I thought the NHTSA data ultimately showed that the incidence of "run-away vehicles" was pretty much entirely mappable to the incidence of "old or confused person stomping on the wrong pedal", and that this incidence rate was in line with the average for all passenger cars?
...NASA did not find an electronic cause of large throttle openings that can result in UA [unintended acceleration] incidents. NHTSA did not find a vehicle-based cause of those incidents in addition to those causes already addressed by Toyota recalls.
...NHTSA's vehicle characterization analysis and testing supported NASA's review. NHTSA found no previously unknown defects in the test vehicles and determined that their braking systems were capable of overcoming all levels of acceleration, including wide open throttle.
Those "other causes" appear to be primarily related to floor mats blocking free motion of the accelerator pedal. There was a recall related to this, to replace the driver's floor mat with a new mat cut differently to avoid the possibility of getting stuck under or behind the pedal. It sounds like Toyota were asshats about that, and they paid sizable fines for failing to tell the authorities about the problems. But a lot of the bad press about runaway cars turned out to be BS, such as these two incidents covered by CBS News.
This is mostly a divergence from icebike's point about PR, which I think is mostly valid. I simply wanted to address what sounded a bit like misinformation about runaway cars. I happen to own a Prius, so I followed up on the stories and investigations in an effort to better understand my own risk.
In a digression from the discussion about the current administration's gun policy:
The purpose of the second amendment is to ensure we are able to end this country the same way it began. How are we supposed to have an effective armed rebellion without assault rifles?
It's arguable that the historical reason for the Second Amendment had more to do with avoiding the need for a standing army, with all the expense and centralized power that entails, especially at a time when 1) the federal government, such as it was, had a shoestring budget, and 2) the states were still very leery of granting any more power (read: ceding any more sovereignty) than absolutely necessary to this new centralized entity.
The end result is probably something like Singapore. Ostensibly free, but scratch the surface and you quickly hit authoritarianism and an oligarchy of connected families and companies. The problem is, most of the US governing class would see little wrong with such an outcome.
From the things I've read, Singapore has better social services.
I like the Windows Update ones where it gives you a hex code with the message "an unknown error has occurred". If you know enough about it to give it a code then how can it possibly be an "unknown error"? My first senior programmer would have beaten me with a deck of punchcards for doing something like that. Lazy kids today.
From your description, that's clearly the +++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR +++ +++ REDO FROM START +++.
Re-reading my previous post about externalization, I realize that it sounds like I'm painting amiga3D with the one-percenter brush, and that's actually not my intention. I think a different dynamic is at work in posts such as h(er|i)s.
I cannot find a link to it now, but I recall reading about a social experiment, where the researcher went door-to-door and just gave each household a $20 bill. He did this daily for some period of time, perhaps a few weeks. At first, the receivers of this unexpected money were very happy and surprised. As time went on, they came to expect the money, and to even be unpleasant if the researcher was perceived to be "late" in making his rounds. After the researcher stopped giving money at all, the people were quite angry and upset with him.
All this despite the fact that them receiving $20 daily was a complete fluke of luck that their neighborhood had been chosen by this researcher.
I think some of the upset about the ACA is that most people have had no understanding of how high averaged-across-the-boards insurance costs actually are. Being suddenly faced with a (sometimes substantially) higher bill for the same level of service as before, or sometimes even less service than before, is a rude shock. This shock is not at all abnormal -- the situation with health insurance in the US is seriously fubared, and many of us have been protected from that fubar-ness by either having insurance through our jobs, or by exercising our option to forgo insurance altogether. Many folks haven't had to deal with that expense -- they were, in some ways, analogous to the people getting a free $20 a day, though they might not have known it. And now they are no longer shielded from the expenses. (Setting aside that the insurance companies have also been ramping up their premiums as a whole in the run-up to the ACA's enactment.)
The ACA sucks donkey balls, in many respects. Which makes it all the more horrible that this is actually an improvement over what we've had so far (what with pre-existing condition bullshit, dropped policies, benefit caps, obscene profit margins...). My hope going forward is that, longer term, the anger expressed by amiga3D and others will lead to increased public pressure for a saner insurance system.
By *not* purchasing insurance you are placing the costs of the risk that you may need significant medical attention on society rather than on yourself. As such, you are externalizing the risk of injury and the medical costs associated and "assfucking" your neighbors in your haste to accumulate wealth.
The externalization of costs is one of the primary goals of one-percenters and those who aspire to join those ranks. Externalization of negatives is deemed as an absolute positive, in complete disregard of the ultimate impact on others: this is expected behavior for sociopaths, who eschew any concept of responsibility to anyone but themselves. So naturally, any requirement that costs not be externalized and foisted onto others is anathema, and is fought tooth and nail.
Much as we see now with the US Congress, where the faction bought and paid for by Koch & Co. are playing chicken with the global economy in an attempt at fending off one such requirement.
Because it is work that they have produced. It's theirs and they should be allowed to share it with whomever they like. You have no right to content I produce and neither do I have a right to content you produce. To claim that they are denying us access to "culture" is absurd. Culture is not something that was created 20 minutes ago, it's intergenerational.
And clearly you're trying to trick me into accessing your creation here, whereupon you'll claim some sort of damages!
And has exciting-but-not-yet-fully-proven correlations with a variety of nasty human psych disorders! No overt mind control; but Team Epidemiology has given us some reason to suspect that rodents and crazy cat ladies aren't the only mammals it infects...
I recall reading that there's some evidence that certain varieties of schizophrenia are essentially the symptoms of toxoplasmosis infection, to such an extent that treatment with drugs designed to kill toxoplasmosis cures some patients of schizophrenia.
Remember when the future was something you could look forward to, with optimism?
Heh. I don't know how much of that change is just middle age, and how much of it is bigger macro-cycle stuff having to do with end-of-empire nation-scale depression and assorted emotional fallout. Then again, I did grow up in DC and have been pretty cynical from my teen years onwards; then again again, life now does seem to hold less opportunity than it did, at least on a personal level...
Quantizable and meaningfully quantizable are both beside the points of usefully quantizable, and useful to whom.
Case in point: one of my wife's middle school students in humanities (basically English + history) was getting quite competitive and was obsessing over her grades in specific, narrow areas, to the point that her overall performance in class was deteriorating -- her scores on individual tests and assignments were good, but her actual comprehension was lacking. After talking with the parents, my wife floated the notion of not providing the child with a grade, i.e. not quantizing her performance, in an effort to get the child to stop obsessing over the number. The student calmed down, stopped obsessing, and her understanding of the material increased. And, in not being so competitive about the number she was assigned, she became friendlier and socialized more.
Part of the dynamic in this case is something that gets lost by any test-centric approach. Specifically, there's more to school than just the subject matter, particularly at the younger grades. How does one quantize a student's sociability? Friendliness? Cooperativeness? Etc. Many of these different aspects certainly can be quantized, but without any objective measure for doing so, these numbers are meaningless outside of the subjective context of whomever is assigning them. Sure, 1 + 1 = 2. But how does one objectively work out the math for "my pet hamster died and I feel sad and don't know how to talk about it, and don't want to"? Or, "I don't get along well with this teacher because our communication styles are too different, and she reminds me of that horrible Aunt Edith who spits when she talks and always gives me scratchy wool for Christmas, and I'm allergic to wool"?
Humans are deeply contextual. Math isn't. Trying to apply math to human contexts doesn't always work very well, and often has unintended consequences. One of the biggest issues is when a number score ostensibly represents a particular metric, but a deeper inspection of the scoring algorithm reveals that the metric doesn't actually measure what it's supposedly measuring. Quantization represents a gross kind of summarization, and in extreme cases, the baby does get thrown out with the bathwater (that is, all of the detail that's been summarized away). Sometimes the numbers do effectively lie.
If the NSA want to feel like idiots, they're free to do so.
A similar thing happened to a friend in Germany. And not, the German police didn't feel like idiots, and quite happily wrecked the guys life. If you have a gun, you never feel like an idiot. Instead you just pull the trigger on anybody who dares to snicker...
Yeah, they stop laughing quick. Then they call in the SWAT team that's more heavily armed than you are.
Um, I think ArsenneLupin was referring to the police as the one's with the guns, who wouldn't feel like idiots, and who would kill anyone who pokes fun at authority. As an attempt at pointing out how out-of-control people can be when armed and in a position of authority or power.
But then, your comment about SWAT teams actually just reinforces that point, so hey.
You can always push for Article the First to be ratified and finish ratifying the original 12 amendments. You'd have a representative for every 50,000 people so about 6000 representatives. Harder to bribe them all and more responsive to those who they represent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_the_first
When the country had a population about the size of Brooklyn spread up and down the Atlantic coast that was probably true. Times have changed, and with the number of representatives set at a fixed amount the voices of the people get easier to tune out as the population grows. The federal government we have is not the right kind of government to oversee the nation we have become. It is time to dissolve, focus more on state level governments with cooperation akin to the EU (but not identical)
Except you typical American Freeway does not have a speed limit of 70 mph, and four tons is heavier than every single non-commercial vehicle in the world.
"Typical" is a loaded word, as so much depends on one's local geographic context. 70 mph is common in Washington state outside of urban areas, for instance.
Four tons might sound like hyperbole; however, some larger SUVs do come close, or even exceed that mark. For example, the Hummer H2 has a curb weight of 6,400-6,600 pounds, depending on engine configuration -- essentially 3.25 tons US. The gross vehicular weight tips the scales at 8,600 pounds, over 4.25 tons. And it sounds like some Hummer models (probably the almost-milspec H1) could be as heavy as 11,000 pounds, or 5.5 tons.
I see a few Hummers daily on my regular commuting route. The posted speed limit never goes above 60, but it's common when traffic is light for folks to be barreling along at 70+ mph.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the NHTSA data ultimately showed that the incidence of "run-away vehicles" was pretty much entirely mappable to the incidence of "old or confused person stomping on the wrong pedal", and that this incidence rate was in line with the average for all passenger cars?
Okay, this prompted me to poke around again on the NHTSA page for Additional Information on Toyota Recalls and Investigations. Of particular note on the NHTSA-NASA Study of Unintended Acceleration in Toyota Vehicles page and the executive summary of the report linked from there:
Those "other causes" appear to be primarily related to floor mats blocking free motion of the accelerator pedal. There was a recall related to this, to replace the driver's floor mat with a new mat cut differently to avoid the possibility of getting stuck under or behind the pedal. It sounds like Toyota were asshats about that, and they paid sizable fines for failing to tell the authorities about the problems. But a lot of the bad press about runaway cars turned out to be BS, such as these two incidents covered by CBS News.
This is mostly a divergence from icebike's point about PR, which I think is mostly valid. I simply wanted to address what sounded a bit like misinformation about runaway cars. I happen to own a Prius, so I followed up on the stories and investigations in an effort to better understand my own risk.
Cheers,
The average UK citizen does not believe a word the politicains say, and is far to busy looking at page 3 to give a shit.
I thought that's what these rags were *for* -- something to look at while on the shitter.
Cheers,
In a digression from the discussion about the current administration's gun policy:
The purpose of the second amendment is to ensure we are able to end this country the same way it began. How are we supposed to have an effective armed rebellion without assault rifles?
It's arguable that the historical reason for the Second Amendment had more to do with avoiding the need for a standing army, with all the expense and centralized power that entails, especially at a time when 1) the federal government, such as it was, had a shoestring budget, and 2) the states were still very leery of granting any more power (read: ceding any more sovereignty) than absolutely necessary to this new centralized entity.
Cheers,
From the things I've read, Singapore has better social services.
I like the Windows Update ones where it gives you a hex code with the message "an unknown error has occurred". If you know enough about it to give it a code then how can it possibly be an "unknown error"? My first senior programmer would have beaten me with a deck of punchcards for doing something like that. Lazy kids today.
From your description, that's clearly the +++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR +++ +++ REDO FROM START +++ .
Simple, really.
No he's right -- the penny was for me. I'm from the Government and I'm here to help.
Somehow I think Pearson is more of the threat in this particular situation. Government is just the tool that the corporation is using.
Hold it right there, you said it perfectly:
That's the best advice I've seen so far! I'm happy to W8 and not install Windows 8.
Windows 8: Just W8.
Cheers,
Re-reading my previous post about externalization, I realize that it sounds like I'm painting amiga3D with the one-percenter brush, and that's actually not my intention. I think a different dynamic is at work in posts such as h(er|i)s.
I cannot find a link to it now, but I recall reading about a social experiment, where the researcher went door-to-door and just gave each household a $20 bill. He did this daily for some period of time, perhaps a few weeks. At first, the receivers of this unexpected money were very happy and surprised. As time went on, they came to expect the money, and to even be unpleasant if the researcher was perceived to be "late" in making his rounds. After the researcher stopped giving money at all, the people were quite angry and upset with him.
All this despite the fact that them receiving $20 daily was a complete fluke of luck that their neighborhood had been chosen by this researcher.
I think some of the upset about the ACA is that most people have had no understanding of how high averaged-across-the-boards insurance costs actually are. Being suddenly faced with a (sometimes substantially) higher bill for the same level of service as before, or sometimes even less service than before, is a rude shock. This shock is not at all abnormal -- the situation with health insurance in the US is seriously fubared, and many of us have been protected from that fubar-ness by either having insurance through our jobs, or by exercising our option to forgo insurance altogether. Many folks haven't had to deal with that expense -- they were, in some ways, analogous to the people getting a free $20 a day, though they might not have known it. And now they are no longer shielded from the expenses. (Setting aside that the insurance companies have also been ramping up their premiums as a whole in the run-up to the ACA's enactment.)
The ACA sucks donkey balls, in many respects. Which makes it all the more horrible that this is actually an improvement over what we've had so far (what with pre-existing condition bullshit, dropped policies, benefit caps, obscene profit margins...). My hope going forward is that, longer term, the anger expressed by amiga3D and others will lead to increased public pressure for a saner insurance system.
The externalization of costs is one of the primary goals of one-percenters and those who aspire to join those ranks. Externalization of negatives is deemed as an absolute positive, in complete disregard of the ultimate impact on others: this is expected behavior for sociopaths, who eschew any concept of responsibility to anyone but themselves. So naturally, any requirement that costs not be externalized and foisted onto others is anathema, and is fought tooth and nail.
Much as we see now with the US Congress, where the faction bought and paid for by Koch & Co. are playing chicken with the global economy in an attempt at fending off one such requirement.
There's a cream for that.
But we can't tell yet if your insurance will cover it.
Because it is work that they have produced. It's theirs and they should be allowed to share it with whomever they like. You have no right to content I produce and neither do I have a right to content you produce. To claim that they are denying us access to "culture" is absurd. Culture is not something that was created 20 minutes ago, it's intergenerational.
And clearly you're trying to trick me into accessing your creation here, whereupon you'll claim some sort of damages!
Look out, it's a trap!!
Well, I don't smell any hint of corruption here, no sirree!
</sarcasm>
And has exciting-but-not-yet-fully-proven correlations with a variety of nasty human psych disorders! No overt mind control; but Team Epidemiology has given us some reason to suspect that rodents and crazy cat ladies aren't the only mammals it infects...
I recall reading that there's some evidence that certain varieties of schizophrenia are essentially the symptoms of toxoplasmosis infection, to such an extent that treatment with drugs designed to kill toxoplasmosis cures some patients of schizophrenia.
See Google for more.
Remember when the future was something you could look forward to, with optimism?
Heh. I don't know how much of that change is just middle age, and how much of it is bigger macro-cycle stuff having to do with end-of-empire nation-scale depression and assorted emotional fallout. Then again, I did grow up in DC and have been pretty cynical from my teen years onwards; then again again, life now does seem to hold less opportunity than it did, at least on a personal level...
[...sigh...]
Loving the album artwork too. Monorails -- especially as something snazzy and hip -- man, that dates things. :)
Cheers,
More Russell Brand.
Russell Brand is the new cowbell?
Quantizable and meaningfully quantizable are both beside the points of usefully quantizable, and useful to whom.
Case in point: one of my wife's middle school students in humanities (basically English + history) was getting quite competitive and was obsessing over her grades in specific, narrow areas, to the point that her overall performance in class was deteriorating -- her scores on individual tests and assignments were good, but her actual comprehension was lacking. After talking with the parents, my wife floated the notion of not providing the child with a grade, i.e. not quantizing her performance, in an effort to get the child to stop obsessing over the number. The student calmed down, stopped obsessing, and her understanding of the material increased. And, in not being so competitive about the number she was assigned, she became friendlier and socialized more.
Part of the dynamic in this case is something that gets lost by any test-centric approach. Specifically, there's more to school than just the subject matter, particularly at the younger grades. How does one quantize a student's sociability? Friendliness? Cooperativeness? Etc. Many of these different aspects certainly can be quantized, but without any objective measure for doing so, these numbers are meaningless outside of the subjective context of whomever is assigning them. Sure, 1 + 1 = 2. But how does one objectively work out the math for "my pet hamster died and I feel sad and don't know how to talk about it, and don't want to"? Or, "I don't get along well with this teacher because our communication styles are too different, and she reminds me of that horrible Aunt Edith who spits when she talks and always gives me scratchy wool for Christmas, and I'm allergic to wool"?
Humans are deeply contextual. Math isn't. Trying to apply math to human contexts doesn't always work very well, and often has unintended consequences. One of the biggest issues is when a number score ostensibly represents a particular metric, but a deeper inspection of the scoring algorithm reveals that the metric doesn't actually measure what it's supposedly measuring. Quantization represents a gross kind of summarization, and in extreme cases, the baby does get thrown out with the bathwater (that is, all of the detail that's been summarized away). Sometimes the numbers do effectively lie.
Land of the free, home of the brave?
O say does that scar-strangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the sheep, and the home of the slaves...
Like spongeworthy?
It's Spongeworthy Bobpants, the new porn star!
...
Bleh. That's an image I didn't need to think of today.
If the NSA want to feel like idiots, they're free to do so.
A similar thing happened to a friend in Germany. And not, the German police didn't feel like idiots, and quite happily wrecked the guys life. If you have a gun, you never feel like an idiot. Instead you just pull the trigger on anybody who dares to snicker...
Yeah, they stop laughing quick. Then they call in the SWAT team that's more heavily armed than you are.
Um, I think ArsenneLupin was referring to the police as the one's with the guns, who wouldn't feel like idiots, and who would kill anyone who pokes fun at authority. As an attempt at pointing out how out-of-control people can be when armed and in a position of authority or power.
But then, your comment about SWAT teams actually just reinforces that point, so hey.
Cheers,
You can always push for Article the First to be ratified and finish ratifying the original 12 amendments. You'd have a representative for every 50,000 people so about 6000 representatives. Harder to bribe them all and more responsive to those who they represent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_the_first
http://www.thirty-thousand.org/
Cheers,
When the country had a population about the size of Brooklyn spread up and down the Atlantic coast that was probably true. Times have changed, and with the number of representatives set at a fixed amount the voices of the people get easier to tune out as the population grows. The federal government we have is not the right kind of government to oversee the nation we have become. It is time to dissolve, focus more on state level governments with cooperation akin to the EU (but not identical)
You (C0R1D4N) are probably already aware, but for other readers: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/.
Cheers,
Realistically, one kid should be applauded. The remaining students were just copycats.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but copying is a large part of how people learn.
Cheers,
Except you typical American Freeway does not have a speed limit of 70 mph, and four tons is heavier than every single non-commercial vehicle in the world.
"Typical" is a loaded word, as so much depends on one's local geographic context. 70 mph is common in Washington state outside of urban areas, for instance.
Four tons might sound like hyperbole; however, some larger SUVs do come close, or even exceed that mark. For example, the Hummer H2 has a curb weight of 6,400-6,600 pounds, depending on engine configuration -- essentially 3.25 tons US. The gross vehicular weight tips the scales at 8,600 pounds, over 4.25 tons. And it sounds like some Hummer models (probably the almost-milspec H1) could be as heavy as 11,000 pounds, or 5.5 tons.
I see a few Hummers daily on my regular commuting route. The posted speed limit never goes above 60, but it's common when traffic is light for folks to be barreling along at 70+ mph.
Cheers,
Seriously, what sort of incompetence do you have to have on display to have someone actually manage to patent the peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
Or the combover hairstyle. (Ostensibly to conceal baldness, but it usually just makes it more obvious...)
Or swinging sideways on a swingset.
There ain't shit that the US Patent Office does that passes any kind of smell test. The word incompetence doesn't begin to describe the situation.