I am quite sure I do not want a giant touchscreen. We have a small screen for the infotainment system and for the most part, I hate it.

I've recently read of BMW putting movie trailers for the upcoming Spiderman movie on the screen of their latest cars. If consumers don't push back hard against this, every other OEM will follow suit.

The American economy (and to a lesser extent, everybody else's economy) was already pretty damned parasite ridden. Far too much money going up the chain and never getting back down. The US is simultaneously wealthy and very stupid, deliberately blinded in some ways. That makes it the prey of all sorts of scams. The middle and lower class were already looking pretty anemic.

Putting that guy in charge was like finding a handful of the biggest, fattest and hungriest leeches you can and using them for blood-letting to treat pernicious anemia.

I saw an ad during COVID to the effect of a major pizza chain (I forget which) was now offering a eat now/pay later deal for pizza.

My first thought at the time was "oh those Americans are so, so fuuuucked"

If you have to finance a pizza, probably the cheapest family meal you can order delivered, you're in deep trouble financially. If Papa Johns or whoever sees enough demand to actually provide this service, it means a LOT of folks are just hosed.

Something something leopards, something something face.

Derek Lowe is a drug chemist who has an amusing series of articles dubbed "Chemicals I won't work with".

This seems vaguely relevant https://www.science.org/conten...

People seem to have forgotten that after his last term, Trumps existing personal plane (a 757-200) was left to rot because, according to rumour, he couldn't afford to pay for the maintenance. (big jet maintenance is a very large expensive proposition) He had to rent or borrow a smaller jet for a lot of his travel during the Biden administration.

According to current information, the plane is that the US gov't will pay to have this 747 refitted to be Air Force 1. But that after Trump steps down (assuming he does, of which I am doubtful) it will transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation. The Library Foundations are initially funded through donated funds, but once stood up and operating, are transferred to the Federal Gov't. Once in the hands of the Federal Gov't. The National Archives and Records Administration is responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the Library and its holdings.

So it looks to me like Trump is indeed getting his own personal jet, outfitted and maintained by the gov't for the rest of his life. As a bonus; the National Archives, which embarrassed and annoyed him by keeping track of the secret records he took home with him and demanding them back, is going to be the one to pay for it all.

So he gets his very expensive airborne symbol of ego, another opportunity for sycophants to slip him major amounts of money and revenge on some honest Federal employees who upheld their duty.

Adobe trying to "solve" the problem of pissed off customers by sticking fingers in its ears and going la-la-la.

Customers are rightly pissed. Just in general I.T. terms I think software as a subscription service is a Bad Thing. Forcing it on customers is worse.

Buuut, until the creative types and the I.T. guys that support them pull a mass defection to other software suites, nothing's going to happen. The money machine going brrr is louder than customer's complaints.

Dude, I gre up in and around the community. I was among the family invitees at the first legal gay wedding in Ontario. I've been to half a dozen Pride parades and many post parties.

I have never, repeat *never* seen paedophilia be accepted, let alone "nurtured" as you claim. NAMBLA and the like tried to become part of the LGBTQ2S+ movement back in the 60s and 70s and it was rejected at almost every turn. Even today, every time the LGBTQ2S+ movement re-surges in public awareness, the pedo crowd try to attach themselves to the coat-tails of the movement, only to be repudiated and rejected.

What I *have* seen is the acceptance of youth in the community and an encouragement for such youth to discover and celebrate who they are. For many kids, the recognition of their sexual orientation occurs simultaneously with the early stages of puberty. To put it bluntly: Once you're old enough to masturbate, you're also old enough to realize what your orientation is. If you're a tween or teen lad who finds yourself masturbating anthro porn, you might be a furry. If you're a lad masturbating to Luigi Mangione, you might be gay or bisexual. The entire community is keenly aware of how they themselves worked through their journey of self discovery. There are literally MILLIONS of people who went through a real bad time during that vulnerable phase because their family and friends were not accepting of them. Greenwich Village, the Castro district and Miami Beach are full of people who had to run away from home in their younger years because there is no room for queers in Smalltown USA.

This is why the song "We Are Family" is such an anthem for the community. There are millions of people who had to leave their biological family behind. So the community has explicitly evolved as an intentional family.

Crucially, it DOESN'T mean that it is OK for an adult to be sexually intimate with such a youth if they are still below the age of consent. That is predatory behaviour and is recognized and rejected as such.

Remember that this administration regards the LGBTQ2S+ community as dangerous sexual deviants _at best_.

Posting pro Pride material will almost certainly be construed as "subversive material". Ditto for pro religious tolerance, pro immigration, pro Ukraine (or who ever the latest national victim of of authoritarianism is). There is already talk of opening up logging and oil drilling in what was protected lands, including National Parks. Any immigrant or resident who wants to protest that automatically becomes an enemy of the State.

The ultimate result being that resident aliens and immigrants won't have the same freedom of speech the rest of America has. At what point will you see that as America being in the wrong and stop shifting responsibility to the victims?

"I hate when the bullshit I spew, the end stage capitalist things I want to do end up reducing the value of my portfolio"

That's still 79 million dollars for what amounts to nothing more than a Cheshire Cat's smile. Since Trump tends to not actually own anything carrying his name, just licensing his brand and collecting steep salaries for being the CEO of the business, I wonder how much of this actually ends up in his offshore accounts.

There are already numerous large shipping brokers, load expediters, load amalgamation services and load boards. There are a lot of ways of ways to avoid deadheading, or running with only partial loads.

And yet, even the companies with the widest footprint and market penetration have to run deadhead sometimes. No service in the world can make loads appear out of thin air. And trucks have to have homeward bound legs on a regular basis or you'll lose drivers. (you might even run afoul of DOT regs) You can't just keep taking loads to wherever on the grounds that going to B on a paid basis is always better than going to C deadhead so the driver can see his family and get his laundry done.

That said, there probably are some inefficiencies there. There is a place for a universal "one stop shop" for shippers, carriers and receivers. But it would have to be huge, with almost complete market share for it to be effective. But that gets into monopolies.

I'm in the "let the idiot kill himself if he is so determined" camp. So there is a problem with the enforcement of those maritime laws.

Easy solution though, next time he needs to find someone willing to run a charter out into International Waters and drop him and his hamster wheel off.

Of course, then the powers that be might end up charging the charter captain with all sorts of things.

FWIW, This is the reason behind higher educations "liberal arts" programs. The idea was that studying those subjects were necessary to ensure the creation of well rounded individuals "liberated" from the usual human patterns of greed, bigotry and intolerance.

And this is also the reason why even highly technical majors (or perhaps especially technical majors) always include the requirement that you take some electives in the arts or soft sciences.

Obviously, it doesn't always work.

Nitrogen asphyxiation. (or any inert gas really) You don't feel suffocated by a lack of oxygen as long as you can fill your lungs. What actually causes the symptoms of suffocation is a build up of CO or CO2 that does it.

It's a major factor in confined space training. If you are in an oxygen poor but otherwise inert atmosphere, you feel fine until you suddenly pass out. If you don't get hauled out and artificially ventilated within a very short span of time, you're dead.