> Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.
I think that's the already the ultimate test for any regulation to pass, as it's up against a huge industry trying to prevent costs of compliance.
Of course, the calculation is not to put a price on a human and then compare this against the cost provided by e.g. a car-company.
When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"
I know the economy is always important, but human society also shouldn't be taken for granted.
> When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"
We live in a society, etc, etc. I think it's worthwhile, or even _more_ important, to look at how these impact other people.
In some hypothetical deregulated world, I can choose to buy a car without seatbelts, air bags, ABS/TCS, reverse camera, etc and take that risk on.
My neighbour doesn't get to choose whether or not they want to take on the risk of me backing over their child. The other people on the road don't get to choose whether they take on the risk of me losing control of my vehicle and slamming into them.
The value question isn't purely economic. Regulations that force a general societal care and consideration over selfish individual choices have value in _allowing us to have a society_.
>I think that's the already the ultimate test for any regulation to pass, as it's up against a huge industry trying to prevent costs of compliance.
I think it mostly cancels out since the pro regulation side is inevitably bolstered by those who'll sell more shit if alternative goods get worse for the money and those who make a buck on the compliance process.
>When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"
What if it turns out that at the societal level that letting airbags, abs, traction control, etc, etc, etc, be optional is actually better because it puts more people into cheaper newer cars that benefit from other safety engineering even if they don't have airbags and all the expensive electronic stuff?
This sort of stuff wherein one tries to anchor the discussion around whole lives (or some other easy to measure thing that makes for good appeals to emotion) and hand wave away anything else is a huge part of the problem.
The core purpose of regulation is to create better lives for society as a whole.
Human lives being lost is usually considered negative for a society, but just a number in economics for insurances, car-companies, etc.
It's an annoying hindrance for companies to be forced into contributing to the well-being of society, they prefer to decide on that by themselves.
Meanwhile, governments suck at communication with their citizens, and their message is drowned by companies who do marketing every day. So the growing assumption also fueled by companies is that we could have much better stuff if the market wouldn't be regulated.
And yeah, there is surely regulation which should be reviewed, but I don't believe this should be done by putting a price on a human life.
I don't think we would have bike helmets on the street and seatbelts in cars if they wouldn't have been required by regulation, driving down the cost of development and production and making them available for everybody.
Even vice-versa: If I'm involved in a car-accident, I would also want the OTHER party to have a seatbelt or a helmet.
Looking how "disruptive companies" find ways to do stupid shit because it's not properly regulated (e.g. skipping mechanical door-handles in car-backseats, creating "digital markets" without equal competition,...) tells me that ESPECIALLY these days empowering regulators to make good decisions and communicate better on them would be more important than having "cheaper newer cars".
We’re also incredibly adaptable - seatbelts and helmets have become so standard that many feel “naked” if they don’t use them. It’s likely if we required 5 point harnesses and head-and-neck-devices (HAND) like the race cars do we’d get used to it relatively quickly.
But each of those things has a real cost, one that is borne by each and every individual, whereas the cost of NOT having them is only borne by the unfortunate.
> We show that laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat.
It's almost Darwinistic: Offspring has an increased potential of survival and faces less threats, so reproduction is organically adjusted to prevent overpopulation.
Forwarded donations are not tax-deductible (in the US); That's a lie that's been spread around the internet. If you give a company money with the express purpose of them forwarding it to someone else (the company acts as a "collection agent"), it's not their income or donation.
So it would be actually financially _better_ for Valve to donate a portion of their revenue and state "we will donate x% of the price to yy", as THEN it would be tax-deductible for them
It's not better, because being revenue and donated away and tax-deductible all cancels out. It's as if they never saw the money, just like forwarding it.
And even if it was, all "tax deductible" would mean is that they wouldn't have to pay taxes on that money. Which, you know, they don't get to spend. So it's kind of defacto tax deductible in the same sense that my friend's income is "tax deductible" for me, I guess.
A lot of people online have convinced themselves that "tax deductible" means that the government would refund you that dollar amount. That's a "tax credit"... If forwarded donations were a tax credit, then yes, rounding up is giving the company "free" money! But you're not.
Isn't the role of the VW MIB2 (as in "Modular Infotainment Baukasten") explicitly the infotainment part of the vehicle (and NOT the instrument cluster, cruise-control, etc.)?
I never had an issue with those, as their reach is isolated (or "limited" as people would say today) to the infotainment part of the car. It couldn't even take control of the climate system back when I had one.
Can't argue much about MIB3, it is just a few years old and a child of the Tesla Software-defined-car era (albeit still tries to uphold Volkswagen's DNA of strictly separating roles of all components, partly making it the mess it is...)
> "I’d consider paying double the price of the Neo for a MacBook with similar specs (but more RAM and better I/O) that weighed 2.0 pounds or less. I’d buy such a MacBook not to replace my 14-inch MacBook Pro, but to replace my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro as my “carry around the house” secondary computer."
> "As it stands, I might buy a Neo for that same purpose, 2.7-pound weight be damned."
The wonders of the closed ecosystem / walled-garden, where you don't have to face competition on equal terms, because you already locked-in your customers...
yeah, I expect they use the camera as a make-shift ambient light-sensor, just with a lower frequency than a illumination sensor would be used (due to power consumption impact), and with overall lower accuracy (lower dynamic range, reduced FoV, very bad accuracy in low-light/bright conditions,...).
This pretty much matches the described experience in the article that Gruber had, as he mentions he had to adjust brightness up and down at least twice every day...
Not to be devils's advocate here, but I'd suspect Apple is aiming for a smaller retirement window for this kind of product.
It's basically a Laptop engineered in the iPhone/iPad space of the company, it's only natural for Apple to target a shorter lifecycle.
8GB RAM is maybe the best way to achieve that, many of the MacBook Neo buyers of today will be very compelled to upgrade to a newer (or higher-tier) model in ~3 years from now...
If the Neo would have 16GB of RAM today, it would be harder to justify an upgrade in 3 years from now, when the common entry-tier for laptops is likely still at 16GB...
Reminds me of the recent experiment which found that providing the works of Harry Potter to an LLM to answer questions will not cause it to process the books, because the LLM already knows enough about them to answer everything regardless.
So many of those models are probably already aware of the entire lore of skynet and all its details, it is just not considered "actionable information" for any model yet...
I think that's the already the ultimate test for any regulation to pass, as it's up against a huge industry trying to prevent costs of compliance.
Of course, the calculation is not to put a price on a human and then compare this against the cost provided by e.g. a car-company.
When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"
I know the economy is always important, but human society also shouldn't be taken for granted.
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