Good blog. You touch on this point in the blog but IMHO it should be one of your main talking points.
Can’t you run that one app under WINE or something? Or even a Windows VM if you really need to…
Replacing the batteries with new ones on my $50k when it was new car (BMW i3) would cost me about $10k. Which is roughly what the car is worth on the second-hand market right now. The chances of me ever having to replace said batteries are basically zero. The chance of an ICE car spontaneously setting itself on fire are actually much higher, so this is a massive nothing-burger. When owning a car you should ALWAYS think about what happens if said car is suddenly total-loss the next day. Usually the answer is to replace it with another second-hand, not buy a new (!) battery from the dealer. Hell, second-hand battery packs are a thing too now, and much cheaper. On most EV’s you just drop them from the bottom and pop in the replacement, much less work than replacing an ICE engine.
Which is stupid, because current batteries already last way longer than most ICE cars. IMHO the depreciation is mostly because newer EV’s are still getting better at such a rapid pace, not because second-hand EV’s aren’t great cars (with a few notable exceptions, such as 1st gen Nissan Leafs, which didn’t have active battery cooling). I drive a 2016 EV and it’s still pretty much as it was when new, battery included.
In China NMC isn’t really used any more as a battery chemistry, almost all cars have LFP batteries. Sodium-ion has a slightly higher energy density than LFP. So basically almost all cars except the really expensive ones with a ridiculous range should switch over to sodium-ion pretty soon.
This also means that, when you buy a car with say a 500 km range, that the battery will last for 10,000 x 500 = 5 million kms. That is an absolutely insane number compared to cars that are on the road right now. And one you will obviously only reach if the rest of the car can keep up. EVs are already doing well compared to ICE cars in this regard, but this is almost an order of magnitude larger than the current status quo.
Agreed, hence the “very often” and not “always”. You are always trusting the VPN provider to not fuck you over, and there probably are a few who don’t.