It's already clear that RFK Jr. will make a lot of unscientific and harmful changes. The new vaccine panel full of anti-vaccine activists, the whole autism study and messaging around that and the recent statement that they'll make drug approvals much faster by skipping animals and using AI instead. MMS is just another well-known pseudo-scientific cure for everything, and plenty of scammers earn money with that bullshit.
These are all absolutely extreme ideas and will cause harm.
Lumping all artificial dyes together is a sign the regulations RFK Jr. is proposing or implementing are unscientific. These are different chemicals, and actual scientific or medical arguments would treat them as such.
There's plenty of good discussion possible about which additives in food should be regulated more. But making this kind of unscientific push is harmful in the end.
I somewhat support being unscientific in this case.
It's not as though food dyes are being used to make healthy foods more palatable. It's quite the opposite, that food colorings are used to make processed foods more stimulating, which in turn makes non-processed foods less attractive.
I support this in the same way that I'd support an outright ban on processed food advertising (especially to children). There is a health crisis in the US (and much of the western world), with one factor being the prevalence and poor nutrition provided by processed foods.
For this kind of comparison you have to treat CDU/CSU as a single party. They're always counted as one in national polls. It is very confusing and misleading to treat them separately in this kind of national comparison.
A simple error like that should be caught before you fill the rocket with methane and liquid oxygen. If a simple error gets through to this point your procedures are bad, which is a big problem for a complex rocket with many parts that could have simple errors.
Obviously it's not trivial, since they already flew a few spaceships and rockets, but it could be an edge case not considered until now which can still be fixed, rather than a "well, it turned out to be impossible to fly a rocket with this design".
I don't see why Tesla would deserve the benefit of the doubt here. We cannot know how well the actual Taxi software will work, I think it is fair to extrapolate from the parts we can observe.
re. extrapolation: I agree with that, but remember there's sampling error. The crashes/failures go viral but the lives saved get zero exposure or headlines. I don't think that means you can just ignore issues like this but I think it does mean it's sensible to try to augment the data point of this video with imagining the scenarios where the self driving car performs more safely than the average human driver
I absolutely do think that self-driving cars will save many lives in the long run. But I also think it is entirely fair to focus on the big, visible mistakes right now.
This is a major failure, failing to observe a stop sign and a parked school bus are critical mistakes. If you can't manage those you're not ready to be on the road without a safety driver yet. There was nothing particularly difficult about this situation, these are the basics you must handle reliably before we even get to alle the tricker situations those cars will encounter in the real world at scale.
I agree it's a major mistake + should get a lot of focus from the FSD team. I'm just unsure whether that directly translates to prohibiting a robotaxi rollout (I'm open to the possibility it should though).
I guess the thing I'm trying to reconcile is that even very safe drivers make critical mistakes extremely rarely, so the threshold at which FSD is safer than even the top 10% of human drivers likely includes some nonzero level of critical mistakes. Right now Tesla has several people mining FSD for any place it makes critical mistakes and these are well publicised so I think we get an inflated sense of their commonality. This is speculation, but if true it leaves some possibility of it being significantly safer than the median driver while still allowing for videos like this to proliferate.
I do wish Tesla released all stats for interventions/near misses/crashes so we could have a better and non-speculative discussion about this!
Caveat/preface to prevent trolls: FSD is a sham and money grab at best, death trap at worst, etc.
But, I've read through your chain of rplies to OP and maybe I can help with my POV.
OP is replying in good faith showing "this sampling incident is out of scope of production testing/cars for several reasons, all greatly skewing the testing from this known bad actor source."
And you reply with "Zero systemic reproducible mistakes is the only acceptable critera."
Well then, you should know, that is the current situation. In tesla testing, they achieve this. The "test" in this article, which the OP is pointing out, is not a standardized test via Tesla on current platforms. SO be careful with your ultimatums, or you might give the corporation a green light to say "look! we tested it!".
I am not a tesla fan. However, I also am aware that yesterday, thousands of people across the world where mowed down by human operators.
If I put out a test video showing that a human runs over another human with minimum circumstances met, IE; rain, distraction, tires, density, etc., would you call for a halt on all human driving? Of course not, you'd investigate the root cause, which is most of the time, distracted or impaired driving.
Tesla would like to replace that with FSD. (And make a boatload of money as a result)
My point is that we therefore can (and should!) hold Tesla to higher standards.
'Better than human' as a bar invites conflict of interest, because at some point Tesla is weighing {safety} vs {profit}, given that increasing safety costs money.
If we don't severely externally bias towards safety, then we reach a point where Tesla says 'We've reached parity with human, so we're not investing more money in fixing FSD glitches.'
And furthermore, without mandated reporting (of the kind Musk just got relaxed), we won't know at scale.
No! Ignoring a stop sign is such a basic driving standard that it's an automatic disqualification.
A driver that misses a stop sign would not have my kids in their car.
They could be the safest driver on the racetrack it does not matter at that point.
In the video (starting at ~13 seconds), the Tesla is at least 16 and probably 20 car lengths from the back of the bus with the bus red flashing lights on the entire time.
If the Tesla can't stop for the bus (not the kid) in 12 car lengths, that's not p-hacking, that's Tesla FSD being both unlawful and obviously unsafe.
I don't really know enough about this, but what would you expect the pilots to do with that control if they don't have any thrust? Unless there was a suitable landing spot very, very close I don't see what they could do even if they have full control of the plane. There is nothing they can do except getting the engines to work to avoid a crash, the only thing controls would give them is the option to choose a slightly different place to crash.
All the conflict of interest stuff is just a giant smokescreen. Kennedy is anti-Vaccine, he might sometimes pretend to not be againt vaccines but that is just misdirection. He's going to sow doubt about vaccines, he already removed vaccines from recommendations against all scientific evidence and will make new vaccines (and even adapted versions of existing vaccines) much harder if not impossible to approve.
Well, I think that's basically RFK's fundamental belief: people who have certain lifestyles are significantly more immune to a wide range of diseases, and that we should focus resources on improving lifestyle rather than investing it in expensive medical treatments.
For all we know, RFK and his kids got sick but just didn't tell anybody.
I just expect a confused approach, as he doesn't seem to know how to handle the industry push back. He's talked about banning food dyes repeatedly, but then only pushed for phasing out rarely used ones, and then started talking about authorizing new "natural" ones.
That is a major issue with Starfield, but it also felt like Bethesda missed the improvements happening in other games in the last decade or so. Many games now are much more cinematic in their storytelling, often with full motion capture. A very recent comparison would be BG3, which is very cinematic despite being almost impossibly large.
In Starfield you have a mostly static view of your questgivers talking. Which was fine 10-20 years ago, doesn't feel as engaging today when many games do it much better.
It's also not only about this aspect, you can make engaging stories with old-school methods. But the writing could not save the aging presentation here, it appeared very bland and tired to me.
What absolutely didn't help was the persuasion minigame, where you essentially broke all pretense of having a story-based reason to bypass a certain check. Persuasion checks are very common in RPGs, I've never seen them done so terribly as in Starfield.
The environmental storytelling certainly was the highlight of previous Bethesda games. But the main and side stories often were engaging as well. In Starfield they felt aggressively bland and mediocre in a way I haven't really seen in other games.
They've always been terrible at animation. 10 or 20 years ago, their animations have always been the absolute worst by any contemporary standard (the art used to be too - see Battlespire for some terrible art - but they improved it). Maybe part of that was because of the engine, but I think they just never had the culture for it.
They clearly did try to improve their animations in Fallout 4 in 2013-2014, which is the timeframe the most development happened, so it's not like they're oblivious to their biggest shortcoming as a studio. So what they did in F76 and Starfield is just a regression.
These are all absolutely extreme ideas and will cause harm.
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