So protesting is only ever acceptable if the only people impacted by the protests are precisely the offenders being protested. If anyone else is affected, protestors should go to jail for their heinous crime of protest. If the very people the protest target make themselves inaccessible to protesters, then protest is not allowed.
A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire. The fire department arrived minutes later,...
The luddites were not protesting technology. They were protesting their labor being squeezed. That the factory owners, thanks to new technology, were going to be able to pay less and keep more. It was a labor movement.
The looms were the symbol, not the problem.
The luddites were, of course, crushed with great violence. Then all their predictions of the future came true. They were almost beyond all doubt right.
Driverless cars... the threat may be similar but the scale is tiny in comparison. I think these protests are actually about the technology, not how it affects labor. It's about these cars being seen as dangerous threats on the streets.
I only wish that ire were turned toward their city managers office instead of the cars. If people want safe streets, they aren't going to get them targeting driverless taxis. They have to go after all the fundamentally unsafe auto oriented design.
A transgender woman running for an Ohio House seat has been disqualified for failing to disclose her former name on petitions circulated to voters, in violation of a seldom-enforced state law....
The legal name change is all the disclosure you need. That's a matter of public record. No one is concealing their identity if they're using their full government name.
The idea that some kind of subterfuge may happen without this law is plainly preposterous. You're steelmanning it for no reason.
The rule is only enforced for transgender people, though, and specifically exempts some other kinds of name changes that are considered more 'socially acceptable' to these fuckwits.
So no, if the cisgendered people do not need to disclose, neither do the transgendered people. That's called discrimination on the basis of sex.
Disclose previous names, please. There were full records of the legal name change. Nothing was hidden. The forms didn't even have the fucking disclosure requirements on them because no one gives a shit about this law.
This is strictly an anti-trans rule at this point and you're here rushing to its defense based on some law and order conservative bullshit.
I know a lot of non-rich people who've been looking into various birthright citizenships lately. It's been a bit of a meme. Irish, Italian, etc. Especially among new adults.
My bet is that a lot of this trend is just caused by inadvertent awareness campaigns through modern social media. Especially for people from the US, the idea of having a non-US option appeals. Anyone who grew up here and has so much as watched a few videos about the difference in experience from living in a modern western european democracy will be green with envy. Healthcare, work/life balance, livable urban design... grass just seems way greener to anyone who was born post-9/11.
Literally any subject matter expert on the subject of transportation can spell out a half a dozen things that make no sense/are actively harmful about all the attention and investment these projects got. Well There's Your Problem has a 3 hour slideshow on the subject, for example. Musk was even caught on the record admitting one of its motivations was to fuck with real transportation projects like California HSR. The whole thing was all-but-provably an elaborate con.
“You have review boards, that’s fine, but it’s got to be done in ways where you have the Sheriff or Chief of Police appointing people,” the governor said. “It can’t be people that have an agenda.”
No satire could hope to come up with a more obvious hypocrite than reality.
The dumbest part is that these boards had no power to begin with. Their rulings were entirely unenforceable. Just a transparency tool. The sunshine state hates sunlight.
What is clear, however, is that Trump — who ostensibly spent four years as president of the United States — has little clue about what NATO is or what NATO does. And when he spoke on the subject at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, what he said was less a cogent discussion of foreign policy than it was gibberish...
They can definitely afford it. They are extreme wealthy and growing moreso with every molecule extracted. If we want to make it so they "can't afford it", we need to change the societal paradigm and start holding them responsible for all damages past and future in civil and criminal courts.
It's more that there's an intense disinformation and misinformation campaign about it. Run largely by people who should be celebrating the victories that have been made, but who instead just handwave away all progress as insufficient. Because they really, really, really hate Biden, and so accepting that he's good on an issue (which he just plain is on climate) is not compatible with their worldviews.
You'll see it in this thread just as assuredly as anywhere.
Where yo WON'T hear it is among policy wonks. The IRA is celebrated in serious climate circles. Just listen to, say, David Roberts (http://volts.wtf), for example, and you can barely get through any segment without talking about how much it has unlocked renewable spending/expansion.
And it's not the endgame, it's just the first step along a new path. It's even built into the law that it will make further efforts politically and financially easier.
Meanwhile, people who claim they care deeply about climate don't even know what the IRA is. I'm not one to gatekeep, but it really does show how shallow climate reporting in the greater media landscape is.
The irony is, refusing to see how much progress has been made on climate under Biden may condemn us to lose it all when Trump gets reelected as a result and follows through on his promises to reverse courses on green energy in all its forms and vastly scale up drilling and LNG. Because Trump would potentially be able to cripple the act and the institutions it created even without control of congress.
Just so tired of almost every time a doctor submits stuff to insurance, we have to be the ones to make multiple phone calls to both the doctor’s office and insurance to iron everything out, figure out what the issue is (it’s always a different issue), and basically be the go-between for the office and insurance. What am I...
And what might be the most important part cannot be elided over: market capitalism is HIGHLY efficient at solving optimization problems, but it only responds to incentives.
So if you can create the right incentives to reward the result you want and punish results you don't want, a market solution is going to do a marvelous job. It's great at, say, price discovery. But if the incentives do not align with the desired result, it's going to grind you under heel.
The incentives the insurance companies are responding to, frankly, are the ones you have outlined and essentially no others. Collect more premiums, make fewer payouts. There's no "breaking point" here because they have an absolutely vast customer base that has no choice to opt out of the system for a variety of reasons (ranging from the ACA individual mandate to the fact that it is not possible for an individual to make fully-informed financial decisions about their health even WITH advanced knowledge and training that nearly no one has).
Health insurance is pretty much a textbook example of the kind of service that shouldn't be on private markets.
So over time, market capitalism is going to make them collect endlessly-increasing premiums and pay out less and less. It is going to continue to get worse because the incentives of the system have defined 'worse' as being the optimal result. Period. It will eventually get nationalized. Period. All the argument in the meantime is just over how long we want to continue to let people be sick and broke before we apply the only fix.
It doesn't add any cost to include a throttle on the ebike.
Regulate speeds, not mechanisms. Moving people to micromobility is a benefit regardless of the form of that micromobility. Speed is the safety concern, not any of this loophole-inducing nonsense.
The reality is, there are meaningful cultural differences between even relatively nearby geographic groups of Japan -- though it is hard to deny an appearance that they are shrinking. The goal of all this "one culture one language one people" stuff is a soft genocide of these diverse groups to make administration of the state simpler by eliminating sources of friction.
The same shit happens in every authoritarian state. China, Russia, Hungary. No one thinks there was only ever a single ethnic group in North Korea, but that's likely the reality of what remains there today. It's an impulse of right/conservative thinking -- to view those outside of your tribe as enemies and diversity as a threat to your way of life.
Yellen, who is planning her second trip to China as Treasury secretary, said Wednesday in Georgia that she will convey her belief to her Chinese counterparts that Beijing’s increased production of green energy also poses risks “to productivity and growth in the Chinese economy.”...
Outside of the US, you can get a 10k or less electric mini-van, mini-truck, or mini-car which would serve 90% of most peoples' needs. Most US trips are under 3 miles after all and giant fast luxurious vehicles for those bike-range trips is just totally silly.
Meanwhile the cheapest new car in the US is what, a Mitsubishi hatchback for $18k? It's ridiculous. The US Automakers are in a tacit conspiracy to squeeze us as hard as they can by refusing to sell anything affordable -- by inflating sizes and bloating features to justify way higher MSRPs. Meanwhile the French have access to cheap ICEs like the Skoda Citygo and even ultralight city EVs like the Citroen Ami for half that price while still being easily 90% as capable for most people.
Or for roughly the same price as that bottom-of-the-market US ICE car you can get a totally workable EV like the Dacia Spring.
The US subsidizes huge vehicles in a million pointless ways. I absolutely refuse to believe that vehicle inflation is just caused by some cultural woo. It's mostly just that we create giant roads, giant parking spots, giant highways, and have automakers that intentionally go as big as the market can bear because bigger means more money. And sprinkle on some bullshit tax loopholes and state agencies/NHSTA being ultra-conservative and you have a disaster. Smaller cars thrive in the old world because the old world doesn't make it as convenient as possible to have a goddamn road yacht. They'd go big too, but it would just be a nightmare dealing with those huge cars because their governments don't prioritize making way for them in every way possible.
And that's not even getting into the frankly fine $2-3k EVs you can get in China. This is all just Europe.
If you put a TV in a Faraday cage that blocked the relevant radio spectrum, would there be no static on it? I expected the answer to be a quick Google, but it wasn't.
Those first two, the "people" are largely the auto manufacturers.
Smaller and cheaper cars are SUPER popular in the rest of the world and are literally not available at all in the US. The auto mfgs will tell you it is because of US preference, but in a country of 330 million, there doesn't need to be that much demand compared to these vehicles popularity in, say, a cheese-loving nation of 65 million. Even if they are immensely less popular, there is still MORE than enough market for some of these ALREADY-BEING-PRODUCED vehicles.
But the US auto mfgs refuse. They go bigger and more expensive. The US consumer has no real choice.
For your fourth and fifth, the "people" are US civil/transportation engineers. They must be stopped. They are a scourge. There's no culture of safe road engineering in the US. AASHTO are an association of insane fuckwits.
I am incredibly skeptical that the behaviors of US drivers are significantly different than anywhere else in the world. I'm pretty skeptical of worries over inspections or licensing requirements and am CERTAIN that additional police enforcement will only cause more mayhem and death and not protect any life. I believe it's almost entirely a problem of road engineering, urban design, and vehicle design.
It turns out shoplifting isn’t spiraling out of control, but lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes anyway....
People who have fallen victim to moral panics frequently get absolutely indignant when told they have fallen victim to a moral panic. Not really different than cults or MLMs, in that regard.
Though to be clear, policies that disenfranchise violate equal protections and the moral foundations of democracy from the start. Even if she had been 100% certain it was then illegal for her to vote, she did nothing wrong. Maybe did something illegal, but the law is what's wrong. If we had a legitimate court system, her case would be an easy opportunity to toss the bad law.
The argument for drive-by-wire in personal automobiles is basically that it's safe enough for airplanes, so it should be safe enough for cars.
I mostly buy that. But there's a glaring omission in the reasoning.
In airplanes, there's a full incident investigation for EVERYTHING that goes wrong. Even near misses. It's an industry that (mostly lol boeing) has a history of prioritizing safety. Even at its worst, the safety standards the airline industry and air transportation engineering are orders magnitude more strict than those of the automotive industry and road engineering.
In real terms, automobile incidents should be taken just as seriously. Even near misses should have reporting and analysis. Crashes should absolutely have full investigations. Nearly all automobile deaths are completely avoidable through better engineering of the road systems and cars, but there is mostly no serious culture of safety among automobiles. We chose carnage and have been so immured by it that we don't even think it's weird. We don't think it's weird that essentially everyone, at least in the US, knows someone who died or was seriously injured in a car accident.
So yeah, we should have drive-by-wire. But it should also include other aspects of that safety culture as part of the deal. "Black box" equivalents, for example, and the accompanying post-accident review process that comes with it. A process that focuses not on establishing liability, but preventing future incidents, because establishing liability is mostly a thought-killer when it comes to safety.
...of course, if we actually took road safety that seriously it'd be devastation to the entire car industrial complex. Because much of that industry is focused on design patterns that, in fact, cannot be done safely or sustainably.
Preventing the collection of data by the state may be impossible, but they should be accountable for who has it, who it's given to, and they should need to go through proper due process to use it against you in any kind of official proceeding.
It might be impossible to get everyone out of the databases, but we can at least force warrant requirements and the like.
Actual policy experts will tell you that the reason nuclear energy died off in the US in particular and in the world at large is not because of anti-nuclear environmentalist lobbies.
It's a financial question. What environmentalist opposition exists is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the lack of nuclear development.
These projects get killed because they are almost hilariously expensive by any standard, including the cost per joule produced. They show NO signs of learning curves. Thorium is vaporware. SMRs have proven to be neither small nor modular. These projects get shitcanned not because oh no newcleer so skaweee. They get shitcanned because no one wants to pay for them when you can just do cheap natural gas and wind or even cheaper solar.
The hunt the nuclear fanboys go on to attack environmentalists is invented. It's basically false consciousness. The fossil fuel industry benefits from this strife.
For what a nuclear facility costs to build, buying equivalent solar would probably get you an order of magnitude more energy production, even factoring the additional transmission capacity you'd need to buy alongside it. You could almost certainly get at least the same value out of a combination of wind, solar, transmission, and medium-term energy storage. And end up with a far more resilient grid in the process. And also not be blighting a couple square miles of riverside real estate.
Just Stop Oil activist jailed for six months for taking part in slow march [UK] (www.theguardian.com)
'White Lives Matter' member gets 18 years for firebombing church that planned drag events (www.nbcnews.com)
A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco (www.theverge.com)
A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire. The fire department arrived minutes later,...
Transgender woman running for Ohio House disqualified for not disclosing deadname (thehill.com)
A transgender woman running for an Ohio House seat has been disqualified for failing to disclose her former name on petitions circulated to voters, in violation of a seldom-enforced state law....
Gag Order Against Trump Is Expanded to Bar Attacks on Judge’s Family (www.nytimes.com)
Reddit moderator rebellion: AI moderation is part of the solution (9to5mac.com)
Rich Americans are getting second passports, citing risk of instability (www.cnbc.com)
Elon Musk sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming betrayal of its goal to benefit humanity (apnews.com)
Argentina’s Milei bans gender-inclusive language in official documents | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
DeSantis signs controversial bill banning civilian boards from investigating police misconduct (www.sun-sentinel.com)
Trump Is Losing It: It is unclear whether Donald Trump has forgotten the precise nature of NATO or whether he ever fully grasped it in the first place. (www.nytimes.com)
What is clear, however, is that Trump — who ostensibly spent four years as president of the United States — has little clue about what NATO is or what NATO does. And when he spoke on the subject at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, what he said was less a cogent discussion of foreign policy than it was gibberish...
The world is warming faster than scientists expected | Fossil fuel groups and investors cannot afford to ignore the warnings (www.ft.com)
Few have heard about Biden's climate policies, even those who care most about issue — CBS News poll (www.cbsnews.com)
Why do we have to do the health insurance company's job for them?
Just so tired of almost every time a doctor submits stuff to insurance, we have to be the ones to make multiple phone calls to both the doctor’s office and insurance to iron everything out, figure out what the issue is (it’s always a different issue), and basically be the go-between for the office and insurance. What am I...
E-Bikes Should Not Require Pedaling, Proposes U.K. Government, Diverging From E.U. (www.forbes.com)
E-bikes could get faster, more powerful and not require pedaling, in a move announced today by UKGOV. Cycling organizations are opposed to the plans.
Biden calls U.S. ally Japan 'xenophobic,' along with China and Russia (www.nbcnews.com)
Yellen says China's rapid buildout of its green energy industry 'distorts global prices' (apnews.com)
Yellen, who is planning her second trip to China as Treasury secretary, said Wednesday in Georgia that she will convey her belief to her Chinese counterparts that Beijing’s increased production of green energy also poses risks “to productivity and growth in the Chinese economy.”...
What produced the old dead channel tv static audiovisuals on tvs?
Media alt text:...
Car insurance prices surge (www.newsweek.com)
Car insurance rates are surging as Americans struggle to pay for basic necessities and ongoing debt....
The shoplifting scare might not have been real — but its effects are (www.vox.com)
It turns out shoplifting isn’t spiraling out of control, but lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for low-level and nonviolent crimes anyway....
Prosecutor to appeal against Texas woman’s acquittal over voting error (www.theguardian.com)
Tesla stops cybertruck deliveries—accelerator pedal may be to blame (arstechnica.com)
Owners will have to wait until April 20 for deliveries to resume.
California can share your baby's DNA sample without permission, but new bill could force state to publicly reveal who they're giving it to (www.cbsnews.com)
You can't claim to be an environmentalist and be anti-nuclear energy at the same time