Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Google hopes to further the destruction of mass transit?

I had an automated opinion poll phone call about self-driving cars. The most notable aspects were Google-awareness and the desire to see if Google would be held liable by the people for software failures resulting in accidents. As the only company mentioned, obviously it was their own marketing (it was also a "wireless caller", according to Caller ID).

The whole way through the poll I kept thinking how utterly stupid this whole self-driving car thing is. There's already a safe, effective, mature, reliable and very efficient technology for transporting people without worrying about everyone controlling their vehicles:

TRAINS!

That little known form of transit that automobile corporations almost completely extinguished.

Yes, let's keep pushing more and more cars and overly complicated (and error prone) gadgets out there because it's better for the capitalists, rather than do what makes sense for the ENTIRE SOCIETY.

[exasperated sigh]

This is a major failure of government to allow private industry to destroy mass transportation infrastructure in its growth time, keep it from fully establishing itself, and continuing to fight it with nonsensical crap like "feature" cars.

But republicans want to regulate human sexuality.