Have you ever wondered why have cars got so big? Why do we have more SUVs? It's because emission norms take into account the class (size) of the vehicle. All the powerful engines couldn't get away with getting into the right brackets so many manufectures instead decided to keep the same engine/power/emissions but make the car bigger so that it can squeeze under the right limit.

That's in the US due to EPA regulations or CAFE.

But the real reason is profits - because the big car trend started with the American automakers in the 90s where CAFE was much less of a deal. It's just that big trucks and SUVs made a lot more money than sedans and small cars. After all, you can tell people complain about EVs costing $50,000 when a new econobox costs $20K. Ford/GM/Chrysler of course would rather you buy that luxury SUV for $50K where they make far more money than that $20K econobox. It only costs just a tiny bit more to build it, but the margins are way better.

It's why the Big 3 don't really do small cars or sedans, and the ones they do generally suck outside of a few specialized ones like muscle cars.

If you're American, then Buy Ford/GM/Chrysler is basically in your DNA (despite the last two being foreign owned), so you've been forced to go along with buying the more expensive vehicles because the cheap ones are crap and the dealer would also want you to buy the bigger vehicle.

Meanwhile the rest of the world are making smaller vehicles that run great and are fuel efficient and making a profit.

The Japanese don't want to buy an F-150 that is larger than their famous Klei trucks and is far less nimble or practical on Tokyo streets. Meanwhile, Toyota makes nice sedans that get good mileage with great quality that satisfy the portion of the American population who either cannot afford a big vehicle, don't want to drive a big vehicle, or need a car to go down congested city streets easier than a literal tank.

We are also (I assume) college educated professionals. Not the guys with hs diplomas being fired for being 4 minutes late from their potty break at Walmart where they are treated like kids and can't have their phones out etc. all for 35k a year.

These are American statistics of course. Terrible management who are a different breed rule blue collar jobs. It goes back to slavery and class structure for these roles.

Only 25% are college educated. Terrible work environments motives my education

It's not hard to see why - a GPS satellite isn't a really powerful thing - think of it as just a lightbulb transmitting signals and you're basically seeing how strong the signal is. It's basically in the noise by the time it reaches earth.

The other problem is the signal geometric dictates how accurate it is - a city with tall buildings means you only have a very narrow view of the sky, and that narrow view leads to large GPS errors. It's why everyone uses wifi and tower trilateration to get a better position.It works pretty well especially with wifi since it's relatively short range and a simple scan of what you can see can often locate you quite precisely especially since a dense urban area will generally have lots of it around.

In a city with skyscrapers, your narrow view of the sky is a huge problem, regardless of what GNSS system you use - you just don't have a good view of the sky.

Even XM satellite radio, who use some of the highest power radio transmitters available dpesn't work well in urban areas because of the narrow view of the sky blocks access to a lot of satellites. It's why they have to use terrestrial repeaters in cities

Satellite services need sky to work.

Toxic workplaces aren't new. In fact, they're probably as old as work itself.

The rise in toxic workplaces is like the rise in autism - it's always been there, we're just way more aware of it now and things you could get away with 30 years ago is no longer acceptable in any workplace today.

RTO has nothing to do with it, it just amplifies it.

Toxic workplaces are what gave rise to "work to rule" or its more contemporary name, "quiet quitting". As in there's no longer any reason to go above and beyond at the workplace - you won't get that promotion, your raise will be minimal, so why bother putting in excess effort? And if your workplace is toxic, you put in even less.

As in you don't even give it 100%. You put in just enough to not get fired while using the rest of your capacity to look for another job.

China has started to go through such a reckoning, because the business culture is very capitalistic and you have people rejecting work altogether (something helped by the low cost of living so survival is fairly easy on a small budget).

The US, which has traditionally more worker protections (few as they may be) might be undergoing something similar where toxic workplaces are just simply called out, and like places forcing RTO, they will likely have to pay more for their employees to recruit and retain them.

Is it? Or were many wanting revenge and payback for increasing salaries since 2019 and doing remote work?

The frustrating thing is wages were constant from 2000 to 2019 for most folks. A few professionals they did skyrocket which skewed some data. As a system administrator 75k remained constant for 18 years! Now it is finally like 115k, but adjusted for inflation you are screwed if you tried to buy a home or rent today.

75k could get you a mcmansion in 2000. Today it is not enough for a starter home, even in an affordable area. It is 1 bedroom apartment only.

Meanwhile, CEOs and leadership are furious and think prices need to return not realizing at all that $ sign doesn't have the purchasing power it did for so many years. So yes people are angry at both sides.

You are in a minority.

Statistics I read is 75% of people hate their jobs. Be greateful!

I wonder if it has always been like this or were there times when that number was much lower?

It does impact these criteria as it shows bad leadership and management and culture.

If the culture is treating you like an assembly line worker when you are not, then that damages morale and kills loyality.

Employees who do not want to spend over 2 hours a day and $300 a month in gas just to join Teams meetings in a shared open office when they can do the same at home, so they can be watched by managers who do not believe in remote work or self atanomy and feeling stressed and disgusted by disrepect. SHOCKING!

Musk brought micro management and Style X Management from the 1950s back in style again, and away from Style Y and empowermment. It is all the rage now in leadership. Attendence, attendence, and attendence, and firing if you make a mistake. Forget about trying new innovative things and being creative.

THe pendelumn has swung back to the employers HARD from the employees and it is showing. I wonder if this is revenge syndrome from the C Suite who felt blackmailed to pay people more back when in 2019 they paid the same in 2005 and in office attendance where workers finally got a pay raise and gave the finger to in office work? Now the jobs are paying closer to 2020 levels.

It's also not innovative because solar powered EVs have been around since the Tesla Roadster.

You know, solar panels on roofs have been a thing for a long time, and it's not a huge stretch to take the power they make, and shove it in an EV. Viola, solar powered EV.

Sure it's not a car with built in solar panels, but the average area of a car does not provide enough power to go anywhere - given practical shading and other aspects, you might get a kilowatt or two out of the solar panels. A car with a 50kWh battery would take several days of full sunshine to charge. It's L1 charger speeds, at best. Except instead of being able to use your car during the day you have to charge it during the day in the sun and then use it at night, versus plugging it in to an L1 charger at night letting it charge while you sleep.

You're far better off with fixed solar panels on the roof and channelling that energy into the battery of your EV.

My brother built an electric bike using cheap lithium batteries he bought online. The guide he followed said the system was smart and safe, with no need to worry or really understand how it worked. One night, the bike caught fire in our garage. Lithium fires burn fast and hot, and you cannot put them out with water. By the time firefighters arrived, the garage was destroyed and part of the house was burning. My brother got third-degree burns trying to pull the bike outside.

Lithium ion batteries do not cause lithium fires. If that was the case you should be concerned about the several pounds of sodium that's sitting in your kitchen right now.

Lithium ion batteries have several weaknesses - and they catch fire not from lithium ions, but the stored energy which creates an internal short circuit that rapidly generates a lot of heat. Couple that with flammable electrolyte and cell materials that contains oxidizers and you get the recipe for a fire. The lithium itself is fairly stable in its ionic form and it's very reluctant to replace the lost electron.

It's not the lithium - because if you take a discharged battery and a charged battery and puncture them, the discharged battery (or really, anything below 50% charge) will at best spew a little contents out. meanwhile the charged battery produces exciting fireworks.

Lithium primary cells though do contain actual metallic lithium and are exciting, but their expense and non-rechargeable nature mean they are not very prevalent.

As for your kitchen - sodium in the form of table salt. Sodium chloride, which has both the reactive sodium metal plus the poisonous gas chlorine, but together is rather innocuous other than giving you high blood pressure.

If you have dodgy cells, if you're willing to give up half their capacity, they will not cause a fire even when damaged as at 50% they do not have enough energy stored to discharge with flame.

Nevermind. The problem was my /tmp ramdisk was full. I guess Fedora uses tmpfs by default and it's a fixed size. This has bit me before. Wonder if I can change it back to a normal directory on the disk.

No, tmpfs is not ramfs. It's called tmpfs because it's a self-resizing RAM disk - it takes more RAM the more stuff you put in there, and shrinks when you delete stuff, which is great for /tmp and other temporary file storage. It does have a limit of up to half the physical RAM installed, but that shouldn't be a huge issue on a modern system.

tmpfs might fail if there's no more RAM available which can happen if there's a lot of stuff going on, which likely might have lots of stuff in /tmp so it's a double whammy of low RAM and lots of temp files clogging things up.

While true, it's also potentially risky especially in a high profile case where pretrial coverage can reach a lot of people.

As example, if for some reason part of the evidence publicly disclosed will be ruled inadmissible for trial, jury selection would be significantly impacted as it might become very problematic to find an unbiased jury.

Or it's likely that it's evidence they aren't going to use because it's so circumstantial it's worthless. "We found our suspect, he had ChatGPT and location history putting him in the area".

They likely have far more convincing evidence than that and hearsay from the passengers.

All that's basically been revealed is "We found a suspect, and evidence points to him being in the area where the fire started". It's not criminal level airtight evidence, and any good lawyer can poke holes at that (well, so were dozens of other people that were in the area), so it's general enough to not taint the pool.

Presumably he was in the area. But likely so were many more people - he didn't happen to be the only person there at that time.

The prosecutor's job is to convince the jury that it could only be this person, and likely the evidence they release isn't even close to it.

Contrast that with Luigi Mangione who has had the President and his DoJ secretary all call him a murderer, which is tainting the jury pool because they're associating him with murder from the get go.

All the police have done here is say he's a suspect who had this amount of circumstantial evidence tying him to the fires. If you can concoct a plausible story to cast doubt, the jury's not tainted.

He's only a suspect. Whereas Luigi Mangione has been called repeated a murderer to the point it's tainted the jury pool. It's why Trump repeats his words a lot - repetition drills it until it becomes "truth", and having the top people say it basically makes it true. He might walk simply because the administration simply couldn't shut up. (He could also walk simply by jury nullification - especially with health insurance premiums doubling or tripling in 2026)

I were at a job interview with company make these Internet of Trash things. Of course, a lot was cloud, but they actually were also looking for embedded skils as they also want to move as much as possible into the devices such they could work without internet. But then: without a local websiervr, the configuration probably couldn't be changed without a cloud backend.

You don't need a webserver for configuration. Presumably the devices were getting configuration information from somewhere, and if that part is documented, you're all set.

Because when the cloud shuts down, you release those docs, and then let people figure out how to redirect the configuration requests then go on from there. Within a month someone will have a internet DNS service that redirects to their web configuration thing.

Just tell people how to do it and let the hackers figure it out.

Easy ... this.

Sony can't order chips 2 years ago that will be fast or up to date a chip from next year. That is not how technology works.

  They can work on algorithms or existing hardware to do things at a much smaller scale, but if Sony/'AMD released chips every 2 to e 3 years it would be obsolete anyway.

As soon as a prototype is ready IT MUST GO LIVE within 4 to 6 months or Nvidia/Intel will beat them to the punch.

AMD and Sony have also partnered to make things off camera not render. AI assisted ray tracing researchi s almost done but that takes a efw years.

It's stupid; but at least more honest than trying to dress 'grok' up as the master control computer.