Makes sense.

My wife and I don’t commute very far so an EV is fine for us even if we can only charge it with 120V initially (until we install a proper charger in our garage). We’ve got a BMW iX on order.

Tesla is opening superchargers to all brands eventually. That’ll help a lot, as will the inevitable changes that’ll happen to gas stations where they replace some pumps with EV chargers.

Range is definitely an issue, but it’s improving over time. 10 years ago, the average EV range was around 100 miles. I know BMW have tested a prototype car with ~600 mile range, and that tech should hopefully come with their Neue Klasse vehicles some time in 2026/2027. The Lucid Air gets around 500 miles range. Our current gas car (2012 Mazda 3) only gets around 360 miles until the gas light comes on, so it’s not actually that different for us.

Become a network admin and you can stare at blinking lights instead, making sure they don’t stop blinking.

In California the property tax can only increase a maximum of 2% per year, so at least there’s that. (this law was put in place so that older people don’t get priced out of their house due to house values going up a lot)

there was about 22% inflation

I’m not disagreeing with you, but I just wanted to note that inflation numbers (more specifically, the CPI) is an average across multiple industries - supermarkets, rent/mortgage, furniture, cars, flights, health care, and several more. It’s possible for inflation to affect some industries much more than others and I wouldn’t expect everything to all go up at the same rate.

In California at least, houses made with a wooden frame are usually on top of concrete (either a concrete slab under the whole house, or a concrete perimeter under the exterior walls), and the frame is bolted into the concrete along the entire perimeter.

Older homes often aren’t bolted into the concrete, but it’s common to retrofit this to improve earthquake resistance. Without the bolting, the house can move around during an earthquake. The government here has a program (Earthquake Brace and Bolt) where they cover part of the cost of doing this work.

Masonry (houses made of bricks, stone, etc) are much less common here, since they perform much worse in earthquakes.

It might be too large for your use case, but have you looked at the Kia EV9? The EV6 might be worth looking at too.

Not all manufacturers use adaptive headlights, and on some cars it’s only available as an upgrade whereas there’s a lot of people driving base models.

I saw this, but apparently the European ones don’t meet the US guidelines, and the Euro manufacturers aren’t yet redesigning and recertifying their headlights to meet the US guidelines. The two brands I was looking at (BMW and Porsche) both still have this feature disabled on their 2025 US models.

Porsche are kinda doing this with their modern cars (e.g. see the inside of the Macan EV). They have flat capacitive buttons, which are better than a touch screen, but still not as good as actual proper buttons.

I don’t think I’ve seen a car with the hazard lights button on the touch screen… Even the Teslas have a physical button for it. I imagine this must be a legal requirement, at least in some countries.

I hope European-style adaptive headlights become the norm in the USA eventually. Some higher-end cars have a matrix of LEDs instead of one bulb per headlight, and they can programmatically dim just some of the LEDs. If you have your headlights on but there’s a car in front of you (or on the other side of the road, whatever), the high beam will dim just the area the car is in. This happens automatically while you’re driving.

This is an option in some European vehicles (or may be standard on high end ones) but they have to explicitly disable the feature when exporting to the USA.

The USA did approve something relating to this, but it must not be sufficient since the European manufacturers are still disabling the feature in the USA.

I wish adaptive lights were legal in the USA. Manufacturers like BMW have to disable the feature at the factory because their implementation isn’t approved for usage in the USA.

I think you want a 2007 Toyota Corolla lol

I’ve currently got a 2012 Mazda 3 but swapped the radio for one that supports Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. No other fancy features.

Tactile controls cost more to install

Not just more to install, but also more to design. Physical controls have to be designed so they fit the aesthetic of the car and don’t look out of place. On the other hand, a touch screen can just reuse a generic UI design across every vehicle made by a particular manufacturer, or even across different manufacturers if the same vendor supplies the same OS for all of them.

The transition to contactless (where you tap your card or phone instead of inserting the card) took so long in the USA though. It only really became popular during COVID and with Apple Pay. Home Depot finally enabled contactless payments recently. In Australia, we were using contactless payment 15 years ago!

US banking is behind in a few other ways too. Apps like Venmo and Zelle just don’t exist in some other countries since you can easily do an instant transfer through your bank to anyone else for free. Some US banks still use SMS for two factor auth, which is insecure.

They could change the rules, but it took them many, many years to get to finalize the rules they’ve got today. IANA isn’t exactly a fast-moving organization.

I’m pretty sure that the country of Tuvalu (population 12,000) love that .tv is so widely used. It’s estimated that GoDaddy Registry (who run the TLD) pay around $10 million per year for the rights, which is around 1/7 of the entire country’s GNI (gross national income).

.website is too long though.

I like the SwitchBot Lock because it sits over the existing thumbturn rather than completely replacing the lock. It still looks like a normal lock from outside, unless you get a keypad of course. I got one with a keypad so my dog sitter can come check on my dog and take her out while I’m at work.

It’s not internet enabled by default. You can buy a wifi gateway from SwitchBot, but instead I have mine connected to Home Assistant using Bluetooth via a Bluetooth proxy.

The whole point of Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is to decentralize, so everyone routing through a single service (Cloudflare) seems to go against that.