And who's fault is that?

The government could decide tomorrow that driving confers implied consent for them to quarter soldiers in your home and a huge chunk of people would defend it because those people just don't like cars and want to see the users screwed at every turn in order to make other things comparatively less worse. Of course they won't tell you that because they know they're in the wrong so they'll use the pretext that driving is a privilege not a right, public safety etc. etc.

Look at the discussion about ebikes. At first iw as all "look how cool and great and free of downsides these are". Now the discussion is all "those darned kids and poors are dangerous" and "nobody needs to go more than 20mph". Give it 10yr and you'll be forced to by insurance for them too.

Vehicles are regulated how they are and you have less rights to the extent you do specifically because people 50-70yr ago wrung their hands about them until laws were passed, just like we're doing to ebikes now.

Probably can't happen without huge changes to the tax code IMO.

That said, I think bringing the amount of research science we have under the umbrella of academia has been bad because it's basically introduced a plausible deniability and reputation laundering layer that furthers the 3-way revolving door between academia, government and industry.

Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale.

[1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill

Someone in a subdivision that's a few miles inland with a mangrove swamp between it and the ocean anyway has to care about New Orleans style flooding, not "what sea state is my picture window rated for" flooding.

Like there's a reason that Florida building code just says tie it down and call it good. It's just not necessary nor economically worthwhile to try and make structures shrug off the surf. Sure, literally on the coast type stuff will get rekt (most of that stuff is concrete now though) but the average modular home subdivision doesn't need special requirements above and beyond what it takes to shrug off the wind.

When it comes to wind loading the code is basically a fight between evil civil engineers who want the state jackboot to force you to buy their service and the hardware makers (Simpson and the like) who'd prefer you reference a conservatively pre-computed table and install that much of their hardware.

There are many reasons to shit on Florida but their building code is pretty top notch (and this makes it expensive but everything has tradeoffs).

The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.

Between the requirements imposed by needing to resist hurricane winds and the slab ties it's "good enough" that there's a 99.9999% chance the building will stay on it's foundation long enough for something else to be the problem.

Also it's one of two convertible SUVs on the market so if you want that your options are basically a coin toss.

You multiply the "well we should allow it for uses X Y and Z" takes by every issue and the end result is that there's just enough political will to let the government walk all over everyone and everything else.

You have to draw a line in the sand otherwise you get the political equivalent of everyone littering "a little" and the cumulative result is things being crappy.

I don't think they're barreling into foot+ deep water.

I think they're driving into shallower "perfectly navigable but still deep" puddles at normal for the roads speed and this pizza delivery boy type behavior is making passengers clutch their pearls because they are expecting their robotaxi to drive like a high end chauffeur.

Those "naive" ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I've ever seen since.

It's also just a much harder problem. At low margins the "solution" may very well be to genuinely make your widget superior to the competing widget for a given set of users or situations.

First is that local and state governments have been deploying 1984 for enforcement of petty matters for which dispensing "real" enforcement labor can't be justified economically politically a or both. The feds are fine with this because they can get at that data. What they're not fine with is that it's pissing people off. The feds are worried that this could turn into court and legislative precedents that make things harder for them. For example the DEA doesn't want their flagship I95 surveillance corridor to get nerfed because NYC went too far with it's own pet project and laws got made in response. They'll happily tell the states "no you can't do this thing we do" in order to preserve their own ability to do the thing.

Second is that the feds don't like that the public is becoming soured on the regulatory hackjobs of the 1970s that were hailed as great successes at the time. As the country becomes more divided people are realizing that the current "have the feds grand fund everything at least in part" paradigm results in strings that nobody wants being attached to everything. So doing one little thing that everyone agrees on is seen as a way to say "look we can do good with this power we really shouldn't have in the first place".

Finding american freed slave papers in a grave at Valley Forge -> ever so slightly interesting, we know those people were around there at that time.

Finding american freed slave papers in a grave outside an 1870s British encampment in Sudan -> very interesting how did this get here.

Or kind of like how finding Christian stuff in a roman grave varies a lot in implication by the year.

The journalist got their hands on the report saw "arsenic" and just copypasta'd without understanding the context and now everyone is screeching about something that's less than the local baseline.

Pretty much all water discharge rules are built around filtering stuff out. I thought we wanted it in the dirt so it would't be in the water?

The part that drives me up the wall is the two faced capricious nature of all this.

I have a grass parking lot and everyone screeches about tire rubber concentrating in the dirt.

I pave the lot and everyone screeches about the rubber in the runoff

I pay an engineering firm to say that my grass strip on the side of the paved parking lot is an engineered feature that per their calculation will catch yada yada yada blah blah blah and I get my permit.

Seems to me like you can't put anything anywhere. You just go in circles until you've the right rings for the right amount and then they say "this is fine".

Whether the ditch is dirt and grass (nature's filter) or lined with something, hexavalent chromium is just the big boy big dollar version of the same stupid parking lot problem.

Say they filter the chromium out. So then it winds up concentrated in something. Where does it go then? Seems like the only way to permanently deal with waste is to sell it into another jurisdiction where the buyer has kissed the right rings to let it be used as some input to some other process where it then goes from waste to something else.

Sounds like someone swapped a 70s-80s engine from a lighter application in.

I don't think that truck would've had manual choke from the factory. Lots of stuff could've happened over the years.

The amount of air your engine breathes is monumental compared to what the smog pump moves. The math of dilution just doesn't work. What does work is pissing a light stream of oxygen (remember, not much of that coming out of the engine, especially on warm up while it runs rich) to help the catalyst burn those hydrocarbons off of itself a wee bit faster.

I'm not sure if an 80s gas MDT would've had cats from the factory.

However dirty you think the sausage factory is it's worse.