Any vaguely recent car is constantly reporting its location back to its manufacturer.

Sure, appetite drops a bit in that specific person, but this still doesn’t do anything to motivate the big food industry to change its ways - they can assume that specific person will still eat their products, and can carry on selling ultra-processed food to everyone else

Isn’t the dystopian bit of this the scary capitalism of it? This approach allows the food industry to continue selling people crap that is making them unhealthy rather than reforming their business model, and it’s doing this by handing a massive amount of money to the pharma industry. This is exactly the solution I’d want if I were a wealthy investor with money in lots of vast global businesses, and for me that’s the dystopian bit - the way it’s all about handing money to The Man to continue unhealthy lives rather than, y’know, fix anything a bit

I’d be very intrigued in a system that lets me leave my phone in my (waterproof) pocket and access audio and navigation on Bluetooth. Let’s get this on bikes asap

One of my big worries with the way people are using LLMs is that they’re being trained to trust whatever they spit out. Hey Google, what’s the nutritional content of peanuts? And people are learning not to ask where the information came from or to check sources.

One of the many reasons this worries me is that very soon these businesses are going to need to recoup the billions they’re spending, and I wonder how long until these systems start feeding paid promotions to a population that’s been trained to accept whatever they’re told. imagine what some businesses, or governments, would pay to have exactly their choice of words produced on demand in response to knowledge queries.

Interestingly, my family subscription more or less halved a few months ago, which I was NOT expecting, but which was very welcome

Agreed. although my worry with the closed-list system is that it makes parties, not people, the main thing we vote for. This feels like a barrier to entry for independents, and a way of propping up the power of established parties. It also feels like it removes voters’ ability to reject a politician that happens to be popular within the party, or to support a more maverick politician who doesn’t toe the party line but who resonates with the public.

It would have a massive effect. Transport (car) emissions are one of the larger - and growing - sources of emissions.

And we can’t hide behind “But the corporations…” because ultimately what they produce gets used by us.

So to answer your question: riding a bike when Global Capital wants you to keep buying cars and pumping oil into them is one of the best acts of defiance you can make

Apparently the surge pricing reflected what touts would have charged. Makes you want to grab somebody and shout HOW IS THAT A JUSTIFICATION?! Yeah, and if somebody steals a car they’ll sell it to me cheaper than the dealer - so it feels like TM logic means the dealer should sell it to me cheaper too because that’s what the black market is priced at?

2 and 3 are massive. I’m on Mastodon, but am having a much better time on Bluesky. Mastodon is full of gatekeeping and policing and people complaining - Bluesky is just fun and interesting, like Twitter 12 years ago

They mean it would cost more because the problem has become bigger and more complicated because it wasn’t addressed early

The thing is, they’re now just using platforms owned by Meta and Microsoft, both arguably awful corporations in their own way. Choosing Zuckerberg over Musk is out of the frying pan and into the fire in my opinion. They really should go to Mastodon, I guess?

If they’re like the originals, let’s hope nobody ever needs to control them with the slightest bit of moisture on their hands.

I know. But I was satirising GPT’s bland writing style, not providing facts

“Shits are frequently classified into three basic types…” and then gives 5 paragraphs of bland guff

Important to know that real-world testing shows that PHEVs are rarely plugged in and just burn oil much of the time

Except people don’t plug in their hybrids and run them on fossil fuels. Hybrids are yet another way the FF industry keeps itself going while pretending things are being fixed

People need to hire vehicles occasionally rather than buy more polluting vehicles against some rare edge case

The main alternative would be state funding, proportional to vote share. The big question would be how one establishes a new party

Ah, thanks. I knew it was something like that. I bow to your superior knowledge on 80s sci fi comedies