Both "1984" and "V for Vendetta" were projections of British tendencies... (when i first read 1984 i thought it was about the Soviet Union / Eastern block and only later did i learn who wrote it and when and why)

I thought it was overblown, but then during Covid to read how the brits were informing on eachother for being out during curfew or "going for a second run" when only one bout of exercise was allowed. (e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-en... )

To be "just a touch" dramatic: why did the West even bothered with WW2 and the Cold War? We could've just surrendered and saved millions of lives and untold Trillions of dollars and it prob would've turned out just the same...

On the flip side, at least in the West in the past ~5 years (longer in some places, but really getting out of hand esp after George Floyd) instead of using all this surveillance to grab and jail criminals and like deport illegal migrants and such, they use it for revenue generation as you guys point out with speeding cameras (thankfully not yet in the US so much), red light cameras, and expired registration trolling.

(Not that i want the West to go China/Middle East way on crime and punishment, but there's nothing "progressive" about just letting street criminals whether "evil" or just nutty just go on about their crimes because enforcement has a disparate racial impact and equity trumps all other concerns ) (and while i'm randomly manifestoing here ... our jails and prisons should be a heck of a lot calmer and rehabilitative. Especially for property crimes, and low level violence, but just in general. along the lines of https://calmatters.org/justice...)

Brave had been doing something like this for years
https://brave.com/brave-reward...
(the Creator piece of it)

Building and maintaining this kind of surge capacity for like 3 days a year of snow-days seems pretty ridiculous to me.

Agree with that. In addition i don't think i've ever seen a lower price (when including shipping) available when looking for other sellers from their product page anyway. Maybe it's different without Prime ?

I'm drifting away from amazon because of the poor search, sponsored results, questionable recommendations, near infinite clones of products of made-up brands, questionable product descriptions and specs, batching of unrelated products on the same page, poor curation of reviews, poor review and interaction features (e.g removing discussions or downrating of reviews), etc. etc.

But shipping, returns, and (usually) pricing, are a bright spot.

If these numbers are true, then it just emphasizes how much of a distraction the environmental argument really is.

Why would I focus on $5B of externalized and socialized costs compared to $1.3T of externalized and socialized costs? To put it another way, when framed as you have, the environmental impact is shown to be negligible.

Just like with EVs (and esp PHEVs), and solar, and wind, and wave power, and desalination plants, and water recycling i really like heat-pumps, especially if used w/ a geo-thermal loop because it's neat tech and harnesses physics in a cool way and i want it to succeed.

But for the love of FSM, stop shoving this stuff down people's throats with bans and mandates!

I'm at the point of switching to an 80s diesel Mercedes and coal heating just out of spite. (ok not really, but damn! get off my back!)

Not your antagonist, but
it's prob the BMW i3 REx series hybrid https://www.motortrend.com/fea...

It physically has a 2.4 gal tank but for the first several years the US models were electronically limited to 1.9 gal (i.e. it wouldn't use the last .5 gallons) because of some laws mandating that for certain credits the gas range had to be less than the battery range. (though you could reprogram them).
Also because it's series only it only gets 31mpg on gas which is "ok", not great. Still a pretty interesting car overall.

But this is the only one of its kind i'm aware of. All other PHEVs have more normal size tanks (10+ gal) if still somewhat smaller than ICE only versions.

Excellent! Looking forward to some more options in this field. Like another PHEV minivan, pref AWD. Something to compete w/ the Rav4 Prime. Or maybe something like the BMW i3 REX.

As you are probably well aware this categorisation is already a white/Western obsession and systemic racism.

And so is enumeration and counting.

Also who are these people to label these things as birds, let alone give them names? Did anyone bother to ask them how they identify?

It's just hate and toxic whitenessculinity all the way down.

I'm willing to believe the premise of the article after the subprime crisis and having seen these sales people in Costco and Home Depot for years.

but the "long story" of the article in the end shows that the main illustrating example is basically a lie ..

uhh... why aren't their panels working? that had nothing to do with securitization and Wall Street. thousands (?) of words earlier they'd said in passing that Hernandez was still paying the same $500 a month for power, not the $50 he was promised... but didn't explain why and implied it was because he was somehow misled about capacity or something. Then at the end of the article they drop the bomb that it's just broken (somehow)

So it sounds like this guy's finances would have worked out exactly as promised except there's something wrong with the install.
it is not a valid illustration of the problem the article is about.
If this problem is so widespread couldn't they find a better, not intersectional, poster child?

(my beef here is more about crappy "post truth" advocacy journalism than already securitized solar companies which can all go bankrupt for all I care)

Chrysler Pacifica PHEV is a minivan that's been around for around 5 years. 33 miles electric range (https://www.caranddriver.com/chrysler/pacifica). Unfortunately it it's not AWD and loses the "stow and go" 2nd row. Also, not cheap. But it'd be near the top of my list if i had some kids to haul around.

Also, i'd say that a lot of people spend a fair amount of money on cars, bigger, sportier, newer, or fancier than they NEED, but that's also true of food , clothes, phones, computers, houses, vacations, and most things we buy. And ... that's ok. it's (mostly) their money.

It's the bans, mandates, prohibitions, and artificial scarcity that annoy me. Let people buy what they're going to buy and see how it develops. 20 years + or - isn't going to make a difference

Yeah, props to the kid and the scene, but this is a click-baity BS headline and summary quote and article (but the video is ok).

TFA is somewhat ok in that it chronicles that highest level has increased over the years into the hundreds, but even the article doesn't say that "the dude got a probabilistic crash to happen on level 157 and he's the first guy to get it or something" or even contain the number 157 afaict.

The video is better in that it explains some stuff but in a "in the beginning was the big bang. and here's a 30 minute blow by blow of what happened next..." style.

Some of the people responding here clearly know more about the details, but a pox on everyone else in this "reporting" exercise. /rant

Technically, "no", but, functionally "yes": A 2016 video that significantly overstated self-driving capabilities was revealed just this year. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/t...

Yeah, i'd like to see this against the base rate failure of all games. Or games that require a community or some other reasonable benchmark.

Even for non-crap games and good games it's really hard to gain and keep users because of the huge amount of competition. It's a pretty brutal industry overall, with market dynamics a lot more like entertainment than tech: i.e. a small number of highly successful participants and a long long tail of people who have to wait tables (or work at a web design / marketing) to pay the rent.

the video on the article shows it's at least not vaporware. They show some reasonable sounding stresstesting. That said, it's pretty concerning/disappointing that 10 months after said video there's basically zero additional news about consumer availability (or its presence in an OEM product. Suggests there's at least SOME significant shortcoming.