Zeg makker!

Even if you argue that after a while the less convenient becomes familiar, that doesn’t really mean it was more convenient, it was just not inconvenient for you. But I have to say even if you’re a seasoned manual driver, not having to shift every 25mph is arguably more convenient than having to, even if you’ve gotten used to it.

You keep assuming it’s an inconvenience that you have to ‘get used to’, that’s not the case at all.

Let’s us another example: typing. You have to learn to type, that’s inconvenient, right? When you first learn to type you have to look at the keys and hunt-and-peck to find the right keys to press. Why would you learn this when every modern computer and smartphone has speech-to-text? You can simply speak instead of typing, nothing to learn, much more convenient, right?

Except it’s not. Using speech as an input mechanism is annoying and inconvenient, it’s slow, it’s annoying to people around you, privacy is an issue in any shared space, etc. Typing by contrast is fast once you’ve learned it. You no longer consciously have to search for the keys on your keyboard or even think about it. You just think what you want to type and the words appear on your screen, your fingers move to the right keys with you barely aware of what they are doing.

The same happens in a car, even an automatic. If you want to go faster, the car goes faster, you aren’t really aware of your foot pressing the gas pedal. If you want to slow down, the car slows down, you don’t have to think about operating the break pedal, that’s just something that happens of which you are barely aware. The car basically becomes an extension of your body. The same goes for shifting, it’s not an inconvenience as you are barely aware that you are doing it. It’s like breathing. Sure, if you pay attention to it you notice, and you can consciously control it, but 99,999% of the time it’s just something that happens automatically.

As I said, the car becomes an extension of your body, and this is not something that happens ‘after a while’. it happens in the first 10 or so driving lessons. When you first get in the car on your first lesson, you are a person sitting inside a car operating it. By the 10th lesson or so you are no longer a person in car, you are the car. This happens whether or not it’s an automatic or manual. The only difference is that with a manual you have a little more control over this extended body than with an automatic. I’ve owned an automatic and that lack of control is a mild inconvenience. The automatic gearbox doesn’t know what is happening ahead of you, it can’t anticipate, so you get small annoyances like it shifting up when you know you need to slow down in a second to take a corner, and then it’s in the wrong gear and it has to shift down again when you need to accelerate out of the corner. The gearbox is not clairvoyant so it doesn’t know what I’m about to do and it’s always a little too late. It’s a small inconvenience that you don’t have with a manual.

And the few people left with the ability to clean up the mess will make bank.

USA

We have laws to protect children

Hahaha, good one.

we need laws that hit hard companies that don’t respect people (and other companies)'s rights.

In the US? That’s not going to happen. The US is run by corporations.

Now Epic can finally install their own payment system, bypassing Apple’s parental controls, and little Timmy can just enter the details from mommy’s credit card when Epic gets him addicted to gambling loot boxes.

Such a win for consumers.

It’s weird to me that y’all don’t appreciate the convenience of advancing technology.

You’re operating from the incorrect assumption that an automatic is more convenient while it isn’t.

Try this: stand up, walk to the other side of the room and back. Was that inconvenient? Did you have to consciously place your legs and think about how to use your feet? No. You just want to go in a certain direction and your legs just move without you needing to think about it.

Driving a manual is the same. You don’t consciously operate the gearbox, you just drive. Shifting gears doesn’t require conscious thought. An automatic isn’t convenient, quite the opposite, as it gives you less control.

Why don’t you use a wheelchair? Surely rolling around is more convenient than balancing on two legs? It’s because balancing on two legs isn’t actually that inconvenient once you learned how. It was when you were a baby, but we help babies learn to walk instead of putting them in a wheelchair. Same goes for driving a manual. Once you learn to a point where you no longer need to think about it, it’s more convenient than an automatic.

It’s like going “only mentally disabled folks use microwaves, the rest of us light the wood stove and let it simmer for a half hour”

Good analogy. Now go microwave a steak while I cook one over a wood fire, which steak do you think will turn out the most delicious?

I’ve tried to drive manual vehicles and it just required way too much of my attention for what should be a simple means of conveyance.

Driving a manual doesn’t require any more attention than an automatic. Here almost everyone learns in a manual and by the time you get your license it’s something you don’t need to think about.

If you’re used to manual, driving an automatic for the first time is a pretty scary experience. Half the controls you need to operate the car are missing.

It’s not an elitism thing as almost everyone drives a manual. My late mom drove a manual at 72, including dragging a big caravan all across Europe.

Used to be that the only people who drove an automatic were people with (mental) health issues. If you got a manual-only license it used to have a big stamp across it that said ‘AUTOMATIC ONLY’. If you got one of those as a physically healthy 18yo it might as well have said ‘RETARDED’, as that would have been the only reason to get one.

Nowadays with electric cars becoming more common having an automatic-only license has become socially acceptable.

Anyway, back then it wasn’t considered the job of the programming language to hold the hand of the aspiring developer as it is common today.

But that’s exactly what it’s doing by trying to figure out what the developer meant. ‘“11” + 1’, should cause the compiler to tell the developer to to fuck themselves.

It’s easier to generate electricity during a zombie apocalypse than to pump up oil and refine it into gasoline. Let alone if you have to actually prospect for oil and drill an oil well.

So many ways to easily create and store energy using an alternator and some lead batteries. You can make a windmill, use a stream and a watermill, basically anything you can make rotate can be used as an energy source.

They won’t keep exploding, they just aren’t finished yet. It’s a different way of developing. You can spend lots of time and money validating your designs by calculating and modeling them, come to the conclusion it would have exploded, and go back to the drawing board (which is basically what NASA does) but it’s cheaper and faster to juist build one and see if it explodes. It just makes the inevitable bugs in the design a lot more visible to the public.

Add to this that even the best modeling doesn’t completely match with reality. For all their effort in getting it right the first time there were also issues with the Artemis 1 mission, maybe not as spectacular as an exploding rocket but it just goes to show that real life testing is a better method of exposing flaws.

you can fix all the things you’ve seen on Friday during the weekend

Just how I love spending my weekends.

It is a big success. NASA’s approach in the 60s was simply different than SpaceX’s approach, specifically because of reactions like yours. If you’re spending public money you better get it right the first time. What people fail to understand is that SpaceX’s iterative approach is much faster and cheaper than getting it right the first time.

The entire Saturn V program costs $52 billion dollars in today’s money, with each launch costing $1.4 billion. The Space Launch System, costs $32 billion in today’s money, development for the SLS began in 2021 and has only flown once. So far one launch every year and a half or so has been planned at a cost of $2 billion per launch.

Development cost for Starship is estimated at about $8 billion so far, with launches expected to cost about $100 million per launch initially (but that’s expected to go down in the future). You can launch 20 starships for each SLS or 14 for each Saturn V and that’s ignoring the up-front cost of developing it.

if you retire at 67

But you won’t.

By the time I’m 67, the retirement age will be 75, by the time I’m 75, the retirement age will be 80. The whole thing is a scam. The boomers get to enjoy retirement and they have us pay for it which is why they keep dangling that carrot in front of us, but realistically it will never happen for my generation or anyone after. Due to advances in medicine people get older and older, while costs keep rising. It’s simply not sustainable anymore to have that large a part of the population not working while simultaneously costing a lot of money in care.

Pensions in theory are nice, because it guarantees you a certain quality of life after you retired.

Yeah, that’s the scam. They say you will get some income after retiring, what they fail to tell you is that they will never allow you to retire. The retirement age will keep getting pushed back. The truth is that you will have to work till the day you die.

We should just abolish pensions.

Every month the government takes money out of my paycheck to supposedly pay for my pension. Every month my employer puts money into a mandatory pension scheme.

My expected pension age according to a government website is 68 years and 6 months. By the time I reach that age it will probably have been raised to 70+.

My parents died at 72 and 70. I will never see once cent of the money taken from me during all those year working. Pensions are a scam, let’s acknowledge that fact and just get rid of them. pay out that money every month so I can enjoy it instead of saving for something that will never happen.

If you write it down it’s even more clear that he’s rambling like a lunatic.

It’s actually quite rare for cats to kill birds, it’s a skill very few cats have. None of our cats has ever brought back a dead bird, while they have gone on an absolute killing spree among the local mouse population.

The birds around our house (mainly jackdaws, which are wicked smart) like to taunt the cats though.

That series was so, so bad. It had absolutely nothing of what made Stargate fun. It was just a bunch of people whining and talking about their feelings against a shallow sci-fi backdrop.

This you?