That’s the only reason I bought a modern car.

My parents would always buy cheap beaters. They had a car from the 90s they only recently got rid of because the transmission was shot. My first car was an '05 Caravan I drove for almost two years and got rid of in 2018.

I swallowed the pill after seeing cars get absolutely crushed to the point where the jaws of life were necessary yet passengers could just walk out.

I remember someone posted a picture of their brand new sedan. It was involved in a serious accident and sandwiched between two large pickup trucks. The entire car was squished down until it was smaller than the passenger compartment. The driver was able to walk away with minor injuries and the paramedics weren’t even surprised.

I don’t give a shit about the fancy features. I just want something that is reliable and safe.

You might want to re-read the article. That quote was talking about lithium ion batteries.

This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent prices skyrocketing, putting the needed batteries further out of reach.

Lithium deposits are also concentrated. The “Lithium Triangle” of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia holds more than 75% of the world’s lithium supply, with other deposits in Australia, North Carolina and Nevada. This benefits some nations over others in the decarbonization needed to fight climate change.

“Global action requires working together to access critically important materials,” Meng said.

Fwiw mining and manufacturing isn’t as bad as some people want you to believe.

About 40% of lithium comes from brine extraction. There’s a lot of lithium in the ground which are dissolved in brine - a super salty solution of minerals and water. They’re extracted by allowing the water to evaporate into the atmosphere and then retrieving the minerals from that.

While that “wastes” a lot of water, none of that water was usable in the first place. It’s too salty for humans and would kill any plants or fish if used for crops or dumped respectively.

Another 60% comes from normal hard rock mining. This is as environmentally friendly as most mining is.

A small portion - about 2% - comes from clay mining. This is actually rather bad for the environment and results in a lot of atmospheric pollution. Fortunately, it’s a small shrinking portion of total mining.

The other main minerals in li-ions are cobalt, manganese, and lithium.

A large amount of cobalt comes from artisanal mining in the Congo. Artisanal is just a fancy term that means it’s not work being performed by a company at a dedicated mine, but on a small scale such as a single person digging an area and collecting it or a handful of people who run their own mine. Unfortunately, though, we know that slave and child labor are used at a large portion of these mines.

Fortunately, there has been a large push to move to more sustainable mining practices. Some Congo miners have allowed outside observers to verify that all miners are adults working of their own volition.

Other countries such as Cuba and Indonesia have begun mining cobalt and are also following minimum employment practices. As a side benefit, these mines are also the main sources for nickel which reduces the number of mines we need.

Manganese is rather interesting. The current extraction process involves using natural gas to separate the components. However, there are nodules on the ocean floor which are rich in manganese. While these would produce less pollution to process, there are worries that removing the nodules would cause irreparable harm to the local environment.

However, even if your batteries were mined in the most harmful method possible and your power comes from the dirtiest plant of all time, the long term emissions are still much better than driving the most fuel-efficient ICE over the same time period.

And while it’s a more minor issue, EVs are heavier than ICE vehicles in the same class, which causes more road wear and more tire wear (and more micro plastics to enter the environment).

Easy solution is to move to Indiana. Our environment means that almost every day from November through April, the temperatures will be in the 30s-50s in the day and 10-20 at night, so the pavement is constantly cracking. Combine that with the lack of investment in infrastructure (Indy literally has a ban on new streetlights and stop lights going back to the 80s) and it doesn’t matter how heavy the car is, the pavement will be just as broken.

Should be every single one that supports IPv6.

Wow. Everyone, ignore this guy, he’s also an ad.

Instead, you should hop on over to your local Chevy Dealership and ask about test driving the all new 2025 Tahoe. Drive one home today for less than $2,000 down!

HamCo?

I see them all the time near 37. You always gotta be careful around them.

It seems like the Mustang EV is selling better nowadays at least. I see just about as many of them on the road compared to Teslas. They at least seem to be pretty good drivers.

it certainly hasn’t been tested in court yet, at least not that I’ve been able to find.

Arbitration is allowed in an EULA and has been sanctioned by courts.

Most agreements are considered enforceable as long as their content is reasonable, you have been granted sufficient notice to accept or decline the agreement, the agreement is not unconscionable, and it doesn’t violate the UCC.

It’s usually considered a poor idea to use it also as an AP.

The location usually isn’t great for your WiFi and there are better tools for the job.

OpnSense would be the easiest way if you wanted to go. It’s still not easy, but the articles online should help you out.

First you’d need a machine. I’ve got an m920q I bought off eBay for $135 after shipping.

The computer will likely only have one Ethernet port. And it’s likely the port is Realtek which isn’t supported well.

So, you’ll need to get yourself a NIC (a fancy term for a network card). There are good forum posts and articles online about the best NICs to buy for your needs. Intel is a must. However, you can find many of their NICs online labeled as another brand - usually HP, Lenovo, or Dell. Again, the forum posts will tell you what to look for.

If you bought the same computer I mentioned above, you’ll also need a riser and a bezel. Amazon and eBay will have a good selection.

Now assemble it. Flash the computer with OpnSense. Don’t plug it in as your router yet. Follow along with some basic setup guides online to figure out how you want it configured.

Once you’re happy, plug it in as your router and test that it works. If not, you’ll need to put your old router back in place until you can figure out what you need to change.

SD has pass through charging, so once the battery is fully charged and also while it is plugged in, you aren’t powering it through the battery like cell phones and most laptops do.

That’s how nearly all modern devices work. Li-Ion can’t be charged and discharged simultaneously. There is circuitry to split the power between the battery and the device when it’s being charged.

Cheaper devices will just stop charging when you use them or they won’t work at all when plugged in.

It’s not working because W11 is using a CPU instruction that doesn’t exist in older processors.

And by older, I don’t mean Pre-Zen or Intel 5XXX… I mean OG AMD Athlon and Intel Core 2 Duo. If you’re trying to run on a CPU from 2008, that’s on you. These were never supported - hence the title.

The only reason this was discovered was because some YTers make videos of running W10/11 on super old computers.

Only way I’m using most shopping sites is if I know they’re trustworthy and if they support PayPal or one of the major payment processors. I’m not going to type my CC number into a random website and trust that they aren’t hacked.

There are a lot of issues with PayPal, but at least it makes it easy for me to get a refund if the seller refuses. The last time I had to get a refund, it was because the seller told me I had to ship my $20 product back to China in order to get a 50% refund. This was despite the returns agreement explicitly requiring them to cover return shipping and that shipping it to China would have cost me about $150.

The details for Prime explicitly refer to it as Two Day Delivery, not shipping.

Prime Membership Benefits

Delivery benefits

FREE Two-Day Delivery: Millions of items delivered fast and free.

FREE One-Day Delivery: Available on more than 15 million items with no minimum purchase.

FREE Same-Day Delivery: Available, in select areas, on over 3 million items for qualifying orders that meet the minimum threshold of eligible items, in as fast as five hours.

They haven’t had an expansion franchise since 2002 and it’s unlikely it’ll happen any time in the near future. 32 teams is perfectly balanced - each conference has 16 teams and four divisions. Each division has four teams.

It would also be very expensive.

You’d need a stadium that met the NFL standards. The average stadium costs about $2B. Fortunately for her (and unfortunately for the rest of us), taxpayers on average pay about $1.2B of that. We’ll be very generous and assume they paid even more or she received a substantial loan that will be paid off otherwise, leaving her with about $250M out of pocket.

It should be noted that the opposite is more often true for expansion teams, though. Cities don’t want to pay for the stadium because there’s more risk with new teams. They could decide to leave very quickly, the owners might not have the capital to keep the team afloat, etc. The Texans were the last expansion team and nearly all of the cost for their stadium was privately funded.

Now, the NFL also charges a fee for expansion teams. This mostly has to be a guesstimate because we haven’t seen one in two decades. The Texans paid $700M at the time so we can assume it would be closer to $1.5B now.

After that, you have the practice facilities and offices. Cities don’t usually cover that. You might be able to get away with using local facilities for a couple of years, but that won’t be enough to actually create a competitive team. A safe low-end estimate for this would be $150M. The Cowboys paid $1.5B for their facilities, but other teams have paid as low as $125M.

Finally, the last big cost is payroll. This by itself would sink any chance she has.

The NFL requires all guaranteed contracted salaries to be placed in escrow. I’m not sure where that rule came from, but I can probably guess Al Davis is to blame. A single year’s salary would be $225M for 2023 and around $240M for next season.

However, most of the big name players have guarantees that would destroy that. The most common is a signing bonus. Teams love them because the salary cap rules would allow them to amortize it over the length of the contract, including “void years”. Your QB would receive about $200M immediately upon signing. The expansion draft picks and early draft picks would be another $300-500M likely. In the end, the salary escrow plus bonuses would be about $500M-1B.

So assuming everything goes her way, she’d be on the hook for close to $2.5B immediately plus the reoccurring costs.

It should also be noted that the NFL isn’t really a great way to make money as an owner. It’s really just a long term retirement hobby for billionaires. They could just go invest in companies or whatever, but they buy NFL teams because they like football and it occupies their time. Yeah, they’ll make money, but not as much as they otherwise could. There’s a reason most owners hate the idea of a super-billionaire like Bezos owning a team.

They were doing awful in the first half. Their offense couldn’t get a first down to save their lives. Kelce had one reception for one yard.

She’s still not rich enough to buy the worst team in the NFL. You’d still need about $5-6B just to get interest.

He had one target for one yard in the first half. Travis Kelce is the best TE currently in the NFL and considered to be the third best ever to play the game.

Since all the receivers for the Chiefs are mid at best this year, he’s got some reason to be pissed. One of them, Kadarius Toney, was put on the gameday injury report for the AFCCG as being out for a leg injury and “personal reasons”. He then went public saying his leg was perfectly fine and he had no personal reasons to skip the game… Basically clarifying that the actual reason he wasn’t playing was because he’s ass.

But Travis Kelce was also being guarded by Fred Warner during the first half who is one of the best linebackers in NFL history.

It could be a diva moment, sure. But it’s the Super Bowl. Good teams know that you trust your studs. Romo would throw to Dez in double or triple team coverage, knowing he’d come down with it. Peyton Manning would chuck it at Marvin Harrison no matter who was on him. When someone is that good, all you’ve got to do is get the ball in their vicinity. Either they’ll come down with it or they’ll keep the defenders from getting it.

It’s still stupid to yell at your coach like that and physically push him, but Andy Reid was making a lot of boneheaded decisions in the first. They went into halftime down 10-3. They did change things up during the second half, though. Kelce ended up with 9 receptions for 93 yards while the Chiefs won 25-22 in OT.

Blame the Republicans in Congress.

It took until last May for the Senate to finally confirm the fifth Commissioner. Per law, they can’t create new rules or regulations when there’s a vacancy.

Have you noticed that 5G was getting faster and had more coverage until it more or less stopped last year? For the first time in history, Congress did not renew the FCC’s spectrum auction authority. T-Mobile bought a lot of 2.5Ghz spectrum back in 2022 but the FCC couldn’t grant it to them. It wasn’t until a month and a half ago that they could use it… Because Congress passed a bill that granted the authority for auctions held prior to March 2023.

They’ve also tried going after the VOIP services that don’t follow STIR/SHAKEN or allow robocallers. But they don’t have enough funding to do much more than the minimum. For the very few that they can catch, they first provide a warning period for the company to remove robocallers and correct their systems. If that fails, the FCC then permits carriers to block the provider, but they can’t mandate it.

Except even that’s not enough. The FCC can’t take actual legal action against the providers, only the robocallers. So quite often, the provider will just change their business name, list different fake people as their executives, and then rejoin the networks as if nothing ever happened. Look up One Owl Telecom - they’ve done this numerous times.

Counter-counterpoint.

The Lions collapse was even more boggling.