What features do you use? Their website seems pretty slim but makes it appear that their apps are primarily about home fitness training, not necessarily trail mapping. Being a Polish company might help as they would have designed everything with GDPR in mind, even if they’re not required to avoid invasive tracking of international users.

Thanks for the recommendation, but I’ll have to pass on it. I’m sure Gaia GPS is great for hiking, especially with offline topographic maps, and presumably good for MTB as well. However, it’s owned by the same folks as Trailforks. They started with a bunch of venture capital in 2020 and went on a tear buying other companies in 2021 and 2022 including Trailforks, Pinkbike, and Gaia. It took a couple years for them to start enshittifying Trailforks, but now that the process has begun I have little doubt that I want to avoid giving them data through any of their other brands as well.

If the carpool stickers had come with a 20 year guarantee then nobody could reasonably be upset about the rules changing later because “forever” turned out to be too good to be true. This would be like solar, except that they want to change the rules later anyway.

If they simply left the original EV carpool stickers grandfathered but stopped giving out new ones, people who missed their chance would be upset. But the program would have worked exactly as intended, to incentivize early adoption of EVs by giving out a priceless benefit. It should never have gone on as long as it did, but government reacts slowly.

You’ve articulated well a lot of good points, but you’re missing a few key considerations. One elephant in the room is that the Investor Owned Utilities (which cover the vast majority of accounts in California) are abusing their monopoly powers as much as possible (including regulatory capture). That is sadly inextricably linked with the resentment felt by their solar customers, even as it is also felt by all of their non-solar customers.

You’re talking about the kind of tradeoffs that make sense in an ideal system, pricing things according to what they actually cost to provide. But the IOUs price things at “how much can we get the CPUC to allow us to charge?” And they love to stoke class warfare politically when it suits their business purposes. It’s just one more area where the actual problem is the billionaires (or just call it capitalism) against the 99% but they keep the water too muddy for most people to see it.

I believe it’s also still generally either illegal or at least infeasible to disconnect from the grid entirely in most of urban and suburban California, because it’s tied to occupancy permitting. I think the best hope of ending the madness does lie in that direction though. Solar customers tend to be much wealthier than non solar customers, which in aggregate means many of them will have the means to go full battery off grid as the pricing disparity continues to grow. This loss of legally-mandated captive market is the only chance to force monopolies to behave better.