Senator Holds Up Spending Bill Over Name of Forest, Washington Post Mansplains Government to Cardi B, and Elon Musk Deletes Tesla, SpaceX Facebook Pages: P.M. Links
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Oregon lawyer storms out of a courtroom after failing to prove the local government set his client up.
- Idaho Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) holds up a spending bill to prevent a federal forest being named after a political rival, an ex-governor of Idaho who died last year.
- The Washington Post does a little hand-holding for Cardi B, showing her exactly where all her money is going. The article will soon be taught in schools as a textbook example of "mansplaining." Reason meanwhile treats her like the libertarian hero she is.
- Tariff-advocating A.I. alarmist Elon Musk has Facebook pages for Telsa, SpaceX deleted following the Cambridge Analytica "scandal."
- The stock market takes a tumble after a week of nothing but bad news.
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Idaho Sen. Jim Risch (R ? Idaho) holds up spending bill to prevent a federal forest being named after political rival, ex-governor of Idaho who died last year.
My hero.
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Whatever holds up spending.
The Washington Post does a little hand-holding for Cardi B, showing her exactly where all her money is going.
How was the beat?
Go-go music makes us wanna dance
Do the pony puts us in a chance
Do the Watusi just give us a chance
Then we fall in line…
Cardi B, Eve called. She wants her story back.
Idaho Sen. Jim Risch (R ? Idaho) holds up spending bill to prevent a federal forest being named after political rival, ex-governor of Idaho who died last year.
So assholery is our only hope of getting out of debt?
‘Twas assholes who got us into debt, it’s only fair they get us out.
That is not assholery. It is dickishness. Get it right.
Dicks, pussies, and assholes. Pick three and taste ’em all.
I am only familiar with 2 of those.
Tariff-advocating, A.I. alarmist Elon Musk has Facebook pages for Telsa, SpaceX deleted following Cambridge Analytica “scandal.”
Christ, what an asshole.
Yes, but even a broken asshole shits twice a day or something. Everyone should delete Facebook.
And get a VPN.
I thought my esteem for Musk could go no higher, but he continues to amaze me.
Our modern day Thomas Edison.
Tariff-advocating, A.I. alarmist Elon Musk has Facebook pages for Telsa, SpaceX deleted following Cambridge Analytica “scandal.”
Skynet will be built with cheap foreign components, you know.
Does anybody see any alt-text? Because I don’t.
I caught that. Britches feels left out.
“Reason meanwhile treats her like the libertarian hero she is.”
More shots fired.
I hope he becomes some sort of passive aggressive monster, with every set of links having multiple fuck yous to us.
So a more erudite Weigel?
(Not, like, Dave Weigel, I mean TAFKADD.)
When he’s making time with a lady, BUCS can’t get off until she calls him an asshole and leaves.
So BUCS is like a reverse Louie C.K.?
Yes, especially in that masturbating in front of people will eventually improve his career.
They’re meaty links, so Britches had to leave his mark elseways.
“Meaty Link” was my nickname in college.
It was because Crusty used to lock his bike with a Polish sausage.
[reads alt-text]
Player 2 has entered the game!
Red Tony, looks like there needs to be a supermatch. A Troll Bowl!
Oh snap!
Has anybody seen Ed? Because I don’t.
This dimension’s Eddie Kray left Reason last week in order to open up a vape shop in Harrisburg. Sorry bro.
Why Harrisburg. Why.
He knew a guy.
Well he’s about know the inside of my kidnapping sack.
It better be a Bag Of Holding.
[rimshot!]
I don’t need D&D crap when I’ve got inter-dimensional technology.
Are you reading this Ed?
I’m coming for you.
Hard.
*George Takei voice*
Ohhhh myyyy.
It’s a nice city. There is a river.
Anywhere in the same state as Scranton is garbage.
He got upset that I called him Krayven the Hunter and left. Even though I apologized.
Britches did Alt-Text??????
We lose Heaton?
Grey Horseman riding down the street?
Oregon lawyer storms out of courtroom after failing to prove the local government set his client up.
Presenting the next Attorney General of the United States.
Real potential.
“Real potential” was never my nickname.
Upham served as elected district attorney for Washington County for 20 years before going into private practice.
I’m guessing Upham knows how the system works.
Stock market takes a tumble after a week of nothing but bad news.
Palin’s Buttplug is happy about this.
Now it’s going to be Tump’s economy again.
The Washington Post does a little hand-holding for Cardi B, showing her exactly where all her money is going.
“Now, you see this picture of a guy lighting a bunch of money on fire? Yeah. That’s where all your money is going.”
They just showed her Obama’s “Life of Julia” on constant loop.
Oregon lawyer storms out of courtroom after failing to prove the local government set his client up.
In that lawyer’s defense, local governments and particularly court systems are incestuously corrupt as all get-out.
I hope nobody things I’m being grotesque when I say, I’d love to hold hands with Cardi B.
Just to show you what an old fart I am, had to google to see what a cardi b was. Not impressed.
Such and old fart that you didn’t bother to read the links.
Reading the links is one thing. Clicking on them is something entirely other.
You are supposed to click on them?
Not if you want your comments to remain pure.
Oregon lawyer storms out of courtroom after failing to prove the local government set his client up.
He’s obviously new if he doesn’t realize setting someone up is business as usual.
So, I have a question for all of the creepy-ass foot fetishists who frequent this website:
Would you describe today’s spending bill as a cornholing or more of a fist-fuck?
Singling out the foot-fetishists as creepy is disrespectful to all the other types of disgusting freaky-ass motherfuckers among the Hit’n’Run commentariat.
No, foot fetishists are basically the worst. Only vore is worse.
I defer to your experience. Your terrible, terrible experience.
Simple Mikey’s desire to get spit- roasted by X and I* is worse than any foot fetishist.
*Let that image settle in.
Jesus Christ. That is the worst thing i’ve ever read.
The intense eye contact is to die for.
Just to be clear, the eye contact is between you and X, while Mikey rotates around your penises and makes muffled Ned Beatty noises?
Does it get worse when he believes that both of you are David Weigel, and so he wants to get twinned in the ass and mouth by you/him.
[vomits]
DV/DA like whoa.
🙁
Our sweaty hands embrace as we inject some much-needed salty freedom juice deep inside lucky Mikey.
It’s beautiful.
Two girls and a cup. Hands down winner.
What have either of those things got to do with foot fetishism. I don’t know what happened in the future, but in our time it still refers to weirdos who post pictures from TV shows where characters aren’t wearing shoes.
In my time, it’s usually movies and video games.
Also, Joss Whedon-helmed shows.
I see your Whedon and raise you a Tarantino. Also throw in Peter Chung.
Foot fetishists’ weirdness pales in comparison to feeders and those who enjoy being squashed by obese women.
I mean, we can go down the rabbit-hole of weirdness. I’ve seen some classics, that guy who had an erotic fixation with the state of Ohio, the guy obsessed with floor tiles (particularly ornate ones). Or if you want more general ones you can go into one’s that terrify me. Breath-play gets into that, as does anything involving actual harm.
Foot-fetishists and vore fiends are just the guys who show up when everyone else is talking and make everything weird.
Objection: the floor tile fetishist was a fucking around. I’m talking about legit fetishes like abortion-play.
I concede on the last point though. I find myself dumping my vore on even the mildest of sexual topics.
Was he? Was that confirmed, if so the world is a little darker this day.
Abortion-play is pretty grim. Anything death related is pretty grim. Sometimes I think I came out wrong for wanting people to just be happy and loving to one another.
How has no one brought up furries yet.
Because much like bronies, they’re not as prevalent. And who hasn’t wanted to pretend that they’re a paraplegic autistic turtle wanting to get it on with a pansexual rabbit in the middle of a convention?
I actually don’t know. But there were inconsistencies in his stories. That and it’s fucking 4chan.
Your want is as realistic as Britches developing a heart, you hand-holding pervert.
Until it’s proven false, I’m choosing to believe it. Because the world is more beautiful with those dreamers.
You guys have much more interesting sex lives than me.
The only one limiting it is you.
You could always fuck your mom if you want a quick way to spice up your life. Just thinking about gets me randy.
You could always fuck your mom if you want a quick way to spice up your life. Just thinking about gets me randy.
I’ve always seen a lot of truth in Freud. If you do that much coke you’re guaranteed to nail a few things with the ensuing mind-mouth-vomit.
Stock market takes a tumble after a week of nothing but bad news.
Someone’s bracket didn’t pan out.
The Washington Post does a little hand-holding for Cardi B, showing her exactly where all her money is going.
The money goes into the money hole.
I love the money fires!
Spokeschild David Hogg Offers Profanity-Filled Angry Rant;
School Plans Defense Against Shooters — a Five Pound Bucket of Rocks That Can Be Thrown
“It’s like when your old-a** parents are like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage,’ and you’re just like, ‘Give me the f**king phone’ and you take it and you’re like, ‘OK, let me handle it,’ and you get it done in one second,” Hogg said. “Sadly, that’s what we have to do with our government because our parents don’t know how to use a f**king democracy, so we have to.” — David Hogg, Spokeschild, 2nd Amendment Expert, and person who was vaguely in the vicinity when something bad happened to people he didn’t know
“Sadly, that’s what we have to do with our government because our parents don’t know how to use a f**king democracy, so we have to.”
Quote of the year.
What a….
/dons sunglasses
Hogg.
This kid is so angry at his liberal mommy who wanted a girl and had to settle for him.
Goose stepping little ferret.
Speaking of weird fetishes, do you guys remember when we used to rib Longorso for making love to a body pillow?
Longtorso, Johnny? No, I don’t believe I have been around that long.
I think the meme got started because he kept posting PUA links.
“Our parents don’t know how to use a fucking democracy.”
That is because we live in a Representative Republic, not a democracy, you fascist simpleton.
In France, ISIS Gunman Killed After Supermarket “Siege”
What’s with the scarequotes around siege?
You cannot call an assault a siege if there are no rams, catapults, trebuchets, etc. Don’t you idiots play Total War?
Haven’t played it since the original Rome, like 20 years ago or whenever it came out. Want to try Total Warhammer though.
You haven’t even played Medieval II? I can’t believe I post in the same comment section as you.
I played the PS1 game, Medieval II.
You’ve been exonerated, but one more fuck up and I’m calling you a fag.
I’m going to indulge this weird little thing you are doing just this once to remind you that we are a fag. So I hope you know what you signed up for.
Yellow Tony’s not a fag. He’s pansexual, like everyone else from his dimension.
Geez, Past Me, is it too much to ask that you keep everyone else’s sexual preferences in mind when insulting them?
I know, and I’m disappointed. Foreign dimension me originates from a dimension where pansexuality is the norm. Not only does this dimension’s current me have a stolen quantum computer that has the shitposting power to destroy totality, but dimension’s current me sexuality is limited. A lot of work has to be done, naughty me.
Do you have any idea how much the idea of a 3-way with myself turns me on? Of course you do.
Tony, Red Tony, and Yellow Tony form a band in response to a request in the comments on Soave’s “vegan beta male” article today.
I play synth.
Take your Tony by the hand
And make him do a high highstand
And take your Tony by the heel
And do the next thing that you feel
That’s my all time favorite Wang Chung Tony song.
Fuck you this dimension’s future me. You already called bass. As the only one here to have crossed dimensions, I’m the best one qualified to Rick Wakeman the shit out of some synth.
we can all play synth
This is now my jam.
This changed me.
Tony! Toni! Ton
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Who Are We to Judge?”
“The Lottery” is a classic short story written by Shirley Jackson in 1948. It’s the tale of a rural, farming community in America of about three hundred residents. The town seems normal by all accounts as it prepares for a traditional, harvest-time event known as The Lottery.
* * * * * * * *
Then in the 1990s, something started to change dramatically in how her students responded to the sobering tale. Rather than being horrified by it, some claimed they were bored by it, while others thought the ending was “neat.”
When Ms. Haugaard pressed them for more of their thoughts, she was appalled to discover that not one student in the class was willing to say the practice of human sacrifice was morally wrong!
When I was in high school in the dark ages, I remember an English teacher handing out a one or two page story about a girl who was attacked while walking through the woods. In addition to the girl, other characters were the perpetrator, someone who didn’t warn the girl about the danger, someone who did warn her, and a couple others (perhaps a judge who let the perp out of jail, silent villagers, etc) I don’t remember (this was the dark ages). Well, at the end of the story you were supposed to pick out who was most at fault for the attack: the girl for ignoring the warning, the perpetrator, the person who didn’t warn her about the danger, etc. I was flabbergasted, even at 17, that I was among the only 3 or 4 in the class of 30 who thought the perpetrator was most at fault.
“Reason meanwhile treats her like the libertarian hero she is.”
You’ve been trolled, Commentariat. YOU HAVE BEEN TROLLED.
Christian, you understand us.
I gotta say, he is nipping at Robby’s heels like one of his Yorkies.
Congress should pass a bill that repeals all taxes and sets the minimum wage to $50. I mean, if deficits don’t matter, then fuck it, go all in.
“Go all in” was your moms nickname in college.
Buttballing his roommates is how MP’s mom paid for his college.
Jesus you’re an idiot. My roommates were broke.
Because they were always paying to buttball your mom. Geez, MP, connect the dots.
Drop piles of cash from aircraft at random locations.
Better yet, drop a trillion dollar coin and watch 300 million people converging on the same square foot of real estate. Talk about hilarity ensuing.
You just doxxed yourself, Mr. Krugman.
To me it shows that he’s a brave man, one of the few in Washington to be as openly petty as they all are.
“Look, I’m just saying that the local chambers of commerce would prefer ‘Greenwood’ to ‘Mirkwood’ – sounds less sinister.”
Is that before after you eminent domain that Necromancer’s place?
You mean the site of the future Middle Earth Disney?
The Washington Post does a little hand-holding for Cardi B, showing her exactly where all her money is going.
They say that she pays $8 million in taxes, and $1.83 million goes to Social Security.
That’s weird. I thought there was a limit on that. I had no idea rich people pay millions each year into Social Security.
I just looked it up:
If you’re self-employed, however, you’ll be on the hook for the entire 12.4%. So if, for example, you earn $100,000 a year, you’ll be required to pay $12,400 in Social Security taxes on your own.
I found this:
“If you’re self-employed, you pay the combined
employee and employer amount, which is a 12.4 percent
Social Security tax on up to $128,400 of your net earnings
and a 2.9 percent Medicare tax on your entire net earnings.”
https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10022.pdf
Yes, looks like I misread the article. It was just saying if you’re self-employed you pay the full 12.4% rather than your employer paying half. I jumped the dang gun.
This is why you should consult with your tax attorney before commenting on the intertubes.
Yes, self-employment tax is 12.5%. Back when I was self-employed, it was a nice ram up the ass at the end of the year.
You should’ve been paying estimated taxes. I bet you got rammed for that too.
“It’s a myth that we throw it all down a hole. We pay people to dig the hole then fill it in again. That’s quite a different thing, and it has a multiplier effect…look honey, it’s a bunch of technical stuff, you wouldn’t understand, don’t bother your pretty head.”
Labor Theory of Value for the win!
There no limit when all of the trust fund interest and redemptions are paid from the general fund.
“Tariff-advocating, A.I. alarmist Elon Musk has Facebook pages deleted for Telsa, SpaceX deleted following Cambridge Analytica “scandal.”
Yes, and Musk should be castigated for that because, after all, there’s nothing libertarian about showing people that you can use your freedom of choice–rather than giving Facebook the regulation it craves?
Or something.
Has anyone else read Justin Raimondo’s piece in Chronicles taking Reason, et. al. out to the woodshed?
“The ideological degeneration of “official” libertarianism is not only far advanced but a threat to the future of liberty itself. The sheer insanity of a “libertarian” siding with the most unaccountable and coercive sectors of the state apparatus, the “intelligence community,” in their quest to overthrow a sitting President is something I would have thought inconceivable. But that was back when the world made sense. Now, the “libertarians” are either clowns or apologists for power. “
—-Raimondo
http://www.chroniclesmagazine……/10843421/
He’s calling out everybody by name from Mangu-Ward to Cathy Young–but didn’t even mention the worst of it, Dalmia and Little Robby.
I don’t agree with all of it, but it deserves a read. Maybe even a response.
Saying Putin is a bad dude doesn’t mean Hillary’s defeat is his “fault.” In fact that would be giving him too much credit.
But, yes, immigration policy should be taking a look at how American jobs are being affected. Maybe the net effect of open borders is jobs for everyone, but if not – then I think a more restrictive approach may be called for.
I haven’t kept up with Raimondo’s arguments as of late, but from my own perspective (I advocated this before Trump was elected), working together with Putin on ISIS was precisely the correct move from a libertarian perspective, and the alternative–especially if Hillary had been elected, was most likely war.
One of the things I disagree with Raimondo over is the centrality of non-interventionism to libertarian thought–back during the Cold War. It was more complicated than that. Seems to me that the way Trump dealt with Putin in Syria was similar to the way the Reagan administration handled Pinochet in Chile. We didn’t need to invade places where there were proxies available to fight our wars for us.
In the meantime, there are still questions lingering over the Ukraine, the Crimea, Georgia, etc. It doesn’t surprise me that someone who sees war as an inherently collectivist enterprise to be avoided like communism itself would downplay the significance of Putin as a threat to our national security.
All that being said, Raimondo used to participate with us here in comments back in the day. Even when I disagreed with him, I always respected his opinion, and if the guy that talked to Lenny Frielander in his dorm room before he mimeographed the first issue of Reason and spoke regularly with people like Rothbard is telling us that the leadership of the libertarian movement is unrecognizable as libertarians, then libertarians who care should pay attention to that.
No it should not. If an immigrant takes the job of an American, because the immigrant is willing to work for less, that means whatever product or service that job provides will cost less to produce, resulting in lower prices. This benefits all Americans, as opposed to just the one American, were he to keep the job. Anything else is a redistribution of wealth using immigration restrictions rather than direct taxation.
If you can’t make the argument for immigration on the basis that it’s good for America and good for Americans, then please tell people you’re a progressive or a Baptist. Do us a solid and don’t tell them you’re a libertarian.
P.S. The American people should embrace libertarianism for the good of America and Americans, too.
I thought I just did. You don’t think lower prices are good for America?
The hardest part of me is how can we come up with an ethical reason for why the state can prevent me from interacting with who I choose.
Of course, this pretends there is no price floor for labor in the United States. We’re so far from the point where open borders would be even theoretically possible that it’s amusing to watch people shill for that while failing to mention that U.S. Labor policy is one of the biggest hurdles and one of the most popular things in America simultaneously.
Oops.
I have seen no attempt by anyone at Cato or Reason to resist or even mildly question the Russophobic hysteria that’s gripped the left
Justin doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s talking about.
That is not a persuasive argument.
Reason ran an article this week I believe arguing against Russia hysteria. Your boy is just making shit up.
c’mon Ken. seriously? YOU haven’t seen any attempt by anyone at Cato or Reason to call out this Russia horseshit? Cato I’ll concede to. But Cato is a fucking policy organization. I’m sure I could find some blog post somewhere jumping on it, but that’s not their thing. They’re not a media critique or a left vs. right vs. libertarian critique organization. Goettler or Boaz or someone probably has an op-ed somewhere, but as an organization, this is not in their ballpark.
As for Reason…c’mon…do I really need to dig through H&R to feed yo all of the links slamming the media and the left for their Russia hysteria? Really? I know you read this blog all the fucking time. Go on. You make the claim that YOU can’t find anything on H&R pissing all over this Russia hysteria, and then maybe I’ll spend my time rebutting that.
I’m not going to waste time rebutting Justin’s willful blindness. He’s making shit up.
I posted it yesterday. Raimondo has jumped the shark.
Meaning what precisely?
He’s the Fonz.
Tony loves Chachi.
Meaning he fucked up by shilling for Trump and now he is refusing to admit he is wrong, and is instead doubling down on stupid by attacking the free trade in labor and private property rights of business owners of being able to invite and hire whomever they want.
I’m always shifting my views for various reasons. I think a lot of the concessions mentioned in the article are attempts by modern libertarians to court moderate liberals. We can’t get many social conservatives right now because of vastly diverging opinions of what constitutes “personal liberty.” Social welfare is absolutely entrenched. Tens of millions of citizens are completely reliant on it, and nobody wants to just dump these people on the streets. I don’t see many viable alternatives than to massively clamp newcomers and ween the current users off, and since some are multi-generational, I don’t anticipate that these folks will ever become productive citizens.
I think the ideological purity is still very important to libertarianism. We should never forget that the goal is always to completely eliminate welfare, completely emancipate the market, get rid of 99% of the 2mil federal employees, and get out of the world-police business. But many potential libertarians are (rightfully) dismissing those ideas as impossible to achieve right now, and therefore going back to voting D or R.
Or, Raimondo, et al. are analogous to the pure scientist / theoretician, Cato/Reason, et al. are analogous to the engineer / applied scientist. Both are necessary and always fighting for dominance in a healthy environment.
That’s funny, because Reason is closer to pure libertarianism at this point than Raimondo.
You wouldn’t say that if you knew what you were talking about.
I don’t see ideological purity as the issue.
Pointing out that reasonable people can disagree about abortion is one thing.
Elitism is inherently unlibertarian.
I’ve seen Reason staff argue, repeatedly, that immigration policy is outside the purview of democracy–no matter what the Constitution says. How could we think about giving average people a say in such things?
I’m sure I’ve read a dozen articles that seem like they’re supposed to be pro-free speech, but you can’t really tell whether the author wants to get rid of Title IX or wants Title IX to violate everyone’s rights equally.
Let’s not even get started about freedom of association.
It seems to me that we’re not talking about ideological purity. It seems to me that some people here at Reason fell for the idea that everything about the culture war changed between 2012 and 2016, and in order to pursue a wider agenda, we now have to adopt the new style.
Except that “new style” is ultimately about blind elitism, and it makes us look like Leisure Suit Larry. And it isn’t just a style change. It’s fundamentally unlibertarian.
You have a point about the elitism. It can definitely be a snooty crowd, and we have inherited some of the down-nose sneering from the academic left. Younger libertarians, myself included, have been entrenched in the liberal school system for 15+ years, so I’ve naturally picked up some bad habits. We can be better.
Re: immigration: This site, and the commentariat, have actually changed me from being “open borders.” I really am for unlimited legal immigration, but our welfare system can’t handle it, so I’ve adopted a more conservative mindset purely for pragmatic reasons. At heart I still feel that limiting immigration is a massive infringement on free association, but we can have our relaxed-border utopia when the welfare state has been dismantled and everyone is aware that you have to be ready to work to build a future here.
It seems to me that some people here at Reason fell for the idea that everything about the culture war changed between 2012 and 2016, and in order to pursue a wider agenda, we now have to adopt the new style.
Can you provide an example or two w/ before/after? Genuinely curious.
I have some differences with what you said but close enough that I’ll take it.
Yes, and Musk should be castigated for that because, after all, there’s nothing libertarian about showing people that you can use your freedom of choice–rather than giving Facebook the regulation it craves?
FFS Ken, Musk had the pages deleted because he supports the idiotic regulation. He’ll have the pages back within nano-seconds of such regulation. His action is a protest vote for regulation.
Do you have a link for that or am I supposed to just take your word for it?
The link is in the links, for christ’s sake.
I read the article in the link.
I didn’t see anything about how his action is a protest for regulation or that he plans to put the pages back up.
I read that he deleted their Facebook page with 2 million likes and that he’s glad it’s gone.
I can’t find anything in Reason archives on Musk regarding his support for tariffs either, or what tariffs those might be. Seeing as he the producer of things involving steel and aluminum, I somehow doubt he is for the Trump import tariffs.
Much of the criticism towards Musk is light on calories.
So I Googled it, and apparently being steamed on Twitter at having to pay a ten-fold increase in tariffs for exporting cars to China vs. China exporting cars to us is “advocating” a tariff. He later clarified that low tariffs would be the best option for everyone.
I seriously do not get the animosity in these pages. Modern-day American wunderkind gets shit on far too often for working with government (there is no option to be a rocket manufacturer without getting into bed with government).
Makeup is feminist
“This type of look often requires an hour or more to create, and yet, it, too can be viewed as a feminist act: The time a woman spends making herself up is time she focuses completely on herself, making it a woman-first routine.”
The same argument, of course, can be made for burkas and corsets.
I’m pretty sure I’ve read articles claiming that the burka is feminist and liberating, and while I understand their reasoning I think they fail to understand the difference between a choice and a law.
Things I like are feminist.
In statue news – California town takes a stand against a William McKinley statue.
U.S. Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy
March 21 at 4:19pm ?
Major Breakthrough: It appears the Omnibus appropriations bill will make it clear that the CDC can research gun violence, effectively repealing the Dickey Amendment. This is something I’m proud to hav…More
This be tru?
Turns out, measuring your ‘recycling success’ by the tonnage dropped into the blue bin at the curb, might fail to show that most of your shit is ending up in the landfill.
It’s entitled “Chinese crackdown may send more recycling to Northwest landfills.” When I see the word “may” in a story associated with city government, that means it’s 100 percent being sent to Northwest landfills.
Not a super big fan of Ron and Don, but that’s a good line.
The Washington Post does a little hand-holding for Cardi B, showing her exactly where all her money is going.
It’s nice that the fourth estate now does the heavy lifting for government communications directors.
Although, I have to give the WaPo credit, they show a huge percentage of her taxes are going to wealth transfer payments. So bully to them.
On the other hand, will we start referring to Cardi B as “Alt-right doyenne, Cardi B”? Asking for a friend.
Tariff-advocating A.I. alarmist Elon Musk has Facebook pages for Telsa, SpaceX deleted following the Cambridge Analytica “scandal.”
Brag: Proving my point right.
Facebook is going to get it from both ends. People who think Facebook negligently “allowed” Donald Trump to win, and people who are sick of Facebook actively spinning content and search/ad results to push wokeness.
Buh-bye Facebook.
If only it were that easy. They will lose some market share, but the legions of retards using that site without an ad-blocker will keep it afloat for a long time to come.
Looks like Uber released the dashcam video of Tempe – https://youtu.be/ufNNuafuU7M
The entire storyline they’ve given is clearly crap. She was walking across the road – at night. No obstructions to view or anything. No brakes applied and clearly the ‘sensors’ can’t even remotely identify a human moving at human pace. This may have occurred – with a drunk human at night.
I like the video of the driver, looking into their lap at their phone.
Also, the whole fucking point of self-driving cars and their arrays of sensors are supposed to be BETTER than human drivers. They should see through fog, in the dark, with infra-red, ultraviolet, microwave radar, you name it. I don’t care if I, the human didn’t detect the drunk homeless person wandering across the road, the vehicle should have been able to detect an object moving from left to right– before it was in the headlights– and act accordingly. We’ve got a long fucking way to go.
The victim wasn’t drunk. The police have already said that. Just homeless.
I was speaking in broad terms. If you live in a place where there are a lot of homeless, they act drunk when they’re not drunk. Like wandering out into traffic. I assume they’re all drunk, because why in fuck would a sober person do that?
I hear you. But there was no ‘traffic’. It was an empty street – with no streetlights – at night. I’ve crossed many streets exactly like that, And what I look for before I step into the road is – headlights. That tells me whether I can make it across the road or not. If the car is driving blind, I’d have died many many times. And it looks like robocars basically drive near-blind – much like a drunk. Their ‘headlights’ are as useless to them as tits on a bull. So they are a useless signal to pedestrians too
My ‘technical’ guess is the sensors only really work within low-beam range. So at any speed where the car cannot stop within lowbeam range, it will do nothing to avert a collision. And it doesn’t know enough to know that non-drunk humans who drive at night with no streetlights use high beams to see possible danger further away. That behavior is not done via a mandated change in speed limit at night (which is the only ‘limit’ the car seems to be programmed to since it was driving over even that limit).
And even if the car itself can stop within the low beam, the high beam is needed to signal to pedestrians/bikes/etc where your car is – because that’s the info they need to know whether to step into the road or not – esp at night when 70% of pedestrian collisions occur. The robocar doesn’t need its headlights itself – so it doesn’t give a shit about signalling others either.
My ‘technical’ guess is the sensors only really work within low-beam range.
Which if correct is utterly ridiculous.
If so, that’s an almost impressive oversight. It’s not like that’s a technical limitation with how the sensors tend to work.
I agree. I was very surprised at how fast that vehicle was going given how dark it was. I would have absolutely been using my high beams. I’m no technophobe, but I don’t think the robo-cars are going to be able to emulate good human judgment for a few years yet. The number of variables involved is significant. I imagine one “fix” could be having dark stretches of road “programmed” to use the high beams in the absence of oncoming cars. Really this whole thing just makes me more amazed at how remarkable the brain is at shit like this. Even awful drivers have a lot less accidents than one would expect given how stupid people can be.
I think about it myself. I believe most of these models are trained using Reinforcement learning. I’m curious how they set up their simulations for the training.
Reinforcement learning would be very similar to how I mentally “model” long-term potentiation in our brains. Behaviors, habits, personality traits, memories, etc are basically muscles that atrophy without use. Like when people create desire paths. Of course it’s not really analogous at all, but I find it helpful to think about it like that.
I wonder how the computer would know whether a new behavior had a bad or good outcome. We learn from almost-accidents all the time, so it can’t just be a binary, “did not hit pedestrian: outcome acceptable.”
Why not? That’s basically what automatic braking does. Now it gets more complicated if you want to allow avoidance in addition to braking, but the car did neither here.
You score it. And you give the score a real value. So it doesn’t have to be binary.
Great points by you and NASkippy both. This is why I’m not programming autonomous cars. No creativity.
I can actually imagine avoidance even though I had a mental block on effective braking resolution earlier. Assuming that sampling was often, and I’m sure the resolution is plenty high, the car can maneuver in the opposite direction of the X axis from the pedestrian’s movement, given that the X-axis is orthogonal to the vehicle path. It might crash into an adjacent car, but that’s entirely possible during normal driving conditions, and if we can avoid the pedestrian we can probably prevent a death even if we have a pile-up.
Good points. The machine’s perception (IR, thermal) should indeed exceed human capabilities. Our eyes are God-awful.
Thank you gentle(wo)men.
It has a broader spectrum with greater range and sometimes faster update (LIDAR likes like it has a make refresh rate of only 20Hz). The human eye is actually pretty good but it has a limited focal range and an even more limited slice of the EM spectrum.
Just because you’ve seen the optical part of the sensor suite doesn’t mean that that’s all there is. The suite is redundant and should have had no technical issue detecting her. And with the fact that she was walking a bike with all those spokes, even the radar should have had no trouble seeing her.
Uber really fucked something up.
The one advantage humans have is understanding context and being able to negotiate with other humans on and around the road. That’s an important advantage, but that was also irrelevant here.
Well its possible that Uber alone fucked something up with their vehicle but given how the storyline has been written over the last few days (she’s leaping into the road, obstructed views, no human could have avoided) supported by the entire tech media (and thus by the experts they would call on for quotes) – and now completely refuted by the video, I will call BS on that.
She was two feet away from finishing crossing the road. Looking at it again, she was at impact speeding up (to her capability) to try to get across. The only point of Uber v otherrobos is ‘would they also have hit her’. Which is kind of irrelevant. SHE stepped into the road with the intention of getting to the other side not of committing suicide or seeing havoc unfold around her. There was NO actual pedestrian ‘unpredictability’ here. Both she – and even the human monitor – responded to the emergency ‘faster’ and ‘better’ than the vehicle. And that is exactly where ‘context’ – that old instinctive lizard brain – happened.
Something about the robocar – its speed, its lights, whatever – almost certainly sent a signal to her that either there was no car there or that she would easily make it across the road. Before she made the decision to cross the road. Given what I know of techies (most of whom have no social awareness or communications skills at all), my money is that every robocar has this same failure source. Their programming is internally oriented – not externally oriented.
or tldr – the point of fatality occurred 20 secs or so before impact – when she decided to cross the road. And there isn’t a single robocar company that ever talks about how it ‘aids pedestrian decision making’. Which means – not one of them even tries to do that.
Well considering that humans don’t ‘aid deer decision making’ either, do you have a point?
Considering that you think humans are basically deer – or squirrels – or dogs – or rolling garbage cans – and all are merely ‘obstacles’ to a robocar, I think you have proven my point.
If Uber is so uniquely inferior, then do tell – how many squirrels, dogs, deer have they hit vs Waymo/etc? Do they all hit squirrels without thinking much? What size obstacle is OK to hit? If hit not OK, how much do they swerve/brake/etc and create problems for other drivers (also ‘obstacles’ therefore deer)
And BTW – you have also shown why one of the first ‘problems’ that will happen with robocars is that they will get hacked, parameters for ‘acceptable hit’ will get changed and – hey presto a self-driving bomb. Far more easily than I would have guessed.
Either there was a hardware malfunction (unlikely given the redundancies but see my question about one potential single point failure)
In drivers ed, that was Night Driving 101. Called “Don’t Overdrive Your Headlights”. So how many times/second do the different robocars test that hardware (roboheadlights) to see if it is still functioning or do they just ‘wait for intervention’?
or the algorithm failed
See self-driving bomb hack above.
So basically your argument lacks any technical merit at all and it comes down to what you feel. Got it.
You seem to think there’s a problem, so it’s incumbent on your to provide some evidence to back up your feelz. You still haven’t done that once.
Based on, let me guess, your crystal powers.
So the fact that the police made a silly claim and the “entire tech media” said something is your evidence. The fact that Uber has trailed (and badly) the other self-driving car companies and you make an ignorant claim that the sensors only work out to “low beam range” makes me call BS on your BS. Uber uses Velodyne LIDAR which has a range of 100-300m according to wiki.
Recall that a year ago they were interrupting every mile.
This is just stupid. There was no ‘context’ involved here at all. She was an obstacle that should have been detected well before the collision by any of the 3 primary sensors on the vehicle. The human reaction that you’re so proud of resulting in exactly zero braking exactly like the computer, so congrats on the increased heart rate? Would you like to demonstrate the human superiority after being awake 24 hours or with a BAC of 0.1?
The computer appears to not have reacted at all. That has nothing to do with some magical lizard brain and everything to do with a design (or more remotely a maintenance) failure.
There was no ‘context’ involved here at all. She was an obstacle that should have been detected well before the collision by any of the 3 primary sensors on the vehicle.
This whole video is the context. This was not like the storyline at all. It was exactly like 50% of all pedestrian fatalities – 6pm-midnight, no alcohol/drugs, random-aged adult pedestrian, driver overdriving headlights which sends dangerous message to pedestrian that street is safe to cross. Wanna bet this ain’t when robocars are doing most of their testing on arterials or rat runs in residential areas? Maybe try morning rush hour through same (20% of fatalities) and see how kids perform as obstacles. Downtown is EASY to robonavigate because the vehicle speed is slower and the ped speed is higher.
But the car was gray! Don’t you understand?! It was gray!
Put up or shut up. Provide some data.
The human reaction that you’re so proud of resulting in exactly zero braking exactly like the computer, so congrats on the increased heart rate?
It resulted in no braking because the vehicle was overdriving its headlights. The ‘intervention’ should have occurred long before the impact – the second the ‘human monitor’ sees that the car is travelling faster than they themselves can react, if needed, to prevent a collision. Faster than they themselves would be driving. And you can’t seem to see that.
My guess is that’s exactly the sort of human monitor that will never be hired – someone who actually takes the job seriously with them being able to truly take control and know when the car has become unsafe – because that’s the sort of person who will screw with the miles/intervention metric.
No one should have any faith in car companies (killing pedestrians for 100+ years – feel unsafe? – buy a bigger SUV) or Google (humans are far more than an eyeball – you are now an obstacle) or Uber (let’s make driving safe for felons, porn surfers, fomo texters and those who want to pass out) giving a shit about deer pedestrians in developing their robocar.
And you demonstrate what happens when you outrun your brain. The car has more than headlights. You claimed that the human reacted better, so why didn’t he brake (think it’s a he but not sure)? The human didn’t see that the car was traveling too fast. The human was almost completely ignoring what the car was doing. So, in fact, the human failure was even more egregious using your criteria, because he is supposed to be the one who can exercise judgement and understand the context of the situation. He. Did. Nothing.
Human monitors do not work. This has been known for decades.
Handoffs require significant time for the human to acquire situational awareness. That is why self-driving cars needs to be truly self-driving. Relying on a human to take control in millisceconds is guaranteeing disaster.
The car has more than headlights.
Gawdallfuckingmighty. I don’t give a shit if the car itself navigates via ESP, chocochip cookies and Googleporn. Whatever it uses it has to continually know that what it is using is working. Otherwise, it is blind. It has to have a reaction if what it is using isn’t working. That reaction had damn well better be stopping regardless of whether there is an obstacle in the way or not. And reaction must be visible to every human in the area – including YOU watching the video of an Uber car clueless that EVERYTHING in that video is a ‘system failure’ since the car itself should have already stopped. If the human monitor was intended to take over in case of emergency, then the car would max out at whatever speed the human can control (which also means high-beams at night). But you can’t even understand that concept.
Getting back to ped decision-making. If you are standing on the side of the road looking to cross at night, YOU look for headlights. YOU need the high-beam for cars that are travelling quickly. What you sure as hell don’t need is some asshole geeks driving a near-invisible 2-ton object and judging ‘success’ by their ability to miss you at the highest possible/legal/contextual speed and ‘failure’ by their tendency to hit you. It is quite obvious that there is no testing being done – by any company – from outside the vehicle from the pedestrians perspective. None need be done as long as pedestrian=deer=squirrel=dog.
JFree and NAS are actually in agreement about one big factor, and that is that the human monitors are certain to be deficient. NAS says that an emergency takeover is impossible because of reaction time in becoming aware of a problem, and JFr is arguing that a good human driver maintains some level of situational awareness at all times so that it needn’t be acquired in the event of an impending collision. We can’t focus that well for more than a few minutes, so we have to use context to modify our vigilance levels. In this case a human driver would have recognized that it’s abnormally hard to see through this stretch and made some sort of correction: slowing down, using high-beams, looking further out for movement, etc. Then once back under streetlights they can relax their focus again. Like NAS says, the cars are going to have to fully-self driving. The human monitor is just a feel-good measure.
Also we can modify our driving behaviors based on what obstacles we are observing. A pedestrian is likely to speed up to avoid being hit, a deer may become blinded and suddenly stop, a squirrel will dart and change direction, a trashcan will do nothing. Ergo, you decide whether to maneuver left/right/straight based on these factors. If the sensors aren’t aware of the likely behaviors of the obstacle, it has less knowledge to use when decision-making. Humans are prone to making errors in these snap-judgments, so I don’t know how much more effective they really are, but it is a factor.
Your ‘technical’ guess is almost certainly wrong. There appears to be no change to the car’s trajectory all the way up to the point of impact which would have clearly been in the near field camera view. There was no attempt at avoidance or even attempted reduction in speed. That leaves 3 main possibilities:
1) The software is shit (most likely)
2) The (multiple) sensors were defective or disabled or perhaps there is a single point of failure like a CANbus
3) The computers were grossly underpowered for the workload
Of the 3 the first is by far the most likely. Uber has run dead last in the miles per intervention metric.
Hey, you gotta break some eggs to make the omelet, amiright? So a few pedestrians cash in the chips, I just wanna Facebook while driving.
In News you Can’t Make Up, Jay Inslee signs law allowing people to voluntarily add themselves to the NICS database, barring themselves from buying a firearm.
“? After causing a Twitter meltdown upon asking for Chicago restaurant and pizza recommendations, Roger Federer ? perhaps the best tennis player ever ? chowed down on Chicago deep-dish pizza at Lou Malnati’s in the South Loop earlier this week with fellow legends John McEnroe, Rod Laver, and current star Nick Kyrgios. And it appears that they loved it, as Federer and Kyrgios even took pies to go, a rep says.”
Unless you have, in your hands, either a law of physics that prevents the creation of an A.I. smarter than humans or a mathematically-proven way to prevent an A.I. from having bugs, calling Musk an “A.I. alarmist” is merely a declaration of your own idiocy.
I’m just aware of how stupid AI still is.
Does a power plug count?
Washington governor signs law requiring coverage of abortion when insurers offer maternity care
“Additionally, the (Reproductive Parity Act) will also require health insurance plans issued or renewed after January 1, 2019, to provide deductible-free coverage for all contraceptive drugs and devices.”
Everyone seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word insurance.
As I understand it, it’s a business in which companies are permitted to engage so long as they provide specified perks for lawmakers and/or their constituents.
California Student Organizes School Walkout to Protest Abortion
“(Brandon) Gillespie will meet with the principal of (Rocklin High) school on Friday and is asking for the same accommodation the gun-control protesters asked for: a 17-minute walkout at 10 a.m. But the high-schooler and his group say they will go ahead with their pro-life walkout whether or not the school recognizes their right to protest.”
“Gillespie got the idea from his history teacher, Julianne Benzel.
“Benzel was put on paid administrative leave after she suggested the school might have a double standard for what protests are acceptable.”
Reason ran the Julianne Benzel story here.
I saw this on Drudge a few days ago and wanted to post it in the PM Links, but there wasn’t one that day. I hope it works out. It would be an egregious double standard if it wasn’t allowed. I’d really like to see more pro-2A kids doing this, but considering I was too afraid to go to a gun-control town hall at my former college, I can’t say shit. It would be social suicide for a high school kid.
It will be interesting to see. I think they should be allowed to walk out, as I don’t believe schools are prison. I will not be surprised to see many people attempt to come up with technicalities that make them monsters somehow.
I think its a mistake to mix the two issues. If you want to counter the gun grabber walk outs then stage a pro-gun walk out.
I get that everyone knows that gun grabbers are lefties and will not support anti-abortion walk outs either. It just seems weird to oppose the school walkouts over gun grabbing by not doing a walkout to support the 2A.
The teacher was apparently disciplined for giving an example of a prolife walkout. So as the article says, the students (one of whom is in the teacher’s class) are testing the very proposition the teacher mentioned.
But as usual (see also the Washington State stories above) prolife people and gun-controllers seem to belong to opposed political factions.
To put it another way, 2nd Amendment defenders and prolife people seem to be on the same side.
Yet Reason seeks recruits to the libertarian cause among the woke and the hip on the left.
Hint to Reason: The left think you’re part of of Koch-spiracy to rape the worker and the environment, and to implement the nastier parts of the Handmaid’s Tale.
The left just isn’t into you. Seek allies among those who have shown a disposition to share your core commitments.
The Illuminati want you to believe that their infamous all-seeing eye actually represents some kind of “God”
(Autoplay is activated for the non-illumined)
The article will soon be taught in schools as a textbook example of “mansplaining.”
Jfc…
Woke af
“One of the big themes in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes is the concept that elves were once a mutable race. Their creator Corellon Larethian was an androgynous being and elves could originally change their forms at will, although they eventually lost this ability when they descended into the Material Plane.
“However, according to Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, some elves retain a blessing of Corellon. As part of this blessing, these elves can actually choose their biological sex whenever they finish a long rest. These elves can choose to be male, female, or “neither” based on their moods or feelings.
“Dungeons & Dragons, at least the most recent Fifth Edition, has made it clear that players don’t need to be “confined” by binary notions of gender.”
Luthien is now Luther, anyone got a problem with that?
And Beren will be in for quite a surprise.
Oh, I feel so dirty almost literally pissing on Tolkien’s grave like this, but I guess there’s no turning back…
Shael mi kyr ialaeraer air shar ei shol or taer Jherol shar ei tal.
That’s Elvish for “when she got undressed it was a big old mess, Luthien was a man.”
If asked, I’ll just say Russians hacked my account and posted these things.
Just as I suspected, days after the school shooting in Maryland and the media stopped covering it very much unlike the Florida school shooting.
Maryland proves that an armed staff member can prevent kids from being killed at the scene of the shooting. 2 kids were wounded and one later died.
The media that covers this story calls what the armed resource officer did a “rare” event. The media tends to refuse to dwell on the thousands of news stories where armed Americans prevent violent crimes every day.
Dr_mack@yahoo. com was the email i contacted when my Lover left me. After spell casting my Lover came back quickly. Keep up the good work
London, UK
I tried the spell, but they sent back the wrong lover, some crazy chick who poisoned her former boyfriend in a fit of insane jealousy.
I contacted customer service but they said they had a no-returns policy, even though the mixup was *their* fault!
I put the poor girl in a package marked “return to sender,” but she escaped and came back.
Meanwhile, Roseanne Barr hired the same witch to get one of her lovers back, but there was another mixup and now I’m in love with her.
Now the girl you send me says she forgives me and is willing to prepare me an antidote to Roseanne Barr’s love spell. Apparently it’s a “special potion” I have to pour in my stew.
Why is Musk labelled tariff advocating when he is against tariffs? (And has historically fought against them) Just because Trump called him out of context?
He wanted Trump to pressure China to remove the car tariffs. Not push for steel and aluminum tariffs. Especially since that would probably up his cost of building cars and rockets.