You're right. The McMurty is an actual car with a driver in it.

WAIT THIS ISN'T THE ONE THAT PEOPLE PREORDERED NINE YEARS AGO?

They're not selling this to the public.

They'll make a handful that a select few billionaires will get to keep in a hanger somewhere for bragging rights.

There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.

I agree with the first two points, but why do you think the thrusters have to be manually controlled? My expectation would be it'd just perform one of the pre-programmed tricks taking in the sensor data to adapt mid-way, the same way they do auto-landings in SpaceX (no one is controlling the landing booster manually, right?).

Sorry, but "just use sensor data and do it like the spacex landings" is such a ridiculous hand-waving of the scope of the actual problem.

Explain what you mean please. First, this is not going on a public road anytime ever, so in an unlikely event this product will actually see the light of day, it’s very likely that anyone who attempts this will do it on mostly static controlled circuit/pad. I don’t know how they did the demo, but I don’t see it as something outside of the realm of reality to calculate ‘kickflip’ on the fly using whatever sensors they put in this thing.

I wouldn’t want to sit in it tho (and I’m guessing no one in the demographic this will be sold to would want this level of risk either).

> There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.

I'm not even sure if a fighter pilot could. The passenger compartment of the "Rocket" model is probably packed full of tanks and other equipment, to deliver total of a few seconds of flight time. Doing anything in the air would probably require such precise timing no person could do manually, and it probably can't even be done automatically outside very controlled conditions.

The demo literally has it flying without a pilot controlling it. There's not going to be like 8 joysticks that a driver has to use at once to make it fly

Not really.

The international border quarantine was quite extreme, but the rest of the country was (mostly) business as normal.

Yeah, we had a very strict initial lockdown, and closed the border, once the number of cases went to 0 we opened up again, we then had regional lockdowns after cases broke the border quarantine.

I’m guessing you weren’t in Auckland?

I agreed with the lockdown and still do. I was pointing out that for a lot of us it was far from business-as-usual for a significant chunk of time.

Our level 4 lockdown was scored at 95/100 ("extreme") by the Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker. Our border lockdowns and MIQ system were extreme and very prolonged stretching into 2022 and even impacted returning citizens.

Our level 4 lockdown didn't last very long.

The strictness index (which is what I'm assuming you're referring to) varied over time as the response changed.

The claim I was initially responding to was, "New Zealand locked down less than a lot of countries". Not specifically length. NZ lockdown was especially strict in some regards (level 4, border lockdown) and especially prolonged in others (Auckland lockdown, border and MIQ).

The claim meant less time. The lockdown periods in NZ were very short. That's because they actually worked.

Yes, also because I imagine people generally followed the dog damned rules there.

It's also because the rules were strict enough to achieve their stated purpose.

we just locked down quick and strict, we then were one of the only places you could go about life relatively normally without too much worry while the rest of the world went through comparatively ineffective lock downs and rrestrictions.

>Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run.

The only reason sprawling suburbs can exist is because they are subsidized by inner cities.

Building and maintaining miles of roads and utilities is not cheap and the number of people in these areas makes it impossible for them to cover these costs unless they're astronomically wealthy.