If people don’t know how to swim, they take swimming lessons or drown. Right?

It’s foundational to enlightenment that human independent skill, an evolving ability to learn and adapt, doesn’t come from divine intervention (e.g. one day suddenly being thrown totally unprepared into the deep end of a pool with no help doesn’t end well).

Of course dictators hate this because it means slow and steady pace at low margins, hard work with unpredictable outcomes, is where power really comes from. How is a tyrant supposed to monopolize power and exploit people busy reinvesting in themselves, let alone thinking about the power shift gained when consent has been learned?

For years we have been witness to Tesla’s tinpot tyrannical CEO throwing “intelligent” cars and his defrauded customers into a deep end of a pool without any proper swim lessons. Of course they’ve been drowning at alarming rates, killing hundreds unnecessarily.

A “version 11” is still running red lights, and probably should be grounded. Imagine a bank robber saying “that was just my eleventh beta robbery, you can’t arrest me until the day I finally learn how to avoid being arrested.” It’s a fool’s recipe for destroying society with fraud.

The Russian military similarly is dumping unprepared machines and soldiers into high risk conflict with tragic mass deaths as a result. It reads to me the same as Tesla.

Russian brigade destroyed and reformed 8 times

Some military analysts foolishly predicted Russia to adapt and revise during battles, but we are now witness to the exact opposite.

…[SATMO has] seen a flexibility in [Ukrainian] planning and operations that is inherent in Western doctrine [that is] not inherent in the Soviet style of top-down command [still used by Russia].

Up to 100 failed Russian assaults in a single day is like Tesla “driverless” disengaging every mile. These are systemic problems due to mismanagement, and why monopolist leadership is about hiding failures and building “exit moats” instead of learning how to reduce and avoid harms.

Russia has had roughly just five weeks of major winning, all in the beginning from the end of February until late March; the rest of this period of escalation, Russia has been almost entirely losing. That’s right, that’s little more than five weeks out of over fifty weeks of Russia winning with over ten straight months of Russia losing, its miniscule gains coming at such terribly Pyrrhic costs that considering them “victories” is a stretch.

Version 8 may become version 11 with the same deadly results because whether in Russia or Tesla corruption makes true learning economically and politically unviable to these dictators.

Once you realize Musk and Putin are operating in the same mindset, bullies who see all of humanity only as disposable machines, you can see why any future they aim towards is demonstrably worse for everyone.

The elephant in the room is whether war no longer expected as context for leaders facilitating mass crimes against humanity. Is Tesla enough of a political entity setup to harm that the ICC can charge executives with crimes?

The people (no longer) support Milosevic. A minority, less than 20%, think that Milosevic doesn’t deserve to be in prison. But some people don’t understand that in order to be an equal and recognized part of the democratic community, we should fulfill the conditions and respect the rules of the democratic community.

Or maybe the opposite? Tesla continue to be used as violent explosive assault weapons, so perhaps they’ll be reclassified for conditions of war like missiles and bombs and thus owners held to account for adherence to agression doctrine. I guess just watch America and wait.

At this critical moment in history, I am pleased to announce that the United States supports the development of an internationalized tribunal dedicated to prosecuting the crime of aggression against Ukraine,” US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack announced Monday.

Update: This just in! More of the same. Let’s call it the 10th version.

“Russia’s 10th Tank Regiment has likely lost a large proportion of its tanks while attempting to surround Avdiivka from the south,” the British Defense Ministry said in its daily intelligence update. The ministry said the losses were likely due “tactically flawed frontal assaults” similar to Russia’s failed attack on nearby Vuhledar.

Sounds like a Tesla to me.

A hacking contest to showcase products with the worst security vulnerabilities wants you to worry about Tesla safety.

[Attacks taking less than two minutes] involved executing what is known as a time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTTOU) attack on Tesla’s Gateway energy management system. They showed how they could then — among other things — open the front trunk or door of a Tesla Model 3 while the car was in motion.

There’s something sadly ironic about so many Tesla owners tragically burned to death because the doors won’t open, yet this big exploit news is how doors can be opened too easily. Tesla has engineered the worst possible mechanism, unsafe when it works and unsafe when it doesn’t work.

And now for the scare quote:

“The biggest vulnerability demonstrated this year was definitely the Tesla exploit,” says Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), which organizes the annual contest. “They went from what’s essentially an external component, the Bluetooth chipset, to systems deep within the vehicle.”

Attackers used the “infotainment” bloat to compromise safety. Yet another reason that Luxury EV are all knobs and buttons, or just more evidence Tesla is below basic engineering standards? A giant TV on the dashboard is basically the white tube socks of automotive design.

…break into Tesla’s infotainment system and, from there, gain root access to other subsystems…

From external to deep root? Not good. Not even remotely safe. Pun intended, of course.

This is exactly what is never supposed to happen with a car on public roads, let alone any security engineering. Next you’ll tell me the Tesla lock design doesn’t even work…

Stories like this make it hard to tell whether Russian children are in prison already when they’re described as going to school.

When Maria Moskaleva drew a picture of missiles next to a Russian flag heading towards a woman and child with a Ukrainian flag at school last year, her teacher called the police, who later discovered comments critical of the war on her father’s social media.

Moskalev has been under house arrest since March 1, while his daughter has been taken to a juvenile rehabilitation center. The charges against him carry a sentence of up to three years in prison. A single father, Moskalev may also lose custody of his daughter in a separate trial set to begin in April.

Her teacher called police.

Without context you’d think a picture of Russian missiles falling on Ukraine is exactly the kind of message Russian police would want to see. In fact, her picture could be described as an illustration of typical Russian leader propaganda.

…Dmitry Medvedev, for his part, wrote, also on Telegram, that ICC judges should start “peering into the sky” because “the use of a hypersonic carrier from a Russian ship in the North Sea against the court building is quite imaginable.”

Unfortunately you can tell from the story about a teen girl’s life in Russia that any representations of enlightenment-like truth — any hint of effeminacy within toxic masculinity — are treated as a direct affront to Putin’s state apparatus.

Her “teacher” played the role of both state spy and punisher, set to destroy a girl’s life on the smallest inkling of any independent thoughts.

Her father will lose his daughter, a family torn apart, because he had dared to speak about a war filling his small town with fresh graves? Seems like police should have arrested Medvedev first for his social media posts about missile strikes raining on civilians.

In somewhat related news, the criminal Wagner group was just criticized so heavily by Putin for throwing away Russian lives in thoughtless suicide attacks on Ukraine, it’s been promoted to destabilize Africa instead.

Wagner apparently is getting a fail-upward transfer after stupidly murdering hundreds of thousands of Russians. Meanwhile an innocent father and daughter in a small town hurting nobody are being ruthlessly punished for simply having coherent thoughts.

If doing the wrong thing is the only thing left to do, and the usually barking Wagner has been thrown a bone to disappear, perhaps Maria’s story will spark new resistance.