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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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lonely-moonshine-still · 20 days

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Roronoa Zoro ⚔️

He's made from a head swap between a G2 Persian Cat body and a fake short hair cat head with his clothes, hair, ear spike, earrings, and eye scar being made from Apoxie Sculpt. His sword handles are also made from Apoxie, with the blades being made from a thin sheet of plastic.

♤

I wanted Zoro to look bulker, then my other customes, and Sanji, so decided to build him of a Persian Cat base to give him more of a beefy look ( I had to cut off a lot of the fluff from the base after a few attempts at sculpting the clothes, though, as they weren't sitting right). Zoro's my joint first favourite character in One Piece, so I spent an ungodly amount of time tweeking his design until I was happy with him. I wish I could have made his face a little more angular, but that's me nit picking again. Overall, I really love how he came out :)))

#lps custom #zoro #zosan #lps art #lps #lps community #littlest pet shop #lps toys #handmade #ooak #one piece #making his swords killed me #i have never experienced so much rage making something in my life #and i kept losing the blade parts #which were the hardest bits to make #im just gonna let you visualise the range of emotions my face went through when i had to make more

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aro-laurance-zvahl · 6 months

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Laurence’s eyes changing color and then I was cooking on a gas stove and then I saw the flames. And they were Blue. They reminded me of Laurance’s eyes. And then I started thinking.

What if all Shadow Knight’s eyes change color? And that has some sort of link to their internal power level? Like how effective their soul is as fuel for whatever necromancy they’re experiencing?

And it wouldn’t just have to be limited to the red (low tier/cooler flames) to white (high tier/hottest flames) color spectrum because different materials can cause different flame colors. For example, cesium and potassium create purple hued flames, like Sasha’s eye color. But then the question becomes what causes different souls to act as a different material?

I don’t know yet! Maybe magicks in the soul could act as a sort of differing fuel source, or maybe feelings when turned could influence it, I dunno! Open to anyone’s thoughts though!

Anyway of course this then leads to a sort of built in caste system with the Shadow Knights. Bottom of the barrel, weak, disposable, would be shades of red. This is where I imagine Zenix may actually land, just...add to his Issues. Then it goes to orange which may be moreso the norm/standard color most knights have, yellow, and then white which is the most powerful and revered.

And then it comes to blue flames, they only occur when there’s a differing material, or when minimal soot and carbon dioxide are at play, so in a way you could say blue flame occurs when the flame is...pure. Irene’s blessing could not reverse what happened to Laurance, but it could purify it.

#minecraft diaries #mcd #mcd laurance #mcd laurence #laurance zvahl #laurence zvhal #mcd sasha #shadow knights #Im not sure where Laurance would land pre purification #But I want to say somewhere in the yellow/white range #And whenever he goes into that rage fueled shadow knight mode #He is unpurifying the fire

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the-nysh · 10 months

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Art appreciation for these stark and serious Trimax Vash panels (vol3)

...aka his firmly set 'game' face when up against unspeakable grief and horrors; he is absolutely NOT playing around.

#trigun #trigunbookclub #manga panels #reading along and thought WOO these are Good #can see where the overhaul icon comes from too #he had cryptid panels and sopping wet panels and then panels like THESE; his range is aaaaaaaaaaaa #looking for good fang panels was difficult this vol too as he mostly kept his mouth firmly shut!! in silent focused rage

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swansong-art · 3 months

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Kelyn: what do you mean half the party has a crush on me? why??

also Kelyn:

also since proper art has been hard, some doodling that will eventually be on a ref sheet I definitely need to do:

#art #fanart #Baldur's Gate 3 #wip #sketch #elf #drow #Kelyn #The Dark Urge #I'm just saying if a twink with long hair goes from standing to a dead sprint in heels #I fully understand everyone in range of that event developing an instant raging crush

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marimeeko · 5 months

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I don't know how I feel about this option, but has anyone else thought about, with AFO whipping out EVERY quirk he has, clearly stating he will use it all to destroy Bakugou, even at a high cost to himself...

And that this is most likely VERY visible to Izuku...

Has anyone else thought that Izuku may at some point interfere? Essentially out of panic that he might lose Bakugou again? That he may witness a much more gruesome death of his best friend/rival??

Maybe not right away, because he believes in Bakugou and was bolstered by Bakugous appearance, but perhaps if ANY indication is given that AFO might become successful?

(Yes, he's got Shigaraki right now but he also sort of "set aside" his current fight with him in order to hurl Bakugou at AFO before, keeping him restrained by Black Whip)

Basically...what on earth is going through Izukus head right now, especially now that AFO is about to go nuclear on Bakugou?? He cant just be chill with all of this happening in front of him. PLEASE HORIKOSHI GIVE ME SOME CRUMBS.

#bnha spoilers #what if #bakugou katsuki #bakudeku #like is he going to be able to atay out of it if bakugou is seriously threatened again??#he was already too late once #what if he legitimately panicks #hed probably be dragging tomura with him like a kid on a leash #and then maybe that would get Tomura within AFOs range ANYWAY #which would up the stakes?#i mean Baku might be fine but also....#AFO has got a LOT OF POWER RN #Im excited for whatever happens. and i dont thin katsuki would die again??#BUT LIKE STILL #i disnt think hed die the first time....#afo is going nuclear rage #is katsuki going to be powered up enough for this???#is Izuku seeing this???#is he or is he not out of his mind with worry for kacchan????#horikoshi please twll us what izuku is thinking again #i need to know #let us hear the protags pov again i miss izuku

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astriiformes · 1 year

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My little sister is on her high school golf team, which is already really funny because she does not have the vibes or personality you would expect of a golfer, but she the other day she sent me a picture of her senior student athlete poster and the energy is so incredible. It's got her in her little polo shirt and glove and everything except instead of coming across as cute suburban golf girl she looks more like the sullen frontwoman of a sapphic grunge band.

Please picture a tiny Korean girl with half her hair dyed hot pink, a bunch of ear and nose piercings, eyebrows filled in with sharp red and black liner and a slit shaved into one of them, and a deeply unimpressed expression on her face, standing there in a golf uniform with a club slung over her shoulder looking more like she's about to hit you with it than she is a golf ball.

#it's so funny to me that somehow my very average centrist parents who made a point of living in boring middle class suburbia #somehow managed to raise three raging bleeding-heart socialist hippie queers in spite of themselves #which has also lead to. some very funny intersections #from what i've heard my little sister shows up all the men at the driving range with some frequency #which is a mental image that always delights me. suburban golf guys destroyed by one (1) powerful bisexual #i love her; i'm looking forward to seeing her soon #even if it's wild to think about her graduating high school -- that's my baby sister!!

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once-was-muses · 5 months

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statistical character personality test. take the linked quiz from the perspective of your character, then select 5 - 10 results from the complete matches list that you feel resonate with your character the most.