Tesla’s SEC public disclosure filings have revealed that it received requests from the DOJ (US Department of Justice) for documents related to “Autopilot and FSD” (Full of Shit Driving) features.
Tesla has a long habit of doing exactly what everyone says is wrong.
One example is that when the U.S. government was cracking down on VW for diesel emissions… Tesla acquired giant dirty diesel generators to power its regressive charging stations as the future of “environmental” electric cars. It was disinformation.
Nobody stopped them.
Tesla power management caught fire, creating an environmental disaster and closing an overly centralized proprietary Tesla charging station. Source: PlugShare
Another example is when an owner tried to sue the company after he fell asleep and killed a cyclist, Tesla announced it was soon deploying Autopilot for owners to be able to fall asleep. It was disinformation.
Nobody stopped them.
And so the obvious question, given serial liars who for over a decade have flagrantly ignored pubic safety for self-enrichment, is where does the buck stop in America… if ever?
In 2016 I gave expert security presentations to show how dangerous and deceptive Tesla was while not being regulated adequately. Such a low quality car company with harmful engineering standards should have had their product grounded back then.
Much to his surprise, @preneh24 reports that the steering wheel of his new Tesla Model Y came off while he and his family were traveling on the freeway…. “We lost trust in Tesla and would greatly appreciate this car be taken back and full refund be issued. I feel safety is more important than tech car,” he wrote in the tweet.
Fact: safety versus tech car is a false choice. Many tech cars are safe. Tesla is neither a tech car nor safe.
It has been clear for almost a decade that many more people would die from the Tesla fraud, cynically self-described by them as having “fun” tricking people into unnecessary risks (the CEO referred to NHTSA anti-fraud work as the “fun police“).
Tesla deaths per year keep increasing, as warned by me since 2016. Source: tesladeaths.com
Bogus “Driverless” and bogus “Autopilot” and bogus “Full Self Driving” all were a key element to the false promise of safety, which they might as well have declared would cure pandemics, poverty and world hunger too.
…like making Big Macs a mandatory part of all grade-school lunches because the CEO of McDonald’s says he dreams of the Big Mac one day preventing cancer.
Apparently people now are shocked to hear a Tesla engineer testify in a wrongful death case: his CEO intentionally decieved customers about safety with grossly doctored evidence to juice sales/stock and ruin market competition.
Anyone worried about “deep fakes” in 2023 should be looking at Tesla PR since 2016.
The decision to advertise partial lane assist with serious safety flaws as FULL Self Driving when it was well known to be on the complete opposite end of automation (barely Level 2), was a callous disregard for human life.
How could any of this still be a surprise? That’s the power of disinformation.
Americans serving jury duty eventually became so offended by evidence of Ford downplaying the significance of deadly vehicle fires (an obvious and odious failure of “self-regulation”) that punitive and even criminal charges were floated against the car maker.
Tesla is long overdue for punitive and even criminal charges.
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.”
