Burkhard Bilger:

Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights, signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids. They have blind spots, leg cramps, seizures, and heart attacks. They rubberneck, hotdog, and take pity on turtles, cause fender benders, pileups, and head-on collisions. They nod off at the wheel, wrestle with maps, fiddle with knobs, have marital spats, take the curve too late, take the curve too hard, spill coffee in their laps, and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.
 
 A case in point: The driver in the lane to my right. He’s twisted halfway around in his seat, taking a picture of the Lexus that I’m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski. Both cars are heading south on Highway 880 in Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour, yet the man takes his time. He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so. Then he snaps the picture, checks it onscreen, and taps out a lengthy text message with his thumbs. By the time he puts his hands back on the wheel and glances up at the road, half a minute has passed.
 
 Levandowski shakes his head. He’s used to this sort of thing. His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It’s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas, and G.P.S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work. Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes, or that he belonged to an élite team of ghost hunters. But nowadays the vehicle is clearly marked: “Self-Driving Car.”

Via Oliver Bruce.

priceonomics:

Over the past 50 years, the way Americans commute has seen one dominant trend: toward commuting alone by car.
 
 The percent of Americans who drive a private vehicle to work has increased significantly since 1960. The rapid suburbanization of the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, which some attribute to White Flight after the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964, may be responsible. America’s love affair with the car certainly didn’t help.
 
 All these commuters could be carpooling, but as Planet Money points out, the percentage of Americans who carpool decreased from 20% to 10% over the past 30 years. (Despite all the new carpool lanes built.)
 
 All other forms of commuting became less common from 1980 to 2011 except for working from home. So the only categories that didn’t continually decrease over the past 50 years were “Private Vehicle” and “Work At Home.” We’ll have to wait and see whether the movement for all things green pushes up the numbers of people biking, walking, and using mass transport. But environmental efforts are fighting against longtime commuting trends.

Nouriel Roubini:

NEW YORK – It is widely agreed that a series of collapsing housing-market bubbles triggered the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, along with the severe recession that followed. While the United States is the best-known case, a combination of lax regulation and supervision of banks and low policy interest rates fueled similar bubbles in the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, and Dubai.
 
 Now, five years later, signs of frothiness, if not outright bubbles, are reappearing in housing markets in Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, back for an encore, the UK (well, London). In emerging markets, bubbles are appearing in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Israel, and in major urban centers in Turkey, India, Indonesia and Brazil.
 
 Signs that home prices are entering bubble territory in these economies include fast-rising home prices, high and rising price-to-income ratios, and high levels of mortgage debt as a share of household debt. In most advanced economies, bubbles are being inflated by very low short- and long-term interest rates. Given anemic GDP growth, high unemployment, and low inflation, the wall of liquidity generated by conventional and unconventional monetary easing is driving up asset prices, starting with home prices.
 
 The situation is more varied in emerging-market economies. Some that have high per capita income – for example, Israel, Hong Kong, and Singapore – have low inflation and want to maintain low policy interest rates to prevent exchange-rate appreciation against major currencies. Others are characterized by high inflation (even above the central-bank target, as in Turkey, India, Indonesia, and Brazil). In China and India, savings are going into home purchases, because financial repression leaves households with few other assets that provide a good hedge against inflation. Rapid urbanization in many emerging markets has also driven up home prices, as demand outstrips supply.

Chris Anderson:

So what is their unique brand of genius? Here’s how I think of it: system-level design thinking powered by extraordinary conviction. Each of those italicized phrases is critical. Let’s dig in.
 
 The first thing to note is that Jobs and Musk are not inventors in the typical sense of the word. The specific products they’re famous for all had numerous other creators. Steve Wozniak engineered the first Apple. The core ideas in the Mac’s graphical user interface came from Xerox PARC. Jony Ive was key to the design of the iPhone and iPad. A company called AC Propulsion helped craft the original tech vision for Tesla. And countless others made key contributions.
 
 To appreciate Jobs’ and Musk’s contributions, you must pull the camera back. What they did uniquely was to imagine the broader ecosystems in which those products could become transformative. To do that involved an intimate understanding not just of the technology but of what would be necessary in design, logistics, and the business model to launch those products and make them truly compelling to potential customers. You can describe both men as amazing designers. But their design genius should be thought of as not just an obsession with satisfying shapes and appealing user interfaces. Those matter, but the start point is broader, system-level design. Most innovation is like a new melody. For Jobs and Musk it’s the whole symphony.

Richard Waters:

Anyone in the US doing their holiday shopping from the product showcases that appear at the top of Google’s search results is almost certain to pay substantially more than if they delved deeper in the search engine.
 
 Five out of every six items in the panels shown on a Google search made in America are more expensive than the same items from other merchants hidden deeper in the index, with an average premium of 34 per cent, according to a Financial Times analysis.
 
 The scale of the apparent premium pricing drew complaints from some Google critics, who said it echoed issues that are at the heart of an antitrust case in Brussels in which the company has already reached a tentative settlement with European regulators.
 
 By showing its chosen product listings prominently while relegating other services, Google could make more money from merchants who paid to have their products featured, said Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer who represents a number of the search engine’s rivals.
 
 Google countered that the price paid by consumers was only one consideration in how it selected items to appear in the panels. “Just as people consider multiple factors when they shop, like free shipping or whether they prefer a particular retailer, there are a variety of factors” at work, it said.
 
 Critics claim that many consumers do not realise the product listings are advertising rather than Google’s selection of the best products to buy. Unlike other panes that show advertising on the search engine, the panels are not tinted a different colour and are labelled “sponsored” rather than “ads”.

It is easy to grumble. Perhaps common.

Yet, God manages to catch our attention at opportune moments.

Settling into the cramped “A” seat for two plus hours on an ERJ-145 recently, the flight attendant mentioned while closing the door – for the second time – (a ground worker noticed that the door did not appear to be properly sealed) that she has been astonished to learn how many people it takes to make the air travel system work.

The smart and bubbly flight attendant then went on to tell me that “I have wanted to fly my whole life”. “My parents would not let me become a flight attendant after high school. I went to college, obtained my teaching degree and taught for 20 years. I retired and became a flight attendant.”

“I love to FLY”!

…..

Other days, shoe shine wisdom appears.

…..

President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens“, to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26.

So we begin with God, Creator of all and Father of our Savior.

Our day to day life is rather different from the early pilgrims, much less 19th century America.

I am further thankful for my ever patient family, children, health, smart colleagues, gracious friends, past teachers, healthcare professionals, government and the information & communication technology revolution (ICT). I am thankful for the opportunities that have arisen from the petri dish that is my life.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Andy Serwer:

But people love their cars. They have their stuff in their cars, the car seats for their baby, their Frisbees, their golf clubs—it’s their second home. People aren’t going to give that up, are they?
 
 Ask a kid. Take teenagers 20 years ago and ask them would they rather have a car or a computer? And the answer would have been 100% of the time they’d rather have a car, because a car represents freedom, right?
 
 Today, ask kids if they’d rather have a smartphone or a car if they had to pick and 100% would say smartphones. Because smartphones represent freedom. There’s a huge social behavior reorientation that’s already happening. And you can see it through that. And I’m not saying nobody can own cars. If people want to own cars, they can own cars. But there is a new generation coming where freedom is defined by “I can do anything I want, whenever I want. If I want a ride, I get a ride, but I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to make car payments. I don’t have to worry about insurance. I have complete flexibility.” That is freedom too.