I don't think it's so much Australians, specifically Rupert Murdoch and fox news, but billionaires in general.

Billionaires work across national lines and have class solidarity. If it wasn't Murdoch it would have just been a different billionaire creating the propaganda that made us also crazy.

Post world war II the elite, the actual elite not blue-haired professor is running the women's studies department at a community college, but the actual elite decided they were all going to work together to benefit each other at literally everybody else's expense.

The trouble is that those people are incredibly incompetent at anything except manipulating the bottom 99%. Which admittedly they are quite good at.

But I think eventually all of this is going to get out of their control. In order to get a lot of the power they wanted they had to put religious lunatics in charge. I think in Muslim countries that's fine because religious lunatics aren't really in charge they're just giving lip service. In America those people are actually insane. Amy Barrett is a absolute lunatic.

I think best case scenario we get a conventional world war III. And I think it's highly likely that we're going to see nuclear weapons used.

Basically limitless greed and religious insanity is the answer to the Fermi paradox.

If you're American it's you. Even if you think you're sane you're letting your neighbors be so crazy that you're obviously crazy yourself.

We are all fucking crazy in this country. No country who was sane would let Trump win a one-term presidency let alone two of them let alone three.

Just because you don't like the consequences doesn't mean the consequences aren't real

They are great cars, and even if you don't want one yourself, they will force other manufacturers to up their game.

When all is said and done. About a quarter of their sales were dependent on the EV credit.

This is on top of the cybertruck flopping ( it was always a pump and dump scam anyway), the loss of the indirect government subsidies from carbon credits bought by other car companies and Elon musk's current pay package being larger than all the money Tesla has ever made ever.

Meanwhile Elon is trying to get a yet another pay package worth a literal trillion dollars.

Right now the only reason the stock hasn't collapsed is so many people bought into it when it was massively overvalued so nobody wants to be the one to try and cut their losses. Everyone is hoping for a massive pump and dump during which they can get out with a profit.

That might happen if not for Elon in the background looting the company himself. The one pay package he already got approved already wiped out literally all of their profits for the entire life of the company. He's also done several dodgy and debatably illegal things to transfer money from Tesla into other companies he owns.

The entire stock market is overvalued. When Tesla pops it's going to pop big. On the other hand our government is so ludicrously corrupted might just bail them out. But on the other other hand it might not because the oil companies might not want it to.

Also remember that if you own stock in GM and you weren't extremely rich you lost out when they collapsed.

I know a lot of people with worthless stock certificates from when GM collapsed.

It's not a question of if it's when Tesla collapses and who gets caught holding the bag. There are not enough public pensions for them to dump the stock on anymore. It's probably going to be your 401k.

The rest of the world needs to understand something.

We are crazy. Our military didn't go away and it's not going away. Historically failing empires begin invading other countries to loot them and fill their coffers from the looted countries.

We are already talking about testing nuclear weapons again and Trump has floated the idea of a golden dome to protect from nuclear attacks.

About 40% of us think Trump is the second coming of jesus. I mean literally. They view him as a Messianic figure. Nuclear weapons and world war 3 aren't going to be a deterrent for our country.

This isn't like having a neighbor that won't mow their lawn this is more like having the mafia boss going senile in a town without cops.

If the temperature doesn't come down over here then the rest of the world is going to be facing a large scale war whether they like it or not. Now would be a good time for Europe and the rest of the world to do things like interfere with Russia's constant cyber attacks on America...

The problem with that besides your own country being under attack as well is that your leadership is hoping they can let America collapse and rise up in their place. That might work for a little while but again our military isn't going anywhere. We are not Russia and it's not going to just collapse.

That's what's happening. Back in 1965 when Barry Goldwater lost the wealthiest people in our country decided they had enough of democracy and began a decade's long plan to do away with it. They weren't shy and they didn't hide it. The media didn't exactly go out if it's way to cover it but a little bit of googling and you can find the quotes and the discussion.

What you're seeing is the culmination of 60 years of attacks on democracy. It's a fundamental breaking of every single check and balance and every single institution designed to protect the American people and frankly the rest of the world from the American people.

This was further exasperated by Russian intelligence operations and a Europe that let their intelligence agencies ignore the Russians open attacks in the hopes that as America falls Europe will rise.

Fascists can't govern so you're going to see increasingly crazy and stupid things. Like the ice goons running around randomly running people off the road and then shooting them and resting them. And something as sensible as EV tax credits going away.

Compare MG with similar cars. Look at actual sale prices, not list prices which only exist for tax purposes.

For example, an MG S5 top spec long range is about £23-24k, and a similar size and spec Nissan Qashqai is around £32k. Those are actual sale prices, not list. I'm not even sure anyone makes anything fossil powered that is similar size and spec to the S5, in the same price bracket. Probably another Chinese manufacturer.

Range exceeds bladder capacity so is basically a non-issue for 99% of people. Much, much cheaper to run.

Do you think battery manufacturing really will spin up in the US?

The current administration is hostile to anything that displaces coal and gas, so that's at least another 3 years of uncertainty and lack of support. Meanwhile everyone else surges ahead.

I think the ship may well have sailed on that one, I'm afraid.

You can buy a top spec MG EV around that price now. It's a shame the US banned them, or you would have price parity by now.

Your user-agent being Firefox seems to be a red flag for a lot of these captchas, along with blocking ads, blocking canvas fingerprinting, blocking third party cookies, and basically anything that isn't Chrome's default settings.

How many visitors does it cost you? I often just close sites that demand a captcha, they aren't worth the effort.

Batteries are so cheap now that the payback time is short and new houses should really have them as standard.

15kWh ones are down to about 1,500 Euro if you don't mind doing some assembly yourself.

Also it's going to be in large part due to people rushing to buy them before the tax credit ends.

In any case, the US needs more affordable EVs. In Europe they reached price parity with fossils a while back.

The whole site needs an overhaul. A lot of people don't understand what it is, the search function is a joke, and the upload controls are non-existent.

For some reason they won't accept any outside help. They could be like Wikipedia, with an open source platform that gets updated and maintained for free for them.

It's probably past time we thought about setting up a second Foundation, I mean archive, in Europe, and another in the East.

CZUR scanners are crap. Their software is a buggy mess that ruins otherwise good scans, because it can't cope with shading. It's okay for basic novels, but even then the results are mediocre.

Fujitsu make a similar overhead scanner that uses an actual linear scan head instead of a camera, and it works much better.

For home DIY use, you can build a camera jig and use an old DSLR or phone. Basically you just need something to hold the camera, and something to hold the book, and a light source. You can make one from some plastic pipes and a bit of plexiglass to hold the pages open and flat. It's still a manual process, but it's pretty fast.

Lots of info and photos here: https://diybookscanner.org/for...