Well yeah. That's the entire point of tax incentives and all that. We want them to do something so we make it in their financial best interest for it to happen.

In this case, we made it so their interests were best served by spending an ass load of money on research and development to make EVs more broadly producible. If you yoink the rule that made them do that away, it's not that they've wasted or lost that investment, but producers who weren't bound by those rules are at a comparative advantage because they weren't set back by the rules, and now they can continue to sell cheaper, dirtier cars for less than the bigger companies can sell clean or dirty cars.

It's to the advantage of Tesla because reducing the sales of electric vehicles while there's rising consumer demand makes it easier for them to sell cars at the same price with less competition.
It's worse for the environment but "giving a shit about the planet" isn't on the table in the current political environment. The most we can hope for is "the interests of a large company are tangentially aligned with those of the environment for once" and just run with it.

It's worth remembering that evolution doesn't select for the best as much as it selects against the worst.

The reason we have such sensitivity doesn't have to be particularly game changing as long as it doesn't make us less likely to reproduce.

You can plainly see our big niche adaptations being used everyday. We think good. We recognize patterns. We use tools. We walk a lot, efficiently and upright. We communicate with high precision. We have a surprisingly efficient digestive system.

We're not busting out the ability to smell rain super often, which hints that it might be more in the "doesn't hurt" category instead of being a big advantage.

My guess is that being able to smell disturbed soil is helpful for tracking, either where an animal has run or where something has been buried. Our ancestors were not above digging up a fresh-ish dead animal a canine had buried for later.
But it could just be that rain sense slightly more accurate than looking towards the horizon was as useful then as it is now: vaguely, I guess? It just doesn't hurt anything.

NAS. Most things sit in downloads indefinitely, and I'll randomly decide the folder is gross and unmanageable and put things into appropriate folders. Usually Documents gets the most sub-categories, with various significant life docs sorted by category and year. Pictures gets random art I made in a folder, pictures, memes and funny shit, etc also get their own folders.

Media downloads go straight to the NAS where they're organized by Format/Category/Series/Name. As in Video/Movies/John wick/John wick 1. TV gets a season level in there.

Check engine light? That's fine, if it goes wrong it's just him. The high beams are dangerous, inconsiderate and just a dick move, but also something that could be done by mistake.

Flagrantly violating traffic control signs is dangerous to him, anyone in his vehicle, other drivers, and random passerbys. That's a pretty big no-no, and worth reporting in the harshest terms on its own.

Would you have wanted previous riders to have reported that behavior before you got in the car? If you knew they were going to drive like that would you still have picked them as a driver?
If not, why would you let someone else be in the same situation you would take steps to avoid?

Just a reminder that the national review is a garbage rag and a biased source.

The judge had questions about the process used to decide the onion had won, and reviewed the information. That's not the same as blocking the sale.
A hearing is normal after the sale of assets, and the people making the claim that it's not are the other buyer, which is ... Alex Jones.

Jones was accused of peddling the narrative that the shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 first-grade students and six teachers twelve years ago, was a massive hoax designed to get federal gun-control legislation enacted. The plaintiffs alleged Jones defamed them on his show and inflicted emotional distress.

That's a very slanted way to say "Jones was convicted of defamation and inflicting emotional distress on the families of a school shooting by insisting their children weren't real".

https://apnews.com/article/alex-jones-infowars-auction-onion-how-d42e7b2c916205b348628686c8b8dd4a

https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3lb3hecp7l22k

Not sure I get what you mean by "slow".

And it's not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we've been building and less of the one we stopped building.

Jesus. That's almost as dark as the reality of things.

The weird thing is, they don't actually sell the jars anymore. "Ball jars" are not made by the ball jar corporation after their antitrust lawsuits for being a fucking jar monopoly. So they sold the "ball jar" rights and now only do aluminum cans for food packaging and high end satellites and satellite launch systems.

"we've built a platform that at least give piracy a run for its money, and used it to develop a massive user base so conditioned to buying from us that they happily joke about how 50% off a game they won't play is cause for them to buy four times as many. Please, join us all in the baffling orgy of commerce, all we ask is 30% of the treasure.".
"We will, but we're gonna try to get the users to come to our platform with less content and maybe a $500 buy-in so we can have a bigger portion of a smaller pie".
"Lol, go for it".
"...".
"...".
"Why are you being anticompetitive?"

For a brief moment in the beta for all this, it basically just summarized the top two or three reputable results, and attached a link to where it got the data.

They should have just left it at that, and not started mixing in random blogs and social media sites.
The ability to summarize the Wikipedia article and a random university professors page where they list every fact known to man about pine trees or something was actually helpful.

If I want the AIs best guess about how to fuck up a pizza, I just go to the site where I can ask it. Bad advice when searching is just shit.
A tldr for "what is turpentine" is actually helpful.

The idea could be perfectly cute, and I feel like it would have been so easy to not make it "shame-y".

Like, "just a nibble", "pretty good!”, "yum!" and "my favorite". "I couldn't possibly...", "if you insist", and "thanks Grandma".

It often starts with some form of financial trouble, and not being educated in how money, the law, or any of that stuff works.

So you sign a piece of paper saying you get a truck, and they get $350 a month. This sounds great, so you don't look any further since you don't have the best work history, but right now you can afford that usually.

Later, your money situation is worse and you miss a few payments. Suddenly, they're sending you this letter that says they're going to take your truck.
It's bullshit, they can't take your truck, it's yours. You never agreed to let them take it, you just owe them something like ten or twenty missed payments.

So you start looking around for what you're supposed to do with the letter, and most places say "pay your bills" or "nothing can be done at this point", but it's not fair that you're loosing your truck just because you're not giving them money fast enough, and you need your truck.
But, you find some people who explain that there's actually some holes in the law, and point you to the law so you can see for yourself. Finally, someone is actually explaining something helpful!
If rich people can use loopholes to get out of stuff, why can't you? The only difference is that they have people who know the law, and you just found some people who will explain it.
The law says that if they can't prove that you owe it, then you don't. The people explain that you need to ask very specifically otherwise they'll be allowed to ignore you. They reference you to another forum where people have more details, and a lot of other stuff you never even thought about...

Anyway, since you had once acknowledged that you bought the truck instead of possessed it, they were able to get out of the loophole and they stole your truck.
That's okay though, since you've been reading and now you know that the law doesn't say you have to pay with money, but you can also pay with a "promissory notes", which someone sold you the template for making, so now you can buy a new truck, agree to whatever terms they want, and use your notes to direct them to collect the money from the taxes you pay. It's great because you get your truck and keep your money, the dealer gets paid just not how they expected, and the people who make up money (turns out it's not real? They just stole all the gold‽) send their fake paper to whoever.
The system is perfect, but complicated, so you'll inevitably make mistakes and face consequences for them, but if you just keep learning the loopholes and getting the special plates and drivers licenses you'll be okay.

It's a coping mechanism for people who are faced with an overwhelmingly complicated social system and don't have the tools or capacity to learn how to interact with it on its terms.
Most people in that situation don't fall off the ledge, but a handful of them are confronted with how overwhelmed they are at the same time they're offered a hand hold to something that feels like control.

There doesn't always have to be a crisis, sometimes they just see the handhold and grab on, but usually their story ends up having some routine legal or financial trouble.