You know how you deal with a playground bully? You stand up to his crap, get people behind you, and call his bluff.
Which works really well right up until you discover the schoolyard bully is a little unhinged, and is playing out of his own book because he believes his own story.
And then you discover it's not a bluff, and then things get really hairy.
Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, not so much with the bluffing.
And I'm not so sure about Putin either.
Mao and Minh aren't compatible to Hitler. Both were conducting a civil war against an oppressive and corrupt regime (The South Vietnamese and Kuomintang (Chinese nationalists) weren't just and fair governments) and both propped up by foreign powers (and both ended up losing because they weren't popular with the people).
But the definition of a bully is someone who talks tough, but is never willing or able to follow it up. This means Putin isn't a bully (neither was Hitler). The Napoleon complex is more suitable for describing Putin but not complete. Putin's biggest risk isn't the US, NATO, western Europe, BRIC or the Ukraine... It's the Russian people itself. The Russian people have no problem overthrowing a government they dont like when that government appears weak so Putin is trying to focus the people's attention on an external threat to distract people from internal problems, basically diversionary foreign policy to prevent domestic strife.
Meeting Russia with aggression is exactly what Putin wants. His approval will soar, internal dissent will be silenced and people will rally around their government ignoring how bad it is. Putin will appear to be the hero, protecting Russia whilst the US will be the "evil imperialist invaders" and if the Russians are good at something, its propaganda and America will be portrayed at the modern Nazi's.
I've said it before, breadlines, not hardlines will break Putin, Ironically, Putin is like the argo (aggressive) drunk at a low rent bar. He keeps telling people that he's going to beat them up, and pushing everyone around him to show how tough he is but wont throw a punch without provocation however he's quite drunk enough to do some damage in a fight if you start it. You stop these people by not serving them any more drinks and ignoring their insults, not by starting a fight with them.
Quite frankly, this sort of stuff is insane when we're continuously running a massive deficit.
No, not even slightly. The reason you're running a massive defecit is because you have dumped trillions into two pointless wars and the military industrial complex. It was such a dumb idea that even previous presidents have warned about such things.
Cutting back on basic research is a sure-fire way to hobble long term future development. The only way to do this successfully and on the scale and longevity required is via government funding.
etc...
Yes government spending is out of control. About the worst way of reignin it in is to cut down on basic research.
Pink elephant in the room.
The government gave $1 million dollars for research that sounds silly but may yield results in psychology (leading to developments in teaching, detecting and treating mental illness, advancements in stand up comedy). Meanwhile, the US military spends $1.3 Billion per day (that's $1,300 million)*.
Now I know a lot of advances come from the military, but I highly doubt much of the money is being spent on R&D. The US could reduce it's military spending a little and solve most of it's economic problems.
* Based on the 2014 budget of $495.6 billion divided by 365.
Your Step 1 is off, you would have to be salaried exempt, in a salaried non-exempt position they can still dock you for lunch.
Step 2 is irrelevant, I have found that it does not matter how hard you work, how much you get done, or how good your results are. The company will always say that there is an unpaid lunch, even when you are salaried exempt. It is just that most people are unaware that in such a position you can ignore them as they can not divide out the half hour or hour for lunch.
Australia got around this by making it legal not to pay for lunch breaks but dropping the work day from 8 hours to 7.5.
In the end it's a win-win scenario. If you take 1/2 an hour for lunch, you work the same hours and get the same pay, if you want to take a longer lunch, you just work a bit later to make up your 7.5.
And we did all this without dropping wages (yep, but unions are evil, right, guys.... right).
Beyond that you can just do what we did in the 90's to get rid of previews and government piracy warnings, record it onto another tape sans the parts you dont want.
Maintaining data security and integrity is a process, not a format.
Besides this, for high def video from multiple cameras the size of the tape cartridge itself would be the same as an 90's VCR unit and well... the calorie intake of the average cop is already pretty high, how much more would it need to be if they had to lug around an old TEAC every day.
I have frequently wished there was a reliable way to tell somebody "your tail light's out," "your blinker's on," or best of all, "stop tailgating me, you stumpcock."
You pay a private company for water? Where is this Randian paradise in which you live?
The third world where the water piped in isn't potable.
As I've often said, the blind Randian believers need to go and live in a third world "libertarian paradise" for a few years where you can pay for absolutely anything and have to pay for absolutely everything. Want the police to help you, expect to shell out. Want the court to do anything, reach into those pockets. Need help from the government, dont expect it to come cheap.
Living in a place like this is great... when you earn western levels of money and a yearly income of $25,000 USD makes you part of the 1%... but not when you're a regular working pleb doing 12 hour days for $4000 USD a year... All Hail Rand.
An LTO-6 drive costs about $2500, and it stores 2.5TB of data on a $50 tape. That is about half the price of a comparable hard drive. If you have more than 100TB of data to store then tape becomes cheaper (that is, the savings for the tapes exceeds the cost of the drive). Tape is also a bit less fragile during transport/etc, and likely more reliable than optical media unless you buy the expensive stuff (which certainly isn't any cheaper than tape).
The advantage of tape has always been it's nigh-indestructibility. Spinning drives in comparison are pretty vulnerable.
Tapes has a crapload of drawbacks, write speed, read speed, the fact it's sequential (random access is painful) but it remains popular because you can drop it, smash it, submerge and then freeze it and all you have to do is roll the tape into a new case. Disks have a bad tendency to fail over time where as tape is a lot more reliable.
If you want to back up a lot of data for a short time (sub six months) then disk is good, if you want to back up data for a long time (years) and know that it will be recoverable in 5 to 7 years, then use tape.
This also explains using names like John Connor. You and I would be able to recognize the source of the name. It's much less likely that a senior citizen would, so it gives them a way to filter out the people least likely to fall for the scam.
Really? The original Terminator movie came out in 1984. People now in their 60s would have been about the same age as most of us here. Someone now in their 90s might not know about the movie, but I would bet at least as many people in their 60s and 70s know the name John Connor as do people in their teens and 20s.
Actually it would be the opposite.
The original terminator movie came out in 1984, the sequel came out in 1992. Someone born in 1984 is now 32 years old, you get a lot of people in their 20's who have never seen terminator.
If we add a non-western culture into the mix (in Australia, a lot of these telemarketers/scammers have thick Indian accents) they will likely have never seen Terminator, let alone make the John Conor connection. Also, it's not an unusual name.
I thought Bioshock was bad when they made a game that you literally could not lose at. It was impossible to die or fail.
Now they want to make games essentially play themselves. What happens when the player produces input the software does not expect? can it backtrack, will it backtrack or just keep going with what it thinks the player should be doing.
The really sad part is I can see this succeeding. Few gamers want to play games any more, they just want instant gratification trophies. There's more focus in achievement trophies in modern games (especially AAA games) than there is on actual gameplay.
Look how well banning Nazi memorabilia has worked out in France where they now have a HUGE uptick in the amount of anti-semitism.
That is a very long and shakey bow to draw.
It's like saying this rock prevents tigers and there were no tigers there before the rock was moved. Chances are the tigers were coming anyway. It's entirely possible the ban in Nazi memorabilia was a response to growing anti-Semitism. The conditions that created the large up tick in anti-Semitism were likely present before the ban went into effect (things like extreme nationalism).
Basically this is a lesson in correlation does not equal causation. In all likelihood, these two events share a common cause.
But from TFA: "Plane passengers will be allowed to use electronic devices weighing less than a kilogram in offline mode from gate to gate without needing to turn them off. The devices will need to remain in flight mode and cannot be used for calls, text or data, however."
So, all this really does is confirm the findings that the FAA had -- small devices are reasonable to use in airplane mode in all phases of flight.
This pretty much means nothing has changed.
Singapore Airlines changed their safety video about 3 years ago to say that "all transmitting devices must be in flight mode and stowed for take off and landing". Ever since flight mode became commonplace (think old Nokia's, long before the time of Android and Iphones) it's been this way. It's only recently that the Hoi Polloi got a phone that has the capability to dick around off-line. For the business traveller, it's long since been a case of put it in flight mode and do some work.
Now they can sell Internet when phone calling abroad is already passé?
Because there's no coverage up that high.
Plus it makes it easier to sell internet services. You simply put a cell on the plane and charge for the connection to the cell (easy enough with a captive portal). Same with voice calls and SMS's.
But for the moment, QANTAS and Virgin AU dont even offer in-flight internet.
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
The free market has taken care of it. Good customer service is expensive. Consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay additional money for good customer service. Successful companies have aborted customer service to keep prices low.
US telco's are amongst the most expensive in the western world and the shittiest in terms of service.
I'm with Australia's most expensive telco, I pay $30 a month for prepaid on a BYO device plan (month by month) with 400 MB data included. The cheapest AT US it would cost me AU$45 for half the amount of data and with Telstra, I can use the same $30 to get an additional 1GB of data. Even though every time I have to call Telstra (about twice a year) I'm connected through to Bangalore they at least have been able to sort my problem out (to be fair, their in store service was quite good. It was 2 minutes to get a SIM re-issued after losing my phone).
You lot can keep your free market faeries, I'm happy with our well regulated system here in Oz.
In other words, the people who just published this "study" have just realized that women who play trivial games on their cell phones are a much larger (and probably more profitable) demographic than their old focus on teenaged boys playing first person shooters.
Stereotype much?
The average age of a gamer is 32 and getting older. This was also published a few years ago before Farmville even existed so it's probably around 35.
BTW, just because there is a market in serving facebook games does not mean the previous market of gamers has disappeared or even diminished. I'd bet its as strong as ever. Sure purely profit oriented entities may leave that market, companies like EA but as a gamer (also a 30-something) that is not a bad thing at all.
I disagree. As usual, they miss the measurement of "quality" and instead dumb it down to "quantity". Playing Candy Crush 5 minutes a day is not the same as playing the Xbox until 4am.
As a PC gamer I dont see the difference in quality.
I think a lot of people, even some actual scientists, do not understand the role of skepticism in Science.
A lot of people dont understand the difference between healthy scepticism and outright denial.
Sceptics analyse the evidence behind conclusions and express their concerns. When concerns are valid, the conclusions are re-examined and if need be, changes are made, experiments are re-run with these new factors in mind.
A person in denial looks for evidence to support their point of view. They dont examine the evidence, they only look for skerricks and soundbites that support their ideas, they dont add to the scientific process at all. The problem is that denial loves to hide in and pretend that it's proper scepticism because this gives denial legitimacy. The worse part is, they will attempt to take evidence out of context to support their ideas.
Scepticism is an important part of verification in science, in science you're not meant to believe anything. However denial means believing in your idea regardless of any and all the evidence arrayed against it. Pretty much the antithesis of scientific scepticism.
Put simply (TL;DR)
Scepticism says: the climate change model is incorrect, we need to change the model.
Denial says: the climate change model is incorrect, therefore climate change is wrong LA LA LA LA LA I cant hear you.
Today's front wheel drive econo boxes are just uninspiring transportation. You need something like the 327 68 Impala I drove in high school to get your blood pumping.
FWD econoboxes can be great fun, it's the automatic transmission that's ruined it for everyone. There's nothing quite like bashing around a small high revving light car like the Fiat 500. Small engines and light weight make for a very fun car and you cant replace the feeling of a manual or the nimbleness of light weight with more power.
And the SUV has ruined it for everyone else on the road.
I'll never live anywhere that won't let me have a car or where for whatever reason cars are uneconomical.
Please name one city in your country where cars are economical without subsidies, such as sales taxes to finance freeways, and without preferential treatment, such as minimum parking requirements to force business owners to build more than the economically optimal amount of parking.
In my country (the USA), I don't think any such city exists.
I'd hate to break it to you, but it's the same for public transport. The fare you pay doesn't cover half of the ride you're taking, let alone the empty buses they have to keep running. Not to mention that public transport and taxis use the same infrastructure you're complaining about. So name me one city where public transport is economical without subsidies like sales and income taxes. At least roads in Oz are primarily paid for by petrol taxes and car registration (user pays is a fairer system).
And then there's the time cost. Some people are willing to pay $20 a year for parking near work because taking public transport is longer and more painful than sitting in traffic. Yes, its more comfortable sitting in my 12 yr old Nissan sports car with its suspension on Viagra than trying to pack myself onto an overloaded train, strange that.
I've never been spat on in my own car and there's always plenty of room. Oh and no public transport strikes/outages/failures.
But whilst we're on the subject of freeloaders, the worst transport freeloaders are cyclists who pay zero usage taxes yet use the roads and have their own special lanes/paths built for them.
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Which works really well right up until you discover the schoolyard bully is a little unhinged, and is playing out of his own book because he believes his own story.
And then you discover it's not a bluff, and then things get really hairy.
Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, not so much with the bluffing.
And I'm not so sure about Putin either.
Mao and Minh aren't compatible to Hitler. Both were conducting a civil war against an oppressive and corrupt regime (The South Vietnamese and Kuomintang (Chinese nationalists) weren't just and fair governments) and both propped up by foreign powers (and both ended up losing because they weren't popular with the people).
But the definition of a bully is someone who talks tough, but is never willing or able to follow it up. This means Putin isn't a bully (neither was Hitler). The Napoleon complex is more suitable for describing Putin but not complete. Putin's biggest risk isn't the US, NATO, western Europe, BRIC or the Ukraine... It's the Russian people itself. The Russian people have no problem overthrowing a government they dont like when that government appears weak so Putin is trying to focus the people's attention on an external threat to distract people from internal problems, basically diversionary foreign policy to prevent domestic strife.
Meeting Russia with aggression is exactly what Putin wants. His approval will soar, internal dissent will be silenced and people will rally around their government ignoring how bad it is. Putin will appear to be the hero, protecting Russia whilst the US will be the "evil imperialist invaders" and if the Russians are good at something, its propaganda and America will be portrayed at the modern Nazi's. I've said it before, breadlines, not hardlines will break Putin, Ironically, Putin is like the argo (aggressive) drunk at a low rent bar. He keeps telling people that he's going to beat them up, and pushing everyone around him to show how tough he is but wont throw a punch without provocation however he's quite drunk enough to do some damage in a fight if you start it. You stop these people by not serving them any more drinks and ignoring their insults, not by starting a fight with them.
Quite frankly, this sort of stuff is insane when we're continuously running a massive deficit.
No, not even slightly. The reason you're running a massive defecit is because you have dumped trillions into two pointless wars and the military industrial complex. It was such a dumb idea that even previous presidents have warned about such things.
Cutting back on basic research is a sure-fire way to hobble long term future development. The only way to do this successfully and on the scale and longevity required is via government funding.
etc...
Yes government spending is out of control. About the worst way of reignin it in is to cut down on basic research.
Pink elephant in the room.
The government gave $1 million dollars for research that sounds silly but may yield results in psychology (leading to developments in teaching, detecting and treating mental illness, advancements in stand up comedy). Meanwhile, the US military spends $1.3 Billion per day (that's $1,300 million)*.
Now I know a lot of advances come from the military, but I highly doubt much of the money is being spent on R&D. The US could reduce it's military spending a little and solve most of it's economic problems. * Based on the 2014 budget of $495.6 billion divided by 365.
Your Step 1 is off, you would have to be salaried exempt, in a salaried non-exempt position they can still dock you for lunch.
Step 2 is irrelevant, I have found that it does not matter how hard you work, how much you get done, or how good your results are. The company will always say that there is an unpaid lunch, even when you are salaried exempt. It is just that most people are unaware that in such a position you can ignore them as they can not divide out the half hour or hour for lunch.
Australia got around this by making it legal not to pay for lunch breaks but dropping the work day from 8 hours to 7.5.
In the end it's a win-win scenario. If you take 1/2 an hour for lunch, you work the same hours and get the same pay, if you want to take a longer lunch, you just work a bit later to make up your 7.5.
And we did all this without dropping wages (yep, but unions are evil, right, guys.... right).
TL;DR: It's called wasting your time. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Tell that to my Casio, I'll let you know when its 88:88
Linear tapes are impossible to edit.
Erm, scissors and glue.
Beyond that you can just do what we did in the 90's to get rid of previews and government piracy warnings, record it onto another tape sans the parts you dont want.
Maintaining data security and integrity is a process, not a format.
Besides this, for high def video from multiple cameras the size of the tape cartridge itself would be the same as an 90's VCR unit and well... the calorie intake of the average cop is already pretty high, how much more would it need to be if they had to lug around an old TEAC every day.
Smoke signals.
Read it,
It says your engine is burning oil.
I have frequently wished there was a reliable way to tell somebody "your tail light's out," "your blinker's on," or best of all, "stop tailgating me, you stumpcock."
http://www.ebay.com/itm/12V-Car-Red-LED-Programmable-Message-Sign-Scrolling-Display-Board-with-remote-/251058089393
You pay a private company for water? Where is this Randian paradise in which you live?
The third world where the water piped in isn't potable.
As I've often said, the blind Randian believers need to go and live in a third world "libertarian paradise" for a few years where you can pay for absolutely anything and have to pay for absolutely everything. Want the police to help you, expect to shell out. Want the court to do anything, reach into those pockets. Need help from the government, dont expect it to come cheap.
Living in a place like this is great... when you earn western levels of money and a yearly income of $25,000 USD makes you part of the 1%... but not when you're a regular working pleb doing 12 hour days for $4000 USD a year... All Hail Rand.
An LTO-6 drive costs about $2500, and it stores 2.5TB of data on a $50 tape. That is about half the price of a comparable hard drive. If you have more than 100TB of data to store then tape becomes cheaper (that is, the savings for the tapes exceeds the cost of the drive). Tape is also a bit less fragile during transport/etc, and likely more reliable than optical media unless you buy the expensive stuff (which certainly isn't any cheaper than tape).
The advantage of tape has always been it's nigh-indestructibility. Spinning drives in comparison are pretty vulnerable.
Tapes has a crapload of drawbacks, write speed, read speed, the fact it's sequential (random access is painful) but it remains popular because you can drop it, smash it, submerge and then freeze it and all you have to do is roll the tape into a new case. Disks have a bad tendency to fail over time where as tape is a lot more reliable.
If you want to back up a lot of data for a short time (sub six months) then disk is good, if you want to back up data for a long time (years) and know that it will be recoverable in 5 to 7 years, then use tape.
This also explains using names like John Connor. You and I would be able to recognize the source of the name. It's much less likely that a senior citizen would, so it gives them a way to filter out the people least likely to fall for the scam.
Really? The original Terminator movie came out in 1984. People now in their 60s would have been about the same age as most of us here. Someone now in their 90s might not know about the movie, but I would bet at least as many people in their 60s and 70s know the name John Connor as do people in their teens and 20s.
Actually it would be the opposite. The original terminator movie came out in 1984, the sequel came out in 1992. Someone born in 1984 is now 32 years old, you get a lot of people in their 20's who have never seen terminator. If we add a non-western culture into the mix (in Australia, a lot of these telemarketers/scammers have thick Indian accents) they will likely have never seen Terminator, let alone make the John Conor connection. Also, it's not an unusual name.
I thought Bioshock was bad when they made a game that you literally could not lose at. It was impossible to die or fail.
Now they want to make games essentially play themselves. What happens when the player produces input the software does not expect? can it backtrack, will it backtrack or just keep going with what it thinks the player should be doing.
The really sad part is I can see this succeeding. Few gamers want to play games any more, they just want instant gratification trophies. There's more focus in achievement trophies in modern games (especially AAA games) than there is on actual gameplay.
Look how well banning Nazi memorabilia has worked out in France where they now have a HUGE uptick in the amount of anti-semitism.
That is a very long and shakey bow to draw.
It's like saying this rock prevents tigers and there were no tigers there before the rock was moved. Chances are the tigers were coming anyway. It's entirely possible the ban in Nazi memorabilia was a response to growing anti-Semitism. The conditions that created the large up tick in anti-Semitism were likely present before the ban went into effect (things like extreme nationalism).
Basically this is a lesson in correlation does not equal causation. In all likelihood, these two events share a common cause.
Yes, because sticking your nails into a drink is totally discreet.
She smiled suggestively at him as she gently stirred her drink with the tip of her nail.
I still think the best method is to just not leave a drink unattended when you're out.
Nowhere near effective. When someone buys you a drink, you dont usually follow them to the bar whilst they do it.
But from TFA: "Plane passengers will be allowed to use electronic devices weighing less than a kilogram in offline mode from gate to gate without needing to turn them off. The devices will need to remain in flight mode and cannot be used for calls, text or data, however."
So, all this really does is confirm the findings that the FAA had -- small devices are reasonable to use in airplane mode in all phases of flight.
This pretty much means nothing has changed.
Singapore Airlines changed their safety video about 3 years ago to say that "all transmitting devices must be in flight mode and stowed for take off and landing". Ever since flight mode became commonplace (think old Nokia's, long before the time of Android and Iphones) it's been this way. It's only recently that the Hoi Polloi got a phone that has the capability to dick around off-line. For the business traveller, it's long since been a case of put it in flight mode and do some work.
Now they can sell Internet when phone calling abroad is already passé?
Because there's no coverage up that high.
Plus it makes it easier to sell internet services. You simply put a cell on the plane and charge for the connection to the cell (easy enough with a captive portal). Same with voice calls and SMS's.
But for the moment, QANTAS and Virgin AU dont even offer in-flight internet.
"Put another shrimp on the barbie Streisand, mate."
Sorry mate, but what the bloody hell you mean by a "shrimp?"
It's an Americanism that no Australian would use.
We call them prawns, we also dont barbecue them.
Apple: Cars that few can afford
Android Auto: Everyone else.
LoL,
Apple products have pretty much become the Camry of their market. Anyone can get a whitegoods Camry.
Android is everything from an i10 to a WRX STI to a Lamborgini. The point is, you have a choice.
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
The free market has taken care of it. Good customer service is expensive. Consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay additional money for good customer service. Successful companies have aborted customer service to keep prices low.
US telco's are amongst the most expensive in the western world and the shittiest in terms of service.
I'm with Australia's most expensive telco, I pay $30 a month for prepaid on a BYO device plan (month by month) with 400 MB data included. The cheapest AT US it would cost me AU$45 for half the amount of data and with Telstra, I can use the same $30 to get an additional 1GB of data. Even though every time I have to call Telstra (about twice a year) I'm connected through to Bangalore they at least have been able to sort my problem out (to be fair, their in store service was quite good. It was 2 minutes to get a SIM re-issued after losing my phone).
You lot can keep your free market faeries, I'm happy with our well regulated system here in Oz.
Came here for this, leaving satisfied.
Have you considered multiple generations and thereby families?
2 grandparents
2 children of those each with spouse
3 kids from each of those.
2+4+6. 12.
It does happen in Europe, particularly in the southern countries.
An Italian wife with only three kids is considered frigid.
In other words, the people who just published this "study" have just realized that women who play trivial games on their cell phones are a much larger (and probably more profitable) demographic than their old focus on teenaged boys playing first person shooters.
Stereotype much?
The average age of a gamer is 32 and getting older. This was also published a few years ago before Farmville even existed so it's probably around 35.
BTW, just because there is a market in serving facebook games does not mean the previous market of gamers has disappeared or even diminished. I'd bet its as strong as ever. Sure purely profit oriented entities may leave that market, companies like EA but as a gamer (also a 30-something) that is not a bad thing at all.
I disagree. As usual, they miss the measurement of "quality" and instead dumb it down to "quantity". Playing Candy Crush 5 minutes a day is not the same as playing the Xbox until 4am.
As a PC gamer I dont see the difference in quality.
A lot of people dont understand the difference between healthy scepticism and outright denial.
Sceptics analyse the evidence behind conclusions and express their concerns. When concerns are valid, the conclusions are re-examined and if need be, changes are made, experiments are re-run with these new factors in mind.
A person in denial looks for evidence to support their point of view. They dont examine the evidence, they only look for skerricks and soundbites that support their ideas, they dont add to the scientific process at all. The problem is that denial loves to hide in and pretend that it's proper scepticism because this gives denial legitimacy. The worse part is, they will attempt to take evidence out of context to support their ideas.
Scepticism is an important part of verification in science, in science you're not meant to believe anything. However denial means believing in your idea regardless of any and all the evidence arrayed against it. Pretty much the antithesis of scientific scepticism.
Put simply (TL;DR)
Scepticism says: the climate change model is incorrect, we need to change the model.
Denial says: the climate change model is incorrect, therefore climate change is wrong LA LA LA LA LA I cant hear you.
Today's front wheel drive econo boxes are just uninspiring transportation. You need something like the 327 68 Impala I drove in high school to get your blood pumping.
FWD econoboxes can be great fun, it's the automatic transmission that's ruined it for everyone. There's nothing quite like bashing around a small high revving light car like the Fiat 500. Small engines and light weight make for a very fun car and you cant replace the feeling of a manual or the nimbleness of light weight with more power.
And the SUV has ruined it for everyone else on the road.
Please name one city in your country where cars are economical without subsidies, such as sales taxes to finance freeways, and without preferential treatment, such as minimum parking requirements to force business owners to build more than the economically optimal amount of parking.
In my country (the USA), I don't think any such city exists.
I'd hate to break it to you, but it's the same for public transport. The fare you pay doesn't cover half of the ride you're taking, let alone the empty buses they have to keep running. Not to mention that public transport and taxis use the same infrastructure you're complaining about. So name me one city where public transport is economical without subsidies like sales and income taxes. At least roads in Oz are primarily paid for by petrol taxes and car registration (user pays is a fairer system).
And then there's the time cost. Some people are willing to pay $20 a year for parking near work because taking public transport is longer and more painful than sitting in traffic. Yes, its more comfortable sitting in my 12 yr old Nissan sports car with its suspension on Viagra than trying to pack myself onto an overloaded train, strange that.
I've never been spat on in my own car and there's always plenty of room. Oh and no public transport strikes/outages/failures.
But whilst we're on the subject of freeloaders, the worst transport freeloaders are cyclists who pay zero usage taxes yet use the roads and have their own special lanes/paths built for them.