“Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots,” Musk wrote on X.

…that makes no sense. By “bots” usually we mean accounts that advertise one thing or another to make money. And if there’s any cause worth paying money for, it’s making more money. But some sports fan or BTS stan or whatever just wanting to cheer on their thing is just gonna stop posting.

Carbon tax, eliminate cheap/free parking, congestion tax in cities. Using the roads and causing noise/danger to others while polluting should never be cheaper than using public transportation (not counting parking, which should be it’s own private cost not passed on to society).

A bouncer is a creator of bounce

It’s the one place where you can have a group for free.

Depends. Speaking from a lot of experience being a socially awkward guy, the following helps:

• Improving fitness and wearing clothes that show it, getting rid of any terrible haircuts.
• Having standards other than appearance and focusing on that from the start. This means rejecting attractive people who aren’t a good personality/etc. fit. Why does this help? It leads to better conversations and less wasted time.
• Attitude of trying to laugh/have fun/be fun. She’s not into FOSS and motorcylces? Ok, don’t keep bringing it up then, instead talk about something you both like (and if you followed the above, there should be something).

Or for a non fictional example, the infamous Chris Everett incident

Yes, western media includes a lot more than safe stations like CNN. But furthermore, it could be any media, arab media like Al Jazeera, whatever. No one is posting about this other than on social media.

Strawman. I’m not someone who looks highly on how the IDF is acting. But these images cause an emotional reaction, and I can’t find the source other than a social media claim (on the most disinfo-friendly social media network) that itself cites hearsay. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, just that it has massive red flags and needs confirmation.

As damning as the images are, let’s remember we live in an age of unprecedented misinfo. Which doesn’t just include fake images, but can also include easier things like lying about the context of the image. I don’t see any source other than this one and social media posts so that’s why I’m suspicious.

Edit: Ok my cautious uncertainty is being downvoted by the uncautiously certain. So maybe I need to do a better job of pointing out why this might be BS:

• The picture has no context. We can tell it’s a slightly dark skinned person, which means it could be a Palestinian, or a Syrian, or an Iraqi, or a Houthi, or an Afghan…
• But, you say…do we know of any other executions like this? Why, yes we do. ISIS certainly did this, there’s videos of it.
• Of course, this all assumes the picture is real. And there’s really no guarantee it is. One problem I can see off the bat is that the prisoner has a zip tie on his hand, BUT it’s tight around his wrist, unlike how you’d imagine someone would be zip tied - around both wrists. Another problem is that the arm is intact, meaning he wasn’t zip tied around his back which is how it’s usually done. It’s possible this was a soldier run over by a tank in a combat zone, and the zip tie was added later. Or the whole image is fake. Or the whole image is real and there’s some reasonable explanation for the oddness of the zip tie, I really don’t know. But it at least might be BS on some level.

I suspect it has more to do with the stark wealth differences in the US which are vastly higher than in Europe, especially because the above includes both public and private education. The US may spend a lot on the mean student, but not much on the median student.

I went to a really well-funded public school, and a lot of the rich parents in the area still sent their kids to private school, meaning they’re basically paying for education twice. Rich American parents spend tons of money on their kids’ education. It would be interesting to see a map of spending per student and see how it is in poor areas.

The fear for me was that Apple would grow quickly in the EV space due to its mainstream popularity, and then start doing the ecosystem thing so driving anything but an Apple car makes you a second-class citizen. Obviously it would only support Carplay and not Android Auto, and probably lack any sort of non-Carplay connectivity so you just can’t connect your Android phone to it at all. Presumably it would also have a proprietary charger that doesn’t work with other cars or vice versa.

Basically yes, but unlike Reddit which has control over its proprietary network, Lemmy instances would have a hard time locking down access to create artificial scarcity for their data without causing other problems.

In a blog post, Waymo has revealed that on December 11, 2023, one of its robotaxis collided with a backwards-facing pickup truck being towed ahead of it. The company says the truck was being towed improperly and was angled across a center turn lane and a traffic lane.

See? Waymo robotaxis don’t just take you where you need to go, they also dispense swift road justice.

World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) study that found SUVs to be 20 percent more polluting and twice as likely to kill a pedestrian in a collision compared to smaller conventional cars.

Twice as likely to kill a pedestrian…if that number holds up this needs to happen in more cities. Driving an excessively deadly vehicle through crowded areas shouldn’t be free.

I don’t think he’ll be dead, rather the Kremlin’s actions regarding him suggest they see him as useful. Nadezhdin gets a lot of help from Russian state-sponsored media in getting his name out there. And while he is seemingly willing to criticize Putin and even score some rhetorical hits, he’s also an official politician who can probably be controlled if necessary. I’m not sure whether he’s a witting part of it or not, but I think Putin wants to keep him around to manage the opposition. The legit opposition may also realize this but may support him anyway because they have no other hope.

If you lived in a state not listed here, the District of Columbia, or a U.S. territory, Direct File won’t support your tax filing needs.

Ok so here in DC we don’t get a voting representative, senators, or that free software other states get. Got it.

Tesla and Musk’s attorneys, the court decided, “were unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process.”

I’m guessing this was the key problem. Courts are very reluctant to set aside corporate decisions like CEO pay packages for soft reasons like general unfairness. But when you start getting into dishonesty and not meeting basic requirements, it’s kind of forcing the judge’s hand.

Full decision for those interested, it’s long. I like this part:

Defendants also argue that Musk needed additional incentives to stay on at Tesla or he would spend more time at SpaceX, where he could fulfill his galactic ambitions to establish interplanetary travel, colonize Mars, and potentially earn more money in the meantime.858 That argument begs another question: if encouraging Musk to prioritize Tesla over his other ventures was so important, why not place guardrails on how much time or energy Musk had to put into Tesla?

Honestly I think the best means for changing things is right under our noses: voting. Not just federal, but also state and local. As it is now, in most places tax cuts that flow mostly to the wealthy are still a great political move that’s an easy way to get votes. That’s the first thing that needs to change.

There’s all kinds of groups like the Center for Tax Reform and the US Chamber of Commerce that push for policies that tend to increase financial inequality - but as far as I know there isn’t one for reducing inequality. Given how many people recognize the problem, maybe there should be one. And then politicians can start to fear that group as much as they fear the others. Of course it won’t have a lot of wealthy donors, but as some politicians have shown small donations can do a lot.

But its not like our laws have changed

And that’s the problem. The internet has drastically reduced the cost of copying information, to the point where entirely new uses like this one are now possible. But those new uses are stifled by copyright law that originates from a time when the only cost was that people with gutenberg presses would be prohibited from printing slightly cheaper books. And there’s no discussion of changing it because the people who benefit from those laws literally are the media.

My understanding of this article is that Tesla’s range estimates were based on assuming they were being driven in it’s range-maximizing, low-performance “chill mode”, while the new EPA rules require reporting the range in the car’s default mode.