California is awesome.

Their values are aligned, theirs strategies are aligned, and so their efforts are aligned.

Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.

Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.

I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.

But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.

Well there are some of those, but they run in parallel for the most part, which is very digestible. They have done a great job on this show.

It already was like 10 years ago.

Enjoy getting pwned I guess.

I refuse to use Facebook anymore, but my wife and others do. Apparently the search box is now a Meta AI box, and it pisses them every time. They want the original search back.

I’m not defending capacitive touch in cars. I don’t like it either. I’m just saying that it being blamed for an accident is silly to me.

I have one too. The only part of the cruise control system that is capacitive is the speed up and down. Love it.

Well, ok, how do you feel about Toyota’s or any other manufacturer’s cruise controls being on the wheel, where they almost always are now? It really isn’t that different.

Cruise control speed changes don’t rapidly accelerate or decelerate the vehicle, much like any vehicle. IMO, if someone is too addled to handle that state change, someone should take their keys from them.

It’s fine. Making a mountain out of a molehill.

Keep finding your axe against capacitive buttons, I don’t like them either. However, the ID.4 is most definitely not causing more people to crash than other cars. People can accidentally swipe touch controls on steering wheels, too.

The stereo causing someone to crash the car? That’s just Darwin at work.

There are falsehoods in the article. Go test drive an ID.4. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is yet another EV hit piece.

How would these be causing crashes? The ID.4 has a few cruise control buttons on the left side of the steering wheel. They are push buttons, but you can swipe the speed up or down to change it to the next 5 MPH. The resume button is not capacitive as the article states, you have to push it. Once again, this seems like people not wanting to take responsibility for their own lack of attention while driving and blaming it on the tech in the vehicle.

All of those are very densely populated places.

I’m open to ideas. Show me an example of it.

It is too distributed in too many places for mass transit. The religious fervor over the fuck cars movement is not going to get people in highly populated, low density areas to walk a mile to catch a bus to catch a train full of homeless people to catch another bus to walk a half mile to their destination, when they could have completed that same journey in the comfort of their own car in 1/4 of the time.

Take Dallas for instance. I’m not going to do the work for you, but feel free to plan a trip from a random house in Allen, TX to a business 5-10+ miles away using both the public transit system and then a car. No one sane with limited time in their day is opting for the public transit option. And this is in a city with a decent passenger rail system.

The United States is simply too large and distributed for everyone to use public transportation. It will never happen, so get used to it and try to optimize what will be part of our future.

No.

Bye!