I have no sympathy for the developers and managers and salespeople who fully knew the nature of the evil they were aiding and abetting. Also, no sympathy for the owners and investors.

But the lower-level people probably had less knowledge of, and less ability to figure out, how evil the product / service is. Also, many of them were likely choosing between working for an evil company, and losing healthcare, food for their kids, and educational opportunities. I DO have some sympathy for folks in that position.

"Flock on, Flock off"

I really do hope that they Flock off, but cockroaches are perennial survivors so I'm not terribly optimistic.

"Journey" is often used as a metaphor for activities such as the "completing a work task however long it might take" which the post I was responding complained about. Viol8 was insisting on the literal, physical-world meaning of the word, so I decided to tease him a bit.

Probably shouldn't add that I tangentially like the sig, though perhaps it could be a "car stolen for parts"?

The actual theft occurred so long ago that prosecution is probably statute-barred. And they've been stripping it all along - they just increased the rate of tearing it apart by a couple orders of magnitude. ;-)

Sub in "psychotic bastard older brother" and "wicked syphilis-ridden whore of an older stepsister" and I'd be onside with the change.

I'm not familiar with the source; but casting AI as a hero would seem to me to be somewhere between befuddled and batshit crazy. To be fair though, it would have been hard to predict what's happened with AI. Not so hard to predict what's happened under Trump though - some of us did pretty much predict it.

I'm not nearly as proactive as I might be when it comes to submitting and vetting potential stories here. I suspect that many others are in the same boat. So I try not to be too hard on the editors over story quality, when AFAICT digging up and upvoting good ones is supposed to be OUR job.

May the 'phors be with you! ;-)

Sorry, that should have been 50 times lower than FM broadcast.

I feel obligated to mention the Wall of Voodoo song "Mexican Radio": https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Entirely agree with your overall sentiment, but humbly submit that your "$5 worth of metal" may be a massive underestimate. The electronics that drive such powerful motors produce HUGE quantities of RFI, which is usually pretty broad in spectrum and therefore overlaps the AM band. I suspect that to make an AM radio work decently in such a vehicle there would be changes needed to the drive electronics, the wiring, and possibly the motors themselves - as well as the radio.

What I'm about to say is a totally a finger-in-the-wind wild-assed-guess: I wouldn't be surprised if the all-in COST of making an AM radio work decently in an EV was at least into the hundreds of dollars.

The switching electronics in EVs produce huge amounts of broad-spectrum "hash" well into the AM broadcast band, which is about 50 times lower in frequency than AM broadcast. This can overwhelm even the best-designed AM radios.

Also, Amplitude Modulation is much more sensitive to interference than the Frequency Modulation which is used in FM broadcasting and DAB. So not only are FM and DAB frequencies much farther away from the emissions that EVs generate, they are also inherently much more immune to that interference than AM is.

It's probably worth pointing out that if you turn your EV off, an AM radio will probably work just fine in it. So even in EVs, AM would still be good to have in an emergency situation.

As others here have explained, AM broadcasting is the best way to disseminate information over large geographic areas when modern comms infrastructure fails. The simplest receievers consist of very few components and don't even require a battery. Even (low-power) transmitters - useful at the neighbourhood level - are remarkably easy to build and can be cobbled together almost out of junk junk by a decent electronics hobbyist.

AM spectrum should remain available for unencrypted over-the-air transmission. Its commercial content should be made relevant and interesting as an incentive to keep people listening and broadcasters broadcasting. This would ensure that it remains available in emergencies when more complex tech with many more moving parts throws in the towel.

I applaud the AM Radio for Every Vehicle act and wish it success. I would like to see it pushed farther, to support a renaissance of commercial AM broadcasting and listening. The cost of a full-blown continent-wide AM radio revival probably wouldn't be much more than a rounding error in the utterly stupid amount of resources and electrical power we're now spending on AI and other data centres.

Yup, the username checks out.

Or how about we all just park the time half-way between Standard and DST, and never change it again?

If you don't want your kids living in the dark just change the administration.

FTFY

I don't want to "imagine" it - I want to discover it empirically. I want to see him and every well-known adult member of his family - except for Mary - doxxed repeatedly until the only way they can talk privately is either in person or via two tin cans and a long piece of string.

The only gaps I want to see closed are the ones between the upper and lower blades of the guillotines around the necks of all these fuckers. Every single one of them is a traitor to humanity.

Their willingness to take advantage of a surveillance technology which is still being widely and popularly condemned says something. I'm just not sure what that "something" is.