Kia has disabled their "Kia Connect" app and subscription service in MA for all new EVs, supposedly due to this law. I just got an EV6 and had to sign a waiver saying I know the app is non-functional for all cars sold in Massachusetts. No remote start, no software updates (except at the dealer), nothing. It's basically them saying "we'll just take our ball and go home, then." Of course there are ways they could tweak the service to allow non-covered functions but they're not doing that.

Quote from the press release at https://newsroom.statefarm.com...:

State Farm General Insurance Company®, State Farm’s provider of homeowners insurance in California, will cease accepting new applications including all business and personal lines property and casualty insurance, effective May 27, 2023. This decision does not impact personal auto insurance. State Farm General Insurance Company made this decision due to historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market.

We take seriously our responsibility to manage risk. We recognize the Governor’s administration, legislators, and the California Department of Insurance (CDI) for their wildfire loss mitigation efforts. We pledge to work constructively with the CDI and policymakers to help build market capacity in California. However, it’s necessary to take these actions now to improve the company’s financial strength. We will continue to evaluate our approach based on changing market conditions. State Farm® independent contractor agents licensed and authorized in California will continue to serve existing customers for these products and new customers for products not impacted by this decision.

I agree with you that they should get out and meet people IRL, absolutely. What I can see from my kids is that they do that -- and they use their phones to organize. My point was really that they can't "be OK with all of that [impending doom]" and *just* go outside. They feel powerless and that causes real mental health harm. Yes, there are better ways to self-medicate than doomscrolling, but the underlying fear is still there, in a way that seems really different than when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s. (I didn't even mention that many of them have immense college debt they'll be paying off most of their lives.)

I'm 60yo and live in the US. Grew up with "duck and cover" and Vietnam and the cold war and all the wars in the middle east. I know what that felt like, and seeing things through my kids' eyes, this is different.

Yes, it's not life during wartime. No single one of the things I mentioned is as immediately dire as living through a war, for sure. But the breadth of existential threats everywhere you look, the paucity of refuges, the seeming inevitability and the indifference of the powerful, certainly makes for a significant amount of anxiety among the Gen Z kids (and me too, frankly). So yeah, they self-medicate with their phones. But they also take to the streets with people like Greta Thunberg and Amanda Gorman and John Lewis. So there's that. And yeah, the hippies took to the streets too, and that didn't turn into the utopia they wanted. So the kids that know history become even more disenchanted.

I agree that phones (especially social media) share some of the blame, no doubt about that. But to point to that as the primary cause of Gen Z's ills seems a bit disingenuous.

We're all doomscrolling more than ever, no denying it. But it seems disingenuous to blame it all on phones and social media. This generation is growing up into existential crises the depth and breadth of which we've never seen -- impending climate doom, the decline and possible fall of democracy, polarization to the point of possible civil war (a huge fraction of US Gen Zers think it's likely in their lifetime), massive wealth inequality unseen since a century ago, and of course a pandemic with all of its attendant societal breakdowns. But they should be OK with all of that, just put down their phones and go outside for a walk? Hmm.

Sync is cloud-based and paid. But the app is open source, on github, and local-first. No possibility of lock-in behind a paywall if you do your own sync (git, syncthing, or whatever you like).

Emacs user here since the mid-'80s. I wish I could use org-mode for my notes, but logseq (org-based) is faster, nicer looking, fully mobile, and supports seamless editable block-level transclusion which is huge for me (along with other nice-to-haves like whiteboards) and a large set of JS-based plugins. Still I do switch into emacs for any serious editing, query-replace, etc. of my notes. What I miss: executable src blocks, org-mode's exports, and of course all the power of emacs itself.

> A long-range perspective proscribes a rounded education

You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Perfectly makes the point of the article.

...and of course it still doesn't work for people with G suite accounts (no calendar access).

I have a Google Home, and was shocked to discover it can't access my Google Calendar! I have a G Suite (Google Apps) account, and apparently for "security" they disallow access to G Suite calendars from Home. Which is weird because apparently Alexa has no trouble with it at all. Hundreds of messages on the Google Home support forum: https://productforums.google.c...

Um, no. In previous Chrome builds (<53) it would spin laptop fans endlessly even when nothing was going on and use at least 50% CPU, at close to max freq. Battery life was significantly worsened just by having Chrome open. So when was the last time I was concerned about battery life due to which browser? A couple of months ago it was a real problem. Now they're close enough that Chrome is usable, because it's so much better as a browser and only a little worse on the battery.

That's not the issue. I use uBlock (and have tried others) but prior to v53 Chrome would spin the fans all the time, just sitting there doing nothing. Now with v53 my laptop and my Surface 4 both sit quietly.

Ditto. The new Chrome fixes this totally. Fans stop running just because Chrome is open.

... Or perhaps there's something else causing the redshift of spectral lines we use to estimate the speed of remote galaxies. Seems like a much simpler explanation than dark energy and all the other epicyclic add-ons we're accruing.

Sorry, try this: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-n...