And the board works for… Boomers. Seriously.

Majority of the US is owned by old people and boomers are such a wealthy class, they outweigh the billionaire class 8 to 1 (though there is a lot of overlap). People over 55 own 52% of all assets from real estate to cash to stock.

Boomers and their 401ks and pensions need to be a target too. It’s a natural consequence of an aging society: the young need to work more and keep less so the old don’t have to work.

Yr.no is a nice weather service and it still shows lake ontario for me (though I’m not in the US and leave it on norsk instead of bothering to change to English)

The national whatever for place names calls it Lake America. That’s the official source of data; neither Congress nor the president needs to be involved every single time a place is named (though this time the president decided to be because the president is a moron).

Definitely possible to connect Gmail and other things

They also pound dogs a lot more effectively now.

Orrrr state media should be insulated from the people in power.

Diesel cars (not trucks) have done 60 highway mpg for 2 decades now. The Prius isn’t a very efficient vehicle on the highway, it’s better suited for urban driving where the electric motor and regen help save a bunch of fuel.

APB tried that and it was pretty controversial. That was when a lot of us late millennial PC gamers were still in our teens and had tons of energy so it would be easy to spend all your minutes doing all nighters.

Having the option of both would be nice though because now I’m in the same boat as you. Would like to play, don’t want to sub.

Autocomplete in your favourite IDE is basically AI assisted too.

I think a reasonable line in the sand is: Does the author of the PR understand what they’re doing with this PR and how/why it works? If the PR is complex (like a whole new feature) then the author should be challenged on parts of it even if it looks OK at first glance.

Always free to create your own alternative if you’re after purity.

Thing is, modern headlights have very sharp cutoffs on the low beams and low beams are to be aimed down with a 1% decline. Old school ( I mean pre-projector) halogens often don’t have any cutoff and just shine everywhere. A properly aimed modern light doesn’t blind you significantly.

Multibeam LEDs are even cooler, the other car can have high beams on and still not blind you.

I can get a Xiaomi with the same SoC, higher display ppi (unfortunately also bigger display, they’re WAY too big IMO) and otherwise similar specs as the 6+ for 435€, but it’s 300€ if I’m willing to drop to 8 GB RAM (still 7s gen 4 so in comparison to the base 6 it has a newer SoC).

Fairphone wants 600 for the 6, 650 for the 6+.

I’m going to want your source for the Fairphone because if it’s significantly cheaper than the 435€ Xiaomi with 12 gigs of RAM for a 6+, I’d buy it despite not even needing a new phone yet.

The USA has yet to kill the UAW which they must do to be competitive. It’s not an end-all be-all solution (wages are only like 30% of the cost of a car), but a good start. It also needs an entirely local battery supply chain, buying from China isn’t an option. And they need to pay for every EV that is manufactured, no matter where it’s sold to.

But the US won’t take it seriously so they’ll never compete for real. Maybe they’ll kill UAW but only to increase shareholder value, not to compete for real.

Volkswagen has made a ton of dumb mistakes, but among the worst are paying union wages and not getting super cheap lithium batteries from being located in a country that has a well integrated supply chain.

We don’t want to mine or refine lithium as much in the EU because “boohoo muh environment” but really, if we want to compete with China we can’t let the environment be a deciding factor. Mine and refine all the resources we need instead of buying them from China and letting them dictate the prices. China doesn’t give a fuck about small issues standing in its way and neither should we.

Plastic oil pans save weight, who even uses metal anymore?

The only time I ever got a hole in an oil pan was a metal one and it was my ex who somehow hit a rock and hid it from me. The one car I had with a plastic pan never had any issues, but it also had a skid plate that makes a larger difference than the material of the oil pan itself, since loose debris would just bounce off. Plus the skid plate helps reduce wind resistance so it’s a necessity in this day and age anyway.

There’s a lot of protectionism going on in China, most western manufacturers aren’t allowed to sell their own cars without a Chinese company owning the majority of the partnership. Most countries don’t really have rules like that, China is kinda unique.

The Chinese actually LOVE big cars. Every other European manufacturer makes long wheelbase versions of their midrange sedans for China exclusively. Space in the back is a status symbol more than comfort up front apparently. And there are a ton of big Chinese crossovers out now. I won’t call them SUVs because they’re not really off road capable, much like most western “SUVs” aren’t these days.

They were only high-end EVs because the EV market was dogshit then. They’ve never competed with high-end cars in general.

Unfortunately it’s a race to the bottom and high-end cars are doing the same Tesla bullshit of a minimalist interior with a huge display instead of physical buttons with heft like they used to.

They pretty much do the same in China. Tesla I believe is or was the only foreign manufacturer allowed to own their Chinese business. Everyone else had to set up a Chinese subsidiary majority owned by a Chinese automaker.

Nothing stopping Xiaomi from doing the same with Ford or GM in the US as far as I know?

The entire world was doing lockdowns though. Not just the US.

Always hated that playing as Horde none of the big cities were as beautiful as SW. Not even the blood elf one IMO. Stormwind felt more significant than any other capital