Technology

Aged like milk

https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymo-ceo-car-death

I wish people were as outraged about people getting killed by human drivers. The safety record of these cars has been no less than stellar until now.

Rest in peace kitkat

“But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” – Exodus 21:23-24

Cat's shouldn't be left outside in the first place, because of situations like this.

*"Cat's shouldn't be left outside because they'll be crushed by a vehicle, eaten by coyotes, catch a deadly disease or purposely killed by shitty humans."

I can never understand why this is so often a hot take other than "it's natural", which is dubious at best. Leaving a cat outside by itself, without supervision and a harness is irresponsible and stupid. If you or your family do that, in a city, then make sure to have some "missing cat" posters pre-printed and always keep the picture up to date because that cat will likely not live a full life. Kindly keep any anecdotal evidence to the contrary to yourself, it stands for nothing.

Maybe if you lived on a farm and you wanted it to keep the mice population down, but then there's the environmental factor of how cats kill a lot of birds which stresses an already stressed population (and is maybe detrimental to crop health re. insects).

/rant

Regicide.

A feline queen reigns over my apartment complex. It's a fair regime.

Some of us are old enough to remember how cats and other creatures would get killed by old car engine designs with the large open fan driven by a belt. They would sleep on that fan housing and not realize the danger when the car was started. So there have been improvements that have helped, maybe not necessarily for that reason. For what it's worth, I'm on the side of minimizing cars for so many reasons, but it has been worse for animals in the past.

There is probably an elevated risk of killing cats in any electric vehicle because there are fewer signs that the car is "on" and about to drive.

I'm not sure I trust the kind of person who was perfectly fine with robotaxi's until an animal was killed. Seems they don't' really have a good grasp on the problems of a car-centric society of which road-kill is a very minor one.

Let cats use them as litter boxes. Cats' revenge.

Highlighting individual cases like this is a good way to capture human emotions but the focus should be on the big picture. The moment a self driving car is statistically safer than a human driver it becomes the objectively better alternative. The fact that accidents will still keep happening nevertheless isn't a reason to revert back to human drivers.

This same "trick" is used in charity advertisements: starving kid will capture the attention of people but a starving village will not despite the fact that it contains that same kid.