My daily driver went from a Dodge Charger Hellcat (v8 6.2L supercharged ICE w/707hp) to Hyundai Ioniq 5N (EV w/640hp) that is faster, brakes faster, corners better, and literally beats the Hellcat in every driving metric on every track... by a lot.

It just doesn't sound like the Hellcat. Granted. Style. There's a visceral quality to the sound of a high-displacement engine. Granted.

But... I checked my bills. I'm paying an average of $36 CDN a month more on my electricity bills compared to prior to the change. I was spending nearly $300/mo on premium gas for the Hellcat.

It's really, really, really hard to ignore that I spent over $18,000 for fuel in six years in the Hellcat and I'm going to spend under $3,000 in the same time. For a faster, sportier, more agile car with more interior space, more utility, and has its own style.

Where I live, most of our electricity comes from nuclear and hydro-electric turbines at natural waterfalls... we were 91% renewable four years ago. My electricity is clean. My carbon footprint is nil. I don't regret the 9,000+ litres of gas the Hellcat burned. At the time it was the coolest monster car I could afford. But I absolutely, positively won't look back from the 5N.

Sure, sure, it'll cost me time and money if I randomly decide I need to drive across the planet but... the v8 rumble isn't worth it. Any of it.

EVs aren't for everyone and every use-case. Again, granted. But the cases where they aren't better are much more rare than the nay-sayers would have folks believe. If you can, do it. If you truly can't... okay, cool, understood... but maybe support the infrastructure expansion that'll get you there, not undermine it.

Netcraft: Name a good Linux distribution.

ChatGPT-4.1: FreeBSD

;-)

And Democrats will have to be good about pointing out that the House "Freedom Caucus", who claim to be vigorous fiscal conservatives against raising the debt, voted for this.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is on video saying she didn't like the bill, but voted for it after getting carve-outs for Alaska exempting it from strict new food stamp rules for two years - the state with the highest SNAP error rate in 2024. Though, because of reconciliation rules, they had to write it a little more obscurely. From Republicans' Absurd Food Benefit Policy Could Reward States Who Waste Money

Yup. Also, apparently, many people are unfamiliar with what's in the bill, and will probably be very surprised.

And this will affect everyone in those areas, not just people on Medicaid / Medicare.

And the temporary tax cuts -- no tax on: tips, overtime, auto loan interest; and the $1,000 initial Trump Account deposit -- expire in/after 2028, the $6k SSI bonus for low(er)-income senior expires in 2029 and the SALT deduction reverts from $40k to $10k in 2030. The tax cuts for the very wealthy and corporations are, of course, permanent.

If there's one thing I'll give this Administration, they know junk science - just ask RFK, Jr (HHS) , Dr. Oz (Medicare) ... Unfortunately, we'll be paying for junk science even w/o subscriptions to journals they simply don't like.

I know that a decade or so ago we did not have the ability to detect and monitor all objects capable of destroying life on Earth yet. Do we now have that ability? Are we now identifying and tracking every potential candidate of that kind, or is that even possible?

Trump is the dictator of the proletariat.

The white-collar bourgeoisie is not happy.

It's not turning out like Marx predicted.

I don't think that will help. The issue is that the aluminum layer which would normally selectively reflect back to the optical sensor isn't doing so. I don't think a solid background would change that. The laser will shine through (not reflecting) to hit your paint regardless.

Or simply walking/driving...

US citizen detained by immigration officials who dismissed his Real ID as fake
Family members outraged as U.S. citizen detained by federal agents in downtown LA on way to work

Even after proving they're U.S. citizens, many are still detained because they "assaulted" the usually masked, unmarked officers refusing to identify themselves as LEO and/or their agency, which make things seem more like a kidnapping. The "they assaulted/resisted us" excuse is getting a bit old, especially when there are usually 5-10 "officers" attacking someone. But, you know, as long as they're only going after "very bad criminals", and not people going to work, simply because they're brown ... /s Stephen Miller, with his 3,000 people/day quota, is the worst.

Sure, but the quality isn't. Everything's a trade-off. My point, though, was that your estimate of a music CD's capacity was way off.

Standard music CDs can hold 74 minutes and the average pop song length is 3.5 minutes. Even at 4 minutes, that's 18 songs. The CD Louder than Bombs by The Smiths, at 72m 44s, has 24 songs on it, most between 2.5 and 3.5 minutes long. I'll note that one of my devices can't play the last song -- it's probably to depressed by then. :-)

Google: average length pop music
Compact disc

We already have bottled water, which wasn't a thing when I was kid. Bottled air is next.

I'd imagine most of the AI crawlers out there have already ingested most of the freely available content. I don't imagine many places that have new content who haven't already struck up some agreement with the scrapers. For instance Ars Technica has.

Had this existed three years ago, it might've been interesting.

That said, there's something missing. There's two ways a crawler can work. Either they request content, get told a price and have to reconnect and agree to the price OR they can declare in advance what they're willing to pay and just get approved if you're not asking for more. What's missing is the "soak these bastards for whatever they're willing to pay." If I've set my price to $1 and they connect up declaring "I'm willing to pay up to $3", I just don't get that $2 difference. That tells you whose side Cloudflare is on. And this all assumes AI scrapers manage to don't manage to disguise themselves as something else.