It's not surprising that you only hear about Waymo in the news when something goes wrong. That doesn't mean it hasn't been extremely successful, which it has by any objective measure, other than profitability at least in the short term. The tech works.
As many have noted, the problem is largely Byzantine zoning regulations, NIMBYism, and a "vetocracy" system that makes it extremely hard to build housing in so major metropolitan areas. For example, NYC likely needs at least half a million new homes to keep up with demand.
That a simple statement of fact is bait ought to tell you how much of a fantasy world people live in.
The covid vaccines are shit and don't work.
End of story.
The mental gymnastics needed to claim they do fall apart when you compare them to vaccines for any other deadly disease. We don't still have small pox running rampant in countries with 90%+ vaccination rates. No one walks around telling you that having only your face paralyzed by polio is a great out come and a reason why we should vaccinate toddlers. If you get the MMR vaccine you're not told to be happy that you only got one of the three.
We need to move people's minds to the real world where everyone gets covid during flu season, rename it covid season while we're at it, and build a hospital system to solve that problem.
Contradicting hard medical evidence about reduced negative outcomes of the COVID vaccine that the entire medical industry has consensus around is just crank stuff at best.
The vaccines are unreasonably effective given how radically the virus has mutated.
The argument that things had to go this way, that we should just lay down our arms from the outset, throw immunocompromised, children and old folks under the bus, and treat it like "flu season" (which has a vaccine for f's sake!) has bequeathed our massive world-wide (or at least west-wide) gain-of-function laboratory that is bringing powerful new mutations to a geo near you.
Track-and-trace and countless bog-standard public health responses (like requiring masks on planes for f's sake), and yes the occasional lockdown, PLUS the fact that we got lucky on how fast we got vaccines delivering measurable improvement in outcomes, would have been a powerful combo. But it wouldn't have made any money.
This is a very poor comparsion. Sure, many companies went bust around then. But many didn't. Plenty of real value was created by companies doing real useful things.
A particularly absurd case of environmental review delaying a much needed project is congestion pricing in NYC. They are actually going to review the environmental impacts of a system that will decrease the number of cars on the road. What are they even reviewing?
One of the big issues with the California High Speed Rail is lawsuits dragging out the environmental review process. Ditto utility solar installations.
