But a mirage ...

Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images

Finally, the truth. Safe, self driving Teslas are but a mirage. Why? Because Tesla only uses cameras to detect the real world while Waymo uses radar, lidar AND cameras to do the same thing and even that is iffy given the inherent complexities of the real world bombarding Waymo at rates boggling the mind.

After over a decade of promising that fully autonomous driving is right around the corner,
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has yet to bring his ambitious vision to fruition.

In early 2019, Tesla started installing a system called Hardware 3 (HW3) in its cars, which according to Musk would enable what the company continues to misleadingly refer to as “Full Self-Driving” (FSD). (As it currently exists, the feature still requires owners to be ready to take over the wheel at any point.)

Over the next four years, Tesla sold millions of vehicles with the hardware, only for Musk to finally admit in January 2025 that HW3 actually wasn’t good enough after all, and that a retrofit would be required to enable fully autonomous driving.

The news came to the dismay of countless owners who shelled out thousands of additional dollars to access FSD, and who claim Musk had lied to them all these years, triggering numerous class action lawsuits.

During Wednesday’s earnings call, the mercurial CEO put it as bluntly as ever.

“Unfortunately, Hardware 3 — I wish it were otherwise — but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” he said, saying that its “memory bandwidth” is the “chokepoint.” Tesla introduced a confusingly-named version of the software, called “FSD (Supervised)” in April 2024, while an “unsupervised” version would seemingly refer to actual, autonomous driving.

Despite Musk first making the concession well over a year ago, Tesla has yet to make good on its promise of providing millions of owners with the necessary hardware upgrade — a process that will be long and painful.

As an aside, Think Anonymous gives an in-depth analysis as to why the Waymo take rings true.

Just a tiny tidbit here, go to TA to get the complete skinny.

Waymo's sensor stack Waymo: 29 Cameras, 6 RADARs, 5 LiDARs

Just in terms of calibration, it must be an absolute nightmare for engineers. Calibrating a camera with a LiDAR is already a long task, but 29 cameras with 5 LiDARs? Then there is the fusion of all of these sensors together, and this is ONLY the "robotaxi" version, because if you look at their Zeekr shuttles, they also have their own types of sensors, with different generation codes. Their stack is therefore always evolving, and depends on the vehicle they drive on. 

Tesla's sensor stack used 8 cameras (red) and 12 ultrasonics (orange)

On this illustration, you can see a very simple design that almost never changed. In red, you can count 8 outside cameras, and in orange, you can see 12 ultrasonic sensors used to detect static objects when parking. Among the 8 cameras, there 2 on the windshield, used for stereo vision, one on the front bumper, one on the rear bumper, 2 on the doors, and 2 on the wheels. See the difference? I can't even begin to count Waymo's cameras, but I can easily show you Tesla's sensor stack.

The cost of doing it right is $, compute and research, the cost of cutting corners, let's not go there.

Said approach to solving a difficult problem reminds your truly of this ...

Department of Government Efficiency

And we all know well how that initiative went, right?

In the short term ...

A record number of super-sized tankers are now headed to the US. Photograph: ClassicStock/Alamy

In the short term, oil and renewables won. On the US & the Americas side, oil, on the Chinese side, solar but both winners will soon be eclipsed by the gorilla in the room, climate change as said entity ignores all borders as the world moves further into the 21st century.

In the open seas, an armada of empty tankers has quietly turned west. A record number of super-sized vessels are now heading to the US, where oil drillers and refineries are preparing to profit from Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East.

Almost 30 of these vessels, each able to hold 2m barrels of oil, are contracted to load US crude, destined for a global market facing the biggest supply crisis in history.

It is just over five years since the shale revolution made the US a net energy exporter and the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. Now the White House is poised to strengthen its claim to an even greater share of the global oil market as the Middle East’s decades-long dominance is dismantled by war.

Guardian graphic. Source: The Oil & Gas Journal. Note: China and Taiwan and Sudan
and South Sudan are combined in the data. *Estimates for the Saudi Arabian-Kuwaiti Neutral Zone
are divided equally between the two countries

As doubts over the future market dominance of the Gulf’s petrostates deepen, the surge in market prices has begun fuelling the rise of the Americas. The growth in US and Canadian crude production – which has accelerated in recent years – is expected to continue through the 2020s. However, almost half of the world’s oil supply growth over the rest of the decade is expected to come from Latin America’s oil boom.

On the solar side, China dominates ...

China’s exports of solar capacity doubled to a record high of 68GW in the
first month of the Iran crisis alone. Photograph: AFP/Getty

China has long dominated the supply chains for the key building blocks of clean energy technologies, from wind turbines to solar panels and batteries. Beijing’s industrial prowess has helped the world’s biggest energy importer to capture between 60% and 85% of the world’s renewables market at a time when countries are preparing to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.

As the world’s first “electrostate”, China stands in contrast with the White House pursuit of fossil fuel dominance. The country also stands to play a significant role in creating the new energy order.

“China derives strategic leverage from its leadership across renewables and electrification, manufacturing and innovation, domestic deployment and global exports,” said Ember, a climate and energy thinktank. “China is not merely manufacturing electrotech hardware, it is manufacturing an energy future in which it holds a commanding position.”

The crisis has meant the world’s greatest supplier of clean technologies is selling these components at record rates as countries prepare to cut their use of fossil fuels for good.

The intent for countries to leave oil for good is all well and good but long term implications regarding the intent to ameliorate global warming using said tech centers on undeniable facts regarding renewables and related factors impacting the spread and maintenance of same: 

• habitat destruction  
• environmental degradation
• resource depletion
• The limits to Growth

We are running out of planet.

Getty/Futurism

It's the water ... seems the inability to plan is not part of the plan when it comes to Corpus Christi, Texas.

A massive drought coupled with political mismanagement might fully deplete water in a major city: neither in West Asia nor the Horn of Africa, but in the United States of America. According to

Inside Climate News, the city of Corpus Christi, Texas could soon completely out of water in the next year. It’s the eighth largest city in Texas, and a major industrial node in the Gulf Coast. Its water infrastructure provides access to over 500,000 Texans, as well as the major chemical plants, oil facilities, and plastics factories which call the Gulf region home.

As Climate News notes, Corpus Christi is on track to be the first American city to completely run out of water, as its reservoirs near empty following a five-year drought. Though nobody can snap their fingers and end a drought, the extremely dry conditions follow decades of warnings that South Texas is posed for a water crisis.

60-70%

 60-70% of all data traffic from Europe to the East runs through the strait and the Red Sea, next to Yemen, which means Iran controls both check points. Methinks the Orange Menace and his minions better think things through before doing something even more catastrophically stupid then the unnecessary action foisted upon the world by Israel telling the US to jump and kick off an event that could expand into WW III if we let it. 

A conversation with Gemini. Just the facts Ma'am - Joe Friday/Dragnet

The "Backyard" of Global Data

While many focus on oil, the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea
are also the physical foundations of the internet.

Massive Reliance: Approximately 95% of all global internet traffic, including bank transfers and communications, travels through thin glass cables at the bottom of the ocean [00:06].

Critical Choke Points: Over 15 major submarine cables run beneath the Strait of Hormuz [00:30]. Iran and the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen effectively control two key corridors that carry 60% to 70% of all internet traffic between Asia and Europe [01:07].

The Economic and Social ImpactA disruption in these waters would have
immediate international consequences:

Global Isolation: Cutting these cables would isolate the Middle East and disrupt
operations for global IT and call centers, with India alone having 20% to 40% exposure [00:48].

Market Paralysis: Major cloud infrastructure from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft
runs through this region. A disruption could freeze trillions of dollars in daily trade,
forex markets, and banking systems [01:43].

The Difficulty of Repair: The video emphasizes that "cutting a cable is not as simple
as repairing it" [01:22]:

Limited Resources: There are only about 50 to 60 specialized ships in the world capable of fixing these cables [01:29].Wartime Delays: These ships move slowly, are rarely covered by insurance in conflict zones, and repairs can take a minimum of 8 weeks [01:37].

The core message of the clip is that Iran doesn't need a bomb to disrupt the world;
it simply needs "scissors" [02:00]. 

This reality is presented as a primary reason for the delicate diplomatic
handling of the region by global powers.

Watch the full clip here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/177PpNKzmqQ

The Kraken ... for real

 An artist's reconstruction of a finned octopus of the species Nanaimoteuthis haggarti

that reached a length estimated at up to 18.6 meters (61.02 feet) and lived about 86 to 72 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, released on April 23, 2026. 

Yohei Utsuki/Hokkaido University/Handout via REUTERS

The Kraken lived. Think about the smarts of this monster! The question to ask is, why is ocean life so small today. Boffins think it's the temperature along with the introduction of man and his baggage
as root causes of this happenstance.

Works for me.

The Kraken, the giant cephalopod of legend, was feared by sailors for centuries. Later interpretations suggested that it may have been based on sightings of the giant squid, which can be 10 meters long. Although they lived far too early to have been the source of the legend, Ikegami et al. describe fossil octopods from the late Cretaceous that truly would have fit the description of the monster, reaching up to 19 meters in length. Wear patterns on their jaws suggest that these octopods preyed upon the large reptiles present at the time, including plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. The authors interpret asymmetry in these wear patterns as an indication of corresponding asymmetry in behavior, suggesting complex brain development and, potentially, high intelligence. —Sacha Vignieri

Fig. 4. Body size estimation of Late Cretaceous octopuses.

The graph shows an allometric relationship between the length of the jaw and mantle in long-bodied species of extant finned octopus (tables S3 and S4) (31). The name of the corresponding species is shown along each growth curve. The sizes of N. jeletzkyi and N. haggarti based on their largest specimen are indicated by black vertical lines. Reconstruction of these two species, the extant giant squid (36), and gigantic vertebrate predators (37–40) in the Late Cretaceous are shown with their maximum total length.

A true apex without question.

A "colossal octopus" attacking ship, pen and wash[1] by Pierre Denys-Montfort,
engraved by Étienne Claude Voysard, 1801[2]

If the monster was alive today, this engraving would be for real. :)

Death by firing squad ...

The U.S. Department of Justice logo is seen on a podium before a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, on May 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

Yours truly used to be ok with the death penalty until data came out regarding people executed who happened to be  innocent, something not acceptable in this writer's opinion. With this administration, reinstituting firing squads is more political than functional as this is a methodology used by dictatorships to quell dissent. Think Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as examples. 

Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-212-0221-07, Russland-Nord, Erschießung von Partisanen

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department will adopt firing squads as a permitted method of execution as the Trump administration moves to ramp up and expedite capital punishment cases, officials said Friday.

The Justice Department is also reauthorizing the use of single-drug lethal injections with pentobarbital that were used to carry out 13 executions during the first Trump administration — more than under any president in modern history. The Biden administration had removed pentobarbital from the federal protocol over concerns about the potential for unnecessary pain and suffering.

The moves were announced as part of a broader push to step up federal executions after a moratorium under the Biden administration. Only three defendants remain on federal death row after Democratic President Joe Biden converted 37 of their sentences to life in prison, though the Trump administration has so far authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.

US executions since 1977

Since capital punishment was reinstated in the 1970s,
more than 1,600 prisoners have been executed in the United States,
the vast majority by state authorities.

Factoid.

Research estimates that at least 4.1% of defendants sentenced to death in the U.S. are innocent, meaning over 1 in 25 death row inmates is likely wrongly convicted. While over 200 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973, experts believe many innocent people are executed without their innocence being officially recognized. National Institutes of Health (.gov)

Any questions and ... think midterms. I know I have.

Goof Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Never made money, violent and funny as hell, spot on in terms of AI, They Live, Pulp Fiction
and Smart Phones, the flick's a hoot, showing there's a cost to everything and not realizing
that fact is terminally stupid and unwise. :)

See the film. Unhinged to the max, 

something society needs in these uncertain times. :)

It's not just the Strait ...

People fill up their cars at a gas station in Seoul, South Korea. Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

It's not just the Strait being closed, it's the beginning of rationing for the world as global warming continues to accelerate while civilization runs out of world. Overshoot applies as we need more planet in order to make more stuff and there is not enough planet to continue to make more stuff. Something to consider, right?

2013 ...

Sound familiar? Overshoot Day has been advancing approximately three days a year yet is it? When BRT posted Overshoot on Sunday, September 25, 2011, the day was September 27. It's now August 20 so the 3 days per year estimate has been past by and then some. From this perspective, it seems mankind is committing slow motion suicide by plundering the planet for profit and keeping the status quo in power at all costs, something disastrous from the get go but we already know that, right?

2024 ...

This year’s Earth Overshoot Day falls on August 1st: Humanity will have used nature’s resource budget for the entire year, according to our calculations, building on the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, now maintained by York University under the governance of FoDaFo.

By comparing the Ecological Footprint with the planet’s biocapacity, it tells us when each year’s Earth Overshoot Day occurs. Falling on August 1st means that humanity is currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate. It is like using 1.7 Earths. Overshoot is possible because we can overuse and deplete our natural capital. This compromises humanity’s resource security. The costs of this global ecological overspending are becoming increasingly evident in the form of deforestation, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The latter leads to climate change, more frequent extreme weather events and lower food production.

2026 ...

By this reckoning. the minimal 3 days per year take ... July 25 seems to be about right.
What happens when we hit June 30, 10 years from now?

The present ...

Gas stations are rationing fuel. Hospitals are running out of medical supplies.

People are hoarding plastic bags, and factories face packaging shortages.

That’s all happening in Asia now.

That could become a problem for the United States:

About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia.

If Asian factories are dealing with a lack of supplies, should Americans expect shortages, too?

Possibly – but not just yet. At least not in any widespread or severe manner. But the longer the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the harder it will become for the United States to avoid the problems piling up elsewhere.

US is ‘more exposed than we realize’

Certainly, the red flags are waving.

But ...

Think overshoot, environmental degradation, global warming and societal disruption
rather than just the strait as it's just the beginning ...

The mirage ... A new reality is coming

Micromanagement 101

Getty / Futurism

The nag, the micromanager, the person always intruding into your space, something not devoutly to be wish, is the cosmic vision of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a recent talk at Stamford portraying said entity as the way to generate ever more growth thanks to the wonders of AI.

Let's think about this. Having been self employed for over 50 years gives yours truly an interesting perspective on micromanagement and the vibe this gives off to the minions working under such a person. Anger, frustration and above all else, inefficiency and hatred ensues. How do I know this? Because, as a consultant, you NEVER GOSSIP so the folks you work with trust you as a valued consigliere as trust is the only way one makes money when dealing with clients.

To this rube, Huang's take is akin to 1984 24/7.

Tom Hagen/Consigliere to Vito and Michael/The Godfather

Instead of getting ready to clear their desks, the centibillionaire argued that instead, human workers’ productivity will instead go through the roof — with the minor tradeoff that you’ll be overseen by a nagging AI boss that won’t ever leave you alone.

“Your [AI] agents are harassing you, micromanaging you, and you’re busier than ever,” Huang said. “And yet our company is able to do more.”

As a result, “we’re gonna create more jobs in the end,” he argued. “There’ll be more people working at the end of this industrial revolution than at the beginning of it.”

Huang has previously argued that company leaders are thinking too small if they’re looking to trim headcounts thanks to AI.

As long as Huang's running the show, it's ok but ask anyone who works for a living about the micromanager in their life. Zuck comes to mind when thinking about the nag nightmare that might be in your life does it not?

Short term ...

F-35

Yours truly has waxed "poetic" on the F-35. Seems the most expensive jet in the world actually does work but only for the short term as seen by the fubar known as Trump's war, you know, the one Israel promoted as a 2 week slam dunk against Iran, which has become anything but, due to the fact indigenous fighters don't have to win, just outlast and this is exactly what is happening with Iran.

The F-35 Is a Masterpiece Built for the Wrong War

Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that. Yet that is essentially what the United States has attempted with its tactical air fleet.

The F-35 program’s total lifetime cost is projected to exceed two trillion dollars, the most expensive Major Defense Acquisition Program in history. The United States plans to purchase thousands of them. Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this.

Channeling the Tiger

Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-299-1805-16, Nordfrankreich, Panzer VI (Tiger I).2

While the Tiger I has been called an outstanding design for its time,[13] it has also been criticized for being overengineered,[14] and for using expensive materials and labour-intensive production methods. In the early period, the Tiger was prone to certain types of track failures and breakdowns. It was expensive to maintain, but generally mechanically reliable.[15] It was difficult to transport and vulnerable to immobilisation when mud, ice, and snow froze between its overlapping and interleaved Schachtellaufwerk-pattern road wheels, often jamming them solid.

Sound familiar? The F-35 does not follow the notion of asymmetrical warfare.

WW II tactics of overwhelming and expensive airpower cannot compete with cheap and reliable ordinance produced by the thousands and able to be replaced without issue. Russia found that out in Ukraine and learned from their mistakes. The question to ask is, has the the US?

To whit. 

Photo illustration by Ioulex for The New York Times

The Iran war is strikingly different from America’s other recent wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The Iran war looks far more like the Russia-Ukraine war, with its proliferation of inexpensive, one-way attack drones, rapid advancements in surveillance and targeting, huge use of munitions and the expansion of the battlefield well beyond traditional military targets.

Adapt or die, better yet, know when to fight and when not to,

a concept Trump does not understand in any way, shape or fashion.

2073

Haunting, powerful and mysterious, 2073 creates, as Morpheus would say, a splinter in your mind as the asides of societal collapse, combined with global warming and fascism up close and personal, is scary as hell and it should be as climate change is real and its impact on society will be profound and dangerous to the nth degree as civilization moves further into the 21st century.

Big Oil knew as early as 1954

New evidence shows that the oil industry was warned about the climate dangers
of fossil fuels in 1954 — but chose to prioritize “industry interests.”

Big Oil companies were warned about the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1954, according to new evidence that could boost efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable in court. The unearthed documents, first reported on by DeSmog, are one of the earliest examples of the oil and gas industry’s knowledge that the pollution from their products could result in a climate crisis.

Following public concern about smog blanketing Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s, the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) — then known as the Western Oil and Gas Association — created and funded a research front group called the Air Pollution Foundation, which in turn funded a Caltech study about the sources of Los Angeles’s air pollution. The $1.3 million in funding — equivalent to about $14 million in 2024 dollars — came from WSPA’s members including Shell and gas companies later bought by or merged with ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Sunoco, and ConocoPhillips. 

The 1954 Caltech study determined that “a changing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” citing coal, oil, and gas as CO2 sources. WSPA and its members were formally alerted to the study findings in March 1955, archival documents show.