Tag Archives: ethics

Self-Driving Cars

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This Luddite remains strongly opposed to letting robots drive me around. However, the software that runs one version of a robot car, that package “guiding” Tesla’s latest iteration of its Full-Self Driving car, version 13.2, is a vast improvement of past efforts, according to BARRON’S.

Absent from the testing, though, at least as publicly reported, is how well 13.2 handles random (and frequent) traffic violations by the cars of other drivers that would endanger the occupants of the FSD or pedestrians or other vehicles. Such violations include the relatively minor, such as speeding; as well as the more dangerous wobbly bicycle(s) and inattentive bicyclists; pedestrians darting, at the last moment even, in front of the FSD in his last ditch effort to cross the road; crossing traffic running the red light or stop sign; oncoming traffic deciding to make a left turn at the last moment; the list is extensive.

Other risks are mostly in the residential neighborhood: the toddler in front of a parked car at the last moment darting into the street and the small pet under that parked car making the last moment dart into the street.

Many of those situations are difficult enough for a human driver to answer, often too difficult and the collision occurs.

Any robot-driven car needs to be able to handle those random situations at least as well as any experienced human driver.

Then there’s the classic moral paradox, usually cast in terms of a railroad exercise regarding which track to be switched to given the certainty of some measure of death regardless of the choice. Those choices occur on roads with cars and trucks, also, and they’re often badly handled by the human drivers involved. What can we expect from robot software?

To repeat: I remain strongly opposed to letting robots drive me around. The software involved is improving, but enough so? What constitutes sufficient improvement? At the least, satisfactory handling of the above situations.

Pointless Resolution

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“Journalistic institutions” are being offered a New Year’s Resolution, by many of us average Americans, for how to execute their function in the coming year.

Americans across the country were united in their New Year’s resolution for the media: “Tell the truth.”

It won’t happen, though, not in any believable way, unless there’s a complete replacement of the current crop of editors and news writers. It’s the current crop that has been so blatantly biased and outright dishonest on their “news” pages and dishonest on what passes for their opinion pages. These incumbents have trashed their credibility far beyond repair with their determined and studied bias and dishonesty over the last decades.

And one more Critical Item criterion: the journalist guild must restore the erstwhile practice of at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate the anonymously sourced claims that news and opinion writers make. That was the original standard of journalistic integrity, and it’s instructive that the current crop of guild members have no concrete, publicly accessible and measurable standard in its place.

I, for one, am tired of those worthies masquerading the voices in their heads and their childhood imaginary friends as actual sources. I’ve had done with their “sources who were present” and “senior officials.” I’m especially fed up with these writers’ ubiquitous sources “who speak only with anonymity out of fear of blowback.” Such cowards—if they exist and aren’t just another set of imaginary sources—cannot ever be believed: they’re putting their personal welfare ahead of doing a right thing.

One More Reason…

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…to stop doing business in New York. This time, it’s the State’s move to tax energy producers who sell their fossil fuel products in the State on the risible basis of those producers’ (global) CO2 production over the years 2000 through 2018. Never mind that, as the Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

It’s impossible to determine a company’s contribution to climate change since the effects of CO2 emissions on temperature and natural disasters are mediated by myriad variables.

New York’s bureaucrats will make their assessments anyway, and those assessments will be, of necessity, wholly arbitrary. Then there’s this, too, which New York’s government personages consider irrelevant:

Most fossil-fuel emissions stem from their combustion rather than production….

The fossil fuel energy producers shouldn’t waste time litigating this in court, even though they’d likely win given the plethora of court decisions that hold moves like New York’s illegal.

These folks should simply stop selling their products in New York, and that should include no longer selling their products to utilities that provide electricity- and natural gas-related energy in New York. They’ll save more money that way, money that could be used for innovation and better fossil-fuel-related products for their other customers.

Nor will New Yorkers be harmed by the withdrawal. They have plenty of energy flowing from all those “green” and “renewable” energy sources. And those nuclear reactors on the horizon. The State government’s personages assure us so.

Since Mexico Won’t

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Supporters of Republican President-elect Donald Trump are making noises about military strikes against the drug cartels in Mexico. Newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is downplaying the matter while she makes noises about her government taking the cartels seriously.

Sheinbaum has rushed to show her administration isn’t soft on drugs and migrants. Her government has gone after fentanyl smugglers in Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel, seizing 1.3 tons of the drug in a record bust. She has sent her security minister to Sinaloa to oversee the efforts to take back control of a state where organized crime dominates the political establishment and two factions are in a turf war.
Mexico is in talks to set up a unit of elite security officers who would be vetted and trained by US law-enforcement officials for operations against criminals in Mexico, according to Mexican officials.

The fentanyl bust seems like a large number, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total fentanyl output of Mexico’s drug cartels, an output that includes both their own production and their transshipment of fentanyl through Mexico to the US. The talks regarding the elite unit appear to be just chit-chat for show, given how progress in setting up the unit is close to nil.

There’s no reason to believe that Sheinbaum is any more serious about the fentanyl flows than was her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who functionally aided the cartels with his hugs instead of jails policy.

The facts remain that the cartels are poisoning us, and so far the Mexican government is allowing that. The Mexican government has even allowed various of the cartels to take over and operate many of Mexico’s cities, and the cartels own and operate the state of Sinaloa. That’s the central government functionally abetting the cartels.

As noted above, Sheinbaum is making noises about returning Sinaloa to government control, but nothing is happening so far. Meanwhile, the fentanyl continues to flow. If all Sheinbaum has is noise, or if she really does try and does not succeed, it may be necessary for the US to take down the cartels ourselves. American lives depend on it.

A Proposal

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The Republican Party has one of the smallest majorities in the House of Representatives in decades. They also have one of the most obstructionist, ego-driven factions in Party history, the Chaos Caucus whose members are pleased to call themselves the Freedom Caucus.

While Republicans will have full control of Congress and the White House, the wafer-thin cushion in the House means any small handful of Republican defectors could trip up the GOP agenda by holding out for their leaders or their own terms.

That small handful of defectors is the Chaos Caucus, and they spent all of the just ending Congressional session blowing up the Republican agenda, denying the party the passage of bills (even if doomed in the Progressive-Democrat-controlled Senate) that would have furthered Republican and Conservative goals.

That claque now is threatening the current House Speaker’s, Mike Johnson (R, LA), with removal from the Speakership at the outset of the next session. Congressman Thomas Massie (R, KY) is on record as refusing to support Johnson under any circumstances, and Congresswoman Victoria Spartz (R, IN) is throwing her own terrible-twos tantrum. The claque is on track to continue, throughout that session, obstructing Republican and Conservative moves in favor of their own desires, an obstruction borne of their my way or nothing attitude.

Hence my proposal.

Regardless of what anyone might think of Johnson’s performance as Speaker, he should continue to run for the Speakership, he should refuse to step aside, and the majority of the Republican caucus should continue to vote him up, regardless of how long that leaves the House without a Speakership, regardless of how long the Chaos Caucus refuses to support him for the role. That should occur even when Chaos Caucus obstruction prevents the Congress as a whole from overseeing the Senate’s attempts to certify the Electoral College election of—still President-elect—Donald Trump, the Republican President-in-waiting, and thereby prevents that certification from occurring.

In addition to that, once Johnson is elected Speaker—if the House gets a Speaker at all this session in the face of Chaos Caucus obstruction—the Republican caucus (which in its aggregation unfortunately includes the Chaos Caucus) should attempt to enact spending cuts, tax rate reductions, and national defense recovery and buildup in the usual manner, and then put the bills to floor votes regardless of Chaos Caucus agreement or continued obstruction.

Put the Chaos Caucus’ deliberate intransigence on display for all to see, especially those Congressmen’s constituents. It’s time to make blatantly obvious just how destructive this ego-driven collection of politicians are of the Conservative agenda that Americans in all of our nation’s House districts elected all of our Representatives to enact.

The Chaos Caucus began as an evolution of the Tea Party movement and caucus, but the present claque as a whole no longer is a collection of Tea Partiers. Congressmen like Jim Jordan (OH), current House Judiciary Committee Chairman and Chairman of the Chaos Caucus, is one of the few who still is a Tea Partier and who is willing to compromise to move things along in the direction of Republican and Conservative—and Chaos—goals.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and coming back later to improve on the good enough takes us toward the perfect. The Chaos Caucus knows that as well as the rest of us; the claque’s refusal to compromise, their way or nothing blockages, only gets the Republican Party nothing at all, and puts the Progressive-Democratic Party in control.

It’s almost like the Chaos Caucus are Machiavellian-esque moles of the other party.

There would be a happy side effect of this: the government wouldn’t be increasing its spending while the Chaos Caucus is holding its collective breath until it turns blue.