Data protection experts say despite high-profile promises from Zoom management to stop doing all the wrong things, the company still violates GDPR due to its handling of personal data.

More specifically, Ulrich Kühn, acting Hamburg Commissioner for DataProtection and Freedom of Information, published this sharp analysis (translated from German):

Public entities are particularly bound to comply with the law. It is more than regrettable such a formal step has to be taken. In the FHH all employees have access to a proven video conferencing tool that is unproblematic with regard to third-country transfers.

Dataport, as the central service provider, also provides additional video conferencing systems in its own data centers. These are used successfully in other states such as Schleswig-Holstein.

It is therefore incomprehensible why the Senate Chancellery insists on an additional and legally highly problematic system.

“Incomprehensible” why people choose Zoom? I suppose that’s like trying to comprehend why people would resort to violence over cabbage patch dolls.

His point boils down to some simple facts and basic reasoning. Why bother breaking the law to use Zoom when far better legally compliant (safer) options exist?

It probably has something to do with Chinese military intelligence… sorry, I meant Zoom knowing that the market has a predictable tendency to be vulnerable to herd thinking and low cognitive ability versus factual reasoning.

A video making the rounds on social media asks the simple question how a Tesla driver can ignore big red warning lights and “proceed with caution” text on the dashboard?

Perhaps the better question is why engineers fail to close the door as its wheels start moving (obviously with obstruction sensors to prevent crushing things, which I know is problematic for Tesla given its reputation for horrible obstruction sensing).

Or why don’t engineers prevent the car moving when a wing is open (let alone when a truck is crossing in front of it at a red light — see what I mean about obstruction sensing)?

Here’s the video in question:

Is there any real use case for driving with these doors open? The simplest and most elegant fix is the car can’t move with a wing door ajar.

I have yet to see anyone make the connection, for example, to this other recent video on Instagram of a Tesla driver very clearly on purpose keeping the doors ajar while driving.

Perhaps in both cases the cars are malfunctioning and unable to close the door?

Here’s a 2019 video of exactly this problem, foreshadowing the news today.

Oops, here’s a 2018 video of the same thing happening:

This is a different 2018 video of the same thing happening, right?

That, of course, came two years after a 2016 example of exactly this problem again:

In many of these cases it does seem like something is malfunctioning and the driver falsely believes one door closing means both are closed, which completely undermines the effect of warning systems.

Does anyone have a count? Seems under reported.

And I don’t mean this as a Tesla-only problem, just that (for pretending to be a “high” brand) they’re spectacularly worse than most at shipping garbage to a customer and ignoring the problems caused.

Here’s more context in what has been happening overall in the market of high-tech, rushed to release fancy gadgets that aren’t properly tested or held for quality control:

Just this week, for instance, the two Alexa-connected blinds in my bedroom failed to roll down at their scheduled time, and this morning, only one of them opened back up again. I have no idea what went wrong, because Alexa doesn’t offer any feedback when things fail, so all I could do was try again until the routine triggered properly. Those kinds of misfires are common in the smart home world. I’ve had Google Assistant refuse to set alarms or read upcoming calendar events for several days in a row, only to fix itself without explanation. My Ecobee thermostat occasionally gets stuck on a single temperature, requiring a reboot. I’ve had light bulbs inexplicably fail to connect to their hub device. And I’m pretty confident that every Echo speaker owner has experienced Alexa playing the wrong music at least once.”

These examples go on and on, yet most of them are marginal or disposable income things. Tesla is in a category where it supposed to provide an essential service, and it can seriously injure or kill people.

A very good summary of the COVID-19 Vaccine has this paragraph buried in the seventh section, under “preventing disease and death”.

The vaccine shows an 8-fold reduction in the development of any symptomatic disease secondary to delta. For hospitalization, it is a 25-fold reduction. That’s 25 times! Remarkable. For death, it is also 25 times! This is a very effective pharmaceutical class when looking at overall efficacy toward the intended/expected purpose. When looking at the very tiny side effect profile, I’d personally consider it one of the best overall pharmaceuticals on the market in any class of drugs.

When people ask what the long-term effects of the vaccine are, I get the feeling this guy would tell them “you’re not dead and the people you know and love are not dead”.

If someone in America wanted to market this more successfully, they would have to call it something like the Rambo patriotic personal health defense system.

That cartoonist almost gets it right, since it really should say something like “it’s for protecting against the spread of evil”.

Speaking of graphic illustration, here’s August 2021 data from all the reporting states in America (less than half — Florida and Texas obviously not reporting). Left side shows fully vaccinated (click to enlarge):

You know that thing where US Air Force brass like to say that it was mutually assured destruction (MAD) that kept the world safe after WWII?

I know such “ultimatum” gaming is wrong generally (pun not intended) because of simple history, yet now there is even more evidence it won’t work based on research in other fields.

Modern conflicts of highly-distributed multi-cultural conflicts have to answer to the Machiquenga results “shaking up psychology and economics”:

…a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.

Spoiler alert: the results stood up. It’s a long read, well worth your time.