Prove it then - make mirrored life. I think we still don't fully understand biology and we won't until we start actually proving our theories about what is going on.
I think you're confused. When the White House decided to stop having federal agencies buy paper straws [1], they didn't designate paper straws a supply chain risk, they just stopped buying them. The term has a very specific meaning which would not apply in the pen scenario.
It's not a great analagy; it's more like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, who then only ships pens with cameras and solenoids so that the point stays retracted until the camera verifies that the paper doesn't include a drone strike orders.
And that would be absolutely fine for a pen manufacturer to do. It would make them unsuitable for meeting the requirements for a government contract as a pen supplier for signing orders, but would not make them a supply-chain risk.
Same goes for Anthropic: they would only consider offering a version of their product for military use that had certain restrictions. The government is free to accept that version or reject it. Rejecting it and designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk is just political intimidation and retribution for not playing ball.
it would be like the pen manufacturer who ships pens with an automatic point retractor, AND a video livestream to the manufacturer from the pen AND remote control of the point retractor.
anthropic and contractors monitor the livestream remotely to make sure the pen is not signing drone strike orders and may choose to activate the retractor.
> anthropic and contractors monitor the livestream remotely to make sure the pen is not signing drone strike orders and may choose to activate the retractor.
I might be mistaken, but in the case of national security deployments the models are airgapped and Anthropic doesn't actually have access to telemetry/logging from them.
however anthropic is demanding that they have access to chat logs for anything better than opus 5.
it is not possible to run recent anthropic models in a secure way. palantir, nvidia, booz allen etc have blocked fable because they can't run it safely.
You are repeatedly saying they spy on their users? Prove it. Then prove t he other ai companies don't. Then prove that the service they offered to the US government didn't have spying disabled.
"Then prove that the service they offered to the US government didn't have spying disabled."
the service they offered did have spying disabled. the security risk is from anthropic updating the claude and covertly bricking or degrading it.
quote: "In such an ongoing relationship where the vendor [...] “continuously update[s] and tune[s] the product,” the Department must establish and maintain confidence that the vendor will not add limitations
that interfere with the Department’s use of the product." (p26)
"the Department relies
on [petitioner] to provide regular updates to Claude" (p27)
All of these said they keep data 30 days and xai even said furthermore it can decide to keep data for even longer. You also said the version they provided to the government had spying disabled, the complaint that the govt made seems a thin excuse for what trump wanted as any and all major AI models are subject to constant updates.
They're talking like Amazon Bedrock doesn't exist, which is exactly the service which provides private data and processing for models including Claude.
But also they quite clearly have no idea how classified information systems work: air gapping is step 1 of that process, and no one from Anthropic would be working on those systems without a security clearance.
there is no private processing for recent claude models. there is no fable in IL5 or IL6.
bedrock IL5, nvidia, palantir and booz allen have all blocked fable.
anthropic is demanding that they rat out their customers on anything better than opus 5.
see: [thein.fo/4dekujW]
also, bedrock govcloud does both log and review customer data. specifically, they log and review customer data when it is flagged by their csam classifier.
That article is locked behind subscription. These are private companies, and presumably not running the model on their own systems but are using an interface to the model hosted on Anthropics machine I would presume. So their decision to decline is different from the us govt which will have gotten special privileges.
From what I am reading the IL6 and IL7 wasn't granted by the DoD out of nonsensical reasons, it wasn't even allowed to go through the certification process, in fact during the very course of its negotiations for military use of Anthropic. Anthropic never required any remote control or line to the deployment, they only requested there be human oversight before murder. The government prevented it from going through the certification tests using the exact nonsense excuse this case is about culminating in the case. So your claims of spyware are completely muddled and nonsense. 'Spyware' is an extremely absurd and over the top claim. It is a plain and naked lie.
for now it's spyware. there is no way for anyone to get fable without anthropic spying. so there is no fable IL5. there is opus 5 or below.
it is anthropic alone deciding to rat out fable customers.
i am not making this up or lying, everything i claim is verifiable.
anthropic would likely have turned off the spyware for the dod. regardless the dod did not trust them to maintain claude with updates etc.
that is a lot to do with anthropic undermining dod by getting involved with safety at dod contractors (palantir).
going behind the boss and plotting was a bad idea.
it does not help the matter if the bidder rocks up to the pentagon for a $200m contract, with a troupe of bay area ea clowns who say that they don't know if claude is conscious and talk about saving the world from p(doom).
in a battle of ego between trump and amodei the latter is out of their depth. amodei is a newcomer starting a fight with a hardened criminal who has spent years amassing power over the media, the law and the republican party. anthropic are radically outgunned here.
No. You made up the term spyware, the US government stamped a Supply chain risk on anthropic without even letting them get certified, and there is no mention of spyware there. You are making up complete utter nonsense. I have never seen the term spyware used anywhere else in relation to Anthropic. A data retention policy, which your own link shows is also shared with xAI is not spyware. You are a plain liar. You are repeating this absurd lie of Anthropic being 'spyware' everywhere. You again made up nonsense about Palantir, all I can see is Palantir comes under the same case, Anthropic's original stipulations and their objection whether Palantir is following it or not. It has nothing at all regarding spyware. You are trying to blow up one singular point, the DoD's sudden U turn and forcible and false application of a status to appear to be several different unrelated events, and muddling up the cause and effect timeline too. The term spyware is completely absurd for a mere data retention policy. Spyware would be if they are adding trojans or other software to illicitly extract data from them, not publicly stated policy. It is beyond absurd and beyond the point of clownish insanity to call Anthropic spyware, to the extent one begins to doubt if there is any english or technical term that you don't have an alternative personal weird interpretation of. How is the matter of the AI being conscious or not a clownish concept? Do you believe in 'souls' and that non-human things cant have souls? Do you think there is supernatural magic inside our brains? In your comment history you seem to have a strange obsession with Anthropic, blatantly making up absurd things like them using obfuscations in their thought process logs and accusing them of various unverified and strange things without evidence.
the xAI models are available with no human review per TOS 3.4 'Deletion and Retention of User Content'. therefore it is not the same as the anthropic tos. [https://x.ai/legal/terms-of-service-enterprise]
But my question is unless you are privy to the negotiations happening behind closed doors with DoD, how do you know Anthropic was not making modifications to it, I doubt even the other AI companies have not had to change some things when providing the secret DoD model deployment.
Secondly you have made an absurd over the top exaggeration and blatant lies about Anthropics interaction with Palantir. You literally said Anthropic "ratted out" Palantir, a language that indicates Anthropic had some secret access to Palantir or made public something that wasn't already known. The partnership between anthropic and palantir was completely public and announced by the very same comapnies before the maduro case. And as far as public statements are known, Anthropic seems to have a specific idea of what kinds of jobs their model should be used for, and they clearly stated from start they didn't like its use for violence or violence without human oversight. They phoned Palantir as any partner would have a right to, for confirming if it was being used for killing or violence during the Maduro mission.
Your link anout summarization of thought has a line right at the end of the section where it says if the raw thought logs are required, to contact their sales team, so it is clearly a negotiable point.
How is the belief or not of ai consciousness clownish? It is a valid and pertinent question in general about all models and not just for Claude regardless of your perceived imaginary views of Anthropic.
>i spend a good amount of time on anthropic because i think that anthropic specifically, is uniquely dangerous to society and human welfare.
Here we are in moral not legal territory. So it is completely absurd to say that in a conversation right here discussing far worse companies eg Palantir CEO saying they are proud in supporting Israel's violent invasions and mass murders into its surrounding countries. Anthropic, as subject to our very discussion, is the only company among the big AI companies that seems to want to have limited dealings with the military and oversight over violent military use. They also seem to be the only major company that brings up the important question of AI consciousness. If you think Anthropic is more evil than the US government and military who has already illicilty killed millions in made up wars, then I have nothing to say. Anthropic from all that appears seems to be one of the most moral of the companies of similar scale. The only way you think Anthropic is uniquely dangerous to society is if you think mass surveillance and mass killing is great and the use of powerful AI's to assist in mass murder is even better, and opposition to these is evil. I cannot begin to think of the upside down mentality that leads to such a downright bizarre thought process.
Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train
(Waymo takes $2.85 off your next ride if you take the train)
I live in East Bay, and I often take gratuitous Waymo trips all the way across the city to Embarcadero Station to ride BART back home. I do this because I like seeing the pretty skyscrapers and the bustling city and the pretty townhomes painted interesting colors. They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
> They may want to rethink their reward structure a bit to avoid paying out to people like me.
Maybe, but who is Waymo to decide whether your trip was gratuitous? Perhaps you had brief business in Embarcadero and chose the particular mix of modalities for one reason or another (timing; or had to carry something heavy one way but not the other etc).
Indeed. Most people travelling around by taxi or public transport could be considered gratuitous anyway. You're probably not carrying a load of tools to do any work. You're more likely going to a bullshit job, going to meet friends, going to a concert or buying shit you don't need etc.
A trick I learned from an east bay friend is that (when possible) the bus across the bridge is way nicer than the BART under the bay, especially around sunset.
A bus that gets stuck in traffic is by definition a failure. It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving, meaning a reinforcing loop where more driving means more traffic for the bus to be stuck on, meaning the bus is even slower and less attractive...
> It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving
I don’t follow the logic here. Why would a bus (periodically) getting stuck in traffic forever invalidate it in comparison to getting stuck in the same traffic in a car?
In aggregate, people go the fastest way - no way to stop this from happening. In places where everyone takes public transit, the transit is fast. To make more people take public transit, you make the transit fast.
Reserving lanes as bus lanes can actually speed up car traffic by making more people switch to bus.
If buses and cars participate in the same road traffic (i.e. the bus doesn't have dedicated lanes), then a bus trip will never be faster than a comparable car trip. This is because you have to walk to/from the bus stop at both ends of the journey, wait for a bus to show up, ride the bus and have it stop for other passengers, transfer between routes, the bus has slower acceleration and turning than a car, etc.
Think about even the most strawman trip possible: A bus rider and a car driver start exactly at the location of a bus stop, the bus shows up exactly at the start time, both contestants ride/drive straight for a few kilometres (which happens to follow exactly one bus route, without changing buses; but the bus might stop a few times along the way for other passengers), and end exactly at a bus stop. The car will win every single time.
It's good to have dedicated bus lanes, but the point of a bus isn't to get from point A to point B faster than a car.
It's a part of a transit ecosystem that makes it possible to survive without a car. It fills in the the gaps where it's not economical to add train/metro lines.
Caveat: the bus can be a little bit slower and still win, because you don't need to drive. Or the car can be a little bit slower and still win, because people are antisocial. When the difference is more than a little, then you're correct.
Except that many buses broadcast their location, and many cities prioritize green lights for buses over cars.
So the car might need to stop on red multiple times (unless following a bus), while the bus will have most lights automatically turn green in front of it.
Yeah, the car will be faster, unless there are accommodations that benefit the bus only (like dedicated lanes). But the bus doesn’t have to be _faster_ to be viable to many people: there are other things going for the bus like not having to park, often being cheaper especially if it allows you to not own a car, etc. etc.
A big one: no need to find parking! Or to go back to your parked car on the reverse trip. You can do a triangle trip A,B,C,A with public transit. With a car it has to be A,B,C,B,A as you left your car at B.
I do trips like A,B,C,A all the time in a car. Sometimes even A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z,A trips in a car.
If you're sprinkling in little rules like "ah but you couldn't park at C", well, "the bus doesn't go to C" is also a valid restriction I run into often. So often when I take transit, its drive to train station -> take train someplace -> take bus someplace -> walk several blocks to destination -> walk several blocks back to bus stop -> ride bus to train station -> ride train back to train stop -> take car home so a A,B,C,D,C,B,A trip is actually quite common just to do the same as A,D,A with a car.
Bus lanes make a bus a very good alternative to driving, and they are much more efficient space-wise compared to cars (and god forbid, pick-up trucks), which means you can get more throughput...
I've heard multiple times Americans complaining about being on the bus.
Genuine question, what's up with being on the bus?
I lived in Vancouver BC, I can't see anything wrong with their bus. Not perfect, but yeah... It's a bus, goes from stop to stop. Anything special about bay area buses?
Service quality is just abysmal, extremely crowded at basically all times, delayed or skips your stop when your standing there, when it isn't crowded there's all sorts of other issues with the service, and this doesn't change the fact that it doesn't really take you where you want to go without transfers.
Truthfully, whenever I'm in the bay area I just find myself walking. There's a reason why e-scooters first found major adoption there.
Yeah. I took the bus in NY and SF and I’m also not sure why the complained. Maybe because I’m a tourist but especially in SF I had always nice interactions with the driver. Mind you I took the Bus in the City Centers. Is it that much worse in the outskirts or is it just the concept of taking a Bus with multiple other people the problem?
The buses in SF and NYC suck because of this bipartisan belief of public transit as social welfare rather than a means for the bulk of society to get to their destination. This leads to things like far too many bus stops because granny complained, lack of fare enforcement, high staffing costs, etc. To make the bus as nice as Vancouver, these cities would need to cut stops and do a draconian fare enforcement campaign. For some reason, Canadian bus riders are not ungovernable barbarians like Americans, despite being poorer on average and more diverse.
In SF it really depends on which line you're on, and a bit of luck. In my experience the 9 was the worst. I didn't ride that one often, but almost every time I encountered something ridiculous. One time a guy rolled a blunt and started smoking it on the bus. Another time a guy in a wheelchair spilled a bottle of booze that then ran up and down the floor of the bus. I got off early several times when an obviously crazy homeless person got on and started silently staring me down.
But even popular commuter routes like the 38 can get pretty dicey. One time a guy was blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker. He had headphones sitting on his neck, so I asked him to use his headphones instead. His response was to get in my face and start yelling, threatening to beat me up. Everyone around us stepped away and ignored us. Apparently the next stop was his, so he got off while threatening to jump me if he ever saw me again.
If you take public transit in the bay area regularly, you are almost guaranteed to have some very unpleasant experiences.
I don't think so. American buses are ridiculously outdated, while having to compete with some of the most well-equipped cars in the world. If Europe had such buses, they wouldn't be popular either.
The shitty metro buses in my 3rd rate "city" have air conditioning, wifi, live location tracking to your phone, wheel chair lifts, tap to pay, tap with app to pay, and run on propane because they are old enough to have "features" left over from the last oil crisis.
Can you tell me what a "Not outdated" bus looks like to you?
Europe isn't the richest place. Some of the western cities surely have nice buses, but there are plenty of old shabby buses there too and people still ride them. Might be that the routing and timing sucks, or the general cultural individualism.
We were discussing riding the bus to a place that depending on traffic is a 20 minute car ride from SF, or a 2 hour car ride in the worst case scenario traffic.
There are a few bridges that connect SF to other places across large bodies of water, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. These bridges do not provide a dedicated lane for the buses. These bridges act as a choke point for traffic. As a result, the buses are not reliably on time, because the traffic is hard to predict and it depends on whether or not people have a car accident that evening.
As I mentioned in another comment, these buses do not have bathrooms inside. So you are spending an unpredictable amount of time standing at an unsheltered bus stop, often with no bench to rest on, followed by an unknown amount of time on the bus.
The buses come infrequently enough that if you go find a restroom after waiting a while at the stop, and the bus comes while you are gone, it will be a decent chunk of your life spent waiting for the next bus to come as well.
This might be fine if you're on vacation and you just wanted to explore the Bay Area, but if you live here and work here, this is just too much time!
If you have a car, there is essentially no upside to taking the bus in this situation, which means if you are greedy and choose to drive instead you contribute to traffic by taking up more space on the road.
In contrast, if you choose to take the train, you know exactly how long the trip is going to be, because there's no variable traffic disrupting the schedules. It's predictable. It's convenient. Sometimes the train might get stopped for one reason or another, but the trains come so frequently that this is rarely an issue.
Before your trip, you're also inside a train station, which is sheltered, has seating, and even often has bathrooms.
There's a sign telling you clearly how long until the next train arrives, you don't have to count on something on your phone to find out.
My understanding of the initial commend “But then you are on a bus” was a negative one to buses and or public transport in general.
I know the geology of SF and drove both bridges a few times myself but was always lucky to not end up in traffic. I would also always prefer the train over the bus. But currently where I live this also is put to the question. I live in Berlin and we have a great public transport network which at the moment struggles a bit on multiple fronts. This happens every few years at least in my experience.
I like to try out the public transport situation in different cities for my own comparison. Funny enough one of the best times I had was driving the metro in D.C. Met a very energetic metro employee who explained the machines and the system :).
American busses are infrequent and often don't follow the schedule. This means any trip where you have to be at certain time (work meeting? class? personal meeting? some event? etc...), you have to add 30-60 minutes buffer, and that's on top of bus being already slower than the car.
Buses are widely perceived as signaling low socioeconomic status in the US, to the extent that it's become a self-reinforcing negative spiral. (As soon as a system loses its higher income riders due to real or perceived dangers or inconveniences, political support for tax subsidies and infrastructure investments (bus lanes etc.) tanks, quality then actually declines, rinse and repeat.)
I've taken buses in the Bay Area and New York a bunch of times and personally haven't had negative experiences (at least not compared to rail-based US transit), other than that the comfort of the buses was generally a few decades behind those in Europe. On the other hand, many of them even have Wi-Fi!
Where I am, buses are heavily subsidised; cost is about $3 per passenger mile. Fares are much cheaper (so cheap nobody ever really thinks about it, other than worrying if they have quarters for exact change).
They are often empty or have 1 or 2 riders.
They are slow, often show up to a stop late, so you have to plan everything an hour early.
They don’t have amenities like bathrooms and are uncomfortable for long trips, even though that’s the only sensible way to use them.
Due to political pressures, they have many, many stops and few express buses, so they are much slower than a car. The stops usually have nobody at them but the driver still has to slow down and check (sometimes they will just skip a stop they know is almost always empty).
The bus depots are not particularly safe or pleasant after dark and have trouble with attracting antisocial people.
Meanwhile, it would be cheaper to just pay for Ubers for anyone who wants them, and just make the Uber show up randomly late to replicate the experience.
There is a market emerging here often branded as “hood Uber”, “Alicia’s Uber” etc of people who will drive you for $1 a mile (cheaper than Uber) negotiated by text message and paid via CashApp etc. It’s completely unregulated. Some are now offering regular service in a minivan on a fixed route taking people to/from employers every day.
As a human who sometimes needs to use the restroom, I like my transit rides to take a predictable amount of time.
Sunset on the Bay Bridge is prime rush hour traffic time, and the favorite pasttime of many Bay Area drivers is to get in a traffic accident after work.
As far as I can tell, these double decker buses are not equipped with a restroom for their riders. Even though I'm sure the view is amazing, the red line is less often obstructed by traffic.
No doubt they are possible. One factor that discourages their existence though is that the dregs of society mess them up or go in there to do drugs in private and then conk out. It's the number one pushback to providing restrooms for the public. It sucks, but it's how it is. Most likely the only way around this is to stop subsidizing transit and to be very careful to enforce fares. This is not popular among the people who love transit, who tend to also love the underdogs and root for them.
I'd be happy to pay bus fares that cover what a bus actually costs; needy people can apply for and receive assistance that is income-based (and get booted out of the programme if they engage in antisocial behaviour).
No bladder issue. Probabilistically, when you load a bus up completely with people (the ideal situation for transit) one of them will have to use the restroom over the course of an hour and a half.
The solution is to make changes so that the bus doesn't take an hour and a half for a short distance. Like a dedicated bus lane during rush hour on a bridge.
> Waymo pays you $2.85 in Waymo credit to take the train
After you "link your Visa card", yet the reward is in "Waymo cash", which expires in 90 days and can only be used for Waymo. That's just something on your Waymo account, not real money. They must want access to your Visa card data.
It sounds like Visa is coordinating the transfer data between agencies, and Waymo has just signed up to the existing program as if it were a transit agency.
I assume Visa is paying some of this from their marketing budget.
I've seen Visa branded ads for some e-payment solution in a South-East Asian country. The solution worked with any credit card, but the flyers were clearly Visa marketing material.
What would they be able to get by linking the card? I thought that would just facilitate immediate charges/refunds to the card since the card is stored.
Not sure how it works in SF, but many cities across the world have moved to "in-card tickets." You tap your card on the way in, and the bus "knows" that this card number has a valid ticket attached to it. Depending on the particulars of the city and system, you might need to tap out too.
In some cities, this is done entirely offline. For cards which cannot guarantee offline payments (which many low-income / under-age individuals have, and such people are far more likely to use transit), this is done "on trust", with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
> with failed payments getting your card blacklisted until you go to the transit agency's office and get the situation rectified.
At least in the NYC MTA's OMNY, unblocking actually happens automatically in the background, either on a nightly reconciliation job that attempts to collect your fare or triggered by the next tap (which will be unsuccessful once more but trigger the collection attempt, and then you can tap again after your card's blocked status has cleared in the system). They also have a website to manually repay without having to wait at the turnstile.
Ugh, turnstiles. Proof-of-payment systems have so much lower friction. You buy a ticket before getting on; there are no barriers between the street and the train; sometimes there's a ticket inspector team on the train who verifies you have a ticket. If you don't have a ticket you're arrested on the spot.
It will never work in a punishment-oriented society because you're very likely to get away with riding for free if you don't do it regularly, and these societies feel that catching the bad guys is more important than working well for the good guys.
It's compatible with a card payment system but then proving criminal intent to free-ride is harder because the system gets complicated for the user. It's great with a paper concession ticket.
Arresting people on the spot is punishment too, more arbitrary and less effective. It just seems worse?
Also, the experience of riding Bart seems to have improved quite a bit since they installed better turnstiles, and that likely will affect ridership numbers.
It's not punishment-oriented. You accept that people get away with it 99% of the time and hope that 1% is enough deterrent. A punishment-oriented society insists you must be punished every time you do the thing.
The biggest benefit of fare gates is keeping out troublemakers. For whatever reason there is a large overlap between those who don't pay their fare and those who sexually harass other passengers, leave large messes, or vandalize.
The other method of suppressing quality of life crimes and fare evasion is lots of transit cops. It's probably cheaper to install the gates than hire lots of transit cops and arresting people over fare evasion makes the city/transit agency look like bad guys.
BART wasn’t punishment based but before they installed turnstiles, many people simply refused to pay. It doesn’t make sense to run a transit system this way.
Transit is mostly funded by taxes and is meant to be for everyone. I don't understand your insistence that it must have a fare.
Why not fund public works through taxes and let everyone use it freely? Do you prefer toll roads and going through a toll over literally all the other roads that have no fare? Are roads worse because stupid and poor people can use them too?
Oh, and funny note, most toll roads in the US are in a weird system where you paid for it's construction with your taxes and then that infrastructure is basically gifted to a company.
Fareless options have been tried before and it comes out to that it makes problems with antisocial behaviour even worse. So I'd say we should just charge fares that cover actual costs, and then for people who can't afford that, provide subsidised fares.
They can check to see whether you took transit! Similarly, when you enter transit with one card, you can exit with another card and they still know it's you.
The target audience of this offer presumably takes Waymo at least occasionally, so how is a Waymo credit "not real money"? And what does transaction data have to do with this?
It is Visa only, so there must be some collaboration, also because they must somehow be able to learn about transit payments (which they normally wouldn't have access to as these happen on a third-party merchant account).
Oh, I think it's a great idea to reward people for taking transit because it will help reduce traffic on the road and allow the Waymos to operate in tighter loops, increasing availability to other passengers, and possibly even bringing costs down as a result.
My selfish trip all the way across the city instead of to the nearest convenient transit station makes things worse for everyone except for me :)
To make it more clear why this would be the case, imagine that everyone in the city behaved as I did, all taking Waymos to this same train station, even if it was far out of their way. Almost all the Waymos would start at that train station after dropping other people off, and they would have to drive to get the next person, so you can think of each trip as a loop. Some of the loops would be very small and fast, for people who happen to be close to that train station, while others would be very long, for the people who started all the way across town. Less cars are needed to accommodate the short loop trips than to accommodate the long loop trips, and since there are a limited amount of cars, people will have to wait longer to complete their trips.
If instead you imagine that each Waymo that's driving around initializes on a grid around the city, with, idk, 10 blocks between each of them, and the people who want a ride, also equally distributed, all instead get a ride to their nearest transit station, the loops are shorter, which means more people can receive service.
I sometimes take the slower and older commuter train back home from the office during "green months" as I call them (May to September) to enjoy the scenery and the ambient clickclacks of the train wheels.
The argument that you shouldn't buy an EV because it's not greener (as seen on Adam Ruins Everything [1]) has always struck me as ridiculous. It's not like your old car just disappears into the ether. Someone else will buy it after you trade it in and use it. It's not like it just goes to waste.
The argument is economically illiterate also. Buying an electric car is a strong signal that there's demand for them. New cars are going to keep being made no matter what. The difference is which kind of cars we will make, and if there's a strong demand signal then more electric cars will be made.
I always thought the argument was that "continuing to drive the cars we have is better than building new cars even if the new cars are EVs". Which, even if true, doesn't sound particularly helpful or useful because very few people had the financial ability to replace their IC car early just because it isn't an EV (which has historically been far more expensive).
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