The supply chain issues that have wracked the rest of the automotive industry for more than a year appear to have finally caught up with Tesla. The EV automaker announced on Wednesday's Q2 investors report that its automotive revenue has declined by more than 13 percent following last quarter's record-breaking mark despite ending the quarter with "the highest vehicle production month" in company history.
Per the company, Tesla produced 258,580 vehicles last quarter and delivered 201,304 of them. During last quarter's investor call, CEO Elon Musk estimated that the company could increase its annual deliveries by 60 percent in 2022. To date, the company has delivered 564,743 vehicles and would need to sell another 935,257 of them by year's end to meet that goal.
This could prove challenging given that the company produced nearly 18 percent fewer vehicles this quarter than last (though still up 27 percent year over year). COVID-related lockdowns shuttered the Shanghai Gigafactory for most of Q2, though ramping production at the newer Austin and Berlin-Brandenburg plants have helped offset the closure. Austin has begun producing vehicles with the company's new 4680 battery cells and the Berlin Gigafactory notched a production rate of more than a thousand vehicles in a single week during the last three months.
Tesla had generally managed to avoid the supply chain woes that have hamstrung the automotive industry since the start of the pandemic — until now. The MSRP of a Model Y long-range currently sits just under $66,000, that's 30 percent higher than it cost in 2021.
The company was sure to point out that its total revenue grew 42 percent year over year to $16.9 billion, operating income had improved year over year to $2.5 billion (with an impressive 14.6 percent operating margin) and is currently sitting atop a $18.9 billion pile of cash.
This is thanks in large part to Tesla's liquidating 75 percent of its Bitcoin holdings (worth $936 million) over the past three months. The company invested $1.5 billion in the digital pseudo-currency in February 2021 and sold off a 10 percent stake a couple months later. Tesla's backing of Bitcoin, much as with Musk's pet Dogecoin currency, helped to further mainstream the crypto schemes. Musk reportedly had "a super bad feeling about the economy" in June.
Tesla executives are scheduled to hop on an investor teleconference after markets close this afternoon at 5:30 pm ET / 2:30 pm PT so stay tuned for updates live from the call.
As the boundaries between developed spaces and wildlands continue to blur, the frequency and intensity of human-animal interactions will surely increase. But it won’t just be adorably viral trash pandas and pizza rats whistling on your veranda — it’ll be 30-50 feral hogs in your garbage and birds of prey predating upon your precious pekinese. Next thing you know your daughter’s knocked up and the fine china’s missing! But it wasn’t always like this, Peter Alagona explains in his new book, The Accidental Ecosystem. He explores how and why America’s cities — once largely barren of natural features — have exploded with wildlife over the past 150 years, even as populations have declined in their traditional habitats.
In the excerpt below, Alagona examines our long and complicated relationships with the coyote, one that has lasted for millennia and ranged from reverence to revulsion, a narrative now influenced by the social media hivemind.
Urban adapters and exploiters may be prepared for life among people, but are people prepared for life among them? In the 1970s and 1980s, when coyotes started showing up more often in dozens of American cities, residents and officials were unprepared, and many were unwilling to accommodate animals they saw as dangerous interlopers. As one teenager who lost her toy poodle to a coyote told the Los Angeles Times in 1980, “Coyotes make me mad. They take care of our rats, which are really disgusting. But I hate coyotes.” The same year, the Yale social ecology professor Stephen Kellert found that, among US survey respondents, coyotes ranked twelfth from the bottom on a list of “most liked” animals, above cockroaches, wasps, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes but below turtles, butterflies, swans, and horses. The most-liked animal was the dog, which is so closely related to the coyote that the two can mate in the wild and produce fertile offspring.
In his 2010 book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals, the anthropologist Hal Herzog wrote that “the way we think about other species often defies logic.” This is not to say that our ideas about animals are arbitrary, but rather that the ways we think about them are shaped as much by history, culture, and psychology as by physics, chemistry, or biology. In the absence of this social context, people’s ideas about and actions toward other animals can seem nonsensical, hypocritical, or downright weird.
Animals are often presumed innocent or guilty — and thus treated with respect or contempt — based on the baggage our culture, through art or literature or tradition, has forced them to carry. An animal’s inherent or perceived qualities also matter. We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to creatures that are big, that we think are cute, pretty, majestic, or humanlike, that seem to embody admirable qualities such as grit, entrepreneurship, or good parenting, or that at the very least leave us alone. Yet such perceptions rarely reflect a species's real behavior or ecology. Many people see rats as disgusting or dangerous, even though most rats pose little threat to most people most of the time. Cats, meanwhile, seem friendly and cuddly despite being ferocious predators and disease-ridden ecological wrecking balls.
Mass and social media play especially important roles in shaping perceptions. When large and charismatic wildlife species started showing up in many American cities more frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, around the time of Kelly Keen’s death, newspapers and TV shows often adopted one of two tones: irony or sensationalism. Ironic images and stories emphasized how surprising it was to see wild animals showing up in supposedly civilized areas. Sensationalistic stories emphasized conflicts between people and wildlife. They often used military metaphors about wars and battles or echoed the paranoid, racist, and xenophobic tropes of the day, comparing wildlife to undocumented immigrants, gang members, criminals, terrorists, and “super predators.”
These images were circulating in the media during an era when the proportion of Americans with firsthand experiences of wild places was flattening or even declining. During the 1970s and 1980s, \consumer products and better infrastructure fueled the growth of outdoor sports, including non hunting wildlife activities like bird watching and photography. Yet technology, which enabled so many people to enjoy the outdoors, also began inserting itself into these same people’s encounters with nature, first mediating and then replacing them. Video screens allowed Americans to spend more time watching virtual creatures and less time interacting with actual animals. Animal-themed visual media exploded in popularity, while zoos and museums struggled to attract patrons. Between 1995 and 2014, even the National Park system saw its annual per capita visitation slide by 4 percent.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the people who encountered wildlife in cities often reacted by treating these animals like the caricatures they read about in the news or saw on TV. For many, creatures like coyotes looked like either cuddly pets or bloodthirsty killers. Neither image was accurate, of course, but both had real world consequences.
When people who viewed coyotes with suspicion saw them in urban areas, often the first thing they did was call the police. Involving the police tended to turn a non problem into a problem or make a bad problem worse. Yet moving away from a law-enforcement-based approach has been difficult.
As late as 2015, New York City, which saw its first coyote twenty years earlier, was still often approaching these creatures as outlaws. That April, the New York Police Department, responding to an early-morning 911 call reporting a coyote in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, deployed tranquilizer guns, patrol cars, and helicopters. The ensuing three-hour chase ended when officers failed to corner the fugitive canine. When questioned about the costly and time-consuming incident, the NYPD contradicted a statement previously issued by the Department of Parks and Recreation saying that the city would no longer pursue coyotes that did not appear to pose a threat. It turned out that the two departments did not have a written agreement spelling out this policy. NYPD officers were not trained on how to deal with coyotes, but it was up to them to decide how to respond. The result was predictable: the same excessive force that has plagued modern policing in general was mobilized to combat a wild animal that presented little if any risk.
Over time, some cities and their residents adjusted to their new reality of living with coyotes. Jurisdictions with ample budgets, supportive residents, and helpful institutions like zoos and museums developed research, education, conservation, and citizen science programs. Some parks and police departments started working together to develop new policies and practices, limiting the use of force and trying, with some difficulty, to respond only to genuine emergencies. One of the key messages wildlife officials stressed was that the decision to launch a response should depend on an animal’s behavior — whether it appeared injured or sick or was acting aggressively — and not its mere presence.
As such messages have percolated, attitudes have evolved. In New York, as people have become more accustomed to living with coyotes, fear has given way to tolerance and even a tenuous kind of acceptance. In some neighborhoods, individual coyotes have become mascots with names, backstories, and social media accounts. Few people actually trust coyotes, and most people don’t want them prowling around their backyards, schools, or playgrounds, but many communities have shown a growing willingness to embrace their furry neighbors.
As early as 2008, studies from suburban New York showed that most residents appreciated coyotes, enjoyed having them around, and even “found the likelihood of injury from a coyote acceptable.” But people’s willingness to live alongside coyotes in their communities dropped quickly when incidents occurred, suggesting that tolerance for them remained fragile. Overall, however, the longer most people lived with urban wildlife like coyotes, the more they viewed these creatures not as threats but as natural and beneficial members of multispecies urban communities.
Electric vehicle adoption has reached its tipping point in the US. With more and more EVs appearing on American roadways, automakers and charging networks alike are working to build out increasingly critical power infrastructure to keep those EVs moving. On Thursday, GM announced that it is partnering with Pilot Company and EVGo to construct a coast-to-coast national DC fast charging network.
"The missing piece in the larger picture of public charging is along highway corridors, which connect the east to the west, the north to the south, one metro area to another" Travis Hester, GM’s chief EV officer, said during a press call Wednesday. "They form a vital network, which moves vehicles and people throughout the country. Rural areas can also be especially affected by the lack DC fast charging in those areas."
The network will offer 2,000 charging stalls at 500 stations located every 50 or so miles along America's highways,"connecting urban and rural communities, the East and West Coasts and different metropolitan areas," per a Thursday news release. They'll be co-branded as “Pilot Flying J” and “Ultium Charge 360” stations, based on Pilots existing Flying J travel centers and governed by EVGo's eXtend service.
GM
The stations will offer a blistering 350kW maximum charge rate. There aren't many EVs on the market yet that can use the max wattage but the stations will automatically step down the current to whatever the specific vehicle is designed to handle. These locations will be accessible and adaptable to all EV brands, though GM owners will receive some added perks like exclusive reservations and discounts on charging sessions.
“GM and Pilot Company designed this program to combine private investments alongside intended government grant and utility programs to help reduce range anxiety and significantly close the gap in long-distance EV charger demand,” Shameek Konar, CEO of Pilot Company, said in the release. “Our travel centers are well-equipped to accommodate EV charging with 24/7 amenities and convenient proximity to major roadways across the country."
This isn't the first time that GM and EVGo have collaborated. The two worked together last year to put 500 Ultium-compatible fast charging stalls at various EVGo stations and are currently working to install an additional 3,250 fast chargers in cities and suburbs by mid-decade. For its part GM is coordinating with seven separate charging networks — Blink Charging, ChargePoint, EV Connect, EVgo, FLO, Greenlots and SemaConnect — as part of a $750 million investment to expand Ultium Charge 360 access to over 100,000 charge point across North America.
“GM agrees with the customer need for a robust charging experience that makes the transition to an EV seamless and helps drive mass adoption,” Hester said in April. “As we launch 30 EVs globally by the end of 2025, Ultium Charge 360 simplifies and improves the at-home charging experience and the public charging experience – whether it’s community-based or road-trip charging.”
The first stations of the new national network are expected to come online by early 2023. There, travelers will have access to a variety of roadside amenities, from WiFi in the lounge areas to onsite restaurants, fresh deli selections, myriad caffeination methods and even secure shower facilities.
Text-to-image generation is the hot algorithmic process right now, with OpenAI’s Craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini) and Google’s Imagen AIs unleashing tidal waves of wonderfully weird procedurally generated art synthesized from human and computer imaginations. On Tuesday, Meta revealed that it too has developed an AI image generation engine, one that it hopes will help to build immersive worlds in the Metaverse and create high digital art.
A lot of work into creating an image based on just the phrase, “there's a horse in the hospital,” when using a generation AI. First the phrase itself is fed through a transformer model, a neural network that parses the words of the sentence and develops a contextual understanding of their relationship to one another. Once it gets the gist of what the user is describing, the AI will synthesize a new image using a set of GANs (generative adversarial networks).
Thanks to efforts in recent years to train ML models on increasingly expandisve, high-definition image sets with well-curated text descriptions, today’s state-of-the-art AIs can create photorealistic images of most whatever nonsense you feed them. The specific creation process differs between AIs.
Meta AI
For example, Google’s Imagen uses a Diffusion model, “which learns to convert a pattern of random dots to images,” per a June Keyword blog. “These images first start as low resolution and then progressively increase in resolution.” Google’s Parti AI, on the other hand, “first converts a collection of images into a sequence of code entries, similar to puzzle pieces. A given text prompt is then translated into these code entries and a new image is created.”
While these systems can create most anything described to them, the user doesn’t have any control over the specific aspects of the output image. “To realize AI’s potential to push creative expression forward,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in Tuesday’s blog, “people should be able to shape and control the content a system generates.”
The company’s “exploratory AI research concept,” dubbed Make-A-Scene, does just that by incorporating user-created sketches to its text-based image generation, outputting a 2,048 x 2,048-pixel image. This combination allows the user to not just describe what they want in the image but also dictate the image’s overall composition as well. “It demonstrates how people can use both text and simple drawings to convey their vision with greater specificity, using a variety of elements, forms, arrangements, depth, compositions, and structures,” Zuckerberg said.
In testing, a panel of human evaluators overwhelmingly chose the text-and-sketch image over the text-only image as better aligned with the original sketch (99.54 percent of the time) and better aligned with the original text description 66 percent of the time. To further develop the technology, Meta has shared its Make-A-Scene demo with prominent AI artists including Sofia Crespo, Scott Eaton, Alexander Reben, and Refik Anadol, who will use the system and provide feedback. There’s no word on when the AI will be made available to the public.
While Tesla, Ford and GM all (very publicly) vie for the top spot in the American electric vehicle market, Hyundai has quietly built a powerhouse lineup of EVs that threatens to surpass them all. On Wednesday (Thursday in Korea), Hyundai Motor Group officially unveiled the Ioniq 6, a streamlined sedan that offers an estimated 610km (380 mile) range and an intelligent interior that George Jetson would mistake for magic.
The Ioniq 6, like the other iterations of the Ioniq lineup, is built atop Hyundai's e-GMP platform. As such, the 6 is outfitted with an industry-leading 800V electrical architecture enabling a 10-80 charge in just 18 minutes.
It will be available with either a standard 55kWh battery pack or an optional 77.4kWh pack, equivalent to what the Kia EV6 and Polestar 2 offer. Combined with a miniscule 0.21 drag coefficient (which is also one of the best on the market), the Ioniq 6 is expected to top 610 km on a single charge. And like the Ioniq 5, the 6 also offers V2L capabilities, enabling it to charge your house, accessories and even other vehicles.
Its exceedingly aerodynamic exterior, available in a dozen different colors, has been likened to that of an Apple Mouse come to life — like someone shortened the back of Mercedes-Benz’ ambitious AVTR Concept and gave it a duck lip. And optional 20-inch rims.
Hyundai
Drivers will have the option between RWD and AWD (2- and 4-motor) variants. Per Hyundai, the AWD will output 239 kW (320HP) with 605 Nm of torque and hit 60 from a standstill in 5.1 seconds. You’ll have to opt for the small battery RWD model to achieve maximum efficiency and get the sub-14 kWh/100 km WLTP-estimated energy consumption.
Drivers will be able to tightly customize their preferred driving experience using the Ioniq 6’s EV Performance Tune-up system. Dial in everything from steering effort and motor power, to accelerator pedal sensitivity and driveline mode. You can also group various aspect settings into quick selectable packages — like a loadout in Call of Duty, or Focus Modes in iOS.
"Our engineers have worked hard to deliver a car with human-centric purposeful features to ensure a completely stress-free driving experience with its focus on design sustainability, technology, and usability," Thomas Schemera, Hyundai EVP of Product and Strategy, said during a recent press call.
Its "cocoon-inspired" interior has been built as a “comfy and personalized hideaway” where, according to the company’s launch video, people can take naps, bang out some light coding or office work and even conduct livestreams to their myriad social media followers — or, in reality, will serve as a quiet place to cry during lunch breaks. (Phil is a terrible manager and he doesn’t deserve your efforts, you should just quit.)
Hyundai
To get you back into the mood before your next shift starts, the Ioniq 6 will offer Dual Color Ambient Lighting which lets the driver select from 64 shades and a half dozen preset themes and tint their vehicle’s interior to their taste. The Relaxation Comfort Seats are optional but are designed specially for electric vehicles and are therefore 30 percent thinner than those used in gas vehicles. When combined with a completely flat floor (look Ma, no driveshaft!) and elongated 2,950-mm wheelbase, the Ioniq 6 should provide, "more space for passengers but without compromised to comfort," Schemera said. It’ll also offer four type-C and one type-A USB ports in the front cabin to keep your various live streaming gadgets fully charged.
The interior features a 12-inch full-touch infotainment display and 12-inch digital cluster, which provide real-time travel radius mapping to inform the driver how far they’ll be able to go on the charge they have remaining. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are both standard, as is Bluetooth multi-connection — meaning you can wirelessly connect two devices to play through the 8-speaker Bose sound system.
While Hyundai (quite responsibly) does not claim any semblance of "self-driving" capability, the Ioniq 6 does feature a slew of Level 2 driver assist functions as part of the Hyundai SmartSense ADAS. That includes Highway Driving Assist, Smart Cruise Control, and Forward Collision-Avoidance Assist all of which operate around the same theme of keeping you from smashing headfirst into other vehicles. The higher trim packages will also offer Junction Crossing, Lane-Changing Oncoming and Lane-Changing Side features, which will work to keep other vehicles from smashing headfirst into you at intersections. Blind-Spot Collision-Avoidance Assist will keep you from smashing headfirst into obstacles you can’t even see.
Intelligent Speed Limit Assist and High Beam Assist will ensure that you don’t speed but do turn down your high beams. The 6 will even watch you watch the road and issue a Driver Attention Warning if you start nodding off. Parking assist, cross traffic/parking collision avoidance and safe exit warnings are also available. Hyundai plans to continually tweak and update the Ioniq 6’s features through OTA updates.
Pricing has yet to be announced for the Ioniq 6, though production is slated to begin in Q3 2022. Stay tuned, Hyundai will make the Ioniq 6’s official American introduction in November.
Panasonic announced on Wednesday that it's inked a $4 billion investment deal with the state of Kansas to build and operate the world's largest battery cell production facility. The company has already identified a site near the city of De Soto, at a former ammunition factory.
“As the largest private investment in Kansas history and one of the largest EV battery manufacturing plants of its kind in the country, this project will be transformative for our state’s economy, providing in total 8,000 high-quality jobs that will help more Kansans create better lives for themselves and their children,” Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat, said during Wednesday's press conference.
The plant will produce high-capacity cells for Tesla, according to Nikkei Asia. Panasonic already jointly operates the Reno, Nevada Gigafactory with the automaker. Tesla opened a third Gigafactory, in Austin, this past April. This project is expected to produce 4,000 permanent jobs at the factory as well as 16,500 construction jobs.
Despite the global economic shock and supply chain shortages instigated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Tesla saw its vehicle deliveries jump nearly 90 percent between 2020 and 2021. The company had begun developing a proprietary line of batteries in 2019 and has been routinely snapping up exclusive deals with lithium suppliers.
Tesla Director of AI, Andrej Karpathy, is stepping down from his role at the company and from the helm of its Autopilot program. "It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways," Karpathy announced via Twitter on Wednesday, having just returned from a four-month sabbatical.
It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways. In that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum.
Before becoming the Senior Director of AI at Tesla, Karpathy was a research scientist with OpenAI's deep learning program focusing on computer vision and generative modeling. Prior to that, he was part of Fei-Fei Li's research team at Stanford for his PhD. Karpathy has "no concrete plans" yet for the future but is looking to "spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education," he noted in a subsequent tweet.
It's not just that one uncle who's not allowed at Thanksgiving anymore who's been spreading misinformation online. The practice began long before the rise of social media — governments around the world have been doing it for centuries. But it wasn't until the modern era, one fueled by algorithmic recommendation engines built to infinitely increase engagement, that nation-states have managed to weaponize disinformation to such a high degree. In his new book Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare, David Sloss, Professor of Law at Santa Clara University, explores how social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have become platforms for political operations that have very real, and very dire, consequences for democracy while arguing for governments to unite in creating a global framework to regulate and protect these networks from information warfare.
Social Media, Misinformation, and Democratic Governance
Governments were practicing disinformation long before the advent of social media. However, social media accelerates the spread of false information by enabling people to reach a large audience at low cost. Social media accelerates the spread of both misinformation and disinformation. “Misinformation” includes any false or misleading information. “Disinformation” is false or misleading information that is purposefully crafted or strategically placed to achieve a political goal.
The political objectives of a disinformation campaign could be either foreign or domestic. Prior chapters focused on foreign affairs. Here, let us consider domestic disinformation campaigns. The "Pizzagate" story is a good example. In fall 2016, a Twitter post alleged that Hillary Clinton was "the kingpin of an international child enslavement and sex ring." The story quickly spread on social media, leading to the creation of a discussion board on Reddit with the title "Pizzagate." As various contributors embellished the story, they identified a specific pizza parlor in Washington, DC, Comet Ping Pong, as the base of operations for the child sex operation. "These bizarre and evidence-free allegations soon spread beyond the dark underbelly of the internet to relatively mainstream right-wing media such as the Drudge Report and Infowars." Alex Jones, the creator of Infowars, "has more than 2 million follows on YouTube and 730,000 followers on Twitter; by spreading the rumors, Jones vastly increased their reach." (Jones has since been banned from most major social media platforms.) Ultimately, a young man who believed the story arrived at Comet Ping Pong with "an AR- 15 semiautomatic rifle... and opened fire, unloading multiple rounds." Although the story was debunked, "pollsters found that more than a quarter of adults surveyed were either certain that Clinton was connected to the child sex ring or that some part of the story must have been true."
Several features of the current information environment accelerate the spread of misinformation. Before the rise of the internet, major media companies like CBS and the New York Times had the capacity to distribute stories to millions of people. However, they were generally bound by professional standards of journalistic ethics so that they would not deliberately spread false stories. They were far from perfect, but they did help prevent widespread dissemination of false information. The internet effectively removed the filtering function of large media organizations, enabling anyone with a social media account — and a basic working knowledge of how messages go viral on social media — to spread misinformation to a very large audience very quickly.
The digital age has given rise to automated accounts known as "bots." A bot is "a software tool that performs specific actions on computers connected in a network without the intervention of human users." Political operatives with a moderate degree of technical sophistication can utilize bots to accelerate the spread of messages on social media. Moreover, social media platforms facilitate the use of microtargeting: "the process of preparing and delivering customized messages to voters or consumers." In summer 2017, political activists in the United Kingdom built a bot to disseminate messages on Tinder, a dating app, that were designed to attract new supporters for the Labour Party. "The bot accounts sent between thirty thousand and forty thousand messages in all, targeting eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in constituencies where the Labour candidates needed help." In the ensuing election, "the Labour Party either won or successfully defended some of these targeted districts by just a few votes. In celebrating their victory over Twitter, campaign managers thanked... their team of bots." There is no evidence in this case that the bots were spreading false information, but unethical political operatives can also use bots and microtargeting to spread false messages quickly via social media.
In the past two decades, we have seen the growth of an entire industry of paid political consultants who have developed expertise in utilizing social media to influence political outcomes. The Polish firm discussed earlier in this chapter is one example. Philip Howard, a leading expert on misinformation, claims: "It is safe to say that every country in the world has some homegrown political consulting firm that specializes in marketing political misinformation." Political consultants work with data mining companies that have accumulated huge amounts of information about individuals by collecting data from a variety of sources, including social media platforms, and aggregating that information in proprietary databases. The data mining industry "supplies the information that campaign managers need to make strategic decisions about whom to target, where, when, with what message, and over which device and platform."
Political consulting firms use both bots and human-operated "fake accounts" to disseminate messages via social media. (A "fake account" is a social media account operated by someone who adopts a false identity for the purpose of misleading other social media users about the identity of the person operating the account.) They take advantage of data from the data mining industry and the technical features of social media platforms to engage in very sophisticated microtargeting, sending customized messages to select groups of voters to shape public opinion and/or influence political outcomes. "Social media algorithms allow for the constant testing and refinement of campaign messages, so that the most advanced techniques of behavioral science can sharpen the message in time for those strategically crucial final days" before an important vote. Many such messages are undoubtedly truthful, but there are several well-documented cases where paid political consultants have deliberately spread false information in service of some political objective. For example, Howard has documented the strategic use of disinformation by the Vote Leave campaign in the final weeks before the UK referendum on Brexit.
It bears emphasis that disinformation does not have to be believed to erode the foundations of our democratic institutions. Disinformation "does not necessarily succeed by changing minds but by sowing confusion, undermining trust in information and institutions, and eroding shared reference points." For democracy to function effectively, we need shared reference points. An authoritarian government can require citizens to wear masks and practice social distancing during a pandemic by instilling fear that leads to obedience. In a democratic society, by contrast, governments must persuade a large majority of citizens that scientific evidence demonstrates that wearing masks and practicing social distancing saves lives. Unfortunately, misinformation spread on social media undermines trust in both government and scientific authority. Without that trust, it becomes increasingly difficult for government leaders to build the consensus needed to formulate and implement effective policies to address pressing social problems, such as slowing the spread of a pandemic.
In January, doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine made history by successfully transplanting a pig's heart into a human. The 57-year-old patient may have died two months later due to complications from the experimental procedure, but the case has inspired scientists throughout the medical field to call on the FDA to expand the scope and scale of human-porcine transplantation research. During a two-day conference in late June, policy advisors to the FDA and medical professionals discussed the future of xenotransplantation and "most attendees agreed that human trials are needed to help answer the most pressing research questions," according to Nature.
“Our goal is not to have a one-off, but to advance the field to help our patients,” Dr. Jayme Locke, lead surgeon of the kidney study and director of UAB’s Incompatible Kidney Transplant Program, told the NYT. “What a wonderful day it will be when I can walk into clinic and know I have a kidney for everyone waiting to see me.”
Humans have also conducted numerous experimental pig-organ transplants into primates like baboons. But in order to safely and consistently do it with humans, researchers will have to test the techniques on humans, Caroline Zeiss, a veterinary specialist at Yale School of Medicine, told Nature. For example, doctors found traces of porcine cytomegalovirus (PCMV) in the heart transplant patient who died earlier this year and believe that it may have played a role in his demise, but they won't know for sure without further tests that a primate model — ones that can't be replicated in primates.
Researchers are only looking at “small, focused” clinical trials with “appropriately selected patients,” Allan Kirk, a transplant surgeon at the Duke University School of Medicine, told Nature. Researchers will have to answer a number of fundamental questions before the technology can be widely utilized, as well as determine the right mix of breeding and genetic tinkering needed to ensure that recipients' bodies won't reject them.
And while the decisions made during last week's meeting may not have an immediate impact on the agency's current stance on xenotransplantation, changes are reportedly afoot. The WSJ spoke to a "person familiar with the matter" at the end of June who asserts the FDA is planning to launch pig-organ transplantation trials in an effort ease the shortage of transplantable human organs (*angrily shakes fist at seatbelts*). There's no word on when such trials would launch as they are being handled on a case-by-case basis, the source said.
When Tesla first launched its network of Supercharger stations, it did so with little thought to interoperability, as the company was virtually the only serious EV automaker around at the time. But as other companies have entered the EV market in recent years, demand for charging station access has steadily risen, prompting Tesla to begin opening its existing charger network to third-party EVs.
In 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company's open-access Supercharger pilot program — already in 13 European countries — would soon be coming to the US. A recent White House fact sheet, spotted by InsideEVs, suggests that it could arrive by the end of the year.
"Later this year, Tesla will begin production of new Supercharger equipment that will enable non-Tesla EV drivers in North America to use Tesla Superchargers," the fact sheet read. To access it, American EV owners will need to download the latest Tesla app and select the "Charge Your Non-Tesla" option from the menu, per the Verge.
Tesla has spend the better part of a year expanding access to its European charger network. However, despite operating in more than a dozen countries, only select stations within each nation are actually available to non-owners. Only in the Netherlands is every Supercharger open-access. To do the same in North America, Tesla will need to install adapters at its stations to get around the company's proprietary charging plug shape as well as ensure that the Supercharger's software can securely handshake with the new myriad non-Tesla EVs.
