Latest news with #Gado
Wales Online
27-05-2025
- Sport
- Wales Online
Teenager dies from 'serious head injury' after playing viral rugby-style tackle game
Teenager dies from 'serious head injury' after playing viral rugby-style tackle game The game has recently soared in popularity on social media and has been endorsed by some professional rugby players The teenager died after playing 'run it straight' with friends in Palmerston North, New Zealand (Image: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images ) A teenager has died after suffering a "serious head injury" while playing a rugby-style tackling game popular on social media, police have confirmed. The 19-year-old from New Zealand - identified in local media as Ryan Satterthwaite - passed away in hospital on Monday, having played a game of 'run it straight' with friends in the city of Palmerston North the day before. The game sees two players, one with a ball and the other the tackler, charge at each other with no protective gear in order to recreate the high-impact collisions seen in rugby and knock each other down. While it has been played casually in Australia and New Zealand for years, 'run it straight' has recently become a viral challenge online, with videos of people running at full speed into one another clocking up tens of millions of views on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. In a statement, Manawatu Area Commander Inspector and police spokesperson Ross Grantham said: 'This young man's death is an absolute tragedy and my thoughts are with his family and friends. 'The tackle game … was based on a social media-driven trend, where participants compete in full-contact collisions without protective gear. "While this was an impromptu game among friends, not a planned event, this tragic outcome does highlight the inherent safety concerns with such an activity," Inspector Grantham added. Article continues below "We would urge anyone thinking about taking part in a game or event like this to consider the significant safety and injury risk." Despite critics warning that it could lead to head trauma and brain injury, the game has not just taken off online but has also been endorsed by some professional rugby players and has led to tournaments being held. Last week, one such event - Runit Championship League - was held in Auckland, having being first held in Australia in March, with a prize of around $20,000 up for grabs. The event saw two men retire from the competition due to head injuries, with videos showing one of them appearing to have a seizure following a collision, according to Radio New Zealand. Tournament organisers RUNIT promotes the game as "the world's fiercest new collision sport" with "strength and grit" being rewarded. A Runit Championship League final had been planned to be held in Auckland with a reported $200,000 prize on the line, but the Trust Arena - where the 'trials' had already taken place' now says it will not host the event. 'The initial Runit trials were held at the Trusts Arena, but a contract had not been signed in relation to hosting the final event,' said the stadium's general manager of community engagement Lynette Adams. 'Following the trials, it was clear from commentary that there was overwhelming concern for the high-risk nature of the event. Safety of all participants at our venue is paramount and this activity presented safety considerations that we could not overlook. 'We therefore made the decision not to allow any further Runit events at our venue and the event promoter was advised accordingly last week." Article continues below In a statement issued to the Guardian, RUNIT said the 19-year-old's death was tragic and said it did "not encourage any copying of the sport", adding that its events involve participant screening, medical assessments and strict guidelines on how and where to tackle. 'Any contact sport like boxing, martial arts or combat-style activities should only be held in highly controlled environments, which include professional medical supervision and support,' it said. 'We do not encourage any copying of the sport as it should only be done under the strict conditions.'
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
Waymo Issues ‘Recall' On Robotaxis, But That's The Wrong Word
A Waymo self-driving car is seen in the Inner Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, California, ... More November 17, 2024. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) Waymo reported it was 'recalling' all 1,200 of their robotaxis for a software update related to a number of incidents where Waymos hit small things like chains and parking lot gate arms. None of these incidents caused significant damage, or any injuries. Often, the idea of a recall, even a voluntary one, conjures up images of exploding Pinto gas tanks or other major issues, resulting in the very expensive process of bringing every car into a shop for service. Instead, with this recall: Several other robocar companies, including Tesla and Cruise, have also issued recall notices which also were resolved with a normal over-the-air software update. No vehicles were called back. Tesla owners all know they get regular updates, usually one a month or two, affecting the Autopilot and FSD systems in their cars. When a robotaxi project starts out, the cars will be getting updates very frequently. Test cars may get them every day at times, though updates to an entire fleet will be more rare. Updates to an entire fleet require extensive testing to assure the changes haven't caused any regression; making it worse while trying to improve it. That testing will start in simulator and then go to test cars, usually with safety drivers monitoring them. As a system matures, updates will get less frequent. Waymo declined to answer questions about how frequent the updates are. So why the recall? Probably because this problem had been subject to an inquiry by NHTSA, the federal safety agency. NHTSA inquiries and investigations have been tied to declaring certain software updates to be a recall, effectively answering NHTSA to say 'that's been fixed.' In one famous case, NHTSA told Tesla it was upset that Tesla FSD would make 'rolling stops' at 4-way stops, and Tesla issued a recall. After, they modified the training data for their machine learning systems to include only examples of full stops, and removed all 'California stops.' This was a major departure for NHTSA, which does not normally regulate driving behavior and rules of the road, which is the province of the state DMVs. While NHTSA has the power to order recalls, normally companies issue voluntary recalls rather than face that. In turn, a voluntary recall is an admission that there was a problem, and a declaration that they have improved it. Waymo declined to give more details on just what they fixed, other than to say the system is now better at detecting and handling these thin obstacles. While it's unlikely these incidents would lead to injury, it's not impossible, and all fixes are good. Waymo's published statistics, audited by SwissRe, indicate they have very few at-fault incidents causing any property damage to others. That includes breaking a parking gate, though not necessarily hitting a chain if the only damage is scratches to the Waymo. Waymo has issued 2 other recalls. One was for the bizarre incident where two Waymos crashed with the same pickup truck being towed backwards, and a more significant incident where one hit a telephone pole in an alley. Tesla has issued 2 recalls for FSD (including the rolling stop) and one for Autopilot. Almost 40% of Teslas recalls have just been over-the-air updates. Cruise issued several recalls, including one after the dragging incident which led to the company's undoing. NHTSA should consider creating a different vocabulary for these recalls where the vehicles are not recalled. They are best described as 'regulator prompted fixes' or perhaps simply 'significant safety fixes.' There are interesting issues over recalls of robocars, particularly if they do require an actual return to a service center. Today, in most cases, once an automaker issues a recall, it is upon the owners to bring their car in for service. Many take a fair bit of time or never do. What happens if a robocar recall demands the vehicles cease operations? Many envision a world were a sizable proportion of the population have replaced car ownership with robotaxis. Such a recall might strand millions if not done with care. Worse, it might make those millions switch to manual driving, even if that is known to be less safe that the robocars are, even with the defect not yet fixed.
Vox
04-05-2025
- Automotive
- Vox
The life-or-death case for self-driving cars
is an editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate, tech, and world teams, and is the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. A white Waymo self-driving car with rooftop sensor equipment is stopped at an intersection in San Francisco's Financial District on March 18. Gado via Getty Images I have some bad news: You are almost certainly a worse driver than you think you are. Humans drive distracted. They drive drowsy. They drive angry. And, worst of all, they drive impaired far more often than they should. Even when we're firing on all cylinders, our Stone Age-adapted brains are often no match for the speed and complexity of high-speed driving. There's as much as a 2.5-second lag between what we perceive and how fast we can react in a vehicle traveling 60 mph, which means a car will travel the equivalent of two basketball court lengths before its driver can even hit the brake. The result of this very human fallibility is blood on the streets. Nearly 1.2 million people die in road crashes globally each year, enough to fill nine jumbo jets each day. Here in the US, the government estimates there were 39,345 traffic fatalities in 2024, which adds up to a bus's worth of people perishing every 12 hours. The good news is there are much, much better drivers coming online, and they have everything human drivers don't: They don't need sleep. They don't get angry. They don't get drunk. And their brains can handle high-speed decision-making with ease. Because they're AI. AI takes the wheel The average American adult will spend around three years of their life driving. If robots could take the wheel instead, well, think of all the Netflix shows we could stream instead. But the true benefit of a self-driving revolution will be in lives saved. And new data from the autonomous vehicle company Waymo suggests that those savings could be very great indeed. In a peer-reviewed study that is set to be published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, Waymo analyzed the safety performance of its autonomous vehicles over the course of 56.7 million miles driven in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco — all without a human safety driver present to take the wheel in an emergency. They then compared that data to human driving safety over the same number of miles driven on the same kind of roads. The results of the study, almost certainly the biggest and most comprehensive research on self-driving car safety yet released, are striking. A master class in driving safety Compared to human drivers, the Waymo self-driving cars had: 81 percent fewer airbag-deploying crashes 85 percent fewer crashes with suspected serious or worse injuries 96 percent fewer injury crashes at intersections (primarily because Waymo detects red lights faster than humans) 92 percent fewer crashes that involve injuries to pedestrians. Had the typical human-driven fleet of cars covered those same 56.7 million miles, the Waymo researchers project it would have resulted in an estimated 181 additional injury crashes, 78 additional air-bag crashes, and 11 extra serious-injury crashes. But the numbers really get eye-popping when you extend this data across all 3.3 trillion vehicle miles driven by humans in the US in a typical year. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that if the same 85 percent reduction seen in serious crashes held true for fatal ones — a big if, to be clear, since the study had too few fatal events to measure — we'd save approximately 34,000 lives a year. That's five times the number of Americans who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. Don't get in the way of progress Of course, there are plenty of caveats to the Waymo study and even more obstacles before we could ever achieve anything like what's outlined above. In part because serious injury crashes are (thankfully) very rare, even 56.7 million miles isn't long enough for researchers to be really sure that such crashes would occur significantly less often with robot drivers, so more data will be needed there. Waymo's cars were also being driven largely in warm, sunny locations, operating in geofenced areas that had been heavily mapped by the company. It's far less certain how they might do in, let's say, the snowy streets of Boston in the winter. This is also a company-run study, though it has been peer-reviewed by outside experts. And even if we decided to go all in on AI drivers, actually producing enough autonomous vehicles to begin to replace human-driven cars and trucks would be an enormous undertaking, to say the least. Still, the data looks so good, and the death toll on our roads is so high that I'd argue slowing down autonomous vehicles is actually costing lives. And there's a risk that's precisely what will happen. Too often the public focuses on unusual, outlier events with self-driving cars, while the carnage that occurs thanks to human drivers on a daily basis is simply treated as background noise. (That's an example of two common psychological biases: availability bias, which causes us to judge risk by outlier events that jump easily to mind, and base-rate neglect, where we ignore the underlying frequency of events.) This misapprehension is something I often see in news coverage and consumption, and it's one of the reasons I started Good News. The result is that public opinion has been turning against self-driving cars in recent years, to the point where vandals have attacked autonomous vehicles on the street. And of course, given that nearly 5 million Americans make their living primarily through driving, any wide-scale movement to self-driving vehicles would bring significant economic disruption. But still, 34,000 lives saved on an annual basis would represent tremendous progress. Maybe, after about 100 years of trying, it's time to give something else a chance behind the wheel. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Newsweek
01-05-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
Trader Joe's 'Two Buck Chuck' Winemaker Announces More Mass Layoffs
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A California winery has revealed plans to eliminate nearly 150 positions, citing shifting industry trends and ongoing economic challenges as the driving factors. The Bronco Wine Company, known for its Charles Shaw brand or "Two Buck Chuck," sold exclusively at Trader Joe's, said the move was necessary due to the "evolving dynamics of the wine industry and broader economic pressures." When contacted by Newsweek, the Bronco Wine Company said it had no comment on the layoffs beyond its initial statement. Why It Matters The U.S. wine industry is facing a number of headwinds at present, including a decline in consumption, particularly among younger drinkers. Adding to this is the potential impact of the administration's trade policies, and the prospect of rising operational costs from tariffs leading to even narrower margins for American producers. What To Know The Ceres, California-based company was founded in 1973, and has since grown into one of the country's largest wine producers, according to VinePair. Bronco Wine Co. employed around 750 people in Ceres at the start of the year, CBS reported. Earlier this month, the company submitted a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) to the state of California, indicating plans to lay off 146 employees at its Bystrum Road facility in Ceres. Stock image: A case with logo for Charles Shaw wine is pictured, Lafayette, California, December 8, 2021. Stock image: A case with logo for Charles Shaw wine is pictured, Lafayette, California, December 8, 2021. Gado/Getty Images In a statement quoted by the Sacramento-based outlet KCRA 3, Bronco said that the decision was necessary "due to a significant downturn in business revenues, necessitating a major reorganization in operations and workforce." This follows Bronco's February announcement that it would be laying off 81 people at its Stanislaus County winery, bringing the total workforce reduction in 2025 to nearly 230. As quoted by CBS Sacramento at the time, the company attributed the layoffs to "challenging headwinds in the wine industry," including "shifting population demographics, consumer trends and industry headwinds, and over supply of wine grapes in the marketplace." In addition to these longer-term difficulties, the U.S. wine industry is currently grappling with the impacts of the President Donald Trump administration's trade policies, including the global, 10 percent tariff announced on April 2, as well as the higher rates on certain import partners. In March, Trump threatened to impose a 200 percent tariff on wine and champagne from the European Union, though this has not come into effect. Stock image: Rolling hills with grape vines are seen in a vineyard, Camino, California, September 14, 2024. Stock image: Rolling hills with grape vines are seen in a vineyard, Camino, California, September 14, 2024. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images U.S. winemakers, who spoke to NPR earlier in April, said that tariffs on imported items such as barrels, corks and bottles could raise their operational costs substantially, which they would be forced to pass on to customers. In addition, the ongoing "buy Canadian" boycott, adopted in response to Trump's tariffs and calls to turn Canada into a 51st state, has taken aim at American-made wines and resulted in further headwinds for domestic producers. According to the Wine Institute, a California-based advocacy organization, Canada had previously accounted for 35 percent of all U.S. wine exports before this protest. What People Are Saying Dom Engels, Bronco Wine Co. president and CEO, said: "This decision was not made lightly. We deeply appreciate the valuable contributions of every employee affected, and we are committed to providing support and resources to help ease the transition. While these changes are difficult, they are also necessary. We stand at a critical juncture—not just responding to current challenges, but making bold moves to build a resilient, more focused organization for the future." Bronco Wine Co., in a statement shared with Newsweek, said: "In recent months, Bronco Wine Co. has taken a series of intentional steps to redefine the company and strengthen its position in the U.S. wine industry. Today's announcement marks a pivotal moment for Bronco Wine Co., as it now directs its attention toward growth and long-term stability." The Wine Institute, in response to Trump's April 2 tariff announcements, said: "Today's announcement of new tariffs will only make it harder for American wineries to regain access to Canada, by far our most important export market. In early March, Canada cleared its shelves of all U.S. wine and continues to block its sale. As this dispute drags on, it is creating economic instability at a time when the industry is already under significant pressure." What Happens Next The layoffs are set to go into effect on June 16, KCRA reports.
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
We Can Have Credit Access Or The CFPB's Alternate Reality, Not Both
Close-up of the upper corner of a consumer credit report from the credit bureau Equifax, with text ... More reading Credit File and Personal Identification, on a light wooden surface, September 11, 2017. In September of 2017, a data breach at Equifax exposed the personal information of thousands of customers. (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images). A dollar invested in the S&P 500 in 2000 is worth $5.95 today. It's an impressive return, but also a reminder: money is never easy. It can't be. See the performance of the S&P once again if you're confused. The simple truth is that lenders and investors have choices. And they can't make bad choices when loaning out money and/or investing precisely because the opportunity cost associated with missing out on credible loans and investments is so enormous. Throw in the genius of compounding when contemplating returns, and it's easy to see why those with capital to put to work are so careful with it. It's something to keep in mind as Congress continues to deal with the errors made by the mis-named Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Agency's ongoing attempts to formalize a ban on the inclusion of medical debt in credit reports indicate that its efforts to protect consumers are symbolic as opposed to serious and tangible. Which is no insight. To see why, readers must first stop and consider why un-elected and un-accountable regulators at the CFPB would want to ban medical debt inclusion in credit reports to begin with. They wouldn't be doing this if those debts tended toward small and inconsequential. Which requires readers to subsequently stop and consider the credit-report implications of reports that lack information about what could potentially be substantial. Substantial is the operative word, and it's the point. Since medical debt can be sizable relative to other calls on individual income, omission of it results in a credit report that is anything but. The problem is that lenders and investors can't part with precious funds to borrowers who have credit reports that are anything but. Which is another reminder that the CFPB's efforts to support consumers are symbolic as opposed to tangible. Reports that lack a crucial piece of information about would-be borrowers associate with the proverbial lending windows slamming shut. In short, the CFPB's actions will limit credit availability, not expand it. So, while some will contend that the CFPB's actions are nice in theory but cruel in practice, it will be said here that the CFPB's actions are cruel in theory precisely they're cruel in practice. As individuals we rely on our credit scores to access credit, only for the CFPB to compromise their integrity, and with it, our ability to secure a loan. What makes the CFPB's actions worse is the blanket quality to them. If one rather pertinent piece of information is banned from credit reports, those for whom a complete credit report would enhance their capacity to borrow are potentially lumped in with those for whom a full credit report would expose a truth that the CFPB is trying to obscure. Which is a long way of saying that if the CFPB gets its way, the credit implications will be chilling for borrowers good and bad. Credit is an effect of information, and the CFPB is trying to muzzle it. Just the same, markets invariably have their say, though not as seamlessly when government gets in the way. Which means lenders will eventually find ways to discover information that the CFPB is trying to obscure, but at the cost of slower, more risk-averse credit flows in the near and long-term. Better than the above outcome would be for Congress to rediscover its substantial power, power that includes oversight of regulatory bodies that exist at the pleasure of Congress, not themselves. In which case the constitutionally correct answer is for Congress to assert itself so that the misguided CFPB cannot.
