Summary
Sheryl Crow announced on Instagram that she is selling her Tesla and donating the proceeds to NPR, citing concerns over Elon Musk’s leadership.
NPR is under political scrutiny, with Republican lawmakers and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr launching investigations.
Crow’s move is a protest against Musk’s influence in government and Trump’s efforts to defund public media.
I live in a city in Canada where it’s too cold to snow a lot of the time and I agree with you that winter tires make a huge difference, but I love my AWD when there’s a big dump of snow or big ruts in the road. Guess it depends how well your roads are maintained.
Also extra non sequitur: have you played Disco Elysium? It’s made by some people from Estonia and it’s probably the best game I’ve ever played in my life.
Oh I love AWD too, but for the first several years of my driving career, I had FWD and RWD cars, never had any trouble even if roads were unplowed, unless there really was a freak snowstorm. Thing is, all roads get plowed here eventually, so it’s not like you’re going to have to drive through a week’s worth of snowfall. It’s one or two days at most.
On a daily basis, the most useful thing about AWD, really, is the ability to accelerate away much faster than everyone else when the light goes green. Then you won’t have tailgaters for a while. The most fun thing, however, is that drifting is somehow really different from RWD drifting.
As for Disco Elysium: I haven’t played it. I really wanted to play it, but I didn’t feel like pirating it and was broke when it came out. Working a dead-end job, etc. Now that the original creators have been driven out of the company, I don’t feel like paying for it, so I might pirate it after all, but now I have so little free time I still haven’t finished my first playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, which I started in August 2023.
I think I’ll download it, install it, start it up once just to see what it’s like, and then play it in a few months when I have more free time again. Might have to finally get a Steam Deck so I could play it in bed, as I already sit behind my computer screen for some 12-14 hours a day.
If you’re into Disco Elysium, you’ll be delighted to hear that executive producer Kaur Kender is a downright controversial figure. Started up writing really explicit and vulgar novels - controversial in their own right, but I don’t think he got in any legal trouble for that. It was just crime novels with sex scenes, detailed violence (IIRC), etc. But things got really heated when he wrote a novel involving CSAM. At no point did he condone it, nor were any children hurt, but he was censored for it. This really launched him into fame or infamy. I haven’t read the book, but to quote Wikipedia: The Finnish Pen described it as a “grotesque thriller” and an important book discussing taboos central to the entertainment industry, including death, serial murder, pornography, and pedophilia.
He was also acquitted for the CP charges, on the grounds of, well, free speech and the fact that no children were harmed and there was nothing graphic.
Around this time frame you could find him rapping with a bunch of other Estonian rappers, about legalizing weed, and the effect of fentanyl on our society. Because apparently it’s almost easier to get fentanyl than weed and it’s fucking a lot of people up - something I have no experience with personally.
Books from him that you might want to read: Independence day, Comeback. But no idea if you can even find them in English at this point.
Holy shit that is all super interesting! I’m interested to know what he actually wrote, because i do find really often when people write about real experiences regarding things of that ilk, there are others with ulterior motives that use the guise of “protecting children” to quash communication of those experiences.
An example that comes to mind in North America is a lot of red states banning Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut for sexually explicit content, which if you’ve read Breakfast of Champions, you’d recognize that it’s a misrepresentation of the content of that book, and that that book deserves a far more nuanced discussion. I’m assuming this will likely be a similar situation.
As for weed, as a Canadian, hell yeah to legalization, and also as a Canadian who has lost friends to fentanyl, fuck fentanyl. You’ve totally given me a new rabbit hole to jump down, so thank you!