Good news: a road in Detroit now has about a mile of wireless-charging infrastructure, which in a few years will be able to charge adequately-equipped electric cars. Since it’s not fully-realized technology (at least in the United States), Joe Biden probably won’t run on it, though you just know Donald Trump would pretend he gave everyone a free electric car if this had happened on his watch. And not for nothing, but this happened in one of those cities in which Republicans now say you’re never ever ever going to be safe again, even though both violent and property crime levels are half what they were 30 years ago.
UCal-Berkeley researchers find what you probably already intuited: that Artificial Intelligence (or AI) systems “Excel at Imitation, but Not Innovation.” I mean, yeah, AI can bullshit a college-level essay, but not particularly well, because insight demands a higher level intelligence than repetition, or even synthesis. Thus, “(i)nstead of viewing these AI systems as intelligent agents like ourselves, we can think of them as a new form of library or search engine.” Even I’ve noticed AI searches for information pretty well, but corporate CEOs will pretend that means replacing workers with AI is a good idea. At least they'll goose up their stock prices in the short term, which is all Our Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs really care about anyway.
It sure looks like Rep. Mike Garcia (E-CA) sold a boatload of shares in Boeing right before his committee (run by Democrats that year, BTW) issued a pretty scathing report about Boeing’s negligence in 737 airline crashes, and then didn't report the sale as required by law. In a sane and moral world, his next re-election effort would be toast, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, where we all agree to the fiction that Donald Trump could be President again even if he’s in jail, I can’t say for sure what’ll happen. But the good voters of California's 27th Congressional district could say for sure what'll happen!
Ho hum, Rep. Don Bacon (E-NE) says there’s “probably not” very much evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors on the part of President Biden, but voted in favor of launching an impeachment investigation anyway. No use arguing that voting to start an impeachment investigation isn’t the same as actually voting to impeach, and certainly no use arguing that “we can’t find out if he’s done anything unless we launch an impeachment investigation" – I mean, if I started an impeachment investigation, that'd mean I already have enough information to impeach. This has been yet another installment of The Uselessness of “Moderates.”
Kellyanne Conway tells Republicans that they’d better embrace contraception if they want to blunt the effect of their own abortion extremism in 2024, and she’s probably right, but the far right-wing voters who hate any freedom for women won’t tolerate such a thing, and anyway Republicans (with a few exceptions, like Rep. Cole) have been banging the saucepan about the supposed evils of birth control for a few decades now, and nobody's memory's that short. I mean, folks don’t think that Hobby Lobby ruling – the one that said a “closely-held” corporation didn’t have to cover birth control in its health insurance planning, thus allowing people of means to inflict their “religious” “beliefs” on their employees – came about by accident, do they?
Finally, when I hear that 31% of Republican voters say they wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump if he gets convicted of a felony, I’m tempted to say that’s a telling result, since he can’t win without Republicans who would be holding their nose to vote for him (or making you think they're holding their nose to vote for him!), but it’s still almost a year out, and another year of wall-to-wall coverage of Mr. Trump’s various and well-earned trials might induce a lot of these folks to pretend they’re disgusted with all the drama and vote for Mr. Trump to “end” it. Granted, “ending the drama” would be a peculiar reason to vote for the biggest drama hound ever to be President, to be sure, but party loyalty leads to all sorts of peculiar arguments.
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