Comment by trothamel
2 months ago
My car has limits the government puts on it - it has to shut off it's engine to reduce fuel consumption to hit a government mandate.
My shower doesn't use as much water as I'd like, as the government mandates a flow restrictor.
Why not printers?
>has to shut off it's engine to reduce fuel consumption
Which government, what car feature?
It sounds like idling shutoff that saves you money, reduces pollution, and reduces fuel consumption, eg when you stop to wait for traffic lights?
You cannot buy a car in Europe without:
- lights permanently on ("safety", definitely not for your ability to get lost in the dark)
- continuously stores logs of speed, brakes, seatbelts, signal, vehicle inclination, GSM connection etc ("safety", called "black box" in Europe, also warns the driver when local speed limit exceeded)
- permanent GSM connection ("safety", definitely not for tracking, pinky promise!)
- continuously monitoring the driver's head/face ("safety", called driver drowsiness warning)
- engine turns off when stationary (the default setting can't be changed by the user, but by a car service with the right tools)
- car brakes on its own ("safety", but it's so bad I turn it off every time I power it on, it brakes when someone nearby but not right in front of you slows down, cannot be disabled permanently)
- signals left/right at least 3 times
- mandatory seat belts
- doors that close and remain closed
- airbags
None of the things you mentioned are particularly an issue with the regulations, they legitimately assist in situations where they are meant to assist. If some feature is mildly inconvenient to you but saves the life of another human being then I feel you can live with the inconvenience.
If you made an argument about subscriptions for heater seating or carplay or some nonsense then you have a valid argument and is in the same line as DRM, mandated actual safety feature not do much.
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Why do you keep putting "safety" in quotes? The only one that isn't actually a proven safety feature is the permanent GSM connection.
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> engine turns off when stationary (the default setting can't be changed by the user, but by a car service with the right tools)
Yes it can.
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> lights permanently on
This is wrong. You can turn them off. Even DRL. If your car cannot you should complain to the manufacturer or live in one of the very few states requiring it.
> engine turns off when stationary
My previous car had a button specifically to disable it and it did so permanently. My current one doesn't need to.
> car brakes on its own
This is a manufacturer choice. Buy another car. Mine can be user disabled permanently.
> signals left/right at least 3 times
Manufacturer choice, usually for the non-flip indicator mechanic, which you likely can configure. If you flip it fully it might only do one, you should try it.
You can. You just wouldn't be allowed to run it on the public road.
You certainly can still buy a decent car in 2025 but it's gonna have to be <2015 model year. None of my three cars have any of this nonsense.
Sure, you save money in gasoline usage but you spend in starter replacement.
What's the environmental impact of the burnt gasoline vs manufacturing and replacement of starters?
The starters used in start/stop vehicles are far more robust than normal ones, and start/stop in hybrids often don't even use the normal starter to turn the engine over. Because vehicles are often kept for quite some time, most start-stop systems will autodisable after a certain number of cycles, so that they only use a given portion of the starter's expected life. (disables the start/stop system, not the starter itself)
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Don't know, only one I've any experience of is Kia's which seems to use some sort of flywheel. I did look into it briefly, but all I found was indications that it saved over the life of the vehicle and wasn't shown to increase replacements (but that might only be that specific tech).
Every western government pretty much.
Why not toilet control - if you have not enough fiber in your ... the electronic money you have on the bank account won't be able to buy you more meat, suggesting vege instead.
But where is the limit of freedom? Where is the border we should stop before or fight for it somehow?
When I was a kid they told us: your freedom ends where somebody’s freedom starts. I still think it is valid and insightful.
> When I was a kid they told us: your freedom ends where somebody’s freedom starts. I still think it is valid and insightful.
When I was younger, I thought this was a good idea. The problem with this rule is that where the boundary between "individual freedom" and "somebody else's freedom" lies varies a lot between different people (and cultures).
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Every “freedom” has two sides. Positive and negative freedom. You don’t have the freedom to dump nasty chemicals into bodies of water (lack of positive freedom), but I have the freedom to not have carcinogens in my drinking water (negative freedom). Some examples are clear cut, in the sense that we as a society surely all agree on where the line should be between positive and negative, but all examples need to be discussed on an individual basis, because they’re all different in terms of where we draw the line. But you can’t use the slippery slope argument here, because the slope works in the other direction too for any given example, the more positive freedom you have, the less negative freedom you have.
This is a refreshingly balanced take, which seems to frequently get lost in discussions.
The more I think about policy, the more it resembles a multi-objective optimisation problem.
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Surely though limiting the government's positive freedom of ubiquitous surveillance, like this example of printers, is something that I'm sure would be resoundingly popular in a democratic society. This seems as clear cut as limiting the freedom to dump toxic chemicals into water supplies.
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>> it has to shut off it's engine to reduce fuel consumption to hit a government mandate.
I've not heard of any car where you can't turn this off. There is no switch anywhere to turn off watermarking in your printer.
those are limits on squandering community resources. this requires you to use your resources (ink) for no benefit to you. to continue the bathroom theme it would be more like requiring your toilet to add rfid tags to your poops to track them downstream.
Seems strange to comparing resource saving to spyware? Potato potatoes I guess.
Auto idle shutdown saves on gasoline but comes at the cost of increased starter wear.
Ye I don't like start stop for that reason. I don't trust the manufacturer to make the starter more robust to handle the increased wear.
The yellow dots requirement means you can't print black and white without yellow ink.
If the government is going to require this, they need to subsidize the yellow ink that I never use, but have to constantly replace.
Does it? Monochrome printers exist. It must either be the case that it's not viewed as necessary in this case, or there's some other way of encoding this information in black and white that color printers could use when not printing in color.
If you're never doing color prints, get a b&w printer.
Is the engine shutoff the government mandate, or is it an implementation by the manufacturer to reduce fuel consumption and thus emissions?
I mean I get the comparison - government requires your car to have a seatbelt and your printer to have identifiable dots and your scanner to be unable to scan money - but in the case of engine shutoff it's more the manufacturer's idea. I don't know who came up with the xerox code though.
There is a difference between government limiting what your device can do, versus government monitoring what you use your device to do.
Sure your engine may shut off to save fuel, but once you have finished driving and left your car, it no longer has any power over you. But tracking dots can forever be used to link a piece of document to your printer.
Good luck shredding everything and never let anything you print leave your control.
Printing something onto paper should not be a blanket opt-out of the 4th amendment.
As far as I understand it, the yellow dots thing comes from the US government stepping on the toes of Xerox and getting them to jump. Same thing with Biden getting COVID misinformation removed or Trump getting the entire tech industry to lurch to the far-right overnight. Both of those imperil the 1st Amendment[0], and the yellow dots imperil the 4th.
Now, let's look at the two other examples you provided. Automatic engine shut-offs[1] and water flow restrictors may be annoying, but they do not imperil constitutional rights like the watermarking dots do. If we were talking about the US government mandating tracking chips in every car, then it would be like the watermarking dots.
Of course "government mandated tracking chips" is old news. The stuff of conspiracy theories. You might even be able to sue the government to stop it.
The current meta regarding getting around the 4th amendment is using industry to violate people's privacy for you. Industry will happily violate people's privacy on their own, because there's money in spying on people, so all the US government has to do is buy from private spies[2]. And because this is 'private' action, 4A stays untripped, because our constitution is a joke.
[0] Not nearly to the same extent, of course. Biden bruised 1A's arm, Trump wants to dump gasoline on it and light it on fire.
[1] My mom's Tuscon has this 'feature' and it's genuinely annoying. First thing you do when you use the car is shut it off so that it doesn't get you T-boned trying to save gas.
[2] This knowledge has been public domain since at least 2011: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-c...