Twitter not only is a toxic platform, the largest hate rally in history, it’s also engaged in egregious stock manipulation by robots to fund the haters.

Of 157,000 tweets posted to the hashtag #TSLA, 23% were from bots, the research showed.

Kirsch and Chowdhury tracked 186 Tesla-related bot accounts and found that after each was launched, the company’s stock appreciated more than 2%. (They looked at the average stock return for the week previous to the bot’s creation and for the week following.)”

“This computational content may have buffered the Tesla narrative from an emergent group of critics, relieved downward pressure on the Tesla stock price and amplified pro-Tesla sentiment from the time of the firm’s IPO in June 2010 to the end of 2020,” reads a paper that the researchers plan to present at the International Electric Vehicle Symposium in June in Oslo.”

Related: Nearly 80% of X Twitter traffic is now just bots.

A two hour log overwrite standard in 2024 is shameful for modern planes.

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy said on Sunday no data was available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours – when recording restarts, erasing previous data.

The U.S. requires cockpit voice recorders to log two hours of data versus 25 hours in Europe for planes made after 2021.

Pilots in the U.S. might be better off with a pad of paper and pencil.

This will come up more and more as Boeing is exposed for allegedly having a culture of destroying evidence.

Notably the requirement for Boeing is that it maintain at least two hours, which means it could design for the more logical 25 hours instead. A bare minimum doesn’t seem appropriate when we’re talking about a world of long-haul flights reaching upwards of 18 hours. Obviously a day of data is the right move for product engineers who care about passenger survival, as proven in just the latest two Boeing safety incidents.

New Zealand’s Transport Accident Investigation Commission said on Tuesday it was seizing the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder of a LATAM Airlines 787 after an incident that left more than 50 people injured.

From a local news station ABC7 WJLA:

A woman is dead after a crash in Aspen Hill, Maryland Monday afternoon, according to Montgomery County Fire and Rescue officials.

Crews said they responded to the intersection of Layhill Road and Bell Pre Road around 2:34 p.m. for the report of a two-car collision.

Given side impact on the driver’s side, it appears like with the recent Hong Kong case the Tesla ran a traffic signal (or… the other car did, which seems far less likely).

Update: Left turn details released.

Police stated she was driving a Subaru Outback, making a left turn from northbound Layhill Road onto westbound Bel Pre Road when she collided with a driver in a Tesla Model Y who was going southbound on Layhill Road.

The breaking news story of whistleblower suicide doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny.

Barnett’s attorney, Brian Knowles, called the passing of his client “tragic” … and went on to express explicit doubt about the circumstances of his death, making sure to call the self-inflicted gunshot wound cops are citing as “alleged.”

What’s more startling is Barnett was literally in the midst of a whistleblower lawsuit against Boeing — his former employer of 32 years — as he was alleging retaliation for sounding the alarm on what he characterized as cutting corners on assembly lines for their planes.

It’s still too early to speculate, yet circumstances (notably opposite to Philip Haney, who was depressed and left a suicide note) suggest Barnett wasn’t planning to die. He left his hotel room and went into the parking garage to head to deposition, when perhaps he was intercepted as he got into his truck.

Last week, he gave a formal deposition in which he was questioned by Boeing’s lawyers, before being cross-examined by his own counsel.

He had been due to undergo further questioning on Saturday. When he did not appear, enquiries were made at his hotel.

He was subsequently found dead in his truck in the hotel car park.

Suicide with a gun on the way to do what he wanted to do? It doesn’t make sense, especially when you see the impact he was having, when you consider the moment he was in.

“They started pressuring us to not document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. They started bypassing procedures and not maintaining configurement control of airplanes, not maintaining control of non conforming parts – they just wanted to get the planes pushed out the door and make the cash register ring.”

Related, from 2017:

Last month, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Dr. Christopher Kirkpatrick Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017 to provide more safety for whistleblowers…

And related, from 2023.

After Killings, Calls to Protect South Africa’s Whistleblowers

Update May 2024:

The investigators closed the case after receiving a ballistics report that mentioned that the bullet had been “fired by the firearm located in the victim’s hand.”