In Kentucky, back in like 2015, we built a much needed new bridge across the Ohio river with money from the Obama administration.
When construction was almost complete, there started being rumors about tolls. And the city was like “nah, we wouldn’t do that”. And then a month later they were like “here’s how the tolls are going to work”.
It’s all hired out to a third party that expects to make profit off of it.
And the tolls don’t recoup the construction cost, they offset future maintenance costs.
And after a few months in operation, the private firm collecting tolls announced that they weren’t making their projected profits, so they were increasing the tolls. It was like $2.50 to cross one way. And it quickly went up from there.
After maybe 6 months they announced that they were having trouble collecting tolls on semi trucks. So they were again raising tolls on cars.
A lot of people have to cross this bridge just to get from their house to their work. So now it’s like $6 or $7 per day just to commute.
The private company is awful. There have been people who have transponders on their cars that end up with huge fines and late fees because they get double billed - billed by the transponder and billed by the license plate cameras. It takes hours to get through on a phone call. Their payment website is constantly down. Now they’re just telling everybody that it takes months for them to generate your bills so you can’t even believe the numbers, or like sometimes they’re just randomly billing customers that have transponders for trips they didn’t take.
IT IS FUCKING HORRIBLE.
And the "drivers’ that should be paying the largest part of the bill - the trucking companies (as their vehicles weight the same as a dozen cars or more) don’t pay anything and just people trying to get to work every day have a $200 per month commuting bill that they didn’t sign up for when they bought their house on the other side of the river.
And the city is stuck in this contract - where a private company can unilaterally raise rates and overcharge and double bill - and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve heard stories of people trying to register their car and finding out it has thousands of dollars in tolls. Buying cars that have thousands of dollars in tolls outstanding that can’t be registered until the bills are paid.
And all of this, not to build a bridge. The bridges were built before the toll company even got involved. But just for future maintenance on the bridge.
And the net effect of all of this is that people who live in this city have learned to never use the big beautiful new bridge. Because even if you do everything right, you still get screwed. So all the tolling has done is coerce more people into using the old, outdated, beyond-design-capacity bridges that the new bridge was built to take the load off of. The new bridge is constantly empty and the little two-lane 70 year old bridge next to it is busier than ever.
Woman calls the police saying she thinks her caregiver is going to kill her and to get her out, the cops come, complement her caregiver’s weapons, and leave; hours later, the caregiver kills her.
My friend’s neighbor shot himself in the bathroom of the house he was renting. After the police left, my friend and the landlord that owned the two properties had to clean his brains off of the bathroom walls and mop up a puddle of blood. My friend got a free month rent for helping the landlord.
As someone who has always been into cars and technology, I’ve never been able to find anything about that tech that Tesla “open sourced”.
It’s just another lie that Musk used one time to juice stock prices or something. I’ve never found anything like a Git with any of their tech. There doesnt’ appear to be any way to read about it or download it from any Tesla websites.
I mean maybe someone can finally provide me a link here, I would love that.
To me, it seems like it’s just more empty words. Googling/Binging/Yahooing “Tesla Open Source” just brings up nine year old articles and the “All Our Patents Are Belong To You” press release. And no actual meat. And an interview with someone from Tesla who qualifies that they’re not actually open source because they’re not publishing confidential engineering data.
Who would have the power to stop Elon Musk from running for President?
Presidents are also not supposed to be actively running their businesses while also being President. But Trump brazenly didn’t even pretend to not be running his companies while in office. Nobody could stop him.
So if Elon Musk was like “I’m running for President” at what point does someone have the power to stop him? Who has the power to stop him from taking the office if he wins? It seems like a lot of those things we learned were impervious norms were really just impotent words that have no actual enforcement system behind them. And Republicans love breaking such norms.
I’ll also point out that according to rightwing folklore, we already had an illegitimate African president who served two terms. I think Republicans would run Elon just to troll.
Kenneth Smith ‘struggled for life’ for 22 minutes in Alabama nitrogen gas execution: Updates (www.independent.co.uk)
“Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.”...
I converted a dead Ender 3 into a heat insert press tool (lemmy.world)
www.thingiverse.com/thing:6394749...
Woman killed hours after Rio Rancho police respond to her home (www.koat.com)
Woman calls the police saying she thinks her caregiver is going to kill her and to get her out, the cops come, complement her caregiver’s weapons, and leave; hours later, the caregiver kills her.
The Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled. (mastodon.online)
Elon Musk supports eliminating voting rights for people without children (www.independent.co.uk)