Politics in the Zeros

Following up my  previous post about the certain chaos if Headless Uber cars try to pick up clubgoers in Los Angeles. I was thinking about Vegas, where I live now. Having a driverless cab take you from, say, the airport to a casino hotel on The Strip or Downtown, would almost certainly be problematic.

I’ll use two examples The Golden Nugget downtown and Caesar’s Palace on The Strip.

The address of The Golden Nugget is 129 Fremont Street Experience. However, that is a canopied walk street. To check in, you enter on S. Casino Center Rd. How will a driverless car know a) not to drive on a walk street and b) that the actual entrance to a casino isn’t its address?

Caesar’s Palace is a ginormous 34 acres. Its address is 3570 S Las Vegas Blvd. Will a Headless Uber car know enough to drive in the driveway to drop the passenger off or will it simply stop on The Strip itself to let the passenger out, creating a traffic jam. How about if a passenger wants to go to the Forum Shops at Caesar’s (not shown in photo)? How will it know where to drop off for any of the other stores, restaurants, and facilities at Caesar’s. After dropping off a passenger, the driverless car will then need to find its way out through a maze of twisty roads and driveways that are always crowded. Good luck with that.

The blogger at Up In The Valley in Los Angeles drives for Uber and says driverless Uber cars will create chaos because they won’t – and can never – know the unspoken rules. For example, West Hollywood clubs have two and only two precisely parking spots, one for taxis, one for valets. There’s no way a driverless car can handle picking up clubbers without clogging streets.

Enter the Headless Uber. That sleek grey Volvo with the radar/camera array on the roof is going to proceed exactly to the address entered on the app. A third of the time, the pin drop is on the wrong side of the street, or in the service alley. No matter, Headless Uber is going to the pin and it’s going to stop and wait right there…and wait, in the only available place, the street itself. The only alternative is to circle the block until the single space loading zone in front of Pump opens up. For how long, 10 minutes? Twenty?

Also, let’s say Headless Uber it pulls into the valet spot, waits for its human, who decided to take Lyft and forget to cancel the ride. What then? Or maybe the human did cancel the ride. Will Headless Uber just stay in the valet spot until it it told to go elsewhere?

It won’t respond to honking, valet parkers waving LED flashlights, outcries of irritation or obscene gestures. With that simple act of traffic obedience, lane one of Santa Monica Blvd. will disappear, from Doheny to La Cienega, so Uber Technologies, Inc. may defend itself from civic injunctions for being a serial traffic scofflaw. Lane two is going to have carry the rest of the thru traffic, the cabs, the limousines, and the old school Ubers manned by second-jobbing drivers doing night work. The Social Contract in Los Angeles will be put to the test.

Plus, driverless in cities are nowhere near being ready.

At a holiday dinner, I asked a teacher of robotics if she would be willing to beta-test a headless Uber without a steering wheel-grabbing back-up driver at the ready.

Her answer was unhesitant: No.

“I know from experience all the things which can go wrong.”

Wikileaks published emails showing the Clinton campaign deliberately tried to influence the Republican primary so an extreme candidate would be chosen. Presumably they thought Bush or Rubio would be harder to beat than Trump, Cruz, or Carson. That worked out well, didn’t it?

Biden says Hillary never really figured out why she wanted to run, which begs the question, then why did she run?

The campaign was run by a database program called Ada. Ada was right about some things and completely wrong about Rust Belt voters. Computer programmers have a phrase for this, “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

Her campaign was repeatedly told by her own staffers on the ground in the Midwest and by Sanders’ staffers that Trump was gaining fast. They were told to STFU.

Hillary strategy was to separate Trump from the Republican Party and attack him personally. This was so they would not alienate mythical Republicans in the suburbs and made it impossible for Clinton to side with the traditional base of the Democratic Party, the working class, which Trump then grabbed.

The cynical triangulation strategy of ignoring the base to appeal to other voters was devised by the Clintons. It was always a rotten strategy and just blew up in their faces.

Part of her pitch was she would run a super competent campaign. Instead, it was one of the worst in modern history.

ISIS-linked news agency releases video of Amri swearing allegiance to them, who is now dead, killed by Italian police.

Amri has as much relation to Islam as Dylann Roof does to Christianity. Let’s try to get past all the rubbish about religion and figure out genuine ways to stop a few lone psychos from slaughtering innocents. Hint: Overwhelming force and let’s go stomp the bastards isn’t effective because they aren’t a state, have no fixed location, and are difficult to find. So, spewing testosterone about stomping them is singularly useless.

Amri was known to German authorities as Islamist. They were trying to deport him. Merkel has a real trouble now. Slamming shut borders and letting refugees fend for themselves and freeze to death in the cold is not a solution either.

Active Response Training, an excellent site about security and defense, details the differences between how men and women are attacked, in their review of The Little Black Book of Violence, which focuses on why men fight and are attacked, rather than straight self-defense. The best fight is one you never have to fight. Their advice for avoiding trouble and violence is “Don’t do stupid things. Don’t hang with stupid people. Don’t go stupid places.” Works for me…

From the Amazon book review:

Every time you engage in violence, no matter how small or trivial it may appear to be at the time, it has the potential of escalating into something extraordinarily serious. What is really worth fighting for when you might find yourself spending the rest of your life behind bars, confined to a wheelchair, or trying to dig yourself out of bankruptcy from beneath the crushing weight of a civil lawsuit? It is important to ask yourself, “Is this really worth fighting over?” While in some instances the response could legitimately be “Yes,” more often than not it ought to be “No.”

One advantage women have is surprise, as you can see in the video. The attacker probably wasn’t thinking she would do a well-placed groin kick then kick him in the face.

Observations about the chart:

Men think about things in a different way, process information differently, and are exposed to different dangers than women. So why should we have one general set of “rules” for handling the broad spectrum of violence that occurs across both genders?

We shouldn’t. While some individual pieces of advice work well for both sexes, there isn’t a lot of overlap in the combatives world. Take a look at these generalized differences in patterns of criminal attack between men and women.