Anybody Surprised?

by

Battery metal costs, shortages could add years to pursuit of cheaper EVs

Surging battery prices and shortages of metals and materials  likely will last for some time, Toyota chief scientist Gill Pratt warned this week.

“The world has thought about this in too simple of a way,” Pratt said of the auto industry’s rapid shift to electric vehicles, warning “there’s going to be this crunch [of] not enough materials,” and conditions likely will remain “hard” in the near- and mid-term.

I’m not surprised:

Coming: a Battery Supply Crunch? (2017)

‘Green’ Energy: Materials-Intensive–And It Matters (2021)

Meanwhile, Biden and his ‘energy secretary’, Jennifer Granholm, are still telling people concerned about high gas price to just get an EV.

Academic Malpractice

by

The post at Legal Insurrection (link) says in part, that the goal is to “…to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.”
So basically, this is an administrative rubber-stamping a passing grade on the report cards of black students who can’t be arsed to attend class, behave properly as students when they do, or turn in required assignments. Frankly, one wonders why such students even bother with school anyway, if they are so vehemently disinclined towards the life intellectual, but truant law and free daycare for such parental units as they have probably account for it, as well as money for butts in seats on the part of the school itself. At this rate of scholastic malpractice, urban schools might just as well hand out high school graduation certificates as if they were Pokemon cards, one to a customer and save themselves time and effort in the classroom. Any serious education of pupils appears as merely a happy afterthought to a means of employing large numbers of administrators, assistant principals and teachers whose union membership is vastly more important to the powers that be than imparting knowledge to that handful of rare-as-hen’s-teeth pupils who seriously want to learn.

Read more

Random Pic

by

cloud lightning

Exaggerated Automation Claim Story of the Week

by

In 2016, a prominent computer scientist–a pioneer in artificial intelligence, he would be a winner of the 2018 Turing Award–said:

We should stop training radiologists now, it’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.

Hasn’t worked out that way.   AI can be a useful supplement to a human radiologist, but I don’t think it’s being used anywhere on an exclusive, human-radiologist-replacing basis.

Just as well that the training of radiologists wasn’t shut down.

It is often unwise to make radical changes based on the opinions of experts who are proponents of particular technologies.   (Of course there are cases where such radical changes are called for–the aviation experts who in the 1920s and 1930s foresaw a major role for aviation in naval warfare, for example.)   But in the case of robotics/AI at the present time, I think over-claiming is generally more likely than under-claiming.

When the Rule of Law Fails: A Reprise Post

by

So, reading the story of this numbskull (link found through Instapundit) bloviating on MSNBC about the fierce urgency of abolishing the police reminded me of a long post that I did some years ago about what happens in a lawless, politically corrupt, violence-plagued city when the otherwise upright and law-abiding citizens get fed to the teeth with lawlessness, corruption and violence, and decide to take matters into their own hands. Brittany Packnett Cunningham, apparently noted as an anti-police activist, likely would not like what happens when citizens are finally pushed an inch too far.

The resulting post of mine was originally in three parts, but reposted here in total, below the fold. The story of the Vigilance Committee of 1856 was one that I had originally researched as providing a turn of plot for my Gold Rush adventure, The Golden Road. The hero of that novel, young Fredi Steinmetz worked for a time in San Francisco with his friend Edwin, selling copies of James King’s Evening Daily Bulletin on the streets and delivering to subscribers late in 1855, but left for the diggings before the Vigilance Committee renewed itself. The situation in San Francisco, which finally boiled over, reminds me very much of current events; naked chicanery at the polls, political corruption, a high level of crony capitalism, and criminals terrorizing ordinary citizens and going unpunished.

Read more