Yeah, Brave has for a few years and it's a Chromium downstream.

I don't like it at all, but maybe in right-to-left bottom-to-top writing cultures it feels natural.

There's a retired couple in my town who had to tell everybody how virtuous they were to save the planet with their EV's and then their Volkswagen burned down their 1800's barn while charging, destroying the other EV and almost burned down their house (flame damage but saved by FD).

Billows of black smoke for half a day.

I have similar concerns with my solar batteries and need to figure something out.

It's getting to the point where we're going to need a live tracking app of ongoing EV carrier fires drifting around the oceans.

I'd call that Northern California, but sure. :-D

California is... different. The extent to which the state rejects Walmart is legendary.

I would say yes. At that point in time, they had only sold maybe 20k to 30k of those cars. A one in 20k to 30k chance of catching fire while brand new is just sad. That's roughly Tesla's average *lifetime* self-combustion rate for vehicles, nearly all which involve a wreck, and almost none of which occurred in brand new vehicles. That's roughly two orders of magnitude too high an initial defect rate to not call them bad rubbish.

This angst about the impact of tariffs on prices appears purely selective and disingenuous to me. There is no such hand wringing about the impact of other government policies on costs when it comes to energy or housing or food or vehicles and many other matters. Just tariffs. Somehow the costs imposed by tariffs are a great crime, but all the rest is fine and of no concern.

Will tariffs work to achieve the stated intentions? No. As you point out, it would require fundamental policy change that survives changing presidents and congresses over decades to effect a re-industrialization of the US. And to actually produce any standard of living benefit, that shift would somehow have to forego rapidly improving automation capabilities.

Neither of these are real or likely. So at the end of the day, this is all performative and pointless. That won't stop you from crying about prices though, as though you actually care about the poor slobs being hurt. And it won't stop me from enjoying pointing out your biases and selectivity.

If these cheap EVs are going to spontaneously combust, better that it happen on a boat in the middle of the ocean than in someone's garage. Also, better that the whole lot of them go up at once, rather than one at a time, because if one spontaneously combusts, there's a good chance that they all eventually will, and this accident probably saved many lives.

I say good riddance to bad rubbish.

Maybe next time, make sure your vehicles are safe before you ship them out to customers, or better yet, before you announce the product.

If you're not paying, you're the product. Apparently, with Apple, even though we're paying, we're still the product.

Well, at my workplace we're opting out of the game entirely. Other than a few machines that require Windows for accessibility or specialized apps, we're moving over to Linux. I test-ran a few different distros, and settled on Debian 12. With a few images and Clonezilla and a bootable USB stick, I've started eliminating Windows 10 from most machines. There's some training that needs to occur, but so far nothing has exploded.

We have perfectly good machines that even if we wanted to upgrade (which we don't), would basically be thrown out, and this dude won't abide that.

Wow. That's amazing. Which near-zero-population area are you in — northern California, extreme northern Texas, northeastern New Mexico, western Oklahoma, rural Montana, rural Idaho, rural Utah, rural Colorado, rural Kansas, rural Nebraska, or rural parts of one of the Dakotas? :-)

And the auto parts stores. And the electronics stores. And the clothing stores. And...

boltdepot.com baby: I'm on about my 10th order with them this year.

I guess Amazon Prime wants some of that from me.

Fuck patent trolls.

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

Does your righteous anger extend to the solar industry, paving over 1000 acre chunks of rural land with each new deployment? Wiping out farms and forested habitat?

I'm betting not. I'm betting your anger is highly selective; reserved for only some of the forces making your dreams more expensive.

That's way more plausible than my other theory, which involved directional antennas and lots of dead birds.

Anywhere mountainous has nothing buried, typically, even if it is a large city. That's not a rural-urban divide, necessarily, but rather a combination of feasibility and whether the planners were short-term or long-term thinkers. Long-term, buried lines are more reliable, particularly if you use conduit, so long as you bury them deeply enough. Short-term, overhead lines are a lot cheaper. Until the fortieth time that an ice storm breaks the wires or wind blows a tree branch down and shorts out the power lines. Then, it starts to get more expensive. And then the one time that the line pops during high winds and the sparks burn down an entire town or two, and suddenly overhead lines are a *lot* more expensive. :-)