Ages ago I worked for a company that developed car stereos. Car companies were insanely paranoid about driver distraction. There were industry standards on minutiae like how fast song titles scroll on the screen, and a complete ban on flashing or pop-up anything.

Car companies being OK with anything flashing up on the screen that isn't absolutely critical to driving is mind boggling. All it takes is one diver glancing down for a split second to look at an ad, hitting someone walking out from between parked cars, and you have a slam-dunk lawsuit that will evaporate any money made from the advertising. Lawyers salivate at this kind of thing. Standing in front of a jury with a client all bandaged up "This callous car company thought it was more important to make money while distracting this driver by selling ads than to make sure the driver was paying attention to the road..."

If you want *any* manufacturing jobs brought back to the US, they are going to be in mostly automated plants. Car companies can barely hire enough workers to cover existing shifts. People don't want to work in factories, and companies don't want to spend $100,000 a year paying workers to stick an automatic torque wrench onto a bolt.

Even completely automated factories large-scale need a few thousand employees to maintain and ship stuff.

You think shareholders have a direct voice in day-to-day operations of a company? What is that mechanism?
Last I heard of something like that happening was when Roy E Disney was pissed that Eisner was screwing up the Disney-Pixar deal. He had to gather a dozen other large investors, overturn a good chunk of the board, then have them vote Eisner out to fix that deal.

We used to use 3rd party booking sites. If everything went fine, there were no issues. If anything went wrong, it was a disaster. Hotel overbooked? The hotel won't help you. Wrong room type? The hotel won't help you. Can't find your reservation number? The hotel won't help you. You get to call Expedia and pray that a human picks up and can do something for you. This happened once to a friend, where a hotel was overbooked so Expedia got them a new hotel room on the other side of town. Didn't help our friend who was going to a conference at that hotel. If he had booked through the hotel, they would have put him in a sister hotel a block away.

We only book through the hotel sites now. You have a lot of leverage with the staff when you are sitting in front of them and they are responsible for filling your reservation. Also, if you are a rewards member, you can call the rewards number and they will usually fix anything the staff won't, or can't, fix.

It wouldn't be the elected elites. It would be the bureaucrats making the rules whom, after tailoring regulations to favor some companies over others, would then go work for those companies.

The oil industry has a half dozen or so new technologies for extracting oil from the ground that wouldn't be otherwise accessible. They aren't using them because it costs a lot to ramp up manufacturing and deployment of new gear, and training people to use it. Fracking and traditional pumping work fine for now. Once what's available gets harder to extract using those methods, prices will go up and they'll switch to a different technology.

I have an 8" Fire for playing basic strategy games, looking at manuals, and light web browsing. It's good for that, and cheap. I side-loaded the Google store, which is much better than the Amazon store. I used to have a Nexus 7 that I loved, but I don't think they make Nexus tablets any more.

You think that large language model technology is the same as the tech that runs autonomous car mapping and obstacle avoidance? lol.

Same thought here. Heat is a major limiting factor for modern CPUs. The die of the IBM POWER chips isn't that much bigger than an AMD EPYC, but the chip package is huge, mainly to accommodate a massive heat spreader with lugs for water cooling.

The problem is developers only know how to make websites now. The Windows app for my UPS is 300MB because it's an Electron app, so it has to run a couple of hundred megs of python and a node.js server to show me the last time my UPS tripped. I just use the built-in Windows battery thing now, but it doesn't keep track of battery health unfortunately.

Microcontrollers are used to reduce weight. Instead of a thick bundle of wires going to the door locks and power windows and power mirrors and door open switch and any lights that happen to be there - you have a couple of data and power wires going into the microcontroller unit that controls all the door stuff.

This goes for everything electronic, and there is a *lot* of this stuff in modern cars. Tail lights, rear climate and entertainment controls, radar parking aids, tire pressure monitors, heated seats, cabin lights, cabin temperature sensors, microphones, etc... Overall weight savings are in the dozens of pounds.

This is all done to drop weight to make CAFE standards. You could standardize on a different microcontroller, but these things are purpose-built and a full environmental TA soak can take years. You don't want one of these things to fail and have to tear doors apart to replace them in a recall.

Yep, I've played with the technology and it's amazing. My point is that the video might get me in the door, but my decision is going to be based on what the house looks like in real life. A big empty box is not appealing. The listing agent can show off the cool virtually-staged videos all they want, if it doesn't look good in person it's going to get marked down in my head.

That seems a bit extreme, but pulling furniture out is pretty common. When we sold our last house we took out maybe 40% of the furniture, which wasn't really a lot as we didn't have much. An extra chair in the living room, a table in the kitchen, the sideboard in the dining room. A hard purge on the toys the kids didn't play with any more Just enough to open up the rooms a bit. 80% sounds like a living room with a couch and a TV, and nothing else.

It does make a difference. We had a house tour of a couple with kids, and there were toys everywhere. Even though it was a good sized house, the piles of stuff scattered around made it feel cramped. We didn't pick that house, but not for that reason. The house we did pick was an even worse mess, but a better deal.

I... don't care? I'm going to look at the house in person anyways. If they aren't staging it in real life, it isn't going to look great. It's nice seeing how it might look on a video, but that's not how anyone is going to make their final decision.

It depends on how far "net zero" you want to go. There are still a lot of people who live in places where the sun doesn't shine much for a good chunk of the year. It also gets dangerously cold. Heating a home uses an enormous amount of electricity. If you still plan on supplementing with natural gas, it's less of a problem. If you want to go all-electric, you are going to have to figure out how to generate a lot of power when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't come out much so people don't freeze to death.