I feel like the dirty little secret at the core of the whole of that advertising industry is that it’s actually really hard to justify spending the amount of money on it that people currently do. Beyone when products are white washing their own downsides, is spending more money on marketers even productive by capitals standards? They chase these data driven privacy monstrosities the same way websites chase clicks becase they can be used as a meteic to show advertisers ‘"engagement’" but how much of this whole song and dance is doing anything anymore? I feel like the advertising industry only survives the way it does today because it asserts itself as important but it hardly productive.
Let it ring. Robocall centers only work when they maximize volume, the more time they spend not getting an answer the more money they’re not making. If you wanna get real saucy, wait as long as you can, accept the call, say nothing or mute your mic. They wont spend more than 5-10 seconds before they hang up on you though because they know it too.
For my friends that are curious I make sure to take them shooting because I know I’m capable of teaching proper safety and maintaining as safe an environment you can for that, and, like you alluded to, if there’s a gun behind every blade of grass, you really should understand how they work and what their limits are or you risk not having enough information to make good decisions in situations with firearms present. Like imagine trying to cross a road if you had no idea how cars worked at all. Universal education around guns alone would save lives even with no other changes.
And now many people won’t learn it at all. But here’s the secret, those people will still get guns, their parents still have guns and don’t give a fuck about safety. Now they have no choice but to learn from their parents. This is not the win you think it is.
This is comparable to abstinence only education. Ignoring teaching how to safely handle yourself because it goes over ‘scary’ topics has never made us safer.
My insight to why is limited to what seemed like a tradeeoff where GM got info on how Hondas hydrogen powered research and development and in return GM shared theirs for batteries. A large percentage or engineers in Detroit are not sold on EVs, especially for things bigger than cars, or applications requiring more power density. If it wasn’t for government essentially forcing them to start transitioning to EVs, most of them wouldn’t be.
Honda used to have a partnership with GM for EV battery development. Id imagine they’re trying to make better and cheaper batteries. US wont get them though, our government will probably ban them from selling anything made in partnership with Huawei because ‘china bad’ and proping up US automotive industry at the expense of others is more American than anything except selling weapons to both sides of a conflict.
Wireless earbuds are trash and part of the problem, like wireless mouses. Stop putting irremovable batteries in things that don’t need batteries, its basically just planned obselecence on shinier more expensive goods. The last thing I want is to spend money on is good quality audio equipment that has a necessary end of life date due to charge cycles. These days you can scarcely find good headphones that arent wireless.
My first thought was if they’re asking for this officially, they’ve piloted some version of it unofficially.