Officially made it home!!
I have Velcro cats attached to me, and have made the executive decision to unpack absolutely nothing and instead immediately start playing Pokopia. 😂
If you’re roughly my age, it’s wild to reflect on the optimism for the future Americans felt when Obama was elected — young Americans spontaneously took to the streets to celebrate! — and contrast with what we face today. The falloff over the past 18 years is hard to process.
As I said, all the current problems can be rectified, but it will take a large investment of time and money, much of which may not be recouped for a long time (development of charging networks across the western plains and rural areas). This is as big as building the national highway system.
“Readily available” technology in a general sense and “readily available” in terms of actual consumer use (in particular the easy availability of usable charging stations) are two different things. I don’t deny the technology is great, but the batteries lose capacity too quickly.
And now I’m officially on the plane back to Detroit. It’s been nice, vacation. I will miss you. 😭
Very true. I’d bet it’s still tens of thousands of families, at least, that go on road-trips to the national parks every summer, from every corner of the country. The American Road Trip is a cultural icon.
If LLMs were treated as a niche technology for a subset of work, instead of being shoehorned into every aspect of life without consent, you wouldn't have people ready to join the Butlerian Jihad Vanguard.
There is a kind of self-centered chauvinism in the way tech people think of "work" and "use."
Like, there are so many stories of people who decided to rent an EV for their vacation going on panicked searches for a charging station and finding them all broken. If there’s going to be a full transition to EVs, that just cannot happen.
Yeah; it works great if you’re in the right areas, I won’t deny that. The concept in general is great, but the infrastructure just isn’t there in so many places, and isn’t maintained in others.
Yupppp. 🫤
Yeah exactly. Cinderella was basically reduced to being a maid of all work, which was pretty much the crappiest work a woman could get (that wasn’t sex work, etc.), and she wasn’t even getting paid for it. 🫤
As a human who lives on this planet and would like to continue doing so, I fully support the transition to green energy and away from fossil fuels. But as things currently stand w/r/t EV technology and infrastructure, you can pry the keys to my hybrid from my cold, dead hands. 🫤
Additionally, an aspect most people forget is that the electricity powering your EV still comes from somewhere. We would need a massive increase in energy production to accommodate an all-EV world.
These aren’t insurmountable obstacles, but they require time and significant investment to mitigate, and we aren’t there yet. A significant percentage of EV owners report that their next purchase will be an ICE or hybrid vehicle, and there are many good reasons for that.
Then add cities on top of it; lots of people just don’t have a place to charge their EV overnight, and that makes a HUGE difference to whether it’s a viable option.
Distance travel is another obstacle; people don’t want to spend 45min+ charging their car when they could have spent 5min pumping gas.
It would be nice if this would work, but if this happened today, it would be a disaster. We don’t have the infrastructure to do a complete rollover to EVs, and the technology still isn’t good enough to replace ICE/hybrid vehicles. Resale value of EVs is in the garbage because nobody wants them.
Mmhmm. Like, in a purely economic sense, a character like Elizabeth Bennet would have been in a similar circumstance if her father had died before she married. Technically part of the upper class by birth, but cash poor. Cinderella obviously had it worse, but the general shape of things is similar.
This thread makes an interesting point, but I think it’s also worth remembering that if she hadn’t married the prince in the end, her impoverishment would not have been temporary. It seems like women *could* inherit and hold property, but it all went to her stepmother at her father’s death.
an orange cat looks truly exhausted after “daylight savings” stole an hour from him
I really needed that hour but they stole it
Refusing to answer the question is answering the question, and it’s funny these people don’t realize that. Either lie and say you voted for Kamala (this option seems never to occur to them) or understand that “I don’t want to talk about it” is in fact an answer, and you will be treated accordingly.
Yesterday I filmed several baby birds walking across a street directly at my camera and asked Bluesky to suggest music
Several dozen folks did
Some even dubbed music over the original clip.
I haven't been able to get this out of my head.
So I give you
A Bluesky exclusive:
Reservoir Ducks
🐣 🪶
We know a lot is going on right now, but we just realized that:
cabinet/board/panel = things made of wood
cabinet/board/panel = terms for organizations
Olympic curling: elaborate sweeping operation to tweak the path of the thrown rock, constant screaming, plus an earth-shaking controversy about tapping the rocks post-release to influence direction
Paralympic curling: just huckin it down there, don't see what the big deal is, works just fine
we need more places where he can exist in public without being expected to buy anything, not fewer
Time moves in only one direction, carrying each moment into permanent memory the instant it passes. Only this present breath, this heartbeat, this now, holds the treasure of genuine joy.
If I had a nickel for every time Franz Ferdinand was involved in the precursor events of a world war, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice
And it’s killing our fresh water supplies. People don’t realize how much water it takes to cool these machines. They should not be draining our Great Lakes to do this. #AIIsKillingOurPlanet
Please avoid using it if you can.
www.forbes.com/sites/cindyg....
happy international women's day
women are great—more people should be them, there's always time
I think my favorites are the tiny kitty duck (which was the first one I found) and the wizard duck keychain. 😁
Took a picture of the whole fam! Meet my collection of cruise ducks! 😁
(The one with the inner tube is one of the ones I brought as souvenirs for our group; the rest I found in various places.)
