The thing is they are not employees. They're freelance workers or sort of like self employed franchise operators. Being a gig worker is not a career. It's work when you want to work and for many, an extra income stream with a lot of flexibility.

Just look at how many people California screwed when they passed union drafted legislation restricting freelance work that hit people like writers and truck drivers hard. This is the unions making the same play they tried through legislation that will end up hurting far more people than it helps. But the union bosses will get bigger paychecks from increased members paying dues and the Democrats will get increased political donations. It's all about the money and corruption and not at all about the actual common worker.

Every map projection has trade-offs. Back when I was in grade school, we actually learned about different ones and that the Mercator enlarged land as you moved away from the equator. Geography class actually taught geography rather than being yet more liberal indoctrination. The whole reason why this current map change is political is because it is being pushed by the globalist Progressives as some sort of anti-racism crusade righting past atrocities in the name of colonialism. The Mercator projection didn't become standard because of a bunch of racists, it provided the best trade-offs to project a globe on to a flat piece of paper.

This is political because no one was stopping anyone from using any map type they desire. This is all about making a big pronouncement of how great the the UN is in virtue signaling ending colonialism. It's a bunch of puffery and nothing more. There are so many useful things the UN could actually be doing, but they're more concerned about far Left idealism rather than solving actual problems.

It's because the person running the agents asked an agent to to define the scope and then didn't bother going through the details of what was spit out. Likely because AI spits out such overly verbose crap, that humans can't get the important details without needing to ask another AI to summarize what the other overly chatty one created. And that second AI summarizes only what it thought was important and missed the actual important parts.

Petroleum for both fuel and for industrial purposes isn't going anywhere for a long time. It's very much an industry that is critical to national concerns. It is something that would be a mistake to become dependent on foreign countries for. Look what happened to Europe after Russia attacked Ukraine and their environmental policies left them highly dependent on Russia for petroleum and natural gas.

It's nice to dream of 100% clean energy, no plastics, no use of oil to manufacture anything or being used in fertilizers to grow food. Reality is a completely different thing. I have no problems with finding better solutions for anything. But it's not going to happen over night and trying to force it through green political policies does nothing but raise prices, create shortages and hurt the average person.

This has nothing to do with your data. It has to do with cameras that can monitor sensitive sites. Add in future autonomous vehicles, and they can just wander and collect surveillance. They could also be used as drones to create havoc if a conflict were to arise.

China already has restrictions on how the connected systems in Tesla's can operate in China. They do have similar regulations and Tesla has complied in order to keep selling cars there. Polestar could make changes to attempt to get a waiver. Odds are their low sales in the US doesn't justify the effort.

You're probably someone that also complains about how much new cars cost. Every requirement added to what cars must do raises the cost to produce them and thus the price. Much of the current high prices in cars is from required safety features. Much of the added weight that killed econo cars was for safety requirements. The price and selection of cars we can buy in the US is very much a result of regulations for fuel economy and safety features pushing us to larger and more expensive cars.

It has nothing to do with Communism. Cars are become mobile surveillance platforms. You don't just let a foreign adversary (of any political system) fill your roads with spies. China has similar restrictions for such systems from foreign countries. It's about national security.

As for why Volvo got the waiver, I don't have the info to know if that was a mistake or if their systems implement fewer features.

It's just a tax in name. It's actually the government seizing 50% of the company from those that took the risk and invested in it. And after that, using its 50% share to control how that company operates. That ownership and control is essentially government controlling the means of production. I wonder what word is defined by that?

Had I been allowed to invest my SS taxes myself in the stock market, I'd have far, far more money for retirement than I'll receive from SS. I'd much prefer that SS did not exist. But since I had to pay in to it, I expect to get back from it.

The government would in essence be in control of the operations and direction of the industry. That is Socialism. Not only that, but it would be an 'Independent' board meaning that it would not even be accountable to the voters. Like most Socialist (and Communist) systems, the unelected bureaucrats get put in charge. Democracy just exists to put in place figureheads.

It's stable and works well. It's simple for family members of varying technical ability to use on a streaming box/smart tv with a remote.

Jellyfin does try to be all these things, but is a steaming pile. When they changed their db schema a few months ago, I got completely broken. I had already been dealing with all their ancient .net code forked from Emby having all sorts of parsing errors. That got worse with their new db stack. The database then started corrupting itself daily requiring restoring a backup. I also ran in to issues with it getting in scanning new file loops for days at a time maxing out my 12 cores. A clean install to start over didn't fix any of that. I have Plex running on the same machine with its sqlite db on the same drive without issue. It's not the hardware, it's the crappy software. Sometimes paying for a solution is worth all the time you save.

The problem with Euro-Socialism is that the bureaucrats fancy themselves as product designers and want to dicate product design through regulation. The problem being they have no real knowledge or skills beyond thinking they know best.

"and parents were asking the government to intervene"

How about being parents and putting rules in place with your kids? The government does not exist for parents to subcontract parenting to. Are parents afraid to be the bad person and want to just wanting to never have to say no to their kids? So, instead, they want government being the bad person?

It's a win for consumer choice, not for Trump. His policies regarding EVs are that consumers should be able to choose if they want one or an ICE vehicle. The government should not be subsidizing a product that cannot sell without the government giving a significant subsidy nor should the government be forcing a transition when EVs are not a practical option for many use cases.

I have nothing against EVs. I actually own two. But I also recognize they're not ready for mass acceptance. They need market forces to drive them to be better and become not just viable alternatives, but better alternatives.