As an aside, what new cars don’t include location tracking?
My experience is they all have satellite connections and require some level of telemetry. My car throws a persistent check engine light and error message on the radio if you disconnect the telematics control unit.
I don't have this info unfortunately. I can say from personal experience that you can remove tracking from the 24 and older Subaru BRZ for about $50 usd, or less if you make your own passive adapter. I can also say the 24 and older low trim brz does NOT have tracking installed from the factory. From my research before buying the brz, many if not all Subarus of this era use the same hardware. There's an older version of this hardware as well that can also be deleted (and should be deleted because it's an older cellular tech that is no longer active and leads to battery drain while the car is unused).
The only problem my car has now is an occasional failure of Android Auto with a time sync error. There's an ota update for the head unit available that may or may not be related. I don't plan to install it. I only put 1000 miles on the car before removing the cellular connection so they could log the engine break in period as being done correctly for warranty purposes, so I'm not sure if it was an existing issue or related to removing cellular.
Afaik, having built in gps is not an issue since it's a receiver and doesn't transmit. The tracking issue is because of cellular.
I would check if the low trims exclude telematics before buying a car. If so, you can probably remove it from the higher trims but do your research.
Fact: Costco explicitly told the public that part of the price increase in some of their goods was having the customer "absorb" (pay) the price of the tariff.[]
"When we looked at -- we also source flowers from Central and South America. We looked at that item and decided that while we were able to offset some of the tariffs through similar activity that we did increase some price there because we felt that, that was something that the member would be able to absorb and it was more of a discretionary item there."
At that time, Facebook provided a free service without any real competitors. The masses will switch to Meta AI or Gemini or Claude at the drop of an ad that annoys them enough.
Gemini, GPT and Claude will all have ads on the consumer side. They will go together in quasi lock-step into the ad future, because that money is gigantic and they're going to need it.
The masses will have no say in the matter. Just as they had no say in the matter with Google's ads getting ever more intrusive, or cable prices previously, or streaming prices going perpetually higher in the present, or YouTube ads, or anything else. Consumers will have no say in the matter, they'll take it and that's that.
With only three relevant competitors (maybe Mistral in Europe), there will be nowhere to flee the deployment of ads.
amazing this is even a debate, we have now decades of this across everything that reaches enough users, it is a certainty as much that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning. as probably many people here on HN I am designated computer-fixer for all my family so any family gathering I have to look at someone's computer about something. years ago I started checking whether browser(s) anything ad-blocking in place and I am 0 for million by now. while HN crowd might be theoretically pushing back on ads (even with like "I won't use this if there are ads" nonsense) general public is so used to ads that I sometimes feel it is welcomed change when some new service etc gets ads. I remember the first time I saw an ad on Amazon Prime Video and my daughter and I were like "no f'ing way!!!" and my wife was like "oh, ____ is on sale this weekend, cool!" :)
absolutely not the case. there isn’t a single nerve in human brains that goes “oh imma tolerate ads cause this shit’s free but if I pay a few bucks no way” - if the product you use has utility to you, you will tolerate ads provided no other acceptable alternative. not to tell you something you don’t already know but anthropic is getting ads, eventually, it is a given. so while today you may have an alternative (arguably better even if no ads in the equation) at some point you won’t have an alternative (other than running local) and you’ll tolerate ads. the thing with LLM ads is that companies can make $$$$ from “ads” you don’t see, i.e. I can (not now but in the future) companies to push my product, e.g. claude is setting up architecture and proposes upstash (which I own and am paying anthropic a lot of money) instead of any competitor. or even more silently adding dependencies on my NPM library which has free and commercial offering…
Has the Hatch Act ever been enforced? Every administration in the last 20+ years have had people violate it but as far as I can tell nobody has been found guilty.
But snark aside, the next elections will be decided around damage control. Yes, the old school dems are pretty spineless (corrupt) but i guess even they feel the temptation of revenge and taking out political opponents for good. I really hope the new generation of democrats succeeds and breaks the corruption ties.
Thank you for understanding. I'm pointing things like Obama "looking forward not backward" and not punishing Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Condi, etc for war crimes and illegal warmongering which leads directly to today's current illegal Iran invasion.
We will need actual punishments for everyone who illegally defunded (or funded) programs, got us into the Iran invasion, embezzled and lined their pockets with corruption etc etc etc.
> Hatch Act won't be enforced until the next administration and next DOJ.
How did that last administration's dwelling on persecuting the one before it turn out?
While I don't like the current one and certainly agree that some of its actions are totally unethical, once it's over can we just move on and look forward, not back?
The only possible way this country has a future is if crime is actually punished. If the members of this current administration who committed criminal acts do not actually suffer the consequences then what is to stop the next one?
Without consequences for illegal behaviour, there's no incentive for bad actors to not continue acting bad. This, in no small part, explains why we are where we are today - a misplaced attempt to 'move forward' by ignoring illegal actions.
Without holding those who do wrong to account, positive movement will always be dogged or straight-up negated by those who do wrong without facing justice.
That'll only work here if there are reforms to the pardon power while we're at it. Any convictions a Democratic administration manages to obtain will be pardoned the next time a Republican gets in.
If only the US Digital Service still existed as an agency to do this right. Too bad it's now been hollowed out to be DOGE, subject to multiple active lawsuits.
Being in his pocket means they owe him something. They don't. They make their own decisions, meant to be representative of the constiutents that did and did not vote for them. If they go against their consitutents wishes, that was their own decision to make. They are to blame.
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