EVs help with air pollution & congestion, but a huge part of the AQI impact of cars is tires, and I don't think there's a solution for that yet short of "fewer cars"
I thought the tire wear particulates being a huge source of particulate air emissions was an overestimate due to misunderstanding and misquotation of primary literature by secondary literature used by regulatory agencies.
Well, scanning an article on it for Manhattan, the fraction of "road dust" PM2.5 looks like somewhere around 2-5% depending on time of year, which is a bit below contributions by sea salt.
From my limited reading, what fraction of road dust is from tire tread is unclear. The models trying to estimate it give anywhere numbers from 4 to 48%, but may be incorrect due to the citation problem above. Experiments seem to show 4-9%, but they have trouble excluding resuspended dust.
I'd also point out that if we're worried about air quality in NYC between modes of transport, then one should look at subways since PM2.5 in stations/tubes is many times that of the street and far exceeds EPA limits.
EV shuttles will come in lots of capacities. Vans, buses. But you won't need to worry about schedules or preset routes because it's all dynamic.
Wherever there would be the most congestion is precisely where the app will give you the biggest discount to switch from your private vehicle into a bus, then switch back into another private vehicle for the last 5 minutes of your trip.
Also, it may be true that these companies theoretically have the cash flow to cover to spending, but that doesn't mean that they will be comfortable with that risk, especially as that risk becomes more likely in some kind of mass extinction event amongst AI startups. To concretize that a bit, the remote possibility of having to give up all your profits for 2 years to payoff DC investment is fine at 1% chance of happening, but maybe not so ok at a 40% chance.
Yeah. He starts with reasonable points about the economy changing into the Electronic Era and then starts making increasingly less-evidenced points by the end.
There are extremely high fixed costs + we require hospitals to do unprofitable work (they aren't allowed to turn anyone away from the ED, for example). In many small regional chains, their profitable hospitals in one area fund unprofitable hospitals in other regions.
Overall we have a crisis of hospitals shutting down, not a crisis of oversupply.
While this could be true, I don't think OpenAI is investing the $hundreds of millions-to-billions that would be required otherwise make it actually true.
OpenAI's fund is ~$250-300mm
Nvidia reportedly invested $1b last year - still way less than Open AI revenue
Health insurance in the US, and other countries, is pretty far from traditional insurance markets where you pay a small amount of money to cover rare, catastrophic events (like your house burning down, or an earthquake).
The name might be similar, but the products actually function very differently. Health insurance in many countries covers routine, predictable "losses" like primary care for strep throat as well as long-term "losses" like prescription medication.
A lot of this is because a traditional insurance model isn't palatable when it comes to healthcare. You can't really employ price or service discrimination against high-risk people with preexisting conditions, like you can with auto insuring a Ferrari, or home insuring a coastal house in a hurricane zone.
Not to mention life insurance! You can't just look assume things work the same way because they have similar names.
Many people don’t understand that insurance companies only make an 8-12% margin. Since each state requires all insurance companies to gain pricing approval to sell in their state (Filings), if healthcare costs go up within a given year the insurance company loses money. We don’t have an insurance issue, we have a healthcare and inflation cost issue. Same goes with home insurance.
What many don’t know: if you don’t like your insurance cost, it’s because of state legislation and cost in YOUR state - not federal govt.
"We don’t have an insurance issue, we have a healthcare and inflation cost issue. Same goes with home insurance."
I think this is the primary driver. However, we can't ignore how insurance company behavior also influences the pricing. The feds play a bigger role in this than you might think with things like Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates and residency funding leading to provider scarcity.
