Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,
From July of this year, every vehicle registered in the European Union will be required to have driver-monitoring cameras in place. That’s not every new car manufactured, but every car registered.
The “Advanced Driver Distraction Warning” (ADDW) cameras are designed to monitor driver behaviour for signs of potential distraction, and then set off a warning if those signs are detected.
It was first announced in 2024 as part of the EU’s “Vision Zero” plan to eliminate car-related deaths by 2050.
But it’s not really about that.
It’s never about what they say it’s about.
Here’s where this goes…
Firstly, kiss successful insurance claims goodbye.
Any accident will be blamed on “sub-optimal driver performance”, and that time you checked your phone while stopped at a light, or your hands moved briefly from the 10-and-2 or your eyeline wasn’t correctly picked up by the mirror sensor, will be used to blame your fender-bender on you.
This will create a change in accident reporting statistics, spiking “driver error” as the cause for anything and everything that goes wrong on the road.
This, in turn, will kick off a big “people drive dangerously” propaganda push.
Headlines like “ADDW data harvesting has shown up 80% of us might be driving more recklessly than we think”, or “most veteran drivers slip in to bad habits, reports show” will appear.
Then comes the new legislation to act on this totally fabricated problem.
What is it? It’s re-certification.
That’s not speculation; it already happened. Under new EU rules, passed just a few months ago, every driver has to be re-certified and issued a new driver’s license after 15 years. It would be the smallest of tweaks to add “or after Y number of distraction warnings are recorded” to that legislation.
The new driver’s licenses will be digital, with biometrics included. It’s possible new cars will be undrivable without a scan of your biometric license.
Your car’s data will be uploaded to a database, of course. That’s going to happen.
…in fact, it already is.
It’s not at all far-fetched to imagine your driver monitoring data getting scanned for errors by an AI, and any detected errors putting points on your license. If you go over a certain number of points, your ability to drive is taken away…pending recertification.
You can appeal, and drive while the appeal takes place. But the appeal fee will be greater than the recertification fee, and if you lose, you have to pay extra legal costs, and you’re subject to an extended driving ban.
This will be covered in the press as a universally Good Thing.
Headlines will celebrate the (almost entirely fictional) decrease in traffic fatalities, whilst baselessly claiming that the smaller number of private vehicles on the road has “improved pollution levels in the inner cities”.
An opinion piece from an anonymous “former driver” will appear in the Guardian, “I lost my driver’s license, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me”.
It will talk up how much money they’re saving on petrol and road tax, and how much fitter they get walking and cycling everywhere and how they know their neighbours so well now.
Not forgetting all sorts of cozy anecdotes about the charming characters you meet and life-affirming tableaux you witness using public transport.
Meanwhile, American “journalists” will wax poetic about the EU’s “forward-thinking system”, and the UK press and punditry will talk of “lagging behind the EU”, and blame every road accident on Brexit.
Some academics will publish a paper finding that “private car ownership has decreased under EU driver monitoring regulations”, and this “unintended upside” will be widely applauded.
Cue Buzzfeed: “New license rules have taken cars off the road, and it’s a good thing.”
And Vox: “The EU’s driver’s license law has given us a glimpse of what a car-less future could look like, and it’s beautiful”.
While all this is going on, there will be persistent white noise on the safety of “robot drivers” vs human drivers, talking up automatic driving software in Chinese electric cars and so on.
Public transport will be increasingly automated too – whether really automated, or just remotely driven doesn’t matter. The point will be to remove images of people driving from the public sphere.
The important part is you don’t get to decide where you’re going or how you’re getting there.
The end goal will be to inculcate a generally anti-car atmosphere, where even knowing how to drive will be considered somewhat old-fashioned.
Middle-class parents will boast to social media echo chambers that “I never wanted my Jacinda to learn!”, and receive bot-fueled applause as a reward. Implausible self-congratulatory anecdotes detailing how “My eight-year-old just told me he doesn’t want to drive because it’s bad for the planet! Children are so wise!” will go viral.
Because the easiest way to trap people is to make freedom uncool.
That might seem like a lot of speculation based on a little information, and in some ways it is, but pattern recognition is important. It’s much easier to put out a fire that hasn’t started yet, and we know they want to burn it all down.
We know they want to end private vehicle ownership; they have repeatedly said so.
Well, this is how they do that. A little at a time, creating atmospheres and environments. Seemingly arbitrary rules and regulations with “unforeseen consequences”. That’s how they work now, they come at us sideways with slow-developing long-cons, because they can’t afford to work in straight lines, not since Covid.
Stuff like this might seem a small – a throwaway issue vs war or the price of oil – but the powers-that-shouldn’t-be have an eye on the far horizon when they take small steps, and we should pay attention to where they want to take us.
#1: Horse To: Horse (#0)
The World's Biggest Fusion Reactor Just Hit A Milestone by Tyler Durden
Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,
The final components of ITER's central solenoid magnet -- a 59-foot, 3,000-tonne superconducting system 15 years in the making -- have arrived in France, clearing a major path toward first plasma.
ITER will never supply electricity to the grid; it exists purely as a research tool, and at €22 billion and counting, it's still years from achieving its primary milestone.
A wave of well-funded private fusion startups is on track to hit the same technical benchmarks as ITER faster and more cheaply -- raising real questions about the megaproject's relevance even as it celebrates progress.
The world's biggest nuclear fusion experiment just got one huge step closer to completion. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, France just received the final shipment of necessary components to assemble the giant magnet at the heart of the reactor. The central solenoid magnet, developed in the United States at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is a critical component of the massive experimental site, which is cooperatively funded and operated by a coalition of seven major world economies: China, the European Union (EU), India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.
The central solenoid is awe-inspiring in its size as well as its capabilities.
"The central solenoid is 18 meters (59 feet) tall and 4.25 meters (14 feet) wide, composed of six individual modules," Interesting Engineering reported earlier this week.
"Each module weighs more than 122.5 tonnes (135 tons) and is wound from 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) of niobium-tin superconducting cable."
And this is just one component of a jaw-droppingly massive apparatus that represents "the grandest scientific experiment in the world". ITER's tokamak (the donut-shaped device designed to confine plasma with ultra-powerful magnets) measures a kilometer in length. The solenoid magnet as its core is therefore almost inconceivably powerful, and it's just one part of a much bigger and more impressive system. "This component belongs to a magnetic system weighing 3,000 tonnes (3,300 tons) that interacts with nine vacuum vessel sectors," Interesting Engineering goes on to say.
This beating heat of ITER has been 15 years in the making, with each individual module requiring a two-year process for fabrication and testing. ITER will never produce power to supply to the energy grid, but will serve as one of the most important – if not the most important – research projects on Earth to solve the puzzle of creating commercial nuclear fusion, the holy grail of clean energy. Nuclear fusion is the energetic process that powers our own sun. Replicating that process here on Earth could essentially provide limitless clean energy. It's a potentially long-lasting, ultra-efficient energy source that leaves behind zero greenhouse gases and zero hazardous radioactive waste, unlike nuclear fission.
But the scale of ITER, and the unprecedented nature of its goals, has led to increasingly long timelines and a ballooning budget for the slow-moving megaproject. While the delivery of the solenoid marks a major milestone, ITER is still years away from achieving first plasma, around €22 billion and nearly two decades after breaking ground.
ITER is still relevant, and will hopefully bring us invaluable scientific findings that would be impossible without its grand scale and budget. But the megaproject is facing increasing competition from smaller and more dexterous fusion ventures. Various other projects are on track to beat ITER to its mapped goalposts, and much more inexpensively.
The race for nuclear fusion is increasingly going private as investors start to recognize the technology as a matter of when, and not if. Interest from the tech sector is also ramping up as Silicon Valley scrambles to find a panacea to the energy monster that the AI boom has unleashed. As a result, a lot of deep-pocketed entities are now focused on fusion like never before.
"If you know how to build a fusion power plant, you can have unlimited energy anywhere and forever. It's hard to overstate what a big deal that will be," Bill Gates wrote in an October essay.
"The availability and affordability of electricity is a huge limiting factor for virtually every sector of the economy today. Removing those limits could be as transformative as the invention of the steam engine before the Industrial Revolution."
A new rush of Wall Street-backed fusion startups is already answering this call to arms, rapidly changing the scientific and economic landscape for nuclear fusion research everywhere. But ITER's backers argue that its looming obsolescence is a sign of the project's success rather than its failure, indicating that its achievements and high profile have inspired the current flood of private investing dollars into fusion research and development. And, if nothing else, ITER now stands as a vanishingly rare symbol of international cooperation for global interests, rather than nationalized and protectionist energy agendas.
Horse posted on 2026-05-08 08:12:15 Reply Private Reply