Rather than concede their mistake, re-calibrate and try again, our intrepid justices liked what they saw, and decided to re-calibrate Originalism instead.

While it’s been clear for some time that Originalism is a sham, a smokescreen for judges doing what they want, this Constitution-changing ruling lays bare the whole truth.  This group has grabbed more power for themselves and a Republican president than the Constitution intended to put into the hands of one person or a group of people with lifetime appointments. 

We have been warned that it is imprudent to protest, as it might be an official presidential duty to shoot us.

The story focuses on the years between Lyndon Johnson’s presidential landslide election in 1964, and Richard Nixon’s landslide election in 1972, essentially turning the country’s politics around 180 degrees.  It takes the time to fill in details of Nixon’s upbringing and apparent motivations, and speculate about the ongoing polarization as of the book’s release in 2008.

About Nixon’s motivations:

“Nixon has been the subject of more psychobiographies than any other politician.  His career vindicates one of that maligned genre’s most trustworthy findings: the recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough.”

– Nixonland, p. 22

One of the conflicts that he introduces early on is the Franklins versus the Orthogonians.  The social elite students at Whittier College called themselves Franklins.  The Orthogonians was a club that Nixon formed as a student there, strivers who were proud to be outside of the Franklin circle.  He told the members that Orthogonian (literally, “at right angles”) meant “straight shooter”.  The Franklin-Orthogonian dynamic provides a meaningful framing for many of the key conflicts of Nixon’s career.  The politics of resentment found its prophet in a man who constantly felt embattled by the elite establishment.

If there is an overall tonic effect achieved by taking the long view, and comparing those violent times to our own, there are also many malevolent “origin story” moments here – for example, as we recognize Roger Ailes, who became Nixon’s executive producer for television during his 1968 campaign, and later went on to found Fox News.  At a lower (power) level, we see that Roger Stone, nihilist for the right, was an original Nixon dirty trickster and is still content to serve in Trump’s rank and file.

Perlstein captures the spirit of the times by evoking pop culture touchstones every step of the way.  There are song references “Something was happening here.  What it was wasn’t exactly clear.”, movie references – Bonnie and Clyde standing in for the nihilistic youth culture, Patton glorifying Nixon’s command and control culture.  There’s Jane Fonda and John Wayne, Woodstock and Up With People. 

There are numerous “what went wrong” stories embedded here too.  Mike Royko, a Chicago newspaper columnist, is a personal favorite of mine.  In an incident where Chicago police killed two Black Panthers in their apartment, the Panthers invited people in to investigate the scene of what police called “the gun battle”.  Royko took them up on it and, brought in a ballistics expert, and reported that somehow all of the 76 bullets fired on the scene were directed inward, towards the apartment.  Later in the book, when the “reform” forces successfully challenged Chicago Mayor Daley’s slate of delegates to the 1972 Democratic convention, Royko challenged the reform delegate slate: “I just don’t see where your delegation is representative of Chicago’s Democrats.  As I looked over the names of your delegates, I saw something peculiar…. There’s only one Italian there.  Are you saying that only one out of every 59 Democratic votes cast in a Chicago election is cast by an Italian?  And only three of your 59 have Polish names…. Your reforms have disenfranchised Chicago’s white ethnic Democrats, which is a strange reform.”  In this scenario, George McGovern and even Jesse Jackson favored some sort of compromise in seating the Chicago delegates, but the reform firebrands let McGovern know that they would not support him if he compromised.

Thanks, undoubtedly, to Nixon’s penchant for recording his conversations for posterity, we know that his private conversations were as contemptible as Trump’s public ones.  For example, the darkly comic conversations with Henry Kissinger, where Nixon just did something reprehensible, and Kissinger cheerleads his guilt away, as in this discussion of Nixon’s pardon of Lt. William Calley, scapegoat for the My Lai massacre:

“The doves are really, really, you’re right, deeply worried about Calley.  They’re worried because – they realize that what it is, is an animal instinct in this country coming up, and most of the people don’t give a shit whether he killed them or not!”

“Zhat’s right” – Kissinger’s amen; then the president: “I don’t – I don’t – I don’t impugn military justice at all!  I uphold it!”

Nixonland, p. 559

Should we be glad that it is so much more out in the open now, or mourn that the veneer of civilization has been stripped away?

In looking up sources for this most untimely review of a book published in 2008, I found a review of the book in the New York Times, written by, of all people, George Will. While Will does admire Perlstein’s writing, he chides him again and again for suggesting that this country was still split into warring factions. Will is currently an exile from the Trump Republican party, and even he might agree, that didn’t age well.

Yesterday, I read online about UPS laying off 12,000 employees. At first, I thought that this was a big layoff, and I am sure that those 12,000 souls would agree that it was important, but further reading revealed that UPS has nearly 500,000 employees, so it represented around 2.4% of their workforce. It wasn’t as big as it seemed on the surface. The volume of packages that the company delivered last year was down 9%.

In the San Jose Mercury News the next day, I was surprised by the headline of the article:

UPS to cut 12,000 jobs as wages rise

– San jose Mercury news reprint of new york times article, 1/31/2024

This headline seemed biased to me, pretty much attributing the layoff to rising wages. It made me wonder whether reprinted articles like this kept the same headline that they had in the news source. So I went to the New York Times online edition, and I found the article. It had the following headline:

UPS to Cut 12,000 Jobs as Wages Rise and Package Volumes Fall

– New york times, by J. Edward Moreno, 1/30/2024

Well now. This headline seems much more even-handed to me. I think that it does a good job of introducing the different factors at play in this case. I can’t say that I love the headline caps style that the Times uses, but good job on the things that really matter.

I examined the article and the reprinted article more closely, and found one more disconcerting difference. The Merc cut the last four paragraphs of the Times article, which gave additional background to put these cuts in the context of the larger economy. The overall effect of the omission is a more negative picture of what is going on in the business world.

I am not surprised that re-printing newspapers reserve the right to trim the source articles to fit, but I plan to look at this more carefully in the future to figure out what I am losing in the translation.

Calling something an edge case gives the impression that the problem is nearly solved, except for an untidy bit here and maybe there. How realistic is that? Is an autonomous taxi in San Francisco in a closed system that can be characterized and solved? How about an autonomous car on an interstate highway or rural cow path? Can nearby vehicles, pedestrians and pets still behave in surprising ways, outside the bounds of the programming? What about Mother Nature, with changing weather, rock slides, hail, high winds, downed trees, downed power lines¹, etc. The list is effectively endless. There are not just a handful of edge cases, there are probably a million.

Another thing that you read in the articles about autonomous car misbehavior is that the people around them (sometimes firefighters that need the autonomous vehicle to get out of their way) first try to signal to the driver before they realize that there is no one in the driver’s seat. Think about how some of your interactions when driving involve making eye contact with another driver or a pedestrian. The situation is a little ambiguous, so you negotiate the correct move by catching someone’s eye and perhaps gesturing with your hands (and I mean constructive gesturing). This is completely missing in the case of autonomous vehicles. A similar situation is when you need to actually roll down your window to take instructions from an emergency worker or police officer at a road block. No wonder emergency workers have such qualms about the autonomous taxis that have been foisted upon them. Some have actually had to break the window of the taxi to get it to stop.

What autonomous driving needs to succeed is to have the reasoning power of a human being, to handle the cases that crop up and cannot all be foreseen. It needs what we now call (for marketing purposes and kick the can down the road purposes) artificial general intelligence (AGI). This guy thinks that AGI is a prerequisite for satisfactory autonomous cars. This requirement is also clear from the Rebooting AI book, as well as more recent comments from Gary Marcus’s blog. In fact, I had been thinking about commenting on “edge cases” when Marcus posted this blog entry that was all about edge cases. For me, it validated that I understood the points in his book loud and clear, and they continue to be the salient points.

1. As a programmer, just thinking about the downed power line case strikes me as incredibly complex. You see a cable in the road, recognize that it is not a tree limb, but can maybe see that it leads up to a utility pole. It might be sparking, but it might not. Depending on what you can see and infer, you make a decision to mitigate the risk. There might be another driver stopped in front of you that has decided to back away from it, and needs you to back up, too. I could go on and on…
   ︎

Thanks to a recent Vox article, I found that book. As you can see in the graphic, the indispensable reference book is Rebooting AI, by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis. It is not quite what I expected, which is probably a good sign that it is what I needed.

You can see that the Vox article gives more examples of Elon Musk giving bad takes on AI, based on progress in self-driving cars and ChatGPT. Gary Marcus offers to bet him a large amount of money that Elon is wrong about the timeframe (the 2020s) for an overarching artificial general intelligence. After reading this book, you will realize how safe that bet really is.

Because I read the Vox article first, I thought that Marcus was strictly negative about AI. On the contrary, the book makes clear that he has some very high hopes for AI. But as an expert in the field, he feels responsible for debunking the hype generated about current AI-based products and demos.

Rebooting AI is a powerful book precisely because it is not an AI debunking project. The authors have much higher aspirations for AI than trying to sell the latest “breakthroughs”. They give a powerful behind-the-scenes tour of what components are working well, and what components are missing in the quest to produce a robust AI that can be trusted to fulfill the promise of intelligent assistants, robots and vehicles.

This book also gave me the background and terminology to understand how AI of today connects with the long-ago aspirations for AI that I remember from 40 years ago. The authors discuss some early, or “classic” approaches to make progress in AI, as well as more recent progress in some areas (deep learning, machine vision, and robotic manipulation).

As a career software engineer and technology enthusiast, I found it an easy and quick (just 200 pages before references) read. It was also an entertaining read, as Marcus is an engaging storyteller. If you want to understand where AI started, where it is now, and where it aspires to be someday, you should read this book.

I struggle to understand the point of doing laps around the same block on a powered vehicle. Who does this, and why? Without the exercise component, wouldn’t it be better to venture a little further, and see a few more sights?

Yesterday, I was waiting in front of my house for Walt, my auto mechanic and friend, to pick me up in my just-serviced car, and a guy went by on a motorized scooter. As he went by, he said “white lives matter”. It took me a few seconds to realize that he was talking to me, as he just kept scooting by after saying it, and I wasn’t looking at him. I realized that he was commenting on the Black Lives Matter sign in my yard.

Well…weird. I had gotten the sign back in 2020, a few months after the George Floyd incident. I had visited my daughter in Portland several times after that, and I noticed that the neighborhood around her apartment had Black Lives Matter signs in front of half of the houses. I thought that it was time to say enough is enough, and show some solidarity with this movement for change. I had never been a political yard sign person before that, but that year, I got a Biden sign, followed by a Black Lives Matter sign.

The next time that Scooter Guy went around the block, Walt was right behind him in my car. I ignored Scooter Guy and got in the car. Before I did, however, he said a couple of things. First he said “yellow lives matter too”. Yes, I had suspected all along that he was a rainbow warrior, anxious to see justice for people of all colors. Finally, as I was getting into the car, he muttered something about “goddamn liberals”. Ah, there we go.

So, these are the guys who go around in circles. I had thought of my sign as a show of solidarity, and I have gotten nothing but positive comments about it from neighbors. Well, except from Sean across the street, who put up an opposing Thin Blue Line flag that I was too ignorant to notice until my daughter from Portland pointed it out to me. Sean moved his family to Texas last year, but he’s not part of this metaphor. It’s about the guys who go around in circles, seeing the same thing over and over, instead of seeing something new or surprising, or getting any exercise, physical or mental.

I am still not optimistic about the future of self-driving cars, and it seems that a growing sense of alarm might be more appropriate.

While Elon Musk has been warned by Tesla technical and legal people to not claim that self-driving is here, it seems likely that a few Tesla owners have followed his nods and winks rather than the caveats that his handlers have added. The following article notes that some bad behaviors tracked by the regulators have been addressed by a recent software update.

Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ mode lets cars speed, run stop signs, cause crashes: feds

Tesla has been under fire over the system, and is facing probes by the federal traffic safety agency, as well as a 2021 administrative complaint from the California DMV.

There is so much about the wording of this article that raises alarms for me.

The software that is being updated is known as the “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) software, an aspirational title, but one that now at least gets enclosing quotation marks.

I assume that Tesla had to show the regulators that the specific issues described are fixed by the software update, so that’s good. But Elon carps about having to call this a safety recall, since it does not require bringing the car into a dealer for a fix.

“The word ‘recall’ for an over-the-air software update is anachronistic and just flat wrong!” – Elon Musk

In fact, that saves Tesla money, so I’m sure that he’s happy about that. What he’s undoubtedly not happy about is that it is a very visible shaming for software that does not do what he claimed. And as the article notes, there is a death toll associated with this ongoing saga, so the alarms set off by the term “recall” are entirely appropriate.

Moving on to self-driving taxi trials, a friend forwarded me a link to the following article, and also pointed out the most alarming aspect of what it says, so I am posting this for Bob D:

Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi now giving rides to employees on public roads in California

For now, the tests are limited to employees at Zoox’s Foster City, California, headquarters.

Especially note the following couple of paragraphs from the article:

All companies testing their vehicles on public roads in the state of California are required to report every time their system disengages or whenever a human driver has to take over for the autonomous system while driving, usually due to safety concerns or software issues.

Zoox doesn’t even refer to these incidents as disengagements, but rather as cases where the vehicle needs support or guidance, so does not report them to the state.

It looks like the regulators hurt some feelings here too, with the term “disengagement”, but I am pretty sure that they would want to know if the vehicle needs support or guidance. I hope that they are reading the same news links that I am, and send some clarifying instructions to Zoox and the rest.

Here is the opinion piece:

Opinion: California gun control laws aren’t the cure for what ails us

State’s restrictive laws have, if anything, made its mass shooting problem slightly worse.

It seemed fishy to me, as the data referenced in the opinion piece was very specific, suspiciously specific, but I didn’t follow up on it.

However, a gentleman by the name of Eamonn Gormley was much more diligent than I, and wrote the following Letter to the Editor (I am copying here, but you can find it online here):

I particularly like the quotation marks around “think tanks”. Well done, Eamonn!

Phoenix is a downtown that is pretty barren of both pedestrian and vehicular traffic, and the surrounding areas are even more sparse, with the possible exception of the student population in Tempe. A poor, confused and lonely autonomous cab can just pull over to the side of the road without being noticed until its handlers arrive to service it.

San Francisco is the other end of the spectrum. There is a lot of pedestrian traffic, a lot of vehicle traffic, the road configurations and restrictions are crazy, and forget about finding street parking. The pedestrians are in charge of a great deal of downtown, bicyclists are aggressive and sometimes travel en masse, and there are many different types of buses, trolleys and cable cars. I hate to drive in San Francisco.

It might seem curious that while we see companies backing off claims of self-driving cars for the foreseeable future, self-driving taxi services are seeking to expand. But on closer examination, it makes sense that self-driving technology would best be proven by taxis first. Self-driving taxis are a subset of the general self-driving car problem, for at least three reasons:

1. They can limit their range to a very well-known set of roads.
2. They can operate a fleet that is maintained to rigorous standards.
3. They can monitor their behavior closely, albeit remotely.

The following New York Times article explains where this effort has gotten to, after more than ten years of research and development.

Self-Driving Car Services Want to Expand in San Francisco Despite Recent Hiccups

Waymo and Cruise hope to widen their projects to more of the city. But local officials are increasingly concerned about breakdowns causing congestion.

Note that the software guys are still talking of “edge cases”. A quote from the article:

“Sometimes these cars just need a human to help them out of a tough spot” – Phil Koopman, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in autonomous vehicles.

Listen pal, I’d like to help you out of this tough spot, but that’s not what autonomy is all about.