SF crowds celebrating Lunar New Year brought the spirit of “Burning Man” back to its streets (where the event started), by using fireworks to publicly destroy a Waymo.

Reports are full of shock and awe.

When I arrived on scene, SFFD was already on scene hosing down the car with water and their chemical extinguishers. The battery appeared to be reigniting multiple times and was smoking like crazy. The live footage…gives a decent idea to how I came on to scene, which was after the attack on the vehicle. The vehicle looked completely “decapitated” and I have never seen a vehicle that damaged up close.

Obviously if more people attended “Burning Man” they would have been suitably prepared and treated this as a more accessible venue, maybe even assumed it was Waymo sponsoring Lunar New Year celebrations.

Publicly donating one of its robots to be destroyed? Can you imagine?

Unfortunately, the sacrifice reads more like San Francisco being like good old San Francisco, and suffering from targeted agitators who really like to blow up a parade.

I mean if you’re foreign military intelligence and you want to know more about the safety of road robots, your troops have been on the ground for years in San Francisco. I certainly run into them, and have seen their work, so it’s curious how they don’t get reported more often for dangerous meddling and experimenting with robots and public safety.

To be clear, putting your life in the hands of a road robot is like throwing away your freedom. You think a company like Waymo is ready and able to fight for your safety, disposable customer? Think again. Riders describe being helpless and terrified.

If we were outside walking we could’ve walked away, run away. If we were driving, we could make sure we locked the door. In this instance, we literally had no control.

Waymo. No control.

In related news, three days ago a Waymo drove into a cyclist.

A cyclist was injured in a collision with a Waymo driverless vehicle in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood on Tuesday afternoon, police said. …”our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision”…

Waymo. Not able to avoid the collision.

A big crash, similar to many other sudden “veered” Tesla, has reportedly just burned a young man to death in University City.

The man was driving a 2021 Tesla Model 3 on Genesee Avenue near Centurian Square, near University City High School, shortly after 4:20 a.m. when he made an unsafe move and hit a right side curb, said police Officer Sarah Foster. The car continued forward and slammed into a light pole.

Other reports say the light pole was at 6900 Genesee, and I see there are very few poles to hit, so I’m guessing about here on the map.

Notably, I can think of FOUR recent sudden unexplained “veered” Tesla crashes on California roads that looked exactly like this. Center divided four lanes with intermittent trees. FOUR sudden “veered” FATAL crashes. This is not normal. Tesla is not safe.

Update: Construction

Lanes will be shifted on Genesee Avenue to allow for two-way traffic; pipeline installation will occur in the southbound lanes and there will be one lane in each direction in the northbound lanes of Genesee Avenue.

A significant win for data integrity.

Michael Mann, among the world’s most renowned climate scientists, won a defamation case in D.C. Superior Court against two conservative writers.

Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had sued Rand Simberg, a policy analyst, and Mark Steyn, a right-wing author, for online posts published over a decade ago, respectively, by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review.

…jury ordered Simberg to pay Mann $1,000 in punitive damages; it ordered Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages.

COVID is now classified as a brain injury with damage estimated to be 20 years accelerated aging (less accurate and slower), based on the latest research on associated cognitive decline.

Patients who participated in the study were “less accurate and slower” in their cognition, and suffered from at least one mental health condition, such as depression, anxiety, or posttraumatic stress disorder, according to researchers.

The brain deficits found in COVID-19 patients were equivalent to 20 years of brain aging and provided proof of what doctors have feared: that this virus can damage the brain and result in ongoing mental health issues.