Sent to my mailing lists this morning about #Mastodon, etc. Just FYI -- I won't argue on this thread.
DISGUSTING: "Search for Titanic submersible unleashes 'eat the rich' sentiment online"
My comments:
I noted this and had arguments about this over on Mastodon (which has a decided Left tilt, as you may or may not know, as compared with Twitter's now far Right tilt). Apparently these people don't care that these now deceased persons had families (one of the dead is the young son of another passenger), other loved ones, friends -- and to show no respect for any of these groups is sick, no matter how one feels about income inequality or the focus of the news on dramatic tragic stories rather than more important and tragic mundane ones involving far more persons.
These seem to often be the same commenters who argue that ALL corporations are evil (no exceptions!), and often that charities are evil as well.
Frankly, I'm growing tired of the rapid decay in social media, and that plus the coming onslaught of government regulations and content controls and ID requirements, etc. have me seriously considering pulling the plug on ALL of these platforms. Life is too short for this disease, irrespective of how much enjoyment and even education one receives via them from time to time. -L
@lauren
I’ve seen some inappropriate comments. Most of what I’ve seen are several variations of this: why spend so much money and news time on this and so little on the sinking of a packed migrant boat off the coast of Greece.
@mcnulla A similar question could be asked about the weeks of continuous coverage and billions of dollars spent on searches and retrofits when a single jetliner goes down and/or vanishes and perhaps several hundred people die, despite millions of people flying safely every year on the same planes. Of course mystery is a key factor. Those immigrants could reportedly have been saved if the local government had chosen to do so. No mystery.
I've long predicted that as robocars kill more people, the manufacturers will amplify Musk's argument that "well, they're so much safer than human drivers on a statistical basis". And that argument won't fly. Watch and see.
@lauren @mcnulla It'd be heartbreaking if that prediction bears out, because IIUC the largest contributor to vehicle safety since the airbag has been the addition of automated safety systems (lane-keeping, auto-stop, etc.).
And not just for human drivers; they're capable of avoiding collision and decelerating a vehicle better than a human can, so they decrease the incidents of, and energies involved in, collision with pedestrians and non-car vehicles also.
Hobbling them because we'd rather see ten humans killed by other humans than one killed by an algorithmic failure would be unfortunate.
@mtomczak @mcnulla I am quite confident in my analysis. Wait until the first headline that says, "Robotic car plows into children waiting for school bus, kills five." Watch the reaction. In fact, the long tail of complicated issues is what's likely to keep truly autonomous cars out of the hands of the public at large for the foreseeable future. And that's just fine with me.
