Looks interesting, is there a non-paywalled version?

You might be surprised how little people actually regard the owner's political opinion of the miltibillion dollar corporation from which they just bought a quarter-million dollar car. I wouldn't even be surprised if a significant percentage of Tesla owners don't even know who owns the company.

Musk's face is everywhere. Let's do the science to be sure.

250k Tesla? The top of the range Plaid is ~130k

They are rich people things. I would say toys but they seem better than that.

I'll take the elecric Humvee over a Tesla any day with my pretend momey.

My favorite piece of 'knowledge': "'Red shift' shows increasing totalitarian domination of the outer reaches of the universe. Write your congressman!"

I read that title and was quite confused, thinking "they do have a free plan..."

Anyway, I understand your concern with this huge monopoly. As far as I know, there really are no competitors. And while I can imagine being worried about the company's future trajectory, I like the way they do stuff now. They are very open about stuff, and they have an interesting blog.

That 20% figure makes some sense to me because a lot of small websites use it because it is affordable (the low, low price of free), and is so valuable to being able to actually get down to the content creation.

Alright... Who paid for this study?

While I know that this decline is probably an indicator of poor ecological health, I personally say good riddance.

Yes, fuck cars.

That picture of the "NYC Banana Fire" was so perfectly random that it is my new favorite picture ever.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/158/nycbananafire.png

I would love to be serious about this, but I simply cannot.

Seems from this article to have been a pretty standard operation, despite the unusually large scale.

The biggest thing I picked up on was their practice that they mentioned of sampling traffic and analyzing it asynchronously, to avoid latency penalties.

Heh, I guess screw them and shut it down anyway - at least that seems to be the policy in my IT department :)

Searching for meaning for these things is a trap. It can be a harmless hobby, but for many people it becomes something more and can tear them apart (e.g. inducing anxiety or obsession with it).

Many (but not necessarily all) people who sell this type of paraphernalia or services are con artists looking to make a buck off of desperate people who are looking to make sense of their lives in places where they won't.

Yeah... that's a good summation.

I have some personal experience with this kind of thing. Back in the `70s my father had a small group of "followers" who considered him to be a sort of "guru". We lived in Hollywood, so there were a lot of folks into that sort of thing.

They believed he had mystical powers. Truth was he was only looking to get laid, and he hurt a lot of women who fell for his BS, and their husbands/boyfriends.

I have a family member now who claims he's a "God". He lived in Hollywood too when he "realized" this. He's not quite as convincing as my father was, but he's pretty good at getting others to believe him.

Those are some sad stories. It's a crazy world out there, with lots of people trying to take advantage of their fellow humans.