machination.org

I am not in the market to buy a new car, yet. But were I, my wife and I would be looking to EVs. When I entertain the hypothetical, I pause at my sense of the industry treating vehicles (all of them, seemingly, not just EVs) as an IoT appliance, tethered to the manufacturer one way or another, even if you don’t subscribe to extra services.

I believe the following should be rights:

• Purchase any new car and operate it without any dependency on “phoning home” for any reason.
• To be able to physically remove the component(s) of the car’s computer that allows it any connectivity to cellular, wifi, even GPS networks or any other methods of connecting to any other party.
• To apply software updates for free locally, as a customer, at least if they’d otherwise be delivered over the air for free, through a physical port.
• I think there needs to be some guarantee of continued software support, at least for security and bugs, for a reasonable estimate of the lifespan of the car.
• And I want to see right-to-repair legislation evolve to explicitly cover EVs to the extent practical—but aggressively. Maybe I can or can’t swap out the battery system myself, I don’t know. But there should still be reasonable self-service options guaranteed to owners.

Perhaps the consumer can leave the comms components in, as well (in order to use those functions for other purposes, or just to save themselves the trouble), and opt-out via software—but easy user-executed physical air gapping of a vehicle should be a right.

All of this for privacy, independence, sustainability and for security, especially when operating an EV past a manufacturer’s support window if it is otherwise safe.

I don’t think there’s a single EV on the market that voluntarily meets these privacy criteria. Am I wrong?

Who is working on this? Is there any draft legislation in Congress?

It’s also Fuck Bell Textron Day, at least for me.

I slowly became good at a sort of GTD style of managing my email inbox. Not quite Inbox Zero, but a healthy total count can be managed on a hand or two. Not as good with browser tabs. Painfully declaring tab bankruptcy today. All those novel links, essays, news articles… ‘til we meet again.

Me: I don’t like this timeline man. Not a new thought, but I tried to make peace with it and find sources of optimism or outcomes to hope for and angle towards and fuck fuck fuck.

Friend: Yup. 110%.

A good trick is not being too high on being present, when one is lucky enough to experience that, to not capitalize on what you might notice.

I don’t think I’ve learned that trick yet.

This morning The Childe held me to account on things I had promised to repair and he reminded me of a litany of things in the backlog that were not yet, or successfully, repaired.

He was sad and frustrated (I hadn’t yet fixed the loose, frayed thread from a not that made up a stuffed sea turtles nostril). I’ve done that now.

He wasn’t yet jaded by any of my missed deliveries. There was new hope in the form of more requests: could I cut the tag from yet another stuffy when he got home from school? Yes. (As he reenlists or gets new stuffys he’s be interested in stripping them of their tags of late.)

But then there was the toy police car, whose wheel had come off its axle (and since also lost its flashers). It was disappeared, I had hoped he had forgotten.

Then there is the blue plastic old American-style toy steam engine (if it were real, it might’ve burned wood rather than coal). Could I make another (6th or 7th) attempt to glue the cow-catcher back on? Could we try another glue? I don’t know.

There’s a helicopter which has lost a rotor blade (multiple glueings for it failed too) and a another half-dozen items that may or may not be stowed in corners by my desk or a drawer in the kitchen with some hope of resurrection or disappeared.

It is time for a reckoning, not so much with The Childe, but with myself in communicating to him the outputs of the functions of time and use: the consequences of quality of material and construction and of consideration during play, and the natural or designed end to all things. The impact of which is only mitigated by our choices, expectations, and our gratitude when noticing all we are getting what we wanted or maybe more … yeah … this isn’t all going to fly with a kindergartener. I barely have learned them truly, maybe.

I received gratitude in the form of a hug (and a kiss! on my arm!) when I affirmed his new and refreshed requests that had the most immediate of deadlines (today).

I want a good rock and roll radio station (or whatever is closest to that these days, I’m pretty ecumenical myself—just not looking for top 40 pop) that has news on the hour. I’m not sure this exists. (If it does, I’d love to hear about it and stream it.)

I have a memory of WETA FM (serving the Washington, DC area) playing classical (it still does) and having NPR news at the top of the hour. I’m not certain that is still their format. I’m looking for structure of that impression, though, with musical taste more like WEXT (out of New York’s Capital Region and also a public radio station, but with no news programming).

If I won the lottery, I’d go after a radio station license (FM, LPFM, hell AM) just to achieve this. (And I think I’d enjoy finding some real DJs—no alorithms—to blow my mind and widen others' minds too.) I’d definitely add some jazz too, if it were “my” station.

I haven’t been to a punk show in a while, let alone one at 9:30 in the morning. It was of course, all ages—and my Childe’s school Spring Pre-K/Kindergarten concert.

I continue to abhor military violence.

I can still understand how, by the rules the United States and Israel play by, Iran’s direct attack is entirely “fair.” With state violence, “fair” only illustrates how fucking insane the game is. Each side and their powerful are responsible for their own actions, but those who write the rules and effectively own the board or who have weighted the dice have more overall responsibility.

I think it is stupid, as are nearly all of the previous events that are justified by the previous event, and so on, and generally, previous military violence in human history. I leave some room for truly having to stop overwhelming occupation and attempts at it, but not uncritically, and not without a jaundiced eye to opportunities missed before and during such stages of conflict.

These cruxes in conflict remind me that it often seems nearly all those with the power of militaries at their hand do not care about human life, no matter the rhetoric of defense. If it seems that they genuinely do to some degree, it is too easy to find their parochial limits. These petty constraints resulting in classes of those worthwhile and those not are an ironic product of playing god.

Speaking of gods, the cynicism of these wars vociferously supported by the arch-conservatives of some of our world’s major religions belies their supposed faith in the expectation to be judged and have their swords beat into plowshares.

We do not need anyone’s god to do that, if we wanted.

This fatalism is not faith, it is the worst cynicism.