#New York’s First Electric Taxi Fleet

[xtruss]

The Electrobat Taxi, One of the World’s First All-Electric Car, was Popular with Members of High Society in Late-19th Century Manhattan, New York. Photograph By New-York Tribune/Library of Congress

The Forgotten History of New York’s First Electric Taxi Fleet—In The 1800s

More Than a Century Before Teslas Hit The Road, Battery-Powered Taxicabs Zipped Silently Through The Streets of Manhattan.

— By Christopher Klein | June 04, 2024

The bustling streets of 19th-century Manhattan had a horse problem. The estimated 150,000 horses roaming the city each produced 22 pounds of waste daily. The inauguration of New York City’s motorized taxicab service on March 27, 1897, promised a cleaner solution. Because Gotham’s first taxis weren’t powered by gasoline—but by electricity. It turns out that the car of the future is actually from the past.

An Electric Start

The idea of electric vehicles gliding around New York City in the 1890s might sound like a steampunk-inspired fever dream, but battery-powered automobiles outsold their internal combustion counterparts at the dawn of the automotive age. Electric cars were quiet, clean, and easy to drive. “Back then, you were lucky if a gas car started in the morning,” says Dan Albert, author of Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless. “It was noisy, polluting, and rickety, whereas an electric car started with a flip of the switch.”

During the 19th century, when electricity began to be used practically, it seemed capable of overcoming any challenge. “If you asked people on the street what was going to happen, they would have said that electricity is this magic force,” says electric car historian David A. Kirsch, author of The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History. “We harnessed it for light. We harnessed it for traction through the trolley. It’s spreading everywhere, and now it’s going to take us around.”

The Pioneering Electrobat

When Nikola Tesla was the only Tesla making headlines, the Electrobat emerged as the first commercially viable electric vehicle. Crafted by Philadelphia engineers Henry Morris and Pedro Salom in 1894, this 2,500-pound car was propelled by a lead-acid battery, achieving top speeds of 15 miles per hour and covering distances of up to 25 miles on a single charge.

Furthermore, the pair devised an ingenious battery-swapping system inside a former Broadway roller skating rink to keep its cabs in continuous operation. Working with the efficiency of a NASCAR pit crew, employees maneuvered vehicles with elevators and hydraulics as an overhead crane, plucked out the depleted 1,000-pound batteries, and inserted fresh ones. The process took only three minutes. “It was much faster than changing a horse team and probably as fast as what we would today associate with filling a tank of gas,” Kirsch says.

The duo’s Manhattan cab service rapidly gained popularity, especially among the upper echelons of society. Rather than selling their cars, Morris and Salom opted to lease their vehicles on a monthly or per-ride basis through their venture, the Electric Wagon & Carriage Company.

The taxi fleet experienced substantial growth, expanding from a mere dozen vehicles in 1897 to over 100 by 1899. The Electrobat proved the ideal city car with its rapid acceleration and noiseless ride. However, its speed and quietness posed unforeseen challenges. In May 1899, the press reported that cab driver Jacob German had become the first automobile operator arrested for speeding after whizzing down Lexington Avenue at 12 miles per hour. Weeks later, an electric taxi fatally struck real estate broker Henry Bliss as he stepped off an Upper West Side streetcar. The first pedestrian killed by an automobile never heard the Electrobat coming.

The Bubble Bursts

Morris and Salom found new backing from wealthy investors, notably New York financier William Whitney, known for his success in electrifying the city’s streetcars. Under Whitney’s leadership, the company merged with the electric street railways and battery manufacturing firms to form an integrated, nationwide electric transportation network.

The Electric Vehicle Company swiftly expanded its taxi operations to major cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston, eventually becoming the nation’s largest automobile manufacturer. However, its rapid expansion proved unsustainable. Operations outside New York were poorly run, and investors felt swindled when a New York Herald investigation in late 1899 revealed the Electric Vehicle Company had fraudulently secured a loan. The company’s stock plummeted, and the enterprise was virtually bankrupt by 1902.

Electric Cars Lose Power

The company’s collapse sent shockwaves through the investment community and cast a shadow over the future of electric vehicles.

“The thing that killed it is not really the idea, the technology, or the business model,” Albert says. “It was the shadiness of the wheeler-dealers behind it.”

A devastating fire destroyed a significant portion of the fleet. Coupled with the economic turmoil of the Panic of 1907, this dealt a final blow to electric cabs in New York City just as gasoline-powered vehicles gained momentum in the market. The same year, local businessman Harry Allen introduced a taxi service with 65 gasoline-powered cabs imported from France. Within a year, his fleet swelled to 700 vehicles.

The internal combustion engine would drive the next American century, but battery power is slowly returning after a long detour. When 25 all-electric taxis began operation on the streets of New York in 2022, the car of the future arrived—again.

[influencermagazineuk]

Joker: Folie à Deux – A Musical Descent with Phoenix and Gaga but Lacks Harmony

Five years since the release of Todd Phillips' critically acclaimed Joker, we are back in Gotham with the highly eagerly awaited sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux. The first film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, was a dark, unsettling pastiche of Scorsese films: a mash of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy in which the thing that was always scary in clown makeup turned a performance of tragedy. While the first film hauled in near-universally great reviews, with some touting it as a work of art, others-like myself-found it incredibly overhyped and not at all worth the adoration it received. It felt to confirm the awards-season tendency of praising a so-called "comedy" that is utterly not humorous, substituting humor for insistent intensity and darkness. Sarah_Ackerman from New York, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Now comes the sequel, which, if flawed, tries to bring something new by going in a bold musical direction. Though at times labored and flat, Joker: Folie à Deux incorporates musical numbers, an interesting structure the first movie did not boast of. Contributing to his performance, Phoenix returns now incorporating musical performances into his Joker à la Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven, in which the characters sing their inner emotions by way of show tunes. This brings a different energy but is not quite enough to really lift the picture. In walks the undeniably sensational talent of Lady Gaga as Harleen Quinzel-a.k.a. Harley Quinn-a disturbed psychiatric patient who meets Arthur in a prison music therapy session. A very strong introductory role for Gaga, but here, her character development is nothing compared to the emotional depth she brought with A Star Is Born. She quickly falls in love with Arthur, setting up an intense-but-troublesome bond between the two. They're a narcissistic dynamic duo, but it's anyone's guess if this is what the filmmakers were going for.The best parts of the film happen at the beginning as it opens up with a mock Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon detailing the prior events before moving into an action-packed prison sequence. Arthur, played by Phoenix, is in prison awaiting his trial for the murders he committed, and he gets to play off of an incredibly strong supporting cast. Brendan Gleeson plays a wittily unsuspecting prison guard, Catherine Keener is Arthur's tough lawyer, and Steve Coogan briefly yet memorably pops up as a tabloid interviewer. Zazie Beetz has also returned in a fleeting reprise as Arthur's former neighbor, reminding one of the fluidity with which brief relationships have crossed his life. It's when they finally meet, in that very peculiar "meet-uncute" fashion, inside the Gotham jail-the spark between Phoenix and Gaga is undeniable. The repetitious claustrophobic settings of the film dull this chemistry. The leads are parted ways for quite extensive stretches; though moving, Phoenix tends to feel one-dimensional in parts, as powerful as his performance might be. He acts with all his intensity, but there seems to be a lack of emotional depth from his character due to the apparent internal turmoil at which it can never seem to escape. This whole drama in the film is about Arthur's trial, while his lawyer, Maryanne Stewart-a role played by Keener-tries to argue that such a traumatic upbringing has made him mentally disturbed and needing treatment, not punishment. On the opposite side stands the district attorney, Harvey Dent, played by Harry Lawtey, who insists that Arthur is sane and deserves to go to the electric chair. He's torn between the insanity plea from his lawyer and embracing his Joker persona, and the identity crisis is strong. That violent alter ego brought him infamy and fear and love in the form of Harley, but it could get him killed. Gaga is great at times as Harley with that subtle, manipulative malice in her character. That makes her character more disturbed than Arthur's, yet it isn't elaborated on very well within the script; hence, her character is a little underdeveloped. In partial developments, there are shades of her being a Lady Macbeth-like figure to DC villains; this potential remains largely unrealized. The pacing falls off by the film's final act; viewers will become restless, awaiting twists or revelations that never seem to materialize. As it lurches toward its finale, Joker: Folie à Deux really labors under the weight of its own self-importance. It demands mythic status for itself, yet in doing so, it sacrifices so much raw emotional heft that could have better sold the story. An electric performance from Lady Gaga gives the film a much-needed jolt, but the narrative falters as the audience craves more depth, humor, or even tragedy that feels earned. At the end of the day, Joker: Folie à Deux has some memorable moments amid a mediocre storyline, for which much credit goes to its cast, but it never hits the mark it should. Could Gaga's Harley Quinn lead her own adventure in the future? The prospect certainly is enticing. Now, the sequel leaves much to be desired despite flashes of brilliance it sometimes offers. Read the full article

[airmanisr]

Republic P-47G-10-CU Thunderbolt ‘225068 / WZ-D’ ”Snafu” (G-CDVX) by Alan Wilson Via Flickr: c/n 21953 Built in 1944 with the US military serial 42-25068. The P-47G was a P-47D built under license by Curtiss-Wright and this is one of only two surviving examples. She flew again in April 2012 and is painted in very authentic colour scheme representing a Thunderbolt of the 84th Fighter Squadron, part of the 78th Fighter Group based here at Duxford. Seen taxiing in after displaying at the Imperial War Museum’s 2012 Autumn Airshow. Duxford Airfield, Cambridgeshire, UK 8th September 2012 The following information on G-CDVX is from The Fighter Collection website:- "The Fighter Collection 'Razorback' P-47G is one of only two Curtiss-built examples left in the world. She was the 129th P-47G built at the Curtiss facility in Buffalo, New York in early 1944. The fighter was accepted by the USAAF in September 1944 and transferred to the Third Air Force at Tallahassee, Florida. It was here that she was re-designated as a TP-47G to reflect the training role she undertook with a number of Advanced Fighter Transition Units. Our P-47G was struck from the USAAF inventory in late June 1945 and was eventually passed to the Aero Industries Technical Institute at Oakland Airport, California. It was here that she taught hydraulic and electrical systems to aeronautical students until 1952 when she was bought by Jack Hardwick, a former Cleveland National Air Race pilot, who rented her out in 1953 to Allied Artists for ground scenes in the film Fighter Attack. Following her silver screen appearance she was parked up in El Monte, California, with a number of other World War Two aircraft until 1975 when she passed to a new owner who commenced a restoration of this rare machine. The work was not completed and the unfinished project passed to Ray Stutsman in late 1979 where a full restoration begun the following year which culminated in a first flight during April 1982, which was rewarded with the Grand Champion Warbird trophy at Oshkosh in July of that year. It flew with Stutsman at many events across North America until 1987 when she passed to the Lone Star Flight Museum, based at Galveston, Texas. She flew rarely during her time at Lone Star, when she passed to Flying A Services in the early 1990s and was shipped to the UK. The fighter remained in her shipping container until she joined The Fighter Collection fleet in 2006. A full restoration programme was undertaken in order to bring the P-47G back to stock wartime condition The scheme our P-47G wears is that of 84th Fighter Squadron P-47D 42-74742 - 'Snafu', the mount of Lt Severino B Calderon in late 1944."

[failtoplan]

Future Imperfect - On Capitalism, Technology and Ideology

Looking out from the 31st floor balcony, it doesn’t seem high until you look down. Shenzhen stretches 80 kilometres east to west, but is only 10 deep, North-South. The city snakes laterally, littorally, between the hills of the Hong Kong border, along  Shenzhen Bay to the Pearl River delta, like a badly kept concrete lawn, with clumps of seventy and eighty story towers sprouting like steel weeds. The 115 story Ping An Tower, the worlds 4th largest, the town’s own tall poppy. When night falls, the entire town lights up like a circuit board, streaming with steel and light. The immaculately kept, perpetually swept, cycle path along the Dasha river is filled with office workers on dockless rental bikes, hired by the half hour, headed to one of the city’s many tech clusters, downstream, deeper into Nanshan district. They’ve phased out almost all the old taxis, replaced with a fully electric fleet. The same for the buses. Pretty much every transaction, from street-corner noodles to legal fees are carried out with QR codes and digital wallets. Cashless, silent, sleek.

This is not ‘The Future’, but it is ‘A Future’. Two days a week I commute from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. The journey takes around an hour and a half, but the time travelled is greater than the distance covered. After getting stamped out of Mainland China and into Hong Kong at the vast Shenzhen Bay checkpoint, coaches and cars spiral up onto the five-and-a-half-kilometre bay bridge to cross over to the New Territories. As we roll up the overpass onto the bridge, the plaiting of concrete weaves carriageways from right-to-left and left-to-right. The first sign that they do things differently here. At least for now.

Hong Kong, like Tokyo, represents a certain obsolete near-future in the collective imagination. Having had its image and form repeatedly appropriated by Hollywood as a stand-in for numerous dystopias, the familiarity can make it seem almost underwhelming. Hong Kong looks exactly like ‘Hong Kong’ - a trait it shares with New York. It also feels like yesterday’s vision of tomorrow. The stuttering neon signs and diesel-streaked streets, PoMo towers and marble-lined lobbies are a particularly sharp contrast with Shenzhen’s unironic modernity. From its peak in 1993, Hong Kong has declined from twenty-seven to less than three percent of China’s GDP. But beyond the numbers, it feels like a city in decline. Slowly, megaprojects such as the Hong Kong-Macao-Zhuhai bridge and the China High-speed Rail Link are stitching the territory together with the mainland, bringing Hong Kong’s greatest fear ever-closer, becoming just another mid-sized Chinese city. With the perceived erosion of its Rule of law, the Special Administrative Region has become a contested space. The acute confrontation over the ‘two systems’ principle, is also representative of a bigger conflict between two ideas. Two visions of what the future could be.

Words can be problematic; they are both the obstacle to articulating a thought and the best way to try. This clash of ideas, in which Hong Kong is just one front, isn’t easily reduced to opposing pairs as the Cold War once was. Capitalism’s ‘victory’ over Communism was always an artificial, lexigraphic binary that pitted an economic system against a total political, social and economic order. ‘Capitalism’ is synecdochic, an easy shorthand for ‘democratic capitalism’ and the free and limited, markets, open societies and shared small-L liberal consensus regarding the primacy of the individual. Democratic Capitalism is Limited Capitalism. And it was ‘Limited Capitalism’ that ‘won’. The front line crossed by the arcing span of the Shenzhen Bay Bridge is not the battle between capitalism and communism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is Capitalism unencumbered by Democracy. It is the front  line between Total and Limited Capitalism.

Limited Capitalism was never an outright winner, but in its rhetoric, it strived to achieve the illusion of permanence. The rights of the individual – the societal sidekick to the economic superhero - has never been inevitable and maybe not even natural. Increasingly this relic of our post-Enlightenment experiments feels like a humanistic blip. In the face of Brexit and Trump, Bolsanaro and Orban, I have found myself increasingly having to defend the ‘pragmatism of the primacy of the individual’ to friends not just in Singapore and Shanghai, but Boston and Berlin. Yes, it is the freedom to screw up, but it is also the freedom not to be screwed with.

When measured in terms of human development Limited Capitalism has been a great success. But ‘Capitalist Democracy’ is a productive tension, not a synonymic pair. Capitalism privileges results, Democracy, the process. One is fast, the other is slow. The market is majoritarian, while the democratic enshrines the individual, not merely responsible to a simple majority. This makes elections, perversely, the least important aspect of a democracy. Limited Capitalism is an uneasy hybrid. You are free to consume, you are free to participate, but the between the two there is no equivalence. The human flourishing this has propagated cannot be measured by statistics alone. It is this tension that universalised the franchise, enshrined judicial independent and – aspirationally -declared Universal Human Rights. Less tangibly and more significantly it gives each of us a hope of genuine human dignity and all of us some faith in a societal-level trust. Maybe it was easier to win hearts and minds in the late 20th century with Right to Buy than the Rights of Man, but failing to promote the civil alongside the economic conflates consumption with participation, creating the opportunity for Total Capitalism.

-- Shenzhen’s subway tunnels are lined with motion-synced LED screens that animate adverts outside the carriage windows selling pizza and pet food station to station. My connected TV won’t switch on without first showing me a short film promoting the latest toilet paper or plastic surgery procedure. Pop-up ads and promotions are a pervasive part of every single product or service, physical or virtual that I use. Upsell, cross-sell, resell. The imperative to consume is everywhere, the Chinese Dream constantly reinforced as the route to individualisation and self-actualisation. Judged by the old Communist clichés of a “decadent West,” focussed on temerarious consumption, contemporary China is the most “western” place I have ever lived or been. One where I am no more and no less than the sum of my purchases. I buy therefore I am.

At the same time deep integration of seamless technology has evolved a new species of human as consumer, Homo Emptus. The local branch of KFC lets me buy a Family Bucket with nothing more than my face, using cameras linked directly to my virtual wallet which holds my credit cards and fictive cash. Recently I was walking through the precinct by my block, when a young woman ran up to me, apologising. Her cleaner’s phone had stopped receiving transfers and she didn’t have the cash to pay. Did I have any? Pulling a handful of 100 yuan notes out of my pocket, she pulled out her phone, scanned my wallet and transferred me the 300 kuai which I had in cash. In less than a minute I had become a human ATM. It was demeaning and thrilling at the same time, I imagine not dissimilar to the excitement felt by the freshly humiliated submissive.

Sometimes living here can feel like magic. But if you only immerse in the wonder, you miss the cost. Recently, a group of cyclists in Shanghai rode past a police officer, stopped by the side of the road, deep in an animated discussion with the driver they had just pulled over. The group, aware the policeman was otherwise occupied, slowly rolled through the red signal ahead, traffic light on a quiet Saturday morning. Fifteen minutes later by the time they had reached their café stop and pulled out their phones to pay, they had all been fined. Facial recognition cameras mounted on top of the police car had ID-ed them and then allowed the officer digitally ensure justice was done. When we are defined only by our consumption, this make complete sense, our economic life is simply ‘life’, giving the state unprecedented control in return for our convenience. Seamlessness may be fast, but to protect Limited Capitalism, we need seams.

The reality is though that our willingness to conflate commercial choice with civil freedoms has makes it easy for us to walk backwards into Total Capitalism. Using ‘Capitalism’ as a shorthand for so long has meant a lack of focus on the social and political dimensions that has allowing the market to perform as a poor stand-in for the whole. This has led to declining trust in the very institutions that underpin both our societal freedom and our consumer choice. The recent World Values Survey shows a minority in both Europe and the US of people born after 1970 believe it is ‘essential to live in a democracy.’ If this is the case then we have collectively failed to remind ourselves what ‘democracy’ really entails. It has also led to the bizarre inversion for many on the neoliberal right who see any democratic limit placed on the market as ‘undemocratic’

The rising indifference to the democratic can be seen in part as a consequence of Limited Capitalism’s success. Just as a fish does not know that it is wet, we take for granted the protections afforded the individual. We have collectively and systemically failed to remind ourselves of the importance of the water we all swim in. Political leaders and populist demagogues who owe their very existence to the small L liberalism that underpins Limited Capitalism have failed to give credit, choosing instead to pee in the pond for short term gain. Taking our collective socio-political foundations for granted has led to their erosion. Ignoring them has also reduced the success of a state to its economy alone. Whilst freedom of speech won’t feed my children, GDP won’t make them happier or more morally rich. This tyranny of the economic means that states which favour the fast and the outcome will be judged the best performing, outshining those that optimise for the slow, the process, the individual. By judging a state by its economy rather than their humanity, we set up a framework in which the Total Capitalism is not only increasingly easy to admire, but objectively ‘better’, with no way to quantify its glaring qualitative flaws. The fallacy that our economic lives are an adequate stand-in for our civic ones provides the ideological misdirection to pull the trick off. Only what is counted is valued.

Total Capitalism, by succeeding on these terms, promotes a worrying model of growth and unfreedom, chipping away at the old liberal consensus. As pervasive technologies allow ever-greater accumulation of information, we are reaching an inflection point, two divergent versions of how this data is used and its implications for how we live. Progress marches an there is a decision to be made, inaction is not possible. A battle that is waged by only one side, even one of ideas, is not without bloodshed; it is a massacre.

Unencumbered by the limits that the state apparatus of Limited Capitalism places on it, technology can quickly become dystopian. The Limited Capitalist model is not just a check on economic entities – as the EU has proved with its fines on Google and Microsoft - but also on governments. And it adds an implicit societal dimension to the economic role. When Apple refused to provide a back door to iPhone for the FBI, it was asserting its social responsibility, not just its economic function. It helped that these two impulses were congruent here, but the difference between that and the case of the Shanghai cyclists is stark. Tencent, makers of the ubiquitous WeChat Wallet in question, were doing nothing wrong by allowing the state to pick pockets; they were fulfilling their duty, legally obliged to do so in the People’s Republic. The FBI’s response to Apple’s refusal was that American lives might be lost, but people died enshrining the rights Apple was upholding. Do we still believe the defence of the individual is worth dying for?

It would be worth asking that question to the millions of minority Muslims constantly surveilled, or interred in camps in Xinjiang. Advanced monitoring technologies, sharpened to scalpel-like precision, have created an unprecedented digital panopticon. The whole region is monitored at a level of detail that previously would have taken vast armies of watchers and handlers. Now instead, the state has the ability to micromanage human life at a macroscale;  facial recognition, device tracking and digital monitoring turn an entire country-sized region into a prison colony. Xinjiang is not just a tragedy though; it is a testbed. China has rolled the same systems across the entirety of its domestic train network as well as at every airport, port and major public area. More disturbingly, it is a showroom for the implementation of its own particular strain of Total Capitalism. A sinister demonstration of how to unshackle the market from democracy, providing economic liberation whilst maintaining total control. For parts of the world that were previously faced with the choice between an all-inclusive version of modernity, open society and all, China offers an alluring alternative, a cake-and-eat-it model powered by pervasive technologies and financed by Belt and Road loans. And it is one that has succeeded by our own ‘Capitalist’ yardstick.

Total Capitalism is by no means inevitable, and its vision of the future not the only one. Technology is neutral and can be used co-opted for community as well as commerciality. The liberal limits within Liberal, Democratic, Limited Capitalism have allowed it to do both. But our willingness to collapse the social, political and economic into one big flat now have left us at a critical juncture. Hong Kong’s fight is an imperfect allegory for the decision that we need to make about what we should measure and what really matters, particularly in the developed world. We cannot take for granted what we already have. An era is only named after it has long passed. It is up to us to decide if we are to witness the end of this one.

[isfeed]

Ford Mustang Mach-E joins New York City’s yellow taxi fleet

Ford Mustang Mach-E joins New York City’s yellow taxi fleet

The Ford Mustang Mach-E is hitting the streets of New York City as the latest electric vehicle to join the ranks of the city’s iconic yellow taxi fleet. The Mustang Mach-E, with its fresh coat of Rally Yellow paint and classic taxi iconography, is being operated by Gravity Technologies, a startup focused on EV fleets and charging infrastructure. This is the first time that Ford’s new, mass-market…

[mondonews]

Elon Musk baffled by NYC agency snubbing Tesla taxis

Elon Musk baffled by NYC agency snubbing Tesla taxis

New York taxi regulators have snubbed a startup’s bid to launch an all-Tesla taxi fleet in the city — and you can count Elon Musk among those who are baffled. But citing concerns about traffic congestion, the TLC voted to stop issuing new for-hire licenses for electric vehicles — saying that Revel could launch its Tesla fleet only if it first purchased licensed gas-guzzling cars and trasferred…

[xtruss]

Illustration of a Mural of a Honey Bear holding the Golden Gate Bridge.

Letter from Silicon Valley: Waymo Cars and Honey Bears! The Logic of Scale is Imposing a Copy-Paste Sensibility on San Francisco.

— By Anna Wiener | July 20, 2022

The desk where I work in San Francisco overlooks Cesar Chavez Street, a four-lane thoroughfare that starts at the eastern edge of the city, in the Bayview, and runs west at a jag for about three miles. Formerly known as Army Street, it is a largely charmless artery. In recent years, owing to procrastination, distraction, or general malaise, I’ve often found myself staring out at it, idly watching the traffic. There is nothing very unusual to see except for the Waymo cars—white, electric Jaguar S.U.V.s, kitted out with sensors and cameras, their rooftop lidars spinning.

Self-driving cars are not a fixture of most American cities, at least not yet. (New York City recently approved a modest fleet of about a half-dozen.) But San Francisco is full of such vehicles, and has been for some time. Most of the cars belong to Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary, or Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. Sleek and smooth, they drift languidly through the streets day and night, gathering and processing huge volumes of training data and emitting a low purr. There is something subaquatic about the vehicles, which seem to travel in small schools, and even to live their own lives. Dozens of Waymo cars used to accumulate on a residential street in the Presidio, continuously navigating themselves into an intractable dead end; earlier this year, after a driverless Cruise car was pulled over by cops, it took it upon itself to scoot away from the scene, to what a Cruise spokesperson later deemed a “safer” location down the block.

California began allowing and regulating autonomous vehicles in 2012, and at first the cars were primarily found in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, on low-traffic streets close to corporate headquarters. During the past few years, they have had a more noticeable presence in the city, showing up en masse, like commuters. Now there are hundreds of them—a regional oddity that, through pure saturation, is starting to lose its novelty. In June, the California Public Utilities Commission allowed Cruise to begin charging fares for rides in San Francisco; the company’s thirty-car fleet became the first authorized by the state to operate without human drivers in the car. The robo-taxis—white Chevy Bolts with orange detailing and prominently displayed names such as Poppy, Tostada, and Matcha—work between ten at night and six in the morning, in a circumscribed part of the city that happens to have minimal traffic and few hills, and have a speed limit of thirty miles per hour. The Cruise car that drove away from its traffic stop was part an earlier test group, and the cars have acted in other surprising ways: recently, about twenty of them got stuck on a single block in Hayes Valley, jamming up traffic; some were eventually rescued by a group of Cruise employees, who climbed into the driver’s seats to move them.

Outside of the Cruise robo-fleet, most of the autonomous vehicles in San Francisco are never entirely autonomous. Instead, they are occupied by contract operators—drivers who sit behind the wheel, toggling between manual and autonomous modes. Pedestrians, cyclists, and fellow-motorists have no way of knowing whether any given vehicle is in self-driving mode. The main tell, of course, is if the vehicle is moving while the person inside has his hands off the wheel. But it’s also possible to arrive at inferences based on how good a car seems to be at making decisions. Several months ago, biking home after drinks with friends, I found myself in Mission Bay, a neighborhood that was unfamiliar not in any geographic sense but in its constructed newness: new stadium, new condos, new medical buildings, new sidewalks. My companion and I made a wrong turn onto a side street, where a Waymo car idled at an intersection, deliberating. We slowed our bikes. The car signalled left, then signalled right, before advancing in a straight line, at a crawl.

If marketers and entrepreneurs are to be trusted, the fully autonomous future has been just around the corner for at least a decade. (In 2019, Elon Musk declared that Tesla would activate a million robo-taxis by the end of 2020, but today the company has no robo-taxis, let alone a commercialized autonomous-vehicle service; Apple has been working on self-driving vehicles for eight years with minimal success.) Depending on whom you ask, the delay is attributable to either technological imperfection or regulatory conservatism. The division boils down to a disagreement regarding method: Is it better to test first and tweak to perfection later, or vice versa? (According to a recent article in the Washington Post, two hundred and seventy car crashes involving Teslas during the past year have involved the car’s Autopilot software.) For now, the most likely future in San Francisco seems to be one in which drivered autonomous vehicles—or highly limited driverless ones—continue to trace the streets for most of the day, making slow and cautious loops, logging miles until the next regulatory or licensing advancement. Pervasive and inaccessible, they are a strange fixture of the city that residents must navigate around.

In the first year of the pandemic, I saw so many Waymo cars so often that I thought I must be suffering from a unique variety of paranoia, or at least some form of frequency bias. The cars appeared to be everywhere. Sitting at my desk, I seemed to see one or two every time I looked out over Cesar Chavez. Once, on a walk through the Mission, I passed six in the span of a few blocks. Were there a disproportionate number of Waymo cars, or just fewer drivers on the road? Eventually, I learned that there was a massive Waymo warehouse near the eastern end of Cesar Chavez, in what had once been a trucking terminal. It contained row upon row of electric chargers, to which the cars were constantly returning. I wasn’t paranoid. I was just in the right place at the right time, all the time.

I came to find the cars symbolically interesting—to wonder what it meant that an idealized transportation model, touted as the future, was one that minimized human interaction. Suppose the fully autonomous future never arrived—then what, or whom, would the cars be for? Earlier this year, Vice reported that the San Francisco Police Department was making use of the footage captured by Waymo and Cruise cars. I began to see the vehicles as promoting certain ideas, or values, of urban life: privatization, atomization, surveillance. Their constant, roving patrol, their opacity and ubiquity, their bland and cutesy sameness, their programmatic logic seemed to presage a future without privacy or mystery.

Over time, the Waymo cars have become linked, in my mind, to another local phenomenon: the yellow, cartoon honey bears, rendered in a two-tone Pop-art style, that proliferated throughout San Francisco during the pandemic. Soft-edged and full-bellied, the bears have been painted on walls, stencilled on plywood boards, taped to the inside of people’s front windows, or tucked into advertising kiosks on the sides of bus shelters; they often wear themed outfits, their dead eyes and curved brows suggesting either innocent confusion or simmering hostility. There was a period, last year, when the bears were like the cars: it seemed that I couldn’t turn a corner without encountering one in a face mask, a baseball cap, or a Ruth Bader Ginsburg jabot.

The honey bears are made by fnnch, a local street artist whose work has been scattered across San Francisco since 2013. fnnch is a thirtysomething Stanford graduate and former tech entrepreneur; occasionally he stencils sea animals, birds, poppies, and a pair of parted lips, but the honey bear is his signature and primary subject. The original honey bear, billed as Classic Bear, has a yellow screw cap with a pointed tip. It stands stock still, arms frozen at its sides. Over time, the screw cap has been replaced with various types of headwear, often vocational (a chef’s toque, a conductor’s cap, a combat helmet); Mobster Bear wears a white fedora, Tupac Bear wears a knotted red bandana, and Pink Pussyhat Bear, which is yellow, wears a pink pussyhat.

The bears have corporate affinities—MacBear Pro carries a MacBook, Lyft Bear is pink and mustachioed, and so on. Like a paper doll, the honey bear never changes its posture, only its accessories, which are unsubtle, bringing to mind last-minute Halloween costumes. fnnch sells limited-edition prints, paintings, and stencilled wood cutouts through his Web site, for prices that start around three hundred dollars, and top out at five thousand; certain editions are designed as fund-raisers or benefit pieces, with a cut of proceeds funnelled toward nonprofits. Depending on your preferred aesthetic references, the bears can be art, or merch, or advertising. Last year, Williams-Sonoma launched a line of fnnch honey-bear plates, spatulas, and aprons—“stock the kitchen with culinary art”—and Sotheby’s sold Burner Bear, an indefatigable ursid accessorized with heart-shaped sunglasses and a scarf, in a Burning Man benefit auction. (fnnch brought honey-bear sculptures to the festival three years in a row.)

The honey bear, fnnch has said, is a “universal symbol of happiness,” positive and nostalgic. Maybe the bears do make people feel good—I should hope so, because they’re everywhere. A Martini with a honey-bear-shaped olive graces the side of a bar in the Mission; a bear in a habit is painted on the building housing the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a playful nonprofit unorthodox ministry of queer and trans activists; in San Mateo, four bears stand stiffly outside of a Shake Shack, holding food from Shake Shack. In early 2020, as San Francisco sheltered in place, fnnch began wheat-pasting thematic bears on the boarded windows of businesses downtown: Soap Bear bore a pump dispenser on its head, and Mask Bear’s face was partially obscured by an N95. The bears begat more bears, as if in the throes of a frantic mating season, and in those months around two hundred new honey bears materialized across the city’s plywood coverings. Through his Web site, fnnch sold about a thousand prints and paintings, donating more than a hundred thousand dollars from the proceeds to local nonprofits working on covid-relief initiatives.

That spring, a grassroots trend sprung up, in which people placed teddy bears and stuffed animals in windows, so as to create a sort of scavenger hunt for restless children. fnnch began selling posters of Mask Bear for what he dubbed the Great Honey Bear Hunt; the posters cost twenty dollars, and would come with a request that they stay in people’s windows for at least three months, if not for the duration of the pandemic. Some twenty thousand posters were sold, about half of them to San Francisco residents; many went up in the windows of homes across the city. fnnch strongly encouraged buyers to have their addresses added to a publicly shared Google Map.

That fall, fnnch appeared on the podcast “Anatomy of Next,” which is produced by the venture-capital firm Founders Fund. His creative goal, he explained, was to “change people’s perceptions of public space,” just as his own had been changed by Banksy. “People think that the graffiti on mailboxes in the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco is gang-related. . . . And it’s not,” he told the host. “These are just taggers. But that’s the perception, and it goes with the ‘broken windows’ theory that this is degrading the neighborhood, it’s dangerous. When you see a honey bear, there’s no chance there’s a gang that’s making this, like the Sharks or the Jets. . . . So it breaks that perception.” He hypothesized that the honey bears might help passersby see previously overlooked urban infrastructure as canvases for art. “Part of my practice is trying to just get people to have any relationship with art whatsoever,” he went on, citing the sf-moma’s low attendance numbers. “There’s a piece I love to hate on, in the moma here. It’s a pile of dirt on a mirror on the ground. I bet if you read all of Chaucer, and you study every word of Duchamp, and you know the work of Mozart, then you can get the piece, right? But one thing I love about the honey bear is it doesn’t have any of that. Whatever cultural background you have is enough to understand the work that I do, or at least appreciate it on a surface level. . . . I hope more to be a gateway drug than the end goal. I hope that you start with the honey bear, and you end up at the moma.” (Last year, he created an N.F.T. of three honey bears designed to look like the Meta C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg, the Spotify C.E.O. Daniel Ek, and the Shopify C.E.O. Tobias (Tobi) Lütke, earmarking twenty per cent of potential proceeds to covid-relief funds. It sold for more than sixty-four thousand dollars.)

I thought about this conversation recently as I walked past a Ruth Bader Ginsburg honey bear in the window of a home in Noe Valley. The bear held a sign that read “VOTE.” It reminded me, in turn, of a scene I’d stumbled across in Russian Hill, two Halloweens back: a group of little girls playing tag in a small private park, all of them costumed like the late Supreme Court Justice. Many people must purchase their honey bears to benefit fnnch’s nonprofit partners, but the bears have also come to embody a flavor of oversimplified, symbolic politics common in the Bay Area. Window signs might tout a household’s belief in science; I’ve had a “The Future Is Female” sweatshirt stuffed in the back of my dresser since 2016. Symbolism has always played an important role in political protest, but sometimes it can feel like personal branding.

In part by adopting anodyne, childlike iconography, fnnch has become one of San Francisco’s most visible visual artists. The creative method he’s used—portable, scalable, modular, sponsored—is less like Andy Warhol than corporate strategy. It’s an approach that makes all causes or concerns monetizable. fnnch describes himself as a street artist, and it is true that much of his work can be seen from a sidewalk, but there is something revealing about the most common place his bears can be found: inside private homes, behind panes of glass.

Living in any city means jostling with other people’s fantasies for the future. Honey bears and self-driving cars promote such a fantasy. It’s one in which the urban environment is governed by the principles of marketing, the aesthetics of high-tech homogeneity, and the interests of venture capital, and imbued with the sterile, cheerful infantilization of startup branding.

There are plenty of other ways in which San Francisco is changing in line with this fantasy. There are more people grocery shopping with cell phones in hand, consulting grocery orders assigned through apps such as Postmates and Instacart. There are more cars double-parked outside popular restaurants, especially during dinner hours and often in bike lanes, driven by contract workers for delivery apps. There are more Nest and Ring doorbells, the latter’s watchful blue circles glowing in the fog. Public space is co-opted for private exertion and experimentation. Product decisions made by companies such as Amazon and Google verge on public policy; the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Rules Committee is considering a proposal that would allow the S.F.P.D. real-time access to video feeds from privately owned security cameras, including those within Nest and Ring products.

Maybe this is what is meant by “tech culture.” A self-driving car named Sourdough ferries novelty-seeking passengers across the Inner Sunset while capturing footage that might be useful for the cops. A local artist scales by adopting political causes as if they’re software skins. At the grocery store, a man and I stand beside each other, deliberating over mustards—but I am running errands, and he is on the clock. Walking through the city, I wonder whose block parties, medical appointments, or conversations could someday be weaponized by law enforcement. Even if it’s not the end of privacy, or mystery, it marks a decline in imagination—a capitulation to a generic sensibility, and to a visual culture of copy-paste. It’s the aesthetic of software at scale, in every window, at every stoplight, on every city block. ♦

— The New Yorker

[airmanisr]

Republic P-47G-10-CU Thunderbolt ‘225068 / WZ-D’ ”Snafu” (G-CDVX) by Alan Wilson Via Flickr: c/n 21953 Built in 1944 with the US military serial 42-25068. The P-47G was a P-47D built under license by Curtiss-Wright and this is one of only two surviving examples. She flew again in April 2012 and is painted in very authentic colour scheme representing a Thunderbolt of the 84th Fighter Squadron, part of the 78th Fighter Group based here at Duxford. She is seen taxiing out for a practice display on the Friday before the 2012 Flying Legends Airshow. Duxford Airfield, Cambridgeshire, UK. 29th June 2012 The following information on G-CDVX is from The Fighter Collection website:- "The Fighter Collection 'Razorback' P-47G is one of only two Curtiss-built examples left in the world. She was the 129th P-47G built at the Curtiss facility in Buffalo, New York in early 1944. The fighter was accepted by the USAAF in September 1944 and transferred to the Third Air Force at Tallahassee, Florida. It was here that she was re-designated as a TP-47G to reflect the training role she undertook with a number of Advanced Fighter Transition Units. Our P-47G was struck from the USAAF inventory in late June 1945 and was eventually passed to the Aero Industries Technical Institute at Oakland Airport, California. It was here that she taught hydraulic and electrical systems to aeronautical students until 1952 when she was bought by Jack Hardwick, a former Cleveland National Air Race pilot, who rented her out in 1953 to Allied Artists for ground scenes in the film Fighter Attack. Following her silver screen appearance she was parked up in El Monte, California, with a number of other World War Two aircraft until 1975 when she passed to a new owner who commenced a restoration of this rare machine. The work was not completed and the unfinished project passed to Ray Stutsman in late 1979 where a full restoration begun the following year which culminated in a first flight during April 1982, which was rewarded with the Grand Champion Warbird trophy at Oshkosh in July of that year. It flew with Stutsman at many events across North America until 1987 when she passed to the Lone Star Flight Museum, based at Galveston, Texas. She flew rarely during her time at Lone Star, when she passed to Flying A Services in the early 1990s and was shipped to the UK. The fighter remained in her shipping container until she joined The Fighter Collection fleet in 2006. A full restoration programme was undertaken in order to bring the P-47G back to stock wartime condition The scheme our P-47G wears is that of 84th Fighter Squadron P-47D 42-74742 - 'Snafu', the mount of Lt Severino B Calderon in late 1944."

[svt-husbands]

Implode.

Member: Wonwoo Genre: Fluff? Word count: 1,279

based very loosely off of that one scene in New York, I Love You

Wonwoo was scared to write about you. Every time he had ever committed his thoughts to paper much like the pen he was writing with, the love bled out. The love bled out until it was an abstract ink blotch that reminded him of what a therapist would show him when he used to visit. He didn’t want you to become an abstract blotch so he kept the thoughts of you swirling around in his head even though they were unorganized and kept him up at night.

There was always something different about Wonwoo, through the years in which he learned to love himself he realized it was not a bad thing, but nonetheless he was different. His thoughts collected to his lips in mazes so whenever he spoke his mind it came out riddled, and in some cases slightly pretentious (which is perhaps why he was such a successful poet). He liked to imagine things that were far too immaculate to ever be physically conceived. He would fall in love with people he had never spoken to on the train, plan futures while in the process forgetting their face, and write stories all about them all in the premise of his own mind. It was simply too difficult to contain an imagination with a tenacious persistence to grow, so tended to each and every though the best he could. But no matter what he did some thoughts would always spiral.

When you are gifted with a brain like his there will always be side effects. Worries, specifically of running out of time, made Wonwoo fear a large amount of living. He wasn’t sure how he could run out of time since there was nothing he needed time for, he was just a college dropout working a dead end job because no matter how big of a dreamer you are you still need to afford rent and electricity and other far too plain things. Wonwoo felt he had nothing to live for, but on the other hand he felt he had nothing to die for either, he wanted to go out with a bang one day far away (and also to outlive his dog, and perhaps, out of spite, his roommate). He wanted something new and exciting to enter his life, and that was why you caught his eye.

The thing was, he hadn’t actually talked to you yet. Unless you counted the conversations he had in his head with you where you argued over whether tea or coffee was better and where fake memories took place of you bringing him on spur of the moment road trips to towns he never really wanted to go to. He was still going through the measures to convince himself he wasn’t being strange. He had first seen you when he returned home from work, choosing to walk since taxis were unnecessarily expensive, and he was hoping to pay his water bill eventually. He didn’t like cigarettes. For one, they made his stomach hurt when he smoked them, but for the most part he was incredibly terrified of being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and given a week to live (an overactive brain tends to focus on this). He didn’t like cigarettes, but when he saw on perched between your lips he grew convinced you had turned it into an art. You had made the act of inhaling 4,000 chemicals, 43 of which being carcinogenic, delicate. It was almost a shame when Wonwoo realized he would never see you again.

However, he was wrong. For the next day and the day after that and the weeks after that every time he walked home from the god awful graveyard shift he saw you leaning against the building of the club you were always in front of. It was like you were an angel personally sent to him, except you had never done anything except look absolutely stunning, and also an angel probably wouldn’t smoke Marlboro. He had already married you fourteen times in his head before he got the guts to walk on the same side of the street you were on. By the time he said his first words to you you had already given birth to his two fictional children (Mary and Naomi).

That last statement wasn’t exactly true, he wasn’t the first to talk to you. The first time he had heard you speak, fall had just rolled around the corner, which Wonwoo enjoyed because the very second it was acceptable for him to wear knitted sweaters he was absolutely going to.

You had said, “Excuse me, do you know the time? My phone died,” And Wonwoo told you the time despite the fact your voice sounded much more amazing than he thought it would, which initially shook him up, and then you thanked him and smiled, and Wonwoo looked at you, and then to the sidewalk where he was almost stepping in gum, and then back at you, and then he felt hot all over.

It took nearly a year before Wonwoo had just about had it. He couldn’t write about you, he couldn’t be that foolish. But the thoughts were beginning to suffocate him since he couldn’t write them, and categorize them, and make them tolerable. It wasn’t superstition. Everything he wrote about died. With the reminder that time was of the essence he finally gained enough confidence to speak to you. In fact he was overconfident, which arguably surprised him more than it did you.  

“You know, I think you’re beautiful.” He wanted to say it as a question, but it came out a statement. He couldn’t help himself.

“It’s probably because you’ve only seen me when it’s dark out. That’s when I do look my best.” He didn’t know if you would be funny, but he’s glad you were; even though he didn’t agree with the joke at your own expense. “I almost feel like we know each other, I see you so often.” You offered him a cigarette, but he declined. Despite how inviting you made coating lungs with ash seem, he still didn’t like the taste.

Wonwoo began speaking his mind, even though it came out in mazes again. “Over the past year I have come to the conclusion that it must be fate.” You gave him a funny look. “Come on, you can’t ignore what’s happening here. It’s like the Gods are intervening or there’s some crazy twist with alchemy-”

“Or I have the same break time every night and you leave from wherever-”

“Or there’s something bigger that’s trying to place you and I together. At least for a lunch or-”

“Or I’m just trying to smoke a cigarette, maybe in the future.”

“Don’t you understand, there may not be another moment just like this one. Everything around us is simultaneously dying and growing and things are changing. We might not get this chance again, this could very well be our last moment together and with the concept of time that is never going to stop passing no matter what I do. If this is our last chance and I blow it I just might implode.”

“Implode.” The heavy word now found itself into your delicate lips. Wonwoo didn’t want this to end, he had tried so hard to keep this alive, but it also had never really started. Every ounce of the desperation he had pent up, all the fires in his belly he had extinguished poured back into these few fleeting moments.

“Implode.” He had repeated, as he stared into your eyes. He needed something to live for.

“Well, I suppose I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.”

- peach

[jonathanalumbaugh]

Weekly Digest

January 7th, 2018, 6th issue.

A roundup of stuff I consumed this week. Published weekly. All reading is excerpted from the main article unless otherwise noted.

Read

Teen birth rates hit a new low in 2016, Boston has joined other cities in banning single-use plastic bags, Tesla restored electricity to a children's hospital in Puerto Rico after it was hit by hurricanes in September, the FDA cleared an earpiece that may help block symptoms of opioid withdrawal, 13 states saw record-lows of unemployment this year, Support for allowing same-sex marriage is at its highest point in 20 years, Vice President Mike Pence said in October that the U.S. "will return...to the moon not only to leave behind footprints and flags but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond," a man in North Carolina has started the non-profit ChemoCars, a service that provides cancer patients with free rides to and from their chemo treatments, Uber partnered with the charity Whizz-Kidz to give those who use wheelchairs in the UK free rides to polling places this summer.

— 9 things America is getting right

This is not some “lite” version of Civ stripped down for touchscreen, mobile implementation. It’s the whole game.

— Civilization 6 on iPad is a marvel

First comment in thread: I keep seeing this referred to over and over, even TV Guide is calling the bad Cooper by the name BOB! In my opinion, this is something that people have been confusing for 25 years.

— Clarification: Cooper is not possessed by BOB

I got married two weeks ago. And like most people, I asked some of the older and wiser folks around me for a couple quick words of advice from their own marriage... Almost 1,500 people replied, many of whom sent in responses measured in pages, not paragraphs. It took almost two weeks to comb through them all, but I did. And what I found stunned me…

They were incredibly repetitive.

— Every successful relationship is successful for the same exact reasons

Explaining #Meltdown to non-technical spouse. “You know how we finish each other’s...” “Sandwiches?” “No, sentences. But you guessed ‘sandwiches’ and it was in your mind for an instant. And it was a password. And someone stole it while it was there, fleeting.” “Oh, that IS bad.”

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman)

January 5, 2018

— Explaining Meltdown with parallel worlds, libraries, and a bank heist

TED Video: How to make stress your friend

— How to make stress your friend

A user visits a website, registers an account, and saves the data in the password manager. The tracking script runs on third-party sites. When a user visits the site, login forms are injected in the site invisibly. The browser’s password manager will fill out the data if a matching site is found in the password manager. The script detects the username, hashes it, and sends it to third-party servers to track the user.

— How web trackers exploit password managers

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP was negligent in connection with one of the biggest bank failures of the financial crisis, a federal judge has ruled, opening up the Big Four accounting firm to the potential of hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

— Judge Says PricewaterhouseCoopers Was Negligent In Colonial Bank Failure

Whether we see an LTE version of the Nokia 3310 in the US is still a major question, as is the release date of this phone — not the mention the battery life, which took a major hit when it added 3G support.

— An LTE version of Nokia’s 3310 may be coming

The Big Five... has produced results that can be shown to remain largely consistent across a person’s lifespan and that can be used to predict at least some part of a person’s likely academic achievement, dating choices and even future parenting behavior. It has also been validated cross-culturally to some extent, Soto told me.

— Most Personality Quizzes Are Junk Science. I Found One That Isn’t.

"Neither [Iraq] nor while I was in the military did I actually hear anyone ask whether we should be doing some of the research we were doing. You know, some of it was a little scary -- I don't know that it was necessarily unethical -- but nobody ever asked the question." -General Robert H. Latiff

— Nobody's Ready for the Killer Robot

If you are a low-wage worker who cuts your expenses to the bone in order to sock away $500 a year, on which you earn 8%, you will still not go more than a year in retirement without starving to death.

— Oh Damn, 401(k)s Aren't Magic

Ever stood at an intersection and prodded at, leaned on, elbowed and otherwise palm-slapped the ever-living hell out of a crosswalk button and wondered to yourself if the thing actually does anything at all, really? Well – chances are, it doesn't.

— Placebo buttons do absolutely nothing, and they are everywhere

Meanwhile, Pete is convinced the Log Lady stole his truck. But wait! It wasn’t the Log Lady. It was Windom Earle, says Cooper. How does he know? Well, look at the map up there. Duh. Try and keep up, people.

— Revisiting ‘Twin Peaks’ Season 2 Finale: An Appointment at the End of the World

In an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis in New York, Cohen said that it was clear that President Trump — like former President Obama — did not want to approve a plan to provide the new arms to Ukraine, but decided to do so in an attempt to shirk allegations that he has acted as a "Putin puppet."

— Russia expert: US decision to supply arms to Ukraine a 'mistake'

Scopophilia or scoptophilia (from Greek σκοπέω skopeō, "look to, examine" and φιλία philia, "tendency toward"), is deriving pleasure from looking.

— Scopophilia

The fatal swatting case started Thursday when a man called the 911 center in Wichita, Kansas, and said he'd shot his father and was holding his mother, sister and brother hostage inside a house, authorities said.

— Swatting case poses legal challenges for police, prosecutors

The IRS lets you claim investment-related losses on your tax return as long as you sell the money-losing investment at some point during the year. You can then use the resulting capital losses to offset any capital gains on other investments that you might have.

— Tax Loss Harvesting: Don't Wait Until Year-End to Save Thousands

Tesla was on the cover of Time magazine in 1931 but died a poor man in 1943 after years devoted to projects that did not receive adequate financing. Yet his most significant inventions resonate today.

— Tesla the Car Is a Household Name. Long Ago, So Was Nikola Tesla.

More than a century ago, in New York City, Paul Strand began creating some of the earliest candid street photography. His goal was to capture people as they act in public, unaware of the observing eye.

— Theater of the Streets, Shot On Google Glass

In 2016, psychologist Danielle Gunraj tested how people perceived one-sentence text messages that used a period at the end of the sentence. Participants thought these text messages were more insincere than those that didn’t have a period. But when the researchers then tested the same messages in handwritten notes, they found that the use of a period didn’t influence how the messages were perceived.

— There’s a reason using a period in a text message makes you sound angry

My beach wedding in Diani, Kenya, was supposed to begin at 4 p.m. It started two hours later. The reason: The photographer was late. He shrugged it off, blaming traffic. "I am here now and that is what matters," he said. Grrr, "Kenyan time."

That is what they call it in my homeland.

— Under 'Kenyan Time,' You're Expected To Arrive ... Oh, Whenever

The year 2017 was really successful for Vue.js. Even though the goals are partly fulfilled, I think that most of the goals are somehow achieved or getting more traction. Vue.js is spreading and a lot more companies are using it now, including: Behance, Adobe, Chess.com, GitLab, HERE Technologies, Car2Go, IBM, and many chinese companies like alibaba, ele.me

— Vue.js review of 2017

In 2007, Warren Buffett entered a million-dollar bet with the fund manager Protégé Partners that the S&P 500 would beat a basket of hedge funds over the next decade.

— Warren Buffett has won his $1 million bet against the hedge fund industry

Earlier today, Twitter published a five paragraph answer to the loudly, repeatedly-shouted question: “Why won’t you ban Donald Trump, a man who has actively used your platform to threaten nuclear annihilation against an entire country?”

— What Twitter's New Statement About Not Banning Trump Really Means

In South Carolina, for example, people hoping to buy a Siberian tiger to celebrate the new year are likely to be disappointed: As of Jan. 1, it is illegal in the state for typical residents — that is, if you're not a zoo — to buy or own exotic animals for pets.

— What's New In 2018? Here's A Brief Tour Of State Laws Now In Effect

Why people believe what they believe is a wide topic that many psychology professors investigate. And while Peterson’s lectures certainly do tend to focus on the idea of “pushing back,” the contents of them raise questions about whether the bad ideologies are the ones he’s rejecting or the ones he espouses.

— Why Is Monsanto Inviting This Alt-Right Hero to a Fireside Chat on Farming?

The danger is that such detailed, sensationalized coverage of suicide can prompt copycat behavior — a phenomenon called suicide contagion. “Suicide contagion is real, which is why I’m concerned about it.”

— YouTuber Logan Paul's video of a dead body put his own audience at risk

Then there’s the matter of how Uber treats its drivers. You know it’s not great, but it’s not as though competing services are much better. Before Uber, taxi companies were notoriously terrible employers. Lyft, like Uber, hires its drivers as independent contractors—they don’t get benefits or minimum-wage protection—and has cut their pay to make fares cheaper for riders.

— Are you a bad person if you still take Uber?

Forecasters are warning people to be wary of hypothermia and frostbite from the arctic blast that’s gripping a large swath from the Midwest to the Northeast.

— http://metro.co.uk/2017/12/30/niagara-falls-freezes-sharks-freezing-death-atlantic-7192401/?ito=cbshare

[perksofwifi]

A Thai Police Department Is Leasing Seven Tesla Model 3s For $2.7 Million

Teslas are making surprising appearances in commercial fleets around the world. A little while ago we reported that the Tesla Model 3 has been approved for Taxi Cab duty in New York, and more recently Elon Musk announced that driverless taxis would arrive by the end of 2020. What’s more, Teslas are starting to make appearances as police vehicles, and a Thai police department recently leased seven Model 3s, according to an apparently translated invoice that appeared on Blink Drive.

They can been seen in the images here. All of them are decked out in police liveries, and each one comes with a sweet roof-mounted light bar. Even though electric cars might not seem like the best choice in extreme cases—like with long-distance police chases (wait, are those a thing?)—electric vehicles make sense for other, more everyday police activities. The Model 3’s base range of 250 miles should prove adequate for most low-speed city patrols, plus, there’s every chance the cars are quicker than whatever this police department used before.

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The biggest drawback for police departments looking to buy a bunch of Teslas for patrol duty? Cost. A Model 3 ain’t exactly cheap, at least compared to traditional cop cars. For this particular police department, the total cost was even dearer. For the seven cars, the total amount for the leases came out to a staggering 89 million Thai Baht, or $2.7 million at current exchange rates. For reference, a standard Model 3 costs $39,990 before incentives are applied. That means that, at the very most, seven Model 3s would cost the average buyer a little under $280,000—so why did the Thai police department pay more than 10 times as much as Americans would have to just lease them? Local taxes and regulations mean Model 3s are incredibly expensive, even to lease, so here’s hoping the department saves enough fuel to make the Teslas worth it. Because that seems doubtful, we’ll just say, hey, enjoy the Model 3, Thai police!

The post A Thai Police Department Is Leasing Seven Tesla Model 3s For $2.7 Million appeared first on MotorTrend.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-model-3-cop-cars-thai-police-leasing/ visto antes em https://www.motortrend.com

[hyundaihappy]

Hyundai, Where’s Your Flying Car?

A model presented by Hyundai and Uber at the Consumer Electronics Show is said to hold the promise of aerial ride-sharing at 290km an hour.

Curtiss Autoplane. Fulton Airphibian. Taylor Aerocar.

Businesses and entrepreneurs have been promising a mass-produced flying car for more than a century. None have succeeded, but that hasn’t stopped Hyundai and Uber from wanting in on the action.

In Las Vegas on Monday, at the Consumer Electronics Show, the two companies announced that they were joining forces to develop an all-electric air taxi that would be part of a future “aerial ride-share network.”

“We’re looking at the dawn of a completely new era that opens the skies above our cities,” Jaiwon Shin, the head of Hyundai’s Urban Air Mobility division, said at the announcement. “We will be able to fly on-demand — just imagine that.”

The South Korean automaker showed a small-scale model and offered a virtual-reality experience. A nonfunctioning full-scale model was later on display.

The public has long been disappointed by promises of flying cars, but hopes have nevertheless been mounting that an aerial taxi could become a reality.

Analysts with Morgan Stanley have said they expect urban air taxis to be common by 2040, with the global market expected to be between $1.4 trillion and $2.9 trillion in size by then. At least 20 companies are working to that end, including start-ups, the aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus, and automakers like Toyota and Porsche.

Daniel Wiegand, a founder of Lilium, one of the most promising and secretive start-ups in the field, told The New York Times recently that within five years a fleet of his company’s vehicles could be ferrying passengers between Manhattan and Kennedy International Airport. 

But a number of challenges await. Building an air taxi that is quiet, safe and economical will mean overcoming several engineering and technical hurdles. Battery technology is limited, and the cost of operation and maintenance needs to be low enough to make rides commercially viable.

And then there is a long road to regulatory approval. According to Morgan Stanley, air taxis will probably be used first in package delivery, which has fewer technical and regulatory barriers.

In its Monday announcement, Hyundai said it would be able to bring “automotive-scale manufacturing” to Uber Elevate, the company’s aerial ride-hailing division. Hyundai would help produce and deploy the aircraft while Uber would handle support, ground connections and the customer interface.

Hyundai’s concept car, the S-A1, is designed to cruise 1,000 to 2,000 feet above the ground at 180 miles per hour. It would take trips up to 60 miles and seat four passengers and a pilot, though the aircraft would eventually be capable of autonomous flight.

During peak hours, the S-A1 would take about five to seven minutes to recharge, Hyundai said. Multiple rotors would allow for vertical takeoff and landing and be quieter than large-rotor helicopters with combustion engines — a feature critical to its use in cities, according to the company.

Uber has said it plans to host flight demonstrations this year and make its service commercially available in 2023. In addition to Hyundai, its partners include the Boeing subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences, Bell, Embraer, Joby Aviation and several real estate companies. It has also signed agreements with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop ideas related to the infrastructure and technology of a crewless aerial network.

Stay up to date with Hyundai news and releases for more exciting stories!

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/business/hyundai-uber-flying-car.htm

[fumpkins]

Why you have (probably) already bought your last car

Image copyright GettyImages

Image caption Driverless taxis cab – the transportation of the future?

I’m thinking you are scoffing in shock at the really recommendation of this short article, however bear with me.

A growing variety of tech experts are forecasting that in less than 20 years we’ll all have stopped owning automobiles, and, what’s more, the internal combustion engine will have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Yes, it’s a huge claim and you are best to be sceptical, however the argument that a distinct merging of brand-new technology is poised to change individual transport is more convincing than you may believe.

The main concept is quite easy: Self- driving electrical automobiles arranged into an Uber- design network will have the ability to provide such low-cost transportation that you’ll really rapidly – we’re talking maybe a years – choose you do not require a car anymore.

And if you’re believing this timescale is hugely positive, simply remember how quickly automobiles changed horses.

Take a take a look at this image of 5th Avenue in New York in1900 Can you area the car?

Image copyright NationalArchives

Now take a look at this image from1913 Yes, this time where’s the horse?

Image copyright Library of Congress

In1908 the very first Model T Ford rolled off the assembly line; by 1930 the equestrian age was, to all intents and purposes, over – and all thanks to the disruptive power of an earlier tech development – the internal combustion engine.

So how will this newest transport transformation unfold?

The driverless Uber design

First off, think about how Uber and other networked taxi business have already altered the method we move. In most significant cities an Uber motorist – or among its competitors – is generally simply a number of minutes away, and charges less than developed taxis, let’s state $10(₤ 7.65).

The business’s rapid development is proof of how powerful the Uber business model is.

Now get the motorist. You’ve most likely cut expenses by a minimum of 50%.

Image copyright GettyImages

Image caption Uber has actually been explore driverless automobiles.

So if we’re attempting to exercise when this transformation will start in earnest the essential date will be when self-driving lorry technology is readily available and – most importantly – has regulative support.

That might well be faster than you believe. The UK has stated it wants to authorisethe first fully autonomous cars as early as 2021

And, state lovers for autonomy, it will just take one city to show the technology is safe and helpful and the rest of the world will really rapidly hurry to capture up.

So self-driving automobiles have cut our $10 journey to $5.

The change to electrical

Now think of the existing mainly fossil fuel-powered taxi fleet is changed with electrical automobiles.

At the minute electrical automobiles are more costly than comparable designs with internal combustion engines, however provide considerably lower life time expenses.

They are more reputable, for a start. The normal electrical car has around 20 moving parts compared to the 2,000 approximately in an internal combustion engine.

As an outcome electrical automobiles likewise tend to last a lot longer. Most electrical car producers anticipate their automobiles to keep opting for a minimum of 500,000 miles.

These aspects aren’t that crucial for many customers – after all, the average driver in England does less than 10,000 miles a year andour cars are parked 95% of the time However, they are big problems if you’re utilizing a car practically continually, as would hold true with a self-driving taxi.

Image copyright GettyImages

Image caption The end of the roadway for the internal combustion engine?

Add in the low expense of charging batteries compared to refuelling and you have actually got another remarkable decrease in expenses.

And it deserves keeping in mind that the expense of electrical automobiles is most likely to continue to fall, and quickly. As they end up being mainstream, go back to scale will drive down expenses. That’s the reasoning behind Tesla’s $5bn battery plant, the so-called “Gigafactory”.

How does this impact our $10 journey?

It brings another remarkable decrease. Fully self-governing electrical taxi networks might provide trips at as low as 10% of existing rates.

At least that’s what tech prophet Tony Seba reckons. He and his group at the think-tank RethinkX have done more than anybody else to analyze how this transformation may rip through the personal transportation market.

‘Transport as a service’

We’ve now cut our $10 fare to simply $1.

MrSeba calls the concept of a robo-taxi network “transport as a service”, and approximates it might conserve the average American as much as $6,000 a year. That’s the equivalent of a 10% pay increase.

And do not forget, when the transformation comes you will not lag the wheel so now you’ll be working or unwinding as you travel – another huge advantage.

You still believe that car parked outdoors your flat deserves having?

What’s more, when this brand-new design of navigating takes hold the advantages are most likely to be strengthening. The more automobiles in the network, the much better the service used to customers; the more miles self-driving automobiles do, the more effective and much safer they’ll get; the more electrical automobiles made, the less expensive every one will be.

Image copyright GettyImages

Image caption Don’t stress over lacking charge.

Don’t stress that backwoods will be neglected. An automobile might be parked in every town waiting on your order to come.

And variety stress and anxiety – the worry that you may lack electrical energy – will not be an issue either. Should the battery run low the network will send out a totally charged car to satisfy you so you can continue your journey.

You’ve most likely seen headings about mishaps including self-driving automobiles however the reality is they will be far much safer than ones driven by you and me – they will not get regulative approval if they are not. That implies 10s of countless lives – maybe numerous thousands – will be conserved as accident rates plummet.

That will create yet another expense conserving for our fleets of robo-taxis. The cost of insurance coverage will topple, while at the very same time those people who demand continuing to drive our own automobiles will deal with greater charges.

Human motorists prohibited

According to the tech visionaries it will not be long prior to the entire market tilts irreversibly far from car ownership and the dependable old internal combustion engine.

RethinkX, for instance, reckons that within 10 years of self-driving automobiles getting regulative approval 95% of guest miles will remain in these electrical robo-taxis.

Image copyright GettyImages

Image caption Will parking lot outdoors homes quickly be a distant memory?

The sensible next action will be for people to be prohibited from driving automobiles at all since they position such a threat to other roadway users.

Take a minute to consider the far-flung impacts this transformation will have, aside from simply altering how we navigate. There will be disadvantages: countless car market employees and cab driver will be trying to find brand-new tasks, for a start.

But think about the numerous billions of dollars customers will conserve, and which can now be invested somewhere else in the economy.

Meanwhile, the varieties of automobiles will drop. RethinkX approximates that the variety of automobiles on United States roadways will fall from almost 250 million to simply 45 million over a 10- year duration. That will maximize big quantities of space in our towns and cities.

And, please remember: I have not discussed the huge ecological advantages of transforming the world’s automobiles to electrical energy.

That’s since the reasoning of this turmoil isn’t driven by brand-new guidelines on contamination or fret about international warming however by the most effective reward in any economy – cold tough money.

That stated, there’s no concern that a wholesale switch far from nonrenewable fuel sources will slow environment modification and enormously decrease air contamination.

In short, let the transformation start!

But seriously, I’ve intentionally put these arguments powerfully to trigger argument and we wish to hear what you believe.

You can comment below, or tweet me @BBCJustinR.

New post published on: https://www.livescience.tech/2018/10/09/why-you-have-probably-already-bought-your-last-car/

[un-enfant-immature]

Ford says its autonomous cars will last just four years

The automotive industry has embraced — and advertised — self-driving cars as a kind of panacea that will solve numerous problems that modern society is grappling with right now, from congestion to safety to productivity (you can work while riding!).

Unfortunately, a very big question that has been almost entirely overlooked is: how long will these cars last?

The answer might surprise you. In an interview with The Telegraph in London, John Rich, who is the operations chief of Ford Autonomous Vehicles, revealed today that the “thing that worries me least in this world is decreasing demand for cars,” because “we will exhaust and crush a car every four years in this business.”

Four years! That’s not a very long lifespan, even compared with cars that undergo a lot of wear-and-tear, like New York City cabs, which were an average of 3.8 years old in 2017, meaning some were brand new and others had been in service for more than seven years.

It’s more surprising compared with the nearly 12 years that the average U.S. car owner hangs on to a vehicle. In fact, Americans are maintaining their cars longer in part because the technology used to make and operate them has advanced meaningfully. In 2002, according to the London-based research firm IHS Markit, the average age of a car in operation was 9.6 years.

So what’s the story with autonomous cars, into which many billions of investment capital is being poured? We first turned to Argo AI, a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based startup that raised $1 billion investment in funding from Ford three years ago and refueled this summer with $2.6 billion in capital and assets from Volkswagen as part of a broader alliance between VW Group and Ford. Argo is developing cars for Ford that it’s testing right now in five cities.

Since Ford will be operating the cars, Argo pointed us back to Ford’s Rich, who, while on the run, answered some our questions via email.

Asked how many miles Ford anticipates that the cars will travel each year — we wondered if this number would be more or less than a taxi or full-time Uber driver might traverse — he declined to say, telling us instead that while Ford isn’t sharing miles targets, the “vehicles are being designed for maximum utilization.

“Today’s vehicles spend most of the day parked. To develop a profitable, viable business model for [autonomous vehicles], they need to be running almost the entire day.”

Indeed, Ford right now plans to use the cars in autonomous fleets that will be used as a service by other companies, including as delivery vehicles. Asked if Ford also plans to sell the cars to individuals, Rich suggests it’s not in the plans right not, saying merely that Ford sees the “initial commercialization of AVs to be fleet-centric.”

We also wondered if Rich’s prediction for the lifespan of full self-driving cars ties to his expectation that Ford’s autonomous vehicles will be powered by internal combustion engines. Most carmakers appear to be investing in new combustible engine architectures that promise greater fuel efficiency and fewer emissions but that still require more parts than electric cars. (The more parts that are being stressed, the higher the likelihood that something will break.)

Rich says the idea is to transition to battery-electric vehicles (BEV) eventually, but that Ford also needs to “find the right balance that will help develop a profitable, viable business model. This means launching with hybrids first.”

In his words, the challenges with BEVs as autonomous vehicles right now: includes a “lack of charging infrastructure where we need to operate an AV fleet. Charging stations and infrastructure needs to be built that will add to the already capital-intensive nature of developing the AV technology and operations.”

Another challenge is the “depletion of range from on-board tech. Testing shows that upwards of 50 percent of BEV range will be used up due to the computing power of an AV system, plus the A/C and entertainment systems that are likely required during a ride hailing service or passenger comfort.”

Ford also worries about utilization, writes Rich, “The whole key to running a profitable AV business is utilization – if cars are sitting on chargers, they aren’t making money.”

And it’s worried about battery degradation, given that while “fast charging is needed daily to run an AV fleet, it degrades the battery if used often,” he says.

Of course, the world would be far better off without any combustion engine exhaust emissions, full stop. On the brighter side, while Ford’s cars may not be long for this world, between 80 and 86 percent of a car’s material can be recycled and reused. According to a trade group called the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), the U.S. recycles 150 million metric tons of scrap materials every year altogether.

Fully 85 million tons of that is iron and steel; the ISRI says the U.S. recycles another 5.5 million tons of aluminum, a lighter but more expensive alternative to steel that carmakers also use.

[airmanisr]

Republic P-47G-10-CU Thunderbolt ‘225068 / WZ-D’ ”Snafu” (G-CDVX) by Alan Wilson Via Flickr: c/n 21953 Built in 1944 with the US military serial 42-25068. The P-47G was a P-47D built under license by Curtiss-Wright and this is one of only two surviving examples. She flew again in April 2012 and is painted in very authentic colour scheme representing a Thunderbolt of the 84th Fighter Squadron, part of the 78th Fighter Group based here at Duxford. She is seen taxiing out for a practice display on the Friday before the 2012 Flying Legends Airshow. Duxford Airfield, Cambridgeshire, UK. 29th June 2012 The following information on G-CDVX is from The Fighter Collection website:- "The Fighter Collection 'Razorback' P-47G is one of only two Curtiss-built examples left in the world. She was the 129th P-47G built at the Curtiss facility in Buffalo, New York in early 1944. The fighter was accepted by the USAAF in September 1944 and transferred to the Third Air Force at Tallahassee, Florida. It was here that she was re-designated as a TP-47G to reflect the training role she undertook with a number of Advanced Fighter Transition Units. Our P-47G was struck from the USAAF inventory in late June 1945 and was eventually passed to the Aero Industries Technical Institute at Oakland Airport, California. It was here that she taught hydraulic and electrical systems to aeronautical students until 1952 when she was bought by Jack Hardwick, a former Cleveland National Air Race pilot, who rented her out in 1953 to Allied Artists for ground scenes in the film Fighter Attack. Following her silver screen appearance she was parked up in El Monte, California, with a number of other World War Two aircraft until 1975 when she passed to a new owner who commenced a restoration of this rare machine. The work was not completed and the unfinished project passed to Ray Stutsman in late 1979 where a full restoration begun the following year which culminated in a first flight during April 1982, which was rewarded with the Grand Champion Warbird trophy at Oshkosh in July of that year. It flew with Stutsman at many events across North America until 1987 when she passed to the Lone Star Flight Museum, based at Galveston, Texas. She flew rarely during her time at Lone Star, when she passed to Flying A Services in the early 1990s and was shipped to the UK. The fighter remained in her shipping container until she joined The Fighter Collection fleet in 2006. A full restoration programme was undertaken in order to bring the P-47G back to stock wartime condition The scheme our P-47G wears is that of 84th Fighter Squadron P-47D 42-74742 - 'Snafu', the mount of Lt Severino B Calderon in late 1944."

[pruchika99-blog]

Electric flying taxi unveiled, could be operating worldwide by 2025

Technology News The world’s first all-electric vertical takeoff and landing passenger jet has been unveiled after completing its first flight.German startup Lilium aims to have a fleet of the five-seat aircraft which can operate with a pilot or in drone mode flying in cities worldwide by 2025.

Providing a pay per-ride service that will be emission-free, five times faster than a car and produce less noise than a motorbike.Lilium has $100 million in funds and must raise the same amount again to bring the model to market, while adding hundreds more jobs to its payroll of 300 people, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Wiegan told Bloomberg TV.

ALSO READ : Asus Zenfone 6 with 48+13MP flip camera unveiled: Better than OnePlus 7?

The plane will have a 300-kilometer (186-mile) range, allowing it link New York and Boston. A short hop between John F. Kennedy International Airport and Manhattan will cost about $70 per passenger.

Making it cheaper than a helicopter and competitive with top-end limousine services, Chief Commercial Officer Remo Gerber said in an interview. A full-scale, full-weight prototype made its flight from Lilium’s base near Munich and has commenced flight tests, the company said Thursday...Read more.