I’d say that if you do have an opinion and state an opinion on something, then you should also know enough to explain why.

Specifically about politics, it’s scary how many people have an opinion without knowing why. Politics is also something that everyone should have an opinion on, because it affects pretty much everything, so everyone do have an interest in something political. It shouldn’t be based on feelings or the charisma of the candidate or group pressure. It should be based on what affects you and how you’d want it done.

I mean… it’s been more than 24 hours by now, hasn’t it?

I’m thinking worldwide. George Bush paved the way for a lot of populistic right wing politicians in other countries, showing that reckless incompetence is fine as long as you put on a suit and pretend to know something about economy.

He then dragged the entire ensemble of headnodding clowns into a war in Iraq on a false premise. Yes, Saddam was an asshole and needed to go, but he did not have chemical weapons. The entire war was about taking full control of oil, that Bush’s croonies had planned long beforehand.

Then there was a little financial crisis called “the great recession” in 2007 and onwards, and of course history has a tendency to point backwards, but I think it’s fair to say that the complete lack of oversight of the financial institutions was the main cause. The cause of this crisis was G. Bush Junior and all the other conservative government leaders in suits claiming to be “fiscally responsible”. If only they had been “financially conservative” that would’ve better, but they didn’t even attempt. It was pretty much as irresponsible as it gets.

I don’t think Trump or the USA as a whole can litteraly destroy the environment, because they’re not that many, 300m people of 8 billion worldwide, and I also don’t think Trump will initiate any wars directly, but they’ll do nothing to stop the existing wars, and we will see a worldwide financial crisis as soon as the next budget doesn’t get approved or earlier.

This election has the same dreadful feeling as 2000.

Nevermind the crazyness, it’s the certainty that something worldwide bad is going to happen due to the incompetence of the American government.

Maybe Biden could pack the Supreme Court before leaving office.

It wouldn’t be a great idea in the long run, but it’d potentially stop the entire system from functioning right now.

not sure what a ceremonial rich dude could have done.

This is the kind of situation in which a king (or president) can make a difference.

Royalty don’t have any direct power to order people to do things, but they do have a voice with quite a broad reach. Whenever the king speaks, people will hear it. Even if they don’t care about the king.

In a time where people are getting their information from sources curated to fit their own political bubble or economical interests, it’s quite powerful to be able to reach a whole country across political and economic interests.

Royalties can’t dictate, but they can encourage and motivate people to work together on a common goal despite of their differences.

When something is seriously threatening the country, it would be nice if the king would bother making a motivational speech, so that people, companies and politicians could see the purpose of uniting against the common threat.

It might not sway the opinions of people or companies who have strong interests in not doing anything differently, but it will boost the morale of people trying to do their best, enabling them to rest assured that they’re doing the right thing despite of what others might do. We could say it’s a really vague forn of long term meta-politics, but sometimes that’s also all that is needed to set a direction.

It’s not political as such, but more like “yo let’s save this sinking ship” instead of passivily watching it happen. It won’t fix anything by itself, but it’s a good start. Without a good start and set direction, you can be sure that nothing will ever change.

I think it’s fairly optimistic to believe that they’ll stop bugging you with the Windows 11 upgrade even if you do pay $30.

Well it isn’t 6.

From Wikipedia:

In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”,the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine

Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that

Is this their Vietnam?

forced into an echo chamber.

Yes, it does that.

Using YouTube on a new account or through one of the alternatives will result in a wildly different feed. I was recently shocked by seeing the default non-curated feed on YouTube.

Absolutely none of the content was interesting to me; most of it was directly anger inducing political crap or just plain brainrot. I would definitely not visit that shit page ever again if the default feed was my first impression. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a right wing breeding ground by now, but it sure isn’t as balanced as I would have expected.

My regular YT feed is obviously much more interesting to me, and I can use it to find new content, but since I don’t want to wait for the ads, I now only watch my own subscriptions on a different frontend, which of course will create an even smaller echo chamber.

I get how a curated feed can benefit the user, but YouTube is just not making it possible. It will only show (rage) engaging content and without the dislike function, you can only decide not to watch the crap or get shown more crap until you do like it.

It should be highlighted that the tough competition from Chinese manufacturers is on the Chinese market. The increased tariffs won’t help on that. VW simply got outcompeted in China.

VW is still the most sold brand in Europe. Every time BYD sells one car in Europe, VW sells 74 cars Europe. That’s not the problem. It’s that the Chinese market used to be the largest market for VW, but now the party is over after 40 years.

Exports are risky like that. It’s difficult to blame the China for this when they have cheaper and more technology advanced vehicles available domestically. I hope VW can see the writing on the wall and up their game, but I fear that this market won’t ever come back. In my opinion they should focus on going back to the core idea of making smaller and cheaper cars available to the people, instead of making luxury car exports.

This is clearly a “why not both” situation.

Emissions must be cut and new technologies for reversing existing damage must be developed. There’s a whole bunch of different things that needs doing, because there is simply no single solution, but using one approach to argue against another is certainly not helping anyone.

It can happen in many ways. If you’ve ever used your mail for anything, then the address is out there.

Just the other day I got an email addressed to 50+ people with every email in the “to” field. Ironically the mail was about online security…

Obviously it’s a breach on GDPR, but the damage is already done. If just one of the other recipients has been hacked or has forwarded to someone who is or has allowed some dodgy app to syncronize contracts, the scamners now has all the emails.

There’s absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it.

Yes it’s country specific, but more about old houses.

In my case the building code says the ground should have an impedance of maximum 1666 ohm. My installation was already grounded and had about 400 ohm.

The charger guidelines says 200 ohm, however the car refuses to charge on anything over 100 ohm. I had an electrician add a new ground spear, bringing the impedance down below 1 ohm.

The building code in USA already recommends 25 ohm, so it shouldn’t be an issue if the installation is up to date.

No regrets, but I do acknowledge that it’s very different and has different challenges. The usual worries before buying about range, mileage, battery drainage, top speed, maintenance fees, towing capability etc, do not actually exist. I understand why people worry, but no, they are not actual issues.

In reality: Software. That’s an issue. Car mechanics do not know how to service software. Doesn’t matter if it’s a subscription to a service or a mandatory but malfunctioning pressure valve, it’s software and they don’t know about it. It usually not a serious issue, but it might be, especially for cars with a lot of gimmicks and shit. This issue also exist with new fossil fueled cars as well. For most part, it can be ignored.

The charger at home may be an issue. (Maybe i. Europe mostly?) Some cars only accept voltages with a very low resistance. Both Renault and Tesla require a better grounding than the building code in most countries. It’s not costly to fix, and it’s a one time fix, but it may be a surprise…(that you need to expand on your electric circuit just for this), but you should have done anyway).

I will acknowledge that range is a downside. Not in everyday use, but for longer trips, you will have to plan your trip according to charging. It has never been an issue for me, because I generally never drive that long without pause anyway. Time it to to your breaks is all there is to it.

For a comuter car with home charging, you will have absolutely no issues in switching. It does have many more surprising positives than negatives. Like, never having to set foot on a gas station. Never mind the cost, but the time spent on going there or stopping on your commute to do it, or holding the nozzle in the cold, or being tempted to buy stuff in the convenience store etc. In comparison, I go home and plug in to charge my car, exactly the same way that I charge my phone, so it’s ready for the next day. It’s not difficult at all. It might take 30 secons and more often than than fueling but it’s still much faster than stopping on the road, gas or not.

Only actual real downside for me is that I’m also a cheapskate. I prefer to time my charging to the variable electricity prices, but not everyone has that option and it’s completely voluntary… I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Sure, i save a few bucks, but the hassle of it is real. I am considering changing to a subscription model instead, just to avoid worrying about it.

The best advice that I got before buying was: “Just drive it”.

Don’t think about it: It’s a tool, use it. In a lot of ways an EV is much better suited for that, because you only need to worry about it being ready to use. You probably never thought of that for your ICE car, because you’d do refueling and other fluids on the road. If you fuel at home, you’ll also have to refill your sprinklers and remember to wash it every now and then… Maintenance is home based, not on a station.

There’s a whole lot of benefits to it as well, but you didn’t ask for those, and I think you should just go test drive one to see for yourself.

If my phone didn’t have a cap, I’d hotspot it all, which is basically the idea of cellular home internet routers. I found a home router without a cap, which time will tell to be true, but it’s still more expensive than my phone with a very large but not unlimited cap.

They want to get paid, that’s the reasoning. The amount of data is really irrelevant except for pricing.

Roaming fees used to be the same until EU stepped in. Hopefully EU will eventually step in and order a full stop to ALL CAPS too. We live in the “future” now, right? Bring me my free unlimited connection so I can download that car they talked about.

I bet those 40 hours are more stressful than before.

Efficiency has increased,so you’re probably doing a whole lot of more tasks with the same time, but the bureaucracy still exists. It’s just a different kind of bureaucracy.

While we no longer need to stand in line to get a rubber stamp on a paper from some rude clerk just to pay a bill, we now need to download apps, keep the systems up to date, manage user accounts and input the data exactly how the app wants it. While the individual task might be somewhat easier than before, it is now expected that you do a whole lot more of these bureaucratic tasks yourself. All the tech bloat creeps up and makes every little task a little more difficult than before.

Otamatone.

It’s a synthesizer shaped like a note with a mouth and eyes.

News and people giving a shit about sports ball.

IMF is part of UN.

Egypt is trying to achieve a rapid transition to electric vehicles. They have started domestic vehicle production with a little help from China. Not just cars, but also smaller mopeds and such I think.

So, by making people drive domestic vehicles fueled by domestic electricity, they hope to be less dependent on IMF loans and imported vehicles and fuel. They want to be the key hub for electrifying African vehicles, so they are also aiming for exports.

It makes sense like that, but it’ll obviously piss off a lot of people, both inside and outside of Egypt. I’m not at all sure they can actually see it through. It’s a bold move when they have a poor economy to begin with. They are in the middle of a financial crisis, so something drastic needs to be done.