When some people say they want to live in a "Star Trek future", it's probably worth mentioning there was also a lot of really dystopian shit in Star Trek.
Manager: "[employee name], can you vouch for the dedication of your team?"
Employee: "We pledge our loyalty to the company, from now until our last deadline."
Manager: "Then receive these pouches from the company, may they keep you focused and productive."
Enthusiasts kept audio cassettes in production, the same thing needs to happen with floppies (and a lot of other legacy tech too).
Current production cassette tapes are all ferric oxide garbage, and don't even get me started on playback/recording mechanisms. Nobody is using these things for anything serious anymore, they're just something for hipsters to waste their money on.
Seriously. Try any cassette gear sold today - it's way, way worse than what was sold back in the format's heyday.
This brings back memories of novice computer users incorrectly referring to 3.5" floppies as "hard disks".
You pay for what you use.
Taxes are supposed to be based on how well this whole "society" thing is working out for you. The only way to do that is to means test, otherwise you're over-taxing the poor and under-taxing the wealthy.
How are toll roads not "taxing appropriately"?
Let's say you're driving on the road to commute to your dead-end job where you're barely earning enough to make ends meet. You pay $8 each round trip.
Then we have the owner of the company you work for. He's driving on the same road on his way to make significantly more money than you do. He also pays $8.
That's the problem with consumption taxes.
Old screens flashed one bright image each frame.
Actually, it was a bit worse than that. Old color CRT screens drew the image as a series of 3 electron beams scanning the phosphor coating. To a creature with fast enough visual perception, it doesn't even look like an image at all.
Some people even got eye strain and headaches from looking at a CRT for too long.
SIM-locking should be banned, period.
That actually was a stipulation Verizon agreed to when they licensed the 700MHz "C Block" LTE spectrum. Then, sometime around 9 years ago, they just started locking their phones anyway. Political leadership changes at the FCC probably had something to do with it.
The carriers' argument is that they want to be able to offer subsidized prepaid phones, and without the SIM locking they'd up with people buying phones to use on competing services (though you'd figure that'd probably end up being a wash, with there only really being 3 major carriers in the US), and/or the phones being shipped overseas by resellers.
I've owned two robot vacuum cleaners: A Roomba about 10 years ago, and a bObsweep now. They're both kind of crap at actually cleaning well.
A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.
When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, it's obvious they aren't going to be capable of generating anywhere near the same amount of suction as a vacuum powered by the mains. That's even assuming they use suction at all - most of the ones I've seen could more accurately be described as robotic carpet sweepers, where a rotating brush pushes dirt and debris into a little collection bin.
Now, this isn't to say you couldn't design something with a massive battery pack (maybe something in the order of 1kWh) and a real motor, but it'd be extremely expensive and just as loud as a standard vacuum cleaner. Plus, I think the target market for these things necessitated that they be priced more in the realm of impulse buy for a gadget that kind-of-sort-of works, rather than upwards of a grand for something that genuinely replaces the need to use a real vacuum cleaner. As you said, most people don't actually hate vacuuming enough to drop serious money on not having to do it.
I've yet to experience a podcast that wouldn't have been better as a written article. It's such a slog to get through someone droning on for 20 minutes, when I could've just skimmed the same article in a few seconds and gotten the gist of it.
I can only assume some people actually enjoy listening to yammering, and just getting to the fucking point already, is secondary.
This would only eliminate dissenting opinions from the center and left. The right wing is heavily backed by billionaires and could shrug off any lawsuits or problems.
Actually, it's crazier than that - X managed to convince some of its users to actually pay for the privilege of de-anonymizing themselves to the platform. That makes it really easy to sue the person who got you sued.
Section 230 protects people and organizations who run websites which allow the public to post content to them without approval from prosecution, so long as they comply with certain legal requirements like declaring your point of contact for having material which remains unlawful removed, which in turn requires that you pay a yearly fee. (This requirement is not part of section 230, it was instituted later.)
Huh? This is the first I've heard of this and wasn't able to find anything about registration and a fee being required for section 230 protection. ChatGPT said the DMCA safe harbor provisions of the DMCA require registration of an agent who will receive takedown notices, but that's something like a $6 fee (and it's in regard to a totally different law which is really only applicable if you'd be dealing with the possibility of users uploading pirated content).
Not having 230 protections means platforms will likely heavily clamp down on what users can say, do, etc. to the point that you will likely see a lot of websites (mainly smaller ones) shutting down simply because the liability is too great and more draconian moderation from big tech websites that can afford to do moderation at scale.
Or basically the death of online anonymity, as platform operators will demand ID verification and make you agree to a pass-through liability as part of their TOS (if they get sued for something you said, then you'll be sued by them to recover their loss).
Ironically, X actually already charges its users for the privilege of knowing exactly who they are.
If natural gas was as easy to get to the refinery as a barrel of crude oil, you better believe they'd process it into something more marketable. Of course, if it was easier to transport, they'd just sell it as-is to power plants.
"Someone" told you wrong.
That probably was me, and I've brought receipts.
EVs represent 1.4% of the US vehicle fleet. There's a lot of cars in the USA. If you assume demand is linear and just added an extra 1.4% to the price of gas, well, that'd raise the current average price of gas by about $0.04/gal.
Granted, the real economics are probably a bit more squirrely if say, a magic genie showed up and granted the petroleum industry their wish that every EV instantly became a dino-juice burner, as the sudden surge in demand would cause a massive price spike at the pump. But in an alternate reality where Musk decided that drones to deliver fast food were more interesting than EVs, their gas prices aren't far off from ours (and they're getting burgers from heaven, so maybe it's not so bad).
From 2018 through 2024, about $16 billion was spent (or more accurately, mostly consisting of income tax money returned to taxpayers) on federal EV subsidies. Nice if it helped you afford an EV (raises hand), but admittedly, a pretty lousy bargain in terms of the amount of gasoline demand it abated.
Less demand for gasoline would probably make diesel and jet fuel (kerosene, basically) cheaper, since refineries already do crack heavier chains into gasoline fractions.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. -- Woody Allen
