HEROES: Three Boy Scouts stopped a whole row of townhouses from catching fire.
I had some thoughts on boy scouts and heroism a while back.
Archive for 2018
December 19, 2018
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Self-driving car drove me from California to New York, claims ex-Uber engineer.
The 3,099-mile journey started on 26 October on the Golden Gate Bridge, and finished nearly four days later on the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan.
The car, a modified Toyota Prius, used only video cameras, computers and basic digital maps to make the cross-country trip.
Levandowski told the Guardian that, although he was sitting in the driver’s seat the entire time, he did not touch the steering wheels or pedals, aside from planned stops to rest and refuel. “If there was nobody in the car, it would have worked,” he said.
If true, this would be the longest recorded road journey of an autonomous vehicle without a human having to take control. Elon Musk has repeatedly promised, and repeatedly delayed, one of his Tesla cars making a similar journey.
The headline says “claims.” But if it’s not true now, it will be soon.
HARVARD LAWPROF QUESTIONS HIGHER ED’S TAX EXEMPTIONS:
ALL THE DATA THAT’S FIT TO STEAL: The New York Times Had Special Access To Facebook Data Without Users’ Knowledge.
A SLEAZY HIT ON A REPUBLICAN THAT COMES FROM A BUDDY OF SAINT MCCAIN? KNOCK ME OVER WITH A FEATHER. BREAKING: John McCain Associate Gave Dossier To BuzzFeed. “A longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the infamous Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday. David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on Dec. 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro.”
COLLUSION: Amazon and Facebook Reportedly Had a Secret Data-Sharing Agreement, and It Explains So Much. This is creepy:
Back in 2015, a woman named Imy Santiago wrote an Amazon review of a novel that she had read and liked. Amazon immediately took the review down and told Santiago she had “violated its policies.” Santiago re-read her review, didn’t see anything objectionable about it, so she tried to post it again. “You’re not eligible to review this product,” an Amazon prompt informed her.
When she wrote to Amazon about it, the company told her that her “account activity indicates you know the author personally.” Santiago did not know the author, so she wrote an angry email to Amazon and blogged about Amazon’s “big brother” surveillance.
I reached out to both Santiago and Amazon at the time to try to figure out what the hell happened here. Santiago, who is an indie book writer herself, told me that she’d been in the same ballroom with the author in New York a few months before at a book signing event, but had not talked to her, and that she had followed the author on Twitter and Facebook after reading her books. Santiago had never connected her Facebook account to Amazon, she said.
Amazon wouldn’t tell me much back in 2015. Spokesperson Julie Law told me by email at the time that the company “didn’t comment on individual accounts” but said, “when we detect that elements of a reviewer’s Amazon account match elements of an author’s Amazon account, we conclude that there is too much risk of review bias. This can erode customer trust, and thus we remove the review. I can assure you that we investigate each case.”
“We have built mechanisms, both manual and automated over the years that detect, remove or prevent reviews which violate guidelines,” Law added.
A new report in the New York Times about Facebook’s surprising level of data-sharing with other technology companies may shed light on those mechanisms.
Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.
The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
If Amazon was sucking up data from Facebook about who knew whom, it may explain why Santiago’s review was blocked. Because Santiago had followed the author on Facebook, Amazon or its algorithms would see her name and contact information as being connected to the author there, according to the Times. Facebook reportedly didn’t let users know this data-sharing was happening nor get their consent, so Santiago, as well as the author presumably, wouldn’t have known this had happened.
Who would have expected this kind of behavior from a company founded by a guy whose college blog was entitled “Zuck on it.”
Related: Why President Trump Should Channel Teddy Roosevelt And Bust Some Trusts.
Make Antitrust Great Again!
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Don’t rule out alien intelligence in UFO sightings, says scientist.
LIVING THE SMUG LIFE: Republicans Blast ‘Corrupt Cop’ James Comey After Second Closed-Door Interview.
Read the whole thing.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Liberal Arts Weren’t Murdered — They Committed Suicide, Victor Davis Hanson writes.
Once a student has signed up for a class on the Renaissance or the Great Depression and quickly learns that it can become a periodic harangue on the oppression and victimization of particular marginalized groups, she will likely not wish to repeat the experience on money borrowed at between 5 and 7 percent interest, or to be convinced that her future employer wishes to be woke by a heady 21-year-old. The irony about the Atlantic article is that when it quotes liberal-arts and history professors to document their outrage at the Wisconsin cuts, their defense of their fields become perceptions of how history is necessary to advance particular contemporary agendas. So, for example, we are told that “in mid-November, the university announced its plans to stop offering six liberal-arts majors, including geography, geology, French, German, two- and three-dimensional art, and history. The plan stunned observers, many of whom argued that at a time when Nazism is resurgent society needs for people to know history, even if the economy might not” (emphasis added).
* * * * * * * *
But when one looks at the Wisconsin campus catalogue, one seems to find few if any classes in World War II. The closest might be “Women, War and Peace,” “Dilemmas of War and Peace: An Introduction to Peace Studies,” or “War and Propaganda in the 20th Century.” No doubt such offerings might be great courses, but I don’t think they would cover fully the Nazi aggrandizement of the late 1930s, particularly the role of Soviet collaboration, British and French appeasement, and American isolationism, or the tragic circumstance of the Munich Agreement — in other words, the likely best way for students “to know history” of any purported contemporary Nazi ascendance.
Nor I am sure that by agreement we live in a time “when Nazism is resurgent.” Certainly the world’s most frightening societies are North Korea and Venezuela, where wide-scale poverty and government oppression are normalized. Both are failed Communist states. The current likeliest threat to the global order for future generations of liberal societies will be statist and authoritarian China, whose government is still proudly Communist in a tradition that includes Mao Zedong’s 50 to 70 million dead. The point is that if students are interested in riveting history classes, they will probably not wish to be told that they should so enroll in one because “Nazism is resurgent” in today’s West.
Read the whole thing.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: California governor predicts too much Democratic spending.
REVIEW: 2019 Ford Ranger Pickup.
DEUTSCHLAND PRODUZIERT AUCH VIELE FALSCHE NACHRICHTEN, KAMERAD. Der Spiegel Has a Stephen Glass Problem: Its Star Reporter — and a CNN “Journalist of the Year”!!! — Has Committed Journalistic Fraud “On a Grand Scale,” Fabricating Interviews and Distorting Facts.
Ünexpectedly.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: In 1998, Journalists Hated the Idea of Impeaching a President.
1973, 1987, 2006, 2018, not so much.
GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: NY State senator who tweeted ‘Kill yourself’ to woman proposed social media background checks for guns.
DR. TIM BALL AND TOM HARRIS: The Proposed ‘Climate Damages Tax’ Is Dumb and Dangerous. “A terrible idea based on terrible science.”
AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS: The Fourth Circuit has alarmingly decided that Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause might require colleges to block Internet sites or services if someone complains about anonymous online “harassment.” Yes, require, not allow. It’s that bad.
REVIEW: Heckler & Koch VP9-B.
AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon – Top Gift Ideas.
DECLINE IS A CHOICE: A fare-beater crackdown is just what New York needs.
Today, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s decision not to prosecute subway-fare theft threatens to undo the gains. When he announced the new policy in February, Vance touted it with lofty rhetoric about “civil, rational enforcement.” Declining to take farebeaters to court, he said, would save money, promote fairness and proportionality, and improve safety by allowing cops to fry bigger fish.
But the evidence from the first nine months is already casting a pall on these sunny predictions — and foreshadowing a return of the bad old days underground.
Earlier this month, NYC Transit, the division of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that oversees the subways, revealed that it had lost $215 million this year to “fare evasion.” That’s up from $105 million in 2015 and amounts to 88 percent of the MTA’s projected budget deficit for 2019.
Yes, the data came in the form of a preliminary estimate, as a spokesman for the DA was quick to emphasize. But the spike was high enough to suggest that farebeating in Manhattan under Vance’s lenient regime is at least a significant factor in the losses, as NYC Transit boss Andy Byford told the City Council.
Michael Bloomberg keeping most of Rudy Giuliani’s “Broken Windows” crime policies in place made New York livable again. Naturally, Bill DeBlasio wants a return to the bad old days.
EVERYTHING IS RACIST: Critics Slam Clint Eastwood’s ‘Mule’ as Racist. “Critics routinely cheer the most despicable characters on screens large and small. So why the fury against Eastwood’s crusty codger?”
Old white guys deserve what’s coming to them, especially the ones who regularly produce entertaining, moneymaking films on-time and under-budget.
MAKING MOON LANDINGS GREAT AGAIN: Israeli firms to launch first private lunar lander with flag, Bible. “Now there’s renewed interest in the moon, and we’ve got a lunar lander.”
Good, since the last human to walk on the moon, Gene Cernan, did so before most people living today were born.