What are you talking about? EV sales are booming, in no small part thanks to Trumps war with Iran.

My EV is an appreciating asset at the moment because used prices are rising.

Those are often the first things to be electrified, because the operators are closer to rational actors who see the immediate savings. Of course the real world gets in the way, but for example about half the busses here are electric because one of the companies replaced them all as part of a fleet upgrade a couple of years ago. They are much nicer too.

And is sure enough it's linked with Trump. It's just another way for Trump to funnel money to his buddies who will then funnel some of it back to him.

66% of Americans believe Trump is openly criminal and corrupt but of them at least 10% are still going to vote for him and the Republican party while they're at it also what the hell is wrong with the remaining 44%?

Nobody gives a rat's ass about kids except their own. This is because of Trump. Also Russia.

This is an effective way to kick American social media companies out of your country. Like most socially destructive and unpleasant things you kind of have to get em young. If you don't hook kids early on they don't become terribly interested in social media.

What they tend to do is they tend to find a platform their friends are on and just communicate with their friends. They don't engage in the Doom scrolling that you need to manipulate political outcomes and control a population and gather shitloads of highly confidential and valuable information. Just a little IMing back and forth and that's no good if you're a Russian propagandist or a billionaire psychopath.

Facebook has had that problem for ages and they stay ahead of it by buying up every tiny little potential competitor or small Network and then forcing kids into their main platform where they can be monetized and propagandized.

Since Trump threatened to invade Greenland Europe sees America as a existential threat, which much as I hate to admit it is correct. My country literally made a pedophile president of the United States twice we can no longer be trusted.

If you're up just banned Facebook and Twitter there would be legal challenges and they would probably lose but by cutting off the kids in 5 or 10 years Facebook and Twitter will be dead in Europe.

The funny thing is I'm sure that both Facebook and Twitter know this well I mean Facebook Twitter is run by an imbecile. So I do wonder how they are going to counter this or if they even can

To avoid purchasing a $50 mini PC. Maybe $100 since everything keeps going up in price since 2024 but still...

I mean if you're a hobbyist more power to you. I'm going to spend some time tomorrow tinkering with a small form factor computer case to get The thermals right. I happen to like this particular case because I've had it for a long time but it's not terribly good and I could and probably should just replace it but screw that I'm going to keep tinkering with it.

Russia does not have the resources to occupy Ukraine. They can invade it they can't occupy it. The amount of troops and resources needed to occupy a hostile nation is extremely well researched and well understood. And Russia with its population of 120 million can't even come close. They don't have the troops they don't have the money and they don't even have the population for it.

If they tried they would get bogged down in insurgency that makes Afghanistan look like a Sunday picnic. Never mind the fact that the rest of the world would be flooding Ukraine with weapons to keep Russia busy.

That means Russia will go straight to genocide. Every single person in Ukraine will be killed or sent to death camps to be worked until they die. The only exception will be people who flee.

That is the only thing Putin can do with the country. Kill everyone there and put his own people in.

Incidentally every single world leader knows that this is going to happen if Russia wins and they are letting Russia continue this war instead of properly arming Ukraine because it's beneficial to them to do so so long as Russia doesn't completely take the region. If Russia takes the region it'll kind of suck for Europe because Europe wants access to Ukraine's bread basket. But it's worth the risk to do this much damage to Russia. At least as far as European leadership is concerned. American too Frankly and I'm not happy about that

So it's not that easy to get your hands on something that valuable. If Ukraine had the dirt on Trump then it would already be out there. Putin is completely incompetent at virtually everything. He can't run a country and he can't run a war.

But he is good at two things. First he's good at feudalism. Which is basically the technique of playing all the other people who are trying to replace you as King rat against each other so you stay on top. And the second thing he's really good at is information warfare. It's literally what he did at the the kgb.

Of course, Norway isn't some third world country.

Because they could charge more. Once the initial setup is done the cost of maintaining internet access for somebody is negligible. If we were a functioning civilization it would be like electricity you would just have it. But on the other hand if we were a functioning civilization anymore we would have built out wind and solar to the point where electricity was free at least for regular citizens.

Speaking of which is a funny thought. If I wrote consumers instead of citizens above I bet it pretty drastically changes the meaning of that sentence to a lot of folks.

But if you're charging 40 bucks a month you're going to make that back in about 3 and 1/2 years and it's pure profit after that. That's pretty damn good return on investment. So the only irrational thing here is that they could probably be soaking their customers a little bit more like Comcast does.

What I find weird is how the Russian bots are just everywhere. This is a dead forum with a handful of tech nerds left over from the 80s and 90s hanging out. But for some reason they keep posting here. I know some of it is llms there's one that follows me around. But I think some of them are actual people.

This used to be a big deal website though so I guess I'm not surprised we're still on somebody's list and we just

It's kind of a pity we can't apply those blocks to people on social media...

So far reports are that the bot traffic isn't down but if they keep hitting Russian it infrastructure it will crash.

Honestly if Ukraine really wants to win this war they need to stop Russia from interfering in American elections. It's pretty obvious Putin has dirt on Trump. I'm sure that he's just got the Epstein files unredacted. We know for a fact that the Russians were all over Epstein island with their girls. I suspect that's the real reason America and Europe are hesitant to fully back Ukraine. Good old compromat.

It's not like there would be any real consequences. Everybody knows Mr orange pedophile is well a pedophile. It's just like the Panama papers when we found out that the rich didn't pay taxes but we already knew that. Still I guess they don't want to be embarrassed. Bill Gates for example has spent hundreds of millions of dollars making people think he's a nice guy while buying up patents or medical technology people need to live...

I don't think anyone exclusively blames trump for the current state of things, but he did lean in heavily into making things worse as a religious issue.

On the other hand, historically other big spikes in prices have not really resulted in much investment in alternatives... just higher prices and profit margins, with people going back to what they were doing at the new normal.

There is also more than one human, so plenty of room for someone to have said something 50 years ago and someone else says something today.