not a larger group than lesbians or bisexuals. (There totally is a "gays for Trump" movement though. I think there are parallel lesbian movements.)

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Huh, I looked up numbers and found very slightly more gay men than lesbians, but not at all the idea that I had in my head in which men were much more likely to be homosexual than women.

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I think that's already happening. Exit polls showed LGBTQ support for Trump increased to 28%! (this is pretty contested though.) Nonetheless, as being gay becomes less salient as a social identity, other identities will come to the fore.

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I hope this is obvious to everyone, but it just can’t be stressed heavily enough that social media performative Pete-hatred does not actually mean that the left hates Pete. Twitter is not the real world. When you walk around on the street and have (outside, socially distant) dinner with your friends, the conversations around politics bear almost no resemblance to the conversations around politics on twitter and reddit. Those forums are a good place to try out snarky comments and engage in vigorous internet debate with strangers, but aren't at all a reliable indicator of the political winds.

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Agreed wholeheartedly. I tried to be on Twitter 3 times since 2009. I lasted about two months each time before I bailed. I'm out permanently. The right may have its pissed off old white guys, but the left has its share of "Know-it-all Bros." Can't take either one. Never joined FaceBook and Instagram, because Zuckerberg. This forum gives me a chance to read posts from (mostly) thoughtful people connected to Matt's blogs on specific topics. For me, a much better choice.

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Isn't this how Biden won the primary? By realizing that Twitter isn't real life?

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It's definitely true that Twitter hate for Pete doesn't translate to widespread hate for Pete. But when the question is whether or not "the left" hates Pete, then there's a real question about what one means by "the left". I think there's a good case that the Twitter group can make to represent "the left" more than the broad group of liberals that like Democrats and hate Republicans (though it's certainly not an open and shut case).

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The mayor Pete hate seems to spring out of a broader anti capitalist sentiment from the online left that I just really struggle to understand. Are all these people in academic corridors where its sort of in vogue to demonize professional success in the private sector? I don’t mean to sound overly libertarian about the matter - but I work with ex consulting folks and guess what, they are really freaking smart. Seems like we should embrace smart people in government!

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This kind of post is better than 75% of your longer pieces (which are quite good), so I'd encourage you to keep doing this

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It's like Twitter but with people I can tolerate!

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I find myself reading the comments here more and more, and reading twitter less and less.

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Yes! And far more intelligent and respectful of various different sincerely held opinions. And not tribal and obsessed with shibboleths.

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This also seems like a good sign of a real transportation/infrastructure focus from the Biden admin writ large. Pete is an ambitious guy and wants to take a job where he can build his profile positively. Biden seems to legitimately want to help him do that.

It seems like if they didn't have big ideas in this space that they legitimately thought could still happen with a Republican Senate Buttigieg would not be landing there.

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Is there a good piece to read about Cuomo and Byford? Getting people from Europe to help with our transportation seems like a good idea so curious to see when we've tried it before.

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My understanding is basically just that Cuomo didn't like how Byford was getting all this good press, and felt he was being overshadowed when he wanted a flunky.

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Strange coincidence there: Byford became the head of the TTC before heading to NY because the previous CEO, Gary Webster, was fired by crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford... also for not being a fluky.

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Small world.

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The New Yorker wrote a profile of him, and they updated it when he left NYC. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/andy-byfords-last-day-with-new-yorks-transit-system

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Not a direct answer, but I remember being surprised at how unexciting the initial NYT coverage of the Cuomo-Byford fallout was. Didn't seem like they had any good sources. Hope some other journalists had better lines of communication.

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NYT is consistently disappointing on local NY politics coverage.

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Disappointing is a vast understatement.

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They've been too busy reporting that Trump is a bad President, which they have done with almost every article for the past 4 years.

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They do manage to get in about 20 op-eds per week on racism. But actually covering issues at the local level would be too much work I guess

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And just a side note - Byford came to NYC from Toronto, and I believe he is natively Canadian. When Cuomo fired him, he went to London, since they wanted someone good. (Though I would have been more amused if Sadiq Khan had hired Byford's predecessor, Janette Sadik-Khan.)

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