...never work for a company big enough to have an HR department. Who wants to be views as a 'human resource' by your own employer? I've been self employed for 10 years, and blessed to have some great customers. Nowadays when I watch Office Space, instead of painful recognition, I can actually laugh at it as something that's a part of the distant past.

It's local and does not rely on the internet for anything but remote access as far as I know, but still buggy now and then.

It has a number of Tesla PowerWall batteries. Compared to a Generator they don't last very long. For the price they paid for everything, I would have added a generator as the secondary backup method when the PowerWall batteries become exhausted. There have been several times when there were prolonged blackouts in the area, and most of the other homes you hear the gennies kicking in.

I don't allow smart appliances or home automation in my house. And really, it's an easy choice. The cheapest stuff does not include that technology. You have to spend more to get a fridge with a screen.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues and information sharing, which all of us here are familiar with, there's another overriding reason not to have smart appliances or home automation - reliability. When you add complexity, things break more often, and costs go up. Obsolescence of your investment happens fairly quickly.

My line of work involves sometimes working inside of very high end homes and the newer ones contain every automation bell and whistle you can think of. And they break, and fail, a lot. One particular home is a brand new, probably a $25 million dollar plus creation, very modern and sleek. The entire house, HVAC, lighting, cameras, gates, door locks, etc. is controlled by a central service on a network. Things go wrong all the time. When the system goes down, nothing works. The more complexity you add to a system, the greater chance of a failure. These are people that paid a premium for these features, and I think they were sold a bill of goods.

Home automation companies market whiz-bang features to high end home builders and their customers, not letting on that A. The ecosystem of hundreds of different products they are assembling is not perfect nor trouble free, and B. Whatever they are putting in the house now will be obsolete in 5 or 10 years, and it will become more difficult to maintain over the next 10, 20, 30 years without substantial upgrades and replacements. What is state of the art now will probably be seen as fairly archaic when the house is sold again. For large homes and mansions, there is probably a middle ground somewhere that allows for some automation, but has enough manual control so that if something fails the device in question is still operable. This is not what I'm seeing in the newest systems. They are entirely reliant on a server for things as basic as turning lights on and off. Where a light switch would be, there is a keypad with five or six buttons, none of which anyone ever uses except the top button that turns the light on and off, and it's harder to find and press vs. a traditional light switch. The idea of being able to have dimming presets, etc. sounds flashy, but in reality they go largely unused. The biggest visual effect of course is when you push the button, it slowly fades the lights on. I find that annoying. I just want it on. Maybe that's just me and my old school ass that grew up with regular light switches. Being around this stuff has completely absolved me of ever wanting it in my own home, and I used to be a pretty big home automation enthusiast in the early days of Homeseer, X-10, Insteon, etc.

For a regular sized home on a regular suburban lot, there is no need for home automation. It is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. If you want to change the temperature, go adjust the thermostat on the wall. If you want to turn on a light, go hit the switch. There have been plenty of examples of home automation companies going under and the network enabled features of their appliances are suddenly rendered useless. With my dumb home, the problems don't exist. I don't have to do anything, maintain anything or subscribe to anything. It's bliss.

This is why it's better to separate the car from the entertainment system and just use it as a dumb screen when it comes to apps that are not directly related to the operation of the vehicle. It's easier to manage something like that on a phone. If it kills android auto, just switch to bluetooth audio until it's fixed.

And GM wants to get rid of Android Auto and Apple Car Play? Expect more of this, plus locked-in, walled garden garbage so they can sell more of your data...

Consider the cost of a new EV, and the insurance, the end of the federal EV incentive program this year and what an Uber driver makes these days, and it may not be enough of an incentive. Certainly, Uber trips are probably an ideal case for electric vehicle use (short trips, lower speeds with stop and go regen braking) but the economics of Uber driving are probably pretty touch and go from the various reports I am reading. (I would like to hear from Uber drivers directly on this matter)

Most Uber and Lyft rides I've taken are in older, well maintained cars. They probably are owned outright or the payment is reasonable. Insuring an older internal combustion car is cheap. Yes, there is a savings in fuel with an EV IF you can charge at home most of the time and you have an EV discount with your provider or you live in an area where electricity is cheap to begin with, but often the other costs can outweigh that. Just looking at the payment and insurance for my wife's (purchased used for around $30k) Tesla, and I am not sure if there is any financial savings in the fuel costs in the end, compared to my high-MPG Mazda3 which is paid for and is cheap to insure, and has had almost no maintenance needed since new, No one who is just getting by is going to do it out of the the kindness of their heart for the environment.

You also have to consider the shelf life of the battery, and amortize the cost of the car over time. A lot of these things don't matter if it's your personal vehicle and you're getting enjoyment out of owning an EV on top of it being useful, but if you're looking at it as a business case that you depend on for your survival, it's a different matter.

Any rideshare drivers here who would like to comment? The above is speculation based on my own experience owning both types of vehicles at the same time, but not as a rideshare driver. I have more questions than answers.

I think this incentive would appeal most to someone who lives in a household with multiple incomes, where the rideshare income is supplementary to another, higher income. Then it would be an incentive for someone who can actually afford to take advantage of it. My three cents.

I don't see a mechanism for the little guy to 'opt out'...case in point: I have a popular youtube channel, I don't want OpenAI harvesting it without compensation. How do individual social media accounts opt out? Sounds like they are just negotiating with major studios at high levels. Aren't they scraping social media as well still?

We need a clearinghouse for photography and video as well. I'm guessing this is just for Microsoft AI. There needs to be one for all models wanting to use copyrighted content. It would suck to have to upload your stuff to 10 different clearinghouses.

something like this would help stop the bandwidth leeching going on right now on every site on the internet, in addition to the IP theft.

A new validation mechanism is needed to verify and filter for human authored works in a large and growing variety of fields. This will likely involve being not lazy, and not relying on AI itself to vet for human created works. The current methods are obviously less and less usable as AI becomes more and more skilled at impersonating the tone and feel of human authored works.

I think this will necessarily mean a return to a more analog, labor intensive review of works and manual vetting of authors through social connections, voice calls, etc. to make sure the person actually exists. The problem and the solution is that it will create barriers that are harder to surmount to get your legitimate work published. Other commenters have mentioned the need for non-corporate or university independent citizen scientists to still be able to submit papers without a huge financial or labor burden. How do you reconcile that? How often does that actually happen?

The thing is, a lot of these tech companies rely on making everything automated for maximum profit margin with minimum labor. They just want a cash machine that prints money once set up and lightly maintained. That approach is antithetical to to the high-touch solution needed here.

What barriers would you use to stem the flood of fakes that are automatically or semi-automatically submitted, and then thoroughly vet the remainder? Fees for submission? Even a very low fee, say $20, would stop a lot of auto-generated fakes from being automatically submitted.

This problem is also very acute in the self publishing world - low quality re-hashes of fiction and fact-based books showing up on Amazon and elsewhere. Wikipedia articles turned into books, fiction books plagiarized into other fiction books. The scam is that if you upload 10,000 fake books, which are easy to generate, you just need a small percentage of them to sell every now and then to start making some serious money. It's very tempting, the tools are all there, and some people having nothing but time to set this type of grift in motion.

...that I cancelled my account a long time ago. It was completely and utterly useless.

I'll continue to stick to my traditional IMAP / POP account on my own domain. There is nothing trying to 'think' for me there and I can set up my own filters on my mail client if desired.

I have a paid account at Vimeo that I use to privately share videos for clients. They are known for their high quality / high bitrate streams and tools for business users. I imagine now the price will get jacked up and then the service ultimately shut down when everyone abandons ship after they've looted what they can out of it.

Our charger has a long cord, even if the charger was inside the cord could run outside and you could shut the door on it.

As it happens, that's not a problem either. I put the charger outside on a north facing wall under a large roof overhang where it's protected from the elements. The Tesla wall charger is waterproof and designed to live outside. I've had zero issues with it.

Besides, isn't it usually recommended not to park an EV in the garage due to fire hazard if something goes sideways?

The car parks right next to where the charger is, we plug it in every night and it's on a timer to start after 9 when the cheap rates kick in. Between the TOD Prime rate that SoCal Edison gives for EV owners and charging almost entirely at home, the electricity for the car is basically free, as our power bills are actually lower on average than they were before we changed rate tiers.

I personally don't care for the car (it's my Wife's car) due to the driver-hostile control setup (no buttons) and the fact that it tracks your every move, but it works for her because she has a long daily commute and we were spending a lot of money on gas every month.

Thanks for the update. I did use Seatguru fairly recently and the information on my particular flight was still valid as far as I can tell, but maybe I just got lucky. I did notice that it was transforming into a booking gateway to maximize revenue. I've bookmarked the new site and I will refer to it for the next trip.

Always consult seatguru before booking...they have maps of the layouts for each plane for each carrier, and you can see the lemons....