Incorrect. It's been shown that Meta is extremely partisan, and anyone who's even moderate can plainly see it. They openly banned hundreds of satire and news sites during the last election, largely under the banner of "fake news and disinfo". Was it? Sure, much if not most of it was. Some of it wasn't, though - and it isn't their job to do that. What it was, was a highly partisan purge.

Stick around the West long enough and you'll have a chance to be convicted while present for political crimes, too. It's already happening throughout Europe and the UK for years.

You've got to be fairly significantly partisan to think any of what you just said. It really doesn't reflect well.

If Trump was a fascist dictator, he was the absolute worst fascist dictator - or dictator of any kind - ever.

Correct on all of that.

Nevermind that leather is biodegradable, environmentally friendly, and a low carbon option vs a petroleum derivative.

They were just catering to their ecoterrorist customers who lampooned them for killing animals to make a profit/product.

I wouldn't be surprised if they try to go back to leather. It's a natural choice - literally.

That guy has no clue WTF he's saying, announcing or giving a speech about if it isn't on a teleprompter or big print, multi-page notes he's given.

You can readily see this any time he dares to go off script and potentially make "them" mad and get into trouble...

And well, it's an organic product too....cows are carbon based life units.

So, hell, you're checking two boxes right there.

And it isn't like anyone is forcing the vegans to buy a leather option that may be offered....

So...why again did they do away with the leather option?

> Please explain how it raises money with a tax rate that's below the existing corporate tax rate

15% minimum. You're a fool if you think a large corporation pays anywhere near the corporate tax rate. 15% is much more money than these businesses are paying now.

Some of them are so good at the game that they effectively "pay" a negative income tax. To pull the first example from that link; AT&T earned $29.6 and the Feds effectively paid them another $1.2B - effectively a -4% income tax. Under the IRA their tax bill goes from getting paid $1.2B to paying $4.4B

=Smidge=

EV sales over the past year or so have slumped

You're just making all that up.

No, not making it up.

CBS: EV sales down 7.4% this year so far. (although hybrid sales are up some).

And here, you can scan through it, is a CNBC "marathon" about EV sales down in the US.

(The first episode in that marathon is only about 17 min).

Just do a little YT search, and you'll see this is a common them from several news sources even the left would admit is reliable.

No normal EV owners I know have put any maintenance on their car beyond the first roadworthy (due here after 4 years for a new car).

I'm not familiar with the term "the first roadworthy"....what does this mean?

All I see there is a reason to regulate crypto bullshit, if not ban it entirely. Can't afford to be wasting that much energy on fraud.

In any case; No, "it" can't happen... assuming by "it" you mean a return to coal as the dominant power source in the US. That ship has sailed.
=Smidge=

I've been driving an EV as my daily driver for 5+ years now. So clearly, I made the decision they work well for me. But I also own several gas powered vehicles (including a Kia my daughter drives). One thing I've noticed is that a lot of EV owners brag about never having had to do any real repairs, but their total miles driven are still pretty low. If you haven't gone 100K plus on your EV, then you really aren't in a position to speak about their long term reliability and costs.

Most auto-makers have tried to engineer their offerings so everything in them will last long enough to get through their warranty period, or even their "extended warranty" period they sell directly at the time of purchase. They won't spend a penny to get reassurance any of the components will outlast that time period, though.

There are certain brands, like Honda and Toyota, who have an overall design philosophy of building their vehicles so moving parts tend to function at low levels of stress vs their maximum ratings. Instead of engineering things to push any limits, they're far more conservative. This strategy pays off for them because they don't have to spend a lot to use "stronger, better" parts than the other guys. It won't help them win many contests for "the most torque in its class" or "faster 0-60MPH time" or "shortest stopping distance".... but it built them a reputation for long-term reliability and being a cost-effective choice.

I've owned 3 different Teslas and I can tell you, my Model X was in their shop quite a bit. Still under warranty, thankfully -- but I traded it off before it ran out. It had more problems than any of my gasoline cars I own now have. My Model S I owned first was a great car, but not a trouble-free one. I had to have a cooling fan replaced when it started making a loud ticking noise, and that turned out to be about a $700 repair due to all the labor involved to get to it. The touchscreen developed yellow lines around the borders and that was a whole ordeal to get repaired properly too. It also had a (very common on Teslas) problem with the control arms wearing out prematurely. And while it didn't happen to me? A lot of Model S owners eventually had the air suspension go bad. The air suspension parts appear to have been made by Mercedes for Tesla, and you were looking at $1500+ to get it fixed in many cases.

I'd have to say that all in all? My EVs have been cheaper to drive than my gas vehicles. But repair-wise? I'd say an EV like a Tesla S is comparable in repair cost and hassle to a luxury car like a Cadillac. Lots of little things that can go wrong, even if it's not going to leave you stranded over any of it. Something more basic like the Chevy Bolt I drive now? It's saving me money on oil changes so that's a big plus. But it's been in the shop a few times now to fix recalls and for software updates it needed to fix issues with false alerts about the battery pack and drivetrain. I think a Toyota or Honda might see about the same number of visits to the shop.

That's my feeling too. I work in a private sector business that's basically "all Microsoft" (like most of our competitors). Once you get on the "Microsoft train", you ride their rails and go to the stops they dictate. You have to jump back off otherwise.

We ran into the typical situation where once people saw they had OneDrive capabilities to share files or folders with other people or groups, they started trying to create folders of information needed by entire teams. If they left the company, all of that data was at risk of vanishing because it was, after all, stored on their personal OneDrive, tied to their user account with only that person as its administrator.

Microsoft's answer to this is SharePoint. Create new SharePoint sites for your groups, so I.T. can be administrator of them and control them (and/or optionally designate others to admin them as needed). And then, people can collaborate and use the shared content on the SharePoint site. Great, right? Well, not so much! Because Microsoft intertwined SharePoint and OneDrive. People needing easy access to the content of a SharePoint site or folder from their Windows Explorer have to "sync" it via OneDrive from that SharePoint site. Then they get a new "tree" of SharePoint sites that appear in their Explorer to get to the information without visiting the web site directly.

Now you get all sorts of headaches because OneDrive can get signed out on a PC accidentally, disconnecting those shared folders. Users may not notice for a while so they keep editing their locally cached copy of the documents - thinking those changed were getting to the cloud. Or OneDrive will do as it does, and gets corrupted and stops syncing properly -- requiring an uninstall/reinstall to fix it again. Or you have "permissions" fun, where a user is initially granted "edit" rights to some content he/she syncs with OneDrive. But their permissions get changed to "read only" at some point, causing them to have files forever stuck that get sync errors, because their changes are no longer allowed to go back up to the SharePoint.

When you have hundreds of people or more in a company using this stuff, these "edge case problems" come up daily and your help desk team is forever tasked with trying to sort out what's happened, and how to help people get the correct versions of documents back in the cloud for everyone to use.

And all this is before we even start talking about your advanced users, trying to link data between Microsoft Office applications. SharePoint still doesn't support some of that like your traditional desktop Office apps do. They're all written to link to data via your standard folder paths. They can't pull from, say, rows in an Excel workbook and import to a PowerPoint using the URL path needed to specify the location of the file out in a SharePoint site.

Companies like ours tried to eliminate the traditional file servers to replace them with the SharePoint and OneDrive combo Microsoft wanted people to pivot to using. But the reality is, we still have to keep a traditional file server around, just for these scenarios. It's half-baked.