YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY: At Amazon, save on High Speed HDMI Cables. Plus, Apple-certified Lightning cables from Amazon Basics.

MACHINE LEARNING: Why AI Makes It Hard to Prove That Self-Driving Cars Are Safe.

Traditionally, he says, engineers write computer code to meet requirements and then perform tests to check that it met them.

But with machine learning, which lets a computer grasp complexity—for example, processing images taken at different hours of the day, yet still identifying important objects in a scene like crosswalks and stop signs—the process is not so straightforward. According to Koopman, “The [difficult thing about] machine learning is that you don’t know how to write the requirements.”

How do you prove that human drivers are safe?

LIGHTER, TOO: Study Shows Inflatable Bike Helmets Are Great at Preventing Concussions: Even better than traditional bike helmets. “A helmet that is basically invisible and then inflates only when you need it? It sounds too good to be true. But researchers at Stanford have been studying this style of inflatable helmet’s efficacy, and the results are promising.”

This will be familiar to readers of Snow Crash.

COVERING ALL THE BASES ON YESTERDAY’S OCTOBER SURPRISE:

If you’re shocked that Donald Trump was capable of being this much of a pig, you let yourself be deluded. If you’re surprised that the Clinton campaign — or some allied party — found something like this, you willfully chose to live in a fantasyland. If you think there isn’t more of this stuff waiting, you’re doubling down on your delusions and fantasies.

—Jonah Goldberg, “Character is Destiny.”

If ‘it’s just sex!!!’ in 1995, then it’s ‘just sex’ in 2005, and this year and every year forever. THEY made that rule. Make your enemy play by his rules — remember your Alinsky.

—Kathy Shaidle, “‘It’s just sex!’ remember? First-coffee thoughts on Trump’s hot mic thingie.”

3. I assume that publication of this recording was okayed by the Clinton campaign. And if not, the public will assume so anyway. That opens the door for Trump to attack in a proportionate way. No more mister-nice-guy. Gloves are off. Nothing is out of bounds. It is fair to assume that Bill and Hillary are about to experience the worst weeks of their lives.
4. If nothing new happens between now and election day, Clinton wins. The odds of nothing new happening in that timeframe is exactly zero.

—Scott Adams, “Why Does This Happen on My Vacation? (The Trump Tapes).”

And for a depressing reminder of the week that was for both parties’ standard-bearers, check out Jack Hellner at the American Thinker on “Trump’s dirty talk versus Hillary’s corruption.”

13TH IS AN INSULT TO MLK:

Instantly acclaimed as one of the most important documentaries of the year, Ava DuVernay’s film about the mass incarceration of black men, “13th,” wowed audiences at the New York Film Festival and looks like a leading Oscar contender as it premieres in theaters and on Netflix on Friday.

Disappointingly, given the importance of the underlying issues, the film is a morass of distortions, half-truths, calculated omissions, absurd hyperbole and outright falsehoods. Equating Donald Trump supporters with Deep South lynch mobs isn’t even its most outlandish tactic.

Read the whole thing.

Obligatory:

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1248.

IMPORTANT QUESTION FOR THE GOP “INTELLECTUAL” CLASS: WHAT PERCENTAGE OF THE GOP DO YOU ESTIMATE ACTUALLY ARE IRREDEEMABLY RACIST DEPLORABLES?

Read the whole thing.

ENEMIES OF THE REGIME MUST BE SILENCED: Progressives push to strip groups of nonprofit status for opposing administration foreign policy.

YOU JUST KEEP TELLING YOURSELF THAT, FELLAS: “NFL Blames ‘Confluence of Events’ for Ratings Declines… As for a potential backlash by some viewers angered at players not standing for the national anthem to protest of police brutality, the NFL said it sees no evidence to that being a factor in declining ratings: ‘In fact, our own data shows that the perception of the NFL and its players is actually up in 2016.’”

ALL HAIL SHALE: While Europe Gets Gouged, Americans Enjoy Cheap Power.

We told you yesterday that spot prices for German electricity jumped more than 17 percent in one day due to constricted supplies from renewable producers and French nuclear reactors, but as green-crazed Germany continues to wrangle with some of Europe’s highest (and most volatile) electricity prices, American households are about to see the first annual drop in average electricity prices in 14 years. . . .

Plentiful—and therefore cheap—natural gas is one of the biggest drivers behind this drop in average American electricity prices, and this bounty comes to us courtesy of none other than the shale boom. Thanks to fracking, U.S. natural gas production is up more than 37 percent over the past decade, and at this point the hydrocarbon has gotten so cheap that it’s doing something very few other energy sources have ever done: it’s outcompeting coal on price.

Shale gas’s ascendance is undoubtedly a boon for Americans, who as we can see are paying less on their power bills every month. That’s especially helpful for poorer households, for whom these bills take up a larger slice of a monthly budget. Just as expensive energy can be seen as a kind of regressive tax that disproportionately harms the poor, so too can we consider cheap power as especially welcome for lower-income families.

Frack, baby, frack.

It’s also cleaner. Win/win.

IT’S ALSO A WAY TO ENSURE A FAIR AMOUNT OF “BAD LUCK:” “Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex you make the rules, the more you reward people with the cognitive, material, or social resources necessary to get around them, “Jonah Goldberg writes in his latest G-File. “Give feudal aristocrats their due: They were a self-dealing crop of rent-seekers and exploiters, but at least they were open about the fact that they believed they had a divine right to sit atop the social pyramid. Today’s progressive aristocracy is largely blind to the fact that their cult of expertise isn’t really about expertise; it’s about organizing society in a way that reinforces their status and power.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: If You Want To Be A Foster Parent, You Need To Know The Truth.

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JOURNALISM: Hacked Emails: Hillary’s Scummy Press Sec. Brags About Pressuring Reporter To Spike Story. “Nick Merrill, Hillary Clinton’s traveling press secretary, bragged to other Clinton staffers about trying to shame a reporter into spiking a negative Clinton story in emails obtained by the Internet transparency group, DC Leaks.”

REPORT: Hillary Is Pulling Away from Trump in the Polls.

On the flipside though, 2016 is suddenly a good year for ‘normal’ Republicans.

BUT TRUMP SAID SOMETHING CRUDE ONCE: Barack Obama’s stillborn legacy: At home and abroad, the President’s agenda is in tatters. “Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, aka Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.”

In a reality-TV culture, we focus on the reality-TV antics of reality-TV stars, rather than on . . . reality.

AFFLICTING THE COMFORTABLE: “And there we have it in a nutshell. ‘Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’ That phrase, it should be pointed out, is not what ‘they’ say it’s a journalist’s duty to do. That phrase was satirical, uttered by the fictional Irish bartender ‘Mr. Dooley,’ the 1893 creation of Chicago Evening Post humorist Finley Peter Dunne. It was not intended to be taken seriously… In other words, give pain to those who don’t have it. What a motto, what a career description. Forget the five Ws, forget just telling the truth. Journalists are here to give pain to those they feel are too pain-free. And of course the press takes it upon itself to determine just who is comfortable enough to deserve affliction.”

Just think of the MSM as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY: Young women experiencing higher rates of mental illness.

A study released at the end of September found that 30 percent of women aged 16 to 24 in the U.K. suffered from mental illness. This is similar to the rate at which women in America reportedly suffer from mental illness.

The study found that 1 in 5 young women in the U.K. have anxiety, depression, panic disorder, a phobia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Men suffer at about half that rate. Also, 12.6 percent of women screened positive for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and nearly 20 percent reported self-harm.

This goes with the way women’s happiness has been trending down since the 1970s. Hypothesis: Feminism remade society in a way that was congenial to the 20% or so of women who identify as feminists, but that was much less congenial for the remainder.

FALLACIES DO NOT CEASE TO BE FALLACIES BECAUSE THEY BECOME FASHIONS: Setting the Record Straight on the Swift Boat Veterans.

(Classical reference in headline.)

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE. College Students: Masculinity Is ‘Extremely Toxic To Our Mental Health.’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: 65% Of Admissions Offices Want Some Law Schools To Close; 52% Want ABA Stripped Of Its Accreditation Power.

NO, MR. PRESIDENT: IT WASN’T SARAH PALIN WHO DROVE AMERICA MAD.

Flashback: Bill Whittle: “You’re not crazy. The Obama Administration will just keep gaslighting you until you think you are:”

BUT WILL ANY ACTUALLY DO SO? FBI agents are ready to revolt over the cozy Clinton probe.

Related: White House Coordinated on Clinton Email Issues, New Documents Show.

NO ALEPPO JOKES, PLEASE: Gary Johnson: My Foreign Policy Vision.