i guess Lilium-like scams can go so much further if basically all entrepreneurialism is just a function of Founder-Proximity-To-The-Ruling-Party
China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
91–100 of 101 posts
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I made that comparison, I did not mean to bring politics into the conversation, but I assume it is a natural direction people can take it too. I will just say this: the issues with the US are beyond *partisan* politics. In my opinion, it is a social problem much deeper than what is shown on TVs and discussed in election campaigns. Changing the party in power will not change the situation. Until the US acknowledg…
Yeah, that’s particularly funny coming from the guy who petitioned to forbid discussing politics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43122960
Read those threads again, I am not petitioning for 'forbidding politics' but for applying the same rules to all discussions related to politics - no more 'rules for thee but not for (D)'. It has become impossible to keep politics out of the discourse since everything has been made political.
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is also amazing and sad to see positive comments on such technological developments in China where similar developments in e.g. the USA would be lambasted on this very same site: Flying taxi drones? They'll fall out of the sky on the heads of the elderly and Musk should stay away from this . Tech and integration? Big brother getting even bigger and no I don't want Musk to be part of this . Is it just that the neig…
You stayed in the Tenderloin? Geez. Most large US cities have, "bad neighborhoods." It's not specific to blue states. The US cities with top highest violent crime rates are more likely to be in red states: https://www.police1.com/community-policing/articles/where-ar... I am no fan of the two-party system but your view of the parties is almost 20 years out-of-date and is ignoring some pretty glaring issues.
> The US cities with top highest violent crime rates are more likely to be in red states
Red states with blue cities, an important distinction. I looked it up - https://ballotpedia.org is a good place to start - and would be interested to see this disproven.
In what way is my view of the parties out of date?
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#94It is both amazing and sad to see China is literally in the future compared to the US in terms of infrastructure and social development. A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now. The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable. In comparasion, the streets of SF, one of the crown jewels of the US technosphere, are just so "normal" I find…
> A trip to one of the major cities in China made it clear to me that they are ahead of the world right now Is that a fair sample. Foreigners tend to visit the best bits of anywhere and China is a very big and varied country. > The amount of tech and the level of integration are unbelievable. Also dystopian as it enables government control and monitoring. In many ways China is ahead in things I do not want to happen.
As much as that might be true to some degree, I doubt most people are comparing China's best to their grandparent's collapsed barnhouse in the boonies. The best I've seen (NYC is the best I'll publicly mention, but also a few other east coast cities) basically look like Ravenholm compared to the photos/videos of what's coming out of China.
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#95I definitely don't want to belittle the achievement, but I would imagine that creating safe self-driving helicopters is much easier than creating safe self-driving cars. (At least as long as the skies are just as empty as they are today. Once it's full of things like the roads, that will be a different topic)
I wouldn't trust anything that can't auto rotate or glide to be safe to fly. A drone style copter falls out of the sky if there is any failures at all at any point in time in flight making it an inherently unsafe method of travel.
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#96It’s sad to see America fighting over old manufacturing jobs while China is leaping ahead. It used to be the other way round. I hope America goes back to its previous innovation cycle
I overall agree with you, but not about these. Drones have no way to recover from any sort of mechanical or power delivery failure. They can't glide or auto-rotate and have zero control or maneuverability on any failures, they just fall straight out of the sky. In open clear areas an emergency parachute might be fine, but drone style flight is not efficient at all so not suited for longer distances and you only really need taxis in more urban areas where deploying a chute will likely just smack you into the side of a building and you fall anyways.
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#97It doesn't mention how much noise does it make. Even though it's electric, drones are usually damn noisy and annoying, and something of this size can't possibly be any better.
Seems as noisy as a standard helicopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=22&v=9-Vr_Kd1W0E
Thats nowhere near the noise of helicopter.
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#98> These vehicles are expected to redefine how cities tackle traffic congestion and pollution Counterpoint: no they're not. These sorts of very large drones may well become more popular, but they're not gonna become widespread enough to impact traffic congestion. The realistic target is becoming a moderately more popular version of helicopters for the sufficiently affluent.
Imagine the perfect city, with lots of green parks, great restaurants with outdoor seating, shops, do you think it should have noisy drones in it? Or a thousand drones?
That's what cities are literally are for. Go rural if you are a decel.
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you been to SF? It’s like a zombie movie with shocking public transport. There are many nicer cities which seem futuristic compared to SF. I’ve not been to a Chinese metropolis but if you just look at some photos it wouldn’t be hard to imagine somewhere like Shenzhen being much further ahead.
SF varies widely be neighborhood. Public transport is not the final solution for SF, instead it’s driverless cars.
It's a cop out in my opinion, it will never scale or be as useful , reliable or enjoyable to use as a well designed, operated subway. Besides Tokyo, Shenzhen, Beijing etc, will have both, subways and driverless, flying taxis, drone delivery and still be ahead of most major US cities in terms of transport options.
You have to visit a top tier East Asian city to understand just how good they have these things running, safe, clean, reliable, always on time. Like, it's amazing. Uncomprable to anything I've experienced in any major US city.
I think if a New Yorker went to Tokyo they'd be amazed how far ahead they're public transport is.
There are also health benefits to using public transport which I think we will see play out with self-driving, people will just become slobs when a car comes to their door, picks them up and drops them at the next door. Using a subway is actually a bit of healthy exercise.
Re: China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This thing has 8 motors. It’s easy to imagine that it could have 8 independent batteries and could be able to perform a controlled descent if two fail. Similarly, it could have redundant sensors and use commodity “majority rules” logic circuits where all calculations are run three times. On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed. With all that, it’s “just” a software pr…
>This thing has 8 motors. It’s easy to imagine that it could have 8 independent batteries and could be able to perform a controlled descent if two fail. Similarly, it could have redundant sensors and use commodity “majority rules” logic circuits where all calculations are run three times. On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed. Most of these are a total nightmare to…
If it’s fewer fatalities per mile than cars, they’re probably ready today!