Citations please? Seriously, you are making up numbers for the cost of cars and the govt subsidies provided. Did you account for the DMV? Did you account for traffic police? Did you account for the installation and maintenance of traffic light systems? Of course you didn't.

The numbers aren’t made up. The Federal government publishes these statistics annually, they're widely used by policy analysts, and they're simple to calculate yourself.

The Federal government spends ~$17.5B/year on maintaining and constructing the interstate highway system. Americans drive 852 billion miles/year on it. The cost per Vehicle Mile Traveled (VMT) is 2.1 cents / mile.

If we look at all government spending (Federal, State, Local) on highways, roads, and supporting infrastructure (which includes traffic management systems), that's around $285B/year and 3.28 trillion miles, or 8.7 cents per Vehicle Mile Traveled.

The cost to the government to provide and maintain roads is on the order of several cents per mile traveled per year. Roads are simply much more cost-effective to build and maintain than dedicated public transit infrastructure.

huh? Public transportation is fully paid for by everyone too.

Yes, but most people don't use public transit.

The error is completely ignoring the negative economic externalities of NOT having public transportation and the positive economic and environmental externalities of having public transportation.

I'm not advocating for helicopters at all - it's an analogy that clearly went over your head.

It's about cost comparison: SF Muni's operating costs (in terms of costs per passenger mile) are so bloated they're comparable to chartering a helicopter.

This should not be possible, and it's a strong signal of poor fiscal management. SF Muni operates at $3.62 per passenger mile. For comparison, Transport for London (TfL) operates at around $0.50/passenger mile and Shanghai Metro operates at $0.11/passenger mile.

You are completely ignoring the MASSIVE benefit the transit provides to the city. It allows densification. It allows people to get places without driving (and thus without parking). It frees up roads/traffic for those who do decide to drive.

Funding for basic research is being slashed by the current administration. Our society is underinvesting in basic scientific research. And, AI will not fill the gap.

It's just because of this administration but future admins can revert it back and even then, i would expect the fund receivers themselves will eventually use AI so.

tech writers disrupted by AI a couple of years ago? Seems very dubious. A couple of years ago, AI was terrible at writing anything.

AI writing is soooo annoying. It's always way too long and way too "serious" for what ultimately is almost always a really dumb point. There is no calibration to the seriousness of the topic or thesis against the actual length of the writing. It's insufferably pompous. Will it get better? Probably.

ever since the discovery of amyloid plaques, it's been an open question. Are they causative or a symptom? Would reducing or eliminating them help treat the disease? There is lots of data that supports amyloid as a disease treatment target, particularly in animal models. Of course the abject failure to actually develop a good anti-amyloid treatment that actually provable and significantly mitigates the disease weighs against the idea that amyloid is a good target. And the high profile frauds that have been discovered haven't helped. But, the biomedical community are not a bunch of morons. All these drug companies wouldn't have spent these billions of dollars on anti-amyloid and anti-tau if they were such obviously terrible ideas.