The brand is on fire, and Elon is kerosene.

Yeah, I was watching an interview with an analyst who was kind of bearish on Tesla. He made the point that while the damaged Tesla cars don’t help, they really aren’t a significant factor driving this. Even if they stop that, it’s not going to fix much. Tesla is not well positioned to appeal to conservatives. You can’t take a brand which you’ve spent years building and then make the thing highly unappealing to your core market without losing a lot.

He also pointed out that Tesla’s physical locations are not located to serve conservatives. Some of that is due to legal restrictions in some states that dealerships got put in place prohbiting Tesla-style direct sales. But regardless of the reason, if you’re in rural State X in the Great Plains, the nearest Tesla location may be a state-and-a-half away.

If Tesla wanted to do some huge realignment, they probably should have had those physical locations up and running ahead of time.

Iceland looked pleased.

San Francisco has something like four entirely separate public transport systems with all different rail gauges within IIRC a couple hundred meters of each other (cable cars, VTA, CalTrain, BART). That’s before even getting to the road-based stuff, which includes electric trolleys, and water-based stuff

No problem. I ignore most of the extra features they provide — my interest in them is really for the privacy aspect — and the ability to search the Threadiverse is one of the very few extra features that I actually make meaningful use of.

I think that this haze gray stuff is getting passé in an era of beyond-visual-range combat. I’m thinking an orange paint job on this one.

If you’re not joking, John Hinkley, Jr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Ronald_Reagan

On March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan, then president of the United States, was shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr. in Washington, D.C., as Reagan was returning to his limousine after a speaking engagement at the Washington Hilton hotel. Hinckley believed the attack would impress the actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had developed an erotomanic obsession after viewing her in the 1976 film Taxi Driver.

David Hinkley appears to be a statistician.

hey could also contain various animals that could distrupt the ecosystem,

The only thing that an egg that someone is likely smuggling in is going to contain is a chicken, and we’re also currently short of the egg-laying variants of chickens, so a black-market Canuck egg-laying chicken wouldn’t go amiss either.

As someone else pointed out above, they have had a search lens to do this for some time. It’s called “Fediverse Forums”.

Honestly, it shouldn’t cost that much for free search engines to build in — shouldn’t add a lot of compute load or anything. I expect that what Kagi did was to run a spider to build a list of hostnames and then to basically do a site search on a huge number of sites. If there’s demand, other search engines could provide similar functionality.

In 2018 a Quebec man named Alexis Vlachos pleaded guilty in a Vermont court to charges relating to a plot to use the library to smuggle backpacks full of handguns into Canada on at least two occasions. He was later sentenced to 51 months in a US prison.

That seems like an unnecessarily-complicated plot to smuggle a small quantity of handguns into Canada.

I mean, yeah, in theory a vehicle could be randomly searched by Canadian customs, but, then hypothetically, they could have looked into the odd guy at the library (which, apparently, they did).

searches YouTube

Here’s a Canadian driving across the border into Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjXIVYfwoXc

Guy drives up, answers a couple questions from Canadian customs, drives on.

Ah, fair enough, maybe the target here is default DNS-over-HTTP in browsers.

Yet Tesla stock is up.

Well, over what period of time are you talking about?

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/

For the day, TSLA is up 5.27%.

For five days, down 0.51%.

For one month, down 26.37%.

Year-to-date, down 38.41%.

For six months, up 4.39%.

Like, depends on the start and end time that you’re looking at.

I mean, you can’t make it illegal to purchase tires out-of-state. A driver could wear them down out of state, or just have a tire blow; they’re gonna have to be able to get tires out-of-state, and distributors across the country probably aren’t going to maintain special California-specific stocks.

I’m pretty sure that any system like this would have to permit purchasing the tire and then later assessing the tax one way or another, and it seems like that’d create some significant enforcement issues.

If you live in one of the rich countries.

Nah, I mean globally. Take your hypothetical fruit-growing country. Are things in 2025 in that country bad compared to 1925? 1825? 1725? 1625? If not now, when is the better time?

How do you deal with a California resident getting tires out-of-state?

Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google, with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers

I don’t know why Italy is wasting time on this.

Italy is not going to be able to force all public DNS servers out there to block things that they want blocked. Anyone using Google’s DNS servers is already going out of their way to use an alternate DNS and can probably plonk in another IP address if they want. It’s not as if Google has the only publicly-accessible DNS server out there.

If Italy really and truly doesn’t want a DNS server that is doing this to be accessible in Italy, go after Italian network service providers, and instead of playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole until they run into someone who just tells Italy to buzz off, just block it. Now, some portion of Italians are probably going to still get to DNS servers that ignore Italy’s views on things via VPNs unless Italy wants to ban those too, but it’d at least be more-effective than trying to go after every DNS server provider out there, which is definitely is going to leave DNS servers that don’t block sites accessible online.

Frankly, I don’t even think that DNS-based censorship is very effective in the first place anyway, but if you’re going to do it, might as well at least do it as effectively as possible.

It’s not. You live in what is probably by most metrics the best time in human history.

If you read unceasingly-negative material, you could develop a negative worldview.

Vidoc posted on local job boards, like the one in Poland. But whoever was behind this operation figured out that it’s profitable to pose as Serbian, Polish, and other eastern European profiles

I’d think that this could be pretty easily resolved by just having a real-life interview, at least for the final interview.

It sounds like Vidoc is in Poland. Maybe it’s just me, but if I were being hired for an engineering position, I’d think that it’d be reasonable to be willing to travel to a final interview, and for the company to cover any costs.

But, okay, say that it doesn’t make sense. Maybe the finances don’t work, maybe they want to hire from somewhere where it’s not practical for people to travel to their location. I’d think that it’d be possible to have an “interviewing company”. That company just obtains some office space, sets up videoconference conferencing rooms, and has their own trusted cameras and suchlike present.

Some are poor.

When I recently got all 4 of my tires replaced I watched the tire techs warn several customers that the tread on their tires was too low and every single one of them said they couldn’t afford new tires right now so rotate them and let them leave.

It’s not just hitting the poor. Like, if it were, you’d only see the poor living paycheck-to-paycheck. But…that’s not actually the situation. The bulk of it is going to be financial literacy, which at least when I went through school was not something covered at all. I think that financial literacy is seriously an area where the US doesn’t do all that well.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/31/61percent-of-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-even-as-inflation-cools.html

The survey found most Americans (58%) are living paycheck to paycheck. Struggling to make ends meet, many are relying on credit cards to cover any shortfalls. Meanwhile, nearly one-quarter of those surveyed said credit card debt also contributed to their financial stress.

Living paycheck to paycheck means consumers need their next paycheck to meet their monthly obligations. How much of a cash cushion they have is hugely important in determining how far consumers are willing to push their paychecks every month — and how stressed out they might be if faced with an unexpected financial shock.

It’s not about being “poor.” And alternatively, not living paycheck to paycheck isn’t about being “rich” — even though most people prefer to define it in those stark terms.

Instead, we find that paycheck-to-paycheck living spans all income levels, including half of high earners (defined as those earning $100,000 or more each year) as of January 2025. Across all income groups, people report similar abilities to pay their monthly bills without a struggle but needing the next paycheck to stay on track. This implies that living paycheck to paycheck isn’t solely about financial hardship or an inability to meet basic needs, but how people choose to manage their monthly income.

All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it’s already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.

The problem is that that’s not linked to usage, which you want — you want consumption of a resource to be connected to paying for it. Otherwise, you get overuse of the resource; it’d create an artificial incentive to go out and drive more, because you’re being subsidized by income tax payers or whatever.