There’s no upside or downside to setting a tariff on uninhabited islands. Why not include Atlantis just in case? Why not also set a tariff on Mars, Venus or Pluto just to be sure? Why not also include Middle Earth and Vulcan in case they turn out to be real?

If all they wanted was to ensure that every place in the world was covered, they could have just said that the standard tariff rate was 10%. What’s more likely is they used an LLM to generate a list of every place on earth and just put a 10% next to it, showing how unserious they are.

Assuming you’re talking about the “no brown m&ms” clause that Van Halen had as part of their tour contract. If so, you might not know that it may have been a form of quality control. Van Halen had a big and complex stage show. A typical show would use 3 18-wheeler trucks, Van Halen would use 9 of them.

The complex contract ensured that they had a stage that could support all the weight of the Van Halen show. That any overhead girders were sturdy enough to hang the things they needed to hang. That the electrical system in the venue could support all their equipment. That the doors were big enough to allow the equipment to be pushed through, etc.

If the band went backstage and saw there were brown m&ms in the bowl, they’d know that the venue hadn’t carefully read the contract, so they’d need to double check everything else.

It’s not really a small point though. It’s a huge signal about how serious these people are.

Like, if a scientific paper has the text “as an AI language model” in it, you can be sure that there’s no point in reading the paper deeply. Similarly, tariffs on uninhabited islands tells you that there’s no “5d chess” being played here, these people are absolute morons.

To be fair, and ugh, I hate to have to stand up for these assholes, but…

To be fair, their claim is that the video was a lie and that the results were manufactured. They believe that Teslas are actually safe and that Rober was doing some kind of Elon Musk takedown trying to profit off the shares getting tanked and promote a rival company.

They actually do have a little bit of evidence for those claims:

1. The wall changes between different camera angles. In some angles the wall is simply something painted on canvas. In other angles it’s a solid styrofoam wall.
2. The inside the car view in the YouTube video doesn’t make it clear that autopilot mode is engaged.
3. Mark Rober chose to use Autopilot mode rather than so-called Full Self Driving.

But, he was interviewed about this, and he provided additional footage to clear up what happened.

1. They did the experiment twice, once with a canvas wall, then a few weeks later with a styrofoam wall. The car smashed right into the wall the first time, but it wasn’t very dramatic because the canvas just blew out of the way. They wanted a more dramatic video for YouTube, so they did it again with a styrofoam wall so you could see the wall getting smashed. This included pre-weakening the wall so that when the car hit it, it smashed a dramatic Looney-Tunes looking hole in the wall. When they made the final video, they included various cuts from both the first and second attempts. The car hit the wall both times, but it wasn’t just one single hit like it was shown in the video.

2. There’s apparently a “rainbow” path shown when the car is in Autopilot mode. [RAinbows1?!? DEI!?!?!?!] In the cut they posted to YouTube, you couldn’t see this rainbow path. But, Rober posted a longer cut of the car hitting the wall where it was visible. So, it wasn’t that autopilot was off, but in the original YouTube video you couldn’t tell.

3. He used Autopilot mode because from his understanding (as a Tesla owner (this was his personal vehicle being tested)), Full Self Driving requires you to enter a destination address. He just wanted to drive down a closed highway at high speed, so he used Autopilot instead. In his understanding as a Tesla owner and engineer, there would be no difference in how the car dealt with obstacles in autopilot mode vs. full self driving, but he admitted that he hadn’t tested it, so it’s possible that so-called Full Self-Driving would have handled things differently.

Anyhow, these rabid MAGA Elon Fanboys did pick up on some minor inconsistencies in his original video. Rober apprently didn’t realize what a firestorm he was wading into. His intention was to make a video about how cool LIDAR is, but with a cool scene of a car smashing through a wall as the hook. He’d apparently been planning and filming the video for half a year, and he claims it just happened to get released right at the height of the time when Teslas are getting firebombed.

A better trick would be to paint the road going straight when there’s a cliff. Much easier to hide the evidence that way.

To you and me, yeah. To a guy who has a gilded toilet, Chuck’s drip is something he aspires to but will never achieve.

As much as Trump is a dick, I think this was more a case of his being unwilling or unable to read. I bet the staff that specializes in protocols for dealing with other world leaders did everything they could to tell him how this event was supposed to go, but he was too dumb to absorb the information, so he just fucked it up.

It’s pretty interesting. The only people Trump respects are kings and dictators. You’d think that he wouldn’t respect Chuck, who has almost no real power, only soft power. But, then you look at how he loves gilded things, and you can see that what he’s aiming for is the jewels and gold of the monarchy. So, he looks up to Charlie. And, it’s going to be really awkward when HRH reminds him that he’s also the king of Canada.

For Chaz, this is an existential thing. Since WWII the crown has been progressively losing territories. Many former realms have become republics. But, Liz and then Chucky have managed to keep them in the commonwealth. Losing a territory over which he’s still the actual king would be proof that he’s really just a figurehead and the monarchy is obsolete. OTOH, if he could use his soft power to protect Canada, he could show some people that the monarchy is still relevant, and maybe keep some countries like Australia from swapping their monarchy for a republic.

The details on that picture say that it’s at Andrews Air Force Base, so it’s the US military providing the US president with a red carpet / staircase.

Alamy has a bunch of photos of John Kerry travelling by airplane and while sometimes there’s a red carpet or a red staircase, other times there’s nothing.

Is this abnormal? Are there images of other people getting normal-sized red carpets?