A mining company in Australia stands to be charged with dumping toxic radioactive material.
Officials said the capsule the size of a pea was found south of the mining town of Newman on the Great Northern Highway. It was detected by a search vehicle travelling at 70 kilometers (43 miles) per hour when specialist equipment picked up radiation emitting from the capsule.
[…]
It contains the caesium 137 ceramic source, commonly used in radiation gauges, which emits dangerous amounts of radiation, equivalent of receiving 10 X-rays in an hour. It could cause skin burns and prolonged exposure could cause cancer.
The radioactive signal was obviously strong, which begs a question why a truck carrying it wasn’t equipped with sensors to detect dangerous loss of load.
It reminds me how coal trains in America were dumping huge amounts everywhere, as if dangerous loss of load has been business as usual for mining companies.
In 2009 a representative from the company testified before a federal review board. He was asked how much dust escapes from each coal train car during a 400 mile trip.
His answer? 645 pounds. Per car.
[…]
Coal has been transported via train for decades, yet little research has been done on the potential health effects for people who live near coal train routes.
[…]
Coal dust has been shown to coat the lungs of coal miners, contributing to problems like chronic bronchitis, decreased lung function, cancer and death.
That article goes on to point out there are 125 cars in a typical coal train.
645 * 125 / 400 = ~200 pounds of coal dust being spread every mile by its train.
And when you read that the charge in Australia for this radioactive pollution case carries a penalty of less than $1000, is it any wonder why a giant corporation didn’t try to prevent such serious disaster?
Have there been other radioactive peas lost before and never reported?
At the very least the huge week-long search and clean expense should go directly to the mining company. Gross negligence and a disregard for public safety is putting it lightly.
The pea really shines a spotlight on just how little attention has been paid to huge pollution risks (safety and environmental integrity) around and in mining supply chains.
Here are two fascinating quotes from an article about how journalists should be trained to report on road deaths.
First the government:
“It’s as if we were living through a war,” Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, said of road death rates in the US. “We cannot accept that these fatalities are somehow an inevitable part of life in America.”
Then the think tank:
“We just hit a sixteen-year high in road deaths,” Zipper told me, of the US. “And Americans don’t really notice it. They don’t really know about it.”
Ouch. The public has lost the ability to understand their own danger because of the lack of coverage.
Ok, I lied. Three quotes. Look at how the journalists report road deaths:
US road deaths have climbed in recent years, including during the pandemic, even as road use declined. Pedestrians and cyclists have been particularly hard hit. In late November, the New York Times reported that fewer foreign-service officers in the US State Department died overseas last year than were killed by vehicles while walking or biking in DC.
More foreign-service officers were killed by cars in America, than overseas for any reason.
It’s important to recognize that Tesla Deaths are a symptom of this U.S. road problem.
Without fraud there would be no Tesla, and their con was right away targeted at anyone who wanted to invest in safety.
Article about an NHTSA coverup of data showing Tesla ‘Autopilot’ to lead to *more* crashes than regular driving
People should think of the Tesla as a poorly controlled loitering munition, a threat to everyone’s safety if not national security. Of course fatalities increased, given Tesla wasn’t immediately banned in 2016 after demonstrably making roads uniquely less safe.
Source: tesladeaths.com
America banned lawn darts, and this one shouldn’t be harder to figure out.
“From America with love” is written on a Ukrainian M777 “three axes” howitzer to be fired at Russians.
When I wrote my first book in 2012, I pitched the publisher on cooking recipes for cloud security.
My vision was that one page would describe how to make an historic meal (such as Royal Navy spotted dick) and then the rest of the chapter would be cloud technical steps (such as how to setup secure remote administration).
I even presented a test chapter for the RSA Conference in China on how to grill the perfect hamburger, as a recipe for cloud encryption and key management.
Things didn’t turn out quite like I had expected, as the publisher asked to change the title to virtualization, drop the food recipes, and insert a DVD. It felt like preparing a gourmet vegan dessert and being told to stick to the meat and potatoes.
*Sigh*
Nonetheless in my mind cooking remains a powerful way to convey the relationship between technology and knowledge.
Everybody eats.
Food automation tends to be disgusting, even causing illness. Whereas technology augmentation in human cooking, using recipes for quality control and governance, will produce the best possible meal.
Perhaps the canonical example I hear all the time in AI ethics circles… if you brought a robot into your home and told it to prepare you a steak dinner, should you be surprised if later you can’t find the dog?
Microsoft management clearly didn’t understand such basic anthropological tenets of technology use. The big news, hopefully surprising nobody, is illness has forced them to cancel a massively funded VR program.
The personnel demoing the tech appear to be using a variant of Microsoft HoloLens. The government recently halted plans to buy more “AR combat goggles” from Microsoft, instead approving $40 million for the company to develop a new version. The reversal came after discovering that the current version caused issues like headaches, eyestrain and nausea.
Soldiers “cited IVAS 1.0’s poor low-light performance, display quality, cumbersomeness, poor reliability, inability to distinguish friend from foe, difficulty shooting, physical impairments and limited peripheral vision as reasons for their dissatisfaction,” per the DOT&E assessment. The Army knows that IVAS 1.0 is something of a lemon [yet] still plans on fielding the 5,000 IVAS 1.0 units it’s currently procuring from Microsoft at $46,000 a pop to training units and Army Recruiting command for a total price tag of $230 million.
It’s like reading some people got sick and then discovered their taco MRE bag wasn’t really a taco, just sugar and cornmeal drenched in preservatives and artificial taco flavors.
VR from Microsoft sounds like the hardtack (dry “cracker”) of combat goggles. A real bargain at $230 million.
Google glass really blew it on this point. They could have developed an HUD for highly technical work like repairing machines with both hands.
Of course Google didn’t think like this because their engineers all went straight from elite schools to sitting in a gourmet cafeteria eating free lunches and talking mostly about their exotic vacations.
They’re in a virtual world, the opposite of what’s required for knowledge, let alone innovation. And that’s why their products depend on finding people who really live, who have daily struggles and needs in a real world, to tell them what to engineer.
That’s all background to the main point here that howitzers in Ukraine are proving today what everyone should have been working on for at least the last decade: cooking.
DARPA’s training demos use something more pedestrian: cooking. Dr. Bruce Draper, the program’s manager, describes it as the ideal proxy task. “[Cooking is] a good example of a complex physical task that can be done in many ways. There are lots of different objects, solids, liquids, things change state, so it’s visually quite complex. There is specialized terminology, there are specialized devices, and there’s a lot of different ways it can be accomplished. So it’s a really good practice domain.” The team views PTG as eventually finding uses in medical training, evaluating the competency of medics and other healthcare services.
First you bake a cake together as a team using augmented vision… then you destroy invading armies with it.
Using phones and tablets to communicate in encrypted chatrooms, a rapidly growing group of U.S. and allied troops and contractors is providing real-time maintenance advice — usually speaking through interpreters — to Ukrainian troops on the battlefield. In a quick response, the U.S. team member told the Ukrainian to remove the gun’s breech at the rear of the howitzer and manually prime the firing pin so the gun could fire. He did it and it worked.
Delicious.
I’m not going to claim credit for this obvious future of technology based on ancient wisdom, given there are so many children’s tales saying the same thing.
Ratatouille is probably my favorite, easily digested in movie format.
The real kicker to the howitzer example is the technical teams spell out very precisely in life and death context where augmentation works best and where it fails (hint: Blockchain is a disaster).
As the U.S. and other allies send more and increasingly complex and high-tech weapons to Ukraine, demands are spiking. And since no U.S. or other NATO nations will send troops into the country to provide hands-on assistance — due to worries about being drawn into a direct conflict with Russia — they’ve turned to virtual chatrooms.
I use virtual chatrooms so much I forgot for a minute that they’re virtual.
The Ukrainian troops are often reluctant to send the weapons back out of the country for repairs. They’d rather do it themselves, and in nearly all cases — U.S. officials estimated 99% of the time — the Ukrainians do the repair and continue on. …Ukrainians can now put the split weapon back together. “They couldn’t do titanium welding before, they can do it now,” said the U.S. soldier, adding that “something that was two days ago blown up is now back in play.”
I love this SO MUCH. Right to Repair in a nutshell. Technology dramatically enhances developing markets by sharing knowledge like how to restore that technology in the field.
It’s the awesome Dakar Malle model of efficiency and sustainability that all technology should be put through, instead of lionizing the biggest waste teams.
And now for the main point:
Sometimes video chats aren’t possible. “A lot of times if they’re on the front line, they won’t do a video because sometimes (cell service) is a little spotty,” said a U.S. maintainer. “They’ll take pictures and send it to us through the chats and we sit there and diagnose it.”
Visual diagnosis in real time to bake a highly complicated cake. Including translation for chefs representing 17 nations in a small kitchen.
As they look to the future, they are planning to get some commercial, off-the-shelf translation goggles. That way, when they talk to each other they can skip the interpreters and just see the translation as they speak, making conversations easier and faster.
And I warned you about bockchain.
The expanse of weapons and equipment they’re handling and questions they’re fielding were even too complicated for a digital spreadsheet — forcing the team to go low-tech. One wall in their maintenance office is lined with an array of old-fashioned, color-coded Post-it notes, to help them track the weapons and maintenance needs.
Hope that’s clear. Writing a big blog post about how to share knowledge in the future is hard. Not as hard as a book, obviously, but I definitely could use some augmentation right now
More than anything it’s clear to me without government funded research teams, many tech companies would be utterly and completely lost in expensive dead end navel gazing.
DARPA is asking for developing recipes that really were needed a decade ago, based on assessment of hunger they see right now. While it’s fashionable to call this future thinking to avoid blame, in reality it’s being less ignorant about the present troubles.
Or I believe Molotov in WWII would have called them “bread baskets“.
Vyacheslav Molotov claimed in 1939 the Soviet Union was not dropping bombs on Finland, just airlifting food. The Finns thereafter called RRAB-3 cluster bombs “Molotov’s bread basket” (Molotovin leipäkori) and named their improvised incendiary device (used to counter Soviet tanks) a Molotov cocktail — “a drink to go with the food.”
Barely a scratch. This late model junkyard Tesla with less than 10,000 miles is ready for a new devoted owner.Many times this week people have asked if I heard about the spontaneous Tesla fire near Sacramento.
The fire department said yet another Tesla just burst into flames without warning, I mean a warning other than the badge on the hood.
It’s all over the news and for good reason, even while the Vancouver fire is barely being reported.
Within two or three minutes, he said, the whole car was on fire. “The whole thing just burst into flames.”
Tesla is a fraud, a rolling death trap. It’s nice people ask me about it, but something else has been on my mind lately.
I ask them all in return if they know how many Tesla go from the dealer to the junk yard with almost no miles.
Nobody has said yes.
I’ve written about it before here, and some of my security talks since 2016 have been based on this state of disaster, not to mention others’ research.
Using a salvaged Tesla Model 3 purchased at auction last year, researchers discovered all of the mobile devices that had been paired to the car, as well as phone numbers and email addresses from those devices. It discovered that it was owned by a construction company in the Boston area, the last six dozen addresses entered into the navigation and video footage from the crash that sent it to the junkyard. That was from one of the many cameras in Teslas that owners have often said they don’t know when they’re actually on. And, according to the business news network, it’s somewhat difficult for even owners to clear that data off of their Tesla.
My first (and last) ludicrous ride was using a Tesla pulled from a junk yard to be reverse engineered; its “driverless” system was exposed and audited (to predict reliably whether Tesla would kill many people, which it has done). It’s probably this hands-on junkyard experience a decade ago that had the most impact on my view of the vehicle as dangerous to society.
Nonetheless, since people are still surprised today, I’ll say it again.
Of more than 120 Model Ys that were totaled after collisions, then listed at auction in December and early January, the vast majority had fewer than 10,000 miles on the odometer, according to online data from Copart and IAA, the two largest salvage auction houses in the United States. The retail prices of those cars ranged from about $60,000 to more than $80,000.
How many $60,000 or higher vehicle brands so regularly fail to get more than 10,000 miles on their odometer?
Don’t forget this car company boasted to investors shortly after launch it would be the safest of all.
An Austin-built 2022 Model Y Long Range involved in a front collision and listed by IAA in early January had a retail price of $61,388 and estimated repair cost of $50,388. The vehicle’s owner was not listed. A second Austin-built Model Y, involved in a side collision and listed by IAA, had a retail price of $72,667 and estimated repair cost of $43,814.
What a bunch of regressive environmentally toxic junk.
I remember the Audi A8 warning about its special construction (“space frame” introduced 1994), which meant a nightmare to repair unless the owner had access to certified aluminum welders — almost certain rapid depreciation. Tesla took an exact opposite marketing approach by falsely promoting its extremely high cost difficult to repair vehicle as a long term investment and the huge losses have been… sadly predictable.
There are many simple explanations for why Tesla is again proven to be a total fraud. Here are three:
First, and most notable, is a CEO preying on fear to inflate his ego (ponzi scheme). As soon as he heard about people fearing a crash (related to a Tesla owner suing the company), he started repeatedly claiming his cars will soon magically avoid a crash (they can’t).
According to Musk, Tesla actually “hustled so much” to get the “V1” iteration of Autopilot released to consumers. This was because a driver had fallen asleep behind the wheel of a non-Autopilot Tesla and crashed into a cyclist. … Musk stated that the driver who struck the cyclist actually sued Tesla after the tragedy, claiming that his vehicle’s “new car smell” caused him to fall asleep.
Musk used this tragedy to start promoting his car as safe for drivers to fall asleep in. He spun common fears into disinformation about faith; engaged in really, really targeted social engineering attacks to spear people using false comfort, not just the usual bland exaggeration about product.
When people said drivers who fall asleep kill, Tesla’s CEO jumped on it to suggest everyone should go ahead and prepare to fall asleep in his cars… which then actually killed them and/or others.
Tesla drivers will be able to fall asleep behind the wheel by 2021, says Elon Musk
Tesla safety has been this kind of an absurd lie since 2013, absolutely proven false since at least 2016, yet many still buy the car because they aren’t qualified to judge such baseless and illegal claims.
Belief in the lies gives them false comfort, extremely dangerous for operating a vehicle. People in fact crash as soon as they start driving these catch-me-if-you-can lying clown cars. The data shows Tesla makes drivers worse, less safe than if they drove another car.
Oh, but isn’t there a boiler plate warning that tells people the opposite of what the CEO says?
Risk research suggests the boiler plate warning when coupled with the exaggerated lies of the CEO are far worse than if there was no warning at all. It’s perhaps counter intuitive, but studies show either the CEO has to stop lying or the warnings have to be removed; the combination of the two is the most dangerous because people are primed to ignore warnings.
In Nigeria the advance fee fraud criminals say they don’t feel sorry for their victims. The line generally goes that if the victim hadn’t believed in a better life, hadn’t taken the bait of safety promises, then they wouldn’t have lost everything… so the liars say it’s their victim’s fault for believing in a liar.
That’s the Tesla fraud.
Second, the car is designed and engineered so poorly it crashes often. There is copious evidence of workplace fraud and shortcuts that weaken safety, even worker abuse in factories… lists of basic manufacturing failures that are endless.
A culture of abuse and pollution.
I’ve called the results of this Tesla in Pole Position — meaning they are being credited with 10 out of 10 deaths — because their “best” engineering keeps abruptly slamming directly into poles.
Tesla’s CEO promised his customers that by 2018 they “do not need to touch the wheel”. This *brand new* 2018 Model 3 in California crashed and proved yet again that without fraud there would be no Tesla.
Nissan (early mover advantage in EV) and Mercedes (early mover advantage in driverless) both far exceed the late-comer (1997 TZero knock-off) Tesla in quality and safety. Economy or luxury, Tesla is the worst.
Did you know Nissan runs nearly the same number of cars as Tesla on the road using “driverless” software, yet Nissan had ZERO crashes to report to regulators?
That’s quality.
Tesla’s software by comparison has had so many bugs and fatalities from crashes we’re having to start a count of graveyards.
Source: Tesladeaths.com
It stands alone as an EV lacking hardware innovation (2012 model S is the same today, nobody wants one, and its look-alike derivatives have only gotten worse with time).
Third, high repair cost is not rocket science. Tesla is literally saying in 2023 that they are realizing bumpers could be designed for better parts availability and lower cost for minor repairs.
I refer you again to the Audi A8 that was honest about its engineering, warning people to not buy the car if they planned to inexpensively repair things.
Ten years ago people would grab a wrecked Tesla, hack them back together and put them out as rogue vehicles (disconnected from Tesla). Then people realized just how much Tesla sucks overall, and they moved the Tesla’s TZero guts to project cars. Now, there’s not really a point to either. It’s a disposable landfill nightmare.
Tesla is just a terrible company that struggles to deliver more than 10,000 miles without a catastrophic event. Hundreds of vehicles showing up like this is NOT explained by a bad driver or a patch of road.
Although, to be fair, Tesla’s brand does attract people who don’t want to drive and are likely bad drivers. That goes back to my first point, though.
It’s hard to say with certainty what was going on inside the vehicle, but it appears that the Model Y actually accelerates into the opposing lane, suggesting that the driver may have mistakenly hit the accelerator pedal instead of the brake. That sends the Model Y into the path of a silver Model S and gives the sedan driver almost no time to react and nowhere to go, leading inevitably to a collision.
Tesla leading inevitably to a collision? That sounds accurate, if you move up the timing to within the first six months.
Bottom line, while spontaneous fire is a regular Tesla fact, the even bigger picture is that the whole company is a raging dumpster fire.
We’re not talking enough about the systemic flaws in risk management within this third rate mediocre car company. It simply doesn’t make a product safe or reliable enough for mass market. Worse, it knows its safety warnings aren’t working and undermined by its own marketing.
The latest rankings of the top seven electric SUV put Tesla dead last (scoring in the 70s while all others are in the 80s). It shouldn’t even be on this list given deadly “flaws in comfort and build quality”.
1. BMW iX
2. Genesis GV60
3. Cadillac Lyriq
4. Volvo XC40 Recharge
5. Mercedes-Benz EQB
6. Audi e-tron
7. Tesla Y
“Y” indeed. Why would anyone buy a Tesla? It is the sad lawn dart of the car industry.
