Monday Mood [DOT 11/3/24]

11/3/24 MegMegMcGee 34

Spring has sprung ahead so you probably need a big coffee this morning!

Hope everyone had a great weekend. I was in the car most of yesterday. Weather was shitty most of the drive too.

So windy!

High winds close Washington Monument
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/10/washington-monument-closed-wind-gusts/

Sen. Katie Britt acknowledges anecdote used to criticize Biden’s border policies didn’t happen during his presidency
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/katie-britt-sotu-response-immigration-biden/index.html

Sprots!

Caitlin Clark, Iowa surge by Nebraska in OT for third straight Big Ten title
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/03/10/caitlin-clark-iowa-big-ten-champions/

Oscars!

Oscars 2024: Mariupol makes history while Robert Downey Jr wins best supporting actor – follow live!
https://www.theguardian.com/film/live/2024/mar/10/oscars-ceremony-red-carpet-winners-updates

Time flies

Have a great day!

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34 Comments

  1. The Dad Blooper is one for the ages. One thing I never understood is when the pandemic crashed down upon us suddenly every call had to be a Zoom call, rather than a regular call, as they had been for over a century. Every organization should have assigned someone to compile blooper reels.

  2. …if I’m honest I’ve been trying to ignore the coverage of the royals generally & whatever surgery kate went in for…but they won’t shut up about press agencies nixing a picture of her & the kids they released yesterday because it was altered at source

    …so I guess this is a request for a tl;dr from @matthewcrawley?

    …I’m sort of assuming there’s been some sides chosen in speculating about what kind of sympathy is in order depending on what kind of surgery she underwent but I don’t really understand what kind of significance they want to imply there might be to having photoshopped a family photo?

    • MY theory is that The Princess of Wales has been replaced by a robotic body double, like in “The Stepford Wives.” This is actually a one-off plot point in “The Windsors,” which is absolutely hilarious.

      As for the photoshopping, that’s pretty hypocritical, given that print media has been altering images ever since they started publishing photography.

      I used to work in an art department and we’d do corporate bios and stuff for the web and sometimes people wanted their headshots on their business cards. You should have seen what we came up with. “X is in his late 40s. This looks like a high school graduation photo.” “It’s what he wanted. The customer is always right.”

      • Right? I was asking my wife why Kimmel referenced George Stephanopoulos. I’m like, this must be a inside joke and they must be friends or something, because that’s completely out of left field. And then this morning I find out it was a real Xeet from the orange buffoon. Which completely explains the weird George digression.

  5. This is a pretty disturbing story about the death of Angela Chao, the younger daughter of Elaine Chao, who was Secretary of Transportation under Trump and is married to Mitch McConnell.

    https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/angela-chao-death-texas-tesla-safety-c435daa

    She drowned after her Tesla went into a pond on her ranch when she switched up forward and reverse during a three point turn, and the attempt to rescue her was delayed because they struggled to break the windows.

    One thing that’s weird about the article is that it barely mentions the fact that Tesla has replaced physical controls with a touchscreen:

    https://bsky.app/profile/tomscocca.bsky.social/post/3kncflzzo3d2g

    And as this article points out, there’s a basic problem with that approach:

    https://www.nngroup.com/articles/tesla-big-touchscreen/

    While touchscreen dashboards offer more flexibility than real dashboards, they have one big disadvantage: no haptic feedback. In order to reliably touch these buttons, people must look at them. Whereas with a physical button we can learn its location and acquire it without directing much, if any, attention to it (and hence we can play the piano while reading the score or we can touchtype on a real keyboard), locating a soft button requires us to visually confirm its position.

    When soft buttons are hidden under menus, selecting them involves multiple touchscreen interactions, and thus even more time and attention. And, in a car, time spent with the UI is time spent ignoring the road.

    I’ve spent a little time on UI issues for websites, and I can understand this. Developers never see things through the eyes of users, and there are huge numbers of assumptions that people make about what is obvious, easy, or logical which really aren’t. Switching up forward and reverse in the middle of a three point turn on a touchscreen seems like an easy thing to screw up.

    • …I mentioned a little while ago that I’d had an ad served to me by youtube for a thing like a milled aluminium cartridge that could fire an internal bolt like a one shot version of palm size bolt gun from an abattoir…it’s whole purpose was to shatter reinforced safety glass in a submerged vehicle whose electric windows are fried

      …that seems like an increasingly non-excessive level of safety equipment?

      …that said…unless they pulled some OTA bullshit update that changed it…the gearshifting wasn’t itself achieved through the touchscreen…paddles on steering or a thing more like a joystick than a gearstick in the ones I’d seen

      …it’s still a whole mess of a UI & the screen would be showing rearview cameras & maybe auto-parking routines/options…so not uninvolved in that sense

      • Evidently the default for that model is the touchscreen. There are buttons, but they are auto-off and have to be activated every time you want to use them.

        I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some huge battle was fought between team button and team touchscreen, and this represented the ugly compromise.

        • …there’s also dedicated “buttons” on the centre console for drive/park/neutral/reverse…helpfully those aren’t always lit up but supposedly they respond to touch & are less of a shit show that way since they’re permanently assigned to the specific “drive mode”

          …it’s not a lot better…but it’s not as entirely bloody dumb as a slider on a touchscreen

        • I have no idea why any car rental place would ever buy a single Tesla because a renter who’s less used to the interface could press a single button and end up crashing!

          I’m anti-touchscreens in cars for other reasons but running everything through it is just asking for more issues … which is why it’s no shock Tesla — “sorry the Cybertruck rusts when exposed to the atmosphere of Earth” — does it.

            • Our next door neighbor just traded in his Audi for a Tesla (don’t look at me, we have a six year old Hyundai). He hasn’t quite figured out the at-home charging, so he parks it five blocks away at a free charging station at the college, and walks home. I dunno, this seems less than optimal and ripe for shenanigans while the car is unattended, but what do I know?

              • One of my neighbors (yes, a crazy one – she used to yell at me that my husband’s BMW was “too loud”, um sorry? It’s a pretty normal car…) Anyway, she plugs her new Prius into the house with an extension cord and she ties little red ribbons on the cord so you don’t trip or fall over it on the sidewalk. Other  neighbor had a little personal charging station built in front of her house.

    • When Teslas don’t have power, their doors don’t open. It’s insane, murderous design that in a proper country with regulations would be recalled immediately (if it was even allowed to hit the streets.)

      Also, Angela is Elaine’s sister, and while I’m sorry she died, here’s hoping she’s a big enough name that people really take a look at this shit because her death was incredibly unnecessary even within the already very unnecessary and enormous grouping of traffic deaths in America.

      • …it’s like nobody remembers the meaning of fail-safe

        …sure if there’s nobody in it maybe you want a secure failure mode…but if there’s weight on a seat…surely you fail-open…isn’t that trivial compared to automating a gear-shift routine or knowing when to turn the screen to the rear camera view?

    • My EV also has no non electronic door lock so if you loose power, you cannot open the door.  I bought one of those little hammers for breaking glass to keep inside when I learned this that I hope I never have to use.

      • That’s just insane, and again, something a regulator would take one look at and be like “lol, no, that’s going back to the drawing board.”

        Not that it would change the minds of the truly insane/rich/Republican of America but it is again helpful that recent safety issues are in things that could kill those sorts of well-off folks — Teslas and planes — to at least have them be like OK, actually, we could use a little baseline of regulation here just in case MY life is on the line.

      • I have a little hammer & seat belt slicer combo because one of my biggest fears is crashing into water. You can also use a headrest to break the window (depending on your car).

    • … I don’t know why nobody else picked up on that, because the big detail that got my attention was that she says that the trafficking had started when this woman was 12, and well, then that can’t—Joe Biden’s only been president for three years, so he can’t—it made no sense.

      Math is hard!

  8. Trump couldn’t keep his mouth shut about E. Jean Carroll and may face round three.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/10/trump-denies-carrolls-claims-after-posting-91point6-million-bond-.html

    It’s a case where he confused in an official deposition a photo of Carroll with his ex wife Marla Maples. His brain is deeply off kilter, it’s been that way for years, but the press narrative has been hung up on speculation and suggestion about whether Biden at some point may have problems.

    It’s speculative and suggestive because the present day evidence has been so scarce, but they cannot bring a fraction of that same energy to Trump’s obvious problems.

     

    • …said the same thing when @bryanlsplinter dropped a link about it the other day

      …someone staked him the cash for the bond…so he seems to not be worrying about where his half-billion is coming from for the other one…& is back in the saddle pushing business as usual

      …that our lady of perpetual prosecutions thing could have legs…I’m telling you

      …when life sucks on lemons…make bank

      … that’s the saying, right?

    • It’s bizarre. Trump very clearly has at least the onset of dementia. His inability to remember anything, his weird and repetitive speeches, the constant mangling of language, all demonstrate a very clear decline. Back during the dark times I remember people posting videos of him when he was younger and how he spoke currently and the difference is pronounced.

      Plus Fred Trump had dementia and eventually Alzheimer’s, so he’s got a family history. But Trump gets a pass while every word Biden utters is scrutinized like Marge going over pictures of Hunter’s genitalia. This isn’t some sort of accident — it’s deliberate on the part of virtually every major media outlet.

      The good news is there’s no possibility of an October surprise like the Republicans pulled with Clinton because they’ve spent the last three years scraping through every aspect of Biden’s life and coming up dry.

      The other thing I really wonder about is whether Trump’s legal team is going to eventually have to mount some sort of diminished capacity defense. They can’t do it until after the election, but if he continues to spew dementia babble at his rallies, he’s going to rack up a fortune in judgments and fines (and by fortune I mean more than the half-billion he owes now). The only hope to preserve anything will be to basically say, yeah, he said it, but his brain is tapioca and he can’t be held responsible for his words. Like the old people in nursing homes screaming “Help I’m being murdered.”

      • I’m not concerned about the risks of an October surprised based on a real story, but I’m worried about one based on a false story.

        There was a cloud of bogus news in the last weeks before the 2016 election that reignited the Butter Emails story, and it wouldn’t take much to get CNN, The NY Times or Washington Post to run a story claiming some agency or police department had opened an investigation into Biden, or there was a doctor’s report on his health, or anything else, really.

        One value of having a gaslighting narrative take over is that it magnifies trivia. It could end up being technically true that an unnamed federal health official had serious concerns about Biden, and then only after the election be revealed it was a VA doctor in Alabama who’d never even met him.

        And conversely when the political press works overtime to normalize Trump’s broken brain, it raises the bar for what might even make it into a story, let alone be a front page headline, and without a long running narrative, the impact of any single story is vastly lower.

    • The year is 2025, Trump whines about losing the election and also that he never was interested in “that lying woman” E. Jean Carroll, earning another $25 million fine…

      … the year is 2027, Trump whines about eggs at Mar A Lago and also that he was never interested in “that lying woman” E. Jean Carroll, earning another $30 million fine …

      … the year is 2029, Trump whines about losing another presidential election from his Medicaid nursing home and also that he was never interested in “that lying woman” E. Jean Carroll, earning another $35 million fine …

      … the year is 2031, Trump’s last Tweet is that he won every election and also that he was never interested in “that lying woman” E. Jean Carroll, earning his estate another $40 million fine …

      • It really is hard to see him ever stopping. It’s compulsive, not strategic. If he wanted to generate outrage from his followers and concern trolls, he could easily pivot to the upcoming Stormy Daniels trial in a couple of weeks. But he can’t let the Carroll case go.

        The cost of the second case rose by over $75 million, so I’d hope that there’s an even greater penalty after that.

  9. A surefire way to WAKE UP on a Monday is to have your carbon monoxide detector start beeping. I changed the batteries, still beeping. So I called the fire dept. They came out and checked (both for gas and CM). Nothing. Just need to replace my detector.

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