It's not really a catch-22, since there's no need for it to be the same people regulating how much lying you can do about prices and producing goods and services.

It's also not really a catch-22 since, if it weren't for the tolerance of grotesque levels of regulatory capture, any 'capitalist' regulator would take ensuring high quality price signals really seriously.

The part that should upset people is that the 'capitalists' are so far into bed with actively anti-market rent seekers that you can't rely on them to stand up for honest price signals, contract law that isn't so lopsided as to be basically a joke, and so on.

It is definitely a good sign that you need to go with professed 'socialists' just to get some honest price signals in your market economy. Failure to enforce those is among the most fundamental failings one could imagine; yet here we are.

Besides this, the NYC rule seems to cover rental agreements, which the FTC rule did not cover, to my knowledge.

Indeed, but I was answering the question: "It seems like there is an obvious business opportunity for a domestic tractor manufacturer here. Anyone care to explain why nobody has moved into this market?"
European tractors would not be a domestic manufacturer. A domestic company moving into the market would be a "new manufacturer" and would have to invest quite a bit into development - design, manufacturing, etc...
It's easier for other companies, whether Chinese, Japanese, or European to move in instead with their own superior offerings.

If you are going to anthropomorphize a tool enough to call it "AI" I suppose that it isn't entirely unreasonable to suspect that it might "reflect CCP ideology and values"; but fretting along that line seems to either be ignoring or deliberately obfuscating the difference between running a model and suckling on someone's black-box API.

A local bot can hurt you to the degree that you trust it to actually work; but a remote vendor can(and, given the competitive scramble for training data, almost certainly wants to and will try to to the degree they can get away with it) hurt you both to the degree that you trust it to actually work and to the degree that it can exploit the data and process information you are exfiltrating to them. This aspect is outright advertised as a virtue to some extent(when facebook is going on about how the 'AI' that 'knows you better' will be more useful; or one of the 'foundation model' vendors is promising your boss that, for real this time, improvements will allow next year's digital transformation to still work after it gets rid of you); but there's no reason to believe that it stops there: if the potential of 'AI' is half as interesting as they claim it is why would you expect that your vendor will just sit there obligingly renting you synthetic programmers or virtual back-office functions forever when they could just eat you whole?

For about 2 American money pits racing toward IPOs the chinese models are the scary pirate version that makes their value proposition look even worse than it does by itself; but for literally everyone else it's using the fancy, respectable, foundation model guys that is the glorious future of short-sighted outsourcing; and there's not much reason to expect any of them to like it for reasons beyond stupidity or desperation.

I realize that it's all about keeping the corporate sponsors happy; but I'm perpetually a bit puzzled by how the 'culture war' stuff never seems to result in any related action on things like food contamination (outside of a few 'crunchy'/'natural' influencers who make some social media noise but are essentially irrelevant from a regulatory perspective).

If one were looking for something remotely resembling intellectual coherence wouldn't the legality of persistent compounds that sure do seem to make endocrinologists nervous in food really get the people who are loudly concerned about biological gender or white birth rates motivated? However much you overestimate the ability of liberal propagandists surely you would take good, old-fashioned, chemical effects on the endocrine system even more seriously?

That would be that labor costs are too high, they wouldn't be able to compete with the established players as a new manufacturer that would have a bunch of development costs for what would, at least at the start, be more primitive offerings.
Of course, primitive is what some people are after.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have taken over on much of the innovation, or at least development. The USA and Europe have too much invested in the status quo these days.

It certainly is good that any of the properties of an LED that you can measure cheaply and reliably enough to get away with using in consumer electronics are 100% distinct from those of other components or precisely the same LED covered with opaque epoxy.

Just detecting that there's now an open circuit where a diode should be would be fairly trivial and cover the cruder drilling cases; but this will be cosmetic at best against any moderately motivated tampering.

I attribute it down to mostly the elimination of leaded gasoline. 18-20 years after use drops, crime drops as well.

There was actually an incident of this some years ago. A pensioner (not the USA, UK, or similar) was declared dead by mistake. So they stopped his payments, went to take his housing away, etc...
He ended up being the most polite thief, just for life necessities.
They eventually tried to arrest him. Except the computer wouldn't accept the entry because dead. Fingerprints were for a dead man.
Couldn't hold a normal court case because dead.
It took like a year to fix, and they decided to drop the charges and stuff because he paid the businesses back when they finally gave him the back money owed.

Autocorrupt: some to somehow

If the aftermarket fob is a cheaper build, one needs to look for a better quality kit. Never had a problem with my fobs.
And yes, the replacement fob did everything.

With lead-acid and extended run times, volume starts mattering again. Especially if one is trying to retrofit cell towers that might not have had significant UPS capability before.

In addition, the lead-acid batteries in this use can last for a long time, and perhaps more importantly, the UPS equipment is set up for lead-acid. It's cheaper to replace the lead-acid batteries than it is to switch to a newer chemistry, even if LFP is getting down to lead-acid prices per kWh.

For a NEW install, I'd very much look at newer chemistries. Though NMC would be low on the consideration list. As you said, need durability not low mass/volume, and lower cost is always good.

I had an aftermarket remote starter in my truck, professionally installed, no problems with it for a decade.
They did hook it up, it replaced my original remote, so I didn't have to carry both.

I remember that, but things have improved a lot. A cell tower only takes 1-8kW, and we have drastically better batteries.
Plus, a lot fewer land lines, so need to keep the towers up for emergency services.

If I had the points, I'm not sure whether I'd mod you insightful or funny. I certainly laughed at it.
I also just replaced the starter in mom's 2005 Saturn Vue due to the relay going bad.
I'm not sure how that thing would start a fire, there's only 2 wires to it, unless the starter itself was bad.

Aftermarket power steering, that's a *shudder* from me.

I'm also very curious as to how one ends up with a separate fob for the starter, even in an ICE vehicle. Maybe fluffer is talking about a different part than what I'm thinking about?

Fluffer - to most of us, the starter is the electric motor that turns the engine in order to start the engine. It generally has a relay to signal time to start, and a wire directly from the battery to provide the amperage necessary to turn everything. Were you thinking of something different? I'm not aware of any starters that have anything really remote.

Unless the thinking is having a different fob for the car doors and operating the vehicle, like how early cars would have different keys for the doors and the starter, because they hadn't thought to match the two up yet, or that was considered too expensive.