I think one place to start would be with ownership.
Make it illegal to sell a vehicle to someone without a valid license.
Make it impossible for someone with a second conviction to be the registered owner of a vehicle for 5 years. Lifetime for third conviction.
There are already ways to charge registered owners for the infractions of those they allow to drive their vehicle. A few tweaks should be enough to make it virtually impossible for a repeat offender to gain access to a vehicle.
Heh. I agree. My only experience with Xplornet was in trying to support people who had it. No internet is far preferable.
We bought a cabin at the lake with an eye to retirement. Dysfunctional workplaces led us to move there nearly 15 years early. We figured that if we were going to work anyway, we might as well do it in a restorative environment.
There is no cell service, landline service is noisy enough that my very nice modem is lucky to hit 20 kbps, and I knew too much about ExploreNet to tolerate their "service". I'm no fan of Musk or the concept of Starlink, but the price/performance is stellar (sorry) and it's nice to be able to get stuff done without having to drive in to the library, especially given that it's only open 15 hours a week.
I spent a decade without internet. I never did figure out how to get Chromecast to work. Even for plain screen casting it insisted on needing an internet connection. Most of my stuff at the time was YouTube rentals that allowed downloads, so I got the hardware that let me use HDMI to connect my phone to the TV.
Yes, good points.
I was born during the baby boom era. I've concluded that "boomer" has long since lost its literal connection to "my" generation. It is now used as a metaphorical disparaging label that means "selfish and clueless because of age."
It's kind of like the trope of technologically clueless grandparents. At this point, the only grandparents who are technologically clueless are those with the same mindsets and experiences as all the GenX and Millenial people who are technologically clueless. And there is certainly no shortage of them.
Your "installer financed" system is sort of like what is available from some solar panel installers. I don't know if it's just a plain lease or rent to own, though.
A not so minor correction. The heat pumps are not free. The maximum payout is $5000. That has to cover the equipment, installation by a certified professional, and any necessary electrical upgrades. A ballpark estimate for my place comes in at over $6000. If I hold the total cost to $5k, the system will not be fit for purpose under the requirements of the program, making me ineligible for anything.
In addition, your dwelling must be eligible. That sounds easy until you realize that mobile homes must have the axles removed. Hitches, too, but axle removal is the big one. For me, that's another couple of grand to remove skirting, shift blocking, pull the axles out, and replace skirting.
The fact that those axles are useless because of other modifications and additions doesn't change the official designation as a mobile home. I suppose it might be possible to appeal that designation, but I'm not sure that would be less expensive.
For the heat pumps to be truly free, they'd have to nearly double the current subsidy and allow for non-electrical expenses like axle removal.
I'm not sure about guarantee. That implies perfection which is never attainable in anything. But requiring transparent evidence of due diligence is certainly doable. As are penalties for failure to meet some kind of standard.
It's past time to institute "grading standards" on large datasets. I have in mind the same kind of statistical standards that are applied in various kinds of defect and contamination analysis. For example, nobody ever guarantees that your food is free of animal feces, only that a fair and representative sample didn't find any.
So the McCarthyism playbook?
The biggest difference I see is that this time it's running as a mostly decentralized and possibly grassroots initiative. But people are still losing their jobs and possibly their entire careers for opinions and activities that have literally nothing to do with their employment or education or even legitimate constraints on their freedom of expression.
Let's face it, Hamas wouldn't even exist if the Israeli government wasn't being a big dick about sharing or at least caring.
I retired from our volunteer department one year ago. I encourage everyone to look into what's involved. Most people see firefighting as this dangerous activity. While it can be, the training is spectacular and reduces risks dramatically.
More importantly for the risk averse, there are many tasks that have very low or even negligible risk by nature. Communications, logistics, pump operations, driving, equipment and hall maintenance, extinguishing hot spots after the fire is over, traffic control, IT support. In a decade of service, I never once found myself on the front lines, because I focused on support roles that would have otherwise taken less risk averse people off the front lines.
And for the women out there, our department has had female members continuously since the mid-1980s, many of whom have served on the front lines.
Yes, I wondered how to express that. I settled on "registered". Where I live, the vast majority of on farm vehicles that can be are formally registered for use on public roads and streets and must display appropriate plates or permits. The vast majority of the rest are some combination of expensive to operate, slow moving, or not permitted to park in town.
As with all edge cases, some are worth dealing with and others can just be left as cracks in the system, at least until we see how things play out.