Sorry, that should have been 50 times lower than FM broadcast.

I feel obligated to mention the Wall of Voodoo song "Mexican Radio": https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Entirely agree with your overall sentiment, but humbly submit that your "$5 worth of metal" may be a massive underestimate. The electronics that drive such powerful motors produce HUGE quantities of RFI, which is usually pretty broad in spectrum and therefore overlaps the AM band. I suspect that to make an AM radio work decently in such a vehicle there would be changes needed to the drive electronics, the wiring, and possibly the motors themselves - as well as the radio.

What I'm about to say is a totally a finger-in-the-wind wild-assed-guess: I wouldn't be surprised if the all-in COST of making an AM radio work decently in an EV was at least into the hundreds of dollars.

The switching electronics in EVs produce huge amounts of broad-spectrum "hash" well into the AM broadcast band, which is about 50 times lower in frequency than AM broadcast. This can overwhelm even the best-designed AM radios.

Also, Amplitude Modulation is much more sensitive to interference than the Frequency Modulation which is used in FM broadcasting and DAB. So not only are FM and DAB frequencies much farther away from the emissions that EVs generate, they are also inherently much more immune to that interference than AM is.

It's probably worth pointing out that if you turn your EV off, an AM radio will probably work just fine in it. So even in EVs, AM would still be good to have in an emergency situation.

As others here have explained, AM broadcasting is the best way to disseminate information over large geographic areas when modern comms infrastructure fails. The simplest receievers consist of very few components and don't even require a battery. Even (low-power) transmitters - useful at the neighbourhood level - are remarkably easy to build and can be cobbled together almost out of junk junk by a decent electronics hobbyist.

AM spectrum should remain available for unencrypted over-the-air transmission. Its commercial content should be made relevant and interesting as an incentive to keep people listening and broadcasters broadcasting. This would ensure that it remains available in emergencies when more complex tech with many more moving parts throws in the towel.

I applaud the AM Radio for Every Vehicle act and wish it success. I would like to see it pushed farther, to support a renaissance of commercial AM broadcasting and listening. The cost of a full-blown continent-wide AM radio revival probably wouldn't be much more than a rounding error in the utterly stupid amount of resources and electrical power we're now spending on AI and other data centres.

Yup, the username checks out.

Or how about we all just park the time half-way between Standard and DST, and never change it again?

If you don't want your kids living in the dark just change the administration.

FTFY

I don't want to "imagine" it - I want to discover it empirically. I want to see him and every well-known adult member of his family - except for Mary - doxxed repeatedly until the only way they can talk privately is either in person or via two tin cans and a long piece of string.

The only gaps I want to see closed are the ones between the upper and lower blades of the guillotines around the necks of all these fuckers. Every single one of them is a traitor to humanity.

Their willingness to take advantage of a surveillance technology which is still being widely and popularly condemned says something. I'm just not sure what that "something" is.

It seems to me that Jitsi is a good start toward meeting EU needs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's probably missing some of needed functionality, but starting with a working core of FOSS and extending it would seem better than making the proprietary private-sector vendor mistake yet again. For a government to have the kind of autonomy they really should have, I think FOSS is the only reasonable way to go.

Any government serious about autonomy should be doing its best to avoid critical software from private-sector companies.

John Taylor Gatto is a favourite author of mine as well. You have a valid point, but I think the story we're commenting on is heading toward at least an order-of-magnitude increase in the broligarchs' control of higher education. And they've been increasing their influence in all of the lower grades as well.

I get that there need to be ties between industry and higher education. But the kind of integration between education and business described in TFS is just more of Big Tech co-opting education for its own gain. It's a kind of indoctrination. Students in higher education are supposed to specialize in a subject, not in a fucking company.

I wonder if poorer countries' usage of social media concentrates more on the 'social' aspect - communicating, organizing, and building community. And maybe wealthier nations' usage skews to the 'media' aspect - entertaining, advertising and propaganda. (Oops... did I repeat myself)? Maybe in poorer countries social media is used more for communication, and maybe in richer countries it's used more for mindless time wasting. I really don't know - I'm just speculating.

Might they be using AI to comb through all that data?