Saturday, December 01, 2018
Autopilot
Impressive... that nobody died.
The speed limit there is 65 or lower.
When a pair of California Highway Patrol officers pulled alongside a car cruising down Highway 101 in Redwood City before dawn Friday, they reported a shocking sight: a man fast asleep behind the wheel.
The car was a Tesla, the man was a Los Altos planning commissioner, and the ensuing freeway stop turned into a complex, seven-minute operation in which the officers had to outsmart the vehicle’s autopilot system because the driver was unresponsive, according to the CHP.
...
Officers observed Samek’s gray Tesla Model S around 3:30 a.m. as it sped south at 70 mph on Highway 101 near Whipple Avenue, said Art Montiel, a CHP spokesman. When officers pulled up next to the car, they allegedly saw Samek asleep, but the car was moving straight, leading them to believe it was in autopilot mode.
The speed limit there is 65 or lower.
Surprising Developments
Horrifying that it's surprising, but...
The family of a Dallas man who was killed in his own home expressed relief but little joy Friday after the former police officer who shot Botham Jean was indicted on a murder charge.
Amber Guyger, 30, was booked into the Mesquite Jail on Friday and quickly released on bond.
"We really are not happy," his father, Bertrum Jean, said, "but we take consolation, we take comfort at this time."
A Dallas County grand jury delivered the indictment against Amber Guyger after weighing the evidence against the fired Dallas officer Monday and Wednesday.
Friday, November 30, 2018
Voter Fraud
Found some.
State officials in North Carolina voted Friday to continue investigating fraud in the 9th Congressional District election, potentially delaying certification of the results for weeks and leaving open the possibility that a new election could be called.
...
The board is collecting sworn statements from voters in rural Bladen County, near the South Carolina border, who described people coming to their doors and urging them to hand over their absentee ballots, sometimes without filling them out. Others described receiving absentee ballots by mail that they had not requested. It is illegal to take someone else’s ballot and turn it in.
[Sam Jackson Voice] PROVE ME WRONG, MOTHERF*****S
Waymo is supposedly starting realsie for sure taxi service in parts of Phoenix by the end of this year. And all their pilot program people will be released from NDAs so they can talk about their experiences. Going with: neato, annoying, and priced way below any rate that would make money even without the understandable additional costs of a research program.
Lol Nothing Matters
Things go from outrageous to normal rather quickly and easily. Back when I was young - early 80s - "PENTAGON PAYING $700 FOR TOILET SEATS!!!" type stuff was a big defense department procuring scandal. Of course that was outrageous, and you could still love TEH TROOPS and say that. Now a similar "scandal" would show up on page A18 and no one would care, because of course the Defense Department and their buddies are just robbing us all blind because America.
If You Control The Past
Gotta change that change that number to 40 now.
This is embarrassing even for James Bennet (editor), who apparently has no shame.
The still more serious problem that flows from both of these issues is that pundits who fail in these ways are hardly ever held to account, and thus self-serving, half-baked analyses keep showing up in op-ed pages and on cable news. For Bret Stephens, “accountability” takes the form of quiet changes to his column that leave its conclusions intact even as it gets more wrong with each update.
This is embarrassing even for James Bennet (editor), who apparently has no shame.
Scamming Black Kids, Scamming Elites
Read the thread as the kids say.
Hey, you know what the scandal is here? It's that HARVARD AND YALE AND PRINCETON AND BROWN AND DARTMOUTH AND STANFORD, in their hunt for the Perfect Black Miracle Student, got taken by this OBVIOUS FRAUD https://t.co/Yck3JeWSHk
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) November 30, 2018
Thinking Small
I can do all the crimes imaginable, but really you should just overpay for rooms in my shitty hotel.
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Such Fun
Federal agents showed up unannounced at Chicago Alderman Ed Burke's City Hall office & his ward office, kicked everyone out, and papered over the windows Thursday morning.
— Polly Sigh (@dcpoll) November 29, 2018
Ed Burke was Trump’s lawyer on reducing his property taxes for Trump Tower Chicago. https://t.co/vOrpSR7UUS
What An Era
Most people didn't really live through the Bush years the way they live through the Trump years. It's social media. Only weird blog reading nerds had any clue about the full cast of characters of the conservative Wack Pack. Most normies - even people who paid a lot of attention to current events - wouldn't have had any idea who all of these C-List conservative weirdos were, or what dumb shit thing was said on Fox News last night, etc. People who paid attention knew the big stuff, but the minutiae of horrors and stupidity went unnoticed by most. Now the phone beams it all directly into their foreheads so they have been dragged into this hell I have been living for so long.
But my real point is that the Bush years were full of horrible crazy shit, also, too, even aside from the more obvious stuff. People don't remember because they weren't really exposed to most of it at the time. Even I've forgotten so much (thankfully).
A little flashback from everybody's favorite totebagging reasonable conservative, David Brooks.
They still pull the first trick regularly now. Lefties are always irrational, always consumed by hatred. They just hate Trump because they are haters, and not for any reason. This was the drumbeat during the early Bush years. Liberals were just ANGRY so HULKANGRY they were silly not like the completely sensible rational people who responded to 9/11 by causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with it and 15+ years later still pat themselves on the back for their very sober reflections and very lucrative book tours about how they could have possibly gotten anything wrong.
That list of names in the last quoted paragraph... those are the liberals to David Brooks.
(via driftglass)
But my real point is that the Bush years were full of horrible crazy shit, also, too, even aside from the more obvious stuff. People don't remember because they weren't really exposed to most of it at the time. Even I've forgotten so much (thankfully).
A little flashback from everybody's favorite totebagging reasonable conservative, David Brooks.
My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.
...
What lessons will they draw from the events of the past month? How will the fall of Saddam affect their voting patterns, their approach to the next global crisis? One way to think about this is to conduct a thought experiment. Invent a representative 20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa, and try to imagine how he would have perceived the events of the past month.
...
WHEN JOEY LOOKS at the talking heads on TV, he begins to form judgments about this country's political divides. First, he sees the broad majority of people who support the war, who, it seems to him, deserve to be called the progressives. These people talk optimistically of spreading democracy and creating a new Middle East. They have a very confident approach to what America can achieve in the world. People in this political movement include Christopher Hitchens, Dennis Miller, Paul Wolfowitz, Joseph Lieberman, John McCain, Richard Holbrooke, Charles Krauthammer, the staff of Fox News, Bernard Lewis, and George Bush.
They still pull the first trick regularly now. Lefties are always irrational, always consumed by hatred. They just hate Trump because they are haters, and not for any reason. This was the drumbeat during the early Bush years. Liberals were just ANGRY so HULKANGRY they were silly not like the completely sensible rational people who responded to 9/11 by causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with it and 15+ years later still pat themselves on the back for their very sober reflections and very lucrative book tours about how they could have possibly gotten anything wrong.
That list of names in the last quoted paragraph... those are the liberals to David Brooks.
(via driftglass)
Racially Divisive
Euphemisms for "racism" are used, in part, because they make it sound like Both Sides can be to blame. Cops shooting unarmed black people, unarmed black people making cops angry by being black. Both sides! The power of the state being used to enforce discrimination in numerous ways, those people complaining about discrimination. Both sides!
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
House of Lords
Why be a senator for a long time? In many ways it isn't a very good job. Of course it's a better job than, say, coal mining. But most of these people are wealthy enough, or could leave the Senate and become wealthy enough pretty easily, that it's a choice. Sure some want to do good and see that as a pretty good place to do it. I'm not so cynical that I think all senators are bad. As for the rest...well, we don't have an actual aristocracy in this country and yet some people think they should be members of one. The most ridiculous deliberative body in the world is the closest you get.
Gossip
Political reporters know lots of things the way we all know lots of things. Gossip. Of course they "know" things, not know them. That's gossip. It affects how they cover people. That's not all wrong, of course. Sometimes there are things that are genuinely known that for complicated/legal reasons can't be reported and I don't think journalists should be the blank slates they like to pretend they are sometimes. But a lot of that stuff isn't that. It's shooting shit at the bar level of gossip. I'm sure there are a lot of skilled whisper disinformation campaigns in DC. A lot of happy hours. What do people talk about?
We Can Pay You To Do That, Too
A great mystery to me, which I mention occasionally, is why we can give obscene amounts of money to the usual corrupt stakeholders to do nice things instead of horrible things? Why does Big Oil care much if it makes its money off of oil instead of solar? Why do defense contractors care if they make planes that don't fly instead of SUPERTRAINS?
I get that the fat and happy corrupt sectors of our society will fight to the death to keep being fat and happy, but they can just lobby for subsidies to do nice things instead of subsidies to do evil? Lock in another government funded gravy train.
I get that the fat and happy corrupt sectors of our society will fight to the death to keep being fat and happy, but they can just lobby for subsidies to do nice things instead of subsidies to do evil? Lock in another government funded gravy train.
Participation Trophies
Not just for millennials.
I suppose I could be underestimating the ability of children to get their parents to hand over the wallets to an indoor water park while spending lots of money on upscale retail as the kiddies slide, but... I don't think this is going to work.
BERGEN COUNTY, NJ — It hasn't even opened yet, and already American Dream Meadowlands has won an award for its innovative approach to shopping and entertainment.
I suppose I could be underestimating the ability of children to get their parents to hand over the wallets to an indoor water park while spending lots of money on upscale retail as the kiddies slide, but... I don't think this is going to work.
The Purge
Maybe there should be one day a year when all of our elite political journalists should be able to go on teevee and tell us what they really think about things.
Would be... scary.
Would be... scary.
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
I Look Up From My Vermouth On The Rocks
Oh boy.
One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we're not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water and it's right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including – just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you're talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.
Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freez to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it — not nearly like it is. Do we want clean water? Absolutely. Do we want clean air to breathe? Absolutely. The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire they have trees that were fallen, they did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light — you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months. And it’s a massive problem in California.
They Know Exactly Who They Are
I'm not dumb enough to think that all members of the "liberal media" are actually liberal. I mean some are, and some certainly are not, but what they all have in common is pretending to not know exactly what most members of the Republican party want. Too lazy to look it up, but not that long ago a Dem polling/focus group outfit discovered that the problem with telling voters the perfectly truthful agenda of the Republican party, without hyperbole, is that voters think it's so outlandish that they are being lied to. But most voters are blissfully dumb as they have better things to do than pay attention to politics all the time. However, there are people who are paid - sometimes a lot! - to pay attention to politics all the time and explain it to voters. And they don't do it honestly. Republicans aren't exactly very secretive about their agenda. Especially this generation, which has been simmering in their own bullshit for so long they don't get that normies don't actually think neo-feudalism is appealing.
Comrade Gritty For President
You should be worried.
All you gotta do is throw a few scraps down on the peasants occasionally to keep the guillotines away, but this lot isn't even capable of doing that.
Fox Business host fears capitalism is in trouble because Americans will see companies "posting record earnings and ... firing people"
Charles Payne on GM firings and plant closures: "The American public is going to get hip to this and my fear is that they're going to end up electing, not a democratic socialist, just a straight-up socialist"
All you gotta do is throw a few scraps down on the peasants occasionally to keep the guillotines away, but this lot isn't even capable of doing that.
Vaporware
Quite often I'm happy to be proved fucking wrong, and on most issues some angry rants on this blog aren't exactly going to change the world so being wrong has few consequences other than making me look bad. You can complain more about the consequences of being wrong when I am Special Adviser to President Gritty.
My pessimism about self-driving cars isn't that they can't work at all. Obviously they kinda work now! Neato! It's that working "90%" or "95%" or "99%" or frankly even "99.9%"... just isn't good enough.
The rest is behind the paywall, but even if they launch it's going to be in 60 square miles, which means a (if actually square) 7.45X7.45 mile square. And, hey, progress. Skynet wasn't built in a day. If it works! But..
I have other issues, too, such as the likely diversion of massive amounts of public money/infrastructure to these things and the fact that even if they work I suspect they'll have a lot of negative effects (and some positive ones, of course), but really...I just don't think they'll work well enough to be useful and certainly the idea that they're going to useful as a viable robotaxi business model in the foreseeable future seems to be insane to me.
Happy (sort of) to be wrong!
My pessimism about self-driving cars isn't that they can't work at all. Obviously they kinda work now! Neato! It's that working "90%" or "95%" or "99%" or frankly even "99.9%"... just isn't good enough.
Waymo has only weeks to meet its self-imposed deadline to launch a public taxi service using fully automated cars by the end of 2018. And right now, that deadline looks tough for the company to meet.
The Information has learned that within the past month or so, due to concerns about safety, the Alphabet company put so-called “safety drivers” back behind the wheel of its most advanced prototypes, ending a year-long period in which those people generally sat in the passenger or back seat.
The rest is behind the paywall, but even if they launch it's going to be in 60 square miles, which means a (if actually square) 7.45X7.45 mile square. And, hey, progress. Skynet wasn't built in a day. If it works! But..
I have other issues, too, such as the likely diversion of massive amounts of public money/infrastructure to these things and the fact that even if they work I suspect they'll have a lot of negative effects (and some positive ones, of course), but really...I just don't think they'll work well enough to be useful and certainly the idea that they're going to useful as a viable robotaxi business model in the foreseeable future seems to be insane to me.
Happy (sort of) to be wrong!
The Book of Faces
I deleted my account. I'm not one to push such things on people. All big companies are bad and we each have our own cost/benefit analysis. It was easy for me to delete it. But aside from "facebook is a bad actor" I didn't have a problem deleting it because...facebook is just... bad.
Once upon a time it was that cool new thing on the internet to find those high school friends you hadn't seen in 15 years. Then it was a decent way to keep up with what your friends were doing, maybe even arrange to meet for a drink or a show or whatever. And then...? I don't even know what it's good for now. You don't need facebook to find people on the internet now, if you really want to, and THE ALGORITHM and all the other shit on that website, which still has the worst user interface on the internet, meant that it stopped being useful for really anything. Once upon a time you could post something like "hey, anyone want to grab a coffee later" and your friends would see it. Now no matter what I do I can't make it just show me posts by people in a timely fashion.
Set up a group message, add a bunch of family members to it, send them a pic of your kids now and then. No need for facebook.
Once upon a time it was that cool new thing on the internet to find those high school friends you hadn't seen in 15 years. Then it was a decent way to keep up with what your friends were doing, maybe even arrange to meet for a drink or a show or whatever. And then...? I don't even know what it's good for now. You don't need facebook to find people on the internet now, if you really want to, and THE ALGORITHM and all the other shit on that website, which still has the worst user interface on the internet, meant that it stopped being useful for really anything. Once upon a time you could post something like "hey, anyone want to grab a coffee later" and your friends would see it. Now no matter what I do I can't make it just show me posts by people in a timely fashion.
Set up a group message, add a bunch of family members to it, send them a pic of your kids now and then. No need for facebook.
Our Sister Network
As if answering the softball questions was generally going to be too hard without a cheat sheet.
Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt was clearly taken aback last year when occasional Fox & Friends fill-in host Ed Henry grilled him about a number of ethical scandals facing his administration.
And Pruitt had a good reason to be surprised. In past interviews with President Trump’s favorite cable news show, the then-EPA chief’s team chose the topics for interviews, and knew the questions in advance.
Monday, November 26, 2018
Pivot To Self-Driving
You, dear readers, know my opinion on the wisdom of this.
Aside from my skepticism about the technology actually, you know, working, I don't really get the race by everyone to develop the technology independently. If I was good at making cars I'd just buy the off the shelf technology when it became available and bolt it on (I know it isn't that simple). I haven't figured out how being FRIST makes anybody rich here. But what do I know?
The Detroit-based automaker said it would not be allocating any production to Oshawa Assembly in Ontario, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio and Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly in Michigan after December 2019. It will also stop allocating production at propulsion plants in White Marsh, Md., and Warren, Mich., after December 2019.
These changes are part of GM’s efforts to focus its resources on self-driving and electric vehicles, as well as more efficient trucks, crossovers and SUVs, the company said in a statement.
Aside from my skepticism about the technology actually, you know, working, I don't really get the race by everyone to develop the technology independently. If I was good at making cars I'd just buy the off the shelf technology when it became available and bolt it on (I know it isn't that simple). I haven't figured out how being FRIST makes anybody rich here. But what do I know?
Shut Up, Elon
And never, ever tweet.
One of the things that’s most irritating about politics in 2018 – and goodness me, aren’t there a lot of choices – is the utopianism that’s crept into the transport debate. There is an apparently endless supply of people who wouldn’t be seen dead on public transport, or using any other service labelled with the word “public”, if they can possibly help it, yet who have come to the conclusion that they are the people staid and dusty world of transport policy has been waiting for.
And the message they are keen to send is that the old ways of doing things is over: shiny new technologies are going to disrupt the transport sector, just as they disrupted the music industry or retail. Why bother investing in mass-transit, when autonomous vehicles (AV) and ride-hailing apps are about to take over the world? Why waste money on high speed rail, when Elon Musk’s exciting new hyperloop will be along any minute? Silicon Valley types ask these questions, even as they earnestly suggest some kind of fixed route, ride-sharing service based on vehicles larger than the private car, blissfully unaware that they’ve just re-invented the bus. Again.
Their Issues, Our Issues
Most people don't pay much attention to politics (lucky souls), but even they "know" things about the political parties. If you love guns and lower taxes, you vote Republican. If you love abortion and open borders, vote Democrat (this list should also include if you love Social Security and Medicare and...but, well, team D is not always so good at this game). Any individual candidate might be able to prove s/he loves guns as much as Team R, but to the extent that people are voting based on party affiliations, there's really nothing to be done (and when Coke is your brand you run a big risk if too many candidates are trying to convince people that actually it tastes like Pepsi).
The rewards to trying to run to the right of conservatives on issues like immigration are... at best, zero. Much likely negative. Oh, gee, why did our base not turn out they should just know "we" are better on immigration than team R despite our policies??? If hating immigrants is your thing, it really doesn't matter how many team D deports or how "hard" their policies are. You're gonna vote Republican.
I can't find it now for some reason but someone from the UK had a thread about New Labour's (Tony Blair) approach to immigration and refugee issues, which was explicitly to run to the right of the Tories on it. And they really did run to the right on it! So much that the Tories even *sounded* more pro-refugee and pro-immigration sometimes, whatever the specific policies were. Their reward for doing this in polls was to sink like a stone among people who were anti-immigrant. The other cost of talking up an issue is that you put that issue front and center. No matter how many internment camps for immigrants it opens, Labour will still be the pro-immigrant party, and all those internment camps on the news will make people really mad about immigrants and motivate them to vote Tory. The conservative party could explicitly make "open borders" their #1 priority going into election day, and voters would still "know" who the anti-immigrant party was. If you're putting the focus on "their" issues, you're losing.
Run with your brand, don't fight it. Especially when it's the right thing on the merits.
The rewards to trying to run to the right of conservatives on issues like immigration are... at best, zero. Much likely negative. Oh, gee, why did our base not turn out they should just know "we" are better on immigration than team R despite our policies??? If hating immigrants is your thing, it really doesn't matter how many team D deports or how "hard" their policies are. You're gonna vote Republican.
I can't find it now for some reason but someone from the UK had a thread about New Labour's (Tony Blair) approach to immigration and refugee issues, which was explicitly to run to the right of the Tories on it. And they really did run to the right on it! So much that the Tories even *sounded* more pro-refugee and pro-immigration sometimes, whatever the specific policies were. Their reward for doing this in polls was to sink like a stone among people who were anti-immigrant. The other cost of talking up an issue is that you put that issue front and center. No matter how many internment camps for immigrants it opens, Labour will still be the pro-immigrant party, and all those internment camps on the news will make people really mad about immigrants and motivate them to vote Tory. The conservative party could explicitly make "open borders" their #1 priority going into election day, and voters would still "know" who the anti-immigrant party was. If you're putting the focus on "their" issues, you're losing.
Run with your brand, don't fight it. Especially when it's the right thing on the merits.
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Sure
People are so gullible. This is not going to happen.
Driverless cars are to be tested on the streets of London this week as part of a plan to deploy the UK's first completely autonomous fleet on British roads by Christmas.
Democrats Will Keep Losing (Quick Find Somewhere They Lost) If They Don't Hide The Scary Black Kids
After painful losses, Democrats in the South face a dilemma: Appeals to progressives cost them the rural white voters who often decide elections. https://t.co/grPeXLlhia
— NYT National News (@NYTNational) November 24, 2018
After this election, the NYT puts on the front page a story about how the one place in America they could still find to tell the story about how Real Americans hate Democrats.
It is true that the Democrats are unlikely to be popular and win everywhere and that a one party state at all levels of government in all states and locations is not in our forseeable future. The New York Times is on it!
And The Gritmas Season Has Arrived
If you are going to be shopping at Amazon anyway, click a handy link like this one first and give me some of Jeff's money. Otherwise, shop elsewhere!
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