In my experience they’re pretty much just motorized drinking platforms.

This is the massive catch-22 of autonomous car development: autonomous car technology inevitably advances like any other technology - incrementally. It’s impossible to go from exclusively human-driven cars to fully autonomous cars without taking the steps in-between. However, humans aren’t very good at interacting…

While I understand all the commenters who want rescued victims like this one to have to pay the cost of the rescue, it’s probably not a good idea for several reasons:

Logical on land, but the ocean is a different beast.

The rescue swimmers (formally “Aviation Survival Technicians”) go through incredibly intense swim training. Everyone else just needs to pass a swim test that indicates a certain level of competence. If your grew up swimming, it’s one of the less difficult aspects of basic training. 

A typical naive joe-schmoe response to this is “How can you be afraid of the ocean if you’re a surfer/sailor?” That fear is a rational and necessary respect felt by the people that know the ocean and it’s incredible power the best (as demonstrated by the video). The people who ask questions like this just haven’t…

Nope. Thankful rescuees are merely advised to pay their federal income taxes.

Nailed it from a policy perspective. You also don’t want to discourage people who may be in trouble from calling the Coast Guard for fear of having been “stupid” and therefore having to pay. Stupid doesn’t and shouldn’t enter the equation, other than being proportional to the amount of face-palming Coasties do…

Those are just “facts that you don’t like.” “Alternative facts” are “convenient falsehoods.”

No, self-preservation.

‘The Bush administration once called for the development of a nuclear nucular “bunker-busting” warhead’

This is a baseless, tinfoil hat assertion. Let me know how your interstate highway, space exploration, commuter rail, and emergency services businesses go. Get it through your head: there are things the public needs that cannot and/or should not be provided at a profit, and it’s ok to approve of them and need them. …

What’s up with the Chinatown bus fixation? Look, I know it’s crazy cheap, and it may rival Amtrak times on the New England portion of the NEC (south of NYC the train saves over an hour versus the bus), but it’s simply not in the same market as Amtrak. The bus is a known option for Amtrak riders, and they gladly pay…

I haven’t spent any time in London, but apart from the kids, why drive and have to put up with the traffic and parking?

How so? It makes air travel affordable for the the average American. Without government subsidized airports private airlines as we know them would not exist, as they don’t have the resources to undertake infrastructure projects as large as multiple commercial airports.

I don’t agree with it, but that’s a fair enough prediction. I think that the autonomous car solution isn’t that close, nor will it be a “solution” to the extent you predict.

The feds have given billions to private airlines: they pay for the airports, they pay for the TSA, they pay for the FAA and all of the associated air traffic control hardware, and yet airlines are still barely solvent.

17.1 million people voted with their money and time to ride the Northeast Corridor in FY15. That’s just Amtrak, not the commuter trains.

Mass transit became publicly run because it couldn’t cover its costs, not vice versa. Behemoths like the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central didn’t just hand over the reigns to the public sector; they went bankrupt first. 

Say hello to industrialization and globalization. Having a loose confederation of 50 mini-countries would be fine if we were all farmers and craftsmen that communicated with each other via handwritten letters carried by horse, but here we are typing on a blog surrounded by products made all over the world. It’s not…