EOM

No, their argument is "because Democrat bias".

I don't want my tax money going to politicized institutions, period. I don't want my tax money supporting one side *or* the other, government support should be politically neutral.

The airwaves are a public resource, the government is supposed to manage that resource for the public good.

"One sided" is not the public good. About half the country is conservative, there used to be rules about political bias, it was abolished in 1987, and this has led to the sorry state of affairs we have now.

MSM is unending, incessant propaganda. Rage bait intended to persuade rather than inform.

If it's not going to use the public resource for the public good, then the MSM shouldn't be using that public resource.

(Of note: Fox news is an internet/cable channel, and does not require a broadcast license.)

Just to clarify:
It was given to me as a spare rental after an accident with another rental. I don't own a car, never have and likely never will. I'm 56, have always used PT, the bike and in recent years a Motorscooter that I bought used. IMHO SUVs and similar vehicles should be hit with an epic eco and luxury tax. I only took the rental because I had to cover extreme distances and train thus wasn't an option.

Europe isn't doing that well either right now, but you guys are leading the charge. This isn't looking good. Notable parts of the US system need a redo. Europe needs a cleanup. I just hope all that can happen peacefully and without a thug government.

EOM

Disclaimer: European here.

4th epic heatwave this year in Germany right now. I'm currently in Karlsruhe and it's 37 degrees Celsius outside (too lazy to convert to bananas or whatever you guys use). Got an SUV rental and it's AC couldn't keep up this noon. Concrete on the Autobahn cracked open in the last heatwave and they had to close down to repair it. Right now NRW is seeing it's largest forest fire since ever.

I was up north on the island of Fehmarn at the start of the week. Summer was bearable there although I did get sunburn. Anything south of Bremen though has unbearable heat at noon. Not fun. The Rhine is at an all time low, you can almost wade through it ( this has never happened ) and Hungary is having an energy crisis because they had to shut down both of their fission plants because the didn't have enough cooling water. France is closing in an the same problem once again too.

Climate change is hitting us like a fist this year. Not fun.

... that you can't get out in 2 hours or less. If it's mission critical that is.

Or are they more mentally fit due to more social interactions and navigating a car?

Any details on that?

There are several breakthroughs on the near horizon that will help.

First up is Commonwealth Fusion, based on a technology breakthrough in 2011 is planning to have net gain sometime in 2027 (delayed from "latter part of 2026"), and is so certain of the results that they are building a commercial fusion plant in Virginia... and have already purchased (IIRC) the land and are in the permitting stage. (More info.

Second up is Tesla Robotics, which is putting the transformer model into a physical robot, so that it can do physically what the LLM chatbot can do with words. For all the discussion about AI and whether it's intelligent or any good or whatnot, it's obvious that AI systems are *useful* at glueing words together. Robots will give us access to lots of cheap labor, and part of that will be robots that to cleanup work for humans. Picking up garbage on roadways, going through landfills and sorting, grabbing bits of rope and plastic from shorelines comes to mind(*).

And finally, Verdox, has figured out a way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere electrochemically. Their system works in the manner of an oxygen concentrator that you may have seen people wheeling around (except it's electrochemical and not physical). They claim their system is efficient at extracting CO2 at atmospheric pressure, which is wildly more efficient than distillation, which is our current method.

I figure in about 50 years we should be well on our way to fixing these civilizational problems. Robots powered by AI and cheap energy, running around doing all the cleanup work that humans don't want to do.

(Cue the climate alarmists who run around and screech about "it's not enough!" and "it'll be too late by then".)

(Note that Tesla has designed its own AI processor chip and is building a semiconductor fab plant that will be able to make them in bulk. Their combination of robotics and AI processing chip will be wildly valuable in the future.)

... without impacting the listening experience?

And how can you check for that watermark?

... with all this AI-sh1t going on is that it's fundamentally non-deterministic in nature. Stunts like these are 10 levels above the non-sense SEO and Co. have been doing for more than a decade, and that was annoying as f*ck already. This new manipulation garbage of LLMs already (occasionally) spitting out their very own version of garbage has me running for the hills and choosing another profession.

Yeah, I use AI to write my code, but that's what I'll be running in the end anyway. There is no AI bot that I trust with anything mission-critical, wether online or on-prem.

After 26 years a loyal customer they finally managed to be such an obnoxious nuisance that I quit them and moved to a (way) cheaper and better provider roughly 6 months ago. And I'll never return.

What he (Dolgov) is saying is a belief that stems from rationalization. It *seems* like it's a proof because that's how he's phrasing it, but in the final analysis he's a biased observer expressing an opinion and bolstering it with a rationalization.

It's what we get every time we ask an expert for advice about something they don't directly know. Ask a physicist about dark energy, or a doctor about your unusual symptom, or a nutritionist about what you eat, or an economist about whether the Fed should lower rates... you'll get a reasonable sounding answer backed by rationalization.

We don't have proof that a computer can self-drive using only cameras (and not "computer can do what a brain does", which is a much wider problem set), but we have abundant statistical evidence that it can.

Tesla claims claims (mid 2026) that self driving has about 1/7 of the collisions of human driving. Fully deployed FSD would reduce driving fatalities by 90%.

While not a proof in the inductive-logic sense, it's probably good enough to become general consensus. Given the enormous amount of data they train on (10 billion miles driven?), I suspect the p-value is astronomically small.

And of note, I recently purchased a Tesla with self driving. The system requires you to be attentive while it's active, but I can say with complete honesty that full self driving is here now.

And it works. It'll go into a crowded parking lot and back itself into a parking space, it'll correctly navigate lane closures and safety cone situations, and just yesterday it correctly stopped for a road worker holding a stop sign, waited, and then proceeded when he turned the sign to "slow".

The reason I got the car is because a friend kept badgering me about... of all things... getting old. Our population is aging, and old people driving is a constant source of problems. Having a way for them to get around without being a danger to others seems like a good thing.

Oh, and coming off a day hike or a day of physical labor or something and being really tired it's nice to be able to hit the "start self driving" and have the thing take me completely home because I'm really beat and not very attentive.

... on early versions of built-in SAT navs and ending up in harbor basins. At least as dangerous but arguably way more entertaining for onlookers. Especially if it was a BMW. 8-)

I was a hardcore GOG advocate, because they opposed DRM and offered native Linux runtimes of their games. However, their Linux support was pretty lackluster in recent years. Game versions meant to run on Ubuntu 16 and 18 and unusable on any recent version. About half a year ago, after many attempts to get things running on current Linuxes, I finally caved and moved from GOG to Steam, since they offer a hassle-free Linux experience with a curated central Linux-compliant runtime environment.

I presume GOG has noticed people giving up on GOG and now has decided to follow suit. I hope they can build a compelling experience, but they've lost me for now.