The obnoxious part about this is that the sw update that brought this so-called feature turned it on by default. It’s a good reminder that the power balance between iphone users and Apple is massively tilted towards the latter.
What is there to prevent Apple’s embrace of another crazy virtue signal in the future? Perhaps they will build a profile of each user that will demerit the user experience of bad-thinking iphone users? Perhaps Apple Watch users that don’t register the required level of physical activity or show some other physiological characteristics that do not align with our Cupertino betters will further have to suffer? Because, as we know by now, “nudging” works.
In a sense, this is a logical continuation of the Exposure Notification System (link) launched in May 2020 in close collaboration with Google. That was an opt-in setup that must have emboldened the iOS Karens to think bigger and better for the clean energy charging (whatever that is supposed to mean).
It’s sad to see a company like Apple take such a strong position uninformed by the thought process. To be clear, I am not objecting to introducing this feature, but rather to making it opt-out.
Amidst all the delays and price problems, Ford’s F-150 Lightning may have been hit with its worst problem yet.
What a smarmy article! It just drips with elitism. Note the comment about “unqualified board members of the Ford family”. ?So owning a major portion or a company now makes you “unqualified. Must be they aren’t “woke”.
Well but of course they do. ?How else would you expect them to pay off the absolutely astronomical national debt. This, along with many government “schemes” is just another Ponzi scheme.
The United States, nor its citizens do not need inflation. Neither do all of the countries around the world who hold U.S. dollars as part of their central bank foreign exchange reserves. Even less, participants in the more than 60% of world trade which is settled in dollars.
It is the illegitimate regime in Washington and its puppet central bank who need inflation. And so, they get it.
Although I have long complained about the two-tier stock structure that lets the Ford family keep control, their self-preservation instincts made Ford the only one of the Big Three to not declare bankruptcy in 2009.
Ford Motor Company has a curious capital structure. When the company went public in 1956, the public offering consisted of “Class A” shares which were given the usual voting rights and dividend rights. The Ford family, however, retained “Class B” shares, which retained around 40% of the shareholder vote and were also eligible for dividends, while representing only around 5% of the capital of the company. This structure remains in place today, although due to appreciation of the Class A stock, Class B shares now account for about 2% of capital. “Bill” Ford, the current chairman, owns 23% of the Class B shares as well as 2.3 million shares of Class A he has acquired on the open market through exercise of stock options. This capital structure is how the family has retained power on the board and ensured the chairman “has his name on the building”.
I seem to recall that this Class A/B structure violated a New York Stock Exchange rule that banned classes of stock with different voting power, but they winked and let it remain in place because Ford was so powerful, being the largest IPO in history when it went public in 1956.
Peter Obi is a Nigerian politician and candidate for president of Nigeria in the election held on 2023-02-25. On 2023-02-27, the Electoral Commission announced that Obi, instead of winning the landslide which had been predicted, had been defeated by his opponent, Bola Tinubu. Wikipedia notes:
The EU observer mission criticised the elections as lacking transparency. Several hundred ballot boxes — in Labour strongholds — had been burnt or destroyed by armed criminals. Elsewhere, votes had been bought. The servers for the digital transmission of election results were not online for days. A telephone transmission of the election results was also not possible. Nevertheless, election results were published by the electoral commissions that contradicted the perceptions on the ground.
That is what is now called “democracy” – at least, “democracy” Biden*-style. Once the new guy starts locking up opposition politicians, banning opposition political parties, censoring all media, and taking over the churches, then Nigeria will have reached today’s pinnacle of “democracy” – Zelensky-style.
“Voters need to wake up and vote differently,” he said. “We need people to look at the outcomes and say, Did these leaders make this worse or better for me? Is my life better today than it was?”
After returning to Stevenson, WA where we were married, to scatter my wife’s ashes from The Bridge of The Gods on our anniversary a friend who had moved to Portland invited me to stay with him the night before my return flight. His wife, whom he met after moving to Portland nearly kicked me out of the house.
After she was moved by the video of the ceremony, the conversation turned to religion. Sensing I could be getting myself into hot water, I decided to frame the conversation in terms of my meta-religious beliefs which are aimed at heading off religious wars such as The Thirty Years War, with which the West is now rhyming. This, of course, was meant to accommodate whatever her religion was – which she signaled by using the phrase “White Privilege” earlier. As part of my attempt to illustrate the danger of the aforementioned rhyme, I said to her, “For example, you view people who don’t accept that they enjoy White Privilege, such as working class white heterosexual men who voted for Trump, with moral contempt.” That did it. She started yelling at me. Not because I had falsely accused her – but because I had relativized her religion in an attempt to dethrone it from its “rightful” place as the supremacist theocracy to which we must all pledge obeisance.
There will be blood. There already is. Look at the streets of Portland.
There are lots of other things I could say about that brief visit, but Portland really is an interesting data point in what should be an enormous dataset subjected to the Algorithmic Information Criterion for macrosocial causal model selection.
