I agree the term neocon kind of raised my eyebrows. It's clear that many who write about politics couldn't care less what neoconservative ideology / philosophy really is, but just use the term neocon as a slur against people loosely associated with George W Bush's foreign policy. And from this article, Bolton is being depicted as some kind of extreme hawk hellbent on a warpath. Which may be true for all I know.

It's worth hearing him articulate his position in his own words. Like the neoconservatives, he is an interventionist. However, it doesn't seem that he has any patience for the freedom agenda, which is really at the core of the neoconservative ideology. A central argument of neoconservatism was that if you want to fight terrorism, you need to dispose of the conditions that make terrorism possible in the Middle East. And since the oppressive and illegitimate authoritarian regimes of the Middle East made terrorism possible, the US should take military action to destroy those regimes and replace them with democracies. The freedom agenda and the war on terror were conceptually linked: the idea was if you spread democracy, you will defeat terrorism, and, really, the *reason* to spread democracy was to defeat terrorism.

The freedom agenda, however much it was based on an incredibly naive and overly optimistic view of human nature (namely, since all people are freedom-loving, if you give people the opportunity to live in democracy, it will inherently promote peace -- obviously this was wrong), was actually a very idealistic, and even universalistic, ideology, even if it was also one that advocated American unilateralism. Bolton's view, as I said, is an interventionist one, but he is somewhat closer to Trump on certain issues. By virtue of his skepticism of multilateralism and international institutions that limit American sovereignty, his views are somewhat akin to the America First ideology (although I think he is, unlike Trump, also free trade oriented, and seems to fall in line with Reagan Republican orthodoxy on economic issues, especially on the view that the federal government's primary purpose is national security, rather than providing social services). He is a unilateralist, but, unlike the neoconservatives, he isn't a universalist. He doesn't believe that American exceptionalism entails that America has certain duties and obligations to the rest of the world, but rather that it grants the US special privileges to act in its self-interest.

It is worth seeing his views as being somewhat principled. He isn't a bloodthirsty hawk who wants war with Iran and North Korea for its own sake. He's someone who sees, for instance, nuclear proliferation as a national security issue, and he believes that the military solution is the only one that can actually definitively deal with the problem. It goes without saying that there are very strong reasons to disagree with his views on the limits of diplomacy, including the fact that one of the reason why the 1994 Agreement between the US and NK collapsed was because of Republican refusal to meet the US' obligations. But I think there actually is another side to the debate on this issue than the orthodoxies of the liberal establishment, that, at the very least, needs to be heard, and may correct the liberal viewpoint, even if it is stunningly blind to the cost in lives of what it proposes.

What “the car telemetry”?

So far they are about 25 times more dangerous than human drivers.

I meant the panels with the indicator stuff.



Ok.

well now that there's blood on the machine hands, I look forward to techies claiming you can't compare self driving cars and real drivers yet

Like I said, "move fast and break things".

OTOH, maybe society would be better off if computer programmers would refrain from projecting their own epistemology onto the outside world? When are we going to see a DIY blog post on Hacker News titled "Self Driving Cars for Hackers"?

Well that's at least slightly encouraging, since the press seems to be depicting Bolton as an unhinged lunatic.

Let me give you an example, Kroko.

This one time in SF, an Uber self-driving car got t-boned in an intersection by a left-turning car. The Uber wasn’t legally at fault; the other driver was. But the Uber drove at 68 mph (110 km/h) past two lanes of stopped traffic, blind to the intersection. A human’s not gonna do that. Human’s gonna assume it’s a dangerous situation and drive more cautiously, especially in the friggin Bay Area. The Uber car might not have been at fault legally, but a human driver would have easily avoided the accident.

All of Uber’s accidents are like this. Their car does what it’s legally obligated to do, but past that doesn’t account at all for illegal behaviour, its own safety, or the safety of others. It’s a Lawful Evil car. IMO they should have been taken off the road a long time ago, but certainly now that it’s killed someone.

By the way, I’m pretty sure Uber edited that dash cam footage to make it look darker than it actually is.

I had a discussion recently with some friends about why Amazon's drone package delivery idea probably failed. They didn't seem to be aware of the difference between software good enough to run a few tests in a controlled setting, and software good enough to have widespread use in untested conditions, something I'm not sure even exists. Humans are capable of all sorts of unpredictable behavior, assuming the basic systems don't fail as with this recent Uber accident.

Web developers build a car

CAP theorem says it's impossible to save every life. It's better to increase total performance of the system than to bother every time a server / pedestrian goes down.

you can’t measure self driving cars by fatalities per mile because that doesn’t take into account all of the hours saved by not having to pay attention to the road anymore.

I've been reading some Hacker News discussion on this, and a couple of things come to mind.

First, when Uber deploys self-driving taxis sometime in the next few years, there will likely be more fatalities. I wonder how it will feel to witness your vehicle needlessly slaughter innocent pedestrians just for your convenience.

Second, it seems that Uber's algorithms likely had access to the data (LIDAR in particular) that could have been used to at least slow down, but chose not to. Moreover, the fact that the cars have two forms of sensory data that are different than how humans sense (LIDAR and radar), it seems likely to me that the heuristics used by the self-driving cars are going to be rather different than the ones humans use, if the engineers simply found an algorithm that worked well enough. For example, there was a comment on HN that said that the car was "driving past its headlights", and should have been cautious about a dark bend. But clearly Uber didn't need to employ this human heuristic, because LIDAR can see where the headlights don't directly shine. But then the algorithm apparently didn't even take advantage of this, as clearly evidenced by the video. The entire thing just reeks of poorly conceived design that is being tested just barely beyond the "seemingly good enough" stage, but with real lives.

But that all said, this all seems to be a red herring. We already know Uber is super shady, and probably doesn't really care about this incident. And I imagine with good reason, since I doubt this will have much effect on their timetable for rolling the tech out anyway. About the only likely prediction I can say is that people now have a new hazard to watch out for. One might envision an app which alerts pedestrians to the presence of such self-driving cars in their vicinity, so that they can take extra caution when entering the street. I saw at least one commenter on HN who confirmed the poor quality of the Uber algorithms by having almost been run over himself by one in a San Francisco crosswalk.

This Bolton guy looks dangerous.

[Quote=Matthew Waxman]
Most of the commentary about John Bolton's appointment as national security adviser has focused on his extreme policy views, especially with regard to military strikes against North Korea and Iran. I want instead to offer here a few firsthand thoughts about his formidable skills—which are what make him so dangerous. The Trump White House is something of a clown show, but Bolton is no clown. Rather than just adding a Fox-newsy ideologue who shifts the balance of the administration team’s view further toward the president’s most hawkish outlook, Trump has added someone who can actually help him make that outlook into reality.

Amb. Bolton may not remember me, but I certainly remember him. In the summer of 2001, I joined George W. Bush's National Security Council staff, serving first in the West Wing as the Executive Assistant to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and later as a National Security Council director coordinating, among many other issues, U.S. policy toward the International Criminal Court (an issue on which Bolton dominated at the time, but later lost influence). I later served the Bush administration in the Defense and State Departments, where I watched Bolton often run circles around rivals or chew them to pieces.

Yes, Bolton is militantly aggressive about wielding American military and economic power. But what I saw in him also was an operator who was relentlessly effective in implementing—or stymying—policy, at least in the short term.

Here are three things to know about what Bolton brings to this job.

First, he's a masterful bureaucratic tactician. Unlike his predecessors, Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster, Bolton is a very experienced and adept creature of Washington institutions. Similar to former Vice President Dick Cheney, he knows the levers and knobs of the vast national security and foreign policy machinery: how they work, who works them, and how to exert control over them. He’ll work to put loyalists in key vantage points and marginalize those he distrusts (both of which I watched him do as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security). In particular, he has the already-weakened State Department, now lacking a secretary, especially mapped out for further hostile takeover.

Second, he’s a crafty negotiator. I’ve never believed that Donald Trump is the artful dealmaker he pretends to be; he has a few plays that he just runs again and again. But Bolton is truly clever. He picks his battles much more carefully than Trump does. As U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Bolton is mostly remembered for his hostility to the institution and for his coarse bluntness. Yet in that multilateral diplomatic maze, he often delivered for the administration, including on North Korea at the U.N. Security Council.

Third, he's thorough and methodical. Most senior policymakers simply cannot keep up with the details across so many issues. I watched Bolton dominate ICC policy meetings with mastery of the minute particulars, preserving a strategy that was more hardline—and unnecessarily costly—than I think even the president would have wanted (though I’d note that Bolton’s early victories on this issue didn’t last into Bush’s second term). Expect the same diligent readiness from him on issues like Iran and North Korea, but with the added advantage that he'll face less pushback than he might otherwise because of the fact that so many senior diplomatic posts remain unfilled. His ability to be meticulous and bombastic will probably serve him very well in this White House.

It’s anyone's guess whether the relationship between Bolton and President Trump will last. The president is, of course, a wild card. My best guess is that Bolton will be effective at managing his relationship with Trump and will be far more influential than Flynn or McMaster ever could have been. But, maybe the president will quickly turn on him as well, or just decide he hates mustaches. What’s more, John Bolton doesn’t suffer fools gladly—and that's bad news for Trump.

For now, the key takeaway is that Bolton brings to the president's national security agenda a competence that this White House has lacked. I generally agree with Benjamin Wittes that some of the president's worst instincts have often been tempered by sheer ineptitude. What makes Bolton dangerous is his capacity to implement those instincts effectively.
[/Quote]

https://www.lawfareblog.com/john-bolton-i-knew

Not really sure what this means though. I couldn't imagine we'd actually go to war with Iran or resume the one with North Korea.

Yeah, I think they're being hysterical. I doubt he's unhinged. I think he's actually a thoughtful, deliberative person, though he skews towards military solutions and likely overestimates what American military power is able to achieve.

If you believe that Lawfare article, he's very thoughtful and deliberative, to the point of being made out to be some kind of Machiavellian mastermind hellbent on stymying other diplomats and bureaucrats in order to push through a minority agenda. This is starting to show signs of imagination on the level of conspiracy theory, though.

Possibly. Aside from that making him intimidating or formidable, I don't see how that makes him dangerous, really.

Well according to Matthew Waxman, he also says in the second to last paragraph that Bolton's formability might just cause Trump to get annoyed and fire the guy. The constant turnover is just about the only constant we can expect from this WH, tbh.

In a weird way, Trump's unpredictability (and consequently short attention span) is his most predictable weakness.

He can be a canny operator who knows how to manipulate the bureaucracy. If he can't persuade the president, he won't get very far. Ultimately Cheney began to exert less influence in the Bush admin when Cheney lost Bush's confidence because he had been so totally wrong about Iraq.

btw, this was also Adolf Hitler's weakness!

Not that I think that Trump is Hitler!

I don't know who it was, but there was a Bush cabinet member who recounted Cheney as basically having lost his mind after 9/11. He had become a very different person.

Oh, well, if the National Review says so

9/11 was a direct attack on the business elite. 12% of the people who died were company executives and 10% more were financial managers. For a terrorist attack it had an astonishing and unprecedented focus on the rich. Cheney probably lost at least a few close friends that day.

It might be crass to say so, but I suspect the US reaction would have been very different if it hadn’t put the fear of God in the rich the way it did. The US might not even be a police state.

I hope they can improve the AI to adapt to those situations better. Or maybe they should just completely redesign traffic to accommodate that rigid adherence to traffic laws.

Improving the AI that much may not be possible. But at the very least we need to acknowledge the fact that, right now, Uber has the worst safety by far. They’re clearly cutting corners in an attempt to beat their competitors to market, pushing their cars onto the roads years or decades before they’re ready, and their criminal negligence is starting to kill people.

(That whole company should be disbanded. They all belong in prison, their founders, their funders, their managers and their board. And not just for this. Uber is literally organized crime.)

Regarding redesigning traffic: if we’re putting the screws to politicians for top down change, why not put sensors in every road so we can use dumb networked cars instead of this smart car horse****? Or better yet, get them to build out proper transit infrastructure instead of this White Elephant car culture?

uber is innovating and creating jobs

yeah, jobs hosing off roads apparently.

Hey look i was right

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/

So what do y’all think? How does editing a surveillance video and paying off a cop stack up against Uber’s other competitive job creating acts, like illegally obtaining the medical records of a rape survivor, hiring PIs to intimidate journalists?

Holy crap that video editing is blatant.

Edit: or, according to something I read on the Ars Technica page, they just used a crappy dashcam. Probably on purpose.

I don't know what's worse: that their "contractor" scam allows them to underpay drivers, or that they're working hard to get rid of drivers, or that people are desperate enough in America for work that they'd accept working for Uber. It all seems like the worst.

I wasn't aware of the rape survivor thing. I guess a "contractor" did it?

Accusing Uber of obstruction of justice is what we in the ****posting business call a "serious allegation" that could "get a publication sued for libel"

well, I mean, he probably had a contract.

https://www.recode.net/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-india-assault-rape-medical-records

Could even suggesting it get you reliably sued? I can imagine they'd send warnings either way, but would they take it to court if you hinted at it?



Damn, they fired 20 people after an internal investigation? That stuff must be insanely rampant then, usually employers won't fire for anything but pretty blatant/severe offenses.

Regarding the rape, seems pretty obvious Uber bears some responsibility for being negligent in their hiring process.



Hah, I wonder how this rumor was started?

That whole article makes Uber sound way shadier than I previously thought. Damn, that's bad.

However bad you think Uber is, it’s worse.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Uber’s entire business plan is to burn money and violate regulations until traditional cab companies are driven out of business, then hike prices once they’ve monopolized the market. Like their prospectus is (1) commit crime, (2) commit crime, (3) return proceeds of crime to shareholders. I literally do not understand why they are allowed to exist.

Probably because Americans sufficiently see themselves as beneficiaries of corporations that they don't ever get as far as phrasing the matter as directly as you just did yourself, however easy it was to do so. And the minority that can figure it out don't have political representation.

Because we have a double standard where if you're a tech company monopolistic tactics are rebranded as "disruption" and you're admired by liberals for being on the vanguard of innovation, no matter how destructive your business is?

Well, unless you're Cambridge Analytica, apparently.

goddamn hypocritical liberals