> “Cars must include modern life‑saving tech like automatic braking and lane‑keeping.”
I rarely drive my car. When I do, 99% of the time it's within a few kilometers of my house. I have no need for lane keeping or automatic braking in city traffic, it's barely moving to begin with.
My car is also getting old and will soon need replacing. Ten years ago you could buy a brand new small car for well under €10k. Sure, it didn't have all the bells and whistles but I have no need for those anyway. Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car precisely because of the safety regulations, emission standards and the fact that it's practically impossible to buy a car with an ICE anymore.
I understand the need for these things for cars that are driven daily, but why do they have to apply to cars that are mainly used for short trips to the grocery store? It's making cars unaffordable for the vast majority of people.
> "Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car precisely because of the safety regulations"
Not really. There are many reasons why new cars are more expensive than they used to be. But safety features like AEB and lane assist are a relatively small part of it. Adding AEB specifically is estimated to cost $100-$300 per vehicle in the US, and it wouldn't be much different in Europe.
And AEB is proven to work: reducing the rate of accidents by 40% or more. A small price to pay if it prevents the car getting damaged even once in it's life, let alone preventing an injury or death.
Also, it will depend on your location specifically, but there are plenty of new, entry-level vehicle models sold in Europe for well under €20k, including taxes and on-road costs.
> Adding AEB specifically is estimated to cost $100-$300 per vehicle in the US, and it wouldn't be much different in Europe.
Isn't this exactly the issue? Any given thing is "only" $300 but you add one of these requirements a year for several decades straight and now you've added thousands of dollars to the price of a car.
> And AEB is proven to work: reducing the rate of accidents by 40% or more.
It reduces the rate of accidents that occur under certain circumstances. Pretty good chance that those circumstances are "in a city in traffic". But then the feature is required on all cars, even when the owner knows they'll rarely if ever be driving it under the conditions where it's useful. Or worse, when they know they'll be commonly driving under circumstances where it's more likely to encounter a false positive and cause an accident.
That only changes the math if collisions are "free" to the vehicle purchaser while causing damage to someone else. Otherwise their interests are aligned, i.e. neither of them wants that to happen and so will want the safety feature unless it has low effectiveness in their circumstances.
Obviously some people will make a poor choice, but that's just as true as legislators, and all costs are a trade off against what else you could have gotten for the money. In other words, all safety features that cost money have an opportunity cost, which is also measured in lost lives, so the ones that aren't effective or have diminished effectiveness under particular circumstances shouldn't be mandatory in all cases.
Most price increase over last 10-15 years is not safety equipment. Regular inflation was massively compounded by the covid chip shortages / missplanning / greed / whatever ratio of factors one subscribes to.
Note, while I do not expect we will convince each other via interwebs, every safety advance from winter tires to abs to safety belts to airbags to glass that doesn't shatter etc has had a "but I don't need it because I don't drive much | I am awesome driver | it could not happen to me | etc". I don't think it's binary, I think regulation over reach is a definite thing, I just don't think massive increase in car prices over last 5 years is because companies are forcing safety equipment on awesome drivers who don't need it.
Case in point, I got the last kia rio model with all the fancy equipment and detection and even wireless carplay for 18k before they dropped the model. They don't sell a car like that anymore. Next cheapest car kia sells me right now is 26k or more - with absolutely no more safety features to justify / blame the massive price jump :-(
Because you're potentially moving several thousand kilos at huge speed, and the people that can find themselves in front of them should not have to trust your judgement of how safe you'll usually need the machine to be.
If you try to brake a motorcycle as fast as you would a car, it has a tendency to flip over. And in general different vehicles have different stopping distances, so "just have the whole line of cars all panic brake at once" is going to have them smashing into each other.
Only if they are all driving too close the the car in front. If you keep to the recommended 3 seconds separation you will most often be fine even in bad weather. I drive my Tesla S on Autopilot with the separation set to the maximum which is about 3 seconds and it makes for a comfortable motorway driving experience.
How close cars are to each other is generally determined by traffic volume. If there are twice as many cars, they can only be half as far apart because otherwise they can't physically fit on the same length of road. If you try to leave more space than that, other cars will merge into the empty space. The only way to actually do it overall is to reduce the traffic volume (or add more lanes), which is not something an individual driver has any control over.
Which is to say, in practice cars will be following too closely whenever there is high traffic volume, and systems that don't work under real life conditions are broken.
> Because you're potentially moving several thousand kilos at huge speed
No, I’m not. My current car weighs less than a thousand kilos (945 to be precise) and the speed limit in basically the entire city is 30km/h.
Newer cars are ‘several thousand kilos’ especially because of all the regulations. Just being an EV adds a significant amount of weight due to the battery.
I’ll be sure to tell that to the poor person on a bicycle in the middle of the road in front of me when I come around a blind curve and can’t jump lanes so as not to hit them.
“So sorry I squished you, my lane assist wouldn’t let me move out of the way in time.”
Is there a lane assist that won't let you change lanes?
I've driven several brands and they just shake wheel or exert like 5% gentle nudge. But maybe there are brands that will actually forcefully prevent lane change without signal (which is automatic / reflexive for most people who'd have good reflexes but I digress).
I'm not at all saying that all Automation is good or that cars always know better than me, but I do want to understand if this is a made-up strawman argument or has anybody ever actually failed to change lanes due to lane assist.
Fair possibility, that's why my question here is - did anybody actually experience a car that won't let you change lanes easily without a turning signal?
I've driven Toyota, Ford, subaru and kia off the top of my head and while e.g. Toyota feels rougher than Honda, none of them approach anything that would even remotely stop, prevent, or even slow me down if I really want to change lanes, let alone if I did it forcefully in emergency. Can't speak for other brands and I definitely never drive a Tesla :-)
You are arguing in bad faith. You are also creating a straw man argument attempting to rubbish a feature that works acceptably well in 99% other use cases even if your scenario is legitimate.
If there is a blind corner you should slow down enough that you can safely stop if there are obstacles in the road. You don't know what's in the oncoming lane, so you can't assume that it'll be safe to blindly swerve into it to avoid something in your lane.
Secondly, lane keeping does not lock your steering wheel preventing you from changing lanes if you need to. The additional force required to override it is the difference between steering with your pinky and gripping the wheel with your hand.
you do realise that most people slow down for blind curves for exactly this reason, right?
pre-empt potential dangers and adjust driving accordingly. if you’re concerned that you might have to act due to an unseen/unknown danger — then slow down.
it shouldn’t be necessary to swerve out when driving except as a choice of absolute last resort (ie something/someone jumped in front of you inside braking distance and you’ve got no other safe option, in which case you’re probably fucked anyway).
This sounds like it'd be a good way to lose your license in the future, and maybe have a criminal court case if there was an significant accident that could have been prevented by said features you disabled.
I'm guessing you haven't died from polluted drinking water, contaminated food, fake medicines, smog, unsafe vehicles, unsafe roads, dangerous household goods, lethal home wiring, shoddily constructed housing, or any of the other hundreds of things that laws have improved?
I’ll never drive a car that in any way takes control of the steering or brakes. Full stop. If I need to modify the car to disable that feature, I will.
At least I’m honest about it.
Pass all the laws in the name of good ideas for the children. If I disagree with it, I’m not going to obey it. I’m not unique in this.
I’m fucking tired of being told “I’m smarter than you and this is actually in your best interest, trust me.”
Did you know that child labor actually increased in India after laws that tried to eliminate child labor?
Let’s keep patting ourselves on the back that we can feel good about passing laws though.
Safety regulations are not why cars cost 3x more than 10 years ago. Emission standards have some impact, but the biggest cause is bog standard inflation and corporate greed.
European manufacturers all decided to focus on higher costs vehicles after Covid-19 because margins are slightly higher and they make more on the financing. They have intentionally deserted the entry market.
Now, sales numbers are starting to plummet so I fully expect to see them blame everything from regulators to China unfair exports rather than admit it’s just a normal consequence of their own strategy.
Add to that that most of them have intentionally not taken the shift towards electric and away from diesel that the regulation forced on them, you get a pretty bleak picture. But, on that point, it seems that Germany will as usual cave in and drag the whole EU down with them so they might have been right.
Emission equipment has huge impact on cheaper vechiles, as it is expensive and costs similary whether it is is cheap or expensive model. DPF in particular.
I agree with everything you wrote. But the real harm with most of these regulations are the unintended consequences, and second order effects.
Say you don't really think <10k cars belong on the road. Sure. But that could just lead to more dangerous forms of transportation like e-bikes or scooters. Or people are restricted to where they can work and live.
An example in the US is Obama era fuel efficiency standards for sedans had lower standards for SUVs. Fast-forward 20 years, nearly every car is an SUV. But it takes a few steps to figure out what the effects actually are.
E-bikes are literally good for your health. Especially for aging people and people that would not ride normal bike that distance. They are also massively more safe for third parties you encounter.
The move from cars to e-bikes would be generally unintended benefit
Happens a couple of times a year here in Ireland. Usually an old and frail pedestrian and a teen recklessly driving a very powerful (i.e. illegal or should-be-illegal) e-scooter.
>> Ten years ago you could buy a brand new small car for well under €10k. Sure, it didn't have all the bells and whistles but I have no need for those anyway. Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car
If you are looking for car without bells and whistles you can buy a new car for €15k. €30k+ is a price tag for much more than basic car.
You are an exception if you never drive more than a few kilometers. Exceptional people need to learn that the world caters to average situations. It’s not possible to please everyone.
> “Cars must include modern life‑saving tech like automatic braking and lane‑keeping.”
My observation and intuition is most accidents are caused by people using their phone, driving under the influence, wrong medicine, being crazy or just too tired or too old.
Unless we are talking about full self driving those assistances only delay an accident at best.
I enjoy those features, they are convenient, but I do not consider them safety features.
I recently rode a scooter for couple of times, and I find it is the best thing to move around in neighbourhood. It is convinent, parking is easy, cheap to run. Everyone should have one electronic scooter.
For your use case, the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
But perhaps you are making a larger point about "things I consider unnecessary adding $$ to the base cost of every vehicle." I would say, to that, that
- your governments and voters consider them important for societal reasons, e.g. airbags so you can walk away from a crash, or cameras to help crushing a child when reversing. Presumably you are ok with this..or not?
- the car manufacturers in the EU are politically powerful and absolutely fearful that if the EU allowed the full range of global vehicles into the European market, they would be crushed overnight. Why buy a VW when you can get any number of Chinese minis, or Indian econoboxes, or even a cheap kei car. I guarantee that China keeps Daimler-Benz and VW execs up at night and that they have the full support of their workers when they spend money to lobby against low cost foreign imports...
Also I’d bet that VW/etc. executives are more fearful of Chinese equivalent’s of their mid/high-end models which cost the same as Europran manufacturer’s budget options.
Not tiny/ultra-budget/featureless vehicles which wouldn’t be that popular in Europe.
The issues with the Ami or anything similar or most cheap barebones models is that you can get a much nicer used car for the same price.
Modern cars are also much more reliable and last longer than they used to several decades back reducing the demand in the budget segment.
> For your use case, the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
That car is not suitable for my use-case. Any situation where I would use that car is one where I would use my e-bike instead. I basically use my car for those occasions where I just need to transport a bit more than I can take on my bike. It doesn’t have to be huge, but that Ami is just not enough.
I just use a trailer[1], I find it bonkers that one would use a car only for urban transportation. If I wasn't going regularly in remote area with my partners and my kids, I wouldn't even own a car.
[1] I like cargo bikes but storage can be a challenge compared to a trailer you can fold and remove the wheels when not in use.
A lot of these features are merely software. The insane increase in car prices over the last decade is a combination of profiteering + inflation, not safety features.
If my ancient Model S can't see the road markings it won't engage lane keeping and makes a noise to alert you to that fact. Similarly when the lane markings disappear, it flashes a red warning in the instrument cluster and sounds an alarm.
Will depend on the country I guess. Over here road markings around (former) roadworks often are literally swept across the lanes (when they use some temporary yellow adhesive lane marking stuff), or stay painted on long after the works have finished.
In both cases, while mostly obvious to the human driver, following the lane markings would send you straight into the opposite lane.
Cheapest Fiat Panda seems to go for €14,700[1], so colour me sceptical on that "€30k+ for a new small car". In a quick check, it seems it was about €10k in 2011.[2]
The price increase is more than inflation, but you can't just assume that it's primarily due to safety regulations and emission standards.
€20k is still a third off from your earlier €30k+. And when I checked yesterday evening I saw several cars in similar price ranges.
And now you're saying that "enormous taxes" are partly responsible for price increases, instead of just regulations and emission standards, which demonstrates my point exactly: there are many reasons cars are more expensive.
The first example I saw (think the order might be randomized?) was an EU ban on plastic straws, which is silly. Straws are a negligible fraction of plastic waste, and have no good substitute ("compostable" plastic straws are also banned; paper straws fall apart easily; metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing). This would flunk any serious cost/benefit analysis. You can hide the costs by making them regulatory instead of financial (the inconvenience of not having plastic straws doesn't appear in GDP stats), but the costs are still there, they're just hidden.
A 2023 Belgian study[0] tested 39 brands of straws (paper, bamboo, glass, stainless steel, and plastic):
Paper and bamboo straws most frequently contained PFAS, sometimes at high levels.
Plastic straws also contained PFAS, but less consistently.
Stainless steel straws were PFAS-free in that study.
That was the first one for me as well and I was surprised they included it. I have never seen a disposable straw that does the job well, except for plastic. I actively avoid restaurants that use the cardboard straws because of it. That's how bad they suck. I can't believe the EU was foolish enough to ban plastic straws when there just isn't an actual viable alternative.
Quality of non plastic straws has improved dramatically, I don't even notice they are not plastic anymore. Unless you are sucking on a drink for hours they don't disintegrate.
The actual text is "Bans the worst beach‑litter plastics (straws, cutlery, sticks) and cuts pollution" and the tooltip says "Targets the most littered plastic items with bans, design and collection rules, and extended producer responsibility to clean up coasts and waterways."
I looked a bit further, it bans a long list of plastic single-use stuff: plates, cutlery, certain food containers, certain cups, and a bunch of other things. It also regulates some labelling for other single-use products.
It claims that "80 to 85% of marine litter, measured as beach litter counts, is plastic, with single-use plastic items representing 50% and fishing-related items representing 27%".
Saying it's just a "plastic straw ban is" ... eh, well, a straw man. And single-use plastics are a substantial source of litter/pollution (I didn't investigate the accuracy of this claim in-depth).
In conclusion, this seems about as accurate and good faith as the ol' "EU bendy banana myth".
Obviously I implicitly meant all single use plastics. But random people littering is not even remotely the main source.
Poor and unregulated waste management is. Of course the fact that a lot of western countries were and still are exporting their plastic waste to poorer countries where they somehow end up in rivers and oceans.
However there is no inherent reason why plastic straws or anything else inherently have to be dumped into oceans.
Of course silly token measures are much easier than actually regulating the global fishing industry..
> Obviously I implicitly meant all single use plastics.
On a thread that is about someone misrepresenting a single-use plastic ban as a "plastic straw ban", this is very much not obvious at all.
As for the rest: if there is no plastic, then there is nothing to "waste manage". Or at least less, and mismanaged waste actually breaks down in a reasonable timeframe. It's been an issue for decades. Everyone knows about it. Nothing really changed.
You missed his point. People have measured this. Basically all plastic waste in the oceans come from Asia. This was true before these EU regulations and is also true of America where such bans don't exist.
It's a good example of why EU regulation sucks. It sounds like it solves a problem until you learn anything about the problem. Then it becomes clear it's all cost and no benefit.
The reason the EU passes all these rules is nothing to do with the actual problems themselves. It's because they think that by doing this they can forge a pan-European equivalent of the USA that reduces the existing nations to mere historical geographic regions. It seems to be some kind of simplistic idea that if most laws are written by the EU, and it has a flag, then it is a nation that can rival the US. If you believe that then to make it happen you have to pass a lot of laws.
> Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?
Funnily enough, there are contingents of people who exclusively use paper plates and plastic cutlery. I think there's an interesting parallel there. Those kinds of people simply do not want the effort and cost of maintenance. I'm not particularly sympathetic to this mindset in either case, but still.
In part, the rest of society subsidises the price of cheap disposable items by paying for their disposal and clean-up. I'd much rather that the manufacturers were made to bear that cost, though I doubt that would be practical in a global market. Probably the easiest way to implement it would be to add a cleanup charge to the price of those items (e.g. like VAT).
On a related note, I'd want any branded litter (e.g. McDonalds cartons) to be charged back to the company - it should be their responsibility to deal with the rubbish they produce and they can easily add a small charge to each order.
The Germany municipality of Tübingen implemented a "Verpackungssteuer" (tax on single-use packaging, utensils). It was fought by the local McDonald's franchisee up to the highest relevant court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) and finally approved.
Dozens of other German municipalities were just waiting for the final decision to implement their own local tax.
It's funny that as far as HN is concerned, this site is a bid to reconstitute a large fraction of every political argument that ever happens here. It even gives me a chance to rant about bees! (My bee rant is not relevant to Europe.)
Hmm... In all the cases I saw the prices were mentioned in EUR not USD as the unit. I consider it a clear indication that the discussion participants are mainly non-Americans ;-)
> You could hold this up in a room full of ~~American business owners~~ Hackernews commenters and watch them all nitpick and prevaricate until they've convinced themselves that every regulation here is, in fact, negative.
I’m sure most people who create regulations believe they’re making good ones.
What’s important is to assess whether the regulations had the intended result, and what the second and third order effects were. A lot of regulations, created in good faith, would fail this test.
I agree. It would be one thing if they did an independent analysis on the outcomes of each regulation and arrived at an evidence-based conclusion (and even then it would still be very difficult or impossible to achieve objectivity).
But from what I can tell, it basically boils down to "let's just read the bullet points for each one and put it on the list if they sound good", which is misleading and even dangerous. Chat Control should be on the list by those standards.
There seems to be a implicit assumption here that the world witouth the regulation is the 'natural' one, which should not be disturbed without good reason?
Not entailing regulations also has second and third order effects, and usually nobody is considering them (unless it can increase revenue).
I did not grow up in the wild, and the default state of civilisation, even simple tribes, is certainly not unregulated. You are expected to take into account how your actions affect other people, and if you fail you will be sanctioned.
I perfectly understand people who wants little regulations. But my point is that choosing to not regulate something is also a choice, and for the big machine that is society, the fact that it's rooted in inaction does not make the outcome better, and thus not a better default either.
This is like the people who claim silence is violence or that everything is political.
Not passing a law about something isn't normally a choice. There are infinity things you might conceivably not pass laws about, and you can't even think about them all. Leaving things undisturbed is the choiceless default, it happens even if no people are around, so focusing on something enough to disturb it is the choice.
At best you can argue that if someone is agitating to pass a law then this forces your attention to a topic, and then - if your job requires you to respond - that then implies a choice of whether to agree with them or not. This is how lobbyists get what they want. But you can just not put yourself in that position.
“Take your streaming subscriptions with you: watch and listen anywhere in the EU.”
In other words, allow publishers to region lock digital content deals to a specific EU country, even though (in theory) the EU is "Single Market for goods and services".
There are good EU regulations. There are also some very bad onces.
Except that's not how it works. (So far) Each one of my subscriptions just show me content of the local country.
So say Netflix, it's say French Netflix, when I'm in France and so on. Same with Spotify.
The law is just setup so services can't block you from using your subscription in another country. Which honestly I don't think was a problem in the first place.
Now if there was a law to make these damn things give you all the language and subtitle options.... I'd be all for that.
Because the big problem (again Netflix is a good example) is when travelling, is for the most part subtitles are only in usually two languages. The native language of the country, and English.
On vacation and want to watch something in another language? Ok now you need a third language (English) in order to watch it.
Even though Netflix has the subtitles in every language.
The way I read the text of the law, it acknowledges that there are regional locking inside the EU, and you should be allowed to bring your subscriptions with you as you travel the EU.
Sounds like you would want the law to be a different law, enforcing the EU to be a single market for all intellectual property and subscriptions. I think that sounds like a good idea, but it's a different law.
Anyone ever bought shoes or clothes or tires in the EU? The sizes are absolutely not metric and a complete mess! Not to start about traffic rules, sizes of streets, traffic signs etc. Nothing is regulated, nothing is standardized. But the worst missing regulations which are keeping the continent back are missing standards for train traffic in the EU: E.g. there are about 10 different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_electrificatio... in the EU. In addition their are thousands of incompatible regulations regarding train signals. The EU could have high speed trains from Lissabon to Helsinki. But I guess the US will introduce metric units before the EU will solve their train traffic mess.
Blocked by court or state. Private ISPs can't block sites.
And this is true for almost all these legislations. They remove power from individuals and companies, while avoiding to limit EU and state power in any meaningful way.
What percentage of citizens do you think support the blocking of websites for reasons of copyright? We have as much choice in the matter as we would have under Franco.
If the people don't agree with something they can always do three things in a democratic country:
* start a party to push for legislative changes that resonate with what the people want
* vote for a party that propose to change certain legislation to something more adjacent to what the people want
* people can lobby the government via interest groups or as a collective to influence politicians or if the constitution allows for it try and hold a popular vote on the issue(s)
That doesn’t work for small issues like this, as well as you know. And the proof is that wildly unpopular things like this keep occurring. We don’t live in a democracy if it’s not like in Switzerland with their direct democracy where we can vote on all issues one by one. What we have is a joke.
There's been countless of small concerns that had been able to be propelled to becoming law or do you think that banning plastic straws is a genuine big movement?
You have the freedom to move to another country that is also ruled by the EU and where the same regulations apply? That doesn't matter in this discussion. In practice EU residents cannot easily leave.
The relevant commission is supposed to re-assess and come up with new recommendations every 5 years.
If someone comes up with a better method for charging, they can get all the big device manufacturers in the room, convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.
This is not far-fetched. All the players relevant to internet, for example, collaborate to determine how web standards should evolve. It works pretty well. It's more or less the same companies who need to collaborate to build something better than USB-C.
There should be no need whatsoever to convince your competitors and/or bureaucrats that allowing your new connector to be produced is in their interest. Only one should be convinced: the person buying the device.
We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.
But clearly there is a price for the standardisation, it makes progress slower. On the other hand it makes everyone's lifes easier. Just as with e.g electrical outlets in the house there is a time for exploration and innovation, and there is a time for standardisation. And we are ready for standardisation now, USB-c is good enough.
USB-c is absolutely not good enough. The connectors are often incompatible due to tiny manufacturing tolerances, cables from different manufacturers often fall out of the port after longer term use, don't make good connection so you have flaky charging, the cables and connectors look the same but are actually incompatible due to supporting only USB 2/3/4 or thunderbolt, whether displayport/hdmi alt mode is supported, etc. This small short-term gain at the cost of locking in USB-c forever was a terrible idea, brought to you by the same hypercompetent group that mandated cookie banners.
Please don't fulminate on HN. You may not owe cookie banners better, but we're trying for a better style of conversation here. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines, which seek to make HN a place for curious conversation, not rage.
> We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.
Which is a fine? The industry eventually converged to just a handful of common standards on its own.
You can’t innovate without being able to experiment. Which is only possible if there are actual people using your product. Thinking that a committee of bureaucrats can replace that is silly.
One standard for chargers is the only acceptable outcome and it wouldn't have gotten there without regulation.
What need is there to experiment with chargers? Wire go in, power go through - it's really not that complicated, the only important thing is standardization.
The "bureaucrats" are a proxy for the person buying the device. That's literally the point of representative democracy. The average person doesn't want to make a million decisions on technical standards, so they elect somebody they trust to make them for them.
> convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.
Only way they could actually prove that is by demonstrating it empirically. i.e. by implementing the technology in products which consumers use.
Any government commission is inherently incapable of making a legitimate proactive decision is such case. You might as well use some sort of a lottery system at that point..
Well, physical interoperable things are done by committees. You need the industry players involved if you want new interoperable standard to be widely spread. Unless it is one of the first movers.
Say how would you improve speed of copper based ethernet. Using nearly same cables and connectors? Every party making the chips must agree on very specific details.
> fewer chargers, less e‑waste, less drawer chaos.
care to mention what negates those things to make it a “not good” regulation?
as a consumer, i think it’s a good thing to not need Nx different charging cables / plugs to go away for a weekend. usb-c is basically the de-facto standard for charging all but apple devices anyway.
hardware manufacturers might have a different opinions/motivations (but that was kind of the point really wasn’t it)
Everything seemed to have been moving towards USB-C regardless for a few years now, so it seems somewhat superfluous at this point in time? Apple was a major holdout though, due to Apple reasons.
Not strongly against it as such, but also not entirely convinced it's needed either.
Well I did say "somewhat superfluous", not "entirely superfluous" :-)
This is where the up- and down-sides need to be considered. Everyone moved from micro-USB to USB-3 because it was easier and better, and this will now be harder (not impossible, as another comment says, this is supposed to be evaluated 5 years). There may also be special cases where there's a good reason to use something other than USB-C Is that a big problem? Maybe not? I don't know.
Most of these are bad for most people. They do something superficially useful, but ultimately blocks innovation and small companies and so leads to large companies being protected from competition.
They should have let apple continue selling garbage connectors so I can’t use my wife’s phone adapter to charge my phone. and have to buy an iphone charger because it is better(not)
What would be the next better feature for a plug? It seems USB-C has it all except for being expensive on the port side with the muxers. Anything different would require tossing a bunch of still useful things. It supports fast charging and good data rates.
That's the entire problem though, isn't it? Now we'll never know.
The one thing I can think of off the top of my head is some sort of magnetic connection similar to macbook chargers to prevent damage when the cord gets pulled out. (Also I would like the USB-3 standard to not suck, but that's never happening and doesn't relate to the physical hardware anyways)
> That's the entire problem though, isn't it? Now we'll never know.
There are definitely a lot of harmful regulation, but this one is amazing with close to no downsides. For one, there are magnetic adapters for everything nowadays, including USB-C ports so you can have your cake and eat it too. Second is the environmental impact of the old charger ecosystem. I lost count of how many cables and chargers I have that are now trash^1. Third one is that historically standardizing interfaces was great for innovation.
^1: Here is the various USB e-waste that I have - usb micro C (2 separate types with same name), micro usb super speed (this one is particularly cursed), mini-usb types A and B, and normal USB type A and type B.
> Here is the various USB e-waste that I have - usb micro C (2 separate types with same name), micro usb super speed (this one is particularly cursed), mini-usb types A and B, and normal USB type A and type B.
Catch just two more and you can challenge the USB trainer in Viridian City!
The protocol was flawed in its design in that it does not standardize or communicate the capabilities of the cable. How do I know whether it’s charging only, data, or thunderbolt? No standard way to understand this
Sounds like someone should make a US version of the site. (I genuinely think it would be very helpful)
I don't think the point of it is to show that these regulations are exceptional or anything. Seems to me to just be highlighting the number of regulations that we have that can make life better.
Sometimes a regulation is bad before it’s good. For example: toilet flush volume.
We used to have 5 gpf toilets. They worked okay. They clogged on occasion but not too often. When they clogged, they would overflow after 1-2 flushes. 5 gallons was enough to keep the poop and toilet paper flowing through the drain pipes once they made it out of the toilet. They used a lot of water (5 gallons per flush!). They had basically no interesting technology to speak of.
Then regulations required less water, and the new toilets were bad. They were basically the same designs, using less water, and they regularly failed to flush, they clogged frequently, and they even contributed to downstream clogs because 2-ish gallons of slowly draining water didn’t get all the waste moving adequately.
Now, after years and years of bad toilets, the industry caught up. Modern toilets use even less water (often under 1.3gpf), but they use that water effectively. They flush well, generally considerably better than the old 5gpf toilets. They rarely overflow. They send the waste through the pipes forcefully. And they use less water! The industry even has standardized testing for flush performance.
I wonder if better regulation could have managed the transition to avoid the interim terrible toilets. Perhaps the performance tests should have come first, then a period of financial incentives for toilets that outperformed legacy toilets along with mandatory labeling with the water usage and performance data, and only actual requirements to use less water after good enough toilets were available.
This stupid effect they have following your cursor around is infuriating on mobile devices, and now that I'm on desktop where it works as designed, it still is super distracting from the text.
It's a cool concept, but let's be honest: it's what the author thinks are good regulations. And it only ever can be, because policy is subjective.
I happen to agree with almost all of them, and most doubt is the devil in the details. The efficiency one, for example - if efficiency in an appliance comes at the expense of longevity (ie, it uses less materials or R&D is put into power use over anything else) then that may be a net negative. And the GDPR, a great regulation for customer data, has had the side effect of putting cookie law banners everywhere which makes the web more frustrating.
And I hate to say it, because it's my own weird ick, but I will forgo eating if the only utensils are wood. Simply cannot handle the feeling of it against my teeth and tongue. Thank God there are newer compostable single use utensils becoming common.
> And the GDPR, a great regulation for customer data, has had the side effect of putting cookie law banners everywhere which makes the web more frustrating
I say it countless times, but no. Data harvesting Big Tech put cookie banners everywhere and make the web frustrating for you. If they respected Do Not Track, they would not need to show you the banner. Instead, they don't take it into account and prefer to show you a banner that takes up all page instead of having a small banner that asks you if you want to agree to optional cookies.
That doesn't pass the sniff test. If a masked assailant in the street is going to rob me, but has to say a certain sentence before so and almost uniformly does, that speaks to the legal priorities of those making the laws.
If hoovering up my data is bad, make it illegal. Don't wrap it up in niceties and then deflect the blame.
The priority of the GDRP was that you needed your users' consent to process their personal data. The industry answer—cookie banners—is something that the industry created because their tracking incentives were higher than their users' experience.
Do Not Track was a thing since basically forever and the industry willfully chose to ignore it.
If you want to keep using websites that have dark patterns and track you, that's on you. I would argue it's even better than before because at least the average user would notice he's being tracked and the website makes it clear that the user's interests are not aligned with the website's owner.
Blaming it on the lawmakers—which I use as mockery as much as the next guy—is of bad faith, in my opinion.
Why is blaming the lawmakers, the only ones who can enact laws governing this, "bad faith"? Bad faith does not mean a decision or opinion you disagree with.
Do Not Track was ignored because there was no legal requirement to. Wikipedia is not the best source, I know, but its first sentence on the "Adoption" section is: "Very few advertising companies actually supported DNT, due to a lack of regulatory or voluntary requirements for its use"
Lack of regulatory requirements. In other words, no government had the smarts or the spine to make it a law. Who is to blame for making the law...? Lawmakers.
"that's on you" is also an absolute cop-out, in my opinion. Lots of things on the internet are illegal, usually for good reason. I don't think I need to list examples. The EU, EU member-states, and other jurisdictions have no problem making horrendous things on the web illegal to host or visit. If data harvesting is bad, explicitly make it illegal.
"The average user would notice he's being tracked" also is the counter-argument to my point - if every site, no matter how banal, has a bar at the bottom with a big blue button that effectively says "yeah whatever go away" then it's ignored. Boy who cried wolf. If this bar only showed up on Meta and Google and Doubleclick ads then maybe it would carry some weight.
I didn't think it was necessary to say, but apparently it is: my criticism of this part of the GDPR is not to invalidate the good work it has done for user rights on the web. Only to note that regulations, no matter how well intentioned (the point of the OP), come with side-effects that were unseen at the time. Don't waste keystrokes defending those unfortunate side effects (while apparently blaming everyone except those with the power to change it) but instead form campaigns and working groups to propose something better and encourage your legislators to adopt it.
I agree that the GDPR could have gone much further but making data harvesting illegal was never the point—and this is not my opinion.
Websites could show a small banner that says "hey, we use cookies for targeted advertising; click here to opt in to them" but instead chose to use a full-screen pop-up where you can't even navigate properly if you don't click. Hell, some don't even have an easy to access "Reject all" button—I even wonder if it's legal.
While I admit cookie banners are a side effect of the GDPR, they only came to be because that's what the industry chose. Claiming that the reason Big Tech did not honor DNT is because there was no legal requirement is true but not the full picture; they ignored it because it is against their advertising incentives.
GDPR should be even more radical for sure but none of what they enacted was a mistake.
Cookie law banners are almost never full-screen. They do often impede clicks on a website ("why can't I click? Oh, I'm zoomed in and the cookie banner is below the viewport now") but very few are as outright obtrusive as a screen-dimming "you have an ad blocker!" or "please join our mailing list!" prompts. At least in my experience.
But that's beside the point. My point (generally) is that what the industry wants is irrelevant. I'm sure many industries would like to pay below minimum wage, or employ children, or deny sick days. It's legislation (and labor unions, but I'm not going down that road right now.) that stops them. Legislators put a stop to all of that because it's bad for people and society beyond that company's bottom line. Governments are the ones who have the tax-collecting, police-enforcing ability and no one else.
Sites abide by the rules as they're read and the precedent of their enforcement. Maybe the only change that needs to be made is an explicit definition of good vs bad cookie banners. And real enforcement of those rules. That's above my pay grade.
But I'd like to go back to my original point: regulations being good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Things that are ultimately good may have annoying effects on the few impacted. Like EV mandates which are great for emissions but deny car enthusiasts their vrooms. Or energy efficient refrigerators which don't have pull-out drawers like American ones did in the 1950s. Or compostable wooden spoons which send shivers down my spine when I put them in my mouth. Often this is a head vs heart distinction, and I accept that.
The GDPR is not an exception to this, and considering the immense power imbalance between the tech giants and the average person, the only counter we really have are legislators who need to take that responsibility seriously.
> Cookie law banners are almost never full-screen. They do often impede clicks on a website ("why can't I click? Oh, I'm zoomed in and the cookie banner is below the viewport now") but very few are as outright obtrusive as a screen-dimming "you have an ad blocker!" or "please join our mailing list!" prompts. At least in my experience.
At work I—unfortunately—cannot install uBlock Origin on some devices and the few times I need to use that device I have the opposite of your experience. Do you live in the EU?
I understand your point but GDPR was not here to ban data harvesting. If anything, I'd call cookie banners a win because it exposes bad websites for what they really are: pieces of garbage riddled with dark patterns trying to force you to consent to give your data by profiting off of your lack of attention. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure the "Reject optional cookies" option is mandated by law. That's why GDPR was successful within the scope it was given.
Thinking it was either pop-up banners or nothing is a false dichotomy.
I'm not in the EU (as I have already stated that in this chain.)
And again, my whole hypothesis was that a well-intentioned regulation can still fall short or have loopholes which need addressing. An in-depth discussion on the merits of the GDPR was a little beyond my plans to be honest.
Gosh. The law says I have to ask for consent before I slap you in the face. Now you're spammed with asks for consent to slap you in the face. Silly law!
I'm 90% sure that this wouldn't pass, even in jurisdictions like Washington State where mutual combat is legal.
The EU passed laws regarding cookies. Were they so inept as to not understand how cookies are used, or are they in cahoots with the bad actors to give them an out? Hanlon's Razor is not kind to the regulations (/regulators) either way.
But some dozens have been raided/swatted/sued/had their devices confiscated, by posting their opinions about some politicians in whichever social media, not limited to facebook.
Amusing to see GDPR there. It's the law that delivers the most of avoidable user friction online, by far.
It's like they saw how annoying the existing "cookie laws" were and said "we can make it worse!"
GDPR might have had good ideas, but the implementation is so botched it's not even funny. Everything related to cookie consent should have been standardized and delegated to browser settings.
> Everything related to cookie consent should have been standardized and delegated to browser settings.
Rather ironic to say this when the entire reason this stuff has been needed is that Google, which has monopolized the browser market, is an advertising company whose core business is tracking people in the first place and does everything in its power to obstruct anything that weakens it.
I really sometimes feels there is lot of Cognitive dissonance going on with GDPR. On one side there is hate for these banners. On other hand they also hate when say phone company sells their location data to whoever pays... Or when this data leaks.
So exactly how is that later part of selling data and gathering it unnecessarily supposed to be avoided if not by regulation like GRPR?
Maybe it is just entirely different people, but there must be some overlap.
> “Cars must include modern life‑saving tech like automatic braking and lane‑keeping.”
I rarely drive my car. When I do, 99% of the time it's within a few kilometers of my house. I have no need for lane keeping or automatic braking in city traffic, it's barely moving to begin with.
My car is also getting old and will soon need replacing. Ten years ago you could buy a brand new small car for well under €10k. Sure, it didn't have all the bells and whistles but I have no need for those anyway. Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car precisely because of the safety regulations, emission standards and the fact that it's practically impossible to buy a car with an ICE anymore.
I understand the need for these things for cars that are driven daily, but why do they have to apply to cars that are mainly used for short trips to the grocery store? It's making cars unaffordable for the vast majority of people.
> "Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car precisely because of the safety regulations"
Not really. There are many reasons why new cars are more expensive than they used to be. But safety features like AEB and lane assist are a relatively small part of it. Adding AEB specifically is estimated to cost $100-$300 per vehicle in the US, and it wouldn't be much different in Europe.
And AEB is proven to work: reducing the rate of accidents by 40% or more. A small price to pay if it prevents the car getting damaged even once in it's life, let alone preventing an injury or death.
Also, it will depend on your location specifically, but there are plenty of new, entry-level vehicle models sold in Europe for well under €20k, including taxes and on-road costs.
> Adding AEB specifically is estimated to cost $100-$300 per vehicle in the US, and it wouldn't be much different in Europe.
Isn't this exactly the issue? Any given thing is "only" $300 but you add one of these requirements a year for several decades straight and now you've added thousands of dollars to the price of a car.
> And AEB is proven to work: reducing the rate of accidents by 40% or more.
It reduces the rate of accidents that occur under certain circumstances. Pretty good chance that those circumstances are "in a city in traffic". But then the feature is required on all cars, even when the owner knows they'll rarely if ever be driving it under the conditions where it's useful. Or worse, when they know they'll be commonly driving under circumstances where it's more likely to encounter a false positive and cause an accident.
But its also there to protect pedestrians and others from the owner as much as himself. From the government/regulatory perspective.
That only changes the math if collisions are "free" to the vehicle purchaser while causing damage to someone else. Otherwise their interests are aligned, i.e. neither of them wants that to happen and so will want the safety feature unless it has low effectiveness in their circumstances.
Obviously some people will make a poor choice, but that's just as true as legislators, and all costs are a trade off against what else you could have gotten for the money. In other words, all safety features that cost money have an opportunity cost, which is also measured in lost lives, so the ones that aren't effective or have diminished effectiveness under particular circumstances shouldn't be mandatory in all cases.
Most price increase over last 10-15 years is not safety equipment. Regular inflation was massively compounded by the covid chip shortages / missplanning / greed / whatever ratio of factors one subscribes to.
Note, while I do not expect we will convince each other via interwebs, every safety advance from winter tires to abs to safety belts to airbags to glass that doesn't shatter etc has had a "but I don't need it because I don't drive much | I am awesome driver | it could not happen to me | etc". I don't think it's binary, I think regulation over reach is a definite thing, I just don't think massive increase in car prices over last 5 years is because companies are forcing safety equipment on awesome drivers who don't need it.
Case in point, I got the last kia rio model with all the fancy equipment and detection and even wireless carplay for 18k before they dropped the model. They don't sell a car like that anymore. Next cheapest car kia sells me right now is 26k or more - with absolutely no more safety features to justify / blame the massive price jump :-(
Because you're potentially moving several thousand kilos at huge speed, and the people that can find themselves in front of them should not have to trust your judgement of how safe you'll usually need the machine to be.
I almost died on a freeway when my Subaru Outback decided there was something in front and engaged full braking.
110 kmh to 40 before it realized it was wrong.
pure luck nobody was following too close.
As long as the vehicle behind you is also equipped with AEB, you should be ok.
Yes, let’s hope that motorcycle has AEB.
You think a motorcycle will do serious damage to a car driver when rear ending?
Infinitely more damage than if not rear ended.
Don't brake check on a highway. Also, semi-trucks exist.
Emotional damage when they hit the inside of your front windshield like ground beef
It's coming. Already mandatory for all new motorcycles in some countries.
If you try to brake a motorcycle as fast as you would a car, it has a tendency to flip over. And in general different vehicles have different stopping distances, so "just have the whole line of cars all panic brake at once" is going to have them smashing into each other.
Only if they are all driving too close the the car in front. If you keep to the recommended 3 seconds separation you will most often be fine even in bad weather. I drive my Tesla S on Autopilot with the separation set to the maximum which is about 3 seconds and it makes for a comfortable motorway driving experience.
How close cars are to each other is generally determined by traffic volume. If there are twice as many cars, they can only be half as far apart because otherwise they can't physically fit on the same length of road. If you try to leave more space than that, other cars will merge into the empty space. The only way to actually do it overall is to reduce the traffic volume (or add more lanes), which is not something an individual driver has any control over.
Which is to say, in practice cars will be following too closely whenever there is high traffic volume, and systems that don't work under real life conditions are broken.
A motorcycle that emergency brakes without warning? If my bike did that I’d be going over the handlebars. There are no seatbelts here.
> Because you're potentially moving several thousand kilos at huge speed
No, I’m not. My current car weighs less than a thousand kilos (945 to be precise) and the speed limit in basically the entire city is 30km/h.
Newer cars are ‘several thousand kilos’ especially because of all the regulations. Just being an EV adds a significant amount of weight due to the battery.
I’ll be sure to tell that to the poor person on a bicycle in the middle of the road in front of me when I come around a blind curve and can’t jump lanes so as not to hit them.
“So sorry I squished you, my lane assist wouldn’t let me move out of the way in time.”
Is there a lane assist that won't let you change lanes?
I've driven several brands and they just shake wheel or exert like 5% gentle nudge. But maybe there are brands that will actually forcefully prevent lane change without signal (which is automatic / reflexive for most people who'd have good reflexes but I digress).
I'm not at all saying that all Automation is good or that cars always know better than me, but I do want to understand if this is a made-up strawman argument or has anybody ever actually failed to change lanes due to lane assist.
To be fair I do not know, never driven one. Seems like the slippery slope has already been paved with good intentions though.
I'm a techie, I loved my 2004 wrx for good two decades, but which slippery slope are we discussing here?
Putting a black box in your car that records everything without my consent - I'm with you on slippery slopes and ulterior motives.
A gentle gentle nudge that helps me on long distances - I'm honestly not with you :-/
Last I heard, not all cars are "gentle". Implementation depended.
Fair possibility, that's why my question here is - did anybody actually experience a car that won't let you change lanes easily without a turning signal?
I've driven Toyota, Ford, subaru and kia off the top of my head and while e.g. Toyota feels rougher than Honda, none of them approach anything that would even remotely stop, prevent, or even slow me down if I really want to change lanes, let alone if I did it forcefully in emergency. Can't speak for other brands and I definitely never drive a Tesla :-)
lol so you’re just making shit up?
You are arguing in bad faith. You are also creating a straw man argument attempting to rubbish a feature that works acceptably well in 99% other use cases even if your scenario is legitimate.
If there is a blind corner you should slow down enough that you can safely stop if there are obstacles in the road. You don't know what's in the oncoming lane, so you can't assume that it'll be safe to blindly swerve into it to avoid something in your lane.
Secondly, lane keeping does not lock your steering wheel preventing you from changing lanes if you need to. The additional force required to override it is the difference between steering with your pinky and gripping the wheel with your hand.
So after manslaughter you are now committing perjury? This is not how lane assist works. Like, not at all.
I don’t think the dead guy will be in the courtroom.
Clever try though.
Someone who read your car's manual might, though.
That's a completely different discussion. OP was asking why not let him lower standards for cheaper price, not discussing the standard's quality.
you do realise that most people slow down for blind curves for exactly this reason, right?
pre-empt potential dangers and adjust driving accordingly. if you’re concerned that you might have to act due to an unseen/unknown danger — then slow down.
it shouldn’t be necessary to swerve out when driving except as a choice of absolute last resort (ie something/someone jumped in front of you inside braking distance and you’ve got no other safe option, in which case you’re probably fucked anyway).
> you do realise that most people slow down for blind curves for exactly this reason, right?
The parent commenter sounds exactly like one of those who don't slow down for blind curves.
You can take a blind curve at 15 miles an hour and not have time to avoid debris in the road.
Use some critical thinking.
At 15mph most cars should be able to stop on a dime, no?
extrapolating a little, 15mph is ~<10m
Speed | Thinking + braking distance | Stopping distance
20mph | 6m + 6m | 12m (40 feet)
30mph | 9m + 14m | 23m (75 feet)
40mph | 12m + 24m | 36m (118 feet)
50mph | 15m + 38m | 53m (174 feet)
60mph | 18m + 55m | 73m (240 feet)
70mph | 21m + 75m | 96m (315 feet)
> https://www.theaa.com/breakdown-cover/advice/stopping-distan...
note that the braking distances are not for modern cars with advancements in braking tech etc.
If you’d meet me halfway on this, it’s not some bizarro-world scenario. It really isn’t.
then 15 mph is probably too fast for that blind curve as it was not possible to see the danger.
it’s fairly simple logic.
Fortunately automatic emergency braking is another tech that hopefully your car also has.
I will buy used cars that don’t auto-anything for me until I literally cannot find one anymore. Then I’ll buy a tune to remove the feature.
This sounds like it'd be a good way to lose your license in the future, and maybe have a criminal court case if there was an significant accident that could have been prevented by said features you disabled.
Only criminals need to modify their car.
Now accept our integrated telemetry gathering that reports directly to LexisNexis so insurance companies can raise your rates [0].
Surely you understand, think of the children!
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...
Nobody had said anything about telemetry, so far. The rest of us are talking about actual safety features.
They're often one and the same in newer vehicles, unfortunately.
Criminalizing modifying your own car only stands to benefit the corporations that salivate at the mouth thinking of the data mining opportunities.
Criminalizing driving cars with certain modifications on public roads serves to benefit other people on the road, pedestrians, and society as a whole.
In this case, modifications that remove or limit "safety features" that aren't even a requirement now, and many cars on the road don't have?
Not to mention, as others in the thread brought up, can invite issues of their own.
It’s so funny to me that people think just because a law is passed, that fixes problems.
“This wasn’t illegal and now we made it illegal, we fixed the problem!”
How’s that been working out?
I'm guessing you haven't died from polluted drinking water, contaminated food, fake medicines, smog, unsafe vehicles, unsafe roads, dangerous household goods, lethal home wiring, shoddily constructed housing, or any of the other hundreds of things that laws have improved?
Goalposts moved.
I’ll never drive a car that in any way takes control of the steering or brakes. Full stop. If I need to modify the car to disable that feature, I will.
At least I’m honest about it.
Pass all the laws in the name of good ideas for the children. If I disagree with it, I’m not going to obey it. I’m not unique in this.
I’m fucking tired of being told “I’m smarter than you and this is actually in your best interest, trust me.”
Did you know that child labor actually increased in India after laws that tried to eliminate child labor?
Let’s keep patting ourselves on the back that we can feel good about passing laws though.
I quote: "It’s so funny to me that people think just because a law is passed, that fixes problems."
I gave you a whole bunch of problems that have been fixed by passing laws.
> child labor actually increased in India after laws that tried to eliminate child labor
I did not. Which law are we talking about? 1948, 1952, 1986 or 2009?
Safety regulations are not why cars cost 3x more than 10 years ago. Emission standards have some impact, but the biggest cause is bog standard inflation and corporate greed.
"Corporate greed" -- most car manufacturers have 3-10% gross margins. Not exactly the big profiteers.
European manufacturers all decided to focus on higher costs vehicles after Covid-19 because margins are slightly higher and they make more on the financing. They have intentionally deserted the entry market.
Now, sales numbers are starting to plummet so I fully expect to see them blame everything from regulators to China unfair exports rather than admit it’s just a normal consequence of their own strategy.
Add to that that most of them have intentionally not taken the shift towards electric and away from diesel that the regulation forced on them, you get a pretty bleak picture. But, on that point, it seems that Germany will as usual cave in and drag the whole EU down with them so they might have been right.
>most car manufacturers have 3-10% gross margins.
I remember some analysis saying that it is true for classic versions like sedan. But on SUVs it is a couple of times bigger...
Emission equipment has huge impact on cheaper vechiles, as it is expensive and costs similary whether it is is cheap or expensive model. DPF in particular.
"I don't need a curb cut or a seatbelt, so I won't benefit from society having them" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect )
Dropped kerb in British English for those like me who had no idea what a curb cut was.
Its more like "Curb cuts are mandatory now so they are everywhere".
(which is not good because now cars can drive on sidewalk)
I agree with everything you wrote. But the real harm with most of these regulations are the unintended consequences, and second order effects.
Say you don't really think <10k cars belong on the road. Sure. But that could just lead to more dangerous forms of transportation like e-bikes or scooters. Or people are restricted to where they can work and live.
An example in the US is Obama era fuel efficiency standards for sedans had lower standards for SUVs. Fast-forward 20 years, nearly every car is an SUV. But it takes a few steps to figure out what the effects actually are.
E-bikes are literally good for your health. Especially for aging people and people that would not ride normal bike that distance. They are also massively more safe for third parties you encounter.
The move from cars to e-bikes would be generally unintended benefit
e-bike is one of the best modes of transportation in city
as far as there is cycling infrastructure
I've never heard of an e-bike or a scooter killing someone.
Happens a couple of times a year here in Ireland. Usually an old and frail pedestrian and a teen recklessly driving a very powerful (i.e. illegal or should-be-illegal) e-scooter.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51707616
To be fair, that's an illegally-modified, illegally-on-the-road e-bike; not exactly the stock device.
I’m pretty sure most non-rental e-bikes in London are ones that are illegal to have on the road.
It has happened several time in the last few years in Norway and UK. Most were the riders themselves but at least once in Norway it was a pedestrian.
It's rare but not unknown.
What is your definition of an e-bike "killing someone"? What will you accept as evidence?
But how sure are you that it was the fuel efficiency standards that led to more SUVs? Feels like bad reasoning, unless you have more evidence.
> that could just lead to more dangerous forms of transportation like e-bikes or scooters.
Yeah, removing mass and decreasing velocity, while increasing sightlines and the controller's stake in avoiding accidents, is much more dangerous. /s
>> Ten years ago you could buy a brand new small car for well under €10k. Sure, it didn't have all the bells and whistles but I have no need for those anyway. Nowadays, you're looking at €30k+ for a new, small car
If you are looking for car without bells and whistles you can buy a new car for €15k. €30k+ is a price tag for much more than basic car.
Indeed, I watched a €15k car TV commercial literally 2 minutes ago.
You are an exception if you never drive more than a few kilometers. Exceptional people need to learn that the world caters to average situations. It’s not possible to please everyone.
You can say the same things a about seatbelts and airbags. And people did.
> “Cars must include modern life‑saving tech like automatic braking and lane‑keeping.”
My observation and intuition is most accidents are caused by people using their phone, driving under the influence, wrong medicine, being crazy or just too tired or too old.
Unless we are talking about full self driving those assistances only delay an accident at best.
I enjoy those features, they are convenient, but I do not consider them safety features.
I recently rode a scooter for couple of times, and I find it is the best thing to move around in neighbourhood. It is convinent, parking is easy, cheap to run. Everyone should have one electronic scooter.
For your use case, the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
But perhaps you are making a larger point about "things I consider unnecessary adding $$ to the base cost of every vehicle." I would say, to that, that
- your governments and voters consider them important for societal reasons, e.g. airbags so you can walk away from a crash, or cameras to help crushing a child when reversing. Presumably you are ok with this..or not?
- the car manufacturers in the EU are politically powerful and absolutely fearful that if the EU allowed the full range of global vehicles into the European market, they would be crushed overnight. Why buy a VW when you can get any number of Chinese minis, or Indian econoboxes, or even a cheap kei car. I guarantee that China keeps Daimler-Benz and VW execs up at night and that they have the full support of their workers when they spend money to lobby against low cost foreign imports...
> the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
It’s a quadricycle and not a real car, though.
Also I’d bet that VW/etc. executives are more fearful of Chinese equivalent’s of their mid/high-end models which cost the same as Europran manufacturer’s budget options.
Not tiny/ultra-budget/featureless vehicles which wouldn’t be that popular in Europe.
The issues with the Ami or anything similar or most cheap barebones models is that you can get a much nicer used car for the same price.
Modern cars are also much more reliable and last longer than they used to several decades back reducing the demand in the budget segment.
> For your use case, the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
That car is not suitable for my use-case. Any situation where I would use that car is one where I would use my e-bike instead. I basically use my car for those occasions where I just need to transport a bit more than I can take on my bike. It doesn’t have to be huge, but that Ami is just not enough.
Tangential, but does your use case rule out taxi service or a car-share plan? Way more expensive per use, but you might still come out ahead.
I just use a trailer[1], I find it bonkers that one would use a car only for urban transportation. If I wasn't going regularly in remote area with my partners and my kids, I wouldn't even own a car.
[1] I like cargo bikes but storage can be a challenge compared to a trailer you can fold and remove the wheels when not in use.
A lot of these features are merely software. The insane increase in car prices over the last decade is a combination of profiteering + inflation, not safety features.
Lane assist is more often annoying and dangerous than helpfull. It assumes lane markings are good/perfect, which over here is a very false premise.
If my ancient Model S can't see the road markings it won't engage lane keeping and makes a noise to alert you to that fact. Similarly when the lane markings disappear, it flashes a red warning in the instrument cluster and sounds an alarm.
Will depend on the country I guess. Over here road markings around (former) roadworks often are literally swept across the lanes (when they use some temporary yellow adhesive lane marking stuff), or stay painted on long after the works have finished.
In both cases, while mostly obvious to the human driver, following the lane markings would send you straight into the opposite lane.
Cheapest Fiat Panda seems to go for €14,700[1], so colour me sceptical on that "€30k+ for a new small car". In a quick check, it seems it was about €10k in 2011.[2]
The price increase is more than inflation, but you can't just assume that it's primarily due to safety regulations and emission standards.
[1] https://www.fiat.it/omni/configuratore/#/customize?color=CL-...
[2] https://supercarblondie.com/how-much-the-fiat-panda-has-incr...
> Cheapest Fiat Panda seems to go for €14,700
Cheapest Fiat Panda goes for €19,990 in my country. Taxes on new cars are enormous here.
That seems to be the only ICE model they still sell, and for how long will they stil sell that? The even smaller Fiat 500e is €28,990.
> Taxes on new cars are enormous here
Seems like taxes could be the larger factor then?
€20k is still a third off from your earlier €30k+. And when I checked yesterday evening I saw several cars in similar price ranges.
And now you're saying that "enormous taxes" are partly responsible for price increases, instead of just regulations and emission standards, which demonstrates my point exactly: there are many reasons cars are more expensive.
Stop shifting the goalposts. The argument was no cars are available sub 30k, and that was proven wrong.
Now you are arguing that <€30k cars might not he available in the near future, which no one is disputing.
Then you use the existence of a <€30k ev to prove your point?
Most accidents happen close to home.
Whose home?
From the source I found, it's the patient's home, not the driver's.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4375775/
What kind of strawman are you trying here?
The first example I saw (think the order might be randomized?) was an EU ban on plastic straws, which is silly. Straws are a negligible fraction of plastic waste, and have no good substitute ("compostable" plastic straws are also banned; paper straws fall apart easily; metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing). This would flunk any serious cost/benefit analysis. You can hide the costs by making them regulatory instead of financial (the inconvenience of not having plastic straws doesn't appear in GDP stats), but the costs are still there, they're just hidden.
Pets remove plastic and instead poison ourselves.
[0]https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-00268...I once drunk from a pasta straw, that should also be PFAS free. Though hot liquids might cook the pasta.
That was the first one for me as well and I was surprised they included it. I have never seen a disposable straw that does the job well, except for plastic. I actively avoid restaurants that use the cardboard straws because of it. That's how bad they suck. I can't believe the EU was foolish enough to ban plastic straws when there just isn't an actual viable alternative.
Quality of non plastic straws has improved dramatically, I don't even notice they are not plastic anymore. Unless you are sucking on a drink for hours they don't disintegrate.
enjoy the paper straw coated in tasty PFAS i guess? As far as i can tell that’s the norm…
i avoid straws altogether.
> has improved dramatically
They are not covered with PFAS anymore?
Dramatically as in their ability of not melting while drinking.
The actual text is "Bans the worst beach‑litter plastics (straws, cutlery, sticks) and cuts pollution" and the tooltip says "Targets the most littered plastic items with bans, design and collection rules, and extended producer responsibility to clean up coasts and waterways."
I looked a bit further, it bans a long list of plastic single-use stuff: plates, cutlery, certain food containers, certain cups, and a bunch of other things. It also regulates some labelling for other single-use products.
It claims that "80 to 85% of marine litter, measured as beach litter counts, is plastic, with single-use plastic items representing 50% and fishing-related items representing 27%".
Saying it's just a "plastic straw ban is" ... eh, well, a straw man. And single-use plastics are a substantial source of litter/pollution (I didn't investigate the accuracy of this claim in-depth).
In conclusion, this seems about as accurate and good faith as the ol' "EU bendy banana myth".
How exactly (and if) do plastic straws from the EU end up in the Pacific Ocean, though? Maybe they could have started with that
You might as well ask how microplastics get into fresh snow in Antarctica - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61739159
Because people litter them and it ends up in the ocean? And it is based on research, as I quoted in my previous post.
My entire point it's not just about plastic straws. I don't know why you need to reduce this to just plastic straws.
Obviously I implicitly meant all single use plastics. But random people littering is not even remotely the main source.
Poor and unregulated waste management is. Of course the fact that a lot of western countries were and still are exporting their plastic waste to poorer countries where they somehow end up in rivers and oceans.
However there is no inherent reason why plastic straws or anything else inherently have to be dumped into oceans.
Of course silly token measures are much easier than actually regulating the global fishing industry..
> Obviously I implicitly meant all single use plastics.
On a thread that is about someone misrepresenting a single-use plastic ban as a "plastic straw ban", this is very much not obvious at all.
As for the rest: if there is no plastic, then there is nothing to "waste manage". Or at least less, and mismanaged waste actually breaks down in a reasonable timeframe. It's been an issue for decades. Everyone knows about it. Nothing really changed.
You missed his point. People have measured this. Basically all plastic waste in the oceans come from Asia. This was true before these EU regulations and is also true of America where such bans don't exist.
It's a good example of why EU regulation sucks. It sounds like it solves a problem until you learn anything about the problem. Then it becomes clear it's all cost and no benefit.
The reason the EU passes all these rules is nothing to do with the actual problems themselves. It's because they think that by doing this they can forge a pan-European equivalent of the USA that reduces the existing nations to mere historical geographic regions. It seems to be some kind of simplistic idea that if most laws are written by the EU, and it has a flag, then it is a nation that can rival the US. If you believe that then to make it happen you have to pass a lot of laws.
Giving paper straws at coffee shops should be criminalised
Drinking coffee from a straw too
> metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing
Boohoo. Don't use a straw then. Out of the billions of beverages consumed during the last 24 hours, it's a given that >95% were consumed without one.
It's also of course an entirely arbitrary line to draw. Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?
> Are all your plates and bowls at home plastic as well?
Funnily enough, there are contingents of people who exclusively use paper plates and plastic cutlery. I think there's an interesting parallel there. Those kinds of people simply do not want the effort and cost of maintenance. I'm not particularly sympathetic to this mindset in either case, but still.
In part, the rest of society subsidises the price of cheap disposable items by paying for their disposal and clean-up. I'd much rather that the manufacturers were made to bear that cost, though I doubt that would be practical in a global market. Probably the easiest way to implement it would be to add a cleanup charge to the price of those items (e.g. like VAT).
On a related note, I'd want any branded litter (e.g. McDonalds cartons) to be charged back to the company - it should be their responsibility to deal with the rubbish they produce and they can easily add a small charge to each order.
The Germany municipality of Tübingen implemented a "Verpackungssteuer" (tax on single-use packaging, utensils). It was fought by the local McDonald's franchisee up to the highest relevant court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) and finally approved.
Dozens of other German municipalities were just waiting for the final decision to implement their own local tax.
> It's also of course an entirely arbitrary line to draw
Banning straws is the "entirely arbitrary line to draw." Why not banning paper plates as well? Plastic bowls too?
They are banned. There is no law that bans just the straws.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/904/oj
It's funny that as far as HN is concerned, this site is a bid to reconstitute a large fraction of every political argument that ever happens here. It even gives me a chance to rant about bees! (My bee rant is not relevant to Europe.)
Hilariously, right below your comment is this one:
> You could hold this up in a room full of American business owners and watch them all cringe like a pack of vampires witnessing a cross.
Not surprising that you'd find plenty of American business owners on.. an American startup platform!
Hmm... In all the cases I saw the prices were mentioned in EUR not USD as the unit. I consider it a clear indication that the discussion participants are mainly non-Americans ;-)
You could hold this up in a room full of American business owners and watch them all cringe like a pack of vampires witnessing a cross.
> You could hold this up in a room full of ~~American business owners~~ Hackernews commenters and watch them all nitpick and prevaricate until they've convinced themselves that every regulation here is, in fact, negative.
“Your data. Your rules. Consent, transparency, security — and the right to say ‘delete it’.”
You see that HN? The right to delete my data? it's the law, please stop breaking the law and implement a way to delete my data as I see fit.
I’m sure most people who create regulations believe they’re making good ones.
What’s important is to assess whether the regulations had the intended result, and what the second and third order effects were. A lot of regulations, created in good faith, would fail this test.
I agree. It would be one thing if they did an independent analysis on the outcomes of each regulation and arrived at an evidence-based conclusion (and even then it would still be very difficult or impossible to achieve objectivity).
But from what I can tell, it basically boils down to "let's just read the bullet points for each one and put it on the list if they sound good", which is misleading and even dangerous. Chat Control should be on the list by those standards.
> Chat Control should be on the list by those standards
But it isn't, so maybe those aren't the standards?
It isn't because it is not yet accepted
There seems to be a implicit assumption here that the world witouth the regulation is the 'natural' one, which should not be disturbed without good reason?
Not entailing regulations also has second and third order effects, and usually nobody is considering them (unless it can increase revenue).
Yes, the default state of the world is unregulated. Why does that seem strange to you?
It is more the 'and should not be disturbed'.
I did not grow up in the wild, and the default state of civilisation, even simple tribes, is certainly not unregulated. You are expected to take into account how your actions affect other people, and if you fail you will be sanctioned.
I perfectly understand people who wants little regulations. But my point is that choosing to not regulate something is also a choice, and for the big machine that is society, the fact that it's rooted in inaction does not make the outcome better, and thus not a better default either.
This is like the people who claim silence is violence or that everything is political.
Not passing a law about something isn't normally a choice. There are infinity things you might conceivably not pass laws about, and you can't even think about them all. Leaving things undisturbed is the choiceless default, it happens even if no people are around, so focusing on something enough to disturb it is the choice.
At best you can argue that if someone is agitating to pass a law then this forces your attention to a topic, and then - if your job requires you to respond - that then implies a choice of whether to agree with them or not. This is how lobbyists get what they want. But you can just not put yourself in that position.
“Take your streaming subscriptions with you: watch and listen anywhere in the EU.”
In other words, allow publishers to region lock digital content deals to a specific EU country, even though (in theory) the EU is "Single Market for goods and services".
There are good EU regulations. There are also some very bad onces.
Except that's not how it works. (So far) Each one of my subscriptions just show me content of the local country.
So say Netflix, it's say French Netflix, when I'm in France and so on. Same with Spotify.
The law is just setup so services can't block you from using your subscription in another country. Which honestly I don't think was a problem in the first place.
Now if there was a law to make these damn things give you all the language and subtitle options.... I'd be all for that.
Because the big problem (again Netflix is a good example) is when travelling, is for the most part subtitles are only in usually two languages. The native language of the country, and English.
On vacation and want to watch something in another language? Ok now you need a third language (English) in order to watch it.
Even though Netflix has the subtitles in every language.
If I travel anywhere in Europe, my Prime account is still locked to the same useless crappy Belgium catalogue because "licenses"
Meawhile the TV sites are region locked, so you can't watch Belgian TV from Spain because "licenses".
So much for the single common market.
How does the first entail the second?
The way I read the text of the law, it acknowledges that there are regional locking inside the EU, and you should be allowed to bring your subscriptions with you as you travel the EU.
Sounds like you would want the law to be a different law, enforcing the EU to be a single market for all intellectual property and subscriptions. I think that sounds like a good idea, but it's a different law.
I was expecting a site with this title to be a troll when you open it it’s just a blank page.
It really should have been that.
(sidenote)
Neither Google nor Cloudflare resolve the domain for me:
Anyone ever bought shoes or clothes or tires in the EU? The sizes are absolutely not metric and a complete mess! Not to start about traffic rules, sizes of streets, traffic signs etc. Nothing is regulated, nothing is standardized. But the worst missing regulations which are keeping the continent back are missing standards for train traffic in the EU: E.g. there are about 10 different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_electrificatio... in the EU. In addition their are thousands of incompatible regulations regarding train signals. The EU could have high speed trains from Lissabon to Helsinki. But I guess the US will introduce metric units before the EU will solve their train traffic mess.
Not sure what you're talking about. Road signs and rules are the same.
We're working on the rest:Site seems to be down? I can't access it.
up for me — maybe try the vercel domain? https://actuallygoodregulations.vercel.app/
the vercel domain worked for me, thanks!
This works. Thanks!
Site is down for me but I found this archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250823220326/https://actuallyg...
> Your internet provider can’t block or throttle websites. The open web stays open
That’s so false it’s not even funny. I live in Spain and there are a TON of blocked websites.
Blocked by court or state. Private ISPs can't block sites.
And this is true for almost all these legislations. They remove power from individuals and companies, while avoiding to limit EU and state power in any meaningful way.
But the government is much more of an enemy to me than my ISP, not to mention I can switch ISPs but I can’t switch governments.
>but I can’t switch governments.
Maybe use the time machine to move out of Franco's Spain?
What percentage of citizens do you think support the blocking of websites for reasons of copyright? We have as much choice in the matter as we would have under Franco.
If the people don't agree with something they can always do three things in a democratic country:
* start a party to push for legislative changes that resonate with what the people want
* vote for a party that propose to change certain legislation to something more adjacent to what the people want
* people can lobby the government via interest groups or as a collective to influence politicians or if the constitution allows for it try and hold a popular vote on the issue(s)
That doesn’t work for small issues like this, as well as you know. And the proof is that wildly unpopular things like this keep occurring. We don’t live in a democracy if it’s not like in Switzerland with their direct democracy where we can vote on all issues one by one. What we have is a joke.
There's been countless of small concerns that had been able to be propelled to becoming law or do you think that banning plastic straws is a genuine big movement?
It came from within the party that pushed for it.
> but I can’t switch governments.
But you can though.
All countries in the EU are democratic plus there's freedom to move between them. You can definitely switch governments.
You have the freedom to move to another country that is also ruled by the EU and where the same regulations apply? That doesn't matter in this discussion. In practice EU residents cannot easily leave.
Great site
*actually good site :p
The scrolling on this website is incredibly slow
USB-C for your gadgets is not a good regulation. The hurdle to adopting anything better is probably too high to overcome now.
The relevant commission is supposed to re-assess and come up with new recommendations every 5 years.
If someone comes up with a better method for charging, they can get all the big device manufacturers in the room, convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.
This is not far-fetched. All the players relevant to internet, for example, collaborate to determine how web standards should evolve. It works pretty well. It's more or less the same companies who need to collaborate to build something better than USB-C.
There should be no need whatsoever to convince your competitors and/or bureaucrats that allowing your new connector to be produced is in their interest. Only one should be convinced: the person buying the device.
If Apple made both USB-C and Lightning variants and let people choose: then sure, let the market decide.
In reality an oligopoly was stuck in a crappy stalemate and people had only compromised options. Carrying two sets of wires everywhere sucked.
We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.
But clearly there is a price for the standardisation, it makes progress slower. On the other hand it makes everyone's lifes easier. Just as with e.g electrical outlets in the house there is a time for exploration and innovation, and there is a time for standardisation. And we are ready for standardisation now, USB-c is good enough.
USB-c is absolutely not good enough. The connectors are often incompatible due to tiny manufacturing tolerances, cables from different manufacturers often fall out of the port after longer term use, don't make good connection so you have flaky charging, the cables and connectors look the same but are actually incompatible due to supporting only USB 2/3/4 or thunderbolt, whether displayport/hdmi alt mode is supported, etc. This small short-term gain at the cost of locking in USB-c forever was a terrible idea, brought to you by the same hypercompetent group that mandated cookie banners.
Cookie-banners were never mandated. It's just a fucking stupid way by the website operators, trying to circumvent data privacy regulation.
And when it comes to USB-C. Sure, it's far from perfect, but it's a great foundation to built upon and improve.
[dead]
[flagged]
Please don't fulminate on HN. You may not owe cookie banners better, but we're trying for a better style of conversation here. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines, which seek to make HN a place for curious conversation, not rage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.
Which is a fine? The industry eventually converged to just a handful of common standards on its own.
You can’t innovate without being able to experiment. Which is only possible if there are actual people using your product. Thinking that a committee of bureaucrats can replace that is silly.
A handful of common standards is useless.
One standard for chargers is the only acceptable outcome and it wouldn't have gotten there without regulation.
What need is there to experiment with chargers? Wire go in, power go through - it's really not that complicated, the only important thing is standardization.
> What need is there to experiment with chargers?
That’s the point, I have no clue. But we might still be stuck with floppy drives with a mindset like that.
Although as a physical connector usb-c is far from perfect. IMHO lighting seemed nicer in some ways.
> But we might still be stuck with floppy drives with a mindset like that.
That seems like a false equivalency to me. It seems quite obvious that storage media have more potential for development than charging wires.
Wire go in - power go through, is literally all they need to do and USB-C does that pretty well.
No, it's cable go in, power go through, *cable doesn't fall out* and usb-c does that terribly after a few months.
I'm extremely pro standardisation, but the next revision needs to do a lot better.
MagSafe is a superior power connector in every way.
The "bureaucrats" are a proxy for the person buying the device. That's literally the point of representative democracy. The average person doesn't want to make a million decisions on technical standards, so they elect somebody they trust to make them for them.
> convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.
Only way they could actually prove that is by demonstrating it empirically. i.e. by implementing the technology in products which consumers use.
Any government commission is inherently incapable of making a legitimate proactive decision is such case. You might as well use some sort of a lottery system at that point..
That sounds really easy and straightforward. And yeah, committee decisions are well known for their technical excellence and far-sightedness.
Well, physical interoperable things are done by committees. You need the industry players involved if you want new interoperable standard to be widely spread. Unless it is one of the first movers.
Say how would you improve speed of copper based ethernet. Using nearly same cables and connectors? Every party making the chips must agree on very specific details.
> fewer chargers, less e‑waste, less drawer chaos.
care to mention what negates those things to make it a “not good” regulation?
as a consumer, i think it’s a good thing to not need Nx different charging cables / plugs to go away for a weekend. usb-c is basically the de-facto standard for charging all but apple devices anyway.
hardware manufacturers might have a different opinions/motivations (but that was kind of the point really wasn’t it)
Everything seemed to have been moving towards USB-C regardless for a few years now, so it seems somewhat superfluous at this point in time? Apple was a major holdout though, due to Apple reasons.
Not strongly against it as such, but also not entirely convinced it's needed either.
That sounds like it wasn't superfluous, because it convinced s major holdout to change, no?
Well I did say "somewhat superfluous", not "entirely superfluous" :-)
This is where the up- and down-sides need to be considered. Everyone moved from micro-USB to USB-3 because it was easier and better, and this will now be harder (not impossible, as another comment says, this is supposed to be evaluated 5 years). There may also be special cases where there's a good reason to use something other than USB-C Is that a big problem? Maybe not? I don't know.
Everything has been moving towards USB-C precisely because of this regulation, duh. Manufacturers want to continue selling in Europe.
That's not "duh" at all, because previously much of it was micro-USB without regulation.
Except the previous EU regulation was microUSB. Before that we had plug types per vendor.
Most of these are bad for most people. They do something superficially useful, but ultimately blocks innovation and small companies and so leads to large companies being protected from competition.
They should have let apple continue selling garbage connectors so I can’t use my wife’s phone adapter to charge my phone. and have to buy an iphone charger because it is better(not)
I hear your concerns, but the future is probably wireless charging and wifi communication
What would be the next better feature for a plug? It seems USB-C has it all except for being expensive on the port side with the muxers. Anything different would require tossing a bunch of still useful things. It supports fast charging and good data rates.
That's the entire problem though, isn't it? Now we'll never know.
The one thing I can think of off the top of my head is some sort of magnetic connection similar to macbook chargers to prevent damage when the cord gets pulled out. (Also I would like the USB-3 standard to not suck, but that's never happening and doesn't relate to the physical hardware anyways)
> That's the entire problem though, isn't it? Now we'll never know.
There are definitely a lot of harmful regulation, but this one is amazing with close to no downsides. For one, there are magnetic adapters for everything nowadays, including USB-C ports so you can have your cake and eat it too. Second is the environmental impact of the old charger ecosystem. I lost count of how many cables and chargers I have that are now trash^1. Third one is that historically standardizing interfaces was great for innovation.
^1: Here is the various USB e-waste that I have - usb micro C (2 separate types with same name), micro usb super speed (this one is particularly cursed), mini-usb types A and B, and normal USB type A and type B.
> Here is the various USB e-waste that I have - usb micro C (2 separate types with same name), micro usb super speed (this one is particularly cursed), mini-usb types A and B, and normal USB type A and type B.
Catch just two more and you can challenge the USB trainer in Viridian City!
The protocol was flawed in its design in that it does not standardize or communicate the capabilities of the cable. How do I know whether it’s charging only, data, or thunderbolt? No standard way to understand this
MagSafe?
to be fair, a lot of these exist in the USA too.
Sounds like someone should make a US version of the site. (I genuinely think it would be very helpful)
I don't think the point of it is to show that these regulations are exceptional or anything. Seems to me to just be highlighting the number of regulations that we have that can make life better.
The USA version is just the letters ADA in gigantic font.
Europe still hasn't caught up to ADA. I don't know any other really good laws that are unique to the US, but I'm sure they exist.
I, too, was so happy and relieved when some troll sued MIT and Berkeley over their freely available video courses.
Such a great law.
> Europe still hasn't caught up to ADA.
Really? Some examples?
Sometimes a regulation is bad before it’s good. For example: toilet flush volume.
We used to have 5 gpf toilets. They worked okay. They clogged on occasion but not too often. When they clogged, they would overflow after 1-2 flushes. 5 gallons was enough to keep the poop and toilet paper flowing through the drain pipes once they made it out of the toilet. They used a lot of water (5 gallons per flush!). They had basically no interesting technology to speak of.
Then regulations required less water, and the new toilets were bad. They were basically the same designs, using less water, and they regularly failed to flush, they clogged frequently, and they even contributed to downstream clogs because 2-ish gallons of slowly draining water didn’t get all the waste moving adequately.
Now, after years and years of bad toilets, the industry caught up. Modern toilets use even less water (often under 1.3gpf), but they use that water effectively. They flush well, generally considerably better than the old 5gpf toilets. They rarely overflow. They send the waste through the pipes forcefully. And they use less water! The industry even has standardized testing for flush performance.
I wonder if better regulation could have managed the transition to avoid the interim terrible toilets. Perhaps the performance tests should have come first, then a period of financial incentives for toilets that outperformed legacy toilets along with mandatory labeling with the water usage and performance data, and only actual requirements to use less water after good enough toilets were available.
What the hell is gpf? I don't like to be forced to search the web to find each locally used unit.
And when will Americans finally learn that instead of the imperial system of units, the rest of the world uses SI?
> What the hell is gpf?
My guess would be gallons per flush
This stupid effect they have following your cursor around is infuriating on mobile devices, and now that I'm on desktop where it works as designed, it still is super distracting from the text.
It's a cool concept, but let's be honest: it's what the author thinks are good regulations. And it only ever can be, because policy is subjective.
I happen to agree with almost all of them, and most doubt is the devil in the details. The efficiency one, for example - if efficiency in an appliance comes at the expense of longevity (ie, it uses less materials or R&D is put into power use over anything else) then that may be a net negative. And the GDPR, a great regulation for customer data, has had the side effect of putting cookie law banners everywhere which makes the web more frustrating.
And I hate to say it, because it's my own weird ick, but I will forgo eating if the only utensils are wood. Simply cannot handle the feeling of it against my teeth and tongue. Thank God there are newer compostable single use utensils becoming common.
> And the GDPR, a great regulation for customer data, has had the side effect of putting cookie law banners everywhere which makes the web more frustrating
I say it countless times, but no. Data harvesting Big Tech put cookie banners everywhere and make the web frustrating for you. If they respected Do Not Track, they would not need to show you the banner. Instead, they don't take it into account and prefer to show you a banner that takes up all page instead of having a small banner that asks you if you want to agree to optional cookies.
That doesn't pass the sniff test. If a masked assailant in the street is going to rob me, but has to say a certain sentence before so and almost uniformly does, that speaks to the legal priorities of those making the laws.
If hoovering up my data is bad, make it illegal. Don't wrap it up in niceties and then deflect the blame.
The priority of the GDRP was that you needed your users' consent to process their personal data. The industry answer—cookie banners—is something that the industry created because their tracking incentives were higher than their users' experience.
Do Not Track was a thing since basically forever and the industry willfully chose to ignore it.
If you want to keep using websites that have dark patterns and track you, that's on you. I would argue it's even better than before because at least the average user would notice he's being tracked and the website makes it clear that the user's interests are not aligned with the website's owner.
Blaming it on the lawmakers—which I use as mockery as much as the next guy—is of bad faith, in my opinion.
Why is blaming the lawmakers, the only ones who can enact laws governing this, "bad faith"? Bad faith does not mean a decision or opinion you disagree with.
Do Not Track was ignored because there was no legal requirement to. Wikipedia is not the best source, I know, but its first sentence on the "Adoption" section is: "Very few advertising companies actually supported DNT, due to a lack of regulatory or voluntary requirements for its use"
Lack of regulatory requirements. In other words, no government had the smarts or the spine to make it a law. Who is to blame for making the law...? Lawmakers.
"that's on you" is also an absolute cop-out, in my opinion. Lots of things on the internet are illegal, usually for good reason. I don't think I need to list examples. The EU, EU member-states, and other jurisdictions have no problem making horrendous things on the web illegal to host or visit. If data harvesting is bad, explicitly make it illegal.
"The average user would notice he's being tracked" also is the counter-argument to my point - if every site, no matter how banal, has a bar at the bottom with a big blue button that effectively says "yeah whatever go away" then it's ignored. Boy who cried wolf. If this bar only showed up on Meta and Google and Doubleclick ads then maybe it would carry some weight.
I didn't think it was necessary to say, but apparently it is: my criticism of this part of the GDPR is not to invalidate the good work it has done for user rights on the web. Only to note that regulations, no matter how well intentioned (the point of the OP), come with side-effects that were unseen at the time. Don't waste keystrokes defending those unfortunate side effects (while apparently blaming everyone except those with the power to change it) but instead form campaigns and working groups to propose something better and encourage your legislators to adopt it.
I agree that the GDPR could have gone much further but making data harvesting illegal was never the point—and this is not my opinion.
Websites could show a small banner that says "hey, we use cookies for targeted advertising; click here to opt in to them" but instead chose to use a full-screen pop-up where you can't even navigate properly if you don't click. Hell, some don't even have an easy to access "Reject all" button—I even wonder if it's legal.
While I admit cookie banners are a side effect of the GDPR, they only came to be because that's what the industry chose. Claiming that the reason Big Tech did not honor DNT is because there was no legal requirement is true but not the full picture; they ignored it because it is against their advertising incentives.
GDPR should be even more radical for sure but none of what they enacted was a mistake.
Cookie law banners are almost never full-screen. They do often impede clicks on a website ("why can't I click? Oh, I'm zoomed in and the cookie banner is below the viewport now") but very few are as outright obtrusive as a screen-dimming "you have an ad blocker!" or "please join our mailing list!" prompts. At least in my experience.
But that's beside the point. My point (generally) is that what the industry wants is irrelevant. I'm sure many industries would like to pay below minimum wage, or employ children, or deny sick days. It's legislation (and labor unions, but I'm not going down that road right now.) that stops them. Legislators put a stop to all of that because it's bad for people and society beyond that company's bottom line. Governments are the ones who have the tax-collecting, police-enforcing ability and no one else.
Sites abide by the rules as they're read and the precedent of their enforcement. Maybe the only change that needs to be made is an explicit definition of good vs bad cookie banners. And real enforcement of those rules. That's above my pay grade.
But I'd like to go back to my original point: regulations being good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Things that are ultimately good may have annoying effects on the few impacted. Like EV mandates which are great for emissions but deny car enthusiasts their vrooms. Or energy efficient refrigerators which don't have pull-out drawers like American ones did in the 1950s. Or compostable wooden spoons which send shivers down my spine when I put them in my mouth. Often this is a head vs heart distinction, and I accept that.
The GDPR is not an exception to this, and considering the immense power imbalance between the tech giants and the average person, the only counter we really have are legislators who need to take that responsibility seriously.
> Cookie law banners are almost never full-screen. They do often impede clicks on a website ("why can't I click? Oh, I'm zoomed in and the cookie banner is below the viewport now") but very few are as outright obtrusive as a screen-dimming "you have an ad blocker!" or "please join our mailing list!" prompts. At least in my experience.
At work I—unfortunately—cannot install uBlock Origin on some devices and the few times I need to use that device I have the opposite of your experience. Do you live in the EU?
I understand your point but GDPR was not here to ban data harvesting. If anything, I'd call cookie banners a win because it exposes bad websites for what they really are: pieces of garbage riddled with dark patterns trying to force you to consent to give your data by profiting off of your lack of attention. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure the "Reject optional cookies" option is mandated by law. That's why GDPR was successful within the scope it was given.
Thinking it was either pop-up banners or nothing is a false dichotomy.
I'm not in the EU (as I have already stated that in this chain.)
And again, my whole hypothesis was that a well-intentioned regulation can still fall short or have loopholes which need addressing. An in-depth discussion on the merits of the GDPR was a little beyond my plans to be honest.
Anyways, fun chat!
My apologies, it wasn't in this thread that I mentioned my location. That's on me.
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Gosh. The law says I have to ask for consent before I slap you in the face. Now you're spammed with asks for consent to slap you in the face. Silly law!
I'm 90% sure that this wouldn't pass, even in jurisdictions like Washington State where mutual combat is legal.
The EU passed laws regarding cookies. Were they so inept as to not understand how cookies are used, or are they in cahoots with the bad actors to give them an out? Hanlon's Razor is not kind to the regulations (/regulators) either way.
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The people you’re attempting to make fun of are the British, who are famously not part of the EU anymore.
They weren't blocked or throttled by their ISP.
No.
But some dozens have been raided/swatted/sued/had their devices confiscated, by posting their opinions about some politicians in whichever social media, not limited to facebook.
edit: Especially in Germany.
Amusing to see GDPR there. It's the law that delivers the most of avoidable user friction online, by far.
It's like they saw how annoying the existing "cookie laws" were and said "we can make it worse!"
GDPR might have had good ideas, but the implementation is so botched it's not even funny. Everything related to cookie consent should have been standardized and delegated to browser settings.
> Everything related to cookie consent should have been standardized and delegated to browser settings.
Rather ironic to say this when the entire reason this stuff has been needed is that Google, which has monopolized the browser market, is an advertising company whose core business is tracking people in the first place and does everything in its power to obstruct anything that weakens it.
Cookie Consent is from ePrivacy Directive and not GDPR.
GDPR us much, much more than cookie banners, that’s just an annoying not very significant distraction.
It had a very significant impact privacy, worker rights and such.
I really sometimes feels there is lot of Cognitive dissonance going on with GDPR. On one side there is hate for these banners. On other hand they also hate when say phone company sells their location data to whoever pays... Or when this data leaks.
So exactly how is that later part of selling data and gathering it unnecessarily supposed to be avoided if not by regulation like GRPR?
Maybe it is just entirely different people, but there must be some overlap.
Is it a joke?
I actually can't tell. The majority of these are literally examples of bad regulations. They have mass appeal without care for 2nd order effects.
The top of the page is a banner rallying against a regulation that would fit right in on the page.
And the fact that the site is a laggy mess just makes it a bit surreal.