Politics And Current Events

[grunthy]

https://jalopnik.com/video-shows-driver ... 1823970417

This is a great example of why I think self-driving cars for everyone are a lot further off than we think. The idea that there is someone always behind the wheel to take over in case of emergency is a tremendously flawed one. Whenever you are driving a vehicle, you (should) be much more focused on what is going on...because you control every movement, you are generally engaged nonstop.

It is not realistic to expect people to maintain concentration on the road in front of them nonstop whenever they are not involved in the operation of the vehicle. Attention spans are bad enough as they are, but if you had to sit there for a long period of time without actually doing anything, your mind is going to wander like it would if you were sitting on the bus. There are too many judgment call situations that require human reflexes and decision-making, even if humans often make the wrong decision, IMO.

I think it will be the cleaning and maintenance issues that keep them from mainstream for a very long time. High cost of repair and you have to clean them like every day so the sensors work.

wrong, sensors are cleaned while the vehicle is operating

I am?

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/22/technol ... index.html

Startup Seeva is developing similar technology to clean autonomous vehicles' sensors. Seeva already offers a system that heats washer fluid to as hot as 160 degrees, and sprays it on surfaces to clean bugs, dirt or ice.
But because autonomous vehicles can have dozens of sensors, Seeva CEO Diane Lansinger doesn't imagine products like this will be able to clean every camera, radar or LIDAR, a laser sensor that most experts see as essential for self-driving vehicles.
"For self-driving technology to scale, we can't have engineers paid $150,000 a year, running around the vehicles and wiping them down," Lansinger said. "It's going to be quite awhile before we get away from the manual care."

[shmenguin]

https://jalopnik.com/video-shows-driver ... 1823970417

This is a great example of why I think self-driving cars for everyone are a lot further off than we think. The idea that there is someone always behind the wheel to take over in case of emergency is a tremendously flawed one. Whenever you are driving a vehicle, you (should) be much more focused on what is going on...because you control every movement, you are generally engaged nonstop.

It is not realistic to expect people to maintain concentration on the road in front of them nonstop whenever they are not involved in the operation of the vehicle. Attention spans are bad enough as they are, but if you had to sit there for a long period of time without actually doing anything, your mind is going to wander like it would if you were sitting on the bus. There are too many judgment call situations that require human reflexes and decision-making, even if humans often make the wrong decision, IMO.

I'm not sure even if he was paying attention, he would have been able to stop in time to not hit her.

There’s nothing about this video that screams, “because self-driving car”. Reckless pedestrian. A driver who MAY have been able to avoid the collision if they were dialed in. Seems like a bad pedestrian and an ambiguously iffy car operator. It doesn’t make me feel unsafe around this technology, though.

Wouldn’t mind if they were able to designate only certain roads for this beta period. Like roads that have zero pedestrian access points. But things seem to be going well.

[MrKennethTKangaroo]

lets face it, most of the time, we are all ambiguously iffy drivers

[dodint]

Have you met dodint...?

Isn't he a ambulance chaser? or worse yet an aspiring one?

Meh, that JD is looking more and more like a wallhanger at this point.

[robbiestoupe]

https://jalopnik.com/video-shows-driver ... 1823970417

This is a great example of why I think self-driving cars for everyone are a lot further off than we think. The idea that there is someone always behind the wheel to take over in case of emergency is a tremendously flawed one. Whenever you are driving a vehicle, you (should) be much more focused on what is going on...because you control every movement, you are generally engaged nonstop.

It is not realistic to expect people to maintain concentration on the road in front of them nonstop whenever they are not involved in the operation of the vehicle. Attention spans are bad enough as they are, but if you had to sit there for a long period of time without actually doing anything, your mind is going to wander like it would if you were sitting on the bus. There are too many judgment call situations that require human reflexes and decision-making, even if humans often make the wrong decision, IMO.

I think it will be the cleaning and maintenance issues that keep them from mainstream for a very long time. High cost of repair and you have to clean them like every day so the sensors work.

wrong, sensors are cleaned while the vehicle is operating

I am?

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/22/technol ... index.html

Startup Seeva is developing similar technology to clean autonomous vehicles' sensors. Seeva already offers a system that heats washer fluid to as hot as 160 degrees, and sprays it on surfaces to clean bugs, dirt or ice.
But because autonomous vehicles can have dozens of sensors, Seeva CEO Diane Lansinger doesn't imagine products like this will be able to clean every camera, radar or LIDAR, a laser sensor that most experts see as essential for self-driving vehicles.
"For self-driving technology to scale, we can't have engineers paid $150,000 a year, running around the vehicles and wiping them down," Lansinger said. "It's going to be quite awhile before we get away from the manual care."

You said for a very long time. I'm going to pull a grunthyism on you and say there is somebody I know who is working on this technology right now, and it is coming sooner than you think.

[Lemon Berry Lobster]

Let's get MR25 in here to confirm

[tifosi77]

I'm sure I’ve told this story before, but a buddy of mine years ago was walking back to his car with his wife and children after attending an event in downtown Pittsburgh. A homeless guy asked him for money, and when he refused the man started following them and screaming threats. Eventually, my buddy turned around and pulled his snubnose revolver just far enough out of his front pocket so that the homeless guy could see it. The homeless guy immediately ran away. My friend didn’t bother calling the police, since the guy would have been long gone by the time they would have arrived. He put his kids in the car and went home. Most studies would call that DGU even though no shots were fired and no police were involved. So would I. But that certainly wasn't a case where "violent criminal activity" actually occurred, and if one counts only situations where shots are fired or the police are called, then that event would not be considered a DGU.

There's a lot to unpack in that post. I'll sum it up by saying I do not believe the instances of legal DGUs exceeds six figures in a year. That's a not an insignificant number, but it also is not a panacea of mass safety, either. And I will certainly concede that it's far more likely than not that the vast majority of DGUs involve no shots being fired, and which do not result in a police report; I've made that argument here myself, in the past.

However, this incident you cite here is no better or worse than the yahoo in the parking lot after the basketball game in my opinion. I specifically cite 'violent criminal activity' because there is a standard for the use of deadly force, and if you're going to show your gun, it needs to be a scenario in which you'd be justified employing the weapon. Your buddy being accosted by an aggressive homeless guy and going for his gun is, to me, only one degree of Kevin Bacon removed from the level of irresponsible conduct that we see in police officers who employ deadly force against unarmed people 'because they were afraid for their safety'. In fact, I'll go you one better: Your friend escalated that conflict, and that's not the purpose of a gun in a self defense capacity.

[tifosi77]

World's dumbest graph

OMG I have so many questions about this graph, namely how did it get approved for TV

https://t.co/3JQ5SCJ8xF

That looks to be about a..... what...... a six lie?

[eddy]

BREAKING: John Dowd, one of President Donald Trump’s attorneys, is resigning amid a shake-up of the president’s legal team.

[tifosi77]

I hope that’s true...but I have doubts that Kushner can actually negotiate since no one has ever heard him speak

[tifosi77]

Interesting read from Noah Feldman for Bloomberg, regarding Jared Kushner's attempt at brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... ed-kushner

In essence, Kushner has approached the Israel-Palestine question by treating it as an adjunct to a broader regional realignment of Sunni states plus Israel against Shiite Iran.

His laser-like focus has been on Saudi Arabia, which is signaling that it’s prepared to develop warm and even official ties to Israel if only peace can be established. The basic idea is for the Saudis and other Gulf states to pressure the Palestinians to the table. Then Trump and Kushner will deliver the Israelis -- or at least try.

Other negotiators in the past have sought to regionalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kushner has gotten further than any of his predecessors on this front.

After the Qatari thing last year, the unfortunate problem here is that there's no way you can convince me any progress on this front is anything but a secondary effect of Kush primarily seeking the best outcome for his personal business interests. Even if he sorts something out - which would probably be a pretty great thing - it will be tainted.

[tifosi77]

I hope that’s true...but I have doubts that Kushner can actually negotiate since no one has ever heard him speak

The writer is generally well-regarded in the academic/policy community...he's not a partisan by any stretch. This is honestly something I wouldn't have suspected or even really known about. It does seem Kushner's team is taking a good tack at approaching the M.E.

He's not a partisan, in the R-D continuum. But he does have some fairly......... let's go with 'unique'..... views on the nexus of religion and politics in the region.

[tifosi77]

I would take anything coming from The Intercept with a grain of salt...they lean far left and have a track record of fabricating sources and stories.

I admit that I sort of have a soft spot for The Intercept after their insistence on using the term 'assassination' when talking about the flying killer robots.

[tifosi77]

A cooperating witness in the special counsel investigation worked for more than a year to turn a top Trump fund-raiser into an instrument of influence at the White House for the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to interviews and previously undisclosed documents.

Hundreds of pages of correspondence between the two men reveal an active effort to cultivate President Trump on behalf of the two oil-rich Arab monarchies, both close American allies.

High on the agenda of the two men — George Nader, a political adviser to the de facto ruler of the U.A.E., and Elliott Broidy, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee — was pushing the White House to remove Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, backing confrontational approaches to Iran and Qatar and repeatedly pressing the president to meet privately outside the White House with the leader of the U.A.E.

Mr. Tillerson was fired last week, and the president has adopted tough approaches toward both Iran and Qatar.

Mr. Nader tempted the fund-raiser, Mr. Broidy, with the prospect of more than $1 billion in contracts for his private security company, Circinus, and he helped deliver deals worth more than $200 million with the United Arab Emirates. He also flattered Mr. Broidy about “how well you handle Chairman,” a reference to Mr. Trump, and repeated to his well-connected friend that he told the effective rulers of both Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. about “the Pivotal Indispensable Magical Role you are playing to help them.”

Mr. Nader’s cultivation of Mr. Broidy, laid out in documents provided to The New York Times, provides a case study in the way two Persian Gulf monarchies have sought to gain influence inside the Trump White House. Mr. Nader has been granted immunity in a deal for his cooperation with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to people familiar with the matter, and his relationship with Mr. Broidy may also offer clues to the direction of that inquiry.

Mr. Nader has now been called back from abroad to provide additional testimony, one person familiar with the matter said this week. Mr. Mueller’s investigators have already asked witnesses about Mr. Nader’s contacts with top Trump administration officials and about his possible role in funneling Emirati money to Mr. Trump’s political efforts, a sign that the investigation has broadened to examine the role of foreign money in the Trump administration.

The documents contain evidence not previously reported that Mr. Nader also held himself out as intermediary for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who met with Mr. Trump on Tuesday in the Oval Office at the beginning of a tour of the United States to meet with political and business leaders.
A lawyer for Mr. Nader declined to comment. Two people close to Mr. Broidy said he had not been contacted by the special counsel’s investigators. In a statement, Mr. Broidy said that his efforts “aimed to strengthen the national security of the United States, in full coordination with the U.S. government.” He added, “I have always believed strongly in countering both Iran and Islamic extremism, and in working closely with our friends in the Arab world in order to do so.”

The documents, which included emails, business proposals and contracts, were provided by an anonymous group critical of Mr. Broidy’s advocacy of American foreign policies in the Middle East. The Times showed Mr. Broidy’s representatives copies of all of the emails it intended to cite in an article. In his statement, Mr. Broidy said he could not confirm the authenticity of all of them, noting that The Times was able to show him only printouts and not the original emails.

A spokesman for Mr. Broidy has said he believes the documents were stolen by hackers working for Qatar in retaliation for his work critical of the country — a regional nemesis of the Saudis and Emiratis.

“We now possess irrefutable evidence tying Qatar to this unlawful attack on, and espionage directed against, a prominent United States citizen within the territory of the United States,” Lee S. Wolosky, a lawyer for Mr. Broidy, wrote this week in a letter to the Qatari ambassador in Washington. If Qatar was not responsible, “we expect your government to hold accountable the rogue actors in Qatar who have caused Mr. Broidy substantial damages.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/us/p ... trref=t.co

Qatar is home to the largest US base in the Middle East, so it's not like the stakes are elevated here or anything.

[columbia]

FEC looking into Nunes...lol
https://amp.thedailybeast.com/devin-nun ... ssion=true

[tifosi77]

BREAKING: John Dowd, one of President Donald Trump’s attorneys, is resigning amid a shake-up of the president’s legal team.

John Dowd Resigns as Trump’s Lead Lawyer in Special Counsel Inquiry

The president’s lead lawyer for the special counsel investigation, John Dowd, resigned on Thursday, according to two people briefed on the matter, days after the president called for an end to the inquiry.

Mr. Dowd, who took over the president’s legal team last summer, had considered leaving several times in recent months and ultimately concluded that Mr. Trump was increasingly ignoring his advice, one of the people said. Under Mr. Dowd’s leadership, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had advised him to cooperate with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russia’s election interference and possible ties to Trump associates as well as whether the president obstructed the inquiry.

The president was said to be pleased with Mr. Dowd’s resignation...

[shmenguin]

unrelated to gun policy, here's a nugget of insight...if a homeless person is yelling at you, that's where it's going to end. go find a youtube video a physical altercation if you want. that's not an exception you should be planning for. just keep on walking and you'll be fine.

[columbia]

Rush just me that the Mueller investigation is just a cover up...for what, he didn’t say.

[Viva la Ben]

It’s that the large hadron collider in CERN opened a gateway to another reality leaking into our own.

[grunthy]

https://jalopnik.com/video-shows-driver ... 1823970417

This is a great example of why I think self-driving cars for everyone are a lot further off than we think. The idea that there is someone always behind the wheel to take over in case of emergency is a tremendously flawed one. Whenever you are driving a vehicle, you (should) be much more focused on what is going on...because you control every movement, you are generally engaged nonstop.

It is not realistic to expect people to maintain concentration on the road in front of them nonstop whenever they are not involved in the operation of the vehicle. Attention spans are bad enough as they are, but if you had to sit there for a long period of time without actually doing anything, your mind is going to wander like it would if you were sitting on the bus. There are too many judgment call situations that require human reflexes and decision-making, even if humans often make the wrong decision, IMO.

I think it will be the cleaning and maintenance issues that keep them from mainstream for a very long time. High cost of repair and you have to clean them like every day so the sensors work.

wrong, sensors are cleaned while the vehicle is operating

I am?

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/22/technol ... index.html

Startup Seeva is developing similar technology to clean autonomous vehicles' sensors. Seeva already offers a system that heats washer fluid to as hot as 160 degrees, and sprays it on surfaces to clean bugs, dirt or ice.
But because autonomous vehicles can have dozens of sensors, Seeva CEO Diane Lansinger doesn't imagine products like this will be able to clean every camera, radar or LIDAR, a laser sensor that most experts see as essential for self-driving vehicles.
"For self-driving technology to scale, we can't have engineers paid $150,000 a year, running around the vehicles and wiping them down," Lansinger said. "It's going to be quite awhile before we get away from the manual care."

You said for a very long time. I'm going to pull a grunthyism on you and say there is somebody I know who is working on this technology right now, and it is coming sooner than you think.

That’s not how grunthyism works. It relates to expressing opinions, not facts. If you cannot provide proof, then your facts aren’t facts.

[shafnutz05]

https://apnews.com/407c69a1155b4231894f ... n-the-rise

“We chose a gender-neutral name, Riley, for my daughter,” said Lori Kinkler, a psychologist in San Antonio, Texas. “We knew her sex, but gender is fluid and yet to be determined. Of all the difficulties faced by those who live beyond, or across, the binary, we didn’t want name-changing to be one of them. ... I like that she feels she has options and knows she’ll be accepted by us no matter what.” Riley is 3.

“We named our baby Avery Morgann. The intention was to give them more room to define themselves as they get older. Also, name changes are expensive and frustrating,” said Portland, Oregon, parent C.J. Alicandro, who strives for gender neutrality in all ways for the 2 1/2-year-old.

“We wanted to set up Avery with an opportunity to not be limited as much as possible by a name and be able to choose an identity as much as possible, given the confines that are forced upon them,” said Alicandro, a 31-year-old social worker.

[eddy]

https://apnews.com/407c69a1155b4231894f ... n-the-rise

“We chose a gender-neutral name, Riley, for my daughter,” said Lori Kinkler, a psychologist in San Antonio, Texas. “We knew her sex, but gender is fluid and yet to be determined. Of all the difficulties faced by those who live beyond, or across, the binary, we didn’t want name-changing to be one of them. ... I like that she feels she has options and knows she’ll be accepted by us no matter what.” Riley is 3.

“We named our baby Avery Morgann. The intention was to give them more room to define themselves as they get older. Also, name changes are expensive and frustrating,” said Portland, Oregon, parent C.J. Alicandro, who strives for gender neutrality in all ways for the 2 1/2-year-old.

“We wanted to set up Avery with an opportunity to not be limited as much as possible by a name and be able to choose an identity as much as possible, given the confines that are forced upon them,” said Alicandro, a 31-year-old social worker.

pretty sure name change is at the bottom of all of those difficulties. I don't even know what they mean by gender is fluid and yet to be determined. Crazy times. Also what is that gif from?

[Dickie Dunn]

https://apnews.com/407c69a1155b4231894f ... n-the-rise

“We chose a gender-neutral name, Riley, for my daughter,” said Lori Kinkler, a psychologist in San Antonio, Texas. “We knew her sex, but gender is fluid and yet to be determined. Of all the difficulties faced by those who live beyond, or across, the binary, we didn’t want name-changing to be one of them. ... I like that she feels she has options and knows she’ll be accepted by us no matter what.” Riley is 3.

“We named our baby Avery Morgann. The intention was to give them more room to define themselves as they get older. Also, name changes are expensive and frustrating,” said Portland, Oregon, parent C.J. Alicandro, who strives for gender neutrality in all ways for the 2 1/2-year-old.

“We wanted to set up Avery with an opportunity to not be limited as much as possible by a name and be able to choose an identity as much as possible, given the confines that are forced upon them,” said Alicandro, a 31-year-old social worker.

[columbia]

I thought the them in the second paragraph was just referring to children in general...then saw it was also used in the first.

Oy vey

[Lemon Berry Lobster]

Save a bullet for me shaf.