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Crypto Currencies: Damaging Greed?
A 2025 Security.org report found that approximately 28% of American adults (roughly 65 million people) own a cryptocurrency. However it is unlikey that they are the same people that invested in NFTs but possibly they were NFT sellers looking to double down. And even these buyers, or eOportunists, who regard themselves as investors, would do well to remember the hundreds of millions of dollars that changed hand during NFT mania and that the exchanges that charge commissions on the both buy and sell transactions will, while damaging the investment world as a whole, be the ultimate winners. Read article
A Tangled Web
Since launching in 1995, thanks to human ingenuity, and never wanting to pass up a buck, the Internet's once simple search return page results has descended into an animated Penny Saver dotted with false news articles and non-existant 404 pages. Every user's Email has to be protected from an ever growing avalanche of toxic and stealth data-stealing spam and any and all search query pages thanks to Alphabet, et al are data scraped by upwards of 20 sites that buy and user's query and purchase data. Add GOOGLE 'partnering' (distorting searches) with over muscular companies such as Pinterest or Reddit and the validity of searches is now at an all-time low. Read article
Electricity for Consumers
Would there be a shortage of electricity if the electricity for the technology companies that operated the Cloud, mined Cryptocurrencies and drove AI servers were made to provide the power needed for such services before their deployment? As rently disclosed companies such as Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta have contracted with nuclear power suppliers but that not only will take years to come on stream and expose the country to the previously acknowledged dangers of such power generation, and in the meanwhile and for some years consumers will be suffer high bills and periodical black outs. Read article.
Immigration and Housing
It is estimated that the US has twenty million or more undocumented immigrants but it is also claimed that the US is short some six million homes. Netting these two figures would suggest a massive surplus of homes so is there a housing shortage or just a failed immigraion policy that could be reversed. Of course the other side of the coin being if a government allows its borders to be crossed by individuals that have no legal rights, yet many of which pay taxes, has tacit permission to stay been granted? Read article
'Invest to Rent' Housing Scams
Developers under the guise of providing affordable housing are offering investors high returns under 'Invest to Rent' developments which are sold to local authorities as 'affordable housing' solutions in areas that have been flooded with new and often undocumented arrivals.
Such a development would be a block of 150 apartments with just ten percent reserved for 'low income' individuals and families and, while such developments are a win / win / win for the developers, investors, builders and the local authority for building permits and other fees, only fifteen or so individuals and families are economically housed. The losers being the locals who have lost the character of their city to multiple massive holiday apartments that have over-burdened roads and services. Read article
Technology's Rat Wheel
How many of us realise that the publishers of the PC and Smartphone operating system have users - as none of us are owners of the software or the hardware - have us over a barrel? Whenever a software company choses to update the current version of their program it forces the user to comply with a download. And whenever a new version of the machines's operating system is released the apps and other software on equipment needs to be updated and this commonly results in the hardware to be bought anew to run the updated software. It's a form of rat-wheel for users and it is past time that the FCC became involved. Read article.
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‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing
It was a Monday afternoon in June 2023 when Rita Meier, 45, joined us for a video call. Meier told us about the last time she said goodbye to her husband, Stefan, five years earlier. He had been leaving their home near Lake Constance, Germany, heading for a trade fair in Milan.
Meier recalled how he hesitated between taking his Tesla Model S or her BMW. He had never driven the Tesla that far before. He checked the route for charging stations along the way and ultimately decided to try it. Rita had a bad feeling. She stayed home with their three children, the youngest less than a year old.
At 3.18pm on 10 May 2018, Stefan Meier lost control of his Model S on the A2 highway near the Monte Ceneri tunnel. Travelling at about 100kmh (62mph), he ploughed through several warning markers and traffic signs before crashing into a slanted guardrail. “The collision with the guardrail launches the vehicle into the air, where it flips several times before landing,” investigators would write later.
The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. According to witnesses, the Model S burst into flames while still airborne. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn’t unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.
At that moment, Rita Meier was unaware of the crash. She tried calling her husband, but he didn’t pick up. When he still hadn’t returned her call hours later – highly unusual for this devoted father – she attempted to track his car using Tesla’s app. It no longer worked. By the time police officers rang her doorbell late that night, Meier was already bracing for the worst.
Customers described their cars suddenly accelerating or braking hard. Some escaped with a scare; others ended up in ditches
The crash made headlines the next morning as one of the first fatal Tesla accidents in Europe. Tesla released a statement to the press saying the company was “deeply saddened” by the incident, adding, “We are working to gather all the facts in this case and are fully cooperating with local authorities.”
To this day, Meier still doesn’t know why her husband died. She has kept everything the police gave her after their inconclusive investigation. The charred wreck of the Model S sits in a garage Meier rents specifically for that purpose. The scorched phone – which she had forensically analysed at her own expense, to no avail – sits in a drawer at home. Maybe someday all this will be needed again, she says. She hasn’t given up hope of uncovering the truth.
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Rita Meier was one of many people who reached out to us after we began reporting on the Tesla Files – a cache of 23,000 leaked documents and 100 gigabytes of confidential data shared by an anonymous whistleblower. The first report we published looked at problems with Tesla’s autopilot system, which allows the cars to temporarily drive on their own, taking over steering, braking and acceleration. Though touted by the company as “Full Self-Driving” (FSD), it is designed to assist, not replace, the driver, who should keep their eyes on the road and be ready to intervene at any time.
Autonomous driving is the core promise around which Elon Musk has built his company. Tesla has never delivered a truly self-driving vehicle, yet the richest person in the world keeps repeating the claim that his cars will soon drive entirely without human help. Is Tesla’s autopilot really as advanced as he says?
The Tesla Files suggest otherwise. They contain more than 2,400 customer complaints about unintended acceleration and more than 1,500 braking issues – 139 involving emergency braking without cause, and 383 phantom braking events triggered by false collision warnings. More than 1,000 crashes are documented. A separate spreadsheet on driver-assistance incidents where customers raised safety concerns lists more than 3,000 entries. The oldest date from 2015, the most recent from March 2022. In that time, Tesla delivered roughly 2.6m vehicles with autopilot software. Most incidents occurred in the US, but there have also been complaints from Europe and Asia. Customers described their cars suddenly accelerating or braking hard. Some escaped with a scare; others ended up in ditches, crashing into walls or colliding with oncoming vehicles. “After dropping my son off in his school parking lot, as I go to make a right-hand exit it lurches forward suddenly,” one complaint read. Another said, “My autopilot failed/malfunctioned this morning (car didn’t brake) and I almost rear-ended somebody at 65mph.” A third reported, “Today, while my wife was driving with our baby in the car, it suddenly accelerated out of nowhere.”
Braking for no reason caused just as much distress. “Our car just stopped on the highway. That was terrifying,” a Tesla driver wrote. Another complained, “Frequent phantom braking on two-lane highways. Makes the autopilot almost unusable.” Some report their car “jumped lanes unexpectedly”, causing them to hit a concrete barrier, or veered into oncoming traffic.
Musk has given the world many reasons to criticise him since he teamed up with Donald Trump. Many people do – mostly by boycotting his products. But while it is one thing to disagree with the political views of a business leader, it is another to be mortally afraid of his products. In the Tesla Files, we found thousands of examples of why such fear may be justified.
‘My husband died in an unexplained accident. And no one cared.’ Illustration: Carl Godfrey/The Guardian
We set out to match some of these incidents of autopilot errors with customers’ names. Like hundreds of other Tesla customers, Rita Meier entered the vehicle identification number of her husband’s Model S into the response form we published on the website of the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, for which we carried out our investigation. She quickly discovered that the Tesla Files contained data related to the car. In her first email to us, she wrote, “You can probably imagine what it felt like to read that.”
There isn’t much information – just an Excel spreadsheet titled “Incident Review”. A Tesla employee noted that the mileage counter on Stefan Meier’s car stood at 4,765 miles at the time of the crash. The entry was catalogued just one day after the fatal accident. In the comment field was written, “Vehicle involved in an accident.” The cause of the crash remains unknown to this day. In Tesla’s internal system, a company employee had marked the case as “resolved”, but for five years, Rita Meier had been searching for answers. After Stefan’s death, she took over the family business – a timber company with 200 employees based in Tettnang, Baden-Württemberg. As journalists, we are used to tough interviews, but this one was different. We had to strike a careful balance – between empathy and the persistent questioning good reporting demands. “Why are you convinced the Tesla was responsible for your husband’s death?” we asked her. “Isn’t it possible he was distracted – maybe looking at his phone?”
No one knows for sure. But Meier was well aware that Musk has previously claimed Tesla “releases critical crash data affecting public safety immediately and always will”; that he has bragged many times about how its superior handling of data sets the company apart from its competitors. In the case of her husband, why was she expected to believe there was no data?
Meier’s account was structured and precise. Only once did the toll become visible – when she described how her husband’s body burned in full view of the firefighters. Her eyes filled with tears and her voice cracked. She apologised, turning away. After she collected herself, she told us she has nothing left to gain – but also nothing to lose. That was why she had reached out to us. We promised to look into the case.
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Rita Meier wasn’t the only widow to approach us. Disappointed customers, current and former employees, analysts and lawyers were sharing links to our reporting. Many of them contacted us. More than once, someone wrote that it was about time someone stood up to Tesla – and to Elon Musk.
Meier, too, shared our articles and the callout form with others in her network – including people who, like her, lost loved ones in Tesla crashes. One of them was Anke Schuster. Like Meier, she had lost her husband in a Tesla crash that defies explanation and had spent years chasing answers. And, like Meier, she had found her husband’s Model X listed in the Tesla Files. Once again, the incident was marked as resolved – with no indication of what that actually meant.
“My husband died in an unexplained and inexplicable accident,” Schuster wrote in her first email. Her dealings with police, prosecutors and insurance companies, she said, had been “hell”. No one seemed to understand how a Tesla works. “I lost my husband. His four daughters lost their father. And no one ever cared.”
Her husband, Oliver, was a tech enthusiast, fascinated by Musk. A hotelier by trade, he owned no fewer than four Teslas. He loved the cars. She hated them – especially the autopilot. The way the software seemed to make decisions on its own never sat right with her. Now, she felt as if her instincts had been confirmed in the worst way.
We uncovered an ominous black box in which every byte of customer data was collected – and sealed off from public scrutiny
Oliver Schuster was returning from a business meeting on 13 April 2021 when his black Model X veered off highway B194 between Loitz and Schönbeck in north-east Germany. It was 12.50pm when the car left the road and crashed into a tree. Schuster started to worry when her husband missed a scheduled bank appointment. She tried to track the vehicle but found no way to locate it. Even calling Tesla led nowhere. That evening, the police broke the news: after the crash her husband’s car had burst into flames. He had burned to death – with the fire brigade watching helplessly.
The crashes that killed Meier’s and Schuster’s husbands were almost three years apart but the parallels were chilling. We examined accident reports, eyewitness accounts, crash-site photos and correspondence with Tesla. In both cases, investigators had requested vehicle data from Tesla, and the company hadn’t provided it. In Meier’s case, Tesla staff claimed no data was available. In Schuster’s, they said there was no relevant data.
Over the next two years, we spoke with crash victims, grieving families and experts around the world. What we uncovered was an ominous black box – a system designed not only to collect and control every byte of customer data, but to safeguard Musk’s vision of autonomous driving. Critical information was sealed off from public scrutiny. Read the full article at The Guardian Newspaper.
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Laws Cooked Locally
When it comes to legislation Californian's do not live in America they live in California, and the same goes for Alabama or any of the other 50 states because local laws, though arguably they are not supposed to, constantly overrule federal laws. An example of such a legal inconsistency is 'pot' being legal in California and some other states is banned by the federal government. The same goes for self-declared sanctuary cities which are in direct opposition to federal policies. Will Governor Newsom, infamous for the thousands of draconian California-specific rules he passed during COVID, should he should be president turn the other cheek towards the states that ignore federal laws. Read article
California's Evaporated Water Policy
Thanks to California's politicians consistently ignoring the ever-cyclical water shortage, even though it is well understood that exporting food exports water, the state's farmers continue to export produce around the world to fund local govrnment spending. No action has been taken to creating new water storage for the also ever-cyclical excessively wet winters to capture the precious water that currently runs to the ocean - through some cities are eying the creation of nonsensical desalination plants. Utility providers claim that desalisation plants will reduce the excess fees for domestic water consumption but in reality bills will greatly increase to cover the cost of the new system installations, while shamefully it is already the case that the present delivery infrastructure aleady accounts for more than 90% of a consumer's water bill. Read article
Social Media's anti Social practices
The billions visiting social media sites enable investors and operators, while claiming that they are only conduits and not publishers, to become immensly wealthy while corroding society by selling ad space to spammers, pornographers and false news advertisers. Such companies also corrupt the politicl process as demonstrated by their leaked internal policies during the last two US general elections when owners - as did the newpaper magnate W R Hearst - mandated political guidelines to match their own. It is way past time to regulate social media sites and to hold them accountable for all the HTML and every graphic that they PUBLISH. Read article
Wind Turbines Are All Puff
Wind turbines dotted all over the landscape are not only ugly to the point of lessening the visual quality of life but, as a recent study has disclosed that prominent wind farms block the wind from going onward to drive more distant turbines, they are often effectual. Such turbines are also responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of birds a year; their blade sare exposed to UV radiation, which can cause degradation leading to cracks and delamination and they consume oil as a lubricant. Read article
Smarter Than People Phones
The innovative device that spawned the first $3 trillion company could be the downfall of society. Though smartphones have been lauded as having opened up the world by putting communications and data at user's fingertips they also and ironically encourage isolationist tendencies, so is it possible that this miracle product is the worst invention of all time?
Walk down any busy street and more often than not teenagers and younger children will be on their smartphones. The device is also a babysitter for on-the-go parents with many young children shopping with their mothers using a smartphone; face to face communication has almost been relegated to the history books; theatres, restaurants most other public areas are far too often dominated by loud phone conversations of people who either annoyingly speak too loud or worse still use the phone's speaker. So we ask, while obviously usful as a tool for internet searches, reminders and many of the other inbuilt functions, when over-used is it possible that this miracle product is the worst invention of all time? Read article
5G is just for AI
Just where are the highly promoted benefits of 5G phones for consumers? It's not in the shorter battery life or when 5G is not available and phone autoswitches to 4GLTE - because there are no 4G masts. In fact so bad is 5G coverage that many users would rather have stayed with 4G. The sad truth is that 5G implementations only really benefit businesses for data collection and not consumers as shown by the lawsuit against GM that prohibited their practice of in-car behavior tracking sold to insurance companies to vary individual driver's premiums. Read article
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