To be fair, I'm not sure this is an unrealistic scenario of your average instagram influencer going out camping.

I'd argue madness is sticking with a candidate who now has virtually zero chance of winning what should be an easy race with anyone else. Democrats have stuck their head in the sand way too many times. They did it with how unpopular Hillary was in 2016. They did it with RBG not retiring. And now They're doing it again.

This is the simple, undeniable truth: Biden is extremely unpopular. One could argue he might win, but that's the best you can do. A remote, unlikely possibility that he could beat what should be the least electable person in history.

Ok let's see how the polls move. If they move in the right direction, Biden stays on. If they move in the direction everyone knows they'll move in, he steps down. Deal?

Anybody. Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders, AOC, John Elway, I don't care. Biden keeps saying he's the only guy who can beat Trump. After last night's debate it should be obvious that he's the only guy who can't beat Trump.

At this point it's starting to feel like Biden's holding the nation at gunpoint and making us have a second Trump term. He's always been a terrible politician, running twice for the nomination and failing to get a single delegate, until Obama made him VP. Honestly I suspect part of the reason Obama chose him is because he didn't wanna play kingmaker and figured Biden was too old to run again.

Then in 2020 I think the argument was Biden could benefit from Obama's popularity. I certainly thought that was a terrible pick, but not totally lacking in logic. But in 2024 there was utterly no rational basis for Biden to be running in the first place. Now that he's been a complete disaster, he's just fucking us as a nation for his own narcissism.

The crazy thing is everything up to this point was so much better. They'd show biden waiving at "nobody" and then they'd zoom out and there's someone standing there. Or he'd say "president of Mexico" when he meant to say "president of Egypt". But then last night was like nonstop fail. It's the perfect nightmare scenario because now everyone can say "You shoulda seen it sooner!" but really, we couldn't.

How about we pick someone who vaguely approaches the average age of an American adult. There's a ton - Buttigieg, AOC, I dunno even Kamala would be a million times better. Literally anybody under the age of 70. Why is that so hard to do?

According to this wikipedia page - Median wealth per adult globally is estimated at $8,654 for a total population figure of 5.5 million, quite a bit less than the global population estimated at 8.1 billion. I'm guessing because this is "per adult" rather than per person. The children of the world are all on the low end of the wealth spectrum and probably would be a large share of the 3.6 billion.

Also questions can be asked about how they value wealth, do we consider debts, etc...in which case there's a lot of people with zero wealth or less, as well as a lot of people who don't have bank accounts and whose wealth is hard to measure is any ordinary sense. Point being, this particular comparison is kind of meaningless without more context. There's probably ways you can do it to get an even larger number than 3.6 billion.

But a more useful and perhaps more surprising metric is that 8 people have as much wealth as 158 million median people. Which is still ridiculous, like those 8 people are worth a Russia's entire population's worth of people. And not just of poor people, but your average adult person who likely has a job and may even be considered on the well-to-do side within some poorer countries.

We would be, if not for Devo

"Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events," the report says.

First administration: "We must do something about the asteroid. I've started a plan to divert it, but it'll take several years."

Second administration: "The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office."

Third administration: "Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there's just too much political resistance to solving it. Let's focus on other priorities that we can solve."

Now imagine this happens in a remote area with no cell coverage. In Arizona those are a thing too.

I think it makes sense to care more about problems that are solvable. If anyone out there has a realistic plan to reduce the suffering of the people of Gaza in any sort of lasting manner, I've yet to hear it.

But people spray painting the library? Yeah that can be solved. Report them to the police, take pictures. No tanks necessary.

Going the whole distance in QWOP

We should start a campaign to write him in to force the Dems' hand.

I'm happy with this. I feel like Lemmy is an oasis of nerds in a social media world of toxic people obsessed with all the wrong things.

As productivity increases, artificial scarcity becomes necessary to maintain pre-existing levels of inequality.

Autopilot “is not a self-driving technology and does not replace the driver,” Tesla said in response to a 2020 case filed in Florida. “The driver can and must still brake, accelerate and steer just as if the system is not engaged.”

Tesla's terminology is so confusing. If "Autopilot" isn't self-driving technology, does that mean it's different from "Full Self Driving"? And if so, is "Full Self Driving" also not a self-driving technology?

Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”

This is the same problem that all these "free speech platforms" keep running into. Some people will abuse free speech - if nothing else, I think everyone can agree spam is a type of abusive speech. But the difference between abusive speech and ordinary speech isn't a sharp line, and the definitions of "abuse" will vary. So there needs to be some mechanism or rules for deciding what that line is. But all the people that create these platforms instead wanna pretend that line doesn't exist, so they don't create a means of determining it. So then "abuse" becomes whatever the users demand and/or the decisionmakers decide it is. Which is exactly the same as having no free speech to begin with.

World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) study that found SUVs to be 20 percent more polluting and twice as likely to kill a pedestrian in a collision compared to smaller conventional cars.

Twice as likely to kill a pedestrian...if that number holds up this needs to happen in more cities. Driving an excessively deadly vehicle through crowded areas shouldn't be free.

I'm actually glad to see what's been happening to Twitter because as much as it was started with good intentions and used to be a positive force for tech, it was also fundamentally flawed social media model. The basic problem was that only positive reactions were allowed - like, retweet, follow. This is NOT the town square, where you can get any reaction. It's more akin to a dictator's rally, where you're only allowed to clap and booing is not allowed. So it's no surprise that over time, it led to filter bubbles and the spread of mass delusions. Because you could say the craziest or most depraved thing, and all you'd hear is applause.

I've done this on a simple timer app I developed.

Why? Because I want the timer to stop automatically during a phone call. To do this I need to request READ_PHONE_STATE (which bafflingly tells the user the permission is to "make and manage phone calls"). Unfortunately, there's no way to alter the permission request to tell the user (at least in Android) why you want the permission. They really need to make the permissions more granular and provide some way for devs to communicate what the permission is for.

X has been toying with the idea of fully embracing adult content and has even planned a feature for adult creators that could position X as an OnlyFans rival. That plan was delayed, Platformer reported in 2022, after red-teaming flagged a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the launch: "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale."

Non-consensual porn had also been a serious problem for PornHub, eventually they just nuked all unverified accounts.

Hmm, maybe that's the plan for X too. It's been going in that pay-to-play direction for a while now.

Apple spokesperson confirmed that the team, which listens to recordings of Siri interactions to make sure it responded appropriately, will “have the opportunity to continue their role with Apple in Austin.”

"have the opportunity"

It's interesting to look back at his AMA on reddit in 2015. Every response was so to the point and on topic, even friendly. Clearly something changed since then.

Immigrants against immigration. The classic American story.

If reddit taught me anything, it's that a growing network isn't necessarily a good thing.

• Trump's lawyers would argue that Biden can order Trump's execution without any punishment, but that it would not cause him to win the next election because the military and other federal officials are not immune and are "obligated" not to follow illegal orders. So basically the argument is that illegal orders are unlikely to be followed.
• Problem with this argument is that the president has the pardon power, which means he could promise to pardon people for following his illegal orders.
• But the problem with that argument is that some believe the president could pardon himself, so maybe that situation is already a reality even if the president is not immune
• What would actually happen? It seems like in both Watergate and Jan 6, some people did refuse to follow corrupt orders. But in the case of Watergate where there was more time and a more intelligent corrupt president, that wasn't itself a major problem. In Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, he forced his AGs to resign until he landed on future Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who carried out Nixon's illegal order to fire a special prosecutor. The bad news for Nixon is that the move was so unpopular it eventually led to his resignation as he probably would've been impeached otherwise.

While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different. RamsesThePigeon said the content on some of Reddit’s most-followed pages, which he moderates, had “gone sharply downhill”.

This has been a long term process. I was on reddit since 2012 or so. In the early days I used it to help me change careers and grow as a developer, and keep track of tech and space news and other topics that mattered to me. But the reality is it wasn't even the API stuff that drove me away. The first thing that really got to me was when I couldn't get rid of r/all as a subscribed sub, and that was full of quick dopamine hits and clickbait. Then every sub seemed to go downhill in terms of content, filled with outrage and pictures of tweets as if I would use twitter if it only used images of text instead of raw text. By the time the blackout happened reddit had become a net negative time sink in my life and I figured it was time to cut it off for good.

The main Trump lawyer defense has been to say that the military has it's own rules against executing such an order. But if Trump promises them pardons, those rules wouldn't be enforced, and the whole thing would be "legal".

The pardon power is kinda the root of all evil here, because even if the court finds that Trump isn't immune (which they almost certainly will), that just brings up the next question which is can the president pardon himself? I'm amazed that after the Trump years and his corrupt pardons there's been no effort to limit the pardon power.

Pressed on whether the court has an obligation to put the country on a more “moral path,” Roberts turns the tables on his questioner: “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path?” He argues instead: “That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.” Presented with the claim that America is a “Christian nation” and that the Supreme Court should be “guiding us in that path,” Roberts again disagrees, citing the perspectives of “Jewish and Muslim friends,” before asserting, “It’s not our job to do that. It’s our job to decide the cases the best we can.”

I know John Roberts has made some terrible rulings, but he deserves credit where it's due in that he won't literally tear up the Constitution. Unfortunately he's the exact kind of Justice the Trump-era GOP tries to avoid choosing, because he puts the Constitution above Trump.

Not that anyone would expect Trump to know this, but Hitler rebuilding the economy was kind of a fraud. He basically used fake currency (before it was cool), banned unions and made it nearly impossible to quit a job, and stole from a big chunk of Germany's own population and those surrounding it. Ordinary Germans saw a decline in their real wages by 25% from 1933 to 1938, and obviously things only got worse from there.

He deserves to lose every dollar, it's the most arrogant business move in history and he disrupted thousands of lives of workers with good jobs in the process. Unfortunately it's only like 10% of his net worth, he's the one who will suffer the least relatively speaking.

Tesla and Musk’s attorneys, the court decided, “were unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process.”

I'm guessing this was the key problem. Courts are very reluctant to set aside corporate decisions like CEO pay packages for soft reasons like general unfairness. But when you start getting into dishonesty and not meeting basic requirements, it's kind of forcing the judge's hand.

Full decision for those interested, it's long. I like this part:

Defendants also argue that Musk needed additional incentives to stay on at Tesla or he would spend more time at SpaceX, where he could fulfill his galactic ambitions to establish interplanetary travel, colonize Mars, and potentially earn more money in the meantime.858 That argument begs another question: if encouraging Musk to prioritize Tesla over his other ventures was so important, why not place guardrails on how much time or energy Musk had to put into Tesla?

I can't help but notice all the comedians who complain about society being took woke for comedy are has-beens. John Stewart's back to crushing it at the Daily Show, is he complaining? No, it's only the guys who've run out of material and have nothing left to do but shake their canes at gen Z kids.

I challenge anyone to go to the "good old days" and find me a comedian who was actually funny and not just being an edgelord. You know who the most popular comedian was in the 80s? Andrew Dice Clay. That's right. That's was peak comedy, dirty nursery rhymes. Sure, I get that some people are nostalgic. But let's be serious for a minute - do we really wanna go back to that kind of comedic void?

Society hasn't gotten too woke, rather comedic standards have evolved to the point where merely being offensive in itself no longer counts as comedy.

OP needs to call Robosaurus

This would be at least the second time this "feature" has been tied to dying horribly.

Texas never attracted techies, it attracted a few Republican tech CEOs with disproportionate shares of power. I've always turned down recruiters trying to get me to move there regardless of how good the job is on paper. If I've got options, I'm choosing to live on one of the coasts. There's nothing for me in Texas. I mean I've been to Bucees once, it's worth visiting. But I'm gonna guess the novelty is probably over by the second visit.

Except we've been trying everything else for decades now

The Model 3 owner's manual states that "only the front doors are equipped with a manual door release."

Well clearly anyone in the rear could just go out the front doors. And there's absolutely no conceivable way that would ever not be possible, right?

Here's a pre-launch article in case anyone wants to compare pre-launch expectations to reality.