Now I’m thinking about other options. Tomato milk. Grape milk. Orange milk. Lemon milk.

Yeah it’s a fine line to walk. There are people who are non-functional, who spend their entire lives unable to take care of themselves and function.

My older sister was a genius who, every couple of years, would have mental breakdowns and need to be institutionalized until she was diagnosed in her mid-30’s. Before the diagnosis I always considered myself a milder version of her- smart but not on her level, introverted but functional. Others in my life, without knowing about her have said they think I’m on the spectrum. So that’s a round about way of saying “there’s a good chance I’m on the spectrum too, but I don’t like self-diagnosing and haven’t had enough reason to get diagnosed.”

I think the real key is giving people the freedom and technology to choose. I could envision a world where people move along the spectrum from day-to-day based on what best serves them. And I think a lot of non-autistic people would find a bit of the spectrum helpful. But that’s probably just a utopian dream.

Yeah my first thought reading the headline is “oh so we can spread it to more people and actually have a functioning society?”

Of course I don’t mean to offend those who suffer from it. But in small doses…

Oh yes I see I got distracted and didn’t get to my conclusion: perhaps it is unwise to ostracize the creations of evil people and evil corporations.

The Cybertrucks are here. I don’t want to toss a bunch of EV’s (even bad ones) in a landfill prematurely just because the CEO is a fascist.

Definitely sucks for the people who thought they were doing the right thing by going electric and ended up driving Swasticars.

I know there’s an argument that those folks should have known what they were in for by the time the Cybertruck in 2023, but some people just don’t pay much attention to current events.

I drive a Subaru and couldn’t tell you who the CEO is, although in retrospect perhaps I should have done more research before buying. But even without looking I can guess that it’s some shitty billionaire who donated heavily to both the GOP and DNC. Subaru itself has a history that involves… Being a Japanese manufacturer during WW2.

You could also look at the Nazi Henry Ford and all of those gigantic pickup trucks clogging the US while also buying fossil fuels. It helps that Henry Ford is long dead, but are they really that much better than Cybertrucks?

I mean morally. Objectively, Cybertrucks are just badly designed and manufactured vehicles but that’s separate from my point. Although if I may also rant- we already know that he used the Boring company to purposely sabotage high-speed rail projects in the US. We know that he bought Twitter not to make it profitable, but to gain power over social media. When you look at Tesla- the QC issues, the labor relations issues, the missed deadlines, the proprietary charging connector, the complete mess of a car the Cybertruck is, and how he is now very actively supporting a president who seems to be trying to destroy EV’s and prop up fossil fuels… Was Elon EVER actually trying to push EV’s, or was he actively trying to sabotage them? I know this is borderline conspiratorial thinking, but a lot of his madness seems to make a lot more sense in that context.

Imagine believing that Democrats are homogenous

Maybe if you live under a rock?

Exactly. The whole world suffers from that. And I’ve seen a LOT of Democrats get absolutely destroyed by their bases for supporting it. Fetterman went from being a folk hero of work class Pennsylvanians to a genocide-mongerer. Cory Booker just pulled off a pretty amazing feat of giving a 25 hour filibuster and yet the news cycle very quickly shifted to how he voted with Republicans to continue bombing Palestine.

This meme doesn’t make sense to me because I’ve never seen Republicans send that accusation towards Democrats. If anything, Republican criticisms tend to go the other way: that Democrats should mind their own business and that there is a moral obligation to limit the scope of government (not that they actually care about that, but they say they do).

Imagine believing that a party can have a policy that doesn’t affect you.

That’s easy for someone who can afford more expensive protein sources to say.

Eggs used to be one of the best protein per dollar values available. You still have flour (and flour products), lentils, and pinto beans as options. Maybe oats and peanut butter, although that’s starting to transition from “protein per dollar” to “calories per dollar” to make sense. And those other sources will start to get more expensive as people move to them.

It hasn’t gotten as much press, but the cost of chicken meat rises with the prices of eggs too. That has historically been the cheapest available meat, so I would expect people moving to alternatives to drive up the costs of pork, lentils and beans. Maybe beef and seafood too.

It’s a significant blow, especially to people who do a lot of physical labor and need that protein. This isn’t just as simple as “don’t buy the videogame that’s overpriced” or “don’t watch the movie with the problematic actor” or “don’t buy the low-quality fast fashion products made by slave labor”. This is messing with people’s food. Go look up all of the long-term ramifications to populations after famines.

Society is never more than a few hungry days from collapse. This could very well push America closer to that.

I’m not a copyright expert either, but I would think it goes one of two ways.

One is that the original rights holder of the IP could sue these binders for profiting off of it.

The other is that they can’t because the work is sufficiently transformative, in which case it would fall to he fanfic writer. From there, it probably depends on how they released their work. Some websites might claim ownership of anything published there as part of their ToS. Some authors might explicitly release their works under more open licenses to encourage community involvement. If it was just posted somewhere without addressing these questions (which I would guess is pretty common)… Sounds like a mess for the courts to sort out.

Perhaps one day humanity will look back and ask whether the lack of Internet in the thousands of years prior damaged the development of everyone who grew up without it

This happens again and again and again. At every level, public and private.

The answer is not “filter these people out of these jobs” because very often they have no prior records. Or sometimes someone gets phished. The answer is to stop enabling this in the first place.

I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I’m a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn’t?

Then I remembered Starlink exists.

Queue all the people in the comments talking about ad blockers or alternative apps.

Those might be great (and ad blocking is important in general), but I’ve found I ultimately just watch YouTube less.

A good chunk of my favorite creators had been pushing Nebula for the past couple years, so I finally tried it out and it’s pretty decent. I’ve even found new channels there that would have been buried on YouTube. Still tons of room for improvement for the platform, but it’s functional now.

Other creators have their own websites with text content, or podcasts hosted elsewhere.

It’s only a small handful of channels I check for on YouTube anymore. It kind of sucks that it’s mostly small channels where video is a key component and they don’t fit with the edu-tainment vibe of Nebula, and I don’t know of another platform for them. Lots of DIY home improvement, self-sufficiency (not religious or conspiratorial lol), music videos, and channels dedicated to specific videogame franchises.

I know LTT has Floatplane too. I wonder if all of these other videos streaming options getting worse will start driving more people to smaller platforms.

Except it’s not private money. Private vehicles have been heavily subsidized for almost a century in the US. We’ve had decade after decades or tax credits, interest-free loans, and bailouts to the oil and automotive industries. Most local road maintenance is financed with debt, and that debt has started to bankrupt municipalities. Minimum parking requirements encourage sprawl and reduce the tax base by filling these municipalities with land that is economically unproductive.

This all applies to electric too. Tesla famously would not exist if not for years and years of government money propping them up and artificially lowering their prices. Plus all the incentives for building owners to add charging stations, and the billions of dollars going towards expanding EV charging infrastructure in general.

And if you want to optimize for efficiency, personal EV’s are still not even close to buses or trains. Personal vehicle ownership absolutely does NOT make economic sense for anyone except the owners and managers of the companies who profit from them.

American suburbs aren’t ever going to become walkable if everyone just keeps saying “well it’s just too hard to have nice things” and keeps throwing money at perpetuating the problem instead of using that money to get out of the hole.

AND all the emissions associated with mining, refining and transporting the fuel

Except it’s nowhere near that simple. Manufacturing and shipping batteries is hardly a clean process. And the impact of the fuel is dependent upon the method used to generate the electricity, and both in the US and globally fossil fuels are still used widely for that.

Plus a lot of the pollution and carbon generation is virtually identical for personal vehicles regardless of how it’s powered. You still have tires that wear, tons of plastics and fluids (even EV’s need lubrication), and of course all of the metals involved. Then of course there is road infrastructure: thousands upon thousands of miles of asphalt and concrete separating neighborhoods and habitats. Acres upon acres of impermeable pavement soaking up heat and occupying valuable space that could be used for something more productive.

EV’s are better than ICE options because they at least will get greener as the electrical grid does, but still have the same fundamental issues that all personal vehicles do. You could add in bil-diesel and hydrogen cars too. It’s saving pennies when things like better public transportation and more walkable cities saves pounds.

Ah see this is the problem with political discussion. It turns out he never actually said that.

According to the article, one tiny piece of the $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill he signed committed two federal agencies to be conduct a study on that as a potential solution.

The Forbes article editorializes that significantly to say that beaconing has received the “federal stamp of approval”.

It’s like a kid asking their parents for McDonalds for hours and the parent says “I’ll think about it”.

No I don’t remember that. Any chance you have a link?

I remember Tesla fanboys crying when Biden appointed Cummings to the NHTSA, but I can’t think of anything else connecting Biden to self-driving cars.

ITT: “What was the victim wearing at the time? Was the car acting in self-defense? Do cars have qualified immunity? Did the pedestrian pose a threat or instigate the car? Were they wearing their officially state-sanctioned Pedestrian uniform and helmet? Did the pedestrian have any pre-existing conditions?”