It's almost adorable when you find someone who believes one side is less corruptible than the other.
It's like saying the banker who embezzled your retirement is less icky than the the guy who stole your car.

Just a hypocrite. Like, honestly, most "green" advocates.

"reality has a well-known liberal bias"
As we both know, reality has no bias; but Colbert's comment is so delightfully self-affirming that narcissist progressives can't stop repeating it as fact.

Personally, I think any society needs both liberals and conservatives to be healthy. Lately, progressives seem to delight in actually killing conservatives. (shrug)

Liberals cheerfully explore the world, and while many fall off cliffs, get eaten by bears, and eat berries that kill them, the ones that survive make progress possible. Without them we wouldn't have found wonderful new places better than where we were, animals to domesticate, and delicious berries that are good for us. Confident, naive liberals die in droves but pull civilization forward.

OTOH, conservatives are insurance for survival. They DON'T explore where stronger, dangerous hostile tribes may lurk to be led back to our village to enslave/kill/eat us. They don't eat those lovely red berries because the blue berries our ancestors have eaten have kept us healthy and well for centuries and are good enough, thank you. They do not accept strangers because if someone was a decent good person, why would he have been driven out of HIS village and come here?

Which is more important, survival of our tribe, or advancement for our tribe?
Trick question: both. The tension between sides is fine, rational, and normal; both should be encouraged. In a healthy society, our educational system would put out both.

What's odious to me is certainty. (To be clear, I find the same sort of certainty among Evangelicals and it is equally if not more repellent. And I consider myself a person of some Faith, maybe that's why?)

I get it; as a liberal you *have* to be confident that whatever whacky bullshit you're following today MUST be right, it MUST be better, or you wouldn't chase after it like an OCD squirrel. What's ironic is that most of the values leftists insist are core humanist values - even humanism itself - was born in the hearts of deeply religious men like Luther, Erasmus, and Scottish Presbyters.

Nationalize the discussion all you like but the US government itself isn't secure if it depends on Starlink, Microsoft, Google, or Amazon, either. To assume assume that these each have a nationalist bias is one thing, to assert that it is automagically in line with the policies and goals of the US government (or the party in power, if you will) is provably absurd.

The internet has become a major strategic context (resource? arena? theater?). Any country that maintains its sovereignty MUST insist that they control their own destiny there. OTOH only China can really say that national/corporate interests align reliably; it takes a level of central planning and control that most* would say is odious to western democratic humanism. In the west, I believe it's farcical to think that a government could possibly keep up with megacorps in this realm; it just demands too much nimbleness. So we have governments which MUST depend on corporate actors to stay in the race.
It's a puzzle which is only being repeated in AI.

*honestly, I'm not even sure what passes for western democratic values any more. Free speech? Free thought? Free religion? Secret ballots? Informed electorate?

While I don't disagree per se that this should be the model, I do wonder which reality you live in where it currently is.

I will not say black is "special" but you cannot simply replace it with another color. There is no function that a male in the US cannot attend wearing black. The only thing a man can wear that's even simpler in its appropriateness for all events is a military uniform.

"Return of the Return of the Living Dead" ?

Yeah, they'll recruit outrageously popular AIs to draw crowds at the cinema.

And when someone eventually asks me why slashdot stopped publishing, I'll explain it's because the normals all departed in the face of relentless leftist screeds & waves of bot posting.

I'll save this little gem for them and explain how an Indonesian pedophile with a bot legion cosplayed as an American.

... And you prove that you don't actually want facts, merely to reinforce salacious things someone else told you.

You are the "news consumer" that's the problem.

Go ahead and ruin every movie plot ever.

Switching systems is largely the time to "clear the attic of junk".

Things of import I already have backing up or they're in the forefront of my mind.

I've upgraded a score of my "main" systems over the years and sure I've lost stuff, but nothing compared to the shit I've lost when systems have actually failed. Nothing ultimately I couldn't live without.

Ok, so you have a hard-on to hate the Slate.
A lot of respected publications seem to feel it reasonably fills the brief. You hate how it looks? It looks precisely like a base line mini pickup, a format which sold rather well.
What the literal FUCK are you talking about 'hiding road rash'? Are you retarded? Have you scratched a painted car, like...ever? If I had to pick a vehicle to brush against a bollard or have some crazypsycho ex key the shit out of, I'd far rather Slate than a painted car, 1000x over.
On what basis are you saying "can't be repaired"? Again....retarded? How are any of its systems blocked from being repaired? Love to see you demonstrate that. It's significantly modular, and largely more self-repairable than most ev's. NO proprietary diagnostics. Modular body parts for easy replaceability. Components & connectors on the Slate are afaik designed to be off-the-shelf stuff, not bespoke parts with a bottlenecked or proprietary supply chain. No dealer reactivation ecosystem - many EVs you can replace a part...but the dealer has to essentially 'validate it' to make it live.

The only place Slate ranks worse is probably the battery pack built into the chassis. Yes, to make a https://www.consumerreports.or...
"A small two-seat pickup that you can convert to an SUV promises to be an antidote to giant vehicles, high prices, and complex technology"

https://insideevs.com/features...
"...the biggest question people have, given the manual windows and ruthlessly sparse interior, is this: Does this thing just feel too stripped out, even for the price? ...Austere, roomy, surprisingly quick"

https://www.theverge.com/trans...
"2027 Slate Pickup First Drive: Simplicity Might Be Its Superpower - The tiny EV pickup with big ambitions is fun and reasonably nimble from behind the wheel"

https://www.caranddriver.com/r...
"2027 Slate Pickup First Drive: Simplicity Might Be Its Superpower The tiny EV pickup with big ambitions is fun and reasonably nimble from behind the wheel

https://www.motortrend.com/rev...
"Overall, we believe Slate's first offering has a lot of promise. By cutting certain corners and offloading certain parts of the car-building experience to the end user, Slate can release a real car with decent figures and an impressively low base price. There's a whole industry's worth of cars out there for folks who can't live without soft-touch materials or heated seats; it won't add too much to your monthly payments to step up to a base Honda Civic or Ford Maverick. But those who long for the days of the austere small car, as well as those who seek to treat their car as a platform for creative expression, will find this small electric truck unique enough to warrant attention."

What's your point? How do you shift the market away from ICE vehicles then for the HUGE segments of society that can't afford boutique EVs, Mr Know it All?

I guess we have different definitions of the term permanent.
Considering this "cryo sphere" (credit for the new fear-marketing term!) didn't exist 30m years ago at all, and somehow it self generated without a trace of UN-endorsement that time, somehow "permanent" doesn't seem honest.