The EU seems really mad they are so far behind the US and China but most of all behind China's authoritarian plumbing. They are going to have to build a Great Firewall if they really want this crap to work long term. Might as well, since they cannot seem to create many useful apps or tech (it's all from the US or China). The EU is partially retarded for trying to fine their betters into supporting their censorship-state. Now they want to go full retard. Go for it you censor-happy losers. I fully expect it from you at this point. The UK will probably re-join the EU just so they don't have to compete so much for the censorship crown.

Reminds me of MS Bob or the MS Office "assistants" like the puppy and wizard-dude. Incidentally, way back then I remember desktop users getting a new desktop had a short checklist. "Does it have speakers" ... "Yeah." ... "Does it have a browser" ... "Yeah." "If you installed Office like I ask can you to disable the infernal assistant shit?" ... "Oh hell yea"

Not "we" so much as "they". I'm not a billionaire.

What's really going on here is that modern "scholars" and "writers" dislike Tolkien. I've heard him called a racist many times by the JK Nemisen crowd. She's the banner bearer for these idiots and her awful books and Hugo vote-rigging efforts speak for themselves. Hugos are basically a list of the WORST books, now, but hey they have multi-racial LGBTQTIA2S/trans themes now, riight? Apparently, according to modern interpretation by the woke, the Orc's skin color was the real reason they were the misunderstood in Middle Earth. Anyone talking in positive tones about "The West" is also on the mandatory demonization schedule for these oh-so-enlightened race-warriors.

Tough shit folks. I like Tolkien. Lots of other people do too. He is a master of the Fantasy genre and his fandom speaks for itself, like it or not. No, we aren't going to re-write his works with a sensitivity reader so brown people can feel better about themselves somehow. My beautiful leatherbound copies are just going to sit there, being LOTR, unless on loan to younger relatives, which happens with some regularity, now. Nobody's censorship urge is going to be "editing" them unless you want to come here with force, which wouldn't surprise me, seeing how these oversensitive collectivists all believe might makes right and we all need reeducation: same beliefs as Saruman and Sauron.

I like how anytime someone has the testicles to risk bad karma and says anything non-complimentary about "cyclists" (I laugh every time I say that word), you all have the same reply "Derp, but you drive a lifted truck, Trumper!". No, I drive a Nissan Leaf EV. Moral is: even people you might think would like "cyclists" don't like them because "cyclists" are utterly insufferable.

Funny how people showed up to North Dakota and other frozen hellholes when they were offering $100k to drive a truck. Something tells me the "problem" in these rural areas is that they don't want to pay normal wages, not that nobody is willing to go there.

Look on the bright side: you don't have to sell cars to Americans anymore. You guys can focus on debanking and censoring protesters, now. Maybe let in some more hostile immigrants or confiscate some more guns, see if that helps. Run your own economy, you don't need those American troglodytes. Sorry to distract you from putting on your spandex to go ride your manly bike, Comrade.

Just imply for one second that we should H1B other job fields with the same volume of immigrants and you'll see how "neutral" people feel then. Doctors cry bloody murder when someone suggests bringing in foreign doctors to lower their wages.

That's more advanced, liquid metal prototype (T1000). This sounds more like the T600. Those had rubber skin. We spotted those easily.

Right on, man. Good for you. The people we do end up hiring are ones just like you: self taught the skills we need them to know.

I like how you lead with ad hominem and then have no counter arguments whatsoever. Typical. This is one fight you'd never win if you had to debate it and you know it.

They don't like people pointing out that what they are doing is definitely a transparent attempt at pure censorship. It also seems like the EU is frustrated about their own inability to produce digital services people actually want and think they can fine & censor their way to success. Good luck with that.

The UK just locked up 10,000 people for speech "violations" too. So, it's not just the EU.

A closely related issue is the fact that EU governments are afraid to hear the people's voice saying "STOP MASS MIGRATION". They don't want to hear the calls for remigration after blatantly trying to flood the voter roles with what they hoped would be groveling Left-leaning collectivists they thought they could import then control. They didn't anticipate those same imports spiking the crime/rape rates and wanting Sharia law instead of Leftist platitudes. Hate speech laws are censorship. The EU loves censorship and hates freedom. Simple as that.

I've done @100 interviews with newly graduated compsci majors. It's very rough because many are just barely able (or not able) to contain their frustration. Some have left the interview in tears. They exclaim "I wasn't taught any of this!"

They pretty much fall into two camps: the ones who were taught trendy skills and the ones taught academic skills. The trendy coders used to be the ones who only learned Java, but lately it's morphed into Rust, Swift, Go, and Python. The academic coders learned three dialects of ML (Haskell, OCaML, etc..) and some form or other of LISP.

The trouble is that they often have had only one or two classes about algorithms and design patterns. Additionally, many have never studied Assembly, C, or C++, which are the most common languages I encounter as a (30+ year) professional coder and what we use extensively on both new and existing projects. Our vendors publish their APIs in these languages, as well. I will admit I do see Python gaining ground professionally as "AI" projects are generally nearly exclusively started in Python and currently inescapable. However, AI tools have yet to really push out any need for coders, but perhaps you could argue increase efficiency from AI has lowered our needs (I wouldn't say that's true). We have a number of AI-enabled IDEs, now. However, we all intermittently use them now as we've learned they cost us in bugs and logic errors about as much as they save us in prototyping time. They are only well-suited for a certain bandpass of tasks. We still hire new coders, but it's a slog, because they rarely have any notable experience or projects. They learned languages and coding practices simply useless to us and without some impressive problem solving or algorithm knowledge, you're toast. Next candidate, please.

I'd be angry/frustrated, too, if I was taught what some of these kids were taught and turned loose on the world expecting a high paying job.

Get ready to be replaced by AI, celebs. They were already "managed" by the corporations. Now all the celebs will be owned by them too. Super not sad about it. I'm happy to see AI and robots coming for Hollywood, Harvard-grad consultants, and the lawyers instead of the plumbers and mechanics of the world. Now, that's not saying I'll consume whatever tripe they put out post-AI, either, but at least they can be 95% unemployed annoying liberals instead of famous and in-my-face annoying liberals. Bubbye now. Bubbye.

Cannot trust or use the regular Firefox anymore. They are also part of the "We'll never give you true lazy loading" crowd that has built-in "lazy loading" (don't load tabs until you click the tab and stop JS in there) which does literally nothing at all (ever). They are empty checkboxes that don't actually work. Neither do any of the plugins that claim to do it for Firefox. I just tried the other day loading bookmarked tab-groups and both the default browser and all 5 of the plugins that claim to do it... don't. They loaded every fucking tab right away. I can only speculate as to why (advertisers angry because their ads won't load and meta-refresh/reload).

I refuse to use Chrome. So maybe it'll do it while selling your data out to Google. Opera does lazy-loading and even proper cookie-sandboxing (another feature they refuse to give us due to advertiser hate) properly but is chocked full of other trendy bullshit and likely corporate spyware and hasn't been usable since version 13 or so (and of course using an old version breaks JS and won't render properly anymore).

So, nowadays, the more aggressive the web "developers" get with JS and cookie spying, the more I use Palemoon, Elinks, or Dillo. When they go high-tech, I go low. Pfft. The web is more of a useless cesspool every day and I find myself simply just using the Internet less and less due to how disgusting the delta is between my values and the folks who ruined it.

My 2016 is probably worth about that. This Summer it had a max-charge that would yield about 60 miles of range. That really means about 50 miles of range since it's quite unsettling to drive them to zero-miles of range (turtle mode). My Leaf might be worth $5000 but I suspect it's closer to $3000 since it's lost so much utility. It lacks the active cooling the 2019 and beyond got, which means the battery degraded (a little) faster and probably has about 15% fewer charge cycles and less extreme weather use (esp cold).

It is a somewhat good car for an urbanite. It's a compact 4-seater and 60 miles gets most folks to and from work plus a store trip or two. So, the car isn't yet useless. However, that's part of my chief concern. The car is in great shape other than the battery, yet it's going to get junked way before 150k miles with (at least what is now at @85k total mileage) a well cared for interior/exterior and undercarriage/suspension/brakes.

Why? Because replacing the battery totals the car. Nissan wants $12,000 for a new 40KWH battery for it (both nearby dealers quoted it the same). It is one of the few EVs you have battery swap options for but they rely on hacking the firmware (99.9% of EVs use DRM to lock you out of battery replacement). Once hacked, all you can get in the US is a used battery pack usually around 70%-85% capacity. Shame, but it's a better situation than most EVs where it's the dealer's price or the junkyard.

I bought the car 5 years ago and at that time it had a max range of 80 miles. Now this winter I'm down to 50 miles. I cannot drive the car to work anymore (60 miles round trip). Train fare would be $10.50 a day, require two transfers, and take 1.6 hours. The drive is 45 minutes.

A failed New Zealand company (EV Enhanced) tried to make a replacement battery that sounded really interesting. It was probably the fact that tipped me into buying the car originally. However, they have never delivered them even in New Zealand, AFAIK and their estimated prices are also sky high, last I checked. There does seem to be a Chinese CATL based replacement battery but nobody imports it and installs in the Leaf domestically (shops only install used/junked batteries). They have a 62KWH version with prismatic NMC cells. As an assembled unit it's $11,000 plus $2200 in shipping and import fees. That'd put my 2016 at about 250 miles per charge.

At those prices I could buy a lot of other cars, included a newer used Leaf. Ranges and $/mile vs my ICE cars isn't even close. I've put 30k miles on the car I originally gave $7k for. It's likely worth $3k now, based on what I see others like mine go for on Craigslist. My Leaf has been non-optimal in most $ terms. It also wears out tires much faster than my ICEs even with proper rotation). However, I like it's low-end torque, comfortable interior, heated everything, decent stereo/bluetooth, 110v cables (slow but super cheap charging), solid (regenerative) brakes, and good handling. It would be nice to keep it going but I'll probably consign it to the local EV shop when it dips @35 miles/charge.

No, it's definitely not a rich person's car. However, it's also sub-optimal in some ways.