But it's true? How does an automaker that doesn't engage in those tactics compete when the rest of the market does?

Like sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free food, where the lack of something is sold as something positive.

I'd love to buy an ad-free, subscription-free, tracking-free, touchscreen-free car.

Those cars exist but don’t do well in the market. And only when sold by very little money and cheap parts.

People demand connectivity, big screens and lots of software.

In the future, no one will be rich enough to buy a free car

is that a sustained 20TW? Absolutely crazy that we're generating 60kwh per person daily. Where does it all go?

Lots of it is lost to heat with legacy fossil generation.

You have pretty much the same heat losses with nuclear, or anything else where you heat water to turn a turbine.

Nuclear is low carbon, it’s fine we lose heat to extract that energy versus stationary and mobile combustion generation, as there is no other effective way to extract that energy at this time.

Quantification of global waste heat and its environmental effects - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062... - Applied Energy Volume 235, 1 February 2019, Pages 1314-1334

* 49.3–51.5% of global energy use would end up as waste heat in 2030.

* Transport sector accounts for the largest (43%) recoverable waste heat in 2030.

I made no claims about carbon.

A lot of endpoint protection products rely on SNI sniffing. E.g. Apple's network extensions filters look at TLS handshakes.

Then they would drop the connection with esni

One thing that's happening is that attestation is being plumbed into the web itself. CloudFlare and Apple have a collab where Safari will inject tokens that let CF know that the request is coming from a blessed device. In a world where all websites are being crushed by bot traffic, expect that Goog pushes on their own integrity initiative in Chrome in the next year or two.

apparently you can use asbestos and they have been and will continue until 2030-ish. It's now in the wild in all kinds of unexpected places.

Yeah, I don't think that is generally viewed as a good thing, though? And I would not be surprised to learn California has some stricter rules on it. (Would honestly not be surprised to find out some of these "banned" items are due to asbestos level concerns.)

I think that's where BEV and L4 autonomy comes in once it's commodified. Buses are huge in part because of having to amortize the driver and that makes them very crude. An autonomous mini-bus that can fit 10 people would fit more organically into cityscapes, destroy the pavement less, be run at 20% of current headways, etc, etc. Honestly the only big issues there I can think of are seatbelts (lower mass means that it may decelerate much more rapidly than a normal bus in an accident) and accessibility.

If there is a case for a smaller bus due to autonomy, there is a case for no bus at all.

Ultimately public transport that doesn't get its own infrastructure (lanes, rails, or tunnels), is just a economic compromise to move people for cheaper than a car... It's not better for the user in any way.

And if it does need special infrastructure to make sense, it gets harder and harder to justify at all once autonomy is in the mix.

No, these guys we seem to have funded and supported. We even helped a former AQ leader become the president of Syria.

Even vehicles that are largely the same as those we get here are banned from being brought in. All because Mercedes didn't like being undercut by gray market imports and lobbied the government.

There's a similar thing currently going on in some parts of Europe, but the imported cars are for the Chinese market.

In one high-profile case a Berlin-based VW dealership was importing the VW ID.6, which is a model exclusive to China:

https://www.shop4ev.com/en/blogs/news/verkaufsverbot-id-6-bl...

Today's cars are a lot more similar in technology to those of the 1990s than they were to those of the 1950s.

I can fix a 90s car with 2026 car tools, but I can't fix a 2026 car with 90s car tools.

Because of the electronics. They're vastly different, there's tons more, and they're proprietary.