Yep -- but there's no systematic routine national program, that's the issue.

There's a bunch of quite specific UK-market problems. Australia also has marginal pricing, but it has 5 minute dynamic segments, and the market is set up in such a way that it consumers can see the effects in real time and thus modify their behaviour to respond to the price signals. Here in Blighty, we just get a bill months after the fact, about which we can do nothing.

What saddens me was that in the course of a 30 minute chat with Claude, I was able as a mildly informed layperson to work up a suite of pretty plausible reforms that would deliver a much more functional market. Both politically and technically plausible. I think so much of this is about will to act, and maddening British negativity. All that sucking of teeth.

A key part of the MAGA movement is absolute shamelessness: this is true of the leaders and the members. They are shameless about their own lies, about holding themselves to different standards from others, about being fascist, about being racist, about hurting other people, about hurting themselves, and above all, about being stupid. They don't merely take pride in being shameless; they recognise that being shameless opens up a wider set of actions to them at any point in time than those that would be available if they allowed shame to limit them. And they recognise that their opponents will spend time pointing out their shamelessness, expecting that to have an impact, rather than accepting it as an amoral and pragmatic decision and fighting them as they are, tooth and nail. So it's been very useful to them. Of course, there are risks to being shameless: your actions may lose you popular support, for example. But that is why part of their program of shamelessness includes seizing control over speech and education, and above all, of cheating in elections and courts. They want the question of whether they have popular support to become irrelevant.

It's an inherent risk. It can be engineered out to a degree, but it requires a program of PPM to actively manage the risk, because seals can corrode, fittings can come loose, etc.

From here in the UK, this is just so striking. Here, we have a single design of number plates (more or less), optimised for readability, with a (more or less) uniform requirement to be on both the front and back of the vehicle. They are so legible that ANPR systems (=US ALPRs) don’t need clevercreepy AI to decipher them, and so they don’t. So we don’t have Flock, and the system is under the control of a public service with a fair amount of oversight, and while it is capable of being abused and has indeed been abused, the scope for abuse is much more limited.

See also: breathalyser rules; how police officers behave on traffic stops and on car chases (largely); etc.

I agree that there are actual ICE-specific failure modes that can cause a fire in a car that’s parked and switched off. It’s also true that the article got itself muddled by not talking about any of those!

There have been several recalls for this kind of failure mode:
* Ford Bronco Sport / Escape (2024): Ford recalled about 42,650 2022–23 vehicles because a fuel injector could crack and leak fuel into the engine compartment. NHTSA explicitly says the fuel could reach hot engine or exhaust components, creating a fire risk.
* Jaguar F-PACE (2024): Certain 2024 F-PACEs had an incorrectly specified plastic oil-filter cap that could crack. Pressurised engine oil could leak onto hot components such as the turbocharger and exhaust manifold, potentially starting an engine-compartment fire. JLR says it had received reports of a small number of actual fires.
* Kia vehicles (2025): A piston-ring problem could eventually damage the engine, including creating a hole through which engine oil could leak onto a hot exhaust component. Kia explicitly identified fire as a consequence.
* Volkswagen vehicles (2025): Another recall involved cylinder-head-cover screws that could loosen, allowing engine oil to leak. VW says that if the oil reaches hot engine components, a fire could occur.

I think it’s fairer to say that OEMs *can* use smaller “starter” batteries for EVs than for ICE, and that some, but not all, do. Tesla does. But Polestar, for example, still uses a 70aH in the Polestar 2. Prob decided it was easier not to re-engineer that system, although it’s obviously a waste

I would actually go further, and say that signing a deal with him isn't merely not worth the paper it's written on, it's actively harmful: people waste time and effort negotiating, end up agreeing to a lot of stuff that's really bad for them, and he still fucks them over and they are very often taken by surprise, despite the fact they shouldn't be, because people are used to deals having some kind of binding effect and it's tough to break away from that psychology.

Sorry to hear about your MIL. AD remains a vicious disease, especially on the family.

I mean something stronger than that. A patient who achieves a positive result will typically not see an effect size large enough to notice a functional difference. It’s not a few great responses buried among a lot of non-responders. It’s many (but not all) people having a response, and each time that response is functionally unnoticeable. We are talking about a six month slowing of memory loss over a five year period. Neither the patient nor the family can notice the slowed progression.

I agree with practically all of this, save describing the effect size of current treatments as “generally modest”, which to my mind is being too generous. Only distinguishable from background noise through epidemiological studies of patient populations.

There is absolutely no evidence that you can do anything to slow the progression of AD. None whatsoever. Exercise doesn’t help. Brain games don’t help. Going ketogenic makes fuck all difference.

If you ask on what basis I say this: my mother-in-law was diagnosed with MCI which developed into moderate AD (although it was cancer that killed her in the end). I am lucky to have a dear friend who is one of the most senior UK dementia physicians in the country. He was blunt when she was diagnosed. The best treatment we have produces a sub-clinical improvement in a single AD symptom, memory loss, but does not help with any others. And what does sub-clinical mean? It means that if you take these drugs at aged 75, by the time you get to age 80, your memory loss will the same as someone who was untreated was at 79.5. That’s detectable through memory tests but is not a functional improvement.

Don’t give yourself or others false hope. If someone you love is diagnosed with AD, enjoy your time with them as much as possible, get support and care as best you can, and don’t immiserate them or yourselves by forcing someone who is already losing emotional affect to eat a fucking keto diet and do fucking wordsearches.

So, so fragile. Hilarious!

It’s beyond silly! It’s just desperate.

What the fuck are you talking about? Just because you love huffing the smell of petrol or diesel, most people don’t. It’s not a nice smell. And it’s bad for you.

And it’s not a fucking binary, you numpty. The fewer ICE cars, the quieter and less smelly the roads are. How this is difficult for you to understand is beyond me.