And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel...
Well, sure. However, quite a lot of the websites aren't actually in compliance in the first place.
For example, this Christmas I had to remind a company that me placing an order was not permission for them to email me a survey asking how good the delivery was — customers aren't a free QA team.
You have to start somewhere and go step by step, if you want to solve huge problems.
Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around? Chicken and egg problem.
There is many crazy shit the EU has done, like the famous regulation on how cucumbers are supposed to bend exactly, which they abolished by now, but still once a month, the whole parliament and stuff moves from Strasbourg to Bruessel - and back, because they cannot settle one one place to be, but the slight push for renewable energy would not be on my list of big faults, even if it is inconsistent.
The owners, obviously. You think we installed gas stations before we had cars?
If anything, right now, an EV is literally a worse car to an equivalent ICE in terms of what it's capable of. The reasons you'd have one is either general environmental altruism or because it'll be cheaper over the long term to own one.
We had to find the petroleum reserves before diesel and petrol could get cheap enough for ICEs to fully dominate over that era's EVs.
Right now, if I want an EV, I'm paying 20% more money to buy it, it's got a shorter range than my ICE for the same size car, and the infrastructure to do things like long trips with multiple recharges isn't there yet.
> The first "drive-in" filling station, Gulf Refining Company, opened to the motoring public in Pittsburgh on December 1, 1913, at Baum Boulevard and St Clair's Street. Prior to this, automobile drivers pulled into almost any general or hardware store, or even blacksmith shops in order to fill up their tanks.
However a human with a fuel reserve that could top you up was a thing before cars (a fuel retail). Before the dawn of the automobiles people were replacing steam engines with gas and liquid powered engines.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/cucumber-grades-an...
Damn that US government overreaching, telling cucumbers how much should they bend!
...or maybe that regulation is there for a reason (most times to protect consumers)?
Erm, can you tell me in what way a cucumber is dangerous to consumers, if its shape is bend a little bit more or less, so they need to be protected of that threat?
Why is that reasonable?
This regulation means, that perfectly fine cucumbers that happen to be a bit smaller will get thrown away. Or well, into the lower grade category, but even in the lowest category
"maximum diameter of each cucumber shall be not more than 2-3/8 inches and the length of each cucumber shall be not less than 5 inches"
These are arbitary size regulations. You do not need to regulate that to ban garbage. You can have a cucumber with the perfect shape, that is still garbage, because sunburned or too ripe or the plant was sick or whatever. Yes it should be illegal to sell garbage as fresh food and it probably is, but I do not see the connection to shape at all. This is merely aesthetics and personally I prefer a weird shaped ecological cucumber over a perfectly sized and shiny tasteless thing full of pesticides any day.
In all seriousness, if you’re paying by weight (or volume) then it should be OK not to have standard sized cucumbers… but pricing per unit should be reasonably consistent.
Sidenote, this whole exchange is .. urgh. People criticizing things they haven't spent a minute to try to understand :/
Imagine if I came up to your monitor and started looking at individual lines of your code, and then I see an "x = 0", and I start criticizing it in a vacuum, completely cluelessly, as someone who has never coded before?
Or maybe I have indeed worked on fields and packaging when I was younger and travelling and witnessed the throwing away of perfectly fine food, that just did not met some arbitary size regulations?
"Sidenote, this whole exchange is .. urgh"
But I agree to that. I am not really here to discuss the sense of defining cucumber sizes. If you are into that, have fun with it.
You just can’t call your torus shaped fruit a cucumber because that’s not what anyone expects a cucumber to look like.
I can't tell why a bent cucumber is dangerous, but I can tell tell why specifications for cucumbers are sometimes needed. When someone in the food industry needs cucumbers, he can't use any kind of cucumber, because it will go through machines with a calibre expectation. The industry that builds the machines also need specifications for their inputs.
Many regulations on fruits and vegetable are meant to help the food processing, since nowadays most of the raw food is processed by the food industry, not by consumers in their kitchens.
Oh, and you can still sell vegetable that are out of spec. AFAIK that's still legal in Europe, but since they can't have the right label, wholesale buyers may be hard to find at the same price.
We were talking about consumer products.
"Oh, and you can still sell vegetable that are out of spec. "
Now you can. The regulations regarding sizes of cucumbers have been abolished in 2009, even though the whole theather about it was rather populism.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verordnung_(EWG)_Nr._1677/88_(... (german)
It's not the same as banning
People also want to perform CSRF attacks. So what do we do? Make a law against CSRF? Or change the browsers to make it much harder?
> It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner […]
Which is obvious FUD. And this comment now makes it clear that you actually knew that you're spreading FUD.
Firefox has that built into its tracking protection. I don't know what's it set to by default, but it took me three clicks to reach the setting.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-fir...
Hasn't that been a standard browser setting since the 1990s? I remember Netscape had it.
If a website wants to spy on you it needs to make that at least very clear to the user.
Nobody likes "cookie banners". But those banners are just a result of the fact that almost all web sites want to spy on their users, and sell the this way collected data. If you don't do that you don't need any banner. (Does HN has a cookie banner? Does for example https://noyb.eu/en has a banner? Does Wikipedia has a banner? Go figure.)
To be clear, normal planes don't run on leaded fuel. Avgas, which is often leaded, is used in small propellor planes.
Also, these seem, er, totally unrelated? The EU could ban leaded fuel tomorrow, and arguably should; this would lead to the grounding of a small number of small planes. But it doesn't have a lot to do with cars.