The Consequence of Matters

  The New York Times Magazine has a long piece on the development of Tesla's "full self driving" software. It is pretty interesting, but one thing stood out to me. Musk said straight up that he is deliberately using his customers as test subjects in the development process. It stood out because as far as I can see, it is blatantly illegal. Because of the Nuremberg trials, the Tuskegee experiments, and quite a few other events where dangerous experiments were performed on people against their will or even without their knowledge, human subjects research is strictly regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services under the Common Rule. The rule is a little vague about how you insure the rules are being obeyed, it simply mandates that you will. Most universities and research labs comply using something called an Institutional Review Board. All research proposals must be submitted to the IRB and it will conduct oversight throughout the project. An IRB can force signi...

  "Why would Meta do this? The company seems to understand that Trump’s attacks undermine democracy and can destabilize the country." Because Mark Zuckerberg has made it abundantly clear for years that he believes nothing whatsoever should stand in the way of monetizing the users of Facebook for advertising purposes. He does not believe in privacy. In 2010, he said the idea of privacy is no longer a social norm, and that we no longer have an expectation of privacy. That was to justify a change of Facebook's privacy settings that dramatically increased the amount of personal information exposed to the world on Facebook. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, said at the time that "...the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data." Facebook has not changed since then. There has been one scandal after another stemming directly from this cavalier approach to your privacy. Each ti...

  At this point, the secret documents scandal leads me to two observations. 1. This has been said ad nauseum but bears repeating because information dies if it isn't. What Biden and Pence did is in no way comparable to what Trump did. Both Biden and Pence appear to have mistakenly packed some classified documents at the end of their time in office. In both cases, it was their people who found the documents, and their lawyers who immediately contacted the National Archives and the Department of Justice to return them. Both are cooperating with the investigations. I could believe that Trump deliberately took them (he has a fetish for souvenirs) or that he was waiting for the election to be overthrown until the last possible moment and they just got swept up in the rush of mad packing when he left. I lean a bit toward deliberate simply because in the Trump hotel bar in New York, there is an empty folder marked secret and a document marked confidential publicly displayed along with a t...

  Before the election, Congress was a lock for Republicans in a wave election because The President Always Loses His First Midterm and inflation. Day after post mortems are all saying similar things -- various mixtures of Biggest Loser Trump, shitty candidates, and Dobbs. This is all based on no data whatsoever but when did that ever stop a political pundit from having an Insight. While these no doubt played a role, I suspect the main story is a lot simpler. The number of voters who might swing either way is getting smaller and smaller. The number of moderates is shrinking (thankfully, mostly to the benefit of liberals), and most of them are moderate in name only, pretty reliably voting for one side or the other. I don't think we'll see wave elections again for a while. The respective sides have sorted out their ideologies and are now so locked into their positions that they will not vote for anyone from the other side under any circumstances. This is why a certifiable moron an...