It gives three examples of people with different abilities than industrial-age (World War I) physical labor requirements.
…the latest research on WWI based on documentary evidence suggests that British troops sometimes reported that being sent into outdoor killing fields was an improvement over being drafted into the slow, agonizing programmed death of the class-enforced loneliness and toxicity from indoor factory work.
The three allegedly have found gainful work using remote drones to help do the miserable physical work. Remote connection is icing on the cake, as it’s really about virtualization that augments and expands a driver’s logical capacity.
…being inside a vehicle is problematic and yet I still drive vehicles for a living which is amazing, ridiculous, but it works.
Driverless is dead, because so many people foolishly believing accelerationist fraud are now dead, whereas ethical augmented driving very much is in our immediate future.
More to the point, forklifts are barely vehicles. They “raise and lower” and might as well have bionic legs for uneven surfaces.
So we’re talking about robots controlled by people who need almost no physical requirements, like the liberationist wheelchair or bicycle evolved. It spells the end of large carriage (car) and cages designed to protect the humans doing high risk maneuvers.
Phantom Auto raises the spectre of an innocuous water tank engineering project of WWI. That humanitarian angle was literally the origin story of combat “tanks”.
Also we know for many years airborne military and intelligence drone operators have been using exactly the same principles as what Phantom Auto is now bringing to machines on the ground.
What’s most interesting in this story is therefore how Forbes (and presumably the Israeli military intelligence PR wing feeding them) quietly frame future warfare systems as good moves for the differently abled (an asymetric strategy that evaporates massive human physical requirements for conflicts).
Woke tech is where any competent military will be headed, leaving waves of toxic masculinity dead in their trenches.
…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.
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.
[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.”
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
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:
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).
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?
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.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
