The Tesla was pinned underneath the truck’s trailer and the vehicle’s four occupants were trapped, police said.
Pinned underneath sounds again like what we’ve seen with Tesla hitting trailers both from behind and the side. The fact it’s an intersection makes it sound like broadside, although it also could have been another case of exiting at high speed and hitting the rear of a parked trailer.
At least 17 people have been killed by Tesla’s known faulty automation software since June 2021 (when U.S. government required carmakers to report such failures). Hundreds more have died from the many other Tesla design and engineering defects.
The petition makes a lot of sense. If you read between the lines, a transit safety expert proves again that Tesla really doesn’t know the basics about how to make a safe car.
In the petition, Lakafossis points out that it has been known since the 1980s that the Brake Transmission Shift Interlock (BTSI) feature reduces instances of sudden unintended acceleration in vehicles with automatic transmissions. The feature has also been required in new vehicles since 2010. “After proactively solving the problem of SUA accidents in the 1980s, today it seems that we are moving in the opposite direction, allowing a driver to select reverse gear while still driving forward without asking for a brake pedal application(!), actively encouraging drivers to enjoy ‘feet-off automatic braking and parking’,” Lakafossis says.
He has asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to recall all 1.6 million Tesla. Consideration of the ability to shift from drive to reverse without touching the brake pedal now sits along the Tesla recalls for steering wheels falling off, brakes not working, and seatbelt failures.
The murder rates in Trump-voting states from 2020 have exceeded those in Biden-voting states every year since 2000, according to a new analysis by ThirdWay, a center-left think tank. Republicans have built their party on being the crime-fighting candidates, even as murder rates in red states have outpaced blue states by an average of 23% over the past two decades.
That’s a huge difference.
Source: Axios
Every state has murders, every state has distribution of murders across population density (urban/rural), yet states running “Republican Red” seem to be the worst at providing safety to citizens.
Is it any wonder why?
Here’s a recent case example from San Francisco. A wealthy white man who allegedly was involved with his friend’s sister’s drugs… was murdered by his friend in a cold premeditated knife attack.
As soon as this story broke, many political commentators jumped onto a totally tired and false narrative that the “urban” areas are unsafe (implying SF is dangerous because of non-white people on the streets).
The fear of crime often gets presented as a response to numbers—murder rates, numbers of robberies, carjackings, and assaults—but it’s primarily an anecdotal phenomenon that very often runs counter to what all the metrics would suggest.
I say tired because “urban decay” is an old racist meme. It’s common for bored white American ladies in their later years to sit around and gossip about their “fear” of living in a city (e.g. around “poor people”, which they say to mean non-whites).
Source: The GRIOT, Volume 6, Issue 3, Summer 2003
These “poison squads” feign being “scared” all the way to today, like they haven’t stopped believing in a giant 1915 disinformation campaign of President Woodrow Wilson. He set “America First” as the platform to resurrect the KKK — fomenting a 1919 “Red Summer” pattern of white-on-black violence. If only more people recognized this old KKK violent racist pattern in the modern day Red state propaganda and policies on crime.
Red means dead (magazine loaded, round chambered, chamber locked) when America is a gun.
It’s no secret that science, as well as most forms of independent thought from actual learning, gets discouraged in these Republican-led states full of preventable deaths. The Reds want votes from scared believers, and they very likely don’t really plan to reduce crimes that generate the fears they prey upon.
Of course murder rates aren’t going to improve where the people charged with addressing such issues are too biased to even look and listen, let alone process real data and symptoms, while they go around banging their fear drum.
Back to San Francisco, reporters interestingly emphasize how homicide rates have dramatically lowered over time.
Source: Mission Local
And further to that point, as I’ve written before here in terms of qualitative investigation data, there’s an organized crime and police corruption element to San Francisco with very non-random targeting.
Anyone jumping to conclusions about “random” crimes in SF, probably isn’t digging into the data.
So I’ll say it again for the white men of Silicon Valley and their whispering wives who have been recklessly spreading old tired racist disinformation memes about “safety in cities”.
Perhaps their ignorance, and obvious inability to read any violent-crime report, is to be expected of these pickled olives hiding inside the comfort of their martini glasses. However, today they are doing it very disrespectfully — on the death bed of a white man who was killed in a clearly premeditated murder by an acquaintence in tech — and doing it in contradiction to well known quantitative and qualitative data on crime.
A NYT report highlights something I’ve been seeing a lot lately in American generative AI logic.
…many chemicals are approved under a provision known as Generally Recognized As Safe, which states that a food additive can forego review by the F.D.A. if it has been deemed safe by “qualified experts.”
Qualified experts is an obviously shady phrase that can enable private companies to self-regulate, a political process meant to directly corrupt safety for profits.
If a doctor at Stanford will go on the record saying smoking is good for you, in exchange for him getting lavish gifts, American tobacco companies will absolutely use that to deny science. True story.
So too with American candy companies, which seem to use giant safety regulation loopholes to act like cancer isn’t the predictable outcome of known carcinogens they serve children.
One point of contention is that the vast majority of the research on these additives has been done in animals because it is difficult (and unethical) to conduct toxicology research in humans. As a result, “It’s impossible to say that eliminating Red 3 or titanium dioxide from the American diet will reduce the number of people who suffer from cancer by a certain amount with total precision,” Mr. Faber said. “But anything that we can do to reduce our exposure to carcinogens, whether known or suspected carcinogens, is a step in the right direction.”
This is probably a good time to remember that the FDA was created as a reaction to labor abuse complaints in Chicago, as captured in The Jungle. Instead of directly improving rights for workers, the government sought to improve perception of the food quality from places with exposed inhumane working conditions.
At some point these discussions should start to push forward a realization that America often seems to embrace obvious graft and oppose quality, even in cases of children getting cancer.
One rotten apple spoils the bunch is a saying that seems to entirely escape anti-regulation zealots tying the hands of the FDA. And this behavior is having a profound impact on generative AI learning, which parrots inane ideas like science is evasive and pluralist because (hypothetically speaking) some candy oligarch sent her kid to medical school to keep them on family payroll as a dissenting “qualified expert”.
