Is Elon Musk Nuts?
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UPDATED: Thursday, September 3, 2026 02:05
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I Took a Ride in a ‘Self-Driving’ Tesla and Never Once Felt Safe
The tech in Elon Musk’s electric vehicles is supposed to prevent accidents, but in several cases, it nearly caused one
August 19, 2024
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/self-driving-tes
la-drive-1235079210/
When the “Full Self-Driving” setting is enabled in a Tesla, according to the automaker’s own description, the car “attempts to drive to your destination by following curves in the road, stopping at and negotiating intersections, making left and right turns, navigating roundabouts, and entering/exiting highways.”
“Attempts” would be the crucial word here, as I learned during an occasionally harrowing demonstration of FSD around surface streets and freeways in Los Angeles. While it’s true that the technology manages to impress at first, it doesn’t take long for severe and dangerous shortcomings to emerge. And, contrary to claims from exaggeration-prone Tesla CEO Elon Musk, it certainly didn’t seem safer than having an average human driver at the wheel.
One morning in early August, I hop into a 2018 Tesla Model 3 owned by Dan O’Dowd, founder of the Dawn Project. Easily the most outspoken critic of Tesla’s so-called autonomous driver-assistance features, O’Dowd — a billionaire who also co-founded Green Hills Software and made his fortune developing secure, hacker-proof systems for the U.S. military and government — established the Dawn Project to campaign “to ban unsafe software from safety critical systems” spanning healthcare, communications, power grids, and transportation. For several years, Tesla has been his primary target; O’Dowd has orchestrated one safety test after another, mounted a single-issue campaign for Senate, and run expensive Super Bowl commercials to spread his warnings against the company’s FSD software.
We experience the pitfalls of Tesla Vision several times during an hour-long drive. (A Tesla’s eight external cameras have a relatively low resolution of 1.2 megapixels. Higher-end iPhones have cameras that offer a resolution of 48 megapixels.) Once, the car tries to steer us into plastic bollard posts it apparently can’t see. At another moment, driving through a residential neighborhood, it nearly rams a recycling bin out for collection — I note that no approximate shape even appears on the screen. We also narrowly avoid a collision when trying to turn left at a stop sign: the Tesla hasn’t noticed a car with the right of way zooming toward us from the left at around 40 mph. Maltin explains that this kind of error is a function of where the side cameras are placed, in the vehicle’s B pillars, the part of the frame that separates the front and rear windows. They’re so far back that when a Tesla is stopped at an intersection, it can’t really see oncoming traffic on the left or right, and tries to creep forward, sometimes gunning it when it (falsely or not) senses an opportunity to move in. A human driver, of course, can peer around corners. And if a Tesla with FSD engaged does suddenly notice a car approaching from either side, it can’t reverse to get out of harm’s way.
After a while, you start to anticipate these mistakes. Maltin, who has plenty of experience testing FSD, frequently tenses up if a complicated or unusual driving task suddenly presents itself. But I notice a certain hesitancy and what I can only characterize as indecisiveness in the Tesla itself, like you’re being chauffeured by a student driver. It reliably slams on the brakes too hard instead of rolling through yellow lights, for example, and swerves unpredictably between lanes as if it can’t decide which it prefers. On the other hand, it operates well enough for five-minute stretches that you can be lulled into complacency.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I Took a Ride in a ‘Self-Driving’ Tesla and Never Once Felt Safe
That's every coal burning car.
Winter's coming. Have fun getting stuck in the snow again.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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Boeing employees 'humiliated' that upstart rival SpaceX will rescue astronauts stuck in space: 'It's shameful'
https://nypost.com/2024/08/25/us-news/boeing-employees-humiliated-that
-spacex-will-save-astronauts-stuck-in-space/
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British want to jail him for the Civil War comments
Musk in reply to a critic of Brazil
Quote:
'Correct'
Michael Shellenberger
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1829215766765547623
Author, “Apocalypse Never,” "San Fransicko"
Brazil is now a dictatorship. It is run by two men, President LulaOficial and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. They are today ending both freedom of speech and free markets. Brazil is no longer safe for foreign investment and its currency should reflect that.
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The judge Elon Musk bizarrely called 'Brazil's Darth Vader' gives Twitter 24 hours to comply with court order or get shut down by the full power of his legal battle station
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/the-judge-elon-musk-bizarre
ly-called-brazils-darth-vader-gives-twitter-24-hours-to-comply-with-court-order-or-get-shut-down-by-the-full-power-of-his-legal-battle-station/
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Elon Musk defies X ban in Brazil by beaming app from space
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-x-ban-brazil-starlink-b26
06095.html
Free internet for everyone getting punished too.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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Sep 11, 9:13 AM EDT
Elon Musk’s Lawyers Accidentally Sent an Incredibly Sensitive Email to the Wrong People, Then Demanded They Delete It
All in a day's work for Team Elon.
Don't Look Back in Anger
In the midst of his chaotic purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk's attorneys accidentally sent a bunch of people the wrong email about his financial backing — and then aggressively demanded the recipients delete it.
As New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac note in a Vanity Fair-published excerpt from their new book about the Twitter buyout, the billionaire's team made the massive gaffe while it was still unclear whether Musk was actually going to pull off the sale.
"At one point, Musk’s lawyers... accidentally sent Twitter’s finance team a full spreadsheet of all the people and investment firms from which they solicited money," Conger and Mac wrote in "Character Limit," their forthcoming book about the deal. "That screwup was immediately followed by a legal threat to the Twitter recipients to delete the email and its contents."
Around the same time as the deal was in limbo in mid-2022, Twitter's financial officers had, as the book notes, developed a dark way to handle the uncertainty of Musk's closing.
"Members of Twitter’s finance teams had adopted a gallows humor approach to the deal," the reporters described, "and made a joke of trying to track Musk’s money."
More at https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-lawyers-twitter-email
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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just say no to Elon Musk —
Tesla Full Self Driving requires human intervention every 13 miles
It gave pedestrians room but ran red lights and crossed into oncoming traffic.
Jonathan M. Gitlin - 9/25/2024, 10:31 AM
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/tesla-full-self-driving-requires-
human-intervention-every-13-miles/
"Its seeming infallibility in anyone's first five minutes of Full Self Driving (FSD) operation breeds a sense of awe that unavoidably leads to dangerous complacency. When drivers are operating with FSD engaged, driving with their hands in their laps or away from the steering wheel is incredibly dangerous. As you will see in the videos, the most critical moments of FSD miscalculation are split-second events that even professional drivers, operating with a test mindset, must focus on catching.”
"Whether it's a lack of computing power, an issue with buffering as the car gets "behind" on calculations, or some small detail of surrounding assessment, it's impossible to know. These failures are the most insidious. But there are also continuous failures of simple programming inadequacy, such as only starting lane changes toward a freeway exit a scant tenth of a mile before the exit itself, that handicaps the system and casts doubt on the overall quality of its base programming."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Musk threatens America’s national security, and what must be done
His incitement to assassinate America’s commander-in-chief is only the most recent illustration
By Robert Reich | Sep 26, 2024
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-elon-musk-threatens-national
Shortly after the apparent second assassination attempt against Trump, Elon Musk responded in a now deleted post: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala ?? ????”
Musk later said his post was intended as a joke. But it could be interpreted as a call to murder Biden and Harris — at least by one of the 198 million followers of Musk who initially received it. Presumably this is why the Secret Service is investigating it.
Under 18 U.S. Code Section 871, threatening a president or vice president or inciting someone to harm them is a felony that can result in a large fine and up to five years in prison.
Yet even as Musk posted a potential death threat against the sitting commander-in-chief, his multiple defense contracts with the U.S. government have given him access to highly sensitive information.
Reportedly, Musk has been given security clearance notwithstanding his admitted use of drugs (Musk says he has submitted to random drug testing at the request of the government), including smoking weed in public and using ketamine (for which he claims to have a prescription).
Quite apart from the drugs, when was the last time the U.S. government gave access to sensitive national security information to someone who posted a potential death threat against the president and vice president, even if he later called it a joke?
Underlying this is a broader question: When in history has one unelected individual held such sway over American national security?
Musk’s SpaceX has nearly total control of the world’s satellite internet through its Starlink unit. With little regulation or oversight, Musk has already put more than 4,500 Starlink satellites into orbit around the globe, accounting for more than half of all active satellites. Musk plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in coming years.
Space X and its Starlink system have become strategically critical to American security. Starlink is providing connectivity to the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Space Force signed a $70 million contract late last year to provide it with military-grade low-earth-orbit satellite capabilities. According to Reuters, the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees U.S. spy satellites, has a $1.8 billion contract with SpaceX.
This gives Musk — the richest person in the world — remarkable power. Single-handedly, he can decide to shut down a country’s access to Starlink and the internet. He also can also gain access to sensitive information gathered by Starlink. “Between, Tesla, Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever,” Musk tweeted in April 2023.
Meanwhile, NASA has increasingly outsourced spaceflight projects to SpaceX, including billions in contracts for multiple moon trips and $843 million to build a vehicle that will take the International Space Station out of commission.
Conflicts of interest between Musk’s ventures around the world and U.S. national security abound, and they are multiplying.
When Putin attacked Ukraine, Musk and SpaceX’s Starlink provided Ukraine with internet access, enabling the country to plan attacks and defend itself. (This was not a charitable move by Musk; most of the 20,000 terminals in the country were funded by outside sources such as the U.S. government, the United Kingdom, and Poland).
But in the fall of 2022, when Ukraine entered territory contested by Russia, Musk and Space X abruptly severed the connectivity. Musk explained at the time that “Starlink was barred from turning on satellite beams in Crimea at the time, because doing so would violate U.S. sanctions against Russia!”
But who was Musk to decide what actions would or would not violate U.S. sanctions?
In fact, Musk was trying to push Ukraine to agree to Russia’s terms f
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