The Doppleganger Theory

I don't have time right now to go through this but...that's really what they went with.

Solutions

Nothing wrong with a bit of substitute transportation, but those of you blessed with good spatial visualization skills (the one aptitude test I always bombed was the rotating "3d" images one) can see the limitations of this.

When the L train goes offline in April, the respective transit agencies have put forth an expected breakdown of just where those 275,000 daily commuters will end up. Up to 80 percent (220,000 riders) will take alternate subway routes. Fifteen percent (41,250) will hop onto the cavalcade of new shuttle bus routes; five percent (13,750) will use temporary ferries; and one to two percent (2,750) will ride bikes. There is also an X factor: the number of passengers who can afford to hail Ubers every day.

...

All of that stands to change, of course. Buses could get stuck in traffic, and the subway system, which only saw one morning rush hour without delay in August, could descend into overcrowded chaos. (Both seem likely.) But one figure that is certain? As of mid-September, at least 1,500 of those passengers in question, or half a percentage point, have signed on to take The New L, an ultra-lux shuttle that promises breakfast bars, free WiFi, and phone chargers, as it carries L expats through the street-level mess that the shutdown will unleash.

I'm not criticizing this business. No one solution is going to replace all of those trips and 15 person vans are better for congestion than ubers. The point is, however, that there isn't a substitute for "very big vehicle with quick simultaneous boarding and its own dedicated right of way, preferably with the ability to brake and accelerate relatively quickly." Wishing doesn't make it so.

Whore It Up A Little, Girls

Such fine mentoring at our elite institutions.

A top professor at Yale Law School who strongly endorsed supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a “mentor to women” privately told a group of law students last year that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all “looked like models” and would provide advice to students about their physical appearance if they wanted to work for him, the Guardian has learned.

Amy Chua, a Yale professor who wrote a bestselling book on parenting called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was known for instructing female law students who were preparing for interviews with Kavanaugh on ways they could dress to exude a “model-like” femininity to help them win a post in Kavanaugh’s chambers, according to sources.

No Deal

I suppose there were two versions (roughly) of the path May chose. One was that she would bluster bluster bluster and then at the last minute "cave" to a deal which basically made the UK into Norway, with respect to its relationship with the EU. The other was that she would bluster bluster bluster wishing for some Deus ex Machina to fix her disaster until it was too late and then... "no deal." Can't hide under the covers forever.

A discussion of Theresa May's Chequers Brexit trade plan by the 27 EU leaders resulted in "everybody" agreeing that the proposal "will not work", the president of the European Council has said.

I don't think even the harsh cynical skeptics have come to terms with just what a disaster "no deal" is.

Forward And Back

On one hand it's good that people are starting to realize that I am gonna be proved fucking right, on the other hand I worry that upon finally accepting that they aren't going to work 100%, they're going to forget that if they don't work 100%...they don't really work.

Toyota doesn’t necessarily buy the hype about self-driving vehicles quickly taking control of roads in the U.S. and beyond. Leonard himself isn’t sold. “Taking me from Cambridge to Logan Airport with no driver in any Boston weather or traffic condition—that might not be in my lifetime,” he says. On its website, the research institute describes its goal as to “someday develop a vehicle that is incapable of causing a crash.” It doesn’t specify whether this uncrashable car would be driverless.

Of course enhanced safety features, if they *enhance safety* in practice, not just in concept, are good, but there is the basic problem that if any of these features encourage people to not quite pay as much attention as they should, then they're probably self-defeating.

Toyota is seeking a middle ground with a system it calls Guardian, which would harness the machine-intelligence and sensor capabilities that make full self-driving theoretically possible and bundle them in vehicles designed for human drivers. These cars and trucks would be able to see much farther ahead and behind, across multiple lanes of traffic, than any human would, and would be more adept at anticipating the behavior of other cars and pedestrians. Actual people would continue to steer and brake, but when Guardian detected potential danger, it would assume control and swerve, slow, stop, or otherwise act to avoid the problem.

Morning Thread

It's Thursday, damnit. Not Monday, not Friday, not Saturday. Thursday. Thursday.

Wednesday Night

Tomorrow is Monday.

Sorry For All Of My Bad Words About Golf

I'm sure it is lots of fun. I just spent a summer temping in a father/son office where, when not yelling at their administrator (their 50-year-old "girl"), they did nothing but talk about golf.

Nevertheless, the Erie County District Court in Buffalo, N.Y., has vacated the murder conviction of Valentino Dixon, 48, who was serving a 39-years-to-life sentence—the bulk of it in the infamous Attica Correctional Facility—for the 1991 killing of Torriano Jackson. On that hot August night long ago, both were at a loud street party with underage drinking when a fistfight over a girl turned to gunfire.

But before we dive into what really happened, a quick refresher on why golfers might care extra about Valentino Dixon. Six years ago, Golf Digest profiled this inmate who grinds colored pencils to their nubs drawing meticulously detailed golf-scapes. Although Dixon has never hit a ball or even stepped foot on a course, the game hooked him when a golfing warden brought in a photograph of Augusta National’s 12th hole for the inmate to render as a favor. In the din and darkness of his stone cell, the placid composition of grass, sky, water and trees spoke to Dixon. And the endless permutations of bunkers and contours gave him a subject he could play with.

More Thread

One of those "spend 2 hours on the phone with the cable company" kinda days. You decide if that's literally or figuratively!

Wednesday Crass Commercialism

My friend wrote a book! Well more of a friend of many friends, but close enough. Boomer1





Reviews are never wrong!

Boomer1 by Daniel Torday, coming out Sept. 18, is a brilliant novel about a new lost generation.

Mark Brumfeld and Cassie Black are overeducated Brooklyn bluegrass musicians with no jobs and no real skills, navigating the ever-extending transition to adulthood.

Mark fails to parlay a Ph.D. into a professorship, ends up back in his parents’ basement, and blames the entire generation of baby boomers hording all the desired careers. Using the handle “boomer1,” Mark starts posting videos threatening retaliation against the boomers that won’t retire.

Lunch Thread

enjoy

Area Reporters Report Their Prime Sources Don't Know Anything, Miss This Big Scoop

Title is slight exaggeration, but Marcy gets this right.

In an article about how Trump’s lawyers, generally, are clueless, and demonstrating though not reporting that the lawyers providing information to the press are part of that general cluelessness, Maggie and Mike don’t pause to reflect on whether that leaves them, too, clueless.

So when Trump tries to understand his plight by reading Maggie and Mike, he would believe a fiction largely created by the lies he has already told his lawyers and his preference for PR rather than solid legal advice.

Roughly, Trump's lawyers don't really know anything, but they (the real lawyers and especially the teevee ones) talk to the press a lot to spin the investigation. Trump gets his information about it from these press reports, especially the conservative propaganda channel version of those reports, and this further reinforces the bullshit loop.

The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth

Rich space nerds have this fantasy that the Earth is going to be turned into a smoldering fireball, or an unlivable post-climate change dystopian hellscape, and, well, there's just nothing we can do about that so we'd better figure out how to send 8 smart unappreciated rich guys and A LOT of hot breeding age women and some robot babysitters to do the hard work to, say, Mars, where they will solve the simple problem of interplanetary colonization and terraforming and begin the new utopian future dedicated to freedom and rule by rich nerds. To save humanity!

Probably a bit easier to clean things up a bit here at home, I imagine, but what do I know.

Wednesday Morning Thread

Tuesday Night

Tomorrow is Friday.

As I Have Been Trying To Tell You

George W. Bush is bad. I did point it out a couple of times somewhere in the archive of this dumb blog.

Exclusive: George W. Bush is standing by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation has been thrown into doubt amid sexual assault allegationshttps://t.co/qhnhzXH32y

— POLITICO (@politico) September 18, 2018

It Was Only Horseplay That Did Not Happen At That Party He Definitely Did Not Attend Maybe

The thing about the conservative shit cannon is that it is always full of shit, but journalists love to explore each flung piece lovingly.

Notable update: Hatch spokesman now says Kavanaugh did not say what Hatch said he did. Instead, he says, Kavanaugh only said he was "not at any party like the one she describes."https://t.co/hXhD1GpIUO

— Dan Eggen (@DanEggenWPost) September 18, 2018

America's Worst Humans

Rosa Brooks.

They'll Know Better Next Time

Kavanaugh has a long history of being a corrupt partisan hack, a prejurer, and someone with frightening public views on "the law." No attempted rape necessary to know that self-described (if full of shit) liberal lawyers shouldn't be supporting him. At least the internet will remember their names forever!

Not Complicated

I've long been amazed that apparently no one said, "uh, guys, this isn't legal..." on the inside.

Facebook has met criticism in recent years over revelations that its technology allowed landlords to discriminate on the basis of race, and employers to discriminate on the basis of age. Now a group of job seekers is alleging that Facebook helps employers exclude female candidates from recruiting campaigns.

Get back to inventing the bus, techbros, it's what you do best.

Figuring Out How To Get In This Guy's Will

Good luck!

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa stood before the audience gathered at SpaceX headquarters Monday evening and was greeted by cheers when he echoed a line from a famous speech by President John F. Kennedy, proclaiming "I choose to go to the moon."

Maezawa was introduced by SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk in Hawthorne, Calif. He is the first to book a trip as a private passenger with the commercial space company for a voyage that hasn't been attempted since NASA's Apollo missions ended in 1972.

A Tax On The Buyer

Like everything else with Trump, even if you have a sense that his instincts might, sort of, possibly, maybe (but probably not), be not be entirely wrong, you know that he has no idea what he's talking about so getting it right is about as likely as me being appointed Attorney General. One could spend all day doing "haha Trump is dumb" posts but this is something you know they have explained to him 700 times and he still doesn't get it.

At the White House, Trump wrongly said that “China is now paying us billions of dollars in tariffs” and he celebrated the Treasury Department collecting “tremendous amounts of money, which is great for our country.”

In fact, tariffs are taxes that are paid by Americans who import goods from abroad. Through the end of August, the administration had collected nearly $22 billion in revenue because of its new tariffs, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

It isn't that he's stupid, it's that he has brain worms, and he's going back in time. As happens.