Perfect symmetry in bargaining power is systematically impossible. Not having perfect symmetry does not mean its anti-competitive.

The facts are, most people don't mind software in their car an like live-updates.

And nothing about software in cars or cars is monopolistic in any way.

"It's not a complaint about water. It's a complaint about the wetness."

If capitalism requires constant vigilant government intervention to prevent monopolistic practices, anti-competitive markets, and asymmetric bargaining power, then it seems to me that this is absolutely a complaint about capitalism. If anything, your comment just makes the indictment more damning.

> The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.

This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).

And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.

> Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect.

I think its actively counterproductive. Criticising the entire economic system doesn't do anything. Complaining in broad strokes about stuff you can't change reduces your sense of agency over the world.

Also, if people believe that businesses must be sociopathic, they will make sociopathic choices in business. The belief reinforces the problem.

I don't want my vehicle connected at all. It's an open invitation to privacy reducing tech and exploits.

I want OTA updates in my car, but I want just benign ones, which add features for free as the software improves.

This kind of attitude is like saying "I don't want software that updates on my PC" when you are actually complaining about SaaS products.

When you're fighting the same enemy on a dozen battlefields, you won't stand a chance of winning until you understand that fact and go after the root cause.

Then don't frame the argument as "over-the-air updates are bad because of capitalism".

I love the over the air updates of my car!

There is no such thing as a communist economy.

The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.

Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.

The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.

There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.

Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.

Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.

Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).

So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.

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

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

Knowing the HN crowd, they would probably run over some family barely being able to make rent, then whine on the internet for the next 7 years about how much that event affected _them_ and _their_ feelings.

Does the article you cited cost money to read? I found a description on google scholar:

> Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries

> Reserves of cobalt and nickel used in electric-vehicle cells will not meet future demand. Refocus research to find new electrodes based on common elements such as iron and silicon, urge Kostiantyn Turcheniuk and colleagues.

I notice that the article was published in 2018. So I guess we only have to wait two more years to decide if it's right or not. Will we be out of cobalt and nickel by then? I'd be happy to take a bet with you, assuming you stand by the article you cited.

That's an atrociously written opinion piece presumeably written to cast shade on the EV industry.

Full article, for others: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/d41586-018-05752-3

My background is global geophysical exploration, primarily for mineral resources with some dabbling in the energy domain.

For a single example, this passage:

  High demand and prices are already encouraging some producers to cut corners and violate environmental and safety regulations.

  For example, in China, dust released from graphite mines has damaged crops and polluted villages and drinking water. In Africa, some mine owners exploit child workers and skimp on protective equipment such as respirators. Small artisanal mines, where ores are extracted by hand, often flout laws.

The tonnes of nickel and cobalt we see largely comes from big mines, big trucks, formal Occ Health and Safety regulations, etc.

It also commits the usual mistake of confusing "just in time" exploration results that firm up suspected deposits with sizes and density estimates for the commodities of interest with absolute limits on what is available over the cycle of time.

As demand increases further areas that are "known" (but not measured) get further technical inspection (magnetics, drill sampling, etc) and become new fresh reserves.

> This is why the left/progressive crowd is so disliked by the conservatives - they phrase any argument from an inherent view point that they assume is self-evident.

Please don't engage in political battle or post flamebait on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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To cause a huge annoyance, it could just randomly apply brakes for some time, which is probably much simpler than bypassing the pedal->brake.

Someone who can write out that code with that specificity should know there are countless technical and procedural ways to help prevent that sort of thing from actually making its way into consumer vehicles (or that OTA updates would be the only avenue to accomplish that). In a properly designed system, the only real fear here is a state-level attack. And I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.

"Antique" is a term for any vehicle that meets the local criteria for antique vehicle registration [0], usually older than 25-30 years. Your falcon is in the same club as those older vehicles now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antique_vehicle_registration