OP: ackshually I don’t like it in my fruit salad, therefore it is not a fruit

adds bacon to fruit salad

Alice is a Russian Op who infiltrates the Queen of Heart’s Court to bring it down from the inside.

This is why nations need stricter prohibitions against illegal immigration.

He placed loyal people on the board and had them vote to give him control of the company.

He could place loyalists on the board because he bought a controlling interest in the company.

And now he has been having them vote to give him absurd unseen before “salaries”

The latest compensation package has virtually unattainable sales targets. And the compensation is almost entirely in equity that assumes a monumental increase in stock valuation.

If he can manage it, I’d be tempted to say he earned it, except I know he’ll only “hit” the target by lying and market manipulation that will collapse as soon as he hits his mark.

I mean, “stealing” is a strong word. Elon bought them out, and they’re both enjoying a net worth in the hundreds of million.

What’s more disturbing about Elon’s tenure as head of the company is how social media manipulation, insider trading, and blatant SEC violations can pump a company’s valuation into the stratosphere.

Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard both continued to contribute advances in engineering that far exceeded the Tesla project. But they’ll never have the kind of easy credit Elon secured through politics and media manipulation. So don’t expect to see them included among the ranks of “billionaire” any time soon.

Americans are going to mandate retractable handles in response

Angry Albanian Noises

From the Sea to the Sea to the Sea to the Sea to the Sea

The big question is why we started adding computer operating systems to our vehicles to begin with.

Originally, automakers tried to shoehorn proprietary subscription services into their vehicles for GPS and roadside assistance and satellite radio. But the opt-in for these services was scant, because they were obnoxious to set up and overpriced relative to - say - a TomTom or a cell phone’s core features. And you could get after-market integration added to your vehicle through its entertainment system, so why bother with the clunky manufacturer options.

CarPlay and AndroidAuto were concessions that automakers began to adopt because they sold more vehicles that way. Reversing this out will likely have the same effect it did the first time - by driving people to foreign car companies like Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Kia.

I already see Kia cars on the road fucking everywhere. And moves like this will only accelerate the trend, I’m sure.

So, by utilizing built-in systems, the car manufacturers would indeed be able to collect more data about how you use the systems in place, while also possibly getting more money out of you through subscriptions.

There were massive protests and constant public pushback against vaccines for as long as vaccines have existed.

There were a handful of outspoken reactionary groups in the early 19th century who registered outsized alarm. But when you look at the data, the rapid decline in smallpox over the century was the direct result of the success of inoculation domestically. By 1898, the mandatory imposition of vaccinations was functionally unnecessary, due to the near complete eradication of the disease on the island. People were - by and large - more than happy to undergo inoculation at a level that provided herd immunity.

The fight for widespread adoption of vaccination has been rough fought against the tides of the confidently ignorant who let their irrational emotions control them.

Confident ignorance has been as much a benefit to vaccine campaigns as an opposition to it. People are, by and large, trusting and appreciative of advancements in medical science, especially when they are subject to regular and repeated trauma from a chronic malady.

Quackery succeeds on this sense of naive desperation. Vaccination does, too (with the added benefit that it actually works). A straightforward solution to an immediate problem is an easy sell.

The real detriment to vaccination policy is its own success. Once you’ve systematically eliminated a disease, the social memory of the disease’s consequences fades through generations. People aren’t afraid of Polio because they don’t have a President in a wheelchair who fell victim to it. People aren’t afraid of measles because they’ve never experienced it, or had to care for children suffering from the disease.

The rapid adoption of prophylactics in the sex work community comes from people who are regularly faced with the threat of STIs, both personally and in their peer groups. People with little direct or indirect exposure to recreational sex are a much harder sell. And so we see STIs flood through religiously insular communities (ex. the sudden surge in Syphilis in Salt Lake City) that had historically shown very low rates of incidence.

This tends to set off a rebalancing of behaviors, as the community rapidly adopts the techniques for prevention. When news of an outbreak spreads, vaccine hesitancy collapses in its wake

“You must mean Base 22”

In fairness, Expelliarmus has a higher success rate

America doesn’t just do this domestically.

They do. It’s just tied up in the private sector. Tons of quackery on American TV and in news journals. Everything from “Head On, Apply Directly to The Forehead” to Dr Oz shilling ginseng as a panacea to the social media conspiracies about MedBeds that Trump himself retweeted.

The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.

Can’t let the wrong kind of people benefit

deleting my account

When the 25lb bag is mostly weavels?

90% of Spotify is trash. Much like Audible, it’s just choking on AI generated content and similar worthless vanity projects

That’s apparently apocryphal. The rate of pullover tracks with the most common car color (currently white). Driver behavior (speeding, illegal turning, etc) and other outstanding features (lapsed registration, broken tail light) are the most common proximate causes for a pull over.

Real “Unpopular Opinion” hours, but a lot of the Google AI results are honestly helpful and significantly less annoying to navigate than the links they reference.

No annoying or intrusive ads or DONATE PLEASE pop-ups or demands that I give them permission to add cookies. No miles of irrelevant fluff text. No captchas or other weird security features.

This feels like a patch on a patch on a patch, given that so much of these annoyances are a consequence of aggressive AI data harvesting and Google Adsense incentives and decades of privatization championed by Silicon Valley libertarians.

But here we are, regardless. AI answers filter a lot of that crap out

I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest.

A lot of the opposition to vaccination reads like fad diets and self-help trends from 20 or 30 years ago. You can prevent autism by fumbles around playing Motzart to your baby in utero? Meditating during Yoga? Eating chocolate? Pick your Oprah-sponsored poison.

But, like, why are we seeing a fixation on a proven medical treatment and not some generic “don’t let your kids eat jelly beans” or “do headstands to get the blood flowing to the brain” hookum?

I think that’s where you get to people really running afoul of an increasingly dysfunctional health media ecosystem. One whose reputation is bloated with empty promises about The Perfect Cancer / Alzheimer’s Cure or Living Forever With Blood Transfusions. And then it’s colliding with an actual system that just seems to throw enormous bills at you for pain killers and palliative care.

On the one end, there’s supposed to be a recipe for perfect health if you have enough money. On the other, I can get a flu shot and still get the flu? How unfair.