I don’t think it was strange for them to offer that shirt for sale, especially since they seem to have a print-on-demand system which does not involve any overhead for having an additional design. Offering the shirt is IMO less awkward that trying to pretend that Nazi Germany never existed.

The shirt itself:

I’m not sure why anyone would want one except to be an edgelord but there’s nothing obviously offensive on it.

There’s almost nothing in that article beyond one bulldozer driver’s self-diagnosis.

It’s amazing. I use it as part of my work as a software developer, I get good advice from it regarding my personal life, and I can talk to it about topics that interest me but don’t interest my friends. Everything is great right now but I’m genuinely worried about the near future, when it might be able to do the entirety of my job better than I can. At least I got this far - I wonder whether my friends’ kids who were born recently will live in a future where they’ll never be capable of contributing anything valuable.

I wish it told me what the title of the deleted video was, so that at least I could know what I was missing.

Were these records unofficially leaked to ProPublica? That seems to be the implication.

Another good article about this.

It’s just a bunch of “tacticool” accessories, not anything rare or particularly high-tech. IMO it makes the agents look like try-hard dorks - no number of laser scopes is going to turn them into commandos.

(With that said, the house does say “We don’t dial 911” and so it makes sense for the agents to be particularly careful.)

Idealists are letting perfect be the enemy of the good but I don’t think that’s why Democrats underperformed. Neither Clinton nor Biden/Harris were idealists of this sort (despite some stuff Harris said but didn’t mean back in the 2020 primaries) and they didn’t lose elections because of a lack of support from the idealists. So IMO while the idealists aren’t helping, the very much non-idealistic institutions of the Democratic party which prioritize seniority within the party over electability are to blame.

That’s not the right way to interpret these polls. Many people aren’t answering the question literally. They’re interpreting it to mean “Do you still approve of Trump’s deportation policy, despite everything?” and they’re saying yes to that. (It’s a reasonable interpretation.) People who really are happy about the killing do exist and they’re disproportionately loud online but they’re not 28% of the population.

I used to work at a company involved in breast cancer screening, and one of the skills I learned on that job was how to say the word “breast” without ever giggling. It was a small startup so we had some interesting people, including a woman who, when discussing how the machine worked, would just grab one of her own breasts through her shirt and start poking it.

I’m glad that at least one government is stepping in to protect the helpless public from the menace of, uh, ads over five seconds long. Disaster averted.

Some hound breeds are pretty creepy.

Really? I wonder what model year will have cars available without it. I was thinking of buying a new car but I can wait.

I’m used to driving a car from 2008, but I borrowed a friend’s 2021 Subaru Forester and there the engine just shuts off after the car is stopped for a few seconds, even without any sort of cruise control. The engine turns back on when I let go of the brake, but I find the noise, the vibration, and the delay of the startups irritating. There’s no way to get the feature to stay off - it defaults to on every time the car starts and it will eventually turn back on while you’re driving even after you’ve pressed the button to turn it off temporarily. I find that especially irritating. (IMO it’s simply not OK for a car to do something after I’ve pressed the button telling it not to do that.)

If they’re undoing changes that customers hate, maybe they’ll get rid of automatic stop-start too?

Are you arguing that it isn’t a scam?

Generally a scam is something done in secret, and if the government finds out exactly what the scammer is doing then the scammer can get in legal trouble. Here Uber is acting entirely out in the open, the government clearly wants to stop Uber, but writing a law that restricts Uber in the intended way appears to be difficult. (Maybe a law written strictly enough that Uber couldn’t work around it would also impact others that the government doesn’t want to target?) So I would argue that this is against the spirit of the law but it isn’t a scam.

I suppose I don’t give “loophole” the same moral weight that you do. Even if this was not intended to be legal, if the law as written permits it then the blame is on the government for passing a law other than the one intended to pass, not on Uber for taking action in accordance with the law.

(Moral obligations can exist without being legally required, but taxes are a legal construct and there is no such moral obligation to pay them which extends beyond the legal one.)

I’m not saying that taxes are bad. I’m saying that if the government says “there’s a new tax you have to pay if you do that” and you say “ok, then I won’t do that,” you have done nothing wrong. You have a duty to obey the law, but no duty to maximize government revenue.

Do you just voluntarily give the government money that you aren’t legally required to pay?