Buelldozer

I don't remember anything about all their designs being open source but they DID open source(*) the Roadster.

They also open sourced(*) their charging connector which has now become an increasingly used standard called NACS.

I'm putting that asterisks by open source because that's only sorta-kinda what they did. More precisely they made the Roadster and TCC royalty free to use and released all of the engineering documents necessary to use & recreate them.

What you're probably remembering is their Patent Pledge from 2014. At this point Tesla holds nearly 1,200 patents worldwide so that Patent Pledge isn't a small thing. They're surely not going to make all of their vehicle designs open source but they do seem to be holding to their Patent Pledge and its underlying "Open Innovation Framework".

This doesn't mean Musk or his companies are good, it's just a review of the facts.

I’ll never understand how the EV thing became a political issue.

I think at first it was viewed as a threat by both the Domestic Auto Industry including the UAW. Tesla was selling an increasing number of vehicles, which is what the Big 3 cared about, and they weren't a Union Shop, which is what the UAW cared about. So they fought the rise of EVs out of self-protection.

It's really the oil industry fighting it now because it's an existential threat. The United States generates almost zero electricity from oil, to them it's all about fuel. Coal has been in steep decline for two decades and as an industry its nearly done. They were replaced by the Natural Gas folks for electricity generation and you won't find many NG folks who are actually against EVs. When you do it's because their parent company is an Oil Company.

Toss in the rise of China as the current best source for EV batteries and the threat that Chinese companies like BYD present to the Big 3 and its easy to see why things are still all knotted up.

The current Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, was appointed by Harry Reid in 2012. The previous Parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, retired after having held the position twice (once appointed by Democrats and the second time by Republicans).

The last Parliamentarian who was "fired" was Robert Dove and like Alan Frumin he held the position twice. He was fired by Democrats in 1987, then brought back by Republicans in 95 then fired by Republicans in 2001.

Senate Parliamentarians don't get "fired" very often, both parties seem to do it at about the same rate, and even when they are "fired" (demoted really) they tend to boomerang back into the position after a few years. There's only been 6 of them since the role was established in 1935.

I should have known that I needed to make my joke more obvious.

Also, I can't go back to reddit. I've been gone so long that they cancelled my passport.

The bot problem has been around since before Sam Altman was old enough to legally drink. For example in the early days the founders of Reddit were running bots to make the site look wayyy busier than it actually was in order to attract new users.

He's a convenient bogey-man, and a huge asshole, but he's the not the source of this problem.

but breaking down what’s different I can’t pin anything concrete down.

One big difference is scale. The 2000s Internet was primarily centered around single(ish) interest forums with relatively low user counts. The entire Lemmy-verse, which is itself quite tiny in 2025, is still WAY larger than nearly any of the 2000s era forums ever were.

Another other big difference is why the user base is online. The majority of them aren't participating to discuss a shared interest anymore, they are doing it for general entertainment or to earn money.

Those two things explain nearly all of the change. Way more users congregated into a handful of websites with many of them, including the sites, attempting to get rich doing it.

The 2000s web was a much smaller number of users spread across a zillion websites / forums with nearly all of the users and site operators doing it without money as a motivator.

MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.

Usenet was Social Media and it had allllll the toxicity.

There isn't a single county in this country that votes 100% in either direction. So saying that "All of whom voted for this." is objectively incorrect.

I'm in Wyoming and fiber started rolling out in multiple cities with multiple different providers in each city two years ago. They got to my house earlier this year so I now have a 2Gb/s connection.

I'm confused. The article is talking about "BEAD" which wasn't passed until 2021. You must be talking about a different program.

Some dipshit would try crushing it with their lifted diesel pickup to compensate for their tiny pp.

The far larger problem would be that every single charging cable would be stolen in 60 minutes or less.

But then again, that can be solved with a pair of concrete bollards. One on each side.

If they were going to be crushed it'd mostly be by EV drivers who can't fucking park. Adding bollards could make opening the charging side door pretty interesting for some models. As an example if there were bollards in the setup in the picture then you'd be entirely unable to open the right rear door of the vehicle. For vehicles who have their charging port on the front ahead of the drivers door the driver themselves may be unable to exit.