anaximander

I used to work at a place that made smart chargers for EVs. They did all sorts of intelligent scheduling, V2H and V2G, grid response and load shedding, some really clever stuff. The standard for most charger interfaces allows for the vehicle to communicate a load of information to the charger, and almost none of them implemented any more than the bare minimum. I’m many cases the charger can’t even tell how full the car’s battery is, it just has to charge until the car disconnects itself and stops charging, and assume it’s done so because it’s full. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if Teslas don’t communicate as much over OBD as you’d expect given the standard it supposedly implements. Manufacturers seem to be quite content to keep that stuff proprietary wherever they can.

Stoicism says something similar, although it gets there via a very different route.

A lot of food places, particularly eat-in restaurants, are just perpetually struggling. Half the staff are on minimal pay, or the owner’s friends and family helping out. They struggle and lose money for a few years before finally folding. A regular who has no idea about the industry buys the place and keeps much of it the same because they always loved it. The process repeats.

Continuing to support demand for beef at current rates as the population grows means that beef production must increase. That means we need more cows. Where do you propose we put all those cows? The current solution has been to cut down trees to create usable land. What’s your alternative?

The water level will be affected by the car’s acceleration, which is likely also affecting your inner ear and causing the illusion in the first place.

If prices go up, and stay up, eventually things like salaries have to go up too, at least a bit. If you need a certain amount per month to live when last year you could get by on less, you’ll need a job that pays you enough to live. In theory if the price of goods has gone up then the value of whatever you’re producing for your company has gone up so they can afford to give you the extra (in practice they take a lot of the extra as profit and pass on just enough to retain employees and no more). Of course, it’s the same physical item, so eventually it all sort of balanced out.

You can see this if you look at it in the long term. In 1970 the average salary in the UK was something like £1200 per year, and a house cost £4500 or something. Today the average UK salary is over £27,000 and a house is around £285,000. The houses haven’t got 61 times larger or anything, that’s just inflation. So, yeah, you kind of are just stuck with it.

One thing I often see is people not understanding the difference between secrecy and privacy. They ask why it matters if you’re not doing anything wrong. A UK government minister actually said “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”, and then backpedaled when someone pointed out they were quoting Joseph Goebbels. The analogy I’ve seen is simple: I’m sure you don’t do anything illegal in the shower, but I’m also pretty sure most people would be uncomfortable with a law that required you to have a police officer standing in you bathroom with a video camera to record you showering, just in case.

The other thing is the assumption that any information about you that the government actually has about you will only be used against you if you commit a crime, in which case you’ll deserve it - if you’re not a bad person then it’s fine. This is a double fallacy.

First, we’ve seen that information can be used to do all sorts of things regardless of wrongdoing - if someone knows enough about you, they can use it to manipulate you. I don’t mean blackmail or whatever, although that’s an option. I mean that with a clear enough picture of your preferences and biases and habits, someone can tailor their actions and information to your psychology and make you think whatever they want you to agree with.

Second, it assumes that you won’t ever commit a crime because crimes are bad things and you’re not a bad person. This overlooks the possibility of you being mistakenly accused while innocent, but more importantly it overlooks the possibility that the government will change into something that holds different moral values to yours. Even in the modern world we’ve seen places outlaw abortions, or criminalise homosexuality, or pass laws on what religions you’re allowed to follow. If that happens in your country and you find yourself on the wrong side of whatever arbitrary line they’ve now drawn, you may regret giving them so much information about you - information that lets them identify you, prove that you broke their new rules, and ruin your life in so many ways.

The default principal of any exchange with governments, businesses, or any entity taking your information should be to give as much information as is required for them to perform the operation you’re requesting of them, and no more - and wherever possible to only engage with those entities that you trust to have that information; a trust that they earn by a verified and unbroken track record of ethical and trustworthy behaviour.

Let’s imagine there was somehow zero rental market. Imagine there was a law against purchasing a dwelling and then not actually using it as your residence. People still need to live somewhere, so there would be a demand for housing. People would see a profit in meeting that demand, so someone would build and sell housing. Currently, those who can’t afford to buy a home have rental as a cheap alternative. Without that, there would be an open niche for something to meet the need for housing. There would be a market pressure to solve the discrepancy between the price of housing and the available capital of the average person. House prices might be forced down, salaries might be forced up, I don’t know what would happen precisely but there would be a pressure to make it possible for people to live somewhere.

You can see evidence for this in what happened in a lot of major cities. People have been able to use one home that they own as collateral in buying a second, and then use the income from renting it out to pay that off plus a little profit. That leaves them with two properties as collateral and a little cash spare, making it easier to do it again with a more expensive place. Rinse and repeat and you’ve got wealthy landlords buying up all the properties so there’s no need for the people selling those properties to drop prices to where first-time buyers can afford them - the usual dynamics of supply and demand that keep prices in reach of buyers have been disrupted, and the two types of buyer separate into two tiers that get pushed further apart, getting harder and harder for people to jump from the lower tier to the upper. This is how you end up with people paying £1000 in rent while the bank tells them they can’t have a £700-a-month mortgage because they can’t afford it, and that £1000 a month leaves them nothing left over to save up for the £30,000 deposit they’d need anyway. The market pressure that led to this situation are obvious, and reversing those pressures is the most obvious way to fix the situation.

A lot of the punchlines are “ha ha, aren’t they weird?”, which hits totally different if you’re the sort of person who the character is an obvious caricature of. Doubly so if the weirdness in question is associated with some form of neurodivergence. For some people - myself included - a lot of the laughs in that show feel very much like they’re laughing at you, not with you. It’s only funny if you identify more with the people on the other side of the joke.

Yes.

Very much an industry of two halves. Some companies absolutely do not care about you and will drive you to do more with less and for longer hours until you burn out, and then replace you with the next poor sucker. Offers will bend over backwards to look after their people and maintain a working environment where everyone gets a say and is happy and able to be at their best. Which one you get can be a total coin flip, and even sat talking to them in a job interview it’s sometimes easy to mistake one for the other.

If people who break laws can’t vote, and the government decides what the law is and appoints the judges who enforce those laws, then the government currently in power can decide who gets to vote. Obviously there’s an incentive there to make laws that disproportionately affect those who weren’t going to vote for you, and thereby remove most of your opposition’s votes. That way lies dictatorship.

It also makes it hard to change bad laws. For a random example, there used to be laws against homosexuality. How do you think LGBT acceptance in law would be doing if anyone who was openly gay or trans lost their right to vote? How do you improve access to abortion if anyone who has an abortion, provides an abortion, teaches young people about abortion, or seeks information about abortions becomes unable to vote? How do you change any unjust law if the only people who can vote are those who are unaffected - or indeed, those who benefit from the status quo?