The thing that I'd be worried about is that when you get to that EV charging station in the middle of nowhere, it's out of service and you're basically screwed.

Maybe it got hit by a snow plow. Maybe it got vandalized by some anti EV luddites. Maybe the company who built it just can't afford to maintain it anymore. Either way, you're still screwed.

Sure... they're going to call it an "impaired driver prevention system" to get the technology approved. Of course, what it will really be used for is remotely disabling cars when their owners are more than 14 days behind on car payments.

There is over 1 1/2 Trillion dollars of car loan debt in this country now, and the auto makers know that there will be millions of additional repossessions the next time the economy takes a bad turn. Rather than pay repo men to clean up this mess, it's far easier to remotely disable the car using this "safety" tech and notifying the bank of it's current location.

You would think that they would have learned some lessons from Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1 failures back in 2024. Hell, even the Apple Vision Pro release from around that time serves as a warning that not every wearable device with an Apple logo on it will be wildly successful.

But, I guess that we need a really epic flop to to help kick off the bursting of the great AI bubble of the mid 2020's?

I love how banks still use weekends and federal holidays as a excuse to delay deposits as well. There is no physical money moving here anymore, it's all been data in a computer for the past 30+ years. Anything to avoid paying interest for as long as possible, I guess.

Great... so now instead of having to worry about my crypto portfolio crashing over weekend, I can worry about my entire retirement portfolio crashing over the weekend! Yay progress!

Yeah... It's easy to proclaim "Do No Evil" when you're not a publicly traded company.

Open AI will need to go public at some point to get funding, though. At that point, it's quarterly profit gains or unemployment for leadership.

It probably has more do to with the oil and gas producers that contributed to Trump's presidential reelection campaign. They want the message to be loud and clear... NO big solar or wind deployments that need federal approval will be approved during Trump's second term.

I was thinking more like a "free" streaming video service that went to a paid model like Peacock or Hulu, but there are plenty of other examples of this.

Microsoft in particular loves the "$1 first month" XBox Game Pass offer just to get your credit card on file and then start charging you $9.95... err... $14.95 a month for the service.

In their defense, adding advertising this is usually just the first rung to full service enshittification.

The next steps will likely be limiting the number of "free tier" ChatGPT queries to less than 10 per day, adding unskippable video ads, and constantly nagging users to upgrade to a Pro tier subscription for "just" $1 a month. Then you start increasing the Pro tier subscription from $9.99 a month for the second month onward to $14.99 a month and upward at about 3 times the annual inflation rate. Bonus points if you find a way to bundle the service into a streaming or cellular plan to make it more difficult to cancel later.

Elon Musk's network is estimated to be more than 700 billion dollars now if you include the value of SpaceX.

I don't think that Elon would brother replying to Iran's e-mail for less than 10 billion, and they probably don't have it.

The timing of this seems super weird, as Facebook is now basically irrelevant for anyone under the age of 40.

They might have been actually able to get away this 12 years ago when Facebook was still new and cool, but now it's really only used by boomers who share fake news with each other and complain that their grand kids don't visit them often. Businesses will just stop posting and leave a link to their website instead.

We really still haven't had that major battery tech breakthrough that allows for $25,000 EV's with over 300 miles of range that can meet EU crash and safety standards... yet. I'd imagine that China is closer to the goal than most, though.

Until then, we really don't have mass market alternative that makes all ICE vehicles obsolete for lower income nations.

Probably. YouTube has been jacking up the prices of their service to around $85 a month. At that point, the introductory prices that Comcast offers for a cable/internet/mobile combo plan are looking better in comparison.

I think that the billionaires are planning for that last one. Bill Gates is buying up large tracts of farm land, and most of the tech oligarchs are building huge compounds for themselves that probably have huge doomsday bunkers in the basement. Their families will be OK when World War 3 or the AI apocalypse happens.

That already happened. Windows 11 has an XBox app that lets you stream console games from your PC if you have an XBox Game Pass Gold subscription.

It really seems like Microsoft is just giving up on new hardware and leaning in hard to cloud streaming.