Last I checked the local government said so. They have indemnified waymo in every market they have launched their taxi service. I don't think that would hold up if they killed a human being, at least not one that isn't homeless, but so far it's held up for the more minor stuff that's happened.

Basically waymo cannot be cited for traffic violations and killing a pet is just a traffic violation. The most they could be held responsible for would be the value of the pet which is usually under $100.

It's that we all know this is a grift and we're all trying to figure out how the grift works.

I can think of a few possible things but I don't have enough of a finance background to really say for sure of what they are up to, but I know damn well that billionaires don't just hand out billions of dollars for the hell of it. There is a reason that Bill Gates is still one of the wealthiest people on the planet despite telling us 20 years ago he was going to give away his fortune.

Billionaires have been lying to us for as long as we've had billionaires, some of us just figured that out

But given this administration's history of corrupting everything they touch it's not something we should get behind from this administration because it's almost guaranteed to turn into some kind of scam that puts money in their pockets.

There is nothing wrong with a sovereign wealth fund per se if your government is relatively uncorrupted. Ours is not, the Trump administration is without a doubt the most corrupt and criminal administration in American history and that is saying a lot.

Simply put you cannot expect good things to come out of this administration even if the underlining ideas are fine. And I don't think that's any kind of exaggeration or partisan bickering. The Trump administration is openly murdering Venezuelan fishermen in the lead up to another war for oil without even the slightest pretexts. That alone should tell you we are in for a bad time. You don't have to be a genius to extrapolate from that data point and the dozens of other data points like the illegal tariffs or the huge bribes like the cryptocurrency or the jet Qatar gave the Trump or the fact that the taxpayer is going to be retro fitting that jet for his use...

If I had to guess, and it's just a guess, I would say that they are positioning themselves to profit from the money put aside for the kids. Probably sitting themselves up to redirect the money being invested in the companies that they own.

The one thing we can be sure of though is that this is a scam and the only question is what are the details of the scam.

You don't become a billionaire by being altruistic. People who genuinely care about society at Large stop accumulating wealth long before they become billionaires. To become a billionaire requires a certain level of sociopathy. There's a reason why the old phrase, never ask a Man how he made his first million, exists. That phrase has been around so long that a million dollars isn't a lot of money anymore but you get the idea.

The supreme Court has overruled 94% of the lower court rulings Trump has lost. It's painfully obvious they will just rubber stamp anything Trump wants. More importantly anything the heritage foundation and Peter thiel wants. Trump can't stay awake through an entire cabinet meeting so it's not so much that he wants anything but he would like to stay in power because he is making billions of corruption and bribes.

Meanwhile the Republican party does not have a viable candidate for 2028. Vance is a joke and a couch fucker and the rest of them are so mired and scandal they are completely unelectable. None of them have Trump's Teflon because they aren't perceived as outsiders.

So the Republican party is going to run Trump unless Trump is physically incapable of running. Meanwhile the news media will protect Trump and will convince the public that it is perfectly normal for Trump to run for a third term. We saw this in 2024 with sane washing. Which is the practice of crazy shit Republicans do, especially anything crazy Trump does being reported as normal and good in the news media.

This probably isn't enough for Trump to actually win a third term but the Republican party will use common voter suppression tactics to stop enough casual voters from making it to the polls in order for Trump to win.

It is possible the voters won't buy into this but at the same time they did elect a felon with 28 credible rape accusations for a second term because he promised cheap eggs and because trans people gross them out...

And of course if anyone can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory it's the Democratic party. They are on track to nominate Gavin newsom and he's fine but I could easily see them coming up with some scandal to take him out so they can put yet another unpopular woman forward. There is a contingency of the Democrat party that is obsessed with the first female president and will do anything to get it. And unfortunately they have a lot of pull in the party...

So yeah Trump cares because Trump is going to run for a third term. This is why he's backing off on some of his tariffs

Also good luck getting that check. It can take years.

Florida in particular is a mess right now and nobody is doing anything to fix it. We've got a fuck ton of retirees who can't afford to move, aren't dying any time soon and are stuck in condos we know are likely to fail without expensive retrofits they can't afford. It's a miracle there hasn't been another collapse and we're just hoping they drop dead of old age before it hits them.

You're not helping your case by quoting a quack like him. He's a pop sci author that specializes in junk science. Exactly the kind of guy that I would expect to do a lazy study pointing to cell phones bad.

Like I mentioned on other comments I'm still not at all convinced and correlation is not causation.

I keep coming back to the fact that these same studies have been done with every new form of media and they always find a correlation.

The problem isn't the New Media the problem is we don't support parents and kids enough so the parents plop their kids down with Penny dreadfuls or radio or TV or Internet and now cell phones and screens.

In another hundred years these same dumb studies will be done for cyberdecks.

So I'm aware that the abstract says that they controlled for socioeconomic factors I'm just dubious of that.

It's far more likely that kids spending a bunch of time on screens is a symptom of other problems.

That said on the off chance that the phones are a problem they are a miniscule problem compared to everything else kids are up against in 2025.

Taking your kid's phone away isn't going to magically make them get better grades or take up sports.

Even so I think it's far more likely that you're seeing the same basic problem across different economic groups. And because of that you could replace the phone with basically any form of media. Which is why you get the same little panic every time a new form of media comes out and the same group of social scientists running the same experiments blaming the New Media for causing the problems.

I'm not a huge fan of folk music but having listened to a little bit of it just because I'm a lefty and Lefty's tend to blare the stuff I can tell you that the same problems that we had a hundred years ago or more we're getting sung about in folk music back then and are getting sung about it and folk music today. We haven't solved any of the problems. And it's the same damn problems. The only thing new is obesity and that's just because we have reasonably reliable access to food for most people... Most people. There are still several million kids having sleep for dinner every night...

It's entirely possible even likely that what we are seeing here is just that latchkey kids are more likely to have smartphones at an early age.

The problem isn't the phone itself it's overworked parents with low pay and no social support.

The abstract at least says that the account for socioeconomic factors but I'm not able to read the actual study past the abstract.

Also I guarantee that these exact same studies can be found for television, the internet and if you go back far enough you can find the 18th century equivalent of these studies for Penny dreadfuls.

Every time a new form of mass media or a new device for mass media shows up you can bet somebody is going to find a correlation between everything bad and if. Meanwhile we never actually do anything about things like child hunger or forcing kids to get up early to go to school when we have plenty of studies indicating the teenagers need more sleep and it needs to be later in the morning...

You know whether people should or not they do. I've more than once come across somebody using Excel like a database application. It's exactly as bad of an idea as it sounds but people do it and for the most part despite time spent debugging problems it does work.

I guess what I am saying is the answer to, there isn't a tool that can do what the customer wants to do, should not be, tell the customer to knock it the fuck off.

Antitrust is mostly how Microsoft stays in power but they do one thing. It's called the 80/20 rule and the idea is that 80% of your features are used by 20% of your customers but it's a different feature for every single customer. So you can't just take features out because you will rapidly start losing customers even though on paper very few customers are using those features. Basically when you have a sufficiently complex application it has a ton of features only used by a small group of people but you keep adding those groups up and suddenly you've got market dominance.

Before the industry consolidated that was part of what put Microsoft on top. Of course nowadays they just don't let anyone compete

Headline is they refuse to give up Instagram reality is that they refused to gag order.

I just got a article in my feed that the lead actress for the Asoka series at Disney refused to do another season because she wasn't paid enough.

The actual facts are that season 2 filming is already done and one of the other less important characters didn't come back because they didn't offer her enough money to afford to live in London where the shooting was.

I'm so sick of clickbait. Lately it's being written by shitty AI so it's gotten even worse.

And then having people check it. The result is every single update can randomly break shit that doesn't get caught.

Having people check the AI code at slop doesn't really work because the entire point of AI coding is to do it fast and cheap so there's going to be enormous pressure to do as little checking as possible.

Not that it matters. Microsoft has a monopoly. Any viable competitor will simply get taken out by well-known and well understood anti-competitive tactics. And because we refuse to enforce those laws because we refuse to vote for politicians who will enforce those laws Microsoft can basically do whatever they want. With the occasional bribe to some of the larger governments that might try to regulate them.

I think Europe is actually trying to quit the habit but I don't think they will be able to. I can tell you right now that there is no alternative for Microsoft Excel when you're doing large complex spreadsheets. Open offices nice but it just doesn't cut it. Some of that's because of shitty little patents Microsoft has but the system is designed to let them keep generating new patents that make it difficult to compete. And some of it is just that it's rough going writing office software so it's tough to compete with someone who can pay people to do that kind of boring dreary work.

And of course you have the aforementioned anti-competitive tactics that work like a charm.

I'm not even going to say we need to decide what's more important, software freedom or whatever bullshit that makes us vote for pro corporate anti-capitalist political candidates (and mark my words pro corporate is just as anti-capitalist as any socialist or communist just in a different direction)

It doesn't matter what the reasons are the end result is we don't enforce laws.

Is right wing governments directly interfering with colleges for political reasons.

Critical thinking and right-wing politics do not mix. The core fundamentals of right wing politics are trickle down economics and a blind faith in authority. Hierarchy basically. The idea that there is a natural order with some people at the top, some people in the middle and some people in the bottom.

I can see why this theology would be appealing to some people. It implies that there is an order to the universe and that you have a place in that order. Although I never seem to meet any right wingers who believe their place is at the bottom..

The problem is that in the real world it doesn't work. Trickle down economics is pretty obviously bad news. But granting absolute power to a handful of individuals is equally bad. You would think people who grew up being told about checks and balances would understand that but well, here we are. We still lionize Kings.

Because of that it is absolutely essential that anyone who wants to climb the ranks in the right wing undermines public education. You can't have people getting well educated because they're going to start asking the kind of questions well educated people do. Like, why is America bombing boats in Venezuela or why does the United Kingdom use child protection laws to go after pro Palestinian groups... Oops I just triggered somebody.

That implies rot from within but this was really just top down Intel firing anyone and everyone in order to make quarterly targets.

That was fine when AMD was struggling but AMD got their shit together in 2017. Intel kept firing people they actually need it all the way up to well, now.

The problem is that your engineers are rotting it's that you don't have them because you fired them. Worse it's not as if you got to assassinate them or anything so they went off and got jobs at your competitors.

This is why Nvidia has always been so strong they hire the hell out of engineers in order to keep them out of the hands of competitors. It's a bit problematic because it's why AMD and Intel have such a hard time competing in the GPU market space. They simply cannot afford to hire enough of the kind of engineers they need. Not with the budget the CEO gives them

Next will be incredibly tight regulation on VPN access and use. Leading up to government-run vpns and a Chinese style great firewall.

This is a authoritarian power grab and once authoritarians start grabbing power they don't stop.

I don't think it's anything that can be stopped because voters are too distracted by the culture war bullshit.