steelframe

I'm a fairly early adopter of EVs, and my family's current collection includes 2 BEVs, 1 PHEV, and 1 ICE.

Road tripping more than about 250 miles in an EV with today's class of 18650-like cells doesn't give me the experience that dino juice does, which is what I want. So when I'm going out of town, I'm either in the PHEV or the ICE car.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I headed out from Seattle to Walla Walla for the weekend. This is a 275-mile trip through the Cascade mountain range with speeds close to 80mph for most of the drive. BEVs that can do that without stopping tend to cost between 3-5 times the cost of either my PHEV or ICE.

If I were to take my $25k (current value) BEV from 2019 I'd need to stop at least once, likely in Yakima, to roll the dice with the Electrify America stations in the Walmart parking lot. When I get there I can expect that several of the stalls will be ICEd because nobody in Yakima gives a flying fsck about anyone else, especially jackwads in their fancy weird EVs passing through town on their way to anywhere-but-Yakima. There's no practical enforcement of the "Pretty please only let people in EVs use these stalls" signs.

There's a better-than-not chance that at least one of the chargers will be broken. Depending on when I get there -- say, late afternoon at the end of Memorial Day weekend -- I will find that there is a line of BEVs waiting to charge. And by "line" I mean people arriving and parking in whatever haphazard way they can somewhere near the chargers and then maybe following some vague resemblance of "first in first out" queuing as stalls open up. Maybe they will form an actual line snaking through the parking lot blocking regular parking spots. I don't know, but for me at least being in a crowd of people trying to get a charge will at least be awkward and stressful.

When I finally get into the stall to charge I will need make sure I have cell phone reception so I can activate the charger, unless maybe I got lucky and found a charger that actually works with a credit card. Then hopefully the charger will successfully handshake with my EV from 2019, start charging, and keep charging without faulting out. It takes about 45 minutes to get enough charge to make it to my destination. Depending on how long it takes to wait for a stall to open up and then get enough charge, my 4-hour trip has turned into what's likely to be a 6-hour trip each way, making a total of 8 hours on the road look more like 12 hours. It will cost about as much as it would have cost to use gasoline instead.

So that's what needs fixing. The charger capacity we have now wouldn't be horrible if (1) "charging EVs only" rules were swiftly and regularly enforced, (2) the chargers that did exist were reliable, and (3) my $25k EV were capable of charging 10% to 90% in about 15 minutes.

Bonus points if I can walk up to a teller, hand them cash, and then charge without my car reporting its identity or anything like that. Because, you know, people should be able to travel without having their comings and goings tracked by data brokers. But I'm just one of those old-school privacy freaks who thinks where I'm going and when isn't anyone's business but my own, I guess.

We're getting there, gradually. Very, very gradually. I am frankly very disappointed in how things have turned out since I bought my BEV 5 years ago. I'll continue driving in around town because it's so convenient to have the proverbial "full tank" pulling out of my garage every morning. I simply don't care about any rapid charging infrastructure any more. I can and will just drive my gas car when doing road trips for the foreseeable future.

My 2024 Toyota has a DCM fuse that I've removed. No telemetry is being broadcast to anyone because the transmitter doesn't have any power.

Regardless, most of my around-town trips I do by bicycle.

If someone with a penchant for committing grand theft were left unsupervised in my car for any amount of time, I too would vastly prefer for it to be totaled at that point.

Fortunately my car has a manual transmission, so chances are any idiot kid who tries to hop in my car and steal it will give up a few seconds after they realize that they have no idea how to operate it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtYLNFBeCr0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S9putayloM

You can probably just enable Airplane Mode on your phone and expect that to work fine.

This is exactly why I bought a car that has a fuse for the Data Communication Module (DCM) that I have pulled, and I will never buy another car unless I can physically disconnect anything in it that sends radio transmissions.

I honestly don't remember how much I "lost" October 6–10, 2008 or February 24–28, 2020. I certainly won't remember how much I "lose" in the next crash.

What I do know is how many shares I still hold of a broad range of companies with a track record for growth today and how much they've collectively risen in value between October 5, 2008 and May 11, 2024.

Just a reminder that you can install GrapheneOS on a Pixel from your web browser.

https://grapheneos.org/install/web

As my grandfather used to put it, you paid some "tuition of life" for a lesson you'll (hopefully) not soon forget.

> sustain yourself from age 65-100

Fortunately my life expectancy has dropped in the past few years!

Electrify America!

(Sorry, I'll show myself out the door.)

Some time ago I completely lost all faith in any company's ability and/or willingness to actually keep my personal information private, along with my government's ability and/or willingness to regulate or disincentivize.

These fines will just be chalked up as the "cost of doing business," and the abuses will continue unabated. The only way to protect your personal information is to not allow it to be collected in the first place.

If you carry a phone, only use it for emergencies, and otherwise keep it in airplane mode. Things like GPS navigation in Organic Maps, music and podcast files in local storage, etc. work just fine without the radio. Pay cash for everything. Never give your phone number to a store and don't use rewards programs. Pop out the DCM fuse in your car. Run a firewall that blackholes spy domains, use a VPN, and block scripts and cookies. Buy entertainment on discs, again with cash. If it's not available on physical media, either go without or download it over VPN. If I can't walk into a store and buy it with cash, I will never contribute to your revenue stream. Oh, and file your taxes with paper forms sent by mail directly to the IRS. Online tax services are spyware.

Unless you decide to go it alone on medical stuff there's nothing you can do about hospitals and insurance companies fsking you over. Your employer's payroll processing company probably sells your financial info to Equifax's The Work Number, which you can allegedly freeze, I guess. For these abuses I feel government needs to get ruthless. Like, if your establishment exposes highly sensitive medical information for $thousands of people, you don't get to exist any more. Smoking crater. Prison time. Liquidated assets. Game over. Next time keep those records offline.

The world managed to run hospitals with paper forms for about 4,000 years, so you can walk records across the office on encrypted USB drives if you have to. There are 4TiB MicroSD cards now, so embed storage in employee badges that only keeps relevant records for patients they're actually caring for that day. That sort of thing just needs to be the cost of doing business with information that's that sensitive, because if it's all sitting on a network, someone somewhere sometime will inevitably screw something up.

So long as it's okay to leak private information every few years as an externality, they will continue to deploy and run systems that drive their operational costs to the absolute bottom while treating any risks to your privacy as irrelevant.

This is a great idea. Having been on the "automatic denial" side of the fence one too many times, I'd subscribe. But I'd want the service to act as an ombudsman for all insurance -- auto, home, health, etc.

I suspect the real trick would be to keep insurance company lobbyists from finding a way to shut that down.

I've filed my taxes myself for several years. A couple of times the IRS sent me letters after the fact saying I messed something up. Then it's another several hours combing through all their paperwork trying to correct whatever they said I did wrong. One time they directed me to "explain why you won't make this mistake again in the future." Which is a particularly asinine thing to ask. "Well, Mr. Tax Man Sir, I probably won't make that particular mistake again because now I know not to make that particular mistake again."

This year things got complicated enough that after spending an entire Saturday staring at forms, instructions, and spreadsheets trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, I finally gave up and hired a CPA that specializes in tax returns do my 1040.

The whole thing ended up being 27 pages long. I guess I needed forms 1040-ES, 2210, 8949, 8995-A, 8960; Schedules 2, B, D, and 8812; and several worksheets. I consider myself fairly capable and experienced in filing my own taxes having done it 20-something times, but I don't think I would have ever figured out that I'd need all those forms and schedules this time around.

It's particularly frustrating that they are somehow able to tell me that it's wrong after the fact and harass me to correct it. If they can do that, why not just tell me what they think it's supposed to be in the first place, and then give me the option of correcting what they send me if I spot something that doesn't make sense to me?

One is likely to provide revenue to the local government. The other isn't.

> they have a hard time finding other opportunities due to a combination of overly narrow experience and ageism

I too know several lifers at IBM. One thing I've realized is that staying loyal to a company over several years won't save you from ageism.

Your best defense against ageism may be to save more than 50% of your tech income for about 20 years, then move into management and build empires until the music stops.

> The responsibility that freedom requires, the responsibility to personally defend themselves when the bad guys come knocking.

I invite you to live in Haiti for a little while and then come back and let us know how that went for you.

> I was on the team that brought him to Google

Authors @ Google? Was this his visit to the Kirkland office?

If so, I was one of the perhaps 5 (?) people who had lunch with him. I was astonished that more Googlers didn't seem the least bit interested in hanging out with Dan Dennett given the opportunity.

He seemed interested in my journey breaking free of religious indoctrination and what part his writings had in that. He said he had never heard of Joseph Campbell being the first step out. We had a brief discussion on how recognizing the universality of religious motifs can lead one to start asking the initial question, "What if my specific religion isn't so special after all?"

I asked him the admittedly-ambiguous question along the lines of, "If Google were to build something that seems to express intentional agency, would we have an ethical obligation relating to it?" I suspect his curt answer of "Yes" was him just being polite with a clueless armchair philosopher asking silly questions.

Then there was the Dawkins visit to Google Kirkland some time later. The failure to set up an audio system that didn't have an echo made me sad. Not sure why we couldn't have just kept the audio engineer present for the actual discussion. Later on Dawkins proceeded to walk through the line at the cafeteria backwards, but everyone seemed cordial enough regardless. That one dude pushing himself in Dawkins' face monopolizing all his time was obnoxious.

That whole program really jumped the shark when they later invited Fonzie to come talk about his children's book.

Apologies, although in this case you are wrong. Human reaction time to disengage the engine in a 3-pedal car is split-second.

> This is true on your car with a physical transmission as well.

I think you mean an automatic physical transmission. My manual transmission car has a clutch that I can always disengage in a fraction of a second.

> In this case, the driver overshot neutral and threw the vehicle into reverse.

FWIW my 3-pedal daily driver is impervious to this failure mode. If the engine starts doing anything I don't expect my instinctive reaction is to push in the clutch pedal, which I am always prepared to do in a split second because I keep my left foot resting lightly on it. In the extremely unlikely situation where the clutch pedal also doesn't work I can still yank the shifter into neutral. The only way to get to get it into reverse is to pull up on a collar on the shaft of the stick and then shift into the "first gear" position, which I'm definitely not going to do while panicking.

I'm not sure we should be celebrating EVs when we could have done much more with public transportation and micromobility.

Given that they have 90kWh battery packs, I don't think many of the Jaguar I-PACEs in my area have even hit the "break-even" CO2 point when their owners are now trying to unload them. For some of these cars it's taken 5 years to get to just 25k miles.

https://www.kbb.com/cars-for-sale/all/jaguar/i-pace/seattle-...

My e-bike with a .36kWh battery pack has done far, far more for the environment than any EV ever will.

And what was the carbon footprint increase in the areas where the batteries were manufactured?

From TFA: "Technological advancements can offer us a lot of convenience and improve the security of financial transactions."

As someone who works in security and privacy, it always stands out to me when the "and privacy" part is left off.

> But they’re all actually very, very boring.

In fact they're actuarially very, very boring!

I'm not sure the degree to which insurance companies are legally allowed to share information such as aerial photographs with each other.

When I worked at Google I knew a developer who was building a prototype service similar to Google Flights, except for auto and home insurance. I don't think that product ever shipped.

The dev on that team told me that a key thing they learned while doing the analysis is that the optimal strategy with auto and home insurance is to automatically switch providers whenever it's time to renew.

It could be because your current company has collected things about you that they aren't allowed to share with other insurance companies.

United States law has made anonymous prepaid cards illegal.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/why-am-i-being-aske...

A representative for my state has recently been bragging about her efforts to protect peoples' privacy from such data brokers by requiring them to disclose whether they offer a way to opt-out of your data being used in certain ways, or they will have to pay a fine.

This is far, far below the bar for me, and it makes me question state government's ability to actually protect citizens from data broker spying. This legislation really needs to make any data collection in the first place illegal except on an opt-in basis. None of this, "Oh you can keep collecting the data all you like, but if someone asks you to pretty-please not use it in certain ways, maybe you should pinky-swear that you're going to do that."

When I use a bank card to buy groceries, that should not give anyone license to my e-receipts, full stop. Until that happens I'm going to keep paying with cash at stores that don't use rewards programs.

It's fascinating to me how much people discount their privacy.

Between the Massachusetts Right to Repair Act and requirement to accept cash (Part III, Title IV, Chapter 255D, Section 10A), that state is looking more and more like the right kind of place for me to land once I'm done doing the FAANG thing. Convince me otherwise.