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> Until we have a national conversation about this, I suspect self-driving will be an intractable problem. I hate to be a pessimist, but I'm not sure "national

> Until we have a national conversation about this, I suspect self-driving will be an intractable problem. I hate to be a pessimist, but I'm not sure "national conversations" are all that useful in the U.S. Consider the "national conversation" leading up to Obamacare. NPR (at least) reported on the known pros/cons of various national healthcare systems around the world. AFAIK some of them were simply better than what we had, regardless of whether one looked at them through a conservative or liberal lens. And yet we still ended up with a system that was only marginally better IMHO.

beebmam 4y ago
For the ACA, whether it's better for you or worse for you depends on what income bracket you're in, whether you have preexisting conditions, and what kind of health care your job previously offered. Whether it's better or worse for the country is a complicated question that I don't have an answer to, and no one does. Because it's a nuanced answer, if you're being serious about quantifying "better". Unfortunately most people, across both political factions in the US, would rather adhere to their ideologies than think critically about things in this era.
TrevorJ 4y ago
I think it's easy to be biased towards agreeing with your point here because failures are much more visible in this realm than the successes. There's a whole host of things that we've 'worked out' on a national level. Schools, National Parks, Interstate Highway Systems, Fire Departments. All these things either didn't exist, or took hugely different forms only a couple generations ago, and now they are almost entirely accepted in their present form. We just don't think much about it now because this stuff is so accepted, even though at one point it was a whole big complicated thing that needed to get worked out and agreed on.

beebmam 4y ago

For the ACA, whether it's better for you or worse for you depends on what income bracket you're in, whether you have preexisting conditions, and what kind of health care your job previously offered. Whether it's better or worse for the country is a complicated question that I don't have an answer to, and no one does. Because it's a nuanced answer, if you're being serious about quantifying "better". Unfortunately most people, across both political factions in the US, would rather adhere to their ideologies than think critically about things in this era.

TrevorJ 4y ago

I think it's easy to be biased towards agreeing with your point here because failures are much more visible in this realm than the successes. There's a whole host of things that we've 'worked out' on a national level. Schools, National Parks, Interstate Highway Systems, Fire Departments. All these things either didn't exist, or took hugely different forms only a couple generations ago, and now they are almost entirely accepted in their present form. We just don't think much about it now because this stuff is so accepted, even though at one point it was a whole big complicated thing that needed to get worked out and agreed on.