Comment by ericmay

Comment by ericmay 3 days ago

12 replies

Nothing you can realistically do about it. In America car ownership for most people is mandatory. It’s unfortunate we don’t have alternatives if you disagree with car manufacturers extra “features”.

abdullahkhalids 3 days ago

On the other hand, it is not mandatory to vote for politicians who continue to make our cities car centric.

You are not doing anything wrong if you are forced into buying a car due to the circumstances of your living. But voting to continue that makes your culpable.

  • ycomb-acct 3 days ago

    So your plan would be to get rid of cars? Wow it's almost like government regulation imposed to dissuade people from free travel via personal automobiles through a thorough enshitification is working in the direction of their intent.

    You mean they're actually asking for 15 minute cities? Yes sir, they are. Very good.

    • ericmay 2 days ago

      Well it's not free, we pay a lot of money to subsidize the highways and roads. If you like your highways and roads and want that freedom, what's better than having fewer cars on the road? That's one of the things that diverting some public funds from highways to other transportation options helps achieve. For those who could get to work or perhaps get to the grocery store by walking, biking, hopping on a bus, or taking a tram/street car that's cars off the road to make your life better.

drnick1 3 days ago

The alternative is to be aware of this abuse and unplug the cellular modem. It requires more or less effort depending on the car, but it can and should be done.

  • ericmay 3 days ago

    It’s not a good alternative though because it puts you into a losing competition with the manufacturers. Take out the cellular modem? Next one requires connectivity to drive the car and so forth.

    You could “ban” it, but the amount of effort required to raise public awareness for that and actually have our dickhead representatives due things like that is basically the same amount of effort, perhaps more, as building better cities and transportation modes.

    We build and subsidize highways, we could do the same with other methods of transportation and have competition instead of big gubmint cars.

    • drnick1 3 days ago

      In many parts of the US, individual vehicles are the only viable mode of transportation. In fact, even in the NYC metro area, a car is pretty much indispensable, unless maybe you live in Manhattan and only rely on home delivery for groceries and the like. If you ever want to do anything outside of the city, you need a car.

      • ericmay 3 days ago

        Right which leaves us without alternatives and beholden to car manufacturers and their collective decisions.

    • vitaflo 3 days ago

      >Take out the cellular modem? Next one requires connectivity to drive the car and so forth.

      Find the cellular antenna and replace it with a dummy load. The car will think it's sending the data just fine but all it's doing is turning radio waves into heat.

      • ericmay 3 days ago

        And so on and so forth up until it’s just not worth the hassle as it even is today for most people. This isn’t a good problem to be solved with hacking. It’s a public policy problem.

otterley 3 days ago

We could lobby together for new federal and state laws to prohibit this kind of tracking without the affirmative consent of the purchaser—or, at the very least, make opt-out as easy as sending an email.