Cops don’t usually distinguish between net and gross revenue when they put out these kinds of press releases.

On most carriers this is code for “coach, but it’s an exit row so we’ll charge extra for the legroom.”

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.

He built a homebuilt aircraft and that wasn’t the thing that killed him, so he wasn’t dumb by any stretch, but “smart enough to be dangerous” seems like a phrase coined just for him.

What’s the harm in a little bit of Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking?

Nah, as near as I can tell that group is vigorously in favor of suspending all human rights for capitalists, so regardless of their views on kink I think they’d be inclined to let the comment slide.

Worse, on her blog she conceived of herself as the chief consort in his harem in between sharing her thoughts on race science and Harry Potter house sorting quizzes.

Given how many women he’s knocked up, and the way he talks about it, I’m about 95% sure he’s got a breeding kink that he’s using his fame and money to act it out in real life. 🤮

TLDR: the polio vaccine used to contain weakened versions of the three strains of poliovirus. When weakened live virus vaccines are used, the people inoculated with them shed copies of those viruses, which is usually no big deal… except that one of those weakened polio strains would, very rarely, mutate back into its full-strength form and sicken unvaccinated people living around those who were being vaccinated.

Eight years ago, the decision was made to remove the problematic strain of polio from the vaccine, because it was thought low wild infection rates meant that the risk of vaccination-derived infection had become higher than catching it from the environment. Regrettably, it seems that decision was made in error – type 2 polio outbreaks have soared since then.

From the industry journal I linked in another comment – it’s literally just an off-the-shelf Mireo Plus B. That’s it. The only thing Tesla about it is that it’s serving a spur line connecting Tesla’s factory to the existing Berlin light rail network, and was presumably financed by them for the PR benefit of not having the workers at an electric car factory arrive by diesel train.

I did a little digging and it seems like there’s a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn’t need frequent all-day service, even if it’s a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they’ve got doing “editing” at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into “world-first electric wonder train amazes!”

For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to “disrupt” it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.

That’s at least more cultured than my brain shouting “MULATTO BUTTS! (Mulatto butts!)” at me

The rules of evidence place a lot (honestly an unreasonable amount) of weight on the value of eyewitness evidence, and contemporaneous reports made from the same. The question for the courts will be, does an AI summary of a video recording have the same value as a human-written report from memory?

I agree that this is good use of AI, but would suggest that th courts should require an AI report to basically have the body cam recording stapled to it, ideally with timestamped references in the report. AI transcriptions are decent, but not perfect, and in cases where there could be confusion the way the courts treat these reports should allow for both parties to review and offer their own interpretations.

Somewhere a philosophy undergrad just sat bolt upright and shouted, “A TROLLEY PROBLEM! I must go, the world needs me!”

neighboring Nebraska

Kansas: “Am I a joke to you?”

I’ve found myself taking a paradoxically accelerationist stance about it, for this exact reason. At the moment, those on the right agitating for violence are a minority, and those that are actually prepared to act consist primarily of a few thousand militia LARPers and an even smaller number of actually-capable fighters. These groups are gradually accruing malcontents while the right wing’s filter bubble casts their ideas as acceptable, but the sooner those chuds decide to go loud, the more lopsided and emphatic the beatdown will be – provided that the armed forces are under the command of non-authoritarian President. Afterwards the public condemnation of insurrectionists will effectively choke off recruiting. Conflict feels almost inevitable at this point and giving the violent authoritarian fringe more time to plan and recruit only makes that conflict deadlier.

Rather, I’d say there are many immigrant groups with culturally conservative values (think Hispanic Catholics, BJP-aligned Indian immigrants, conservative Muslims, etc.) as well as certain more religious and patriarchal Black communities, that have a lot in common with the Republicans on social issues, and might be willing to overlook their racism if they find the Democrats’ stance on those issues unacceptable. Think also of expat communities that came to America on the heels of Communist revolutions in their home countries and have a reflexive hatred of even vaguely left-ish politics.

In a sick way, we’re lucky that the GOP’s embrace of racial hatred pushes as many people away as it does, because if they’d let that go they’d have a much broader base amongst minorities.

Alas, I was so looking forward to hearing them parrot the talking points of acclaimed Leninist… (checks notes) … JD Vance.

Conservatism is about preserving a historical social order, rather than existing conditions generally. Acknowledging an environmental change and altering the structure of the economy to prevent it threatens the social order that allows oil companies, chemical companies, and auto manufacturers to be some of the wealthiest and politically powerful entities in the world.

Further, in the short term, ignoring climate change preserves the status quo for the wealthy and powerful. In the long term, though, it only really becomes an existential threat to those who are not positioned to profit from it – look at Nestle attempting to take control of water supplies for an early example of what this might look like. Cataclysm is a life-and-death issue for the masses. For the powerful, it’s an opportunity.

Israel has been on dubious moral ground from the beginning. There is, perhaps, a future in which Israel either accepts existence as a pluralistic, multiethnic state, or forces Jewish settlers back into its internationally-recognized borders in order to facilitate the existence of an independent Palestinian state, but those futures seem remote and unlikely – and unless one or the other of them becomes reality, Israel will continue as it began: a settler-colonial state enforcing a regime of apartheid on the native people they have intentionally displaced, disenfranchised, and dispossessed.