#you're holding it wrong

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://elonmusk.today/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[petricorah]

lee from the tea shop boutta get it (wip) [id in alt]

edit: completed illustration here

[beechalk]

M*A*S*H is a really good show. It's a shame all the men have blue eyes but what are you gonna do

[corviiids]

it's iliad with one L and odyssey with one D btw. this is difficult to remember because multiple Ls were taken in the iliad and there's definitely more than one D present in the odyssey so i do understand the confusion

[bakudekublogblog]

kacchan there is actually a way you and izuku can be together forever i have this crazy inventive solution for you it's called a marriage license

[dovalore]

since i already drew little ghost a while back but no other characters from hk as little guys you can use as signature/blog/page decoration, i made 3 others and a new ghost as well

bonus under cut

wadiance!

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

HE HAS CLOSED EYES!😔

[fandommothlady]

I finally watched the Togachako episode and just-

"I want to touch you. I want to touch the sadness inside of you."

That fucking line. That whole episode. I sobbed. "The cutest in the whole world." And the floating. Togachako floating together and holding each other in the air. The FOREHEAD TOUCH? Ochako's quirk awakening! The voice acting! Jesus Christ. I don't know what the general consensus is, but I loved this episode.

[shannonsketches]

[shima-draws]

Me: BRO. Can you imagine if Luffy activated Gear 5 2 years earlier at Marineford

AO3: Hey boo I gotchu

Me: AY-YO????

[utilitycaster]

You know what's interesting to me? For all people keep claiming at every juncture that perhaps Bells Hells will come around on the gods and see the harm they do (which, as discussed extensively, is, half the time, simply not intervening) not only have they never done so, but also they never quite cross the line into saying the party should join the Ruby Vanguard or aid them - and indeed, they defend against it - so what does this achieve? It feels like they're asking for a story in which the party stands idly by, which isn't much of a story nor, if I may connect this briefly to the real world, a political stance anyone should be proud of.

That's honestly the frustration with the gods and the "what if the Vanguard has a point" conversations in-game. What do we do then? Do we allow the organization that will murder anyone for pretty much any reason that loosely ties into their goals run rampant? The group that (perhaps unwittingly, but then again, Otohan's blades had that poison) disrupted magic world-wide, and caused people who had the misfortune to live at nexus points to be teleported (most, as commoners, without means of return). While also fomenting worldwide unrest?

Those were the arguments before the trip to Ruidus; with the reveal of the Vanguard's goals to invade Exandria, the situation becomes even more dire. Do you let the Imperium take over the planet?

And do the arguments against the gods even hold up? If Ludinus is so angry at them for the Calamity, what does it say that he destroyed Western Wildemount's first post-Calamity society for entirely selfish means? (What does it say about the validity of vengeance as a motivator?) What does it say that Laudna told Imogen she could always just live in a cottage quietly without issue before the solstice even happened? (Would this still be true if the Imperium controls the world?) What does it say that when faced with a furious, grieving party and the daughter she keeps telling herself was her reason for all of this, Liliana can't provide an answer to the question of what the gods have done other than that their followers will retaliate...for, you know, the Vanguard's endless list of murders. (That is how the Vanguard and Imperium tend to think, huh? "How dare your face get in the way of my boot; how dare you hit me back when I strike you.") She can't even provide a positive answer - why is Predathos better - other than "I feel it", even though Imogen and Fearne know firsthand that Predathos can provide artificial feelings of elation. Given all the harm Ludinus has done in pursuit, why isn't the conclusion "the gods should have crashed Aeor in such a way that the tech was unrecoverable?"

Even as early as the first real discussion on what the party should do, the fandom always stopped short of saying "no, Imogen's right, they should join up with the people who killed half the party," it was always "no, she didn't really mean it, she just was trying to connect with her mother." Well, she's connected with her mother, and at this point the party doesn't even care about the gods particularly (their only divinely-connected party member having died to prevent the Vanguard from killing all of them). So they will stop the Vanguard; as Ashton says, the means are unforgiveable. As Laudna says, it's not safe to bet on Predathos's apathy. As Imogen says, she's done running; the voice that she used to think of as a lifeline belongs to someone she doesn't trust. So I guess my question is: if they're stopping the people who are trying to kill the gods (and defense of the gods isn't remotely their personal motivation)...do you think the next phase of the campaign is Bells Hells personally killing the gods? Reconstructing the Aeor tech and hoping none of their allies notice? How does this end? Does your ideology ever get enacted? Or is this entirely moot and pointless and the story ends with Bells Hells saying "well, I'm really glad we stopped the people who [insert list of Vanguard atrocities from above]; none of us follow the gods or plan to, but honestly, the status quo we return to is preferable to whatever nightmare Ludinus had concocted in his violent quest for power and revenge"?

[butchhamlet]

with most shakespeare plays i have the ability to logically recognize that other people have opinions and my opinion is not necessarily the “right” one because there is no “right” take because these plays are very very old and very very multifacted and performance adds an entirely different dimension of analysis. with romeo and juliet i turn into this guy

[schmweed]

[drumlincountry]

I am at the stage of trauma recovery that feels like reattaching previously dead limbs.

[zipzapzopzoop]

Ladies and gentlemen, I've had an EPIPHANY ✨

If you cross Carl

with Dor-15

You get the aliens from Chicken Little

that is all.

[yuesya]

Mechamaru is a sad character, even though his anger at Shiki, to me, is honestly misplaced and more like self-loathing, envy, and commiseration.

It’s honestly sad what happens to Mechamaru because he did get the short end of the stick when it comes to Heavenly Restriction, didn’t he? He only wanted to have a healthy body, and in canon, he got it.

But what did it cost, really?

Because in the end, Mechamaru did in some way betray the jujutsu sorcerers. He can tell himself that he was desperate and he had the right to try and better his life when no one else cared to or was able to help him. He was in a shitty situation and tried fixing it first chance that presented it, but it doesn’t erase the fact that he betrayed his comrades. He indirectly (?)aided in the tragedy that happened by facitilating information to the curses, which HELPED Kenjaku’s plans, and he died for it. Here, he’s alive to suffer the consequences of ill-fated choices.

He wasn’t wrong to want it. He’s wrong because ultimately, his actions were an act of betrayal.

He feels remorse for his betrayal. He feels guilty. He feels angry at Shiki, because his gamble failed and here she stood as a shining bastion of a “perfect” life.

Though as seen in here, Shiki probably doesn’t give a single fuck about Mechamaru’s feelings. Only that his betrayal put the jujutsu society - and in turn, her family and friends - in jeopardy and that it went against the rules that Shiki was following ONLY because her family and friends wanted her too. Her moral and logic is pretty skewed, after all. Her first reaction to him being turned into a monster is to render him immobile VIA limbs breaking which honestly is NOT the first thing people do, but it’s admittedly in a twisted way the most optimal way to subdue transfigurated!Mechamaru.

TBH wrong is wrong. Betrayal is betrayal. Mechamaru isn’t an innocent victim who tried saving himself. How many more people would die and did die in the jujutsu world because he aided the curses? How many people died in Liyue because here the curses tried getting rid of Shiki?

Which brings me to another point: Whether it was voluntary or not, because of his betrayal which fed the curses informations and had Shiki hunting after them, Mechamaru ended up as a tool in the ambush against Shiki. Mahito tried using him as a shield, but unfortunately for him and the curses, Shiki’s reasoning is far too settled in pragmatic reasoning and logic to a certain point, after which she settled into brute force or death. She wouldn’t sacrifice herself for just Mechamaru, after all, nor be squirmish about breaking some limbs or killing some people.

Kinda shameless to be angry at the girl who you involuntarily aided in ambushing, no?

It’s just. The first time I read the short about Mechamaru (which was STILL amazing btw) I felt sorry for him.

The next few times I reread it though, I was like wait a minute, this doesn’t sound right, this guy is making Shiki to be the bad guy in interrogating him when he “just tried helping himself and he didn’t truly mean to betray the jujutsu society qwq!!!” because she has a perfect life but BITCH so many people just died LMFAOO Shiki here just doing her job and being hated, my poor girl (though she doesn’t care).

Mechamaru lost his gamble in using Mahito and turned into an even worse monster.

Likewise, the curses lost their gamble in trying to delete Shiki and were all basically wiped out in minutes lmao. They probably didn’t expect the Gojo Satoru Expy to actually be a Gojo Satoru 2.0 lol.

Shiki just doing her job, stuck in another world. :( And she had promised her cousin to make a detour to buy sweets, too rip. :(

(which brings me to another point i’m not gonna expand: Satoru and Shiki’s relationship? I LOVELOVELOVE IT!! The opposing powers they present! Satoru is not truly the sole “honored one”! Satoru has someone who somewhat understands the way he looks at the world! Who will stand by his decision and trust! Who’s willing to murder a bitch or a few for him! They’re two peas in a pod, sometimes HE has to be the moral compass for Shiki even! HIM! THE Gojo Satoru! A moral compass!!! 😂😂😂)

!! I am bouncing a bit in excitement from this haha.

Mechamaru! Is a very very unfortunate character. His attempt to outsmart Kenjaku and the Special Grade curses was not something that ended well for anyone. The information that he provided them allowed Kenjaku's faction to set up the test run at the Goodwill Event and break into the warehouse, stealing the Death Paintings and Sukuna's fingers. If we think about what happened in Shibuya, where Sukuna was able to cause as much devastation as he did because of ingesting the additional fingers... arguably Mechamaru played a definite role in allowing this situation to occur in the first place.

Mechamaru wants to be healed. He wants to have a normal body, and be a normal student of Kyoto High with his friends.

In exchange, he betrays the school -but he's not really betraying them, Mechamaru tells himself. Look, he's even been careful enough to extract a binding vow for his friends to be unharmed. And it's not as if he really intends to throw in his lot with Geto. As soon as he gets what he wants, he'll turn on them. Mechamaru doesn't need to kill them in order to win; all he needs to do is escape and find sanctuary with Gojo Satoru. And with the intel that he'll have in his hands, Gojo will definitely protect him. Then, they'll be able to counter their enemies properly from there-

We all know how that turns out in the end, though. The many casualties that result from Kenjaku's plans... Mechamaru might not be responsible, but he's certainly not blameless in allowing Kenjaku to set things into motion.

Mechamaru strikes me as a character who has a strong confidence and ego, which is balanced at the same time by a helpless sense of inferiority and anger. He knows that he's a powerful sorcerer, and he's the only sorcerer whose range covers an entire country -not even Gojo Satoru can do that! And Mechamaru is observant, and intelligent. He hates the limitations imposed upon him by his body, and he wants ever so badly to see for himself the world that he can only interact with through his puppets-

Shiki gets the brunt of that, in this particular AU.

Mechamaru lives. He lives, but he's angry and guilty and oh how he regrets, without truly regretting. Sorcerers are selfish creatures, and Mechamaru is no different.

Here Gojo Shiki stands in front of him, beautiful and powerful and perfect, looking down on him like Mechamaru means absolutely nothing. Given the turmoil that Mechamaru is currently experiencing... it's only natural that he lashes out at her.

(It's no excuse. But it is a reason.)

In contrast to Mechamaru's complicated feelings towards her, Shiki is fairly indifferent about him in return, despite his role as a lure in the 'ambush' for her. She simply protects him because she was assigned to retrieve Mechamaru for an interrogation. Shiki can't retrieve him if he's dead.

... So that just means she'll need to do her best to keep him alive, until she manages to find a way home.