☕️ WHO’S DRIVING? ☙ Saturday, October 19, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Robotaxis on verge of electric swarm; NASA scrubs Boeing and Musk gets political armor; corporate media gets depressed over Kamala switch; great election security news, unexpectedly; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Time for the Weekend Edition. Your author is still recovering from a fall cold, with congestion, brain fog, and oddly, neck aches. So your short but punchy roundup this morning includes: robot taxis set to take the country by convenience and introversion; NASA scrubs Boeing altogether as SpaceX surges into first place in the space race; media reporting Harris campaign shifts using totally depressed rhetoric; and corporate media’s complaints about Trump election security efforts are unintentionally encouraging.

🗞 C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖🪖 If you live in Central Florida and are looking for something to do today, I recommend the “4th Florida Summit on Covid:  First, Do NO Harm!” sponsored by Florida’s heroic Covid doc Dr. John Littell. Healthcare professionals can earn 6 continuing education credits.

The always entertaining and informative event is located at the marvelous World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Florida. I won’t be there, but I’ve represented two of the event’s highlighted speakers.  So.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🤖🤖 The robots are coming! The Wall Street Journal ran a moving story yesterday headlined, “How San Francisco Learned to Love Self-Driving Cars.”

If this long-form press release promoting Google-affiliated Waymo included any actual news, it was paid driverless rides have skyrocketed from 10,000 a week last summer, to over 100,000 per week now. The company has special permits allowing it to run robotic taxicabs in San Fransisco and parts of Los Angeles.

It’s growing. Because its technology is quickly maturing, Waymo is currently planning expansions into new markets like Austin, Texas and Atlanta. The article’s many personal interest anecdotes all raved about how superior fully-automated ride-sharing is; mainly being that you don’t have to make casual chit-chat, and can focus on your Candy Crush.

Introverts will love robot taxis. It’s all fun and games until the day they revolt and start driving everybody crazy.

Driverless conveyances are rapidly becoming the first big wave of robots to replace an entire industry. First, it will be the cabbies and ride-share drivers. Then, once the robot taxis are going well, it will spread like a mechanical fungus, to everything that moves, semis, buses, trains, boats, and finally airplanes. After all, the robots practically own the rocket-driving industry already.

I suspect the robots will even want to drive our bicycles and skateboards at some point, but you have to draw a line someplace.

It’s worth mentioning the robot taxis are the invention that first inspired the fascist WEF’s infamous crack about “owning nothing and being happy.”  Who needs a car when it’s cheaper to just grab rides from robot taxicabs to take you to your robot airplane? Bend over for your robot security probe before boarding!

📉 Speaking of robots and rockets and probes, Futurism ran a story Thursday headlined, “NASA Abandons Boeing's Cursed Starliner for Upcoming Missions to the Space Station.” Cursed. The sub-headline glumly asked, “Could this be the end of Starliner?”

The news was that, despite having invested $5 billion in the project, NASA reluctantly deleted Boeing’s troubled Starliner from all upcoming scheduled space missions through at least 2026. The change leaves SpaceX’s Dragon as the agency’s lone domestic provider. (NASA also demurely confirmed it will continue seat-swapping with the Russians on certain space station missions).

Adding insult to injury, NASA’s decision comes as two of its astronauts remain stranded on the International Space Station, where they will be literally hanging out until February.

It’s only fair to note that, during Starliner’s first crewed test mission, it did not actually explode. It delivered its crew to the space station and returned home on robopilot in more or less one piece. The trouble was that the whole trip was plagued with minor but nettlesome problems, comparable to say, unplanned wheel droppage during airplane landings, but not quite as bad as rapid unscheduled door plug relocation.

Ironically, NASA originally considered dividing its multi-billion dollar budget between blue-blooded Boeing and scrappy SpaceX, but ultimately decided to award nearly all the money to Boeing. SpaceX was largely forced to self-finance, while Boeing built its now sidelined spaceship using taxpayer dollars.

Figures.

One advantage SpaceX has over its much older competitor is that Musk’s company enjoys a leaner, more entrepreneurial corporate culture. That’s a fact, but the main difference between the two companies is that Boeing made DEI its top priority, whereas SpaceX got sued for refusing to hire illegal immigrants, and kept its top priority focused on lowering the per-kilogram price of reliably getting cargo into orbit.

The moral of the story is: Go woke, go broke. But Boeing shouldn’t get all the blame. The religion of Wokeness — along with its sacrament, DEI — were something inflicted on U.S. corporations like Boeing. Nobody wanted DEI.

Investment giants Vanguard and Blackrock, which largely led the DEI revolution, have a lot to answer for. Did they have ulterior motives for undermining corporate America? Motives unrelated to profit?

Who benefits from the controlled demolition and bureaucratization of corporate America? Are Vanguard and Blackrock working for America’s enemies? Just asking.

🔥 In case you missed it, influential financial radio show personality Dave Ramsey endorsed Trump on his show this week, saying he knew he would lose a lot of his listeners over it, but didn’t care.

CLIP: Dave Ramsey goes all in for Trump (0:55).

The news of Dave’s courageous endorsement was not, perhaps, as big as Elon Musk’s all-in bet on Trump, but it’s a sign of a very encouraging trend. Dave’s going all-in may not be as significant as Elon’s in terms of real dollars. But relatively speaking, Dave might have more to lose between the two.

🔥 On Thursday, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Harris campaign shifts strategy as anxiety rises over Trump gains.” If this widely cited story was any guide, the internal polling numbers must be awful.

Behold the bleak language Reuters relied on in its story about Kamala’s shifting campaign strategy: “Democratic anxieties rise,” “dead heat,” “finger-pointing and second-guessing,” “losing sleep,” “narrowing polls,” “underdog,” “major weakness,” “failure to fully engage,” and “subpar outreach.”

Days before the election, the cackling candidate is once again changing her tone. This time, she’s supposed to be “more prosecutorial,” which, based on the campaign’s latest rhetoric, means convicting Trump of being a fascist.

According to Reuters, the new “prosecutorial look” is supposed to make her appear tough, and to appeal to black men, who can’t stand her shrieking chortles and who think voting for Kamala Harris is weak.

🔥🔥 New York Magazine ran an unintentionally encouraging story Thursday headlined, “Trump’s Two-Prong Strategy to Ensure He Can’t Lose.” I don’t mean to quibble, but the article actually lists four prongs. The columnist meant to wail about Trump’s unfair election strategy, but it ended up as one of the most reassuring articles in weeks.

In New York Magazine’s view, the Trump Campaign is relying on four strategies to “suppress the Democrat vote.” Haha, like me, you’ll instantly recognize the four techniques NYMag complained about as being ways of stopping Democrats from cheating. Here they are:

1. Widespread purging of ineligible voters off of rolls all across the country. (NYMag whined: Republicans are removing people just for not responding to inquires fast enough.)

2. New rules in various places make mail-in ballot fraud much harder. (NYMag whined: “ridiculously strict rules” excluding votes for “trivial” slipups like late ballots and bad addresses.)

3. A tidal wave of new Republican poll watchers. (NYMag whined: “flooding” of polling places with Republicans trained to challenge ballots for “sketchy” reasons.)

4. A muscular, local, local, local push to ensure Republicans are well-represented in key counties. (NYMag whined: ”MAGA loyalists” infiltrated key election positions in county and state offices.)

I don’t know about you, but unlike New York Magazine, I find all those developments extremely reassuring and frankly, profoundly encouraging. NYMag called it “twisting the system,” but I call it long-overdue.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Have a wonderful weekend! Forget about robots, drive yourself back here Monday morning as we kick off the last two weeks before the election with a new C&C roundup.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com