Oh, for fuck's sake, you still don't get it... I'll make it just that much more simple for you...

Just what the fuck good would it do to "win" if, in order to do so, I have to become, or the people who are supposed to be on my side become, the enemy? The malice and hatred* you lot have decided to direct towards me would still be malice and hatred if it had a "D" appended to the end just like the "R" signifies now." For whatever their faults, the democrats are not actively working to harm me. the republicans are. If the democrats have to surrender and become republicans in fact even if not in name to "win," I still lose. It is therefore in my best interest for that not to happen.

* And you can call it "playing the victim" all you want. I call it: "I know how to use the internet and television. I see what is being said about me and mine by MAGA. I see the legislative and administrative and sometimes physical attacks. I see you ramping all that up since the first of this month to drive your point home. And I am under no illusions about the sort of reception I would receive if I were ever fool enough to try to break bread with a red-hatter."

Okay. So on the off chance that is a genuine and good-faith but misguided attempt to be helpful or insightful and not just more trolling...

1)
I have never said the democratic party is perfect. And I defy you to find me saying so anywhere. But when the entire neighborhood is burning down and the firefighters are out to lunch... or they're the ones who started the blaze in the first place; one does not concern themselves with relative trivialities like the clutter in the garage or even the Lego bricks lurking in the living room carpet.

2)
The tl;dr of everything you wrote is that if I would just give up all of my values and principles, capitulate to the enemy, and hope that the same people who've made it perfectly clear that they see me as sub-human and who want to see me run out of society and the country or, more ideally, to just die; will... what? Be merciful enough if I surrender to let me live on and hang around as a second-class citizen without the rights that are supposed to go with it and without any say in how I am governed?

And that's supposed to be some kind of "win" for me and mine? I'm supposed to be happy, or even just satisifed, with that? Would YOU just meekly lie down for the slaughter? Would cheerfully YOU accept forever being a second-class not-quite-citizen, at best? Or would you go down fighting instead?

I'd wager very damned few apps are ever distributed via sideloading. meta makes Facebook and Messenger available via sideloading, mainly to get around some locked-down non-Alphabet Android devices, but for the vast majority of users, if it's not on the default app store on their device, it might as well not exist.

> spare me the MAGA accusations. I much prefer a
> government with a lot of Democrats in it, even if I
> have issues with their science denial

Well, if you don't want MAGA accusations, maybe you should not be simping for them by parroting the MAGA narrative that democrats, and not republicans, are the party of science denialism. I mean... FFS... have you SEEN the bullshit coming out of RFK, "doctor" Oz, the HHS department, the slashing of science and research grants, and all their shenanigans with the EPA? But of course you have seen all of that. Your talking point is just more of the typical DARVO, like you people habitually engage in with not a whit of self-awareness.

And yet these very same people who very obviously want the poor to suffer and die ALSO have this weird obsession with the narrative they made up that the world's population is actually collapsing and we all need to make more babies to save the human race; hence Dobbs, their attacks against LGBT people, forcing all that bible crap into the schools, et cetera.

Make that make sense.

> like a deer suddenly darting onto the road

You don't seem to get just how dynamic and chaotic cities are. So far as a self-driving AI responding to unexpected obstacles is concerned; a deer suddenly darting into traffic on road up by Yosemite or Tahoe is really no different from some crackhead suddenly darting into traffic on Market Street or Van Ness... except the crackhead is lighter and will do less damage to the car if they collide. In fact, given that forrest roads tend not to have street parking, sidewalks, parklets, pedestrians, construction, light poles, and so many other things obstructing the car's view of what may dart out in front of it in the city; I would wager good money that the crackhead is the harder problem for the engineers to solve. The AI advantage being, that once they've solved the crackhead problem, by default they've solved the deer problem as well.

Ha! You should switch at a Mazda. They got it soooo right with the current 3. The central screen is reasonably sized; big enough but not huge. And it's not a touchscreen! They put in this wheel thing that you can spin, shift from side-to-side, and press down, to control CarPlay. It's right down there where I reach to shift anyway. AND they put the volume, favorites, and other infotainment controls down there too. They actually THOUGHT ABOUT THE UI, unlike just about every other auto manufacturer out there! Using that wheel took about an hour to get used to, and now I'm hooked. Also, the climate controls are all physical and clicky. And everything that belongs on the steering column and stalks is there and not in the screen's menus.

Never mind contracts. Type an address or phone number into a chat and, congrats, it is now PII, protected under the CCPA... not a contract, a law. And Californians have the right under that law to prevent it being shared in the first place and to have it deleted, should we so desire. A concerted effort to send PII, spam out opt-out and deletion orders, and then spamming out the ensuing enforcement claims might be a good way to stop up the works and screw with this overreaching judge and his delusions of grandeur.

Enron also didn't have data subject to privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Want to even speculate as to how many users OpenAI has? How many of those users have at some point entered PII into a GPT session, even if they didn't realize it at the time? How many users have entered PII into apps that use OpenAI services of models? There is a whole world... no, an entire GALAXY... of difference between Enron's accounting ledgers and literally everything that anyone has typed into a ChatGPT (or services that use GPT on the backend) window.

lol... I think that's mostly due to the fact that it's a Honda Accord. You just can't kill those things. You could torch the interior, strip the paint, let the steel rust away, and bury what's left in the mud for a year; and when you dig the thing up, hose it off, and give it fresh oil and gas, and it would still run plenty well enough to get you from point A to point B for another hundred thousand miles. In a million years, when civilization is long-fallen and the only survivors are cockroaches and Keith Richards, they'll probably be driving around the wasteland in an Accord.

Yes, but the difference is not very significant and can be made up for, in either direction, with driving style.

And driving a car with a slushbox just sucks. With a real transmission, the car does exactly what I want when I want it to. With an auto? It's like playing that old telephone game from when we were kids. You make your decision and pedal inputs, and maybe in half a second, but usually at least a full second or more, the transmission gets the message and usually... but only usually and in some driving situations just maybe or hopefully... interprets your requirements correctly and spends another half-second putting itself in the hopefully-appropriate gear and then FINALLY you get the power and torque you wanted. It's a fucking tedious, frustrating, and all-around shitty and miserable driving experience across the board.

The only automatic transmissions I've ever driven that didn't suck complete ass were the PDG gearbox when I rented a 911, and Nissan's DSG transmission in the GT-R I rented. And those were weekend rentals for the hell and fun of it. Neither one would really be suitable as a daily driver. And it's debatable as to how automatic those two gearboxes really are anyway.

Nah. I got inb4thetariffs this year with one more decent 6S MT hatchback that's both fun and practical. I'm hanging onto this car with a death grip until I go electric and all the instant low-end torque that entails. And even then, I'll probably keep a manual MX-5 or BRZ/86 as a second car for the fun of the "closer to the metal" driving experience that I doubt even an Ioniq 5 N will match.

Well, under some conditions an unique movie car *would* be copyrightable. The case where the car is effectively a character is just one of the ways you can argue a car to be copyrightable.

Copyright is supposed to protect original creative expression, not ideas or functional items, which may be protected by *other* forms of intellectual property like trademark or patents. This is because copyright protects *creative expression*. It doesn't protect ideas, or functional items. A car is a functional item, so *normally* it isn't protected. But to the degree a car in your movie has unique expressive elements that are distinct from its function, those elements can be copyrighted.

But the plaintiff still wanted to claim that he owned the design of the car, so his lawyer looked for a precedent that established that cars can sometimes be copyrighted even though they are functional items, and he found the Batmobile case, where the Batmobile was ruled to be a prop that was *also* a character. Because he cited this case, the judge had to rule whether the Batmobile ruling's reasoning applied to this car, and he decided it didn't. The car may be unique and iconic, but that's not enough to make it a character.

I doubt it can be done for even ten billion. I mean, sure, you can get a spaceship into orbit and point it out Mars. We've done that enough times now. But putting people in that ship and having them arrive at Mars without them being irradiated corpses, that's where the money will go. And then you've got to get them down and back up out of a non-unsubstantial gravity well, and again, get them back to Earth without them being irradiated corpses.

No way any of that can be done for ten billion. Ten billion is the number the project manager feeds to Congress hoping they'll buy the sunk cost fallacy when you come back five years later with a bill that's three or four times that high.

I think the hard part is surviving on Mars for any extended length of time without suffering severe radiation-induced illnesses. Heck, surviving even getting their and back has the same issue. We've basically never gone further than a week or so's round trip to the Moon, with only part of that outside of Earth's magnetic field. Now you're talking years (at least 2.5 years round trip), and while for no other reason than the sheer awesomeness of humans walking on Mars, there are vast technical and biological challenges. Any kind of shielding is going to add significantly to the spacecraft's mass, and we still build these things on the ground, even if we build them in modules.

None of it is impossible, but the costs, even for a nation like the US, are enormous, and ultimately will require more than just stripping NASA's other resources (which add enormous value on their own). With Trump basically, through intense idiocy, ignorance and malice, fucking the US economy over, those huge expenditures are going to take more than just turning NASA into the Mars guys at the cost of everything else.

Sadly, based on experience I think you are wrong. Employees who screw up are often not fired, or are replaced with employees just as bad.

There's a reason there's a common saying that "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys." It's because it's very common for employers to accept mediocre or even poor work if the employees doing it are cheap enough. I'm not anti AI -- not even generative AI. I think with AI's ability to process and access huge volumes of data, it has tremendous potential in the right hands. But generative AI in particular has an irresistible appeal to a managerial culture that prefers mediocrity when it's cheap enough.

Instead of hiring someone with expensive thinking skills to use AI tools effectively and safely, you can just have your team of monkeys run an AI chat bot. Or you can fire the whole team and be the monkey yourself. The salary savings are concrete and immediate; the quality risks and costs seem more abstract because they haven't happened yet. Now as a manager it's your job to guide the company to a successful future, but remember you're probably mediocre at your job. Most people are.

According to economics, employers stop adding employees when the marginal productivity of the next employee drops to zero. What this means is that AI *should* create an enormous demand for people with advanced intellectual skills. But it won't because managers don't behave like they do in neat abstract economic models. What it will do is eliminate a lot of jobs where management neither desires nor rewards performance, because they don't want anything a human mind can, at this point, uniquely provide.