The engine has hundreds of parts but really only a couple of them are moving. That’s the beauty of electric motors.

It does not work like that.

The problem with such statements is the energy costs are nowhere near fixed. The amount of energy needed to play a song on my iPod shuffle through a wired headset is wildly different from the power needed to play that same song on my TV through my home theater equipment.

The same is true on the backend. The amount of power Google spends serving up a wildly popular band is way less than what they burn serving up an unknown Indy band’s video. That’s because the popular band’s music will have been pre-optimized by Google to save on bandwidth and computing resources. When something is popular, it’s in their best interests to reduce the computational costs (ie power consumption) associated with serving that content.

And look, their charities are even helping the children! Their own, but think of the children!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/us/elon-musk-charity.html#:~:text=Musk’s philanthropy has been haphazard,the largest in the country.

No, no, no, the CEO runs the charity free of charge. That allows the charity to pay for their flights to the Caribbean and it rents the CEO’s yacht there (at a discount of course) so the CEO can charitably give a talk about how being poor sucks to potential donors. Of course the charity needs to pay for fuel and food, that’s only fair for the value given by the wonderful presentation given by the CEO.

This of course is all done tax free. After all, we wouldn’t want to bankrupt these valuable charities.

Not a hypothetical… Here’s the Clinton foundation building a luxury hotel in Haiti… You know… For the aid workers or whatever.

https://www.cnn.com/2011/11/28/world/americas/haiti-hotel-clinton/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/11/haiti-and-the-failed-promise-of-us-aid

It’s about stopping centralized programs which would actually address public needs. “We don’t need universal healthcare, here’s a charity that helps people with the bubonic plague!”

And in the worst cases, it’s a grift for the wealthy. Where the charities exist to do scammy things like pay the founder to fly to luxury resorts to give a talk about why poverty is bad. Or to fund your family members solar manufacturing company. Or to put fuel into your church’s private jet so you don’t run the risk of catching demons from the public.

6. They lobby against government aid programs and increased taxes because “look, see, we are help the poors, no need for the government to get involved!”

English got fucked… hard… because so many of the spellings came from people that had weird goals.

Consider phial. Why do we spell it that way? Because some jackass decided that english needed to be more latiny and ph is more latiny than v. (or maybe it was greek? I don’t remember the exact etymology)

This is more than a “breakthrough” IMO. Manufacturers have been eyeing and researching solid states for a long time now. It’s not just a lab toy.

We have an ally next door, Jordan.

We’d probably have more allies if we dropped support.

What we are doing is equivalent to us deciding to support North Korea and being shocked that all of a sudden we lose regional support from just about everyone.

Israel, especially with an ongoing genocide, is toxic to stability and alliances. It isolates more than it gives strategic advantage.

If you’re interested, here’s a pretty good podcast episode that sat down with Dr. Janale Schmidt, a history professor who ultimately got the Robert e Lee statue melted down.

[It Could Happen Here] Melting Charlottesville’s Robert E Lee Statue #itCouldHappenHere https://podcastaddict.com/it-could-happen-here/episode/171742565 via @PodcastAddict

What I find fascinating about the whole story is she did not start with the goal of melting down the statue. In fact, this whole controversy was kicked off because the city of Charlottesville wanted to move the statue to a less prominent park, rather than having it in the center of the city.

She talks about the journey of the statue and why ultimately they came to the conclusion that destruction was the right decision (including the fact that they observed these statues turning into racist shrines after the initial incident).

But hey, he called you an asshole and said you need a come to Jesus moment. So that makes him cool right?

I believe that we should take the statues and move them into museums dedicated to history. We can’t change what happened before we got here, but we can clean up leftover shit and make the future a better place to live.

Let me share 2 practical real reasons why that’s a bad idea.

1. there are a LOT of these statues and these things are HEAVY. A responsible museum won’t accept this stuff because there’s simply not the room for it.

2. The people that will accept it end up being the last people that should. Like stone mountain Park, which enshrines and worships these racist assholes.

The very real problem is by having and concentrating this “artwork”, you create meeting spaces for white supremacists. Because ask yourself, WHO is going to and wants to experience the confederacy memorials?

“Stop turning museums into the attic for your aunt’s racist junk”

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The cost has already been paid. Even small farming communities have rail line access that’s mostly been abandoned because the line owners switched business models.

As for flexibility, again, that’s mostly an issue with how rail line management has evolved. From shorter more frequent trains to ultra long infrequent trains. Mostly to cut the cost of staffing.

The solution is simple, nationalize the rail service. Put it under the USPS and have them figure out scheduling to optimize the speed of goods shipping.

The current state of the rail system is entirely due to the monopolistic nature of ownership. The incentive is to increase prices as much as possible while shipping to the fewest stops possible. Profit motives are in direct conflict with generalized shipping.

The reason trunking works today is the public nature of roads. Well, why shouldn’t rail lines be equally public? We practically gave the property away to the current rail owners with the notion it was for the public good… They’ve failed that.

And frankly, I’m really ok with this.

Trains should be the backbone for shipping. They are WAY more fuel efficient, like 3 to 4x more efficient than shipping by truck. Rail requires far less maintenance. And there’s always the option install a 3rd rail and use electricity instead of fossil fuels to ship.

The only solution is a bigger truck.

We need to get rid of the commie laws requiring special licensing (CDL, Communist driver’s license) for freedom trucks.

I mean IANAL but in a rational world there would be a minimum of grievance requirement before being able to file such a lawsuit.

There is, that’s what the discovery phase of the lawsuit is for. That’s what the dismissal phase of the lawsuit is for. The issue isn’t that these things don’t exist, it’s that these things are the most expensive parts of trial.

Imagine the reverse case where you find out someone has started a campaign to keep you from getting hired anywhere. You know they are doing this because someone tips you off on this happening.

You do not have enough evidence to prove that this is happening in court at the moment of the lawsuit but you are damn sure that the person you are suing has a trail of documents proving your allegation and if they don’t the third parties that didn’t hire you likely do.

If you find enough evidence you can get the person to settle before trial. If you don’t find any evidence you can either go to trial and lose or simply drop the lawsuit.

The unfortunate thing is gathering minimal evidence, which really is the job of lawyers beyond just knowing the law, is a time consuming task for someone (Usually multiple someones) that is pretty expensive.

Now, to the actual real problem. It’s actually 2 fold.

1. Gigantic lawfirms gobble up basically all lawyers that have any sort of talent. This drys up the pool of lawyers available to represent people and consequently drives up prices, for everyone. These lawfirms can keep increasing their prices because their rich clients will pay for it and the smaller lawfirms that would represent your case can similarly raise prices because there is no competition.

2. These gigantic lawfirms and big companies when they sue take a TON of time and resources from the court. You can expect 100 or 1000 issues being filed by one of these lawsuits just at the very beginning. They apply a “Well, there’s a 90% chance you’ll win without these motions, but there’s a 95% chance you’ll win with them. So we’ll file whatever we can to make sure every single avenue is explored. Oh, and we bill you for the hours we spent with our law ghouls scouring legal books in the dungeon.”

These 2 issues mean the courts are constantly flooded, any lawsuit (especially against someone with the resources) takes a long time to resolve, the cost will be astronomical on both sides because the legal team on the other side needs to respond to every court filing, and finally the number of available lawyers will go up because there is little competition forcing them to have lower prices.

The reform we need, if anything, is some sort of penalization on these giant firms for wasting time. Perhaps applying sanctions to the other side if it’s found that they spent 90% of their filings for stuff they never used.

You don’t have to get a lawyer, but you do have to respond to the lawsuit. That is, participation is not optional.

Now, there is protection from the “bad haircut” lawsuits. It’s called “Vexatious litigation”. If someone sues you for a bad haircut, and they’ve sued others for it as well, you can ultimately seek sanctions (including covering your legal fees) against them and their lawyers. That’s why you don’t generally see bad haircut lawsuits.

Further, if the lawsuit is so bad that it’s “bad haircut” level, it’s possible to get sanctions against the lawyer that filed it for wasting the courts time.

But again, participation isn’t optional here. You HAVE to respond to a lawsuit, you can’t just shut your eyes and hope it goes away.

The other route that could work is public civil defenders. It requires the government to properly fund and staff, but having a legal firm sponsored by the state willing and ready to take up cases would mean that the private entities can still get their lawyers but they can’t steam roll over someone that doesn’t make $500k a year.

Of course, there could be corruption issues. I wouldn’t want the lawyer on my case being drinking buds with the lawyer on the opposing side.

You get sanctioned and maybe even thrown in jail.

You HAVE to participate and pray that the judge in the case is willing to listen to you arguments for dismissal. If you don’t do that much a judge is free to issue punishments for not participating. Sanctioning can be as bad as fines but could further be things like “Ok, you’ve failed to participate so we are going to assume you are guilty” (Which, btw, is what happened to Alex Jones. He did not participate in discovery in any of his cases and so got a default judgements in multiple cases).

If the judge decides that there is any sort of merit (and the standard for that is really low. Cases almost never get dismissed) you enter the most expensive part of trial, pretrial and discovery. This is where both sides get to see each others documents on the case and lawyers spend countless hours filing pretrial motions with the court. This is something that can literally last years and even decades, especially in civil matters which take a back seat on the docket to criminal cases. Generally speaking, this is why people and companies tend to settle. It’s a cost saving measure because making you way all the way to trial can easily dwarf the cost of settlement.

This also, btw, is why patent trolls are so effective. They’ll often ask for an amount low enough that most companies will just pay the fees yet high enough to keep them in business. Even if the patents themselves are potentially invalid.

Yes, it doesn’t make sense. In fact, a big issue is that we don’t have any sort of public civil defenders (we absolutely should). So for most individuals lawyers are prohibitively expensive. You basically have to either be rich, be lucky enough to have a case that aligns with a charitable legal organization’s goals, or luck out on a legal firm deciding to take your case pro bono for their own reasons.