This is exactly what Tesla did for years. In addition to getting billions of dollars in socialist payments from the taxpayer, the company used regulatory credits to keep itself going. It didn't make money on its poorly designed vehicles.

Ford does not have the luxury of using those same credits so its numbers are more reflective of the cost to start up an EV car company.

On the other hand, hopefully this sort of technology will reduce the number of exploited people being forced to work in slavery conducting scams in call centers in India and other places.

They'll just be moved to forced prostitution or manually breaking ships. Then again, have you seen all those videos of "manufacturers" in India where everything is done in a room with no safety precautions whatsoever?

Not all abuse is physical, and women have basically the entire government (men with guns) at their disposal to meet out abuse if a relationship turns sour, if they so choose.

Yes, "abuse" when the woman doesn't want to be with the guy any more and the guy doesn't take no for an answer. Sort of like this guy. Or this gold medal catch of a "man".

Because, as usual, the "man" always blames the woman for his faults and issues. Nothing is ever on him.

"Economic Hardship" has jack-shit to do with most of the declining birthrate. Women have more money than ever. If being poor hurt the birthrate, the Third World would have ceased to exist centuries ago. Women choosing careers over marriage has far more to do with it. Those that are getting married are doing so much later in life, when their fertility is already declining, and having few children is a consequence of that. Why do you think IVF and egg-freezing are in such demand? Because women that waited until 30 to get married discover, often to their surprise, that their best chances of pregnancy are in the rear window.

Women were told that they could have it all, the best of both worlds: that they could live like men in their twenties, living the single sexual life and moving up their corporate ladder, and after they had their fun, then they could marry the man of their dreams and have their family. All in a neat package. Except nature doesn't work that way. The Biological Clock is a thing, women have a set number of eggs, and by thirty, they start heading downwards in terms of fertility. Late pregnancies have a greater chance of complications and birth defects. The peak year for fertility and healthy birth is, IIRC, age 24 on average for females.

Life is a series of choices. And choices have consequences. Declining birthrates are inescapable considering the choices made.

Let me know when you can push this crap to a flip phone. Then I'll be impressed.

Til then, ad and malware free it is.

Maybe you don't use Instagram or phone apps, but enough people do that there is simply much less content for Google to Index than before. Which is why you might as well add "+reddit" to any web search - that and Wikipedia are just about the only places which still have anything that anybody might care about.

The assholes need to be plugged up too.

Some may enjoy it, even look forward to it.

That said, this is why we can't have nice things. A human always finds a way to screw things up for the rest of us.

Look at it historically. The constitution wasn't the US's first government. The first was the Articles of Confederation, which was generally understood to be a failure because the federal government was too weak. The whole point of the Constitution was to replace a state driven model with a stronger Federal government.

How is Google not going to suck more? The internet has changed. Nobody's writing webpages anymore. Who's still blogging? People use the internet by logging on to Instagram or using a phone app, which can't be accessed by a Google search.

That is a very angry bit of editorializing, and it's entirely misplaced.

This is why I don't use Windows at home.

After W7 I went to Linux and haven't looked back. It's bad enough I have to put up with Microsoft's excuses and incompetence at work, I definitely don't want to deal with that at home.

No, and because of passenger density and volume issues that affects costs. For high speed rail to pay for itself, you need fairly dense-packed areas with high traffic between each other. For HSR to successfully operate on a large scale in the US, it's going to have to be a political decision to subsidize it and eat the costs (see: the Acela).

Even liberal-ish groups that Rah-Rah things like public rail admit that it simply isn't self-supporting in the US. A decade ago, Brookings did a study on American rail, and concluded that if AmTrak was to be "saved", it was going to require a mix of killing off some routes, and subsidizing the remainder:

HSR tickets are also naturally going to be more expensive than snail-rail fares, too, further hurting traffic numbers, especially over the longer distance routes.

The US can do infrastructure just fine. What it can't do is ape a European rail model that is unworkable in the US. The United States, geographically and culturally, is as different from Europe as it is from Japan. It's a huge, wide-open area with large spaces between major metro areas outside of a small cluster in the Northeast US. Very unlike Japan and Europe in that regard. The train romanticists simply refuse to accept reality on that.

You can become a paramedic in 1-2 years, why does it take that long to learn how to safely cut and dye hair?

For the very reasion you stated. Safety. Do you really want someone hacking away at your hair with a sharp pair of scissors? You have ears, don't you? And that doesn't get into the issue of HOW to cut hair so it looks decent. How do you properly cut a bob? Layering? What do you do with different types of hair (straight, curly, African American, thick, thin, etc)? How do you cut a man's hair compared to a woman (not every guy gets a buzzcut)?

And those chemicals used to dye hair can cause burns to the scalp (and skin if spilled) if not properly applied. Do you want your pre-teen daughter wailing in your ear for weeks and months that her head burns and now she can't have good looking hair because the colorists burned her?

I know it seems silly to have to go through all of this, but there are valid reasons to be certified/licensed/whatever. This also gives you legal rights if something goes wrong.

Go do a parallel search for something political on Google and Yandex.

The reason is two fold. First, with Yandex being Russian, they want every political story about the West out there for people to read. They probably even promote the stories to higher rankings so they are seen. However, try putting in a query about the thoudands of Russian losses in Ukraine or Russian ships being sunk or the oil refineries in Russia being attacked or the Belgorod region being shelled by Russian forces and see what happens. I would be willing to bet you only get a few stories with little substance.

The second reason is as we all know, Google is flooded with SEO crap (like this story) and their software is unable, or unwilling, to filter the wheat from the chaff. They make money regardless of the quality of the search.

I've started reading a lot more non-fiction, mainly history.

Oddly enough, so have I. Right now I'm on a book about Aaron Burr. Before that was Andrew Jackson and before that was James Madison. Then there was the book about how the Pilgrims and Puritans screwed over the Native Americans in New England (wonderful title: God, War, and Providence) despite Roger Williams' best efforts. And who couldn't read history without delving into World War II and the German army, Panzer Battles.

That last two chapters of the book should be required reading for anyone in the Ukrainian military. Literally, in the truest sense of the word, nothing has changed in Russian tactics and actions in the past 80 years. The words written sound like they were written last year.