Interestingly, that thread gives no indication (other than the date it was written) whether the user is mad at CloudFlare for enacting censorship or for the lack of censorship.
Unlawful content gets posted to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc. all the time. We don't deplatform all of them just because there was a window of time in which it was posted but not yet removed.
"With estimates of $100 billion to $110 billion for heroin, $110 billion to $130 billion for cocaine, $75 billion for cannabis and $60 billion for synthetic drugs, the probable global figure for the total illicit drug industry would be approximately $360 billion"
Correct. To square the circle, consider that while they're being fined heavily for their involvement in a massive legally-sanctioned opioid epidemic, the major drug companies aren't even being dissolved.
At this scale, for corporations, total value to society is part of the calculus society does. And KF has no value to demonstrate to offset the harm.
"On June 21, Google parent Alphabet Inc. floated a plan to fix a problem it had identified in its spam filters. The solution was specifically aimed at political spam, the kind likely to pour in during an especially noisy midterm election season. Unfortunately for all of us, Google seems to have decided the problem is that it filters too much spam—and the solution is to let politicians run wild with polling updates, merch solicitations, and frantic fundraising pleas."
Do you follow Elizabeth Warren on Twitter? She is one of the most obnoxious political blowhards on the website, tweeting stuff about how high gas and milk prices are the result of executive greed and other innumerate, populist pablum.
I don’t watch Fox News, so I have no idea what they say about her. I do know that when I read what she actually writes she sounds like a disingenuous liar.
As a point of calibration, if I were to point out that she cynically lied about her Native American heritage, would you also respond by telling me that’s a Fox News talking point? Because, again, while I can imagine what Fox News has to say about it, I know better what I am able to conclude all on my own.
What’s to get? “He “dunked” on her in a way lots of people found funny. She comes off looking kind of silly and weak and he comes off looking clever and acerbic.
Now, look, it’s tantamount to a schoolyard spat. I’m not saying it needs to mean anything more than that. But evaluating it as a spat, most people who read that exchange come away thinking he won it.
I remember reading through some of the judicial rulings on this. IIRC, the logic is that not only is it speech, but the government case for regulating this kind of speech is unusually poor: the function of flashing the lights is to suggest that you obey the traffic laws. That can't reasonably be in the government's interest to prevent.
Now that is an interesting point I never considered. That the message being conveyed is simply "Obey the law".
Not that the contents of the message should be germane (in my opinion) when considering whether a specific act of speech should be considered legal or not.
IANAL, but my understanding is that there are different levels of "scrutiny" that can be applied to a statute when analyzing its First Amendment compatibility, and which one is appropriate depends on several factors. Typically a judicial opinion walks through the logic of which one it applies before applying it. And the level of scrutiny determines how strongly the law is constrained.
Under the strictest scrutiny--applied when the law is restricting the expression of a viewpoint or opinion--it doesn't matter why the law is there; free speech wins. Under lower scrutiny, as seems applicable here, the government must show it has a "rational basis". That's what allows them to, say, require you to communicate your intention to turn via a turn signal. I believe that rational basis test is what's failing here.
This comes from Footnote Number 4 [0], which was literally a footnote in a case where a Justice articulated what the Court was already doing in analyzing its cases. The Court generally applies one of three levels of scrutiny [1]:
* Strict scrutiny - The Government must prove there is a compelling state interest behind the challenged policy, and the law or regulation is narrowly tailored to achieve its result.
* Intermediate scrutiny - The law must serve an important government objective, and be substantially related to achieving the objective.
* Rational basis review - A challenger must prove the government has no legitimate interest in the law or policy; or there is no reasonable, rational link between that interest and the challenged law.
While I don't believe the Supreme Court has taken up a case of light signaling, it is likely that the Court would apply strict scrutiny due to the clear First Amendment considerations. If so, thus the government would need to prove that it's narrowly tailored solution to a compelling state interest. It would need to answer questions such as: is it okay to say flash your headlights for road hazard? Would the state prohibit the defendant from telling others at a gas station about the police officer? Etc. I'd suspect that it would be a hard case to win for the Government.
This is why rural Arizonan drivers were my favorite during a cross-country roadtrip. Everyone drove fast, but competently, and gave you a heads up for speed traps. By the time I crossed into CO I was flashing my lights to warn of police, too.
I've seen flashing lights to warn of speed traps used all over the south east and mid west.
Oddly though, no one in Southern California holds Arizona drivers in high regard. Quite the opposite. Best I can tell they're the western equivalent of Florida drivers.
A few years ago in Sydney Australia there was a couple of cops catching jaywalkers at a traffic light. My friend warned passengers at the other side about them, and then the cops came up to her and told her to move along because she was "obstructing justice".
I see the opposite problem more often (Bay Area): cars with always-on daytime running lights that don’t turn on their headlights (and the corresponding taillights) at night. I flash my lights at them but this rarely seems to help.
And I don't mean this in a, "I'm a luddite and wish cars were simple" type of way. I seriously think the number of controls on a vehicle (and burden of the owners manual) is so great that it is causing safety issues.
My car has more controls for the lights alone than my first vehicle had for everything. Literally.
"Automatic" features like headlights were supposed to make us safer, but I think that is backfiring as it is causing cognitive overload and making people complacent.
> My car has more controls for the lights alone than my first vehicle had for everything. Literally.
As someone driving a 2021 Subaru who grew up in a 99 Integra and an 01 Civic. I don't see this at all? The controls are extremely familiar for the lighting, except my new car has a no-friction option: I turn on the "Auto" setting and it automatically puts on DRLs or full lights for me given the lighting conditions. It even turns on my lights for me when I pull into my parking garage at midday.
I'm not sure what the solution is, or whether it is even a design problem at all, rather than a societal/political/licensing problem.
My older vehicles had 3 controls for exterior lighting: parking lights, headlights, high beam. They were simple on-offs with feedback that indicated their current state. If people couldn't see your car, you couldn't see your gauges.
My 2021 Honda has SEVEN pages in the owners manual dedicated just to the headlight operation -- not counting the several other sections it calls out for related information. Some sections are called out as US specific and some called out as Canadian model specific.
Let's take just the high-beams for instance:
Flashing the high beams is a different physical control than turning them on. Activating the auto-high beam functionality is somehow not a separate control, but is done flashing your high beams, and there is a not-very-clear symbol in the instrument panel that indicates the current state. This means that when you flash your high beams, you are also changing the current state of the auto headlights. If you flash it an even number of times you will keep the same state, if you flash them an odd number of times, you change the state. Furthermore if you hold the stick in for 40 seconds, you disable the auto headlight feature entirely. If you hold it in for 30 seconds, you turn it back on. Yes, there are two independent levels of "on" and "off" respectively just for the auto-high beams.
It works perfectly fine when you know what it's doing, but it isn't something that a person would automatically know if they were someone who started driving when you turned on headlights by pulling a knob on the dash.
Besides that one specific gripe, there's 160+ pages dedicated to just to controls and the instrument panel alone.
Anyone who reads a modern 600+ page owners manual will learn something. The problem is that people don't, and sometimes the thing they didn't learn is important.
I'm late to the party so no one will read this comment, but it's important for posterity. I own an F150 for moving things literally too heavy to move in even a well spec'd SUV. As a result, I cared a lot about things like load tie down points and weight ratings. In many ways, I learned an awful lot about that from the owner's manual, though in many other ways, I wish that they had better information about load placement in the bed and weight ratings of the bed liner in small areas, etc. You really can learn an awful lot that people should know about the limits of their vehicle from reading the manual.
On the other hand, we have legally required boilerplate sections like "how to decode tire ratings" that take up 20 pages, so there's definitely useless bloat.
What you describe here is clearly insanity, although I am slightly unconvinced owner's manual page count is very relevant.
I read nothing and intuitively understood my car's controls, this is what I also agree should be the clear state, and it seems to me in some sense it should be legislated to prevent what you describe. It is an interesting point though, should each vehicle manufacturer be obligated to put a light stick with some exact set of controls for the headlights in?
I don't think it is insanity. It's part of the complexity inherent to managing state with auto high beams. My Toyota worked differently but had other complexities. I just looked up a 2021 Legacy manual and it sounds like Subaru High Beam Assist works about the same way as my Toyota did.
The annoying thing about that design is, if I want to turn my high beams on manually, and the car decides that a street light in the distance is a vehicle, it will ignore my request to turn on my high beams when I push the stick forward. I then also have to set my primary headlights to manual mode in order to override the car. This requires turning the knob at the end of the stalk which is not backlit and therefore not legible while driving at night. This is one area where I like the Honda design better: I can always turn my high beams with one operation.
I think the page count is relevant because it is indicative of complexity and is likely inversely related to the number of people who read it.
While I am sure you probably do understand the controls on your vehicle -- I think it is important to note that the people driving around with lights in an improper state at night are also under the impression that they understand their vehicle's controls. They're just mistaken.
I personally wish licensing and enforcement was more stringent. But this is not politically possible in the US.
> The annoying thing about that design is, if I want to turn my high beams on manually, and the car decides that a street light in the distance is a vehicle, it will ignore my request to turn on my high beams when I push the stick forward. I then also have to set my primary headlights to manual mode in order to override the car. This requires turning the knob at the end of the stalk which is not backlit and therefore not legible while driving at night. This is one area where I like the Honda design better: I can always turn my high beams with one operation.
It's an Outback for what it's worth, but... High beams work directly by pushing the stick forwards. I haven't experienced it denying such a request, only correctly toggling off when traffic is both oncoming and within a reasonable distance, but if it did behave incorrectly in this way, I would simply pull the stick back and push it forwards to re-activate high beams. I don't think there is any complexity in managing state with this implementation, it seems inherently obvious to me it would be this way. I am very surprised with everything else you've written here because it seems quite extraneous.
> if it did behave incorrectly in this way, I would simply pull the stick back and push it forwards to re-activate high beams
In the Toyota that I had, if it thought there was an oncoming car, asking it to do the same thing again wouldn't result in a different outcome. Maybe Subaru's system is tuned better, or maybe my driving conditions are an edge case.
Either way, this was just an anecdotal tangent to support my above point that vehicle controls are more complex than they used to be. What was once one single boolean value is now a logic tree containing four boolean values ([auto headlight system engaged][vehicle detected ahead][vehicle speed within operational parameters][highbeams commanded by driver]).
> In the Toyota that I had, if it thought there was an oncoming car, asking it to do the same thing again wouldn't result in a different outcome
Why wouldn't the result of the action the second time be based on exclusively the stick's position and the current state the vehicle is in? Then it is a pure function of time. If they truly mixed up previous states in there, and somehow it's aware that in the history of positions it was at this position and at that time it rejected your request so it will also reject it now, that's braindead and you should phone Toyota and scream at them
My car's headlight's current state is a pure function of time T and position P. That's my mental model and I haven't observed deviations. I will look at these manuals later perhaps to understand if they really argue there are more stateful factors than this
The Subaru auto headlights work great indeed. Other Subaru smart functionality is crap though. For example, the touchscreen and gauges auto-dimming: literally every time it auto-dims or auto-undims, I have to tweak the dimming level. It would be an objectively better car without the auto-dimming.
> For example, the touchscreen and gauges auto-dimming: literally every time it auto-dims or auto-undims, I have to tweak the dimming level
I have never noticed this, fingers crossed you didn't Baader-Meinhof me. The feature to aim the lights where you steer and auto-dim high beams when traffic is approaching and re-activate them works quite nicely for me as well, so I would consider the headlights to be a great strength of this vehicle. It is crazy to get into my partner's mid-2010s sedan and laugh at how bad the lights are at nighttime compared to the perfectly aimed and calibrated Subaru lights
>It is crazy to get into my partner's mid-2010s sedan and laugh at how bad the lights are at nighttime compared to the perfectly aimed and calibrated Subaru lights
On the other hand, that mid 2010s sedan's headlight system will age gracefully - there are no aiming servos to fail or autodim relay output to stop working or such thing. It's just lights with a switch to turn them on or off.
Increased complexity also implies increased maintenance and often more troublesome failure modes when something does fail.
I would find it hard to believe that the failure mode of these headlights wouldn't be "points straight and doesn't auto-dim ever", which reduces it to the previous implementation's graceful aging modes, but you are right a new possibility is introduced.
I would absolutely believe the failure mode will be that one headlight will stop moving when it's commanded to, which best case means straight headlight, worst case means aimed where it shouldn't be 99% of the time
And whatever those failure modes are, they better be good, because in 20 years those vehicles will be on the road in some state without regular inspections, driven by someone without the money to pay for OEM electrical repairs.
Yup, I discovered that I have an automatic headlight dimming feature. It works well most of the time, often surprisingly well.
BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, it sometimes fails, and at the worst times - like when it is drizzly & foggy at night, in a tight bit of road and a lot of wet pavement glare from the oncoming car — so the workload is already high with bad visibility & grip, and now I have to ALSO flick the lever and move my eyes to the dashboard display to check whether or not I got the lights to the correct state (it may unpredictably finally work and my action goes back to high beams a half second later).
I keep being lulled into giving it a few more chances, but I'm pretty sure it'll get turned off for good. I already reliably switch the hi/lo beams at a subconscious level with near-zero mental workload, so I'm better off just letting that instinct work by feel, rather than randomly having to engage another higher-level attention task at particularly high-workload moments.
This is a Ford and I read that they had this same feature about a decade ago and had to remove it because it just wasn't good enough. It seems that they're a lot closer, but not enough.
Something like the uncanny valley of tech features - almost good enough makes it really bad?
One feature I really like about my car that I'd never seen before (2020 Explorer) is that the headlights will always return to automatic mode every time you start the car. It doesn't matter what they were set to when you turned it off, and there's nothing you can do to disable that behavior. When you turn it on, the headlights will be on automatic mode no matter what. It's a small but helpful feature.
This is a huge problem here in Michigan, too. Many cars come with automatic headlights, but many do not, particularly of a certain age, and the LED DRLs seem to be bright enough that people do not realize that they don't have their full lights on. I find this particularly infuriating in ugly snowstorms and the part of the year where the sun sets before 5:00pm... sigh
This technology exists in Europe, it's not allowed in the US due to very specific wording about headlight laws here, but very recently regulations were changed to allow for it. Not sure if it was in the infrastructure bill that already passed, or the follow-up one they're currently trying to pass. Most BMW (and probably Mercedes, Audi etc) with adaptive LED lights built after ~2017 have the hardware for this for use in international markets, and could probably be retrofitted with a firmware update unlocking it for use in the US market.
This technology is not great on a windy[1] european road though. I rented a car recently and noticed that it was auto-dipping but the problem is it dips once it has detected the oncoming vehicle. That is fractionally too late as the driver has already been dazzled. Manually, I would dip the headlights just before the car came into view because I could see the headlights looming.
[1] a road with lots of turns, not one where the wind is blowing
My current car has auto high beams. Beam shaping is different technology, rather than a boolean operation, it allows the computer to turn off specific LEDs that are pointed at oncoming traffic, leaving the road ahead of you fully illuminated without blinding oncomming traffic
I believe the tech that is not allowed in the US is something that literally dims sections of the lights that would shine line into the eyes of an oncoming driver. This is different than the auto dimming lights feature in US cars that just shuts off the high beams when an oncoming car is detected. Most of the tech is made by a company called Gentex. If you have an auto dimming rear view mirror in your car they most likely made it.
> I don't understand how a car with detectors that dim mirrors can't also turn your high beams off when they detect another car in front of you.
Some can, though I have no idea on how common it is. My 2013 Dodge can do this. Unfortunately, it's also pretty terrible at it, resulting in a lot of on, off, on again, not quite flashing. e.g., a slight bend in the road, it doesn't seen anyone if front, turns high beams on, only for the road to bend back and all of a sudden your brights are shining in someone's face as the road bends back again. Sometimes, I've seen even changing lanes be enough for it to turn brights back on again. It also doesn't seem to give as much consideration when following someone as leaves them on way too close for me.
I live in an urban enough area with plenty of street lighting anyway, so I tend to use the auto high beam feature almost never (it can be toggled with a position of the turn signal lever). I do, however, use the auto-on lights in general, though. Nice to just not have to worry about turning lights on (or off).
I've also been pulled over before for flashing my brights at a police officer. It was entirely unintentional, though. I was a relatively new and young driver (17 or 18 yrs old at the time) and I was driving an older vehicle that still had a foot operated switch for the high beams that tended to stick.
Where do y'all live? That doesn't seem to be the case here in the Seattle area. I've noticed modern cars' headlight look like high beams sometimes, even on the low beam setting.
BMW does "automatic high beams" in Europe, they turn on when there are no cars ahead or opposite and off when it detects a car through the cameras. I've had it since 2006, so it probably existed a few years before that.
Our 2020 GMC Acadia and the equivalent Ford Explorer both automatically turn high beams on and off depending on nearby traffic. It's presumably based on a forward looking camera in front of the rear view mirror.
Ford Edge (US market) has this too when in 'automatic' mode for the lights. It seems to work reasonably well though it sometimes lags a bit so other drivers probably find it somewhat annoying.
I feel for this guy, I get that the post comes off as narcissistic and myopic but it seems that he genuinely put a lot of effort into something with good intentions and came away disappointed. Something just leaves me profoundly sad after reading it, and I'm actually going to seek out a copy of the 'balance of power' book.
Ha yes because saying describing the FSF as `bigots’, is an infraction to the « Code of conduct ». If that's the case your CoC is pure bullshit designed to stifle speech.
