Austin's pretty fond of the turn signal and tends to respect it. It's Houston and Dallas where you take your life into your own hands. Houstonites take a blinker as a challenge to protect the lane. Consequently, 3 of the 5 most dangerous stretches of highway are in Dallas and Houston.

Ah, yes, Uber's claimed a ridiculous number in their earnings report. If I were to publish such a claim on a paper, I'd be gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Actual data and analysis or we're just looking at more marketing "puffery." It's important to remember that Uber's only stated business strategy to become profitable is to obtain a monopoly on all ride-sharing and taxi service the world over so they can juice the prices. They're... not exactly reliable.

We're going to discuss population, but not the sheer volume of travel and consumption at the top? Look at who's contributing the greatest volume of the carbon footprint, even in the US, and it's top-heavy as hell. We're discussing this like 8 people don't control more than half of GDP. One of the fundamental problems is that these folks are in monopoly levels of influence but can't be bothered to prioritize the changes needed to actually clean up their value streams.

One of my ongoing questions is: When will they finally produce a mechanical version? If ergo's supposed to protect against RSI for heavy use, then strictly having rubber dome versions just ignores the customer's need.

Labeling it "Full Self Driving" and hiding behind the legalese in the confirmation screen? Absolutely moving fast and breaking things. Selling to the public like it's L5 when it's L2.

Prime's already under FTC consideration for its effects on the market. Adding this might very well be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Obligatory addition: we'd get more replication studies if 1.) replications were funded and 2.) replications had any affect on the market. I know people who've clearly, roundly failed to replicate studies, but get less support and attention than the study they're critiquing, which continues to be cited.

Psychology's really hard research. The problem is that people want acclaim and easy answers, but it's one of the most imprecise fields because people keep moving around and don't behave as you'd expect. Never trust a psych researcher whose priors always conveniently match their outputs.

Musk was a founder of OpenAI. He's not exactly lacking a spot for leverage, but, weirdly, stuff like this gets taken as a demonstration of expertise in a field as demanding as AI. "We're going to pursue truth" as defined by what? That's a pretty nebulous definition that will require operationalization.

... and for some reason the Fed just can't seem to get to the bottom of this mystery. It must be bank rates.

Yet, we're not seeing increased housing accessibility with all those "inflated wages." There's a concentration on real estate leverage and rents, however. Following that big injection of funds into the investment sector, we've got 1/7 of the stock moved into rent portfolios and increased large-scale land-lording. The problem isn't that more 'mid to upper' people have money; we have a pile of middle-men rent-seeking in every damned thing. Mid hasn't functionally had a significant cost of living increase in decades up to this point, and suddenly shifting a couple of points ain't what's killing affordability. Those price increases are rising along with profitability at the top. It's a squeeze racket from increasing consolidation.

... and if the goal is to concentrate that kind of power as is exercised there, here? Why use the same method? Seems more like "It'll be different because they'll be on *our* side"

I'll buy that Tik-Tok is pretty much a Trojan wrapped in a social network, sure. What I'm not clear about is why we need to give the Commerce Secretary the ability to ban it. If the problem is that Tik-Tok is violating user privacy and drag-netting information, then the sensible action is to enforce those limitations and rights across the entire market. It shouldn't have to wait for wide-spread political pressure to hit *one* app. The solution needs to be a technical and systemic one, not a political one. Of course, the clear motivation behind this is that plenty of *other* software does the same thing, but they don't want to disturb the domestic market. We'd let people prey on the populace for quite awhile, and now a foreign government is (ostensibly) exploiting the same loop-holes.

Musk's funded part of the development. As Cory Doctorow points out about this sort of thing, there's a vested interest in making this stuff seem super-powerful or scary. If it's broken, faulty, unreliable, and has blind spots, then it's less impressive. I *do* agree that it's a major threat, but it's moreso from the societal level for allowing people to flood all channels with unreliable, seemingly-persuasive disinformation. We're not prepared for that, but that doesn't mean it's because it's some hyper-intelligent malevolent entity.

Yet another space to financialize. (Keep paying thousands for that premium device experience, though.)