Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
·
Monday, April 29, 2024
·
55 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Weather tracker: US experts predict one of most active hurricane seasons on record
The topic of Sunday’s Doonesbury was Trump’s dementia.
Tweet with an image:
https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1784689932998435269
Uncontrolled falling asleep also.
This too:
https://twitter.com/pawdebb/status/1784937209398767889/photo/1
Here are two facts, one obvious, that may change how you view the world (very likely probably not):
1. Your speed in spacetime is always the speed of light*
2. You’re always orbiting something.
* as speed in space increases, speed in time decreases, time dilation. The reverse is also true. At our present speed in space (yes, relative to something else), our speed in time is rather high.
@OzarkHillbilly: Flooding from hurricanes is amplified by higher sea level. WAPO has a story this morning about sea level rise along the Gulf of Mexico.
Galveston has seen 8.4 inches. Gotta admit, when those Chinese do a global warming hoax they’re thorough about it.
When you’ve lost Laura Loomer…
I like reading Kevin Drum’s analysis of various studies because he has a keen eye for weak conclusions. (You know, studies you read about in general media that end up taking the forme of “People with red hair are more likely to get sunburned, so dying your hair black gives you immunity form solar radiation”) But sometimes he is mentally invested and fails to pull out his skeptic’s calculator, and a recent column on the safety of Tesla’s self driving mode is an example of this. He accepts at face value Musk’s assertion:
There is so much wrong with this!
1) Musk and Tesla have been caught lying so many times you should never accept their data at face value
2) Wait, Tesla in a non-self driving mode has accidents at less than half the rate of all others cars combined? Why? What would the mechanism be? If it is true (see #1 above) would it be because it has collision detection and backup warnings and the like? If so, then shouldn’t you be comparing it with other similar cars? (FWIW, I would be astonished if there was actually a 2x difference between cars with this technology and without, but will concede that it could be true.)
3) And Teslas in self driving mode are more than 3x less accident prone than when not in self driving mode? If it is true (see #1 above) could it be because self driving mode is only allowed under circumstances that are inherently far safer to begin with? i.e. during the times you are most likely to get in an accident the self driving is not available.
I think Drum got punked here.
@Sleeping Dog:
She is an exception, few Republicans other than never Trumpers like Rick Wilson have said anything. It won’t cost her anything with the MAGA types, could even help her a bit.
https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-mainstream-media-cant-even-cover.html
snip
snip
@Sleeping Dog:
@charontwo:
If you own a dog, chances are sky high you’ll euthanize them when their health deteriorates from old age, or if they get a terminal disease.
When this happens, it’s heartbreaking. The way Noem tell her story, it was cold and driven by anger and inconvenience. If you love dogs, you won’t like this woman at all.
@Sleeping Dog:
As I pointed out yesterday, Trump hates dogs, so this could be a plus for him.
@charontwo:
Most of the MAGAs over at Lucianne.com, aka MAGA Central, are defending/excusing Noem.
This is good:
http://www.thebulwark.com/p/lucky-trump-everything-keeps-going-his-way
I did something different with the ice cream yesterday. the directions on the machine are to let it run for an interval, or until the ice cream is done. This is a bit contradictory, as you can’t quite see whether or not there is still liquid under what looks like ice cream on top. Also, it looks “done” when it seems more like soft serve than regular ice cream. Lastly, I’m often left with frozen mix stuck to the sides and bottom of the bowl, say about half a scoop’s worth.
So, this time I decided I’d let it run for 20 minutes and see how that worked. It was a milk and cream mix, so even if I wound up with a frozen mess, it can partially that to a creamier consistency.
So:
1) No liquid anywhere.
2) Very little stuck frozen on the sides and bottom of the bowl, say about two or tree tbsp worth.
3) The whole thing came out with the mixing blades, and most slid off to the container easily.
I tried a little right then, and it was ok. We’ll see how it does today after overnight freezing.
I may try a water based sorbet again next (which might be as early as Wednesday, as it’s a holiday).
@MarkedMan: self drive also has a nasty habit of occasionally shutting down and reverting to manual control. When this happens shortly before a collision, Tesla interprets that as a collision under manual control, even if it shut down 2 seconds prior.
Today I learned that lug wrenches, and bolts, are not universal. Daughter lost her lug wrench somehow so I grabbed mine out of my car and it was too large. Totally get that for truly large vehicles or very small ones size might vary but never occurred to me they would be different with similar sized cars. Both foreign so both metric so not a question of imperial measurements. Made it almost to 70 without having to know this.
Steve
I cannot comment on the Noem story without becoming completely enraged.
She SHOT a 14-month old PUPPY, who by all counts was behaving in an age-appropriate manner (particularly for a dog without training, I might add).
Her response–that the farm recently had to put down horses that were 25+ years in age–is so different in context that it’s a non sequitur.
I wish absolutely the worst of everything for Noem. She can eff right off.
@steve:
I don’t use a lug wrench anymore (70 is the next offramp), but I remember the old cross wrenches. 3 different sockets and the pry end to get the hubcaps off.
OTOH, I also proved why you don’t do 100+ on recap bias ply tires. Ignorance wasn’t bliss.
@Jen:
Here’s a photo of the miscreant:
http://www.gundogcentral.com/hunting-dogs-for-sale/german-wirehaired-pointer/75846
@Sleeping Dog: And yet, on November whatever, Laura Loomer will not be voting for the person with Kamala Harris as running mate even if Trump picks Noem. Clearly, it’s possible to kill a puppy and become Veep.
A truth in advertising law, might force the “pro-life” camp to adopt a slogan like “Life begins at conception. Our interest in that life ends when the product is expelled from the womb.”
@steve: I’m kind of jealous you made it that far without needing to know that. Meanwhile I have a four way lug nut “wrench/tire iron” from 2001 in my car 😛
@Jen: I have personally seen horses that were past 30 still doing well. The fact that she “had” to put down three horses at the same time has me confused. One horse? sure normal. Two? maybe an accident? but three?? WTF was she doing???
What really gets me is how sure that women is of her decision in relation to the dog. Her declaring the dog untrainable with all the surety of a peak expert. As if she could never conceive of the idea that someone might be better at something than her. The Dunning-Kruger effect in full force with that one..
The part involving the dog and the chicken killing shows how she set the dog up for failure.
@just nutha: Just like Bill Barr and that interview the other day…
Party before country every time.
@Matt: Ugh. I hadn’t realized that all three were put down at the same time. And yes, while some are still past 30 and doing well, 25 is at least a “normal” lifespan for a working farm animal. But you’re right, if all three were put down at the same time, that’s weird/highly suspect.
@MarkedMan:
I would not be surprised in the slightest if the fancy-fancy safety features that have been making their way into new cars are cutting accidents by 50%.
Lane deviation warnings, automatic breaking, blind spot sensors, sleeping driver detection… this covers so much of the “driving along” accidents. You’re then down to pulling out into oncoming traffic at the wrong time and things like that.
They’re a bit over sensitive, as I have something alert at least once a week*, but that might be a carefully calibrated over-sensitivity to familiarize the driver, so they don’t startle the driver when they go off before an accident.
Alternately, I am an amazingly shitty driver.
——1
*: never a bad one, but the “car ahead is stopping” alert and the “person seen 20 ft away while slowly backing out of a parking spot” — things I noticed (or would notice) and am aware I may need to react to. Sometimes the “you’re out of your lane” as I pass a bicyclist.
@MarkedMan: Drum is better than average at detecting bullshit, but not great.
He seldom groups apples and oranges together, but oranges and pineapples is common (pineapples look like citrus at first glance, but aren’t). And he is often quite blind when it comes to looking for bias in sources (accepting Tesla data, the Cass report, etc)
And where he really seems to fall down is assigning partial credibility, and then remembering that uncertainty. The whole “there’s an 80% chance this data is right” first impression gets rounded to 100%.
@Jen:
My cousin has a 26-year-old horse. Great-great of Secretariat. He seems to be in fine shape.
@MarkedMan: I don’t have the credibility issues with Tesla that you have, but sure. Ignore the Tesla data. Data from Waymo is very similar. Autonomous vehicles are *already* a lot safer than human drivers. The reason for this is that the number one cause of accidents (among humans) is inattentiveness. Distracted by something, or forgot to check the rearview, or look behind.
This type of accident will never happen to an AV.
They will introduce, it seems likely, a different type of accident, where the vehicle responds to an odd situation in a way a human *could* have caught. Which is not to say they would have caught it, but they could have. This is the thing humans fear.
I’m ok with the caution. I ponder what the adoption pathway is going to look like. How do people have a first experience of riding in an AV? I can think of some possibilities, but which one will have the most impact?
@Gustopher: You could be right. I guess I’m skeptical on account of two things: the first is that 2:1 is so huge and getting that kind of effect from warning lights seems unlikely to me, although I concede I could be wrong about that. And the second reason is my own personal experience in driving back and forth to work everyday. The most dangerous and accident causing drivers on the road are the weavers, who treat crowded highways as if they were in a video game. They travel 15-50 mph faster than the flow of traffic and weave at high speed from far right to far left and back again in ten seconds. They think they are some kind of amazingly talented driver but in fact are absolutely terrible, frequently misjudging gaps and openings and being oblivious to the motions of other drivers on the road. Everyone else has to maneuver and mash brakes for these idiots who in their own head are flitting effortlessly in and out without leaving a ripple behind. The tragic reality is all too often far, far different. My very unscientific impression is that accidents are far more likely to be caused by these aggressive drivers than distracted ones, and so these warning systems wouldn’t help all that much.
@Jay L Gischer: Just a couple of examples of Tesla faking results: a Tesla engineer eventually revealed the famous 2016 self driving video was completely faked. The firmware didn’t have many of the capabilities demonstrated. Not that they didn’t work as well as shown, but in the case of simple things like stopping at a red light, didn’t have that capability at all.
And on a less serious level, there’s the one that “showed” a Cybertruck pulling a Porsche could outrun that same model Porsche. In reality they stopped the race well shy of a quarter mile.
My personal philosophy is that once someone is shown to be a liar, they are not worth listening to about anything. Are Tesla’s statistics, developed totally in house with data unavailable to anyone else, to be trusted? Why would they be? They’ve been caught doing so much more than merely lying in order to scam the public when they thought it beneficial to them. I’ve read those comments about safety from Musk for years and I immediately discount them. Not worth the electronic ink they are “printed” with.
@Jay L Gischer:
I can believe it much more when it comes to Waymo. Completely different challenges and completely different use case.
@MarkedMan:
Over the weekend, I replaced the car totaled a month ago by a distracted driver. The Mazda I bought does more than warning lights.
For lane departure, it buzzes the steering wheel, but it can be set to “rumble” or emit a beep. Or off, obviously. Pedestrian warning was a beep, but I don’t know if that can be changed to something else.
The blind spot warning on the side mirrors seems useful so far.
@Matt:
I’d wager that the 3, 25 yo horses put down was because they no longer could earn their keep, whatever that was. The governor of ND is a true piece of work that makes Sarah Palin seem normal by comparison.
@Matt: My current car doesn’t have a lug wrench at all. My Spark has an electronic pump and can of “fix-a-flat” that attaches to it.
And while I’m here, Luddite, remind your friend that if he buys my car, he may need to replace the can of tire sealant; it’s close to 10 years old.
@Sleeping Dog:
A biopic of Noem’s life might be titled She Shoots Horses, Doesn’t She?
@CSK: We now have 4 anecdotes. Surely this number must be enough to make the transition to a data point, right?
“This type of accident will never happen to an AV.”* [emphasis added]
*Barring a software failure. (In true/false testing, all statements containing the words “always” or “never” should be counted as “false.”)
I’ve had a Tesla Model Y for over two years now. The lane departure snd other warnings are oversensitive, but the one about a car stopping unexpectedly in front of me has possibly saved my ass (or at least nose) a couple times.
I did *not* buy the self-driving, but they gave me a free tryout period this past month. I have experience in car simulation and AV training. However, my first experience was terrifying: driving down the highway, it decided to pass a car about a half mile before an exit. Except it wasn’t just one car, there was a train of about ten closely-spaced cars with no clear way to get over to the exit lane. I took over at that point because I didn’t know if it was going to dive between two cars and scare the shit out of them (mine was already expelled at this point).
On the other hand, I gave it another chance later and it did quite well navigating roundabouts and some light city traffic. Maybe I just need to build up trust?
One can’t help but wonder what the ideal width of a film is*, if there is an ideal length of 92 minutes.
What I really would like, at least for pictures over 2 hours long (which I think is most of them), would be to reinstate intermissions. I cannot drink a reasonably sized soda, or coffee for that matter, and not be distracted by the need to pee at some point in the movie. An intermission would fix that.
*I think it used to be 70mm, but I’ve no idea how that translates to our brave new digital world, that has such movies in it.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Apparently Oregon still requires actually driving the car in order to get a license (whew!), despite real world evidence to the contrary. We’ll see if that coworker accomplishes this before your Spark goes to the nice people at the ministry.
@Gustopher: Kevin Drum’s systemic error is a desire to be seen as reasonable. He sometimes bends over backwards to avoid criticizing what might be seen as a conservative position. Also, too, IIRC, he and Atrios have a longstanding back and forth about self-driving cars. Atrios is very skeptical while Drum sees them as more realistic. ( I see them as inevitable. Do you have any idea how many people can be fucked out of low paying jobs by self driving trucks?)
I’m surprised the matter of self-driving cars ins’t usually contrasted with the extensive automation used in aircraft. After all, automatic pilot systems go back almost, or past, a century now.
An autopilot, though, is relatively simple. The first ones could keep a plane on a given heading. Latter ones could keep it at a heading and altitude; and with with auto throttle, at a given speed as well. these days if the airport is suitably equipped, some plane models can land on their own; the pilots “just” supervise.
And yet, consider TCAS, Traffic Collision Avoidance System. It’s a great piece of technology, that has saved lots of lives. But it’s not automated. the system is clever. It communicates with the TCAS on the other plane, and both agree who climbs and who descends. But it’s the pilots who have to climb or descend; te plane won’t do it on its own.
A similar system in a car would agree which car swerves left and which right, and would instruct the drivers to do so.
This suggests to me automation handles an environment with sparse traffic, such as commercial aviation, much more easily than one where most hazards consist of traffic, such as driving. In this way, driving is much worse. there are more cars on the road, as well as pedestrians, animals, pot holes, trash that may fall on the road, etc.
Not to mention air traffic is already controlled in a highly structured environment, while car traffic in cities is not.
It’s very likely we’ll eventually have self-driving cars, and that these will be safer than human-driven cars. But it’s just as clear it will not be easy. It will be a long, hard slog.
Clever them Chinese…
@Kathy: As I say on the back of my truck: “Pro-Life My Ass.”
OK. To start with their is NO such thing as an autonomous vehicle at this time.
And it seems to me (anecdotally) that the #1 cause of accidents in Teslas is… Wait for it… Human inattentiveness. Distracted by their texting on their phone or playing games or looking at porn or… Any of the hundred thousand and one things humans can get into when they think nobody is looking.
Musk needs to be taken out in back of the wood shed and whipped with a willow branch for ever putting his (quote/unquote) AV on the market with the caveat that the driver “needs to be ready to take control at any second.”
Has he ever met a human? I mean, c’mon. There is not a person on the planet who will pay 110% attention to everything that is happening at 20/30/40/50/60/70/80/+ mph when something else is doing the driving. The MF’er should lose all his billions just for that stupidity alone.
Great. I look forward to the day when one exists. Seriously. I miss the days when I was riding a bus on my morning commute w/o a care in the world as I read the paper, drank my coffee, and fantasized about the cute girl who always got on 3 bus stops after me.
We are human. Building something that ignores that fact has always been a recipe for disaster.
@Kathy: The biggest danger to cars is other cars, and yet they often pass at high relative speeds within a few feet.
Airplanes don’t really have that problem unless a whole lot of other things have gone wrong.
I don’t see how the systems are all that comparable.
(I suppose that pedestrians are also a problem, even if they are not really a danger to cars.)
@Jen: I grew up working the family farm. The horses they/we had were for show and activities like barrel racing. They didn’t do anything that would be considered traditional work for a horse on a farm. Having said that I’ve seen adults ride +25 year horses on relatively mild terrain without issues. Every horse is different though and some look rough at 25 years.
@Gustopher: I WISH I had the same experience as you with those “warnings”. My car’s collision mitigation braking system would nearly cause an accident at least once a month when I lived in a city. I went on a pretty big rant about it with various details some weeks (months?) ago. It loves to slam on the brakes when there’s nothing in front of me because 3 seconds prior I passed a car. Or my favorite it loves to slam on the brakes when the car in front of me has already completed a right turn and is accelerating. At that point I could of floored the car and swerved right and still come nowhere near the car. I got a LOT of road rage events because of that shitty system. It’s like the system is lagging behind reality and it causes problems galore. None of this would be that big of an issue if there was a way to disable the collision mitigation or at least turn down it’s sensitivity to a reasonable level. Then there was the lane keeper that liked to swerve into the other lane because of damage to the road that the sensor decided was really the lane maker. At least I can perma disable the lane keeper aspect so I didn’t have to fight to keep the car in the legal lane every time I drove to work..
@Gustopher:
You mean the Cass report that Cass wrote after conspiring with DeSantis administration bigots? I shouldn’t have read his response. His fixation on the “high quality evidence” bullshit leads me to believe he’s an idiot or a bigot. Or both.
I wish the people that are responsible for deciding whether something is “high quality
” when it comes to medical care readjust their terms. It’s obvious that one has been destroyed by bad faith assholes and radical centrist weirdos.
Enraging.
On the car issue: I don’t know if this holds everywhere, but drivers here in Chicago seem to have gotten way more aggressive, recently-ish. I mean, Chicago drivers were already fairly aggressive, but it’s gotten way worse. I routinely see people driving on the shoulder, passing where they shouldn’t, refusing to merge.
On the refusing to merge issue I’ve gotten so fed up that I just drive straight at people. I drive a Toyota Camry with a bunch of dents and scratches. I figure that if people don’t want to let me merge, they can see how much they don’t like it when my crapbox takes out their door.
@Matt:
I finally disabled the ‘active’ part of lane departure on my car because the goddam car would fight me every time it lost track of a lane – usually crossing an intersection. But that aside I love the safety stuff and car shop accordingly.
I’m going to need more convincing on AVs. If a BMW can’t get across an intersection without losing its shit. . . And I dismiss Elon data out of hand. He lies.
@Gustopher:
The popular perception is that driving is so easy, just about anyone can learn to do it in a short time. Whereas flying is so difficult, ti takes months of training and years to be proficient.
Therefore it should follow that designing software to drive a car must be simpler than designing it to fly a plane.
Of course, planes do not fly autonomously, contrary to another popular belief.
The whole Tesla driving debate is funny, because if Americans were smarter, our urban commutes and short-haul intercity trips would be serviced by various forms of rail. A conductor could be doing the driving for many of us, while we play on our phones and avoid eye contact with panhandlers.
And yet, here we are, stuck in traffic with Elon.
@DK: The only cities I ever lived in that had extensive commuter rail were Chicago and Shanghai, but I’m also pretty familiar with Boston and NYC. I honestly don’t understand why they all still have horrendous traffic despite that. I guess it’s the last mile thing. I can take the subway to work here in Baltimore. I have to walk three quarters of a mile to get to it, so that’s not bad, but then I have 3 miles at the end in a very pedestrian unfriendly suburb. I’ve contemplated buying a super cheap car and seeing if I could leave it overnight at the station but it’s too much of a hassle.
@MarkedMan:
You answered your own question. There’s extensive and then there’s extensive. To me, New York City is only US jurisdiction that qualifies as having an extensive metro system. As in, robust enough that most people within a 20+ mile radius of the City Center probably don’t need a car to survive, including the aged and infirm.
The public transportation systems in Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco are much better than average for the US. But these systems aren’t robust enough to qualify as daily options for most residents — only for people who live and work near the stations. They’ll get to your general vicinity, yes, but you’ll often have to walk 2-4 miles more or wait for busses. It’s not convenient or efficient. And impossible for those with physical limitations.
In New York, Tokyo, Barcelona, Singapore, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Berlin, Taipei, Stockholm, Prague, Amsterdam etc. there are metro stops every few blocks (give or take, depending on distance from the city center), and throughout the entire metro area. Often on top of extensive bus/tram systems + intercity rail.
American municipalities are nowhere close, sadly.
Elon’s pattern of trail and error development is evident in his space program too. He orders his engineers to make his imagination real and sets a deadline, then fires it of for the real world to do the beta testing despite warnings his imagination had not quiiiiiite been obtained. A rather sketchy method for things that carry fatal consequences.
If I lived in London or Paris or Manhattan I’d take public transportation because driving is impossible. Even then, only if I couldn’t find a cab or an Uber.
But only necessity would get me out of a car. Cars are simply superior. They go precisely where I want them to go. No one is cutting their toenails. No one is chomping a salad with vinaigrette. There are no lice or rats in my car. No one will be playing videos without headphones. I control the temperature and the music and the degree my seat reclines. Hell is other people and other people are in trains and buses.
People talking about the wonders of public transportation are like vegans trying to sell me on their grass-clippings-and-manure ‘hamburgers.’ I can either sit in my heated and air conditioned leathers seats, all alone, with all sorts of room, with the top down and the sun on my face, or I can sit in a gloomy, noisy tube, on a plastic bench next to a guy who weighs 300 pounds and smells like soup. That’s not a hard choice.
A better way to sell public transportation would be, ‘Look, we know it sucks balls, but it’s just one of those shit sandwiches we have to eat in order to help the environment. So suffer, and shut up.’ That would be honest at least.
@Michael Reynolds: She smelled exactly like beef vegetable soup.
-Charlie in So I Married an Axe Murderer
@Kathy: I believe flying a plane is harder than driving a car in an empty parking lot.
@Matt: what horrible car do you own? My Suburu Forester (2019) is perfectly lovely. It does occasionally want to guide me back into my lane to kill a bicyclist, but it’s really very gentle about it, keeps me on my toes, and honestly that’s more the bicyclist’s problem than mine.
@Michael Reynolds: We need to improve our public transportation, and gaslight people into believing it is better and more pleasant than it is, so we can enjoy less traffic in our nice cars with pleasant environments away from all those icky people.
I think that’s the difference between a leftist and a liberal — a leftist wants everyone to take public transportation, and a liberal wants everyone else to take public transportation. Public transportation should be a robust option for all those other people.
(A conservative complains that the bus is in the way, filled with brown people and poor people. And doesn’t realize that the bus is keeping so many more cars out of the way. And has middle class and upper middle class people in it too, on many routes)
@Gustopher: It’s a 2018 Honda that is a fine car outside of the collision mitigation stupidity. The mechanics under the electronics is reliable and easy to work on. I would rate it as a great car if I could only disable the collision mitigation without breaking adaptive cruise control and everything else. I can disable the collision stuff on start up but it’s a bit involved and lasts until you shut the car off. If it was just a quick button press that would be different. Instead I have to wait a minute or two for it to disable. When you’re in and out of the car +40x in one evening the time required adds up to a ridiculous amount