This can really be an opportunity for traditional media if they seize it.

They can form coalitions across political divisions that guarantee that a video or speech or whatever actually happened as you see it.

So Fox, NPR and the NYT, say. They all send live reporters to the event, all of them have cameras and sound equipment, all of them are at the source and can confirm that the video is a true capture of the event, and if any manipulated versions come up, all three have source material to judge against. Nobody (reasonable) can accuse the coalition of bias, because they span the political spectrum. They can give it a catch-phrase and have a 'GUARANTEED' graphic across the screen, the suits will eat it up.

It might give people a reason to watch/read them again, and they don't even have to change their political spin.

I mean, I suppose this relies on people actually wanting a ground truth to base their views on, but I can't solve people enjoy being lied to.

* Tearing up the huge number of parking lots that we have in our cities
* Plant more shade trees in more parts of cities
* More trains, fewer cars
* Leave some methane and tar sands in the ground

Those are the only kinds of geoengineering I want to talk about. Let's modify the earth so that it's less covered in concrete and the concrete-reliant conveyances that we needlessly base our lives around.

There's a lot of good, cutting edge tech here. And Apple is doing things in their typical Apple fashion, playing up this as the dawn of a new era of computing. Whether or not they're correct is something only time will tell us, but I DO think that this is a great way to get people to try it and see what it's good for and get that feedback back to Apple. As a video game dev, something I've seen repeatedly is that when you work on something long enough, you stop seeing the flaws. You may make something that's legitimately good *for you*, but it takes some outside eyes to tell you what you're overlooking.

I think to an extent, Apple learned that from the Apple Watch. I have a Series 6, and it's great, but the first 4 revisions were pretty bad. But they got a lot of useful feedback, and now it's honestly an excellent product if you're in the market for such a thing.

This is probably the worst the Vision (Pro) is going to be, and I think this high-priced release is a good way to trickle users into using it. I *don't* think it's ready for mass use, from what I've heard in the reviews. What they've captured here is a bunch of early adopters and devs, and it doesn't have to go out to us more normal people in this state. Give it 3 generations (18-24 month generations; I don't think they'll be iterating on this on a yearly basis) and we'll revisit.

But for now, yeah, it's $3500 and it's a wild experiment. I honestly would have been very surprised if it had sold any better and there were no returns.

I'm pretty sure evolution will solve the problem, it's just a question of whether the problem will be solved in a way that will support our oceans and life as we currently enjoy it. It's all a huge gamble, and the stakes are very, very high. I have to say I don't like our odds. :/

Not necessary, but probably sufficient.

'Conservatives' that I've met that actually care about the climate don't actually meet the criteria for modern political conservatives, to be honest. But if someone tells me what they think about walkable cities, big trucks, climate change and what we should do about it, I can make a judgement about who they vote for these days, or what they claim their political leanings are.

And to be fair, I think most 'conservative' non-politicians are the victims of a huge political grift. But yeah, the dichotomy is actually pretty stark, I don't know why you don't think it is. It's not absolute--very little in this world is--but let's not pretend that the sides are equal.

The argument about economic viability is mostly a straw man held up by oil interests.

Like, economies will function just fine on renewables and batteries (not just chemical batteries, though I am talking about those as well). High speed rail would alleviate so much congestion and traffic. Making cities walkable is great for local economies. You can find an economic argument for all of the stuff that would make things better.

Huge trucks with bad fuel efficiency and massive parking lots simply aren't good climate policy, but I don't buy the argument they're essential economic policy either. And when you look at the vast wealth hoarding happening with the ultra-wealthy and the oil companies, it's also plain to see that that money isn't actually circulating back into the economy.

I haven't even gotten into how oil companies in Canada lie about how much methane is leaked from their sites and leave dead wells to poison the land. I don't see the economic argument for that at all.

There's just nothing compelling about the argument that switching to a different energy mix is somehow bad for the economy. It's bad for some specific companies, but those guys are huge assholes that don't care about actual people, so we shouldn't pay any attention to what they think.

To your point about vast empty spaces: Canada (and to an extent, the USA) has a lot of that too, and we are NOWHERE when it comes to high speed rail. Like, okay, we don't want to convert our oil-pilled cities to walkable, public transit and bicycle havens like Europe. Overturning city design is hard (not impossible, obviously, but it takes a lot of political will that we clearly don't have), but we've got scads of empty space to put in high speed rail between big cities that would be great for the economy, convenience and the environment. And we don't do it. Because we're terrible at anything that mildly inconveniences oil interests.

I think points 2, 3 and 4 are kind of irrelevant, to be honest. People here need jobs, we have a large construction industry (which is mostly wrapped up in the real estate industry, but only the kind that builds homes for people that already have a lot of money, not the homes that we need) and again, there's plenty of empty space. And even if there weren't a lot of vast empty distances to cross, governments in North America have plenty of power to appropriate property for this sort of thing. They do it all the time.

But anyway, I think a lot of the point of the post you're responding to is that China upholds its obligations, takes global warming fairly seriously, and we really can't allow people (mostly western conservative politicians) to blame all our woes on them.

There is no such thing as a journalist 'objectively' reporting events, and nobody would read that anyway. Reporters do generally try to eliminate bias in their language, but the notion of objectivity is not only highly overrated, it's essentially impossible. As we can see, even the scientific fact of global warming is subject to political slant.

Like, even calling it 'climate change' was a political decision made by REPUBLICAN operatives because 'global warming' sounded too scary, but reframing it as merely 'climate change' allows them to trot out the old canard about how 'the climate has always been changing'. (It was not invented by them, merely popularized as a term by them for political reasons. You can see the original memo by Frank Luntz here: https://web.archive.org/web/20...)

But in any case, scientists are also usually ALSO the experts on what SHOULD be done. It is actually nonsense to ask a politician what SHOULD be done, they have no idea. It's usually also nonsense to ask a citizen on the street what SHOULD be done; they are similarly uninformed. They elect representatives to get expert opinions on what should be done. The issue is now the experts have weighed in and the established capitalists that don't like the news have bought politicians to muddy the waters and make what could have been a relatively easy and gradual solution into what is now an irretrievably bad scenario even if we did have the guts to just get on with it.

For the first time in my life, I'm planning to lease. I absolutely do not want the hassle of owning and getting rid of a BEV after 3 years. We're in an era where things are improving year by year; holding onto a BEV for ten years or more seems bonkers to me. Like, if you bought a non-Tesla BEV in the last year in North America, you're going to need to carry a charging dongle with you because everything's switching over to NACS in the next few years. You couldn't have known that was going to happen, so why saddle yourself with that doubt and trouble?

Oh my god, aren't you precious? I had a VW station wagon when I first owned a home. I could carry a whole freezer chest in there. I loaded toilets, bricks, wood, bookshelves, you name it. I never once had to rent a truck to get anything home, though I would've if I'd needed to, and in return, I had a station wagon that could go 1100km on the highway on a single tank of diesel. And I lived in Edmonton, AB, which is north enough that we spent about 5 months of the year in snow and ice. You absolutely do not need a truck or an SUV for any of the things that you mentioned, and it doesn't even make most of that stuff EASIER, it just makes the day-to-day tasks slower and more costly.

Every time there was a big snowstorm while I was on the highway, I noticed all the spun out vehicles in the ditch were pickup trucks.

95% of the time a truck is an absolute waste. My grandfather owned two trucks--one for hunting and one with a camper on it--but he still owned a cheap car to get around town because driving around the city in a truck in the 80s was something only idiots did. Frankly, it's still something only idiots do.

I live in Canada, so on top of having very expensive service, I ALSO don't have 5G right now. Even MORE importantly, I absolutely could not care less.

Gimme what they have in Europe, and while you're at it, send some trains over as well. I'm sick of the bullshit oligopolies and oil companies running things over here. We keep letting telecom companies merge here and now everything is controlled by a handful of players and they whine if the government even hints at making things more affordable for consumers.

Does the government serve the interests of the people? Does the ECONOMY serve the interests of the people? All people? Like, that's the fundamental question we should ask about any of the institutions that we participate in. The current way things are set up in North America: no. More and more people are left out, and that's not how it's supposed to work.

I don't know how much better or worse it is there, but if their government is trying to do SOMETHING and isn't purely tangled up in mud-slinging, do-nothing political whining, I think they're probably ahead, regardless of how stifling this summary claims their regulations are.

USB-C was probably coming anyway--we know that because there's a faster USB controller in the iPhone 15 Pro that can handle writing video data to a drive that's plugged in. That's not a last minute feature; the designs for those chips and phones are done years in advance. The only thing it did was accelerate the timeline for non-Pro iPhones. Or maybe they wanted to use that as a differentiator between Pro and non-Pro phones, but either way, it's not as big a deal as people make it out to be.

The power that Apple has is just that they have a lot of money they can bring to bear in legal fights and they're not scared to use it.

To be absolutely clear: I don't think it's a good idea for Apple to stonewall here. I think multiple app stores is an idea whose time has come on iOS devices. I hope that this leads to a cascade of open app stores on iOS. I just don't think Apple is going to go quietly, and they've got the money to make it a pain in the ass.

Apple spent a LOT of money suing Samsung. Steve Jobs once said that he would spend all of Apple's money to exact revenge on Android. I feel like that scorched earth mentality still floats around in the company.

But I think we only need look at the modern lawsuits to see that Apple will take any petty disagreement to the most insane possible end, even at some cost to them. They'd rather disable the oxygen sensor in the Watch than license from Masimo. They bought a whole modem division from Intel to try to get away from Qualcomm. They've intimated that they'll disable iMessage in the UK rather than comply with their weird encryption laws (which I agree with).

If Apple is going to lose a bunch of money anyway--money that will go to other App Store vendors--I could definitely see them doing something that seems like they're cutting off their nose to spite their face.

I don't disagree that they dropped the ball, but I don't think it'll make a meaningful impact. If Microsoft released a new phone today with this as its headline feature, people wouldn't suddenly be dropping their iPhones to get it. But I WILL be happy if I don't have to ask Siri 4 times to do something relatively simple for me, or give me some very basic bit of knowledge. It's not something they could not address, but I think they're doing it within an acceptable time period.

They probably are not. Apple tells a lot of half-truths and will dissemble with the best of them, but public statements about financial things are strictly regulated and even Apple tries to stay on the right side of those regulators and the shareholders.

I suspect they made that statement to remind Europe that they are ONLY 7% of revenue and Apple would rather burn some bridges than relinquish control.

Your cynicism assumes Apple lies, but my cynicism assumes Apple will use its money to exert power.