They’re not smooth brained at all. They know exactly what they are saying, but them gaining full control always takes priority over all other factors. Just because a foreign adversary did it to us, which they don’t like, doesn’t mean that they don’t still want to do it to us.

I assume everyone is owned by someone terrible, but the individual policies and changes are what drives me to swap.

I pay for things on sites processed by PayPal too, I just don’t have an account.

Just standard credit card processing for purchases and zelle or venmo for transfers.

Good thing I deleted my PayPal years ago over a previous TOS change.

And this is where you went? This is literally Reddit’s bias taken to the level of hyperbole. The extremism groupthink here is the primary reason it hasn’t and likely will never go mainstream.

Most of the truly ridiculous knife laws are in states with equally ridiculous gun laws. A few have been challenged under 2A grounds with some degree of success but it just isn’t being pursued that much.

I sold it for market value, it was a rare 6 speed one and since then manuals command an insane premium in some segments.

They’re a joke to all the manufacturers that went all in on EVs before the market fell out from under them.

Prices for even 200k mile used vehicles are skyrocketing and cheap new cars simply don’t exist. Yes, ICE is the majority of vehicles out there, especially in rural areas, but they are more expensive and less available than ever. 10 years ago I bought a 100k mile Volvo wagon for $10k, put 50k more miles on it then sold it for $5k; if I wanted to buy the exact same car back today with 250k miles i would need to pay $15k for it. As manufacturers shift to EVs that problem is only going to get worse.

There is a logical reason to be against forced adoption before the technology matures. For a lot of the country they are not a viable replacement for ICE yet. They’re improving, but not as fast as ICEs are being phased out and that leaves a lot of places where a dwindling used market will be the only option for many people.

It’s not a conspiracy or even hidden. The media shows what they want to show. They showed this shooting until they achieved their goals and stopped showing it. It is absolutely possible that each major media corporation did exactly what they wanted for their own goals at the time, no coordination needed, just that most of them are politically similar so their goals were fairly close. Shootings where attention promotes left leaning ideology are kept in the spotlight so long as they generate attention, any time that a right leaning narrative pops up they instantly drop all coverage. This isn’t a crazy conspiracy, it is a simple fact. Vegas resulted in Trump banning bump stocks; it succeeded and then was forgotten for whatever the next useful headline was that popped up.

The bump stock ban was enacted in 2018 which marked the end of coverage for the shooting. It wasn’t passed, it was dictated by arbitrary fiat. After it passed continued discussion could have had a negative impact, especially due to the investigation deliberately refusing to determine if they were actually used or not.

You hear about mass shootings (random public ones that are committed to generate news stories, not ones where it’s crime, usually gang related, with multiple people shot due to poor aim) when the media wants to leverage it for a specific angle. Shootings that play into the desired narrative linger for a very long time, shootings that go against the desired narrative disappear in a few hours to a few days. It has nothing to do with how many people were killed or what questions have or have not been answered; it is simply a function of how much it works towards the desired narrative.

The desired outcome of a gun ban was achieved and the fact that there are still unanswered questions means that continued discussion hurts the desired narrative, so it isn’t discussed. Not only has it “served its purpose” but bringing it up now could have a negative effect for those that control the media so the media never brings it up. No, we don’t know why he did it, we don’t even know for sure if he actually used bump stocks, but none of that matters; the headlines got the immediate response they were designed to get and then they moved onto other headlines before questions outside of their narrative were asked.

I have one on my pocket knife that goes with me almost everywhere.

It’s such a minor thing but fuck it’s annoying.

I have never listened to the radio in my car by choice. My phone is plugged in (currently Apple CarPlay but I used Android Auto with my last phone) but for simple play controls the buttons on the dash or steering wheel are still superior.

Maps make sense but having play controls for music as physical buttons is amazing. I have both a touch screen and physical volume/next/prev and I use the physical ones all the time. I actually like the sync system in my Focus other than the fact that when you start the car it tries to “resume” the first thing it can find and blasts loud AM static 75% of the time when I start the car. The controls are good though.

I’ve definitely gotten text messages at 35k feet on plenty of different occasions. Not a single issue with any systems on the plane from it.

I’ve had people ask me to write reference letters and need to decline. It was super awkward but I just couldn’t put my name to one.

As someone who has traveled across many countries all over the world. Anytime it’s illegal to say “this country is a shithole” quite often that country is a shithole.