The first shot of WWIl was fired in 1931 (in Manchuria by Japanese). It can take a while for a world war to come to a full boil.

Nice idea. But I've long assumed that Flock made it so that any search for any of Garrett Langley's license plates returns nothing.

Disagree. The financials say that the companies that spy do well (at the thing they care solely about). It was at least a decade ago that the then Vizio CEO stated that they make more monitizing the TV buyer after purchase than from the TV purchase itself. Wal*Mart bought Vizio in 2024. The GamersNexus video showed a table of financials where the margin on TV hardware was -0.8% while the margin on post-purchase monitization was 63% (IIRC). So they lose a little bit on the hardware and make up for it with ongoing income from indefinite monitization.

"no class action lawsuit"

Even if you refuse to accept the terms, or (if applicable) send a notarized, signed in blood opt-out of Arbitration Clause, for any class action lawsuit the eligible class members would be the dozen or so people who exempted themselves. With Arbitration, corporation wins either way.

"If space itself inflated, what did it inflate into?"
Exactly the thought I had when hearing "the universe is expanding". Was the universe always 1 Universe in diameter regardless of what form it was in (a hot, dense ball)?

Definitely the kind of thing that defies human common sense. I put it on the shelf next to relativity.

With the subtext that an EV requires a smartphone with a fat unlimited data plan (and possibly the car too). Alot of people do, so maybe that's not much of an issue.

Years of watching EV roadtrip videos reinforces your brother's impression/conclusion. EV charging is phenomenally worse than ICE "charging". Obvious things like failed charging starts to obscure things like realizing that the charge rate is abnormally lower than it should be. And do ICE have "fill curves" where the last gallon (or several) to fill a tank take extra hour(s)?

My kludgey environment involves privoxy and browser running with no direct internet access. The switch the everything https has left privoxy as only a hostname filter, similar to pi-hole, but not at network level which allows for multiple concurrent filters (for various uses).

Firefox takes minutes to come up it makes alot of uncommanded requests. For the profiles with a whitelist privoxy config, things get held up until these requests timeout.

Firefox is also painfully slow because they switched to canvas drawing. Palemoon zips right along using xlib primitives.

Yay!
Fortunately there's now a $500 luxury toothbrush to use so you don't get methmouth.
Double yay!

Same here, wrt teflon. For a forever chemical, it seems to be not very forever.

That's why I wanted to see Harris vs Haley in 2024.
Identity politics would have cancelled out.
Would have been glorious.

Afraid not, named for the city in Oregon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario,_Oregon

Far south-eastern OR, without checking, I'm betting solid MAGA country. Maybe they'll change their name to America, Oregon.

"Chinese government is subsidizing the manufacturers"

Not really (EU figured out the exact amount, 18%?). It's that CCP can do what CARB has been trying to do over and over ("thou shalt make EVs"), but in China there's no opposing. Instead of spending on EV R&D, US legacy auto industry spent it on lawyers and lobbyists fighting EV mandates. While in China, companies worked on the entire dirt-to-drive supply chain. And won. Maybe too much winning...there's expect to be a bloodletting in the Chinese EV industry coming up.

"especially since probably 90% of teh daily driving is less than 50 miles"

These kind of claims appear over and over ("average commute of 38 miles" is another. EV advocates making the statements do themselves a disservice. What happens with human lossy-compression cognition is that a technically correct statement becomes "EVs can go only 50 (or 38) miles". There's also an arrogance factor where it looks like the EV advocates in their ivory tower are telling you what's good enough for you.

Name something "Trump" that would get under Trump's skin. I don't know what would do that well. Trump is so vain and shallow that I cannot get into that headspace. Only idea I have is an offshore wind generation farm. For other things, like trailer parks or toxic waste dumps, Trump may not care.

One tangential trivia, like "Hitler", "Trump" is not a long-standing family name. Both were changed from something similar a generation or two before the most notorious member to carry the name.

At least stick airtags top and bottom. Even one of each competing type (3, IIRC).