Within a month, we’ll know definitively what causes some forms of autism. RFK jr says so.
We’re finding certain interventions now that are clearly, almost certainly causing autism,Kennedy said.We’re going to be able to address those in September.
That’s a bolt out of the blue. These kinds of conditions are difficult to research, and we’d expect to hear that kind of announcement in scientific papers and presentations at meetings, rather than at Trump’s regular ego-stroking sessions with his cabinet.
It’s also surprising since this is the state of our knowledge, according to the NIH:
Scientists don’t know exactly what causes autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Autism was first described in the 1940s, but very little was known about it until the last few decades. Even today, there is a great deal that we don’t know about autism.
Because the disorder is so complex and no two people with autism are exactly alike, there are probably many causes for autism. It is also likely that there is not a single cause for autism, but rather that it results from a combination of causes.
So the NIH doesn’t know, but RFK jr does. But then, the NIH is a hollow shell of a scientific institution, since they appointed an anti-vax hack, Jay Bhattacharya, to run it, and since they canceled approved grants right and left. I don’t think the answer is coming from the NIH.
Maybe the CDC has been working on it? I don’t think so. RFK jr has taken a wrecking ball to that organization, firing its director, and seeing senior leaders resigning.
The ongoing chaos at the CDC reached its breaking point Wednesday.
The Washington Post reported in the afternoon that Monarez was being ousted just four weeks into taking over the role, a decision later announced by HHS on its X page. Over the next few hours, four senior staff members, including the CDC’s chief medical officer Debra Houry, turned in their resignation notice. Some of the members posted their resignation letters online, including Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
I don’t know where RFK jr is getting his revelations, but I do know that in science, it’s not just the answer you get, but how you get that answer, and he’s not only failing to show the trail followed to arrive at his answer, but is actively working to obscure the methods behind his conclusions.
As a guess, I suspect that the big announcement in September will be that vaccines cause autism, a claim that has been disproven over and over again.
By the way, he went on to claim that windmills are “wiping out the whale population” in the Atlantic. He’s just pandering to the crooked mafioso at the head of the table, so expect more of that in September.
Don’t underrate RFK Jr. He can detect the state of a person’s organelles simply by looking at them.
/s
Also, for a claim of this import, any responsible expert would likely take a ‘wait and see’ attitude, and keep an eye out for replication of the results and follow-up studies. I remember how long it took for the ‘H. Pylori causes ulcers’ finding to take hold.
Not sure if it was posted here at the time, but:
RFK Jr. Vowed to Find the Environmental Causes of Autism. Then He Shut Down Research Trying to Do Just That.
Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.
Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.
McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.
As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.
https://www.propublica.org/article/rfk-jr-autism-environment-research-funding
Because, of course, that wasn’t the environmental cause that he was looking for.
RFK Jr and I are about the same age and raised in the same era – late 50’s and 60’s. As RFK has said, “there wasn’t autism when I was a kid” because it wasn’t seen, not because it wasn’t there. Our elementary schools were white or black in the segregated South. What is now “special needs” attended a special school. So, all we saw were kids like us – white, middle class. Also, our radius of awareness was as far as we could see from our front yard plus a smattering of TV shows and news, and magazines. Today, we carry access to the entirety of human knowledge in our pockets.
RFK already told us the “answer” to autism some time ago. Vaccines something something mumble mumble toxins and Twinkies. All we’re waiting for now is for his “team” of whack-a-loons to fire up ChatGPT to get their Causes of Autism Report and we’ll be off and running.
I am about to contact my 2 senators and demand RFK Jr. be impeached for incompetence and his destruction of America’s health system. Not that I have much hope it will do any good. My Texas senators Cruz and Cornyn are singularly useless. As for 2028 presidential elections, I will demand Democratic candidates for president commit to cleaning out all these incompetent fools that are destroying our health system ruthlessly and appoint the best experts available with a mandate to rebuild healthcare in the U.S. . I will also be contacting the Democratic leaders of the Senate and House. And the GOP leaders. Immediately impeachment of Road Kill Kennedy must start as soon as possible.
Windmills are wiping out the whale population in the Atlantic? Did I miss the evolutionary leap that allows whales to fly?
Actually, from what I recently heard at work, I think the right wing echo-sphere may already being given hints that the “answer” the morons are going to come up with, instead of, you know, “We diagnose it better now, and in more people.”, is, literally, “We are going to pretend that other countries don’t have the same ‘epidemic’, and gosh, golly, gee, they have all banned certain artificial food dyes.”
That or they will, when that answer turns out to be just as much bullshit as vaccines, pivot of 5G (despite that never having been a thing during most of the time their ‘epidemic’ has happened. But, like all cults, they will do the same thing that creationists and ID proponecists do with creationism – keep repeating the same bullshit, right up until they can’t, then still sneak it in, when ever they can anyway, as though it wasn’t discredited, but also pivot to some other new bullshit reason why they must be right, and have all the answers.
But, if we are putting money on one thing, I am going to say, “Food dyes”, or.. maybe, “Not enough beef fat?”
In the real world we actually do know the cause of autism spectrum conditions and have for decades.
Autism has a strong genetic component at around 80%.
It is complex and polygenic with hundreds of loci that can be involved.
“Autism is hereditary and therefore does run in families. A majority (around 80%) of autism cases can be linked to inherited genetic mutations. The remaining cases likely stem from non-inherited mutations. “
There is also that 20% environmental component which is only partially understood.
This is old news. We’ve known this for a long time.
What RFK jr. et al. are doing is reinventing the wheel.
And the wheel they are reinventing is square and won’t work.
Um, isn’t it obvious? Vaccines cause autism. This outcome has been pre-ordained, and sadly I fear the verdict is going to be passed down in Sept., as RFK Jr promises. This will be another very large step towards removing vaccine access, and perhaps worse.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a “cure” for autism.
I have a child on the Autistic spectrum, and am pretty much convinced that my father and father-in-law (and probably my father’s sister) were on the spectrum and my older brother is, too, even if they were never diagnosed. The ones in my parents’ generation managed pretty well because they lived in a more structured society, with more explicit rules. My brother had more problems, and my child had a lot of problems in school, mainly because the regular classes were so unstructured and chaotic and kids were expected to simply figure out what they had to do; when we got her into a special ed program with lots of structure and explicit expectations, she excelled.
I believe we’re noticing autism now because society has become less structured and less flexible or tolerant in dealing with people who aren’t exactly what is considered “normal.” In past centuries, they would have simply been considered odd — or if they couldn’t find a place in their society, simply pushed to the sidelines and allowed to die.
But there’s stuff that autistic people can do better than neurotypical people, and I believe that autistic traits are simply examples of natural variation (and I suspect that humanity would be a lot worse off without a leavening of those traits) and are about as curable as left-handedness.
@4 Doc Bill “RFK Jr and I are about the same age and raised in the same era – late 50’s and 60’s. As RFK has said, “there wasn’t autism when I was a kid” because it wasn’t seen, not because it wasn’t there.”
I, too am the same age, I was raised in western Montana, an area about as un-woke as they come. My freshman year, 1967-8, they “mainstreamed” about 30 “challenged” children into the highschool, out of a freshman class of about 400. They were all in one class room with one teacher, they didn’t go from class to class like the rest of the students. We only saw them at gym class. In grade school, they were completely separated. So yes, there were plenty of disabled children, we just didn’t see them.
Here in the US it used to be that they would try to ‘cure’ left-handedness.
While we know that autism spectrum conditions have a high genetic component at 80%, we don’t have a complete understanding of what those genes are or how they produce their changes in the brain.
ASDs are simply complex with each case being unique and polygenic with maybe a 1,000 gene loci involved.
“The clinical heterogeneity of autism is mirrored by a complex genetic architecture involving several types of common and rare variants, ranging from point mutations to large copy number variants, and either inherited or spontaneous (de novo). More than 100 risk genes have been implicated by rare, often de novo, potentially damaging mutations in highly constrained genes. These account for substantial individual risk but a small proportion of the population risk.
In contrast, most of the genetic risk is attributable to common inherited variants acting en masse, each individually with small effects. Studies have identified a handful of robustly associated common variants. “
It’s a minor point, but RFK jr says a rate of “0.7 [percent]” and then “less than 1 in 10,000”. 0.7% is less than 1 in 100, but is 70 per 10,000. Rather makes you not trust any of their numbers.
@Bad Bart, I wonder if they consulted an LLM, a computer system that can’t do math.
Allison@10:
No, I’m pretty sure there’s no cure. There can’t really be a cure, partly because something like autism is structural rather than localized, and partly because anything that could actually ‘cure’ autism would result in someone who rather inherently wasn’t the original person. The whole ‘beautiful child in the glass jar’ idea that a lot of parents hang onto (that there’s a ‘normal’ child in there but the senses are distorted preventing them from actually interacting well) was discredited by the 1990s if not before.
There are treatments for some of the aspects of it (some anti-anxiety drugs appear to reduce some of the negative side effects, at least), and training can make it easier to ‘pass’ just like training for anybody can give them some degree of control over their mental state, but those aren’t cures, just controls.
Of course, the entire concept of ‘normal’ is a lot harder to define than most people think it is, and a lot of ‘mental illnesses’ are simply normal mental processes taken to unbalancing extremes.
Roadkill Fracking Kennedy jr. is as murderous as any of the other destructive magat cult monsters. It’s just that he causes slow deaths that aren’t immediate enough to be fodder for the mainslime news. Roadkill is making sure no new covid vaccines are developed to combat the new strains and he’s making sure no one can get vaccines. tRUMP has destroyed all the means of tracking and reporting the deaths by covid, measles and whatever new epidemic hits us, so all the bullshit being shoveled and the massive eventual deaths can be swept under the carpet. Real Medicare is being destroyed to the benefit of the fraudulent murdering ‘medicare advantage.
If anything is killing the whales, it’s the absurd high-powered sonar the u.s. navy uses everywhere, scrambling the whales brains.
Yes, I know it is upsetting to hear it, let alone admit it, but: welcome to the DEATH SPIRAL.
PZ wrote: That’s a bolt out of the blue. (referring to Roadkill saying he will find what causes autism in ‘two weeks’)
I reply: Well, we now know his ‘revelations’ are just attempts to offset the fact that his destruction is so blatant that someone in congress has called for him to be fired and the backlash is mounting for his destruction of the CDC.
Perhaps RFKJr will, as is mandatory in Washington over the last seven months, get himself in alignment with the Trump™ Agenda, and reveal to us in September that the cause of autism is:
This is a good point.
The tendency in the past and still today is to medicalize human variations that aren’t actually pathological or a disease.
.1. Being gay.
A few decades ago this was is the DSM as a mental illness.
It was very controversial when it was taken out.
.2. Intersexes.
This is 1.7% of the population.
They are often referred to as DSDs, Disorders of Sexual Development.
A lot of intersexes don’t like this terminology.
“Social stigma and discrimination
In the past, being intersex was wrongly described as a medical condition called “disorder of sexual development” (DSD). This way of referring to intersex individuals increases social stigma”
They prefer to be thought of as atypical or different or part of a spectrum, not as abnormal.
.3. Trans people.
They object to being demonized and discriminated against for being who they are.
They have that right.
.4. People on the ASD spectrum.
It is useful to consider a lot of people on the ASD spectrum to be neurodivergent, not sick in the head.
A lot of high functioning successful people in our society are ASD.
A few examples.
Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world.
Elon Musk. I deeply despise Elon Musk, but not because he is ASD.
He oddly enough, has a few accomplishments to claim and is the richest person in the world.
Etc. A lot of scientists and tech people are in this category.
One of my long time close friends is far out on the spectrum.
They struggle with speech, writing, and coherent sentences while being an accomplished scientist with a Ph.D from one of the world’s better universities.
John Watts @ 6
… and visit Holland, where most of the worlds surviving windmills are? Surprisingly, the now large literature on interation between cetations and the wind turbines used in floating offshore arrays was not referred to, …
The notion that autism is supposed to be an illness is something that I percieve as deeply offensive. Variation in terms of human cognition is something that MUST exist if humans are supposed to be different in their nature.
I worry if he actually does pivot to say there’s a genetic component, his solution will be eugenics.
It’s going to vaccines and mental health medications, and probably a few food additives sprinkled in. Not because either of those things actually cause autism- the available evidence says they don’t- but because RFK Jr. has invested his identity in opposing those things. Whether he’s a malignant narcissist or someone with a whisper of a conscience left, the answer has to be what he’s always opposed.
I consider malignant narcissism more likely. I think he hitched himself to Trump’s campaign mostly because he couldn’t stand bearing the Kennedy name and losing the Democratic nomination to someone else, especially in light of his family’s total rejection of him. This way, he could feel like he’d “won” the election in all the ways that important (to him, anyway). Malignant narcissists can never, ever admit to being wrong, regardless of how much evidence is piled up against them, so the answer must be all the things he’s been against for so long.
The other possibility is that Kennedy does, indeed, have a little bit of a conscience. If this is true, and some of his activism suggests to me that it’s at least possibility, then he has spent decades opposing life-saving preventative measures and treatments. If he’s wrong, then that means that his activism against those things has killed or maimed thousands of children and adults for the sake of little more than his own ego. For someone with any conscience at all, that would be an extraordinarily difficult thing to bear. It would take a very strong person to face having caused that kind of suffering, and the evidence suggests that RFK Jr. is anything but. He’ll be forced to dig in and blame those things, because the possibility that he’s been wrong all along would destroy him.
So, the “answers” he gives are going to be the things we know don’t cause autism, and many, many people will suffer and die salve the egos of a handful of craven, foolish, and very weak men.
So, RFK Jr. is tilting at windmills now? That worked out so well for Don Quixote.
No, Steve. He’s badmouthing wind turbines, not literally riding astride a bony, half-broken steed and sporting a makeshift helmet fashioned from a barber’s basin and an old, rusty lance.
Equivalently, Don Quijote never said “When you put a windmill up, the cod disappear, the groundfish disappear. The fishermen are going out of business.”
(And, BTW, in the story Don Quijote gets he was deluded on his deathbed and dies knowing the age of chivalry has passed. So he at least got his mind back)
Bad Bart @14:
It appears that no one in this White House understands how numbers even work. Felan45 has insisted that illegal aliens are taking 107% of the new jobs. Are they bringing new jobs with them? He also claims to have reduced the egg prices by 400%. So, if you “buy” eggs at the grocery store, they actually pay you to take them? And he claims to have reduced drug prices by up to 1,500%? You can get an even greater income from “buying” those drugs instead of those eggs!
Pathologically lying Karoline Leavitt recently tried to deflect a question about Felo45 ignoring the constitution and being a dictator by claiming that Felon45 was “overwhelmingly” elected by the American people (a perpetual lie from the Reich Wing), when he did not even receive a majority vote, but only a plurality (49.8% for Mango Mussolini vs 48.3% for Harris, with the largest number of registered voters allegedly not even voting). But to the innumerate morons, that tiny win signifies a really large mandate from the voters.
Of course, RFK Jr. does not even understand grade school math, it is a requirement to be belligerently ignorant to even be a member of the current White House kakistocracy. He fires anyone with actual medical knowledge so that he can promote his insane anti-science claim that germ theory (many diseases are caused by microbes and viruses) is invalid and that diseases are caused by miasma (“bad air”) and US Froot Loops, claims cod liver oil cures everything, etc. Being a scientific illiterate, a former over a decade long heroin addict, a predator (like Felon45), road kill connoisseur, and even a carpet bagger makes him a prefect fit into the current White House kakistocracy. He first went to the democrats asking for a cabinet position, for which in turn, he would support them, and he simply got ignored, so then he went to the GQP with the same offer of support for the republicans, and was accepted. Siding with the side that gutted the EPA and switching sides for getting a cabinet position clearly shows that he is just a carpet bagger, with his “environmental lawyer” act being just for the money. He even got his younger brother hooked on heroin, who eventually died from it. He is at least a sociopath, just look up how many children his moronic anti-vax policies killed in Samoa. Cassidy is a “doctor” in the same vein of Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and former Dr. Ronnie Jackson (who finally lost his medical license, and entered politics). Like Felon45, RFK Jr. fires anyone who might even contradict him.
And, having failed miserably in his: “Your Teslas will only appreciate in value, and they can make you money by renting them out as autonomous FSD (which is neither) taxis”. Musk is now claiming his fake AI robots will soon outnumber the number of people on the Earth, and they will make everyone really wealthy (through what, magic? Where does the money come from if everyone is unemployed in his fantasy?). I’m including Mush since he was so involved in illegally firing government employees (especially those investigating him for fraud) and stealing Social Security details of millions, while also trying to open an internet link to Russian servers while in the Social Security building. And exactly like Felon45, he is a psychopathic malignant narcissist, and an idiot, while being a literal Nazi, compared to Felon45’s fascism. He spent $288M getting man-baby elected and by firing the very people investigating his frauds, he saved getting over $2B in fines, quite obviously, money well spent by him.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/28/nx-s1-5278407/caroline-kennedy-rfk-jr-confirmation-hearing
https://people.com/caroline-kennedy-breaks-silence-predator-rfk-jr-before-confirmation-8781724
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/rfk-jr-vaccine-firing-health-experts-medical-science-misunderstanding-rcna221767
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/rfk-jr-fires-cdc-vaccine-panel-1235360211/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/cdc-officials-quit-susan-monarez-firing-rfk-jr-b2816038.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-i-think-their-numbers-were-wrong-trump-says-after-firing-bls-head-over-jobs-report
“It appears that no one in this White House understands how numbers even work.” is your own claim, zetopan.
It does not so appear to me. More like they like massaging numbers — the which requires at least some understanding.
They understand how the populace are easily snowed — and you don’t even get that.
This is not incompetence — too many people for that — but strategy and tactics.
(And you go along with it)
@ Morales
So, to be clear, you’re literally calling people out for not being literal now, Captain Hyperliteral?
X-D
It’s a strange question to ask, really, ‘what causes autism?’
It’s less a medical condition than a personality trait, even in those with what people like to call ‘severe’ autism. Sometimes it’s associated with learning difficulties, but not often enough to be one.
To me, it’s like asking what causes people to like Coldplay. The really weird ones are those who declare that they will be searching for a cure for the epidemic of people who like Coldplay. It’s only a big deal because they decide to make it one.
raven @20:
“Elon Musk. I deeply despise Elon Musk, but not because he is ASD.”
Mush does not have ASD. His mother started that rumor, along with him being a “jenius”. And an idiot press has run with that ever since. To show the cluelessness of a technically illiterate press, a reporter had recently asked Musk what Tesla was going to due to fix the AP and FSD failues due to sunlight glare (when the sun is low on the horizon it blinds the cameras). His pseudo-scientific 100% BS reply was: “We solved that problem some time ago with direct photon counting.” The terminally clueless reporter never pushed back on that reply because he lacked sufficient technical knowledge to even understand that it was all nonsensical BS.
0. Note the implication that a trivial problem had aready been solved, despite it affecting Teslas NOW.
1. The Tesla cameras are incapable of “direct photon counting”.
2. Direct photon counting only works at VERY low light levels; it is completely inoperative at high light intensity levels since high sensitivity is required to detect single photons to count them.
3. Photon counting tells you absolutely nothing about the shape of the light emmiting object, which is worthless for avoiding obsticals.
He pulls this kind of nonsensical crap all the time, while the press and his clueless cult members remain too uninformed to detect even the most obvious of his nearly continual stream of BS.
TLDR summery: Musk is an unserious, rather stupid, psycopathic, narcissistic, ketamin and hallucinigenic addicted fraud that the press continually fauns over for his “futuristic” claimes. Remember his overpriced Boring Company “not a flame thrower” that was a flamethrower, his time spent creating fart sounds in the Tesla infotainment center instead of improving the safety, his poop emoji responses to questions sent his now shutdown Tesla PR department, his overpaying for Twitter, trying to back out and then converting it into a Nazi, incel, mysoginest bar with a new name? His driving away advertisers, even saying “fuck them”, and then sueing them for not returning? His narcissism is so strong, that after getting control of Tesla, he even used the court system to have the Tesla history altered, to make him the company founder, writing out the two actual founders!
He is a malignant narcissist and psychopathic lying Nazi. He came to the US on a fake education visa, and then stopped going to classes after only two days, to work on his zip2 software, which he ultimately sold for millions (rather odd, considering that he was expelled from PayPal for writing bad software). He is also a pathological liar and his “futuristic” ideas can be found in 1930’s pulp publications. Check out a copy of “Wasn’t the Future Wonderful” for some good examples. He also isn’t an engineer or a physicist, although he pretends to be those at times. His ideas are often totally impractical, to the point of being silly, he is a VERY unserious person, but an ever credulous scientifically illiterate press is unable to even detect his scams. Investigative reporting has been largely replaced with “entertainment” reporting (Which TV commercials do the Kardashians like best?). The former requires some level of intelligence, while the latter minimizes that requirement to where any fool can do it.
Musk created and showed a fake Tesla autonomous FSD (which is still neither) video in 2016. But when they were interviewed, at least 19 of his engineers were unwilling to lie about it, and said the video was faked. The vehicle had so many problems negotiating the desired path that several parts were spliced together to make it look continuous, and the entire route was 3D mapped beforehand, so the vehicle would know where to go! And that video recording had to be paused for car repairs when it hit a something, and was damaged. He is still peddling autonomous FSD SAE Level 5 in just a few months, while being stuck at SAE Level 2 for at least a decade, despite making so many major hardware changes that FSD will work, this time, for sure.
He removed a couple of very important Tesla safety features, like RADAR and USS, in 2021 against the advice of his own engineers (and even firing ones that remained concerned about safety) while offering 3 different lame excuses why (it was only to reduce his costs). His first excuse was that his venders were unable to supply the parts. Then it was he could not solve sensor fusion, the RADAR and the cameras disagreed on what was ahead of the car. Sensor fusion was first implimented in the industry in the 1960s, along with Kalman Filtering, so his technical sounding claim is rediculous and would imply that his engineering team was totally inept. Note that Waymo has more cameras than Tesla, as well as RADAR AND LIDAR, and they were able to handle sensor fusion just fine. His third excuse was that the RADAR was causing false braking at speed. Teslas with FSD still suffer from false braking, without the RADAR, and without USS they crash into stationary objects, like other parked cars and concrete light pole pedistals, when summoned in parking lots. And with absolutely no recognition of irony, his current HW4 and the currently vaporware HW5 have provisions for RADAR input. Recently, Tesla purchased a very large number of LIDAR units from Luminar, making Tesla, Luminar’s biggest single customer!
He claims that “LiDAR also does not work well in snow, rain or dust due to reflection scatter.” while cluelessly not admitting that those exact same conditions have caused his “vision only” system to fail multiple times! He’s just like Felon45, a narcissistic, psycopathic*, petulant man-baby where every accusation he makes is actually a confession.
He has continually insisted that vision only was sufficient, while disparaging Waymo for their “reduculous” solution. Of course, “vision only” ensures that it will never even match a good manual driver, since the latter uses other cues like sound and road feel, and can recognize shapes that Tesla’s faulty training can’t recognize, etc. Instead of using professional drivers on a training course with valid conditions to recognize, he relys on training by using how his Tesla drivers drive, both the good and the horrible. Like driving from the back seat, running red lights, driving drunk, speeding past stopped school buses with stop signs deployed and red lights flashing, ignoring stop lights and stop signs, etc. As a result his autonomous FSD (which is neither) has committed all of these driving errors, and many more, at times displaying Schizophrenica-like behaviour because of their moronic appraoch to training data. Teslas have even gotten stimied at train crossings (not comprehending the already down or moving down crossing bars) and even turning onto the train tracks, treating them like it was a continuation of the road, even though the tracks are at right angles to the road.
His Vegas Loop to reduce traffic in Los Vegas has been a disaster. He is contractually obliged to provide 68 miles of tunnels, but his Boring Company took 7 years to make 2.7 miles of one-way tunnels, for an estimated total completion time of about 190 years. And the projects from California to Illinois, Texas, Florida, and Maryland that have all fizzled or been disbanded. The alleged goal was to reduce surface traffic by using underground one-way tunnels with automous FSD Teslas shuttling passingers. Teslas were totally unable to navigate the tunnels on FSD without crashing, or creating traffic jams, or slowly operating at walking speeds because ther were no visual cues in the tunnels for the FSD to track. So now every Tesla FSD “shuttle” has a manual driver.
In 2016, Musk claimed that soon, you could summon your Tesla in NY while you are in LA, and it could drive the entire distance autonomously. What about charging, let alone being able to navigate the 2,500+ miles unassisted? As reported at InsideEVs: An independent EV research firm (AMCI) tested the latest Tesla FSD hardware with the latest FSD firmware available in 2024 over 1,000 miles of mixed driving. “During the review process, drivers had to intervene over 75 times.” Which, with very simple math, indicates that on average, in mixed city, country, and highway driving, the driver had to take over every 13 miles. AMCI has videos showing the Tesla FSD(S) very good and very bad testing results. These are not isolated incidents, with minimal searching you can find Tesla FSD HW4 users who have gotten so frightened by the dangerously erratic behavior that they claim they will never enable it again. And he never explained why someone would have their Tesla in NY while they are in LA to begin with. This entire scenerio is as phony as people would want to buy his fake autonomous AI robots to be their “friend”, and also to poor them drinks. Are these really obvious problems that affect nearly everyone?
Musk had claimed that the Hyperloop (an underground vacuum tunnel) would soon allow for transport at speeds of 670 MPH between SF and LA for you and your Tesla. “Hyperloop One” has already died, after spending 100s of millions on it. The company doing the work shut down at the end of 2023.
How about the Tesla Hypertunnel (an undersea vacuum tunnel) between NY and London operating at speeds of 4,000 MPH, which will never be built? And the entire 3,500 mile long tunnel has to operate in a vacuum to allow for those speeds. Pure impractical fantasy. Just imagine suffering a vacuum leak while travelling at 4,000 MPH under the ocean! At the Boring Company’s rate of progress it would only require 6,700 years to complete, if he started at both ends at the same time, and never encountered any problems more serious than at Las Vegas.
To achieve SAE Level 5 FSD safety standards the cumulative distance needs to be about 700,000 miles. At FSD SAE Level 5, the manufacturer assumes responsibility for any accidents. Tesla has refused to assumed responsibility for any of the more than 600 deaths due to Tesla, and an obviously greater number of accidents, and never will. Although the Waymo FSD at SAE Level 4 does assume responsibility. Waymo has been at SAE Level 4 for several years. Note that SAE Levels 4 and 5 NEVER allow for driver intervention. Yet Musk recently stated that FSD HW5 will be required to achieve any real FSD, and it would not be retrofittable on any existing Teslas. So all existing Tesla owners are out of luck on ever getting real FSD, no matter what they paid for that option.
Since this is already FAR TOO LONG, I’m stopping here without showing what is wrong with Musk’s fake AI autonomous robots or his fake Cybertaxi. He is just a VERY wealthy con artist.
*As the head of DOGE, he stopped all USAID to starving children, ensuring that more will die and all will suffer even more. “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is EMPATHY” — Elon Musk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_counting
https://tslainvestors.com/2025/08/27/teslas-elon-musk-takes-another-shot-at-waymos-capabilities-stemming-from-lidar/
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-lidar-technology-spending-luminar-elon-musk-comments-2024-5
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/08/how-a-hacker-helped-win-a-wrongful-death-lawsuit-against-tesla/
https://amcitesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/AMCI-Testing-FSD-release-09242024-Final-1.pdf
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-hyperloop-a-200-year-history-of-hype-and-failure/
https://engineerine.com/elon-hyper-tunnel/
John Morales @28:
“It appears that no one in this White House understands how numbers even work.” is your own claim, zetopan.
Well, that is certainly a relatively unique apologetic for the gross incompetence show by that administration thus far.
“It does not so appear to me. More like they like massaging numbers — the which requires at least some understanding.”
So when Mango Mussolini claims to have reduced egg and drug prices by 400% and 1,500%, respectively, he is merely playing 4D chess? I actually doubt he could win a Tic-Tac-Toe game against a radish.
So you are a fan of the Narcissist’s Prayer:
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it. <== Morales imagines that the stunningly ignorant morons in charge are actually located here.
And if I did, you deserved it.
What are your apologetics for these gems uttered by the unstable “jenius”, grifter in chief?
Stealth jets are totally invisible, even if you stand next to one.
The Continental army took over the airports in the 1770s.
Swallowing bright lights (or via insertion at the other end) would cure COVID, which he previously called a hoax.
And then there is his absolute insistence that the exporting country has to pay the tariffs:
On Wednesday [Mango Mussolini] unveiled a sweeping import tax scheme, in retaliation for what he said are unfair trade barriers on US products. He placed a tariff on Herd island, where the only living things are not people, but rather penguins, elephant seals, and all kinds of seabirds, No word yet on the number of mackerel the White House received, since the wildlife on that island is suffering from a quite pronounced currency shortage.
Meanwhile, back in reality, we find this: Wharton Business school Professor William T. Kelly said: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” And other students at the same school said Trump rarely came to class and was always unprepared.
Does someone’s mommy even know that they are off their meds again?
@8 “What RFK jr. et al. are doing is reinventing the wheel.”
Well.. That may not be the case. A recently resigned CDC staff member flat out said that RFK Jr’s real goal, in attacking vaccines, and lying to the public about them, is Eugenics – literal survival of the fittest, by having not just people, but chickens on chicken farms, cull themselves from the population, by proving themselves “too weak” to survive the diseases they catch. The end game, in his sick mind, being, “The ones that do will be stronger.” Never mind that, if we get hit with something truly horrible, the result could very easily be, “The ones that survived are crippled.”, or worse, “No one survived.”
But, this is hardly a surprise, given that virtually everything going on right now in the administration is based on Nazi eugenics, racism, and gaslighting of morons that support it.
Oh, and, of course, because he is an idiot, he ignores the very real problem of, “You might survive the virus, but it causes permanent long term changes to your DNA, which actually are harmful, if expressed, and you just passed that one to your kids.” – having the exact F-ing opposite effect of what he delusionally thinks would happen by just letting everyone get sick, and the survivors somehow being stronger for it.