The crux of the reporting was about unaccountable police in America, predators squeezing a tiny town (and anyone daring to drive through) into an extortion racket.
Brookside, Al [population 1,200] had very little crime reported to the state, yet used fines and fees to bring in half the town revenue.
Additional awards were collected by these journalists and their “Banking on Crime” series.
“The chief’s pretty upset about that post you put on Facebook,” he recalled the officer saying [about losing freedom of speech]. […] “We had cameras in dispatch and there were multiple times when … he would bring an inmate into his office and shut the door,” she said [about losing freedom of religion]. “I witnessed that he would evangelize to them. And the only way they’d be able to get out of jail is if they accepted Christ. They’d be given a Gideon’s Bible because the previous mayor was a Gideon, and they’d be released from jail.”
The blistering reports deftly exposed the Alabama town for all its awful corruption; the ways police operated as militant evangelical Christian profit centers where poverty and race were criminalized.
In other words, their war on alcohol, their war on drugs… it’s always just been a cover for white supremacist platforms.
“Following the Civil War, Southern States enacted Black Codes to subjugate newly freed slaves and maintain the prewar racial hierarchy,” she wrote in the Timbs v. Indiana decision. “Among these laws’ provisions were draconian fines for violating broad proscriptions on ‘vagrancy’ and other dubious offenses.”
Prewar racial heirarchy. Also known as America’s origin story of creating a caste system for profit.
Using the law to control and profit off poor people in general, and poor Black people in particular, continued through the 20th century. Especially in the South, where the convict-lease system incentivized incarceration to provide cheap labor and enrich private contractors. It survived through that whole century and stormed again into the 2000s, as private probation companies invaded states like Georgia and Alabama and many more.
When you realize America’s Revolutionary War was all about profits by a small group of white men (not about freedom or liberty), which historians now plainly state as matter of fact, then this Alabama town just shows how some Americans are just very, very slow to accept guilt and defeat in Civil War.
Of course this tiny police department, run by white supremacists, in the middle of nowhere, was buying expensive military vehicles as if at war.
Intimidation vehicles used by American racist extortionists to criminalize poverty and suppress dissent. Note use of Orwellian “rescue” lettering on a military vehicle, yet a completely unmarked blacked-out civilian truck, two halves of the same insecurity dementia. Signals of corruption weren’t subtle. Source: AL.com
They saw themselves as Taliban-esque Christian male warriors, touchless crusaders out to terrorize Blacks… like President Woodrow Wilson’s “America First” post-1915 Clansmen (e.g. Red Summer).
IBM undeniably ran the German Nazi death camps. Their instrumental role was cemented, literally, in places like Dachau.
I’ve been to plantations. I’ve been inside of execution chambers. I’ve walked the halls of death row. I’ve been to a lot of places where death and violence are, and have been, enacted on people. But I’ve never experienced the chill in my body and in my spirit that I did when I was walking through the gas chamber at Dachau. I was startled by how deeply I felt it in my body, how deeply unsettled I felt in my spirit. And then you realize how recent it was. This was less than 80 years ago.
IBM’s man Watson was responsible.
Do you know what Watson stood for?
You’d think as a result of his role that the name would be sullied and untouchable, even if IBM successfully knit a “technology is neutral” narrative to avoid accepting guilt from directly facilitating and expanding genocide.
Ford undeniably inspired the German Nazi industrialization of genocide, which led to demand for IBM’s help.
Ford’s man Ford was responsible.
American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford’s long and close relationship with Hitler. Source: Wayne State
Again you’d think as a result of his role that the name would be sullied and untouchable.
Ford literally was cited by Hitler many times and in many ways as his inspiration for race-based state-led violence.
In both cases — Watson and Ford — we should ask did the misconduct of such wealthy men lead to any real justice for their victims?
Let’s just say… IBM has gleefully and cruelly promoted their “artificial intelligence” (AI) product billed to save the world as:
IBM announced WatsonX, an all-in-one artificial intelligence building tool for enterprises.
The X stands for amorphous, unaccountable, irresponsible.
Why not name it Hitler and get straight to the point? I jest, of course. But not really.
A recent attempt to use the dangeously-named Watson AI in a hospital setting had to be unplugged when it tried to kill (simulated) patients. Apparently these overseeing doctors weren’t profiting from death, a devastating blow to IBM’s historic sales model.
A good doctor sees the patient, not the symptoms. Watson saw the symptoms of inefficiency and lack of capability. It did not see the process of care and making whole, where doctors, not data, were what needed to be understood.
Watson saw symptoms of inefficiency… should be words engraved into the memorials at Nazi death camps that ran on IBM.
… suggested a cancer patient with severe bleeding be given a drug that could cause the bleeding to worsen …
That drive to do the wrong thing was quite a big part of how Watson (let alone Hitler) became so suddenly wealthy, right?
Machines “know” this kind of detail in history, without understanding it. Even when humans say they don’t know (ignorant of their own history), machines parse easily the fact that Watson worked for Hitler on genocide as an “efficiency” problem.
Perhaps now you see why I write about technology history. This stuff helps predict future failures. Like the 1960s tragedy of Operation IGLOO WHITE (a billion/year U.S. foreign and domestic drone surveillance project that never worked).
Gaining a foundation of knowledge on what’s behind some American billionaire success (even just these two men out of hundreds or thousands) should give serious pause. Who thinks Tesla ever will do anything about fixing or changing its problems that have been rapidly killing so many people, related directly to billionaire profits?
Source: Tesladeaths.com
Will the latest obnoxious American billionaire, known for spreading toxic lies like it’s 1933 again, ever be held to account? Allegedly he is using Twitter right now to argue a swastika tattoo doesn’t prove someone is a Nazi. What a guy.
Watson, Ford and of course Stanford (sorry, couldn’t leave one of the worst men in history out) likely would say no, accountability never came for them.
I’ll bet that most Americans would say they’ve never heard about such billionaire misconduct before, even though it is widespread and core to their political history… a “Sage” lesson, if you will.
Margaret Olivia Sage
Show me an AI project named after Sage and I’ll show you someone who isn’t ignorant of the risks ahead.
A man who owned a Tesla that “spontaneously combusted” while driving allegedly said “it’s all gone” after he walked away with his life.
That feeling of loss is very on brand for a car company that can’t explain why it has so many fires.
Source: KCRA
You buy Tesla, you lose it all.
The owner mentioned that his two very young kids fortunately weren’t strapped in their carseats, which reminds me of another Tesla father’s unexplained “spontaneous combustion” nightmare watching his kid’s carseat melting.
Tesla is unique in the car industry for these stories, what can only be described as willful neglect regarding fire investigation and resolution. I’ll never forget the NHTSA Complaint (#11466262) by a father wailing publicly about his son being burned-to-death.
Can Tesla be forced to care or will the market just move on without them?
Tesla-fire.com as of January 2023 was nearing a 200 mark, already reporting over 50 deaths.
Over 50 deaths!
Other manufacturers intensively research issues and make very specific recalls as a proactive measure. If you read NHTSA data you see a marked difference.
Tesla has repeatedly said it doesn’t understand why its fires happen so often, it points fingers at others, and it clearly hopes people can just act “thankful” for nearly dying in fires instead of being realistic about prevention.
A Tesla car battery “spontaneously” burst into flames on a California freeway Saturday, and firefighters needed 6,000 gallons of water to put it out. The Metro Fire Department said in a series of tweets that “nothing unusual” had occurred before the Tesla Model S became “engulfed in flames”…
A giant fire would be treated as unusual for any other car maker. And they would be reported as such. Hyundai, Kia and Ford electrical fires, for example, have posted multiple specific resolutions over a decade including NHTSA “engineering analysis” of non-crash spontaneous electrical fires.
For Tesla?
Fires get called “nothing unusual” as owners try to run from a flaming death trap. The car that was promised to them as safer quickly is proven less safe. How can that predictive disconnect go on much longer? It will get better? That’s not how any of this works. It will get worse unless there is proof of improvement (e.g. Shewhart/Deming PDCA/PDSA quality measurement models known and proven since the 1920s).
Tesla quality failures get worse over time. Later models show pattern of safety decline.
Now for some analysis related to Tesla’s ill-conceived and rushed “dominance”, flooding an electric vehicle market with intentional very low quality.
Tesla specifically is to blame for a shockingly high death toll related directly to its known design failures (e.g. multiple cases of occupants unable to escape during intense fire, burning them alive).
Other car companies run far lesser fire risks because, when they do have a flaw, they get investigated and recalled far more proactively.
Let’s talk about Tesla’s fire-to-root-cause ratio, for example. Who keeps that tally public? How many incidents sit open with empty answers?
We see hundreds and hundreds of Tesla complaints, including tragic mention of death by fire, while competing brands have zero complaints.
Consider also how combustion engine fires very often are rooted in electrical systems (e.g. loose wiring harness). Getting to root cause means true “electric fire” recalls are far higher than Tesla ever admits when they try to confuse analysts by calling them combustion.
Examples in 2020, just for sake of illustration?
Electrical short fire recall: over 400,000 Hyundai Elantra
Electrical short fire recall: over 300,000 Kia Cadenza & Sportage
Electrical short fire recall: over 200,000 Honda Odyssey
Touch-screen fire recall: over 200,000 Tesla Model X & S (and 2021 because they missed some)
Electrical fires.
All of them, electrical. Tesla knows this yet cruely twists reporting to falsely make it seem like electrical fires will somehow magically become a low risk after decades of data proving the opposite.
Or, let me put it another way.
Gasoline cars have batteries and wires. The batteries and wires cause fires at a very high rate, second only to fuel leaks.
So if you remove only gasoline, you’re still going to be looking into a LOT OF FIRES from… electricity.
Combustion engine fire recalls for electrical systems should be reported as such, so electrical fires now would make sense in context of always being a problem.
Yeah, electrical systems have caused a lot of fires and millions of recalled vehicles. Soooo, Tesla should have read those tea leaves and figured their cars would have a problem, a big problem with fires.
How many gasoline fires are at a station during refuel, or how many are just driving on an on-ramp? Here again, Tesla seems particularly unique in regard to risk because drivers with no warning, a false sense of safety from marketed overconfidence, are in sudden grave danger.
If a combustion engine tank is ruptured in a crash, and there are high rates of crashes, then that isn’t really comparable to Tesla electric cars repeatedly bursting into flames without any “known” reason other than… electrical risks everyone else is actually talking about and fixing.
…41 crashes vs 20,315 crashes vs 543 crashes make it statistically irresponsible to compare these numbers. For example, if there was a 42nd crash with an EV and it caught on fire then it would be 4.76% of EVs or double the [worst] rate…
Here’s a great hypothesis to examine: removing petroleum fuels will eliminate the current highest area of fire risk, yet the total fire risk may increase as a result from unsafe electrical systems rushed to market by Tesla.
For those still curious about fuel leak cases, the manufacturers talk about simple sensor indicators that can give drivers advance warning about risks of fire.
Advance warning of Tesla fire? That would require Tesla admitting their problems, admitting regulators save lives by forcing ground truth.
Proof of Tesla worsening the market ahead comes further from the fact that after their many fires for “unexplained reasons”, multiple more fires start over many days, allegedly with no ability to predict either.
Should we count each of these Tesla fires individually and adequately?
It seems so. I may ask tesla-fires.com to add a column so we can have a proper muliplier.
There have been nearly 200 fires, yet since Tesla fires are known to restart again and again without proper explanation it should be counted more like 500 or higher.
As a best guess, new short-circuits happen every time a wrecked Tesla battery is shifted so another electrical system fire starts… but who counts all these as unique and different? When does Tesla admit they know the root cause and take proper action to save lives and reduce taxpayer/societal burden from Tesla’s cheap designs and weak engineering?
Dealerships, repair shops, tow-trucks and junkyards have been reporting explosive uncontrollable Tesla fires unlike anything seen in the modern world of highly regulated gasoline safety.
The point is that anyone launching any modern electric car should have treated fire risk as their top engineering priority, and now should recognize immediately how things are worsening (e.g. spontaneous combustion without explanation), instead of repeatedly claiming surprise and ignorance.
Every Chevy Bolt was recalled when it showed even slight risk of fire. I’d thus easily recommend a Bolt over Tesla; the safety/fatality data when comparing the two makes it clear why.
Any electric cars with evidence of ignorant management should be grounded until fire risk is independently studied and verified as eliminated. What does eliminated mean?
There should be no excuses for ignoring the problem, no tolerance of basic safety negligence. No statements of whataboutism. This is not new or different from any car. GM and others have done the right thing on multiple levels, including training public fire crews, with their new electric vehicles. Tesla never seems to care at all, as illustrated by their unique fire death tolls.
At this point we should ask why would any father take such highly unnecessary risks and put children in an inexplicably flammable Tesla.
The Tesla dashboard seems to be only artificially, superficially, designed. A big piece of glass glued to the dash is cheap and lazy. The touchscreen certainly is not meant for anyone who thinks deeply about anything, let alone understands driving.
Take the counter example, the luxury brand Cadillac recently announced buttons to wow critics.
An almost entirely touchscreen user interface was probably Porsche’s only misstep with the otherwise-excellent Taycan. Indeed, when Audi used that car’s platform to make its own electric express, the e-tron GT, it was notable that the climate control touchscreen was gone, replaced with actual buttons…
To be fair, industry innovation leaders (and best EV makers) Nissan and Hyundai never stopped offering buttons.
The explanation is simple. Buttons provide control without sacrificing safety, reliably delivering high value with minimal cost to users.
Touchscreens are the opposite, undermining control, unreliable, and often at high expense to users. Tesla Semis, all brand new and meant to be a showcase of their best ideas, allegedly have been pulled off the roads because their screens catastrophically fail so often.
Before that, and you’d think they could have learned something from it, Tesla had to recall over a hundred thousand vehicles due to failing screens.
Because Tesla decided to put the defroster/defogger button and other climate controls on the screen, rather than using physical buttons, a screen failure falls into the safety domain.
Navigating through various levels of menus to reach a desired control can be particularly dangerous; one study by the AAA Foundation concluded that infotainment touch screens can distract a driver for up to 40 seconds, long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph.
Intentional failures leading to rapid unplanned obsolescence, should also be known as a terrible investment.
Heads up (pun intended), buttons are better for everyone. Luxury brands are meant to sell what’s good by long measures, not poorly made shiny things to rapidly devalue and force wasteful/unsafe consumption.
We’re talking very basic logic here, the kind that suggests nobody should ever buy another Tesla… or a diamond (piece of glass glued to a ring).
…we got tricked for about century into coveting sparkling pieces of carbon, but it’s time to end the nonsense.
Financial analysts point to Tesla’s declining earnings, declining revenue and declining free cash flow as seriously problematic. Safety experts point to rising fatalities, failing designs, worsening quality over time and an inability to learn.
Underneath them all is the simple fact that the CEO of Tesla runs it like a South African blood diamond mine; an oversupply of cheap assets made by exploited labor and marketed through mindless “caste” propaganda about “simplifying systems of control“… to sustain obvious gross overvaluation.
…until the 18th Century, the formal distinctions of caste were of limited importance to Indians, social identities were much more flexible and people could move easily from one caste to another. New research shows that hard boundaries were set by British colonial rulers who made caste India’s defining social feature when they used censuses to simplify the system, primarily to create a single society with a common law that could be easily governed.
Think of Tesla as low grade fashion tokens falsely promising high caste status, instead making people more easily governed (less free, at high risk of sudden death).
Buttons thus are symptomatic of sensibilities returning to a market, providing engineered longevity with an emphasis on safety and utility. The well-designed button represents freedom — quality of life in a car — as an important moral proof.
Don’t buy a car without them.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
