I honestly feel like if this wasn't regulated ketchup would slowly be watered down until it was just weak tomato juice.

The right to free speech and the right to peaceably assemble hasn't been respected at any point during US history.

Not immediately after the country was formed when they signed the sedition act into law.

Not while people were protesting for abolitionism.

Not while people were protesting for women's suffrage.

Not while people held demonstrations while on strike.

Not during the cold war and red scare.

Not during the civil rights movement.

Not during the George Floyd protests.

They're not going to start now.

I’m in Canada and I can never trust my doctor to have any conversation with anyone, at any time longer than five minutes at a time for anything

The best tactic I’ve found if you want to get anything done for yourself or someone close to you is for you to do the legwork and make calls, contacts and literally hound people to do their job.

This is my experience in the US as well. Also nobody knows anything about anything.

Doctor A puts you on a medication, doctor B doesn't know until you tell them and then he says "he put you on that!? You shouldn't be on that, I'm taking you off it."

You go to have a surgery and say "hey guys, did you know that I'm difficult to intubate? Because I could die if you don't take that into account", they didn't know.

"Hey guys, I have reason to believe that the insurance card I was issued in the mail isn't completely correct, can anyone help me with this?", 4 different people at the company that issued the card have no idea what's going on, don't even know about the policy tied to the card in question and think you must have accidentally called the wrong company (you didn't).

"Hey guys how much is this going to cost?" it is literally impossible to say.

Are you misreading “preparing” as literally any writing

"Prepare derivative works" means not just any writing, but literally anything creative. If you paint a picture of a character from a book, using specific details described in that book such as their appearance and name, you are creating a derivative work.

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/78442/what-is-considered-a-derivative-work

Even that Wikipedia article goes into fair use.

Fair use carves out an exception for parody, criticism, discussion, and education. "Entertainment" or "because I like the series and these characters" are not one of those reasons. Fan fiction might qualify as parody though.

What effect on the market can there be for a fan remaster of a 20 year old game that isn’t for sale anymore? Hard to argue that doesn’t fall under fair use.

This is not how "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work" part of fair use works.

A company can create a work, sit on it for literally 100 years doing nothing with it and making not a single cent from it, then sue you for making a nonprofit fan work of it. Steamboat Willie is 95 years old and until just this year you could have been sued for drawing him. Note that, in the eyes of the law, Steamboat Willie is effectively a different character than Mickey Mouse.

Again, I cannot stress enough how it doesn't matter at all whether you are personally profiting from something or whether you are affecting a market. The word "potential" in that quote above is doing a lot of work:

A father in the UK wanted to put spiderman on the grave stone of his 4 year old son who loved the character. Disney said "no". Disney does not make tombstones. You are not eating into their profits by putting spiderman on a tombstone. And yet in the eyes of the law Disney has every right to stop you since they might decide to start up a tombstone business next week.

Nothing I have written here is legal advice.

EDIT: I am not a fan of any of this. I think you should be able to write nonprofit fanfiction without worrying that some corporation might sue you. I am on your side on this. But this is the reality we live in.

People are allowed to write fanfic and make fan movies and whatnot. The line isn’t crossed until money changes hands.

This is completely wrong. A company is fully within their rights to issue you a cease and desist for fan works. Some companies, like Disney and Nintendo, do this all the time (though sometimes people are able to fly under the radar).

If you see a free fan game or fan work of anything it's completely at the mercy of the company that owns the IP. If it's not taken down it's either because the company is cool with it, not aware of it, or can't be bothered to deal with it.

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

People really have no idea how overbearing IP laws are. Technically even recordings of people playing video games (let's plays and the like) could be infringing. This hasn't been extensively argued in court because most game companies don't want to deal with the PR backlash that forbidding let's plays would cause (in addition to the free advertising they get). Though, once upon a time that didn't stop Nintendo from using YouTube's copyright system to claim videos of their games.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays

https://www.slaw.ca/2024/02/07/lets-plays-a-copyright-conundrum/

I would add Project Gutenberg and Open Street Map to your list.

In a lot of situations I would rather cross mid block than at a corner crosswalk. The cars can't be relied on to stop anyway, and mid-block there are a lot less directions you have to worry about.

Even if the intersection is signalized given the existence of right turns on red it's still often safer to cross mid block.

90% of the things they named weren't cars but in practice if you actually compare cities with tons of cars vs ones with few you'll find that removing cars removes 90% of the noise.

Though It may be that not being bombarded with car noise makes people quieter as well (like how being in a loud crowd makes you want to speak up as well).

https://xkcd.com/963/

Fortunately I haven't had to open it in a very long time.

Make the page 15x more bloated with JavaScript popups and it'll be "modern".

There is already a Chinese EV that uses a sodium ion battery, the JMEV EV3.

It's a tradeoff of range vs price. The EV3 only has 155 miles of range, but thanks in part to its sodium ion battery it costs only $9220 new. Which is a price that will probably drop even more as more sodium ion plants come online and economies of scale kick in.

EDIT: even if your commute is 40 minutes long, driving 60 MPH the entire way, that range is enough to get you to work and back using a little more than half your charge. Given that it's also generally cheaper to charge an EV than pump gas, and there's less maintenance costs, I think there's absolutely a market for such a car.

Adding on to what GreyEyedGhost said, since the year 2000 the price of solar power (per watt) has fallen by more than 50x. Because of this huge drop in price the installed solar capacity has been doubling every 3 years. That means that in the time since 2020 we've built more solar capacity than we did in the previous 20 years combined.

If that's not good enough then idk. Imagine holding any other technology to that standard. The model T came out almost 100 years ago for an inflation adjusted price of $27,000 and with an MPG of 7.5. ICE cars today are better in a lot of other ways but they are not 50x cheaper and they are not 50x more fuel efficient than that.