I see your point, but I also saw Juiced Bikes go out of business last month after 15 years in the industry.

“Ireland does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers,” stated a spokesperson from the Irish Ministry of Finances.

I wish the media would eviscerate these people like they used to.

It’s almost like they knew in the sixties that they were in for some problems and have since been devising ever more complicated methods of disinforming the public in order to maintain their wealth. Does my head in sometimes.

When 52% of all trips made are less than 3 miles and less than 2% are over fifty miles, I don’t think battery swapping is something any individual needs on a regular basis.

I could get on board if manufacturers were making $10,000 sub 50 mile vehicles that were compatible with a swap station so you could switch to a larger battery for the weekend. This would have to be a standard adopted by all however, and even before that, they’d have to make small cars. Which they won’t, because we all know they are too busy making trucks and SUVs.

Not sure if this image from the DOT is actually of this specific shipment because I found this image from April when they moved the eighth part and it’s less that half the weight. Here’s a two minute video of it.

I think that last bit is more of a ‘what you make of it’ situation, regardless of how smart or dumb a phone is.

Unfortunately the manufacturers want the data and advertising revenue, and they’d only be persuaded to offer an alternative if they made the same amount of money.

If each sale of a $900 smart phone gives them $100 of ad revenue over a couple years, I’d bet my bottom dollar they would charge $200 for the ‘dumb’ version.

Sounds like my usage is just different to yours. I can’t remember why but I got accustomed to listening to audio at increased speed around a decade ago and slowly cranked it up to the point that now I can follow certain people’s conversations slightly higher than 2x. Only with voices and cadence I’m familiar with though. Any guests on a show can really throw me off.

The silence trimming aspect is a bit absurd honestly. It makes laughter sound almost all the same and robotic; you have to infer where comedic, dramatic, or thoughtful pauses in the speech are; and if there’s a more rapid fire back and forth in the conversation it can be tricky to follow. Although that last point doesn’t happen with podcasts where all the speakers record separately and it’s edited together to be coherent.

If you listen to a lot of shows, with hundreds of hours of episodes, it’s worth dialing up as much as you can stand. Then again, if I didn’t have two dozen podcasts with decades of backlog, I sure wouldn’t be listening at auctioneer pace.

After reading your comment, I checked my Pocket Casts stats page and it looks like between the skipping, variable speed (1.5-2x), and trimmed silence (mad max), I save nearly 20% of listening time with the majority of that being the silence trimming.

Might be an outlier, but with daily podcast listening, trimming is important enough to keep me on Pocket Casts, even though AntennaPod is attractive given it’s open source nature.