Category Archives: Technology

Business, Culture, Technology

Keyless Killer?

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My Dad brought to my attention a news story that people are dying because of keyless cars. It was from a New York Times article describing how people are leaving their cars running in their garages because the no longer need to turn a physical key to the off position.
As we all know, the Times is the queen of “fake news“, hence I needed to look at the numbers.

The story describes how “dozens” of people have been killed by the deadly assault keyless cars. The total number killed according to the story was 28 which is  4 more than TWO dozen, so it is technically “dozens“. That’s tabloid journalism for you, to make a click-bait headline.  Once again we need to delve deeper into the numbers.

Just as an aside, VEHICLES OF WAR don’t need KEYS to operate.  You can start almost all WAR MACHINES, tanks, humvees, MRAPs, personnel carriers, WITHOUT A KEY.  As a deadly keyless operation assault car, you can turn on and off a VEHICLE OF WAR without turning a physical KEY.  But I digress…

The “dozens” of people killed is over an 12 YEAR period. That makes the “death toll” a bit more than TWO per year. Not exactly headline news. “Stop the presses!  Breaking news!  Last year, two people were killed by because they forgot to turn off their car!  Oh the humanity!”   But let’s delve deeper.

The article says that 8.5 million cars sold annually have keyless operations. Over 12 years that would be more than 100 million assault cars with deadly keyless operations. For a back of the envelope analysis, let’s assume only half of those cars are running today (50 million cars), because some of the cars will have been crashed or have become inoperable.

Say that you park your car in the garage once per day. You need to drive to work, the store, school, whatever and return to the garage. That means with 50 million cars, the cars get parked AT LEAST 5 times per week.  With the 52 weeks in a  year, that gives us 13 BILLIONS opportunities to NOT shut off the car, per year. Over 12 years that would be 156 BILLION opportunities to leave a car running in the garage.

With 28 deaths and 156 BILLION parking cycles, the death rate is 0.000000018% !!!   For the betting folks, that’s ONE IN 5.6 BILLION.

Putting it into perspective, you are 300 times more likely to be hit and killed by a METEORITE.

BUT there is a potentially more sinister latent hazard that isn’t described by the queen of fake news. I’ll cover that in the next entry.

Culture, Technology

How Awesome Is Facebook?

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Anyone who knows me, knows I’m a Luddite.  I have no social media presence. No Tweety, no Facepaging, no Instascope, no Snapblab, no Linkedup, nothing.

The latest hubbub from the fake news media is about how Cambridge Analytica captured “personal” information of 87 million Facebook users, parsed the information, and using that information, coerced the gullible public into electing Donald Trump as President of The United States.

Now if we actually believe the hysteria, what does that mean?

It means you should invest your money into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica because they have obtained the holy grail of the advertising world!

Since caveman Og had extra wheels that he wanted to sell to his fellow Neanderthals, people have been trying to figure out the “best” way to get others to “buy” their goods.  Obviously Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have figured this out, according the the talking heads in the fake news media as well as those of the liberal left.

According to the Federal Election Commission, the “Donald Trump for President” campaign paid $5,912,500 to Cambridge Analytica.  For some perspective, a 30 second Superbowl ad this year cost an advertiser $5,000,000, about the same price

An investment equivalent to a single 30 second spot during the Superbowl, overcame the will of the people to elect Hillybob and forced the zombie voters to elect Donald Trump.  Damn that was money well spent compared to the $1.4 BILLION spent by Hillybob, to lose.

Of course if we take the flip side to the “common sense” reasoning and conclude that the collected data had little or no influence on the election, the implication is that you should get your money out of Facebook.  This would indicate that their business model is flawed.  Facebook’s value is all of that personal data AND the linkages between users AND the links they maintain between the users and stores they shop at.  Facebook sells this information to advertisers to generate revenue.  The personal data and its utility to advertisers is the whole reason for the company’s billions in valuation.

No matter which side you care to believe, Facebook will be reviewing its image but little else will change.  Mark Zuckerberg will testify to Congress in just a few days.  My guess is that he will give a well scripted and moving mea culpa and say how naive they were and didn’t see the evil in the world and that they only had a vision of how they were bringing the world together.  Blah, blah, blah.  Zuckerberg will say that he would welcome regulation.  Blah, blah, blah.  Mark will give a list of how they will protect the public going forward.  More blah, blah, blah.  What will happen in the end is nothing.  No new regulations will be written.

If Facebook implemented or was forced to implement stringent privacy rules then the treasure trove of data has little value.  If advertisers can’t use the personal data to target ads, Facebook can’t charge as much for placements.  You can’t make money just letting people post vacation pictures and cat videos, for free.

I suspect that Congress (and the fake news media) will have short-term theatrical outrage over the current hysteria de jour  but will soon move on to the more pressing 2018 election cycle and Facebook will go back to business as usual.  Anyone remember the huge stink about Russians planting fake ads on Facebook just a few months ago?  Anyone still have outrage over that?  Were any new laws written?  As I said, back to business as usual.

I think I wasted too much time writing about this topic.  “Move along nothing to see here”

Culture, Politics, Technology

Judged By Experts. The Verdict MUST Be True.

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Lefty Lunatics are at it again. Calling them LUNATICS is somewhat IRONIC and SEXIST which I will explain later.

A Yale trained psychiatrist, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, has just released a book titled, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” where she presents her findings that President Trump is mentally unfit to serve as President of the United States. Doc Lee has taken her new found 15 minutes of fame and has briefed a small group of fellow LOONS in congress, as to her conclusion that President Trump is mentally unfit.  She claims that this is her duty to sound the alarm about President Trump just as someone should have raised the alarm about the rise of Adolf Hitler.

It has been reported that Doc Lee herself has said that diagnosing a patient without ever seeing him or interacting with him in any way is against the “ethics” of her profession. I guess the CANONS of ETHICS for psychiatrists isn’t worth the toilet paper that they obviously must be written on. I haven’t heard that her medical license to practice has been revoked or that she has been censured in any manner.  Makes one wonder how ethical the profession actually is.

I’ve heard the LOONS on the left yelling that it’s not one, not two, not three, but 27 psychiatrists who believe President Trump is unfit for office. Once more let’s look at some numbers. These 27 lunatic psychiatrists with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” make up only 6/100ths of a percent of the 49,000 psychiatrists in the United States.

“But 27 is a big number”, the LOONY LEFT argues. “There MUST be some validity to their conclusions”. Once again let’s revisit some recent history to assess the accuracy of a “BANDWAGON” conclusion.

In 1989 TWO physicists, Marty Fleischman, one of the world’s leading electrochemists, and Stanley Pons released finding of HISTORIC proportions. Similar to Doc Lee releasing her findings in a non-peer reviewed book, Pons and Fleischman released their finding, not in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but in a press release to the general public. What was this history finding? Unlimited energy production through COLD FUSION. It has become know as the Fleischman-Pons Experiment. As soon as the experiment was described almost immediately MANY physicists around the world said that they duplicated the results, VALIDATING the EXPERIMENT. The Russians claimed they were getting higher yields of energy than the original experiment. The mass media was reporting this discovery as “Greater than the Pennsylvania Oil Rush” as to energy production. What happened to this great source of FREE energy? Within months of the announcement of COLD FUSION and physicists world wide showing POSITIVE results, other physicist were starting to report that they could not replicate the results.  More negative results poured in.  The majority of physicists were concluding that the results of the Fleischman-Pons experiment were flawed.

A conference was held on COLD FUSION where Steven Koonin of Caltech stated that the results were simply a matter of “the INCOMPETENCE and DELUSION of Pons and Fleischmann,” In less than a year after its announcement, COLD FUSION was DECLARED DEAD.

NEVER FORGET, just because a group of EXPERTS declare something as TRUE, doesn’t make it TRUE.

Oh yeah, I’m being quite sexist when I call them LUNATICS. The term LUNATIC comes from the 28 day (Lunar) cycle of the moon which was thought in times of old to reflect the 28 day menstrual cycle of WOMEN, where they believed that women lost their minds for a period of time.