#budget 2017 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 8 months

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By Sharon Parrott

It’s tempting to ignore a budget resolution released just days before the start of the fiscal year that it’s meant to guide, and amid the chaotic debate around a short-term extension of government funding to avoid a shutdown. But House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington’s proposed budget is important for what it illustrates about House Republicans’ disturbing vision for the country: health care stripped away from millions of people, higher poverty and hunger, capitulation to climate change, more tax cheating by high-income people, and large-scale disinvestment from the building blocks of opportunity and economic growth—from medical research to education to child care. It would narrow opportunity, worsen racial inequities, and make it harder for people to afford the basics. It reflects the wrong priorities for the country and should be roundly rejected.

Chair Arrington made clear in his remarks the intent to extend the expiring tax cuts from the 2017 tax law, which included large tax cuts for the wealthy. In addition, the budget resolution itself would pave the way for unlimited, unpaid-for tax cuts that could go well beyond those extensions. The extensions alone would give annual tax breaks averaging $41,000 to tax filers in the top 1 percent and cost more than $350 billion a year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. The budget reflects none of these costs and fails to explain how—or whether—they will be offset.

A shocking share of the spending cuts Chair Arrington specifies target people with low and moderate incomes, including $1.9 trillion in Medicaid cuts and hundreds of billions in cuts to economic security programs, such as cuts to assistance that helps people afford food and other basic needs. Just last week the Census Bureau released data showing that poverty spiked last year, more than doubling for children. Rather than proposing policies that could reverse this deeply troubling trend, the budget proposal would deepen poverty and increase hardship.

The budget would also make deep cuts in the part of the budget that is funded annually through appropriations bills. Disingenuously, the budget resolution shows that these cuts total more than $4 trillion over ten years—but hides the program areas that would be cut, labeling them “government-wide savings.” But this year’s House Appropriations bills—which include substantial cuts—make clear that cuts would fall on a wide range of basic functions and services that support families, communities, and the broader economy, including Social Security customer service, support for K-12 and college education, funding for national parks and clean air and water, rental housing assistance for families with low incomes, and more.

Chair Arrington claims the budget’s deep and damaging program cuts are in the name of deficit reduction. But the failure to identify a single revenue increase for high-income people or corporations—and in fact, to potentially shower them with more unpaid-for tax cuts—is an extreme and misguided approach. Moreover, calling for a balanced budget in ten years is merely a slogan that has little to do with addressing our nation’s needs—and the budget resolution resorts to gimmicks and games to even appear to get there, including $3 trillion in deficit reduction it claims would accrue from higher economic growth it assumes would be achieved by budget policies.

A budget plan should focus on the nation’s needs and lay out an agenda that broadens opportunity, invests in people and families, reduces the too-high levels of hardship and financial stress faced by households across the country, and raises revenues for those investments. But the Arrington budget blueprint would shortchange much-needed investments and lock in wasteful tax cuts to the already wealthy for the next decade.

House Republicans are pursuing a damaging agenda at every turn—first threatening the nation with default, and now demanding deep cuts in an array of priorities in this year’s appropriations debate, risking a government shutdown, and proposing a budget blueprint that would take the country in the wrong direction.

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consultingsister · 21 days

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Highbury Terrace, London bought in 2015. floorplan.

Cee never feels at home anywhere. She once spent twelve million on a house in Chelsea and lived there for three weeks. Highbury Terrace was bought on a whim on a trip back to London when she called NYC home. When she returned to London in 2017, Highbury Terrace was just the house with most of her stuff. But it's almost like she forgot to move out to find somewhere new. 2024 will mark the longest Cee has lived in a house since her childhood home. She likes the garden, which feels like a secret; she likes the park across the road where people walk their dogs and children play. She likes that the bedrooms feel small for such a large home. She likes no one chose the house with her, no one else lived here, and no one haunts the halls.

#( ii. headcanon )#( iv. home )#stop i love house hunting with cee's budget #but this has actually been THEE house since like 2017 and i love it #long post --

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imkeepinit · 1 month

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#GOP #2017 tax cuts #government shutdown #budget priorities

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kurothoughts · 2 months

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finished watching the Book of Atlantic movie~ at first I was kinda bummed up bc I couldn't find to watch in full HD, only 720p maximum, but then I saw the cgi and realized maybe it was a divine blessing in disguise

#black butler #kuroshitsuji #book of atlantic #that was like 2017 #cgi in anime was always a huge hit or miss #especially in the beginning #but OH MY GOD #even the people dancing here cgi???#i remember seeing some post joking that 80% of the budget went to ciel's contract eye glow in one scene #and look i get it #it's a movie you want to cut some corners #fine #but i just wish studios would allow themselves to be properly animated like the old days #og anime was rough sometimes #but when they but their soul into it you would feel it through the scene #idk how this started as an basic comment #and turned into a mini-rant abt modern animation #i'm sorry

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ahdriking · 2 years

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Honestly looking at all the new bl dramas coming out this year, especially just in June, and seeing how many of them look so high quality and high rated he he is making me think I genuinely could not have picked a better time to sell my entire ass to the bl machine

#like to go from what offerings there were in 2017 to this year? crazy #and the pandemic delayed it so like can you imagine whats gonna happen next year?#the year after that?#i feel like thailand in particular is heating the hell up and starting to pay serious attention to what amounts to a mega cash cow #finally queer people and women of all ages are getting recognised as the valid paying audiences we are #finally the talented individuals who have been pioneering this industry from the outset are getting the budgets and network support #that they've always deserved #im honestly just really grateful to thailand especially #thank you for being the one shining beacon of non-criminalised or censored lgbt queerness in asia #thank you for being unafraid to throw money at this genre #we all reap the rewards worldwide #kinnporsche #check out the series #cutie pie #cutie pie series #kinnporsche the series #blueming #bad buddy

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bmpmp3 · 2 years

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YESTERDAY i saw so many fledgling birds

FIRST OF ALL there was a baby cardinal that’s been hanging out in our backyard as its papa gets it some snacks and its very funny seeing it just sit there so diligently. blank expression. until papa comes with lunch and then it YELLS its fantastic

SECOND OF ALL i was doing an errand on my bike and i passed by this big huge little baby robin staring at me so i stopped to take carefully take a picture and once i was done one of its parents came down a few feet away with three huge worms in its mouth so the baby like. stood up with its huge gangling baby legs and toddled over with its wings out for balance. i hadnt seen a baby bird walk before but it makes sense that theyd be clumsy with it. i then took a few minutes to watch the parent feed the baby from a distance because the world is full of marvelous wonders to see and experience every day

bonus photo of the robin fledgling:

#art #watercolour #traditional art #sorry my photo looks Like That #I have a 2017 budget motorola phone and when you zoom in (i didnt wanna get too close to freak out the parents) everything becomes...#crunch......the crunch..........#anyway i adore fledglings so fuckin much. they just SIT THERE #the blankets expression. these guys dont know WHAT the hell you are or whats going on #they just know their parents are coming back with appy slices for afterschool snack. and thats wonderful

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falllpoutboy · 1 year

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the jl reshoots debacle really pisses me off still because zack stepping away to grieve is fine and expected but it still blows my mind how wb 1) didn’t delay the film to be released in early 2018 and have zack come back at a later date or 2) contact another director who zack is actually friends with to finish the movie in post. ben is a director himself and zack is friends christopher nolan… but they knew what they were doing when they brought joss on to reshoot a finished movie that didn’t need to be reshot.

#they wanted to recreate the magic and earnings of the first two avengers movies #most notably the humor and levity of joss’ mcu movies #its just sick to me bc they knew what zack’s movies were #and zsjl had lowkey humor anyways just not cringey jokes and quips #and the fact that the reshoots ballooned the budget to $300 million and #jl 2017 is the most expensive movie ever made and it took a year for that movie to make a profit #dceu

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irrigos · 2 years

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ok 4 more stories and then ill have done all of 2017... I'm just planning on doing one a day until i run out of fate and then we'll see if i want to buy more

but heres where my stats are overall for my ES 100% speedrun (this run is incredibly slow and i will be breaking no records)

2015 - 7/7

2016 - 12/12

2017 - 8/12

2018 - 3/12

2019 - 3/12

2020 - 12/12

2021 - 12/12

2022 - 8/8

can you tell which years i wasnt playing fallen london lol

#i became an EF for the first time during the second ES they ever had #and then played very little between 2017 and 2020 #fl has been a part of my life for so long lmao. and i spent so much of that time refusing to learn ANY lore #also before anyone gets on my ass about spending all my money on video game microtransactions #i budget for this babey #i dont make a LOT of money but i can spent my fun money budget on a game i really love if i want

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tempestuousserenity · 2 years

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#ahhh i love my new phone #idk how i even got my old phone to last as long as it did #the screen was so uncalibrated that certain zones were completely unusable #the camera was super grainy #i totally maxed out my storage #and the mere 2GB of RAM made scrolling on tumblr a nightmare #rip you old budget phone 2017-2022 #you were a trooper #tempest talks

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courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme · 2 months

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Dumbo (2019, Tim Burton)

06/04/2024

Dumbo is a 2019 film directed by Tim Burton.

USA, 1919. Holt Farrier, a former star of the Medici circus, returns from World War I to start a new life with his children Milly and Joe. Unfortunately, when Holt returns home, he finds his life turned upside down: a widower, he lost an arm during the war and consequently will never be able to do his circus stunts with his horses again. Max Medici, the director of the circus, then gives him another task: to take care of the new circus animal, an Indian elephant.

Milly and Joe visit the puppy, who they decided to call Dumbo, a name previously given to him by the circus spectators for mocking purposes, and discover that he has the ability to fly thanks to a feather; they therefore decide to exploit his talent to help the circus, now in a serious situation.

The next evening the circus puts on another show in Missouri and Dumbo makes his first appearance as a flying elephant after getting stuck on a burning building. The little elephant's performance causes a sensation throughout the country and begins to be on everyone's lips, including that of V. A. Vandevere, a powerful entrepreneur, and Colette Marchant, a French trapeze artist, who go to Medici and invite him and his circus at Dreamland, a park built by Vandevere full of rides and entertainment.

Dumbo, tired of life in the circus, decides to say goodbye to his new friends and moves with his mother to the jungle.

On July 8, 2014, Walt Disney Pictures announced the live action remake of Dumbo, together with the name of the screenwriter Ehren Kruger. On March 10, 2015, Tim Burton was announced as the film's director.

The film's budget was $170 million.

In January 2017, it was announced that Will Smith was in talks to play the father of the children who develop a friendship with the baby elephant Dumbo after seeing him in the circus, but later turned down the offer due to of the filming of the sequel to the film Bad Boys II, and other reasons. Bill Hader, Chris Pine and Casey Affleck were also offered the role, but turned it down before Colin Farrell was cast.

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jaythelay · 2 months

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OOOOOweeeee I wanna rant about the resident evil remake so badly.

Something that bothers the FUCK out of me is they fucked up the tank controls! But in reverse! The ENTIRE map is NOT designed around tank controls, not a single part of it, you'll CONSTANTLY be running into walls and having to stop and turn, the OG had SOME moments of this, but for the most part ALL OF THE WORLD WAS DESIGNED AROUND THE CONTROLS.

Instead the remake is made around it's "alternative" control scheme that just SHITS on difficulty and the controls themselves, having to adjust every new camera angle is abhorrent and not something you ever needed to do in the OG game.

Because of all this, the game NEVER has a flow, it constantly feels like you're fighting walls or the camera more than enemies, constantly.

I hate the new shit they added too. The dogs aren't interesting and honestly I quit playing damn near everytime I have to use that damn whistle because it's just such a filler content. It doesn't feel like a genuine addition to the OG, it feels like someone said "we need new things" and put it randomly there. It disrupts flow severely having to go allllll the way there and then BACK. The new armor key section has a vibe but that's it. It's, again, just not a natural addition. It again, disrupts flow to stop everything to do this extra feeling objective. It doesn't add anything to the world either.

The visuals. Oh my god. Why do people call this an upgrade? Jill's head looks like a fruit. Some kinda oblong apple. Chris just looks like a pineapple and his FUCKING HAIR IS HILARIOUS. Dude looks like he's supposed to take calculus, not be in essentially the police reserves.

I hope you REALLY hate color, because holy hell, there's no fucking color. There's hardly even RED, BLOOD hardly exists in the zombie game. God damn I hope you really like greys, blacks, yellows, occassional blues and greens. Because that's the color scheme. Every room looks exactly the fucking same, nothing feels different, it never feels like you're in a mansion you'd ever want to explore. It's a generic, creepy mansion, more generic than the OG which gave it LIFE. COLOR. ATMOSPHERE. FUCK SOMETHING.

Hilariously, the Gamecube port looks better than the "HD" rereleases. There's SOME actual fucking color for one thing. It's minor, but it really does look and feel better.

Oh my god the voice acting. Nobody. Not one soul, can say the OG has bad voice acting after the remake. The remake's voice acting is ACTUALLY bad. It's not even debateable, they don't actually act. They don't emote hardly either, and the poor face rigging makes that problem even worse. How pixels on a flat face can show more emotion, well that's the toyificaion/personification effect that companies still don't understand, but simply put: Jill's eyebrows/eyelids never raise, not once. I never noticed such a thing in the OG, because they NEVER made that something to FOCUS on.

Listen to Chris make fun of Wesker in the OG when he reveals the Tyrant. You can say "oh they didn't have enough context to make it feel natural-" Doesn't matter. They have a vibe, and an actual direction. They all. Sound. Like. That. Because it was Intentional. You can claim otherwise, but they refused a japanese dub because it sounded bad, IMO, OG RE's voice acting, even if it's not "realistic or diegetic" or some nonsense, means NOTHING to the SHEER EFFORT put in by these people.

You know what these characters, with no movable parts on their face, are FEELING. There's ACTUAL. FUCKING. ACTING. Is it GOOD acting? No, nobody's arguing it's good acting, is it GOOD VOICE WORK? YES. UNDENIABLY. And the constant jokes that it's "bad voice acting" severely undermines the actual art put into it.

Whether intentional or not, the fact remains they're doing good voice work. You like it, I like it, nobody actually hates it, people just shit on it because it's TRYING TO BE CORNY. and they don't care about that bit of context.

Meanwhile, the remake? It's just bad. No direction, no emotion, no one's having fun. Not one soul is having fun reading these boring ass lines in this boring grey mansion with boring grey clothes and boring grey everything.

It's so boring. It's such poor work, I don't blame the voice actors, just the direction. Serious is NOT what the OG RE was EVER going for. Ever. The boss gets LAUGHED AT. The fucking BOSS. Laughed at.

Not in the Remake. It's just...boring. Wesker doesn't even start pissing and crying, he's closer to neutral. It's so...fucking boring. They took a fun story, and made it a generic slop.

OH MY GOD. The voice acting in the remake, is just. Fucking. Bad. It's dreadful. It's like someone told them to do a bad job, not have fun, doing a bad job, just do a fucking BORING take and move to the next line. Awful. No fun at all. And you can't take it serious because the acting is actually BAD. Like, Boring bad. I keep saying boring but you have to understand, there's nothing funner than "you the master of unlocking" or "you were almost a jill sandwich" THESE ARE MEANT TO BE FUNNY. NOT SERIOUS.

THEY MADE THEM SERIOUS BECAUSE YOU FUCKING IDIOTS THOUGHT THE ORIGINAL GAME WAS TRYING TO BE LIKE THE REMAKE IS TRYING TO BE. SERIOUS. WHEN IT'S FUCKING SILLY.

You're fighting fucking ZOMBIE DOGS, PLANTS. A TALL NAKED WHITE GUY. YOUR BOSS IS ACTUALLY A DOUBLE CROSSING, SCIENTIST MAN. IT'S FUNNY!

The remake takes all the SOUL out. And replaces it with a poor imitation that genuinely only disrespects the original. Everyone who says it's SUCH a good remake, and SUCH a good example of what to do, MISSES THE FUCKING POINT SO HARD IT BECOMES EXTRA EMBARRASSING.

Oh my god then Lisa, holy shit what a waste of time. Another addition that adds nothing. Not one thing. Not to the story, not to the characters, not to the gameplay, not to the artistry, pacing, nothing.

And then the music is worse. It's boring.

That's my review of the remake. Boring/Resident Evil (PS1)

#resident evil remake #resident evil #one day I'll make a video #I just don't want to deal with people continuing to pretend this is a good remake or game #it's atrocious #I've completed the original in 2017-2018 #first time playing it #played the remake LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG before the classics #even then I hated it #even now I hate it #but the OGs are still genuinely good experiences #the remake takes a shit on all of that #from voice acting #to controls #to music #to artistry and visuals #it's a direct offbrand copy #beginning to end it feels like a chinese knock off with a budget

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cammie · 3 months

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thanks so much reddit user iamnotcreativeDET for this information 😢

#i’m looking for either a 2017 explorer or a 2016 yukon...#with my budget everything is going to be at or fast approaching ~150k miles. definitely going to remember to ask the dealer whether or not #the water pump and timing chain are original ...#cammie.txt

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josefksays · 3 months

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...)

#One step away of suing this hellsite (if only I had the guts and budget)#Something I just saw but it's recurring in a way #Two measure thing kills me here plus everyone who left this after 2017

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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