tal

He fought to keep his job on First Amendment grounds.

looks dubious

One of the exceptions to "the government cannot restrict your right to speech" is the government acting in a "government-as-employer" role. There, they can act like any other employer, and don't have special constraints just because they're the government. Employers can normally let people go because they think that they're bad for their image, and that's what the article said happened here.

...university leaders said he sullied the school’s reputation and had to go.

https://www.nyclu.org/resources/know-your-rights/speaking-out-public-employee

Different rules apply if you are making these comments in your personal time as a private individual. Generally, your statements about topics that are of general interest to the public, including current events, are protected by the First Amendment. However, a public employer in New York may discipline you if your comments either disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job.

Now, I suppose you can ask whether the professor publicly releasing porn videos of himself is actually damaging to public perception of the university, but the rationale they used is a legit rationale.

?

Plastic recycling isn't fake. It's often not been economical, so it often doesn't make any sense to do it. But you can recycle plastics.

Plus, is this sending my data to HP to be processed remotely as a cloud service, or is this AI stuff being run locally? I don't especially want to have the contents of my print jobs being sent to HP.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in early September that his government must create the conditions “so that having many children becomes fashionable again, as it used to be – seven or 10 people in a family.”

Getting back up to a sustainable TFR of 2.1 hasn't been achieved by a number of countries that have tried. I don't think that there's any chance that Russia is going to hit between 7 and 10 via trying to control the information enviornment.

But we shall see.

I haven't been following this or US politics much, but looking at other stories, it looks like "manhunt" may be a bit over the top. It sounds like this relates to serving a subpoena:

https://www.newsweek.com/fani-willis-nathan-wade-missing-1959447

"The committee issued the subpoena on Friday, attempted to serve the subpoena to Nathan Wade's lawyer, who declined, and subsequently the committee tried to serve the subpoena via email through Nathan Wade himself, never heard back. As a result the committee had to use the assistance of the U.S. Marshals, who have also not been able to find Nathan Wade," Dye told Newsweek via phone Wednesday evening.

The committee spokesperson also told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Republican-led committee has "served over 100 subpoenas this Congress. We have done so, for the most part, without controversy or the need to use the U.S. Marshals." He added that "Nathan Wade's evasion of service is extremely unusual and will require the Committee to spend U.S. tax dollars to locate him."

Newsweek reached out to the Fulton County District Attorney's Office for comment via email on Wednesday afternoon.

Andrew Evans, Wade's attorney, and Dye have differing views on what transpired over the past few months as the committee has tried to get Wade to testify. Evans told Newsweek in a phone interview on Wednesday that his client previously "voluntarily agreed to go up to Washington, D.C., and the Republicans canceled it."

Like, I don't think that normally having a process server involved is described as a "manhunt".

If you remember, Rudy Giuliani had been very openly dodging process servers for while until a few months ago, and I don't think that anyone called it a "manhunt":

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/18/giuliani-birthday-indictment-papers-00158783

Rudy Giuliani received a different kind of surprise at the end of his 80th birthday bash Friday night when he was served with a notice of indictment in Arizona’s 2020 election subversion case after weeks of successfully evading the state’s prosecution.

Arizona prosecutors had been attempting to locate the former Trump attorney since his indictment at the end of April, along with 17 other Trump allies, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and lawyers John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn. The indictment, which also names former President Donald Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator, includes felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery.

In a since-deleted post to X in the middle of the celebration, Giuliani taunted: “If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning: 1. They must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes.”

But around 11 p.m. as the festivities wound down for the night, agents from the AG’s office arrived and served Giuliani with indictment papers outside the house, causing several of the guests to express outrage.

That's my understanding of the article text, though obviously there's not a lot of detail there.

I assume that there'll be more analysis of it once the thing becomes public.

EDIT: It might also benefit internal combustion vehicle manufacturers, if it makes EVs less-competitive with them, at least until there's a hard cutoff and requirement to transition to EVs.

Hmm.

That's an interesting set of rules.

So, it'll presumably let European auto manufacturers compete in the value segment, whereas before they couldn't put a car out at as low a price.

But...if Chinese manufacturers continue to have lower costs -- I remember a quote from BYD saying that they were confident that they could maintain 15% lower costs -- it'll mean that they'll be able to offer a more-luxurious car in that segment and still make the same amount of profit.

So it may be that Chinese cars will wind up becoming associated with more-luxurious offerings in Europe.

It'd be kind of an interesting switch-up; my understanding is that historically European offerings were considered more-luxurious in China, and Chinese products could only really compete in the value segment.

EDIT: No, sorry, the 15% was apparently Tesla. I see articles with 25% to Europe:

https://technode.com/2023/09/06/byds-manufacturing-costs-in-eu-could-be-25-lower-than-rivals-ubs/

New research from UBS’s evidence lab that took apart the Seal electric car, BYD’s closest peer to the Tesla Model 3, reveals that the medium-sized sedan is 15% more cost-efficient than locally made offerings by the US automaker at its Shanghai facility. 

This percentage would be extended to 35% when compared to Volkswagen’s similar offerings manufactured in Europe. This means it would cost BYD $10,500 less to produce each Seal in China than a Volkswagen ID.3 in Europe, UBS analysts wrote in a Sept. 1 note. 

For Chinese-branded EVs, exporting from China to Europe is cheaper than manufacturing locally. Even so, Chinese EV makers would still maintain a 25% cost advantage over rivals if they produced in Europe, Gong added. 

UBS attributed the gap primarily to BYD’s technological and engineering integration of vehicle components. Additionally, the investment bank noted that 75% of the auto parts, ranging from batteries to power semiconductors, were made in-house. 

BYD could strike a balance between performance and cost by offering a relatively simple assisted driving system at a cost of less than RMB 3,000 ($411), significantly lower than the industry standard of around RMB 20,000. 

The teardown, aimed at uncovering the secrets of BYD’s success, reinforced UBS’s confidence in the rise of Chinese EVs. The investment bank expects Chinese automakers to double their global market share to 33% by 2030 and increase their European market share to 20% from last year’s 3% over the same period. 

Same idea, though. You'd expect the cost difference to be expressed in terms of the output.

I haven't used a dumbphone in many years.

However, it looks like there is a subreddit devoted to this, which may be of interest:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/

There are some open-source systems for media PCs.

Kodi seems to me to be popular, though I don't use a media PC myself.

You'll need to have the technical knowledge to install it yourself.

I'm not really gung-ho about mandatory approaches either, like with licensing, but for an optional approach:

• I have to be able to assess a device and its drawbacks with a reasonable amount of knowledge and time spent researching it.

• There has to be at least one option on the market that does what I want.

For cars, at least, we're really getting to the point where it's not practical to get a new car without a cell data link that phones home.

And trying to stay atop of the privacy issues for all classes of device out there can't be a full-time job, or it's not reasonable to expect people to make informed purchasing decisions. Like, I should just be able to say that I don't want a device that broadcasts any persistent unique IDs in plaintext over a radio, not have to research whether the current crop of smart automobile tire pressure valves has a protocol that exposes that information or not..

I'd like to avoid Europe's prescription-heavy regulatory route, but the way things are now in the US isn't my ideal either.