If it's like Jeep, the salesmen are punished if customers don't sign up for the monthly services. Of course the first few months are always free and you can always cancel at any time they say.

Mod parent +1 insightful. It is definitely not a troll. It's the absolute truth. Life kind of sucks for a lot of lower middle class Americans, and it has for some time. And it's not really their fault. They've done everything "right" to fulfill the American dream but they can't ever get ahead for very real, structural reasons. Naturally they are looking for someone to blame and since Obama presided over much of the years since the great collapse, he makes a convenient scapegoat for the GOP and for Trump in particular. Asking these people to vote for a Democrat what in their mind they've never seen any personal benefit to doing so is a losing proposition. Never mind that Trump has done nothing to help them and made their lives worse. But he he appeals to their egos while at the same time stoking their fears.

And the Great Barrier Reef is "in" Australia. Presumably in the outback some where.

Trump doesn't typically follow the law and does what he wants. So far we have his words on the matter, which are very clear. The jet will go to the Trump Presidential library after he leaves office, and he and Eric Trump have both said he will continue to use the plane for private purposes once it is attached the library. How Trump will actually do this, we don't know. Legally maybe the jet does belong to the air force. But who will enforce that? Maybe the courts. Certainly not Congress. Not the MAGA voters.

Just the other day I heard an Electronic Frontier Foundation representative talk about their recently released tool called Rayhunter for finding and identifying these surveillance devices.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
https://github.com/EFForg/rayh...

The way things are going these days if you attend any kind of protest in the United States right now, you can expect to be surveiled and tracked by police and federal officials. So turn your cell phone off. Sad that not having your constitutional rights protected is the norm these days. I think it's been that way for years but has gotten significantly worse lately.

Apparently there is an open source app called "Policy Plus" that lets you set up policies on Windows 11 home. But I really don't think most users would ever install that, let alone know how to use it.

I'm not at all surprised. Most of Trump's inner circle is entangled in Epstein somehow. For years the GOP has been saying the Epstein files implicate many prominent democrats. It's a bit odd because if the files could bring down some democrats you'd think the GOP and the Trump administration would be champing at the bit to release even some small part of the files that would show this, or even hint at it! Or even some redacted pages that protect their own. But it's crickets. I can only surmise that they are nearly all so deeply implicated it's not even possible to release anything at this stage.

No I think the word he originally chose was the right one!

Also, we should do more of the kind of thing they do in Sweden. Only 1% of household waste in Sweden ends up in landfills. What cannot be recycled is incinerated and used to heat homes and produce some electricity.

Yes household plastic waste should be incinerated and turned into electrical power. At least for now, fossil fuels are going to continue to provide a decent amount of baseline power. If so, we might as well burn the plastics to help with that, rather then let them pollute.

Crazy how the media organizations want to have their cake and eat it too. If they are going to assume every blank media will be used to pirate, and thus tax appropriately, then they have no right to go after pirates. After all they are already being paid by the would-be pirates in advance. Greed knows no bounds.

Indeed "driving" as an active pastime is really gone in North America. It's been a real problem for car makers in the last couple of decades. They used to be able to advertise to and appeal to the driving lifestyle people. But recent generations just don't care that much about driving, other than being a means to an end. One car is very much like another. There's no lifestyle branding that works anymore. The number of teenagers getting drivers licenses has been falling for years.

Maybe not an abacus, but definitely a slide rule!

I have a friend who has driven a manual most of her adult life yet really doesn't know how to correctly run a manual. Or at least has a lot of bad habits. But hey it keeps the mechanics in business changing clutches.

Is it, though? Seems like everyone I know is paying their monthly fees and just streaming what they want to watch. And indeed if you only plan to watch something once, there's no point in buying it on media.