EVs and luxury cars tend to have more fancy features that enable these issues than ice or hybrid cars. That’s changing as more advanced tech filters down.
Ironically from the perspective of 2026, the actual "conservative" conservatives were the key opponents. The "total information awareness" and national ID efforts were really killed by the conservatives in congress. The "neocons" and moderate/conservative democrats were mostly fine with both.
I doubt it. According to the 1960s courts, they did because this “ancient concept” was essentially common sense. If you tell someone something, you shouldn’t expect a constitutional right to it remaining a secret. If I told someone I robbed a bank and my confidant calls the police, why shouldn’t they use this information? Should the courts respect mafia NDAs?
The banking aspects didn’t show up until the mid 70s. Personally, I think technology changed society in ways the constitution isn’t prepared for. In 1790 a banker was a dude you worked with in a local institution. In 1975 half of California was a Bank of America customer.
The constitution didn’t anticipate this and you’d need an amendment to create some sort of agent or attorney like privilege. It’s a fairly nuanced issue — from the humans point of view, an email is like a letter, and Google Drive is like a file cabinet. But the courts are forced to think about the where the logical artifact (ie the folder) is located. A USB drive in a drawer is protected, but the file in Google is not.
Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage. The dismantling of everything to maximize executive power in order to maximize grift and corruption will have effects for decades.
This is the American version of the cultural revolution. We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.
> Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage.
Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.
(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)
Seems like your advocacy of the devil still supports the parent comment’s speculation of this being a cultural revolution appealing to workers who have been “left behind” (e.g. coal miners who didn’t learn how to code).
>We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.
What?! Who's doing that? Plumbers and scientists are not interchangeable cogs. Big brain scientist won't make good plumbers and plumbers won't make good scientists.
And plus, so what if they would be doing it? Why do you make it sound like being a plumber is like being a leper somehow? The world needs plumbers too and they make a pretty penny. See that US warship that wasn't combat effective anymore because the shitters broke. You can't win a war with starbucks sipping scientists, you still need roughnecks willing to get their hands dirty, fight, build and fix things.
Maybe you’ve been in a coma, but there’s this dude in the White House that has imploded science funding. We’ve probably displaced a quarter million people directly, and universities are attriting more as foreign students aren’t coming.
The copium offered is “go become a tradesman”. It’s just pandering nonsense offered to keep smug old people living in 1970 in line.
>The copium offered is “go become a tradesman”. It’s just pandering nonsense offered to keep smug old people living in 1970 in line.
Yeah sure, because every american/westerner can become a 500k/year tech bro, no matter their IQ, and we don't need domestic skilled trained plumbers because democrats can replace them with a gorillion imported illegals.
GE Capital was a different creature, riding the line of fraud in some ways. They misapplied accounting rules and had to write down or capitalize over $20B for long term care insurance.
That's what brought them down, but that could bring down anyone. My point is that vendor financing turns non-finance companies into finance companies, and brings along a huge can of worms.
That’s fair. You become vulnerable to a guy like Jack Welch.
The vendor financing stuff I saw (as a junior / intern at a supplier) in those days was a reflection of that culture. They’d lease capital equipment through GE Capital, and pack it with other stuff to the limit of their accountants appetite for risk. (You can usually roll 20% of the value into services or peripheral stuff) I remember one deal where we had to run around and buy office supplies and tools with a corporate card. I did 4 Honda Civic of laser toner.
GE was reporting their own capital equipment and office supplies as revenue on the Capital side. :) But that is penny ante stuff in terms of what they did.
The AI stuff is a shady variation of that, but likely far worse as we’ve fired all of the watchers.
I don't know the full the history of this story, but I honestly wonder if type of scandal is still possible in the United States. After Enron and Worldcomm, the US introduced Sarbanes-Oxley reporting regulations. Additionally, after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/2009, there was a dramatic increase in regulations for banks (of all kinds) and insurance companies.
GP said:
> there was a dramatic increase in regulations for banks (of all kinds)
and if I can deposit funds, make "investments" (gambling or not.. to me most stock investments are gambling anyway since they pay out in dividends based on quarterly profits) and withdraw money, that is at it's core a bank.
However, in these and many other cases they are now effectively unregulated ones. Partly because the executive branch responsible for said regulations have their hands in the pie.
>and if I can deposit funds, make "investments", and withdraw money, that is at it's core a bank.
Not according to pretty much all countries. When a depositor is making investments, that is called a brokerage, not a bank. But these gambling websites are not making investments either.
Also, with the transition to digital currency, banks don't really have the same purpose anymore of storing and guaranteeing people's access to their money, now that money is entries in a digital ledger and there is no risk of losing the money (outside of political risks where someone edits the database). They have been obviated, but the system persists.
>most stock investments are gambling anyway since they pay out in dividends based on quarterly profits
This is not true, publicly listed companies' boards regularly choose to vary dividend amounts based on longer term cash flow, and you will be sorely disappointed if you are expecting dividends to land in your account as a function of quarterly profits.
And how do you expect a business to work if it did not vary dividends? No business knows the future, and dividends are the same as owners paying themselves a profit, so if owners do not know how much profit there will be in the future, how can dividends be a "known" quantity? They have to be based on profits, they literally are the owners distributing the profit amongst themselves
Any venture in life is gambling, just like people exploring the oceans and traversing continents without knowing what was ahead of them was gambling. But that is a different type of gambling than risking money with no effect on the outcome such as on the aforementioned gambling websites and casinos.
The POTUS kids are players in Polymarket and Kalshi, and are running crypto grifts.
The SEC fired most of their investigators, hasn’t appointed members to key boards, and cancelled most of their contracts with FINRA. (Which has laid off a ton of people) Nobody is watching.
So there’s an open season for normal corporate bullshit, and if you’re personally committing felonies attributable to you, you make sure you do it in Florida, and pay a vig to the library fund for a pardon.
We’ll have a fun run, then everything starts exploding in mid 2027-2029.
Oh it was becuase of their race for sure. For the type of man who joins a lynch mob, the only thing worse than a black man being black was him being “uppity”.
The black community resisted the lynching and stood up for the poor bastard they wanted to murder. Their prosperity as a community and individually gave them the fortitude to fight back.
It wasn’t “because they were rich”. It was because they had agency and dared to stand for their rights as a community. For a person who believes that the color of your skin makes you an inferior or superior human, that is an unforgivable affront.
So you take issue with the idea that an out of mob that burned down 35 blocks of a mid sized city was motivated by envy and resentment of the prosperous black community.
Instead, you assert it was a mob that assembled to lynch a young man who was arrested for assault after he stepped on the foot of or grabbed the arm of a white female elevator operator when he tripped in the elevator. I guess they got out of hand when there was resistance to their murdering the kid.
I take issue with the statement "There were too many successful black men" and wikipedia as proof for that.
Honest representation of facts is important to me in general.
"After an all-night battle on the Frisco Tracks, many residents of Greenwood were taken by surprise as bullets ripped through the walls of their homes in the predawn hours. Biplanes dropped fiery turpentine bombs from the night skies onto their rooftops—the first aerial bombing of an American city in history. A furious mob of thousands of white men then surged over Black homes, killing, destroying, and snatching everything from dining room furniture to piggy banks. Arsonists reportedly waited for white women to fill bags with household loot before setting homes on fire. Tulsa police officers were identified by eyewitnesses as setting fire to Black homes, shooting residents and stealing. Eyewitnesses saw women being chased from their homes naked—some with babies in their arms—as volleys of shots were fired at them. Several Black people were tied to cars and dragged through the streets."
---
"One kid groped another kid" is an insufficient explanation of this kind of violence and looting.
reply