A domain called motherfrunker has compiled a huge list of lies. It’s really quite amazing Tesla operates as such an obvious scam. Here a just a few examples out of the dozens:
September 2014: “They will be a factor of 10 safer than a person [at the wheel] in a six-year time frame.”
FALSE.
December 2015: “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.”
FALSE.
June 2016: “I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem, I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans.”
FALSE and PROMOTING DEADLY OVERCONFIDENCE.
March 2017: “I think that [you will be able to fall asleep in a Tesla] in about two years.”
FALSE and PROMOTING OBVIOUSLY DEADLY BEHAVIOR.
It’s this kind of disregard for truth that generates cults of fraud and irresponsibility. The actual crash data released by Tesla shows their safety declining fast over time:
Man arrested for riding in the back seat of his driverless Tesla got out of jail, bought a new one, and did it again. […] Consumer Reports said Full Self Driving performed inconsistently and sometimes disengaged without warning. Still, Sharma said he has no plans to stop riding in the back seat of his car, despite the clear dangers the stunt poses to pedestrians and other drivers. “I feel like by mid-2022 the backseat thing will be normal…”
To be clear here, this guy in 2014 was “sentenced to 90 days in prison for selling a stolen iPhone” and claims to have an “honorary” PhD from Berkeley in a degree that doesn’t seem to exist.
Rich idiot?
He bought a new Tesla after police confiscated his other one since, as he put it, he’s so rich he is above the law and “blue-blue-collar villagers can’t understand my life”.
His online persona is being a cruel wealthy troll who claims, and I swear I’m not making this up, that he likes…
…pooping in sparkling water. I use wealth as a comedy…
So there you have it.
Think of Tesla like a bunch of rich kids taking a dump in your drinking water so they can laugh at you choking on it, because all these lies about safety apparently aren’t being taken seriously at all.
In 1846 a chef in Paris created a disruptive edible paper portrait of a visiting Egyptian dignitary, perched on top of a pyramid of pulled sugar steps:
On the top of the [sugar] pyramid was a portrait painted in food dyes on sugar paste, of the Pasha’s venerated father Ibrahim. As the Pasha picked it up to examine it more closely he saw that embedded in the filigree icing frame of the portrait was a tiny, but perfect, portrait of himself.
Pretty innovative, considering edible wafer paper already had been around for hundreds of years before that.
In another disruptive example about 50 years later, a London chef started a “fad” of edible paper, including a dinner menu.
It appears an ingenious chef conceived the idea of making an edible menu card, and, after many experiments, he produced one composed of the sugar tissue paper which is used on the bottom of macaroons, and which is, of course, edible.
Edible wrappers have been so common, so easy to make and use, we might take them for granted and forget they even exist.
Here’s a sentence I found on a site that sells very large boxes of edible wrappers at super low cost, right next to their DIY recipe:
Wafer paper is a single most affordable product in edible printing industry, everyone uses it, from big box bakeries to stay at home moms.
Surely that was supposed to say stay at home parents. Or are they trying to imply stay at home dads can’t afford or use edible wrappers?
Anyway here is some “big disruption” news, in stark contrast to all this ancient history of edible wrappers:
‘A disruptive solution to pollution’: introducing edible packaging.
Indeed. Someone has just introduced something very familiar.
We’re told an inexpensive and common thing, centuries old, is about to start disrupting.
Combining her engineering background with her passion for a ‘cradle to cradle’ lifecycle, Lamp has launched a new company, Traceless, to commercialise the idea.
Lamp? She didn’t want to name her new company something like Illuminated? Also “cradle to cradle” sounds like it’s going exactly nowhere. Like saying from point A to point A. Are we there yet?
And I would be more impressed if she was marketing her idea as a way to deliver one-time written passwords (OTWP), or send ephemeral messages, which obviously you eat after reading.
One can only imagine if she had an history background. Would she still have gone commercial? I suspect no historian would be framing something centuries old as her new idea.
Traditional nougat wrapped in traditional traceless edible packaging anyone?
Women had been carrying important information over private networks for centuries if not longer. The communication protocol safety was so effective that to outsiders only the water was seen.Part four in a three part series…
I told myself I wouldn’t treat this lightly and so it ended up being delayed a long while.
In a nutshell when a “water charity” would roll into villages in Africa they believed dropping a well directly outside homes would liberate women and children from the burden of long walks with heavy loads.
These wells in fact undermined a core network and fabric of social order and thus dangerously unbalanced power — women no longer had private time in shared chores away from the home at their “workplaces” and overall safety/security of the region was significantly undermined.
This is not conjecture. I was working with a huge global tech firm that was pushing a water charity donation pledge. When I started to question the ethics of the charity, the head of it came to meet with me in person.
At first it was cordial and he said things like “happy to answer your questions” though soon he seemed a bit frustrated, even deflated as if I had unmasked him. I had asked straight questions like “exactly how many villages had security issues after a well was dug”.
To his credit he told me could confirm exactly 15 examples (at that time). I appreciated the transparency, yet he seemed disturbed by having to admit to the fact an utterly simplistic solution (get donations, drive in, dig a well, leave) to a complex problem was in fact making lives worse.
In other words I was told by the head of a major charity that in more than a dozen cases soon after the new well was established armed rebels were known to target it, seize control and force all residents into refugee camps. That was fascinating, and still didn’t go deep enough for me as it focused on militant action more than the subtle process of cultural devaluation and collapse (e.g. Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart“). He admitted the lost villages were never reported, despite his transparency with me.
He also tried to muster some of the usual “big picture is we’re helping a lot of people” chaff. When I dug into his actual data (at that time) even it was questionable, suffering from big data integrity issues like obvious copy/paste numbers for a map of the wells scattered across an entire continent.
Finally, when I broached this subject with regional conflict experts they confirmed that the resource charity model was typically flawed from the start, and conditions worsened without analysis. They knew of the problems, and again said none of it was ever reported. More to the point, they confirmed they knew how introduction of wells (or similar technology shifts for that matter, such as men on bicycles fetching water) destroyed a traditional model of safety and power for women.
While perhaps counter-intuitive that reducing a burden creates far worse burdens, it lays bare the kind of false assumptions someone can make when they look at ways to “fix” networks and markets they observe only as “do good” outsiders.
If we think only about carrying water as hard we risk projecting that mindset into other communities and look for ways to remove that specific pain point. Instead we should think about how hard life becomes for people if they don’t have the opportunity to carry water on long isolated paths (removal of private time/place to communicate translates directly to loss of power).
The water charity seemed to be attempting what Fela had written about in the mid 1970s, in a song called “Water no get enemy“.
Initially, water was likely deemed the safest option for substantial and impactful donations. The idea was that nobody could oppose something as essential as water, and any critics would likely be perceived as misguided. However, there was a serious oversight in considering broader risk management related to resources.
To put it plainly, it seems the individual behind the water charity felt a sense of guilt for their past actions and attempted to portray themselves as a “white savior” by delivering water to black communities, thinking it would shield them from scrutiny. Unfortunately, addressing complex real-life issues is not that straightforward, and the search for superficially criticism-proof solutions only reinforces the self-dislike that led to this approach in the first place.
The failure to conduct a thorough threat analysis on water distribution had far-reaching consequences, disrupting security processes, procedures around assets and political power, and jeopardizing the privacy and safety of women and children. The belief in invulnerability was proved wrong.
A long time ago, what seems like a hundred years from today, I wrote a post called “1873 Slaughterhouse Cases Explain US #Covid19 ‘Anti-Mask’ Cultism” on why Americans are so slavishly (pun not intended) obsessed with refusing to wear a simple safety mask that benefits society as well as themselves.
Today we have multiple examples of this manifesting in violent “biker” culture, as aggressive fringe groups and criminal syndicates operate campaigns to undermine rights by campaigning for suicidal anti-freedoms.
I don’t use the suicide phrase lightly, as just the other day I was sitting down with a biker (yes, I ride) who proudly explained his machine to me — an open fat drive belt by his ankle “sometimes rips pants off”, situated just in front of a giant “suicide shift” lever topped by a skull. He said he made it all so hard to operate safely it prevented anyone from stealing his ride and living to tell.
Imagine a guy thinking he needs to make his seat so miserable for others they wouldn’t dare try to steal it from him, devaluing it entirely while at the same time bragging about what a supremacist he is for being able to keep power out of the hands of others. Here’s how HD Forums describes the suicide shifter lifestyle:
Now, I realize there are plenty of semantic arguments about what constitutes a “suicide” shifter. But for the sake of this question, let’s just say the term refers to a hand shifter, rather than the conventional foot set up which became standard around the end of the Eisenhower administration.
Do you know what else became standard around the end of Eisenhower administration? Desegregation meant to allow blacks to have a seat.
As we talked I noted this guy had hung on his wall a framed Confederate dollar above a picture of Ronald Reagan, which clearly to him represented the same thing.
In other words, do you want to ride a motorcycle safely for yourself and everyone around you? Some bikers hate that.
Do you want to be free of mindless assaults and horrible designs of a simplistic/selfish predator? Some in society violently disagree — are more than ready to kill you and themselves as a “protest” against such asinine freedom (of course fraudulently calling it a defense of freedom when they deny freedom to you).
This is like asking do you want the freedom to drink water without known poison, or breathe air without known toxins? Allegedly there are restaurant and factory owners who ride bikes and demand their “god given” right, above any governmental interference, to deny everyone else any freedom from harm.
These are the people who see themselves as individual victims of concepts of society, fighting against everything always, angry at the world. The idea that someone could be given kindness or spared a dangerous moment without some kind of divine intervention or having to pay a huge price… is an unthinkable one.
Such perpetually dis-satisfied and unhappy people are in a constant state of anger at the world.
They ride without helmets, emitting noise and pollution, smoking cigarettes… and thus it is no stretch (pun not intended) that just like all the other ways to do harm since 1873, they can’t put on masks even today if they think it would help someone else. If it helps them directly (e.g. avoid being identified and held responsible for their actions) they have no hesitation to put on a mask. However, in terms of helping society… about as likely as that guy taking Ronald Reagan’s portrait off his wall. For them it is only one more thing to be angry about.
