if your digital ID is tied to your phone (which is eventually where things are going), that is exactly what is going to happen. There is no reason that it would stop somewhere in the middle.
Why would anyone propose, and why would anyone agree to, Digital/Physical ID becoming mandatory for mundane transactions? It doesn't make any sense and it would never fly.
> It's that it's a permission system that can be instantly updated and centrally managed by people that have legal authority to spy on you.
How is it a permission system? It's a way to prove your identity safely, online. No proposal/implementation that I'm aware of (maybe outside of China, but I'm not familiar enough) that actually conditionally does so based on preconditions and blocks you from actions. It would probably be actively illegal to do so in multiple countries.
> But these things are not tied into every aspect of your life (your bank doesn't necessarily know how many miles you've driven this year)
I mean, that's not true. LexisNexis is the company many car vendors send your driving data to, to be bought by insurance companies to do adaptive pricing. Banks don't necessarily need that data, but if they did, they could buy it too.
Which is why it's better if it's the government - there can be laws, regulations, pressure, judicial reviews to ensure that only legitimate uses are fine, and no such discrimination is legal. Take a look at credit scores in the US - they're run by private for profit companies, sold to whoever wants them, so credit scores have become a genuine barrier to employment, housing, etc. If this were managed by a state entity (like in France, Banque de France stores all loan data, and when someone wants to give you a loan, they check with them what your current debts are, and if you have defaulted on any recently; that's the only data they can get and use), there could be strong controls on who accesses the data and uses it for what.
> How is it a permission system? It's a way to prove your identity safely, online.
Can someone revoke your ability to prove your identity? To pick an example, say, the far right wins an election and decides that trans people need to go back to their birth genders, and revokes the validity for the identifiers of anyone that has transitioned.
Racists deserve free speech, and our society is better for it. When racists are silenced, anti-racists become complacent, stupid, and ironically, racist because they lose the ability to recognize racism.
Defend everyone's free speech. Don't require the necessity of unfair accusations. The destruction of people's lives over unfair accusations is simply a failure of due process and the desire of people to join a mob for safety. You should hate that no matter what you think about the right to free expression and belief. Anyone who would earnestly defend mob justice led by demagogues and supported by people afraid to be targeted next has a particular demagogue who they back.
> Racists deserve free speech, and our society is better for it.
To the extent that our society is better for extending free speech to racists it has nothing to do with them deserving anything, but with the costs of empowering any fallible human institution to deny anyone things that that particular group of people do not deserve, and the cost of failing to make that distinction is being susceptible to being convinced that some other group truly does not deserve it and therefore some institution should be empowered to identify members of that group and deny it to them.
Wild how you're weaving a tale about mob justice when someone says something against racists.
Also, it's logically incoherent how you're portraying mob justice as a bad thing while rejecting governmental regulation. The entire idea of the state having a monopoly on violence is to prevent mob justice, or individuals taking the law into their own hands. Basic civics.
I'm generally in favor of free speech, but there are thorny issues associated with it that "free speech absolutists" aren't interrogating because they stop at "racists should be able to say what they want".
One is free to say racist things. Others are free to mock them in return.
Racists are not free from consequences. If they don't like others freely expressing themselves in return, at the rhetorical and emotional expense of the racist, racists can freely express themselves in their home.
You're advocating a very reductive approach to free speech.
There are a lot of definitions of what that entails. Some people have landed in hot water for making comments about what's happened in Gaza and accused of that.
In economics 101 one of the first things they teach you is supply and demand, and inelastic goods. Food and healthcare are the two main examples of inelastic goods, where demand is heavily disconnected from supply. There are of course nuances (you can eat just beans and rice, or do the bare minimum of healthcare/medicine to survive), but both are not things you have a lot of choice to consume or not.
> So you are bearing the full cost of extremely high quality health insurance in a western country.
Overinflated imaginary cost*
There is no way that a medical consultation of 15 minutes actually cost $32k. Examples like this are aplenty, but only from the US. My favourite one was an itemised bill for birth that included a $1k for skin contact with the newborn.
> caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers
Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.
This isn't a problem because any given server can support hundreds or thousands of weekly players, so only 0.1% of your playerbase needs to run a server.
We had this, it worked, for years. I'm baffled by all the posters saying it won't, because it did.
There are games I play were one of the players' machines becomes the server. In some it's transparent to them, you just join their world or lobby, in others it's explicit and you even have to input the host's IP to enter.
Standalone servers you need to run separately and care for are much more rare.
It's not the 2000s anymore - you don't have to run/rent "hardware" and worry about "connectivity" and whatnot. For most games that offer dedicated servers, there are services with easy to use panels with fancy colored buttons and everything.
I never ran a server back in the day but I still benefitted from community run servers where decisions about banning were done by volunteer admins. These days with centralized servers it has to be automated.
It allows running non/semi-trusted workloads with isolation. Pretty useful to onboard applications into a proper scheduler with all bells and whistles without having to containerise, but still with decent levels of isolation between them.
> The only reason why cars are the size and shape they are is because ICE engines couldn't be made smaller. Electric engines on the other hand are small enough that I can have the chassis of a fully functioning car be light enough to lift by one man.
Nope, the Smart existed for quite a while. Safety standards made cars slightly bigger (e.g. the new Renault Twingo is bigger than the original), but modern American "cars" are massive because that's what marketing has convinced Americans it's what they need. American vehicle manufacturers are pretty terrible at everything, and efficiency standards nudge them that way anyways, so making massive cars with high margins is a good deal for them.
In Europe there are SUVs, but the average car is a VW Golf or a Renault Clio sized. They are pretty decently sized, good visibility, can fit a family of 4, etc. Yeah, you can't haul a 50 ton campervan offroading up to Kilimanjaro, sure, but that's not what 99% of car trips are for.
> I think we will see small, light weight and intrinsically pedestrian safe cars made of tubes and canvas replace the heavy monstrosities we have now.
> that's what marketing has convinced Americans it's what they need
Is there some kind of objective analysis which supports this claim? It seems more likely that people vote with their wallet, and bigger wins out a lot of the time. It's hardly an American manufacturer thing, either, Japanese cars have reliably gotten bigger year after year as well.
> Is there some kind of objective analysis which supports this claim
It's a bit hard to have objective research on marketing and public perceptions. But how else do you explain all the marketing in that regard, and the fact that Americans, on average, even urbanites, keep buying massive pickup trucks, the majority of which are never used for anything more than a commuter vehicle for 1, maybe 2 occupants? Even in rich countries with very outdoorsy people (Switzerland, Nordics, hell, the Netherlands has camping as a national sport, and during summertime they do mass migrations in towed campers and campervans towards the south of France, Italy, Spain), very few people buy trucks.
Marketing, an arms race, manufacturers not offering much else because their marketing works, Americans being very aspirational about what they'll do with their vehicles, idk.
> It's hardly an American manufacturer thing, either, Japanese cars have reliably gotten bigger year after year as well.
Japanese vehicles in the US or everywhere? Cars in general have been getting bigger because of safety features, but American monstrosities with lower visibility than literal tanks are an almost uniquely American phenomenon (slowly invading the rest of the world too).
Well, as someone who owns an F-150 Lightning, I have to tell you that my choice had zero to do with marketing. Does Ford even market this thing? Heck, even the regular F-150 doesn't seem like it gets a special amount of marketing, these days everyone already knows all about them and doesn't need to be told whether they want one or not.
What you may be missing is that the vast, vast majority of Americans do not live in an urban core where owning a full size pickup is a chore. If you have the space, then a modern half-ton crew cab pickup basically checks all the boxes. The interior is enormous, comfy for passengers, it can haul nasty dirty things in the bed, tow, etc. And my Lightning has a huge frunk for even more capacity. As a family vehicle it's pretty dang useful. We own a sedan, too (a Model 3) and it's fine, but far less space and not nearly as comfy.
> Japanese vehicles in the US or everywhere?
Might be just the US, but that just confirms the market is driven by consumers and not by American auto manufacturers pushing some sort of narrative. A modern Honda Civic, for example, did not become the size of an old Accord because of safety features. It's because people keep preferring something incrementally larger. There are still much smaller cars in the US that are quite safe, they just aren't as popular.
>massive pickup trucks, the majority of which are never used for anything more than a commuter vehicle for 1, maybe 2 occupants? Marketing, an arms race, manufacturers not offering much else because their marketing works, Americans being very aspirational about what they'll do with their vehicles, idk.
Not sure why you have this judgmental and holier than though "Europeans better, Americans stupid for buying trucks" stance throughout this conversation. It's not like Europeans are immune to marketing car oversizing with their affinity for SUVs which is why Volvo only makes SUVs for the past 8+ years now.
Most cars on this list, and the ones I see while living in one big European city, and regularly visiting lots of others, are not SUVs. There are plenty of them, but even then it's on the smaller side (e.g. a Renault Captur, not a Escalade 8 wheeled 65ton)
>the ones I see while living in one big European city
Except that statistics don't give a damn about what you see in your city. In 2024 54% of vehicles sold in EU are SUVs.[1] And indications point to 2025 being 57% in some months.
Which matches what I see where I live with a lot of Tesla Model Ys and BYD SUVs. Plus, Volvo only makes SUVs, which should tell you why SUVs are becoming majority.
Also matches the purchases I see amongst my acquaintances where their wives push for bigger cars for perceived safety of their family so they all got SUVs.
>it's on the smaller side (e.g. a Renault Captur, not a Escalade 8 wheeled 65ton)
Now you're moving the goalposts to what a SUV is. A Renault Captur is still classified as a SUV, which is what I was talking about. Don't try to spin this around just because European SUVs are smaller than US ones.
> A Renault Captur is still classified as a SUV, which is what I was talking about
It can be classified as a fighter jet, it's still a moderately sized vehicle and it's barely bigger than the Renault Clio it's based on. It's a compact SUV. Almost none of the negative points of Americans style massive SUVs or trucks apply to it - it has good visibility, doesn't have a flat front to mow down pedestrians, doesn't weigh double what it should, doesn't consume absurd amounts of fuel.
So my original points, that the average cars in Europe are drastically smaller than their American counterparts, even when they're SUVs, still stands and is even confirmed by your source.
And the fact that Volvo decided to only do SUVs, while having a sister brand for EVs (Polestar), is pretty irrelevant.
The original comment was that the cars are Clio/Golf sized instead of SUV-sized.
You countered that SUVs and crossovers are outselling other categories, but subcompact crossover SUVs like the Captur, Yaris Cross, 2008/3008, etc are, in fact, Clio/Golf sized.
So whatever statistics you're considering, if you're going just based on "type contains SUV" without considering size, then you're missing the actual important part.
If you're going based on your link's content, it also says:
"Compact SUVs (C-SUVs) were the most popular type within the category, accounting for 42% of total SUV registrations last year, followed by smaller models (B-SUVs), with 36% market share."
So that means that about a third (64% of the 54% number you're quoting) of vehicles sold are SUVs larger than the Clio/Golf size they mentioned.
And since this whole sub thread started based on a comment about vehicle sizes, it's not "moving the goalposts" to talk about the actual size of the vehicles being sold.
Of course, one could argue "it's SUV sized if it has SUV in the class name (regardless of compact or subcompact)" but I think that would be willfully sidestepping the point.
What do you mean, the ID series for the main VW brand have 7 upcoming models over the next two years (4 for the Chinese market, 3 for everywhere).
> all established brands we know are left behind
I wouldn't go that far. The Renault 5 is one of the best selling EVs in Europe, and all the reviews are extremely positive (it's a fun and good looking car overall, and accessible). They have the 4 rolling out, and the small Twingo coming next year. They've also managed to narrow down the time from concept car to production at scale to less than 2 years (which according to the article on the topic I read is very fast).
No??? What do you imagine, that every single transaction you make, like buying bread, will require a Digital ID? Why on earth would you imagine that?
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