Down Bad
In City Journal, Chris Rufo and Haley Strack report that California state prisoners (“justice-impacted individuals,” per state policy) are watching porn and sexting w/ minors on taxpayer-funded tablets. The program is part of a “digital equity” initiative, coinciding with reforms like building a whole-ass podcast studio in San Quentin State Prison (follow Uncuffed and Ear Hustle on Spotify (real)). On these tablets, inmates can video chat with friends and family; and, as three-time serial killer Robert Maury explains, he never asks people to play porn over chat… but “when it happens,” he “just say[s] cool and thank you.” (Another inmate rotates between “porn an[d] short clips of my family at the Beach.”) My take here is simple: iPads are for consumption, not education (CERTAINLY not for rehabilitation), and jail is for reading tattered hard copies of the Bible while slowly finding God — not texting 12-year-olds “u up?” from your free podcast studio.
Stop the low-IQ Waymowhining
The Atlantic recently published a piece about AI. Its first mistake: “studies have shown that automated vehicles are less able to detect people of color.” Per Kelsey Piper, Waymos primarily rely on lidar (laser bouncing) and imaging radar (radio waves), which are (obviously) race agnostic. But the article’s second “mistake” was more sinister. It said “One of the arguments for self-driving cars is that they would be free of the human errors that lead to crashes” — instead of letting readers know Waymos are currently already much safer than human drivers! In fact, in medical research, when a disparity like this emerges between the placebo (manual driving) and the drug (autonomous driving), doctors end the study early so that people can get on the drug, as Dr. Jonathan Slotkin wrote for the NYT in December, because anything less would be catastrophically unethical. So what are we actually doing here? Deliberately lying? Or?
Spin-N-Out
According to the California Post, a planned retail and dining destination in Irvine, CA will apparently feature one (1) new In-N-Out chain, and because most news coming out of this godforsaken state of late has revolved around such fun topics as “another homeless man stabs Whole Foods shopper” or “another billionaire job creator chooses Miami over living under communism,” dyslexic Governor Gavin is seizing the opportunity to toot his own horn harder than Marilyn Manson post-rib removal. “IN CALIFORNIA YOU SAY?!” tweeted out the social media girlie running his press account in response to the In-N-Out news. And look: it’s easy to get lost in all the terrible things about this state, folks. But if you simply consume a 250mg weed edible from the local minority-owned dispensary, and allow yourself to forget inconvenient facts like In-N-Out’s CEO moving her family out of California specifically citing the state’s terrible business climate… things actually aren’t so bad!
