The lack of enthusiasm for EV sales in the US can be summed up as a $7,500 price increase, thanks to Republicans. Anything else is just splitting hairs. The Equinox EV was actually selling quite well before the tax credit got the axe.

Quite a few of the world's democracies are shifting towards the right, and since EVs became a partisan issue - there you go. Seems like the same thing happened with plant-based meat substitutes, too.

Some of the earliest models of the Leaf have degraded to even less than 45 miles of range. There's videos on YouTube of people who have bought one just to demonstrate how bad they are. Nissan used a passively cooled battery until very recently, and the earlier batteries also just didn't hold up well in regards to calendar aging. It's not uncommon to find one for sale with relatively low milage on the odometer, but the battery is still heavily degraded.

A surprisingly large number of Americans aren't even willing to accept the range limitations of EVs as reasonable, and that basically boils down to having to make a stop for 30 minutes rather than 5. The idea that we should be limited to the stores and restaurants within walking distance, and beholden to a train and/or bus schedule for everything else represents significantly more compromise than slightly longer pit stops.

Honestly, my take on it has been if you enjoy urban living, fine, you do you. I like that I have some space between me and my neighbors, and that the semi trucks noisily unloading goods for the local Walmart while I'm sleeping, takes place several blocks away in a commercial zoned area - well out of earshot.

Yeah, I thought one of the major selling points of crypto was that it couldn't be seized by the government. Obviously, there's still the $5 wrench attack (which is actually a $21 wrench these days, thanks inflation), but having multiple crypto wallets would mean you could just surrender the one with the least amount of coin in it and deny any knowledge of the keys to the other wallets.

Now he can build a second ball room and paint this one blue.

One of the big arguments on the right is that parents shouldn't be allowed to trans their kids. There's this meme going around X that there's no such thing as a trans kid, only mentally ill parents. So, in principle, right-wingers are opposed to the idea of parents trying to alter aspects of their child's sexuality, right? Well, that logic goes right out the window if it's a gay kid. In that situation, right-wingers are totally okay with the parents dragging the kid off to conversion therapy and having their sexuality altered. The SCOTUS might be ruling on the legality of so-called "conversion therapy" real soon.

Also, In Florida and Texas, conservative governors have been ordering the removal of rainbow crosswalks (along with other forms of street art as collateral damage, so their actions are more likely to survive 1A legal challenges). While that's not really a direct assault on LGBTQ+ rights, it does demonstrate a desire to literally "erase" a visible part of the community, and stronger discriminatory measures will inevitably follow.

Finally, and I've mentioned this several times before, the GOP's official party platform contains the following statement:

Superficially, it comes across as just sounding like the GOP is pro-family, and what's not to love about that? Unfortunately, the use of the word "Sanctity" is a dead giveaway that their actual intentions are far more insidious. Sanctity is not a legal definition, but a religious term. It means they're literally saying that the legal form of marriage recognized by our culture should only be marriages that comply with a religious definition for marriage, and that clearly excludes same-sex marriage.

Punching down at LGBTQ+ folks isn't going to make your groceries, housing and/or healthcare costs any cheaper, but you know that old saying about when the only tool you have is a culture war hammer...

I'm not sure if /. covered it and I just missed it, but apparently Tesla pushed out an updated version of their self-driving software and it doesn't support their older hardware platform. "Older" being like sometime in 2023 and earlier, IIRC.

Now, if my $40k+ vehicle was obsolete in a mere three years, I'd be absolutely furious. It's probably stuff like this that contributes to the statistic of EV owners who claim they're going to switch back to ICE. It'd be pretty damn insulting if instead of getting the latest self-driving software, you just get a silly Tron UI skin.

What is there really to say about it? It makes a few visual changes on the infotainment screen, which you're really not supposed to be staring at while you're driving anyway. So, maybe it's a neat thing if you've got a Tesla and young children who also happen to be fans of Tron?

The EV tax credit did just recently go away, so I think this is probably more Tesla trying to stay relevant than the other way around of Disney attempting to market their film to something like 0.7% - 0.8% of vehicle owners (Tesla has a large chunk of the EV market, but compared against ICE their marketshare is still miniscule).

They've also nerfed it rather hard lately. Even attempting to generate rather generic sounding things like dancing cartoon hamsters will run into the "This content may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content." error.

I've already seen plenty of videos go viral on X with the Sora watermarks still intact. We're truly living in a post-fact era, where people choose what they'd like to believe even when it's plainly obvious the video is AI.

It's like the saying goes: You can't fix stupid.

The seasonal section of my local Target is already loaded with tons of his disgusting chocolate bars. I also seem to remember something involving some equally disgusting hamburgers.

I'm guessing his other ventures haven't been as profitable as posting clickbait on YouTube?

Remember how awhile back Facebook added a bunch of pre-selectable backgrounds for text posts, because they wanted to encourage people to still post written content rather than just images and videos? That's kind of like what Sora 2 is intended for - it lets people who'd rather write a prompt than film something, create content for TikTok. Yeah, there's a certain irony in it being flooded with AI slop right around when it's supposedly coming under new ownership.

I think the initially lax guardrails are because it'd be really difficult to prove that the content being produced is infringing (as 10 seconds isn't even long enough to generate the average length TV commercial), and the brief "wild west" approach certainly got the hype train rolling. I think most of the lawsuits with any likelihood of gaining traction are going to be the ones argued from the point of misuse of copyrighted materials to train the models, not the hilariously short clips of Pikachu fleeing from the police.

At any rate, they are tightening the guardrails, which probably is a good thing anyway, because that means people who actually understand the basic concepts of screenwriting will probably stick around to make their original content, while the "South Park but Rick and Morty show up and make derp faces" crowd get an error message and leave in a huff.

There actually is going to be a new Bolt released soon, but since the tax credit is gone, it was probably better to go with the Equinox EV.

While there's certainly a vocal minority of folks who claim to have 300 mile daily commutes, most don't. That's why it's called "range anxiety", because for the majority of use cases running out of juice is an irrational fear.

Where I will agree though, is that since the current administration killed the EV tax credits, hybrids are now looking a lot more cost competitive. It's why I'm still kind of surprised Elon was all for this, because it is going to totally screw over Tesla's sales. The rest of the major automakers aren't all-in on EVs, so they can just scale back production of EVs, letting their ICE lineup continue to be their cash cows.