News bits: Tesla & customer complaints; About the debt; Etc.

From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files: Jalopnik writes about Tesla's bad attitude toward customers and complaints about safety:

Whistleblower Drops 100 Gigabytes Of Tesla Secrets To German News Site

The files contain over 1,000 accident reports involving phantom braking or unintended acceleration--mostly in the U.S. and Germany

A German news outlet sifted through over 23,000 of Tesla’s internal files and found a disturbing trend of brushing off customers complaining about dangerous Autopilot glitches while covering the company’s ass.

Customers from the U.S. and Europe told Handelsblatt Tesla wasn’t too interested in assisting with their issues, but seemed more intent on covering for the company. It turns out, this was explicit policy at Tesla: 

 

How did the company deal with complaints? The Tesla files also provide information about this. The files show that employees have precise guidelines for communicating with customers. The top priority is obviously: offer as little attack surface as possible.

For each incident there are bullet points for the “technical review”. The employees who enter this review into the system regularly make it clear that the report is “for internal use only”. Each entry also contains a note in bold type that information, if at all, may only be passed on “VERBALLY to the customer”.

“Do not copy and paste the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer,” it said. Vehicle data should also not be released without permission. If, despite the advice, “an involvement of a lawyer cannot be prevented”, this must be recorded.

A bit of the Google translated Handelsblatt article:

"My autopilot almost killed me": Tesla files cast doubt on Elon Musk's promises

Insiders have passed 100 gigabytes of data to the Handelsblatt, which is said to come from Tesla's IT system. They suggest that the automaker has bigger technical problems than previously thought. Tesla speaks of data theft.

For Tesla, building self-driving vehicles is a question of existence. Developing a working autopilot, said CEO Elon Musk in June 2022, “decides whether Tesla is worth a lot of money or practically zero”.

This resonates with me. On two occasions while on the freeway driving with cruise control (not autopilot) with no car in my lane ahead of me, my Tesla Model 3 slammed on the brakes while sounding a loud urgent collision warning. It came out of nowhere. That scared the crap out of me. The car's speed dropped by ~35 mph real quick. I had no time to control what happened. Fortunately no one was behind me, so no collision happened.

Elon urgently needs to pull his head out of his ass, get his stupid mind off his Twitter hellscape, and instead focus on Tesla car safety. But given his gigantic ego and shameless arrogance, I suspect his head will stay firmly embedded right where it is now. Elon is not endangering just Tesla owners and people in his cars. He is endangering the public at large.

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About the debt ceiling: The NYT writes:

Yellen’s Debt Limit Warnings Went Unheeded, 

Leaving Her to Face Fallout

In the days after November’s midterm elections, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen was feeling upbeat about the fact that Democrats had performed better than expected and maintained control of the Senate.

“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Ms. Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”

Democrats did not heed Ms. Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of President Biden’s agenda.

Yellen currently projects that the US will start defaulting on debts on June 5.

Q: Why should Yellen face fallout for something that is the fault of congress and beyond her control?

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From Russia's brutal tyranny: The WaPo writes:

Parishioners have denounced Russian priests who advocated peace instead of victory in the war on Ukraine. Teachers lost their jobs after children tattled that they opposed the war. Neighbors who bore some trivial grudge for years have snitched on longtime foes. Workers rat on one another to their bosses or directly to the police or the Federal Security Service.

This is the hostile, paranoid atmosphere of Russians at war with Ukraine and with one another. As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime cracks down on critics of the war and other political dissenters, citizens are policing one another in an echo of the darkest years of Joseph Stalin’s repression, triggering investigations, criminal charges, prosecutions and dismissals from work.

The effect is chilling, with denunciations strongly encouraged by the state and news of arrests and prosecutions amplified by propagandist commentators on federal television stations and Telegram channels. In March last year, Putin called on the nation to purge itself by spitting out traitors “like gnats.” He has since issued repeated dark warnings about internal enemies, claiming that Russia is fighting for its survival.

This could happen in the US. It probably will happen if voters keep putting Republicans in power in Washington. The Christian nationalist and the brass knuckles capitalism wings of the radical right Republican Party are both inherently authoritarian. The former dreams of a corrupt Christian Taliban, while the latter lusts after a corrupt autocratic plutocracy.

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Air-Gen tech: An Update: Air-gen is the use of materials with tiny nanopores in it to generate electricity using water vapor in the air to naturally create an electrical battery. At this point, the batteries actually work. Now, the unknown question is whether it is possible to make the nanopored materials on a gigantic scale. Also to be done is to see if there are some materials that are more efficient than the current early-generation devices. If this can be made to work on a gigantic scale, it will probably take ~4-6 years to begin to come online. The WaPo writes:

Nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity, scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously producing clean energy with little pollution.

The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material can be used, like wood or silicon, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores.

“What we have invented, you can imagine it’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,” said Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the senior author of the study.

The air-powered generator, known as an “Air-gen,” would offer continuous clean electricity since it uses the energy from humidity, which is always present, rather than depending on the sun or wind. Unlike solar panels or wind turbines, which need specific environments to thrive, Air-gens could conceivably go anywhere, Yao said.

The device, the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair, is dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores. The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair.

The tiny holes allow the water in the air to pass through in a way that would create a charge imbalance in the upper and lower parts of the device, effectively creating a battery that runs continuously.

Yao estimated that roughly 1 billion Air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions. The team hopes to lower both the number of devices needed and the space they take up by making the tool more efficient.

 

The original discovery of Air-gen in 2020 was in protein that the bacterium Geobacter sulfurrducens makes naturally. The Engineer commented:

The laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) have created Air-gen with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere. 

The Air-gen device requires a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick [about one-eighth the diameter of a human hair], the researchers said. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an electrical current between the two electrodes.

The device produces a sustained voltage of around 0.5 volts across a 7-micrometer-thick film, with a current density of around 17 microamperes per square centimeter.

The original discovery came from observations that the flagella or pili of Geobacter bacteria were electrically conducting, basically acting as nanowires in water. Phys Org wrote in 2017:

Microbiologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report that they have discovered a new type of natural wire produced by bacteria that could greatly accelerate the researchers' goal of developing sustainable "green" conducting materials for the electronics industry. The study by Derek Lovley and colleagues appears this week in mBio, the American Society of Microbiology's premier journal.

As Lovley explains, "Microbial nanowires are a revolutionary electronic material with substantial advantages over man-made materials. Chemically synthesizing nanowires in the lab requires toxic chemicals, high temperatures and/or expensive metals. The energy requirements are enormous. By contrast, natural microbial nanowires can be mass-produced at room temperature from inexpensive renewable feedstocks in bioreactors with much lower energy inputs. And the final product is free of toxic components."

Until now Lovely's lab has been working with the nanowires of just one bacterium, Geobacter sulfurreducens. "Our early studies focused on the one Geobacter because we were just trying to understand why a microbe would make tiny wires," Lovley says. "Now we are most interested in the nanowires as an electronic material and would like to better understand the full scope of what nature may have to offer for these practical applications."

Artist's cool rendition of

G. sulfurreducens

Cooler electron microscope rendition

G. sulfurrducens lives in the mud or sediment in water that is depleted of oxygen. The bug chemically converts minerals in the mud as its energy source. It "breathes" minerals outside the bug's body, not oxygen. It has a strange lifestyle: 

Geobacter sulfurreducens was the second Geobacter recovered in pure culture, yet the first to have a genetic system and a sequenced genome. It quickly became the model representative of a group known for coupling organic matter degradation to metal reduction and mineralization. Conductivity of type IV pili at unprecedented rates and distances was demonstrated in G. sulfurreducens. The pilus nanowires extend the cell’s respiratory chain beyond its envelope to reduce iron oxides to magnetite, which electronically couples Geobacter to syntrophic partners. The pili also trap uranium extracellularly to prevent its permeation in the cell envelope and dynamically disassemble and reassemble to detach the mineral and continue breathing. Cells use the nanowires to grow as electroactive biofilms on electrodes, allowing current harvesting in bioelectrochemical devices. G. sulfurreducens electrified microbiology and set the foundation for the electromicrobiology subfield.

News bits: Supreme Court guts a key environmental regulation; Whacking Ken Paxton; Etc.

The AP writes:

Supreme Court limits federal power over wetlands, 

boosts property rights over clean water

The Supreme Court on Thursday made it harder for the federal government to police water pollution in a decision that strips protections from wetlands that are isolated from larger bodies of water.

It’s the second decision in as many years in which a conservative majority of the court narrowed the reach of environmental regulations.

The justices boosted property rights over concerns about clean water in a ruling in favor of an Idaho couple who sought to build a house near Priest Lake in the state’s panhandle. Chantell and Michael Sackett objected when federal officials identified a soggy portion of the property as a wetlands that required them to get a permit before building.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that wetlands can only be regulated under the Clean Water Act if they have a “continuous surface connection” to larger, regulated bodies of water. There is no such connection on the Sacketts’ property.

The court jettisoned the 17-year-old opinion by their former colleague, Anthony Kennedy, allowing regulation of wetlands that have a “significant nexus” to the larger waterways.

Kennedy’s opinion had been the standard for evaluating whether wetlands were covered under the 1972 landmark environmental law. Opponents had objected that the standard was vague and unworkable.

The pro-pollution, brass knuckles capitalist Republican Party's animosity toward regulations and protecting the environment is on display yet again. Private property rights trump the public interest as usual.  

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From the Shocking and Amazing Files: In an amazing move against years of blatant corruption, the Texas House of Representatives filed articles of impeachment against Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is probably one of the to five most criminal/corrupt people in high level government anywhere in America. I didn't think he could be impeached by his own party, which has serious chronic corruption problems of its own. The NYT comments: "the committee filed 20 articles of impeachment against Mr. Paxton, charging him with a litany of abuses including taking bribes, disregarding his official duty, obstructing justice in a separate securities fraud case pending against him, making false statements on official documents and reports, and abusing the public trust."

Ken has been a naughty boy. Articles 7-9 and part of 10 is shown below.

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From the climate change denier party: The Independent writes:

DeSantis dismisses climate change, calling it ‘politicization of weather’

Florida governor repeats common misconception about climate change and fierce storms

Mr DeSantis was speaking to former congressman Trey Gowdy, a conservative Republican who himself is a climate change denier, in an interview with the conservative news network following his disastrous Twitter Spaces event minutes earlier with Elon Musk.  

The governor went on to say that he believed emissions could be reduced by encouraging innovation in the private sector, and dismissed the necessity or effectiveness of government regulations on that subject.

As long as voters keep putting Republicans in power, America will be seriously crippled in its ability to even try to deal with climate change. The private sector can't and won't effectively deal with the climate issue. It's a miracle that Biden got to sign a bill with non-trivial spending to mitigate climate change. 

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From the anti-democracy, anti-rule of law party: DeSantis Says He Will Look Into Pardoning Jan. 6 Rioters If Elected President. If Trump doesn't get a chance to pardon the traitors, DeSantis will do it. 

Most Republican Party elites still support the Republican Party's1/6 coup attempt and the traitors who participated. The GOP normalized and justified the 1/6 treason event as "legitimate political discourse."

Legitimate political discourse at

the Republican's 1/6 coup attempt

Voter intimidation by White supremacists is 

legitimate political discourse

Right Wing Death Squads intimidating people  

is legitimate political discourse

Acting and looking stupid while heavily armed 

in public is legitimate political discourse

Artificial intelligence advances rapidly and increasingly so

American society and governance is a turtle. AGI (artificial generative intelligence) is a fast cheetah running flat out and pulling away from society and government at a shocking speed. Folks, we are caught flat footed. This thing is out of control. And, it's getting smarter by the day.

The WaPo writes:

Artificial intelligence has become shockingly capable in the past year. The latest chatbots can conduct fluid conversations, craft poems, even write lines of computer code while the latest image-makers can create fake “photos” that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. 

It wasn’t always this way. As recently as two years ago, AI created robotic text riddled with errors. Images were tiny, pixelated and lacked artistic appeal. The mere suggestion that AI might one day rival human capability and talent drew ridicule from academics.

What is artificial intelligence?
AI is an umbrella term for any form of technology that can perform “intelligent” tasks. For decades, AI has been mostly used for analysis — trawling huge sets of data to find patterns. But a boom in generative AI, which uses this pattern-matching to create words, images and sounds, has opened up new possibilities.

What is generative AI?
The technology backs chatbots such as ChatGPT and image generators, such as Dall-E, which can create words, sounds, images and video, sometimes at a level of sophistication that mimics human creativity. This technology can’t “think” like humans do; it can find patterns and imitate speech, but it can’t interpret meanings.

How does AI learn?
AI can “learn” without programmer to tell it each step, a process called machine learning. It uses neural networks, mathematical systems modeled after the human brain, to find connections in huge data sets. The poems or images it makes may seem creative, but it’s really pattern matching based on which word is most likely to come next.

Much of this recent growth stems from a new way of training AI, called the Transformers model. This method allows the technology to process large blocks of language quickly and to test the fluency of the outcome.

It originated in a 2017 Google study that quickly became one of the field’s most influential pieces of research.

The model allows AI tools to ingest billions of sentences and quickly recognize patterns, resulting in more natural-sounding responses.

Another new training method, called diffusion, has also improved AI image generators such as Dall-E and Midjourney, allowing nearly anyone to create hyper-realistic photos with simple, even nonsensical, text prompts, such as: “Draw me a picture of a rabbit in outer space.”

Researchers feed these AI models billions of images, each paired with a text description, teaching the computer to identify relationships between images and words.

The diffusion method then layers “noise” — visual clutter that looks like TV static — over the images. The AI system learns to recognize the noise and subtract it until the image is once again clear.

The cost to compute is dropping. In 2023, $1 buys about 35.5 billion FLOPs/second. A FLOP refers to FLoating Point Operations.* Note the steep drop in price in the curve from 2019 until now.

* I guess FLOP is easier to say than FLPO.

 

The BaGuaLu AI system (upper right) uses 14.5 trillion 

parameters, making it currently the most 

sophisticated AI system in operation 

The first AI system in the 1970's, Bootstrap Adaptation (lower

left) operated with 21 parameters

Experts say it’s hard to predict how much better AI will get. Major obstacles stand in the way of further development. These models are expensive to run [Huh? I thought they were getting cheaper to run?] and exact a staggering environmental toll. They confidently churn out wrong, nonsensical and sometimes biased answers, while creating lifelike images that could sow confusion.

Most people are likely to interact with this new technology in the near future. But how useful it will be and what impact it will have on society remains to be seen.

Something serious is going on here and no one has a handle on it. The big players pushing this forward, including the US military and Google, openly admit they are in an arms race and will not slow down for fear of being overtaken by enemies or competitors. We are going to experience the good, bad and ambiguous consequences of whatever AGI is turning itself into.

News bits: Tina Turner

Tina Turner died. She was 83. Total bummer. 

1973

This woman was alive

1990

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A NYT opinion opines on controlling plastic in oceans. The bottom lines are (1) international cooperation will be needed, and (2) as long as brass knuckles Republicans retain enough power in the federal government, the US will not cooperate with anyone and will continue to pollute as usual. The article opines:

As the world’s population expands and more people rise out of poverty and into more consumer-oriented lifestyles, demand for plastic-packaged goods will inevitably grow. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicts plastic use will nearly triple by 2060 at the current rate, with most of the growth occurring outside Europe and the United States. Economist Impact and the Nippon Foundation’s Back to Blue Initiative modeled policy scenarios for reducing plastic production by 2050 — none of them resulted in a production rate lower than what we see today.

America's Republican Party. Pro-pollution, fascist, anti-civil liberties, anti-democracy.

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House Democrats obliterate a needed pro-democracy norm: We live in a time when adults who act like spoiled, less than average intelligence children are in power and pushing the country into American fascism. The Hill writes:

Democrats erupt in laughter after Greene calls for decorum in House

Democrats erupted in laughter on the House floor Wednesday when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who was presiding over the chamber — called for decorum.

The heckling came as House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) was delivering floor remarks about the debt ceiling, which has been the subject of high-stakes negotiations between GOP lawmakers and the White House.

As Scalise was urging the Senate and White House to take action on raising the borrowing limit — referencing the bill House Republicans passed last month — a lawmaker yelled out in the chamber.

“We are in fact the only body in this town who has actually taken steps to address the debt ceiling and the spending problem in Washington. I would encourage the Senate to take up the bill, I would encourage the president to get engaged and address this problem, but we already have, the votes are on the board —” Scalise said before pausing to react to the yelling.

It is unclear which lawmaker shouted and what they said.

“Order,” Greene said from the dais, pounding her gavel.

“I ask that the House be in order and there be some decorum on the other side,” Scalise said.

After a roughly 15-second pause, Greene called for decorum in the chamber.

“The members are reminded to abide by decorum of the House,” she said.

Democrats in the chamber then erupted in laughter. Some members — including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) — stood from their seats and started shouting.

Republicans must have loved that. They won't forget this. In the unlikely event that the Dems ever regain control of the House, Republicans being the spoiled rotten adult-children they are will do the same at times and circumstances of their choosing. The Dems should publicly apologize and say they will never do that again. This might lead the House into an occasional (frequent?) shitfest of uncontrolled hate and childish temper tantrum. One thing is for sure, House Republicans won't rise above this because mentally they are not actual adults.

Between explicit Republican Party theocratic fascism and Democratic Party stupid this country is in desperately grave trouble.

This post brought to you by Tina performing Nutbush!

Follow-up from yesterday’s “When you get prayed for” OP…

Fellow blogger, Ellabulldog, is making the claim that pantheism is atheism.

• Do you agree?

• Who/What entity is the ultimate authority on those definitions: Webster, community (the existing folkways and mores), your/the church, fellow pantheists/atheists, the Pope or other religion figureheads, the self, other?

• In truth (whatever that is), are these two categories of “religion” (i.e., “theisms”) merely ECCs (meaning essentially contested concepts, in the eye-of-the-beholder)?

• How do you define these two (disparate?) philosophies?  Go into as much detail as you can.

News bits: A debt limit wild card?; Etc.

The Hill write about a court case filed by National Association of Government Employees that claims (1) the debt ceiling law is unconstitutional, and (2) the law should be suspended. This lawsuit has nothing to do with the bickering between Hose Republicans and Biden over the debt limit. This is an independent attempt to get existing law nullified. The Hill writes:

A federal judge late this month will hear arguments involving the debt limit law and whether it is unconstitutional and should be suspended.

The hearing, set for May 31 at 2 p.m. before U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns, will come hours ahead of when the Biden administration warns the federal government could run out of funds to pay its obligations.

The National Association of Government Employees (NAGE) earlier this month sued over the law that sets the nation’s debt limit, arguing it presents separation-of-powers issues. Yellen and President Biden were named as defendants.

If the limit is reached, NAGE contends Biden would be forced to take over Congress’s spending authority by deciding which payments to prioritize over others. It also would effectively amount to a line-item veto, the union argues, which the Supreme Court has previously rejected.

This strikes me as strange. The union did not argue invalidity of existing debt ceiling law on the basis of the 14th Amendment. How much legal traction the separation of power argument might have is not clear to me. Maybe the union had to rely on this argument because it did not have standing to sue for invalidity on the basis of the 14th A.

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The Catholic church and its sex and inconvenient truth problem: Hundreds of Catholic clergy in Illinois sexually abused thousands of children, AG finds . . . . investigators found that 451 clergy sexually abused nearly 2,000 children since 1950 — far more than the 103 individuals the church had named when the state review began in 2018.

I thought that you must not lie was something in the Bible that could not be ignored. Guess I was mistaken. Too bad there wasn't a commandment that said you most not rape. Of course, that would have been ignored too. Those feisty priests and their libidos. That feisty church and its lies.

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Christian nationalists rise up to defend hate speech and lies: Religion News Service reports: "The National Religious Broadcasters, an association of Christian media outlets, has joined a lawsuit seeking to block a California law that requires social media companies to publish their policies on removing hate speech from their platforms. .... Under the law, companies must disclose in detail how they remove content, including hate speech, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign political interference. They are also required to submit terms of service reports to the state attorney general by Jan. 1, 2024. Fines for noncompliance were set at up to $15,000 per violation per day."

The propaganda spin is blatant and shameless. Here, Christian Taliban theocrats claim that publishing policies on removing hate speech and disinformation is suppressing free speech. That can easily be seen as an implicit admission that Christian nationalist media relies heavily on hate speech and disinformation to spread the infinite love of Jesus on the flock and America.