The worst part is that there's so much class discrimination that you don't even need to bring race into it to see how broadly fucked it is. I personally have a friend that's an older white guy who the bank wouldn't approve for a 15% down mortgage that would cost him about $1000/mo, but he had no issues getting approved at a manufactured home lot where the lot rent alone is $950/mo, plus the $500/mo for the home itself. All because he used to be poor and had some really unfortunate financial luck, he gets the privilege of paying twice as much for objectively worse housing.
It was something like $9k to have my grandfather cremated and a small service for him. The funeral industry is even worse than the wedding industry at taking advantage of your time of emotional turmoil, and because even legally you're kinda limited at what you can do with the body and you're on a time crunch, shopping around isn't exactly easy.
Given that servicemember funerals can be quite elaborate, and I'm sure that number also likely includes a number of other things like death benefits paid to the families, I can totally believe that cost.
I can tell you the real reason: Cameras are cheap for the amount of stuff you can kinda-sorta manage with them. That's literally it. There's no other 4D chess game of data collecting or anything else. They're cheap to add and integrate, and adequate for object detection in typical scenarios. No need to worry about the shape of the bumper or paint effecting the radar, no need to have a bunch of individual ultrasonics integrated into the bumper and the associated wiring/labor costs.
I worked with them, and there were numerous times where they came to us asking for new sensors because their cameras were too shitty for what they wanted to do, then once they got a quote, they miraculously didn't need them and figured it out. It happened with corner radars on the Y, it happened with them removing the front radars on everything, and it happened with the ultrasonics.
They bet it all on cameras as a lie to consumers and defraud investors that their cheap shit-boxes would be income generating Robotaxis. Even worse, their own engineers had hard data showing that removing the radar would directly result in pedestrian/motorcyclist deaths, but they had to keep those bullshit production numbers going, so they took them out and it's directly resulted in dozens of likely preventable deaths.
Anyone who's ever worked with Tesla directly knows they're an absolute fucking nightmare, and even compared to the shitshow of GM or Stellantis, the absolute blatant disregard for human life at that company is disgusting.
It sucks, where is the 2016 Musk. That dude seemed to really want to help the world
Knowing people who worked with him at the time, 2016 Musk was a PR illusion and nothing more. He's literally always been a giant piece of shit, he just had much better handlers and was able to hide it a lot better so he could get all those sweet government subsidies and commit stock fraud. Literally everything he's ever done has been in the name of gifting money from the government or shareholders in some form or another for personal enrichment. He's never once cared about anyone other than himself.
Musk is now one of the wealthiest people in the world and our justice and financial system have made it clear he won't be punished, so now he can be the same piece of shit he's always been, just publicly, because it's clear there will be basically zero repercussions.
The thing is that you don't need FSD to do that. Having a really good AEB system massively improves safety, far more than a convenience feature like FSD does, but they fucked that up by taking the radar out so now it performs far worse at night, hence running over pedestrians and other VRUs far more often.
But you can't grift billions out of investors by having a really good safety feature, so you hack together a system from hardware only ever originally only meant for adaptive cruise and lane keeping, and tech bros can show off on YouTube and hopefully not run over a cyclist, all to keep that grift rolling
This is legitimately one of the real reasons Musk is pushing for Trump so hard. NHTSA (and all the other regulatory agencies) were effectively gutted completely by the Trump admin and it's basically the entire reason Elon could grift his way to where he is today. The moment Biden got into office, basically every single agency in existence began investigating him and pushing blocks out of the proverbial Jenga tower of the various Musk companies. He's praying that Trump will get elected and allow him to keep grifting, because otherwise he's almost definitely going to jail, or at a minimum losing the vast majority of his empire.
There was a show I remember way back called "Testees" where it followed a couple of guys who were human Guinea pigs for some pharma company. Each episode was generally about some new drug and the horrible/hilarious side effects and shenanigans that would ensue. There was also a 3rd guy who was basically Frank from It's Always Sunny, and the B plot would flow him sometimes. In one episode, the company actually makes a penis enlargement pill that works, however a little too well. It's so big that every time he gets an erection, he blacks out from the drop in blood pressure. Been a while since I've thought of that show lol.
Yes, that's where the original quote comes from.
"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."
When you look at the regulatory environment and enforcement under the Trump admin, even before they were best buds, it's very clear that Elon is absolutely terrified of a Harris administration. The moment Biden took office, he was almost instantly under investigation from basically every letter agency in the USA, and they've been slowly chipping away at his Jenga tower of fraud. He sees Trump as the only way to hold on to his ill-gotten gains and avoid a prison cell.
See: the cyborg soldier subplot of Metal Gear Rising: Revengence
It's kind of both. A lot of modern Samsung phones do this really weird "AI Enhancement" shit to improve the look of zoomed in shots. I remember testing it out at Best Buy, taking pictures of some Blu-rays on the other side of the store with the 20x zoom option. The original photo was pretty much what you'd expect, it looked like a low-res super cropped pic, but then it applied the "AI Enhancement" and did it's best to fill in the text and price labels, and wound up looking exactly like a bunch of garbled AI text.
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Absolutely! It's something people really don't like thinking about, but end-of-life planning is super duper important. Create and regularly update your will, ensure you have beneficiaries listed for stuff like stock accounts, and leave very clear instructions (and ideally money) aside for how to act on them. Have a lawyer look over them as well to prevent any family bullshit from going on as well.