In my area last year I was legitimately looking at all options. Toyota lot was the biggest disappointment. They had 1 RAV4 that was completely stripped, cloth seats, barely any features etc. but somehow the payments were still $150 more per month than leases on better equipped EVs at that point (prior to the federal tax credit expiration). I asked the Toyota guy if he had any other competitive options and he tried to tell me I should get a massive truck (Tundra).
This continues to baffle me. Europe, the US, and likely even Japan was never going to be able to win the race to the bottom on price. China understands its supply chain and mineral strengths and has optimized its entire production towards churning out good (or good enough) EVs at scale.
Still, the US could continue to wall China out of its market with massive tariffs while also promoting alternative cheaper vehicle options, a large portion of which should and could be EVs. But the US hasn’t even done that… Domestic manufacturers have run screaming from EVs, seemingly ceding the entire field to China.
I use Audire from F-droid. It relies on the APIs of Shazam and AUDD. But it’s a FOSS app, there is no account to log into, and I’m running it on Graphene so it’s also sandboxed and permissions restricted.
Awesome, glad they’re doing it.
The problem is the price and the timeframe. The next batch is available next May?
For that price, more than a year from now, you’ll likely be able to assemble or purchase a small form factor PC and build it out with similar or better components for significantly cheaper.
I think the treasury should issue a Darrell Sheets commemorative $40 bill.
For years they ran a program to reward people for using Bing (they still technically do, but the payouts are next to nothing, maybe $5-10 worth of gift cards per year).
10 years ago you could accumulate a passive income of several thousand dollars per year by farming Bing Rewards, Perk (before that company went under) and a few other programs.
That and LeMays firebombing of Tokyos residential areas with mostly wood-construction buildings. The destruction was devastating (some estimates of 100,000 civilian casualties and 1 million made homeless).
The idea being to choke off Iran’s ability to use it at all. This kills their remaining income stream and also incents the Chinese and others who thought they had a workaround (the tolls) to instead put pressure on Iran.
I just assumed it was a loot and repair system like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Agree but this does need to be explained to people who aren’t in the know. These laws are currently being marketed as “put the power in parents hands” in various states left, right, and center.
Its a good bet when there seems to be widespread bipartisan push for restrictive laws that literally no one asked for, it’s gonna be something bad. But you have to explain to mouthbreathers in the electorate why or this shit just gets rammed through.
On the technological side of things, you’re pretty much fucked no matter what. Virtually all car companies now have proprietary app integrations, partnerships with Google and Apple, and other anti-privacy features.
Some practical things you can do-
Opt out of as much data collection and sharing as you can. Read the manual and menu dive to disable optional features you don’t need.
If you finance or lease from the dealer, there are likely additional data disclosures and third party sharing that you can opt out of. Read all the paperwork when you sign your purchase or lease documents. In my case I had to literally fill out and mail something in (they don’t want it to be easy to opt-out because they make money from sharing the data with third parties).
When it came out, Dreamcast legit felt like it was from 5-10 years in the future.
California needs to wise up and realize that you can make functional firearms out of $20 worth of hardware store parts. They can’t stop the signal.
Shinzo Abe got his cheeks clapped with a homemade gun in a country with roughly zero legal civilian firearms, and a violent crime rate of less than 1 per 100,000.
Can’t stop the signal.