Author Archives: ViolettSparks

The Road From 98% Autonomous Cars to 100% Autonomous Cars Will Take About Five Years

by ViolettSparks Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Uber decided to put a few of its self-driving cars on the road in San Francisco without bothering to tell anyone, so yesterday the California DMV revoked the registration of its cars. During the week they were tootling around the city, however, people reported that Uber’s cars were running red lights and making right turns incorrectly. Atrios comments:

People always say “oh, well, if it works 98% of the time and then every now and then the cars needs the driver to step in then that’s good enough.” No, that isn’t good enough. There isn’t time for me to switch from taking a nap or texting my pals to taking over when a bike lane appears suddenly, unless I’m paying 100% attention. And no one is going to pay 100% attention in a “self-driving car” because what’s the point.

Who says that? I’ve never heard anything remotely like this from anyone with more than a Twitter egg understanding of autonomous vehicles. The goal is, and always has been, a car that’s 100 percent self-driving. Personally, I envision something the size of a tiny room with a couple of La-Z-Boy recliners suitable for reading, twittering, watching Buffy reruns, or taking a nap.

We’re not there yet, of course, and no one claims otherwise. But the fact that we’re not there yet doesn’t mean we’ll never get there. Griping about the fact that current iterations of autonomous vehicles aren’t perfect doesn’t seem very productive.

Personally, I’m hoping to live long enough to ride in a fully autonomous car and prove Atrios wrong. I think it’s gonna be a close call.

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The Road From 98% Autonomous Cars to 100% Autonomous Cars Will Take About Five Years

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Iowa GOP Official Warns That Child Migrants Might Be Highly Trained “Warriors”

by ViolettSparks Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Iowa Republican National Committee member Tamara Scott has a special theory about the flood of child migrants entering the United States: What if they’re secretly ninjas?

Republican congressmen have previously argued that the 70,000 youths who will come across the border in 2014 are being brought over to bolster Democratic voter rolls at some point in the distant future, or that they are carrying a deadly disease that does not actually exist in their home countries. Scott, in a Thursday radio segment flagged by Right Wing Watch, sought to outdo them all:

For us just to open our borders it’s chaos we don’t know orderly who’s coming in, who’s not. When we see these kids, you and I think young kids, we think maybe 12-year-olds, maybe even…middle-schoolers. But we know back in our revolution, we had 12-year-olds fighting in our revolution. And for many of these kids, depending on where they’re coming from, they could be coming from other countries and be highly trained as warriors who will meet up with their group here and actually rise up against us as Americans. We have no idea what’s coming through our borders, but I would say biblically it’s not a Christian nation when you entice people to do wrong.

This is a terrible idea for a Red Dawn sequel.

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Iowa GOP Official Warns That Child Migrants Might Be Highly Trained “Warriors”

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