> It comes as EVs are facing scrutiny from safety watchdogs around the world after a number of deadly incidents, including two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
You had one job, door handles... but being made sleek and sexy and unlike normal door handles also made you a fucking liability.
People wonder "Why is there a law for this stupid thing, it's a regulatory hassle", and yet time and time again it comes around there was at least some partially legitimate reason said rule exists.
Simply put vehicles are at the point where we need a rule that says "The doors can be unlocked and open if the battery is dead" Full stop, no ifs, ands, or buts.
One of my unfavorite random car regulations is that as of some time in this millennium, cars sold in the USA may not have required lighting on movable bodywork.
This bans new cars from having clamshell bodywork like that found on classics like the Jaguar E-type and Ford GT40. I suspect it also results in many cars having narrower truck/hatch openings than they would have if they could put mandated lights on the trunk lid or rear hatch.
It's not hard to imagine the partially legitimate reason that on occasion, someone will drive with the trunk open, but do we really need a law about it?
> It's not hard to imagine the partially legitimate reason that on occasion, someone will drive with the trunk open
No, it's a much more serious and likely reason -- people stopping on a highway at night, getting out, and opening their trunk for some reason (like a spare tire, fluids, etc)?-- then their lights (and the reflectors in the lamp housings) are pointed at the sky.
Or, movable bodywork is more prone to be misaligned during normal operation.
Headlights get out of alignment sometimes. I posit that likelihood goes up if the lights are themselves mounted on a hood/door/whatever that can also go out of alignment.
He was on the right track. I put truck trailer tape on the inside lid of the trunk, not so visible when in normal operation. All of our motorcycles, OTOH, have strips of trailer tape right down the saddlebags because safety over aesthetics.
Some automakers have chosen to meet the standard while keeping their lights on movable panels by placing additional lights/reflectors in the bumper to meet requirements.
Your post reminded me of a video on the an imported TVR Tuscan, filmed by Doug DeMuro where he covers this too. The TVR Tuscan is one of those cars where if the rear trunk is open, you can’t see the turn signal lights. In the video it is claimed that because of that, by laws in the UK, the trunk must have a triangular exclamation point sign as a safety precaution to let other drivers know when the vehicle is immobile.
That particular blood was probably people stopped at night with the trunk open to access a spare tire or tools. And then there was more blood because sometimes those people forget to leave their lights on, or their lights don't function because the battery has died, so we got more regulation requiring ugly reflectors.
This has become a mantra, but it's not always true. Automatic shoulder belts, for example were a terrible idea, and 5 MPH bumpers were more about repair costs than reducing injuries.
It is not the government's job to enumerate every specific brand of stupid design that may be harmful multiplied by every class of product nor should it be.
If you want to do that stuff, do it with a performance test or criteria, not with stupid whack-a-mole rules. And don't think that weasel wording the test to the same effect is any better. If you want to do this the not stupid way you need to actually do the hard work and figure out what the over-arching general case performance characteristics need to be.
With better styling cues and design that make it obvious how to use the Tesla handles (and all the degrees of copycats) it wouldn't be an issue. But that isn't the kind of sleek sext angular bullshit modern car designers like so it never got made and here we are.
Game it out - if you issue guidelines, people abuse them, then government agencies get in trouble (isn't it your job to stop this kind of thing?), so government agencies issue strict rules.
Bureaucracies have many fathers, the society we have is the result of conflict and incentives.
>Game it out - if you issue guidelines, people abuse them,
You wind up with smaller gaps with the qualitative and rules based approach than you do with the whack-a-mole list.
>then government agencies get in trouble (isn't it your job to stop this kind of thing?), so government agencies issue strict rules.
Government agencies tend to grow in scope and resources when they screw up. Even when punished, it's not like they go bankrupt and everyone is out of a job.
>Bureaucracies have many fathers, the society we have is the result of conflict and incentives.
And ideology. You can incentivize the Taliban all you want they won't send their girls to school. I postulate that the failure of american regulatory to systems to regulate without sucking is driven in large part by what goes on in the heads of the subset of people who spec out, create and operate said systems.
>enumerate every specific brand of stupid design that may be harmful
As commonly said by the libertarian at heart, right up until the point their loved one gets injured or killed, then they are at the forefront of regulation.
> But that isn't the kind of sleek sext angular bullshit modern car designers like
Who likes safety and security? These features commonly make every day use more difficult. Who needs unblocked fire exits, that takes up too much room in the building. Who needs a common interface for a safety critical device, that removes the 'cool' factor.
The video that made the rounds on Reddit yesterday really hits home how quickly an EV can become a death trap when the doors can no longer be opened from the outside
I've owned dozens of vehicles and I've only had locks or windows fail on one of them -- and both failed on this vehicle: It was a Ford with manual locks and windows. Turns out if you design something poorly enough even mechanical parts can fail. Point being: quality of construction matters more to reliability than anything else.
I tend to keep cars for decades. My Ford for 35 years. The manual windows and doors never failed. My dodge is 50 years old. Doors and windows still work.
I've had three cars where the electric windows failed and two where the electric door locks failed.
Would you believe me if I said the police aren't worried about it because even if they put in the effort and catch thieves, they won't be prosecuted very hard. Since 2014, "low-value shoplifting" (under £200) in England and Wales can only be tried in the Magistrate's court and have a maximum sentence of 6 months (now ~1 year since 2024), no matter how many summary offenses you're convicted of. So if you steal under £200 of stuff, hundreds of times over, it's the same outcome. You'll be back on the street very soon.
The government is currently seeking to amend that:
> The bill will remove the perceived immunity granted to shop theft of goods to the value of £200 or less, by repealing Section 22A of the Magistrates’ Court Act 1980 and the legislation that inserted it (section 176 of Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014).
> This will ensure that all offences are tried as ‘general theft’ (an either way offence with a maximum custodial sentence of seven years), instead of summarily in the magistrates’ court, unless the defendant elects for jury trial
"Either-way" here means that the offence can be tried either as a summary or indictable offence; an indictable offence can carry much more serious penalties.
I don't disagree, and I would add that the court system is so clogged up that one might not even end up behind bars at all - because by the time the hearing is finally scheduled, the perp might well be on another continent.
Still, the public would appreciate some effort - if anything to actually get some of their stuff back, if not to inconvenience thieves.
Linking against every distro-supplied glibc to distribute your own software is as unrealistic as getting distributions to distribute your software for you. The model is backwards from what users and developers expect.
But that's not the point I'm making. I'm attacking the idea that they're "working just fine" when the above is a bug that nearly everyone hits in the wild as a user and a developer shipping software on Linux. It's not the only one caused by the model, but it's certainly one of the most common.
It's hardly unrealistic - most free software has been packaged, by each distro. Very handy for the developer: just email the distro maintainers (or post on your mailing list) that the new version is out, they'll get round to packaging it. Very handy for the user, they just "apt install foo" and ta-da, Foo is installed.
That was very much the point of using a Linux distro (the clue is in the name!) Trying to work in a Windows/macOS way where the "platform" does fuck-all and the developer has to do it all themselves is the opposite of how distros work.
User now waits for 3rd party "maintainers" to get around to manipulating the software they just want to use from the 1st party developer they have a relationship with. If ever.
I understand this is how distros work. What I'm saying is that the distros are wrong, this is a bad design. It leads to actual bugs and crashes for users. There have been significant security mistakes made by distro maintainers. Distros strip bug fixes and package old versions. It's a mess.
And honestly, a lot of software is not free and won't be packaged by distros. Most software I use on my own machines is not packaged by my distro. ALL the software I use professionally is vendored independently of any distribution. And when I've shipped to various distributions in the past, I go to great lengths to never link anything if possible that could be from the distro, because my users do not know how to fix it.
distributions started out with solving the problem that most developers at that time didn't even bother to build ready to run packages. they couldn't, because there were to many different architectures that not everyone had access to. so developers had to rely on users to build the applications for themselves. distributions then organized around that to make this easier for users. that's how the port system in BSD came about. linux distributions went a step further and built distributable binaries.
the problem was to not predict that developers would want more control over the build of their applications, which, thanks to architectures consolidating, became easier because now a single binary will reach the majority of your userbase. and the need to support multiple versions of the same library or app in the package manager. that support should have been there from the start, and now its difficult to fix that.
so it's unfair to say distros are wrong. yes, it's not an ideal design, but this is more of an accident of history, some lack of foresight, and the desire to keep things simple by having only the newest version of each package.
there is a conflict between the complexity of supporting multiple package versions vs the complexity of getting applications to work with the specific library versions the distro supports. when distros started out it looked like the latter would be better for everyone. distributions tended to have the latest versions of libraries and fixing apps to work with those benefited the apps in most cases.
Literally none of these were foiled by the security circus we all have to go through.
If anything, they are evidence that serious attempts are foiled by intelligence services long before the perpetrators get anywhere near an airport, and the others were just incompetent idiots.
Nonetheless, I hope you recognise that incompetent idiots beget more incompetent idiots, if they think they'll get away with it. You don't want e.g. a spate of bank robberies, by idiots who've heard that rubbing lemon juice on your face makes you invisible to cameras. It doesn't matter that they'll get obviously get caught, the problem is a spate of idiots attempting bank robberies (because they're filled with confidence they'll succeed) could easily get people killed.
I don't like security theatre either, and clearly the whole thing is a job creation program and an excuse for vendors to sell flashy scanner devices. But you need visible deterrents, even if most people know they're theatre.
They also act as reassurance for idiots who wouldn't fly otherwise. Idiots' money spends just as well as clever people's money, and there's a lot more idiots out there than clever people.
Because we live in a society with a free press, we have the chattering classes asking "what can we do about this threat?", and government is expected to respond. People don't like to hear from the politician "you're idiots, we don't need that, you are no less safe if we do nothing", they like to hear "we're doing XYZ to address this threat, how clever and wonderful you all are, dear citizens, for recognising it. Your safety is my top priority", then we get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
Governments successfully managed this before. It was called Local Loop Unbundling.
They recognised where the monopoly was: the incumbent telcos with millions of customers that had to go through them to get anywhere else.
So the government insisted that such incumbents make available space in their exchanges for third parties (not for free!), and to allow their customers to use the third parties for telephone and/or internet service, rather than themselves.
A similar argument and regulation could be made today. It could only apply to ISPs with a significant number of endpoint customers. It could require that the ISP make peering available to third parties, at the third party's cost, but the resulting transit should be settlement-free. It could require that if a peer asks the ISP to upgrade, because the ISP is deliberately underprovisioning, the ISP is compelled to allow the third party to pay reasonable costs to upgrade both sides (so the ISP can't sit on its hands, can't brazen it out, and can't set an impossible price)
The Scottish court system uses Royal Mail Signed For to send citations, I believe it makes two attempts to deliver, and won't consider the citation delivered unless the named addressee signs for it.
...on the other hand, if you don't respond to citations e.g. for a criminal case, they might then escalate by issuing a warrant for your arrest.
Looking at the English civil courts, I'm having trouble parsing their rules:
My reading is that either the court sends the summons (claim form) and comes to its own conclusion if it has been served or not, but if you choose to do it or have a process server do it, you have to submit a certificate of service to the court. If you do that, all it says they require is the method and date you sent it, no proof it got delivered!
Furthermore, rule 6.18 says that if the court posts the claim form itself, it will inform you if the form is returned to them undelivered... but will deem it "served" anyway, provided you gave them the correct address?
The UK is not alone in using traffic cameras to enforce speed restrictions. There was a funny example in Germany where their automated cameras blur the face of any passenger... leaving them to be unable to see who was driving a UK left-hand-drive car with Animal from the Muppets in their passenger seat: https://boingboing.net/2008/10/27/german-traffic-cops.html
your source...is a union? really? you can look at ONS numbers yourself (and you will see this isn't the case).
Scotland has seen a drastic reduction in police numbers (unfortunately for you, not a Tory government :( oh well) despite record government funding levels. Labour's plan appears to be attempting the same trick with consolidation of forces, which should allow massive reductions in numbers. In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England, and the expected time to respond to car accidents is usually 6-12 hours (this includes situations with serious injuries).
There is a lot more going on here than funding because government has never had more resources. The Tories, to their credit, actually put money in but (even then) the results were no better.
Also, in response to original comment, I am not sure why you think the Police are competent. Much of the policing function of a few decades ago not lies with private companies. Police numbers are generally high but the level of output has never been lower. You are seeing this in multiple areas of the public sector, public-sector output hasn't increased since 1997 whilst govt spending to GDP has basically doubled. The police have massive structural issues with their remit in the UK because of demographic change, and it is generally seen as a career for people of low ability resulting in fairly weak performance. It doesn't feel complex but than you realise that people don't understand that a politician looking to get elected might say it is even simpler. Does anyone actually work at a company where more spending increases results? I have never seen this to be the case. If anything, more spending seems to lead worse results.
> In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England
Are you high, or did an AI write this?
Area of Scotland: 80,231 km^2
Area of England: 132,932 km^2
So on some days, in Scotland, there is one traffic car covering an area that is larger than Scotland. OK, where's it patrolling? Or are you saying Police Scotland only sends out 60% of one car to cover the whole country?
2010-2018...when did the Tories time in government end? Based on your comment, I am assuming 2018.
Lol, quite the pedant. To be clear though, yes when they are short-staffed they only have one car actually on patrol for the whole country (iirc, the actual full staffing policy overnights is two cars...which you can see has been covered by the media).
Traffic was consolidated into Police Scotland so there is only one police force, and so there aren't local forces patrolling a local area. I believe the total number of traffic police is something like 400 now (which is mostly not people on patrol) and so, overnight around holidays, the policy is to have two cars which turns into less than that on some occasions.
> In Scotland, there are some days when there is one traffic car covering an area the size of England,
Scotland is smaller than England, so this makes no sense.
Furthermore, anyone who drives regularly in Scotland knows this to be completely false - there are plenty of traffic cops around (sometimes incognito too), and they are sometimes even seen waiting in rural and semi-rural areas.
Again, there are not. The number has fallen significantly...I am not sure what you are arguing with (or why). You can just check because the number of police and the number of traffic police is reported. If you just Google, you will see that the current staffing level for overnight in Scotland is two cars for traffic police.
I live in a rural area, I have done so for two/three decades. When I moved here, you very often saw police doing speed checks because I live in an affluent area and the police would come out if you asked the right people. I don't think I have seen that for fifteen years. Again though, the data is that the number is way down since consolidation...which was the point and stated aim of the policy.
Hilarious to see pearl-clutching when people point out the SNP has been doing this after complaining about the Tories. This is why the UK is so shit, reality doesn't matter, just politics.
> Hilarious to see pearl-clutching when people point out the SNP has been doing this after complaining about the Tories. This is why the UK is so shit, reality doesn't matter, just politics.
I'm not sure where this tirade came from; I wasn't arguing in favour of any political party.
But getting back to the matter of traffic police - I have eyes, and I can see traffic cops with them. I have family in the force elsewhere in Scotland too, so I know that what you're saying simply isn't true. I really don't know why you are making this false claim.
> Back in 1977, Schulz insisted that the cartoonist's role was mostly to point out problems rather than trying to solve them, but there was one lesson that people could take from his work. He said: "I suppose one of the solutions is, as Charlie Brown, just to keep on trying. He never gives up. And if anybody should give up, he should."
... provided you own land that the government allows for agricultural use. And most people can't afford to own enough land to be self-sufficient.
So you're not free to grow your own vegetables either; just like fishing, farming is regulated to manage limited resources. Things get ugly fast when you start raising pigs in your city apartment, or start polluting with pesticide runoff, or start diverting your neighbour's water supply...
You can grow some amount of produce, if you have a garden, but a lot of people don't have their own garden, and if they do it's quite small. To be entirely self-sufficient, you need quite a large area of land just to grow enough food for the entire year.
Most people don't have that, and can't afford that, hence why they take the route of earning money some other way, and using the money to buy food made by others, from supermarkets. They can supplement their diet with home-grown fruit and veg, but few can sustain their family on home-grown produce.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp37g5nxe3lo
> It comes as EVs are facing scrutiny from safety watchdogs around the world after a number of deadly incidents, including two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
You had one job, door handles... but being made sleek and sexy and unlike normal door handles also made you a fucking liability.
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