The infrastructure required to perpetually get decent to good quality petrol to where it's needed is insane. For electric you just need a battery, some solar cells and you're good to go. Petrol throughout south America is notoriously bad, often mixed with (bad) (m)ethanol and often a gable to fill in your tank. Its not uncommon for adventure bike riders to bring an extra spare piston and cylinder along in case you frag yours beyond repair and need to replace it somewhere in the ass-end of Patagonia.

That doorstep countries around the world are moving to solar and electric vehicles faster than developed countries makes perfect sense.

It's not just greenflation. Companies have realized that they can make more money focusing on the top 10% of consumers and just what the bottom 90 go to hell. If they had the slightest fear of competition then they wouldn't take that risk because a competitor might work their way up in the cheaper markets and then jump into the more profitable ones, but since we don't enforce antitrust law because we're busy freaking out about trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest you can kiss that goodbye.

Our cheapest EV starts at $30k for a Nissan Leaf. No wonder I've been seeing more people riding around on e-scooters lately.

If no human wrote it, no human understands it.

We all need a reliable OS not controlled by some power-mad corporation that increasingly wants to own your computer, own your information, own your bank account, and run your life. Humans need to understand that OS, be able to improve it, debug it, verify that it is not compromised, etc.

If there are jerks who (like little boys given hammers who now see the world as made-of-nails) want desperately to shove AI into an OS (either in the coding of it, or the implementation) , let them do it with their own OS rather than breaking one that's vital to so many of us.

If AI coding is so great, run the experiment! AI fanatics: fire-up yer toys and tell them to make you an open-sourced POSIX-compliant OS without using any code from Linux or BSD. Let us see what it comes up with, and as a show of your confidence, re-format your drives and install and use the new OS that your AI comes up with as your only OS. The rest of us can adopt later after YOU have lived with the results for a few years.

It you AI guys are not actually confident, then try this:

Ask your AI to make a fork of Linux, keep that fork compatible with the AI-free Linux, etc.

There's simply no legit reason to slop-up the Linux code base or tools, or processes for creating them, with AI experiments.

During incognito browser mode. So that's fun. As usual we found out as part of a lawsuit and settlement.

as the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

The schools have been adding-in all sorts of social garbage, which it's NOT their job to teach, and to do it they have discarded a lot of stuff that actually WAS their job to teach - the most-basic of which is READING AND WRITING. If you can READ, you can learn anything else you need. If you can WRITE, you can communicate effectively. Cursive is primarily about writing faster, without the need to lift the pen/pencil between letters.

People who cannot WRITE cursive, are also unlikely to be able to READ cursive... and thus will be completely incapable of reading the world's most important historical documents. Such people will stupidly claim they can just read it in printed form, or have AI read it to them, or some other garbage excuse for their partial illiteracy. Such people are unlikely to, but most-importantly, people who cannot read cursive are incapable of going back to the original documents to verify that the printed versions, or AI spoken ones, are correct and not manipulated. This level of ignorance may well serve the interests of some people who want to steer the culture and society but it will eventually become dangerous for normal people.

There was a time when most people were illiterate, and the Bible was only available in Latin, with Catholic clergy being almost the only people who could read it. This situation allowed the leadership of the Catholic Church to convince many generations of decent well-meaning average illiterate people that the Bible said a great many things it does not say. About 500 years ago, a monk named Martin Luther came along and pointed out the differences between the actual Biblical texts and those teachings and practices which had been piled-on over the centuries when average people could not compare stuff to the actual text. Along with Johannes Gutenberg, who created the printing press and started printing Bibles in German, Luther launched the Protestant revolution in which he encouraged the average person to learn to read and to read the Bible on his own in his own language under the banner of "Sola scriptura" (Latin for 'by scripture alone'). This huge shift (based on the idea of everybody being able to read, and to read the documents themselves without somebody else in the middle) is one of the pillars of Western Civilization, and it's still vitally important even if one is not religious, and it's important even for non-religious texts.

Only on Slashdot can you get modded down for pointing out that there are a lot of Walmart stores.

And that map is from like 6 years ago, so there's probably even more than what's shown. So my point still stands, if none of your grocery stores take credit cards, where out in BFE do you live that there isn't even a Walmart?

Show of hands: How many here are old enough to remember when the CDROM first appeared?

For you young'ns out there: When the CDROM tech first made it into the hands of average folks, consumers were buying-up CDROM drives like crazy and installing them on their PCs. There were initially a few polished applications ready for people to buy and use like encyclopedias and a game called "Myst". It did not take terribly long for the vendors of good software to get on board and start making titles that took advantage of the then-considered-gigantic storage of the new media format, but in that window of time when the tech was new but there was very little GOOD content available. The scammers and fly-by-nighters popped up all over the place selling CDROM disks stuffed full of public domain stuff, text files anybody could freely get anywhere, piles of amateur computer art, MIDI music files.... ANYTHING the people making the disks could come up with to use at least a third of the space. They'd build a disk image, shoveled-up with junk, give the disk some interesting/promising title, mass produce it, and get it into stores with a moderate to low price that was just low enough that lots of people with their new CDROM drives would buy it just to have some uses for the new drives. We called these disks "Shovelware" disks.

Same thing here

YouTube is becoming a host to mountains of AI shovelware. They need to get a grip on this stuff and find a way to squash it before it convinces people that the platform is nothing but AI slop.

There's also another thing happening here which is of far greater concern:

With soul-less grifters using AI to pump out piles of videos in order to make money from click and views, much of the actual content is completely bogus...but it LOOKS shiny and "true" to many people. This is probably useful to the hyper-political and evil among us who do not care who they lie to as they try to build political narratives, BUT it's fundamentally dangerous to civilization to make a scheme in which a significant portion of the population cannot tell what is true and what is false. We were already getting a taste of this with the toxic political activists who have many people CONVINCED that Michele Obama is a man, or that Trump colluded with Russia, or Ted Cruise's dad helped kill JFK, or Chelsea Clinton is Web Hubble's kid, etc. Most of THAT stuff could be more easily debunked up to this point, but now people are pumping out AI videos that look (to average people) like valid news casts telling them garbage like [1] several Canadian provinces have become US states, [2] Clint Eastwood has had a religious conversion, [3] Elon Musk has developed a warp drive, etc. Put another way: It has escaped the political realm, and is no longer concentrated into the political cycle. Anyone who wanted to could go read the government docs on the whole collusion scam and see the reality, but there ARE no documents in government archives, with under-oath sworn testimony that apply to the stuff outside the political/governmental realm.

This is VERY bad, and it'll get worse. There's probably no geeky TECHNICAL fix for this (I know, this will not go over well on Slashdot...) As a society we're gonna have to find our way back to a place where most of us can agree on the reality that is, in fact, REAL, and can trust each others' WORD and hand shake. My grandparents' generation could do business with each other on a handshake. Everybody kept their word and worked hard to make sure they kept-up their end of any bargain. Even I can remember a time when our home had no locks on the doors, people could leave their keys in their cars, etc and nobody expected anything bad to happen. We've come a long way, and it isn't all good.

That's because you're taking the default, most expensive, booking option. On hilton.com, which I almost always use for business travel, click through the "more rates" link and you'll typically see rates for prepayment with no cancellation, rates with 2-3 day cancellation and rates with 24-hour cancellation. Also rates with free breakfast, rates with double points, etc.

Back in the '80s which kept the economy going and then we followed that with two huge economic bubbles that kept things going. There was also a lot more government assistance back then in a lot of ways that we don't think about. I'm not talking about food stamps I'm talking about heavy duty subsidies like the aforementioned infrastructure spending that made it easier to get jobs.

We were in a much better position to weather 12 years of Republican rule back then. The Republicans have been building up to this for 60 years, ever since Goldwater lost. Trump is the final form of the party. A pedophile pretending to be godly while openly admitting he will burn in hell and still somehow tremendously popular with the party.

It's not just about how terrible Trump is it's about how voters would let somebody like that have that much power. It's a sign that our civilization is near collapse. A fundamental breakdown in the institutions that have been protecting all of us for our entire lives.

It's the opposite. People here have mostly done okay for themselves. Most of us are well over 50 and we got the full benefit of the Great society and the New deal. For example the government paid for 70% of our college tuition.

I don't think anyone here believes that they are going to ever suffer any serious hardship. And that's why we have so many Trump supporters here. They keep quiet because this isn't a safe space and Trump supporters won't talk about it if they're not in a safe space. But I know they are there.

These are the same people that are learning the kind of terms typically associated with libertarians right now.

They always think they will get off scot-free and maybe some of them will. But the point is not all of them will.

Only consumers who are okay with possibly not being able to book a room.

I actually do this quite often on vacation. We like to fly to an interesting place with only a rough itinerary -- basically a list of things we want to see in approximate order based on a rough driving route -- then during the trip we book each night's accommodations that day, usually mid or late afternoon. By searching the whole area reachable by driving from our current location (and in the direction of what we'd like to do the next day) we can usually find a really good price on a decent place, and very often end up finding nice places that we'd never have stayed otherwise.

A few times we've really hit the jackpot, such as one night we spent at the fantastic Liss Ard Estate in southern Ireland, paying about 120 EUR for a room that usually goes for upwards of 500. That was so nice we almost decided to stay a second night. Another time, a call directly to the hotel got us the owner who offered us the night in a nice room for 50 EUR on the condition that we pay in cash :D . The flip side is that we have a couple of times had to stay places we really didn't like. It's likely that if we do this for long enough we may eventually have to badly overpay for a room (since hoteliers sometimes hold back a small number of rooms they hope to rent at very high rates when things are busy), go to a hostel, or even end up sleeping in the car. But on balance it's a risk that has paid off for us, mostly because it makes our vacations flexible and casual rather than tying us to a rigid schedule of locations, or keeping us restricted to one region.

I highly recommend this vacation strategy if you can be flexible and a little adventurous and when traveling in countries where you speak the language (or many of the locals speak yours) and which are generally safe. We've done it on a western US road trip (UT, NV, CA, OR, WA, ID), and in New Zealand, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Italy, Slovenia, Portugal and the US Virgin Islands. This is a vacation strategy that wasn't really possible before smartphones and Internet booking. I guess it could have been done pre-Internet, but it would have required a more adventurous mindset than I have at this point in my life, or than my wife has ever had.

For business travel I want my hotel reservation locked in, well in advance.

We're sliding down the slippery slope.

A few states already did the age check thing with porn, and the SCOTUS ruled that was just fine by the 1A. Now comes the ID just to prove you're not a kid, in order to participate in social media.

It's never been about protecting kids, it's about being able to eliminate online anonymity.

Both iOS and Android have built-in parental screen time limit functionality. Why is the government getting involved?

I think this would hit a lot harder on Reddit. Slashdot is full of us olds who have lived through the Great Recession and look at Trump's economic fuckery like Florida Man would an approaching hurricane. "Bring it bitch, we've seen worse."