But the activists are not the point. Animal rights activists are a minority, things change because the majority or a significant share of people backs them.
In this case this large group that backs banning horse drawn carriages is very likely eating industrially produced meat. That’s the inconsistency, 95% of Americans eat meat and a substantial share cause far greater inhumanity on animals through their diets which are completely optional (as in, they could vote with their mouth and stop it), than these horse drawn carriages which they want to ban.
I think if a bunch of horses were dropping dead in my city from heat exhaustion, and the only upside to having them was that they congested the roads and left shit everywhere, then I would weigh the two and probably say better to not have them. Turns out 78% of registered New Yorkers agree. Maybe they are all massive hypocrites and should actually support this, since they also eat meat.
Essentially this is simply what solar panels have done for ages, feed back electricity to the grid, sure it's not through a power outlet but essentially it connects to the grid in a similar way.
What's new is cheap and ubiquitous micro-inverters. Before it wasn't worth putting a $800 inverter on a small 2-panel 600 or 800 installation. Now with micro inverters being so cheap, this tech becomes viable. And with loads so limited (less than a microwave) the regulation is equally light to allow this convenient plug-in solution.
I mean a Toyota Yaris (first facelift) from 2016 for example sits around a ton (1070), and it's completely comfortable to drive on the highway.
And it's not some niche car, it's one of the most sold compact cars on the planet. And the 2026 versions are actually slightly lighter at 1025 and are very comfortable.
Of course comfort is up to interpretation, and as cars get better, our window of expectation moves, the cars my dad used to drive for 8 hours in a row for our summer vacations in the 1970s are considered ridiculously loud and cramped by today's standards. Just like Kings of the past had no tropical fruit in winter, while even unknown shitty corps hand them out for free to their unpaid interns at this point, our standards move.
But even with today's standards I think a modern Yaris at 1 ton (+2%) is completely fine for highway driving.
No not per se, but most people tend to stop using the switches.
The Hue basically just adds a switch inside the bulb, which can be remote controlled. The lamp's switch is still there, and functions as normal (turning on or off electricity to the bulb).
So your light is on when the lamp's switch + the hue's switch is on. It's off when either one is off.
So if your light is on, you can indeed walk to a lamp and turn the switch off to turn off the light. Or you can turn off the Hue bulb via your phone (or Philips Hue switches you can put anywhere in the house, they're basically bluetooth switches that run on a <$1 replaceable battery that lasts 2 years.
If you turn off your Hue light via your app, you can turn it back on later via the app, but not the light switch (as that's already on, but the bulb isn't).
And if you turn off your lamp via its switch, you can turn it back on later via the same switch, but not the app, as the bulb is already on but not getting power as the lamp's switch is off.
Especially with multiple people living in the house with different behaviors, that becomes annoying. So usually people choose to stop using the lamp switch and only use the Hue. You can of course hook-up the bulb to a Hue switch, so you can turn it on and off with both the switch and the app.
I'd want to add a bit of nuance to that, as bright lights hurt my eyes and induce headaches (sometimes migraines).
For that reason I really like overhead lights as:
1. You can easily fit a larger number of overhead lights (e.g. 6 overhead lights vs 2 eye-level task lights)
2. For equivalent lighting in a room say x lumens, each overhead light must be x/6, whereas the 2 eye-level lights would be x/3 lumens, much brighter.
3. Because the lights are overhead, they're not in my vision, yet light up the objects in my room.
I still have 5 eye-level lamps in my living room, but they supplement the overhead lights which always give a base amount of light, and allow the lamps to be less bright. Every time I turn off the overhead lights I see too little, and if I turn up my lamps to see better, it is too bright for the comfort of my eyes.
It's akin to driving: I like having a sun above me, when it's low in the sky before dusk and shining in my eyes, it sucks, even though objects are less bright and visible than midday, simply because of the positioning of the light vis-a-vis my eyes.
A regular household plug should be more than enough unless you want to use your home as a quick pit-stop between two long rides. (e.g. drive 150km from work to home, then drive 300km to your holiday home for the weekend an hour later).
Typical EVs nowadays get about 6 km per kWh, the average driver in the US drives about 54 km. A US home typically has 15A plugs, or 20A in the kitchen/garage. That's 1.8 - 2.4 kW. Even at 80% safe continuous charge, you'll be averaging 1.5 kW at minimum. So that's just 6 hours of daily charging at minimum.
If you have a garage and plug in when you get home, your car typically sits there from 8PM to 8AM for 12 hours. That's already double the time necessary to charge 100% of your driving at home, at the minimum charging speeds equivalent to a microwave or washing machine. And you'll typically have much more time with the car plugged in on weekends and home-work days.
A 5k upgrade to the electrical box might be a good idea, but it's definitely not necessary for most normal EV users.
As for ROI, a Corolla might get 20 km per liter, in Connecticut that's 6c per km. An EV even at the 29c per kWh is just 4.8c per km which is 20% cheaper. If you have some solar panels you can cut that figure by another 65%.
Not to mention the lower maintenance costs for EVs and the rebates various local governments give.
> The reality is, however, that consumers don't want EVs for a myriad of reasons and prefer hybrids.
I think this is completely true for the period 2010 - 2030.
But from 2030 onwards, it seems 4 things are structurally different in many markets:
1. energy per kilometer, improved about 30% (from about 5 km per kWh to about 6.5)
2. kwh of useable battery, increased by about 80%
3. chargers per person, increased by about 20x
4. Charge speed increased by 5x from about 50 kW to 250 kW
All these figures are approximate averages for normal EVs, the very low / very high end are different.
So we have more battery, which we use less of to drive, which we can charge faster, and at way more places.
The reality is that an average European for example drives about 30km per day. Take the base model Tesla 3, it has 575 km of range and can charge 285 km in 15 minutes. The base model. So for the average driver that's a ~15 minute charge, every 10 days. For the average person an EV makes more and more sense.
That's today, for a base model car, which is suffering from cheap and quality competition out of China that will be even better.
Cars that will be released in 3 years from now (>2030) are even more favorable. I honestly think the 'myriad of reasons to prefer a hybrid' is soon going to be an exception, not the rule, for newly purchased cars (of course the 2nd hand market is a different, delayed story). And compromising your car design won't let you compete with manufacturers that don't compromise and go fully EV.
If you consider the squeeze that regulators worldwide are going to be putting on gas the next decades, I think going full-EV on new models makes sense. Sure you can keep selling some ICE cars but developing entirely new ICE models, and mixing an EV into them?
Yeah very creepy, I'm afraid it'll be normalised in a few years, together with the cameras in our glasses.
I always knew this was coming eventually, with storage and compute getting so cheap, eventually every record can and then will be saved for security / convenience reasons. Every word uttered, every emotion shown on your face, every URL visited, every view you laid your eyes on.
I will miss the days that things could happen and be forgotten.
No doubt this stuff is all very useful, but I'd rather we skip this line of technology.
‘… but contrary to what a regular person may think (that this level of data gathering is unusual), privacy experts know that it’s not, it is standard practice’
This is correct, it's monetisation, not commissioning.
Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.
It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.
However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.
Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.
Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?
I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
As a US citizen who takes our country’s free speech norms seriously, I don’t think Meta should be aiming to deplatform even the hateful content I vehemently disagree with.
I think government should work more on helping people find alternatives to social media. The “town square effect” that makes people feel forced to use these apps is real and pernicious. That feels like a better target for regulation and taxation than content. If your business moat is based on network effects, perhaps there should be the equivalent of a land value tax on your network.
I think there is a distinct difference between deplatforming content, and simply not monetizing it. You have the right to shout in the town square but I do not have to put money in your cup when you do it.
I find those advocating for censorship of right wing voices to be pretty unconvincing, and often acting in bad faith (like this article and its cherry picking)
Reddit and Blue Sky are almost entirely left-wing rage-bait and conspiracy theory content these days, and they amplify such content right to the top of the default feed, yet you rarely see the right calling for these platforms to censor their users.
If the right can learn to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive, then it’s reasonable to expect the left to do so as well, without resorting to these contrived cancel culture talking points.
The vast majority of political violence and riots in the US these days is orchestrated by left-wing movements and individuals. The assassinations of Brian Thompson, Charlie Kirk the attempts on Trump, all the riots surrounding BLM and George Floyd etc
Obviously directly inciting violence is not acceptable, but cherry picking obscure instances of it, while simultaneously overlooking the far larger problems that exist on the left, is bad faith. The threads celebrating the murders of Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk are some of the most shared Reddit posts of all time, with zero self-reflection from the left about this double standard.
> If the right can learn to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive
Ah look, it's the hallmark of well-reasoned thinking. I have seen this exact phrasing numerous times over the past week, did the bots learn a new talking point? "The right" sure is doing a lot of tolerating around abortion, trans identities and women's bathrooms and sports.
Or break the companies up like we did with Bell. Any social media platform with over 20 million MAU in the US gets broken in two, and companies with over 1M MAU must offer open federation under some reasonable terms.
I suppose you are not at the end of the hateful content. It's easy when it's a group, but how small does the group have to be before they should deplatform it? 100k, 10k? 1000? 10, 1? Is one person okay? If I and a bunch of fellow idiots publish rubbish about you and you alone attacking you on facebook with our fellow 1,000,000 followers, would you still vehemently disagree with facebook deplatforming the hateful content?
Business is not bound to any sort of freedom of speech. There is no such thing, it does not exist. The first amendment covers government actions only.
If I owned a social media network, I wouldn’t let Nazis, MLM peddlers, transphobes, pro-gun advocates, or anti-vaxxers, among others, on my network. That’s where my moral compass lies.
Now, you might say that’s unfair, that’s not an open forum. I’m not being open-minded to other ideas or freedom-oriented.
You don’t have to agree with me. Go use someone else’s product.
The thing is, Zuckerberg has uniquely overarching control over Meta in ways that most public companies don’t. He has controlling special founder’s votes, he is the guy in charge, equivalent to a dictatorship.
That means that anything Meta allows on their platform is a reflection of Zuckerberg himself. Whether or not that’s how the eyes of the law views it is very different than how it is from a moralistic “who is responsible?” angle.
Zuckerberg can stop all hate and anger on his platform in one business meeting. Plenty of other platforms (public and private companies) including HN don’t allow the kind of conduct that Facebook and Instagram allow wholeheartedly.
He chooses not to hold high standards for his platform because anger, fear, snake oil sales, and purposeful disinformation campaigns, among other shady business ventures, are profitable.
And here we are, debating whether he and his company are responsible. After all, they just provide a neutral platform, right? If I get hit by an Amazon truck, it’s not their fault, that was a subcontractor! Companies enthusiastically create these mechanisms to detach themselves from the harm they bring.
I think you may be misunderstanding the post. He is not saying that Meta is prohibited from censorship by the First Amendment.
He is saying that the US has free speech norms (not laws) where it is acceptable for people to get together and rant about X, Y, or Z. There are limits (e.g. calls for violence), but they are few. Anyone who does not like the speech can leave the room, try to argue with the speaker, or make their own speech in another room. It is not the social norm to shut down the speaker, make the speaker unemployable, trash or bankrupt the venue, etc. Those actions are contrary to the norm.
That is simply not true. One example is a hilarious skit by an Australian comedian (John Safran) going to salt lake city and knocking on doors asking if he could talk to people about atheism. The amount of violent threads he received is quite revealing.
In my personal experience having lived in the US and several other countries, I found officially people can say much more things (i.e. due to the strong freedom of expression laws), but in personal settings you are much more likely to be shut down, fired, threatened with violence, ostracized... for stating unpopular (in that social environment) opinions, in the US compared to the other countries.
Meta is a private organization[1]. It is not “the US.” In fact, most of its customers aren’t even in the US.
Private organizations dictate their own social constructs. It’s not acceptable to proposition sex at a book club, but it’s acceptable to do that at a swingers club.
This idea that private companies follow the social norms in the US is only partially true at best.
It’s socially normal for me to talk about how my company sucks and I hate my boss with 100% of my friends and family, but doing so at my place of employment isn’t okay. That’s one major example where my company doesn’t follow social norms.
If what you say is true then YouTube should allow hardcore pornography since over 90% of men watch pornography. It’s socially and legally acceptable, with numerous legal brick and mortar businesses specializing in that market. But they don’t allow that because they are a business that doesn’t want to engage in that business activity.
I think it’s easy to mistake the current state of private social media as “open” in the way you describe just because it looks open. To your point, not a lot of speech is banned outright, which seems parallel to US social norms, but whether or not something is banned or removed from social media is almost meaningless because promotion and multiplicative reach is the domain of the algorithm.
The algorithm doesn’t promote and multiply the reach of content based on whether that content is most aligned with social norms. It’s promoted based on whether it makes money or causes users to stay watching the platform.
In real life, you don’t hang out with your friends and family most who make you the most mad or generate the most shocking content. But that’s how social media works because social media isn’t real life.
This idea that today’s social media platforms are a neutral vessel for speech is flawed right from the start because of that algorithm.
[1] publicly traded, private as in “private property”
Facebook wants to get that speech in as many rooms as they can, because they figured out a way to profit off of the emotional reaction of the people who were already there. They offer free hosting for community groups of all sorts in order to bring people to the rooms they can profit from.
Thank you for this poignant allegory - its so spot on - it will really open some people's minds here who are overthinking and rationalizing their current Big Corp employments.
They put you in several opposing camps. They identify the most insane content and show only that to everyone in the opposing camp.
No one cares if you clean up after your dog makes a nr 2. The anti dog poop people want to hear you don't give a fk and let Herman poop wherever he likes.
Similarly the dog owners don't want to hear you understand. They want you to talk about little poopers getting stuck in your barbed wire with razorblades.
In this case this large group that backs banning horse drawn carriages is very likely eating industrially produced meat. That’s the inconsistency, 95% of Americans eat meat and a substantial share cause far greater inhumanity on animals through their diets which are completely optional (as in, they could vote with their mouth and stop it), than these horse drawn carriages which they want to ban.
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