Tag: pee

Posted on

Why Self Driving Cars Won’t Work For Ridesharing

Driverless CarsSan Francisco is where ridesharing started. Uber, Lyft and the defunct Sidecar as well as smaller players have all started here in the City and they all seem to think they can get rid of drivers now.

This is one of the strangest ideas I have heard in a long time and these companies need to look at Muni in San Francisco to understand what will happen if you remove drivers from cars. Our Muni and BART trains have tried to be autonomous in the tunnels and that didn’t work very well now did it. Many of you may not know this, but there was a time when Muni tried [for a very short time] to have the drivers step out of the compartment when trains entered West Portal Station and let the trains, on tracks, be controlled by a computer. That didn’t work and now a driver has to sit there and make sure the computer is working right and doesn’t crash when the train begins to pass 60 mpg in the tunnel.

I know what some of you are saying, but Google/Uber/some other tech company wasn’t controlling them. OK, fine, but even with a driver riding along on a Muni or BART train have you seen what happens on one of those trains? How would a driverless car picking people up and taking them to their destination on city streets be any different?

There is already the reported problem of lots of these cars getting into accidents. Most of the time it isn’t the fault of the car’s computer, but the humans that are driving around them.  You can write that off if you want, but I don’t think everyone is going to jump onboard from day one when a driverless car becomes available.

Then there are the other problems that people don’t think about. I’m one of those guys that do and here’s something to think about. A driverless car is like the set of Home Alone. People won’t have an overseer to keep them in check. I’ve given rides to young people who even with me behind the wheel have gotten into a fight in the back of my car. I stopped and threw them out, but think about what the first thing that dominates a new technology is…PORN.

VHS, DVDS, the Internet all become intrenched because of the porn industry. I would not be surprised if some of the first people who grab a driverless car will shoot a porn film in it that will be on the internet within a couple of days. The second or third will be someone who pukes and after that will probably be some kid who thinks it would be cool to take a dump in a driverless car.

Imagine if you will for a moment the amount of human body fluids that will be flooding, soaking into and dripping from the insides of a driverless car. No one has talked about safety features in these cars because that of course would be an invasion of someone personal privacy.

Will these cars be equipped with cameras that can see all over the car? Will these cars be equipped with fluid sensors to notify home base if someone barfs or pees in the car? NOTE: I have heard from lots of drivers who have had riders not just puke, but also pee in their cars. This usually happens after midnight and the person is pretty drunk and well, it seems like a good idea at the time… Maybe the companies that are on the bandwagon will make these cars self cleaning so that after a person or porn film crew leaves the car it will sanitize and sterilize the interior for the next rider’s safety.

Then there is the drunken factor that I barely touched on. People like the current ridesharing services because they don’t have to drive home drunk, but their faculties are not at their best. I’ve been asked to pull over so someone could jump out and vomit. I’ve also had a large number of people who put in the wrong address or wanted to go to Safeway, but Google’s Maps which every system uses for some reason chose not the Safeway that was closest to them, but one in the East Bay or North Bay [seriously, try it]. How will the computer controlling the vehicle know whether the customer is right? Will the car electrically zap the riders who have passed out after drinking too much to rouse them to get out because the car has hopefully arrived at the correct location?

In the end the public has been sold a science fiction novel that has been poorly written. This isn’t the taxis of Blade Runner or even Total Recall for that matter. Driverless cars for the masses are a long way off and the idea of driverless transport vehicles are an even longer way off.




Posted on

I Have No Need For Glow In The Dark Pee Or Poop!

As many of you are aware, we have a daughter who is autistic so things move a bit slower. She’s coming along quite well with many things, but potty training is the last step. We’ve gotten into serious mode with potty training. There are lots of schools of thought with this from the free elimination parents who watch and then notice what’s going on and hold their kids over a bucket to eliminate and never allow diapers. That’s a bit extreme for us, so we’re taking a bit safer, albeit more expensive route.

With our therapists we have gotten her to learn to sit on the toilet for five minutes straight and moved onto five minutes straight with her pants pulled down. Now we’ve switched over to panties instead of diapers for most of the day and every 30 minutes go through the potty training routine. We’ve had only a few accidents and have managed to only get one stained chair out of it, but I think I can handle that.

A friend of ours suggested that perhaps she would get the idea more if we had a Betsey Wetsey type doll. My wife and has been looking left and right for one and they’re in the $25-$30 range. This seems a bit much for something we don’t even know if it will work. None of these dolls by the way come with a toilet to sit on. That of course, costs extra.

So wife, daughter and I are at target today and we discover a doll that even when you’re potty training a kid and are used to getting vile human produced substances all over your body this was a bit too much for either of us. It’s not really a potty training doll, but it’s a doll to teach your little girl how to change diapers because of course, it’s their job to do it right? [ducks quickly, I’M NOT SELLING IT!] This is a doll that comes with a little somewhat hard plastic diaper that is somehow control by artificial intelligence by the doll to tell the diaper to show that it has peed, pooped, or both. How does this happen? Well, I don’t know the code someone had to write to make this happen, but the end result is that the diaper has a yellow and a brown led in it that glows to indicate whether you have a number one or number two.

Yes, you ready that write. This is a doll who’s poop and pee are so nuclear that it makes the diaper glow with light. Luckily the lights will go off after a certain time and you can put the diaper back on your atomic baby doll which would add to the mix of having to explain to your daughter why the poop and pee just disappeared and why that doesn’t happen with normal babies. My comment which wouldn’t go over very well would be, because Mommy and Daddy bought you a radioactive doll who’s poop and pee glows to wake you up in the middle of the night from it’s flashing diaper so that you know to change the diaper that the poop and pee actually just disappear from which means you can ignore it because it will go away all by itself. Wow, that was a bit of a mouthful.

Apparently I just read that you actually have to wipe a hard plastic wipe across the diaper and not the baby to make the lights go off which isn’t exactly the right way to change a diaper either, but I guess they really don’t want to teach anyone something they could use later in life. I can tell you from the number of diapers I’ve change that while less than my wonderful and lovely wife, this ain’t how you change a baby.

Hopefully we will find one of these little peeing dolls to show our daughter how the process works because I don’t want her to one day ask me why her poop and pee doesn’t glow like her dolly’s

Posted on

Mid-Market: It’s Freaky to Walk Around

Everyone is talking about the possibility of Twitter and other tech company moving to the mid-market area. I had the chance to walk around the area today to get a feel for what it would be like if I had to work there. It wasn’t a pretty sight and now I’m going to tell you all about it.

As some of you may remember I have a friend that lives in the Tenderloin just a couple of blocks from where I was today. For people like him Mid-Market works because the first thing I noticed was all the Dollar Stores. If you’re single and on a limited budget Dollar Stores are the way to go. You don’t need the jumbo Costco sized items because they usually go bad before you’ve finished them [except bacon bits which I feel you can never have too much of]. Being able to get smaller food items like cooking supplies cheap is good. So that’s about where anything good I have to say about this area ends.

After noticing all the dollar stores, I started to realize that with very few exceptions I was probably one of the only sane people on the streets. I saw people who looked normal and then they’d start screaming at the top of their lungs and banging on anything that was around. I wouldn’t call them much of a threat to anyone except themselves, but there were a few tourists who for some reason thought it would be a good idea to come up here and found out the hard way they were wrong.

Then as I made my way to Civic Center Plaza I noticed that there at least 40 people sitting around on the granite slabs and almost everyone of them either had a cane or a wheelchair. These were not elderly people either. They were around my ages and in many cases younger. These could have been props if they were asking for money, but they weren’t asking for anything. They were just sitting around talking about nothing much and they just looked like a slab of granite in the sun what about the only thing any of them had to look forward to other than making it through another day.

Suddenly I hear a group of black guys in front of me start cheering, “You go girl!” and the usual cat calls, so me being male turned around to see a woman who thought it was a good idea in the middle of Civic Center Plaza to drop her pants and start peeing. I suppose if seeing a girl peeing is the high point of your day, what exactly does that say about the quality of your life? The stench of barf, urine and excrement is very present here even though the place looks relatively clean.

If you can stomach the smell and want to find food there are a few places, but not many. Mostly fast food places some of which I remember eating at and they didn’t stand up to the same places in other parts of town. There are a few diner style restaurants, but they all served pretty much the same thing. Eggs at Breakfast and burgers for lunch. If you look real hard you might find some teriyaki, but you’d really have to look hard. There’s actually more places to eat a block away on Mission street, but I was walking Market because I hadn’t had a chance to walk this part in several years.

Yes, there is the Main Library which I’ve talked about before and that’s nice, but I don’t think too many techies will be taking their lunch break to go to the library [which oddly enough does have a decent cafe downstairs].

Twitter has been offered a sweet offer from the city to stay here and take up residence in Mid-Market that the city is hoping to bring up that area. So far it looks like that will be a long time coming for this part of the city.

[gmap width=”650px” height=”200px” type=”satellite” visible=”true” static=”true” zoom=”16″ lat=”37.7797232″ lon=”-122.4131994″]

[ad#AdBrite]