I think the real issue is warm parts of China selling to cold parts of India without including the features that aren't needed near the factory. We know lots about battery chemistry, but rural farmers have had more immediately relevant things to know about up to now and don't have a good source of information on this new thing the government is pushing, so they skip things that sound like luxuries and end up with something inappropriate for their purpose.
We're past this. We can thrive now without the huge carbon emissions. We're prisoners of billionaire profit streams because those profits resist change.
Zoox doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals. You do not have control of it (except for the emergency red stop button).
Right now, Zoox can not even deviate from a hardcoded preprogrammed route, so it's a long ways to be true self-driving either.
Notice how the routes it does in San Francisco or in Vegas are always the same circuits.
Getting a DUI on it wouldn't make any sense.
Like almost everything in the US, it's up to the state. New Jersey has annual inspections, but other states I've lived in don't.
The irony of your sarcasm is it actually *is* horrible.
Water is good - necessary even - but too much water will kill you. Choice is the exact same way - it's entirely possible to have too much of it, as much as that contradicts an ethos buried deeply in the American id.
Lol, so many of the posts here reek of bitter developers who have clearly never worked in the halls of quality software engineering
It seems that a smart person would know how to conserve mental energy far more efficiently than you.
But that's the only way to get there.
50% of the industry disagrees with you.
I do very much understand what you're saying and it certainly adds to the complexity. One cannot put sociological or psychological factors on a box.
That aspect of the problem is indeed going to be much harder to deal with than, say, salt, trans fats, or known carcinogenic compounds.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do about those aspects - financial incentives help a little, but honestly I don't believe they make a huge difference - which is why I've concentrated on unsafe levels of ingredients, because although we don't know exactly what those should be, we've at least got a rough idea for some of them. It's going to be a delicate one, though -- you don't want to overly restrict sources of sugar because diabetics can suffer from crashes due to excessively low sugar just as badly as excessively high levels, and some items get unfairly maligned (chocolate, per se, isn't bad for you, it's the additives, and indeed particularly high percentage chocolate can be helpful for the heart).
But, yes, I absolutely agree with your overarching point that the problems are primarily psychological and sociological. I just don't have the faintest idea of how these can be tackled. Jamie Oliver tried (albeit not very well, but he did at least try) and the pushback was borderline nuclear, and that was where there was clear and compelling evidence of significant difference in health and functionality. If you can barely escape with your life for saying eating better reduces sickness and improve concentration, and pushing for changes where these two factors essentially dictate whether a person is functional in life, then I don't hold out hope for change where it's more ambiguous or the economics are much tougher.
There are papers arguing that smoothies aren't as good as eating real fruit because it seems that there's actually a benefit to having to break down cell walls, even at the expense of not getting 100% of the nutrients from it. However, cooking food breaks down cell walls, although obviously not to the same degree. It's not clear that breaking down cell walls is harmful, even if it's not beneficial.
A lot of ultra-processed foods have been accused of having unhealthy levels of certain ingredients (usually sugars or salt) and certain styles of cooking can add harmful compounds.
It would seem reasonable to say that there's a band at which a given ingredient is beneficial (analogous to a therapeutic threshold), with levels above that being increasingly harmful, eventually reaching a recognised toxic threshold. In terms of the harmful compounds from cooking, it seems reasonable to suggest that, below a certain level, the body's mechanisms can handle them without any issue, that it's only above that that there's any kind of problem.
So it would seem that we've got three factors - processing that can decrease benefits, ingredients that follow a curve that reaches a maximum before plunging, and processing that can increase harm.
Nobody wants to be given a complicated code that they need to look up, but it would seem reasonable that you can give a food a score out of three, where it would get 3 if you get maximum benefit and no harm, where you then subtract for reduced benefit and increased harm. That shouldn't be too hard for consumers, most people can count to 3.
Yeah, understood, food is going to vary, since it's all uncontrolled ingredients and processing itself is very uncontrolled. So take two or three examples as a fair "representative sample". Further, most manufacturers can't afford to do the kind of testing needed, and our understanding of harm varies with time. No problem. Give a guidebook, updated maybe once every couple of years, on how to estimate a value, which can be used, but require them to use a measured value if measured, where the value is marked E or M depending on whether it's estimated or measured.
It's not perfect, it's arguably not terribly precise (since there's no way to indicate how much a food item is going to vary), and it's certainly not an indication of any "absolute truth" (as we don't know how beneficial or harmful quite a few things are, food science is horribly inexact), but it has to be better than the current system because - quite honestly - it would be hard to be worse than the current system.
But it's simple enough to be understandable and should be much less prone to really bizarre outcomes.
If it has syntax, it isn't user friendly.
