People say things in a car they might never write in an email. Well, they used to.
Who knew? The Subaru privacy policy allows them to record your conversations and your face and sell that data to the highest bidder. Most likely (who reads these things) all the other car companies do too. When an AI analyzes it, presumably it will identify your voice (and you from the cameras). Anything you say in the public broadcasting world of private cars will belong to them, even if you are a passenger, and were never asked.
So if you want to have a private discussion about your political views, your children, your religion, troubles at work, intellectual property, discoveries, information that might affect stock prices, your thoughts on immigration, corruption, or mention any medical issues you have, or affairs anyone you know has had, don’t do it in an electric car. Imagine the blackmail, political, legal and insider potential with this data in the hands of…
Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants”, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes.” Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.
Subaru also admit that when the information is transmitted they cannot guarantee that it will not be intercepted, only that they will do their best to look after your info after they receive it.
To opt out:
It seems the best way to keep Subaru from collecting, sharing, or selling your data to people who want to sell you stuff or data brokers or law enforcement, your best bet is to never buy, drive, or ride in a Subaru. Except if you’re walking on the street when a car with exterior cameras or sensors drives by. Then you might get caught up in that data collection too. So, yeah, the point is, you really don’t have many great choices when it comes to protecting your privacy from connected cars these days, other than to never buy them, drive them, sit in them, or exist on the street when they drive by.
It’s just another day in the hottest ever hyperbole race. The most unprecedentedly unprecedented record where more scientists on Earth than ever before, forget more of the Pleistocene than they ever have in history.
This year didn’t just shatter records. It changed the scales.
Graph after graph tracking this year’s soaring global temperatures reveal that not only were the numbers higher than ever recorded in many places around the world, but the deviation from the norm was also astonishingly large.
Michael Mann says it’s the fastest rate of warming for millions of years. Naturally, no science journalist thinks to ask him how he could possibly know this?
What’s especially concerning, experts say, is that “the rate of warming over the past century has no precedent as far back as we are able to look, not only hundreds or thousands, but many millions of years,” according to University of Pennsylvania meteorologist Michael Mann’s book “Our Fragile Moment.”
Think about how impossibly hard it is to know how much the world warmed from say 3,450,000 BC to 3,449,900? I mean in the last 10 million years there are 100,000 whole centuries. How many samples do we need each century from around the world to estimate what the “global” rate of warming was in every single century? If we just have three samples from the year 2 million BC, could we really say we knew what the temperature was?
Here (below) is one estimate of temperatures for the last 50,000 centuries. It’s a wild ride. Really, truly, could anyone say there wasn’t one century that warmed faster than our last one?
Graph based on work by Lisiecki and Raymo in 2005. Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art
Has Michael Mann found an unknown trove of temperature records from Australopithecus onward, or was it just a moment of mad arrogance fueled by 30 years of propaganda?
We elect an Australian government but get the EU rules
Just before Christmas the government quietly put out new emissions rules they know Australians won’t like. “Tis the season for dropping press release bombs.
Tough new petrol standards will be introduced at the end of 2025, potentially increasing the cost of fuel while expanding consumer access to leading-edge, mostly European, ultra-efficient vehicles.
By forcing Australians to buy expensive, unreliable cars prone to exploding, the government will stop families going on holidays, burn down a few homes, and keep friends from visiting each other, unless the nation of petrol-heads keep driving their old cars and Utes, Cuba style. For all this pain, the new rules will “slash 18 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions” which is equivalent to taking 280,000 imaginary cars off the road, or cutting 0.15% of annual emissions from China. i.e. nothing.
All Peter Dutton, the opposition leader in Australia needs to do to win the next election is to stand up for drivers in Australia.
Apparently Australians need to import more EU cars to save German industry or something:
…the government aims to spur greater imports of vehicles that car makers currently do not sell in Australia because the fuel is too dirty for their highly calibrated engines.
The press release reads like it was written by the EU aristocratic snobs, not the Australian Labor Party.
This is no place for an EV.
The government will force you to subsidize the EVs while pretending the manufacturers are doing it:
The trick in the new Command Economy is to make devious rules that force the market to come up with strange and expensive ways to satisfy communist rules.
The new rules mean cars and light commercial vehicles sold from December 2025 will need to meet so-called “Euro 6d noxious emissions standards”. Years in the making, they are separate to a push by the government to introduce a “fuel efficiency standard” that would force car makers to sell more EVs by imposing penalties on the sales of higher-emitting vehicles such as utes, SUVs and four-wheel-drives.
In other words, if the punters buy the cars they want, and not the cars the government wants, then the prices of the “limited” number of popular cars will rise. The penalties that will have to be imposed by the car makers are really subsidies in disguise. They will add thousands in costs to the popular cars so they can use the extra profits to sell the unpopular cars at discount prices.
The net result is that billionaires will keep buying whatever they want to buy, and if it’s an EV it will be subsidized by the workers, who will have to pay more for their own “higher emitting” cars that will still be able to drive as far as the outer suburbs, or God forbid, a country town.
This is a boilerplate policy that been copied from overseas. It’s a blueprint of the global billionaire class. It would mean newer smaller petrol cars will subsidize bigger EV’s, and as Craig Kelly says, put lives at risk on country roads. The small car passengers will be more likely to die in crashes with cows, trees and heavier EV’s. Momentum always wins. Or our children will only be able to drive cheap Chinese-EV’s.
Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Catherine King said the changes would save lives.
“The changes, along with fuel efficiency standards are part of delivering cleaner, cheaper-to-run cars and tackling transport costs for Australian families and businesses,” said Ms King.
Time Australians stood up and paid attention.
Those elected are not on our side,
And their contempt for us barely hide,
As the truth slowly dawns,
That these globalist pawns,
Are all to the doom cult allied.
Australians are angry the BOM didn’t see the flooding rains coming
Worse, we’re betting the nation on the BOM’s ability to predict the climate.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) tells Australians that record breaking extremes are getting worse because of our cars and our air-conditioners (that’s “The State of the Climate“). But when the BOM can’t predict record breaking rain a month in advance, or even the day before, we know the BOM doesn’t understand what drives the climate.
Somehow the BOM expect Australians to spend trillions and rearrange their economy based on their fifty year prophesies, but not to mind when “this summer” goes right off the rails.
But the real weather gods had another idea, and all the places under any shades of green below got somewhere from 100% to 300% of the average rainfall. The indigo and purple zones got even more.
This was a savage downpour — seven feet of rain in five days fell at one location:
No fewer than 12 locations across far north Queensland posted record rainfall totals.
Some areas received a year’s rainfall in a single day, isolating towns, closing highways and leaving hundreds stranded by surging floodwaters. Black Mountain near Cooktown recorded a cumulative 2189mm over the five days, while Mossman South, an hour northwest of Cairns, had 1935mm.
The BOM suddenly wants to absolve itself of liability
People have noticed there is now a mandatory check box forcing users to agree to a legal disclaimer clearing the BOM of all liability:
Users of the BOM app now have to agree to a 699-word “terms and conditions” statement that includes “information at this app … may not be accurate, current or complete”.
“To the maximum extent permitted by law, the bureau excludes any liability that may arise in connection with the BOM Weather app or any information or material presented therein or your access to or use of any of the same,’’ the bureau says in a “terms and conditions” statement that appears when a user attempts to download its app. — Mackenzie Scott, The Australian
They know they are in trouble.
I say the BOM can have immunity the same day Australians can also tick a box excluding ourselves from any and all costs, imposts and taxes related to any BOM predictions.
To be fair to the BOM, a hysterical and ill-informed media has allowed climate alarmism to infect reporting of what should be routine weather events.
For thirty years the Australian media has made hyperbolic scare stories about the weather while the BOM tacitly stood by and smiled. Where were they as the tenets of science were trashed, and critics were called “climate deniers”? If the BOM are victims of this hyperbole now, they reap what they sowed.
The BOM raised the stakes, and they don’t get to weasel out by saying “we used the best science” as if the best science wasn’t riddled with holes. If the science is good enough to throw away trillions of dollars, then the worst failures need a truckload of explanation.
Predicting the weather is hard. We could forgive the BOM for getting a complex immature science wrong, but not when they also tell us it’s just simple physics, they’re absolutely sure, and there is no doubt they’re wrong (give us your money!).
We know it’s a cult or long-form advertising when every possible consequence is 100% bad, bad, bad, and for everyone, all the time.
Climate change will cause more droughts, except when it rains, and that means more pollen (obviously?!). Even though summers will be longer, and spring will be earlier, and flowers will go extinct, the pollen will be more potent (whatever that is). More people will get asthma, and even though we don’t know what causes allergies, we know that it will get worse with climate change, whatever it is, because everything does.
You too will be locked in your house, afraid to leave, unable to breathe, unless you get solar panels and an EV.
This was Australian’s national news prime time story tonight on our public “news” service. Australians spent some part of 3 million dollars today on their ABC, where regional health reporter Steven Schubert asked no hard questions, did almost no research, and sought no alternative views. He just found an asthmatic trophy victim to use as a poster-girl for F.E.A.R.
Whether Caitlin Ross will go outside on any given day depends on weather and pollen forecasts. If they’re too bad, her severe allergies and asthma mean it can be too uncomfortable or dangerous.
Researchers say pollen is becoming more potent, and seasons longer, as the climate changes
They expect the number of Australian hay fever sufferers to grow by 70 per cent over the next three decades
Poor Caitlin. Her symptoms have got worse these last five years. The ABC news works like hypnosis planting the suggestion that if your asthma got worse lately “it’s climate change”, as if asthma never gets better or worse for any other reason.
Climate change is affecting asthma already — we know because we did an opinion poll:
A recent survey showed climate change was already affecting the health of asthmatic Australia
A survey conducted by advocacy group Asthma Australia in 2023 showed that 91 per cent of people with asthma were very concerned about the impacts of climate change, according to CEO Michele Goldman.
She said 39 per cent of asthmatics surveyed said climate change was already affecting their health, compared to 21 per cent of people without asthma.
It’s like ignorant climate models went on dates with a Women’s Weekly story on asthma from 1985, and gave birth to yet another scary narrative.
In the real world of health and biology the rise of asthma in the last fifty years could be due to diet, pollution, hygiene, loss of gut flora, or a lack of parasites. It could be due to leaky guts, new highly allergenic wheat strains, heavy metals, pesticides, or all of the above. It could be because kids don’t get to eat dirt or play with farm animals, and it could be because kids don’t play in the sun and get their vitamin D.
Asthma is a first world problem, not a climate change one
So these researchers — whoever they are, are starting with models that can’t predict rainfall, humidity, soil moisture, cloud cover and wind speed, and use those errors to not-predict plant growth and pollen movement. Then they take all those failures and run headlong into a medical swamp.
This is lousy science, bad reporting, and incompetent “investigation”.
China must be wishing CO2 caused some damn warming
Beijing this month has had the coldest December since they started measuring the cold in 1951. Obviously, this is because of climate change. Any day now newspapers will start to call this the tragic inevitable result of man-made climate change, reminding us of how we need to send money to renewables, and immediately, or we’ll face so much more of this.
Or maybe journalists will forget how they use every freak warm event as free-advertising for the climate religion:
BEIJING, Dec 24 (Reuters) – China’s capital Beijing has broken its record for hours of sub-zero temperatures in December dating back to 1951, after a cold wave swept swathes of the country and brought blizzards in its wake, sending temperatures towards historic lows.
As of Sunday, a weather observatory in Beijing had recorded more than 300 hours of below-freezing temperatures since Dec. 11, the most for the month since records began in 1951, according to state-backed Beijing Daily.
Naturally cold snaps are due to natural causes like a polar vortex. Strangely, Reuters editors suddenly remember that climate scientists don’t know everything:
However, there is debate among scientists about what part climate change plays in this.
Thanks to having more than half the worlds coal fired power plants, Beijing and a few other Chinese cities have more CO2 in the air above them than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Strangely no media outlets are telling us that China would have been even colder if it weren’t for CO2.
Finally, the wheel turns and the Greens start to realize their bedfellows might be the environmental wreckers and industrial profiteers that they thought they were working against. Finally there is a point where the price of “climate action” can be too damn high. And somehow, the ends does not always justify the means.
Make no mistake, Bob Brown was the face of the Greens in Australia for decades. He was in politics for 30 years, and Leader of the Australian Greens. He was Mr Green himself on the Australian scene.
Now he’s going further and saying the “free for all” with wind farms must stop. He’s even using the ugly term “profiteers” to describe the Tasmanian government setting up a 200% Renewable Energy Target to soak up carbon penance money out of the mainland. Of course, wind power is still essential (how could he say anything else?) but some of these wind farms — a small number — will do more damage to the environment than they will prevent. The wind farm developers are “not doing it in the service of the planet” you know.
This all very well, but ten years too late. When skeptics were predicting exactly this outcome — that Green policies would wreck the environment, where were the Greens? They weren’t saying “let’s listen to the climate deniers” — or climate deniers are people too you know. All their talk of building communities was the Gucci fashion show of hipster vegans who would just as soon demonize half the population as have a coffee with them.
Who needs maths?
As usual, the Greens biggest failure — and they condemn birds and whales with it every day — is that they can not do maths. They want to micromanage a bit of a wind farm here and a bit there — without doing the sums. To meet their own “climate targets” Australia needs to install 40 wind turbines every month, and 22 thousand solar panels every day. Where will they go? Where exactly will those gigawatts fit among the gum trees, and the ten thousand kilometers of high voltage lines too? That’s eighty million kilometers of transmission lines around the globe. How many trees, bats, birds and koala’s will they kill?
Bob Brown protests at the Adani coal mine at Parliament House. By Andrew Meares, Flickr
Veteran conservationist Bob Brown has turned on sections of the wind industry, accusing some developers of “profiteering” from climate change and not caring about the planet, while warning the wind rush risks accelerating extinctions.
He was concerned the Tasmanian government’s pursuit of a 200 per cent renewable energy target – to allow surplus power to be exported to the mainland – was driven by “profiteering” under the guise of climate action.
The Bob Brown Foundation continues to fight the 100-turbine wind farm proposed for Robbins Island by ACEN Australia.
“The real driving reason for that (200 per cent renewables target) is profiteering by people like ACEN, moving into a lucrative new market which is being forced by the exigencies of climate change,” Dr Brown said.
Bob Brown is also opposed to the windfarm being built to the west of Cairns in the Daintree National Park, a project he calls “appalling”. In that he is correct.
From the press release — the Greens have a vision that we can save the world just by turning off a few appliances at home:
“This is part of humanity’s deliberated destruction of the natural world which sustains all life,” Bob Brown said today.
“Instead of turning off wasted electricity, we will wreck another surviving stronghold of natural wildlife diversity in Australia. It is now up to the Albanese government and national environment minister Tanya Plibersek to protect the cornucopia of nature which Robbins Island holds. They should at least back the Tasmanian EPA position.”
So we keep the 1.5C global safety limit under control just with a few more windfarms and turning off the standby light on the stereo?
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