History, Security

Tulips Too Late? Dutch Anger Grows at Tesla Fraud

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In 1566 the dangerous autocrat stood in front of you.

The Dutch built centuries of defensive mechanisms as non-repudiation against Spanish inquisitorial authority, coded into Dutch business culture as Calvinist truth-telling.

The famous “tulip market speculation crash” cautionary tale was one output. Amsterdam archival records show no mass bankruptcies and no documented suicides. The ruin narrative was shaped by moralizing pamphleteers in 1637 and cemented by Mackay in 1841. Propaganda at its finest. The underlying apparatus was much older and deeper.

Tesla FSD now sits in the functional class the Dutch anti-autocrat apparatus evolved to resist. A self-promoting, self-valuing authority that claims it cannot be wrong. A promise verified only by the authority making it. Old class, new vector, who this? In 2019 the Tesla autocrat sold Holland a future-dated capability, verified by a state stamp that arrived seven years later, to legitimize a deliverable that excluded the buyer.

The historic defense apparatus was built for face-to-face deceit. Tesla’s remote algorithmic deceit through future-dated capability claims is a pre-authentication attack on a verification system that expected the attacker to show up in person.

Front-end failure was the purchase in 2019. RDW arrived seven years later, certifying AI4 after Musk’s 2025 admission that HW3 could not support FSD, after the Australian class action over the same misrepresentation, after thousands of Dutch and EU owners organized a collective claim. State complicity at the tail end of an information cascade the state was positioned to read first.

The 2019 buyer faced the familiar class in an unfamiliar form. Founder-cult oracle. American export. Charismatic owner-as-truth, verified by market capitalization and fan base. The Spanish inquisitor wore robes and spoke Latin in a room you could enter, and the Dutch consider themselves free of it all. Musk speaks in eXcrement (tweets) and earnings calls from a platform he owns. The 1566 defense stack recognized the function and missed the form. The Calvinist reflex fires on detected deceit. Undetected deceit flies straight past the reflex like an open door.

RDW’s 2026 stamp approved a product asserting it does what Tesla claimed. In the same motion it certified the bifurcation. Buyers who paid for capability in 2019 could now see neighbors receive FSD Supervised while they received nothing. The framework itself has no procedure for catching deferred-capability fraud. Type approval examines the vehicle in front of the inspector. No test exists for the vehicle that was sold but never built. RDW operated inside that limit and approved anyway.

And so, realizing the Tesla attack very late, at least some of the Dutch are now very pissed.

Back-end success: Electrek writes about a man named Sigtermans who is doing classic Dutch directness. Recording a Tesla call, publishing the transcript, launching hw3claim.nl, aggregating 3,000 claimants across 29 countries. The reflex still fires. Late.

“Be patient” is an extraordinary thing to tell someone who paid you €6,400 seven years ago for a product you now admit you can’t deliver on their hardware.

The tulip tale was propaganda dressed as warning. Fabricated cautionary tales do not inoculate a culture. They flatter it into believing it knows how to be warned. The apparatus that beat the 1500s inquisition catches the 2020s autocrat only on the very late back end. Seven years of lost use. €6.5 million in claims filed. Tesla drivers burned alive in vehicles whose doors would not open, a rising body count the propaganda tale never needed to invent.

Can you see this? How many Dutch have been trapped and burned to death by Tesla?

Holland has a dangerous blindness problem. Human and machine.

Security

New Cheat for Boltzmann Brain

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A new paper by Wolpert and Rovelli is out claiming to help resolve the Boltzmann Brain (BB). In short, what if your memories were not real, but just randomness with no actual prior events?

Are your perceptions, memories and observations merely a statistical fluctuation arising from the thermal equilibrium of the universe, bearing no correlation to the actual past state of the universe?

Immediately I was struck how the Plato’s cave metaphor does something this paper doesn’t. It makes the stakes ethical, more than just epistemic. Plato’s prisoners who glimpse the outside have an obligation to return and tell the others, even knowing they’ll be disbelieved or killed. That’s an important function.

The BB framing drops ethical aspects and treats the question as a puzzle about priors rather than a situation with consequences for how you act toward other apparent minds. Which is strange, because if you’re a BB, so is everyone you’re arguing with, and the ethics of that situation are genuinely weird. Imagine everyone thinking they are the queen and their memory is the only valid one, now bow down. (Hat tip to Wollstonecraft)

Or imagine watching Blade Runner where everyone can claim to be the Blade Runner, instead of everyone wondering if they are a replicant.

Descartes saw the ethical aspect and tried to escape with God as an external guarantor. Kant gave up on the outside and relocated the problem to the structure of cognition itself, which is what this paper also does. Their “construction rule” is basically a Kantian move: here are the rules any coherent reasoner must follow, given that we can’t step outside reasoning to check it. Or as Hume would probably say, we are creatures of our habits far more than our justifications.

Modern physics gets stuck like this. There’s only inside, no outside. The faculties you’d use to check whether you’re in a cave are produced by the same physics being checked. Wolpert and Rovelli are Plato’s prisoners who’ve proven rigorously that they can’t tell if they’re in a cave, and then they just stopped and hit publish.

They say the answer depends on your prior and leave it there, as if prior selection is a separate problem someone else can solve. But prior selection has the same structure as the original question. You pick a prior using judgment, which depends on memory and inference, which depends on the second law, which depends on the prior. The circularity doesn’t get resolved by being pushed to the meta-level. It just relocates.

That’s a cheat. They aren’t admitting it’s inherited, yet placing it somewhere you would inherit it from.

Plato’s escape was that something outside the cave (the Forms, the sun, reason properly trained) gives you leverage the cave can’t corrupt. That’s the authentic inherited-rights move. External source, not controlled by the thing being questioned. It’s law and order, which physicists are disciplined to deny has an outside.

Security

KKK Destroys NYC by Blocking Taxes

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A mayor and a governor propose a tax. I swear this is real, not a joke. The tax applies to homes in New York City worth more than five million dollars that are not the owner’s primary residence. The owner’s primary residence is somewhere else. That is the legal definition of a second home, so that is the simple condition for owing the tax.

The projected tax revenue is five hundred million dollars. The projected city deficit is five point four billion. The owners who owe the tax are, by the tax’s own definition, people who have multiple million dollar homes and live elsewhere. Palm Beach. Aspen. London. Riyadh. The apartment stays mostly vacant or holds a partial-year occupancy for a few weeks. The tax exists because the apartment is extra, waiting for someone who lives somewhere else.

A federal politician who is a billionaire calls this destruction of a city. But isn’t the reverse actually the case?

A Washington outlet prints the word destruction in its headline and supplies the billionaire’s quotes underneath. A finance outlet publishes a companion piece the next morning in which unnamed Wall Streeters say the city is cooked. Neither piece prints the revenue figure against the deficit figure. Neither piece explains that the taxed party is by definition a non-resident. Neither piece mentions Vancouver, Paris, or London, which have run versions of this tax for years and still stand, arguably among the most desirable cities.

Consider what the reader of these outlets now knows instead. The reader knows a particular Trump feeling. The reader knows a verb. The reader does not know the arithmetic. The arithmetic, if printed, would answer the feeling. Five hundred million dollars from a few thousand absentee owners, against a budget gap that otherwise falls on eight million residents. The tax either produces the revenue or moves the apartment to an occupant. The buildings remain where they are in either case. The land cannot be relocated.

So the arithmetic exists, and the outlets did not print it. This was a choice. Print the arithmetic and the story collapses, because destruction requires a mechanism and the mechanism cannot be produced. Omit it and the Trump supplied verb survives. The verb obviously was what the president wanted reported. The outlets reported the verb.

This is an old disinformation trick.

In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan operated two national papers, the Fiery Cross out of Indianapolis and the Imperial Night-Hawk out of Atlanta, which printed populist slogans against plutocrats while the Klan coalition pursued Prohibition and opposed progressive taxation at the state level.

Prohibition, the Klan-Protestant-nativist coalition’s product, was a racist platform to remove the liquor excise that had supplied part of the municipal tax base. Klan driven opposition to income tax prevented any replacement. The hole was filled by raising property taxes and sales taxes. Property tax landed on farmers. Sales tax landed on wage workers. The rhetoric named Wall Street. The real cost arrived elsewhere.

The cost from tax opposition, by design, arrived most heavily at Black Americans.

Black landowning farmers in the 1920s South paid the same property tax rates as white farmers, on land they had fought to acquire and held under constant threat. The revenue those taxes raised funded segregated white schools. Black schools received token allocations or nothing. Oklahoma, Indiana, and the Deep South ran this pattern. The property tax hikes extracted capital from Black landowners through statute, sometimes to the point of forced sale.

Black wage workers paid the sales taxes that replaced the liquor excises. A domestic worker in Indianapolis paid the same sales tax rate on flour as the banker’s wife. The banker’s household paid no state income tax. The Klan coalition had opposed its introduction. The domestic worker’s grocery bill subsidized roads the wealthy drove on.

Where statute could not reach, the extraction ran through violence. Tulsa 1921 is the version everyone knew in 1921 and today, with a very suspicious silence in-between. Black Wall Street’s accumulated wealth transferred by firebomb and mass murder in a single night. Rosewood followed in 1923. The tax program and the racial violence were not separate patterns. They were the same extraction moving through different instruments. Violence where the statute would have drawn federal attention. Statute where the violence would have drawn it. The Klan coalition ran both.

The rhetoric pointed at Wall Street. The instruments landed on Black farmers, Black wage workers, and Black communities that had accumulated visible wealth. A contradiction covered in white sheets, with X logos and swastikas.

The KKK in 1921 used bi-planes to firebomb Tulsa, OK. They also dropped racist propaganda leaflets across America. The swastika was their symbol, and the X.

The Fiery Cross and the Imperial Night-Hawk printed the rhetoric and omitted the instruments. Mainstream Indiana and Oklahoma papers could transcribe Klan rallies as news and extend the effect. One paper chose differently, to report the truth. The Indianapolis Times under Boyd Gurley obtained D. C. Stephenson’s bribery ledger in 1927, printed the names of the officials on the Klan payroll, and won the 1928 Pulitzer for public service. The prize measured a specific editorial distance. The distance between printing what a powerful white supremacist said, and printing what his program did.

That distance is the core subject of this post.

Father Coughlin, speaking to tens of millions on radio in the 1930s, told his audience to drive the money changers from the temple while opposing every legislative proposal that would have taxed the money changers. Huey Long, in Louisiana, proposed actual taxation of actual wealth, and was shot in the state capitol. The pattern holds. Anti-plutocrat performance on the surface. Pro-plutocrat policy underneath. The revenue gap closed by taxing the people the performance claims to represent.

The Trump post attacks a tax. Blocking the second-home tax leaves five hundred million dollars with absentee owners and pushes the gap onto residents through service cuts or regressive taxes. The costume of populism wrapped around a donor-class outcome, exactly as Coughlin wrapped it, exactly as the Fiery Cross wrapped it.

The outlet that prints the verb without the arithmetic is doing the same work the Fiery Cross did. It is not neutral it is a megaphone, wind in the sails.

The Economist/The New Yorker weren’t wrong

Neutrality would require the arithmetic. The arithmetic would end the story. The editorial choice to omit it is the mechanism by which the performance becomes news.

The Hill’s piece, by Sarah Davis, published on April 16. Business Insider’s piece, by Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, published the next morning. Both bylines, both editors, and both business models sit on the wrong side of the distance Boyd Gurley crossed in 1927 to pull the white sheets off. Whether they cross it is a choice available to them today. Someone should investigate why they have not.

History, Security

Tesla is a Crime: Fifty Funerals Before the First Verdict

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Every layer that could have stopped Tesla fraud was designed to monetize harm after it occurred. Prevention of murder was never in scope, which enabled Elon Musk to get rich on fraud even despite mass suffering.

Big Tech billionaires are exhibiting historic levels of cruelty towards society, as if to usher in harms

Criminal fraud prosecution of a sitting CEO requires DOJ willingness. SEC enforcement requires a functioning SEC. NHTSA enforcement requires a functioning NHTSA. All three were initially weakened by Trump’s indifference.

Source: Twitter

The indifference worsened into directly hollowing out protections, when he gave Musk a federal position whose explicit function was deleting the investigative apparatus with his name on the docket.

Elon Musk celebrates the Trump family turning the White House into a corrupt monarchy, serving only billionare interests.

What Musk-at-DOGE actually represented was the subject of pending federal investigations being handed authority to delete the investigators and reclassify himself as untouchable. DOGE was a ruthless, murderous, sharpened acceleration of a 120-year-old template of harm-for-profit. Every prior case involved lobbying, revolving doors, regulatory capture from outside. DOGE was direct appointment of the defendant to dissolve any offices or courts protecting the public.

Pending investigations by the government vanished because the agencies were gutted by the subject of the investigations.

Tesla harms already remained dubiously legal because no US institution was ever given full authority to stop a car from being sold over a design flaw, until enough people have died to force a NHTSA recall, where the recall is negotiated with the manufacturer. Musk money was then not only generated by fraud because the US enforcement stack was built to extract penalties after the fact, but also because he captured the part of the stack that could still catch the fraud later.

Compare this with other countries. China and the EU use pre-market approval. A car must be certified by the regulator before it can be sold. When the Dutch Data Protection Authority ruled Sentry Mode violated GDPR, Tesla had to change the feature from on-by-default to opt-in and add a flashing-lights warning before it could keep shipping. When Chinese authorities decided Tesla’s always-on cameras were a surveillance risk, the cars were banned from military bases and government compounds. FSD was blocked from Chinese roads until Tesla met data localization requirements. The regulator has a veto, because they protect the public from obvious fraud.

Without fraud, there would be no Tesla.

Why? Four million cars worth little more than a 1992 Kia, or even negative value as threat to public safety, carry false FSD promises, false robotaxi promises, false autonomy timelines, and false HW3 “all hardware needed” claims. They repeatedly “veered” uncontrollably, exploding and killing trapped passengers. Courts constantly issue “death trap” dollars to grieving families. Without fraud there would be no trillion-dollar market cap and no Musk compensation package. Arguably there would be no Musk story at all, except about a criminal who goes to jail before hundreds of lawsuits have to be filed.

The most important thing to understand about this litigation landscape is the timing. The lawsuits being resolved right now — Benavides, Huang, and the handful of post-verdict settlements — all stem from crashes that happened in 2018-2020, when Autopilot was less capable and far fewer vehicles were on the road with the feature. FSD beta only launched publicly in late 2020. The hundreds of thousands of vehicles that have been running FSD in the years since will generate a second, much larger wave of litigation that is still in its infancy.

Tesla stockpuppets re-ratified Musk’s pay package by majority vote after a Delaware court voided it as a breach of fiduciary duty. People still believed the lies and bought cars on promises the CEO had already broken publicly. The victim participation angle in the fraud is truly problematic.

NHTSA has no veto, so Musk has more and more victims every year. NHTSA has a complaint form and an investigation pipeline measured in years. They won’t even accurately report the Tesla deaths, as I’ve explained here before, because Trump blocked honoring the dead to instead personally promote Tesla profit on harms.

Source: White House Press Secretary

Musk made money because the US treats CEO claims about product capability as puffery, treats securities fraud as a civil penalty paid from shareholder funds, and treats consumer fraud as recoverable only through individual arbitration and slow class actions. The 2018 SEC weak-kneed settlement set the template. Sneeze twenty million. Laugh at a fig-leaf Twitter oversight provision. Keep the job, keep the equity, keep mass killing innocent people.

The billionaire equity has compounded faster than the penalties for depraved indifference, reckless homicide, wrongful death… fraud.

This is not a Trump invention, because Trump isn’t capable of inventing anything. It is the default setting of US corporate liability since at least 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act, which was itself a response to Upton Sinclair documenting mass harm the regulator refused to see.

Ford Pinto? A known fuel tank defect, doors that wouldn’t open, internal cost-benefit memo, no executive prosecuted.

You think lawsuits about door handles failing in a fiery crash are new? Think again. That’s just Ford Pinto economics coming back into accounting like Elon Musk DGAF. Seems like Tesla at least has a direct precedent here.

GM ignition switch? 124 dead, GM knew for a decade, $900M deferred prosecution, no executive prosecuted.

Purdue/Sacklers? Over 500,000 opioid deaths, $6B settlement, Sacklers kept most of their wealth, no Sackler prosecuted.

Boeing 737 MAX? 346 dead, MCAS fraud on the FAA itself, $2.5B deferred prosecution, no executive prosecuted.

BP Deepwater Horizon? 11 dead, $20B penalty, no senior executive criminally prosecuted.

Johns Manville? More than 40 years of asbestos concealment, bankruptcy used as liability shield.

Takata? Over 30 dead, mass recall, company bankrupted, executives paid fines.

Leaded gasoline, leaded paint, leaded buckshot… don’t even get me started.

Tobacco? 50 years of cancer fraud, Master Settlement extracted money and prosecuted nobody.

You arrest the poor Black people, while I smoke weed openly, that’s why I emigrated from South Africa to America with bags full of money to escape the fall of apartheid. Think about it. How many non-whites can I openly mock and kill in America with no penalty? Have you seen my Hitler salute?

Regulators were designed to arrive after the funerals, enabling shareholders to re-ratify fraud, doubling-down on a century of the same deal from Pinto to Purdue, allowing a defendant to be appointed where he could dissolve his own investigators.