Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The transition to fully driverless cars is still several years away, but vehicle automation has already started to change the way we are thinking about transportation, and it is set to disrupt business models throughout the automotive industry.
Driverless cars are also likely to create new business opportunities and have a broad reach, touching companies and industries beyond the automotive industry and giving rise to a wide range of products and services.
We currently have Uber developing a driverless vehicle, and Google advancing its driverless car and investigating a ridesharing model.
Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly gearing up to challenge Telsa in electric cars and Silicon Valley is extending its reach into the auto industry.
These developments signal the creation of an entirely new shared economy businesses that will tap into a new market that could see smart mobility seamlessly integrated in our lives.
Consider, for example, the opportunity to provide mobility as a service using shared on-demand driverless vehicle fleets. Research by Deloitte shows that car ownership is increasingly making less sense to many people, especially in urban areas.
Individuals are finding it difficult to justify tying up capital in an under-utilised asset that stays idle for 20 to 22 hours every day. Driverless on-demand shared vehicles provide a sensible option as a second car for many people and as the trend becomes more widespread, it may also begin to challenge the first car.
Results from a recent study by the International Transport Forum that modelled the impacts of shared driverless vehicle fleets for the city of Lisbon in Portugal demonstrates the impacts. It showed that the city's mobility needs can be delivered with only 35% of vehicles during peak hours, when using shared driverless vehicles complementing high capacity rail. Over 24 hours, the city would need only 10% of the existing cars to meet its transportation needs.
The Lisbon study also found that while the overall volume of car travel would likely increase (because the vehicles will need to re-position after they drop off passengers), the driverless vehicles could still be turned into a major positive in the fight against air pollution if they were all-electric.
It also found that a shared self-driving fleet that replaces cars and buses is also likely to remove the need for all on-street parking, freeing an area equivalent to 210 soccer fields, or almost 20% of the total kerb-to-kerb street space.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 07 2015, @04:46PM
Is there a direct conversion to American units? How many baseball fields is that? Or, football fields?
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:16PM
A standard international game soccer field has 7140 square meters. An American football field has an area of 5320.45 square meters. Thus one soccer field is about 1.342 American football fields. 210 soccer fields are therefore 281.8 American football fields.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:28PM
That's a good sized paddock then!
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday November 08 2015, @12:00AM
It's kind of weird that there is no mention of the amount of space that those 210 soccer fields of parking are saved in. If it's the whole of Great Britain or the U.S. then that's not very much parking space saved. My guess is that there is around 3000 to 4000 square feet of on street parking in an average city block in the U.S. So maybe there could be that much saved per several blocks. Because just where are all these shared cars going to park?
The other thing I wonder about about is the allotment of shared vehicles. In the small Central California city I live in most traffic is in the morning from 7:30 AM to 9:00 AM and in the evening from 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM. So if the 2 to 4 hours that most people need a car is at the same time, how does that cut the number of cars on the road? How does that provide a car for everyone when they need it.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by soylentsandor on Sunday November 08 2015, @08:51AM
From TFS:
a recent study (...) for the city of Lisbon in Portugal
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snow on Saturday November 07 2015, @06:14PM
210 Soccer fields = 12 library of congresses
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:06PM
the driverless vehicles could still be turned into a major positive in the fight against air pollution if they were all-electric.
Unlike those electric cars with humans behind the wheel. You know the ones I'm talking about: they belch tons of black smoke, drip oil everywhere, and cause soot to build up on buildings. I'm glad we are finally going to get automatic electric cars instead of these manual ones so we can cut down on the pollution!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:14PM
Reading that part stopped me in my tracks too. "Driverless" and "Electric" are orthogonal characteristics.
It is an example of someone trying to push a weak argument by seizing (or rather appearing to seize) some high moral ground to associate with his case, even though it really has nothing to do with it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:30PM
People seem to be drinking up all the kool-aid about these driverless cars without considering what these companies (and also likely the government) will inevitably push on you: Privacy-invading 'features', digital restrictions management, and proprietary software. We must reject cars that do not run Free Software; that includes driverless cars. No amount of convenience or shiny things are worth sacrificing freedoms for.
(Score: 3, Funny) by isostatic on Saturday November 07 2015, @08:10PM
Sure. But given that 99% of the cars out there run non-free software, 99% of people will ignore you.
No amount of convenience or shiny things are worth sacrificing freedoms for.
Patrick Henry once said "Give me liberty or give me shiny things", then we got the iphone.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Max Hyre on Saturday November 07 2015, @08:27PM
So, how much less do I want a car that reports every trip I make, in detail, to some corporation? (And only one request away from the government having the info.) Do you really want to be trapped in a car being subjected to advertising from your destination store's competitors? And that's the least of it.
With luck, I'll be dead befor they outlaw human-driven vehicles. Somehow I don't see the electorate rising up to insist on privacy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @10:34PM
I used to think like you -- avoid the EZ-Pass, since it's nobody's business when and where I travel.
Then, I realized all toll booths have cameras, and are 99% likely taking a snapshot of my license plate, OCR-ing it, and storing it in some computer forever.
Once you internalize that, the EZ-Pass no longer makes any difference, might as well save yourself the hassle of waiting in line at the single remaining cash tollbooth...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @11:09PM
You used to think like him, and then you decided to hand over your information on a silver platter. Since keeping your privacy is hard, you might as well give up whatever remaining privacy you have. Give up and reduce your chances of success to zero. Brilliant activism!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @04:50AM
nothing on that silver platter "they" weren't taking from me already, that was my whole point.
I'd love to deny them whatever information they *don't* already have, but adding hours of backroads to my commute to accomplish that crosses into "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face"...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @10:17AM
Well, your point is an outright exaggeration. The government is neither all-knowing nor omnipresent. There are also methods you can use to obscure your license plate from license plate readers without completely covering it up.
but adding hours of backroads to my commute to accomplish that crosses into "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face"...
So you *can* accomplish it. Yet you choose not to. The more people accept injustice, the more it will prevail. Challenge injustices in every aspect of your life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @12:01AM
Guess you didn't think of this.
http://www.businessinsider.com/infrared-leds-protect-your-license-plate-number-from-police-cams-2011-6 [businessinsider.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @04:59AM
So there' s the polycarbonate reflective flash shielding, and the market for that is "noisy" (i.e. there's so much cheap crap that probably doesn't work that it's hard to pick the one that actually does). Then there's people driving around with license plates shielded so darkly that one can't see it with the naked eye, which is just asking for the cops to pull you over and mess with you. This LED gimmick falls into the same category (cop car pulling up behind you, if their license plate reader shows yours looking "weird", you're in for some fun times).
I don't want to play bullshit cat and mouse games with the cops. As long as my plate is visible to the naked eye, there'll eventually be a technology that can read it automatically, in relatively short time. Anything else is like asking the cops to kick me, so no thanks.
I guess while I'm at it I could put on a fart can and a spoiler wing as well :)
"If EVERYONE just started acting like ricers the cops can't pull us ALL over, man!" is a nice fantasy, I've had it many times, but then I wake up, get in the car, and drive to work, like every other schlub.
Have any *realistic* suggestions ?
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Sunday November 08 2015, @10:25AM
I don't want to play bullshit cat and mouse games with the cops.
Your 'solution' seems to be to give up and let government thugs violate your privacy with impunity. You don't want to take any risks when challenging evil, and if something that will help you take back some of your privacy now won't work perfectly or work forever, you simply give up and allow your privacy to be violated. This is such a self-defeating attitude and why the government is able to commit so many wrongs. Those of us who take action against the government will not be discouraged by your lack of concern for freedom.
"If EVERYONE just started acting like ricers the cops can't pull us ALL over, man!" is a nice fantasy, I've had it many times, but then I wake up, get in the car, and drive to work, like every other schlub.
Like most cowards, you mean. Not everyone is like you.
Have any *realistic* suggestions ?
Accept that challenging evil can be risky and that no solution is going to be absolutely perfect. Don't expect a perfect solution to the issue of mass surveillance of public places, but try the best ones that are available to screw over the surveillance as much as you can.
You seem to have some amount of desire for freedom, but you have no desire to actually fight for it or take risks to get it. If everyone were like you, we would have no freedom whatsoever. Luckily, there are people who will fight for freedom and take risks doing it, and you will reap the rewards despite doing nothing and attempting to discourage the activists the entire time.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 08 2015, @04:23PM
no solution is going to be absolutely perfect
I think his concern is about the "solutions" that are very distant from perfect.
but then I wake up, get in the car, and drive to work, like every other schlub.
Is also a solution for dealing with surveillance and one that is nearer to perfection than to stand out as the one in a thousand people interfering with surveillance in a blatantly obvious way.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Monday November 09 2015, @08:52PM
I think his concern is about the "solutions" that are very distant from perfect.
Whereas he has none of his own except to give up, which is significantly worse.
Is also a solution for dealing with surveillance and one that is nearer to perfection than to stand out as the one in a thousand people interfering with surveillance in a blatantly obvious way.
That's a solution for "dealing with" surveillance, not for getting rid of it. It seems few people want to take any risks in the name of freedom, but that doesn't stop them from wanting freedom. Oh, well; as usual, the majority is useless.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 09 2015, @09:36PM
That's a solution for "dealing with" surveillance, not for getting rid of it.
No different from your not quite absolutely perfect solution.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday November 10 2015, @12:22AM
Not really, because you're trying to thwart the surveillance's effectiveness, and perhaps doing so in a visible way. If enough people do this, the surveillance will become less useful. Also, if more people do this, even more people may join in as it gains more publicity. If worthless government thugs harass people over this, that just means even more publicity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @06:55PM
Yeah, because the government can't read license plates. SMH
Also, this mindset of 'free' transit is silly. Trains are pretty cool, but they go where they go. There's no flexibility. Between a train and walking, I'm pretty good. Along that same line, merely seeing what tollbooths I use is about as detailed a view into my personal life as noticing I wear Levis. "Whoa, I went downtown again. You got me there, big brother. Care to guess where I went? Nope, not the concert. Nope, not a bar. No mistress. Uh-uh, too late for clothes shopping or a job... (etc)'.
If you want your privacy protected, get it at the point of origin: illegalize gathering and retaining individual activity data. It's harder, bordering on impossible in a corporatocracy. But obsessing about the rest of these things is nibbling at data sources rather than the database they feed. Kill one source, another springs up. Go for the core. Or we'll just be tracked due to facial recognition via surveilance cameras, the things we buy, the less-vigilant people we associate with, our cellphones nattering with LTE power poles (was that a story here or on /.?), etc.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:31PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:48PM
we can drop car usage by a factor of three
I think they are saying it would drop the number of cars in existence by a factor of three (because they are shared). The traffic level will not drop because there are the same number of people making the same journeys.
In fact the traffic level will increase (which TFA admits) because of empty cars re-positioning. I would suggest that the traffic level would about double. That just could not happen in London (the city example I know) where traffic is already choked.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday November 07 2015, @07:01PM
It's been that way forever. Gugo Gernsback mentioned it in his 1926 futurist essay Fifty Years from Now [mcgrewbooks.com].
He predicted that in 1976 cars would all be electric, we would have Star Trek matter transporters, and control the weather with electricity. So take what futurists say with a lot more than a grain of salt.
Mad at your neighbors? Join ICE, $50,000 signing bonus and a LICENSE TO MURDER!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:34PM
That's already an established precedent for a car sharing service. Avis bought them out a few years ago. Google for the yelp reviews... they're not looking too good.
That's one big reason for owning your own car. You don't have to hassle with yet another utility company.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SubiculumHammer on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:51PM
Besides after afew years the price for the car service will be just slightly under buying your own car...always happens.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Saturday November 07 2015, @05:41PM
Don't know where to begin debunking this puff. But here's some :
driverless cars is still several years away
... and yet ...
vehicle automation has already started to change the way we are thinking about transportation
Is it? Only in the sense that from time to time we read (and comment) articles about driverless cars. I know of no-one who is already planning their travel arrangements for the driverless car era.
showed that the city's mobility needs can be delivered with only 35% of vehicles during peak hours when using shared driverless vehicles complementing high capacity rail. Over 24 hours, the city would need only 10% of the existing cars to meet its transportation needs
Eh? I suspect that means that a hell of a lot more people are assumed to be using rail (nothing to do with driverless cars), otherwise it is assuming that each driverless car is averaging three commuting trips in the peak time - like into the centre and and back into the suburbs again for the next passenger, three times. The optimism is out of control here.
it also found that a shared self-driving fleet that replaces cars and buses is also likely to remove the need for all on-street parking
Eh? Replacing buses as well now? And how the removal of on-street parking? People are going to want the thing right outside their home when they come out in the morning (at least the first of those three commuters). They are not going to be happy with waiting for half-an-hour while it comes from some central parking area. Don't forget all these re-positioning trips when empty are traffic over and above present day traffic levels. At least TFA does mention that, but makes very light of it.
Since these self driving cars are going to be very minimalistic (judging by the ones seen so far, and they are "green" you see) it is not going to cost much to own one anyway, then at least you won't need to go to work sitting in someone else's last night's vomit and fag ends.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Saturday November 07 2015, @06:54PM
It's far easier to have "robot" trucks do only the "robot friendly" routes (e.g. mainly expressways), do them well, and do them nonstop - no driver fatigue. You might even be able to convince the insurance companies to charge you less. And if a kid somehow jumps in front of a robot truck in an expressway and gets squished, it's a smaller PR problem than if a kid jumps in front of a robot bus/taxi/car in the city/suburb and gets squished (just make sure the robot truck doesn't go through such places till the technology and laws etc are ready and you can avoid a lot of such problems).
Taxis and buses have to deal all sorts with strangers- plenty of unknowns. Whereas for certain trucking routes you can arrange for the robot trucks to not deal with strangers (unless they are hijackers, in which case you don't really have to be so friendly and interactive either ;) ). Taxis and passenger cars have to deal with humans and their fickleness, and more difficult road conditions (there may not be any robot friendly routes to the destinations they want).
So I don't know why so many people are so enthusiastic and gungho about robot taxis, buses and passenger cars. To me it seems an easier sell to the trucking industry.
Of course that's still bad news to the millions of truck drivers in the world. People say these robots will create jobs just like when cars replaced horses, those making buggy whips switched to doing something else. But how many of the truck drivers are the horses and how many are the buggy whip makers? Did the horses get more jobs? Or did they get turned into glue and animal feed?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday November 07 2015, @07:49PM
People have some really fantastic ideas about how they think these driverless cars will work.
They seem to think that some magic "AI" will drive visually just like a human, or better.
Nope. You are basically putting them on an electronic equivalent of railroad track with a few sensors to prevent collisions, and a pile of pre-programmed algorithms to handle KNOWN exceptions and variations.
Absolutely the trucking industry wants this. You can't just make space for new railroad tracks any more, and industry is much more distributed these days. But unlike Billybob Blowjo living in a rural area with gravel and dirt roads, pathways to industrial locations are easier to map and maintain.
If enough consumer driverless cars actually get on the road, just wait until 5000 cars drive in to a canyon after a bridge goes out, only stopping once it fills up. Or cars plow in to a maintenance crew because certain models of cars didn't get the emergency map update or whatever. Or after enough disasters, traffic grinds to a halt ever time a swirl runs across the road.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @11:06PM
How many industrial areas have you been to? Many actually do have dirt roads as truck drivers don't care too much and tear up roads very fast. Every time these sorts of stories come up I am reminded that 99% of the readership here live in urban environments and work in cubicles, never venturing out of their tiny bubbles to see how ignorant they really are.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @11:42PM
That is a good point, but there is no need to be insulting about it.
In all probability, the people designing, promoting, and buying in to driverless cars and trucks are likewise unfamiliar with the real world conditions. Either way, users of such vehicles will have to make some concessions if they want to fully automate their processes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Sunday November 08 2015, @11:39AM
How many industrial areas have you been to? Many actually do have dirt roads
Not in the UK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @03:56PM
How many industrial areas have you been to? Many actually do have dirt roads as truck drivers don't care too much and tear up roads very fast. Every time these sorts of stories come up I am reminded that 99% of the readership here live in urban environments and work in cubicles, never venturing out of their tiny bubbles to see how ignorant they really are.
#1 You forget one of the points - unlike taxis the robot trucks don't have to do ALL the routes.
It's far easier to have "robot" trucks do only the "robot friendly" routes (e.g. mainly expressways), do them well
#2 I've been to a fair number of industrial areas where the roads are fine. More importantly the roads at most major transportation hubs like the LA port, O Hare airport, the Houston port are fine and certainly aren't dirt roads.
So you're not just ignorant, you also have difficulty following a thread.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday November 07 2015, @11:07PM
I'll wager that driverless trucks will not happen, for simple liability reasons. That is , the driver is usually responsible for the load in some manner. I would expect auto-drive (like the simpsons!!) to be plausible, with the driver actually being responsive.
At least initially. I would argue that the changes that are going to happen will be quick, but the penetration will be uneven as with most technology.
The positive side is the number of people who *cannot* drive, who will be able to get around - elderly and other disabled folks. Surely this is something we can all hope for?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday November 07 2015, @07:04PM
Tesla's cars are far from dinky, and they have one out now that's almost driverless.
Mad at your neighbors? Join ICE, $50,000 signing bonus and a LICENSE TO MURDER!
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 07 2015, @07:53PM
Actually driverless cars are already there now. Indeed most of the cars are driverless most of the time. It's just that usually the driverless cars don't move, and if they do, it's because someone forgot to put in the brake. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @04:40PM
Yeah, this article (and by extension its "curator" Arthur T. Knackerbracket) are involved in that journalistic Möbius strip of the Driverless Car Utopia. They're probably getting passive-aggressively sick of being stuck in traffic on the few days they can't be in their Web-2.0 Bullshit Economy Utopia (a.k.a. the home office), and have to deal with the realities of motor vehicle logistics in urban areas (our ancestors found a solution to expensive and scarce parking, auto theft, and what west coast motorists call "San Francisco Nose" [the dents on the front and back bumpers from other moronic parallel-parkers playing bumper-cars with your car]: that solution is called THE SUBURBS).
This "constantly flowing stream of cars that doesn't have to park" isn't remotely possible now, not without some sort of utopic mega-fuel-station where hundreds of cars can fill up with gas, or super-recharge (and that's not even taking the payment for said fuel into account). Also, have you noticed that every cab you've ridden in the past has had some dire mechanical problem due to not going to the mechanic often enough during its death march to 300,000 miles in 5 years? How do you think that's going to hold up with EVERY car owned by society, in your pie in the sky "utopia"?
When I see "driverless car" or "car of the future", I think of the Johnny Cab from Total Recall, and the electric cars in Gattaca, in the middle of the absolutely abhorrent "utopia society" (which is a world I wouldn't want to live in, in far far more ways than just the genetic discrimination).
To the authors and fanboys of articles like these: grow up. Either live with the joys and pains of owning an automobile, or move into the city and strategize to the point where you never need to own one. (I have a friend who doesn't have a car, doesn't need one for his travel logistics, and isn't as utterly insufferable as these "driverless car society" acolytes).
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Saturday November 07 2015, @10:25PM
These driverless cars are motionless for 75% of the time because they have to be recharged. Car sharing will end up just as public transport, not where you are, not where you want to go, not when you want to go. I'd rather stick to my own car instead of sticking to someone else's dirt.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by FlatPepsi on Sunday November 08 2015, @01:08AM
Everyone keeps saying driverless cards will make car ownership obsolete. I don't understand why this would be.
We already have a self-driving, time-share by the hour car rental. It exists in nearly every city in the nation. We call it a Taxi.
Taxi's (aka self-driving car rental on demand) has not made car ownership obsolete. In a very small handful of cities, it makes not owning a car a practical option - but in those cases decent public transportation exists too.
Self driving cars will change nothing with personal car ownership. Now, long haul truckers, on the other hand...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 08 2015, @03:00AM
Agreed. Self-driving cars provide only an incremental improvement over existing taxi and carsharing services. Those services already get some value out of being able to use the car for a larger proportion of the day than a single user. The main advantage over a taxi would be getting rid of labor costs, making the service cheaper, and therefore making slightly more people be willing to use it instead of owning a car. A taxi company could also probably need fewer taxis as currently the taxis are unused while their owner sleeps, but the need to cover peek demand means that probably wouldn't make too big a difference, especially after counting the fact that self-driving cars will likely be significantly more expensive, at least initially (due to the additional sensors needed if nothing else).
The models I've seen claiming self-driving taxis could be significantly less expensive than owning a car assume pretty much everyone in an urban area would switch, meaning there would be a huge fleet of self-driving taxis (mind, significantly smaller than the current set of personally owned cars), so there would always be one available nearby and having so many would mean they could be used efficiently enough to significantly reduce the number of cars needed. Whether slowly decreasing the price of taxis over time gets to such a state, I don't know.
(Score: 2) by EQ on Sunday November 08 2015, @09:48AM
Dense urban area these might work, but not for wider or spread out cities like in the US western and Midwestern areas, or any suburban areas, and absolutely useless for small cities and towns, as well at total rubbish for rural areas. Don't these people have any clue as to their won bias?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday November 08 2015, @02:49PM
These sorts of discussions remind me of the futurist musings from the 1950's when everything in the future was going to be atomic powered, and everything in life was going to be done while sitting behind the wheel of your car.
Having driven back to Brooklyn from Boston last night, I admit it would have been quite pleasant to put the car on autopilot and snooze. But it's far from necessary to change the way we think of car ownership. That's already happening. Google "Millenials car ownership trend."
There are a lot of aspects to the shift in car ownership. Part of it is economics--the finance industry has used student loans to suck away money millenials might have had to buy cars (incidentally it has also sucked away money they might have used to buy homes, another trend in decline). Part of it is a significant shift in where people choose to live--suburbs are passe, cities have seen new influxes of young adults. Part of it is habits--younger people want to spend their commuting time doing something other than cursing at other drivers. Another part is the use of transportation alternatives--walking, biking, mass transit, car sharing. But you can sum it all up with a generational shift away from the car as the center of life.
Driverless cars will have their niche, but it's really a late addition to something that's already underway. It smacks of the auto industry scrambling to remain relevant in the face of damning, ineluctable social trends, in much the same way the coal industry is scrambling with "clean coal" and the utilities are scrambling with "fracking" and cable companies are scrambling with "better cable boxes." The train has left the station.
Washington DC delenda est.