I'm assuming you've got a fixed interest mortgage?

The whole advantage of that is that as inflation does its thing, if your employer gives raises (or you hop to greener pastures if they don't), your mortgage payment actually becomes easier to pay over the life of the loan. Rent, on the other hand, keeps going up.

So no, despite $20k roofs and $15k furnaces (you do know you can buy those online for a lot less, then get a HVAC tech to install it on the side, if you ask around), you're still coming out ahead.

Here in Florida you pretty much have to at least Photoshop the lawn on any vacant home, because if it hasn't been actively maintained it'll either be overgrown or mostly dead, depending on what the weather has been doing.

That, at least, is actually less dishonest than the pictures fast food restaurants use for their menu. If you buy the house and do the necessary yard work, you actually can end up with a lawn that looks like the photo. There's nothing you can do to get McDonald's to give you a burger that actually looks like their picture.

I will draw the line though at things that aren't a manner of assumed sweat equity (if you own a house, you'll be regularly dealing with the lawn), though. If you Photoshop out the chemical plant that can be seen from the back yard, make the dining room look bigger, or make the dilapidated driveway look freshly paved - yeah, now you've crossed into the realm of being scummy.

So, 37.28 freedom units? That's only about 7 miles more range than my e-scooter.

...and I can take my scooter on the train.

He's been screaming from the hilltops warning about pretty much every locked-down, consumer-hostile trend the tech industry has been on, even going as far back as when these ideas were just proposals. The thing is, the vast majority of consumers don't see it as a problem and buy the stuff anyway.

It's like McDonald's - everybody knows it's unhealthy and really doesn't even taste all that good, but somehow the business is still incredibly successful.

You can just say it: The Democrats do some truly boneheaded stuff, too.

For what it's worth, this is one of those times where it might be a good idea to contact your representatives and tell them you'll forgive them for voting along with Republicans on this issue, because the broken clock happens to be right.

To be fair, Tesla's current iteration of self driving is at least safer than letting a drunk person drive.

Just inflation of new car prices alone has a lot of people feeling this way, too.

So, find some way of punishing the people who drive impaired without operating under the assumption that every person behind the wheel is a potential drunkard. If your approach is "guilty until proven innocent", you're going about it backwards.

Personally, I'm fine with making the penalties really harsh, so those of us who don't partake don't have to have nanny hardware in our cars. There's really no excuse to not just get a taxi or Uber if you've had a few drinks.
 

Aftermarket remote kill switches already exist. If anything, the only people who have to worry about remote kill switches are the repo men, since they'll be out the work if it's easier/cheaper for the lender to electronically disable a customer's car until they pay up. There really is no situation where you don't pay, but get to keep driving the car.

The real issue with mandating this technology is that it's yet another point of failure/false positives.

If the kind of EV chargers they're talking about are actually EVSEs, then no, it's not scary. EVSEs are actually just a glorified extension cord for connecting your EV to your home's mains. All the hardware that actually modulates the amperage draw and converts the voltage to what is required to charge the traction battery, is located inside the vehicle itself. The EVSE only tells the car what is available from the circuit it is connected to and engages a contactor that energizes the cord, after the car signals to the EVSE that everything seems good to go with the connection to the vehicle.

The worst you can really do by hacking an EVSE is to cause it to fail to function (which I guess would be a denial-of-service attack) - something that would be just as easy to accomplish by stealing/vandalizing the cord. I suppose you could also reconfigure it to present itself to the EV as having more amperage available than the circuit it is connected to can actually provide, but that will just result in a tripped circuit breaker.

Now on the other hand, if we were talking hacked L3 (DC fast charging) chargers, yeah, things can go very wrong when those malfunction.

If they deny your claim, you can always ride a Lime scooter.

Autonomous cars as a service, and micromobility paired with public transit.

If you want fun, take it to the track. The public roads aren't supposed to be your playground, they're for people getting from A to B who want to come back home to their loved ones at the end of their travels.

Come to central Florida sometime.

Florida actually managed to make car insurance costs come down by imposing some restrictions on lawsuits. I'm sure the devil is in the details, but it actually worked and my rates did go down, so it's one thing our awful Republican leadership did that I actually saw a tangible benefit from.