The U.S. state’s Department of Motor Vehicles has put forward a draft that the group says nullifies key benefits of the technology

The Departments of Motor Vehicles (DMVs for short) are the motor vehicle authorities of the U.S. states. They often appear in television series when something needs to be portrayed as particularly bureaucratic and unnecessarily time-consuming – for example, on The Simpsons, where Patty and Selma Bouvier work at the DMV, or in the South Park episode Let Go, Let Gov. But the agencies owe this reputation not only to such series, but also to their own actions, as a recent draft regulation from the California DMV shows.

In it, the authorities demand that the robot cars that companies such as Google, Audi and Bosch plan to launch in the next decade be allowed on the road only if they have pedals and a steering wheel, behind which sits a driver with a driver’s license who keeps a close eye on traffic and is liable for accidents and traffic violations.

Practical comparison of portable navigation systems

On the one hand, navigation systems are still considered as a prosthesis for people who are too blind to read maps. On the other hand, almost everyone wants one now. Have they really become practical or will the purchase be followed by an exchange?? This depends a bit on the character of the driver and the device – in general, a navigation system increases road safety, but it can also sometimes lead to the opposite.

The best navigation system is an attentive passenger who not only looks up a map, but also pays attention to road signs and tells the driver how to drive. Unfortunately, these co-drivers are rare – women supposedly can’t read maps anyway and men are not much better in this discipline and rather tell the driver what a great blonde has just passed and only afterwards which exit has passed by in the meantime.

In the meantime, the crisis produces its own aesthetics and takes possession of capitalist cultural production. Crisis of capitalism – part 8

My home is my castle, my car is my tank: to this denominator can be reduced the asthetic change that gives many new vehicle models of the car industry their downright vicious, predatory pragmatism – especially in the middle class and upper class segment. The new carts of middle class people, who could still get a fenced-in row house with a few square meters of lawn, visualize the increasing bashing and stabbing that will be necessary for this purpose. Nearly every new midsize sedan looks like it came out of a Batman movie. Black – formerly reserved for the cars of power mongers such as corporate executives, politicians or mafiosos – has become the most popular color of the middle class.

Part 7: Crisis global. An overview of crisis-related global dependencies and imbalances.