Obviously a cheaper car is going to be cheaper; you didn't have to go through the trouble of doing math to figure that out. What I was pointing out is that after the savings inherent in having a purely electric vehicle it's not AS BAD as it seems at first glance.
I'm not exactly rich, but I've been seriously thinking about buying one. I've run the numbers and I can EASILY afford it. Then again, I'm single, and have enough in savings to buy it outright, so I'm not your typical "middle class family". But I can see it being a decent buy even in those circumstances, as long as the buyer makes good choices about financing. That's going to be your biggest problem.
I would argue that a middle classer who bought a car that costs more than a year's salary has piss poor money management.
This very much depends on other cost factors.
The average American right now spends over $2,000 per year on fuel. In Canada it's more like $3,000. Europe is even higher. Electric drastically lowers that cost, making it easier to justify a large initial investment.
Vehicle maintenance is another consideration. Electric in general is supposed to require far less maintenance. On oil changes alone you should save $200+ per year. Reduced break wear thanks to regenerative breaking means you breaks and rotors last longer. And so on.
So say an electric vehicle reduces your annual costs by $1,500, and you keep it for 10 years. That's a saving of $15,000. That makes it much easier to justify "a car that costs more than a years salary", especially it it's amortized over a few years. And with fuel costs constantly increasing, the amount saved is likely to be higher over the long term.
The g-forces are enough that the drivers can't breath for half the lap. They're getting really close to the point where g forces are a problem.
That's interesting. Any idea why they're not using G-Suits yet? Seems like it would provide a significant advantage, assuming this is really as much of a problem as you say...
To be fair, many human children (and some adults!) cannot do that and they still get the full protection of our laws. An average chimp is at least as intelligent and self-aware as an average human toddler.
That may be true, but we know that humans as a species are relatively intelligent and self-aware, even if not all individuals are. If there comes a day when we can say the same thing about chimps, all of them will receive rights/protection even if some of them don't meet those criteria.
Difference being that Jerry was modified. If we can ever uplift chimps to that level, granting them "human" rights will be a no-brainer. Sci-fi in general has done a lot of hand-wringing over such questions (see Data's trial in ST:TNG) but given the current zeitgeist I couldn't ever see it being an issue. The day a chimp can walk up to me and say "Hi, I'm Jerry, could you please stop experimenting on me?" is the day he gets the full protection of our laws. Until then it's always going to be a fringe issue.
I get that. Nobody likes advertising. But the GPS functionality of my phone/tablet is valuable to me, and turning it off makes no sense when "they" have other ways of tracking me.
On my android devices I have XPrivacy installed on the XPosed framework, which does a good job of letting me control which apps can track me. I let the google maps, google earth, and Copilot apps have access to location data; all other apps get fake location data. Right now Facebook thinks I'm in Madagascar.
May want to give that a shot if you have your devices rooted.
I've soured on the desirability of gps in my phone. Maps just ain't worth the tracking of everywhere I go by the phone company and facebook and everyone else for targeted advertising and whatnot.
Um, you realize that they can track you just fine by doing things like tower triangulation and correlating your position to known WiFi access points, right?
By giving up on GPS you're throwing away your ability to know where you are while preserving "their" ability to know where you are. Doesn't make much sense.
I mean, let's be blunt here, look at how your soldiers treat people where they invade.
With kid gloves?
Seriously, dude, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. The extent to which the US will go to avoid civilian casualties and avoid violating local customs and sensibilities is astounding. This is a fairly new thing in combat - previous wars were butchery by comparison - yet the US takes more flack for it now than it ever has before.
There was an incredibly strong pro-US sentiment in Iraq right after the invasion. That changed damn quickly.
Of course it did. You had local warlords slaughtering anyone who cooperated with western forces, and terrorizing the rest into submission. You had the same warlords plus related propaganda outlets spewing nonsense about how the horrible crusaders were raping women and eating children for breakfast. You even had lovely useful-idiots (you can guess where my finger is pointing) in the west repeating the same lies and jizzing themselves with glee every time they got to post online about some innocent getting killed or some detainees being abused. And you had 90% of the western population repeating the lie that "we were lied to about the reasons for the war", and claiming nobody gives a shit about the Iraqis and we're only there for the oil. In such an atmosphere I'm surprised that support for the US presence stayed as strong as it did.
The Germans and Japanese in WW2 got treated far worse than the Iraqis ever did, but in those wars we didn't have to contend with an organized resistance, or a grassroots propaganda machine within our own borders working against our interests.
Saddam did not violate any ceasefire agreements in anyway that mattered to US interests.
Oh yeah, shooting at American aircraft is like totally not a big deal.
I should try that line of defence in court though. "Your honour, it's true that I violated my parole conditions, but I didn't do it in any way that matters to your interests. Ya gonna let me go, right?"
Now, you still hear about what's happening, but not straight.
This has always been the case; the reason you notice it now is:
1. It's gotten a bit more blatant with the advent of the 24-hour-news-cycle. 2. As you grow up you tend to develop a better sense of whether or not someone is trying to manipulate you. Go back and watch some news from the past which you thought was "balanced", and you'll be surprised by how poorly your memory of it stands up to the reality.
Just like you can't get straight black coffee anymore without someone dumping some kind of syrup in for flavoring
That's just weird. My coffee is still as black as ever. Maybe you should stop buying your coffee from the syrup factory?
It's more valid than your position, which pre-supposes that there isn't a purpose.
This is fractally wrong. Even if that were my position, it would arguably still be more valid since nothing we've observed even hints at the existence of some objective universal purpose. However, you've also managed to construct a complete strawman of my position, which makes you even more wrong.
For the record, the only position I have on the topic is that before you can ask what the purpose of something is, you first have to have some relatively solid reason to suspect that a purpose exists. Otherwise you're simply engaging in a guessing game based on hunches, feelings, and paranoid delusions. "Why did we have a drought which killed all our crops? Must be because we haven't sacrificed enough virgins."
Oh I understand the issue just fine: the issue here is that you're asking for an objective process to agree with your personal preference; essentially a request for reality to adhere to your opinions rather than the other way around. And you think this is an intelligent request.
Your job, not mine. Or, we have a domain not resolvable by science, as was the original claim.
That's easy then; I'll define "best" as "most records sold", look up the figures, and have an answer for you in no time.
What, that's not the kind of "best" you meant? Well then rephrase the goddamn question instead of telling me that I have to define what you're asing for.
Bullshit. Science has plenty of heroes, and their stories serve to fascinate and inspire future generations. What science doesn't have is the mindless fanboi-ish worship of heroes. Anyone who actually understands the first thing about science knows that even our heroes can be wrong; and most of them HAVE been wrong about at least a few things. That doesn't stop them from being heroes, it just makes them human.
No, it's not. The question "why" in this case presuposes some kind of purpose, without any reason to believe that such a purpose exists. Just because you can phrase something in the form of a question doesn't mean that your "question" makes any sense.
Of course, there is video. Yes, there are SD copies and screeners, maybe even someone ballsy enough to cam and slip that on BitTorrent, but 1080i (true, not upsampled) movies are rare.
Say what?
Dude, either you haven't been paying attention, or you don't know how to use teh intertubes. Every movie is available as a torrent in full 1080p pretty much the day the blueray disks hit the store shelves. Many are available even earlier.
Even Blu-Ray hasn't been fully cracked yet (it is still a race with each individual movie.)
If by "race" you mean that the various release groups are tripping over each other in order to see which one can get theirs up in the shortest amount of time, then yes. "X-Men Days of Future Past" won't be available for purchase for another 3 weeks, but there's already a 720p blueray rip available on the torrent sites, and the 1080p version should follow in the next few days.
It's easy to copy music by plugging a cable from a headphone jack into a line-in jack on another computer.
Got you one better: in this day and age it's pretty much inconceivable that they would disable bleutooth functionality. If you can pair your fancy unpiratable player to a PC rigged to copy the incoming audio stream to disk, you've got yourself a digital copy with essentially no quality loss.
The problem is devices that WOULD be significantly cheaper to repair if parts were more easily (and reasonably) available and if the things weren't designed to be harder to repair.
I keep hearing this complaint - that there are devices out there which are "designed to be harder to repair" - but, at least in my experience, that's incredibly rare. More often devices are designed to be difficult to open due to concerns about warranty claims on modified items, and even THAT is pretty rare. Every electronic gizmo which I currently own can be opened with relative ease. Most of them I would be able to perform SOME repairs on, as long as it doesn't involve having to replace chips or capacitors.
There are some things that bug me - such as my Nexus 5 not having a (easily) replaceable battery. However, while I may not be happy about them, they're all design choices which the manufacturer made for reasons that have nothing to do with repairability. And, for the most part, they're things that don't really effect me (eg. it is highly unlikely that I will keep my Nexus 5 long enough to actually need a battery replacement).
If it were well supported by the data I wouldn't have said that it keeps being repeated without any good evidence. In reality, all of these claims are only supported by the "research" of S.A. Marshall, and there's no evidence that the guy ever actually did the research that he claims he did. There's certainly no replication of his results. But there is evidence that he had a habit of making up data to support his narratives.
In fact, it's one of the reasons veteran units are so dangerous. Most of the members are actually trying to kill you instead of just shooting in your general direction.
This is like saying that the reason professional basketball teams are so good is because they actually try to score points. Silly, at best.
The actual reason veteran units are so dangerous is because:
1. They're experienced. 2. They're a (literal) example of the survivor bias; most of their crappy soldiers die off, shifting the bell-curve to the right.
That's tactics, not psychology. During the 2nd world war most soldiers did not want to kill enemy soldiers because they saw them as fellow humans.
That claim keeps getting repeated without any good evidence. Anyone who's actually studied history knows that it's complete bullshit. Human beings have been participating in organized murder and genocide for thousands of years. We have archaeological evidence of mass slaughter on every continent, amongst every major ethnic group. Plus we have evidence of lovely post-death atrocities such as scalping, ritualized slaughter, and even cannibalism; things which only further illustrate how unlikely it is for combatants to view the other side as "fellow humans". The idea that soldiers on the battlefield are reluctant to shoot at each other is complete nonsense.
A repair culture exists any time it's significantly cheaper to fix something than to replace it outright. A couple hundred years ago there was a repair culture about everything including socks, because a new pair of socks was a luxury and continually patching old ones was way more economical. We stopped repairing our socks when they became cheap enough to throw away. Do you really want to go back to a time when you had to keep repairing your socks because you couldn't afford new ones?
I don't miss that. Not at all. I much prefer having the choice to either tinker with my gadgets when I have the time, or just buy new ones when I don't.
Ever looked at a 'natural' map, like Europe, Asia etc? And ever looked at an 'artificial' map, like USA, Africa?
There's no such thing as a natural map, unless you're talking about the geological outlines without any political boundaries. You know why your "natural" maps look so chaotic as opposed to your "artificial" ones? Because the former are a result of centuries of conflict carved out according to what each tribe could hold, whereas the latter are carved out arbitrarily by one tribe (ie. the British) which can hold everything. The latter is no more "artificial" than the former; it merely ceases to have any meaning once the all-powerful tribe packs up and goes home. The power vacuum gets filled by the old tribes all going back to their original squabbles.
The British didn't create conflict by putting up new borders; they put a stop to ongoing conflicts which resumed once the British left.
The guys ruling there usually do one thing: 'cleanse' the previous ruling cohorts and replace every post with family members and far relatives. Regardless if they win an election or become rulers by a coupe. The idea that law is above everything, that corruption is bad etc. etc. is a strange concept to them. How should it not, during the occupation by europeans they experienced that the laws are not protecting them, they are only to the benefit of the imperialists.
While there's a small bit of truth to your conclusion, it creates the false impression that "cleansing" is a modern invention. That's bullshit. These tribes were destroying and enslaving each other long before the white man ever set foot on their continent.
So we've given them lower infant mortality and more regular food availability, while they continued to kill and enslave each other at roughly the same rate as before. And you think that "messed them up"?
How so?
Seems to me at worst we've made things slightly better for them. I'm pretty sure the women, at least, are happy to see more of their children surviving to adulthood. Plus we've given them the tools and knowledge to build better societies, even if it hasn't happened yet. How is that a bad thing?
Not to mention that you whole comment stinks of condescension. "Should have left those poor dumb Negroes to their own devices; they'd be much happier running around naked chucking spears at the local wildlife".
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Obviously a cheaper car is going to be cheaper; you didn't have to go through the trouble of doing math to figure that out. What I was pointing out is that after the savings inherent in having a purely electric vehicle it's not AS BAD as it seems at first glance.
I'm not exactly rich, but I've been seriously thinking about buying one. I've run the numbers and I can EASILY afford it. Then again, I'm single, and have enough in savings to buy it outright, so I'm not your typical "middle class family". But I can see it being a decent buy even in those circumstances, as long as the buyer makes good choices about financing. That's going to be your biggest problem.
I would argue that a middle classer who bought a car that costs more than a year's salary has piss poor money management.
This very much depends on other cost factors.
The average American right now spends over $2,000 per year on fuel. In Canada it's more like $3,000. Europe is even higher. Electric drastically lowers that cost, making it easier to justify a large initial investment.
Vehicle maintenance is another consideration. Electric in general is supposed to require far less maintenance. On oil changes alone you should save $200+ per year. Reduced break wear thanks to regenerative breaking means you breaks and rotors last longer. And so on.
So say an electric vehicle reduces your annual costs by $1,500, and you keep it for 10 years. That's a saving of $15,000. That makes it much easier to justify "a car that costs more than a years salary", especially it it's amortized over a few years. And with fuel costs constantly increasing, the amount saved is likely to be higher over the long term.
The g-forces are enough that the drivers can't breath for half the lap. They're getting really close to the point where g forces are a problem.
That's interesting. Any idea why they're not using G-Suits yet? Seems like it would provide a significant advantage, assuming this is really as much of a problem as you say ...
To be fair, many human children (and some adults!) cannot do that and they still get the full protection of our laws. An average chimp is at least as intelligent and self-aware as an average human toddler.
That may be true, but we know that humans as a species are relatively intelligent and self-aware, even if not all individuals are. If there comes a day when we can say the same thing about chimps, all of them will receive rights/protection even if some of them don't meet those criteria.
Difference being that Jerry was modified. If we can ever uplift chimps to that level, granting them "human" rights will be a no-brainer. Sci-fi in general has done a lot of hand-wringing over such questions (see Data's trial in ST:TNG) but given the current zeitgeist I couldn't ever see it being an issue. The day a chimp can walk up to me and say "Hi, I'm Jerry, could you please stop experimenting on me?" is the day he gets the full protection of our laws. Until then it's always going to be a fringe issue.
Did you know that the word "gullible" was created as a result of a new fusion process?
True story.
I get that. Nobody likes advertising. But the GPS functionality of my phone/tablet is valuable to me, and turning it off makes no sense when "they" have other ways of tracking me.
On my android devices I have XPrivacy installed on the XPosed framework, which does a good job of letting me control which apps can track me. I let the google maps, google earth, and Copilot apps have access to location data; all other apps get fake location data. Right now Facebook thinks I'm in Madagascar.
May want to give that a shot if you have your devices rooted.
I've soured on the desirability of gps in my phone. Maps just ain't worth the tracking of everywhere I go by the phone company and facebook and everyone else for targeted advertising and whatnot.
Um, you realize that they can track you just fine by doing things like tower triangulation and correlating your position to known WiFi access points, right?
By giving up on GPS you're throwing away your ability to know where you are while preserving "their" ability to know where you are. Doesn't make much sense.
I mean, let's be blunt here, look at how your soldiers treat people where they invade.
With kid gloves?
Seriously, dude, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. The extent to which the US will go to avoid civilian casualties and avoid violating local customs and sensibilities is astounding. This is a fairly new thing in combat - previous wars were butchery by comparison - yet the US takes more flack for it now than it ever has before.
There was an incredibly strong pro-US sentiment in Iraq right after the invasion. That changed damn quickly.
Of course it did. You had local warlords slaughtering anyone who cooperated with western forces, and terrorizing the rest into submission. You had the same warlords plus related propaganda outlets spewing nonsense about how the horrible crusaders were raping women and eating children for breakfast. You even had lovely useful-idiots (you can guess where my finger is pointing) in the west repeating the same lies and jizzing themselves with glee every time they got to post online about some innocent getting killed or some detainees being abused. And you had 90% of the western population repeating the lie that "we were lied to about the reasons for the war", and claiming nobody gives a shit about the Iraqis and we're only there for the oil. In such an atmosphere I'm surprised that support for the US presence stayed as strong as it did.
The Germans and Japanese in WW2 got treated far worse than the Iraqis ever did, but in those wars we didn't have to contend with an organized resistance, or a grassroots propaganda machine within our own borders working against our interests.
Saddam did not violate any ceasefire agreements in anyway that mattered to US interests.
Oh yeah, shooting at American aircraft is like totally not a big deal.
I should try that line of defence in court though. "Your honour, it's true that I violated my parole conditions, but I didn't do it in any way that matters to your interests. Ya gonna let me go, right?"
Now, you still hear about what's happening, but not straight.
This has always been the case; the reason you notice it now is:
1. It's gotten a bit more blatant with the advent of the 24-hour-news-cycle.
2. As you grow up you tend to develop a better sense of whether or not someone is trying to manipulate you. Go back and watch some news from the past which you thought was "balanced", and you'll be surprised by how poorly your memory of it stands up to the reality.
Just like you can't get straight black coffee anymore without someone dumping some kind of syrup in for flavoring
That's just weird. My coffee is still as black as ever. Maybe you should stop buying your coffee from the syrup factory?
It's more valid than your position, which pre-supposes that there isn't a purpose.
This is fractally wrong. Even if that were my position, it would arguably still be more valid since nothing we've observed even hints at the existence of some objective universal purpose. However, you've also managed to construct a complete strawman of my position, which makes you even more wrong.
For the record, the only position I have on the topic is that before you can ask what the purpose of something is, you first have to have some relatively solid reason to suspect that a purpose exists. Otherwise you're simply engaging in a guessing game based on hunches, feelings, and paranoid delusions. "Why did we have a drought which killed all our crops? Must be because we haven't sacrificed enough virgins."
Oh I understand the issue just fine: the issue here is that you're asking for an objective process to agree with your personal preference; essentially a request for reality to adhere to your opinions rather than the other way around. And you think this is an intelligent request.
Your job, not mine. Or, we have a domain not resolvable by science, as was the original claim.
That's easy then; I'll define "best" as "most records sold", look up the figures, and have an answer for you in no time.
What, that's not the kind of "best" you meant? Well then rephrase the goddamn question instead of telling me that I have to define what you're asing for.
Tell me, then, which is the best rock band in history, or is no knowledge of the subject possible?
First define "best".
If you think science can't give you the answer to something, it's only because you don't know how to ask the question.
Science has no heroes
Bullshit. Science has plenty of heroes, and their stories serve to fascinate and inspire future generations. What science doesn't have is the mindless fanboi-ish worship of heroes. Anyone who actually understands the first thing about science knows that even our heroes can be wrong; and most of them HAVE been wrong about at least a few things. That doesn't stop them from being heroes, it just makes them human.
"Why?" is still a valid question;
No, it's not. The question "why" in this case presuposes some kind of purpose, without any reason to believe that such a purpose exists. Just because you can phrase something in the form of a question doesn't mean that your "question" makes any sense.
Of course, there is video. Yes, there are SD copies and screeners, maybe even someone ballsy enough to cam and slip that on BitTorrent, but 1080i (true, not upsampled) movies are rare.
Say what?
Dude, either you haven't been paying attention, or you don't know how to use teh intertubes. Every movie is available as a torrent in full 1080p pretty much the day the blueray disks hit the store shelves. Many are available even earlier.
Even Blu-Ray hasn't been fully cracked yet (it is still a race with each individual movie.)
If by "race" you mean that the various release groups are tripping over each other in order to see which one can get theirs up in the shortest amount of time, then yes. "X-Men Days of Future Past" won't be available for purchase for another 3 weeks, but there's already a 720p blueray rip available on the torrent sites, and the 1080p version should follow in the next few days.
It's easy to copy music by plugging a cable from a headphone jack into a line-in jack on another computer.
Got you one better: in this day and age it's pretty much inconceivable that they would disable bleutooth functionality. If you can pair your fancy unpiratable player to a PC rigged to copy the incoming audio stream to disk, you've got yourself a digital copy with essentially no quality loss.
The problem is devices that WOULD be significantly cheaper to repair if parts were more easily (and reasonably) available and if the things weren't designed to be harder to repair.
I keep hearing this complaint - that there are devices out there which are "designed to be harder to repair" - but, at least in my experience, that's incredibly rare. More often devices are designed to be difficult to open due to concerns about warranty claims on modified items, and even THAT is pretty rare. Every electronic gizmo which I currently own can be opened with relative ease. Most of them I would be able to perform SOME repairs on, as long as it doesn't involve having to replace chips or capacitors.
There are some things that bug me - such as my Nexus 5 not having a (easily) replaceable battery. However, while I may not be happy about them, they're all design choices which the manufacturer made for reasons that have nothing to do with repairability. And, for the most part, they're things that don't really effect me (eg. it is highly unlikely that I will keep my Nexus 5 long enough to actually need a battery replacement).
Actually it's pretty well supported by data.
If it were well supported by the data I wouldn't have said that it keeps being repeated without any good evidence. In reality, all of these claims are only supported by the "research" of S.A. Marshall, and there's no evidence that the guy ever actually did the research that he claims he did. There's certainly no replication of his results. But there is evidence that he had a habit of making up data to support his narratives.
In fact, it's one of the reasons veteran units are so dangerous. Most of the members are actually trying to kill you instead of just shooting in your general direction.
This is like saying that the reason professional basketball teams are so good is because they actually try to score points. Silly, at best.
The actual reason veteran units are so dangerous is because:
1. They're experienced.
2. They're a (literal) example of the survivor bias; most of their crappy soldiers die off, shifting the bell-curve to the right.
That's tactics, not psychology. During the 2nd world war most soldiers did not want to kill enemy soldiers because they saw them as fellow humans.
That claim keeps getting repeated without any good evidence. Anyone who's actually studied history knows that it's complete bullshit. Human beings have been participating in organized murder and genocide for thousands of years. We have archaeological evidence of mass slaughter on every continent, amongst every major ethnic group. Plus we have evidence of lovely post-death atrocities such as scalping, ritualized slaughter, and even cannibalism; things which only further illustrate how unlikely it is for combatants to view the other side as "fellow humans". The idea that soldiers on the battlefield are reluctant to shoot at each other is complete nonsense.
I miss the culture of repair.
You miss overpaying for goods?
A repair culture exists any time it's significantly cheaper to fix something than to replace it outright. A couple hundred years ago there was a repair culture about everything including socks, because a new pair of socks was a luxury and continually patching old ones was way more economical. We stopped repairing our socks when they became cheap enough to throw away. Do you really want to go back to a time when you had to keep repairing your socks because you couldn't afford new ones?
I don't miss that. Not at all. I much prefer having the choice to either tinker with my gadgets when I have the time, or just buy new ones when I don't.
Ever looked at a 'natural' map, like Europe, Asia etc?
And ever looked at an 'artificial' map, like USA, Africa?
There's no such thing as a natural map, unless you're talking about the geological outlines without any political boundaries. You know why your "natural" maps look so chaotic as opposed to your "artificial" ones? Because the former are a result of centuries of conflict carved out according to what each tribe could hold, whereas the latter are carved out arbitrarily by one tribe (ie. the British) which can hold everything. The latter is no more "artificial" than the former; it merely ceases to have any meaning once the all-powerful tribe packs up and goes home. The power vacuum gets filled by the old tribes all going back to their original squabbles.
The British didn't create conflict by putting up new borders; they put a stop to ongoing conflicts which resumed once the British left.
The guys ruling there usually do one thing: 'cleanse' the previous ruling cohorts and replace every post with family members and far relatives. Regardless if they win an election or become rulers by a coupe. The idea that law is above everything, that corruption is bad etc. etc. is a strange concept to them. How should it not, during the occupation by europeans they experienced that the laws are not protecting them, they are only to the benefit of the imperialists.
While there's a small bit of truth to your conclusion, it creates the false impression that "cleansing" is a modern invention. That's bullshit. These tribes were destroying and enslaving each other long before the white man ever set foot on their continent.
So we've given them lower infant mortality and more regular food availability, while they continued to kill and enslave each other at roughly the same rate as before. And you think that "messed them up"?
How so?
Seems to me at worst we've made things slightly better for them. I'm pretty sure the women, at least, are happy to see more of their children surviving to adulthood. Plus we've given them the tools and knowledge to build better societies, even if it hasn't happened yet. How is that a bad thing?
Not to mention that you whole comment stinks of condescension. "Should have left those poor dumb Negroes to their own devices; they'd be much happier running around naked chucking spears at the local wildlife".