In many ways democracy is a lie. You still have a system of government that puts a handful of people in fairly powerful positions. These people will always do what is needed to keep the power they have.

For centuries democracy has focused on the elites. They have done a good job of keeping participation low and therefore creating an under informed population. Commonly in the US, you’ll hear phrases like “It doesn’t matter who I vote for.” “My vote doesn’t count.” “They’re all the same.”

When you have a voting populace who has regularly not participated and talk with authority to them, you can get them to buy whatever you’re selling.

In some ways that is the answer. Crashes keep happening because they are not being held accountable to regulators because they are not reporting these incidents and no one is exercising oversight to be sure the reporting matches reality.

I think over the years, accurate reporting by manufacturers has been done because they generally do not want to be known as that car company that killed a child and it could have been prevented with a 50 cent bolt. As a result, regulators have been less hawkish. Of course there are probably political donations in the US to help keep the wheels turning.

I’ve come to the realization, at least where I live, that a hell of a lot of accidents are prevented because of drivers who are actually aware and safe. This goes a bit beyond defensive driving IMO. I’m talking flat out accident avoidable. There is an entire class of drivers who are not even aware of the accidents they have almost caused because someone else managed to avoid their stupid driving.

The majority of accidents that are likely to happen with these robocoffins will be single car or robocoffin meets robocoffin. The numbers on safety after a year will be acceptable because non accident causing error prone driving is not reported in any official capacity.

I still maintain that the only safe way to have autonomous vehicles on the road is if they do not share the road with human drivers and have an open standard for communicating with other autonomous cars.

Can’t wait to see how well it works to glue armored panels on.

Something that has been bothering me lately. Reasonable people who counter the toxic misinformation leaving the platform only allows the disease to grow and spread. But reality is they weren’t reaching the people that needed the dose of reality anyway. And then I realized that the algorithms have always been the disease, my feeds are my own echo chamber to drive engagement, just as theirs are. I’ve pretty much cut all social networks out. The only way to change minds is honest respectable conversation, and I am not a person to change anyone’s mind.

We’re fucked

And if the only people willing to work for the tyrant only kids the ring, it will take a long while for someone to stop his worse actions, if anyone ever does.

I don’t believe in heros, they were just brave enough or dumb enough and in the right place to do some good. And that might actually describe this guy. But still just a flawed person.

I absolutely disagree with much of what Liz Cheney supports, but I’ll still give her props for serving on the J6 committee knowing what it could mean for her career.

Been using Onn boxes for years and absolutely love them. They are about as pure android TV as you can get. I would definitely recommend the 50$ pro version over the 20$ original though.

I can actually see some practical use for this. Imagine a textbook for programming or system administration with a built in terminal and feedback loop to walk students through examples and correct mistakes.