>hedge funds would be worth nothing.

People who want to maintain their wealth find value in hedge funds. Being able to insulate your wealth from whateveris happening in the world, without you having to think about it is valuable.

Both the business and the customer get value when the customer spends their income on something from the business.

Currently it's looking like Waymo's most viable competitors are in China, namely Pony.ai and Baidu's Apollo.

Even without competition it will be a long time before Waymo is operating in most American cities.

They will make it worse, as it makes it easier to move a vehicle around. When the price goes down, the usage goes up. And it's traffic whether the vehicle has a human being transported, it's circling waiting for a fare, or it's on the way back, empty, from taking a child to school

They might fix it a bit. Cars might be able to travel at more consistent speeds, not speeding up and slowing down, that causes traffic, and fewer accidents would also reduce traffic.

Maybe in the future they could also travel closer together!

you are right, it probably won't fix the traffic, but it doesn't matter because if you are not steering the wheel then you can work or study while in the traffic.

there is a huge economic impact

This argument never makes a lick of sense, these are entirely different problems. Trains, buses, subways, do not go to my house, and they do not go to my destination. They (sometimes) get close, and then I have to get through the last mile somehow, often a taxi or Uber. That transfer alone is annoying and it often makes sense to just take the taxi the whole way, even if it costs more, and it's a better experience than any public transit, so why not?

Maybe that setup works in China where everyone lives on top of each other in shoeboxes and you can just route a monorail through an apartment building, but I like both having my space and living adjacent to a large city. You could put a teleporter to the train station on my boulevard and I'd stand next to it while I wait for an Uber. You could build a train station a block from my house and I'd move somewhere else. I would pay multiples of any train ticket price to get into an autonomous sleeper Waymo and wake up in a city hours away in front of my hotel. You literally could not pay me to take more public transit if I have any other option, and I don't think I'm alone in that, and building more of it doesn't solve that.

America's strength here is that it's full of great places where you can live like that, take public transit everywhere, walk everywhere else, if that's what you want, with the compromises it comes with. But instead of moving to those places people say "build more public transit", which then just sounds like "I wish public transit was more accessible to me specifically" and then we're just back at taxis, or building rail to connect the front doors of everyone on earth.

For long distance trains:

While I also love trains and public transit, China is about the same physical size of the US, but has about four times the population, so it's four times denser. Definitely makes trains more appealing for them.

> We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains.

Absolutely we can build trains. It's not that we're incapable. It's that it's not financially viable based on the usage it'll get.

Again, I'd love better trains in the US, but it doesn't make sense in a lot of cases in the US still due to density and current value props for individuals. If it was valuable, someone would do it.

Now, for intra-city transit, the lack of trains also drives me insane.