I can’t. I just can’t.
They will really do anything before investing in public transit
Yup, drunkards in a tram are annoying but they almost never kill people and cause tens of thousands in damage.
almost never
thank you for that almost. jackasses like me see words like always and never as challenges and this is not one i want to take
Automobile-centric infrastructure was such a colossal societal fuck-up.
Bad for personal health, physical safety, household finances, and the environment. Automobiles are not a symbol of freedom, they are a symbol of dependence.
While I agree about automobile centric structure, when rural living automobiles are absolutely the ticket to freedom. It’s a shame more populace areas get designed around maintaining dependence on cars.
I think the point is choice. Even those living in suburban and urban areas have a difficult time opting out of car-dependence.
If you choose to live rural, I would say that automobiles are part and parcel to that decision. It’s just the nature of low population density.
Except for the thousands of years that humanity was able to exist in low population density towns and villages completely fine without the need for personal vehicles.
That statement just isn’t true in the slightest. It’s only part of rural living because that’s how it has been designed in roughly the last century of human society.
There is no materially restrictive reason it has to be this way. It is entirely a problem that is artificially created.
Except for the thousands of years that humanity was able to exist in low population density towns and villages completely fine without the need for personal vehicles.
Should we go back to the horse and buggy?
Love the quote, not the context. It’s a legitimate question. We got ride of horses in rural areas due to cars. In North America and Canada in particular the distances are so vast that rural public transportation is not really feasible
It’s only a ticket to freedom because rural living is structured like ass. It’s a bandaid on a bigger, festering issue of poor city planning.
This is true in many cases, but for very rural living (eg people living on farms) there’s not much you can do about car-centric design
Except this is entirely false of a claim. Human society worked for thousands of years before the car. European countries prove it is possible as well with their rural public transit services. It is absolutely not a necessity. There is no reason to design our cities and towns around personal vehicles being the primary method of transportation.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that car centric urban design is a bad thing. Truly, I do. But in very rural places in North America, you either need a car or a horse and buggy, or something, and the car seems like an obvious upgrade. Just because they can do public transit in rural areas in Europe does not mean we can do it here. Because the size comparisons aren’t even close. European countries with good rural transportation are dealing with significantly less landmass than North American rural communities are.
To put things in perspective, Denmark is 42,947km2, and Canada is 9,984,670 km2. That means that you could fit almost 232 and a half Denmarks in Canada. Despite this about half of the population of Canada in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, which is only 1,150 km-long, and about 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border. That means that the vast majority of Canada is totally rural, and there are often vast distances between towns and First Nations. It is simply not economically feasible to build rail lines to connect all these places, let along sending out regular train services to these places.
To really hammer the point home, consider Nunavut, a territory in Canada. It is 2,093,190 km2. For perspective, Ukraine (the second-largest country in Europe after Russia) is 603,549km2. That means you could almost put three and a half Ukraine’s in Nunavut (and again, Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe!). And Nunavut is extremely rural, with a population of 36,858 (and Ukraine has 32283000 people, meaning that Nunavut has 875.87 times fewer people than Ukraine). The largest population centre in Nunavut is Iqaluit, which has only 7,429 people.
So putting aside, for a second, the extreme logistical challenges with creating railways in Nunavut (due to terrain, ice, etc), how can we possibly build public transit to connect the entire territory? When we are dealing with places this vast, and this rural, we simply not economically feasible to build rural public transit. Even reality wealthy countries like Canada cannot afford to fund megaprojects like that. And again, this is just Nunavut, 1 of 13 provinces / territories. When you look at the entirety of Canada, it is simply not realistic to have rural public transit servicing the entire country. I’m sure it’s possible in small countries like Denmark, but not here.
But that doesn’t change the fact that, within cities at least, we should of course do our best to get rid of car centric design.
Only because we have made society this way. There is ZERO material necessities that stipulate that it must be this way. None, absolutely nadda.
Other countries have done it. The size argument is bullshit, China is able to do it and has equivalent landmass. No excuses. The entire point of trains was to traverse these vast expanses. Trains are what drove the Westward expansion of American society. So arguing that trains can’t handle those distances is absurd.
Also, public transit is more than just trains, it’s also walkability and bus services. Cars can exist in society without them being the primary method of transportation.
“Economically feasible” is a bullshit excuse because we create the economy. If the economy can’t meet the needs of people then the economy is what needs to change, not force people to go without BASIC SERVICES. Money is not a materially limiting factor.
Humanity existed without cars (or a horse and buggy since someone made that flippant response) for hundreds of years and we absolutely can restructure our societies to go back to being pedestrian centric in both urban AND rural locations. It is entirely possible and there is no legitimate excuse not to. Economically feasible as stated is not a legitimate excuse.
Except there is absolutely no reason it has to be like that in rural areas. Period. At all. Even a little. Look at China (or if you still believe the NED puts out legitimate stories, Denmark or Sweden or Norway) which has public transit to nearly all rural areas at least a couple times a week, and inter-village public transit in pretty much all villages that have more than a dozen people.
Busses are more efficient than independent vehicle ownership in all settings. All of them.
More efficient, sure, but their argument was about freedom, which is just a different dimension. In an extreme example, private jets provide more freedom than public transportation does, even though it’s obvious which one is worse for the environment, more expensive, more intrusive, etc.
Except that’s not freedom.
It is not freedom to have a, and this really isn’t an exaggeration, more than 10,000x personal cost for transportation. It’s freedom for the rich, but the rich aren’t a part of society and cannot be generalized into society.
It is not freedom to have to personally rely on the US to do the right thing.
It is not freedom to take on the massive legal and financial risk that is driving a death machine.
It is only freedom in the most infantile, ‘Anarkiddie’ sense of the word freedom. The ‘Hurr durr we’d all be more free if we had less laws’ kind of idiocracy most humans abandon by the age of 15 when they learn about the concept of government.
What anarchist supports car ownership bullshit in America?
Your point is good up until you start naively slandering Anarchism out of nowhere. Way to absolutely undermine yourself there.
That’s what marxists do here. Note how he can’t even say anything about it beyond his random slander.
Wanna bet he thinks anarchists need left unity too?
Is this just in America? Or worldwide?
Mostly the US. But if it ships to the US market from overseas, expect it there too.
Yeah, it’s looking like those days are ending. Silver lining of the usa becoming a pariah state.
If you’re expecting the EU to save your privacy? That’s gonna be a problem, based on old news:
This sort of bullshit is why I am happy to ride a bike.
Reminder that this requires all vehicles be SOLD with the tech. It says nothing about what happens to it after purchase.
It’ll be like every other car with driver assistance and every other advanced feature now, everything gets strapped to the same CANbus and unified powerttrain control module so disabling one part of the system causes the car to get stuck in limp mode, have constant nusiance alerts, and fail state inspections to get registered.
Good news is if you have an expensive enough car you’ll get an asshat mode.
I’m trying to figure out of this is just the distracted driving safety feature that’s been on every car I’ve bought in the last 6 years. If so it can be disabled and really isn’t that big of a deal when it’s enabled. Just sends you an alert when it detects you weaving within the lane a little too much. I can’t help but think this article might be a little sensationalistic.
These things aren’t going to just give you an alert. They’re going to disable the car if it thinks you’re impaired.
The car manufacturers even warned the government about false positives that they can’t prevent and Congress moved ahead anyway.
Removing “safety features” from a car is illegal, btw
And when they call the infotanmint crap a “safety feature” and no one lynched a lawmaker over it we know that as a people we have given up.
Onstar is safety for the government, not for the driver.
Unjust laws are not to be followed.
Just pull the fuse for the onstar radio. It can log all it wants locally.
They prevented that from working years ago. Now it’s usually on a critical circuit that you can’t just disable.
My bolt euv doesn’t transmit after I pulled the fuse.
Happy for you, but onstar shares the infotainment circuit on my vehicle. The only way to disable it is to dismantle the dash, remove the whole infotainment unit, and remove the circuit board for onstar. Which likely has some warranty implications, as well.
Hope to get to it soon, but what a hassle.
If there’s enough demand, I imagine that there will be shops that will do it without individuals having to research it.
If the manufacturer designs it so that I have to disassemble the entire engine just to replace the spark plugs, I’m still going to be irritated even if I can just pay some people a ton of money to replace them for me.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Every technical hurdle they put up, is defeatable.
Every time they make the wall higher, we make the ladder longer.
There will come a time where there will be a privacy-conscious choice and that might require flashing the infotainment system.
We’re getting closer to one of Cory Doctrows stories. I can’t find a direct link, but its on this page under the name “Plausible Deniability”
Funny, that is the opposite take that Cory has had recently. His argument has basically morphed to the opinion that, while individual action is cool, this stuff pretty much can only be defeated by collective action. You can’t shop (or hack) your way out of living in the surveillance state. If everyone else is being surveiled, you get pulled in by association.
I don’t quite agree, and think we will always have to exercise some individual choice to protect ourselves. I am not sure that disabling a radio is enough though, if every other car on the road is covered in cameras and streaming data constantly.
You can do both? Push for collective action and defeat the devices that are being put in front of you.
To be perfectly blunt, no not every hurdle is defeatable. To even consider that to be true is fucking retarded. There is a point where your option is to deal with it or use something else.
Modifications can be made illegal, hardware can be made unobtainable legally outside of vendor contracts, real time motion data to insurance can be mandated, etc.
Even if you go out of your way to bypass everything you can The simple fact is, at some point you WILL be pulled over or get into an accident. And at that point if the powers that be decide what you did breaks a law then your still fucked. Or that you broke your insurance contract with your modifications.
Just because you can do something doesnt mean you can get away with it if caught. And everyone’s caught at some point. You either end up in jail or uninsurable and monetarily fucked.
You should read the short story.
That’s the whole point of the story.
But yes, it will always be possible to remove this sludge. You may have to fight for your rights to do so. That fighting might involve setting things on fire.
I work peripheral to data science. I am starting to think the defense is never to be a hole in the data. AI is incredible at filling in missing data.
What you want to do is poison the data about you. AI is absolutely terrible at weeding out bad or especially intentionally misleading data. You can even protect others if you do it right.
Thanks for sharing this, the fiction is astoundingly horrifying yet vital in timeliness.
What the fuck? When did Congress pass this, and why wasn’t there a huge public outcry against it?
2021
This shit is why biden didnt arrest trump. Democrats need him to drive voters their way. To use the trdump as a club to hit any one who has a independent thought.
Republican surveillance state: bad 😡
Democrat surveillance state: good 😏
So how much is this tech going to raise already stupidly high car prices.
$100-$500 according to the article. No discount for the biometric data they’ll sell.
Because they were already selling it before.
That thing is so ugly that it almost loops back around into looking cool again
How about limiting the insanely bright headlights first?
https://futurism.com/the-byte/camera-cars-detects-drinking
A team of Australian scientists have cooked up a new AI-driven camera system that can detect whether you are too drunk to drive a vehicle.
But the project isn’t quite ready for wide use with only 75 percent accuracy, according to the researchers out of Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, who had presented this camera project at a computer vision conference earlier this year.
Should be interesting.
with only 75 percent accuracy
Unless they’re telling you the Type 1 and Type 2 error rates, they’re not worth a shit.
I assume the system is working properly and 25% of drivers just drive as erratically sober as the other 75% blind drunk.
And that’s among the ones who managed to get to the study. The percentage would be higher if it took into account the ones who got lost or crashed on the way.
as a disabled person who moves weird but drives fine (okay i’m a shitty driver but like, i’m an aware shitty driver) this is going to be fuuuun
If that was true should be rolled out as that’s about the same thing. Those people shouldn’t drive / should go/back to driving school
I said this months ago
Kinda creepy but as someone who crashed and almost killed themselves when driving too tired… Uhm yeah maybe it helps?
Not to be a dick but you need to be more responsible behind the wheel. Driver aids just help drivers get complacent and I don’t want rolling surveillance drones everywhere :c
If I can’t sleep well at night, explaining it to my boss and skipping work is not an option. I’ll gladly document my occasional sleeplessness and apply for disability, but I have my doubts on whether this will be effective. If you can find me a place to live that doesn’t require work or money, I am open to safer alternatives.
If I can’t sleep well at night, explaining it to my boss and skipping work is not an optio
Bus. Uber. Lyft. Anything besides shrugging off “I don’t care about others even after I hurt someone.”
This better be bait, because no judge will give you the leniency of “oh well he was just asleep behind the wheel, who cares about the family he ran over?”
Fuck your entitlement. What does your lack of sleep have to do with my privacy? Get a remote job or take the bus if your too tired to drive.
It has nothing to do with your privacy. The comment I’m responding to has to do with driving while tired. In my community, not driving while tired isn’t an option. I’d need to spend $70 per day to ride five miles with Uber. “Personalized pricing.”
If you cant get to sleep regularly you need to asses your routine, excersizes, and diet and see a doctor if you cannot sleep with those in check <3 don’t put others lives at risk plz
Sounds like a you problem. You fucked up so everyone needs constant surveillance? Fuck that authoritarian nonsense and fuck you for supporting it.
You want the government to spy on everyone because you have no responsibility. Congrats, you’re a Republican.
The day the vehicle I paid for doesn’t work because a goddamn sensor thinks I’m not fit to drive is the day I break my foot off in someone’s ass.
Fuck this dystopian shit show we’re creating for ourselves.
Vote better.
So this works perfectly and has no bugs, right? There’s probably going to be millions of false positives everyday and people won’t be able to use their cars. Between this and AI age verification and everything else, the dumbass politicians in power seem to think all this shit is magical wizardry. Their going to cause society to collapse.
Only drive cars made before Onstar and similar systems were added in the early 90s. They have been tracking you for a long time. But even then you need a license plate, which is constantly collected in most urban areas, stored and sold. It’s really impossible to travel anywhere even if you have no phone giving away your location. Flock and all the surveillance systems also tie into the license plate data. Cars began having cell connections and other ways to broadcast data after the onstar type systems were added. Now it’s a whole other world with the amount of data cars like Tesla can collect. /OldManRant
My car is constantly telling me to drive with both hands or yo get coffee when I am driving fine.
Many years ago I had a somewhat scary car accident and since I drive very cautiously and never speed. Yet this fucking thing is still yelling at me all the time.
If I could figure out how it decides to yell at me, I would unplug it.
Many cars that can tell that, senses wether or not you give any resistance whenever it corrects the lane position. If it doesn’t feel any resistance, it’ll assume you’re not actually holding the steering wheel. Try keeping a firmer grip of the wheel.
I have to admit to developing the habit of wiggling the steering wheel regularly. Unfortunately that doesn’t help for camera based systems
Instructions unclear, steering wheel now layered in zip ties
What car is that? So that I know never to buy or suggest one
Ford Fusion
I suspected as much. The only car I’ve ever seen with a coffee symbol. That alert can be disabled in the settings. At least, it’s easy in the turbo gen 2 fusions (2013-2020) with the single dial gauge and dual screens in the dash. Not sure if the 2.5l gen 2 (or any gen 1) has that alert in the more basic single screen dash.
Gen 2 is a great car otherwise because it’s a rebadged EU Mondeo.
Bless you. I’ll dig around in the menus and find it.
One of the greatest things. When someone gives you something that helps to stop something that was annoying you regularly. A good day!
Every new car has a million alerts and beeps and warnings and its sensory hell
Yeah the beeps and bongs are not a new thing. Clarkson raged about it 20+ years ago. “I KNOW THE DOOR IS OPEN THERES A HUGE GAP NEXT TO ME”
No, that’s not even close to how bad it is now. Hell, I bought a car that’s a decade old and the fucker yells at me for being to close to the lines, yells if I’m approaching a stopped car “too fast” (which means it freaks out even when I’m slowing past 25 with 4-5 SUV lengths ahead of me), when I back up and there’s anything remotely close off to the side (remotely close is the 2.5 ft on either side of me as I back out my driveway), and it gives me an extra special freak out if there’s any possible cross traffic to 4 houses on either side of me. That last one is a nice warning the few times I’ve needed it, but more often than not, it’s spazzing out over the neighbors taking their dog out on the other side of the street.
Yeah I didn’t mean to say that its been that bad forever. Its gotten worse in the last 10-15 years. But it started ages ago, back in the ancient times. I remember my 1987 Volkswagen had a buzzer if I had lights on when the ignition was off. That was a good thing to have tbh, especially back then. But now you get a warning bong just because you have a kilogram of apples on the back seat.
I have a 2023 and while it does those things by default every single one of them can be turned off.
The front collision and the movement behind were left on because they occasionally help. Lane assist and the proximity got turned off immediately because of so many false alarms.
I’ve had my gfs accord emergency brake on me twice. One was coming to a hairpin turn on a mountain and an rv had pulled off onto a turn out for us to pass. And another was several car lengths away from a car making a turn into a drive way. Neither of which were even remotely close to an accident. It just freaked out.
And I’ve had tons of beeps for side streets with cars park along a gentle curve which the car doesn’t understand the fucking road turns. I HATE all the tech.
It’s the lane assist I believe. If it detected you using the land assist too much, it will send you those alerts. Essentially, you either drive too close to the lines, weave in and out of them too much, your sensors are bad, or your city has bad lines lol. You can turn off lane assist in every Ford I know of. Usually a button on the turn indicator stick. Check your manual though.
It does have lane assist but I only turn that on when I’m doing highway driving.
![screenshot of Hacker News with the following text per OCR: [flagged] Federal Surveillance Tech Becomes Mandatory in New Cars by 2027 (gadgetreview.com) 79 points by functionmouse 41 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 48 comments vetrom 41 days ago | next [-] There's a ton of bad reporting here, because the publications, or writers, are lazy about sourcing their reporting. In this case, there is a kernel of truth: The 2021-2022 "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act" ( https://www.congress.gov/..) directs NHTSA to develop an in-vehicle driver system to detect some definition of impaired driving. In particular, "SEC. 24220" (searchable by that string in the above bill text.) directs NHTSA to either write and publish a rule implementing such, or make a yearly report to Congress as to why said technology is not implementable. This is the 2026 report: https://www.nhtsa.gov/site... In essence, they state that while they have prototypes, the technology is not yet sufficient. There's nothing in a proposed or final rule yet, to the best of my knowled](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/1427740f-4f86-4edc-96cd-2615d95a2367.jpeg)
