The post-scarcity utopia only happens after the Eugenics Wars and that whole Khan thing, mind you…

Yeah, motherfuckers can’t even drive in two dimensions. Adding a third would be a clusterfuck of galactic proportions.

A solid-state battery developer in China has unveiled a new cell that could help change the game for electric mobility.

Oh yeah? Again?

Tailan did not mention any specific plans for passenger vehicle integration yet, but did state its latest generation of all-solid-state battery cells are vehicle grade. If the company is able to scale this technology large enough for consumer vehicles while keeping prices down…

Ah, so more vaporware. Same as usual. Come find me when these technologies actually exist.

If the gal in the 3rd position there is any indication, I think the only superpower you might gain is the ability for your drill to be the drill that pierces the heavens.

Edit: The part about “Falun Gong” tickled one of my neurons. I thought to myself, aren’t those the whackadoo tai chi aliens people?

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Falun_Gong

Yes. Yes they are.

Attempting to have no authority may be the “point,” but here in reality that doesn’t actually work as long as humans remain what they are. It can only function so long as everyone involved cooperates to the very letter of the classless-moneyless-stateless social agreement and there is no outside disruption from anywhere else that doesn’t subscribe to the ideal. The moment someone figures out they can cheat to get more than others, it falls apart.

And what they want more of does not necessarily have to be money. It could be land, or crops, or coconuts, or a bigger hut, or more sexual partners, or shinier rocks, or internet post likes, or more prestige, or whatever.

One of two things then happen: They succeed, and become the authority. Or an authority has to be formed by some type of agreement by everyone else to stop them. This also inevitably begets violence.

You can try as hard as you like to evade this, but unless you lobotomize literally everyone or have magic mind control powers or something (which would require you to be… the authority) it is guaranteed that you will fail. Maybe not immediately, but the larger in scale your little social experiment gets the sooner it will happen. You can get 5 or 10 or maybe even 100 people to perfectly agree with each other and play along. If you’re lucky, you might even make it last for more than one generation. Don’t even try to argue that you could do it with a million people. Or ten million. Or 332 million (the population of the United States). Ceaseless cooperation in numbers beyond those of our immediate tribe- or family-sphere is not a trait that is found in humans.

The core belief of sovereign citizens – initially, anyway – is the notion that since government exists at the consent of the governed they can “opt out” of being subject to the laws of wherever they are.

This has a tiny grain of legitimate logic to it, in that not a single person on Earth is given a choice of society and/or country to be born into. Governments attempt to exert absolute authority over everyone within their spheres of influence regardless of what those people may happen to think of the matter, and the feasibility of them physically leaving said society/country notwithstanding. All laws are just words on paper, after all, and from a certain perspective completely artificial, arbitrary, and transient.

Where it all breaks down is that these people typically arrive at the above conclusion by being absolutely stark raving loony, and typically want to have their cake and eat it, too – they don’t want to be subject to obeying laws, or paying taxes, or having to register their vehicles and get driver’s licenses, pay child support, etc., but they still somehow feel entitled to the use of public infrastructure like roads and bridges, police and fire services, municipal water and sewer use, and so forth. In modern times a simple “no gubmint can tell me what to do and I’m answerable only to myself” outlook has mutated into this arcane and nebulous pseudo-religious willful misinterpretation on the wording of laws, what is and is not printed CAPITALIZED on various government documents, and fixation on “contract law,” treating every interaction between everyone and every thing as a “transaction” which the sovereign citizen believes is inherently negotiable (always in their favor, of course).

This is furthered by shucksters who sell books and seminars to idiots the types of people who have the right type of chip on their shoulders, which purportedly contain the secret knowledge and legal incantations to make all this work but are, of course, just bullshit. Usually people who entangle themselves in SovCit bullshit are trying to weasel out of of some particular financial obligation. Not wanting to pay child support seems to be a very popular one, as are taxes in general, fines, loans, and liens.

The whole thing is just fascinatingly whacked the more you look into it. Here’s the RationalWiki article on it, for instance:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen

The problem with that and most other proposals for whatever other moneyless utopian society is that they all implicitly require some manner of all-powerful central authority to ensure that the rewards get distributed, the labor gets allocated, and the rules stay followed.

And we already know how well that’s going to turn out.

You can get charged thousands just for showing up an an ER, seeing no one but the receptionist, receiving no treatment whatsoever, and leaving in exasperation after a multiple hour wait without any sign of anyone having any intention of administering to you in the slightest. I’ve seen it happen personally. America!

This is the part that drives me bats. For any other service in any other industry you can get a quote first, but for some fucked up reason healthcare in America doesn’t work that way. The hospitals and insurance companies just do whatever the fuck they want, and you get to find out afterwards if you could have afforded it, i.e. after it’s too late. It’s such bullshit.

Yes, and not having a big money lobby behind whatever the old thing was fighting tooth and nail against progress probably helps, too.

This is easy(ier) for Ethiopia because they already have one of if not the lowest rates of car ownership per capita in the world. 2 per 1000 people. Practically nobody there owns a car to begin with. And note the repeated distinction of “car” and not “vehicle.” Like most African nations (and Southeast Asia, and South America) the majority of people who have motorized personal transportation at all don’t own a car; instead they own a small motorbike.

Even so, according to the sources I found the motorized vehicle ownership rate per capita in general in Ethiopia is only approximately 6 in 1000 – motorbikes included. So this isn’t a very big Band-Aid for them to rip off compared to, say, most places in Europe. Or the US.

greenwashing of their hybrids

Fuck’s sake. Flashback! People argued with me so hard about the Prius when it first came out, because I (correctly, thank you) pointed out that no matter how “hybrid” you make a car you can’t escape the laws of thermodynamics to ever make it go farther than what can be achieved by the energy contained the gasoline in its gas tank. Period. Obviously the OG Prius was not a plug in hybrid, so there was ultimately no way of adding motive power to it other than burning fuel. Do I need to call in Scotty on this one? Ye cannae defy the laws o’ physics, captain.

But regenerative braking! But synergy drive! But it can drive 12 miles on the electric motor alone! But! But! But!

You can cheat the stats a bit with the specific use case of stop and go city driving and achieve better short-term mileage than an ICE vehicle only because an ICE engine achieves a glorious 0% fuel efficiency at idle. But on average, over distance with sustained driving, it is literally impossible for an OG Prius to achieve better economy than an equivalent traditional compact car that doesn’t have to lug around a fuck-off heavy NiMH battery bank. There is no free lunch. Even if you capture kinetic energy with the regenerative brakes, that energy was initially created by… burning fuel… and the regen process is less than 50% efficient anyway. Energy reused this way will be still eaten by the bearings, road friction, air resistance, and all the rest of it just the same as propulsion gained by burning fuel. And then what? You need to create energy to fill the battery which is done by… burning fuel again. All you’re doing with a hybrid like that is shifting your energy losses into the future to have to pay back later. (Obviously the newer plug-in models aim to rectify this.)

So the 2nd gen Prius (the first version sold in the US) got a combined 46 MPG. Whoopty-do. So could my combustion-only Saturn SL1, which also weighed the thick end of 800 pounds less and didn’t have a battery pack to wear out, and cost half as much. If it were shaped like a Prius (which was quite a bit more aerodynamic than most contemporary cars, and was the actual key to the Prius’ MPG figures) you wouldn’t have even had to drive it very carefully to do so.

I’ve said it before but the ultimate end goal of Ford engineering is to design the Möbius part: A regular maintenance component of a vehicle that is so difficult to access that not only do you have to remove everything else to get it out, it is also in the way of itself so it cannot be removed without first removing itself. But you can’t do that without removing itself first, which you also can’t do because you have to remove itself…

The only path forward will be to throw the entire car away, walk to your Neighborhood Ford Dealership, and buy another one.

Well.

I own a 1999 Silverado. It has a manual transfer case, no traction control, no stability control, no terrain modes, and no trick electronic differentials. Its ECU probably has less computing power than your wristwatch. I have never gotten it stuck in the snow, not once in over two decades, even when the stuff was deep enough to be up to the axles.

I’m also certain the factory tires on a Cybertruck are not up to spec for mud and snow. They’re probably low rolling resistance jobbies in an attempt to make the range less abysmal. That does not equate to soft surface traction.

A man takes his Lada back to the dealership and says, “This car is useless! It’ll only get to 80 up that hill.”

“Well that’s not bad,” says the salesman.

“But,” replies the man, “I live at number 93!”

Nearly all window air conditioner units have a built in programmable timer that allows you to do just this, and if your system is central you can spend all of $20 on an electronic programmable thermostat that’s a plug-in replacement for your old one and doesn’t require being connected to the internet.

Just saying, this functionality already existed and worked just fine before everything had to be on the fucking “cloud.”

You should do that anyway; they’re a bag of dicks. I have to deal with them at work.

Note also that Haier includes GE Appliances and their subsidiaries GE Profile, Cafe, and Hotpoint since Haier acquired the GE Appliances division in 2016. Fisher and Paykel is also owned by Haier now, too. So if you’re gotten the feeling that your GE appliances are crap now compared to the ones your parents had, it’s not just a feeling and you’re right: They’re crap now since Haier has been cutting corners all over the place to chase a dollar.

Narrator: They are intentionally being an ass.

Horseshit. The legislation does not just require that they “ask.”

If the pop-up can’t be served, all it means is that they can’t use the cookies or tracking restricted by the legislation. If the user did not consent for any reason, then they did not consent. This includes if the pop-up is not displayed for whatever reason. It’s not the user’s fault CNN is too stupid to understand this. If they don’t serve illegal cookies or perform illegal tracking, then they don’t have to ask. It’s pretty damn simple.

In reality, they’re just using this to try to prevent people from using an ad blocker on their site, and making up a rationalization post-hoc.

Isn’t the whole point of this to not use their services? As long as Haier’s software and servers are not being touched I don’t see how they have any legal standing. This guy should speak to a lawyer to verify if this is the case.

Anyhow, the last Haier/GE air conditioner I took apart had a commodity off-the-shelf USB Wi-Fi dongle inside it plugged in via a short USB extension lead to an off-the-shelf microcontroller board to enable its “smart” features. I’ll bet you a dime Haier is violating the terms of at least one open source license, possibly more than one, via the software stack they’re running in there. So as far as I’m concerned they’re free to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.