Baffled European

Tag: attacking lawyers

  • 4-dimensional chess

    Elon Musk was boasting a few days ago that his predictions have generally come true. This comes as a surprise to me.

    It turns out it was as long ago as 2013 that we all got excited about self-driving cars and their imminent arrival. Musk has made regular promises about such technology, usually several times a year, but still no self-driving cars.

    We all know he wants to go to Mars. In fact, he reckoned he would send two rockets there by the end of 2022. That moved to 2025, now 2029. Not to mention that StarShip, among all the rapid unplanned disassemblies, does not meet specifications and will probably never work as promised.

    Then there’s his Boring Company. The idea was to have a tunnel for public transport. He expects cars to travel through this tunnel at 250kmh. They don’t. His sales patter following the obvious failure is like that of a perpetual motion crank: the prototype is there, we just need more money.

    Predictions for Neuralink are for 2025. Maybe they will come true. On the other hand, research suggests that the human brain is like a very very slow modem in computing terms and cannot be linked to a gigabyte stream. I await the breakthrough.

    Most recently, he predicted he could put a puppet in charge of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Despite spending $25million on this project, and engaging in outright election fraud, he got that wrong as well.

  • A question of honour

    A sliver of sanity in the US as a judge rules that you can’t simply declare thousands of people to be “dishonourable” and exclude them from the army. The trans soldiers are thus to be reinstated, after months of being illegally discriminated against. But their cards are marked and the government won’t stop there.

    The most galling thing of this episode (so far) is that President Bonespurs himself, who was too scared to join the army, is the one who decides who is “honourable” or not. This order violates the very constitution he swore an oath of honour to protect.

    But what is honour anyway, and why is it so important? Everybody knows what it is, but defining it is more difficult.

    In the Middle Ages, people relied on oaths of fealty to maintain the structure of society. From peasants to the King, everybody promised to serve their Lord and Master. Anybody who broke this oath was dishonourable. They were outcast, shunned by all who knew them.

    Losing your honour was a terrible punishment. Gentlemen would fight duels to the death over “honour”. This was still commonplace at the time the US constitution was written.

    We don’t bother with “honour” much nowadays. We have NDAs and other legal instruments to precisely define people’s behaviour, rather than relying on a vague and outdated concept. Losing your honour today is pretty meaningless and explains why it is no impediment to becoming president.