A nice thought.
Unfortunately the only ones who switch will be people 1. Know that it is even possible to switch/that they have an option to switch, and 2. Have the technical knowledge to back up their data, then download and install Linux, that 3. Don’t have to run Windows for other reasons and/or haven’t already switched.

Unfortunately with all three qualifiers you aren’t left with a giant number. Certainly no mass exodus.

IMHO, the answer is simple.

No corporation may own more than X single family or multifamily (up to 4 family per building) housing units, other than for occupation by its employees, for more than 120 days. Any housing units owned for more than 120 days are taxed at a rate of 50% of their fair market value per year.

Watch how fast companies like Zillow that tried to get rich fast by ‘playing the housing market’ dump houses on the market.

I’m invested in real estate, and I want this to happen even though it’ll hurt me economically. Real estate is horrifically overvalued, and corporations owning huge numbers of single family homes / small multifamily homes are a big part of why.

I’m all for investing to make money. Some things should be considered public resources, not vehicles for investment. Land and health are among them.

Problem is that Samsung is like Apple- a shitton of people just blindly buy the latest Samsung whatever with zero research.
So you have a bunch of other companies trying to stand out in one way or another- Motorola for example just released a phone that brings back the 3.5mm headphone jack. And you have a ton of cheap Chinese companies that may or may not offer any software support after purchase but have interesting form factors.

That makes it hard for the little guys to get the kind of sales volume needed to justify the development and tooling for a really cool flagship phone.

Personally while phones today are far more capable, I think phone designs peaked in the mid 2000s. Mainly because you had actual innovation in design– wildly different form factors. There were a few phones that flipped open like a laptop with a physical keyboard, a handful that slid open to reveal a blackberry-style keyboard, many had SDIO ports or other ability to clip on expansion modules, etc. Phones had fun features- there was one that could do an early ‘google pay’ type thing by pulsing a magnetic field to pretend to be a magnetic credit card stripe for a swipe reader. A lot of the early Samsung phones had IR blasters so you could turn TVs on and off. There were a couple designed for gaming that were laid out like a game pad. Manufacturers weren’t afraid to experiment and the result was some really cool stuff.

Sadly that’s all gone today. HTC (which made many of those cool phones) was driven out of the market by Apple and Samsung, so now virtually all phones are identical flat bricks.
I see a glimmer of hope with flip phones and foldables, but not much. They’re all just excuses to

Liberal-libertarian here- I think the married gay couple should have AR15s to defend their marijuana crop and adopted children from attack, confident in the knowledge that single payer healthcare will be there if they get hurt.

I also follow history, at least a little. And I think even a light perusal of the last 100ish years should be enough to show anyone that ‘it can’t happen here’ / ‘it won’t happen here’ are foolish attitudes, as the current situations are demonstrating.

I’m curious if you regret your past support of anti-gun policies, knowing that they are directly making it harder for you to acquire a gun for self-defense today?

And FWIW if you have any gun questions or want to know anything about specific guns, safety, culture, etc please feel free to reply or DM me.

FSD has routinely plowed into children, emergency vehicles etc.

You are using this word ‘routinely’, but I do not think that it means what you think it means.

Can you give me, say, 10 incidents of this? Of a Tesla confirmed to be on FSD driving full speed into a child, emergency vehicle, etc?

FSD used to ‘routinely’ be overly cautious and slow down when not necessary, but I don’t think it’s driving into things.

I’d also point out the driver remains responsible for the car and an eye movement camera prevents distracted driving, but I digress.

Other companies have implemented these more limited systems (that often include better sensors such as lidar) not because they can’t do it but rather because they are more cautious about brazenly lying to people about the capabilities of their system.

Other companies simply have less capable systems.
If I go and buy a current product Tesla, I can have it drive me home and chances are I won’t have to touch any controls. In a few cases, new production Teslas literally deliver themselves to the new owner’s driveway. Can any other automaker say the same?

I don’t think MS is out of touch with what the customer wants, I think they just stopped listening.

The fact is nobody is asking for this stuff.

I think the hope is that they build it anyway and then people will use/want it. AI is the big buzzword of the decade, just like ‘cloud’ was the big buzzword of last decade.

At least they’ll live.

But what is the point of living if there’s no quality of life?

This is the difference between treating a patient as a person and ignoring the person but treating the disease as a broken machine.

Almost any medical treatment has potential or real side effects, possibly including death. Sometimes those side effects happen, and the risk is weighed against the benefit.
Pain relief is no different. You’re acting like an opioid pill is a death sentence. The fact is under proper medical care and supervision they can be quite safe.

The UNsafe things, the people who get addicted and die, are people who were NOT treated properly to begin with- given high dose extended release opioids (creating dependence), then cut off cold turkey. Proper protocol for that is a wean-off protocol where the dose is reduced slowly over time so the body adjusts without huge withdrawal. If the person turns to street drugs and ODs you’re right money can’t bring them back. But the problem is the prescriber that did an unsafe protocol, and the company that paid them to do it.

Blaming the pill for effects caused by medical mistreatment is stupid.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking

Quite true, many entrenched interests want no accountability. Look at the ‘regulation’ of big banks after 2008— a lot of nothing. Nobody went to jail. Taxpayers bailed out the system, investors made whole or nearly whole. What should have been a ‘party’s over’ moment became a ‘back to business as usual’ moment.

There was actually a paper recently that tested this exactly.

They made up a new type of problem that had never before been published. They wrote a paper explaining the problem and how to solve it.

They fed this to an AI, not as training material but as part of the query, and then fed it the same problem but with different inputs and asked it to solve it.
It could not.

AGI would be able to learn from the queries given to it, not just its training base data.

In some ways we as a society are afraid of change. A solution like I propose would require a serious rethink of major capital investors. Even if it was only limited to companies needing a bailout, it would make investors sit up and take notice on what their holdings are actually doing.
I think it should also be done in extreme cases where the company flagrantly violated the law. Forget the usual million dollar fine for a company that spends more on office supplies. Forget the billion-dollar fine that takes a hit on the financials. Wipe the owners out.
I think Purdue might be a good case for that. The company clearly and blatantly violated every legal and ethical standard and destroyed lives as a result.

And if he’s flying at Mach 2, there’s probably a fuckton of wind noise against the helmet. Which means he’s probably listening way too loud. Same problem.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more heartless and unempathetic reply in my whole life.

Your post, and the linked article, boiled down, basically all say that doctors should ignore pain and patients who are in pain should just suck it up and not think about it.

I’m very glad that medical science doesn’t treat patients in such a cold and uncaring manner. By this logic, there’s no reason to bother with anesthetic during or after surgery, because ‘pain is part of life’. There’s no reason to do joint replacements, because ‘pain is part of life’ and if the person can’t walk more than 10’ without pain too fucking bad for them.

Perhaps someday there will be an objective way to measure pain- some scanner that can read the signals going up the spinal cord or can read activations of nerve endings. But until then, this is what we’ve got.

I encourage you to take a serious look in the mirror and think about what kind of person you want to be. Because right now you’re someone that looks at a fellow human who is suffering and says ‘too bad, we shouldn’t lift a finger to help them’.

Much like racism, the solution isn’t to rig it in the other direction, the solution is to unrig it.

There should absolutely be a corporate death penalty. Perhaps the same process should be used for anything too big to fail. Nationalize the company, All existing shareholders and equity owners get wiped out. Then either wind down operations or appoint an interim administrator and interim directors, then issue a new stock offering the proceeds of which first pay back any taxpayer expenses or bailouts, then pay back creditors, then used as capital for the company.

That’s what should have happened to all the banks that got bailed out. Wipe out anybody who held the stock, fire management, then issue new stock for purchase, the proceeds of which pay back the bailout.

If nothing else this would make investors take a much more active interest in the malfeasance of the companies they invest in.

I agree on journalistic integrity. But isn’t it important to uphold that standard, even if others don’t?

They may deserve it, but it’s by knowing those details that we determine if they do or not.

Because otherwise your position basically becomes ‘If company did thing x and as a result is bad, it’s okay to blame them for thing y and thing z, which they probably had nothing to do with, but we’ve already determined they are bad and therefore they deserve any blame we throw at them justified or not’.

The problem with that is it sets up witch hunts. You are bad, therefore we can blame you for anything we want, and that blame justifies your being treated as bad.

That is why the Constitution mandates due process. And we should uphold that same standard, in our minds and in our positions and in our debates.

It’s a bunch of crap. In fact, modern headphones can if anything help protect your hearing.

The thing that damages your hearing is sound level. Doesn’t matter if it’s from a speaker to inches away or 20 ft away, what matters is the sound pressure level that arrives at your eardrum.

The problem with headphones is many people turn them up to drown out outside noise. To get it loud enough that you actually can’t hear the surrounding noise, it’s pretty loud. That is what causes hearing damage, not the fact that it is headphones. It would be no different if you put speakers and turned it up loud enough to drown out the noise.

I say modern headphones can help because a lot of modern headphones have noise canceling. Thus, reducing the ambient noise level means you don’t feel a need to turn up the volume as high.

If you don’t have good statistics, then you don’t include them right next to talking about the prescription drug epidemic sending the impression (If not precisely stating) that your number is directly caused by prescription drugs.

Journalistic integrity is important.

Significantly changed. Even in the last few months. I would encourage you to go do a test drive. Night and day from the type of experience you have.
The driver monitoring now uses a camera. If you are looking at the road, it doesn’t ask you to jerk the wheel at all.
Speed control is much more organic and considers turns, hills, etc. The machine vision on the cameras is different as well, it uses a processing technique called occupancy networks to produce 3D data out of the 2D camera images.

The one concern is you list speed in km, the current full self-driving software is not available in all countries and may not be available in yours, which might mean if you do a test drive you are still on the same very basic system you had before.

The core issue, IMHO, is a mixture of lack of critical thinking and intellectual laziness, reinforced by algorithms and echo chambers. You see it in almost any contentious debate these days, including things like politics, but it’s pretty much everywhere.

Whatever my opinion is, various algorithms will figure that out and feed me a solid stream of crap that agrees with me because that’s what I will click on and engage with. Every time I see an article that reinforces my opinion it gives me a little hit of dopamine that I am right and so I conclude that I am right and everybody smart agrees with me because my position is obviously the right one.
Meanwhile the guy on the other side of the issue has the exact same experience and thus is convinced that he is right and everybody smart agrees with him.

Combine this with an educational system that is teaching the test rather than teaching to think, and the very simple thought process of ‘what if I’m wrong? What if I don’t have all the details?’ simply doesn’t occur in an awful lot of people.

Elon Musk is a perfect example. A few years ago, he was a genius eccentric billionaire working to make the planet a better place with green technology and electric cars. Then he joined up with Trump, and suddenly he is a fraudster using Daddy’s money to bully his way into companies and taking credit for their success. The rockets are bad, the cars are bad, the tunnels are bad, the brain chip is bad, and all these things always were bad from the beginning because it’s easier to retcon than to acknowledge your position changed because of politics.

The fact is, in this age of information there is really no good excuse for ignorance. The information is always out there, if you put even a little effort into finding it. Yes it requires waiting through a lot of crap and slop, But it’s out there. And as you say you can just head down to your local dealer and ask for a test drive, and then you have real empirical data to base an argument on. Not that anyone would do that, because to them, their opinion is just as valid as my first hand experience.

Consider the difference between supervision and intervention.
All production Teslas need human supervision, this is enforced with driver monitoring systems as a safety procedure. But the current versions of FSD, released in the last few months, can often navigate through most or all driving situations without human intervention. So the computer will make sure you are paying attention, but will in most cases execute the drive perfectly without making mistakes that require the human to take over.

There’s plenty of videos on YouTube check some of them out :)