Odds and Ends (6)

I get an idea for a post, start it, put it aside to see if more ideas accumulate around it. If they don’t then eventually, when I have enough too short posts, I put them together and post them.

The ICE Shooting in Minneapolis

Ross is not going to be convicted of murder, for two reasons:

1. Criminal prosecution would be in a federal court and the people who control the federal government are on his side. As I wrote in a different context,¹ if the King controls criminal prosecution, the King’s friends can get away with murder. So he will not be prosecuted. At least not in the next three years.

2. If he was prosecuted for murder it is not clear that he would or should be convicted, although he might get a hung jury. Shooting the driver of a car who is accelerating towards you is arguably self-defense, arguable enough to not meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for murder. That does not cover the second and third shots but his attorney could argue either that having started to shoot he didn’t have time to realize his reason for shooting no longer existed or that, having tried to run him down, as he reasonably (if mistakenly) believed, she was a danger to others. I have seen both arguments made online; given the observed split in how different people interpret what happened, a unanimous vote for conviction is unlikely.

Even if he will not be tried for the crime of murder and, if tried, probably would not be convicted he can be tried, perhaps convicted, for the tort of wrongful death. A tort prosecution is initiated by the claimant not by the state. A tort conviction only requires proof by a preponderance of the evidence.

The plaintiff’s attorney could argue that if he was afraid the car would run over him the sensible response was to get out of the way, since shooting the driver might kill the driver but would not stop the car. He could also point out that the second and third shots were fired after he had gotten out of the way, all evidence that whether or not he was trying to kill her he was not trying nearly as hard as he should have been not to.

He might not lose the case and if he did lose it his employer would probably pay the damages, but the trial would generate information about what happened that should make it a little clearer who and to what extent was at fault.

Iran

Probably the best thing Trump could have done was nothing, which would have made it a little harder for the authorities to blame the demonstrations on him. Now that he has promised the demonstrators his support he has the problem of finding a form of support he can actually provide.

I have a possible answer: Airdrop tens of thousands of firearms with their ammunition randomly around Iran. Shooting demonstrators is a more risky tactic if some of them can shoot back.

No boots on the ground, total cost less than a hundred million dollars.

Rudyard Kipling’s Comments

On California’s Proposed Billionaire Tax. On Trump.

Measuring Religion

I have a simple way of estimating how religious a neighborhood is: In the week before and the week after Christmas, go around counting lawn displays. Some will be nativity themed, some Santa themed. The higher the ratio of the former to the latter, the more religious the neighborhood is.

My count² in my neighborhood is 3 nativities, 3 Santas, three or four secular displays sans Santa: Snowmen, reindeer, and a Grinch.

Designing a House

A news story on Drafted, a startup that produces computer-drawn plans for custom house designs, reminded me of an idea, probably my father’s, for when we were designing Capitaf, my parents’ Vermont house. The idea was, for a week or so, to have every member of the household log trips: Bedroom to bathroom, living room to kitchen, kitchen to bathroom, … . The count of how many times each of us went where could be used to evaluate alternative house designs by how much walking each would require each day.

As best I recall we never actually did it, but it struck me as a idea the startup could use. Offer customers the option of logging trips within their present home and sending the count in along with the information on what sort of house they wanted. The computer that drew up alternative house plans could calculate for each how far each member of the family would have to walk each day. The customer could decide for himself whether he wanted to minimize the number to save time, maximize for exercise, perhaps minimize it for the aging parents, maximize for the slothful children.

Computers do arithmetic fast and cheap.

Tesla

I have a proposal for Tesla: Offer to give other car companies the information necessary to make their cars physically capable of implementing Tesla’s self driving software. Just as with Tesla’s own cars, getting the software downloaded and activated will require a payment to Tesla, currently a lump sum of $8000 or a subscription fee of $99/month.³

Tesla has deliberately made the physical requirements relatively simple, so it should not cost other companies much to modify current designs to satisfy them. Most companies already have ways in which the car can control steering, acceleration and possibly braking for their driver assistance packages so the only substantial cost should be a much better computer.

Tesla’s annual profit is about $5-10 billion a year. World car sales are about ninety million a year. If one percent of car buyers buy self-driving, that is $8 billion a year of revenue with almost no direct cost beyond modifying the software to make it work with internal combustion cars as well as EV’s. There will be an indirect cost to Tesla’s income from selling its own cars, since other companies will be in a better position to compete, but total profit will almost certainly go up. If two or three percent …

And other companies will have less of an incentive to develop their own self-driving software in competition with Tesla’s.

Speaking as a Tesla stockholder, I am in favor. Speaking as a would-be customer for the self-driving minivan that Tesla isn’t making — there are videos of it online but unfortunately they are fake — I am also in favor. A self-driving Honda Odyssey might not be as cool as a Tesla minivan but it would do fine for our annual Pennsic trip, 2600 miles each way in a minivan stuffed with pavilions, rope beds, medieval furniture, garb, cooking gear and us.

---

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

1. A passage in a chapter of my Legal Systems Very Different quoted in an earlier post.

2. I did not keep notes as carefully as I should have, so my count may be a little off.

3. Tesla has announced that the lump sum option will be dropped in another month; I am using it in my calculations since it makes them simpler and might come back.