Tesla is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk announced at the company’s shareholder meeting on Thursday.

The meeting took place at Tesla’s vehicle assembly plant under construction outside of Austin on a property that borders the Colorado River, near the city’s airport.

However, the company plans to increase production in its California plant regardless of the headquarters move.

“To be clear we will be continuing to expand our activities in California,” Musk said. “Our intention is to increase output from Fremont and Giga Nevada by 50%. If you go to our Fremont factory it’s jammed.”

But, he added, “It’s tough for people to afford houses, and people have to come in from far away….There’s a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area.”…read more.

The City of Vancouver’s incessant guerilla assault on car and truck owners has taken on many shapes over the years. But 2022 offers the prospect of an inflection point, from a period of annoyance to one of absurdity.

A proposal before the city’s council this week would smack the owner of a 2023 vehicle with an annual fee of up to $1,000, depending on the model’s emission rate, and hits all but low-income owners with an annual overnight parking fee that will start at $45 but can be banked upon to climb. No other North American city tries this combo, but this is Vancouver after all.

The pretense is that this is designed to contribute Vancouver’s “fair share” in the fight against climate change. But the plan is really just another in a ceaseless series of tax seizures. We all pay at the pumps for carbon emissions, and the city already imposes a property tax surcharge for its environmental scheme.

The staff report on the proposal admits Vancouver has “extremely limited jurisdiction and tools to impact emissions,” but that won’t stop it from leveraging whatever it can grasp. This new confiscation does not solve anything and indeed avoids what would be a more effective application of its principles. It simply makes people with more money pay more money…read more.

The best quick-buck scheme of the year isn’t GameStop stock, cryptocurrency, or reselling next-gen consoles. It’s…Pokémon Oreos? Oreos emblazoned with designs of Mew, the psychic-type feline Pokémon, are currently selling for hundreds if not thousands of dollars on eBay.

Wait, there are Pokémon Oreos?

Earlier this month, Oreo announced a limited-edition run of its signature sandwich cookies with Pokémon-themed designs. The full suite of offerings falls far short of Pokémon’s full 6,298,524-monster roster, featuring 16 Pokémon from across several generations: Bulbasaur, Charmander, Cyndaquil, Dratini, Grookey, Jigglypuff, Lapras, Mew, Pancham, Pikachu, Piplup, Rowlett, Sableye, Sandshrew, Snivy, and Squirtle.

Honestly, it’d be a pretty cool cross-brand collab, if, y’know, employees at Nabisco (which produces Oreos) hadn’t been on a well-publicized strike since earlier this summer.

Sorry, they’re re-selling for how much?

Of the 16 available designs, Mew is far and away the rarest. This tracks with source material; in the game, Mew is an exceptionally rare Pokémon. Typically, there was only one in each game, and you’d have to use something like a GameShark or some other in-game glitch to acquire the elusive creature. According to Pokémon info-trove site Serebii, Mew has a capture rate—the likelihood that your Poké Ball will successfully catch a Pokémon—of 45. For comparison’s sake, a cannon-fodder Poké like Rattata has a catch rate of 255. So yeah, the little purple psychic-powered Pokémon is Mew and far between…read more.

Canadian military leaders saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test out propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting public, a newly released Canadian Forces report concludes.

The federal government never asked for the so-called information operations campaign, nor did cabinet authorize the initiative developed during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, then headed by Lt.-Gen. Mike Rouleau.

But military commanders believed they didn’t need to get approval from higher authorities to develop and proceed with their plan, retired Maj.-Gen. Daniel Gosselin, who was brought in to investigate the scheme, concluded in his report.

The propaganda plan was developed and put in place in April 2020 even though the Canadian Forces had already acknowledged that “information operations and targeting policies and doctrines are aimed at adversaries and have a limited application in a domestic concept.”…read more.