A NYT report highlights something I’ve been seeing a lot lately in American generative AI logic.
…many chemicals are approved under a provision known as Generally Recognized As Safe, which states that a food additive can forego review by the F.D.A. if it has been deemed safe by “qualified experts.”
Qualified experts is an obviously shady phrase that can enable private companies to self-regulate, a political process meant to directly corrupt safety for profits.
If a doctor at Stanford will go on the record saying smoking is good for you, in exchange for him getting lavish gifts, American tobacco companies will absolutely use that to deny science. True story.
So too with American candy companies, which seem to use giant safety regulation loopholes to act like cancer isn’t the predictable outcome of known carcinogens they serve children.
One point of contention is that the vast majority of the research on these additives has been done in animals because it is difficult (and unethical) to conduct toxicology research in humans. As a result, “It’s impossible to say that eliminating Red 3 or titanium dioxide from the American diet will reduce the number of people who suffer from cancer by a certain amount with total precision,” Mr. Faber said. “But anything that we can do to reduce our exposure to carcinogens, whether known or suspected carcinogens, is a step in the right direction.”
This is probably a good time to remember that the FDA was created as a reaction to labor abuse complaints in Chicago, as captured in The Jungle. Instead of directly improving rights for workers, the government sought to improve perception of the food quality from places with exposed inhumane working conditions.
At some point these discussions should start to push forward a realization that America often seems to embrace obvious graft and oppose quality, even in cases of children getting cancer.
One rotten apple spoils the bunch is a saying that seems to entirely escape anti-regulation zealots tying the hands of the FDA. And this behavior is having a profound impact on generative AI learning, which parrots inane ideas like science is evasive and pluralist because (hypothetically speaking) some candy oligarch sent her kid to medical school to keep them on family payroll as a dissenting “qualified expert”.
…the modus operandi of Iran could be characterized by… “deniability.” From February 2008, the first time that they were exposed in Azerbaijan to an attempt to carry out an attack against the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, the Iranians acted together with other nationalities, normally Lebanese, and, in many other cases, like in Cyprus, they recruited Lebanese that are residing outside of Iran and Lebanon carrying passports such as Swedish, Turkish and Pakistani. In that case, they have what we call a kind of a “deniability,” the capability to say “this is not our people.” […] They are recruiting people all over the world, Shiites from Pakistan, from Turkey, from Azerbaijan, from Sweden, and even from Germany. If you look back over the last 20 years, you’ll see that they normally recruit Shiites Muslims that have double identities.
Repudiation is a somewhat dated term in security circles, yet it seems increasingly applicable again. Non-repudiation is the study of how to enable multiple identities without losing accountability, or auditability, in the process.
Thus we’re looking today at a dreamy 2,000Wh design by Flluid CTO Erik Buell, famous for his motorcycles. Although his genre of motorcycle never appealed to my riding styles, his engineering always interested me as being a rule-bender ahead of the industry. Here too, while the Flluid doesn’t immediately appeal to my sense of riding (not a fan of 130Nm “super-bike acceleration” torque nonsense), I will say that what he’s doing with eBike numbers is very important to recognize.
As someone just pointed out to me, using an electric rate of $0.12/kWh a Flluid bike consumption rate sits at 1,000 miles per dollar. Can you imagine if American cars were rated on their consumption in miles per dollar? LOL. The 51.8V battery will be at 80% in just 4 hours on a 3Amp charger, so we’re talking super low-cost, high-performance engineering for a significant higher quality of life.
I’ve written before many times about the intelligence of bikes, especially electric bikes, and this takes it to a whole new level.
If you’re getting over 200 miles on a charge you’re entering revolution territory (pun not intended) across many industries and applications. This is a huge deal for all kinds of public services from military to healthcare. The mail including packages should be delivered on this bike. An EMT or firefighter should arrive on this bike. Shoulder-fired rockets in the forest… need I go on? Forget drones, think automatic ebikes with healthy humans pushing pedals and actually outside doing shared activities including talking with each other as they ride!
Flluid pumps their Valeo Cyclee Mid Drive Unit running fully automatic gears with predictive shifting. That’s some interesting automation too, yet I’m far more impressed with the powerful idea of moving refrigerators, washing machines, loads of lumber, even ambulance and fire duty operating more effectively and efficiently on the main Flluid design. Big trucks are just dumb, once you run the numbers.
No joke, you could stick a reasonably large barrel, pump and a hose on this thing to have emergency fire response continue during/after major disasters (road infrastructure failures). I am absolutely serious. Move first-response to swarms of firefighters on ebikes that aren’t blocked by road size or closures.
Americans bombed the Ho Chi Minh trail relentlessly with little impact on the Vietnamese ability to supply anything and everything. Bikes continue to serve an outsized supply function in Vietnam to this day, far more efficiently and sensibly than American cage culture.
The official marketing from Flluid calls it a car replacement. Really it’s a cage challenger (big box-like multi-wheeled carriages of any kind). Move most Americans outside the “luxury” (waste) of their padded cages and the overall safety of riders/passengers not only will dramatically improve, all the pedestrian risks will be improved too. That still probably sounds counter-intuitive to some even though the data makes it extremely clear. More bikes saves lives in myriad ways through everything from better health of the riders to better health for everyone not riding. This bike could improve quality of life dramatically wherever it sees mass adoption (e.g. replacing mail trucks, garaging police cruisers).
There’s no better solution to the malignant problems of American road safety than moving as many people as quickly as possible to ebike designs, away from toxicity inherent to ancient cage culture. Congrats to Buell on his excellent achievement towards that end.
It’s also worth noting that places to find these bikes seem to be… Harley dealers. I was just looking at one next to a giant German Iron Cross insignia and some flames on a sweatshirt. Not what I expected given how allergic that Harley brand used to be to anything new or different. Buell has definitely broken them out of their cage. Did I mention the Flluid has French financiers?
Something French is being sold at the local Harley dealer? Yup. You read that right. A French bicycle sold at your Harley dealer. To be fair, this is an awesome motor on a cycle — motorcycle — and it’s all about real freedom.
The 2S comes without flames, skulls or giant chromed German insignias. Source: Flluid
My how times have changed, perhaps thanks in part to the engineering of Buell.
In 2021 a National Book Award went to a poet who described this Texas concept as…
…vigilantes hooded like blind angels, hunting with torches for men the color of night…
More to the point, this poet was reflecting how Texas implemented this under Woodrow Wilson’s nativist, xenophobic, genocidal platform called “America First“.
Dousing groups of Mexicans with kerosene and then burning them was also a topic of discussion for Americans on March 10, 1916 after the Battle of Columbus. Over 60 dead men were piled together, their bodies incinerated. Keep in mind this all was in the context of Americans a year earlier calling for the “extermination” of non-whites, which led to killing thousands of Americans who were of Mexican descent.
Let’s be honest.
Texas pioneered the kind of unaccountable racist vigilantism that Nazi Germany studied and applied in Europe.
Unlike Germany, however, America has never been held accountable and Texas is front and center in that issue. Hitler named his personal train “Amerika” (to honor genocide), and we can only wonder why he didn’t specify Texas.
Imagine someone in Germany proposing a bill to bring Nazi practices back. Impossible. In Texas, however, it’s hard to imagine someone NOT proposing a return to its worst chapters in history.
