Happy, Happy

What's The Problem

Can't think of any.

A Chinese startup that's vying for Tesla's customers unveiled Sunday a 48-inch-wide video screen that stretches across the top of the dashboard of the Byton M-byte battery-electric vehicle.

The video screen, the size of seven iPads across, will anchor a business model that focuses as much on selling "content" as cars, CEO Carsten Breitfeld told CNBC.com. The SUV offers an optional 95-kilowatt-hour battery that can travel as far as 325 miles between charges.

And Justice For All

We all know the TV cop show setup. There's the extreme pressure from the press, the mayor, the police chief, to close cases. Jobs and careers depend on it. Cops *know* a perp - and they're dangerous - is guilty and just can't quite get the charges to stick. They cut a few corners, plant a little evidence, and the greater good is served. The thing is, when I hear stories of police corruption I never get a sense that any of these pieces are in play. There is no pressure to close cases. Careers and jobs do not depend on doing so. Harder to know, but there's no evidence the perps are known to be dangerous. Cops (#notallcops) just do this stuff because bears shit in the woods.

In May 2017, Philadelphia Narcotics Bureau supervisors Inspector Raymond Evers and Chief Inspector Anthony Boyle called staff into a police conference room in Germantown for a mandatory meeting. Evers would later describe it as a “pep talk” to "get better-quality investigations.”

But what he outlined, according to a 177-page August 2018 Internal Affairs report obtained by the Inquirer, was a scheme to flip low-level suspects into off-the-books confidential informants through a process that would evolve into falsifying paperwork, as well as hiding information from the District Attorney’s Office.

Morning Thread

The New York Times explains why Dear Leader has hired 17 new lawyers this past week.

Uhm, whee?

Friday Happy Hour

I think Trump said a bunch of stupid stuff today.

Rapists Coming Over The Border

I know it's mostly just racism. Keep the brown people out, kick the ones who are here, and any lie in service of that is fine. But I've known enough (not many, but enough given they aren't exactly my main social circle) people over the years to know that the fear of this type of thing is real. Black people riding the bus to the exurbs to steal your TVs, Mexicans crossing the border in Tijuana to rape "your" daughters in Missouri, etc. Yes it's mostly hatred but there is fear there. I really don't understand it. Fears aren't always rational, of course, but there are so many more things to be legitimately afraid of.

Afternoon Thread

enjoy

Genius Business

I don't actually think it's that hard to run the numbers on this kind of operation. Capital costs, labor hours, ridership/revenue. There aren't many inputs into a model here. This isn't a complicated operation. It's like a coffee shop that only sells coffee. It's pretty easy to calculate your projected costs and just how many cups of coffee at what price you need to sell to make a profit at your current rent. I can't see how things like this come close to penciling out under any basic assumptions, so they're just selling someone (executive, investor, whoever) on "DISRUPTION" or some shit.

Chariot, the microtransit service owned by Ford, is going out of business. According to a companywide email obtained by the San Francisco Examiner, the on-demand bus service will cease operation February 1st. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the news to The Verge.

People always come up with examples where services like this would be good (quite possibly!) and profitable (hahaha unlikely), but these are generally examples of places which don't already have transit options.

NAFTA II ELECTRIC FENCE BOOGALOO

Has anyone told Trump that Congress needs to approve this new deal that will pay for the wall?

It's Morning

Again.

Thursday Evening

Tomorrow is...

We Do Not Trust Teachers, So Arm them

I think a fair observation is that teachers - ones in public unions, at least - have been demonized from all sides for about 30 years. From the Right, mostly, but Dems (especially state and local) have participated as well. So when the response to school shootings is "why don't we give these horrible untrustworthy people guns..."

TAMAQUA, Pa. (WPVI) -- School board members in Pennsylvania have voted to postpone a policy allowing teachers to carry guns in school.

for now.

How Can Trump Supporters Support This??? But They Do So He Is Golden!!!

The "people who like Trump like Trump" window of analysis onto this administration has always been stupid(and it comes from liberals and neverTrumpers, too, not just journalists in diners). It both suggests that people are crazy for supporting him, and also that their support is the only thing that matters. Neither is actually true. Sure his MAGA fans are horrible crazy people, but most of the rest are just "eh, Republican better than Democrat, good enough for me" which is bad but it is bad because Republicans are bad, not because Trump is especially bad. He is, but I don't think it's crazy they think he's worse than PRESIDENT RANDOM DEMOCRAT given their worldview.

I suppose it's interesting to wonder what would pull Trump's support down from 40% to 27%, but really 40%ish of this country would support almost any Republican and 27% would support any. This is a conversation about 13% of the population.

FREEDUM

Border restrictions affects everybody and if I lived by the border I'd be pretty mad that popping across it for a little lunch was not a feasible thing to do. EU-style free movement was never gonna happen under NAFTA, but that easy movement wasn't enshrined says a lot about its architects.

The Silly Season

All of the Democratic candidates for president will have legitimate flaws. Some of those people will have flaws I think are important, some of those people have flaws you think are important, some of these people have flaws reporters will imagine "voters" think are important.

Also there will be lots of made up stuff.

BREAKING

This is more a Daily Show bit than journalism, because we shouldn't be taking these stupid things seriously in the first place.

EXCLUSIVE: DHS test of steel prototype for border wall, Trump's preference, showed it could be sawed through.

We've obtained a never-before-seen photo.

Our report, with @JuliaEAinsley. https://t.co/VfRTSt36mr

— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff) January 10, 2019

Of course walls not made of Wolverine won't stop people from getting over, under, or through them. That doesn't make them pointless. People put up fences for a reason. But it was easy to get over the Berlin Wall if you didn't mind being shot in the process.

Morning Thread

Not a puppet.

Not a puppet.

Not a puppet.

Can't Escape Everything

There are some things that rich people can't realistically protect themselves from, without an absurd amount of inconvenience. Sure you don't have to live next to a superfund site, but living in a bubbled dome, solely, even if affordable, is pretty inconvenient. Gotta breathe the air the rest of us do, sometimes, unless you want to be bubble boy. Kinda hard to establish an alternative food supply system, too.

The ongoing federal government shutdown has stopped most food safety inspections, but the Food and Drug Administration is planning to resume at least some of them. To do it, the agency will have to force furloughed workers to come back without pay.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said he is trying to pinpoint the most essential inspections, while making sure that employees do not suffer too much.

Under the Sea

In Venice there's an elaborate system and, of course, apps to let you know where you can and can't easily walk every day. But that's Venice.

A Jersey Shore town is planning a 24-hour online livestream of flooding along one of its most frequently inundated streets.

Sea Isle City plans to mount a web camera on its public works building at 40th Street and Central Avenue by mid-February. The Press of Atlantic City reports the camera, which costs about $5,000, is being paid for through a grant from OceanFirst Bank to the New Jersey Coastal Coalition.

Negotiation

So how about we nationalize the means of production?

Haha. no.

Okay how about we implement the full socialist revolution with a top 70% tax rate?

Um, ok (haha stupid kids that's not really socialism).

Damn. Pops tricked us.

Well Then

WATCH: Trump argues that we need a border wall to stop migrants just driving right across in their "unbelievable vehicles... stronger, bigger, and faster vehicles than our police have, than ICE has" pic.twitter.com/b04eEKuL0I

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) January 9, 2019

Fox&Friends releases new picture from border caravan.

Max Max: Fury Road was a truly good movie, by the way. Maybe you have to like that kind of thing, a bit, but it's a lot better than that.

"Regulations"

Sure, Elon.

While Elon Musk has been guiding self-driving capabilities by the end of the year, Tesla has been taking a more cautious approach.

Tesla salespeople have been warning buyers of their ‘Full Self-Driving package’ that it could be “very far away” due to regulations.

Anyone who knows anything about this stuff knows it's a fraud, but you shouldn't have to be a super informed consumer, even a rich one who can afford a Tesla, to not get taken in by it. There are people who genuinely think Elon's gonna flip a switch soon and they're gonna be able to pay for their Teslas by turning them into automated robotaxis. They're wrong and stupid, but it isn't their responsibility to not be.

America's Dumbest Columnists

Bari Weiss.

There Is No Plan B

As the AP tells us it takes two to tango, and while it made no sense in that context, I suppose it does make sense in this one.

Theresa May will be obliged to present MPs with a new Brexit plan within three days if her current proposal is voted down next week, after a procedural amendment to the plan’s progress through the Commons was passed amid chaotic scenes.

The amendment to the business motion for the plan, drawn up by the Conservative former attorney general Dominic Grieve, gives May the deadline to put forward new her plans if she loses the vote, as many expect, next Tuesday.

The two being the UK and the EU. I don't what happens if there is no deal and there is No No deal and there is no plan 'B.' No one seems to!

Complaints

There are many and complicated reasons that the press is cowed by the right and responds horribly to criticisms by the left, and I certainly don't mean this is the most important part of it, but one is that they actually know the right is full of shit about the criticisms and that the left is serious. As in, the right is playing a game and the left means it. They (some) like being part of the game. Many in the political press simply see that as part of the role. When the game is give me scoops or the asshole you hate will, or give me scoops and you can get out in front of someone else reporting it more negatively, or let me run this very flattering profile of you on the off chances I get scoops later (a beat so sweet is must be sweetened by the beat sweetener), you are playing a game. Maybe it's a justifiable game, but it certainly will have an impact on how you to approach your job. If they thought the left was just playing a game, too, they'd respond better.


This is actually much worse than it probably sounds.

Morning Thread

Tuesday Evening

I think so, anyway.

Tea And No Tea

Parliamentary maneuvering above my pay grade a bit, but Parliament has voted to make No Deal difficult, might vote to reject The Deal, leaving...well, there isn't a third option on the table so shruggy.

Theresa May has become the first British Prime Minister for 41 years to lose a vote on a finance bill after 20 Conservative MPs rebelled against the party whip and backed Yvette Cooper’s amendment, which sharply limits the government’s tax-raising powers in the event of a no deal Brexit. What does it mean for the resolution of the Brexit crisis?

Although Cooper’s amendment was billed as “preventing no deal”, as she herself freely conceded in the House, the amendment itself does no such thing. In fact, by limiting the government’s powers to raise revenue, it sharpens the rocks at the bottom of the ravine rather than pulls the country away from the cliff edge. But the amendment has two important implications. The first is that it gives Parliament an opportunity to avert a no deal exit at the eleventh hour if the need arises. The second is that, as it was billed and seen by MPs as an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of the parliamentary majority against a no deal exit it gives us a sense of the size of that majority – and its limitations.

He's The President

No I don't think networks should do this weekly, but it's a reasonable occasional request for The President even if nothing from Trump is actually reasonable because Trump. News networks that wish to responsibly give their viewers "news" and not just point the camera and turn on the mic and then have people from Both Sides yelling at each other could find many ways to bracket a short speech with responsible and educational complementary programming. I know they mostly won't do that because it's TV news, but still the idea that this is a reasonable request from The President, whoever he is, seems sound to me. Also, too, I know when President Ocasio-Ortez is refused such a consideration the excuse will be "but you libs didn't want Trump to speak" because those are the rules.

tl;dr point the camera at Trump for 8 minutes, but don't do just that.

I Thought He'd Kick The People Who Deserved It

As I've said before, too many people love putting assholes in charge because they think the right people will get kicked. Even if you think people (your lazy coworkers, black people on the secret welfare system, whoever) deserve to be kicked, this is dumb because assholes generally don't have any good sense of who really deserves to get kicked, and probably just kick everybody but the most extreme sycophants.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Morning Thread

I predict a long afternoon nap for the resident in the WH. Else he may appear slightly unaware at 9:00 p.m.

Overnight

Enjoy

Teevee

If the president wants to give a speech on the teevee the networks should show it, though they should consider their broader obligations to the public too.

America Is Already Great

What a nightmare.

BIAS

Congress could pass a $10 trillion increase in the military budget in the middle of night and it would barely show up on page A18, but if someone proposes spending 50 bucks for child care or similar it will be a big debate.

Ain't she a beautiful sight?

From bean to cup...

The Department of Transport had hoped for 150 trucks to take part in Monday’s test , but only 79 turned up, including several from the Eddie Stobart haulage company.

Double Doink

Sportsball can be funny.

Fly Eagles Fly

Somehow my local sports franchise made it into the playoffs.

I Am A Big Dum Dum

I'm not sure if is psychologically healthy, but running this dumb blog for years has taught me that I am an idiot. Sure I am RIGHT about some things, but mostly I get exposed to people smarter than me all the time and it is humbling.

I don't know how the idiots in the White House imagine they can run the country.

Bow Wow Wow

Yippee yo yippee yay.

Snoop's message to furloughed employees during the government shutdown is really quite something 👀 pic.twitter.com/nxxkqF6SDt

— J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) January 6, 2019

Young

In a lot of ways our concept of "young" keeps get ratcheted up. Maybe it's because people get married/have children later. I'm not sure. I don't remember people who were 30ish being thought of as "young" when I was 30ish.

Golf Carts

All innovative ideas for urban individual transit vehicles face the problem that they have to share the road with...other things. And while something like golf carts would probably make a lot of sense, our road network is not really designed for them. E-Scooters are a bit like Segways. Neat, but do they actually fit? If I ran the world I'd ban cars, but I don't.

Sunday Morning

And all is well.