Russia clearly miscalculated. It thought heavy armor and heavy handed propaganda (e.g. saying Ukraine doesn’t even exist) was some kind of abuse-based recipe for easy dictatorship.
It’s displaying the importance of learning the ages-old lessons of small talk and small arms.
…everyone can forge mind-to-mind connections through creative, lesser-known small talk strategies and techniques from the field of linguistics to create more meaningful “small talk” that leads to rewarding “big talk.” Approach small talk by forging a mind-to-mind connection with stories that:
Bond you with others over a professional, social, or personal cause (pinpoint a shared value such as empathy, integrity, and honesty and then build a story around it).
Illustrate a skill, method, or process important for personal growth (stories make things easier to remember just as with Isaac Newton and the apple).
Highlight how to overcome a shared challenge (think of powerful decision-making moments in your life that have the potential to inspire your counterpart to make similar decisions in their lives).
Second, I’ve written before about a history of small arms economics.
Does anyone still believe the odd mythology of Ronald Reagan’s racist “trickle” economics? The latest science of behavior has been the more you earn the less you give.
…wealth and happiness are not positively correlated, according to the Harvard Business Review. One reason, for instance, is that wealth appears to make people less generous. In a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, participants playing a game of Monopoly grew progressively meaner as their wealth grew, by talking down to their poorer competitors and assuming more dominant positions. Most egregiously, they also consumed a larger portion of a bowl of pretzels meant to be shared equally. Similarly, another study found that when participants were given $10 and told they could contribute some or all of it to another person, the wealthier subjects contributed about 44% less. In the real world, researchers have discovered that rich people give proportionally less of their income to philanthropic causes.
An obvious way people are made happier is when they have the trust to build connections and be more social (even misery enjoys company).
That nugget of wisdom is perhaps why it’s important to flag when a small group of people attempt to get rich by building deceptive and isolating social platforms. The Germans had a specific phrase for a small group promising freedom to others while locking them up instead: “Arbeit Macht Frei”.
Think about someone completely isolated, angry and miserable (due to wealth accumulation) using high-speed unregulated technology communications with others by convincing them to join a political movement to destroy the government. It’s like discussing a suicide cult, as they would be destroying the very thing that enables them to be happy in the first place (the stability to start and join a political movement).
“Giving” is said to be another route to happiness, but as I’ve written here before it doesn’t necessarily absolve a person of unethical enrichment schemes. Therefore…
While trusted social networks are the route to being happy, wealth feeds isolationism.
While trusted social networks can enable generosity and giving, an even bigger route to being happy, wealth feeds selfishness.
The selfish isolationism of wealth also has persistence over generations. For example the KKK platform of “America First” has manifested through American history as an implicit caste system of wealth generation, as described by the Journal of the National Archives in 1977.
The richest one percent owned forty-four percent of Milwaukee’s wealth and the poorest one-third owned nothing, while in Wisconsin as a whole almost one-half the adult males owned no property whatever… [due to] ‘extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth in 1860.'”
Is it any wonder Ronald Reagan’s racist “trickle” platform of wealth accumulation was so dangerously popular in the South where he started his presidential campaign.
The campaign tones of 1980 have been decidedly shrill. And today, Carter continued to perform in that voice. Referring to previous Reagan campaign comments, the president said: “You’ve seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like ‘states’ rights’ in a speech in Mississippi; in a campaign reference to the Ku Klux Klan relating to the South. That is a message that creates a cloud on the political horizon. Hatred has no place in this country.” In a recent appearance at the Nashoba County Fair in Mississippi — the country where three white civil rights workers from the North were murdered in the 1960s — Reagan indeed said he favored “states’ rights.” The phrase was a code word for resistance to desegregation in the 1960s.
Carter was right. Reagan employed racist code words to promote isolationism and selfishness where only white men rule — an unhappy “America First” slaveocracy. Does anyone still think highly of Reagan? It’s like asking who on earth likes General Lee.
Quality of Tesla vehicles has been notoriously bad for years, and has been trending worse, which should be little surprise given how poorly it treats human life (from its workers and its customers to anyone in or around their product).
Now top experts in automobile safety, who finally are getting some attention, aren’t mincing words about the sad danger a Tesla poses to everyone on the road.
“Tesla sticks out like a sore thumb,” said David Friedman, who was deputy and acting administrator of NHTSA from 2013 to 2015. “And it has for years.” [Heidi King, a deputy and acting administrator of NHTSA during the Trump administration added] “I really dislike a lot of what Tesla has done, and at the top of the list in bright, bold letters, is Elon Musk’s habit of making false public claims… visionary exaggerations about a consumer product can be very, very dangerous.”
Liar, liar Elon Musk’s customers are literally dying in fires.
One of the reasons Musk has become an obvious “sore thumb” of safety is explained by his bully mindset of doing harm: to do wrongs until someone can afford to stop him in court.
“In the US, things are legal by default,” Musk said.
A public automobile company showing intent to commit crimes unless someone can catch them is the worst possible CEO statement.
“Things” are not simply legal by default.
To put it another way, in the US cannibalism is legal by default. So is Elon Musk’s next business idea going to be grinding the rising number of his dead customers into hamburger? Something technically legal DOES NOT mean you won’t be convicted of a related crime.
“We essentially have the Wild West on our roads right now,” Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the NTSB, said in an interview. She describes Tesla’s deployment of features marketed as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving as artificial-intelligence experiments using untrained operators of 5,000-pound vehicles. “It is a disaster waiting to happen.”
The Wild West killed a LOT of innocent people, especially because of men like Stanford when you think about it. I mean Silas Soule was a very notable exception who became more like the American rule but only much later.
But I digress. Tesla is not a disaster just waiting, it already happened!
Let’s play spot the disaster. Here are the death rate stats for electric cars.
Source: tesladeaths.com
I warned very loudly about the disaster we are now in for at least six years prior. My 2016 keynote presentation about Tesla death at BSidesLV was literally called “Great Disasters of Machine Learning“.
Elon Musk long ago signaled disaster as his business model and I saw it right away after the first road death was reported April 2, 2013.
Tesla was leaving Laguna Beach and veered into oncoming traffic
Veering across lines into oncoming traffic is not “legal by default” yet it seems that Tesla must believe it to be a profitable business model for America, given their vehicles have become notorious for doing exactly that.
A US federal judge’s ruling paves the way for a trial in July, the first time Tesla will face a jury in litigation over a car crash. The electric car-maker faces a flurry of lawsuits over a spate of accidents… Barrett Riley, 18, was at the wheel of his father’s Model S when he lost control and veered into a concrete wall of a house in Fort Lauderdale. The car was engulfed in flames. Riley and his friend in the passenger seat were both killed. The father, James Riley, alleged in a lawsuit that Tesla was negligent for removing a speed-limiting device from the car after his wife had asked for it to be installed. The after-market device was designed to cap the car’s speed at 85mph. The family also argued that Barrett could have survived the impact of the crash but lost his life because of the intense fire, which the suit attributes to a defective design in the battery.
Defaults give an interesting framing for this court case.
Why was the default top speed so far above any legal limit? The family tried to set a safe mode by requesting Tesla enable their built-in speed limiter (“loaner” mode with an 85 mph max). Allegedly Tesla later removed the setting to override parents’ explicit request, which led directly to the predictable death of their child.
Tesla’s argument for why they intentionally disobeyed parents was… because they could. A toddler-level mentality of safety, if not a conspiratorial one. When parties A and B come to a service provider with conflicting requests, Tesla very clearly took sides: serving the (reckless abandon) one and not the (safer, wiser, legal) other.
Two footnotes also may be worth adding.
First, this Tesla also operated with two un-repaired recalls at the time of its crash; unrelated to the cause of death yet it still gives evidence of Tesla being not on top of safety.
Second, the car continuously re-ignited into fire. It was on fire when police arrived. It then caught on fire again when it was put on a tow truck. It then caught on fire again when it was put on a second tow truck. And it then caught on fire again when it was unloaded from the second tow truck. That’s significantly worse “rush to market” thinking than even the Pinto disaster.
The lawsuits brought by injured people and their survivors uncovered how the company rushed the Pinto through production and onto the market. […] Ford officials decided to manufacture the car even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank. Did anyone go to Mr. Iacocca and tell him the gas tank was unsafe? “Hell no,” replied an engineer who worked on the Pinto. “That person would have been fired. Safety wasn’t a popular subject around Ford in those days. With Lee it was taboo.” As Lee Iacocca was then fond of saying, “Safety doesn’t sell.”
The 2006-2012 ML, GL and R-Class have a moisture related corrosion issue with the brakes, which can result in total failure.
…brake force support might be reduced, leading to an increase in the brake pedal forces required to decelerate the vehicle and/or to a potentially increased stopping distance. In rare cases of very severe corrosion, it might be possible that a strong or hard braking application may cause mechanical damage in the brake booster, whereby the connection between the brake pedal and brake system may fail. In such a very rare case, it would not be possible to decelerate the vehicle via the brake pedal.
Not possible to decelerate the vehicle via the brake pedal.
I believe that officially means these road bathtubs should be classified as a boat instead of a car?
The issue is so serious Mercedes says drivers should immediately call and a tow truck will come take the vehicle to be repaired.
MBUSA is advising affected customers to stop driving their vehicles. MBUSA will also offer complimentary towing to owners of affected vehicles to attend the workshop.
I suppose what’s hidden in the details is how Mercedes took a single report and extensively researched the causes until they arrived at a decision to recall vehicles even 16 years old. Consumer Reports tells the story:
The automaker began its investigation in July 2021 after a report of a customer from outside the U.S. experiencing reduced braking during a stop. After conducting numerous field studies and tests, including discovery of a single similar situation in the U.S., Mercedes-Benz informed the National Highway Traffic Safety Association of the recall on May 5, 2022.
A Columbus police crash report states that the driver of the Tesla, 63-year-old Frantz Jules, told police that he was unable to slow the vehicle as it hit speeds of 70 mph on a Downtown highway, so he exited and smashed into the center.
Jules told police he was driving on Ohio Route 315 when he “lost control of his brakes and was unable to stop,” according to the police report. He exited Route 315 at the Neil Avenue exit, which leads directly onto Vine Street toward a T-intersection and traffic light at North High Street — with the convention center directly in its path.
Three witnesses to the crash, one of whom was stopped at the red light at North High Street, told police that the driver of the Tesla appeared to speed up in order to beat a red light. They also said it did not appear he applied brakes before the building was hit.
Lost control of his brakes and was unable to stop… or sped up to run through a red light, or BOTH? Tesla likely doesn’t care and will spend its time trying to find ways to avoid being responsible.
