UM: This $1,500 Robot Will Talk To Kids So Parents Don’t Have To. “A video promo for Moxie clearly tries to make the robot seem sweet, helpful, and appealing, but it actually comes off as a creepy form of parent replacement.”
Archive for 2020
September 29, 2020
GEORGE ORWELL DIDN’T WRITE 1984 AS A HOW-TO GUIDE: Somehow the Biden campaign secured the rights to the ‘@Truth’ Twitter handle.
SAD EVIDENCE OF REALITY FOR FEMINISTS:
The problem is, would a man like Jesse Barrett settle for a hardcore feminist?
SO LIKE AMERICA, THEN? In France, Southerners Grumble at Virus Restrictions From Up North.
I HEARD MILLIONS OF VINTAGE CAR ENTHUSIASTS CRY OUT, AND WERE SUDDENLY SILENCED:
According to Jim Treacher, Iowahawk’s account was hacked:
Iowahawk is one of the few remaining bright spots on Twitter; I hope his account is restored ASAP.
BECAUSE HOSPITALS AREN’T CREEPY ENOUGH? Why Boston Dynamics Is Putting Legged Robots in Hospitals. Boston Dynamics is technically sweet, but their aesthetic is straight out of SkyNet.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Operate a Rifle in the Dark.
NEIL KINNOCK? British member of Parliament nominates Biden for a Nobel Peace Prize.
“When others have resorted to violent solutions, [Biden] has argued that the best force is the force of argument,” Chris Bryant, a member of the Labour Party, told the Standard. “Because guns can stop a heart but well-placed words can change many hearts, and many hearts can change a world.
Flashback: Obama’s Weak Defense of His Record on Drone Killings.
I INHERITED AN AXE FROM MY — OH, WAIT: Evolutionary and heritable axes shape our brain.
SCHRODINGER’S CANDIDATE: The Strangest Campaign in History? Joe Biden may be running for president — and then again, maybe he’s not.
And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.
So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute — a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.
And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.
His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.
As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nation’s next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.
As in 2016, a few polls — Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby — show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely “prove” their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans — as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.
And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.
Don’t get cocky.
WHERE WE’RE GOING WE DON’T NEED ROADS: Hyundai is moving ahead with production of this crazy walking car.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: This Week in Democrat Voting Fraud for September 29, 2020.
QUESTION ASKED AND — PARTIALLY — ANSWERED: What Caused The Massive Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Outage Yesterday? Here’s What We Know.
DRIVING TOWARDS UTOPIA, SKIDDING ON ICE:
Unfortunately, if you want to get a policy changed, it’s not enough to persuade governments that it will have a net negative impact on the country. You also have to convince that them there is a policy that will also meet their aims—here it’s reducing carbon emissions—to compensate them for having to abandon their destructive approach.
In this case there is an alternative policy. It is to improve the efficiency of the internal combustion engine so that it releases fewer carbon emissions into the atmosphere. It’s a very simple and practical approach to solving a difficult problem. It does not require the building of any infrastructure, let alone a massive one, in order to work effectively. For that and other reasons, it doesn’t constitute a heavy increase in expenditures by governments and consumers. It’s already being accomplished by the research departments of automobile companies which have transformed conventional cars to an astounding extent since the 1960s.
How effective might this approach be in reducing carbon emissions? Professor Kalghatgi estimates that a 5 percent reduction in fuel consumption by ICE vehicles would obtain a larger reduction in carbon emissions than the massive switch to electric cars with all its attendant infrastructure costs. That alone would be a massive prize. But he also believes that a reduction much larger than 5 percent in fuel consumption by ICEVs could be obtained through such methods as “better combustion, control and after-treatment systems along with partial electrification and reductions in weight.”
The snag is that though these innovations are being pursued now, how long is that likely to continue if the U.K. government instructs car manufacturers that they must stop selling their product in ten years? What incentive is there for companies to maintain large R&D expenditures when they are officially told that these innovations, even if successful, will reduce carbon emissions and make other improvements in their automobiles for only a short period before production is halted altogether?
As Iowahawk likes to say, in America, we need the equivalent of the Second Amendment to protect us against the coming war on driving.
WHEN THE LEFT IS VIOLENT, IT’S THE RIGHT’S FAULT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Harvard Kennedy School director says ‘riot porn’ from ‘right-wing’ media is responsible for violence. The picture is exactly as you’d expect.