They wanted to make an example of someone. His thumbing his nose at the US government was well publicised, so they made their revenge on him very public too.

Remember the time - two days ago - when Trump said he was going to ban all electric cars? I wonder how Elon feels about that.

Celebrities get wide latitude to protect themselves from imitators. Impressionists can do “satire” etc. but this isn’t that. It’s explicitly a reference to her voice in the movie, and as such she’s protected by law from them going around her and hiring someone else to imitate her.

It was explicitly represented as her voice when he tweeted “Her” in relation to the product, referencing a movie which she voiced. It’s not a legal grey area in the US. He sank his own ship here.

He tweeted “Her”, which explicitly tells us it’s a deliberate imitation of Scarlett’s voice in that movie. And he tried to negotiate licencing her famous voice, which she rejected.

So it’s more than just a coincidence, it’s deliberate bad faith behaviour. Legally you can’t misrepresent a product as being from a famous person when it wasn’t, and he very much did that. I guess he was hoping she’d give in and accept the licensing agreement post-facto. But instead it looks he’s in legal deep water now.

All this tells me is that they have a great PR department.

Meanwhile Mercedes has already reached level 3.

One that results in a crime, apparently.

…because based on the facts it is homicide.

It’s a very cheap and low effort way to reduce Russia’s ability to invade across Europe and stomp a bunch of NATO countries.

A lot of plastics have PFAS in them and I don’t think it’s likely they’ll be rushing to remove them. I wonder how this is going to play out.

You mean aside from the ex-president?

There have been UBI trials before and they found that it didn’t lead to price increases to any great degree.

They definitely did challenge it

I’m surprised that the supreme court would even hear this request. He’s just a normal citizen now and the brief sounds a lot like someone requesting retrospective absolution for their crimes.

They have devices installed which include GPS and an accelerometer. They report back to base via a cellular connection when you drive erratically or aggressively etc.

It’s not just EVs - most new cars have these tracking devices where they sell your data to your insurance company to be used against you.

You appear to be arguing that even if microplastics are present in the environment it’s not a problem. That’s a brave stance to take given the wealth of information to the contrary.

Even if they did break down it’s bad. Plastics have additives in them which are used to improve their material properties. These additives include BPA and PFAS (and similar). We know that these compounds cause problems in humans and the environment. So if they were “easily digestible by the body” that would absolutely be a big problem.

There’s no world in which “nothing will be harmed” by plastic decaying. Some people even argue that conventional plastics are less dangerous in landfill than bioplastics because at least they don’t release dangerous by-products like microplastics or “forever chemicals”.

They don’t break down completely in landfill. They just turn into microplastics.

Despite claims to the contrary, PLA does usually break down into microplastics. It’s possible that under certain conditions (such as those found in industrial composters) those microplastics might be broken down into starches and consumed by bacteria, but most teabags will just end up in landfill and won’t break down beyond microplastics.