I was into fuel efficiency for a while, yes I too was fooled until about 2007, so I can tell you that gasoline-powered cars are more efficient at 90km/h than they are at 100 but typically they’re most efficient somewhere below 60km/h. Probably lower, depends on gear ratios and such. That they went with 55 instead of 40 is just because nobody would have accepted the latter. In fact they largely didn’t accept 55 either in the long run, as we know. But such technical details don’t matter a whole lot at this point because fossil fuels should not be burned at all by anyone.

Fuel efficiency standards: Demonstrating the Jevons paradox and distracting everyone from the urgent necessity to stop burning fossil fuels, since 1975.

Why vote NDP? Because even if we concede that all your criticisms of the party are exactly right and unchanged under its new leadership, that still makes them the best of the main parties available to vote for.

The one I like to watch is Mozilla’s own count of monthly active users. Once every year or two I’ll remember to check it. This time, it’s at least temporarily broken out of its years-long downtrend! The total number of Firefox users (not its market share) is up by 2% over 52 weeks as of the latest data point.

The hacker news discussion is surprisingly not bad. Very few Google stans coming in to shill for their corporate masters, and they’re getting soundly ignored and downvoted.

There are very few reasons left to buy any consoles, and they decided to make it one less.

Oh, sorry, did not mean to put that in c/technology.

In the old days we had large numbers of people believing that being online meant using AOL, Compuserve, or whatever walled-garden type of “portal” they were lured into using. But we could mostly rely on tech-aware people like computer programmers to know better. Not any more. Today it’s a more diverse group that knows better, but a less cohesive and politically influential one, and it makes up a much smaller fraction of net users.

ah good — I just assumed it was their latest name for the address bar.

Browsing history results now appear with images.

Images? What? Why? I hope that’s easy to turn off.

How did kitty-corner and point form make the list? Surely everyone who speaks 500 words of english knows those words.

Yeah. Not exactly an improvement, is it.

They’re directly lobbying the government on a massive scale. They’re looking for every opportunity to force their software on people buying any computer, like they always have. They’re looking for every technical trick to screw the competition, and to extract more from their customers. Where it’s possible (i.e. not LibreOffice) they’re buying up any company that does threaten to successfully compete with them. They bought half the video game industry for example. They’re buying their way into all the schools so kids grow up knowing nothing but the Microsoft life.

I mean what else would they do? It’s Microsoft.

In principle, it’s a bad idea to route so many of everyone’s web requests through one central provider. It gives them too much power to track everything. It’s not how the web was meant to work.

In practice, the techniques they use to try and keep out the bots also keep out people like me who like to make our web browsers slightly more secure by disabling parts of the vast and overly-complicated set of features implemented in javascript, such as those that are normally only used for browser fingerprinting. Over time it’s become increasingly difficult to figure out all the things I’d need to do to have my usual browser pass all their tests, and in this era of plentiful browser 0-days I’m more reluctant than ever to spend any time trying.

Tax the rich. Start rebuilding the public wealth that has been sold off over the past 40 years. Reinvent capitalism along more sustainable lines where it’s possible, build alternatives to it where it isn’t. Or maybe just let things roll along the path of least resistance for a few more years and then watch it all crash and burn.

By saying that even a relatively modest goal such as an NDP government “will never happen” you’re casting a vote for the latter.

Does anyone actually use calendars that put Monday on the left? Not where I live but I haven’t seen the calendars of most of the world.

Rabble dot ca got cloudflared so I can’t see the article, but who needs democracy when you’ve got a strong leader, tough on crime, who can really get things done, forcefully confront our problems, thrust forward with nation-building projects like helping the world burn even more fossil fuels, and boldly invest in the future by buying expensive military hardware from all over the world. Listening to parliament — let alone listening to civil liberties nuts and environmentalist weirdos who don’t have the financial clout it takes to make a difference in the new Canada — would only slow them down.

If the fundraiser is in the form of a bake sale, I pledge to go down there and buy a cupcake.

It’s kinda weird that you came back to continue arguing against the human tendency towards curiosity.

If noticing (and reporting on) an odd statistic does not make you want to investigate to find out the cause of it, you are perhaps not cut out for a career as a journalist.