Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Washington Post — Winners and losers in the new global climate deal
Island nations left COP28 disappointed. The UAE gained some bragging rights. And the prospect of the world hitting its most ambitious climate goal remained in limbo.
...COP28 undoubtedly included breakthroughs — in this case, the first time that nearly 200 nations have called on one another to transition away from reliance on the fossil fuels that are driving the planet’s warming. It also called for the tripling of renewable energy by 2030 and doubling of energy efficiency measures.
“We are finally naming the elephant in the room,” Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, said in a statement Wednesday of the fossil fuel language. “The genie is never going back into the bottle, and future COPs will only turn the screws even more on dirty energy.”
But as ever, the consensus deal was criticized by some activists and nations as too weak, riddled with loopholes and not sufficient to confront the scale of the climate crisis bearing down on humanity.
“I never imagined leopards would eat MY face,” complains woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party
Argentina on Tuesday announced a sharp devaluation of its currency and cuts to energy and transportation subsidies as part of shock measures new President Javier Milei says are needed to deal with an economic emergency.
...“For a few months, we’re going to be worse than before,” Caputo said, two days after the libertarian Milei was sworn in as president of the second largest economy in South America and immediately warned of tough measures.
...As part of the new measures, Caputo said the government is canceling tenders of any public works projects and cutting some state jobs to reduce the size of the government.
He also announced cuts to energy and transportation subsidies without providing details or saying by how much, and added that Milei’s administration is reducing the number of ministries from 18 to 9.
...But social leader Juan Grabois, who is close to former center-left president Cristina Fernández (2007-2015), said that Caputo had announced “a social murder without flinching like a psychopath about to massacre his defenseless victims.”
And the community stands together:
Remember, SCOTUS could rule to eliminate the ability of agencies like the FTC to enforce regulations like this, so that’s fun:
New FTC regulations, called the Combating Auto Retail Scams Rule, are supposed to make life easier for car buyers.
...The agency says these predatory fees and tactics cost auto consumers in the U.S. $3.4 billion per year, and they add 72 million hours to their time spent shopping for vehicles, according to NBC News. The new rule bans misrepresentations about price, cost and other important information when shopping for a car. It’ll also require dealers to provide the actual price consumers have to pay for vehicles, tell them that additional items like extended warranties aren’t mandatory and state the full monthly payments consumers will be paying upfront.
It also bans add-on items that the FTC described as “providing no value to consumers” like duplicative warranties, software and auto subscriptions for vehicles that don’t have the tech, or service contracts for oil changes on EVs that don’t need motor oil. It’s really shitty stuff, NBC News reports. Another provision in the new rule will prohibit dealers from trying to trick members of the military by falsely suggesting that dealerships are affiliated with the military – something that is super shitty.
“This rule by the FTC is really going to help ensure a more fair and honest marketplace so that Americans can buy cars without worrying about getting tricked or deceived,” Kina Khan, FTC Chair, said in an interview.
Meanwhile…
In another fantastic argument to defend Tesla's "Autopilot," litigious pedo guy Elon Musk claims California can't regulate false advertising because it violates his free speech.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles has filed a complaint against Tesla and wants to strip it of its license to produce motor vehicles in the State. The complaint stems from the numerous problems with Tesla's non-working "Autopilot." Musk had been all over the place with personal promises about how wonderful it was until people started getting hurt, whistleblowers released tons of internal documents revealing that the company knew, and the government got involved. Ever since, we've heard a lot less from Musk about self-driving tech, however he has been busy enabling "free speech" elsewhere.
It should come as no surprise that Musk's defense against the complaint is that "the First Amendment lets me say whatever I want." Clearly, the government can regulate speech on behalf of public safety. Lies about a car's autonomous driving system very likely meet whatever standard the courts require. This seems like another large waste of time and money.
And also:
...The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for.
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
...20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.
But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit.
And also:
This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law.
There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it.
It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.
The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android".
The country’s highest-stakes water fight in a century is playing out this week at a Las Vegas casino.
The seven Western states that share the Colorado River are facing a looming spring deadline to agree on how to share its dwindling flows. The negotiations will shape the future of the West — and they’ll depend, more than anything, on the personalities around the table.
There isn’t a single, or even two or three, fronts to the American West’s water wars. Fault lines cut between states, regions and rural and urban users. And the people leading the negotiations aren’t governors, state lawmakers or even elected officials for the most part: They’re local appointees, bureaucrats and engineers.
It’s a mix of old and new players, some with decades of experience and others cutting their teeth during the most consequential water negotiations in modern times.
You may have noticed, perhaps around the time you started studying magnets in school, that we don't power vehicles by strapping a magnet to the front of them and propelling them forward with a second magnet just out of reach in front of it. Instead, we continue to power our cars using electricity and the remains of not dinosaurs like chumps.
This tells you one of two things: Either there is a very good reason that a magnet truck won't work, or you are the first person on Earth to come up with the idea of plonking a big ACME magnet on your van and are about to change the world.
Occasionally, people think (or most probably joke) that they're in the latter.
...The key part here is an outside force. The magnet, despite being dangled in front of the car like a carrot in front of a donkey, is still part of the same system as the car, attached by a bar and/or rope. They are not applying any force to any outside object, attracting only to each other and canceling out, and so remain as stationary as your car...
Do you feel like you’re stuck in one place no matter how hard you propel yourself forward (maybe all the outside forces acting on you cancel each other out?)
Or maybe, like the former guy, you wish that basic laws of physics just don’t apply to you?
Tell us all about it in the comments!