And there are few more phony than Elon Musk. Here’s a good interview with Edward Niedermeyer, who has written a book about the way Musk built a car company on some good engineering (not done by him) and a whole lot of lies (his contribution). In particular, his so-called self-driving cars are killing people.

People such as Walter Wong and Josh Brown have died. The Tesla fans blame them. And Tesla basically says, These people chose to be distracted. They chose to operate the system in a place we told them isn’t necessarily safe for it. Therefore, it’s all on them. And the NTSB said, No. We know from literally decades of behavioral psychology—particularly those that look at safety critical systems and partial automation—that if you put someone in what’s called a vigilance task, where they’re just monitoring this automation, and they just have to be there to jump in and take over when something goes wrong, which over time gets more and more rare, it is not a question of good drivers doing okay and bad drivers doing poorly. It’s not the same as driving. It’s a task fundamentally different from driving. It’s one that we as humans are actually less well evolved to do than unassisted driving. There’s no moral or skill factor in this. Inevitably, every human who is put in that position will eventually, given enough time, become inattentive, then given enough time, the system will find something it can’t deal with. Basically, people are gambling with these sorts of numbers. They’re playing roulette in a way.

That’s an interesting point. Our brains don’t have a good autopilot — our attentiveness tends to wane if we aren’t seen constant feedback to keep us tuned in. I know that when I’m on a long distance drive, my brain needs constant reminders to refocus and stay in the present and the task at hand. If I don’t have that, I know I’ll lapse into daydreaming and thinking about totally irrelevant stuff.

I suppose if we had a really good self-driving system, we could replace the need for minute-by-minute attention to the road with a system that delivered random electric shocks with a voice over saying “wake up, dummy”, but I don’t think it would sell well, and if mandatory, would fuel a robust market in YouTube videos instructing you in how to rip it out.

When Elon Musk promotes self-driving cars, though, he’s being openly fraudulent.

For me, this is where Tesla crosses into unambiguous fraud. First of all, it’s Level 5 autonomy, which you have to understand nobody in the space is pursuing. Level 5 means fully autonomous, with no need for human input ever. But operating anywhere—basically anywhere in the United States, anywhere a human could drive, this system needs to be able to drive. This is the core of its appeal as much as, Oh, we’re developing this generalized system. Everyone else is tied to these local operating domains with mapping and all this other stuff, more expensive vehicles. We don’t have time to get into all of the ways in which this is an absolute fantasy. Anybody who’s serious in the AV sector is just amazed that this even has as much credibility as it does. What it comes down to is that he’s identified not a plausible fraud or vision that he is selling, but an appealing one. People believe it because they want to believe it. They want to believe that they can buy a car—it gets back to that frisson of futurism—without having to change any behavior. You’re just gonna go out and buy another car. It’s gonna belong to you like any other car. But unlike other cars, it’s going to drive itself anywhere and everywhere. And that’s absurd. With a camera-only system, technically, people call it AI. People call it machine learning. Fundamentally, it’s probabilistic inference. And when you think about that term, probabilistic inference, you think about something that could kill you at any second. Does it sound like a good combination?

No, it doesn’t. That’s a terrifying combination. Even worse, imagine being on a freeway with thousands of other cars, all relying on those odds. That’s not just you rolling the dice, that’s everyone doing it simultaneously, trusting that no one will get snake-eyes.

This is the principle that drives the profitability of casinos. Even tiny advantages in the odds of a chance event, when iteratively repeated by a great many people, converges on inevitability. Hey, that’s also a factor in understanding evolution!

James O’Brien always says what makes sense.

'If your car breaks down, go to a mechanic. Don't go to your uncle Keith's Facebook page.'

James O'Brien on vaccine misinformation.@mrjamesob pic.twitter.com/ot9qc2KvoW

— LBC (@LBC) January 10, 2022

Sometimes, though, I think the government is run by a bunch of bumbling Uncle Keiths who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t ever look at the evidence. For instance, here’s what the omicron variant is doing right now:

Deaths are down from last year, which is very good — we’ve got a better fortified population of people who have been vaccinated. This disease is still raging, though, which makes this decision by the St Paul school district incomprehensible to me.

Just as coronavirus cases are surging after winter break, St. Paul Public Schools is considering no longer identifying and excluding unvaccinated students who come into contact with an infected person at school.

Contact tracing is taxing school health personnel, and extended quarantines are hard on families, said Mary Langworthy, the district’s health and wellness director. She said many students have had to stay home for 10 days on three different occasions.

“Our parents are struggling to get to their jobs, they don’t have daycare options. … That’s a hardship for many of our families to endure,” she told the school board this week.

That is quite the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard from someone who’s supposed to be sensible and reasonable. We’re seeing many students being exposed to COVID, so our solution is…to close our eyes and stop testing, so we don’t see them anymore.

I know what a hardship it is to have your rigidly scheduled work life disrupted by natural causes, we used to have kids in our home. Somehow, though, the American solution is to pretend the problems of health and illness don’t exist, because work must carry on as if no pandemic existed. We can’t possibly decide that work must compromise and develop a greater flexibility to accommodate the needs of the people in this time of stress. Oh no, you have sick children at home? But how will these widgets get made? How will luncheon be served to those wealthy matrons? How will these boxes of Amazon goods get next-day delivery, and how will Jeff Bezos be able to afford a new rocket? Your priorities are maladjusted and out of alignment with American values! There are bosses and landlords whose pockets must be filled!

While we don’t have kids at home anymore, if my wife got sick, my number one priority would be helping her, and my job would have to work around that fact. If I got sick, my next goal would be to not drag my sniveling, virus-infected respiratory system back to the classroom to share my viral load with the students. I’m weird that way.

Also, public schools are not a baby-sitting service, even if some school officials think that’s their most important role.

I refused to pay any attention to the news yesterday, the first anniversary of the MAGA riot and insurrection. I was just so sure that the Democrats would be taking the event very seriously and working hard to bring justice to the criminals (one of whom is still preparing to run for president in 2024), so, as they assure me, nothing would happen because they’re so earnestly and quietly working behind the scenes.

Nope. It’s hard to believe the Democrats can be this tone-deaf.

Following a solemn discussion of imperiled American democracy between the Librarian of Congress and historians, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) chose to commemorate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by inviting the cast of Hamilton to give a virtual performance with the production value of a tinny Zoom call. The musical’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda said to his C-SPAN audience, “We should never take our rights and liberties for granted. That’s what I wrote about in the song ‘Dear Theodosia’ from Hamilton.” Cast members, all in separate locations and out of costume, appeared via videoconference on a projector screen in the Capitol. They sang the earnest song straight into the camera, some via visible headphones in their ears. The disconnect between the musical and the severity of the Capitol riot called to mind the celebrity coalition that produced the reviled “Imagine” pandemic video. As one Twitter user quipped, “This is worse than the insurrection.” New York Times reporter Astead Wesley wrote, “We owe Gal Gadot an apology.”

I get so much spam email from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer because I once donated a small sum to the Democratic party, and I am totally sick of them and their histrionic headlines and pointless posturing. Sit down and shut up, because they’re just driving me away from ever supporting that party any further. Local candidates, yes; the occasional progressive candidate elsewhere, sure; Democrats as a party, nope.

Huh. The jury actually found Elizabeth Holmes guilty on some of the counts.

A federal jury found Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty on four of the 11 charges for a fraud scheme, delivering a verdict on the long-running controversy over her role in the now defunct blood-testing technology start-up and marking a big win for the government in its years-long probe into the entrepreneur.

The jury of eight men and four women returned their verdict on the seventh full day of deliberations. They found her not guilty on four counts and deadlocked on three counts. Holmes was acquitted on all counts involving patients. Holmes faces the possibility of jail time over the convictions, although a sentencing hearing has not been set at the time of the verdict.

That’s what I find interesting: she was found guilty of crimes against investors, but not crimes against all the people who were misled by Theranos’s claims. It was all those gullible Silicon Valley venture capitalists who were hurt, not all the people who went into Walgreen’s and got misleading, false test results. I guess that sort of makes sense, since Walgreen’s doesn’t care about their customers all that much — they sell homeopathic remedies, after all, and didn’t question the likelihood that a company with Henry Kissinger and George Shultz on the board might not have any medical competence.

I’m not surprised. It’s clear that the US government (even the judicial branch!) is in the pocket of the corporations, given their current policies which are all about putting the peasantry back to work no matter how sick they are. Even the Democratic party cares more about the health of Wall Street and Silicon Valley than of the citizenry.

Man, Holmes was such an obvious, unqualified phony from the get-go, yet she was briefly a billionaire. I am persuaded that Silicon Valley is mainly a pool of stupid people.

Good news: Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty. I think we can also consider this a conviction for Jeffrey Epstein, since there has to be a child rapist to receive delivery from a child trafficker.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime paramour of financier Jeffrey Epstein, was convicted on sex-trafficking charges after a trial that centered on what types of enabling conduct — including befriending young girls and teaching and scheduling them to massage an older man — should be considered criminal.

Maxwell, 60, was accused of recruiting teenage girls to massage Epstein at his homes in Palm Beach, Fla., New York, New Mexico and elsewhere between 1994 and 2004.

Epstein allegedly paid the girls hundreds of dollars in cash for the massages, which involved sexual touching and which he expected three times a day. He died by suicide 28 months ago, while awaiting his own trial.

The jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking of an individual under 18. She was found not guilty of enticement of one individual under 17 with the intent to engage in illegal sexual activity.

Also, though, I must ask what has happened to the BBC? They asked Alan Dershowitz to provide commentary on the verdict.

After Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty Wednesday on five of six sex trafficking counts for her role in procuring young girls for her former boyfriend and serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to abuse, BBC News took to the airwaves to analyze the proceedings. And they brought on Alan Dershowitz, notably named by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre as one of the men (she has also claimed Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her) she said Epstein and Maxwell allegedly forced her to have sex with repeatedly when she was underage. Dershowitz has denied the allegations.

He is currently suing one of Epstein’s victims, so the BBC should have known better — there’s an obvious conflict of interest. Dershowitz should have known better, too, but he’s nothing but a sleazy hack already.

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Another reminder:

Big day of remembrance and reflection for all our heroes of Science and Rationality. pic.twitter.com/eZNX0cnPQp

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) December 30, 2021

Maybe the BBC should convene a round table conversation with Pinker, Krauss, Dawkins, Summers, etc. to sadly discuss the fate of their old friends.

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Belatedly, the BBC says “oops”.

Come on, every news service. Scratch Alan Dershowitz off your invitation lists already, just like all those scientists should have automatically shunned Jeffrey Epstein.

One of Oprah’s greatest crimes was promoting that horrible opportunist, Dr Oz, and turning him into a celebrity quack. Here’s a good expose of how awful Oz is.

Dr. Oz became an Oprah regular, and when The Dr. Oz Show premiered, it took off. He fit in easily among the celebrities in his new social stratum and now counts among his friends everyone from hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio (who did not wish to discuss their relationship with me) to Brooke Shields (who did not respond to a text seeking comment) and Martha Stewart (who said she couldn’t talk owing to her “busy year-end schedule”). And then Dr. Oz seemed to change.

“He’s one of those public figures who really haunt me,” Frank Bruni of the New York Times said. Bruni met Dr. Oz when he wrote about him in 2010 for The New York Times Magazine. Bruni spent weeks observing his subject, work that required him to experience for himself the incongruity of Dr. Oz’s dual existence. One day, he was in an operating room, peering into the open chest cavity of a patient as Dr. Oz stitched around her heart. The next, he was hanging out at a studio as Dr. Oz and his producers discussed a plan to create prop body parts to hand out to the audience at a taping of The Dr. Oz Show.

During the process, Bruni said, “two things came into equally vivid relief: This is a man who is or was a serious doctor. Seriously trained. Seriously talented. Gifted. And with a record of performance in which he contributed an enormous amount to humanity. But at the same time, I’m sitting in on these story meetings where they’re talking about ‘Does cotton or Silly Putty or something else better stand in for testicles?’ I mean, how do you go from A to B? Why does he seem more excited about the fake testicles than the open-heart surgery? The answer is because the latter was the route to fame and riches — and that’s the Faustian bargain.” That observation was not just some convenient mythic device, Bruni said, but his honest conclusion about a subject he’d thought hard about for more than a decade. “I’ve met and profiled very few if any people who so embody the wages of ambition.” In this allegory, the Devil gave the doctor wealth and fame in exchange for his reputation.

“Somewhere, I’m not sure how, he started to sell out — it happens to a lot of people when they get money and success; they want more money and more success. He went from doctor to entertainer to scam artist,” a veteran daytime producer said. “Dr. Oz is dangerous because he believes he’s got some divine power.”

The author’s conclusion is a little worrisome. Oz has a chance of winning, but he’s facing opposition from the far-right MAGA crowd. He may not be nuts enough to win! Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

After TheCrafsMan lifted your mood (I hope), now it’s time to come crashing down. The name of the young woman murdered by the cops has been released to the public.

Her name was Valentina Orellana-Peralta. She was 14 years old, shopping for her quinceañera dress. She was hoping to be an engineer someday.

The linked article also includes a video of the asshole cop in action, which I won’t be including here. The cop rushes in to the store eagerly with his rifle, turns a corner, sees the guy we assume had been attacking people with a bike lock, and pop-pop-pop instantly opens fire. The cops did not take any time to deliberate, to argue, to try to settle the problem relatively peacefully, and there was a whole mob of cops idling around the store who could have easily taken the alleged attacker down by physically jumping on him, or hitting him with their nightsticks. But no, that guy was marked for death from the instant the trigger-happy cop lifted his big gun out of his car.

Lots of people are noticing that.

Many critics of the police have expressed outrage over aspects of the shooting — the speed with which an officer opened fire on Mr. Elena Lopez although he did not have a gun, the fact that police officers did not ensure that the area was clear of bystanders.

“You guys don’t have the ability to just tackle him to the floor?” said Chloe Cheyenne Rogers, an activist who started the Justice for Valentina petition, which has nearly 5,000 signatures. “You can’t use any parts of your training to be able to take that person in a way that doesn’t include your assault rifle?”

The LA PD North Hollywood (@lapdnorthhwddiv) has now deleted their Twitter account. The police chief is calling it “a chaotic incident”. The ass-covering has begun.