Weeks are quickly passing by as Edmunds tries to get this big dumb vehicle to operate on a closed track without critical malfunctions.
In mid-July, we reported that the Tesla Cybertruck we had just purchased for our long-term test fleet suffered what the car called a “critical steering issue.” The article’s author even called it the Cybertruck’s “first snafu” because … we knew. Two weeks later, under similar circumstances, the Cybertruck failed again and displayed the same errors. And once again, we had to let it sit…
The public and the professional reviews all seem to be steering towards the same sad conclusion. Tesla released probably the worst vehicle design and engineering in history, immediately condemning all Cybertruck owners to massive waste, embarasassment and unnecessary debt.
The racism news just keeps getting worse at Tesla, like a repeat of the rapid fall of South African apartheid. It’s almost as if Elon Musk, whose family helped build and run South African apartheid until 1988 when they abruptly fled to Canada, has somehow escaped accountability for their and his horrible past.
On Wednesday, Judge Nöel Wise set Sept. 8 of next year as the start date for the jury trial.
Nearly 6,000 current and former Black employees and contractors at the plant have signed onto the lawsuit, and the number could climb past 10,000 in coming months, a lawyer for the workers said.
Black workers claim they experienced racist epithets, graffiti, discrimination and harassment at the automaker led by CEO Elon Musk.
The lawsuit seeks a court order that would bar the company “from maintaining a hostile work environment on the basis of race,” and would impose mandatory training on harassment for all Tesla managers and employees.
“The same racism and harassment that was there back in 2017 when we first filed this lawsuit are there today,” Bryan Schwartz, a lawyer for the workers, alleged.
The suit is to bar a company from maintaining racism as part of the workplace? That’s an incredibly telling line, not to mention the comment that high levels of racism at Tesla continued through years of formal complaints and public condemnation.
Really it explains why Musk dumped so much money (over 40B) into inviting and spreading racist violent incitement on Twitter. He didn’t care at all about making money when he bought the platform, and rebranded it with the swastika. It’s just him redirecting other people’s money into instigating racist violence and censorship in a fraud scheme of selling “speech”.
He’s literally trying to spend billions on normalizing anti-Black racist speech, to return America to its tragic past.
Twitter revenues could go negative and Musk — like Henry Ford’s publication of the kind of racist hate that Adolf Hitler credited in his rise to power — probably would say it’s still worth it at a huge financial loss if it destabilizes markets, undermines democracy and shifts power to extremist white nationalists (him).
As a historian of African decolonization, I’m expecting Tesla to lose the suit in the same way that South Africa lost repeatedly and constantly yet kept fighting.
Two potential paths: 1. Musk manages to prolong failure by turning the whole U.S. into a puppet-run racist dictatorship, with him and Thiel polluting its board of directors. 2. Or he tries to launch as many firebombs as possible into U.S. and U.K. streets while abruptly fleeing to Russia.
Great car, thank you Elon Musk for the gift. We will put it into special military operations soon to test it and then send you our orders.
The allegedly dumbest and most desperate Russian soldiers, nicknamed “TikTok Chechens” for revealing their locations on social media, must be super excited to buff this thing into a bright artillery target.
But instead if you think of the Cybertruck as a militarized remote chemical explosive drone, a lot of Black people around the world are about to be in a lot of danger from Tesla robotics trained for taking orders from Russian dictators.
Nearly ten years ago on Reddit, a user posted this recipe for Yellow Jacket Soup.
Yellow Jacket Soup – (OO-GA-MA)
Hunt for ground dwelling yellow jackets early in the morning or in the late afternoon. Gather the whole comb. Place the comb over the fire or on the stove with the right side up to loosen the grubs that are not covered. Remove all of the uncovered grubs. Place the comb over the fire or on the stove upside down until the paper-like covering parches. Remove the comb from the heat, pick out the yellow jackets and place in the oven to brown. Make the soup by boiling the browned yellow jackets in a pot of water with salt. Add grease if desired.
Simple enough. Bake the insects, then boil them with fat and… eat soup.
Apparently the recipe was actually found and posted to the web first by a Tiny Pine Press blog, from a 1951 cookbook they found in a shop.
Recipe written by Mary and Goingback Chiltoskey (published January 1, 1951) as posted to a blog on November 6th, 2009
Five years later in 2017, the idea showed up again on Twitter, and caught the eye of a chef “Barlowe”.
“You’re up to something, aren’t you?” I ask him. “Yellowjacket soup,” he says, smiling from ear to ear. … The idea sprouted by way of chef Sean Brock posting a centuries-old Cherokee recipe on Twitter. “I’m dying to try this,” Brock wrote.
The Twitter version of this story as published by Vice (which really was an Instagram post) goes on to erase not only Reddit and Tiny Pine as prior and better written sources than Brock, but also obliterates the cookbook too. Somehow it cites the book as Brock’s written source while saying it doesn’t count.
The recipe was last written down around 1860, and Barlowe took a quick interest in the idea of recreating it.
Such misinformation, the Web looked better in 2009 on that original Tiny Pine blog post.
Wasps for soup maybe sounds far fetched and ancient, given the Twitter misinformation treatment, yet the Japanese certainly still do it.
After we got a good pile going, Sayoko simmered the larvae in a pot with sugar, sake, chopped ginger, and soy sauce. That method of cooking is called tsukudani—people make all kinds of things that way… so much of wasp culture in Kushihara is centered on being in the present moment: in a certain place at a certain time. Wasps are, more than anything, a fleeting mark of the fall season. You spend months cultivating the nests just for that moment when you pop a raw larvae into your mouth and it bursts into a flash of honey butter.
…we dipped them in water to wash them off, them placed them in a bowl together. Then, heating some oil, we deep fried them…. My Italian friend went a step further and sautéed them in butter with some sage.
And of course there’s science to support the nutritional value.
The high amounts of unsaturated fatty acids in the lipids of the hornets could be expected to exhibit nutritional benefits, including reducing cardiovascular disorders and inflammations. High minerals contents, especially micro minerals such as iron, zinc, and a high K/Na ratio in hornets could help mitigate mineral deficiencies among those of the population with inadequate nutrition.
The science certainly gets a shout out as well in Africa.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, edible insects with high consumption rates have been identified as beetles (31%), caterpillars (18%), bees, wasps and ants (14%) and grasshoppers, crickets and locusts (13%). Across the central Africa region, insects still provide more than 50% of dietary protein, and their commercial value is higher compared to animal-derived protein. This can be attributed to the superior nutritional profile of numerous insects coupled with the ease of insect production and the low carbon footprint associated with insect rearing.
Super interesting, really, why Americans aren’t more familiar with their own delicious variations like Yellow Jacket Soup.
The Daily Show interview with Mark Cuban is fantastic. I agree, I agree, AI agree.
He really nails the problem with the post-2008 Silicon Valley rise of fascist bro culture. In particular he correctly points out Musk and Thiel types want to end democracy and flip the U.S. into a corporation, buying themselves a seat on its board of directors (e.g. oversee and give orders to a puppet President).
He also explains the opposite, how corporations playing fair can do good, delivering ethical values (e.g. transparency and accountability), making so many lives better. The proof… being his own new tech company rapidly fixing American healthcare.
And then his response to the hate spread by Musk is a master class in being a joyful leader.
