Paper straws were pushed by big corporate polluters to build a negative association with environmentalism.

Plastic straws are single-use plastics, but seem unexceptional by those standards. It's almost a meme that they're being singled out like they're the single greatest source of plastic waste, or uniquely damaging to ocean life.

On top of that, there are way better ways of reducing straw usage. I've used bioplastics that seemed way better. You could redesign the lids. You can do the plastic bag thing and charge people a nickel for a straw or whatever. Hell, you could just not give straws with every drink, and plenty of people will just drink from their cups and glasses. Instead, we get paper straws, something that is so obviously a bad idea it sounds like a joke, or a metaphor for a useless invention. Often served with cups and lids made entirely out of plastic.

So you get a bunch of people who have their drinks kind of ruined by a frustrating straw. It's a small thing, but it's just a little nudge away from environmentalism. You build an association with disappointment and inconvenience. Maybe it doesn't cause a big sway, but it makes people maybe a little more anti-environmentalist than they already were, or just less passionate about environmentalism.

It's about PROTECTING WOMEN! And if I have to hurt a bunch of women to protect them from hypothetical scenarios I made up to demonize trans people, so be it!

I believe that's Andy Ngo, so yes, absolutely a pro-fascist activist. He was caught on camera actively coordinating with Patriot Prayer, a far-right extremist group.

I HIGHLY recommend people actually click through and read the superintendent's full ad, because it's a gold mine of hypocrisy, idiocy, and not-so-subtle racism.

EDIT: To clarify, the article doesn't actually present the superintendent's screed. It embeds a tweet that has a photo of it. That said, it's been posted elsewhere in this thread, which has the added upside of avoiding Twitter.

I have to admit I was kind of impressed seeing the way two scams worked together: the Hyperloop, and the Loop. People genuinely thought they were related projects because of the name and, I guess, the tunnels. So the Hyperloop made the Loop sound more exciting than it really was, and the Loop made it seem like there was progress towards the Hyperloop.

Of course, in reality, the Loop is just a shitty cab tunnel designed to financially and physically block local mass transit projects, while the Hyperloop is just bullshit vaporware designed to financially and politically block intercity mass transit projects.

You make it sound like they were losing because they pulled advertising from Twitter instead of... practically every other decision they make.

I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update the extension and restart my browser a few times.

The entire impeachment theater is directed at low-information voters. People who will find out about the hearing and not bother to read or watch to find out it's a nothingburger, who won't read the accusations but just take it that there's a scandal, and who will throw their hands up and say "both sides are the same" because they're impeaching one another's presidents.

New national parking platform

...if that means what I think it means, it's probably the worst of the lot.

Take it from an American: mandatory minimum parking will absolutely ruin your towns and cities.

That's one of the things that bugs me about conspiracy theories. So many of them don't even have a point.

How can so many be people be so wrapped up in conspiracism, but never once have the though, "Oh, wait, why would anyone do this? It'd be pointless."

That might be surprising for developers that released a Unity game back in, say, 2015, when Unity CEO John Riccitiello was publicly touting Unity's "no royalties, no fucking around" subscription plans. Now, even developers who paid $1,500 for a "perpetual license" to Unity back then could theoretically be subject to additional per-install fees starting next year (provided their game is still generating sufficient revenue and installs).

This reminds me of a story from earlier this year from Wizards of the Coast, publishers of Dungeons & Dragons (and subsidiary of Hasbro). It hinged on exactly the same semantics.

The short version is that, in 2000, Wizards of the Coast released D&D under the "Open Gaming License (OGL)," which gave third parties explicit approval to make and sell their own material using most of the D&D content, under a perpetual license. Cut forward 23 years, and lots of major publishers got their start making D&D supplements, and continue to use the OGL because (a) it's a cover-your-ass license in case they tread into a legal gray area, and (b) allows them to open up their own content to third parties. Plans for an update OGL leaked, with predictably dogshit terms that I won't get into right now, but essentially killed the license as anything anyone would want to use. The malicious part was that they would be "de-authorizing" the OGL 1.0a, because while it was a perpetual license, that didn't make it irrevocable.

(IIRC, it's also a legal argument based on case law established after the OGL was written. Not a lawyer, though.)

Predictably, there was a huge backlash. WotC backtracked, and even gave up ground by releasing a bunch of stuff under the Creative Commons. However, the OGL is still dead, because third parties can no longer trust that WotC (or Hasbro) won't try this ratfuckery again. (Sound familiar?) Lots of products were subtly rewritten to no longer need the OGL, and several publishers worked on an industry license amusingly called the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC.

The thing is, D&D's going to survive this a lot better than Unity. The business model was to sell D&D and D&D supplements, they only indirectly benefited from third-party material, and people are still going to make D&D stuff because it's D&D. Unity's entire business model relies on licensing, so if people stop using it... that's it.

Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.​

It sounds to me like the reasonable conclusion to draw from this would be to modify the design of the car. I'd also assume you don't need tolerances to be the same for literally all parts inside and out. I'd also think that, if the car looks that bad if things are 10 or more microns out of place, these cars are going to age terribly after regular use.

But what do I know? If I were smart, I'd be rich, right? And Elon is so rich, he must be a genius!