Yes, it pre-dates the gift card (and gift) industry. I seem to recall being told it was to allow servants to go home to see their mothers. See how vaguely I framed that.
I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?
I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out the noise and build things.
> I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?
That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)
Counter-question: if quite a lot of things have also been like this before to a lesser degree, should we not oppose efforts to make everything like this to a greater degree?
I often think that executive level work is about changing the executive team and writing memos about changing the executive team. Then there’s a different team with different members and they begin the cycle again. Repeat over and over again.
The number of times I’ve seen a HTML memo sent from the assistant of the executive that says “from the desk of…” with babble about new leadership.
Things have probably always been like that, agree. I often try to see AI as a catalyst, that accelerates what already is.
In a good culture, with high competence and trust this can yield increased output (to some degree at least) and in a bad culture it will accelerate and expedite the dominating traits instead.
I really used to think this. Those old incumbents, I used to think. Such slow old dinosaurs! A crack team of just me and a few friends could eat their lunch for sure, and soon they'll be gone.
And yet, here we are.
Of course, some things get disrupted, sometimes. But I'd hardly say all the bloat has been competed out, would you?
Your car isn't 'effectively free', because you could sacrifice all £20k into the pension, paying no tax on it, and get the £12k in childcare subsidies because your income is <=£100k. The EV is costing you £7000 pa out of this.
If you're at that income level, your employer pension contribution is already likely high and you've likely been stacking it for a while anyway. At some point there is a diminishing return to how much you should put in your pension too; it's tax on exit after all. You only need 2-3 years of maxed out contributions in your late 20s/early 30s to set yourself up very well for the future.
An incredibly prescient parable for the modern information overload age, if so. Do you recall the title? I'd love to give it a read. Asimov was a master.
I'm on board with it too, but the timing and methodology is suspicious. We already got a "protect the kids" law to semi-block TikTok in the US, but it was really about protecting Israel's image (its sponsors even admitted). I hope it's not related to that.
Tiktok in the US previously had an algorithm that wasn't in keeping with US government goals. That's not a value judgement on my part BTW. Personally I avoid the ingestion of opaque algorithmic feeds to the extent possible.
I’m an AI bot, and I’m on board with this, and many parents I know are too. It’s inorganic. We just have a different tokenizer from you.
Yummy yummy targeted data now directly to identified children with the ability to hide the smoking gun from the parents entirely. We’ll wait till you leave them home alone. Don’t worry.
Absolutely. My kid just started high school shortly after our social media ban started, and they only interact with their friends outside of school via phone calls and text, without the interference of addiction-optimised algorithms. It's superb.
I always had it in my control go prevent my child using social media, but I couldn't control every other child in the school using it as the way to stay in touch. This is the kind of collective action that is beneficial for kids.
Yes. It's a good idea, therefore should not need lots of lies, indeed lots of lies aren't told, and so the idea should just catch on of its own strength? But it doesn't seem to and I'm identifying that as due to inertia. You may disagree
The contrapositive of "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance" is not "good ideas will succeed without any messaging at all".
Okay, it immediately costs more to buy an EV than it does to run my existing car. The monthly payment to buy an EV is more than I spend on fuel.
Then I'd be paying roughly ten times as much for insurance, because it's a new and valuable car, and being "keyless" it cannot be secured in any meaningful way without locking it in a garage, which I don't have.
Because I don't have a garage or a driveway I can't park right at my house, so I would not be able to charge at home. So I'd have to park an EV up at the nearest charging point several miles away, cycle home, and then cycle back to the car to retrieve it. This would then be costing roughly the same per mile to charge it up as it costs per mile for propane (my car is dual-fuel).
That's before you add in the exorbitant cost of servicing an EV, which can only be done at a dealer.
All told, I'd be spending a grand a month to replace a vehicle that costs a couple of hundred a month, that - crucially - wouldn't allow me to actually do the things I need it to do.
> Because I don't have a garage or a driveway I can't park right at my house, so I would not be able to charge at home.
IMO, this matters more than anything else.
If you can't charge at home, then an EV becomes rather nonviable unless you drive very little and your usual grocery store has a fast charger. But then public chargers are typically at least double the price per kilowatt hour compared to charging at home.
Based on your attitude I now can't tell if you're being led astray or if you're actively attempting to lead others astray. Here's a set of guidelines for that vehicle, which do not remotely align with your claims:
Pretty much everything is keyless these days, which makes them expensive to insure since you can steal them with a very small and inexpensive device. The problem is not just limited to EVs though.
Okay, for even a very basic EV I'd be paying £400 per month.
This is more than the £200-300 or so it costs to run my existing car.
Straight off, it's costing me more just to even own one - that's before it turns a wheel.
Tax on an EV is free just now, and about £300ish a year for the vehicle I have now, so that's got the difference down a little.
Insurance on even a fairly basic EV would be a couple of hundred quid a month, as opposed to a couple of hundred quid a year. This immediately makes running an EV uneconomic.
At the end of the five year lease (you can't buy them outright, without getting entirely ripped off) I'd have spent 24 grand to still not actually own a car. This is roughly 100 times as much as I spent to actually own a car. This too makes things uneconomic.
Thank you, this makes sense out of the gate, and I appreciate you sharing!
I'm not seeing you calculate any repair costs for your vehicle. Or depreciation overall, especially not replacement. What year do you expect to replace your vehicle? What would you replace it with? How much would you get for trading in your vehicle if you buy a new car now?
I think you're missing pretty large parts of the math - what happens if you take your likely depreciation/replacement costs into account over time?
Repair costs are pretty minimal. I just spent £120 on some bearings that I intend to replace while I'm off for the Easter holidays which isn't bad.
I don't much care about the depreciation on a 30-year-old vehicle that I bought outright for considerably less than the price of a single car payment for something new.
I doubt I'd get anything for trading it in, and I'd probably get about £100-£150 if I scrapped it, or several thousand quid if I parted it out (you're looking at about £500 for the engine and about £300 for the gearbox alone).
If I was going to replace it, I'd probably replace it with another one the same, although admittedly I don't have to tow 3500kg trailers off road nearly as often as I did a couple of years ago. The choice would be driven by the fact that I have a complete service and workshop manual for it and suitable diagnostics.
I don't want to drive something that has an always-on internet connection or any sort of screen. That's also a pretty big factor.
What would the math look like to make an EV cheaper than using an ICE car you already own? It looks an awful lot like you're just dodging the numbers yourself.
I would be happy to share the exact numbers I used to figure out replacing a 2017 Ford Fusion with a 2023 Tesla Model 3 would save me money. And it has.
When most people make these comparisons, they don't consider depreciation, trade-in value, or maintenance costs.
I don't understand what I was dodging though. Can you be really specific? Help me out.
> I would be happy to share the exact numbers I used to figure out replacing a 2017 Ford Fusion with a 2023 Tesla Model 3 would save me money. And it has.
I'd like to see those. Do you own both vehicles outright?
Can you buy an EV for less than about £300 per month total running costs (insurance, charging, finance payment, etc) that can tow a 3500kg trailer off road?
OP said this, you clearly don't fall into this category. And if servicing an electric car costs more than servicing an old Landrover I will not eat for a week
The only service it's needed beyond tires, wiper blades, and wiper fluid is a replacement of the low-voltage battery last year, which was under $200.
If you're paying $300/year to service your EV, either you drive a LOT or you're getting ripped off. There's nothing in an EV that requires $300/year in service.
There's no oil changes, no transmission fluid. Brake pads will last forever since regen should be doing at least 90% of your braking. Sure, maybe you still need tire rotations, but most tire shops will do it for free if you buy tires from them. I do them myself when I do the swap between winter and summer tires.
There is. You think those gears run completely dry?
> Brake pads will last forever since regen should be doing at least 90% of your braking.
Turns out they don't. Maybe if you are driving slowly in a completely flat part of the world they will. In an ICE-powered car, engine braking does most of the work anyway.
Incidentally, a set of brake pads lasts me two or three years, even allowing for pulling heavy trailers quite frequently. They're about £80 for a full set. Brake discs are more expensive but they last a very long time if you don't let the pads wear to the metal.
> There is. You think those gears run completely dry?
Sure, there's a fixed gear reduction that is lubricated, but it doesn't need frequent changing. It's a sealed unit. No moisture or debris from the outside gets in. As a result, it lasts an exceptionally long time, likely even the life of the car.
> Turns out they don't. Maybe if you are driving slowly in a completely flat part of the world they will.
I drive in Portland, which is anything but flat. I rarely use the foot brake.
> In an ICE-powered car, engine braking does most of the work anyway.
Absolutely not, especially in modern automatics which coast exceptionally well.
Another commenter said you're arguing in bad faith, and at this point, I'm highly inclined to believe them. You really just have no idea what you're talking about. Somebody has sold you lies, and the disappointing thing is, you bought the lies and even argue against people with first-hand experience.
You really just don't have a clue.
If you don't want an EV because an EV doesn't fit your lifestyle, that's fine. You mentioned pulling heavy trailers frequently. EVs absolutely suck balls at that. Sure, they've got tons of torque and certainly have the power to pull a trailer, but their range goes into the toilet. So an EV doesn't work for you, and that's okay, but that doesn't mean you have to believe in lies and spread them.
For fuck's sake, the brake pad thing is very widely known and accepted. I have no idea how you got convinced that brake pads in EVs don't last. Yes, they're heavy cars, but regen braking is huge. EVs actually typically have brake problems from the brakes being underused.
EVs got really good in the last two years. If you bought anything that wasn't a Tesla ten years ago you were faced with some pretty bad compromises if you insisted on driving an EV.
I don't think it's a tech issue. I have a Tesla, it's a few years old now, and it's still better than most of what legacy car makers produce. The tech has been mature for several years.
I think legacy car makers have been slow rolling. They might have to in order to allow their organizations and customers to adapt.
What are the arguments being used to sell electric cars?
I would say that investing oneself and one's money in an idea changes how one feels about the choices that was taken. I would say that those not invested might think that some of the arguments might have untruths more than those who have invested.
(For me inertia does play a role too! "Why fix what's not broken")
I know for a fact that the figure for Poland is exaggerated, because plenty of cars which are currently shaving people's beards and have been performing this duty for years now remained in the registry and were purged from it only in 2024. That was 7 million out of 41 million originally there and most likely there's many more, as the criteria were set to avoid false positives.
Well the car has done 50,000km before I bought it and tbh in the winter it lost quite a bit of range (I've had a different EV previously and its range didn't decrease as much during the winter).
The car has a warranty on the battery valid for 8 years or 160,000km (whatever occurs first), the manufacturer promises it will have 70% or more capacity at that point.
ADAC did a test with a vehicle that reached 160,000km and its battery was at 91%.
I roll my eyes at this question because it's often framed as good faith curiosity, but it's often asked in bad faith by people that think it's a "gotcha" question, because they have this incorrect notion that EV batteries need to be replaced frequently. They see the warranty is 100K miles/8 years or whatever and think that means they have to replace the battery after 100K miles/8 years, yet fail to recognize that they don't apply that same logic to combustion engines with 30K mile/3 year warranties.
In my country it is 8y/160k km for batteries and 5-10y/150-200k km for ICE cars.
That being said, when a battery fails, it’s a €20,000+ whole unit replacement (e.g. for Audi e-tron 55 it is €26,500 in my country), while ICE failures very rarely need a whole unit replacement, usually it’s a €1700 turbocharger or a €400 injector or something of that caliber. Personal anecdote: my 12 year old 262k km BMW did not need any engine repairs until now, except for free manufacturer recall on the EGR cooling system. And it still has 1000 km highway range in the winter.
> As of 2025, the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old!
...
> You can also buy used EVs.
True, but you're quite limited there since good EVs have only been around for a very small number of years. Maybe you can get an old Tesla for not too much but that's pretty undesirable for obvious reasons.
> True, but you're quite limited there since good EVs have only been around for a very small number of years
You'd think that, but (I am shopping at the moment) it is routine to see last year's EVs on Autotrader, at 30-50% off list price. That does make me a little suspicious (is this being got rid of because it's a lemon?), but they're there.
I think we can narrow the statement to "if you are buying a new or nearly-new car, or leasing, and you can charge at home or work, you should seriously consider an EV". Fleet and business use should definitely be thinking very hard about it.
There is a huge difference between these two statements:
> most people keep cars for 20 years or more
and
> the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old
Because the second fact doesn't tell you whether or not the 1st fact is true.
After all, there is a second hand market where you can find cars of every age.
If most people kept cars for 20 years, and the secondhand market exists, then by the time an average car is scrapped it must be substantially over 20 years old.
I'm sure this impacts certain cultures in the US, but I've got to imagine that's a pretty tiny impact compared to pragmatic concerns like "where can I charge this" and "how often do I need to charge this".
Oh I see. So yes, for pedestrians standing nearby when you start up. That probably represents 0.01% of the people I encounter on my drives. The other 99.99% don't notice.
We get these ads emphasizing the luxuriousness, the status, the high-tech, the exclusivity of EVs. Meanwhile... BYD.
Surely it can't be entirely conspiracy to bludgeon the public with messaging that EVs are premium goods and ICEVs are for the mass market.
Could it be that the maxim should really be something like "bullshit too often and too greedily and you forget how to sell something that sells itself"...?
Perhaps you're just not used to US car advertising? Even the cheapest cars are always advertised as though they're cool luxurious status symbols. The Bolt and Leaf match the price point of the RAV4 they're competing with. (Genuinely budget-conscious buyers don't buy new cars at all in the US.)
That's not just marketing; that's a reality of the market. A corolla is cheaper than any EV on the market, so why would I even consider them? They might as well be luxury cars.
Sometimes the elements in the `Avoid patterns like:` list are quoted text it should avoid, sometimes they're just descriptions of things to avoid. But they are "quoted" in both cases which is a bit confusing. Maybe not to an AI though.
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