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Main reason why I will never buy an EV, and keep driving my Internet-free Honda until it dies, which will likely be after me.

nothing about this has anything to do with EVs

EVs and luxury cars tend to have more fancy features that enable these issues than ice or hybrid cars. That’s changing as more advanced tech filters down.

I think the GP was talking about the fact it is hard to find an EV that is bundled with a lot of invasive software.

There's another post on this article asking for an EV that doesn't: "need internet connectivity via wifi/esim at all? I'm looking for something really simple. A chassis, four wheels, an engine, airbags. Basically my current ICE car, just electric."

I'm hoping that they get a lot of good suggestions, but I'm not holding my breath.


There are a number of basic EVs that have no more telemetry than the equivalent ICEV.

Someone with the requirements you outline is not in the market for any new car, regardless of powertrain.


What are these on the us market?

The boring ones. Things like Bolt, Niro, Equinox, Lightning, etc. Not every EV is like Tesla.


German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.

>German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century,

The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.

Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me


phaseout was adopted by redgreens in 2000 and continued by cdu in 2011. THat's a fact German solar was just not competitive - labor, electricity and coal were more expensive in germany. Solar industry was showing problems even before cfd's reduction (which applied to chinese ones too but they endured since costs were lower)

> continued by cdu in 2011.

because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public.

The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).


Not only that, aggressive cuts to the EEG subsidies killed dogfooding their own solar industry in the country.

> It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.

Now that is a lie. The anti-nuclear push came from the Greens in the 90s. Conservatives just used it for a quick win once that policy became very popular in Germany.


Because it's not about children but requiring identification to speak online.

That's the cynical view, yes, but we can see educational standards and performance going down in the United States, we have seen plenty of scientific and medical studies showing problems with children and more specifically teenagers using social media. I'm not one to want to want to limit someone's rights, but it seems like the trade-off here is in favor of requiring age verification at least for social media companies.

Separately I still don't fully agree with concerns raised regarding social media and identification for everyone. Bots, people who are online just stirring up trouble, &c. are causing pretty significant challenges and problems for society. If you spew a bunch of racist stuff for example I think people deserve to know who you are.

And you know we do this all the time. Folks want gun registries and things like that (and I agree, as a matter of practice, but not principal) so I'm not sure why we're ok with that form of requiring identification to exercise your rights and against this one other than political priorities.


Maybe requiring identification to speak online is not the intent but it would likely be the practical effect of the laws that were originally intended just to help children. It's not enough to think about laws' intent, but also their practical effects.

We haven't even mentioned the censoriousness that already takes place in various online forums not because a user said something racist or was stirring up trouble, but because moderators were vindictive, petty, or lazy, or because the automated moderation tools in place were heavy-handed and unintelligent. I don't look forward to that kind of moderation spreading everywhere and made more efficient by reducing everyone to a single identity. (Maybe Joe Contrarian has some opinions worth listening to, but it's just easier for the moderator of a forum to see that he was already publicly blacklisted by another unrelated forum, and just blacklist him on this one, too.)


At the end of the day they are private websites and the owners get to decide all of that stuff. Start your own, or just stop posting and let such folks have their echo chambers. One of our problems in society is that folks seem to think there is a need to post on the Internet on some forum - stop giving others power over you. You’re just posting to a bunch of anonymous people. They may be bots for all you know. Who cares?

> Maybe requiring identification to speak online is not the intent but it would likely be the practical effect of the laws that were originally intended just to help children. It's not enough to think about laws' intent, but also their practical effects.

Right we should analyze trade-offs. But you are quite focused on censorship which I am also generally concerned with. But are you really being censored by being identified and associated with what you say online? In public you aren’t anonymous - why must that extend to this digital public square?


A photo identifies you. This is the digital equivalent of having a photo taken of you upon entering the mag store, stored digitally forever, shared with government, and tied to every magazine you read and purchase.

They want regulation for others but not them. Otherwise there might be competition.

I think they want regulation for them as well, because they have the money to comply… but regulation eliminates the threat of open source models, foreign models, and small independent companies.

This is not about kids. It's about surveillance.

It's about kids. Its serious problem, every parent knows this. It has some scary negative externalities. Related issue, but not the same issue.

It can be both (and in my opinion is).

There are groups that would love to be in full control of visible information and parents rightly concerned about social media use by kids.


There aren't really any groups that want full control that have any power really - it's more like systemic pressure.

A police investigator trying to do his job is 100% sure he can solve crimes this way, to him, there is zero doubt about the benefit of being able to get info from social media, it's a moral concern.

The anti-terrorist squad - same. They see all sorts of threats, daily they are truly concerned, they're all waiting for horrible things to happen and in each case they 'knew they could have prevented it'.

Then you get corporate interests, who just want to 'sell gear to make money'

Maybe it even works really well ... because of 'checks and balances'.

But then, the 'checks and balances' start to fail, either from corruption, bad legislation, legal rulings etc.

Those forces all collide into the 'slippery slope'


>Its serious problem, every parent knows this

Not "every parent knows this"; lots of parents fiercely oppose their kids being banned from access to decentralized information and communication sources. Would you prefer your kids get all their information from textbooks written by Glisaine Maxwell's father, all their news from sources owned by zionist-aligned billionaries?


This is about 'social networking and media' - generally not 'information space', ie. Wikipedia et. al. are not regulated.

Crucially, parents can trivially allow their kids to access whatever information they want.

Finally 'textbooks written by such and such' is delving a bit into conspiratorial inanity.


Do you think this is about kids? It's about online identity and government surveillance and control.

Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it. Or you just want to tell other parents to raise their kids the way you want? Then tell them that, don't hide behind fascist police and justice system to force online ID for adults.


>Even if you think it is about kids, then take responsibility into your own hands, be a parent and prevent your kids from using it.

Common but bad argument. You've misunderstood what the age verification control is for. It's to hold online services accountable for illegally providing services to minors. A parent being negligent doesn't mean Facebook should not be held responsible for breaking the law.


I can't believe that we've managed to escalate past seeing parents as negligent for letting their kids walk home from school or play outside. Is this the new normal? You are negligent if you let your kids ... talk to people online? I uh, am outraged. What if kids start having thoughts their parents don't approve of?

Further, facebook users could chose to use platforms that don't exploit their users. By allowing facebook to benefit from the network effect, they are responsible for kids wanting to be on the platform. They give facebook power, and then facebook uses that power to exploit children. Yet facebook's adult users don't even see the need to defend themselves. To take responsibility.

Some of these laws affect mastodon, so these laws are not a regulation of facebook. What exploitive features of mastodon deserve such a ban? Are children addicted to mastodon's default chronological feed? It seems like it would benefit facebook to establish a regulatory moat that smaller non-ad-driven competitors don't have the resources to comply with. It certainty doesn't seem to have affected their stock.

Also there is reasonable suspicion that meta lobbied for similar laws: https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/attestation-findings

So much for holding facebook accountable.

Oh, also: https://xkcd.com/743/


> illegally providing services to minors

> breaking the law

what law?


How so? We already have digital ID in Norway. How does providing that information to American corporations further Norway's surveillance goals?

You shouldn't be all or nothing here. To ignore the effect on teens is to be blatantly ignorant of social science itself. To ignore the implications of surveillance is to be ignorant of government surveillance. There is no value at either extreme.

The opposite seems more likely, tbh.

This is incredibly naive.


ok, then what do you suggest? we don't get involved and decisions at the government level are made for us? I might be naive, but let's not be restrained by the cynicism of any involment in politics and governance is corruption


What? This is how governance and public opinion happen, at least in Spain. Government does something bad? Everyone out on the streets to complain, and calling politicians to change their mind.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, but doing nothing is never an option if you disagree with what they're doing. To think that doing nothing is better than something, that's incredibly naive.


Doing nothing can't be better, but it's entirely possible that doing nothing has exactly the equal effect as doing something.


> but it's entirely possible

You're right, it possibly has the same effect. How could we figure out what's the actual answer in practice?


Are _you_ making software for the government?


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