Unlike Tesla, which never seems to be held accountable for its serial lying and egregiously false representations, Uber is yet again facing penalties.

The second offense related to estimated taxi fares provided by the app to Sydney customers between June 2018 and August 2020, when the taxi ride option was abandoned.

The algorithm used to calculate the fare ranges inflated the taxi estimates. The actual taxi fare was almost always cheaper than Uber’s lowest estimate. Uber had not ensured the algorithm was accurate, the commission said.

Did not ensure the algorithm was accurate? Tesla’s inaccurate algorithm is killing people. At least Uber just stole some money. The first offense also was Uber lying to its customers.

Again, however, Tesla doesn’t seem to be in any trouble for all its lies that lead directly to deaths so it begs the question why regulators keep going after Uber.

In 2018 both Uber and Tesla had “self-driving” products that killed pedestrians. Guess which company shut down their program and faced extensive public and regulatory outrage, versus the other company that simply charged customers more for even less?

Regulating industry-laggard engineering practices of Tesla (documented as worse than even 1990s KIA in quality failures), let alone their inaccurate algorithms and deceptive business practices is an obvious requirement for market safety. That is probably why O’Dowd has started a campaign to do exactly that.

Putnam’s first ad for O’Dowd is dubbed “Unsafe at Any Speed,” an homage to the 1965 best-selling book by longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader. It opens with a brief disclaimer and an image of O’Dowd, who is identified by his company title. The ad then shifts to a nearly minutelong compilation of Tesla cars crashing and nearly veering into things, and includes audio of passengers and drivers dismayed by the seeming malfunctions.

O’Dowd is being reported as an outsider to politics, when he seems to be the only one running with the inside view of actual engineering and market safety. This would be like calling a doctor an outsider to politics when running on a healthcare reform ticket.

The 1933 Wall Street Putsch is looking like foreshadowing.

Business leaders like JP Morgan and Irénée du Pont were accused by a retired major general of plotting to install a fascist dictator

I’m not hearing the warning yet from a retired major general, and Elon Musk is perhaps no automobile union-busting Irénée “Black Legion” du Pont (or maybe he is), but there surely are parallels to history worth studying.

Galloway makes the case very eloquently without using any real history at all.

Elon will be a poster child for how power corrupts potential…. The kind that reduces effectiveness. Last week at TED, Mr. Musk continued to disparage what’s left of our nation’s umpires, calling the SEC “bastards” for its enforcement action against him after he tweeted he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. Elon insisted the Commission had bullied him into saying he’d lied and had no funding. The day after Elon’s TED interview, a court filing confirmed that, yes, he had lied, and funding had not been secured. Mr. Musk’s wealth results, in large part, from the protocols of the SEC, not despite them. Likely the biggest one-day hit to his wealth would occur if he were to leave this ecosystem of bastards and re-list TSLA elsewhere. Without subsidies and credits from the entity he has such contempt for (Uncle Sam), would TSLA even exist?

Putting a town square under the ownership of one man has already proven catastrophic.

In fact, Galloway gets history of America completely wrong and thinks the obvious mistake is something new or novel when it’s instead a rehash of long past failures. Facebook was clearly going to turn out very badly, as I warned here in 2011 by explaining why I deleted my profile in 2009.

A better exposure of the “emerging” caste system (Galloway hints at only briefly) is to look more honestly at the origin story of America, which was unquestionably a slaveocracy intended to block abolition movements and create a new country of tyranny.

Consider for a minute whether Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are successful in America because it rewards their apartheid/caste mindset of wealth generation, which they learned well when their parents benefited so much from one in South Africa.

Others are demonstrating through data analysis that (in classic dictator fashion) the big pronouncements to remove “bots” on Twitter is a tell, which is to say that buying Twitter is meant to do the opposite. Armies of “not so secret” bots can be expanded dramatically by dictators to generate fraudulent wealth (and power) without accountability.

Kirsch and Chowdhury tracked 186 Tesla-related bot accounts and found that after each was launched, the company’s stock appreciated more than 2%. (They looked at the average stock return for the week previous to the bot’s creation and for the week following.) While Tesla’s market value has increased over the years, the price has seen dramatic ups and downs. The periods around bot creation showed sharp increases, but outside those windows, trading was far more volatile, Chowdhury said. “This isn’t a causal relationship, but it does raise questions,” Kirsch said, about why there’s a correlation that does not appear to be random. “We’re trying to understand the mechanism. It can’t be just a bunch of tweets that push the stock. People have to notice them, interpret them and act on them.”

As Doctor Strangelove put it in 1964 when predicting realities of today’s big data security “The Whole Point of the Doomsday Machine is Lost if You Keep it a Secret!”

June 2021 through March 2022, when Americans had clear access to vaccines, about 61% of Covid-19 deaths were probably preventable according to a new study.

KFF analyzed the monthly death toll, parsing out vaccination status and controlling both for age (older Americans are still at increased risk of death even when vaccinated) and for the imperfect efficacy of the vaccines. That allowed them to estimate the number of preventable deaths per month from last June through March.

In just one year at least 234,000 dead Americans could have lived had they been vaccinated. Or as the study concludes plainly: “…most deaths continue to be among those who are unvaccinated.”