It's a service and a convenience. If you don't want to pay for it, you can fuel the car yourself before return. No charge.

For myself, I'd be quite happy to refuel it myself. Most times I've travelled, I'm driving the rental for a couple weeks so I have to refill it at certain points anyhow.

Is it stupid? of course.

As the current LLMs are basically what we will have for the next few decades

I've enjoyed reading most of your comments on this post; very clear headed.

However, this bit seems to me to be unfounded speculation rather than assured fact. The velocity of machine learning development is very, very high. LLMs are also only one aspect of ML. We have already seen applications well outside of text prompting such as drug discovery and protein elucidation where ML has made significant advances. There are ML driven robotics being demonstrated right now that showcase the ability to learn in situ. It seems to me, at least, that the ML development curve is highly visible, monotonically upwards, and notably steep. Which leads me to think that there is very likely a significant impact to gainful employment in the relatively near-term offing. I just don't know how you could make the statement I quoted and be confident in its predictive ability.

If thing's[sic] are so crushingly expensive why is consumer spending at record levels right now?

When the expenses the consumer must disburse — food, fuel/transport, housing, medical care, education, tax collections, etc. — are subject to record level price increases for whatever reasons (corporate greed, increased/excessive governmental spending, usurious interest rates, transport costs, etc.) then the consumer will be spending at record levels to continue to do so.

Even if an individual is in the increasingly smaller portion of the population where these increased costs aren't a problem for them, they're still causing them to push more money through the system. Being wealthy doesn't make food less expensive, for example. So... record consumer spending. At every level.

Other metrics indicate that this record spending is not a healthy economic sign. For instance, rising credit card and auto loan delinquencies are signaling increasing distance between income and costs. People are spending everything they have to in order to get by and that naturally shows up as "increased consumer spending."

Another factor is people's inability to evaluate what is necessary. Large numbers of people treat various combinations of things like Netflix, premium sneakers and sunglasses, new clothing, high end phones, coffee, subscription software and services, visits to fast food emporia, bars and restaurants as "necessary." These are expenditures that don't help reduce spending on actual necessities in any way, but can in many circumstances cause the ready funds to come up short (and earlier) against those costs.

Social conditioning is largely responsible for these types of financial blunders, but again, given a previously somewhat stable situation that cost the consumer less, the increases will result in increased consumer spending until they hit the limits of what they can spend. They may then turn to credit, and we are seeing the results of precisely that in the current spate of increased credit delinquencies. Using credit to "get by" is unsustainable. But when people have to cover food and housing today, they will make the move today that ensures that is possible — today.

This applies to everyone, the laws meant for preventing facial biometric search just aren't good enough to do that.

Good luck with that loophole.

Sure, but the point needs addressed, and the conversation drifted that way.

It's first generation EV's (disregarding the early 1900's EVs)

Expecting them to be completely reduced to practice in the first stab is not realistic.

Also, we must separate the EV from Musk's cult of personality. Much of what he has done is detrimental to the EV platform.

For all of the handwringing and gnashing of teeth and tearing of garments when an EV catches fire, there is the strange lack of concern that Internal Combustion vehicles catch fire and burn every day. A simple DDG image search will show us that. It's that energy density thing The energy wants out, matters not if it's gasoline or a bunch of batteries.

Or how in electronics, the transition from vacuum tube to Tube/transistor hybrid to VLSIC to Integrated Circuitry took place. Or computer technology, or just about anything that uses technology

The first of anything is seldom the zenith of the technology.

We have to look at where things are going. Gasoline is not getting cheaper, nor fuel oil. Yet people gripe about filling up their brand new 10 mpg truck. What did they think was going to happen. And yet, there are alternatives. I have a Jeep, trail hawk version that will get over 30 mpg highway on E85, yet is fully capable of rock climbing. Always wanted to find a Cybertruck owner to have a little off-road challenge with.

Speaking of - that abomination is so far off the rails that it shouldn't be taken into consideration in the comparison between EV and ICEV vehicles.

Back to point, complaining about first generation EV's and acting like only they are subject to fires, and the elephant in the room - that Petrochemicals are not in infinite supply, and will eventually price themselves out of the market - I'm content to wait out this first generation while keeping my fuel bills low, and driving fully capable vehicles for my use case.

I have a Windforce 4060 16GB and the fans don't run most of the time, even for light gaming. It's not until I run something graphically intensive that they turn on at all, and they're still quieter than my system fan (stock cooler, system not overclocked) because of the blade design and the counterrotating fan not fighting its neighbor. I'm told that if you underclock and undervolt you still get decent performance and the fans only run slightly on very heavy loads.

You can replace pulseaudio (and JACK!) with pipewire and wireplumber. It also supports ALSA clients. Just install pipewire and wireplumber, chmod -x pulseaudio, and reboot. This is effective on probably any Linux system; I do it on Devuan. You need to keep pulseaudio installed for the client libraries. You can control system and application volume using the pulseaudio interface, so all of your normal desktop environment volume controls will work with it.

I agree that pulseaudio is crap, but you CAN replace it, even if you can't remove it fully from your system. It's not very big, so it's not a big problem to have it lurking.

Yes, they wanted to connect to the kernel in ways they weren't allowed to. Changes were made in Linux that forced them to comply. Nvidia made the necessary changes on their end in relatively short order, so short in fact that by the time I actually got a distro with an affected kernel the driver had already been updated, so there was zero impact to me — an Nvidia user. No question that it was sleazy, though.

I used to be an Nvidia user because I dual-booted, and AMD drivers for Windows are hot garbage (and before AMD, the ATI drivers for Windows were the same.) Now I am an Nvidia user even though I don't dual boot, because CUDA is required for some of my use cases, and ROCm only supports a small subset of cards. The AMD drivers for Windows are still trash, but the OSS AMD graphics driver for Linux is great so the only thing that needs to happen is that my use cases need to be less CUDA-dependent or AMD needs to get serious about supporting ROCm across all of their GPUs, and then I will start thinking about buying AMD GPUs which I have regretted every single time I have ever done it in the past. I have seen crappy drivers cause crashes with "their" (ATI's and then AMD's) hardware since Windows 3.1 and the Mach32.

Nvidia can't release GEforce drivers as OSS because they contain Microsoft code. This was part of the deal for getting their chip into the original Xbox. As you yourself state, they have released drivers for their ARM-coupled GPUs. You may not be happy with the way they released the sources, but they did release them and they are usable. Don't unpack them over the top of the prior release and you won't confuse yourself. If AMD were competent at software, then Nvidia would be far less popular. They aren't. That's why their Windows drivers still cause crashes. If you have a simple use case and only want to run Linux, AMD GPUs are totally viable and probably even your best bet. If you want broad application support for GPU acceleration, or if you want to dual boot, Nvidia is still the best choice by far. I use AMD CPUs exclusively, but I also use Nvidia GPUs exclusively. These days (and for some years now) the Linux driver keeps up with the version of the Windows driver. The only missing feature is interleaved SLI, which I no longer want to use anyway, so it's not bothering me.

Before we go too far into this, we must acknowledge that oil and oil based energy sources are not in infinite supply, And synthetic fuels are going to be nasty expensive. So I always challenge people to come up with their solutions to personal transportation.

There is nothing that would prevent an EV from being much more repairable than an ICE powered vehicle. Modularize everything, repairs are just replacing module C or what have you. Module goes back and is recycled or repaired.

And regular vehicles can be non-repairable, or simply too expensive to repair. A case where a brand new Audi had a catastrophic coolant pipe failure got the owner a 30K bill for a new engine. Not warrantied https://www.youtube.com/watch?... BTW, "I do cars" is a fun channel. Guy does forensics on blown up engines, the worse the carnage, the better, with a bit of gentle humor involved. ASMR for gearheads.

Although I would not want to see the dood's wife's reaction. to sinking 30K into a new car engine for a new car.

Any and all issues you raised are not intrinsic to the Electric Vehicle however.

I got a debt collection letter for a whole ass [used] car once. The perpetrator had a driver's license with my name on it, because it was their name too. My FULL name is approximately the 400th most common FULL name in THIS country, middle name included. But that is not sufficient proof of identity to establish a debt. What the court in Nevada City, CA decided WAS sufficient proof was a check cashing card with my SSN written on it in pen.

Who knows which of the many identity breaches I've been "involved" with ("victimized in" is a more accurate description) or whether it was from Yuba College, which was transmitting student SSNs in cleartext over the internet until I implemented encryption for remote sites for them as a contract job, but they got it somehow and the court accepted it as proof of identity. This is, of course, a spectacular fuckup which destroyed my credit rating — I wasn't even aware of it for years. ANY state database system connected to the SSA would have revealed that the other party's DOB didn't match my SSN, but there were NO SUCH CHECKS.

The SSN was only ever supposed to be used for social security and tax purposes (which are intimately involved) and its use has grown out of all sense. The credit score system is fundamentally no different from China's "social credit score" in that if your credit score is low, it affects employability and access to housing directly, both rentals and purchases, plus has secondary effects on these as well since it affects your access to effective transportation (buying a car, that is, in a country with very few reasonably functional public transport systems) which in turn affects your employability again. The system is rotten from stem to stern and someone having an ID with your name on it is only a severe problem because of general government malaise and incompetence.

I have an employee benefit that lets me rent at approximately half price from Hertz. So I can choose between an affordable rental (with the benefit, the rental car allowance from my insurance comes within a couple of dollars of actually covering the rental car completely like they never do) or a potentially competent rental company.

Please explain how this is not a first amendment issue when the information was only sought so that it could be disseminated in a way that informed and educated. Use words small enough that we can believe that you understand them.

We tried that, it was called not allowing anonymous comments. But without the trolls, the engagement actually went down, so they brought you back because the only thing the owners care about is ad impressions.

I've noticed that if you dim your laptop screen, it can make the battery last a lot longer. OSX does this by default, but not all Linux distros do it.