Energy, History, Security

How Elon Musk Pulls An Enron And Gets Away With It

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The big question is why Enron, “the most innovative company in America“, ever got caught and held accountable for the thing Elon does constantly: lie and defraud people.

…Times story carried a quote from the closing arguments of the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Nicholas Porritt: “This case is about whether rules that apply to everybody else should apply to Elon Musk,” he said. On the one hand, sure, yes, that would be nice and good. On the other, it has become so radically implausible to the extent that it’s borderline absurd.

The answer, at least from a jury judging Tesla, was that they didn’t really understand how hateful constant improvisation and disregard for law and order by an American CEO would be a bad thing.

A jury was meant to recognize the harm in obvious crimes like, you know, intentional fraud.

Elon Musk’s own defense was that not everyone became his victim, therefore he couldn’t be held accountable for people he victimized.

Seriously, he said some people didn’t believe his fraud as if that should mean those who did have themselves to blame only. Imagine every bank robber ever saying “but whatabout the safe I didn’t crack” in order to avoid conviction.

Blame the victim didn’t move the jury to want to stop victimization. It reminds me of how hard it can be for rape victims to hold accountable their attackers.

[Laws] won’t be enough unless we change the culture that allows assault to happen in the first place.

And that touches on the thorny problem in American history, its sad record of injustice.

When British corporations in 1740s (e.g. James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia), and even their King decades later, started abolishing slavery the Americans revolted to find a way to legalize crime against humanity and keep it their primary source of wealth. President Washington used his lawyer to exploit loopholes and preserve slavery after he was ordered to abolish it.

Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”

This racist and cruel “father” of America was selfishly manipulating laws through the late 1700s, according to his better peers. The Revolutionary War was about profit, not freedom; especially about profit derived from raping black women.

And we all know how the American courts treat black women plaintiffs let alone any woman.

What’s so bad about Musk undermining all inherent value to replace it with an arbitrarily controlled dictatorship that cruelly destroys society? And is it any wonder, as if mocking the American court system, his big project was announced as a robotic black woman to serve him?

It’s pretty obvious to anyone with expertise in cars that Tesla is a worthless company, yet experts have zero influence over Wall Street manipulation and related fraud.

History says it’s terrible to allow crimes like Musk’s, the worst because trust is erased by selfish predators, but then who is to say any American jury knows anything about history? (PDF of Killing Hope)

Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” It’s probably even worse than he realized. During the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a Japanese journalist, Atsuo Kaneko of the Japanese Kyoto News Service, spent several hours interviewing people temporarily housed at a hockey rink—mostly children, pregnant women and young mothers. He discovered that none of them had heard of Hiroshima. Mention of the name drew a blank. And in 1982, a judge in Oakland, California said he was appalled when some 50 prospective jurors for a death-penalty murder trial were questioned and “none of them knew who Hitler was”.

Those who know history are condemned to watch others repeat the worst of it.

Enron executives used fraud to inflate revenues and hide debt. The SEC, credit rating agencies, and investment banks were also accused of negligence—and, in some cases, outright deception—that enabled this massive fraud.

Now we can add jurors to that list, again.

In Musk’s case it seems to be taking a lot longer to convict someone for fraud than others like him. Maybe in the end Enron Musk will be like Ford and use his purchase of media to spread hate speech into every dashboard, even directly backing his loyal follower Adolf Hitler, yet get away with it all.

American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford for enabling his most infamous follower Adolf Hitler. Source: Wayne State
Energy, Security

Tesla Isolated After Flames Engulf 7 Car Carrier

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The key to this breaking news story seems to be that while seven different cars brands were being moved on a shared trailer, the Tesla burst into flames and has to be isolated as the worst of all.

The Tesla will remain in isolation for 30 days, per expert advice, according to the towing company.

Perhaps it should have been isolated before too? Perhaps Tesla should be banned?

It’s a good reminder that while electrical failures have been a top cause of car fires since forever, Tesla fires are the worst in car history and risk dragging the entire industry down. The towing company has been posting infrared sensor data and video evidence:

Continuous monitoring of the EV’s from last evenings Fire… Early this morning this is what the Tesla was doing.

You’d think every car company would be entirely focused on preventing fires.

Wierdly it’s been the opposite with Tesla, as they seem to think they should be allowed to have “mysterious” fires and ignore the victims.

in an interview with KCRA, siblings Sunit and Dilpreet Mayall described the terrifying moments their car’s battery component suddenly burst into flames on Saturday about 4 p.m. driving eastbound on Highway 50.

“We could have died in that moment,” Sunit Mayall told the TV station. “I was really scared. I was panicking a lot and just re-living it. I’m getting emotional right now. But it was really scary.”

[…]

Dilpreet Mayall told KCRA that they reached out to Tesla multiple time, but haven’t heard anything back.

Tesla often uses whataboutism claims of combustion engine fires being common… without mentioning that a top cause of car fires is electrical systems. By that fact alone Tesla brings increased risk unless it can demonstrate special precautions and response (e.g. what we’ve seen from Chevy).

The dozens of spontaneous fires being reported by local fire departments simply does not happen with other cars.

When you include just these two data points, Tesla seems willfully negligent by failing to respond and showing no signs of improvement.

Vox openly mocked Tesla’s handling of emergency response training as unfocused and bizarrely under-resourced.

In the long, wide-ranging message, [Michael McConnell, an emergency response technical lead at Tesla] explained what assistance Tesla could and could not provide. He offered online training sessions but could not arrange in-person training because, McConnell explained, he had “just too many requests.” A diagram for the Model X implied there was magnesium in a part of the car that did not, in fact, contain magnesium. There was no extrication video guide for the company’s Model Y car (extrication is the firefighter term for removing someone from a totaled vehicle). It would be difficult to get a training vehicle for the Austin firefighters to practice with, McConnell added, since Tesla is a “build to order manufacturer.” Most of Tesla’s scrap vehicles are recycled at the company’s Fremont plant, he said, though a car could become available if one of Tesla’s engineering or fleet vehicles crashed.

Tesla says they are overwhelmed with requests for training, while not knowing how their own car works, yet then somehow falsely believe that there aren’t enough wrecked Tesla available yet to train on. Where do they think all that demand comes from? Can any car company really be any worse at engineering?

History, Security

Canadian wide-net forensic genetic genealogy (FGG) identifies soldier missing for 106 years

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Soldiers MIA are many. Here’s just one example:

He was 23 years old when he fought with the 7th Canadian Infantry Battalion in the Battle of Hill 70 near Lens, France, in August 1917. On Aug. 15, the first day of the fighting, he was reported missing and presumed dead — one day shy of his 24th birthday.

About 10,000 Canadians died, were wounded or went missing during the bloody, 10-day battle, National Defence said, including 1,300 with no known grave.

So the researchers had the monumental task of whittling down Howarth’s identity from a massive list of lost soldiers.

And here’s what used to happen next.

“It is vital to remember that many lied about their age. So that date of birth on [their] attestation papers quite often is incorrect,” she said. […] His possession of [a whistle] suggested he ranked higher than a private, Lockyer said.

The reporter sure made a giant hoo-ha about age right before throwing that whole concept under the bus.

But did WWI soldiers lie about birthdays as much as people being forced to register on Facebook forms? Let’s not pretend this is a century old situation.

I’ve never thought of birthdays as a reliable identifier, especially where people have been disallowed from holding multiple birthday records. If your birthday is so important yet so visibly celebrated, why wouldn’t you have variations?

The lowly whistle was thus treated as a far more reliable issued token of identity than any birth record.

Perhaps think of it as low incentive to steal or tamper when issued a whistle. Primitive technology, the simplest token, yet crucial as an identity clue. A rank insignia would have to match the whistle.

And now methods of solving identity mysteries may be changing rapidly because ever larger immutable identification nets are being cast among the general population. What’s fascinating in this case was a soldier who allegedly had no surviving close relatives.

“That means we have to go up to his grandmother and see if his grandmother had any sisters. And we’re now in the early 1800s and trying to find records from that time,” Lockyer said.

“Then, based on finding out if the grandmother had any sisters … see if we can trace down through the maternal line to somebody who was living today, who’s willing to give a DNA sample.”

It took time, but they finally found a donor — Howarth’s cousin, four times removed.

“They admittedly had no idea who Percy was,” Lockyer said.

The burning question is now of course whether that donor owns and controls the data they consented to provide… or did it become property of the system doing the forensics processing?

I suspect “would you like to help recover the identity of a lost WWI soldier” is a consent request that should have a very, very limited timeframe. And I also suspect currently it’s being treated as a permanent one instead, which may be dangerous.

Security

Tesla Owners Keep Crashing Into Their Own Homes

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You’d think by now nobody would want to own or be around a Tesla.

Their design flaws are putting everyone and everything near them at risk, dragging the entire car industry down.

Alas, Tesla owners this last week again have “mysteriously” crashed into homes. First in Sacramento. Then in San Ramon.

Laxmana Marpu said he was simply moving his Tesla Model Y from the entrance of his house into the garage when the car seemed to take over, eventually plowing into his home. Marpu said he was not on autopilot mode and believes the car accelerated on its own.

The latest case mentions causing damage in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Is that expensive for a Tesla owner who already paid too much money for a defective product well known to cause so much grief? The owner maybe feels lucky this Tesla didn’t burn their house down or kill their children.

Those aren’t hypothetical disasters, they’re very real for Tesla owners. And looking at a case in Texas we see this is a very old problem unique to Tesla that they have been refusing for 15 years to fix with any transparency.

KXAN took the case to Dragan Djurdjanovic, a mechanical engineering professor and expert at the University of Texas at Austin. He investigated similar allegations against Tesla around 2008. “I was shocked when you came to me with this news. I thought, ‘Not again!’ Honestly,” he said. Djurdjanovic said there may have been electromagnetic interference between the cables in the car. “You press the pedal and the electrical command goes to the car. And there could be a break in that electrical connection,” he explained.

I’ve mentioned before here how Tesla “mysteriously” burst into flames and they “mysteriously” crash into poles, leading to astronomical death rates.

Tesla promised it would make the safest car on the road yet instead it has proven the exact opposite with its annual death tolls rapidly increasing.
Source: tesladeaths.com

None of it is really any mystery.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, unintended acceleration incidents happen in the United States at a rate of 1 per 100,000 vehicles per year. But issues with Tesla vehicles are too frequent to be dismissed by user error. For instance, within the first year of the Model X being released, 13 incidents of unintended acceleration were reported, when there were only 18,240 Model X vehicles on the road in the United States—a rate of 71 per 100,000 vehicles.

That’s a horrible rate of failure from a design flaw, causing huge amounts of death and destruction.

Tesla wouldn’t exist without fraud.

A big part of their fraud involves “cooked logs” that nobody but Tesla are allowed to collect and verify. Remember the Enron mystery of fault-free audits?

…a series of markedly similar crashes involving Tesla drivers attempting to park have been described in news reports, consumer complaints, or in legal filings.

If Tesla doesn’t send real-time logs of car data to private personal data storage outside the control of Tesla, then don’t believe a single word the company says.

The Enron CEO was sentenced to jail for less.

You know it’s bad when insurance companies say Tesla blocks them from getting the data. And that’s a huge problem. Who owns the car and who pays the insurance? Tesla is literally denying data owners access to their own data. Basically insurance companies need to start putting their foot down hard on anyone who even thinks about buying into the fraud of Tesla.

Depending on what city you live in, insurers are fed up and you might be out of luck. […] “This is a serious problem impacting our customers and the entire auto insurance industry, so we temporarily stopped writing new business in some states.”

Of course a Tesla ban would make even more sense. They banned lawn darts right? And nobody ever said lawn darts should just sell their own insurance so don’t even…

Update: NYC this time