I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.
I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.
Oculus was founded by a shitty person who sold to Facebook and then went on to help make a company to bring Big Tech into surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. Basically, he’s trying to bring on an orwellian nightmare.
Oculus would have gone bad weather or not Facebook bought them.
This whole post is a good illustration to how math is much more creative and flexible than we are lead to believe in school.
The whole concept of “manifolds” is basically that you can take something like a globe, and make atlases out of it. You could look at each map of your town and say that it’s wrong since it shouldn’t be flat. Maps are really useful, though, so why not use math on maps, even if they are “wrong”? Traveling 3 km east and 4 km north will put you 5 km from where you started, even if those aren’t straight lines in a 3d sense.
One way to think about a line being “straight” is if it never has a “turn”. If you are walking in a field, and you don’t ever turn, you’d say you walked in a straight line. A ship following this path would never turn, and if you traced it’s path on an atlas, you would be drawing a straight line on map after map.
There was an app called Buycott that lets you join “campaigns” of things you are either for or against, and when you scan something, it tells you which positive and which negative campaigns apply to that product and the company as a whole. Koch was on there. Seems like it may have been abandoned years ago, though.
their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing
Cool. So let’s pass legislation that prevents any auto manufacturer from sending sensitive info to anyone unauthorized by the owner of the car. Just because you buy a car “assembled” in the US doesn’t mean that your data isn’t being harvested, stored improperly, and sold to all bidders.
Yeah, you could detect a difference between drunk me and sober me, but where does sleepy me fit in? It’s wrong, but not exactly illegal to drive while very tired.
Plus, most laws about operating a vehicle only apply when the vehicle is on public roads.
I wish it were as simple as calling things like your onstar microphone a deal-breaker when looking for a new car, but it seems like every single car out there has many deal-breakers, and you just need to choose which are worst.
Thanks for looking through all of this. If I’m understanding right, it seems like Congress is asking NHTSA to do a task that is probably not possible, but they are required to at least go through the motions to try?
It seems like they just told nhtsa to use technology to fix drunk driving so they can wash their hands of the situation and claim they tried to do something, but nhtsa couldn’t figure it out. Why didn’t they tell the NIH to eliminate the cancer while they were at it.
I do believe the technology to detect BAC is too erroneous to inflict on innocent drivers, and technology that could detect impairment through driving characteristics, while possible for individual drivers could never work on a population level. There’s going to be a lot of overlap between impaired drivers and just naturally bad drivers.
Solar panels are about 70x as efficient in getting energy when compared to corn ethanol. If all corn ethanol land (which is heavily irrigated, fertilized, and subsidized) were converted to solar, it would generate 3x the yearly electricity needs of the US.
30.2 million acres * 400 MWh/acre/year = 12,080 TWh/year. US energy use is about 4,000 TWh/year.
We are already taking cropland away for energy production, might as well make it way more efficient.
Recyclability, too