We need a tax on self-driving cars. Beneath eight states of the American Great Plains lies the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest bodies of groundwater on Earth. For centuries, extraction was constrained by the modest capacities of wind and hand power. At that rate, this 'fossil water' resource was effectively limitless. Farmers could draw as much as they wanted without ever running it down. worksinprogress.co/issue/esc… But in 1949 Colorado Farmer Frank Zybach invented centre-pivot irrigation. Combined with electricity and the centrifugal pump, farmers could now draw thousands of gallons per well per minute, enough to irrigate 40 acres at a time. Since then, the aquifer has gone down 10%, losing a Lake Erie's worth of water. It is down 50% in the dry parts, where it recharges just 0.02 inches per year. Without intervention, modern pumps will bring about the total end of irrigated farming in the arid parts of the Great Plains in 20-30 years. This is what I call the Ogallala Trap. Technological change can create a new tragedy of the commons. The telegraph enabled the destruction of the passenger pigeon; sonar, radar, and diesel enabled the industrial trawling that devastated the North Sea cod in a decade; chlorofluorocarbons came close to destroying the ozone layer. Self-driving cars are about to do the same thing to roads. When you can sleep, work, or drink with friends in a moving vehicle, you will take many more journeys by car. Roads, which are free at the point of use almost everywhere, will grind to a halt. People who have to go to the office or the hospital will be stuck sharing the road with people having beers, working remotely, and taking naps. There is a fix, but it depends on acting now, before autonomous vehicles go mainstream. Voters balk at being charged more for something they already depend on. The tax needs to come in as soon as possible. Waymos are already in dozens of cities and do millions of journeys per month. We have very little time left. If we want to save our roads from omnigridlock, we must introduce road pricing for autonomous vehicles.

what every day feels like now

i taught my claude to start each conversation with a Stolen Data Acknowledgement

Awesome & wholesome: Slashdotters were dunking on @stevewoz for selling his Apple stock… then he showed up in the comments with the most grounded reply. Gave away his Apple wealth, funds museums, pays his taxes, and measures life by joy: “Happiness is Smiles minus Frowns.”

Remember this the next time you hear some right wing dingus complain about money going to research on mushroom enzymes or whatever

So happy someone (@marcelsalathe) did the work and put an end to the stupid take that ChatGPT etc. require a ton of energy 🙏🏼

My most radical belief is that a lot of people would love to live in a neighborhood with great cycling and transit infrastructure:

City of Tokyo released a 3D digital twin of the entire city in high resolution point cloud, free to download. It’s an inevitable trend that more and more cities, houses, and factories will be transported into simulations. Robots will not be trained in isolation. They will be simulated as an “iron fleet”, deployed in real-time graphics engines, and scaled across a huge cluster to produce the next trillions of high quality training tokens. The majority of embodied agents will be born in sim, and transferred zero-shot to our real world when they are ready. They will share a “hive mind” that sends latent embeddings back and forth to coordinate a multi-agent physical task. Fun fact: NVIDIA’s Santa Clara Headquarter buildings are designed and rendered in Omniverse, a GPU-accelerated graphics platform, before materializing in atoms.

Paris proves bold leadership transforms cities. 🌍 From suffocating smog (2007) to clean, green & livable streets (2023): 🚴‍♀️ 100s of km of bike lanes 🌳 Tens of thousands of trees 🚗 Car-free zones & 30 km/h limits Millions now breathe clean air. When will we dare to follow? 💪

The only true justice for the land is global Georgism, but people aren't ready for that argument.

Councillor Paula Fletcher has made reference to letters by Hospital CEOs supporting the University Ave bike lanes in 2020. Here are a couple of those letters, from CEOs of Sick Kids and Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai CEO says 63% of hospital staff bike to work.

My new op-ed on land value tax with @floydmarinescu for @TorontoStar

Why housing & environmental activists should support paying rent for land: it reduces urban sprawl, pollution, energy use, traffic, environmental degradation while eliminating income taxes for most. Sprawl forces people to travel further jobs, making cities less sustainable ⤵️

“Vladimir Putin at a pride parade” 🏳️‍🌈 #StableDiffusion (redd.it/z0yrr9)

North Americans look around and assume that the car-centricism that surrounds them is this emergent phenomenon, the pure result of revealed preference, when in fact it's the most heavily planned/subsidized/regulated pattern of development in human history.

We released some human neuron electrophysiology data! You can check out the data on @DANDIarchive here dandiarchive.org/dandiset/00…

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This month in “the war on drugs”