One of the other products in this vein that works well is Konnected's "Blaq"

With RATGDO (or the one or two other things that do the same thing), you can:
- View status of door
- Open/Close door (this includes positioning it to some position, like 5% up, or 50%, etc)
- 'Lock/Unlock' the RF side. RF stuff is relatively insecure, so being able to 'lock' it is helpful

And you can do all of this without cloud, without paying subscriptions, and without worrying about the vendor going "poof" (open source is cool that way) and leaving you stranded, and without requiring an app (the device serves a basic webpage that you can access from your LAN (or IoT lan)).

You can use it with (local!) home automation like Home Assistant too.,

You can always choose to go live in some other successful society where no one has any requirement to pay for the common good.
Admittedly I'm unaware of any such, and they may not exist, because the game-theory of such a society causes it to collapse rather quickly.

It'd cost less to put solar panels on most roofs in the US than to fund a single war for a year, and not a whole lot more to then include local storage/charging. This is ignoring bets we could fund and build out on community or grid storage.

I think you grossly overestimate the required investment for usual/normal use as compared to the cost of keeping the alternative going, and paying for its effects.

We've had the ability to solve the logistical problem for years. The will? Nah. No, and especially no since it became a politically polarizing issue.

Fun idea is to have some external entity hack the tractors, plow under most of the crops.
Yeay, famine.

People forget the security element of having humans in the loop way to often.

.. the thing that is weird about that is.. .. Congress /always/ had the power to change the laws, and the scope, responsibility and composition of the regulatory bodies.. and thus to direct the regulations.

Couldn't have written it better. 100% Agreed.

Loper Bright vests in an unelected body of /explicitly/ unaccountable (for life) folks (literally because there is no precedent) unprecedented power over what legislators can do with laws/legislation.

The topic of the law or enforcement of it, or understanding companies' behaviors doesn't require experts?

That is a courageously naive outlook.

So, who are we electing in congress or appointing in courts that understand this stuff enough to do /anything/ proper w.r.t. modern communications?

The power to regulate commerce is explicitly mentioned as one of the powers of government in the constitution. All I'm aware of saying that Congress can't do what has been done for the last nearly 200 years, having been previously upheld by prior Supreme Courts, is a dubious recent Supreme Court ruling... where the Supreme Court is a unelected bunch of explicitly unaccountable for life folks. This was, in my opinion, one of many recent dubious rulings, like "gratuities to government officials aren't bribes."

Amusingly, you assert that you want the president elect to be able to push executive orders, which vests in the executive branch powers that are not explicitly enumerated under the constitution either, and which powers it'd have made sense to restrict to the legislature as well under the recent dubious Supreme Court ruling...

I think you need to check your arguments to make them more coherent, something which is often true for the things I say as well, which doesn't render the observation false...

Or.. corrupt it worse than the alternative(s) would have presented.

We've seen the deregulated world before. Rivers that catch on fire from pollution, etc. Water that kills.
That world was much worse than today's world.

Regulation is always bad for someone. The question is /always/ does it create more good, i.e. driving the flywheel faster for everyone or not?
Too much regulation is a damper. Too little is a danger.

The biggest issue isn't the amount of regulation, or who does it-- it is that it takes too long to get anything done.
What we need is more efficient regulation (and I'd throw the courts in there too-- taking years to get /anything/ done is ludicrous).
That can come in the form of 'less' regulation, but it could also come in the form of limits to the amounts of delay that can happen because of regulations.

Having the legislature (who don't know much about.. much of anything) be required to make all the rules is also not good. You often need actual experts to do that, and you better pray those experts aren't just lobbyists.

As with many things going for some ideal at either end of the spectrum is likely to result in lots of suckage.

Not that the legislature is particularly accountable in the first place, mind you, especially with gerrymandering giving you control over everything with as low as 30% of the vote (yes, this is correct. 30% with "perfect" gerrymandering gets you 100% control of everything), or partisan primaries, or the electoral college, or incumbent advantage, or the way we do non-ranked-choice voting, or the Supreme Court finding that "gratuities" paid after the fact for things that folks want aren't bribes...

Basically, the idea that politicians and thus the legistlatures are very accountable is, at best, polite fiction, and I'd suggest it is impolite fiction.

So, yea, you can argue that they're unaccountable, but I'd prefer unaccountable relatively reliable and competent to unaccountable, unreliable, unstable, incompetent, and even more corrupt, which is what we get from the current voting/election system.

Oh, certainly there are worse alternatives. But things have gotten substantively worse in the modern era than say 30 or 40 years ago where a lot of the schenanigans were not tolerated or possible.

Note that this is the reason that we have laws against things like defecating not in a toilet or on someone else's property.
'cause that crap spreads disease.

So, you can say it is in your own hands as much as you want, but it isn't true at all so long as you're other than a self-sufficient carveout from all of society (no trading/buying with that society in any dependent way either).

Practically, that is noone.

Sadly, this isn't how it works.

If others act as disease breeding (and mutation) grounds and communication vectors, then public health cannot be in your own hands.

We could be better prepared.. but the pandemic response was politicized, and so we'll probably see worse outcomes next go round.