I put in a suggestion years ago that they require a confirmation screen that allows you to proofread your submission before you commit it, but that doesn't seem to have been implemented. Well, at least based on posts like this one....
Something something horse to water, drinking, something.
You see the bubble, that's progress. You're on the wrong side of it, however.
You also threw down a nice strawman, well done. When you resort to that, it's a sign you're on the wrong side of the issue.
What people want is a thinner, lighter status symbol that shows how much money they have. And it needs to be the new version, not the one from a year or two ago. If it's broken or doesn't work quite right, it gives them social media points when they complain about it. It also gives them a reason to go to the apple store and browse the new shiny stuff while sipping a latte.
Apple has rebranded itself to be all about status, and not about being a professional tool. Doesn't matter if the keyboard gets fucked after a bit. It's either under warranty, or you're going to be getting a new one soon anyway.
Since you apparently use a Mac, you apparently haven't ever tried not to use iCloud.
iCloud can't be ignored, and can't be killed. I tried for 6 months. It's woven through the entire Mac ecosystem, and if you don't log into it, you get prompted to do so every time one of the components wakes up.
I literally had an iCloud login popup about every half hour near the end when I quit using the machine. Turning it off in software settings didn't work, manually killing the process didn't work, and trying to blow away the program caused errors and it came back every time it updated. I seriously worried that I had a trojan trying to steal my login info, it was that bad.
You have to use iCloud. At least on the 2012 MBP I have.
You forgot the requirement to use iCloud, which absolutely is a requirement when the base MBPs ship with 128gb hard drives in them, and jumping up to a 1 TB drive costs you $800. That's a sixty fucking percent increase to the price of the laptop to add a sensible sized drive to it. Retail, that's maybe a $200 drive.
The Mac Pro fairs a little better, because it at least starts with twice the storage. Still caps out at 1TB however.
But hey, no big deal, right? You can drop $300 on a 2TB Airport drive, or just carry around some external hard drives with you.
You are 100% incorrect. Apple absolutely listens to its users. The problem is that you don't understand that you are a minority, and the vast majority of apple users don't care about what you care about.
"People" do not like to be able to rip apart their laptop and upgrade it. You like that. I like that. But not people in general. Not half of people, not even 10% of people like that.
Apple has successfully changed to market itself to the mainstream population, and they are not like us.
When their MBP hardware really stagnated, they got rid of magsafe, and I got tired of their incessant iCloud nagware, I realized that they had moved on from where I am as a customer. That's life. My Dell precision running ubuntu isn't quite as slick as my 2012 MBP was when new, but it's better than that laptop these days, and better than the current line of MBPs. Thin, light, powerful, user-upgradable, and relatively inexpensive.
If a company isn't making a product you want, move on to one which is.
But above all, you're missing the larger point, which is that lumping together everyone on the other side of the line, whether they be just a shade over or the most extreme, is a really terrible political strategy...
A major issue is that lack of criticism of one's voluntarily adopted party often comes across as condoning their actions.
If people aren't willing to differentiate themselves from horrible people that they voluntarily associate with, how do you not lump them together? Nobody is forcing you to be a Republican or a Democrat. When you voluntarily adopt one of those labels and stand silently while other members do shitty things, how, exactly, does one figure out "how far over the line" you are?
If you can't criticize the group you run with, that's a serious problem, and you probably shouldn't be running with that group. Unfortunately, politics seems to run on tribalism, and that is largely responsible for this situation.
The insurance company did their own estimate to argue against that price, and came up only about $250 lower. The parts themselves were listed at $250. The labor was all the rest. And that's in large part due to a fancy-ass paint job, which requires three layers of paint that have to be blended over the front quarter of the vehicle to look good. The car living in the paint shop for a day or two was a good chunk of that bill.
In looking to see how ridiculous this was, I came away realizing that it seemed semi-reasonable. Especially after seeing a couple posts from people with non-luxury cars (Honda, Mazda) who did similar damage to their fenders/wheel wells, and got $5k-6k bills for the repairs. It turns out that that's one of the really expensive parts of your car body to damage. I learned something new today.
Same thing here. The only hiccup at the moment is that I moved into a new house which has a bunch of old-school dimmer switches in it. Those cause LEDs to flicker, even when the dimmer switch is turned up to max. I need to rip those out, then all will be well again.
The house I moved into was bathed in blue-white CFLs, (which also flickered, which was particularly awful) and that was an instant nope. Lots of warm LEDs later, and it's far more livable.
My current car requires the battery to be removed to access one of the headlights. Doable, but it's far more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. Replacing the actual bulb is pretty trivial to do, and doesn't require any tools if your fingernails are strong enough. Pulling out the battery, however? That requires a screwdriver, a wrench, and a fair bit of cussing.
Agreed. But for some people, being able to have a country estate rather than a tiny apartment or row house is more important than all of that lost time and money.
For the same price as a suburban house my grandfather purchased an old farmhouse twice that size, (7 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms, 2 living/entertaining rooms, etc.) along with 150 acres of land with five barns and a pond. He then proceeded to put a three hole golf course in one of the fields.
He was one of those insane people who would make a drive like that, leaving at 6am and getting home somewhere between 5-6pm. But on the weekend he'd go golfing and fishing on his property, and that's what really made him happy.
That's a real difference between the US and Europe. The US is big, and a large percent of it is empty. For relatively little money you can own real property, and if you so choose, you can have your own private fish pond and golf course. Or dirt race track. Or hunting grounds. The trade-off is that you likely will need to drive a long way to where the jobs are in order to have those things, if you don't come from money.
The US is not like Europe. Here's some math with a real world example to put it in context:
On average, lets say you work about 22 days per month. (4 weeks * 5 days plus a couple extra days)
Lets suppose this is a particularly bad commute of 90 miles (145km) one way. (I work with a couple people who do this, actually. No, I don't understand why either.) That's 180 miles per day, times 22 days, gives you about 4000 miles per month commuting. Assuming a 20mpg gas hog, (the US loves their giant SUVs) that's 200 gallons per month, and at $3 that's $600, and that doesn't count weekend driving.
The rationale for driving 90 miles each way is that it "only" takes about an hour and a half, the cost of living is about 30% less that far from the city, it's mostly easy highway driving at speed, and they can listen to podcasts and books on tape. As I noted, I don't get this at all. It seems utterly insane to me. But I've worked with a few people now who do this.
Oh, and that's all in-state driving, not even covering half the width of the state.
What? Just being arrested is being severely harmed?
You're not from the US, are you? Here just being arrested can quite literally ruin your life.
Arrests get airtime and newspaper articles, refusals to prosecute or being found innocent does not. So that means any future employer who does a cursory search on you finds out that you got arrested for something. They won't find out that it was a misunderstand, mistaken identity, or due to a corrupt cop. Have you seen any of the mugshot websites where they post all of them? Do you think they follow up on what happens and take them down for everyone not convicted?
When you're arrested, you don't necessarily get to talk to the outside world for a bit. So you just go missing. You miss work shifts, meetings, picking your kids up from school, etc. When school finds out that you didn't pick up the kids because you were arrested, now you're on the watch list of potentially dangerous parents. Kid falls down and gets a bruise, teacher sees it, now it's a call to child protective services because you abuse your children. They can just come take them while they investigate, and you can't do shit about it.
If you can't or won't make bail, you sit in jail. That means more missed work, and miss too much, and you're out of a job. Keep in mind that the publicity of the arrest and loss of the most recent reference might seriously harm your ability to find a new job. If you don't have someone else managing the bills, that's potentially a repossessed house or a foreclosure to add to your misery.
Now, does this happen all that often if you're white and at least modestly wealthy? No. But it does happen, and that's a fucking travesty. You might not see it solely due to your race and socioeconomic status.
Even non-speedrunning gamers can find some real joy in pacifist runs. It's often far more challenging to not kill enemies than it is to just play the game as designed. It requires different strategies and skills, and often radically different gameplay.
I've replayed a fair number of games that way, just because it breathes new life into an old favorite.
That's why I specifically used the term TCO. That covers everything you just posted.
And missing from your list are brakes. Those aren't cheap, and regenerative braking is starting to stretch the lifetime of brakes to the lifetime of the car.
No, it's the immigrant work ethic. They are much more industrious and hard working than the natives, as they seek to eek out a better life for themselves and their family.
The other issue is that there are very few used Teslas for sale. If you want one, you're most likely going to have to buy new. In another 5-10 years, there will be plenty of used ones. My guess is that will drive down demand and thus price a little as well.
Two other thing to consider are renters and repeat customers.
Not a lot of landlords are going to be interested in investing tons of money on home storage. However, lots of renters may be interested in an EV. (If they can figure out how to charge it.)
And you add home power systems to your home once in a lifetime. You tend to have something on an order of magnitude more cars.
Not if you want it to be cost effective. Powerwalls are way more expensive than a shed full of marine batteries. My brother lived off the grid for awhile, with a couple of solar arrays and a shed full of batteries. When he looked at the Powerwall, he laughed. Way less capacity than he had, costing an obscene amount more.
If you're into functional art, sure. Spend the premium. But if you want to affordably store power, Powerwall isn't the way to go.
EVs are poised to be huge (once they become cheaper than regular cars
They are pretty much there already. No, not in sticker price, but when you look at TCO, EVs are pretty much on par with ICE cars. It looks like the 5 year Model 3 TCO is on par with a Camry as long as the tax incentive is there. Without it, the Model 3 comes in a little higher than a Camry.
If the machine is intended to be used for the detriment of humanity, don't help build it.
So coders are now required to be psychics, eh?
There's no real way to tell most of the time if the code you're working on is going to be used for good or ill in the future. If you're the one engineering the whole system, sure, you know. But if you're just a code monkey? No way to tell.
Even if you knew that it was going to be used to some detriment, the question then would be what percent of the time it will be used for ill, and what percent of the time it will be used for good. And then where you draw that personal line? Saying "I'll only work on this if I have a guarantee that it's 100% pure angel magic" is utterly unrealistic.
You seem to think the world is black and white, and everyone has full knowledge of everything. That's really not the case.
Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices...He pointed to how Wikipedia had to rapidly adapt its policies after putting online the power for anyone to edit its encyclopedia, noting: "They introduced a whole lot of bureaucracy around it but that actually makes it work, and it ended up be coming very functional."
Coding is nothing like editing Wikipedia.
You can't be "consciously grappling with ethical choices" while you're implementing a sort function. Maybe that sort function is going to determine which sick child gets priority treatment, or maybe that sort function will figure out which sick child costs too much, and another routine will try to get rid of the kid. If a coder is going too far down the rabbit hole trying to figure out how every last hunk of code will be used, they're no longer just a coder.
If the summary had quotes from TBL about software engineering, architecture, or design it would be a lot more insightful. But a whole lot of code is making function foo handle variable X correctly. There's nothing ethical or unethical in that. It just is.
Code is a tool. And like any tool, it can be used for good or ill. Placing the focus there rather than on the larger design and decision systems seems really dumb to me. Of course, the article might go into these things, but ain't nobody got time for that.
Running sucks balls. I've never liked running. I can tolerate a little bit of sports in the spring/fall, but summer is too hot and winter is too cold. And running for the sake of running....I'll never understand people who do that. I guess I've never gotten a runner's high from it, so it's all just 100% suckage for me.
What worked for me was spending a lot of money on a personal trainer. 30 minutes of circuit training twice a week, and that's it. I'm paying for my time and my health. The first six months were brutal, but I can suck it up for a half hour. Run for 15 minutes? Fuck that. But 2 minutes on, 30 seconds off, for 30 minutes? Sure. Every couple of minutes switch exercises? Sure. It keeps it interesting, I don't get bored, and I never have to do anything, no matter how much it sucks, for more than about 2 minutes.
A year and a half in and I feel great, physically and mentally, and I'm looking a lot better too. An hour a week with someone who knows what they're fucking doing has gotten me results that three hours on my own every week never could.
If running isn't your thing, and you want to do something other than look and feel more and more like shit while waiting to die an early death, hire a professional. Recognize that you don't know how to effectively exercise, and pay someone to show you how.
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I put in a suggestion years ago that they require a confirmation screen that allows you to proofread your submission before you commit it, but that doesn't seem to have been implemented. Well, at least based on posts like this one....
Something something horse to water, drinking, something.
You see the bubble, that's progress. You're on the wrong side of it, however.
You also threw down a nice strawman, well done. When you resort to that, it's a sign you're on the wrong side of the issue.
What people want is a thinner, lighter status symbol that shows how much money they have. And it needs to be the new version, not the one from a year or two ago. If it's broken or doesn't work quite right, it gives them social media points when they complain about it. It also gives them a reason to go to the apple store and browse the new shiny stuff while sipping a latte.
Apple has rebranded itself to be all about status, and not about being a professional tool. Doesn't matter if the keyboard gets fucked after a bit. It's either under warranty, or you're going to be getting a new one soon anyway.
Since you apparently use a Mac, you apparently haven't ever tried not to use iCloud.
iCloud can't be ignored, and can't be killed. I tried for 6 months. It's woven through the entire Mac ecosystem, and if you don't log into it, you get prompted to do so every time one of the components wakes up.
I literally had an iCloud login popup about every half hour near the end when I quit using the machine. Turning it off in software settings didn't work, manually killing the process didn't work, and trying to blow away the program caused errors and it came back every time it updated. I seriously worried that I had a trojan trying to steal my login info, it was that bad.
You have to use iCloud. At least on the 2012 MBP I have.
You forgot the requirement to use iCloud, which absolutely is a requirement when the base MBPs ship with 128gb hard drives in them, and jumping up to a 1 TB drive costs you $800. That's a sixty fucking percent increase to the price of the laptop to add a sensible sized drive to it. Retail, that's maybe a $200 drive.
The Mac Pro fairs a little better, because it at least starts with twice the storage. Still caps out at 1TB however.
But hey, no big deal, right? You can drop $300 on a 2TB Airport drive, or just carry around some external hard drives with you.
You are 100% incorrect. Apple absolutely listens to its users. The problem is that you don't understand that you are a minority, and the vast majority of apple users don't care about what you care about.
"People" do not like to be able to rip apart their laptop and upgrade it. You like that. I like that. But not people in general. Not half of people, not even 10% of people like that.
Apple has successfully changed to market itself to the mainstream population, and they are not like us.
When their MBP hardware really stagnated, they got rid of magsafe, and I got tired of their incessant iCloud nagware, I realized that they had moved on from where I am as a customer. That's life. My Dell precision running ubuntu isn't quite as slick as my 2012 MBP was when new, but it's better than that laptop these days, and better than the current line of MBPs. Thin, light, powerful, user-upgradable, and relatively inexpensive.
If a company isn't making a product you want, move on to one which is.
But above all, you're missing the larger point, which is that lumping together everyone on the other side of the line, whether they be just a shade over or the most extreme, is a really terrible political strategy...
A major issue is that lack of criticism of one's voluntarily adopted party often comes across as condoning their actions.
If people aren't willing to differentiate themselves from horrible people that they voluntarily associate with, how do you not lump them together? Nobody is forcing you to be a Republican or a Democrat. When you voluntarily adopt one of those labels and stand silently while other members do shitty things, how, exactly, does one figure out "how far over the line" you are?
If you can't criticize the group you run with, that's a serious problem, and you probably shouldn't be running with that group. Unfortunately, politics seems to run on tribalism, and that is largely responsible for this situation.
The insurance company did their own estimate to argue against that price, and came up only about $250 lower. The parts themselves were listed at $250. The labor was all the rest. And that's in large part due to a fancy-ass paint job, which requires three layers of paint that have to be blended over the front quarter of the vehicle to look good. The car living in the paint shop for a day or two was a good chunk of that bill.
In looking to see how ridiculous this was, I came away realizing that it seemed semi-reasonable. Especially after seeing a couple posts from people with non-luxury cars (Honda, Mazda) who did similar damage to their fenders/wheel wells, and got $5k-6k bills for the repairs. It turns out that that's one of the really expensive parts of your car body to damage. I learned something new today.
Same thing here. The only hiccup at the moment is that I moved into a new house which has a bunch of old-school dimmer switches in it. Those cause LEDs to flicker, even when the dimmer switch is turned up to max. I need to rip those out, then all will be well again.
The house I moved into was bathed in blue-white CFLs, (which also flickered, which was particularly awful) and that was an instant nope. Lots of warm LEDs later, and it's far more livable.
My current car requires the battery to be removed to access one of the headlights. Doable, but it's far more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. Replacing the actual bulb is pretty trivial to do, and doesn't require any tools if your fingernails are strong enough. Pulling out the battery, however? That requires a screwdriver, a wrench, and a fair bit of cussing.
Agreed. But for some people, being able to have a country estate rather than a tiny apartment or row house is more important than all of that lost time and money.
For the same price as a suburban house my grandfather purchased an old farmhouse twice that size, (7 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms, 2 living/entertaining rooms, etc.) along with 150 acres of land with five barns and a pond. He then proceeded to put a three hole golf course in one of the fields.
He was one of those insane people who would make a drive like that, leaving at 6am and getting home somewhere between 5-6pm. But on the weekend he'd go golfing and fishing on his property, and that's what really made him happy.
That's a real difference between the US and Europe. The US is big, and a large percent of it is empty. For relatively little money you can own real property, and if you so choose, you can have your own private fish pond and golf course. Or dirt race track. Or hunting grounds. The trade-off is that you likely will need to drive a long way to where the jobs are in order to have those things, if you don't come from money.
The US is not like Europe. Here's some math with a real world example to put it in context:
On average, lets say you work about 22 days per month. (4 weeks * 5 days plus a couple extra days)
Lets suppose this is a particularly bad commute of 90 miles (145km) one way. (I work with a couple people who do this, actually. No, I don't understand why either.) That's 180 miles per day, times 22 days, gives you about 4000 miles per month commuting. Assuming a 20mpg gas hog, (the US loves their giant SUVs) that's 200 gallons per month, and at $3 that's $600, and that doesn't count weekend driving.
The rationale for driving 90 miles each way is that it "only" takes about an hour and a half, the cost of living is about 30% less that far from the city, it's mostly easy highway driving at speed, and they can listen to podcasts and books on tape. As I noted, I don't get this at all. It seems utterly insane to me. But I've worked with a few people now who do this.
Oh, and that's all in-state driving, not even covering half the width of the state.
What? Just being arrested is being severely harmed?
You're not from the US, are you? Here just being arrested can quite literally ruin your life.
Arrests get airtime and newspaper articles, refusals to prosecute or being found innocent does not. So that means any future employer who does a cursory search on you finds out that you got arrested for something. They won't find out that it was a misunderstand, mistaken identity, or due to a corrupt cop. Have you seen any of the mugshot websites where they post all of them? Do you think they follow up on what happens and take them down for everyone not convicted?
When you're arrested, you don't necessarily get to talk to the outside world for a bit. So you just go missing. You miss work shifts, meetings, picking your kids up from school, etc. When school finds out that you didn't pick up the kids because you were arrested, now you're on the watch list of potentially dangerous parents. Kid falls down and gets a bruise, teacher sees it, now it's a call to child protective services because you abuse your children. They can just come take them while they investigate, and you can't do shit about it.
If you can't or won't make bail, you sit in jail. That means more missed work, and miss too much, and you're out of a job. Keep in mind that the publicity of the arrest and loss of the most recent reference might seriously harm your ability to find a new job. If you don't have someone else managing the bills, that's potentially a repossessed house or a foreclosure to add to your misery.
Now, does this happen all that often if you're white and at least modestly wealthy? No. But it does happen, and that's a fucking travesty. You might not see it solely due to your race and socioeconomic status.
Even non-speedrunning gamers can find some real joy in pacifist runs. It's often far more challenging to not kill enemies than it is to just play the game as designed. It requires different strategies and skills, and often radically different gameplay.
I've replayed a fair number of games that way, just because it breathes new life into an old favorite.
It's not just gas savings,
That's why I specifically used the term TCO. That covers everything you just posted.
And missing from your list are brakes. Those aren't cheap, and regenerative braking is starting to stretch the lifetime of brakes to the lifetime of the car.
No, it's the immigrant work ethic. They are much more industrious and hard working than the natives, as they seek to eek out a better life for themselves and their family.
The other issue is that there are very few used Teslas for sale. If you want one, you're most likely going to have to buy new. In another 5-10 years, there will be plenty of used ones. My guess is that will drive down demand and thus price a little as well.
Two other thing to consider are renters and repeat customers.
Not a lot of landlords are going to be interested in investing tons of money on home storage. However, lots of renters may be interested in an EV. (If they can figure out how to charge it.)
And you add home power systems to your home once in a lifetime. You tend to have something on an order of magnitude more cars.
Not if you want it to be cost effective. Powerwalls are way more expensive than a shed full of marine batteries. My brother lived off the grid for awhile, with a couple of solar arrays and a shed full of batteries. When he looked at the Powerwall, he laughed. Way less capacity than he had, costing an obscene amount more.
If you're into functional art, sure. Spend the premium. But if you want to affordably store power, Powerwall isn't the way to go.
EVs are poised to be huge (once they become cheaper than regular cars
They are pretty much there already. No, not in sticker price, but when you look at TCO, EVs are pretty much on par with ICE cars. It looks like the 5 year Model 3 TCO is on par with a Camry as long as the tax incentive is there. Without it, the Model 3 comes in a little higher than a Camry.
If the machine is intended to be used for the detriment of humanity, don't help build it.
So coders are now required to be psychics, eh?
There's no real way to tell most of the time if the code you're working on is going to be used for good or ill in the future. If you're the one engineering the whole system, sure, you know. But if you're just a code monkey? No way to tell.
Even if you knew that it was going to be used to some detriment, the question then would be what percent of the time it will be used for ill, and what percent of the time it will be used for good. And then where you draw that personal line? Saying "I'll only work on this if I have a guarantee that it's 100% pure angel magic" is utterly unrealistic.
You seem to think the world is black and white, and everyone has full knowledge of everything. That's really not the case.
Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices ...He pointed to how Wikipedia had to rapidly adapt its policies after putting online the power for anyone to edit its encyclopedia, noting: "They introduced a whole lot of bureaucracy around it but that actually makes it work, and it ended up be coming very functional."
Coding is nothing like editing Wikipedia.
You can't be "consciously grappling with ethical choices" while you're implementing a sort function. Maybe that sort function is going to determine which sick child gets priority treatment, or maybe that sort function will figure out which sick child costs too much, and another routine will try to get rid of the kid. If a coder is going too far down the rabbit hole trying to figure out how every last hunk of code will be used, they're no longer just a coder.
If the summary had quotes from TBL about software engineering, architecture, or design it would be a lot more insightful. But a whole lot of code is making function foo handle variable X correctly. There's nothing ethical or unethical in that. It just is.
Code is a tool. And like any tool, it can be used for good or ill. Placing the focus there rather than on the larger design and decision systems seems really dumb to me. Of course, the article might go into these things, but ain't nobody got time for that.
I like, "I'm present, how are you?"
Running sucks balls. I've never liked running. I can tolerate a little bit of sports in the spring/fall, but summer is too hot and winter is too cold. And running for the sake of running....I'll never understand people who do that. I guess I've never gotten a runner's high from it, so it's all just 100% suckage for me.
What worked for me was spending a lot of money on a personal trainer. 30 minutes of circuit training twice a week, and that's it. I'm paying for my time and my health. The first six months were brutal, but I can suck it up for a half hour. Run for 15 minutes? Fuck that. But 2 minutes on, 30 seconds off, for 30 minutes? Sure. Every couple of minutes switch exercises? Sure. It keeps it interesting, I don't get bored, and I never have to do anything, no matter how much it sucks, for more than about 2 minutes.
A year and a half in and I feel great, physically and mentally, and I'm looking a lot better too. An hour a week with someone who knows what they're fucking doing has gotten me results that three hours on my own every week never could.
If running isn't your thing, and you want to do something other than look and feel more and more like shit while waiting to die an early death, hire a professional. Recognize that you don't know how to effectively exercise, and pay someone to show you how.
Did you even look at their "research"? (No, because it's behind a login, so you can't see what bullshit they did to get those numbers.)
What do you mean, standard FUD?
Some Electric Car Drivers Might Spew More CO2 Than Diesel Cars, New "Research" Shows