Just to +1 this - a major reason we picked the car we picked last year was because it had AA. Now, you can upgrade most any system to it, but given we were buying a new vehicle anyway? It's just.... superior to any in-car system, and I'm not even an Android user !
Norway has been leading the pack in this regard for quite some time. A few Government incentives, both financial and for instance the ability to use dedicated bus lanes (now discontinued in Oslo I think?) majorly helped.
One of the large issues around uptake is simply infrastructure. Here in Ireland, it is still patchy at best. We had an EV (Nissan) from around 2016 but gave it up in 2020 as there was simply too much anxiety around out of service public chargers and lack of backup. Range anxiety is definitely possible to overcome, but it requires the state to back it up with resources: Norway has most definitively done this.
Final thought: no surprise that ID.3 is making inroads in a huge way on sales. It's a sweet spot of a good car at an attainable price that looks, for want of a better word, 'normal'. Some EVs seem to be designed 'differently' almost for the sake of it - and while some will love that, it ends up adding another hurdle for a certain segment of the market I believe.
I drive occasionally and the first time I drove an electric last year, I barely made it to a charging station an hour outside Oslo and not close to another city. I had to wait a couple of hours before hopping to a fast charger. I treated it like a gas car, but after that, I changed both my attitude and a number of driving habits to get the most of them. I am happy the wide breadth of support across the country is available to maintain charging stations. Just on cost alone, I would prefer electric for rentals.
Many thanks. Was there a change in perhaps the hours they could be used, or was it floated perhaps at one stage? I’m nearly certain I read it more than once maybe 3-4 years ago.
This is mostly because aerodynamics become very important in an EV, and weight becomes (relatively) less important.
That changes substantially many design decisions, affecting a lot of things you might not expect - dramatic changes to the visual appearance, focus on AC rather than a sunroof, internal airflow changes to prevent fogging, etc.
Very interesting. An idea that has long held interest (har) for me.
I note from your comments the socially-laudable aim of attempting to help people in financially vulnerable populations. I wonder if emulating more elements of a lottery-like game would assist with this... EG imagine if I could walk into a shop, buy what looks and feels like a lottery ticket, but I've actually effectively added money to my phone-number linked savings account. I think there would be real power there, but naturally real logistical complexity also.
Totally! We have thought about this a lot. It's too heavy a lift for us at the moment given the complexity, but this is something on our radar for sure.
I realise I’m probably not in a majority here on this one but: I’m not offended or too bothered by being targeted by ads on Facebook.
What I am offended by however is how poor the targeted ads are on Facebook. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything based on one or even been tempted to.
This ! Looking in from the other side..Im usually appalled at how bad their advertising is from an advertisers point of view. I tried to target ppl for 'broadband options', Thus one might expect the lead to have a house(not own just a roof over his head) , He might liked netflix and streaming and certain modern games. The amount of basically 'homeless ppl' liking the ad is amazing ! Like the bulk genuinely just look like fake profiles !
I note the opening says: "(Municipal elections today, May 26, will provide a crucial test for the plan.)"
Does anybody with familiarity with the area have a sense of how that test panned out? I can look up the basic results but wouldn't be familiar with how parties stood on the plan, and accordingly if people who backed it were successful or otherwise.
So so. Although the election result is worse than the previous elections for the mayor Ada Colau, the political deal game finally has given her the office again (in Spanish):
Ada Colau, which was the major behind the Superblocks proposal, was elected once again, although with some turmoil (basically she's from a left-wing party and got elected thanks to the votes of the previously France Prime Minister Manuel Valls who was running with a right-wing party). More info https://www.thelocal.es/20190616/barcelona-mayor-reelected-a...
How is Valls seen in Spain? His public image in France was not amazing when he left (he was a socialist but left the party to join macron, and now you're saying he joined the right wing? )
well, spain... keep in mind he's only involved in the politics of barcelona, which is the capital of catalonia, which is only a part of spain. and he didn't even get that many votes, despite pairing with a well-established party as "ciudadanos". which have already broken the deal with him anyway.
in general, I'd say the consensus is that he's an opportunist. he knows how to play politics, but he's an opportunist. we are aware of his image in france.
in my opinion, he only joined ciudadanos for convenience, so he could enter the game in a decent position, and now he will attempt a transition towards the socialist party (if they want him, and it's still way too early for this, we probably need to wait 4 years until he's free of his current responsibility in barcelona). this is highly speculative on my part, but it's the way I see it. enter the scene through ciudadanos, and then distance himself through his actions, not leaving ciudadanos himself, but rather being rejected by the party itself. first by criticising the idea of ciudadanos being part of an agreement in madrid to have the support of an extreme-right party (Vox) so the right-wing parties could have the city council, and later, just a few days ago, by giving Ada Colau the support to be named mayor in barcelona, in exchange for "nothing". he's good at navigating the waters, he has experience at that, but everyone knows he's just an opportunist. he's already in the middle of the first scandals regarding some businessmen paying him 20.000€ each month for his involvement in politics. anyway, there are bigger things at play in catalonia with the independence process and all that, so in general people doesn't even care much about him. he's lucky to have that.
For a few months he was a "hero" of sorts for the spanish right wing, since he was viscerally unionist (i.e., against catalan sovereignty), and this is a basic tenet of spanish right wing. Now that he has supported the current mayor of Barcelona to be re-elected, he has fallen out of favor (since the mayor is left wing and somewhat neutral on the independence question).
For left wingers and non-unionists, he's always been nuts.
after the elections, the mayor will continue being Ada Colau, despite ending in second place this time. the whole situation is much more complicated than that, but there's a clear majority by left-wing parties, so the plan will most likely continue
I would say the plan is unlikely to continue unless Ada really really really wants it and she's ok dropping something else instead (I was going to cheekily say she might drop her righteous crusade against CIEs, but she dropped it as soon as she won 4 years ago, sadly)
Right-wing parties, such as C's, that she needs to pass on anything, are against superblocks. Her left-wing rivals on the indy side would probably be against it too just for the sake of leverage.
I’ve worked on ticket touting legislation for my own Parliament for two years now. It’s surprisingly complex and naturally has an unsurprisingly monied lobby funding opposition.
I find the parallels here very interesting and the suggestion from the first comment that a lottery could be deployed for all who purchase within the first X minutes. Maybe that’s the way forward for tickets too.
I agree with the parallels. I disagree with the solution.
It seems to me both markets have a producer retailing a product far below the market clearing price. A 3rd party is thus stepping in and claiming that unclaimed value.
It seems to me that the producers hold all the cards needed to put the 3rd parties out of business. They can increase prices, or supply. Why don't they?
I've heard accusations that musicians are getting kick backs from touts, which suggests that the touts are basically scapegoats.
The question then becomes why people don't think it's reasonable for these producers to raise prices. That view is kind of understandable for musicians, they are 'artists' not in it for the money, although why their fans would begrudge them more money or why the artists wouldn't want to perform more for their loyal fans I don't know.
In short it's a strange market dynamic, where nobody actually seems to be honest about their motivations.
Musicians generally want to make money but, like most market participants, they're not short-term income maximisers.
Musicians are concerned with their reputation. They want to tour (though some don't) but not burn out and also need time to work on new material and recording. They want to play the best possible gig. That means sell-out performances with the most devoted fans, not the richest ones. It means venue matched to the type of music.
Venues and promoters are in similar positions. Auctioning tickets to the highest bidder could be short-term profitable but in the long term it's a disaster.
If you want that long list of things, and can get it, good for you. Does it then follow you can demand legislation to protect that?
Then there's the question of what a devoted fan is. Surely if they only wanted devoted fans they'd site the concert somewhere out of the way. The South pole perhaps? That would sort the touts.
Edit:
And a final point, my experience as a fan would be much improved if I could reliably go out and buy say 4 tickets for me and my friends, any friends because i don't know which will be free, and if only 2 can make it, sell 1 to someone else that would like to go.
It's great that you're looking into legislation. Touts are annoying. I've lived in Hong Kong for a while, and once lost my iPhone. Getting a new one from Apple was basically impossible, because everything for open sale was snapped up immediately by very long queues of people paid to stand in very long queues and pick up 2 iPhones, which were then slipped over the border to go on the Chinese gray market.
I ended up paying some inflated price at a dodgy computer centre (as the alternative would have been to take out another 2 year phone service subscription).
However, I believe you that regulating this appropriately is complex. I'm not sure, for example, what Apple could have done better (beyond their 2-per-customer-limit, apart from raising prices or magically producing more). Lotteries might be one way (and that's what Apple did later in HK, I believe).
Are you going to ban drugs, alcohol and selling sex too? If people sell items at below the market clearing price someone will buy it and sell it at its true value.
They literally have no parliament, Government or decision making capacity right now. Both days of closures in NI were clear copy and paste efforts within an hour of the rest of Ireland announcing same. Not a great way to make decisions !
Hmmm... why wouldn't it be a good way to make decisions, assuming that the Republic of Ireland's weather people are competent, and their own people were unavailable (for whatever reason)?
Some things are independent of politics, and tomorrow's weather is pretty high on that list. :-)
Political campaigns, outside of the States, are very much bootstrapped. And IT folks very much not minded to volunteer their time.
Citation: I'm a member of a European Parliament on his third term in politics. Of my 200+ volunteers, not one is in infosec. Within my party, maybe 60 staff total are paid for a campaign.
I am really skeptical that considering the ongoing total operational budget on a yearly basis for all of the facilities and support structure in Strasbourg there are no infosec/netsec professionals. If that's really true, then to put it crudely, you're utterly fucked. Because Russia certainly does have money for blackhat infosec/netsec types.
> considering the ongoing total operational budget on a yearly basis for all of the facilities and support structure in Strasbourg
You're conflating parliamentary budget and staff with a campaign budget and staff. These documents came from his campaign, not a parliamentary office (be it EU or French). For obvious reasons the two don't mix. Campaigns generally operate on extremely restricted budgets, and are naturally transient in nature.
okay, true, even so. In a nation the size of France I find it really doubtful that major political parties would go begging for the budget to hire infosec/netsec professionals, considering the amount of money spent on all the other expenses of a major campaign.
Note that En Marche is a party that was specifically set up for Macron's presidential campaign in April last year - it's not one of France's established parties.
FN is financed by Russia, since other banks wouldn't give them a loan. And Le Pen is a contender in the second round so presumably it is exactly the case that major parties can have budget issues.
> I am really skeptical that considering the ongoing total operational budget on a yearly basis for all of the facilities and support structure in Strasbourg there are no infosec/netsec professionals.
I think you just confused "a European Parliament" (that is, a national parliament in Europe) with "the European Parliament", which is a different thing altogether.
And then also confused an MP (or, in your interpretation, MEP) not having any infosec staff with the whole government (or EU) not having infosec staff.
But then, even with all that, your conclusion isn't all that wrong for the topic at hand; if a major power like Russia targets a particular politician in the West (perhaps aside from the official, rather than campaign, personality of the sitting head of state), there is likely to be a substantial resource asymmetry that favors the attacker.
I think OP works for a member of parliament, if I understand them correctly. Their offices are actually not that sensitive. All the secrets are held by the executive, and the EU doesn't even have the sort of military and intelligence institutions that are usually most secretive.
>EU doesn't even have the sort of military and intelligence institutions that are usually most secretive.
Might just be because the EU is a trade block, it doesn't have secretive military and intelligence institutions because it doesn't have any military and intelligence institutions at all.
Well shit, I better let the people in the DGSE and BND know that they shouldn't have access to their data sharing partnership with the NSA. Some guy on the Internet says that the EU doesn't have any IMINT, HUMINT or SIGINT, it must be true.
France or Germany having their own intelligence services is entirely compatible with what I said though. Their allegiance is to their own country first, and data sharing partnerships change little.
I'll just add as a reference that for the french presidential election most campaigns are costing around 5 millions euros ( it's a side effect of a system which fixes this as a max limit for campaign costs refunds, but I guess they can't spend way more)
And in France (as in many other countries), most high ranking politicians do not have any kind of technical background. They typically studied political science or other soft disciplines. And are also often of a generation that barely uses computers but do not understand them.
In fact in France there is a general contempt from the political class and the medias for any candidate who is not a literary person.
Then political parties need to get real or resign themselves to being hacked.
At the level of Hillary and Macron, the money is there. If infosec people don't volunteer, they will need to be paid for, even if it means running less television ads or what not. Even in Europe campaigns have paid staff. It might mean cuts to something else, but is it worth skimping on security?
As an aside, I'm from the US and have never heard of a campaign looking for infosec volunteers. Are we sure no one would volunteer?
> Political campaigns, outside of the States, are very much bootstrapped
Get real.
edit: Considering the response perhaps I should qualify. The major parties in most developed countries have permanent election teams with multi-million pound budgets. I cannot see why my response is in any way controversial.
The US is mostly unique in having 18-24 months to fundraise, A/B test, staff up, etc.
edit: Regarding this...
> The major parties in all developed countries have permanent election teams with many multi-million pound budgets.
That's very likely. However, the bursty nature of elections means they're probably also onboarding thousands of volunteers and temporary staff in a very short period of time.
a Canadian political campaign (Federal) lasts at most 45 days, with probably an estimated 45-60 days of additional lead up time to prepare for it when it's obvious a vote is going to be called... The parties still seem to find plenty of money to spend on 4/5-star hotels, chartered airplanes, staff, etc.
> And IT folks very much not minded to volunteer their time.
This is an ignorant statement. The many millions of hours of work freely given to producing, maintaining and supporting users of software licensed under Free Software [1] licenses shows it's not true.
I suspect it's just that ‘IT folks’ tend to be cynical about most political parties. So they would want to be paid for any work done for such outfits rather than doing it pro bono.
I'd suggest that politicians who expect they can get such work done for free are the ones who need to “get real”.
So, this happens to me all the time also - from the month I got the phone (Nov/Dec 2015) in fact.
It seems to die with battery as high as 60%, though it only happens in cold weather conditions, and then immediately switch back on if plugged into a power source.
It's definitely cold-dependent in my case, and only started to show same problems again in November of 2016.
When did you upgrade to iOS 10? Immediately after upgrading to iOS 10, my wife's iPhone 6 (not 6s) started draining battery much faster, and automatically shutting off with 30% battery remaining. A couple weeks ago, she upgraded to iOS 10.2, hoping to fix the issue. The issue got worse. Now, she burns through about 70% of her phone's battery within about 2 hours (even if it's sitting in her purse).
Apple support says the remote battery test shows no problem. The Genius Bar guy ran a test with the phone physically present and confirmed the battery is showing some signs of age, but still within spac.
We live in Hong Kong. One of the phone support guys we've talked to in the past couple weeks checked for a recall for my wife's phone's specific serial number and said "There's no recall in Hong Kong for that serial number". When I pressed him about if the same serial number had a recall in other countries, he said something about New Zealand. However, he changed subjects quickly enough and didn't come back, so I couldn't really catch if there really was a recall in New Zealand for this serial number, or he was just mentioning a hypothetical possibility.
In any case, Apple isn't replacing our battery, and my wife doesn't have a pre-upgrade phone backup, so we are unable to test if the shortened battery life is just coincidental with the iOS update.
I took her to the phone market yesterday and we picked out an Android phone for her. Now I'm going through the pain of exporting and migrating what data we can, and manually migrating some other data.
As a long-term Apple user and shareholder, the botched MBP and iPhone 7 this year, along with the iPhone 6 battery issues and the lack of empathy shown toward my wife all make me more than a bit sad. I would have considered upgrading my wife's phone to an iPhone 7, except her frustrations with Apple support have made that a no-go.
