rkbabang

"live downtown", which is why this is possible for you. You can't live in the suburbs (never mind rural areas) without owning a car. Even most small cities aren't as livable for the carless as the larger ones are. If I lived and worked in a large city I wouldn't own a car either. The thing about cities is that the easier the city is to live in without owning a car the more difficult, inconvenient, and expensive it is to actually own a car if you wanted to. If you lived in Manhattan it would be incredibly inconvenient and expensive to own a vehicle, never mind 2-4 of them as most suburbanites do. This is a good indication of what will happen when car ownership becomes rare everywhere. The fewer people who own their own vehicles in an area over time the more and more inconvenient and expensive continuing to own one yourself will become. Parking lots/garages will start getting smaller or disappearing as land is developed for its best marginal use, even in the suburbs you will see large shopping centers with very little parking capacity as acres of land dedicated for parking will just be a waste of money. City streets will have more space for pickup/drop off only stopping (5 min parking only) and less for leaving your car there for a long time. Development will proceed in a direction with the assumption that people don't own their own cars and need places to park them.

Wha? How do you figure that? Maybe if you distributed the demand across the entire day. But that's not an accurate way to look at it. Most people need transportation at roughly the same time as most other people. Commuting to work, commuting back from work are the two main times that come to mind. How are you supposed to spread your 3 cars across 30-40 people for a morning commute? Simply doesn't make sense. Also, you're assuming that once autonomous cars hit mainstream, everyone will want to car-share. Huge assumption that I simply don't think will be the case. I think plenty of people will still want to own their own car. I also think your longevity assumptions of 600k to 1mm miles are way out of whack. I think your assumptions and the conclusion you've drawn are absolutely insane. Ya I kinda echo your thoughts. Now I haven't read all of this thread, but where did this the rationale that we will want to own less cars come from? Are you saying empty driverless cars will come pick up passengers? I am a carless person. But I will buy a car if it is driverless and economical. So me as a datapoint says that cars will increase. The fundemental change of driverless cars is it allows people to drive who cannot or don't want to drive. So it will mean more cars on the road. How can there be more cars on the road and less cars? I disagree with both of you. Do you have teenage children? My kids don't even want to drive, neither do any of their friends. My son just got his license and I practically had to force him to get it. Yes in 10 years there will still be a bunch of old people driving their own cars (you and me included), but this will diminish every year as these people die off or get too old to drive. 30 years from now there will be almost no human drivers on the road. In 30 years anyone under 50 will look at a car with a steering wheel the way millennials look at CD Walkmans today. "What the hell is that for?". bang, did you read my post carefully? I told you I am w/o a car! I am not like you and I won't be driving when I am old, I am not even driving now! I bet I hate driving as much as your son, or even worse. But driving is an orthogonal issue to ownership. I hate driving but I love being a passenger. I have a GF who drives me everyday but that may change, a driverless car is like having a woman driving me around w/o the issues and the mood swings! I ride a bike, take the train and get a ride to work everyday. If I took uber how will that work? Will all ride sharing cars be able to support my bike? It is so much better to have my own driverless car, with a dedicated compartment in the back for my bike. How do you get to your in-laws who live five hours away? Or your parents who live 2.5 hours away? In both cases there are zero trains, and a flight for a family of five is well into the thousands verses a $50 tank of gas. And it takes as long or longer with security. I don't drive much, but I do have a truck. I have a late model Tacoma that allows me to run errands as needed, and also haul things as needed. It was not very expensive so I'm alright with it mostly sitting idle. My wife drives a lot, with kids it's unavoidable. We walk them to school, but it would be impossible for them to ride a bike to soccer practice. The terrain is very hilly here, and it's a 20m car drive, maybe 45m-1hr for an adult to bike, almost impossible for a kid.. If we lived in NYC or SF or Toronto like most do on here and all family lived in a big city as well I can see how going carless is easy. You take the train, or you fly. Or maybe on the rare chance you venture outside of an urban area you Uber. In fly-over-land (Western Pennsylvania) there isn't the infrastructure to support this. There are trains and some busses, but they're only for commuting. I have no idea if my kids will want to drive. They're too small. One of them loves jeeps and off-roading vehicles, maybe he'll have a mud slinging truck. Maybe I'll be a dinosaur driving, who knows, I accept it. I just wonder how where we live would support all of these extra cars. Think of the traffic jams leaving a high school football game. You'd have a jam of cars trying to get there at the same time, then all leave to go pick other people up, then all come back at the same time and leave again. Where we're at it isn't nice four lane roads with turning lanes. It's twisty little hilly streets that can't be widened. I think the AV car revolution will hit the coastal urban areas first then take another 15-20 years to trickle throughout the rest of the country. It's probably better that way, traffic is an issue in Manhattan, it's not an issue in Paducah, KY. I'm sure you are correct about hitting the high population density regions first and the rural areas much later. It will role out in much the same way Uber has/is. I'm sure if you live in the middle of nowhere with corn fields as far as the eye can see you couldn't easily call for an Uber driver right now.

Wha? How do you figure that? Maybe if you distributed the demand across the entire day. But that's not an accurate way to look at it. Most people need transportation at roughly the same time as most other people. Commuting to work, commuting back from work are the two main times that come to mind. How are you supposed to spread your 3 cars across 30-40 people for a morning commute? Simply doesn't make sense. Also, you're assuming that once autonomous cars hit mainstream, everyone will want to car-share. Huge assumption that I simply don't think will be the case. I think plenty of people will still want to own their own car. I also think your longevity assumptions of 600k to 1mm miles are way out of whack. I think your assumptions and the conclusion you've drawn are absolutely insane. Ya I kinda echo your thoughts. Now I haven't read all of this thread, but where did this the rationale that we will want to own less cars come from? Are you saying empty driverless cars will come pick up passengers? I am a carless person. But I will buy a car if it is driverless and economical. So me as a datapoint says that cars will increase. The fundemental change of driverless cars is it allows people to drive who cannot or don't want to drive. So it will mean more cars on the road. How can there be more cars on the road and less cars? I disagree with both of you. Do you have teenage children? My kids don't even want to drive, neither do any of their friends. My son just got his license and I practically had to force him to get it. Yes in 10 years there will still be a bunch of old people driving their own cars (you and me included), but this will diminish every year as these people die off or get too old to drive. 30 years from now there will be almost no human drivers on the road. In 30 years anyone under 50 will look at a car with a steering wheel the way millennials look at CD Walkmans today. "What the hell is that for?". bang, did you read my post carefully? I told you I am w/o a car! I am not like you and I won't be driving when I am old, I am not even driving now! I bet I hate driving as much as your son, or even worse. But driving is an orthogonal issue to ownership. I hate driving but I love being a passenger. I have a GF who drives me everyday but that may change, a driverless car is like having a woman driving me around w/o the issues and the mood swings! I ride a bike, take the train and get a ride to work everyday. If I took uber how will that work? Will all ride sharing cars be able to support my bike? It is so much better to have my own driverless car, with a dedicated compartment in the back for my bike. I did somehow miss where you said you are a carless person. At first many people might buy driverless cars, but it will be so much more expensive than using the car services companies that car ownership will fall drastically over time. I'm sure there will be many different types of car services available. If you want to share rides with strangers to reduce your costs further that will be available, if you'd rather ride alone directly to your destination that will be available as well. And and many different vehicles to pick from as well: from bare-bones to luxury; from one person with no storage; all the way up to big 100+ft long triple trailer semi. If you want a one person vehicle with a bike rack, I'm sure that will be available when you need it.

Lol. That's going to be my problem. I get carsick unless I'm in the front seat. Unless they develop some technology to eliminate inertia, I am never going to be productive in the car - driver or not ;) You can request the car with the phony steering wheel in the front so that you can pretend you're driving. :) I know someone who has control issues and won't ride in any vehicle that he isn't driving. He refuses to go on planes, busses, boats (unless he's driving), cars (unless he's driving), or trains. I wonder how he'll feel about driverless cars, I'll have to ask him sometime.

Wha? How do you figure that? Maybe if you distributed the demand across the entire day. But that's not an accurate way to look at it. Most people need transportation at roughly the same time as most other people. Commuting to work, commuting back from work are the two main times that come to mind. How are you supposed to spread your 3 cars across 30-40 people for a morning commute? Simply doesn't make sense. Also, you're assuming that once autonomous cars hit mainstream, everyone will want to car-share. Huge assumption that I simply don't think will be the case. I think plenty of people will still want to own their own car. I also think your longevity assumptions of 600k to 1mm miles are way out of whack. I think your assumptions and the conclusion you've drawn are absolutely insane. Ya I kinda echo your thoughts. Now I haven't read all of this thread, but where did this the rationale that we will want to own less cars come from? Are you saying empty driverless cars will come pick up passengers? I am a carless person. But I will buy a car if it is driverless and economical. So me as a datapoint says that cars will increase. The fundemental change of driverless cars is it allows people to drive who cannot or don't want to drive. So it will mean more cars on the road. How can there be more cars on the road and less cars? The main benefits of driverless cars are cost (don't need to pay a driver), safety (lower error rate than human), and cloud control (efficient swarm management). Progress toward these goals has already been achieved by ride-hailing services. I think that car ownership WILL decline significantly in the future. There's no reason for a vehicle to sit parked in a garage when it could be doing useful work. Let's face it - if you could satisfy your transportation needs for $5-10 per day without owning a car, why would you own one? In some cities people are already close to this, but the problem is if you want to take a road trip or drive to the airport you still need a car. It's a bit like the US road system before the interstates were built - we don't have uniform service. The cost of service is still too high for some Uber driver to be wandering out in rural Kentucky. Once vehicles are driverless, the cost may well be low enough. Exactly. The AI prediction algorithms are going to know your schedule better than you do. 90% of the time when you go to call a car (however that is done, smart phones or some wearable or glasses, etc) you are going to look out your window to see it already waiting for you. As far as luxury, I'm sure there will be different classes of car services. The rich riding in the back seat of a fancy car (or carriage) and leaving the driving to someone else is not exactly unprecedented in human history.

Wha? How do you figure that? Maybe if you distributed the demand across the entire day. But that's not an accurate way to look at it. Most people need transportation at roughly the same time as most other people. Commuting to work, commuting back from work are the two main times that come to mind. How are you supposed to spread your 3 cars across 30-40 people for a morning commute? Simply doesn't make sense. Also, you're assuming that once autonomous cars hit mainstream, everyone will want to car-share. Huge assumption that I simply don't think will be the case. I think plenty of people will still want to own their own car. I also think your longevity assumptions of 600k to 1mm miles are way out of whack. I think your assumptions and the conclusion you've drawn are absolutely insane. Ya I kinda echo your thoughts. Now I haven't read all of this thread, but where did this the rationale that we will want to own less cars come from? Are you saying empty driverless cars will come pick up passengers? I am a carless person. But I will buy a car if it is driverless and economical. So me as a datapoint says that cars will increase. The fundemental change of driverless cars is it allows people to drive who cannot or don't want to drive. So it will mean more cars on the road. How can there be more cars on the road and less cars? I disagree with both of you. Do you have teenage children? My kids don't even want to drive, neither do any of their friends. My son just got his license and I practically had to force him to get it. Yes in 10 years there will still be a bunch of old people driving their own cars (you and me included), but this will diminish every year as these people die off or get too old to drive. 30 years from now there will be almost no human drivers on the road. In 30 years anyone under 50 will look at a car with a steering wheel the way millennials look at CD Walkmans today. "What the hell is that for?".

What's the difference in the reasoning between: "The polls are validating that approach", so the majority must be right AND Market efficient hypothesis: The stock price always reflect all fundamentals. If you think the stock is undervalued or overvalued, you must be wrong. The market must be right. So why are you on this value investing board? :) +1 The market in the short term is a voting machine and in the long term a weighing machine. Unfortunately the democratic process is always a voting machine and works as well as you would expect.

Hmm, I'm somewhat in the camp that the number of cars produced won't likely go down much. Very very optimistically (or pessimistically?) to 1/2 of current. I see proportionally more smaller cars - almost nobody needs four-seater taxi - but I don't see why you think the production will drop so much. Can you walk through your thinking and numbers? My thinking follows the discussion on FCAU thread (I think): The number of miles driven is unlikely to go down (I still have to do all my driving legs even if I call self-driving-Uber). It might even go up if cars have to drive empty to pick next person and if people switch from busses to self-driving-Uber. Assuming number-of-miles-driven doesn't go down, it doesn't matter that person does not buy a car. The car wears out from being driven. So replacement cycle based on miles driven won't change (much). There is some replacement from cars being old but not driven much, but that's likely what 10-20% of replacement? So OK, let's go all the way and say 50% of replacement gone. That's where we get to 1/2 of current. Maybe you can argue that electric/automatic cars don't wear out at 200K miles driven, but I'm not sure that's true... Anyway, I don't see cars going to 1/10 even in wildly optimistic (pessimistic?) scenarios. :) I'm not talking about possibility that something else replaces the car concept way long term. I think fleet owners will take better care of their fleets than private owners do, and will be much more concerned about the longevity of the vehicles they purchase than private owners now are (look how many people are still buying GM vehicles ;)). Also if most are electric cars with less maintenance required and better built for the requirements of the industrial fleets, I don't think it would be a stretch for a vehicle to last 600K-1M miles on average (through multiple battery replacements). The entire market will change drastically when vehicles are a business to business product and no longer a consumer item. Tractor trailers regularly last in excess of 1M miles today. Also I think you overestimate the number of vehicles required on the road at any given time. Take my house, I have 3 vehicles (my son drives now as well) and they are sitting parked for the vast majority of the time 95+% I'd estimate. You could serve the needs of 30-40 people with the 3 vehicles that just serve my family. You are also correct about the average size. You will still need to call up a truck once in awhile to carry something large or a 5 seater to go out with the family, but the vast majority of the time a car only has 1 occupant and no passengers. Most cars on the road will resemble Smart cars rather than Range Rovers or F150s. I might be a little optimistic with 1/10 or 1/100, I don't know, but I think 1/2 is way too pessimistic unless we somehow experience greater population growth than expected or autonomous cars cause people to travel a lot more. This is something I hadn't thought about, but it could be the case. Autonomous cars represent a much more efficient use of resources, so they will be quite a bit cheaper to utilize than owning your own vehicle is today. Also there will be no age restrictions or reaction time requirements. You may just pack your 10 year old in a car to grandma's house while you take a different car somewhere else. Or you may send a car to pick up grandma who is 93 and wouldn't be able to drive herself. A lower income family of 6 could all get in 6 different cars at the same time where now they would be lucky to afford one vehicle. The market will be very different from what it is now, I'm not sure we can know exactly what it will look like, but I think all and all there will be much fewer cars needed than now.

"disruptive technologies move very quickly" They do and this will apply to automated vehicles as well as electric vehicles (maybe more so, since automation isn't limited by battery technology). Fully autonomous vehicles will reduce the number of cars on the road by a huge amount. I'd predict a factor of 10 at first then by a factor of 100+. 90M cars/year could be 9M/year in the mid-term and 900K in the long-term.

I am not expert in carbon prints of electric car vs gasoline cars. However, my point is regular gasoline cars have also improved. Prius 2017: 54 city / 50 highway Honda civic 2016: 31 city / 42 highway Honda civic 2011: 26 city / 34 highway For someone having mostly highway commute, the differential between regular and hybrid cars is going down. Yes in some places even highway driving can be stop & go, but my point is one won't actually put much mileage in stop & go scenario and vast majority is highway driving at decent speed. Thus, even though hybrids are vastly better in city driving, it is not relevant unless someone puts a lot of mileage in city driving which is difficult because they can only go so far in an hour in city traffic. When we talk about electrical/hybrid cars, we need to compare with improvements in regular cars which have considerably improved particularly in Highway mileage in recent years. For example in one of my previous jobs, I used to have 40 miles of highway driving and 4 miles of local driving. The Honda civic is competitive with that type of driving profile. The Civic is a very small compact car, I think the advantage of a hybrid is that you can get compact car like milage in a mid-sized car such as: 2016 Toyota Camry Hybrid: 43 city / 39 highway

Car companies have been doing research and introducing Electric cars for some time. Here is GM EV1 1996-1999 ==> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 People have short term memory. In fact as we speak GM is ahead of Tesla in introducing a EV at less than $40k. Search for Chevy BOLT. One can order it and get it this fall. I'll never understand why all of the traditional car companies think that you need to make your electric vehicles look as strange and ugly as possible. I wouldn't drive that car if you gave it to me.

Depending on the drug, I agree. More psychedelics (mushrooms, mescaline, LSD, ayahuasca, etc), more weed, less pharmaceutical poisons. Especially psychedelics, there is a growing field of research into treatment for many disorders and even the benefits of micro-dosing for anyone. I don't see much use for heavy duty opioids except for infrequent short term pain relief. Cocain doesn't seem worth the risks to me, however if it were legal I'm sure there would be safer versions of it available, smaller-less concentrated doses (more like beer and less like moonshine) and such. I'm not saying anything at all should ever be banned, because no drug should, I'm just saying what I'd like to see people do more and less of.

I think the question is about the long term upward trend, not the short term ups and downs. In the short term those reasons you listed drive the market back and forth, but over the long term it has only gone up. My opinion is that the long term upward climb, has been due to population growth (people are the ultimate resource) as well as increases in productivity, wealth creation, technology, transportation, trade, etc. Population is not going to increase at the same rates as in the past (as has been mentioned by others above), but hopefully increases productivity, wealth creation, and technology of all types (weak AI, then strong AI, nanotech, etc) will partially or even completely compensate for the that lack of new people. Maybe, maybe not, I don't know. But even if 7-10% long term growth becomes 2-4% long term growth, I do think the market will continue to grow long term not shrink.

Why do you find that admirable? Certainly it isn't good to abuse these things, or to drive while intoxicated, but what is admirable about not enjoying life's pleasures on occasion?

Since we are doing recommendations. I tried this a few weeks ago: Nitro Coffee Stout I was a little sceptical, but it was surprisingly good, and refreshing on a hot day.

I just use it for cooking. I sometimes feel bad using wine received as a gift for marinating meat, so sometimes I save bottles I suspect are more expensive for guests. I usually buy the cheep gallon size jugs for cooking.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates wine. I could never stand it. A good whiskey is OK, but I don't go out of my way to drink it. The only alcohol I really enjoy is dark beers, and since I've been trying to keep my carbs on the low side I don't drink very often anymore. Here's an article for the wine snobs: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science-analysis

Neither in the last week, but I am not philosophically against either. I probably have about 6-12 beers/year and do recreational drugs far less than even that (it's been a few years). But as far as what others do ... smoke em if you've got em, I don't mind.

was he even born? Obviously he went back in time. He used the Tesla that comes with a flux capacitor. That is the model which has an incredible battery that can deliver 1.21 gigawatts to the flux capacitor for time travel. Manufactured in the gigafactory of course.

Why don't ya marry him - looks like he's available ;) Hopefully this thread doesn't go the way of the Elizabeth Holmes thread. Hopefully Musk doesn't go the way of Holmes. Although with Holmes there was nothing but secrecy, speculation, and hype. Where Musk has already achieved enough to be highly respected even if he fails at everything else in his life from this moment forward, so there really can't be a comparison between the two.

This morning my friend lucked out and was able to buy several cases of ammo. On the way home he stopped at the gas station where a drop-dead gorgeous blonde was filling up her car at the next pump. She looked at the ammo in the back of his pickup truck and said in a very sexy voice, “I’m a big believer in barter. Would you be interested in trading sex for ammo?” He thought a few seconds and asked, “What kinda ammo ya got?”

Politics always brings out the best in people.

I've tried to stay out of this as much as possible. But I think you're spot on Mark. I think of the last 8 years as difficult for everyone as it was the aftermath of the Great Depression. Right now we are about 8 years off the crash in 1929, that makes this the equivalent of 1937. The world was engulfed in war in political turmoil leading to WW2 with officially began in 1939 which doesn't officially end until 1945. The next 4-8 years will be crucial a perhaps the most difficult. I fear you both may be correct. I know that history never repeats, but even if it rhymes with the late 1930's/early 1940's I don't want either of these two in the Whitehouse. <sigh>

+1. Trump himself might be just a middling racist and xenophobe on the par of water-cooler brogrammers and jocks who just don't think it racist or misogynist to call someone n word or ho, bitch, etc. The problem is that he's running a campaign based on raising and supporting that hatred. I don't know if the fact that this strategy is working says a lot about our society or if it just shows how bad his competition is, both in the primary and now in the general election? Whatever it means it isn't good.

With a few words snipped that is a excellent summary of this election. The dangerous, corrupt, bloodthirsty, war hawk politician vs. the dangerous populist xenophobic demagogue that, well, who knows what he will do. I find it fascinating that "war hawk" would be a pejorative for Hillary Clinton from the standpoint of the Trump supporter given that a consistent rhetorical position of Trump is that the military has been underfunded (good luck proving that based on military budget allocation through the Obama administration from actual data). Further, a major talking point of Trump is something like knocking the hell out of ISIS (whatever that means - he apparently knows more about ISIS than the Generals) and encouraging increasingly brutal "enhanced interrogation." How is increasing military spending, increasing military actions against ISIS, and encouraging more intense "enhanced interrogation" (plus, encouraging war crimes by "kill[ing] their families") not the actions of a bona fide war hawk? Trump has said some hawkish things and also some very anti-war things as well. Like I said "Who knows what he will do?" He's a complete unknown, I don't think he knows what he will do if elected. Also did you just call me a Trump supporter? How many Trump supporters describe him as a "dangerous populist xenophobic demagogue"?