Monthly Archives: August 2024

Wrong Mindset

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As self-driving cars, misnomerly termed AI-driven cars, become more common, or at least less uncommon, there is growing concern about the ethics of the AIs involved. It’s a valid question, but it aims at the wrong target.

What will the roadway scruples of AI look like?

What to do about avoiding collisions vs the consequences of an avoidance maneuver? Relatedly, dodge the large animal but don’t bother about the small animal? Which property is more legitimate to avoid if any avoidance maneuver means collision with something or damage to the maneuvering car—into the ditch or into the tree to avoid another collision.

There are easier questions, too, whose answers left to the AI are just examples of laziness.

Is taking the fastest route the core metric that should guide autonomous vehicles, or are other factors just as relevant? Focusing on getting to the destination quickly would allow self-driving ride-share vehicles to make more trips and more profit, but might result in more danger. Giving priority to safety alone could slow and snarl traffic. And what about choosing routes that let passengers enjoy the journey?

After all,

The trade-off between safety and speed is “the one thing that really affects 99% of the moral questions around autonomous vehicles,” says Shai Shalev-Shwartz, chief technology officer at Mobileye…. Shifting parameters between these two poles, he says, can result in a range of AI driving, from too reckless to too cautious, to something that seems “natural” and humanlike.
The software can also be calibrated to allow different driving styles, he says. So, for example, an autonomous sports car might drive more aggressively to enhance a sense of performance, an autonomous minivan might put the biggest emphasis on safety and an off-road vehicle might default to taking a scenic route.

There’s no need to leave those factors solely in the software. It’s just not that hard to break them out into separate routines, with the human car driver selecting one when he gets in and boots up his car. Planning a trip is what humans do now, whether a trip across town or to another city or the short trip to the grocery store, even if the latter is planned sub rosa. That needs to be in the hands of the human.

Even if we decide to turn driving over to the AI system running the autonomous vehicle, only the driving itself should be turned over—while maintaining human oversight and real-time overruling capability and responsibility during the driving. It’s hard enough for a human to make the value judgment call regarding a broad variety of collision scenarios, especially regarding those outlined at the start of this post. It’s impossible, at least for the foreseeable future, for humans to write code to wire those judgments into the software running a car.

Autonomous vehicles cannot be only AI operated. The human must be responsible for the decisions he makes in validating the car’s real-time decisions, or overruling them. Or flipping a switch and taking over the task of driving because the software has gotten over its code.

Kamala Harris’ Tax Policies

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And misallocation of those tax collections. Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to raise taxes on Americans and our corporations by some $5 trillion over the next decade and cut other taxes by more than $4 trillion. Or so she claims, especially regarding the latter. The former can be taken as gospel; raising taxes, especially on those Evil Rich Americans, is what Party does.

Under her plan, taxes would go up sharply on some high-income households, and top marginal tax rates would reach their highest point since 1986. The wealthiest investors and company founders would encounter sizable s that they don’t face under current law.

That capital-gains tax bill is made the more sizable by her plan to tax capital gains that haven’t been realized—i.e., gains that don’t exist.

Her claim to not have any tax increases on households making under $400,000 is shown to be a sham promise by her decision to ignore the effect her corporate tax increase to 28% and her increase in the diktated [sic] minimum corporate tax to 21% would have on middle-income workers and shareholders. The impact includes that tax on phantom capital gains that Harris wants to impose on us middle class workers who own shares of companies in our own, however miniscule, portfolios.

Left unanswered, so far, is what Harris intends to do with those tax revenues. Her silence here stands against the backdrop of the Biden-Harris administration’s years long cuts, in real terms, to funding for our defense establishment, leaving us the weakest we’ve been in decades at the moment of greatest national security danger we’ve faced in decades.

This tax policy also is one of the reasons Harris floated her price controls proposal—to try to distract us from the policies she’s serious about slipping past, a squirrel maneuver which a compliant press is actively aiding her with its concentration on price control proposals while minimizing coverage of the rest of her ideas.

Parenting is Hazardous to One’s Health?

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That’s what the United States Surgeon General says. His solution?

[Surgeon General Vivek] Murthy prescribes a mix of institutional actions such as child income-tax credits and workplace management training on one hand, and individual action such as seeking more mindfulness and self-care on the other.

Sure. The typical progressive mix of throw money at the problem along with feel good self-care claptrap. Nothing about taking care of the children directly. Nothing about local community involvement, and no, I’m not talking about it taking a village nonsense. I’m talking about misdiagnosing the problem because the Progressive-Democrat Surgeon General bureaucrat possessed of a medical degree has missed the underlying problem altogether.

It’s not the powerlessness of parents, nor is it their loneliness; although, the latter does play a part.

Parents have nearly complete power over their children except in some jurisdictions where government asserts itself as the sole possessor of children, whether through public schools locking parents out of their children’s education or emotional problems or directly by locking parents out of the government’s decisions regarding children’s sexual health. “Nearly complete” because parental power does not extend to abusing children. That’s the short and simple of parental power.

Now, the loneliness aspect. The loneliness of parents isn’t from being a parent, it’s from lack of community in the local neighborhood. The folks in too many neighborhoods don’t interact with each other, so they don’t know each other, so they’re in no position to support each other. Yes, yes, both parents work in a double potful of those cases. So what?

I grew up in a household where both my parents worked. At the same time, I grew up in a neighborhood where most households had both parents working. In those days, though, there weren’t backyard fences for individual privacy in the neighborhood. Instead, all those backyards, and front yards, too, functionally ganged together as one large playground for the neighborhood kids to play together, sometimes with ad hoc games, sometimes with less informal games: croquet courts, football (yes, we played tackle), sometimes out into the streets for baseball. The noise of children having fun was loud and common, from toddlers more closely watched by the various parents through high schoolers playing those football and baseball games, and soccer today—and where basketball hoops were set up in driveways, those games, too.

The parents interacted among each other, too. They all knew each other, and they all looked after all the kids, emphasizing their own, to be sure, but all of them. They even had each other’s kids over for snacks or a dinner.

We’ve lost that capacity now, with those ubiquitous fences isolating the back yards, and the children and adults, from each other. We’ve lost that capacity now, too, with today’s adults—parents—more self-centered, me-time demanding, and less community oriented. Today’s neighborhoods are eerily silent of kids playing outdoors.

That sense of community is much harder to achieve in many inner city (and a growing number of outer city) neighborhoods, but that’s not the loss of community among parents and families, it’s the destruction of community through two mechanisms. One is the crime rate. Too many city, county, and State governments reduce, or leave already inadequate, funding for policing the neighborhoods and don’t prosecute criminals that the police do catch. Crime expansion makes the neighborhoods unsafe for parents or children to go outdoors, for adults interact, and for children play with each other.

Community: gangs fill a lot of that—children need their own sense of community, and gangs, however dysfunctionally or crime-oriented fill a lot of that. Those gangs are potentiated, too, by the lack of policing in the neighborhoods.

The other aspect is the lack of effort in or facilities for encouraging newly arrived immigrants to assimilate into American culture. Instead, the newly arrived immigrants hold themselves apart, keeping themselves and their children apart. And they become old immigrants, establishing themselves in their own small (or large) enclaves, into which further newly arrived immigrants of the same culture go to live, and to stay apart.

Lose the loneliness by tearing down those fences; throwing the kids outside to play, without their electronics; talking to the neighbors; get adequate numbers of beat cops in the neighborhoods; prosecute crimes—especially by the gang members. Take concrete, measurable steps to get immigrants assimilated rather than held apart.

Don’t Only Blame Gensler

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have their panties in a twist over SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s imposing $393 million in fines on 26 companies that fail[ed] to track employee “off-channel” [personal] communications.

It’s certainly true that Gensler badly overstepped his bounds with those fines. The SEC, and no one in it, has any authority to surveil or to require surveillance of private company’s private employees’ personal communications. Gensler and his SEC should be swatted down—hard—in court for that excess.

However.

A major part of the blame for this overstep belongs on the management teams of those 26 companies. Those worthies demonstrated deeply disgusting cowardice when they meekly acceded to the fines. They’ve done a disservice to the companies of which they’re in charge, they’ve betrayed their shareholders, and they’re right next door to betraying the fiscal duties those managers have to their companies’ shareholders. Their meekness serves only to expose their companies to further government overreach, and it exposes their employees to further unwarranted (in both senses) surveillance by an overreaching government.

That betrayal vastly outweighs any financial “savings” from agreeing to pay the SEC fines…because it’s less costly than resisting in court. And it interferes with that necessary swatting-down, an interference that potentiates the likelihood of those future costs.

A Crock

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That’s the only term for the Biden-Harris White House stonewalling of a Fox News FOIA request for the identification of the nationalities of the illegal aliens that those two are allowing into our nation via their open-borders policy. Fox News isn’t even asking for by-name data, just aggregated. Speaking through their Customs and Border Protection manager mouthpiece, though, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris are claiming—and they’re serious about this:

Releasing data for a particular nationality, or nationalities, that reflect a small number of individuals could lead to identification, especially by organizations familiar with the individuals.

And

The privacy interests of third parties (being protected from public disclosure because they could conceivably be subject to harassment and annoyance in his/her private life) far outweigh whatever public interest, if any, exists in having their information released.

This rationalization is a crock in two ways. One is that Biden-Harris are holding up identification of all nationalities because only a few illegal aliens, they claim, are of particular nationalities.

Another crock is the beef that the illegal aliens might be identified. They need to be identified so they can be gathered up and deported for their illegal entry, for their beginning their presence here with breaking our laws.

Biden and Harris also have it precisely backward in counting those third party privacy interests as more important than the public interest. We have a right to know who and what party(s) are aiding and abetting illegal aliens and by extension—intended or not—aiding and abetting human traffickers moving these illegal aliens. These third parties, along with such traffickers as can be identified and caught, need to be hauled into court and held criminally liable for their status as accessories to these crimes.

We also have a right to know who these third parties are so we can have a chance to assess the amount of our tax monies that is being used to support these illegal aliens and those third parties.

And this bit of cynical disingenuousity:

If such an organization were to move ‘X’ number of operatives of one nationality over the relevant period, and the disclosed nationality numbers were substantially lower than X, the terrorist organization could infer a large percentage of its operatives from a particular nationality have been able to move undetected (thereby minimizing the deterrent effect of the TSDS)[.]
…
This information could allow bad actors to reverse engineer effective countermeasures to facilitate undetected movement and activity and thwart CBP interdiction efforts[.]

The terrorist organizations and the cartels operating in Mexico already know these data. They already know who they’ve moved in and who’s been caught; this tells them how successful they are in their trafficking. To the extent the administration is serious with this claim, they’re simply projecting their own inability to conduct serious intel operations regarding who or what is coming across our border and where they’re going once inside.

This is the level of cynicism, or of incompetence, or both, that is rampant in the Biden-Harris administration and in Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ border policy.