Are you sure about that? The sustainable operation of modern cars is in doubt, from very specialized parts and fully integrated modules, to critical software that will not be updated, to dealer keying required for most every substitute part, the era of anyone being able to run cars for 200,000 miles long after the warranty is over will soon be in the history books.
I haven't seen any evidence that the "reliable" car brands are trying to change that dynamic moving forward. I think we are seeing a change in consumer behavior that leads to increased demand for new cars, but that is not connected to the reliability of the platform of the long term maintenance requirements.
If electric cars are actually simpler like all of these experts keep telling us, then in the next 3-5 years, we'll know which models are living up to expectations and which ones are not aging as gracefully.
The other thing to consider is the "old" batteries. If I can buy a used Nissan Leaf and harvest the batteries for a home-storage project after the frame kicks the can due to rust or some other problem, then I'm essentially able to keep those batteries as a form of equity on the vehicle. We also will see new companies popping up to address these home-battery conversion projects with plug and play harnesses to drop in your car batteries after the vehicle is no longer worthy of use on the road.
Sure, batteries will also continue to come down in price across the board, so that calculation also needs to be considered, but we're in this interesting middle zone where a lot of used EV value is being left on the table because the business market hasn't quite kept up with the demand for the next step in the lifecycle of modern EVs.
You say this like the average age and reliability of cars hasn't been skyrocketing for years.
Toyota offers a 10-year warranty on new cars, which would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
You can't update the infotainment, but the engine controls have remained modular because it's simply too hard to convince people to buy truly unrepairable cars. Tesla did it, and once people realized that gently tapping a Model 3 was likely to total it resale values plummeted.
I got Connect by T-Mobile a few years ago when it was $10/mo prepaid ($11.03 with tax), and I am grandfathered in. It has a hard cap of 1GB/mo, then nothing. Then I got Hello Helium with a physical SIM on my exercise phone (out in the rain, at the gym) and it is completely free with ... wait for it ... 3GB/mo of data. Go figure. The Hello Helium app used to require location permission on at all times, but they eliminated that.
Why creating a World Logic Day? Human beings are classically considered as "Logical Animals" (Latinized as "Rational Animals"). Logic, as reasoning, is a central feature of human beings. It is not very difficult to see what can be promoted on January 14, considered as the World Logic Day: rationality, understanding and intelligence.
>>What legislation makes you think America is going to be re-industrialized?
>Several actually.
BBB passed. The others died. This Congress passed an historically low number of bills. If reindustrialization of America depends on Congress, we are doomed.
Isn't that part of Paul Graham's startup lore? They were running lisp web servers for their ecommerce store and while a customer was on the phone with an issue, they would patch the server live and ask the customer to reload. Customers would hang up convinced it was their personal glitch.
The tool uses a Forth-like language with immutable data structures and persistent memory snapshots. It also uses Clojure style meta-data and compile-time meta-programming. I have no luck convincing people that a language without curly brackets is useful.
I have found Claude Code is a great help to me. Yes, I can and have tinkered a lot over the decades, but I am perfectly happy letting Claude drive the system administration, and advise on best practices. Certainly for prototype configurations. I can install CC on all VPSes and local machines. NixOS sounds great, but the learning curve is not fun. I installed the CC package from the NixOS unstable channel and I don't have to learn the funky NixOS packaging language. I do have to intervene sometimes as the commands go by, as I know how to drive, so maybe not a solution for true newbies. I can spend a few hours learning how to click around in one of the cloud consoles, or I can let CC install the command line interfaces and do it for me. The $20/mo plan is plenty for system administration and if I pick the haiku model, then CC runs twice as fast on trivial stuff like system administration.
Let's take an example: a managed database, e.g. Postgres or MySQL, vs. a self-hosted one. If you need reasonable uptime, you need at least one read replica. But replication breaks sometimes, or something goes wrong on the master DB, particularly over a period of years.
Are you really going to trust Claude Code to recover in that situation? Do you think it will? I've had DB primaries fail on managed DBs like AWS RDS and Google Cloud SQL, and recovery is generally automatic within minutes. You don't have to lift a finger.
Same goes for something like a managed k8s cluster, like EKS or GKE. There's a big difference between using a fully-managed service and trying to replicate a fully managed system on your own with the help of an LLM.
Of course it does boil down to what you need. But if you need reliability and don't want to have to deal with admin, managed services can make life much simpler. There's a whole class of problems I simply never have to think about.
> The best way I could try to reel him in was to simply suggest that if it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.
Alas, most good entrepreneurial activities violate the efficient market hypothesis. Ditto for many investments. Some people are more alert to opportunities, have better deal flow, etc.
>Because without any form of regulation, the ISP has no requirement to honor that letter?
Is this your personal exerience, or are you making assumptions?
I would love to hear how this process possibly fails to unsubscribe anyone:
1. Go to your state's corporate website and get/buy the name and address of the corporate registered agent for your ISP or whatever. In Texas that costs $1.
2. Write or ask ChatGPT to write a demand letter that they cancel your service as of the date of your letter. If they don't, threaten to sue them in small claims court. In Texas, threaten triple damages under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. (ChatGPT will help you write demands using the "laundry list" of deceptive acts.)
3. Send letter return receipt requested.
4. A lawyer on their side is now involved. They will neverever show up in any small claims court for this. And if they do, the judge is so on your side for this!
Heck, this works for a bunch of things, once you assert your rights. For example, I made a Coinbase account when they first existed and played with $10 of bitcoin. There it sat for six years or so, and then I tried to log in again. Their identity bullshit was demanding to use a phone number from an older phone and they stonewalled. So I sent a demand letter as above and, surprise!, my account was magically re-enabled for my $3 of bitcoin.
You'd spend far longer in the post office and the courts than you would on the phone.
All the company has to do in that court room is show that you mailed the form to someone whose job has nothing to do with account services, or who doesn't even have access or authorization to access people's private account information, or that they tried and failed to reach you in order to verify your identify since they sure as hell won't cancel the account of someone and shut off their service all because an anonymous letter showed up somewhere nobody was expecting to get it. What a great way to DoS an enemy or competitor if that worked. Just mail off some letters to a few store's webhosts right before Christmas or black friday.