The battery will never need to be replaced. Other than defective units, EV batteries will outlast the rest of the vehicle, though they might only have 75% of the original range by the time the vehicle is recycled.

I'm not sure which aspect of it is worse, the manufactured outrage or the way it dulls proper outrage.

You're making the same mistake Karl Marx did in his economic predictions: assuming technology remains static, and ignoring the knowledge generated by market competition.

If the West were to stop inventing stuff, then what you say would be true. Or if China were to become as good at inventing stuff as the West is. The reason the West is better at inventing stuff than China is exactly because open, democratic societies with competitive marketplaces are better at it than controlled, non-democratic societies with central planning. China made great strides for a couple of decades precisely because they opened up and engaged in capitalism, but Xi Jinping has realized that they can't continue any further down that path without abandoning their political system, and he's putting the brakes on it, hard.

Assuming Xi and the CCP continue in power, the West will retain its technological lead, and Xi's recent moves make it likely that the lead will expand. Or course, China can close the gap if they become an open, democratic society with competitive marketplaces, but the West would largely be good with that.

The big risk right now is that the West has in many ways outsourced its manufacturing to China. Even if we continue doing that it won't enable China to close the technological gap, but it means the West is currently at a huge disadvantage if the conflict turns hot. If we were to go to war with China right now, we'd be in the position Germany was when the US entered WWII, facing an opponent with orders of magnitude greater manufacturing industry. Yes, the Europe and especially the US do still do a lot of manufacturing today, but it's mostly at the high end and depends heavily on inputs from China. We need to mitigate that risk, probably by helping other developing countries build manufacturing capacity. The problem is that sort of thing takes a couple of generations.

You're assuming the mass famines were not exploited for advantage by ensuring it was the people the party didn't like who did the vast bulk of the dying. You're accusing others of committing a crime against history by oversimplifying through conflating different kinds of death, but you're committing a crime against history by oversimplifying through drawing sharp lines that are in fact very broad and fuzzy.

Biometric authentication was found to not be protected by the 5th amendment by a federal appellate court, yes. I think that will stand, although SCOTUS could reverse it. Rulings on password authentication, however, are split. Some appellate courts have held that you cannot be forced to divulge your password because it would be testifying against yourself. Others have held that unless the password itself is incriminating being force to divulge it does not self-incriminate, any more than opening your home in response to a search warrant does.

SCOTUS will eventually have to weigh in on this.

Personally, I'm not expecting passwords to be protected[*]. I also don't think it will work for suspects to claim the password itself is incriminating, since courts can just specify that any incriminating information in the password is inadmissible, and anything derived from that information is fruit of the poisoned tree... but anything found on the device by unlocking with the password is admissible.

[*] Unless SCOTUS has a political reason to rule the other way. If you want to protect passwords from being compelled the best thing you could do is to find some device of Donald Trump's that investigators want access to. The court has shown they'll bend over backwards to protect him.

Jesus Christ!

When you’re stupid, you don’t know you’re stupid!

The Chinese are SMARTER than yankes; their average IQ is higher.

Do yankee really think the Chinese can’t do anything they do?

During the last 60 years, the Chinese have done a fantastic job of catching-up to the West. Why wouldn’t they pass us during the next 60 years?

I recall when the top Google phone was an LG product which was unreliable and unrepairable trash. The digitizer on my Nexus 4 died and the replacement cost was more than buying a new phone.

Naturally I did not buy another Nexus device. Been buying Moto since. No regerts.

If they give it more battery then it will have a longer useful life (as the battery degrades, and the OS updates cause more power consumption) and then you won't have to buy a new product as soon. They are specifically and only targeting sales frequency with their battery sizing across all of their battery devices.

Alcohol is inherently dangerous in at least two ways. One, it's toxic. Two, it reduces inhibitions in exactly the way that the other substance you mentioned (weed) doesn't. That's why it raises accident risk but weed doesn't - people on weed are able to recognize and account for impairment by driving slower and maintaining longer following distances.

The problem with the auto body repair business is that it's toxic AF. Most people don't last long in that environment, sometimes literally. When you spray paint, it's around half solvent. There are water based paints, but they don't perform as well as the solvent-based ones. When unibodies are painted they spray the whole thing and then bake the paint so hot that it reflows, which is how they get a good result even with water-based paints. Body shops can't do that when they make a repair.

Engine repair is much less toxic, but also in much less demand. By the time most vehicles need an engine rebuild, they need a lot of other stuff too. Doing an expensive engine job and winding up with a sloppy old car anyway makes little sense. And the number of people needed is waning as we shift towards electrics; not rapidly yet, but meaningfully. I wouldn't go into that career at this point, it would be exactly the wrong time.

If history is any indication, AI will be overused, then there will be a backlash and it will be underused, and eventually use will seek the middle. It might flop back and forth a few times, too.

It's already being overpromised, so that part of the usual pattern is already being fulfilled.

The kind of processing "AI" does now is clearly only part of the thinking process, the imagining part, or hallucinating as it's commonly called where AI is involved. We imagine a whole bunch of things and then filter out the dumbest ones, hopefully anyway. We can understand the things we've imagined. AI can't, because it's not thinking about them.

There is probably no heaven or hell, though, except what we create here.

So they've found the mechanism, right?

No, they don't. Coal and nuclear plants aren't located near residences either, but we still lose under 5% in transmission in the USA. The losses are higher than local, but not anything you could reasonably call "high".

Have you tried visiting Twitter after hanging out on Bluesky for a while? OMG, it feels like a dystopia. Was it always that bad and did I just forget, or has it gotten that much worse since I left?

It seems like you could do it with any decent firewall easily enough. Certainly on any of the popular Unixlikes it would be reasonably trivial.