No matter what you buy, energy was expended to make it! The car you own already has spent the energy. It's done.

So, assuming you're not spitting flames and smoke out wherever you go, your current car will be greener than quite literally anything you can buy, new or secondhand.

Note: I've done zero maths to verify this but it makes perfect sense to me :)

Sometimes you just _can't_ use less oil. My own situation is that I make 5 sub-100 mile round-trip journeys each week now. It's the poster-child for home charging an EV. It saves me at least £3k a year on petrol alone.

However, I had to pay an additional £7k over and above what I sold my petrol car for (just last week, in fact) in order to get a secondhand EV. I could have gotten a much older, higher mileage one for around the same as I sold my car but that was too big a gamble for me. So I was in a position that I _could_ use less oil by switching. Not everyone has a spare £7k lying around.

I was told by a friend of mine (he's been driving electric for 5 years I think!) that a few years ago, the 92p/kWh fast chargers used to be about 30p. We now have waaaay more of them available and the price has gone up by about a factor of 3x so I don't see the price coming down any time soon and more infrastructure isn't helping in our case.

The UK energy prices are really high too: £0.13/kWh is the global average and we pay £0.27/kWh [0]. So electric isn't always the answer either unless you can get a cheap tariff.

Plus if you need to have a car and you live in a flat, you're only real option is petrol/diesel and a great many people here live in flats.

In terms of industry, it will have some luck changing the last few miles of delivery over to electric. That may be fine though - leave the mega-miles to the diesel trucks and then city and town deliveries could be made by electric vehicles where they only need to do 200 miles of stop-start driving.

Energy isn't free... if we want to power things we need to expend energy somewhere in the chain in order to do so.

[0] - https://selectra.co.uk/energy/guides/tariffs/world

I don't like it either but you have to pick your battles these days.

We have a staggering number of people that live in apartments so charging is out of the question except at public charging points and the cheapest I've seen is £0.40/kWh. Most of the fast chargers are £0.92/kWh.

When I get my home charger fitted I'll be paying 6.9p/kWh between midnight and 6am but I have a driveway.

Not everyone can give up ICE cars. The logistics don't add up for many people plus the entire world runs on diesel - every truck, earth-mover, factory etc. relies on diesel in some fashion.

I used to be dead-set-against electric cars but I just bought one and am loving it. The maths is staggering. It's secondhand though as I don't believe new ones are worth it.

It's lost 60% of its value, has only done 57k miles and has a battery state of health of 97.4%. I paid £22k.

I still maintain that new cars, especially new electric cars, are not worth the money but secondhand ones are a bargain now... relatively speaking.

Surely we could just get a pair of eyeballs on everything flagged and if it's not 100% crystal clear what's going on, then it gets flagged for a senior pair of eyes to look at?

I'm against the Minority Report kind of stuff but a system (AI Flock cameras in this case) flags up , surely it should then go into a queue for humans to look at! Flock can add in a certainty score and the human must verify!

It could still increase efficiency this way.

It's the pure AI companies like OpenAI that will hit the wall.

However, the tech companies are increasing their debt enormously. That's the issue.

I believe that some of the private credit is the banks' own private credit arm! It's absolutely mental: the bank can't lend to them so they have a private credit company/division that can skirt around the rules and still provide the capital!

Also, I bet that the Oracle datacenters aren't for Oracle LLC but Oracle Datacenter No 4 LLC so that if it all goes tits up, Oracle LLC walks away!

Unfortunately, that's not the case. Between the big 5 (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon etc.) they're spending more than $600 Billion in 2026! They don't have that much cash lying around so they're selling bonds!

That's debt!

Not only that, they're increasing the bond sales in Europe! I assume that means they're tapped-out in the US!

All this off-the-books stuff, despite being legal but shady, is still debt! Debt has to be paid by someone.

To sum it up: the AI buildout is a highly leveraged, debt-fueled expansion, not an organic, cash-funded software cycle... this will not end well!

They'll be knackered though, unlike a good Herman Miller chair. :-)

We might even be able to afford RAM again!

That means losses. Big losses for some.

I assume that these off-the-books companies can quite literally be pinched off and the debt becomes the banks' problem, so the primary company, i.e. Meta, Oracle, can walk away but the banks will be left holding the bag.

We know what happened the last time the banks played their stupid games!

It won't be framed as bailing out the AI companies. It will be sold to the public as bailing out their pensions and investments.

It's all about the marketing...

However, my real worry is that governments will make these models illegal in the west. They'll cite national security or some other bullshit.

I genuinely believe that will happen and soon!

People talk about a lack of moat with AI companies... that's their moat: Government intervention!

I use Gemini Pro (got it with my 5TB of Google storage) and for a while it seemed if Google had pulled the rug as I was running out of quota after only a few hours. That seems to have been dialled back a bit lately...

I also use Chatbot with Deepseek V4 Pro and GLM 5.2. However, GLM 5.2 seems to eat tokens like crazy as the context increases. Anyway, there isn't a meaningful enough difference between the two to be honest and Deepseek is pretty magical imo.

The point I want to make is that to me it seems clear that China is totally undermining the West with AI. I'm fine with it tbh. As long as more and more AI is released into the wild, rather than locked behind massive token farms like OpenAI then I'll be happy. Don't get me wrong, I can't run Deepseek on my computer at home but someone can!

The US (and the west) has invested trillions at this point into datacenters, chips, bribery/lobbying but it doesn't look like China has dropped the same levels of cash as the west (that's the way it looks to me, at least!) so they can just roll out new models every so often that are more than good enough.

This level of cash burn in means the west has no choice but for this to succeed or every pension fund and stock will tank! And China knows this, hence the push to release more and more really good models.

Anyway, just my $0.02

Google handle the payment and the subscription too (same with Apple) and that's a very common pattern too.

I understand the skepticism though.

I know it sounds a bit cynical but I think that's the case for me in a lot of ways: I love the idea of being able to play the piano. However, I've given it up many times (I'm 51 now).

I think I just prefer the idea of being a piano player but when it comes down to it, I don't have the willpower/dedication/motivation (delete as appropriate) to follow it through.

My 15 yo son, on the other hand, is hell-bent on becoming a pro hockey player (not necessarily the NHL but that's the goal, of course!) and he's working his ass off 6 days a week at various aspects, and missing out on stuff like playing football down the park with his pals after school on a Friday coz he has training).

So, I think for some of us there is a disconnect between the desire to work hard anc become something, and liking purely the idea of being something... I think they're quite different (for me they are!)

The Guid is purely for an external system to grab onto something that I can tie back to an actual row in the database but the external system does not need to know anything about the backend other than .