flaming mo (12. 527)

The fleet of self-driving murderbots already incendiary enough in both the figurative and literal sense have been making for some spectacular footage of Trump’s made-for-tv crackdown on dissent playing out in Los Angeles. Tear-gas canisters are generally not used on the streets because they can cause traditional petrol-powered automobiles to explode and possibly are far more flammable for a vehicle that stores ninety kilowatt hours of chemical energy in the battery array—the equivalent to some eighty kilograms of TNT that can cause a runaway reaction through the engine at over a thousand degrees centigrade. A battery aflame can require up to forty times the amount of water to extinguish that a regular dumpster fire. Waymo autonomous cars have attracted special attention—though as above not necessarily the work of protestors—as a symbol of rage against the technocracy that is more and more aligned with and facilitating the police state with well established contracts with authorities like ICE and other policing agencies to provide real-time surveillance with casual and passive use. To see these marauders circling the block for a potential client has supposed prompted some to hail a ride to commit arson once they show up, not to destroy dragnet evidence but rather punish the collaborators. Someone, I’m sure will use this as an argument against electric vehicles—and for individual ridership at the expense of mass-transit, then have it—but it’s far more a critique against their extractive nature (subscription services are a revenue-multiplier), deregulation and the spying of course.