Passing good bills? In a rare-as-hen's-teeth decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California's "one gun purchase every 30 days" law was an unconstitutional *rationing* of an individual's right to self-defense guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment. Yesterday Newsom AB1078, which restricts handgun purchases to _three_ guns per month, despite not having been able to demonstrate that the previous one-gun-purchase-per-30-days law had any effect on gun violence, and establishes a digital database tracking all handgun purchases with the biometric data of the purchasers, cross-referenced against social media profiles, and uses AI to flag 'suspicious patterns' by a purchaser, and gives law enforcement the authority to investigate any one approaching the three-per-month limit, even if they have no record of criminal behavior. The bill provides for warrantless searches of gun stores, mandatory reporting of customer conversations, felony charges for gun-store owners' systems not interfacing properly to the statewide system, and shares all of this data with federal agencies, creating a national gun registry through the back door.

But he's managed to sign one bill that is unreservedly beneficial to residents, so that clearly excuses all of his other actions.

Or list the charge for the basic service, with the footnote, in something actually readable instead of the "Flyspeck 3" commonly used to hide embarrassing details, that these prices do not include locally-imposed access charges, with a link to a page where the potential customer can put in their general location and get an itemized list of any and all additional charges that apply to service in their area -- if the ISP can't itemize the additional charges for an area, then they can't charge them to the customer.

What TFA doesn't mention is that "renewables" lumps hydro power and biomass (i.e., burning trees, sawdust, and other organic material for power) into the category of 'renewables', allowing the renewable lobby to jump on the claims as proof that the world is rapidly moving toward wind and solar power and away from fossil fuels. In fact, wind and solar only contributed 15% of the world's electricity last year, and is unlikely to rise significantly this year. In the article, Rowlatt declared that solar power " is now so cheap that large markets for solar can emerge in a country in the space of a single year" -- yet the contribution of solar power rose from 5.6% in 2023 to only 6.7% in 2024, hardly a transformative increase.

And it's funny how TFA does its own bowing to conventional preconceptions with "...because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory..." and completely dodges a much more visible mainstream idea -- anthropogenic climate change -- despite the mainstream adherents being much more aggressive about silencing and excluding dissenters.

Do the cost factors for wind and solar power account for the cost of the backup storage system to cover for the periods when the wind or solar systems are not producing power or producing insufficient power? If your site requires 100MW continuous power, a solar facility with a nameplate capacity of 100MW is going to be producing essentially zero power for 8 hours a day, and reduced power output in mornings, evenings, and overcast weather, and a wind turbine farm will be producing little or no power in periods of calm or excessive wind, so there will be a need for 'supplemental' power, either a separate conventional or nuclear generation system or battery backup accompanied by increased wind/solar generation to supply power when the main generation system is not producing, and industrial battery systems capable of standing in for a wind or solar facility for days at a time are definitely not cheap.

Microsoft won't be happy until they make the operating system a subscription service.

And it's gotten worse; I recently got notified by my local power company that they're 'restructuring' their charges; under the new system, the charge for your connection to the grid and the 'generation charge', both fixed fees, will now be assessed separately, so that you're paying both of those charges each month even if you're continuously selling power back to them from overproduction, where previously your overproduction could apply against those costs.

We can look at the statistics for jobs that are replaced by AI, but we don't see statistics for the number of jobs that are not being created because AI is being set up to do those jobs rather than hiring someone to fill them. BLS recently issued a correction that the US added 911,000 fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously reported, the largest downward revision on record. Without being able to get data from businesses on the reasons for smaller increases in hiring, we can't point to any specific cause for the downturn. Increased adoption of AI might be responsible for some, most, or all of this reduction, but there's no legitimacy in pointing a finger at AI and blaming it.

In addition, the imposition of a tariff assumes that there is local production to be 'protected' or 'encouraged'. If the only producer for a product is in a foreign country and it's not something that is readily done without, imposing a tariff just sucks cash out of the pockets of consumers -- an inherently regressive tax that hits low-income people harder than high-income people. And even if the tariff does spur local companies to begin producing a competing product, their startup costs and the tariff point give them no incentive to not price their product just below the tariff-raised cost of the foreign product, even if their actual cost is significantly less than that point. A good example of the 'no local competition' is plastic model kits. Virtually all of the manufacturers of plastic model kits are in other countries -- China, Japan, Germany, etc. -- and both the startup costs and lead times are significant; injection-molding machines are expensive, as are the molds to use in those machines, the expertise to make the molds is difficult to acquire, and it's time-consuming to set up a production line to make the kits, so you're likely looking at years before a local manufacturer can set up to compete with the foreign kitmakers. Then, because it's not a high-volume industry, current business-administration practices will drive pricing those kits as high as possible to recover the startup costs quickly, so the kits will be only barely cheaper than foreign kits.

Actually, the snake oil sold in Chinese stores did have health benefits, because of the omega-3 fatty acids in the oil. Unfortunately, when it was brought to the US, the traveling salesmen who picked up on the idea didn't know what kind of snakes to use, and the ones readily available in the US didn't have a significant omega-3 content. So it was an actual health product turned into worthless crap by greedy American marketeers.

They're just waiting for the tax breaks and subsidies they need to be able to make it financially viable, like Mitsubishi's recent withdrawal from the wind projects it had been involved in -- citing an inability to make the projects economically viable, even at strike prices of $140 to $200 per MWh.

Well, he has to pay for the tax cuts for his rich supporters in the OBBB somehow, so he'll just soak the general populace for it. Masking it as a tariff on imports that 'encourage local companies to make replacement products cheaper' throws a feel-good camouflage net over the problems of there likely not being any local manufacturers for some products, and that standing up new production lines is expensive and time-consuming -- but, hey, we're really sticking it to the Chinese... and the Canadians... and the Germans... and the French... and... Never mind that the tariffs don't affect them, except maybe for having to collect it from the US customers. The tariffs come out of our pockets, a tax for having the temerity to buy something that's not a genuine 'Murican product.

Or equally "Our profits are going to go down if we have to make products that are actually better than the ones the competitors we have to allow in will offer!"

Both speech and perception. I had a supervisor whose normal speaking rate was noticeably faster than my coworkers; it was gratifying to be able to get the information she wanted to convey faster than if the same information had been conveyed by another of my coworkers. While I don't know if the pace is deliberate, when I'm watching YouTube videos, I will often bump the playback speed to 1.5x, because at normal speed it feels as if the speaker (or the AI narration; I'm not naive enough to believe that it's not being used by posters who don't think they have a good enough speaking voice) is unnaturally stretching their speech out.

No, this study gives a foundation to why AI-driven narration sounds so horrible. On top of the seemingly-random abrupt pauses between words that should be a single phrase, AI narration either runs on for much longer than a human would, or breaks up sentences with 'normal' pauses, but in the wrong places. They always seem to make Shatner's... dramatic... pauses sound like... smooth... ...delivery.