Favorites November 6th 2023
Tim Lee has not been particularly positive on Cruise's current situation, but the reporting that Cruise cars phone home for assistance relatively often is not particularly bad. When they had safety drivers they were going thousands of miles without a disengagement, when they switched to fully driverless it made sense to be extremely conservative and ‘phone home’ often.
Now that politics is global, really dumb ideas can spread across oceans. The UK is so NIMBY that they recently blocked a datacenter from being built despite an 'urgent need' for it, because it might block the view of green spaces from the motorway.
Electrification went faster for the easier vehicles, but we've still got a ways to go on larger vehicles. Relatively, is Musk's behavior to blame for sales of EVs slowing a bit? Less related: Nigeria has installed massive amounts of solar capacity since the government ended fossil fuel subsidies.
Longer Reads
• Long discussion of comparing civilian casualties in Ukraine vs Gaza. TL;DR: Ukrainian civilian deaths are undercounted, especially in the regions captured by Russia.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Hamas definitely recognizes that they're part of Cold War 2 (src)
– 390,000 full time jobs due to Youtube (src)
– Yemen (really Houthi rebels in Yemen) became the first in history to initiate combat in space. (Israel shot down their ballistic missile outside the atmosphere) (src)
– A basic BART extension is costing as much as an entire rail system in montreal (src)
– New study finds fewer accidents in 35mph zones if you use 9 foot wide lanes instead of 10 or 12. (src)
– Cruise may be having trouble, but Waymo released a study arguing that they're now clearly safer than human drivers. (src)
– "[China] has built enough auto factories to make every car sold in China, Europe and the United States" (src)
– Taiwanese polling indicates folks are willing to fight China. (src)
– More Cold War 2 discussion. (src)
– You don't need to say Israel is doing genocide to be able to say that we don't need to be giving them military aid. (src)
– One year later, Twitter still hasn't paid severance to employees they laid off. (src)
– People are certain the economy is terrible despite the fact that they've got a job and/or a raise. (src)
– Trump forgot which years he was president during the real estate bench trial (src)
– The two biggest GOP successes in living military are PEPFAR and Operation Warp Speed. The GOP is in the midst of disowning both of them. (src)