I live in central Los Angeles and use Starlink as a failover to my cable internet. Sometimes there are outages and Starlink takes over. I've also tested Verizon 5G home internet but Starlink was faster and more affordable.
"He found a way to further boost the number of electric vehicles when he met with President Joe Biden’s top environmental adviser, John Podesta. That led to a deal in which the government provided $3 billion to the Postal Service, with part of it earmarked for electric charging stations."
> There's a reason why SUVs are the most popular type of car in the US
Not practicality for sure! The trunks of at least mid-sized SUVs are small and the trunks of mid-sized estate wagons are quite large. SUVs have a raised vehicle floor, which is terrible for driving dynamics, removes interior space, and adds air resistance.
SUVs are staggeringly stupid vehicles, but fashionable. Personally, I like some fashions, and others I ignore and avoid as hard as I can - SUVs are firmly in the latter category.
One funny side effect of pickups and SUVs being sold for suburbanite egos is that some actual tradespeople and farmers have started importing tiny Japanese kei trucks because the cargo volumes are the same or higher than a modern American vehicle.
It is staggering. I live in the UK and we have been moving in that direction. We have lots of small city style cars. But they are never big enough to easily hold a newborn baby with its stroller (ironic when you consider how tiny babies are). So parents tend to get these small SUV's and it is seen as the natural upgrade. I guess this happens again when the family grows and you start doing more DIY.
We are all hoodwinked into believing that space in a car is unusual and needs a special kind of car. When actually a well designed small car or coupe can have plenty of space. And adding an extra couple of foot to the size of the boot probably has minimal effect on the manufacturing cost. But that would break the product skews that car companies want to push.
Most people in the US live in suburbs, which means it's more efficient to carry larger loads due to larger distances. For example, bigger grocery trips since the grocery store is farther away. Bigger home sizes in the suburbs also enable larger families.
I can easily carry a week's worth of groceries (21 meals plus snacks) for my family of five in my old sedan. Even if the trunk is half full of junk just throw grocery bags in the back seat.
I even managed to fit enough lumber for three 4' by 10' by 6" raised garden beds in there, trunk to sticking out the front window. That was a little hairy though.
By far the biggest issue is fitting 3 kids in back now that they are bigger, especially if one or more are grouchy. I always take the bigger car if more than 4 people are traveling.
And that worked fine for decades (well, as long as your definition of fine includes traffic jams) using regular cars which cost and polluted considerably less. SUVs are bulky but as anyone who’s ever packed one knows they don’t have more usable cargo space unless you’re stacking stuff up to the ceiling since most of the volume is directed vertically to make them look tougher.
I notice this whenever we go to IKEA or Costco where our sub-$30k Subaru is loaded faster and with less hassle than vehicles costing twice as much.
I thought we already understood that US large car sales was the result of the individualist culture and perceived improvements in safety from being in a heavier vehicle during a collision
It’s important to remember that Japanese car manufacturers weird absolutely slaughtering U.S. companies in the 80s and 90s by making cheaper, better quality, more efficient vehicles. Detroit has a lot of political weight, however, and when they started pushing far more profitable SUVs as the ideal daily driver, nobody in Congress was going to get in the way by suggesting policies intended to help tradespeople should be modified.
That campaign in the 90s made them popular enough to cancel out decades of fuel economy and safety improvements, and effectively started an arms race where people who never go off-road started to think that they needed to pay more for one, too, because otherwise they’d be at a fatal mismatch in a crash.
A while ago I read somewhere that it was because for a long time (American) trucks were technically nit cars. And manufacturers could save money on a bunch of safety things.
I was a previous Pinboard customer. I've since moved to Linkding[0], a self-hosted solution, and highly recommend it. It's got the same feature parity as Pinboard but gives me much more confidence about the longevity of my bookmarks.
Internally, perhaps, but it doesn't have external feature parity when it comes to, e.g., being able to automagically import things using IFTTT.
(Yes, I could probably lash up a webhook feeding into linkding but IFTTT's webhook support still isn't great but I'm already 20 projects behind on my personal list and redoing all my IFTTT recipes that talk to Pinboard isn't going to be a priority.)
Linkding is definitely worth a look though as backup.
I think this is a common fallacy and an incorrect extrapolation, especially made by those who are unfamiliar with what it takes to build software. Software development is hard because the problems it solves are not well defined, and the systems themselves become increasingly complex with each line of code. I have not seen or experienced LLMs making any progress towards these.
Sorry but it'll happen regardless since the incentives are too strong. Imagine highway lanes in the future that only allow cars that support communication protocols – say goodbye traffic.
Will they ban older cars that do not support the latest protocols? Will we be forced into a 5-year upgrade cycle like we are with phones, because the manufactures stop supporting their older products?
I would gladly give up my ability to drive (under normal circumstances) on the freeway if it ended the reign of terror that rubberneckers and people that don't keep right except to pass (the law in at least WA state if not where you are too).
Just imagine a world where rush hour didn't mean slowdowns. Oh and also get rid of the onramp metering; it's worse than useless when traffic can't zipper and accommodate the influx of new vehicles.
It's like the memes about how 'Americans' will use any insane representation to avoid metric. It applies equally well to avoiding rail infrastructure. Instead of putting two metal sticks down and getting a big metal box for it, we are leaning into AGI and quadratic complexity infrastructure to stop a problem in a space we absolutely refuse to constrain because reasons.
A train that takes you directly from the inside of your garage to the front door of your destination, in a private cabin, with no transfers or unnecessary stops at locations you aren't traveling to. So... still more a car than a train.
I imagine that the manufacturers' fleets will be driving 24/7--a parked car is an investment that's not paying off at this moment. If they last 5 years, that'll be doing pretty good.
If you want to own one for exclusive personal use, you'll be doing so in an environment that's increasingly unsympathetic to your needs as somebody with a fleet size of one and a customer base of one.
I don't understand what you mean when you say incentives? Politicians are strongly incentivized to avoid enraging their constituency. HOV lanes have ended more than one politician's career and that's as close as we've ever gotten to the kind of lane discrimination you're describing.
As long as there's soul-sucking traffic, the public will demand solutions. Traffic has been getting worse in LA and they've already gone beyond HOV lanes. Now there's toll lanes on most of the major freeways where you can pay to bypass traffic. The next step after that will be congestion pricing just to enter the city (Metro is already studying it).
The solution to traffic is to build better, more efficient transit infrastructure that doesn't involve everyone driving their own giant metal boxes everywhere when for most trips they just don't need to.
Sure but you are still going to have people want to drive in their own metal boxes, like those who prefer to have their own space. And for a sprawling city like LA, it's not possible to build efficient public transit connections between each point. It's not realistic for everyone to take the train or bus.
But most people who drive metal boxes would actually take long fast metal tubes that don't have issues with traffic if they were given the opportunity to. This means all the people who really want to drive metal boxes or have to drive metal boxes don't have as much traffic.
Tokyo is of comparable size to LA and they don't have these issues. LA used to have the largest streetcar network in the country but they stripped most of it out circa WWII. See also NYC, London, etc.
> But most people who drive metal boxes would actually take long fast metal tubes that don't have issues with traffic if they were given the opportunity to. This means all the people who really want to drive metal boxes or have to drive metal boxes don't have as much traffic.
Even if most people would take the tube, that still leaves millions who need to drive into LA for work. Since everyone has a backyard and the population density in the suburbs doesn't come anywhere close to Tokyo's, it's neither economical nor practical to build public transportation options out there.
> Tokyo is of comparable size to LA and they don't have these issues. LA used to have the largest streetcar network in the country but they stripped most of it out circa WWII. See also NYC, London, etc.
Used to, but those days are gone and it's now 100x harder to reverse that decision. Los Angeles is currently spending the most money out of all the cities in the US on its metro system in preparation for the 2028 Olympics, and even that is still scratching the surface.
it's never gonna happen. teslas and waymos can't even implement this, as if 100 different companies are going to agree to comply. not to mention the privacy nightmare! pure nerd fantasy that ignores reality.
that is wrong, there are communication protocol standards already. a quick google search could tell you that.
https://medium.com/@wiprodigital/talking-cars-a-survey-of-pr...
perhaps you haven't seen the xkcd about standards? i can google it for you if you need.
my point was, teslas could communicate with other teslas (and waymos with other waymos) by using any proprietary technology or method they choose. and yet they don’t. they honk at each other at 4am instead.
The link is broken, but I can see that article is from 6 years ago. It needs to be a protocol that is developed with the purpose driving in sync with each other – perhaps it needs some sort of oracle or centralized entity that maintains the state.
Teslas communicating with each other isn't using an open standard that can be used by other car companies, nor is Waymo's.
Yes it will be called the grandma protocol. “Unfortunately you are not driving to the standards of this road and will now be pulled off the road to wait for others who can actually drive to get home. If you are experiencing an emergency please say emergency and assistance will be sent to your location. Would you like to watch some ads while you wait?”
Holy shit I’d support this. Far too many incompetents on the road, and yes they should be required to wait for better drivers.
Germany has so much better driving norms on its highways since the lack of speed limits enables those who are fast to force those who are slow to stay in the right lane where they belong.
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