October 20, 2018

Three Cheers for Driverless Buses!

Kevin and Marian are on a weekend getaway, but where are they?Kevin Drum

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I’m on vacation this weekend, but right now I’m sitting around waiting for some photos to upload very sl-o-o-o-w-ly to my ancient tablet.¹ I would buy a new Surface Pro if it were even slightly better than the one I have now—and I’m such a hopeless fan that it wouldn’t take much to talk myself into it—but Microsoft’s latest is a joke. I guess I’ll have to wait for the Surface Pro 7, assuming Microsoft doesn’t kill the whole product line before then.

Anyway, I was perusing my blog reading list and noticed Atrios once again mocking the concept of self-driving cars. And that’s OK. We all need a hobby, and besides, I’m now confident that advances in the treatment of multiple myeloma will let me to live long enough to see full, no-shit driverless cars for sale in ordinary Chevy showrooms. So I’ll have the last laugh.

In the meantime, though, I just have one comment: if the software boffins can build driverless cars, they can also build driverless buses, trains, blimps, hyperloops, and hovercraft. It’s just a matter of a little more time.

¹It’s one year old.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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