swope

Recently our county sheriff put out an Amber Alert (a forced alert on all mobile devices) but the obfuscated link resolved to Twitter.

I wonder what portion of the public saw the Twitter login page and just closed the tab, never to see the details of the child abduction.

An EV engineer friend of mine said that this is specifically the Hertz Teslas because Tesla parts are expensive and sometimes hard to get. So when a Tesla breaks, they sell it rather than repair it.

I rented a Bolt EV from Hertz once. The car was fine, but the charging stations in the area were mostly broken, or they required downloading an app and giving personal information to charge.

I got the feeling the charging networks are all about collecting government incentives and the sale of private information from subscribers, and not at all about service.

My new preferred rental car is no rental car at all.

Ohm my god, right‽

You think the culture wars over pronouns have been bad, wait until the machines start a war over prepositions!

I enjoyed the humor, but the OP did set a boundary of [serious].

So I guess what we are learning here is that setting boundaries is always going to provoke some people to break those boundaries out of spite.

Long ago “drive” meant urging an animal to move forward. And “dialing” a phone number meant entering the “digits” by turning a rotary dial with your digits.

Words aren’t as static as you seem to think.

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BYD has a factory in California where they make electric buses and commercial trucks.

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I’m going to go look for an update on DeepSqueak…

I think most computer vision cameras are fairly low resolution, so I’m not expecting the hit-and-run vehicle will be identified.

No manufacturers can make a dishwasher that lasts 18 months anymore. And they don’t make replacement parts. I’m not in any hurry to add another hunk of electronic junk to my home.

VAX.

(pun for “facts”)

I think it’s a different thing. For me, my expectation is that Threads/Meta connecting to Fediverse is more like when AOL connected to IRC (specifically EFnet) in the 90s. I wasn’t really into Usenet, but Eternal September was pretty much the same wave. AOL pushed hard in advertising and recruiting users, and IRC and Usenet were originally populated with people who got into it more organically.

I don’t remember Jabber or XMPP having any kind of discovery system. I only ever talked to people who knew already. So when Google connected Talk, it was just added convenience. I wasn’t bombarded with rude idiots like the AOL invasion of IRC. When Google ended XMPP support, I was disappointed, but I continued using XMPP with my friends.

I think Meta is spending a ton on promoting Threads, and it’s going to bring in a lot of people with different values. It’s going to be unpleasant for me, but I think that’s just the self-similar fractal that is the Internet.

I knew XMPP as Jabber, and I remember being delighted when I tested messages between my Jabber accounts and my Gmail account.

This. I think every culture has beauty standards, and some of them inspire a lot of people to do pretty drastic procedures. It’s pretty mainstream in America to covet straight, gleaming white teeth.

I’m guessing there’s some long history of orthodontics in USA that intersects with phrenology, marketing to people’s low self-esteem, and piggy-backing on government and orgs’ campaigns for dental health (extrapolating from medical necessity to aesthetics.)

Also I think there’s a weird thing where parents are paying for braces for their kids. Notionally parents want their kids to be confident, but I also sense an undercurrent of social signalling of wealth and status, along the lines of putting solar panels on the north roof of the house if that’s where the neighbors will see them.

I’m in the US and I can’t think of any real third places in my current community. I used to have them when I lived in Kansas City years ago, in the Westport area and around the university (UMKC), but that was sort of unusual in the wider metro area.

Sometimes I wonder if US law, especially tort law, has contributed to the decline in third places. As in, if you are going to have a lot of people in a space, you must have insurance because there’s a lot of exposure to normal risks. Like the cost to just be a human in a place is too high – unless those people are paying you.

It’s just a thought and I don’t have an essay full of citations. It may be a minor factor in what is mostly a car-dependency symptom. What do you think?