Court denies Tesla’s motion to dismiss the four California state law claims in Urban’s complaint…
The owner of a very expensive Tesla couldn’t get into it after the cheap handle design failed. More importantly he couldn’t open the door either. And Tesla allegedly replaced only one handle, at high cost to the owner, with the same design.
Ludicrous.
That’s what they literally named the car model with door handles designed to fail for profit.
Fail fatally, when you read all the tragedy surrounding Tesla complaints and lawsuits.
Witnesses saw the car come to a rest against the wall of the parking garage before bursting into flames, the complaint said.
McCarthy could be seen trying to escape the engulfed vehicle after the crash, according to the complaint. But car defects prevented him from getting out safely, the lawsuit alleges.
…”faulty door handles” trapped McCarthy in the vehicle after the crash, causing him to burn alive and inhale toxic gases.
McCarthy was a former FBI agent killed in 2016 in a “veered” collision into an Indianapolis tree. A trial is finally set to start in 2023. In the time since his tragic death it has become clear he was a canary for hundreds more who have been killed since.
President Reagan increasingly is examined for his divisive inhumane neglect of harms, which means his extreme right platform enabled genocide, facilitated war crimes, promoted racism, ignored cancer and AIDS, and even harmed children. Source: Headline, NYT, November 1988
We’ve known since forever that Facebook was created by a guy who set out to hurt young women.
Quick recap: His time at Harvard was spent stealing personal data from female students to create a website where he could direct hate at them. After Harvard’s women of color filed a formal complaint, he was investigated by Harvard for privacy violations. Then the school abruptly let him go without penalty, instead becoming an early investor in his new startup… Facebook. Such a classic Harvard story. Why don’t they turn it into a children’s book about wild success from doing the wrong things?
Fast forward to today and basically anyone in America who cares about protecting children from dangerous online content is trying to undo Harvard’s predatory folly.
A group of 42 attorneys general is suing Meta, alleging that features on its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms are addictive and are aimed at kids and teens, the group announced Tuesday. The support from so many state attorneys general of different political backgrounds indicates a significant legal challenge to Meta’s business.
It doesn’t just indicate a legal challenge.
It indicates universal distrust in the platform across all parties. All sides are uniting, all coming together on the central point that Facebook has been intentionally harming children.
…for all of the attorneys general from both parties, people who frequently disagree very vocally and very publicly, to all come together and to move in the same direction, I think that says something.
It reminds me of the time Facebook’s high profile, highly paid, yet incompetent “security” chief personally facilitated atrocity crimes. It was easily avoidable, entirely unnecessary, and then Facebook enabled genocide because nobody outside stopped them.
We have been witness to calculating and cruel people who use their power and influence to commit lasting societal harms for personal profits, facing no real accountability. They wouldn’t even stop themselves when being warned of imminent genocide. That’s basically the whole and ongoing story of Facebook, to do wrong and undermine opposition.
Let me put it like this. Genocide was being organized on its platform, such that all Facebook had to do was turn off one small East-Asian country. It had basically zero impact to Facebook to turn it off, had nothing to gain leaving it on, yet massive risk was ignored for years. They just sat back and helped a slow march into genocide.
In the end, there was so little for Facebook to gain from its continued presence in Burma, and the consequences for the Rohingya people could not have been more dire.
Mind you I deleted my account 2009, as explained a long time ago here, when I saw the many reasons (not least of all the Russian influence) that it would never be safe to use by anyone. So it’s not like this whole time they didn’t have more red flags than a birthday party for Stalin.
On that note, Facebook focuses its massive security budget on incredibly Machiavellian political tactics to undermine safety regulators and prevent anyone from stopping harms.
Political divides are cynically deepened, in a classic Russian anti-democratic strategy, to discredit critics. Look at the whistleblower case of Frances Haugen. Facebook on one hand warned Republican lawmakers she was a left wing political activist who wanted to silence conservative voices. Then on the other hand they warned Democrat lawmakers she was a right wing operative of Republicans serving to punish Facebook for banning Trump. They played both sides, deepening cracks in oversight, to prevent any accountability forming.
But does Facebook just hate oversight, or do they really grasp harms being done by them to the most vulnerable populations?
To me it looks like the latter.
After research showed 13% of suicidal teen girls in the UK traced their first suicidal thought to Instagram, Meta decided to launch Instagram Kids. It would be like Exxon reading about VW diesel-gate and then announcing a “rolling coal” club. Remember the Facebook origin story about a frustrated male Harvard student (targeting female students who had rejected his unwanted advances)? There is a pattern.
When Facebook’s own research showed that their algorithms were a form of “psychological permission” for dangerous extremism, the Facebook CEO blocked any fix. Worse, he figured out a way to promote extremism. Facebook research also found that posts being tagged with an “angry face” emoji indicated higher engagement. So the CEO ordered that posts making people angry would be prioritized five times higher than other posts.
Facebook even hired notoriously extreme right wing lobbyist Joel Kaplan to push hard on the theory of protecting attackers from their victims. For example Kaplan blocked exposure of harms from Russian influence campaigns. This is not as outlandish as it might sound. Stanford, a genocidal brand of its own and school for many Facebook staff, has been well known for coddling abuse as a form of power and privilege.
Kaplan stepped in to ensure disinformation would flow from specific known bad actors, as if channeling President Reagan’s ads promoting cigarettes (before they killed tens of millions of Americans and he still refused to oppose tobacco). The news tab is supposedly regulated by internal counts of “strikes”. However, Breitbart continues to stand at bat on the news despite repeatedly and egregiously failing at accuracy. Kaplan coddled them so their lies became untouchable, undermining the entire concept of Facebook following even the simplest of safety rules, let alone morals.
As conservative users on Facebook showed a very predictable slide into radical extremism after being exposed to Breitbart and similar disinformation, it again was Kaplan who made sure harm was not blocked. Even as Nazism was facilitated and witnessed, those at Facebook who tried to intervene and introduce safety were reversed.
In a similar vein, Facebook kept a group on the platform for a year after the FBI designated it a domestic terror threat. They didn’t just watch, they studied the group and celebrated its ability to cause dangerously fast (1 day) radicalization: “Carol’s Journey to QAnon“.
Something like this image (a mashup by me) representing weaponized social media may be the next addition to The Atlantic “Brief Visual History of Weapons”.
I could go on, but the point should perhaps be clear that the harms of Facebook to society are entirely intentional; weapons studied and battles expanded. And society has done a poor job of protecting itself by failing to move the discussion back into the middle ground of humanism.
This maybe will change as everyone finally seems to agree that the horrible avoidable harms done to children are universally condemned. As one Boston Globe writer put it clearly:
Many were killed by presidential neglect…
Meta has been deploying extremist political strategies meant to fracture democratic governance, weaken democracy, and force a hard-right shift to private exploitative control of society. The latest news however suggests their free reign may be facing a real challenge from the sleeping giant known as the moderate middle.
Another day, another messy thoughtless political flareup by Elon Musk. The man obviously can’t stop erratically shooting messengers in his clumsy attempts to protect and promote hate speech.
The tactic he uses often mirrors well-known Nazi propaganda, where anyone reporting harms is blamed for those harms. Like if someone said systemic racism in America has resulted in positions of power held only by white men, they would be accused by Elon Musk of expressing bias against white men.
The German government made an immediate pronouncement that “the Jews” themselves were to blame for the pogrom [instigated and orchestrated by Nazi officials] and imposed a fine of one billion Reichsmark (some 400 million US dollars at 1938 rates) on the German Jewish community. The Reich government confiscated all insurance payouts to Jews whose businesses and homes were looted or destroyed, leaving the Jewish owners personally responsible for the cost of all repairs.
Victims of systemic racism were blamed for it; Jews falsely accused of being the ones causing all the trouble that Nazis directed at them.
We learn from history that the act of silencing critics, by illogically assigning blame to them, is not something to be taken lightly as it often accelerates harms. And yet Elon Musk is one of the biggest speech censors on the Internet given how he tries to cancel all criticism he dislikes.
Tesla has ballooning technical safety issues precisely because his engineers work hardest at hiding important safety criticisms from the CEO.
They are literally killing people with negligent disregard for those who report harms.
Who can forget this episode, for example?
Source: My presentation at MindTheSec 2021
To be clear, those of us in 2016 who reported that Elon Musk’s fraudulent claims about “driverless” were going to get people killed… were accused by Elon Musk of getting people killed.
See the problem with such word games?
Tesla in fact then began killing more, and more, and more people… all the while trying to blame it on someone, anyone else.
Source: Tesladeaths.com
In other words if we had accused him of racism (i.e. his work environment has been repeatedly judged by courts as obviously racist) he would have called us the racists even as he kept on barking about “his struggle” (mein Kampf) to personally intervene and stop extinction of the white race.
Here’s one thread to observe:
This fascist (Romanian “bronze age pervert” adherent) account spreads racist hate speech with “blood purity” mythology and “replacement theory” fraud. Source: eXtwitterThe same account has announced intention to commit acts of violent racist domestic terrorism. Source: eXtwitterElon Musk then elevated the known hate speech account, likely inciting violence, by replying that a Robert E. Lee statue being melted is evidence “They absolutely want your extinction”. Who is they? Source: eXtwitter
And here is another one, from an attempt to meddle in Scotland politics.
A spokesperson for Yousaf said on Friday: “The first minister has been on the receiving end of racist hate, abuse and death threats his entire life, and has stood firm against hatred and bigotry, of any kind, throughout.
“Sadly, much of the racist abuse and threats of violence the first minister faces are directed his way on X. Mr Musk should use his position to tackle racism and hatred that goes unchecked on the social media platform he owns.”
[…]
Musk, the owner of Tesla, Space X and the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, reacted to a 45-second clip of Yousaf listing all the senior public posts in Scotland held by white people, which was posted on X by an anonymous account called End Wokeness.
The account, which has a paid-for blue verification mark, accused Yousaf, who is Scotland’s first ethnic minority first minister, of “openly despising white people”. It said: “Why would Scotland’s parliament and King select a guy who hates almost 100% of the country?”
Musk replied: “What a blatant racist!”
Got that?
A public servant who has spent his life being anti-racist, who has dedicated himself to protecting people from racism, gets accused of being the racist by an infamously racist troll (from a racist family) who has used ill-gotten wealth to convert Twitter into a racist hate speech spigot. The truth is fairly obvious here, right?
Backwards and upside down, Musk keeps repeating the worst and most ignorant mistakes in history as if he found a magic loophole to avoid accountability for being racist.
Also note the role of a blue verification mark. It has come to represent little more than troll accounts either paid for by Russia or coin-operated mules trying to juice attention.
February 2022 Lukoil called for peace in Ukraine. September 2022 Lukoil chairman Ravil Maganov fell to his death from a Moscow hospital window. Lukoil was forced to state that he “passed away following a severe illness.”
Reports of recent high profile assassinations in Russia, as previously mentioned, have now put the total at 40 people dead.
A top executive at Russia’s second-biggest oil company has become the third person to die suddenly in the past 18 months at the firm, which last year took a public stand over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Chairman of Lukoil Vladimir Nekrasov died after suffering acute heart failure, the company said on Tuesday. It did not respond to a request for further comment.
Mr Nekrasov replaced the previous head of Lukoil’s board Ravil Maganov in September last year, after he died falling from a hospital window, according to state-run news agency TASS.
Putin has even ordered his critic’s spouse and children killed, just like the families killed in a gruesome “veered” Tesla crash.
Is it any wonder how penalty of death means nobody in Russia dares to show any real thought or competence, just like under Tesla management?
More and more Tesla death court cases reveal that engineers are focused on avoiding or burying criticism, instead of on fixing their growing numbers of fatal design flaws. Tesla engineer Ashok Elluswamy testified in court July 2022 how “Autopilot” AI had been an intentional fraud from its start, killing nearly 40 owners.
And so the death toll rises from these dictators who even collaborate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday praised Elon Musk, calling [sabotage of Ukraine communications the work of his] “talented businessman.”
Which is more likely now, Americans dying in a Tesla “driverless” crash or Russians falling to their death from a Moscow hospital window?
