53 karma · joined October 15, 2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_Street
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jeremy_Kyle_Show
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5455122
I remember thinking at the time that these were quite exploitative.
Concatenate FILE(s) to standard output.
With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input
Later on I bought a Sapphire 9800pro "Atlantis" which had some T1000 esque figure on the box art.
After that a lot of stuff becoming more corporate and boring.
It massively depends on the manufacturer, model and country. So it not entirely true.
Even if it was true it doesn't make EV simple or simpler which was your claim as they are completely reliant on a huge amount of electronics.
There is no such requirement really for Petrol/Diesel vehicles as I drive a vehicle with no ECU and no digital electronics.
> For better or worse, that’s all cars now.
It is obviously worse. Things are less reliable, less repairable and more proprietary.
> The days of simple engines you can fix with a wrench are in the past.
No quite true either.
You can still do a huge number of jobs with basic tools. You may need some sort of code reader to help diagnose. You can still physically inspect things, and prod things etc. The fundamentals of how the vehicle works hasn't changed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45631855
The original poster does a much better job than I explaining the issue.
> Even if it’s true that people have a “perception”, it won’t matter in the medium term, these folk are going to learn pretty quick that EVs are more reliable than ice cars. Much simpler, much less to go wrong.
When people make this claim I know they have never had to work on a vehicle. What you think is simpler (which I suspect is less moving parts) actually isn't. Mechanical systems can be diagnosed by simply prodding / wiggling them much of the time or a visual inspection.
EVs for the most part have a huge amount of electronics and computer software. Computer software is incredibly complex in its own right and I shouldn't need to spell that here.
Electronics can fail with moisture and dirt. Electronics are the most difficult thing to solve when repairing a vehicle and this includes working on older vehicles. Issues are difficult to diagnose and intermittent.
So while is mechanically it is simpler, that is dwarfed complex electronics and computer software which is many of orders of magnitude more complex.
As far as most people are concerned that is just a claim that is made as they have no idea whether it is true. I am specifically talking about what is the perception.
Therefore it is seen as risky and for something like a car which most people see as a way to get from A to B, they don't want potential headaches.
> It’s the same thing.
No because one is already known and the other isn't as far as most people are concerned.
They also talk about whether these things are any good. They normally talk about the issues that other people have had. Any issue that seems like a PITA, will put them off when the existing vehicles typically don't have many of these issues.
I think we are still in the Early Adopter Stage for EVs and I don't know whether we will get out of it.
It is something that I do not need to worry about with my current vehicle, in fact most Petrol/Diesel vehicles will last a very long time with basic servicing.
I don't understand why people on have such a hard time understanding potentially expensive unknowns are not an attractive proposition.
When browsing Firefox 3.0 would randomly not load a site when say about 10 tabs were in the window and hang for about 30 seconds. It was annoying. There was an obvious issue with how it handled the tab isolation (it didn't really that was the issue). IE 8 and Opera didn't do this.
It has nothing to do with my impression of Google Chrome because Google Chrome didn't exist at the time.
It doesn't matter what the rates are compared to Petrol/Diesel cars, it is an unknown and large potential cost with an expensive initial purchase especially compared to a second hand vehicle that would fulfil the exact same function.
UK and EU are defacto making Petrol/Diesel cars production uneconomical / illegal. California IIRC are also has a deadline for Petrol/Diesel cars IIRC.
> And why a massive downgrade?
The biggest ones for me are:
1) Range. I have a 700 mile range on my car. My old car before that could do 600 miles. I can travel from one end of the UK to another with 1/2 fuel stops. I have family I see regularly on the other side of the country. I can do the trip in 4 providing good traffic In an Electric vehicle that time is 5-7 hours due to the extra stops required. I know this because my mother and step father recently came to visit me and they have an electric vehicle. If you regularly do longer trips even 30 minutes off the road is a long time. I don't stop for anything other than a bathroom break when I do a long journey.
2) Charging time. I live in an apartment. I would need to charge the car away from home. That is a massive PITA IMO. I spend maybe 5 minutes in a petrol station, compared to 30 minutes at a charger.
3) Almost every modern vehicle car has a bunch of annoyances in the vehicle. The electric cars I have seen have this dialled up to 11.
4) Cost. Electric vehicles are really expensive IMO. I can get a cheap second hand diesel for a few thousand in reasonable condition.
> And why don't you change the channel off of Fox occasionally?
Snarky responses like this is why people become resentful. Just because people have a different view point to yours doesn't mean they have been brainwashed by someone.
A lot of us are happy with the vehicles we already have. I simply do not have an interest in ever owning an electric vehicle. I also prefer older vehicles and bikes because they are simpler and I prefer the way they operate.
A lot of these themes btw was explored by Demolition Man with Sly Stallone. The "resistance" figures to the "regime" are eating meat and driving a v8 muscle car.
I suggest you watch that, it is a fun movie and Sandra Bullock looks gorgeous in it.
So do traditional vehicles. You need to have them serviced regularly, but otherwise they work fine for literally decades. My uncle has a Volvo 240 GL that car is 50+ year old.
> How much is an ice whole engine replacement in a semi modern car? Not cheap and happens more often than an ev battery dropping dead.
Engine failure is extremely rare. My 1997 Landrover Defender 300TDI is getting upto 300,000 miles and lets just say it hasn't had the easiest life (it was on a farm before I got it). Landrover's aren't known for their reliability.
My old Astra is still on the road (according to the DVLA) and that had well over 150,000 on the clock when I sold it.
> So I mean I’m sorry your wife is irrational about it, but I don’t think that’s indicative of the market as a whole.
His wife isn't irrational. I can get a mid-2000s Diesel that will have decent mileage for less than £4000 in the UK. I see people saying "I only paid $30,000 for this EV". I have never paid more than £10,000 for a car and they last for years and years as long as I get them serviced
At the time 3.0 came out I was still in University and every other student I spoke to had the same experience. People also experienced in my first place of work in 2009.
This problem was ultimately fixed with 4.0 when they did something different with how multi-tab worked.
Chrome was simply better than Firefox, Internet Explorer, Legacy Edge. I am not a Windows Admin, but Chrome also offered an MSI package whereas Firefox didn't bother until years later. So it was easy for IT to roll out Chrome as part of the standard corpo install image and not an option with Firefox.
As for web development it offered better JS debugging and had a decent phone emulator built in and this was back in 2014. I am sure I could also debug phones as well with some reverse proxy shenanigans via fiddler and some open source tooling I forgot the name of now.
In 2010 Firefox 3.5 had a estimated global market share of 15-20%. BTW nobody thought any of the stats were accurate at the time as they were easily skewed. Some counters would report 30%, but it was an estimate and not a reliable one.
On the sites I was building, which were mostly travel sites, e-commerce and later gambling. Firefox was maybe 5-10%. I am also no in the US. I just didn't see anything like what was reported in site stats for the things I was working on.
Later on it was IE and Chrome and Firefox was still at maybe 10%. I really cared about compatibility and web standards at the time and made every effort to make sure that the sites work. So I knew it wasn't a "the site doesn't work in this browser".
> It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development.
So people that used the net heavily used Firefox and people that didn't tended to use IE. So on some sites Firefox usage would be far higher than it would otherwise be.
e.g. People using IE might only use the internet for online shopping, checking mails, so visiting an online shop, booking a flight etc. Whereas many Firefox users would be using Social media, Blogs, Forums or YouTube more heavily. So you will see two completely different pictures depending on what your site's audience would be.
That is why the statistics can be misleading.
No I am not. I remember this clearly and all my friends were complaining about it before chrome was released. I just checked the dates. Firefox 3 was released a whole year before Chrome.
I really don't appreciate it when people tell me that I have been swayed by some big company, when my friends and I were complaining about it before we even knew that Google had a browser.
Firefox used to just completely lock up. Wouldn't load a tab. Chrome didn't with the same number of tabs. I am not talking about JS perf speed or anything like that, I am talking about the browser just not locking up when using more than few tabs.
I was so happy when Chrome came out. Over the years I've tried going back to Firefox and I've gone back to either Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium or Brave.
As an aside. IE7 was IMO worse in some ways the IE6. It had many of the same rendering bugs but was more subtle in how it failed.
Chrome when it came out was much faster than Firefox. It was lighter and worked better.
Also macs had moved to Intel chips a few years before and were actually pretty decent so a lot of people were moving to them.
Also of this chipped away at XP and the few people running XP machines were diehard xp fans or corps that were dragging their heels upgrading.
The significant shift IMO was when Windows 7 machines replaced the ageing XP machines. That is what I saw in the google analytics on the sites I was supporting at the time.
As for hunting. I don't see anything wrong with hunting. I don't see anything wrong with eating meat.
As someone that has lived the vast majority of their life in the countryside, I also have little time for animal welfare arguments of the sort you are making.
> But given our history I'm also pretty terrified of what happens if and when we run into a smarter and more powerful alien species or AI. If history is any guide, it won't go well for us.
This is all sci-fiction nonsense. If we had any sort of aliens contact they wouldn't be many of them, or it would most likely be a probe like we send out probes to other planets. As for the super intelligence, the AI has an off switch.
Whereas much of the technology we have today has a massive positive benefit. Simply access to information today is amazing, I have learned how to fix my own vehicles, bicycles and do house repairs from simply YouTube.
As I said being cynical is being intellectually lazy because it allows you to focus on the negatives and dismiss the positives.
A good portion of my salary is already taken by Tax and the government wastes it. I've seen the waste first hand when contracting for both Local, Nation Government. I was so disgusted by this, I have made every effort to avoid working with them.
I've also seen this waste happen in large charities and ossified corporations. The former also disgusting me as I know they would simply piss away a few thousand on complete BS, that took a whole village to collect and for it not to go towards the stated purpose of the charity. As a result I don't donate to any charities that aren't local.
Every-time someone suggests a tax increase, I know for a fact they haven't seen the waste happen first hand.
> UBI isn't about giving everyone free money. It's about giving everyone a safety net, so that they can take bigger economic risks and aren't pushed into crime or bullshit work.
Giving everyone a safety net will require giving people money that is taken from others. To the people that benefit it is seen as "free" and will become "expected" and won't be treated as a safety net.
Being a responsible adult is about reducing the amount of risk you are taking, not increasing it.
So what you will be doing it teaching people to essentially gamble and people did similar during COVID. Some people took their cheques and put it into crypto, meme stocks or whatever. Some won big, most didn't.
I've met people in my local area that have lost huge amounts of money on risky investments, everything from property developments, to bitcoin. Creating an incentive for risk taking without the consequences is actually reckless, a massive moral hazard and will simply create perverse incentives.
> The upper half of society will only see the indirect benefits, like having greater employment/investment choices due to more entrepreneurialism.
You will be taxing those people more and they will have less to invest. The reason why many people invest is because they have disposable income that they can afford to risk.
By taxing people more (which you admit would have to happen), they will have less disposable income and will be inclined to invest less as a result.
I actually think it is very intellectually lazy to be this cynical.