There is absolutely no safety benefit to having an AM radio built into your car. I could not have been clearer about that in my post. There is absolutely nothing a car's AM radio can do that an emergency AM radio in the back of your trunk can't do just as well or better.

The only reason to insist on having AM radio in a car is so people can listen to it while they're driving. Either for political reasons because billionaire right-wing extremists have taken over AM radio and have for some time or just plain old economics because a bunch of people make their living off of a captive audience of people driving places in a car.

So you can fuck off with your straw man argument that because I'm a left winger I should always back government regulation that appears to be for safety on the face of it. There's this magical thing called nuance that can be used to make decisions that are more complicated than black and white. You ought to try it sometime. But being a right winger you're probably physiologically incapable. I mean that. Multiple studies have shown that right wingers have overactive fear responses and while it's possible to train that out of them our civilization does the exact opposite. So it's all about the knee jerk reactions.

It is kind of funny that you follow my posts enough that you recognize me and know I am a left winger. I frankly have no idea who you are I can only tell that you're a right winger based on the particulars of your post and the rather nasty tone in it. It's that overly high and mighty tone that right winger is always take combined with the love of discovering hypocrisy without actually understanding what hypocrisy is enough that you could figure out that there wasn't any actual hypocrisy in my position. Did you vote Trump all three times or just the two when there was a woman up on the ticket?

In order to get the numbers that they want it they have to include break-ins not just thefts. Yeah 24/7 surveillance will make it easier to catch somebody who steals your car. We won't do it of course because why the fuck would we but it does make it easier.

But you can't get the numbers from the study with just stolen cars and if somebody breaks into your car no having all that surveillance isn't really going to help. It doesn't help that they know your license plate when your window gets broken in.

As for why the drop in crime besides the fact that crime is way down and keeps going down right around this time the police did a huge huge push going after car break-ins. A shitload of manpower was put to the task that's all this is. Yeah if you want to spend a boatload of money on police to keep your car from being broken in you can do that but the window is going to be a lot cheaper than the taxes you're going to pay for the army of cops needed to enforce that law at the level they're at.

Incidentally they won't be able to keep this up forever so eventually the crime numbers will go back up and when they do I'm sure that we'll get another article somewhere where the police talk about how crime is on the rise and they need more money...

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm so fucking tired of being lied to. And in such fucking obvious ways.

Younger generations gave up on radio because it sucks. One company bought virtually everything. AM radio is mostly right wing talk shows now. FM radio is the same handful slop music shoved in our faces whether we like it or not pretending to be local radio while owned by clear channel.

You can't shitify a product that much for that long and have anyone give a shit. Who the hell cares if I can get a radio station from thousands of miles away when it's the exact same content because it's from the exact same mega corporation?

And as for emergencies just buy a radio. Don't force me to spend an extra couple hundred bucks on my car radio or more if you're buying a electric car because of the Herculean engineering task needed to make them work around electric car motors.

We spent the last 50 years building out infrastructure for radio. It's called a cell phone. You don't need AM radio in your car anymore.

Yeah sure go ahead and have one of those little radios that you crank and run off batteries. You can even keep on in your car if you want. They are cheap.

But I don't need a bunch of extra expense in my car because a bunch of politicians want to keep talk radio around because it's political useful to them and a bunch of broadcasters want to keep it around because that's how they make their living.

I noticed that people are all in on the market until it's costing them money and then all of a sudden they get real socialist real fast and start running to the government to protect them. The farmers have been doing that for a while. All the small farmers are long since gone because after decades of engineered recessions those guys have long since lost their land to Rich assholes but those Rich assholes keep pretending they're small farmers to get your taxpayer money. It's called the Red Barn illusion.

You get a lot of people with a lot of different views some of which are just fucking stupid and they're only there because the other side wants to murder them.

The Republican party is basically composed of three groups. You've got the racists, you've got the religious lunatics and you have the ultra wealthy who want to screw us all over. That makes them a lot more cohesive and it's less obvious when there is corruption because being corrupt doesn't conflict with the goals of any of those three groups.

The Democrat party is everybody else. That's because America has first passed the post winner take all voting and that means you've got two parties because if you don't you just have one party and a bunch of small parties that keep losing elections.

In the Democrat party when the party is in good shape this kind of corruption is irrelevant because it doesn't make it very far. You'll notice that it's the Democrat party machine in San Francisco that's all in but they're not really going to be able to do much of anything at a state level let alone in national level by themselves. The corrupt elements of the democratic party will partner with the entire Republican party to screw you over.

But if you took out the Republican party the corrupt elements of the democratic party would be pretty fucking weak. It is only by crossing the aisle that they become a problem. This is how you get fuckers like Kirsten Sinema and Fetterment. And they are a problem only because so many people vote Republican that the Democrats have weak majorities if they ever get one.

Too long didn't read, stop voting Republican and the problem solves itself

You have to put up with shitty software for at least 5 or 10 years while your guys catch up.

As crappy as Windows 11 is Teams mostly works now. Microsoft kept getting their asses handed to them by other software companies and because they have limitless money from the office and windows monopolies they can just keep plugging away until they get it which they did.

Other software is still better but teams has finally achieved good enough. And good enough is always good enough.

When you start I new a software package out it is not going to be good enough. So you are the pour money into it until it is or you just force everybody to use it until eventually it gets fixed.

Or you stop using it and you go back to the Monopoly from a nation that is rapidly becoming fascist and hostile to your Nation...

The answer is no. Moving up the work hours would mean fewer work hours available. Americans are pushing 50 hours a week on average. You have to work longer hours because pay had keeps going down but rent keeps going up.

The only option is to keep increasing your productivity and hope you get enough to keep your head just barely above water.

If you want to do away with daylight savings time you're going to have to do away with our current anarco capitalist system. You can't have a few nice things in a terrible world. You are going to have all the nice things or you have none of the nice things.

You have to get your kids up and make sure they get dressed and get to school. And you have to do that early because you have to get to work.

Now we could build a civilization around something other than work especially given how much automation we keep doing but fuck that right?

In a non-commercial setting. You can do all the research you want at public universities I mean assuming you can get them funded.

And you can run whatever software you want at home.

The laws are targeted specifically at businesses who are chomping at the bit to abuse new tech.

It is funny to me to watch the centrists actually doing something about potential job losses while the left wing sits around with their thumbs up their asses. I am absolutely a lefty and I'm really sick and tired of how useless my side has become and how we have completely given up on the working class.

You can't do things with a simple majority because one half of our political party, the Republican party, are batshit crazy fascists that we cannot trust with the power of a simple majority. And they consistently win Congress even though they consistently do not get enough votes to win Congress both due to voter suppression and gerrymandering.

So no we can't do things with a simple majority we need a supermajority because we need to put the brakes on a bunch of crazy fascists who are busy screwing us all over and we know it but like an abused spouse we just can't quit them

Bernie is usually correct and nobody really listens to him. The left wing has become pretty fucking useless. What he needs to be doing is focusing on voter suppression and that's what the left-wing everywhere needs to be doing. But that doesn't get the headlines so here we are.

What Bernie is trying to do is get attention to a movement because he's trying to do what worked in the '60s. This isn't a 1960s the fascists adapted to the tactics Bernie Sanders is using back in the mid-70s and he never figured that out. In his defense neither did anyone else on the left wing. I only figured it out a few years ago and fuck knows nobody listens to me.

Obama figured it out. That's why he formed his own organizations for combating voter suppression so that he could win his elections. But he's kind of a selfish little fuck so once he had what he wanted he didn't really do much more. And he left the Republicans dismantle what he built. Doesn't help that Hillary was happily letting that happen because she was undermining any potential opponents because people hate Hillary Clinton and always have and she knew she wouldn't get the nomination otherwise.

I've said it before but every single system designed to protect you has failed.

Too many voters are obsessed with tough on crime. It's politically impossible.

Go look at some midterm ads right now attacking the Democrats and every single one of them will be going after them for either being radical socialists or weak on crime or both.

The Republicans do the same thing every time, they make a law often one that's already there with a few extremely minor changes that does something like make it illegal to be a pedophile or something when it's obviously already is, than they add something in it the Democrats can't vote for usually banning birth control or criminalizing abortion or something. The Democrats vote against the law because of course they do it's got a poison pill in it and then the Republicans run on such and such politician voted to let predators attack your children or something.

I am older than dirt and they have been doing this bullshit since I was a kid and since before that I'm sure and voters always fall for it.

Keep in mind that only gets the Republicans to about 45% but voter suppression can make up the other 6% and winner take all voting means they can win elections without winning elections. What some might call cheating... Or election interference if you're kind of dumb and don't just want to use the existing term voter suppression.

So anyway the point is the Democrats are constantly walking a minefield where they can't just ban things that sane and intelligent people don't want. And the Republicans are just fascists at this point.

It is funny watching a bunch of old people showing up at Community meetings where data centers are being rammed through and watching those people realize that after 50 years of undermining democracy for stupid reasons they no longer have a proper functioning democracy so they don't really have a say in anything. I've seen a couple of cases where people are just dumbfounded because the data centers are getting built and there's nothing they can do about it because they're too stupid to stop voting for people who are going to let the data center is be built so their communities are just fucked.

But during the elections they'll get scared of some trans girls or violent video games or whatever moral panic there is or they will get scared of the socialists or they'll get confused by advertisements about week on crime and then they will once again vote against what they actually want. And again that's only about 45% of the country that's that stupid but voter suppression works.

But after 10 million compute hours it's still setting up the board.

In 2026 you can just say democrats. We don't have to pretend the Republican party or anything else but batshit crazy religious lunatics and fascist psychopaths anymore. The Democratic party isn't perfect but we are so far past both sides bad at this point that you can just say Democrats and we aren't going to get upset. This isn't 1993 we don't have to pretend partisanship matters anymore.

As for the Democrats fixing shit not a chance. Not because they aren't going to try but because holy living mother of Christ where the hell do you begin? They are going to have their hands full, assuming Trump ever leaves office, just trying to keep everything from collapsing. And in 2 years the dipshit voters who put a pedophile rapist in the white house twice are going to vote Republican because the Democrats won't have fixed every single fucking problem in their lives that they caused by voting Republican.

70% of baby boomers voted for Trump and 65% of the older Gen x voted for him. There are days when I'm not at my kindest and I really wish the Boomer remover had done its job. I also wish the American left Wing would stop blowing off young men and calling them small dick mediocre rapists... It would be really nice if the left wing would stop bitching about patriarchy long enough to remember that not every single dude on the planet is a fucking rapist pedophile and that maybe they ought to do something about the fucking economy and jobs or at least mention it in passing in between blurting out dumb shit like defund the police and then having to spend 30 minutes explaining what the fuck that means to nobody in particular

Basically the center is too busy trying to fix the messes caused by the right wing and the left are too busy playing around with their dumb hobby bullshit. We don't have a chance of breaking up any of the trusts.

Although private equity is made the healthcare system bad enough that the doctors who have real money and real time for lobbying or starting to step in because it's affecting them directly.

Because there's less choice every year. They don't have to care about what you want or what you think. Because it's so much easier to just be the only game in town and if you don't like it well you can't even go fuck off to the mountains because they own that land too.

I remember reading a post from a guy who moved from super liberal Oregon to the land of the free that is Texas expecting it to be a lot cooler because there would be less government regulation and he'd be able to do all the cool stuff he wanted to do like drive his ATVs and go hunting and shit. Only to find out that any of the land worth doing any of that on was already owned by other people with a lot more money than him and there was fuck all for him to do in Texas. You didn't have to worry about following the rules when you were out in a public park because there weren't any. At least not the kind he was used to it from Oregon.

I guess what I'm trying to get out here is you don't realize what you lost until it's gone. We lost antitrust law enforcement and we still haven't realized what we lost...