Goddamit I’m just sitting here waiting to lose my job over this fuckery.

Those are ways to gather empirical results, though they rely on artificial, staged situations.

I think it’s fine to have both. Seat belts save lives. I see no problem mandating them. That kind of thing can still be well founded in data.

It’s hardly either / or though. What we have here is empirical data showing that cars without lidar perform worse. So it’s based in empirical results to mandate lidar. You can build a clear, robust requirement around a tech spec. You cannot build a clear, robust law around fatality statistics targets.

This sounds good until you realize how unsafe human drivers are. People won’t accept a self-driving system that’s only 50% safer than humans, because that will still be a self-driving car that kills 20,000 Americans a year. Look at the outrage right here, and we’re nowhere near those numbers. I also don’t see anyone comparing these numbers to human drivers on any per-mile basis. Waymos compared favorably to human drivers in their most recently released data. Does anyone even know where Teslas stand compared to human drivers?

These fatalities are a Tesla business advantage. Every one is a data point they can use to program their self-driving intelligence. No one has killed as many as Tesla, so no one knows more about what kills people than Tesla. We don’t have to turn this into a bad thing just because they’re killing people /s

That’s neither a funny joke nor a serious idea of any worth.

It’s a logical fallacy that I have to solve peace in the Middle East before I can evaluate the morality of kidnapping, rape, and murder.

But I do recognize my privilege. Moral qualms and principles are a luxury. Does this make them meaningless? Ceding morality to those locked in a cycle of murder takes us to a dark place.

The Israelis say the same shit you are, frankly. “You would do the same thing if they’d taken your family?” And “easy for you to criticize from the outside.” So this is easy to reflect back at you. Unless you’re sitting in Tel Aviv right now, you’re judging from a privileged place

Like I said, I’ve followed this conflict for 40 years. Casting off moral qualms to engage in a tooth and nail cycle of endless murder is what got everyone here, not what’s going to get them out. Hate cannot drive out hate, said someone less privileged than I.

You can have the final word here. I only ask that you spend it on something other than ad hominem if you can.

Yeah that sounds oddly specific.

Such selective logic. Their massive terrorist attack has caused such blowback that now they have no good options to minimize child deaths. Maybe the terror attack was not about preventing child deaths? That’s the point here.

I understand you want to champion the Palestinians because they are dreadfully overmatched. But don’t let that whitewash your view of a very grey situation.

I wish their entire strategy was built around minimizing the number of children dying, but it is clearly not. There is no actor in this picture whose is.

I see it as people wanting to commit righteous violence. People have violent impulses, but we usually control them. Some people with extraordinary violent tendencies go looking for a place where it’s “okay” to let them loose. This is not the only example.

Palestinians tried everything the “right” way.

I’m well aware - have been following this conflict for 40 years, generally siding with the Palestinians. I will say however that no one has done such a clean job of “trying it the right way” as you make out here. It’s been far more morally grey from the start.

But let’s accept your point and the language you’re establishing here. They tried everything the right way. Now they’re trying everything the wrong way. It’s like I said: they stopped waiting for the world’s moral outrage to save them, went it alone, and have played it as dirty as they think they need to. Understandable. Predictable.

They don’t need me to think it’s excusable, and it happens that I don’t. They’ve discarded any hope of moral rectitude and are simply trying to win the fight in practical terms by whatever means available. They’re not trying to be right, they’re trying to be effective - to control land, repel Israel, and help Palestinians.

How would you say they’re doing?

Instead of quibbling over whether suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism are orally excusable, judge them by their effectiveness on behalf of the Palestinians.

It’s hard to say what their condition would be without the suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and hostage takings over the last 20 years since the second intifada. No one knows what would have happened in an alternate reality where they continued doing things “the right way.”

But from what I see, “the wrong way” is not only wrong but ineffective. The October attacks have succeeded at the impossible: restoring Israel’s moral standing in the eyes of the world. If the west were silently complicit before, they are actively and vociferously complicit now. Gaza is nearly sanitized of all life. There isn’t even a bargaining table at which to give everything away at. Palestinians are being erased from existence.

So maybe, just maybe, on “effectiveness” grounds, these tactics are a practical failure as much as they are a moral evil.

Palestinians heartily agree with your “what else are we supposed to do” notion and long since stopped waiting for the world’s moral courage to come to their rescue. When they did that they also said that they no longer cared what anyone thought of the morality of their actions. They don’t need them to be excusable by us and frankly they aren’t. I’m past excusing anyone involved in this conflict.

Do you really tjink the October attacks gained them any “negotiating leverage?”

Understandable, yes.

Predictable, yes.

Deserved, yes.

Effective, perhaps.

Excusable? No.

Are we really debating whether it’s okay to rape / kidnap / slaughter civilians?

I miss the minutes when this term was just used unironically and hadn’t yet become a magat slur.

He says it so many times in so many ways that he actually starts to make it seem more complex than it is. You start wondering if you’re missing something, because you got it in 6 seconds but 12 minutes later he’s still talking about it.

Yep, convenience of plopping the phone down really is 100% of it for me. Especially with Apple’s magnets setup, it’s a one-hand, one-second operation, and then the phone is standing at attention on its cradle stand. The thought of having a dangling cable on my desk and picking it up and fiddling to plug it in then laying the phone flat seems like something from 10 years ago. I’ve even forgotten once or twice what kind of port my phone has.

But its only exhaust is PuRe wATeR!! /s

It still makes me LOL to see people tout this, when battery EVs don’t exhaust anything.

I actually AM surprised that they don’t have one village idiot who loves Trump. It always seems like there’s one asshole who wants to wave the Trump flag as a fuck-you to their world.

Elon held an all hands at the company to announce “I’m back in charge” and the financial press are reporting that “the markets rewarded it.” Meaning the stock went up. Which makes me want to puke.