Amikke @Amikke@social.cleverlibre.org

Everyday on the fedi...

@funny

java, a boiler plate driven language designed for writing verbose object oriented instant legacy code

Telegram has released user data to the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany in several cases, Spiegel reports.

The NGO CeMAS monitors 3,000 German-language channels & groups for "disinformation, antisemitism, and right-wing extremism."

https://gettr.com/post/p1clhn8469c

which one are you? https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1532157559750410241/photo/1

MarkovJunior is a probabilistic programming language where programs are combinations of rewrite rules and inference is performed via constraint propagation.

https://github.com/mxgmn/MarkovJunior

This is your periodic reminder that personalized advertising, which is a gigantic invasion of all our privacy and makes the entire web significantly slower and shittier to use, is often less effective then simple situational advertising (on a blog about ponies, advertise pony stuff).

We are losing so much of our privacy for what is essentially a scam all the way around. The best sales pitch made by advertisers is the one they made for themselves. They fuck us, and the people that buy the ads.

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Thread from mateosfo on Twitter.

The stupid discourse over the price of gasoline is the quickest way to conclude that everything is galactically broken. Here’s a quick primer.

Consumers think they’re being creamed by the “price” of gasoline, but they’re not. They’re being creamed by the “cost” of transport.🧵

For most of the past 30 years, the car industry has been transitioning its products from cars that got increasingly good fuel economy, to trucks and SUVs that are essentially stuck around 25 miles per gallon.

No, this is not just a “USA” thing. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-suvs-in-total-car-sales-in-key-markets-2010-2019

As usual, car industry has mostly been lying and bullying its way to converting fleet from more-efficient models, to gas-guzzling SUVs.

VW got caught; US automakers cheated the old fashioned way, and just rigged the process.

Yes, this was predicted. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cafe-loophole-could-lead-to-bigger-cars/2011/12/14/gIQA3bGLuO_blog.html

So, now that the car industry has driven gasoline demand through the roof, and a (completely predictable) price shock has hit the oil industry, car consumers are angry about …

The cars they bought. Which are mostly trucks and SUVs. https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/light-trucks-now-outselling-cars/

Except … they don’t know the problem is the car they bought. They think the problem is price of gasoline.

Math quiz: A cat buys a Civic that gets 55 miles per gallon. A dog buys a F150 gets 27 miles per gallon. Both drive 20 miles each day.

Who has higher transport costs?

The dog will complain about the price of gasoline. The cat will wonder what the dog is going on about.

Oh, and of course, the folks who chose other modes – transit, bikes, walking – gas prices mean nothing to them.

But in the USA, we do two things:

First, we mandate driving. Yes, it’s a mandate: The government throws a couple trillion dollars per year at driving subsidies, and backs up the subsidies with land use patterns that prohibit people from moving around without a car.

And second, we let the car industry govern us.

Directly, the car industry sets fuel economy standards, controls how our tax dollars are spent, and controls land use with highway and road funding policies. Indirectly, the car industry is the reason our military is so well-equipped – oil wars are expensive!!

Even worse, the car industry has proven that it can convince Americans to tolerate a massive amount of death and destruction caused by their products. Nothing causes more death and destruction in the USA than the car industry – nope, not even guns.

All of this is to say …

The political salience of “high gasoline prices” is really a thin veneer for how everything in the USA is about cars. We wouldn’t even need to “ban cars” to solve it! Just banning gasoline cars, or even forcing real fuel economy standards, would make a huge difference.

Of course, the real solutions do, in fact, involve reducing car use dramatically, reforming land use in our cities, ending parking mandates, pumping a few trillion into transit and bike lanes … that’s the only viable pathway. It’s not optional.

So, either we defeat the car industry, which has no problem handing the government over to Republican fascists if it allows their SUV sales kick to continue, or …

They defeat us. I sure hope they lose! Go, us!