From an outside perspective, American system looks more like "right" and "extreme-right", disguised as choice over small-ish policies.
Sadly that's an extreme them-or-us system that's being slowly exported pretty much everywhere else.
Some online banks (don't know how widespread this is) allow you to create "virtual card" that expire either after 1 purchase or at a specific date (and with a set maximum of budget). I use them for every single purchase I make online, it's inconvenient but at least i've never entered my real card info anywhere.
That sounds like a lot of work. At least in the US you are not responsible for fraud. (I think the law may have like a $50 liability thing, but Visa/MC waive). So it's better to just not do this, and every 3-4 years when my CC is stolen, call them up - dispute the charges, get a new number. Takes < 5 minutes and I keep going.
For what it's worth, the 2 times my number got stolen in the last 6 years, one was from a rogue agent at a hotel in Chicago, and one was from a bad website that stored credit cards.
My bank has a browser plugin that can create virtual cards with just a few clicks.
> dispute the charges, get a new number. Takes < 5 minutes and I keep going.
This isn't the case for me, it would take me quite a bit of time over a period of several weeks to update all of the places i use my card if I were using the same number everywhere and it was compromised. I handle a lot of billing. I've had cards compromised at least three times in the past and it's very unpleasant. (for me)
Programming is hard because you need to have a lot of pre-acquired knowledge before you can even start to delve in the only interesting aspect of it, which is the logic solving.
Is like having to learn everything about how a lego brick is built (from the materials used, to the production processes used in the factories, to the composition of the houses where lego bricks are used) before being able to play with them. Everyone (aside from an very motivated subset of people) would find Legos "Hard" in that context.
Having to memorize a myriad of arcane incantations, software setups and a million "standards" will always make programming look "hard" and daunting, even for those who have an interest in logic problems, but not have an interest on babysitting a computer.
I used to read dystopian cyberpunk and think "lol that's stupid, no way will it get that far" and it's increasingly more often that I see stuff from dystipian fiction creep it's way into our lives lol
I could have sworn something similar happened in the 90's (possibly early 2000?) which prompted the US government to create such a law. I'm unable to look it up right now, but a quick search may yield what I'm describing. Look for "Space Marketing Inc." or some variation thereof.
> In my opinion, this is yet another case of people being lulled into a false sense of security that the car drives itself, when in reality the Tesla's driver should have been attentive and should have reacted.
In every similar story I always fail to imagine how the driver can possibly stay in a state of "active attention" 100% of the time, while also not doing anything active. That's not how much of the human race works.
At this point it's a lot easier to just actively drive, instead of having to make a sudden split-second decision while being dulled by the inaction.
I feel like non full-autonomous driving just doesn't make sense at all.
It's also why airplane pilots do much more than they theoretically would have to – under normal conditions, a modern autopilot should be able to handle the whole flight without human supervision.
But then the human won't be reacting fast enough when he is needed to handle an unforeseen problem, so they're kept in the loop and active, just in case.
I wonder how many flaps you could possibly check on your Tesla during your commute (i'm being sarcastic).
Also, I could imagine that an airplane is, from a totally theoretical and simplicistic point of view, much easier to manage for a computer, even for simply having a lot of space to maneuver, and knowing constantly what other airplanes are doing.
But driving a car? How can a computer possibily handle a scenario where edge-cases make for a good 85% of each travel, unless you drive in the desert?
It doesn't have to be a 1:1 replacement. The computer has some advantages that can make up its lack of brains by having lower latency, not getting distracted, better sensors, better maths when it comes to motion ("objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear") and more training than a human will ever experience.
I totally agree. But also, critically, an auto-pilot is precisely expected to have "a brain", it's implicit in the name.
Maybe we should just agree that auto-pilot, in its common interpretation, is currently just a sci-fi concept, and communicate more honestly what a computer inside a car can't and can do.
Apparently, dodging weird obstacles is something it struggles with. Which is a problem, since all driving is, essentially, dodging weird obstacles.
I agree with you. So maybe the system could expect the driver to actually drive.
I've never driven a Tesla, but I've seen a similar thing in a Citroën I rented once. On the highway, with cruise control, the car could practically drive itself. It would follow the lane, slow down if cars in front got too close, accelerate back to the set speed when they went away, etc.
Once or twice I completely lifted the hands off the wheel, and pretty quickly it would start complaining. So with this system, the driver actually had to be engaged.
It's also a matter of perceived consequences. To put it bluntly, most people simply don't have the energy, at the end of the day, to chase "feel good", distant, ethereal causes. Yeah meat consuption leads to pollution, but that's such a stretch of the imagination, and I'm hungry, so please let me see what I need to do to pay this month's rent and taxes instead.
There's an oil spill in the ocean? Man, that sounds bad. But what can you do, it's in the ocean, someone will take care of it eventually.
I know it's a defeatist way of thinking but you can't build a running society (meaning with, literally, people running all the time) and expect to conserve energy for non-primary, non-immediate, non-localized causes.
To put it even more bluntly: I would be very happy to change my whole way of life if I didn't have to run after money. But I have to, and I'm exhausted, and that's the problem.
I used to have discipline. Don't know what happened.