it is called inflation - expansion of the money supply that accumulated over the years (bail outs, social payouts, covid.. ) In terms of gold HDD prices fell.

You can't effectively have free speech if you also have to comply with so-called "hate speech" regulation. That is the main issue.

To be fair, half a percent is actually only slightly below the average for tech-sector stocks right now. AAPL is paying 24 cents quarterly on $170 (.565%), and the Fidelity Nasdaq Composite Index Fund (FNCMX) has a forward dividend yield of 0.64% annually.

It isn't just a matter of anti-consumer behaviors. Yes, without NN, ISPs could block content they don't agree with, limit your access to information, your freedom of political speech, etc. but it can also have an effect on innovation and competition. Imagine scenario where you as a small time owner of a startup want to compete. How can you do that if your competition can have you throttled, or if your bandwidth is so heavily taxed so that only big corporations can afford it? This goes against free market principles. It isn't just theoretical either. ISPs have been caught doing things like this before.

Very little of an EV's weight comes from anything that's particularly rare.

The main components in a modern Tesla battery are lithium, iron, phosphorus, and oxygen. Lithium is the rarest, at about .002% of the Earth's crust. There's "only" about a third as much of that as there is copper. Now think about how much we use copper. Iron makes up 6.3% of the Earth's crust, making it the fourth most abundant element behind only oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. Phosphorus makes up about .1% of the Earth's crust (which is still 17x as common as copper, and only slightly behind hydrogen). And of course oxygen is the most common element in the Earth's crust.

The industry as a whole is built around a dealer network that depends on repairs and service charges to stay in business. Apart from stupid minor problems, EVs have far fewer major mechanical issues than ICE cars, so dealers don't really want to sell them. I would argue that there is every financial incentive for car dealers to ensure that EVs fail. Those dealers are the ones who help people decide what to buy, and if they're discouraging EV sales, you're not going to get any EV sales.

I believe that the word in all three cases is "won't" not "can't", for the reason stated above.

How do you figure? Tesla sold 1.8 million cars in 2023. And even in a really down quarter this year, they still made over a billion dollars in profit. That's not what I would call "struggling financially". Sales are down lately, but I think that's mostly the public's reaction to Tesla's really stupid and user-hostile design changes (e.g. no turn signal stalk, changing gears with the touchscreen, etc.) that they have made over the past few months, rather than because of anything specific to electric vehicles themselves. I love my 2017 Model X, but I wouldn't feel comfortable buying any car that Tesla is currently selling, and I doubt I'm in the minority here.

What efficiency problems? They're already vastly more efficient than ICE cars by any metric. Capacity problems? How many people routinely drive more than 300 miles without stopping? Endurance problems? Far fewer major mechanical problems than equivalent ICE cars also contradicts that theory.

EVs are already cost effective, and if Tesla would stop trying to be cute and f**king up their steering wheels in new and infuriating ways every year or two, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Also note that ICE cars also frequently fail to start when parked outside in cold temperatures. This isn't specific to EVs. If anything, EVs should be a lot less likely to fail to start, because they have a giant lithium ion battery pack with battery heaters to maintain its temperature, and that main pack periodically tops up the 12V battery when it gets low. Also, EVs tend to have active monitoring to warn you when the 12V battery is getting near the end of its life.

I support free market and also generally oppose government regulation. I'm also intellectually honest enough to recognize that opposition to net neutrality (NN) is opposite to my conservative principles, since NN's aim is to maintain an open and competitive internet market. NN is important to me not just in principle, but because internet service providers have proven time and time again that it is indeed necessary to protect many of our freedoms.

I would be glad to return to a day where we can see more of these areas of compromise and for our country return to a more unified state. As your post well demonstrates, though, partisan purists will always be around to crudely condemn me despite my intention to engage in honest dialogue on the issues. While it is true that NN is of great importance to me, I am not a single-issue voter, nor am I in any way oblivious as you suggest. I am openly acknowledging this contradictory stance held by Republicans and lending my support on this issue. Mock me if you prefer.

What's really sad is that it wasn't always that way. When I was a kid, we went to Canada and Mexico all the time, and we never had passports. The passport requirement wasn't introduced for travel by land until 2009 for Canada and 2008 for Mexico (and previously, in 2007 for travel by air to Canada or Mexico). You still had to go through customs at the border, but it was nothing like what people have to deal with today.

>" In this particular instance, hate speech is not what the accused is being charged with"

Oh, *I* know that, but every article that references "hate speech" in an article gives the term/concept a tiny bit more "legitimacy." I want to combat that any time I see it.

>"Yep, snap ends up being more of a problem than a solution."

Not just screw snap, but screw any FORCED use of containerized packages. Users should always have a choice for native packages- you know, the ones that take little disk space and are not complicated to manage.

Having the choice to use a container package is fine/great- they can be useful. But abandoning native packages is bad. And if you are going to support containers, using snap would probably be the worst choice. It is why Linux Mint not only has native packages for the major stuff that Ubuntu doesn't, but they also fully support flatpak and not snap.

>"Every Snap I've seen is alongside the deb package, so the choice is there."

You haven't looked very hard, then. And the number will go up with each release. It is one of several reasons Linux Mint is continuously gaining in popularity.

>"Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 'Noble Numbat' Officially Released"

Kewl, because that means a new Linux Mint will be on the way soon.

https://linuxmint.com/

And I seem to be more fascinated by their LMDE project, although I haven't decided to jump to it from regular Mint quite yet...

https://linuxmint.com/download...

>"No, hate speech is speech that attacks not just an individual, but a whole class of people."

No, "hate speech" is whatever anyone wants to define "hate speech" as. It is a nebulous, ever-changing, non-legal-definable, subjective, emotional, nonsense concept. I have seen countless examples of so-called "hate speech" that, in my opinion (and I doubt I am alone), are not "hateful" at all. It is a dangerous term that is utterly incompatible with any rational form of "free speech" and should have no place in our society.

The issue here shouldn't be what was said, but the fact that someone was IMPERSONATING someone else with mal-intent. I am no lawyer, so I am not sure if that is a crime, but it certainly should be one.

Yes, I have (by way of Cocoa Beach). And I've gone about 3/4 of the way several times. I'm familiar with Florida roads and their constant state of construction....

*shrugs* I usually got reasonably close on I-95. Maybe it's a time-of-year thing.

Either way, though, when you get to the other end, unless you live in Miami or you're going to rely on public transit, you'll still need to find a way to get a rental car, but you're no longer at an airport with car rental places, so you'll end up waiting for an Uber or Lyft or cab and going a mile or so to one of the car rental places, by which time you've almost certainly lost most or all of your time savings.

And even if it takes an entire hour longer by car and you're able to avoid extra delays that wipe out those savings, the cost is still exorbitant. Driving will cost you $20 in fuel for everyone in your party, versus $75 per person for the train. For a family of 3, that means the train costs 1100% as much as driving. That's a *huge* cost difference for such a small time savings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed that 4,600 people are riding it every day (which likely means about 150 people per train), but that's probably not even close to being commercially viable. They've already had to massively scale back their ridership projections because people aren't taking it nearly as often as they expected, which is likely because the cost is way too high for the amount of time saved.

And in spite of those high prices, the company is still losing money — on the order of $250 million per year, which makes the shortfall somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per ticket by my back-of-the-envelope math. And they are already $4B in debt.

I fully expect them to go bankrupt. I hope I'm wrong, but I definitely wouldn't buy their bonds. :-)

As a conservative, it might surprise you to say that I'm in favor of net neutrality, and this is an area of where I disagree with a lot of other conservatives. I know I'm not alone though. There are multiple Republicans who joined Democrats in trying to codify this into law, and I stood by that effort as well. This is one of those areas where I see a place for bipartisan support. Although I am behind the spirit of this, and understand why this is needed, what I don't stand by is the way this is being implemented. This business of circumventing failed legislation like this is not the right way to to effect change. Despite being for it, I will stand by the inevitable overturning of this when Republicans retake FCC majority. Congress needs to get back to legislating. Yes, it is hard and purposefully so. This however, is disappointing to see.