Texas

Alive and Kicking: Tesla Semi Charging Corridor Project Survives Biden Administration Funding Snub

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Combined with around $24 million of its own money, Tesla wanted to build nine electric semi-truck charging stations between Laredo, Texas and Fremont, California. “The project will help create a hydrogen corridor from southern California to Texas,” the Department of Transportation wrote in a statement in January. “Funding hydrogen stations will go down as purely wasted money,” Patel told TechCrunch this week. While he no longer speaks on behalf of Tesla, he also criticized funding hydrogen infrastructure when he was still with the company. Despite all this, the Tesla Semi program is still slowly attracting customers.

Texas Crash Fatality Occurred While Ford’s BlueCruise System Was Engaged

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The driver of a Mustang Mach-E who crashed into a stationary car in Texas in February was using Ford’s hands-free driver assistance system, BlueCruise, according to data obtained by the National Transportation Safety Board. It’s the first known fatality resulting from a crash involving the use of BlueCruise, which Ford first announced in 2021. The NTSB’s announcement that BlueCruise was active during the Texas crash comes just one day after the safety board announced it’s probing a second fatal crash near Philadelphia where Ford’s driver assistance system may have been active. The NTSB released on Thursday what’s known as a preliminary report, and is still investigating the crash. NHTSA is also probing the Texas crash, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Pornhub Declares: Texas Penalized for Lack of Smut Consumption!

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Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Pornhub has been playing a game of chicken with a bunch of state legislatures for a while now. That’s right, Texans are now officially barred from the sacred halls of Pornhub, unless they’re crafty enough with a VPN to sneak past the digital bouncers. In a twist that surprises exactly no one, Pornhub isn’t thrilled about asking its patrons to flash their digital IDs at the door. Pornhub is not exactly a startup, so why are we featuring this front and center in the Startups Weekly newsletter?

Texas Being Restricting From Pornhub Over Age Verification Legislation

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Texas residents can no longer access Pornhub — without a VPN. As of Thursday, when people in Texas try to access any of the porn sites owned by Aylo, formerly MindGeek, they’ll instead see a long message in opposition to age verification laws. Laws requiring age verification on adult entertainment sites have already gone into effect in states including Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Utah, Montana and North Carolina. “Since age verification software requires users to hand over extremely sensitive information, it opens the door for the risk of data breaches,” Pornhub wrote on its blog. At first, Pornhub complied with age verification via the state-run LA Wallet app, which connects to a Louisiana resident’s ID.

“Bumble’s Texas Team Shrinks by 33% in Wake of Restrictive Abortion Legislation”

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Bumble has lost a third of its Texas workforce in the months since the state passed the controversial abortion SB 8 (Senate Bill 8), also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, over a year ago. We’ve supported employees who’ve chosen to move out of state,” Monteleone added. “We — since SB 8 — have seen a reduction in our Texas workforce by about a third. The dating app maker became the first business to join an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit against the Texas abortion law, Zurawski v. State of Texas, filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights. The dating app maker posted a weak Q4, with a $32 million net loss and $273.6 million in revenue.