Tuesday, November 05, 2019

Thoughts on self-driving cars

AAA envisions a self-driving car reality and sees this as pretty much inevitable in the near future. I get their news magazine and they seem completely on board with this. I'm not. The level we're talking about here is not fully autonomous so a driver has to be behind the wheel at all times but then he/she mostly lets the car do its thing at least on open highways although I've seen other videos on YouTube showing folks driving cars with adaptive cruise control with the self-driving feature in slower stop-and-go traffic. I'd rather have a fallible self-aware human being in control of the car at all times instead of relaxing and letting advanced tech take over which can and will go wrong. I can probably come up with a list of other reasons why I'm against. What with ai robots and self-driving cars trucks and buses just around the bend and now flying cars on sale for the bored rich and some people on jetpacks (you can easily search all of these on YouTube) what can go wrong???

Friday, October 18, 2019

The Impeachment Inquiry etc.

Kind of tangentially following the political stuff because I don't care anymore. A lot of other stuff on my plate of late but re this impeachment inquiry for me it's kind of weird that there's some kind of connection between the Ukrainian president and digging up dirt on Joe Biden himself and his son. It'd be like saying there's some kind of Tanzanian connection for that matter but the bottom line is you can't impeach someone for simply being an asshole so you have to have something. Hell Trump might complete two terms with the constant background chatter of impeachment talk. Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings just died at 68 because of poor health. Sen. John McCain died while still in office and of course Alex Trebek with pancreatic cancer is still doing Jeopardy. Seems a trend now work 'til you drop. That ain't gonna be me and I don't see the nobility in it. Soon as I reach the required minimum I'm going online to file my SS. Just saw an interview with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns last night on PBS. He reminds me a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson for some reason. Their smartness is annoying and do they ever question their own smartness? Burns just did a whole documentary on Country Music which I'm not really into and never could get into not for lack of trying ("...They shot my horse and my wife ran away...") but I did watch parts of it anyway because I like Johnny Cash. Now Burns said he's gonna do one on race which that's another one to slog through God help us. I think we've reached the point where most of us would like to move onto other subjects. Burns said in the interview that Thomas Jefferson had something like a hundred slaves on his estate and we know now that Columbus killed the Indians so you can't really honor anyone these days. I don't know man talk about what you want.

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

The liberal version of original sin

The House hearings on reparations for slavery.  You can go on down the line.  Should gays get reparations?  Women?  Other historically oppressed groups?  What about the Indians?  Or you can talk about what you want.

Thursday, March 14, 2019

& the award for Best New Political Artist goes to AOC

I get the feeling Trump wins reelection in 2020 because the Democratic field is so diluted from which a real powerhouse is unlikely to emerge.  What are there twenty candidates now?  Cardi B may as well run.  Impeachment seems not much worth it to quoth Nancy Pelosi.  My mind is tired.  I've moved onto other things.  It might be a good thing if Maroon 5 stopped churning out new songs.