“I marvel at all the nonsense that has been written about me in the last year,” he said. “At a certain point I’ve said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself.”

What a child. It’s a lifetime appointment, jackass- the whole point is you don’t have to worry about being popular.

This asshole wants it both ways- to be ‘above’ politics in terms of accountability but still reap the rewards of ingratiating himself with the political donor class.

Need to start demanding radical financial transparency and limits for anyone that wants this kind of power. Like you get $250K/yr for the rest of your life, but any income over that amount goes straight back in taxes. All spending publicly audited for the rest of their life. Holding public power should come with a sacrifice. Saying you can ‘only’ make $250K/yr forever to be able to make decisions that effect millions for decades just doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask to me.

John 8:7

You have to remember ancient people had about .000001% of a modern human’s general knowledge and visual references when describing their experiences. Also there was no eye doctor so by adulthood a lot of people had untreated visual issues. Look at how ancient descriptions of manatees somehow became beautiful women with fins. Read descriptions of elephants by Romans seeing them for the first time thinking they were stone monsters. And that’s all assuming people are sober and in reasonably good mental health.

Ancient accounts of ‘UFOs’ are no different than ancient accounts of angels or demons. There’s reasonable evidence that they are descriptions of known phenomenon and zero evidence that they are paranormal.

I think its almost always pointless to hold back innovation, but in this case I think a full ban on self driving cars would be a great move.

I agree on both points. Also I think it’s important to characterize the ‘innovation’ of self driving as more social-economic than technological.

The component systems- sensing, processing, communications, power, etc- have a wide range of engineering applications and research and development will inevitably continue no matter the future of self-driving. Self driving only solves a very particular social-economic-technological issue that only exists because of how humans historically chose to address the same issue with older technology. Self driving is more of a product than a ‘technology’ in my book.

So my point there is that I don’t think a ban on full self driving really qualifies as ‘holding back innovation’ at all. It’s just telling companies not to develop a specific product. Hyperbolic example but nobody would say banning companies from creating a nuclear powered oven was ‘holding back innovation’. If anything forcing us to re-envision human transportation without integrating into legacy requirements advances innovation more than just trying to use AI to solve the problems created by using humans to solve the original problem of how to move humans around in cars.

I don’t get why anyone is surprised by this sort of thing.

Because the the idea that the US was founded as a meritocracy is a core cultural myth that’s taught as fact to every new American. There’s value to constantly repeating challenges to pervasive cultural myths. Won’t change anything for us but might help a few in the next generation see past the bullshit sooner than they otherwise would.

The ‘War on Woke’ makes the ‘War on Drugs’ sound marginally less insane. That’s kind of an accomplishment.

Double the fine for ‘self-driving’ traffic violations and bill the manufacturer for half.

I don’t think it’s a collective or organized ‘they’, probably just a few guys that didn’t appreciate Grusch nosing in on their legitimate classified operations- reverse engineering downed Chinese balloons and whatnot, so they fed him a big fish that had enough truth to sell it but also crazy enough to ‘decommission’ Grusch when he started repeating the crazy parts.

At least the History Channel will get to update their ‘Ancient Alien’ content catalog with some new footage from all this nonsense.

Do you really not get how silly it is to say “I’m done” and then show up again to say “I’m done”?

It’s okay if this subject is over your head and you want to leave, you can just go.

I love when people throw a little tantrum that they’re ‘done’. People that are really ‘done’ don’t have to fuss to anonymous strangers about how done they are ;)

It would be an appropriate comment if we’d just had a congressional hearing about Jesus showing up at the superbowl with Prince’s guitar

The comment is a perfectly valid comparison- we have congressional hearings about religious nonsense all the time. The Prince\Kid Rock part was a goof but are you seriously unaware of how often Jesus and ‘Gods will’ are cited in congressional session?

So if you heard religious kookery in a hearing and then said ‘Well, if God really did bring that hurricane to punish gays it would change humanity’s relationship with religion and science’ - that would be a deeply, stupidly, asinine statement. So it’s just like you adding your half-cent to the UFO kookery. Not sure you can follow that but thought I’d lay it out for you just in case.

Good point, and if Jesus showed up at the superbowl with Prince’s guitar we’d owe a lot of apologies to a lot of Kid Rock fans who were written off as Kid Rock fans ;)

…and thus, (cringe) That’s not an exaggeration either, it’s just completely asinine, like babbling about ‘ancient astronaut theory’. So don’t get so upset when strangers point out that it’s asinine.

Except it is a contest for very fake women.

I mean… it’s supposed to be a ‘beauty contest’ so why shouldn’t they compete?

Not that I don’t think the entire concept of a competition over beauty is stupid, but they exist, so why not just see who wins?

I like to think what happened is the atrophied part of his brain where a conscience would be suddenly came back online and for those 20 seconds he was consciously aware of what a monster he’d become.

The reason the Fermi paradox, (@be_excellent_to_each_other thanks for bringing it up,) is a paradox is because our mathematical estimates regarding extraterrestrial life says it is likely, yet we have not conclusively observed any.

The reason people think the Fermi paradox is a paradox is because they assume insanely optimistic values for L in the Drake equation.

You can’t even theorize lightly about scenarios where there might have been extraterrestrial interaction with Earth in most contexts without being pretty much branded a kook.

Well, yeah. You can speculate about those scenarios all you want, that’s why sci-fi is so much fun. But ‘theorize’ implies a serious consideration of the event having occurred and there is zero tangible evidence for that and physics itself suggests that in the span of a civilization the chances of even detecting another may be infinitesimally small. So any ‘theory’ of those scenarios would be based on nothing so- yeah- kookery.

Perhaps so, but if that was all that was going on here I’m surprised Grusch got to be front and center at this congressional hearing.

See my first point about this being a political brownie-points bonanza. They’ve got a hot stage and a rising star. Of course they’re going to make a good show of it. And even with zero evidence- enthusiastic members of the public can’t get enough and will go on and on about how credible this guy seems because he’s saying things they really, really want to be true.

They’re both silly, yours just seemed more so to me because you followed up on a silly generalization with another silly generalization.

Because they tend to not do that when it’s their guy.