It is strange for people to come to a technology focused forum and then complain about... the prevalence of technology in vehicles. Kinda makes you wonder what their motivation is or they are a bunch of bots just out there to sow discord.

I'm not American but the anti-US bias here is making this site almost unbearable. Used to be a time when nerds could congregate here and talk logically about stuff but now Slashdot is devolving into Reddit where somehow, a BUNCH of people have convinced themselves that, of course, 350 million Americans must ALL follow the same mentality and therefore are justified in painting a huge swath of the population with the same brush. It's about as un-nerdy as you can get.

If you want to use every technology story as a platform to share your anti-US, anti-Musk, anti-Trump, anti-AI opinions with a million other people, perhaps you're better off going to Facebook and shouting into the void. Please leave us nerds to discuss technology.

.. politicians palms are getting greased.

I bought and sold 2 vehicles through Clutch Canada and it convinced me that, unless you are looking for something very specific, going to a dealership voluntarily is self-abuse. Yes, you can't actually see or drive the car prior to purchase but Clutch has thet figured out. They post a LOT of very detailed photos of each car and they point out any dings etc. so you know what you're getting.

Then on purchase day, you get to do a walk around of the car and take it for a solo test drive, or at least that's been my experience. If you're happy with everything, you sign and drive off. If you had a trade-in, the person inspects your car, you sign and the money is in your account somewhere between 4 and 24 hours later. If you're not happy with the car, there's some number of days where you can just return it - sorry, can't remember what that timeframe is.

At no point are you talking to some greasy salesperson or having to sit through their painful sales pitches where they try to convince you to buy paint protection for $2000.

I've also purchased from Tesla. Did it all online and had the option to take the car for a 48 hour test drive. On returning it, just dropped the keys off - no sales pitch, no annoying sales person. On pick up day, they showed me to the car, asked if I wanted a tutorial (I didn't), handed me the keys, shook my hand and that was it.

It was the closest thing to a perfect sale that I could have imagined.

That's...that's not a thing.

We've been doing technology for a long time and even technical-competent managers seem to still do dumb stuff like, "We want you to consume at least 2M tokens a month"

It's not about the quality of the output, but someone, somewhere needs to see a nice chart showing an upward trend in token usage because in their mind, that somehow translates into "more productivity"

We have literally been told that AI usage is mandatory and that if we're not using AI for everything then we are dinosaurs. Don't get me wrong - AI has really helped increase productivity in a lot of areas but I don't really need to use AI to create a simple chart in Excel...

I have a Tesla and carry a CCS adapter. Whenever I have to use a CCS charging station, it is a royal PITA. I have never once had a first time successful connection. It takes 3 or 4 attempts before it starts charging. I feel it's because of the extra weight of the adapter. Contrast that with a NACS cable .. it just works every time

A car having a native NACS vs having to use an adapter would 100% sway my decision.

I think you just described a lot of people without the other tags thrown on. People who use other people for their own personal goal whether it's to get really rich, or to have political power, or whatever their end goal might be.

I've always struggled with the idea of his doctor because on one hand, it's easy to criticize Bloch from our armchairs. How could a Jew possibly continue to support Hitler while millions of his fellow Jews were being hunted down and killed? Despite his designation as a "noble Jew", surely he would have preferred death over servitude?

On the other hand, maybe he thought he could somehow influence Hitler to change his mind or perhaps slowly poison him or something. Who knows?

Anyway, my point is that it's easy to condem people but I think we'd all be better off as a species to do a little less condemning and a little more trying to understand.

man, you are really angry and the immediate resort to ad-hominem attacks is a bit of a giveaway. I'm not pretending to be the smartest person in the room but I must admit, I do feel like a characteristic of a nazi does involve hate for Jews and an advocation for their extermination. I also feel like watering down the definition of a Nazi does a gross injustice to the suffering people faced under an actual Nazi regime

Look, we all get it. You feel like Elon is the personification of evil itself. That's your mindset. On the other hand, think about alllll the people who work for his companies - surely you don't think are all stupid and uneducated? Some of them are literal rocket scientists and they work for him.

The only way to reconcile that fact with your position would be to condemn all of them (however many thousands of really smart people there are) as being just in it for the money and have no moral direction at all. But that's clearly a fallacy.

But, to be clear, if you DO believe that, you do you!

I feel like if you really believed in the supremacy of white Europeans, you probably wouldn't hire a bunch of non-white people into executive roles in your companies.

This goes against my better judgement, but I have to ask .. do you think Elon is an actual Nazi? Like... he wants to exterminate Jews and other races? I see this sentiment posted on Slashdot, which is weird because I didn't think Slashdot was reddit and, generally speaking, Nerds tend to have higher cognitive ability that would make it really difficult to throw terms like "Nazi" around willnilly.

You might not like his politics but you're just working yourself up in a frenzy for no reason. You're not on his radar and he probably doesn't really care about your opinion. You'd be much better off not getting yourself so worked up.

As someone is pretty hard of hearing, even when I have my hearing aids in, I often struggle to make out conversations in movies/TV Shows. I watch mostly Youtube and very little regular TV and the subtitles really help.

Yes, they are sometimes inaccurate, but I'm using them to supplement what my ears are hearing. For example, someone might say, "50 CAL" and the subtitles say, "50 COW" but even though I might not hear "CAL" properly, the subtitles help me figure it out, despite being wrong.

It's like that writing test where someone replacs or omts a few leters in each w3rd but you can still read it.

Nope, I don't have one of those fancy solid state batteries. But I have been driving an EV for 2+ years now and 95% of the time, I charge at home. I travel ~100km each way to work and a single charge is more than enough to get me to work and back. When I'm driving to other places, I might have to stop at a Supercharger and that might take me ~20 mins but ... if I've been driving long enough to charge, I welcome the 20 min break to stretch my legs etc. It's a small price to pay to not have to pay for gas.

I know an EV doesn't make sense for the millions of people who apparently drive / tow 800km every day but that's not my situation.

probably because they're on vacation and the rental place only had EV's.

I know it's not for everyone but having owned 40+ cars in my lifetime, I can't ever see myself going back to an ICE voluntarily. My EV does everything my previous ICE cars did... and more.

Up here in the vast frozen North, we have similar temps to Chicago. Now, it could very different in Chicago but I have no issues finding functional chargers in Ontario, Canada. Maybe a few times I've gone to a 12 stall charger station and perhaps 1 or 2 have been out but I've personally never had a problem finding a working Supercharger. Other brands e.g. FLO, Chargepoint are a different story. They seem to be out of service pretty often. I've driven from SW Ontario to Ottawa in January temps of -21C and had zero issues with the vehicle or with the supercharger stations.

Canadian here. Most (if not all) of our electricity (Hydro) comes from Nuclear. I pay around $0.04 / kWh for overnight charging - which is mostly when I charge. The on-peak cost is $0.39 / kWh is comparable to the Supercharger stations around me

Can confirm. I was spending ~$500 a month in gas. Switched to an EV and I pay ~$70 a month in additional electricity. Unfortunately my workspaces doesn't have chargers so 95% of all my charging is done at home and most of that is overnight when it's cheapest.