Wednesday RACING/Open Thread: Onward Christian Horners, Google Diversifies The Wehrmacht, Leasing At 20 Miles A Day

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the lower left image is from the upcoming netflix film, “the otto skorzeny story”

Vindication for “Christian Horny”

Earlier today, Red Bull announced that their “rigorous investigation” had cleared Christian Horner of all the charges that nobody was willing to publicly disclose but which absolutely or probably or maybe had to do with making a female employee feel bad. The phrase “controlling behaviour” kept coming up in the reporting — so was this a case of Horner playing some sort of BDSM game with her, or was he just being an unpleasant and aggressive and calculating person?

Note, if you will, that these sorts of vague allegations will always get you kicked out of regular jobs, or the military, or being a firefighter, or pretty much anything but the highly serious business of sport, that alone in the world is exempt from the concerns of human resources meddling. In much the same way that we never worry about “inclusion” when it comes to building a winning NBA team, little concerns like sexual assault or impropriety are easily swept aside in the struggle to claim the Constructors’ Championship. Some souls are more equal than others. That’s why people still speak well of Kobe Bryant.

Last night, just for the purpose of enjoying myself and perhaps fortifying against the imminent departure of Christian Horny, with all that implies for endless Hamilton “Still I Rise” podiums in the second half of the year, I went back and watched the Abu Dhabi race of 2021. In retrospect, it was a brilliant bit of theater that probably did a lot to make F1 a bigger deal than it already was. Can’t we forgive Horner a bit of “controlling behaviour”, on that basis alone? The car community is a tolerant one in all cases except for mine; didn’t one of my fellow autowriters (allegedly) try to corner and forcibly fingerblast a young woman at a press event, only to be (even more allegedly) rewarded with not one but two coffee-table book opportunities, the newest one hitting the (virtual) bookstores shortly and right next to the similarly turgid, self-important and devoid-of-intellectual-interest volume, “We Deserve This: A Transfeminine Automotive Lookbook”?

Rumor has it that Toto Wolff, upon hearing the news of Horner’s exoneration, was so angry that he promptly punched Susie Wolff. That’s a joke. But this investigation probably represented the last chance for any driver but Max Verstappen to win the 2024 WDC. The Constructors Championship, on the other hand… Checo Perez will do his best to keep that in play.

A Gemini dream gone wrong

However, if you prompt Gemini for images of a specific type of person — such as “a Black teacher in a classroom,” or “a white veterinarian with a dog” — or people in particular cultural or historical contexts, you should absolutely get a response that accurately reflects what you ask for.

So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive.

That’s the word from Prabhakar Raghavan, the Google SVP who earned $1,775,000 in cash and $35,295,496 in stock during 2022, up from a frankly pathetic $28,649,009 in total comp during 2021, regarding the “Gemini controversy”.

In a nutshell: When Google rebranded their “Bard” large language model (aka “AI”) as “Gemini”, they included the ability to generate images. These images were carefully and deliberately designed to be “diverse”, as Raghavan notes elsewhere in his apology letter. If you ask for “engineers”, or “astronauts”, or “Swiss people”, you’re going to get a mostly brown and black palette of people in response.

Don’t like that? Too bad. There is not, and there will never be, any future in trying to ensure fair representation of “wypipo” on the Internet, or at your job, or anywhere else. Don’t hitch your wagon to that. It’s a losing cause, and the minute you say something like “it’s okay to be white”, or “white people aren’t responsible for each and every terrible thing in the world,” everybody you have ever known, especially the wypipo around you, will forever think of you as Theophilus “Bull” Connor, but worse. In fact, I guarantee that at least five of you just read the above two quoted phrases and reflexively thought, That racist motherfucker! If you're an upper-class white person, you probably also cringed a bit, because despising whites (meaning poor whites) is what Rob Henderson calls a “luxury belief” among the elite (meaning rich whites). White people who didn’t attend a good school are the Universal Enemy now. The Morlocks.

There’s fun to be had as a Morlock, however, and it largely consists of messing with the machine. (As an example, I know a 14-year-old poor white kid with a remarkable IQ who has become astoundingly adept at making ChatGPT write the most offensive things possible, via patient and intelligent blackboxing of OpenAI interpretation and replacement patterns. It’s the equivalent of singing “Hark The Hare Lip Angels” in Catholic-school choir class, I guess.) So the Badwhites Of The Internet promptly prompted Gemini into depicting diverse Vikings, British kings, and, as a killshot… “1943 German soldiers”. (Naturally, Gemini can’t hear the word ‘Nazi’.) The ensuing backlash caused The Thirty Five Million Dollar Man at Google to pull the plug. For now.

For the record, I think Google’s decision to force a little diversity into Gemini isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s a global product. If you’re a Nigerian or Mongolian techie, why shouldn’t some of your generative AI results look like you? I think it’s interesting that you don’t see very many Indian (as in India, not Cherokee) results, however. After all, Google is massively Indian, with forty percent of the people who matter coming from India, the percentage of whites programmatically declining each and every year, and a culture so powerfully Brahmin, they can cancel a discussion of caste privilege on company campus.

Don’t look for Google to take diversity within Google as seriously as they take diversity outside of Google, for the same reason that I will actively accost people who litter in public then go home and step over a pyramid of 53 empty cardboard boxes to type this Substack. But a little bit of conscious diversity programming in the Gemini results is arguably a social good, or at least not a social ill. Were I a black father with a black son, I wouldn’t want the majority of generative images for “thug” or “criminal” to return a black man, regardless of statistics or anything else. Because my son didn’t create that reality, didn’t create the images on which Gemini was trained, and he should have a chance to see images that depict people who look like him in a positive light. (Oh, and the original “thugs” were Indian, anyway — plus they were a lot deadlier than any Crips or Bloods ever dreamed of. Take that, 2Pac!)

Does that mean that the whole Gemini thing is just a tempest in a Boomer-conservative teacup? Not quite. It points out two serious issues facing humanity in the near future.

Issue Zero: Google can’t be trusted. This is a bigger deal than you’d think. The majority of the global laptop class gets their search results, their shopping suggestions, and their general vision of the world from Google. Yes, we all knew that the company puts its thumb on the scale once in a while with search results, and most of us knew that Google has long since become a hotbed of left-ish political extremism. But the subtle results of applied bias in a long list of search results doesn’t hit like seeing a black George Washington or a Native American Puritan or a Benetton Wehrmacht. Let’s hope people get the message. It’s long past time to nationalize or break up Google, a case that Matt Stoller and others are in the process of making. It exercises more power over Americans than American Telephone and Telegraph ever dreamed of having. It should be kneecapped with the force of a million Shane Stants.

Issue One: “AI” is, and won’t be, accurately reflective of reality. I’ve beaten this drum about as hard as I can on ACF and elsewhere, but “AI” is just a randomized pastiche of what’s on the Internet. Just because you don’t make it show Black Wehrmacht doesn’t mean it will show you an accurate Wehrmacht. (Let’s not forget the Free Arabian Legion, which did have some African soldiers, so…) Nothing that “AI” generates, from program language to the logos and words in images, is in any way guaranteed to be accurate or correct. It’s more likely to be wrong.

The combination of Evil Google and Stupid Artificial Intelligence is going to get people killed before everybody wises up to it. You can depend on that. So our nine-figure pal Prabhakar Raghavan isn’t a villain. He’s an accidental hero. Go spend that Floyd Mayweather cash with glee, Prab-Dog!

You won’t get far with these deals

In other techie news… Sorry, bugpeople of the world: now that Apple has canceled its autonomous car project, you’re gonna have to drive yourself out to Napa. Gonna need a solution for that. Money isn’t a problem, because you’re a Director Of Diversity at Twitter and therefore you get a million dollars a year for correcting people’s pronoun usage, or maybe Elon fired you from that job and now you make your money sweating under a nepo baby for three minutes twice a month while thinking about your personal trainer, but either way you’re paid.

The only question, in the words of the Wieden+Kennedy Subaru campaign: What to drive?

Enter the world of Leasehackr and answer that question.

This site, which was down bad during the worst of the auto-supply crisis but is now experiencing a bit of a renaissance, puts would-be bargain hunters together with salesmen who are eager to move metal. Sort of a Seeking Arrangement on four wheels. There’s a big lesson to be learned in the above graphic, and we’ll get to it in a moment I promise, but before that: 7,500 miles a year?

“Well, duh, Jack, that’s the easiest way to show a low payment.” Hold up. It’s stranger than you think, because thirty years ago these leases did not exist. The “captive” finance arms, like Ford Credit, didn’t do leases below 12,000 miles a year, and with good reason: they’d learned that low-mileage leases lead to drastically declined satisfaction with the finance company during the term of the lease, lower customer retention, and plenty of complaints to outside authorities like the government and media.

Yeah, you could get a bank to do 10,000 miles a year, but sometimes that was coupled to the infamous “open-ended” lease where the person driving the car was somehow expected to guarantee what the vehicle would fetch at auction come the end of term. During my five years in the business, I don’t recall ever seeing a single personal-use vehicle actually finish and pay out an open-end lease. It was always handled via trade-in or dealer buyout. The only people who actually played by the contract were blue-collar firms that leased Econolines in bulk and had a 10% residual at the end of the contract. They did that for the tax benefits. But if you open-ended an S-Class for 60 months through “Physicians Leasing” or similar, you were always gonna handle it a different way besides the auction-and-settle method.

7,500 miles a year is 20 miles a day. Nobody who needs a car needs one for 20 miles a day, with the possible exception of “remote knowledge workers” who only leave the house a few times a week. It also means these relatively prosaic crossovers are ringing the register for more than a dollar a mile. Not that this is a direct comparison, but my 2014 Accord has cost me 27 cents a mile in purchase and finance costs. Is a new Lexus NX a better way to get around? Yes, if you’re not in a hurry. Is it four times better? Uh…

Doing a similar payment on a 12,000-mile-per-year lease balances the books a bit. I leased my lime-green Audi S5 for $920 a month, with 15,000 miles a year, for 73 cents a mile. On a much rarer and more interesting vehicle than either of the bugpods above. No, the dollars aren’t quite inflation-even, but you get the idea. 7,500 miles a year distorts the value equation of a vehicle rental.

In 2024, however, the low-mileage closed-end contract is a very real thing and in fact pretty much all the blockbuster lease deals out there use it. I wonder what your credit rating needs to be. Betcha it has to start with an 8, because the average Nissan Altimatroid who leases a car for a low payment can’t be bothered to keep it under 20k a year much less 7.5k. The irony, of course, is that mileage has never mattered less to residual value than it does now. Cars with 100,000 miles on them had an effective zero value in 1995. Today, they’re 60% of MSRP. Don’t you love The Current Year? But it’s also reflective of a non-economic fact, namely: high-mileage cars are a lot more usable than they were during the Clinton Administration.

Another non-economic fact, albeit one with a much longer lifespan: since the bulk of prestige cars are leased, it’s the monthly payment that shows their effective prestige, not their MSRP. Example: During the nineties, Infiniti sedans tended to lease for about half to 75% of their Lexus equivalent. This was despite the fact that Lexus real-world residuals were far stronger. Nissan had to stack the deck to move the metal.

Now, in 2024, I look at the above pair of deals and see that the real value of an Audi Q8 e-tron with an $81,780 MSRP is pretty much the same as a.. fifty-three grand Lexus NX. People, that’s a RAV4 in a party dress. But if you want it, you’re gonna pay Audi Q8 money.

If you think the lesson out of this is that Audi sucks compared to Lexus, you’re not entirely wrong. Maybe 90% wrong. I’ll show you the lesson.

Same approximate lease rate for a $20k difference. Because the one on the right doesn’t have a real engine.

Ah, here’s the best comparison — and I’m not lining any of these pairs up, Leasehackr is:

The real-world value of a $129,040 battery Benz is the same as a $66,455 South Carolina wagon. The market is speaking loud and clear, folks. When Mercedes-Benz has to throw $35,000 at something that is already priced under the cost of construction, and they still have 18 left! Expect that a change is gonna come.