All the Russia conspiracism in here reminds me of the claims that they blew up their own pipeline. The cost/benefit analysis of that situation was so obviously out of whack that no serious person should could have considered it to be a possibility.

This case is more plausible than that one was, but not by much. How could the benefit from derailing a few trains possibly justify the risk of A) more sanctions, and B) triggering NATO's Article V? The benefit of these operations is what, slowing trains down by one day? The 2022 sanctions on Russia have lowered their GDP by 6% by some estimates, which is the equivalent of turning the entire Russian economy off for three weeks of the year, every year. The notion that Russia would risk war and/or crippling sanctions to mildly inconvenience a tiny share of rail customers in The Netherlands is simply absurd. Putin makes plenty of mistakes, but he remains a shrewd adversary, and he is certainly not stupid.

I for one am disappointed that it took 500 years for people to acknowledge that the most important consideration when choosing a map is its emotional impact on the people of Africa.

> As the resolution itself states: "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation."

Beyond parody.

You can't compare autonomous systems that drive hundreds of thousands of vehicles to a single person. You have to compare it to hundreds of thousands of people.

American drivers kill ~100 people every day behind the wheel of a car. If autonomy were 50% safer and was deployed at such scale that it replaced 50% of all hours driven it would save 25 lives every day. It would also kill 25 people every day.

Sadly, many people will clutch their pearls at inevitable headlines like Bloodthirsty Elon Sacrifices 25 Innocents on the Altar of Profit Every Day! and, their emotions sufficiently primed, they will happily pull the plug on autonomy, sending 25 people per day to their deaths and feeling great about themselves as they do it.

Ok, in my country, you actually get your license removed and jail time if you kill someone (usually 2 years, up to 10 if you're drinking).

Let's say Tesla kill 50% less than a human driver, I'd agree to give Tesla's board 50% of the sentence for each person autopilot kills. As an incentive to make the cars kill less.

Let's reformulate it as a railroad problem. In the proposed hypothetical, if you effectively ban self driving cars until they're literally flawless, 50 people per day will be killed by human drivers every day. If you pull the lever and allow imperfect-but-better-than-human self-driving, 25 people per day will be killed by by autonomous vehicles.

As a reference point, non-suicide gun-related deaths total ~45 people per day.

What moral principle could possibly justify not pulling the lever?

But, even as everyone talk about morality as an ideal, no one really cares about it (else the world would be very, very different). What most people care about is feeling that things are 'fair', at least the appearance of fairness. I guarantee you that if a company accepts that it's board (or executives) get jailed if their car makes a mistake that kills someone, like any random driver, people will accept it.

If the base universe is postulated to have always existed, why not do away with this theory altogether and simply postulate that our universe has always existed? Sure, our universes physics are conveniently balanced, which Occam's Razor abhors and which begs explanation. But this theory doesn't seem to satisfy Occam as it requires more rather than fewer assumptions (a capacity for infinite self-replication, complete with heritable and mutable physics).

If we're going to waive the need for a first mover, why not just waive it?

Occam's razor suggests that a coincidence is just a teensy bit more likely than a story surviving unchanged for a thousand generations.

"The tragedy of the commons" isn't a claim that "the commons universally leads to worse outcomes", but rather "the commons universally leads to worse incentives". The existence of a separate set of contradictory cultural incentives may prevent worse outcomes, but it doesn't change the nature of the incentives created by the commons, nor does it contradict the truth of "the tragedy of the commons", let alone render it fallacious.

The constitution says it is written to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", actually.

Brought to you by the guys who said Obamacare would lower premiums.