This gaslighting story out of a small African country makes me think that Elon Musk must now be their President.
Somali officials are denying that a member of the presidential office made calls to several media outlets ordering them to submit content for review.
VOA this week spoke with members of at least four news outlets who all said they had received such calls from a person who identified himself as Abdikadir Hussein Wehliye. The caller claimed to be from Villa Somalia, the presidential office.
“Firstly, there is nobody by the name of Abdikadir Hussein Wehilye that is employed with the President’s Communication Office and secondly there isn’t anyone with that name authorized to speak with the media on behalf of the President’s Communication Office or any other departments at Villa Somalia,” Abdikadir Dige, director of communications for Villa Somalia, said in an email to VOA on Friday evening.
Prank calls? Dumb ideas that have no accountability? Cracks in the lines of authority?
Lack of integrity in authorization channels can hilariously awful as trust is destroyed.
Who said what, where?
It looks very bad for Somalia (and easily fixable) but Twitter management has sounded far worse lately, to be honest.
Remember when Elon Musk proudly announced engineers had to submit code for review? And remember when he flipped back and forth repeatedly between censoring people and claiming he would never censor people?
Who here predicted that a chaos of authority within a destabilized devolving African state would still sound better than a giant American tech firm run by a South African?
Germans rightfully expect vehicle drivers to be intelligent.
As their old saying goes…
Der Mensch denkt,
der Chauffeur lenkt
A man thinks, a driver steers.
Tesla has flagrantly violated this German saying on both ends by telling customers they don’t have to think when they sit in a “driverless” box that can’t steer.
Unfortunately, the overtly fraudulent Tesla still seems to sell cars. And it’s buyers, especially Americans, sometimes believe any crazy thing they hear instead of checking the NHTSA records.
The latest news is a Tesla driven by a man in Germany under some unspecified influence (social media, drugs, alcohol, etc.) had to be removed from the Autobahn.
Police have described how the Tesla driver ignored a safety check, then completely ignored their chase from in front of him.
Der Fahrer war gegen 12 Uhr auf der A70 von Bamberg in Fahrtrichtung Bayreuth unterwegs, als die Polizeistreife ihn einer Verkehrskontrolle unterziehen wollte.
Teslas have a very sad reputation for ignoring safety lights and signs but this case is a new low.
The NHTSA is currently investigating at least 40 crashes involving faulty Tesla software.
Checkpoints to remove Tesla from roads seem like a great idea, until you factor they’d have to be staged as moving interceptions over many miles since Teslas are too blind and dumb to stop on any normal notice.
Apparently the driver confidently entered his vehicle unfit to drive (typical for Tesla owners), set cruise control then went to sleep.
While we can blame him for being the kind of person who would buy a Tesla in order to do the wrong thing, it also sounds like he was doing exactly the sort things the CEO has repeatedly encouraged.
Police sirens and lights failed to wake this man or disable his machine for fifteen minutes. They tracked the vehicle from in front observing a blindingly obvious inability to think.
When the driver finally was alert and forced to avoid disaster, he was charged with thoughtless endangerment. The police also noted Tesla’s safety feature to prevent drivers being “inattentive” had been trivially bypassed; yet another design flaw.
His driver’s license then was revoked. But when you really think about the design flaws and CEO messaging… all Teslas should have had their license revoked.
This incident follows German regulators warning since 2019 that Tesla’s abuse of the term “autopilot” is misleading to the point of being negligent fraud (the safety troll phrase “full self driving”, of course, is even worse).
More recently, German regulatory investigations this year reported unsafe “abnormalities” in Tesla software, highlighting unethical engineering practices.
Tesla manche Funktionen nur freischalte, wenn der Fahrer eine bestimmte Punktzahl in Abhängigkeit von seinem Fahrkönnen erreicht. Ein Fahrzeug müsse so sicher sein, dass es von allen Fahrern bedient werden kann, hieß es beim KBA.
Cars are meant to be safe for anyone to drive, yet Tesla introduced “political” points systems in their cars to deliberately curate a false sense of privileged access to safety.
They may as well have been charging $15K for Elon Musk bobble head dolls while telling owners it makes their car invincible.
Neither the points systems nor the high cost have any correlation to achieving basic safety. Tragically, this means “safety warnings” given to Tesla drivers makes them LESS safe because they falsely believe the CEO and think they don’t need the warnings.
I warned about this here way back in 2006, if you will, the year Tesla was founded by copying the tzero EV design:
…countermeasures sometimes may increase danger, rather than diminish it [because] in the rare event it is [needed], the warning will no longer be received and there may be a victim. […] A warning that is not perceived as needed will not be heeded–even when it is needed.
The news therefore continues to be about Tesla owners falsely believing the CEO he is personally elevating them into privilege (again, the “luxurious ignorance” often associated with fans of dictators), when in fact they are a threat to themselves and everyone around them.
Tesla engineering has in this regard always been quite predictably and uniquely toxic to road safety.
Source: tesladeaths.com
This brings me back to 2016 when I very publicly (BSidesLV keynote) explained how Josh Brown would not have been killed by Tesla if he hadn’t been misled by the CEO’s bogus “crash avoidance” propaganda.
Taking away one license isn’t going to solve this problem until that license is the one that gets all Tesla off the roads.
NHTSA Campaign Number: 22V844000
Manufacturer: Tesla, Inc.
Components: EXTERIOR LIGHTING
Potential Number of Units Affected: 321,628
Summary: Tesla, Inc. (Tesla) is recalling certain 2023 Model 3 and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles. One or both taillights may intermittently fail to illuminate.
It’s hard to understand why anyone would buy a Tesla. Have they not read the NHTSA files?
The NHTSA for example points to 11 safety complaints already recorded for the 2023 Tesla Model 3.
The prior models were dogs too: 2022 Model 3 had 9 safety recalls, 2021 had 13, and 2020 had 14… a huge number for a company caught repeatedly lying about safety and implicated in over 50 deaths from design defects.
Pushing a recall fix that makes safety even worse is… unbelievable, yet also on brand for a car company that hasn’t innovated since 2006. In fact, in 2021 I clearly warned of this problem and then watched as my warnings were proven accurate.
Given that the bug appeared in the first place, what is to prevent an even worse bug from being deployed to cars on the road at any time and in any place?
Here’s what the start of 2022 looked like for new Tesla owners:
NHTSA ID Number: 11471044
Incident Date February 20, 2022
Consumer Location DURHAM, NC
While driving at a normal speed and turning around at an intersection in our neighborhood, the car suddenly went out of control, causing the car to hit a fire hydrant in front of a home, smashed a tree before crashing into the siding of the home. Insurance deemed the car as “totaled”. We were reimbursed by insurance so this is not about monetary losses, but a report to protect other drivers and their families. The Tesla database records mentioned user acceleration and error, but this doesn’t sound like a reasonable cause. The airbags didn’t open and neither did the automatic emergency braking or forward collision warning work. I was unable to brake and control the car to stop. This accident is captured in the security system video of the impacted home.
I find this all the more fascinating when compared with the Nissan LEAF. Nissan quietly dominated EV sales in 2018 and outsold Tesla in important EV safety test markets like Norway. Its LEAF reigned as the all-time top selling plug-in electric car through December 2019.
What were the Nissan LEAF safety recalls over all these same years that Tesla failed so hard at safety?
Nissan delivered a near perfect record or one flaw.
LEAF turned in safety engineering scores that should have been headlines for the EV market.
And even more to the point, while Tesla’s ill-conceived full-of-shit “driverless” (FSD) has crashed hundreds of times needlessly, Nissan recently posted that its own “pilot assist” operating nearly 600,000 cars had zero crashes to report.
Zero crashes while zero recalls!
It’s an amazingly modest yet dominant engineering position.
People talk about EV being new but cars have been electric since the first cars.
People talk about Tesla like it’s an early mover, yet it’s very, very late.
As the world’s first mass-market EV, LEAF has secured unprecedented achievements. In 2011, it was the first-ever EV to win the World Car of the Year award in the 47-year history of the prize. […] LEAF introduced unprecedented technologies that helped drivers optimise efficiency, including the innovative e-Pedal for one-pedal driving, regenerative braking and Eco-Mode.
And people talk about Tesla like it is a big player, yet it’s very, very small.
The number of public charging points increased hugely over LEAF’s life, from 2,379 in the EU in 2011, to 213,367 today.
The Nissan LEAF is the EV everyone in Norway has been raving about.
Tesla not only has far fewer charging stations, sales are less than 4% of all EV vehicles in the EU. It’s barely registering, and on some top 10 EV lists such as Germany and Norway the Tesla models don’t show up at all.
Tesla year after year has made wildly boastful “coming soon” claims to confuse and excite people. And as a result it appears distracted, weak and exhausted, unable to even connect bat to ball — putting owners and everyone around them in serious risk of injury or death.
Meanwhile, Nissan absolutely hit the ball out of the park with its innovations and EV engineering.
From 0410 to 1617 very large Soviet-era military transport planes sent from Russia (each with capacity for 245 soldiers) were tracked landing at a Belarus airport.
За 13 часов в Беларусь прилетели 6 военно-транспортных бортов ВКС РФ
За последние 13 часов в Беларусь на аэродром в Мачулищах прилетели шесть военно-транспортных самолетов Ил-76МД ВКС РФ.
Это борты с рег. номерами: RF-76745, RA-86900, RF-76549, RF-86898, RA-76763 и RF-76772. Они начали прилетать в Беларусь начиная с 4-х утра, а последний (RF-76772) приземлился в Мачулищах в 18:17 по минскому времени.
По нашей информации, все самолёты что-то привозят в Беларусь, но что именно — пока неизвестно. Нельзя исключать, что может идти как доставка техники, так и ротация/подвоз мобилизированных.
Если мы говорим о привозе в страну солдат ВС РФ, то речь может идти о максимум 1 470 солдатах, так как максимальная вместимость каждого из Ил-76МД — 245 человек.
Детальное расписание прилёта бортов на иллюстрации. Если вам известны какие-либо подробности — пишите в…
I think my favorite description of this plane is a 1960s truck for troop/equipment movements to remote/rural areas that also can fly.
They look like cowbirds landing to graze fields.
Nom, nom, nom
You may recall back in February that Belarus gave Putin access to its territory to start his latest invasion of Ukraine.
“This war that you are waging, Russia, it is not with NATO, as your propagandists lie. It is not for historical reasons,” Zelensky said. “Your leader wants to show that he has the military behind him and that he is in front. But he is just hiding. He hides behind the military, behind missiles, behind the walls of his residences and palaces. He hides behind you and burns your country and your future. No one will ever forgive you for this terror,” he continued. “Ukraine will never forgive.”
Some analysts suggest Russian missile attacks increasingly include “deliberate provocation” by taking a path where they could only be intercepted by Ukraine over Belarusian territory.
Indeed, a Ukrainian interception missile path ended up with debris in Belarus.
If six flying trucks are meant to be a distraction, even as provocation, it’s unclear whether anything Russia does at this point could overcome Putin’s weakness.
Russia might have sent empty planes to Belarus, lacking any ability to divert its own overstretched troops; hoping a bunch of its old cowbirds will scare Ukraine into diverting theirs away from Russia to the Belarus border.
Belarus doesn’t allegedly pose much of a military threat however, since less than ten percent there support a war with Ukraine. If the dictator did attempt a fight, he’d probably need to keep all his troops at home to prevent flushing himself down a drain that Putin plumbed.
