My default tip is higher than most terminals have a button for, but if the server is standing there watching then a simple button push is what they get.
Terminals are asking but that doesn't mean people are tipping, as the article points out:
> People are tipping less at restaurants than they have in at least six years, driven by fatigue over rising prices and growing prompts for tips at places where gratuities haven’t historically been expected.
That might be the way to bet but casually mentioning a lawyer once worked for me on a used car warranty claim. I didn't make any threats, I just said "my mechanic says X and my lawyer says Y" and they said we'll call you back, which they did in ten minutes and said I was covered after all.
If that's actually what your lawyer says, then there's nothing wrong with that, but if you don't have a lawyer and they call your bluff, you're worse off than before you ran your mouth. So it's not really too much different than me telling about that one time I was in Vegas and I rolled a seven.
I had a buddy who was a lawyer, who spent a few minutes looking over the contract as a favor. There was no bet for them to call since I wasn't threatening action, just pointing out what the contract actually said (which my buddy confirmed for me).
It was under a thousand bucks so I could have just taken them to small claims court if they didn't fold. That may have worked in my favor.
> they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on.
If I'm an artist and copy the style of another artist, I'm also competing with that artist, without violating copyright. I wouldn't see this argument holding up unless it can output close copies of particular works.
The only way to prevent that is to not report whistleblower deaths at all. It's not like people can't privately have their own suspicions, and if I were a potential whistleblower, I'd want to know that any apparent accidents or suicides get very thoroughly investigated due to public outcry.
A smart contract can still help. Use Shamir's secret sharing to split the decryption key. Each friend gets a key fragment, plus the address of the smart contract that combines them.
Now none of your friends have to know each other. No friend can peek on their own, they can't conspire with each other, and if one of them gets compromised, it doesn't put the others at risk. It's basically the same idea as "social recovery wallets," which some people use to protect large amounts of funds.
If you don't have any friends then as you suggest, a conceivable infrastructure would be to pay anonymous providers to deposit funds in the contract, which they would lose they don't provide their key fragment in a timely manner after the liveness signal fails. For verification, the contract would have to hold hashes of the key fragments. Each depositor would include a public key with the deposit, which the whistleblower can use to encrypt and post a key fragment. (Of course the vulnerability here is the whistleblower's own key.)
The contract should probably also hold a hash of the encrypted document, which would be posted somewhere public.
Ah, putting the key under shared control of (hopefully independent) entities does sound like a useful extension.
But still, while this solves the problem of availability (the shardholders could get their stake slashed if they don't publish their secrets after the failsafe condition is reached, because not publishing something on-chain is publicly observeable), does it help that much with secrecy, i.e. not leaking the secret unintentionally and possibly non-publicly?
I guess you could bet on the shardholders not having an easy way to coordinate collusion with somebody willing to pay for it, maybe by increasing the danger of defection (e.g. by allowing everyone that obtains a secret without the condition being met to claim the shardholder's stake?), but the game theory seems more complicated there.
I guess you should also slash the stake if they submit the key in spite of the liveness function getting called. If the contract doesn't require the depositor to be the one to submit the key, then there's an incentive to avoid revealing the secret anywhere.
A well-funded journalist could pay the bonds plus extra. I think the only defense would be to have a large number of such contracts, many of them without journalistic value.
Distributing the key among trusted friends who don't know each other seems like the best option.
Yeah, that's what I meant by allowing anyone to claim the stake upon premature/unjustified release.
That would incentivize some to pose as "collusion coordinators" ("let's all get together and see what's inside") and then just claim the stake of everybody agreeing. But if somebody could establish a reputation for not doing that and paying defectors well in an iterated game...
> Distributing the key among trusted friends who don't know each other seems like the best option.
Yeah, that also seems like the most realistic option to me. But then you don't need the blockchain :)
Well the blockchain still helps with friends, just because it's a convenient and very censorship-resistant public place to post the keys without having to know each other. But there are plenty of other ways to do it.
For the friendless option, don't return all the stake if secrets are submitted despite proof of life. Instead, return a small portion to incentivize reporting, and burn the rest.
Wouldn't you want the incentive for false coordinators to be as strong as possible?
Otherwise, the coordinator has more to gain by actually coordinating collusion (i.e. secretly pay off shardholders, reassemble the key, monetize what's in it, don't do anything on-chain) than by revealing the collusion in non-iterated games.
Ok to sum up what I'm thinking: As a stakeholder, I pay a large deposit. I get an immediate payment, and my deposit back after a year. Proof of life happens monthly. If nobody reveals my key after proof of life goes missing, I lose my deposit. If anyone reveals my key despite proof of life in the past month, then 99% of my deposit is burned, and the revealer gets 1% of the deposit.
If I understand right, your concern with this is that the coordinator could pay off shardholders to reveal their shards directly to the coordinator, avoid revealing shards to the contract, and then the shardholders can get their money back.
However, the shardholders do have to worry that the coordinator will go ahead and reveal, collecting that 1% and burning the rest. Or it could be 10%, or 50%, whatever seems sufficiently tempting to coordinators....given the burn risk, the coordinator has to pay >100% to shardholders regardless (assuming non-iterated).
Maximum theft temptation to coordinators is 100% return, but this removes the financial loss to shardholders who simply reveal prematurely on their own. But maybe even losing 10% is sufficient to dissuade that, and then you have to trust coordinators with access to 90% of your funds.
And all this, hopefully, is in the context of the general public having no idea how much economic value the document in question has to a coordinator. In fact, if coordinators routinely pay shardholders more than their deposits, it would pay people to put up lots of worthless documents and collect the payments.
Self-driving won't take over by just being available in the new cars people are buying anyway.
It'll take over when people find it cheaper to ride robotaxis than to own a vehicle at all. That's potentially a much quicker transition, requiring significantly fewer new vehicles.
Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road. This is the main problem, America has suburbanised itself to hell and no amount of robo taxis will create the world you are suggesting. And elsewhere in the world there’s no need because most places have adequate public transit which solves the problem way more efficiently than robo taxis ever will.
People wait for things all the time and if it can take away the hassle or driving your kids somewhere, maintaining multiple vehicles for multiple family members etc. I'd bet that it does take off. Public transport doesn't solve groceries or other types of shopping though even in highly connected cities, especially for people with health problems or just aging ones.
Imagine a parent today driving to work and dropping off their two kids at school on the way. Instead of one car making three stops, you're suggesting three robo taxis would accomplish the same thing. What do you think already clogged roads would look like in this future? The only scalable solution is public transit, walking, and cycling.
I used to live in Germany, which had lots of excellent public transit, walking, and cycling. There was still quite a bit of car traffic. If even Germany's public transport isn't enough to eliminate cars, then we should put some effort into improving car transport, in addition to whatever we do with buses and bike lanes.
To that end, I'm not convinced automation will make things worse.
If the kid's school is near the parent's route to work, there's nothing stopping the parent from saving money by taking the kid in the same taxi.
If the kid's school is in the opposite direction, then a separate robotaxi can be more efficient. What matters is total system mileage. If a robotaxi takes the kid, then picks up a commuter starting near the school, then we save the parent's trip from the school back to their starting point.
Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road.
I absolutely would do that. Sometimes I already do wait that kind of time for a taxi or bus. Having the robo taxi turn up in ten minutes from when I decided I wanted to go to the shop would be fantastic.
Public transport doesn't compare to robotaxis. If robotaxis become a reality I expect a significant drop in car ownership and public transport use. The price will be competitive with the price of public transport, at least for single fare prices.
I can catch a bus every five minutes a one minute walk from my house in Utrecht. Those buses go anywhere. In Oslo I could ride the T-bane to the forest or to downtown. In Tokyo it was obvious public transit is the only way to go. All the places I lived outside the USA I would never take a taxi much less a robot one in lieu of Public transit.
That's what I'm saying. When price goes down, robotaxis become a more viable option due to convenience and speed. You're shopping? Just put it in the trunk. Have fun with 4 grocery bags on public transport.
Public transport can be faster for going from A to B, but most people live a couple of kms from A and they're not going to exactly B but somewhere in the vicinity. The "last mile" will more likely be by robotaxi.
Note that some parts of that car park are 300m from some of the shops in that building. (There are choices of shops and parking spaces larger than that, but it looks like I can easily justify 300m without resorting to maxima).
Note that within 300m of that address — i.e. the bounds of the example American shopping mall car park — there are 6 [super]markets, a pharmacy, at least five cafe/bakeries, two cinemas, several takeaways, at least two restaurants, a dentist, a car repair shop, a car dealership, a pet-goods shop, a kitchenware shop, a newsagent/post office, two sets of tram stops, four sets of bus stops, and I'm not counting any corner shops ("Späti" in the local language).
Carrying a few bags of groceries around inside well-planned cities is pretty trivial. Anything connected to that area by a single mode of transport is no harder to take shopping through than the transit systems within a mall — escalator, elevator, travelator — and that means one of the main commercial areas of the city (Alexanderplatz) and the road to it (which itself is basically a 3km long half-density strip mall with a tram the whole length and a railway crossing it in the middle and another at the south end) are both trivial to reach even with shopping — I've even seen someone taking an actual, literal, kitchen sink on one of Berlin's trams.
Even in my current place, still in Berlin but close to the outskirts without the advantages of density, a mere four grocery bags is easier to get through public transport than it is from one end of an American car park to the other.
> Lower prices don't make things more convenient or fast.
You are replying to a straw man, I never said anything like that. It makes for dull discussions.
> Even in my current place, still in Berlin but close to the outskirts without the advantages of density, a mere four grocery bags is easier to get through public transport than it is from one end of an American car park to the other.
It's unclear to me why you compare it to a geographically unrelated area. You should compare the public transport with a robotaxi alternative. At similar pricing, how is convenience and speed impacted.
Not the op.
If you reread what he wrote I think he’s trying to say the price going down changes the viability of the option—not the convenience and speed which he treats as inherent to the car.
Said another way:
When price goes down, robotaxis (which are convenient and speedy) become a more viable option.
Not sure what you think is my public transport. My ideal computerized public transport combines vehicles of all sizes and types, and an uber-like app let's me choose what I prefer based on cost and other attributes.
The optimal route means picking up multiple people on the same route, and dropping them off elsewhere on the route, and then making the vehicle large enough so that they can do this comfortably, i.e. a bus.
It ends up being another form of public transport — perhaps one with no predictable timetable, or perhaps timetables are themselves a useful Schelling point, I wouldn't want to guess.
But as fixed bus routes make it possible to plan things like bus shelters, I think I'd prefer a bus over the logical progression of self-driving "taxis" that constantly move rather than finding parking spots.
That's optimal for the vehicles, but less optimal for the people, who have to walk to stops. I used to live in Germany which had fantastic public transport, but walking a mile to the nearest stop was something we took in stride. That's great for health, but didn't prevent Germans from being quite fond of their personal automobiles, and there didn't seem to be noticeably less traffic than in the US.
Meanwhile I think plenty of people find Uber perfectly convenient, just a bit expensive.
As far as physical efficiency goes, Tesla's plan is more efficient than their competitors'. Their dedicated robotaxis are either small two-seaters, or decent-size buses.
Assuming we get to your level of value prop. It will still only be a choice for new first time buyers
If I already own a car, for which am paying an emi and no hope of selling for good value (because market is dropping as newest buyers disappear) it won’t make economic sense for me till I generate LTV from the car to switch over .
Either way it till take 1-2 decades after ubiquitous L5 availability, even if that was possible at all and soon
there are already cheaper ways to ride from point A to point B without owning a car (especially in urban areas) and yet car ownership has never been higher… ideal robotaxis will take at least one full generation to actually materialize.
just as a silly personal example, I took a car to the shop and got Uber credits. my wife was heading into the city for an event (had to deal with both traffic and parking) and I was like “take a free Uber” and she was like “no way, driving my own car…” my daughter on the other hand…
I agree with your general points, but if we can trust Vox, the Anthem situation wasn't quite what people thought. The policy was to prevent overpayment to anesthesiologists, because they get paid partly by the hour and there's evidence that they tend to inflate their times. The policy would not have increased costs to patients, because of this:
> “Say there is a contract between an insurance company like Anthem and an anesthesiologist,” Garmon told Vox. “What is always in that contract is a clause that says, ‘You, the provider, agree to accept the reimbursement rules in this contract as payment in full.’ That means the provider cannot then turn around and ask [the patient] for money.”
There was also a process for anesthesiologists to apply for extra payment if surgery went extra long.
They make a larger point that the main reason Americans pay so much more for healthcare is that we pay our providers a lot more. Nations with more reasonable costs and high-quality results have controls in place to keep costs down at the provider level.
Vox might be right but under no circumstances would a company admit "hey we're changing this unpopular decision because we're personally afraid of being killed". Tying good patient outcomes to dead CEOs would be literally suicidal for Anthem execs.
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