They’re not “passing laws.” They define the minute technical details that Congress can’t cover completely or doesn’t understand. Here’s an example:

Elected Congress: Don’t sell moldy sausage.

Unelected FDA: Ok, here’s how long you can safely store sausage below this temperature. If that date is passed or the sausage has been exposed to higher temperature for this amount of time, it must be discarded to greatly reduce the possibility of selling moldy sausage.

Unelected Judge: Mom said if it’s not green it’s not moldy. Just don’t sell green sausage boys.

Unelected SCOTUS: Yup, that’s how it’s done.

I feel like this is a dying gasp effort to keep the game online. I actually feel bad about it.

Elite is one of two games where I’ve ever spent money on cosmetics. I spent like $60 on paint jobs because I actually wanted to support the game.

I’m not sure what to think about this, because normally I hate “pay to win” and cosmetic shops alike. I wish Elite just had a subscription model and could support more stable servers or something. I don’t know how they expected to put an always-online game on sale for $5 all the time and keep it profitable without eventually running into a brick wall where they’d need to choose between shutting down and pissing off players.

I genuinely hope this somehow turns out to be worth it for them.

Putin orders development of homegrown rifles that can be fired by next generation of young conscripts with stubs for hands

In the US, public transportation is so bad that a lot of used cars come from rental companies. People fly somewhere and then literally need to rent a car to get anywhere from the airport. The rental companies tend to buy new cars and sell them around 40k miles.

Another big source of used cars is from people leasing their vehicles, then upgrading instead of buying out. It’s very common to find 3-year-old cars that just came off lease.

Both of those should be easy to incentivize - require rental agencies to maintain a high percentage of electric in their fleet, and make leasing electric cars significantly cheaper than leasing ridiculous SUVs - either by subsidizing them or by taxing the leases on high-mpg ICE vehicles.