Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

From a recent New York Times Tesla test-drive:

so successful was Autopilot that I was tempted to let down my guard by not bothering to look in the rearview mirror.

For all its vision capabilities (including in darkness), Autopilot became confused when lanes weren’t clearly marked or split in two or at exit ramps. You can’t simply program the destination and let the car find its way. It’s reassuringly cautious about changing lanes, but in heavy traffic, I would have missed an exit while waiting for it to find a suitable opening, and had to assert manual control.

While heading south on the New Jersey Turnpike, I could see in the rearview mirror a BMW bearing down at high speed. I pushed the turn signal for a lane change, and despite its ultrasonic sensors, the Tesla seemed oblivious to the onrushing car. It started to move into its lane; the driver laid on his horn, and I had to grab control to avoid an accident.

Quite a few aviation accidents and incidents have occurred due to pilots’ confusion regarding what the autopilot was responsible for doing. One of the most famous is Asiana 214 at San Francisco. From Wikipedia:

In response, the captain selected an inappropriate autopilot mode, which, without the captain’s awareness, resulted in the autothrottle no longer controlling airspeed. … Over-reliance on automation and lack of systems understanding by the pilots were cited as major factors contributing to the accident. The NTSB further determined that the pilot’s faulty mental model of the airplane’s automation logic led to his inadvertent deactivation of automatic airspeed control.

It is extremely unlikely that the crew would have crashed the B777 if they’d simply been hand-flying and knew that they were responsible for both yoke and thrust levers.

I’m wondering if we will quickly conclude that anything more advanced than cruise control in a car is a bad idea, unless the car can drive itself under all conditions.

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Two staples of U.S. media for the past 1.5 years have been the purportedly anti-LGBTQ bias of the Trump Administration and the potential for Donald Trump to become a Hitler-style dictator.

I can’t figure out why the same folks are demanding that the Trump Administration pay government workers to go out and find all of the people living in the U.S. who say that they are LGBTQ. If you think that the government is attacking LGBTQ residents of the U.S., why would you want to give that government an electronic database with the full names and street addresses of every LGBTQ person? When the German government in 1933 did its first census to identify Jews, this turned out not to be a positive event for Jews living in Germany (see Wikipedia).

A sampling of media stories…

“Why the Trump Administration Won’t Ask About LGBT Americans on the 2020 Census” (Atlantic, March 2017)

Shortly after the bureau released its report, a new version came out. This time, the line about sexual orientation and gender identity was missing. The bureau didn’t immediately post an update about what had changed to its website or explain what had happened at length. Its “proposal” to include questions about LGBT identity on its upcoming surveys had just disappeared. LGBT advocates were outraged.

“The Census Won’t Collect L.G.B.T. Data. That’s a Problem.” (NYT, May 2017):

That’s why the Trump administration’s decision not to collect data on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans threatens these communities in ways that are both symbolic and practical.

“After Scuffle, Census To Add Sexual Orientation Question To Marketing Survey” (NPR, September 2017) shows a “marketing survey” in which “Gay or lesbian” is the first response to “Which of the following best represents how you think of yourself?”

“2020 Census Will Ask About Same-Sex Relationships” (NPR, March 2018):

Beyond improving national statistics, many advocates of equal rights for LGBT people see the changes to the census relationship categories as a symbolic victory. … “It really normalizes our experience on an American government form so that everybody looking at it and everybody filling it out sees that we exist,” she adds.

“Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late? Fascism poses a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II.” (NYT, April 2018):

Trump has attacked the judiciary, ridiculed the media, … equated mere policy disagreements with treason. He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity. He routinely vilifies federal law enforcement institutions. He libels immigrants and the countries from which they come.

“With Trump, don’t confuse the unthinkable with the impossible” (CNN, March 2018):

If there is one thing we have learned since Donald Trump took office is that we should not confuse the unthinkable with the impossible. That’s why we should pay attention to the President’s words in a private meeting with Republican donors when he told them he might try to become president for life. … there is also little doubt from his track record that Trump finds the checks and balances of democracy highly inconvenient. He openly admires dictators. When he speaks of other countries’ strongmen he sounds envious.

Trump’s impulses are already in the mold of an autocrat. He is restrained only by the democratic rules that still survive his tenure. Like dictators do, he hates the media…

Readers: Is it possible for a rational person simultaneously to believe that there is a significant risk of Donald Trump becoming an autocrat, that Donald Trump and his Administration are anti-LGBTQ, and that it would be a good idea to give Dictator Trump a flash drive containing the full name, street address, and phone number of every LGBTQ resident of the U.S.?

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“Trump Signs Bill Amid Momentum to Crack Down on Trafficking” (nytimes):

First, federal authorities seized the classified advertising website Backpage.com last week. Then, a 93-count indictment was unsealed, charging several of its top officials with facilitating prostitution and revealing details about victims including minors as young as 14.

Now, President Trump has signed new anti-sex-trafficking legislation into law on Wednesday. The new law, which passed Congress with near unanimous bipartisan support, will give prosecutors stronger tools to go after similar sites in the future and suspend liability protections for internet companies for the content on their sites.

Not everyone is happy about this…

After Backpage was seized on Friday, the Women’s March group said on Twitter that the result was “an absolute crisis” for sex workers seeking safe communication with clients, drawing criticism.

“Women’s March stands in solidarity with the sex workers’ rights movement,” a spokeswoman for the organization explained on Tuesday. “We believe a world is possible in which no one is trafficked or enslaved, and in which sex workers are not criminalized and ostracized by the state and our movements.”

“Shutting down websites like Craigslist and Backpage pushes sex workers and sex trafficking victims into street-based sex work where they’re at greater risk of violence,” said Ms. Raven, who said she had survived homelessness and engaged in sex to survive as a teenager.

My question, though, is what practical difference do these shutdowns make if the Internet is global? There are plenty of countries in which prostitution is legal (see “Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution”) and where Internet is both legal and available. If Americans want to meet virtually in an online forum, why would they need to do that in a U.S.-based site?

Will the U.S. need a Great Firewall and an outlawing of VPNs to enforce this new law? Or can the Federales somehow go and shut down web servers in foreign countries just as easily as they can in the U.S.?

Related:

• Stormy Daniels, prostitution, cell phone video, and the snowflake gynecologists
• Economics of legal sex work in the U.S.
• Law school graduate goes public with her participation in sex work

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Here is a selection from the New Books shelf at our local public library:

The titles:

• Semitism: Being Jewish in American in the Age of Trump, by one of the Washington editors for the New York Times (let’s hope that he is not so extreme as to advocate that Americans Jews actually observe Judaism)
• It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America (by a NYT journalist)
• The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, by 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts (safe to assume that they found a mixture of Republicans and Democrats to query?)

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Here’s an interesting article from the ACLU:

We don’t know all the reasons and circumstances for the FBI search of Cohen’s office and home. News reports suggest that the focus is on Cohen’s payments to two women, adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to suppress their stories of affairs with Donald Trump, and that these payments may have been illegal. But what is clear is that prosecutors had to overcome high hurdles to obtain the search warrant. That the warrant was issued is not a sign that the attorney-client privilege is dead. It is, on the contrary, a sign that the rule of law is alive.

Essentially, the ACLU takes the position that if two government workers (prosecutor plus judge) can agree to dislike an individual then the government can send in the FBI (not too busy thanks to hanging up on anyone offering school shooter tips, Tsarnaev brother tips, 9/11 hijacker tips, etc.) to raid the individual’s lawyer’s office.

Separately, the particular “crime” that the ACLU thinks justifies sending out the FBI on a hunting expedition, was a purported exchange of cash for sex. Back in 2014, however, the ACLU published an article saying that this kind of exchange should not be a crime:

The ACLU position holds that laws against prostitution violate “the right of individual privacy because they impose penal sanctions for the private sexual conduct of consenting adults, …

The myriad federal, state and local laws against prostitution mean that “rights for sex workers” will require more than decriminalizing sex for money or other consideration.

Sex workers are human beings with the right to self-determination. It’s time for policymakers, the courts and law enforcement to recognize they are equally deserving of the civil rights, civil liberties, and above all human rights accorded to the rest of us.

I guess there is a potentially nuanced position here. The ACLU is not objecting to whatever Ms. Daniels and Ms. McDougal might have received in exchange for having sex with an old guy 12 years ago, but they are objecting to Ms. Daniels and Ms. McDougal being paid not to talk about their supposed sexual transactions. But why? If the ACLU promotes freedom to speak, why wouldn’t they also support the freedom to profit from not speaking? And if the ACLU supports prostitution, why wouldn’t the ACLU also support prostitution with an extra fee for discretion? If the only way for an elderly American to hire a prostitute is with the understanding that the prostitute will then post a YouTube video of the encounter and/or go on TV to talk about the transaction, doesn’t that reduce demand for prostitution, an infringement of prostitutes’ economic rights?

Related:

• From an old-style ACLU member, Harvey Silverglate: “Going After Trump’s Lawyer Michael Cohen: When Pursuit Becomes A Blood Sport” (WBGH)

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Several of my remaining Facebook friends have announced plans to leave the platform. They say that they are gradually deleting all of their old posts and that they can be reached via email(!).

For those who wish to preserve some of their best Facebook content in PDF form, Postclipper.com is a free service that allows users to select favorite Facebook postings into one or more books and, for each book, export a PDF version. (I was one of the authors of this software/service, along with Avni Khatri and John Morgan.)

We designed the software/service for people who were going to stay on Facebook, but wanted to segregate out content related to one child or one vacation. It turns out, however, that Postclipper is useful for people who are leaving Facebook.

Separately, can anyone tell me what Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday at the Senate? I didn’t tune in myself because it strikes me that the most serious problems with Facebook are right out in the open, e.g., that it turns people into junkies for news and political information that has no effect on their lives, or that it turns formerly fairly nice people into 24/7 hate/outrage-spewers. (ARPAnet and USENET discussion forums could degrade into flame wars, but the percentage of content that was devoted to hatred regarding abstract political phenomena was much smaller. So this is not a problem inherent to Internet.)

Finally, is there any reason for the average American to need news, other than the weather forecast, more than once per week? Or political information more than once every calendar quarter? Let me scan today’s nytimes.com:

• FBI wants to find out which women were paid to have sex with Donald Trump 10+ years ago and keep quiet about it
• Nigerian schoolgirls previously abducted by an Islamic group are now at a university
• The Law is Coming, Mr. Trump (editorial hatred from the nytimes)
• Paul Ryan is retiring (so people in his district will have to vote for someone else this fall)
• Walter Mondale says that we are ignoring the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (if we have been ignoring it for 50 years, why can’t we ignore it for up to one additional week?)
• The FBI is attacking Trump through the lawyer that paid off Stormy Daniels
• Trump is allegedly taking the bait on Syria (the government supposedly used chemical weapons there, which doesn’t make any obvious military sense (since the government has bombs, artillery, etc.), but it provides a perfect pretext for a U.S. invasion or similar)
• “Pro Cheerleaders Say Groping and Sexual Harassment Are Part of the Job” (photos suggest substantial age and gender discrimination by employers, but the nytimes is not upset by this; see also Family Law Issues for NFL Players, Child Support, Paternity & Prenups by Randall Kessler for a guide to the profitability of getting close to a football player)
• Ilyushin Il-76 plane crashes in Algeria

How would any of the readers have been worse off waiting until Sunday morning to learn about this? It is unfortunate that people died in the plane crash, but is any reader today going to hop on a plane to Algeria and try to help out?

How about the news that I got on Facebook today, highlighted by friends…

• a purported white supremacist died in his home bomb lab in Wisconsin
• “Zuckerberg made it clear he doesn’t care about users.” (over an article about Zuckerberg’s testimony)
• an article on how to tell if one’s information was shared with Cambridge Analytica (how would I behave differently if it had or had not?)
• Arizona cuts off college tuition subsidies for non-citizens (DREAMers can still go to college, but they have to pay the same tuition as, e.g., a citizen-resident of California)
• BP said that an oil spill off the coast of Australia would boost the local economy (probably true if we use the GDP measure; another good reason to get rid of GDP, which also goes up when citizens’ lives are degraded by population growth)
• “Elon Musk to the Young and Ambitious: Skills Matter More Than Degrees” (Inc.); see also Tesla’s recent recruiting effort at Harvard University
• a bunch of articles related to young American women who purported had sex with an old rich guy and/or the ensuing cash flow

I could have waited until Sunday for this stuff too.

Maybe Americans who want to be productive and happy need a firewall programmed so that social networking and news sites are available only on Sunday mornings?

Related:

• “Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook hearing was an utter sham” (by Zephyr Teachout)
• Why Facebook is so addictive: the Like button
• Facebook is bad for us (says the sociologist)

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Here’s a sign from the Boston Public Garden:

City officials say that giving birds free food and shelter within the City of Boston will lead to overpopulation and environmental damage. Furthermore, they’ll be reluctant to migrate away.

I wonder if these folks ever walk over to the government offices that run the SNAP (food stamps; free food for humans) and public housing (free housing for humans, including Barack Obama’s ordered-by-a-judge-to-migrate Aunt Zeituni (she apparently preferred NOT to migrate, despite the deportation order)) programs and, if so, how the conversations go…

[The Boston Housing Authority says it “processes over 10,000 new applications every year. There are thousands of more applicants than there are available housing units – so the selected waiting lists can be very long.” In other words, there is already “overpopulation” if you consider the mismatch between the supply of housing and the demand from humans.]

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Available now, the Stormy Daniels action figure:

(spotted at Harrison’s Comics at the Woburn Mall, walking off a dim sum meal at New China Pearl)

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Friends send their smart kids to the Buckingham Browne and Nichols private school in Cambridge. They texted me from Disney World in mid-March. Public schools in Massachusetts have one-week breaks in February and April. It is tough to go anywhere warm during these breaks due to airline tickets and hotel rooms being scarce and expensive. It seems that BB&N does a two-week break in March. Kids can travel to Asia and have enough time to de-jetlag. Families can take a one-week or 10-day trip without having to pay $1,200 per airline ticket.

If it works for the BB&N families, why can’t a public school system do it too?

I talked to our town’s superintendent. She said that there is no law requiring a mass exodus in Mass (so to speak), but that talk of a change gets shut down due to (1) trying to keep athletic team schedules in sync and, more importantly, (2) keeping school employees who have children in nearby local school systems in vacation sync with their kids.

But maybe it would make sense if the whole state moved to a two-week block? Then there wouldn’t be a mad rush for Logan Airport on a Friday afternoon. People would naturally end up with slightly staggered travel schedules because not too many families would go away for the entire two weeks.

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A productivity-oriented friend said that she mostly sees news about the Russia investigation when she’s at work. “It makes me feel better and reminds me not to complain about the people at [BigCo] who do nothing.”

Related:

• Are the same FBI agents who investigated the Tsarnaev brothers investigating Russia and the 2016 election?

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