Vital work from CDC is being lost
My daughter got canned from the CDC, a job she’s had for eight years, and was a hardworking and dedicated employee.
Losing her job hurts, but even more so by the implication that she and her team were underperforming in their duties. Her warning that the vital work people were doing would be lost, causing untold generational health issues for our country, is frightening.
I can only hope that the spineless and cruel Republican Congress supporting the Trump/Musk chain saw massacre will soon be receiving their own pink slips in the next election.
RALPH CARTEE, LILBURN
Self-driving cars shouldn’t be tested on our roads
Doug Turnbull’s recent article promoting simulators to perfect driverless vehicles is spot-on regarding public safety.
Georgia has little to no regulation over autonomous vehicles, which have been involved in hundreds of accidents nationwide. One big sales pitch for driverless vehicles is they will be safe. But, according to the Association for Computer Machinery, the nation’s premier association of computer engineers, “ … experimental automated vehicles have caused and will continue to cause serious injuries and fatalities to public road users, as well as other problems.”
According to the ACM, “ … fully automated vehicles cannot now and may never be able to operate safely without a human driver’s active participation and engagement except on limited roadways and under controlled conditions.”
Research from the Pew Research Center reveals that only 1 in 5 Americans feels comfortable or extremely comfortable sharing the road with driverless cars.
Based on this information, it is fair to ask whether self-driving cars should be permitted to operate on Atlanta roads in the coming months or whether there should be additional testing in a controlled environment. Atlanta residents should not be guinea pigs for this unproven technology.
AMY WITHERITE, ATLANTA
Data centers won’t benefit Georgians
I enjoyed reading Bill Torpy’s editorial on data center power. It is really disappointing to read that after years and years of rate increases to pay for Plant Vogtle, 80% of the power will go to data centers.
An important issue that I think Mr. Torpy failed to touch on is the product’s value. Will that product benefit Georgians? Or will it be used for cryptocurrency mining, a product that will benefit few and most of us do not even understand? Will that use create jobs for many workers?
It’s very different from using electricity to pump water for irrigation. We all like to eat and benefit from crops grown in Georgia. It also takes a known quantity of water to produce a pound of blueberries, and the amount of electricity and its cost is figured into the price of blueberries. But can we say that for the data produced by the data center?
Unlike food, clothing and shelter, the value of the data produced might go away. If we don’t address this issue, one day we will wake up wondering exactly what we got from the billions of dollars we spent on the power plants for the then-shuttered data centers.
MICHAEL CEIGLER, ATLANTA
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