On what planet are the bay area *or* new york *islamist* (neither of which has a Muslim population over 5%)? And how on earth is the glowing core of American capitalism, home of freaking *wall street*, marxist?

Go to places and experience them before you decide what they are.

Yes there has been.

In the last decade, education spending as a percentage of us GDP has dropped sharply.

The president doesn't rule by personal power alone --- he's not a supervillain.

The president has power because of all of the millions of people who've agreed to exert power on his behalf. These are the people wielding truncheons; these are the people cheering on the people wielding truncheons; these are the people who gleefully wallow in their privilege and ignorance and bully anyone they've decided they don't have to care about into silence.

These are the people who will actually do the ruling and exerting the power. And we are engaged in making sure they never have to learn to think critically, and never have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past.

But they *do* create industrial pollution.

You can cast blame on individuals for their "carbon footprint", but don't forget that that concept was invented by the petroleum industry to take the heat off of them.

Yes, we who participate in society are all making the problem worse. But none of us individual consumers, by our own abstention, can meaningfully inflect the trajectory. To align all our actions enough to actually make a dent, we'd need to either all band together and refuse to buy this stuff *at the same time* (and what's that look like? A democratic government banning them!) Or, the few people with all the control over the companies making these products could simply decide to stop doing it. Personally. Out of the sort of sense of responsibility you're expecting 8 billion people to coordinate.

It's the fault of the people who could stop it, and don't. And that's not the consumers. That's the government, and the producers.

Seriously, though: we should get rid of college loans. The ability to go to college on credit and the fact that that debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy has allowed tuition to go through the stratosphere. If we want to increase access to college, we should just *pay* for college with our tax dollars. We want the next generation to be educated -- they will some day rule us. Our allergy to paying for it is beyond me.

And if the federal government is paying tuition, it can negotiate prices down. A bunch of individuals buying college on a credit card absolutely cannot.

I think the issue is people arriving at college out of an increasingly terrible school system, barely able to read, and then being subject to standards for which they were not prepared at all. It's a no-win scenario for colleges -- either soften standards, or treat freshman year as a sort of prep school, or have the norm be that everyone arriving in college is immediately failing or getting Cs (for which there are potentially lifelong consequences).

This is what happens from (continuing) decades of disinvestment in education.

Does it do anything that the airtag doesn't do? Because otherwise, the size makes it seem like it'll be more awkward on keychains, dog collars, anywhere that there's something small that *can* not go missing. I'm surprised!

Reminder that any car that has an always-on cellular internet connection that you aren't paying for has a connection that's being paid for by the manufacturer, and it must be worth it to them.

If you can, and can get at it, remember that a coax terminator in place of the 5G antenna connection is a pretty good guarantee against your privacy being violated and your possession being treated like it's the manufacturer's.

I mean, humans have a double standard for mistakes they make while they're in control, and mistakes someone else makes while in control of their lives. Which is pretty reasonable.

And we also have a double standard for mistakes that a human might make (which we might anticipate and be able to prepare ourselves for), versus mistakes a computer vision system might make (which are more likely to take us completely by surprise when they're in a category that a human would never make). Driving in an automated car is knowing more than ever that at any minute your car may kill you, and you have no power to stop it or even know when to be anxious. And that *is* a worse experience than being a passenger in a car with a human driver, and certainly worse than driving yourself.

And that's the thing --- if it's just augmenting a human driver, it means that now, instead of driving, you're supervising. And that's a much more difficult thing to devote continuous, full, unwavering attention to (still required) than it is to devote that attention to something you're actually doing yourself.

I have yet to feel safer in a car that argues with me than I do in a car that just lets me drive. And until it can take over *fully* from me (which it may never), I would rather it not express opinions at all.

Except, specifically and only, adaptive cruise control, which is strictly better than regular cruise control, and which still leaves me steering.

And that's got nothing to do with whether or not it's an EV. *All* modern cars are heading that way, very unfortunately. The drivetrain is irrelevant.

That's an absurd statement. If you live in an area where this does not happen, it doesn't make any sense to have your house set up as a refrigeration unit. This is hotter than it's ever been there; why would it be the norm in a place where this doesn't happen to built refrigeration into every dwelling?

Any gas station that *can* install fast chargers, though, may be doing quite well. Gas stations make most or all of their money on people who come into the store, and there's much more opportunity for that when people are sitting at the 'pump' for 20 minutes.

(Almost) everyone who's driving on the roads is paying for them, roughly in line with the damage they're doing (larger vehicles consume more gas, and the roads are maintained with gasoline taxes). A few rich assholes leaving the roads won't mean they aren't maintained.

He clearly either isn't interested in organically building popular support for his app, or fundamentally doesn't understand that that can be done. But my fear is that he finds a way to force the issue, by finding things Americans *need* to pay for and arranging with his billionaire cronies for X to be the only convenient way to make payments.

This would be an extreme example, but imagine if next year it was cheaper to pay your federal taxes through X, because Musk gave Trump a gold-plated Tesla limousine or something.

People who don't know how get people to like them sometimes resort to coercion, and that definitely feels like Elon's MO. He doesn't respect you, and he *does* feel entitled to your money and the knowledge of everything you do in your life.