Yeah, the IRA and Infrastructure Bill steer about $67 billion to railways, $80 billion to transit systems. And even though a lot of the other spending goes towards the status quo of car-based passenger transportation, electrifying that will go a long way towards reducing carbon emissions.

And there are some more ambitious ideas baked in, too: redesigning cities to require less car infrastructure and overall energy use, etc.

I thought it was a big deal when passed and honestly can’t understand why people who care about climate don’t acknowledge just how big of a deal it was (and how devastating that so much of the money authorized will now be in control of a Trump administration).

The Inflation Reduction Act included $65 million in research grants for low emission aviation and $245 million in development of biofuel based Sustainable Aviation Fuel (aka SAF). And the $3 billion in loan guarantees for manufacturing advanced vehicle technologies included certain aircraft.

There were also $5 billion in loan guarantees for shutting down our heaviest polluting power plants or retooling them to greener generation methods.

There was $3 billion in buying zero emissions vehicles and charging infrastructure for the postal service.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which inherited a lot of the stuff from the Green New Deal, was a lot of things, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called deeply unserious before today.

I haven’t combed through the data in a minute, but I want to also say that they’re also leading in fossil fuel deployment too.

Yup, China is also leading the planet on new coal plant construction. As of 2 months ago, it seemed to be on track to add 80GW of coal generation capacity in 2024 alone, and accounts for more than 90% of new coal construction.

By way of comparison, the US peaked in total coal plant capacity in 2011 at 318GW, and has since closed about 134GW of capacity, with more to come.

In context, what we’re seeing is massive, massive expansion of electricity generation and transmission capacity, both clean and dirty, in China. We can expect China to increase its total carbon emissions each year to be closer to the West, while the United States reduces its own from a much higher starting point. Maybe the two countries will cross in per capita emissions around 2030 if current trends continue, but there’s no guarantee that current trends will continue: will the United States continue to shift from coal to gas? Where does grid scale storage, electrification of passenger vehicles, demand shifting, or dispatchable carbon free power go from here, in a future Trump administration? What’s going to happen with the Chinese economy over the next 5 years? What technology will be invented to change things?

You could put Wendy’s, Walmart, Northrup Grumman, Tyson, Bank of America, whatever, into this, and just change the last line a little bit, and I still would not be able to determine if its satire or not.

I read this as an oblique reference to the “you’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign. It’s a bit of a reach, but it works.

Corporate Advertisement in general is almost completely stylistically played out

It’s like any other thing with fashion or styles. Trends come and go, different eras have distinct markers, later eras may intentionally evoke references or tributes to earlier eras, or other contemporary trends in other fields.

The sign of a successful ad campaign is when the campaign itself gets satirized to continue to build on brand awareness.

They’ve got a good, but not perfect, track record of actually uncovering illegal conduct by their targets.

• They exposed Nikola’s fraud (including exposing the video they published pretending that their prototype rolling downhill was moving under its own electric power) and their findings led to the Nikola founder’s indictment about a year later.
• They alleged fraudulent disclosures and financial statements by Nigerian conglomerate Tingo Group, and the government ended up indicting the founder for securities fraud.
• They showed that Lordstown Motors was drumming up fake demand by literally paying potential customers to sign letters of intent to join the waitlist for their not-yet-created electric truck. The SEC ended up charging them with misleading investors, and brought action against their auditor who had conflicts of interest.
• They exposed the obvious fraud of EbixCash, a gift card network, and tanked its IPO, by showing that they were lying to investors about the existence of their partners (using photoshopped buildings and fake addresses and phone numbers), lying about app downloads, and almost all of the revenue was from their own sister companies. This exposure brought down its parent company, which ended up in Chapter 11.

They’ve had less success accusing two huge well-connected investors of fraud:

• They published a report that billionaire Carl Icahn was manipulating the share prices of his fund by using a sophisticated ponzi scheme structure that paid old investors using new investors’ cash. The SEC ended up investigating and settling for a disclosure violation about failing to disclose their pledge of more than half the stock as collateral, but didn’t actually find facts confirming the meat of the Hindenburg accusation.
• They’ve gone after India’s Adani Group for accounting fraud and stock manipulation, but that hasn’t led to anything actually uncovered. India’s security regulator has concluded their investigation without findings of wrongdoing, but Hindenburg has doubled down and says the regulator is compromised by corruption. Adani’s founder is close to India’s Prime Minister.
• They alleged that Block/Square was aware of, but doing nothing to stop, widespread fraud in its Cash App and debit card transactions. That wasn’t enough to actually move the stock price, because it was kinda a weak accusation, they didn’t really show that Cash App was any different from any other similar fintech product, and Block is a much bigger company that has lots of other business units.

The problem is that most of us on the outside looking in just see accusations, some of which are proven years later, and some of which never get proven, so we don’t have a good sense of which ones are real or not, whether anything is overstated, or whether it actually makes a difference to the underlying company.

Are they working alone, or do you envision groups who can stop, collaborate, and listen?

Dammit for the last time you can’t wear an NBA jersey and shorts here, this is a doctor’s office.

Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.

Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

There’s that one game that censored “Nasser” to “N***er” which made it much worse.

I get how it works with wifi connections, and Bluetooth scanning (since that’s a peer to peer protocol that needs to broadcast its availability), and obviously the OS-level location services, but I’m still not seeing how seeing wifi beacons would reveal anything. For one, pretty much every mobile device OS now uses MAC randomization so that your wifi activity on one network can’t be correlated with another. And for another, I think the BSSID scanning protocol is listen only for client devices.

Happy to be proven wrong, and to learn more, but the article linked doesn’t seem to explain anything on this particular supposed threat.

I set a simple task to turn off WiFi when my home network is not detected so my phone doesn’t scan and report my location to businesses.

I was under the impression that BSSID scanning was entirely passive, and that a phone that scans for beacons doesn’t actually reveal itself to anyone.

And that introduces a specific type of supply chain threat: someone who possesses a computer can infect their own computer, sell it or transfer it to the target, and then use the embedded microcode against the target, even if the target completely reformats and reinstalls a new OS from scratch.

That’s not going to affect most people, but for certain types of high value targets they now need to make sure that the hardware they buy hasn’t already been infected in the supply chain.

The first Rambo was definitely about PTSD and how the act of killing fucks up American soldiers.

Yes, that’s in the picture.

I’ve seen some discussion hypothesizing an explanation that Millennials actually use more sunscreen, use less nicotine, and exercise more than Gen Z. I can buy it.

I think in some jurisdictions it’s considered a bump stock.

Shouldn’t the DE/Window Manager be handling that? Seems like doing it on a window by window basis would be inefficient (and look inconsistent).