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It’s an outdated legalism. 250 years ago, the patent office operated as an incentive to record and register ideas to the public in exchange for exclusive commercial license.

Now that simply isn’t an issue

quietly

Stop putting “quietly” in your fucking headlines, you hacks. This wasn’t “quiet”, it was very publicly announced.

That man is going to catch a cold

That said, there sure are a lot of Teslas and Rivians driving around today.

Toyota outsells Tesla 10:1.

You notice Teslas because they look bizarre, while Toyotas fade into the crowd. Same with Rivians. Ford fully outstrips them by volume, but damn if that chasis doesn’t pop.

If you have an electric car that can recharge in the same amount of time that it takes to fill the tank with gas

You don’t. Even the highest end Chinese EVs need a solid 5 minutes to get to 70% charge.

I’m stick stuck on hybrids for the off instance I need to make a 400 mile drive.

Damn shame they cancelled that HSR through Texas. Would love to not drive at all.

one president signed a bill to move chip production to the US then the next president raided the chip-making facility and arrested all those chip-making people for trying to show the locals how to make chips

Chip making production has begun to migrate largely as a consequence of the Trump tariffs. The Biden plan to send Intel a few billion in kickbacks in exchange for a chip fab industry that wasn’t the laughing stock of the planet only enriched shareholders and executives.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Maybe Operation Low Voltage, which was a raid on a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia? I can’t find anything about a raid on a chip fab plant.

In fairness to Trump leadership, a bunch of these workers were, in fact, overstayed on their visas. Although, as usual, Trump sent guys in with shotguns to do what a sternly worded letter would have just as easily accomplished.

But these are the two faces of Western Capital. The bailout and the beat down. Liberals throw money at the problem. Conservatives slap you around on the thinnest pretexts. Neither president seems to have benefited the US domestic consumer.

It’s debt stacked on debt. The money isn’t real, just the consequences of decades of credit expansion.

Now we either deal with a cascading wave of defaults (a la '29, '73, '86, '08, and '23) or we rush in with state credit to bail out all the private lenders.

But there’s very little real money in real pockets. At the end of the day, it’s borrowing power that makes you a billionaire.

But he will be gone soon enough.

The fossil fuel lobby is older than Trump and far more influential, digging its roots deep into both major parties back to the Cleveland administration.

Censorship is never the answer.

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

Formally banning certain forms of vulgar and bigoted expression establish a code of conduct for the community, even if they aren’t strictly enforced.

Teaching values and the corresponding ethics and morals that come with it is closer to the answer.

Morality is as much about proactive and affirmative pursuit of justice as internalized codes of conduct.

If there is no social consequence for immoral behavior, there is no reason to believe the act is immoral.

This money isn’t just vaporizing. Someone is cleaning up on these skyrocketing prices.

Never said it was a good podcast.

But if you’re good friend, you’ll throw in the kind of comedy material that makes it ones.

Having an autistic friend is no different than listening to a podcast

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People are just so obsessed with cars

It’s hardly an obsession among the vox populi. Highway construction is dogma produced by the Church of the Petrochemical Company. We continue to cling to low density, high cost cement roadways because that’s why billionaires and their lobbyists tell elected officials to pay for.

Where rail exists, people flock to it. But you have to build before people can come.

I’ve been losing money on Dragonfly for months. Unfortunately, the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent.

The author is French, the story in France, and the slaves are Roman.

No shortage of French slavery in the New World. Just ask anyone from Louisiana or Haiti.

Maybe it’s in the movie adaptation, but the scene of their “freeing” is pretty clear about its point.

Oh sure. You can find all sorts of period critiques of industrial capitalism as slavery with extra steps.

But the notion that people would volunteer to return to bondage really undersells how hard plantation overseers and state police in slave states had to work to keep them there.

In that time, ive taken up muay thai, gratitude practices, doestevesky, and started a new business.

I mean, congratulations, I guess. I’m in Houston, so all of that just sounds like a ton of driving.

From what little ive read, X/Twitter has never been for debate…but instead existed as a warzone.

I’ve yet to hear of any bridges getting blown up because of a Tweet

it’s so hard for so many to just, not use them

Networking Effect is a bitch. It’s like telling someone to stop using AT&T or United Airlines. These are the major arteries of communication for billions of people. Individuals can’t abstain from using them without isolating themselves.

You can delete your account and I promise you won’t find yourself missing them.

Spoken like someone who doesn’t have their entire extended family posting and chatting on the sites regularly. I get calls from extended family, asking me to weigh in on long conversations and exchanges and posting sprees. And then when I respond on the phone, I get a “No, you have to post it, I’m not going to just repeat it to everyone for you”.

Tons of social pressure to just go where everyone else is.

What’s frustrating about this “Your consumer habits are wrong, you should make them better” is that Twitter was (ostensibly) the space for the liberal intelligencia to go for journalism and debate and organizing until Elon Musk bought it.

Does anything stop a billionaire from buying up or shutting down the next social media platform? We can wax poetic about Lemmy/Mastadon as a decentralized and indie-operated environment. But crazy to think Joe Biden/Donald Trump can squash TikTok with a few swipes of the pen, that Feds can play wack-a-mole with ZArchive and Anna’s Archive and Wikileaks, etc, while insisting the main hosts for the most popular indie media sites are bulletproof.

Might as well tell people to stop using the internet entirely.

In fact, they go back to being slaves because then they don’t have to worry anymore.

This last bit is Neo-Confederate propaganda. The “slaves were happy to be slaves” myth is wildly apocryphal.

Far more often, the freedmen leave their plantation economies in pursuit of more lucrative work in more industrial and urban regions. Harlem, New York and Detroit, Michigan are testament to the exodus of American colored people northward following the war. Or they strike out to undeveloped territories and form their own municipalities. Large black communities popped up across the Southwest and West coast, as the post-Civil War frontier was subjected to industrial scale genocide of native peoples.

The consequence of this mass migration is a labor shortage at home. One which can only be resolved by (a) raising wages / living standards until people want to stay or (b) re-enslaving the population through other means. In the case of the US South, these “other means” were the Jim Crow laws, which transformed the private plantation economy into a publicly managed (and privately profitable) state prison economy.

Following the end of Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hayes, southern state governments imposed a suite of laws forbidding “vagrancy” and constricting the right of colored people to travel unattended. Independent communities of black citizens were raided and demolished (The Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 being two notable examples - really all of Red Summer being a major historical turning point for American race relations). Enormous prison compounds were constructed. And the incarceration rate among people of color skyrocketed.

The campaign to re-enslave the colored population was a central position of the “Dixiecrats” straight into the LBJ administration. And capturing these revanchists was pivotal to the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, even as the taste for segregation soured nationally on the American tongue. All of this was covered up and expunged from US History, following the 1980s Reagan Revolution and the reactionary efforts to undo the Civil Rights Movement. So it’s very easy to never know the long dark winter of civil rights in post-Civil War American history.

But “slaves were actually happier to be on the plantation” is textbook Coolidge Era white nationalist revisionism.