> No it's not. Multifunction devices existed long before enshitification. The two concepts are not remotely related.

Enshitification predates the internet. It is a concept as old as human invention itself. We just don't see it int he historical record, for the most part, because shitty devices generally don't become popular enough for examples to survive the scrap heap. However, if you dig into some antique catalogs (catalogs that are antiques, not modern catalogs listing antique items...) you'll see lots of dubious devices being advertised.

  > Your phone's main purpose is to make phone calls.

A phone's main purpose is to make phone calls. This is a categorical error on your part; a modern smartphone is, despite the unfortunate etymology, not a phone. It is a portable internet terminal more than anything that just happens, perhaps merely by virtue of its history and nothing more, to be able to make live voice chats.

> given this is an optional extra that costs money it is clear that someone deemed it a benefit

Yes. that someone being the manufacturer, who can add $20 worth of parts and sell it to dipshits like you for an extra $500 because apparently you're a toddler easily distracted by bright colors and movements. You're like the living embodiment of that Simpsons gag Nuts and Gum. And of course, apropos to this story, the manufacturers see extra benefit in that they get another way to harvest your behavioral data and shove advertisements in your face. You're being sold a solution to a problem you don't have in exchange for your privacy and attention. You are paying extra to become the product. You are both a figurative and literal tool.

> Man if only there was an internet connected screen in the kitchen from which to pull up my recipe...

It's amazing to me that you can have the solution literally in your hand and still sarcastically complain that there is no solution to the non-problem you have already solved. Just... fucking amazing. Is carrying a tablet from one room to another such a heavy burden that it justifies building another, shittier tablet into a random appliance? Even if you absolutely needed a tablet in every room of the house, could you entertain the idea of just.. buying them separately?

A true luddite would argue if you even need an internet connected device when printed books dedicated to recipes are a thing, and they'd at least have a solid point to make in that at books don't need batteries and continue to work even when the internet doesn't... and they don't actively spy on you either.

> False equivalence. A leatherman directly trades off primary function against additional functionality.

And a tablet built into a fridge door trades primary function (portability) for... actually not even additional functionality because a tablet in a fridge door does literally nothing to make the fridge better at its job, and attaching a fridge to a tablet does not make the tablet better at its job either.
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> The premise of a device having "one job" again is the position of a luddite.

No, it's the position of being anti-enshitification.

A refrigerator's main function is to keep food cold. That's the reason you buy a refrigerator. If putting a screen on a TV actually had a demonstrable benefit to that purpose then fine; but it doesn't. It actually has no objective benefit whatsoever, and the increased complexity not only increases cost but also reduces reliability. That's literally the definition of enshitification.

If having a computer screen in your kitchen, mounted to your fridge, is that useful... get a tablet and mount it to the fridge. Not only would that be cheaper, but if the tablet fails it doesn't make the refrigerator scrap metal and vice-versa and you can upgrade one without throwing out the other. Bonus is you can take the table off the fridge and put it where you need it.

I have a leatherman multitool that I keep on me whenever I'm out of the house. It does a lot of things, but it does none of those things as good as a dedicated single-purpose tool of the same kind. It's a good knife but it will never be as good as an actual knife. It's a good pair of pliers but it will never be as good as a proper pair of pliers. It's a decent screwdriver but I will always reach for a normal proper screwdriver if there's one available. Does it make me a luddite to not want a single item that does all things kinda shitty instead of many items that each do their one thing well?

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> Wouldn't I be better off having the package delivered to an Amazon Lockbox right next to or even inside of the post office, and then not pay any fuel surcharge?

You realize this is already a thing the post office does, right?

You can also have items shipped to, say, a UPS store or have it held at a FedEx shipping hub for pickup.

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> It may be a shitty project, but the people all had at least an indirect say in it.

No we didn't. Nobody votes for what NASA does, not even indirectly through their choice of congress critters. More often than not even Congress barely gives more than a passing thought to NASA's budget, and even then all that matters is how much of that budget will be spent in their jurisdiction and not what it will be spent on.

I do not approve of congressional (or presidential) meddling in NASA's projects, but not because of what the projects necessarily ARE - I care because you cannot hope to make progress on a project that'll take 10+ years when the project changes every 2-4 years.
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It's funny because if you go back in time about 40 years you could replace "Chinese" with "Japanese" and get the exact same sentiment. And we all know Japanese auto makers definitely didn't learn any lessons and definitely didn't eat US automaker's lunches, right?

> There are plenty of good used cars if price is the issue.

Fun fact: There can't be any used cars if nobody buys new cars.
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> It's money-neutral for everyone involved

Not only will the LNG plant absolutely cost more than $1B by the time it's all said and done.

Not only is LNG something that needs to be paid for in perpetuity, unlike wind, which means an ongoing expense that will be paid by utility customers.

Not only is the price of that LNG linked to global markets which are, for lots of reasons, more expensive and volatile now and will be for the foreseeable future.

But the LNG plant will be built in Texas, and does not generate electricity at all. Do you know what an LNG plant actually does? Generates Liquefied Natural Gas. Do you know why you'd do that? To put it on a boat and export it... not to burn it for electricity. Not that generating electricity in Texas - which has an isolated grid from the rest of the US - would be of any use to the people in the Northeast US and Canada who would have definitely benefited from cheaper electricity.

So not only are you wrong about it being cost neutral in both the short and near term, but it could ever be neutral 'for all involved' either. The people of the Northeastern US are fucked out of cheaper electricity, and the people of Texas don't get anything out of the deal.
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Yes, I'm aware there are forums full of people with no personal experience with X complaining to the people doing X every day that X simply can't be done. A forum full of truckers saying EV trucks can't meet their needs doesn't mean EV trucks can't meet their needs. It only means they have opinions about it strong enough they feel it necessary to post online about it.

Meanwhile, all-electric trucks doing 800km (500mi) trips across Europe has been a thing long enough that it's becoming mundane, and they only have rated ranges of ~300-400km (190-250mi) loaded. Again, I'm not going to say a 500-mile range is never needed, but I'm absolutely saying the necessity of that range is way overstated. The tech is very clearly good enough for the vast majority of real world use cases and has been for some time, evidenced by the fact that it's successfully used in real world use cases and has been for some time. Those guys can post on their forums about how it can't be done until their fingers fall off, but it won't make their opinions into truths.
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> Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?

I'm gonna guess that you're one of those idiots who think Amazon sales are a great deal, rather than the 'sale' price being the normal price and the non-sale price being inflated by 20% (because fuck you what are you gonna do about it, leave the house?)

The flip side you're not seeing is if they peg you as someone who ALWAYS buys Maxwell House coffee even when other brands are cheaper or on sale, they will charge YOU SPECIFICALLY more for that product because they know you're likely to pay it. Amazon already does that shit (try looking at the exact same item in a different browser or device while not logged in...) and with the use of digital price stickers on shelves it's likely gonna start happening everywhere.

And in case you're wondering how; the security cameras are already face-IDing and tracking you from the moment you walk through the store. All they'd have to do is set that coffee's price to $20 and give you a 'discount' as you approach, which of course won't be as much a 'discount' as someone they aren't sure has a strong preference for that brand.
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> However law makers should probably get in front of any dynamic pricing issues

New York just straight up banned it.

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I can only assume you mean fast chargers for trucks since essentially all DCFC stations currently installed for passenger EVs and light trucks/vans do not include any form of intermediate storage...

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> THEY TOOK ANOTHER LOAD instead of waiting for hours to refill their tanks.

Well no not exactly.

After driving 250 miles they probably sat for 2-3 hours waiting to be, and actually being, loaded/unloaded. And then they probably sat somewhere for another 7-8 hours hours straight because it's literally against federal law to drive that much in a single day.

The point is that with ~250mi of range you're not having to delay a shipment waiting for your truck to recharge mid-trip, so it imposes little to no logistical hurdles over the current system.

Even with longer trips, mandated rest times means there is usually plenty of time to recharge.
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Pretty much every manufacturer of big trucks has at least one electric offering already on the road and in service. Some of them for several years now. While Tesla has been sucking up all the oxygen in the room, manufacturers like Freightliner, Volvo, and Kenworth have been quietly putting out fleets in both Europe and North America.

I'm not going to say nobody needs a 500+ mile range, but the demand for such a vehicle is way overstated; according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics 73.7% of the weight of goods moved less than 250 miles in 2023. The number is slightly higher in 2024 but thanks to you-know-who all the US government websites are fucking broken so citations that actually have data are hard to come by...

We have this warped and romanticized idea of the trucking industry with long-haul drivers traveling through the vast wastelands of the American midwest. Sure that happens, but the vast vast vast majority of actual truck-hauled freight is mundane and short distances. We are focusing on like 5% of all cases while the other 95% has been achievable for years.
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Okay well, AI will not solve your desires.

LLMs can't be trusted to be accurate. They mash words together based on statistics billions of layers deep, producing output that is very authoritative and confident sounding, but they to not have any semantic understanding of what they are calculating. Despite all the guardrails and tuning they still hallucinate or produce inaccurate results, and the time you spend figuring out if the output you got is trustworthy would have been better spent figuring it out yourself because at least then YOU will have an understanding instead of just an answer.

And it's entirely possible - even likely - that the LLMs have all sorts of hidden guardrails put in place by corporations, governments, and maybe even the company you work for if they use a licensed LLM for company use... so you can't trust it to be honest either. They will generally not give honest answers to certain questions about sensitive or restricted information, unless perhaps you ask it in a tricky way that gets past the internal checks. Of course, you have no way of knowing what information is considered sensitive or restricted so you'll never know what it's NOT telling you. Another reason to not trust it.

Just get a rubber duckie and keep it on your desk. Duckie will never mislead or lie to you.
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> Anything with a fan will be "better". It will not be more efficient.

You are using some strange definition of "efficient" but okay. Let's continue to ignore practicalities like launch mass and volume, material cost, and serviceability too while we're at it.

Spacecraft thermal control system in all but the most trivial arrangements require power too. You need to get the heat from inside where it's being generated to the panels, and that requires active coolant loops with pumps. Passive heat pipes will only get you so far (literally, like a meter or two at best without gravity to assist fluid movement) and have pretty limited capacity.

A single ~100W fan can dissipate over 40KW of thermal load from an automotive radiator. According to publications by NASA, the ISS thermal management system has two pump assemblies that consume 275 watts and can dissipate up to 6KW. I'll leave you to do that math. Even if you triple the power (which as absurd) for a air-water radiator arguing that you also need to pump water on the inside, they still win handily.

And since you implied cooling towers earlier; I can tell you from professional experience that an evaporative crossflow cooling tower like you'd see at a data center can easily reject about 10 megawatts of thermal power with just 30-40 horsepower (~30kw) worth of fans and pumps.

I'll say it again: Thermal radiators are dogshit. If you want to move heat quickly and efficiently, you need mass transport. The only reason spacecraft use thermal radiator panels is because there is literally no other choice.
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> For a closed loop system, space is quite simply more efficient, because the temperature differential is larger, period.

Wikipedia cites a printed book and mentions 100 to 350 watts per square meter for radiative cooling in space.

As a low ballpark, one cubic inch of automotive radiator has about 24 to 30 square inches of surface area, and even more approximations say you need about 1 cubic inch per horsepower which is roughly 250 watts of thermal dissipation to the air.

So car radiator is, on the low end, about 1500 times better at rejecting heat than a radiator on a spacecraft. And that's with the temperature difference advantage.

Turns out radiative heat transfer is absolute dogshit compared to convection or conduction.
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