CAFE killed small trucks in part, tariffs in another part, but US manufacturers are the real reason small trucks are dead.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
>Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
Why isn't Ford worried that Chevrolet, Toyota, Ram, or Nissan will bring back a small and cheap U.S. built pickup? Is that because all manufacturers are afraid of cannibalizing their more expensive offerings? Are they all colluding? Or do not many people want small pickups? I guess if the Slate becomes a breakout hit, we'll know that people really want the smaller pickups.
Neither GM, Chrysler, or Ford wants to hurt their expensive offerings. Toyota and Nissan have less expensive offerings, but can't bring them here because the tariffs make them much less margin, and the CAFE standards kill the rest off.
> The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
Because that's exactly what will happen. This is battlespace preparation for the destruction of anonymity on the internet, because politicians find this inconvenient.
The micro stamping law is in no way reasonable because removing the micro stamping from the end of a firing pin is laughably trivial. The only people who won’t do this are people who weren’t going to break the law in the first place.
Even people who didn’t want to break the law might find themselves on the receiving end of law-enforcement if the firing pin wears such that the micro stamping is no longer identifiable.
The micro stamping law does nothing to prevent the flow of guns to people who should not have them, and does everything to prevent the use or purchase of guns by people who can lawfully own them - which is the whole point of a law like this. The people who make these laws are well aware of this.
The age verification law, coupled with the proposed hardware attestation that our good friend Lennart poettering is working on will ensure that anonymity on the Internet is gone. This is precisely what lawmakers are aiming for. And just like the micro stamping law, the intent of the law is not the literal word of the law.
> The micro stamping law is in no way reasonable because removing the micro stamping from the end of a firing pin is laughably trivial. The only people who won’t do this are people who weren’t going to break the law in the first place.
I'm curious, so if (when?) California ends up successfully hunting down some criminals with this, what is your new position going to be? They were going to get caught anyway, or something like that?
It'll never happen. As op said, it's laughably trivial to remove, and thus criminals will remove it.
Legitimate gun users will, at best, use their weapon in self defense, in which case they'll be sitting there waiting when the police arrive, so no need for microstamping.
The "crime of passion" so popular in TV shows are few and far between, and there's usually a huge amount of other evidence.
I was put on 5000IU D2 and I got kidney stones, twice. The doctor wouldn't believe that the D2 was the cause, but I stopped taking it and the stones have not recurred.
I would like to bring my D levels up, but not at the expense of kidney stones.
I was put on it because I have stones and my parathyroid hormone level is 2.5x normals. The understanding is that low vitamin D causes higher PTH which can influence stones even though my blood calcium is normal. We didn't get to a root cause on the palpitations but my vitamin D has dropped back to 9 so I am going to have to supplement.
* that once it was adopted, every single package started requiring it
* which meant that packages that previously could run everywhere, now could only run on systemd-based systems
* binary logs - a solution that solved nothing but created problems
* which locked out any system that wasn't linux
* which locked out any linux system that didn't want to use it
* which led to abominations like systemd-resolved
* "bUt yOu DoNt hAVe tO uSE it" - tell that to the remote attestation crowd, of which Poettering is a founding member of. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 - soon you'll have to use systemD because nothing else *can* be used.
literally everything the systemD crowd has done leads to lockout and loss of choice. All ramrodded through by IBM/RedHat.
The systemD developers don't care about any of this, of course. They've got a long history of breaking user space and poor dev practices because they're systemD. I mean, their attitude was so bad they got one of their principal devs kicked from the kernel because they overloaded the use of the kernel boot parameter "debug", which flooded the console, and refused to modify the debug option to something compatible like "systemd.debug", broke literally every other system, and then told everybody else "hey we're not wrong, the rest of the world is wrong." And this has been their attitude since then.
Look, if people want to use systemD, that's just fine. But it is a fact that the entire development process for systemD is predicated on making Linux incompatible with anything else, which is an entire inversion of how Linux and Free Software works.
I actually like unit files. But if systemD was just an init system, it would stop there.
I don't like unit files very much. Instead of these variables that are specific to systems, and are ignored if you use a too old version of systemd, thus running your ftp server as root, you can prepend to the command line: sudo -u nobody ftpd. This composes much better and you can use the same commands that work in the shell.
> * "bUt yOu DoNt hAVe tO uSE it" - tell that to the remote attestation crowd, of which Poettering is a founding member of. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 - soon you'll have to use systemD because nothing else can be used.
You're saying that because the person who made systemd now work on hardware attestation, all Linux distributions will eventually require remote hardware attestation, where users don't actually have the keys?
Maybe I'm naive, maybe I trust my distribution too much (Arch btw), but I don't see that happening. Probably Ubuntu and some other more commercial OSes might, but we'll still have choices in what OS/distribution to use, so just "vote with your partitions" or whatever.
If you build remote attestation into your product, corporate entities will require it. Just look at Android - What phones today give you unlimited root? If you have rooted, what applications have you broken? If you root, what e-fuses have you blown in your CPU meaning it can never be un-rooted? Android, at the start, was open and freely modified - not so much anymore. Companies like Google can and have cut off access to user's data, without recourse. You can't modify your phone, so you don't own your phone. You just pay rent until they don't support it anymore.
I think phones are a completely different beast though (and already a lost cause), PCs seems a lot more resilient to that sort of lock down.
But on the other hand, you might be right, you never know how the future looks. But personally I'll wait until there is at least some signal that it's moving in that direction, before I start prepping for it to actually happening.
* Literally every game console
* Literally every smartphone
* Microsoft, with their Win11 requirements, is moving there
* John Deere (read on their own hardware attestation efforts to block DIY)
* Car companies (require specialized tooling and software subscriptions to make certain repairs)
* Anything that requires a signed bootloader and signed software updates
* Snapdragon CPUs and e-fuses that burn when you use unsigned software, and brick
* Apple hardware, literally crypto-signed so you can't use aftermarket parts
* Google Chromecast
* Amazon Kindle, locked hardware
* IBM has locked hardware to their laptops for *years*. Ever try upgrading a wifi card in an IBM laptop? They're already invested in this
And Linux probably predates most/many of those things, yet remains open and without forced attestation. Why suddenly it's different today than all those years you reference?
Companies can make Linux variants that are tivoized, but it's not standardized. They have to put effort into it. Soon it'll just be systemctl --tivoize-me
They are a different beast because of the culture surrounding them — nothing technologically different. Lennart wants to bring that same culture to desktops.
People have been saying this since day dot. It was very controversial for Debian to change to use systemd. The vote was close due to many arguments which are still being played out
