I can't play a record in my car, even if there were record players that did not skip on a slightly bumpy road, they would probably wear out the records pretty fast.
And if I connect my phone to the car, then instead of just driving and listening I am tempted to play with the phone trying to select the next song at every opportunity (red light, stopping for a pedestrian etc).
With a tape, I just put it in and listen until the end of side B.
I use cassettes to listen to music in my car and on a portable player primarily.
I already have a lot of cassettes - recording them to CDs (though CDs are bigger than cassettes, so it would be less convenient) or other digital formats would take a long time. It is easier to record the new CD I bought to a cassette so I can listen to it in my car. Also, some music (quite a lot on my country) was only released on a cassette, so if I want it, I have to buy (or copy) that cassette. I tried connecting my phone to the tape deck and playing mp3s. The problem was that I was too tempted to skips songs etc that it distracted me (I would select the next song at an intersection, not notice that the light is already green etc). With a tape, I just put it in and I listen to it until the end of side B. Also, connecting the phone, starting the player program is an additional thing to do when I start the car. I also tried minidiscs - better than using the phone and actually quite good for longer driving (let's say more than 45 minutes), also, it is easier to record from a PC to a minidisc. However, the need to connect an additional device is still there, so it's annoying for shorter trips and since I have more tapes than MDs it would be more inconvenient to replace the tape deck in my car with a MD player.
There is no "drop it on the porch" option in my country. Unlike what I see on the internet about the USA, individual houses in my country have fences and my fence from the street is 2m tall and completely opaque, so a couple of times the lady who delivers the mail has called and offered to throw the package over my fence as the package did not require a signature. There was somebody home, so she didn't need to do that though.
Normally the delivery is either handed to you (or someone at your address) and you have to sign it, or you have to go to the post office and show your ID. Recently they made a third option (which is cheaper) - your package gets delivered to a special locker, you go there and have to type in a password that you received in a text message.
So, essentially, you get your stuff stolen and can do nothing about it.
Also, Mr. Rober did not send the package trough the mail, he just put a fake shipping label (even addressed to the two thieves in Home Alone) and placed it on the steps to his door.
What looks more weird to me is that the delivery people would just put your item in the open, no need to sign for it etc. In my country, if the item is delivered to the door, someone from that address have to pick it up and sign for it. If the item is sent trough the post, it would either be delivered to the door (and someone has to sign for it) or I would have to go to the post office to pick it up, show my ID card and sign for it.
No, but it's like seeing the previous dictator swinging on a rope, put there by the new dictator who is exactly the same. The state of the things didn't change, but the good feeling of "an asshole getting what was coming to them" is still there.
And yet, the government runs ads against alcohol and has banned smoking in some areas. So, there should also be ads against consumerism, telling people of the options they have beside going and buying the new shiny.
Otherwise it really seems like the environment is just another excuse the government and the companies use to make people buy things or pay money: Internal combustion engine cars are wasteful - buy these new electric cars, look how cheap they are to run and ignore the fact that ~50% of gasoline price is actually tax and if/when electric cars become popular their drivers will get to pay the same tax as gasoline car drivers pay now.
I'll add this: If the government really believed that we should not pollute and waste energy, it would tell people to NOT BUY stuff. DO NOT buy a new TV until the current one breaks beyond repair, DO NOT buy a new iPhone, DO NOT buy a new car if it is not orders of magnitude more efficient than your current one. DO NOT SPEND.
Making things creates waste and uses energy. When you throw out a working TV, it creates waste, even if it is recycled, some waste is created and recycling uses energy (less than if the materials were dug up, but still more than if you kept using the TV). The government should tell people to buy used stuff instead of new, to reduce the need for manufacturing. The government should force companies to make stuff that lasts a long time (if you can buy a fridge that lasts 30 years, you won't need a fridge for 30 years).
This would help the environment much more than banning inefficient lightbulbs or plastic straws. And yet, all the environmental efforts of government can be summed up as "BUY NEW STUFF", whether it's a car or a lightbulb.
Oh yea, but this would hurt the profits of companies and the stock market. Which seems to be much more important than the environment. A fun coincidence is that the new environment protection efforts actually help company (though they may not be the same companies) profits.
So yea, until the governemnt is willing to hurt the stock market and the super rich in an effort to clean up the environment, I won't believe the problem is big enough.
Or the State should provide such a service. If some product or service is mandatory, then the government should provide it. I'd rather pay into the budget of my country than into the pockets of some already-rich shareholders
Meanwhile the CEO's new Tesla is still a few pennies per worker spread across the year.
It's the principle of the thing and how it looks. Yes, for a large company the argument that even if the CEO distributes his salary to all the workers, there is not much difference is valid. However, it looks really bad when the CEO says "We have to tighten our belts and so you will get lower salary, but I'm keeping mine, as it would not change much if I didn't, but we are all in this together". And if this is a small company, then the CEO's salary may be a larger fraction of the expenses.
Sometimes, in my country during a recession, people get angry that the members or the parliament do not cut their own salaries, while thy go around cutting pensions etc. Even if the salaries make a really tiny portion of the budget, it's the principle - maybe if the MPs got whatever the average (or even better, median) salary is, they would have more incentives to make it so that the average salary increases...
This is, again, why we need strong social insurances: we are better off per-capita, meaning the winners are coming out so far ahead that they can compensate the losers and still be winners.
I completely agree. Otherwise things like the GDP do not really matter. I mean if one guy got a million, but 1000 people lost $100, it is a net gain on average, but the 1000 people would rather the one guy lost a million and they all got $100. If the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, the GDP may increase, but it still is not good for the poor.
The difference is destructive vs non-destructive safety features.
Seatbelts, airbags can reduce the injury in an accident, but the car is still damaged. Which means that usually people do not want their car to get damaged. As such, probably very few people think "it's OK if I hit a tree at 100km/h, the airbags, seatbelts and crumple zones will save me" and then drive bouncing from tree to tree.
This is like the safety feature of some table saws, where if you touch the blade, the saw gets destroyed, but you finger is safe. Nobody would put a finger in that saw on purpose, because even if the safety feature works OK, you just destroyed your saw, which, I assume is not cheap.
On the other hand, non-destructive safety features can be abused. ABS will let me stop better on ice, so let's drive faster and tailgate. After all, there is no cost associated with activating the ABS.
And Autopilot, in my opinion is the opposite of a safety feature. ABS at least does make it safer to stop on ice, though I think the cars should not advertise that they have ABS, so the people drive as if there is no ABS. Autopilot encourages people to not pay attention completely. After all, the car drives itself and has been doing so perfectly for the last 3 hours today and for the last 200 times before, why should you just sit and stare at the road with nothing to do (which is incredibly boring), better watch a movie or read a book. After all, you don't really need to pay attention, the various messages telling you to do so are probably there for some bullshit legal reasons.
At least airbags and crumple zones are destructive, so, people usually do not want to damage their car on purpose, even though they drive less carefully now.
On the other hand, I can totally see something like ABS and traction control abused for driving fast on a slippery road ("It's OK, my car has ABS and traction control, it drives on ice just as well as on asphalt"). The automatic emergency stop can be used in place of regular stopping, until it fails one day and you hit another car.
Autopilot-type features are the worst. If my car had them, I would ask my passengers (if I wasn't driving alone) to hit me if they saw me turn it on. The reason is that (I can only speak for myself obviously, but I believe this is common for people) I get bored when I have nothing to do, and watching the car essentially drive itself flawlessly does not count as "having something to do", so I would stop paying attention, start daydreaming etc and could crash if the Autopilot failed. Just like I do not pay attention when somebody else is driving. On the other hand, driving my car without such features keeps me focused on driving.
That's actually a red herring. Walmart has 1,500,000 employees, and the CEO makes $6 million.
Which is probably something like 200 times the salary of the average employee.
I need something better than a CEO pay cut to stop people from starving to death or losing medical care.
Yes, sure. However, "the times are bad, I have to let some of you go and the rest will get reduced salary, we have to tighten our belts to survive the recession. Oh and look at my shiny new Tesla" makes people hate the CEO and company owners in general, developing into an "us vs them" mentality that the government gladly exploits. This is kinda true in my country, where an increase in the minimal wage is followed by cries from various small company owners that they won't be able to afford this, followed by "serves them right, they are thieves anyway" sentiment from the rest of the people.
In practice, the employment moves around--have you noticed unemployment is low all the time, with recessions in between?
Depends on how you count it, in some cases people give up hope on ever finding a job and become alcoholics. Since they are not registered as looking for a job, the government does not count them as "unemployed". Quite a few people (especially the more hard-working ones) emigrate to other countries.
Employment moves around, but I notice one trend. As robots (and workers in foreign countries) are replacing less skilled local workers, those workers have nowhere to go. So, a factory with robots may need more engineers to program and maintain those robots, but the people who assembled the product by hand previously may not e able to do it.
More to the point, again, the theoretical jobs are 0.1% of the workforce.
The way I understand it is that the 0.1% is for a single big factory or for all the factories making the same type of product (pants for example). But then the shirt factories move to China. And then car factories. And electronics factories. And so on. At some point in the future self-driving cars will put professional drivers out of work. And at some point there may be no more work for people who, for example, cannot program a computer.
At every such change, a small percentage of people are ruined, the top 1% (or less) of the country get huge bonuses and everyone else is slightly better off*. As every change ruins another small percentage of people, I'd say that this, on average is bad for the majority.
* this assumes that moving the factory to China reduces the price of the product. It may very well keep the price and just increase the profits.
Also, for some reason China does not have free trade with the US, you can build a car in China and import it into the US for free, but, AFAIK, China does not want cars made in the US.
As for the environmental policies, what incentive is there for someone to open a factory in the EU or the US if he will have to pay the workers more and comply with the more strict environment laws? Why not just open the factory in China or somewhere else with lax (or unenforced) environment laws, dump poison into drinking water, make the product cheaper and sell it for the same price for higher profits.
It seems that open trade may work for some countries and especially be beneficial to the poor countries. However, the way stuff works now, AFAIK, is that factories in, say, the USA get moved to China, workers are now jobless, but the profits go only to the company and its shareholders (as the rich pay relatively little tax, especially with all the tax evasion options (Panama papers etc) that are available to them).
Norway is a different case, as the mentality there differs from the USA and my country, from what I have read. There is is considered "shameful" if a CEO of a company earns 10 times more than the workers, while in my country, in the last recession, it was relatively common for the salaries of the workers be reduced and some workers fired (with the remaining ones having to do more) on account of the recession, while the boss buys a brand new car.
In theory automation, for example, is awesome. Pretty much nobody wants to flip burgers. Except that if there are burger-flipping robots, then the burger-flipping human gets to starve. In theory, robots could work for us and we could have life-long vacations. In practice, very few people would have life long vacations, while the rest would starve.
With good progressive taxes (that are actually collected even from the rich), open trade and automation would be great. The way it is now, not so much, at least in my opinion.
Also, if someone wants to preach to me about environment (either CO2 or waste), I always think that there should be tariffs imposed on goods imported from countries with less strict environment laws. If I open a factory in the EU, how am I supposed to compete with a factory in China if they are allowed to generate as much waste as they want and I am not?
Recently the EU banned plastic straws on account of waste plastic getting into the ocean. Good enough, even though I have not seen a lot of plastic garbage on the street or in a river in my country (most people throw them in the trash). However, in some countries, for example India, the rivers are full of plastic garbage that makes its way into the ocean. So, I think that sanctions should be imposed on those countries, until they clean themselves up and, for example, also ban the plastic straws.
And only the rich win from open trade and being able to screw the local workers.
So, since it's a lose-lose proposition for me, I'd rather see the rich lose too.
Also, people talk about how we should take care of the environment, governments pass laws that forbid dumping toxic waste into a river etc. However, you can always open a factory in China, produce as much CO2 as you want, dump as much toxic waste into rivers as you want, that will allow you to make the product cheaper and you will out-compete the local factories that have to use expensive equipment to clean out their waste and reduce their CO2 emissions. Being able to use child labor and no need to care about workplace safety is also great. After all, what matters more than the income of shareholders?
Well, the current terrorists, maybe, but you never know what the future terrorists will think.
I mean somebody figured out that you can hijack and airplane and, instead of asking for ransom, use it as a missile to knock down buildings. Also, hacking a lot of cars (if there is a vulnerability, then it probably affects all the cars of the same model) and making them kill the people would be a large scale attack, possibly spanning multiple countries.
Maybe the car should have a built-in taser. During the recovery, the thief has to keep both hands on the wheel or he gets zapped repeatedly until he puts his hands on the wheel.
And there would be a second PIN (unknown to you) in case you insulted Dear Leader and needed to be transported to a gulag. Or Dear Leader wanted you to accidentally, due to inattentiveness, drive full speed into a tree.
It would be even more interesting if the terrorists hacked the cars and told them to drive into a tree at full speed. That would cause much more terror than flying airplanes into buildings or planting bombs.
The problem with the cyclist you mention is that he will most likely damage someone's car and can cause emotional trauma to the driver. Just like the people who get run over by a train.
When I go to work, driving is the fastest way, because I do not encounter traffic jams (and on a bike I would have to wait the same time for traffic lights and would be slower when actually going). Also, when I am driving, I do not mind the wait so much. It it's -20C outside, I can use heating in my car, If it's +30C, I can use AC. The car has a roof that protects me from rain or snow. So, even if it was faster to use a bike, I would not do so. I'd rather sit in my car, listening to my favorite radio station (or tape), not too hot or too cold than be in a bike in rain (or heat, or cold), even if I could save a few minutes.
Honestly, the slower phone seems like the better outcome as it ensures you have a phone and not a brick
Yes, it does seem like a better option with one requirement - that I am notified that I need to replace the battery. I can then decide if I want to do it (or use the slow phone, or buy a new phone), but I should know about the problem.
At least when the phone fails to boot or randomly shuts off, I know there is a problem and can bring the phone to a repair shop to fix it. If the phone just slows down, I may not notice it at first (if the slowdown is gradual) or think that the software update is bloated and inefficient (if it is very noticeable immediately).
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I can't play a record in my car, even if there were record players that did not skip on a slightly bumpy road, they would probably wear out the records pretty fast.
And if I connect my phone to the car, then instead of just driving and listening I am tempted to play with the phone trying to select the next song at every opportunity (red light, stopping for a pedestrian etc).
With a tape, I just put it in and listen until the end of side B.
I use cassettes to listen to music in my car and on a portable player primarily.
I already have a lot of cassettes - recording them to CDs (though CDs are bigger than cassettes, so it would be less convenient) or other digital formats would take a long time. It is easier to record the new CD I bought to a cassette so I can listen to it in my car.
Also, some music (quite a lot on my country) was only released on a cassette, so if I want it, I have to buy (or copy) that cassette.
I tried connecting my phone to the tape deck and playing mp3s. The problem was that I was too tempted to skips songs etc that it distracted me (I would select the next song at an intersection, not notice that the light is already green etc). With a tape, I just put it in and I listen to it until the end of side B. Also, connecting the phone, starting the player program is an additional thing to do when I start the car.
I also tried minidiscs - better than using the phone and actually quite good for longer driving (let's say more than 45 minutes), also, it is easier to record from a PC to a minidisc. However, the need to connect an additional device is still there, so it's annoying for shorter trips and since I have more tapes than MDs it would be more inconvenient to replace the tape deck in my car with a MD player.
Ubuntu with LXDE graphics. Nice for hardware that does not have a lot of memory, well, now not so nice if the hardware does not support 64bit.
Then again, if I need to, I can just use the last working version. Or use Debian and LXDE.
There is no "drop it on the porch" option in my country. Unlike what I see on the internet about the USA, individual houses in my country have fences and my fence from the street is 2m tall and completely opaque, so a couple of times the lady who delivers the mail has called and offered to throw the package over my fence as the package did not require a signature. There was somebody home, so she didn't need to do that though.
Normally the delivery is either handed to you (or someone at your address) and you have to sign it, or you have to go to the post office and show your ID.
Recently they made a third option (which is cheaper) - your package gets delivered to a special locker, you go there and have to type in a password that you received in a text message.
So, essentially, you get your stuff stolen and can do nothing about it.
Also, Mr. Rober did not send the package trough the mail, he just put a fake shipping label (even addressed to the two thieves in Home Alone) and placed it on the steps to his door.
What looks more weird to me is that the delivery people would just put your item in the open, no need to sign for it etc. In my country, if the item is delivered to the door, someone from that address have to pick it up and sign for it. If the item is sent trough the post, it would either be delivered to the door (and someone has to sign for it) or I would have to go to the post office to pick it up, show my ID card and sign for it.
No, but it's like seeing the previous dictator swinging on a rope, put there by the new dictator who is exactly the same. The state of the things didn't change, but the good feeling of "an asshole getting what was coming to them" is still there.
We may be seeing Microsoft getting a taste of its own medicine.
And yet, the government runs ads against alcohol and has banned smoking in some areas. So, there should also be ads against consumerism, telling people of the options they have beside going and buying the new shiny.
Otherwise it really seems like the environment is just another excuse the government and the companies use to make people buy things or pay money:
Internal combustion engine cars are wasteful - buy these new electric cars, look how cheap they are to run and ignore the fact that ~50% of gasoline price is actually tax and if/when electric cars become popular their drivers will get to pay the same tax as gasoline car drivers pay now.
I'll add this:
If the government really believed that we should not pollute and waste energy, it would tell people to NOT BUY stuff. DO NOT buy a new TV until the current one breaks beyond repair, DO NOT buy a new iPhone, DO NOT buy a new car if it is not orders of magnitude more efficient than your current one. DO NOT SPEND.
Making things creates waste and uses energy. When you throw out a working TV, it creates waste, even if it is recycled, some waste is created and recycling uses energy (less than if the materials were dug up, but still more than if you kept using the TV). The government should tell people to buy used stuff instead of new, to reduce the need for manufacturing. The government should force companies to make stuff that lasts a long time (if you can buy a fridge that lasts 30 years, you won't need a fridge for 30 years).
This would help the environment much more than banning inefficient lightbulbs or plastic straws. And yet, all the environmental efforts of government can be summed up as "BUY NEW STUFF", whether it's a car or a lightbulb.
Oh yea, but this would hurt the profits of companies and the stock market. Which seems to be much more important than the environment. A fun coincidence is that the new environment protection efforts actually help company (though they may not be the same companies) profits.
So yea, until the governemnt is willing to hurt the stock market and the super rich in an effort to clean up the environment, I won't believe the problem is big enough.
Or the State should provide such a service. If some product or service is mandatory, then the government should provide it. I'd rather pay into the budget of my country than into the pockets of some already-rich shareholders
Meanwhile the CEO's new Tesla is still a few pennies per worker spread across the year.
It's the principle of the thing and how it looks. Yes, for a large company the argument that even if the CEO distributes his salary to all the workers, there is not much difference is valid. However, it looks really bad when the CEO says "We have to tighten our belts and so you will get lower salary, but I'm keeping mine, as it would not change much if I didn't, but we are all in this together". And if this is a small company, then the CEO's salary may be a larger fraction of the expenses.
Sometimes, in my country during a recession, people get angry that the members or the parliament do not cut their own salaries, while thy go around cutting pensions etc. Even if the salaries make a really tiny portion of the budget, it's the principle - maybe if the MPs got whatever the average (or even better, median) salary is, they would have more incentives to make it so that the average salary increases...
This is, again, why we need strong social insurances: we are better off per-capita, meaning the winners are coming out so far ahead that they can compensate the losers and still be winners.
I completely agree. Otherwise things like the GDP do not really matter. I mean if one guy got a million, but 1000 people lost $100, it is a net gain on average, but the 1000 people would rather the one guy lost a million and they all got $100. If the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, the GDP may increase, but it still is not good for the poor.
I remember somebody on Youtube saying "It's 4 wheel DRIVE, not 4 wheel STOP"
The difference is destructive vs non-destructive safety features.
Seatbelts, airbags can reduce the injury in an accident, but the car is still damaged. Which means that usually people do not want their car to get damaged. As such, probably very few people think "it's OK if I hit a tree at 100km/h, the airbags, seatbelts and crumple zones will save me" and then drive bouncing from tree to tree.
This is like the safety feature of some table saws, where if you touch the blade, the saw gets destroyed, but you finger is safe. Nobody would put a finger in that saw on purpose, because even if the safety feature works OK, you just destroyed your saw, which, I assume is not cheap.
On the other hand, non-destructive safety features can be abused. ABS will let me stop better on ice, so let's drive faster and tailgate. After all, there is no cost associated with activating the ABS.
And Autopilot, in my opinion is the opposite of a safety feature. ABS at least does make it safer to stop on ice, though I think the cars should not advertise that they have ABS, so the people drive as if there is no ABS. Autopilot encourages people to not pay attention completely. After all, the car drives itself and has been doing so perfectly for the last 3 hours today and for the last 200 times before, why should you just sit and stare at the road with nothing to do (which is incredibly boring), better watch a movie or read a book. After all, you don't really need to pay attention, the various messages telling you to do so are probably there for some bullshit legal reasons.
At least airbags and crumple zones are destructive, so, people usually do not want to damage their car on purpose, even though they drive less carefully now.
On the other hand, I can totally see something like ABS and traction control abused for driving fast on a slippery road ("It's OK, my car has ABS and traction control, it drives on ice just as well as on asphalt"). The automatic emergency stop can be used in place of regular stopping, until it fails one day and you hit another car.
Autopilot-type features are the worst. If my car had them, I would ask my passengers (if I wasn't driving alone) to hit me if they saw me turn it on. The reason is that (I can only speak for myself obviously, but I believe this is common for people) I get bored when I have nothing to do, and watching the car essentially drive itself flawlessly does not count as "having something to do", so I would stop paying attention, start daydreaming etc and could crash if the Autopilot failed. Just like I do not pay attention when somebody else is driving. On the other hand, driving my car without such features keeps me focused on driving.
Universal dividend seems like a good idea.
That's actually a red herring. Walmart has 1,500,000 employees, and the CEO makes $6 million.
Which is probably something like 200 times the salary of the average employee.
I need something better than a CEO pay cut to stop people from starving to death or losing medical care.
Yes, sure. However, "the times are bad, I have to let some of you go and the rest will get reduced salary, we have to tighten our belts to survive the recession. Oh and look at my shiny new Tesla" makes people hate the CEO and company owners in general, developing into an "us vs them" mentality that the government gladly exploits. This is kinda true in my country, where an increase in the minimal wage is followed by cries from various small company owners that they won't be able to afford this, followed by "serves them right, they are thieves anyway" sentiment from the rest of the people.
In practice, the employment moves around--have you noticed unemployment is low all the time, with recessions in between?
Depends on how you count it, in some cases people give up hope on ever finding a job and become alcoholics. Since they are not registered as looking for a job, the government does not count them as "unemployed". Quite a few people (especially the more hard-working ones) emigrate to other countries.
Employment moves around, but I notice one trend. As robots (and workers in foreign countries) are replacing less skilled local workers, those workers have nowhere to go. So, a factory with robots may need more engineers to program and maintain those robots, but the people who assembled the product by hand previously may not e able to do it.
More to the point, again, the theoretical jobs are 0.1% of the workforce.
The way I understand it is that the 0.1% is for a single big factory or for all the factories making the same type of product (pants for example). But then the shirt factories move to China. And then car factories. And electronics factories. And so on. At some point in the future self-driving cars will put professional drivers out of work. And at some point there may be no more work for people who, for example, cannot program a computer.
At every such change, a small percentage of people are ruined, the top 1% (or less) of the country get huge bonuses and everyone else is slightly better off*. As every change ruins another small percentage of people, I'd say that this, on average is bad for the majority.
* this assumes that moving the factory to China reduces the price of the product. It may very well keep the price and just increase the profits.
Also, for some reason China does not have free trade with the US, you can build a car in China and import it into the US for free, but, AFAIK, China does not want cars made in the US.
As for the environmental policies, what incentive is there for someone to open a factory in the EU or the US if he will have to pay the workers more and comply with the more strict environment laws? Why not just open the factory in China or somewhere else with lax (or unenforced) environment laws, dump poison into drinking water, make the product cheaper and sell it for the same price for higher profits.
This is a very informative post.
It seems that open trade may work for some countries and especially be beneficial to the poor countries. However, the way stuff works now, AFAIK, is that factories in, say, the USA get moved to China, workers are now jobless, but the profits go only to the company and its shareholders (as the rich pay relatively little tax, especially with all the tax evasion options (Panama papers etc) that are available to them).
Norway is a different case, as the mentality there differs from the USA and my country, from what I have read. There is is considered "shameful" if a CEO of a company earns 10 times more than the workers, while in my country, in the last recession, it was relatively common for the salaries of the workers be reduced and some workers fired (with the remaining ones having to do more) on account of the recession, while the boss buys a brand new car.
In theory automation, for example, is awesome. Pretty much nobody wants to flip burgers. Except that if there are burger-flipping robots, then the burger-flipping human gets to starve. In theory, robots could work for us and we could have life-long vacations. In practice, very few people would have life long vacations, while the rest would starve.
With good progressive taxes (that are actually collected even from the rich), open trade and automation would be great. The way it is now, not so much, at least in my opinion.
Also, if someone wants to preach to me about environment (either CO2 or waste), I always think that there should be tariffs imposed on goods imported from countries with less strict environment laws. If I open a factory in the EU, how am I supposed to compete with a factory in China if they are allowed to generate as much waste as they want and I am not?
Recently the EU banned plastic straws on account of waste plastic getting into the ocean. Good enough, even though I have not seen a lot of plastic garbage on the street or in a river in my country (most people throw them in the trash). However, in some countries, for example India, the rivers are full of plastic garbage that makes its way into the ocean. So, I think that sanctions should be imposed on those countries, until they clean themselves up and, for example, also ban the plastic straws.
And only the rich win from open trade and being able to screw the local workers.
So, since it's a lose-lose proposition for me, I'd rather see the rich lose too.
Also, people talk about how we should take care of the environment, governments pass laws that forbid dumping toxic waste into a river etc. However, you can always open a factory in China, produce as much CO2 as you want, dump as much toxic waste into rivers as you want, that will allow you to make the product cheaper and you will out-compete the local factories that have to use expensive equipment to clean out their waste and reduce their CO2 emissions. Being able to use child labor and no need to care about workplace safety is also great. After all, what matters more than the income of shareholders?
Well, the current terrorists, maybe, but you never know what the future terrorists will think.
I mean somebody figured out that you can hijack and airplane and, instead of asking for ransom, use it as a missile to knock down buildings.
Also, hacking a lot of cars (if there is a vulnerability, then it probably affects all the cars of the same model) and making them kill the people would be a large scale attack, possibly spanning multiple countries.
Maybe the car should have a built-in taser. During the recovery, the thief has to keep both hands on the wheel or he gets zapped repeatedly until he puts his hands on the wheel.
And there would be a second PIN (unknown to you) in case you insulted Dear Leader and needed to be transported to a gulag. Or Dear Leader wanted you to accidentally, due to inattentiveness, drive full speed into a tree.
It would be even more interesting if the terrorists hacked the cars and told them to drive into a tree at full speed. That would cause much more terror than flying airplanes into buildings or planting bombs.
I guess it is also useful that my native language is rather difficult to learn for foreigners. Companies cannot outsource tech support or spam calls.
The problem with the cyclist you mention is that he will most likely damage someone's car and can cause emotional trauma to the driver. Just like the people who get run over by a train.
When I go to work, driving is the fastest way, because I do not encounter traffic jams (and on a bike I would have to wait the same time for traffic lights and would be slower when actually going).
Also, when I am driving, I do not mind the wait so much. It it's -20C outside, I can use heating in my car, If it's +30C, I can use AC. The car has a roof that protects me from rain or snow. So, even if it was faster to use a bike, I would not do so. I'd rather sit in my car, listening to my favorite radio station (or tape), not too hot or too cold than be in a bike in rain (or heat, or cold), even if I could save a few minutes.
Honestly, the slower phone seems like the better outcome as it ensures you have a phone and not a brick
Yes, it does seem like a better option with one requirement - that I am notified that I need to replace the battery. I can then decide if I want to do it (or use the slow phone, or buy a new phone), but I should know about the problem.
At least when the phone fails to boot or randomly shuts off, I know there is a problem and can bring the phone to a repair shop to fix it. If the phone just slows down, I may not notice it at first (if the slowdown is gradual) or think that the software update is bloated and inefficient (if it is very noticeable immediately).