Since 2020 there have been plenty of rolling power outages in California. They simply renamed them "Public Safety Power Shutoffs". While these are done under the guise of "Wildfire prevention", I guess it's just a "convenient coincidence" they occur during the EXACT SAME times that rolling blackouts would have occurred (extreme heat waves). As an added bonus, the burden of dealing with these shut-offs got shifted heavily from liberal urban areas to conservative rural areas, which I'm sure the liberal state government had no issues with. Anyone who thinks that in 2026 the only reliable way to prevent a fire is to shut off everyone's power during a heat wave is a gullible idiot. This is typical political trash where you just rename something that is unpopular and then celebrate while pretending that you fixed the problem.

We already had Taxis. They've been around since before cars themselves. Taxis became ludicrously expensive due to fees and over-regulation. The only reason anyone cares about Uber or Lyft is because they offer CHEAPER RIDES. Repeating the same mistakes that largely destroyed the traditional Taxi business isn't going to help anyone.

Those with the best talent and best products always want to make the most money from it, and you can't do that in a Totalitarian dictatorship that willfully exerts control over your company or product, and takes whatever it wants for free any time it feels like it.

After cleaning up a friend's computer, I watched them get back on it. The first thing they did was go to Facebook. There was an advertisement that was clearly disguised to look like a Facebook notification claiming that they had a new friend request. Without hesitation they clicked on it, and thus began the process of re-infecting their system. It turned out to be very instructional, at least. I explained to them how being asked to copy and paste commands into an Administrator command prompt isn't a normal part of inviting a new friend on Facebook. Crisis averted. But it was kind of mind-blowing to see that Meta allowed those ads on their platform in the first place. I realized that even I had become a bit sheltered due to using uBlock Origin on Firefox for years, given how good of a job it does.

The end game for this, or really the only way that it could truly be enforced, would be to have chips that report their location and have the ability to be remotely disabled via a "kill-switch". Otherwise you can always just ship things through networks of 3rd parties to work around export restrictions.

got good Black Friday deals on their VPN.

If you need to run cable across a driveway, it's a lot cheaper to erect a pole and run it above than it is to destroy part of your driveway and rebuild it afterward just to run a pipe underneath. If you happen to have large amounts of money with nothing better to spend it on, then yeah the pipe underneath would objectively be the better route to go.

I had a FedEx truck clip a support wire for an electric pole in front of my house. It pulled on the pole so much that it and 2 poles in each direction were all wobbling. The lines where swaying so much that the lines must have arced, and caused power to go out at my house and several of my neighbors. The damage that this drone did was very mundane in comparison. Why would this require an FAA investigation?

While it's true that people are also buying even fewer *new* gas cars, that's because there is a huge selection of used gas cars on the market. Not so much when it comes to used electric cars. Especially if you are looking at used cars that are actually somewhat old (aka cheap). Electric cars will never get to that point of being old enough to be cheap on the used market, because by that point they will need a new $15,000 battery.

I'm a big fan of Samsung products overall, but I've never seen a single person use Bixby that didn't pull it up on accident.

Unfortunately it's difficult to compete with a country like China that can brush aside regulations and ethical concerns in the name of "progress". Don't forget, this is where Covid came from.

BS. Even the wildest dreams of the Trump administration still involve a future where billions of things would use these batteries. He's not trying to outlaw phones, drones, etc...

There was never going to be any batteries. The government money went into the pockets of the people who it was intended for. It's purpose was served.

It's another thing to forfeit *your* land to that 30%

Globally? That probably puts it in the same category as toe fungus.