That was his heroic plan the whole time.

It’s honestly a remarkable accomplishment.

It is unreal how many tourists are there, though. I was shocked when I went there and basically couldn’t even see the fountain. We left immediately because we didn’t want to deal with all that. Rome has been my least favourite city to visit, purely because of all the tourists. Even going to Paris, which has CRAZY numbers of tourists, didn’t seem as bad; maybe because it was just designed to handle it.

I don’t think the 2 euro fee will stem the number of tourists, but it will help pay for all the upkeep the city has to do for everything to not go to shit when a million people walk through a small area every day.

I didn’t know that until this thread. That other poster made the distinction, so I looked it up.

The point they were making is that blackmail is only about revealing legal infractions. It’s a legal distinction that most people don’t care about in everyday language.

Under US law, blackmail is legally defined as threatening to reveal a criminal act in exchange for goods/services. Extortion is for threatening to reveal sensitive information.

Under US law, blackmail is legally defined as threatening to reveal a criminal act in exchange for goods/services. Extortion is for threatening to reveal sensitive information.

Can you imagine the sales bump from the positive PR if they had given 500 random strangers a million dollars instead of giving it to Elon? Absolute worst case they would have sold roughly 499 more cars.

Time to get Elon a trillion dollar bonus!

This wasn’t on my phone. I don’t have TikTok installed on either my personal or work cell phone. It was on my wife’s phone, which always has auto-updates turned off. She hates updates and never lets them happen. She woke up one morning and TikTok was updated with no way to turn that off. Two of her friends also complained that their apps auto-updated overnight.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-new-privacy-policy/

https://piunikaweb.com/2026/01/23/tiktok-privacy-policy-update-january-2026/

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/social-media/is-tiktok-u-s-broken-or-working-as-intended-3-terrifying-terms-of-service-changes-may-explain-whats-really-going-on

Side note: tomsguide is now horrifically hard to read.

Apple forced an update on iphones that auto-updated TikTok, which now has mandatory reporting of your geolocation (including SIM card and GPS info). This geolocation sharing can’t be turned off in Settings like all other apps. It is greyed out for TikTok.

You think this is all coincidental?

Or the intentional actions of a person who understands that his insane ramblings can cause stock market drops and that walking back those insane ramblings will cause stock markets to recover, allowing him and his buddies to make more money.

Not surprising. Korea has a HUGE population of smokers. While it has gone down in very recent years, back in 2017 almost half of all male adults were smokers. They still have 30% of the adult male population as smokers, though, which is double the US male smoking population.

It has nothing to do with Elon. He just said what intelligent people who have looked into the physics of the problem have known for a long time.

Hydrogen ONLY makes sense for things like trains. Do you really think it is better to use electricity plus extract then process oil to create hydrogen, burn oil to tanker truck that hydrogen to a gas station, use electricity to store the hydrogen, then waste electricity converting it to its components through a rare earth catalyst plate to charge a battery… versus transmitting electrons over a wire to charge a battery? Hell, even the fact that EVs can charge at home instead of constantly driving extra miles to get to a gas station to refill their hydrogen makes them better for the environment.

Yeah, mining rare earths for batteries is bad. But you are an idiot if you think the same thing isn’t happening in the creation of hydrogen and the rare earths used in hydrogen motors, along with the inefficiencies of transport and storage of hydrogen.

Yeah, we love traveling a lot, too. The numbers of tourists (which includes us, I know) has gone up so much in the last few years. It’s like COVID made everyone say, “fuck saving money, let’s just travel the world and buy luxury goods instead.” We went to Paris for Christmas 3 years ago, and while some of the bigger stores were crowded, it wasn’t that bad in the rest of the city. We just got back from Paris, and holy hell you could barely go anywhere due to the amount of people every place we went. It was 2C every day, and that didn’t deter anyone.

I fully support raising lodging taxes like this to help locals out who have to deal with idiots like me on a daily basis.

They might not know about their equivalent in the US: Mississippi.

I don’t disagree with most of what you said, but you have to agree there is some fear of Russia escalating if NATO does send actual troops. Russia is not doing as well as most people expected, and them getting their ass handed to them by NATO would back an unstable and suddenly politically weak Putin into a corner where his response would be unpredictable.

No, he got banned for blatant trolling. He outright admitted to saying he was making shit up. His first post is that NATO is “fake-ass” and couldn’t do anything, and then said that Russia was justified in feeling threatened by Ukraine joining NATO. When called out on the contradictory statements, he said he was just making shit up and didn’t believe either.

Nearly two thirds of Canadians aren’t paying attention.