Spyke

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Just to get this straight. If I stand outside a voting center and give each person 500 bucks to vote for me. That is illegal? But if I am a Dipshit In Chief and offer 5k that is 100 percent legal?

Technically, the equivalent would be you standing outside a polling place with a sign saying “I will give every adult in the area $500 if Candidate X wins”.

Ostensibly, you could just be lying (just like Trump) - and that would probably be covered under your 1st Amendment rights.

It’s stupid, but there is enough of a disconnect between action and reward that it might skirt past.

gaming

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Instead of convincing us digital-only games are secretly a good thing, Sony was just caught testing dynamic pricing again on PlayStation 5

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I mean, I personally view the start of the PS3 era as part of that same golden period - but it was also the time when we began to see the beginnings of enshitification also:

  • Day 1 patches
  • Day 1 “on disc DLC”
  • Microtransactions
  • $10 “online pass” for 2nd hand games

The launch PS3 was probably the peak of Somy giving the customers what they wanted; full hardware backwards compatibility with PS1/PS2 titles, affordable Blu-Ray player, built-in and upgradable HDD, heap of standardised IO options.

It’s just been all downhill from there.

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EV prices are falling while the average new car tops $50K

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Not a fan of all of that tracking, but as I’m doing a novated lease through work (so it comes out of my pre-taxed income) - I’m not sure I’ll have much leeway to figure out how to disable that.

We’re starting off with a level 1 charger, but as we’re in a 230V nation - we’re hoping that 12am - 6am charging (when our rates are ~8c/kWh) will suffice.

Good to know about the charging cable lock, and that does make sense - prevents jokers from randomly unplugging cars from chargers out in public. Can imagine having to explain that one to the missus a couple of times before it clicks though. 😅

It’ll be replacing our ‘16 Honda CR-V; we’re all pretty low-key excited - especially our 3yo.

How do you find the acceleration - any issues getting up to speed from 0 on freeway on-ramps?

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Just to get this straight. If I stand outside a voting center and give each person 500 bucks to vote for me. That is illegal? But if I am a Dipshit In Chief and offer 5k that is 100 percent legal?

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I should look forward to Trump getting charged with that, then?

But more seriously, there would be countless lawyers happy to argue that a general statement such as “$500 to every adult in the county if John Smith wins” does not technically break that particular law because it’s not explicitly targeted at any one individual recipient, nor is it contingent on them participating in an election whatsoever.

Just as I’m also sure there would be more than one sympathetic Trump-appointed judge to side with the defendant too.

US laws mean nothing if they aren’t actively being followed.

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Permanently removed my LG TVs WiFi privileges

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I would still be extremely wary; HDMI as a spec has the ability to carry Ethernet data.

I wouldn’t put it past the manufacturers from giving it a couple of years for this news cycle to pass from user memory, before trying more nefarious methods to try and exfiltrate data by piggybacking through connected devices like a Chromecast.

That’s mostly because I don’t trust Google to not help facilitate that for a share of the profits and access to the data for AI training.

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