Big US Corp is in bed with money and power. Right now, that means MAGA and that does mean fascism & Zionists. The tech itself can be ok. Though WhatsApp/Facebook isn’t.

Same here in UK. So many people think of it like email. A universal communication system. They can’t see the problem with it being a single, closed, for profit, provider. Now Meta feels people are locked in, they will be finding out. But they still won’t see the problem until it ratcheted to really bad. Like frogs in boiling water.

I’ve been using it for over a decade. I use it to auto upload all my family photos from family phones. I use the calendars to organize. I use Notes on my phone all the time and pick them up my laptop. I use Passwords for all my passwords. I use Contacts to sync my contacts from my phone and Thunderbird. Then I nightly remote backup it to a machine I leave at my parent’s. It’s great.

Right to repair, and openness, is absolute must for devices being put into peoples bodies. The fight seams to not even started yet. Most people are completely asleep to issues right now.

Karen Sandler did a great talk on closed source software medical devices many years ago.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qW1h1s_ojpM

This even more the case if it’s your brain! It probably won’t work for decades, but we should get house in order long before it does.

Locked down means a power imbalance. The users are then just serf and will be abused. I want users empowered and the right to repair, repurposed and upgrade. Locked down devices mean short lived disposable devices, built as ewaste, that hoover up user data when used. It’s dystopian.

Let alone where are tomorrow’s developers coming from when they are growing up in such nutrient poor environment.

I rage against this dark serfdom future, but it’s on law makers to regulate to keep consumers/user free. So I’ve monthly donated to OpenRightsGroup for over a decade and always telling people to read some Cory Doctorow.

The only one with a different web browser engine? The only one that is actural competition?

Ok, I accept all that, but the maps just are better to me. I grew up with the UK Ordnance Survey maps, and that’s kind of what I want from my maps.

I’ll amend.

Not quite the same. The big thing with GrapheneOS is it can run the actual Google services, but sandboxed. Organic Maps is better than Google Maps in everyway, but it’s routes are so much worse because it has no traffic into to go on. It’s an anticompetitive network effect, but it’s hard to fight without law makers.

Edit: Ok, it is good, but the main thing I like about is the maps can be setup to be as good as ones you’d manually navigate by. A bit like UK’s Ordnance Survey maps.

Range is important, but so is cost. Teslas are too expensive for Leaf owners.

My 7 seat EV only does at most 150 miles. But even now, two years later, there isn’t anything else that comfortably fits 7 adults. Let alone not over twice the price. So 200 miles seams ok to me.

I agree standard charger connectors are important. But CHAdeMO is standard, just not in Europe or North America. Can’t blame the Leaf for not knowing that would happen.

The Leaf is also one of the very few cars, least in the UK, which can be using bidirectionally. https://www.indra.co.uk/v2g/

I don’t own a Leaf, but I respect what they did. You see loads of them here.

The Leaf was cheap. It introduced many to EVs. They are super common third or fourth hand now. It was aimed at the other end of the market than the Tesla.

Yes, because it was cheap.

Don’t know about that. Leaf has been pretty important as well.

You could swap out the Pixel+Graphene for say a FairPhone+LineageOS. I ran misc-secondhand-phone+LineageOS for over a decade. Still selfhost everything I need. My family have all their photos upload to my nextcloud instance instead of Google.

My switch to Pixel+Graphene is because ultimately the problem is political not technical. A banking app I needed for work refused to run without the real Google services. It also refused Custom ROMs. I tried a lot of tricks. Also GoogleMaps is the only satnav with traffic information in the route planning. There is other things, but Graphene allows you a compromise of running the Google services, but sandboxed.

The problem is not technical, it’s political. Most people don’t understand the difference between a standard and a monopoly. The law makers are asleep to monopolies and the need for competition in the tech world, so have allow this tech dystopia to happen. Some that are more awake know big monopolies are easier to get things like this story from. Multinational corporation are money machines, they won’t really fight for their users. But they miss the bigger picture.

If you care about all this stuff, there is groups like:

https://openrightsgroup.org/

https://fsfe.org/

Maybe also https://openuk.uk/ , though they more work with big tech.

Exactly. I want things, especially expensive things, built to be repaired and upgraded. Not vendor locked and with built in obsolescence.

See, for me, I rapid charge like once a month. All the rest of the time I use my home charger or even a granny lead. 10A granny charging is absolutely fine overnight. But for the size of the E-Berlingo, the battery is a bit small and I know all kind of new batteries are coming. More kWh for the same weight/size, less degradation, safer, etc etc. If I knew the car was designed with battery replacement in mind, I’d worry a lot less about it being obsoleted prematurely. These cars are all black boxed stuck together. It’s not built with repairing and upgrading in mind.

Oh totally, I have a E-Berlingo which basically an ICE converted to an EV, so there is all kind of compromises.

But batteries do improve and an old existing EV can be improved battery. Example: https://evsenhanced.com/aftermarket-battery/

But the economics is much harder if batteties aren’t unique to each EV. (They aren’t completely of course, the guts of my E-Berlingo are shared across a number of others.) EVs, like a lot else, should be designed with maintaining and upgrading in mind. Especially with parts like batteries which are in such evolutionary flux.

Yes and no. No need to hot swap massive EV batteries. Rapid is fast enough. But yes so the EV can be upgraded. The batteries go obsolete quicker than they degrade. So make it so we can swap the batteries and keep the rest running. In fact, just right-to-repair the whole car. In fact, the whole everything!

The point is that they are malleable.

They don’t care about being bad or good. They just care about money. Change what makes money and they change. There is no resolve. Along with changes happening I listed before, one big thing we need do is bring environmental cost on to the balancesheet. At the moment it’s all external costs. Move the costs of items disposal on to the up front cost. Scale it by item’s life time. Incentivize better behavior.