Raise the benefit & liability requirements to the same level as FTE.
Right, because fixing the symptoms with even more regulations and heavy handed tyrannical control over people's lives and business contracts is what we should be doing right now.
Unless you have a self-energizing alternator, which generates its own field when RPMs get high enough, in which case yes you can indeed push start your car with a totally dead battery.
. Any system with fundamentally un-knowable but mildly predictable bounds (like the sun cycle) will work like this; the only people in the end who were "smart enough to see it" were really just the best guessers.
That's nonsense. What about the economy is "unknowable"? Every aspect of how everything in the world works is knowable, if you study it enough to learn. The economy is just such a large and complicated system that consciously knowing every single detail AND keeping it in mind all at the same time is impossible. You certainly can however understand it well enough to see trends and make more or less accurate predictions.
As for me, in early 2007 I got my first job (and last. *shudder*) as a cubicle drone. At the time and for a long time to come I knew next to nothing about real estate, investing, bubbles, or any of that. On my way to/from work I did see the subdivisions of expensive houses filled with people who couldn't afford furniture. I did see that there was something fundamentally wrong here.
Later that month I met a wild eyed guy from Washington State who had just paid some ridiculous amount for a house which he expected to re-sell and profit from immensely in a few years. I do remember feeling quite skeptical about the sustainability of this way of living, especially with this guy talking about how the market was just going to keep rising. I remember getting the impression that the guy was basically just a naive follower who was copying what everyone else was doing, and that's probably why I was so skeptical.
Just prior to this white collar, I worked briefly as a surveyor's apprentice. I walked around out in a field and held a pole for the guy with the instrument to sight in on and take distance and angle readings. Our last job was in a big green field that was being bulldozed to install a subdivision full of cookie cutter houses, which would be expected to sell for $150k+. I remember thinking, WHY in the world would someone pay $150k for a cookie cutter house on a little patch of grass in a cookie cutter neighborhood in Nowhere, Alabama? It sickened me to help destroy a beautiful part of nature for no good reason whatsoever.
Contractors seemingly made easy money, driving huge trucks and living in huge expensives homes, all because of building neighborhoods full of bland, uninspiring houses. Just because "everyone is doing it" was not enough to convince me this was right. Something seemed fundamentally wrong about the whole scenario, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what.
What I felt in all those situations IS knowing. That's what knowing IS. All the evidence was right there in front of my face, just like it was in front of everyone else's eyes too. I saw that the housing market was an unsustainable bubble, even if I couldn't exactly put it into words at the time. It wasn't a "guess" when I decided to not become involved in this wickedness. It was a correct *prediction*. I *knew* this shit was all going to come crashing down on people's heads, I just didn't know exactly how or why.
For all the people trying to claim they "never saw it coming"? Well....sorry. Clearly these people have terrible vision, instincts, or simply failed to listen to them.
An interesting side effect of higher fuel taxes in Canada and especially in Europe is that vehicles tend to be smaller and more fuel efficient. That allows for denser parking (since vehicles don't take up as much space) and easier visibility for drivers on the roads, not to mention making our limited supplies of oil last longer.
Which in the end is futile, because the oil runs out anyway. It may run out more slowly under your scheme, thus reducing the buildup of pressure to change, increasing the unsustainable increase in the people-to-available-resources ratio, until it inevitably all comes crashing down in massive and horrible war like it always does in this scenario.
Under the American way of doing things, we're basically burning the stuff as quickly as it comes out of the ground, and we are heavily dependent on it. These recent high gas prices--and yes they are high, because they are much closer to free market pricing than your socialist, highly regulated economy--really hurt. The kick in the ass is what we need to bring the problem quickly to everyone's attention so we can start working on real fixes, rather than trudging along unworried right to our doom.
Oh, and our cars simply kick way more ass than yours. European cars are BLAND, other than German offerings, and well....they're Germans. Only Australia with their offshoots of our car industry (Ford and Holden) and more lax environmental/safety regulations has cooler cars than we do. So enjoy your slow simmering cauldron of doom, while we burn up the gallons in style.
(At least until the Dollar comes crashing down......sigh.)
The fact that Microsoft is playing catchup in the game of throwing the core users under the bus to chase iPad and Android fanboys is so satisfying!
Yes, and I'm sure you will be further and further mystified as this "abortion of an idea" continues to take hold, eventually becoming the standard way of doing things everywhere, until later morphing into some other completely unexpected direction into something else even more mystifying. Like a cat lady you will sit barricaded in your apartment, surrounded by rattling, yellowed beige boxes and the dim glow of flickering CRTs, pounding greasy keys on your crumb-filled Model M as you scratch out code for the Nth rendition of Windows 95 (for Linux!) which you are just sure will revolutionize everything, and illustrate once and for all to these silly kids how wrong they are.
Then the decision to not drink should come very easy to them.
Your reply shows exactly the lack of understanding I'm talking about. You can't legislate (or demand, or "why don't you just...?" or intimidate or...) social problems out of existence. Obtusely trying the same failed method over and over again is not improving anything.
You seem to be confusing "God-given ability" with "Daddy was rich therefore I am".
In my case, Daddy was not at all rich nor was he inclined to be. He was perfectly content with living in an old single wide trailer out in the woods, and seemed indignant that I wasn't. He was however an intelligent man who instinctively understood how systems of things worked, and had a very practical curiosity about a great many things.
Mom wasn't rich either. Her dad was a temperamental, fiercely independent Cherokee/Irish man who worked as a welder all his life building cranes. Her mother was an intelligent lady of English descent who loved to read. My mother grew up in the backwoods of Alabama. No wealth there, only riches of spirit.
At the lowest levels all of the Universe is based on mathematics, is it not? Put two and two together and guess what? Here I am with Curiosity, Intelligence, Ambition, and Drive = Entrepreneur.
I beg to differ: my God-given abilities (aka genetic predisposition to certain ways of thinking) most certainly DO make me rich.
Any disbelief in the existence of genetic predisposition towards riches is nothing more than insecurity, or ignorance, crying out for attention.
Belief in god(s) is the mark of a moron.
If every chemical reaction which occurs in the Universe has a cause, which is knowable......does it not follow that there is a grain of truth inside every myth, story, or idea which humankind (the species) has felt (collectively) was important to perpetrate to some degree?
Would it not also follow that, given the extent with which these stories/myths/ideas (i.e. the Bible) have been spread prolifically, copied, and otherwise upheld by mankind for ages.....the grain(s) of truth in question must be significant indeed?
I was an atheist too--starting around elementary school--and ending when I learned enough about the Universe to know that while there may not be (and probably isn't) a Supreme Being in the form imagined by Man, Man isn't stupid, and there IS a reason behind all this religious "nonsense."
Take the Bible, remove all the supernatural stuff, 2000+ years of misinterpretation and word-of-mouth/hand-copied-scrolls evolution/mistranslation, and most importantly....substitute "Society" (or "Society + Nature") wherever God is mentioned. Now re-read the whole thing, assuming everything is a metaphor or allegory to the human condition. It makes perfect sense. The book contains a ton of truth.
There is no God-given ability which "makes" you rich.
False.
No-one is forcing you to take a high-paying job nor to keep the money you're paid - these things come of choosing the worldly path.
Of course you, a person who apparently does not possess the God-given ability to accumulate wealth--otherwise, what explains your apparent total ignorance of how wealth is actually built, by wealthy people? hint: it's not "high paying jobs." So therefore it can be forgiven that you would completely misinterpret the Biblical saying based in an attempt to flatter your own insecure ego.
And either it's merely a nice idea or it's God's word, in which case he won't take any of your rationalising bullshit.
It's merely a nice idea. Or do you actually think the Bible is God's literal word? LOL.
tl;dr you get what you deserve.
1) tl;dr is the mark of a moron. Please do yourself a favor and stop using this worthless phrase.
2) Didn't God say something about judgment being reserved for him alone? What makes a man arrogant enough to think he's got God's judgment figured out, worked out to a system based on rumors and stories written down by Bronze Age sheep herders? Oh yeah, and it's a dichotomy as simple as "poor men go to heaven and the rich go STRAIGHT TO HELL"?
No alternative possible scenario occurs to you, such as "the original words spoken two thousand years ago have been greatly twisted and distorted and the real original meaning is damn difficult if not impossible to discern today"? Jesus didn't judge people based on their wealth, but on their deeds. Makes sense to me. He was friends with wealthy people including Joseph of Arimethia.
OK then, how about $200/month? Not at all unlikely for a typical teenage driver. At what price point does it become OK and morally right to effectively disenfranchise someone from their right to travel based on their inability or unwillingness to participate in what is essentially a racket?
They don't help at all, because the Color Rendering Index for sodium lamps is shit, especially low pressure lamps. The light is ALL yellow and it's more difficult to tell distance/recognize shapes/etc.
DUI is a big problem in the US in no small part due to the fact that our punishments for it are a total fucking joke.
The only joke I see is the idea of "just make the laws tougher" and that will solve all our problems. Sorry, laws don't solve social problems, and throwing people in prison is not going to solve anything. The United States, one country with 3% of the world population, already holds 25% of the entire world's prisoners. What makes you believe imprisoning more people is going to help a goddamn thing?
Lies. There's plenty of research to support that any alcohol in a person's system has a deletrious effect on driving ability.
True, but let's be realistic: if the viewpoint were popular enough and anyone cared to conduct it, there would be just as many studies claiming just the opposite.
0.08 seems like a reasonable limit to be set, if we have to use a single absolute number as absolute proof.
We don't. We could just empower the officer to use his brain and write someone a ticket if they are obviously intoxicated. If a person is not obviously intoxicated and/or driving erratically, police officers have no business minding his business.
All that said, it's not drunk driving that is really at issue, but irresponsible and/or inattentive driving.
Agreed.
But the argument can be made that (from a statistical standpoint) people who are caught violating motor vehicle laws and are legally drunk (as it is presently defined) are responsible for the lion's share of vehicle accidents resulting in death or serious injury. It would be very pragmatic to simply remove those people from public roadways, and leave the arguments over why that particular subset of people are over-represented for another day.
It might be "pragmatic", but it would be utterly ineffective and just cause more problems than it solves. You can't "just remove" people from the roadway, when we live in a nation where a large percentage of the population REQUIRES a vehicle just to survive. The end result of trying to do the impossible is just heartache and misery.
I think I'd have to go back to the mid-60s Ford and Chevy 3/4 ton trucks to remember fooling around with a choke. Or the farm tractors and semi rigs. I can't remember fooling around with a choke on a passenger car after the mid-70s.
Clearly you are speaking about manual chokes, which went out of style in the mid-60s as you recall. I can assure you though, every carbureted car you've ever owned has some kind of choke. If it's not a manually adjusted one, it's an electric or exhaust-heated one. The original poster's reference to people having a hard time starting their cars in cold weather refers to the common condition of the automatic choke being out of adjustment.
Electric chokes have been common in American cars since the late 60s at least. Every Quadrajet-equipped GM car had either an electric or (functionally equivalent) hot air choke.
Maybe you should start speaking from a position of knowledge, rather than assuming, based on your obviously limited experience. Damn near every American car in the 80s had carburetors, especially in the first half of the decade. The very first fully electronic, digital fuel injection systems weren't even invented until the early 80s. The Monte Carlo SS had a carburetor right up until it was discontinued in 1988. Fuel injection did not become widespread on American cars until the 90s.
No, this is wrong. The oil only needs to be changed after it's no longer doing its job of lubricating the engine, not when the engine has passed some arbitrary mileage figure. You can actually drain a sample of the oil and send it off to be tested, to let you know *exactly* when it needs to be changed.....which is often far less often than most people assume. With a modern, quality synthetic oil, under normal driving conditions 10k is nothing, turbocharged or not.
Yes, you are correct--if we're talking about an engine that was built by a mechanic/shop/etc, and hasn't been run-in at all until it makes it to your vehicle. In that case, change the oil and filter (filter is most important) after the first 500 miles. The vast majority of engines though in today's world are broken in by the manufacturer before ever being installed in the vehicle, so there is no need for a special first oil change interval on a newly purchased vehicle.
But he changes the oil in his cars and motorcycles more frequently than the book says. Just because.
Your friend is a fool, because running an engine 30-40k miles on a single oil change (especially with modern engines and synthetic oils) isn't really that big of a deal. Now if the car had been driven 100k+ miles with such infrequent changes, then yeah, I'd be leery too. But never under any circumstances other than the HARSHEST conditions and abuse should anyone ever change oil *sooner* than the manufacturer's recommendation...which is usually 6k+ miles on most modern vehicles.
A friend of mine once had a job at the Honda plant years back in Lincoln, AL where they build the Odyssey. One day he got pulled off the floor to help them diagnose a possible quality control problem. Seems they had a bad run of valve retainers. My friend is the hell raising kind and he beat the piss out of that minivan, until it finally dropped a valve at 80 MPH near the end of the test track, destroying the engine. Damn near wrecked it trying to stop when the brake pedal went hard, lol.
There are probably plenty of good reasons for owning a Toyota over a Jeep (especially since they are owned by Chrysler), but access to Haynes data isn't one of them. I once spent a couple evenings laying under my car in the cold, cursing while I drilled broken flywheel bolts out of the crankshaft, cause a Haynes manual gave me incorrect torque specs. If you want access to reliable maintenance data for your car, turn to the factory shop manual, or Alldata (which contains all the same stuff.)
You do realise that all the software you name is almost certainly relying on glibc or GNU libstdc++ to run on your Linux computer, right? Sure, those could be replaced, but they haven't been.
Because they work fine and there is no compelling reason to do so, not because the GNU utilities are just soooooo damn good that nobody could possibly ever want to replace them.
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Raise the benefit & liability requirements to the same level as FTE.
Right, because fixing the symptoms with even more regulations and heavy handed tyrannical control over people's lives and business contracts is what we should be doing right now.
Unless you have a self-energizing alternator, which generates its own field when RPMs get high enough, in which case yes you can indeed push start your car with a totally dead battery.
. Any system with fundamentally un-knowable but mildly predictable bounds (like the sun cycle) will work like this; the only people in the end who were "smart enough to see it" were really just the best guessers.
That's nonsense. What about the economy is "unknowable"? Every aspect of how everything in the world works is knowable, if you study it enough to learn. The economy is just such a large and complicated system that consciously knowing every single detail AND keeping it in mind all at the same time is impossible. You certainly can however understand it well enough to see trends and make more or less accurate predictions.
As for me, in early 2007 I got my first job (and last. *shudder*) as a cubicle drone. At the time and for a long time to come I knew next to nothing about real estate, investing, bubbles, or any of that. On my way to/from work I did see the subdivisions of expensive houses filled with people who couldn't afford furniture. I did see that there was something fundamentally wrong here.
Later that month I met a wild eyed guy from Washington State who had just paid some ridiculous amount for a house which he expected to re-sell and profit from immensely in a few years. I do remember feeling quite skeptical about the sustainability of this way of living, especially with this guy talking about how the market was just going to keep rising. I remember getting the impression that the guy was basically just a naive follower who was copying what everyone else was doing, and that's probably why I was so skeptical.
Just prior to this white collar, I worked briefly as a surveyor's apprentice. I walked around out in a field and held a pole for the guy with the instrument to sight in on and take distance and angle readings. Our last job was in a big green field that was being bulldozed to install a subdivision full of cookie cutter houses, which would be expected to sell for $150k+. I remember thinking, WHY in the world would someone pay $150k for a cookie cutter house on a little patch of grass in a cookie cutter neighborhood in Nowhere, Alabama? It sickened me to help destroy a beautiful part of nature for no good reason whatsoever.
Contractors seemingly made easy money, driving huge trucks and living in huge expensives homes, all because of building neighborhoods full of bland, uninspiring houses. Just because "everyone is doing it" was not enough to convince me this was right. Something seemed fundamentally wrong about the whole scenario, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what.
What I felt in all those situations IS knowing. That's what knowing IS. All the evidence was right there in front of my face, just like it was in front of everyone else's eyes too. I saw that the housing market was an unsustainable bubble, even if I couldn't exactly put it into words at the time. It wasn't a "guess" when I decided to not become involved in this wickedness. It was a correct *prediction*. I *knew* this shit was all going to come crashing down on people's heads, I just didn't know exactly how or why.
For all the people trying to claim they "never saw it coming"? Well....sorry. Clearly these people have terrible vision, instincts, or simply failed to listen to them.
An interesting side effect of higher fuel taxes in Canada and especially in Europe is that vehicles tend to be smaller and more fuel efficient. That allows for denser parking (since vehicles don't take up as much space) and easier visibility for drivers on the roads, not to mention making our limited supplies of oil last longer.
Which in the end is futile, because the oil runs out anyway. It may run out more slowly under your scheme, thus reducing the buildup of pressure to change, increasing the unsustainable increase in the people-to-available-resources ratio, until it inevitably all comes crashing down in massive and horrible war like it always does in this scenario.
Under the American way of doing things, we're basically burning the stuff as quickly as it comes out of the ground, and we are heavily dependent on it. These recent high gas prices--and yes they are high, because they are much closer to free market pricing than your socialist, highly regulated economy--really hurt. The kick in the ass is what we need to bring the problem quickly to everyone's attention so we can start working on real fixes, rather than trudging along unworried right to our doom.
Oh, and our cars simply kick way more ass than yours. European cars are BLAND, other than German offerings, and well....they're Germans. Only Australia with their offshoots of our car industry (Ford and Holden) and more lax environmental/safety regulations has cooler cars than we do. So enjoy your slow simmering cauldron of doom, while we burn up the gallons in style.
(At least until the Dollar comes crashing down......sigh.)
We are NOT petty.
Additionally, "whining" is NOT spelled with a G.
Have a nice day.
The fact that Microsoft is playing catchup in the game of throwing the core users under the bus to chase iPad and Android fanboys is so satisfying!
Yes, and I'm sure you will be further and further mystified as this "abortion of an idea" continues to take hold, eventually becoming the standard way of doing things everywhere, until later morphing into some other completely unexpected direction into something else even more mystifying. Like a cat lady you will sit barricaded in your apartment, surrounded by rattling, yellowed beige boxes and the dim glow of flickering CRTs, pounding greasy keys on your crumb-filled Model M as you scratch out code for the Nth rendition of Windows 95 (for Linux!) which you are just sure will revolutionize everything, and illustrate once and for all to these silly kids how wrong they are.
Then the decision to not drink should come very easy to them.
Your reply shows exactly the lack of understanding I'm talking about. You can't legislate (or demand, or "why don't you just...?" or intimidate or ...) social problems out of existence. Obtusely trying the same failed method over and over again is not improving anything.
You seem to be confusing "God-given ability" with "Daddy was rich therefore I am".
In my case, Daddy was not at all rich nor was he inclined to be. He was perfectly content with living in an old single wide trailer out in the woods, and seemed indignant that I wasn't. He was however an intelligent man who instinctively understood how systems of things worked, and had a very practical curiosity about a great many things.
Mom wasn't rich either. Her dad was a temperamental, fiercely independent Cherokee/Irish man who worked as a welder all his life building cranes. Her mother was an intelligent lady of English descent who loved to read. My mother grew up in the backwoods of Alabama. No wealth there, only riches of spirit.
At the lowest levels all of the Universe is based on mathematics, is it not? Put two and two together and guess what? Here I am with Curiosity, Intelligence, Ambition, and Drive = Entrepreneur.
I beg to differ: my God-given abilities (aka genetic predisposition to certain ways of thinking) most certainly DO make me rich.
Any disbelief in the existence of genetic predisposition towards riches is nothing more than insecurity, or ignorance, crying out for attention.
Belief in god(s) is the mark of a moron.
If every chemical reaction which occurs in the Universe has a cause, which is knowable......does it not follow that there is a grain of truth inside every myth, story, or idea which humankind (the species) has felt (collectively) was important to perpetrate to some degree?
Would it not also follow that, given the extent with which these stories/myths/ideas (i.e. the Bible) have been spread prolifically, copied, and otherwise upheld by mankind for ages.....the grain(s) of truth in question must be significant indeed?
I was an atheist too--starting around elementary school--and ending when I learned enough about the Universe to know that while there may not be (and probably isn't) a Supreme Being in the form imagined by Man, Man isn't stupid, and there IS a reason behind all this religious "nonsense."
Take the Bible, remove all the supernatural stuff, 2000+ years of misinterpretation and word-of-mouth/hand-copied-scrolls evolution/mistranslation, and most importantly....substitute "Society" (or "Society + Nature") wherever God is mentioned. Now re-read the whole thing, assuming everything is a metaphor or allegory to the human condition. It makes perfect sense. The book contains a ton of truth.
There is no God-given ability which "makes" you rich.
False.
No-one is forcing you to take a high-paying job nor to keep the money you're paid - these things come of choosing the worldly path.
Of course you, a person who apparently does not possess the God-given ability to accumulate wealth--otherwise, what explains your apparent total ignorance of how wealth is actually built, by wealthy people? hint: it's not "high paying jobs." So therefore it can be forgiven that you would completely misinterpret the Biblical saying based in an attempt to flatter your own insecure ego.
And either it's merely a nice idea or it's God's word, in which case he won't take any of your rationalising bullshit.
It's merely a nice idea. Or do you actually think the Bible is God's literal word? LOL.
tl;dr you get what you deserve.
1) tl;dr is the mark of a moron. Please do yourself a favor and stop using this worthless phrase.
2) Didn't God say something about judgment being reserved for him alone? What makes a man arrogant enough to think he's got God's judgment figured out, worked out to a system based on rumors and stories written down by Bronze Age sheep herders? Oh yeah, and it's a dichotomy as simple as "poor men go to heaven and the rich go STRAIGHT TO HELL"?
No alternative possible scenario occurs to you, such as "the original words spoken two thousand years ago have been greatly twisted and distorted and the real original meaning is damn difficult if not impossible to discern today"? Jesus didn't judge people based on their wealth, but on their deeds. Makes sense to me. He was friends with wealthy people including Joseph of Arimethia.
OK then, how about $200/month? Not at all unlikely for a typical teenage driver. At what price point does it become OK and morally right to effectively disenfranchise someone from their right to travel based on their inability or unwillingness to participate in what is essentially a racket?
They don't help at all, because the Color Rendering Index for sodium lamps is shit, especially low pressure lamps. The light is ALL yellow and it's more difficult to tell distance/recognize shapes/etc.
DUI is a big problem in the US in no small part due to the fact that our punishments for it are a total fucking joke.
The only joke I see is the idea of "just make the laws tougher" and that will solve all our problems. Sorry, laws don't solve social problems, and throwing people in prison is not going to solve anything. The United States, one country with 3% of the world population, already holds 25% of the entire world's prisoners. What makes you believe imprisoning more people is going to help a goddamn thing?
Lies. There's plenty of research to support that any alcohol in a person's system has a deletrious effect on driving ability.
True, but let's be realistic: if the viewpoint were popular enough and anyone cared to conduct it, there would be just as many studies claiming just the opposite.
0.08 seems like a reasonable limit to be set, if we have to use a single absolute number as absolute proof.
We don't. We could just empower the officer to use his brain and write someone a ticket if they are obviously intoxicated. If a person is not obviously intoxicated and/or driving erratically, police officers have no business minding his business.
All that said, it's not drunk driving that is really at issue, but irresponsible and/or inattentive driving.
Agreed.
But the argument can be made that (from a statistical standpoint) people who are caught violating motor vehicle laws and are legally drunk (as it is presently defined) are responsible for the lion's share of vehicle accidents resulting in death or serious injury. It would be very pragmatic to simply remove those people from public roadways, and leave the arguments over why that particular subset of people are over-represented for another day.
It might be "pragmatic", but it would be utterly ineffective and just cause more problems than it solves. You can't "just remove" people from the roadway, when we live in a nation where a large percentage of the population REQUIRES a vehicle just to survive. The end result of trying to do the impossible is just heartache and misery.
Dude, if you think US BAC limits are low you need to get out more.
Why would anyone want to "get out more" if it means being exposed to countries which are EVEN MORE despotic than our own?
I wonder who these people who can afford French petrol and diesel prices, but can't afford $4 are.
Probably same as the Americans who can afford American gas prices, but can't afford a mandatory $500/month insurance policy on top of it.
I think I'd have to go back to the mid-60s Ford and Chevy 3/4 ton trucks to remember fooling around with a choke. Or the farm tractors and semi rigs. I can't remember fooling around with a choke on a passenger car after the mid-70s.
Clearly you are speaking about manual chokes, which went out of style in the mid-60s as you recall. I can assure you though, every carbureted car you've ever owned has some kind of choke. If it's not a manually adjusted one, it's an electric or exhaust-heated one. The original poster's reference to people having a hard time starting their cars in cold weather refers to the common condition of the automatic choke being out of adjustment.
Electric chokes have been common in American cars since the late 60s at least. Every Quadrajet-equipped GM car had either an electric or (functionally equivalent) hot air choke.
Maybe you should start speaking from a position of knowledge, rather than assuming, based on your obviously limited experience. Damn near every American car in the 80s had carburetors, especially in the first half of the decade. The very first fully electronic, digital fuel injection systems weren't even invented until the early 80s. The Monte Carlo SS had a carburetor right up until it was discontinued in 1988. Fuel injection did not become widespread on American cars until the 90s.
No, this is wrong. The oil only needs to be changed after it's no longer doing its job of lubricating the engine, not when the engine has passed some arbitrary mileage figure. You can actually drain a sample of the oil and send it off to be tested, to let you know *exactly* when it needs to be changed.....which is often far less often than most people assume. With a modern, quality synthetic oil, under normal driving conditions 10k is nothing, turbocharged or not.
Yes, you are correct--if we're talking about an engine that was built by a mechanic/shop/etc, and hasn't been run-in at all until it makes it to your vehicle. In that case, change the oil and filter (filter is most important) after the first 500 miles. The vast majority of engines though in today's world are broken in by the manufacturer before ever being installed in the vehicle, so there is no need for a special first oil change interval on a newly purchased vehicle.
But he changes the oil in his cars and motorcycles more frequently than the book says. Just because.
Your friend is a fool, because running an engine 30-40k miles on a single oil change (especially with modern engines and synthetic oils) isn't really that big of a deal. Now if the car had been driven 100k+ miles with such infrequent changes, then yeah, I'd be leery too. But never under any circumstances other than the HARSHEST conditions and abuse should anyone ever change oil *sooner* than the manufacturer's recommendation...which is usually 6k+ miles on most modern vehicles.
A friend of mine once had a job at the Honda plant years back in Lincoln, AL where they build the Odyssey. One day he got pulled off the floor to help them diagnose a possible quality control problem. Seems they had a bad run of valve retainers. My friend is the hell raising kind and he beat the piss out of that minivan, until it finally dropped a valve at 80 MPH near the end of the test track, destroying the engine. Damn near wrecked it trying to stop when the brake pedal went hard, lol.
There is no Haynes available for it at all
There are probably plenty of good reasons for owning a Toyota over a Jeep (especially since they are owned by Chrysler), but access to Haynes data isn't one of them. I once spent a couple evenings laying under my car in the cold, cursing while I drilled broken flywheel bolts out of the crankshaft, cause a Haynes manual gave me incorrect torque specs. If you want access to reliable maintenance data for your car, turn to the factory shop manual, or Alldata (which contains all the same stuff.)
You do realise that all the software you name is almost certainly relying on glibc or GNU libstdc++ to run on your Linux computer, right? Sure, those could be replaced, but they haven't been.
Because they work fine and there is no compelling reason to do so, not because the GNU utilities are just soooooo damn good that nobody could possibly ever want to replace them.
Why is this downmodded? He makes a good point. "Do as I say, not as I do" is also a common lesson than the typical mom teaches her kids.