I like to go on hikes with outdoors-oriented Meetup groups. I like hiking anyway, and I frequently find someone to have an interesting conversation with. If I don't, no problem, it's still fun to do the hike anyway even if I don't talk to anyone.
1,012 karma · joined December 23, 2015
That wasn't what happened. People were driving at high speeds on the highway and claiming they couldn't stop. They were wrong.
>1. Twisting the key to turn off the engine engages the steering wheel lock, which might not be a good idea if you're moving fast.
That's why you turn the engine off and then turn the key back on, or don't take the key out. Usually you have to take the key out to engage the steering lock.
Besides, which is worse, accelerating uncontrollably until you reach the car's maximum speed, or killing the engine and not being able to steer?
>2. Modern cars with start/stop buttons might end up with issues that disallow stopping the engine - physical button failure, or software issues related to the button handling.
Wrong. All such designs let you turn off the engine by either holding the button down, or by pressing it multiple times. People just were too dumb to learn how their cars worked.
>3. Diesel runaway - diesels are quite difficult to stop, as they need very little external assistance, and can run on basically anything.
Wrong and stupid. We're not talking about 1960s diesel engines with mechanical fuel pumps here, we're talking about modern vehicles with engine computers and electric pumps. Kill the power and they stop.
>1. Brakes seize up at load, and "full power" is certainly a lot of continuous load.
That's why you press them hard right away instead of trying to modulate the engine power with them....
>2. Brake failure.
Impossible. The odds of having a separate brake failure at the same time as an unintended acceleration failure are astronomical.
>3. The sheer difficulty of holding the car. I have once in my life stopped a diesel van
We're not talking about big diesel vans here, we're talking about regular cars in America which run on gasoline having unintended acceleration problems. Americans do not drive diesel cars, and certainly not diesel vans.
Do you have any more completely irrelevant anecdotes to try to disprove my assertions?
The challenge now is to predict whether society in 50 years is going to look more like "Idiocracy" or "The Walking Dead".
Either way, I don't foresee a good future for the human race.
Hopefully, in some parallel universe, humans have avoided this fate, and are continuing the trajectory of the Enlightenment, and will proceed to exploring the stars, going where no one has gone before.
Exactly. Why bother regulating this at the DMV when people who can't drive a stick simply aren't going to try anyway (unless they're trying to actually learn and a friend is teaching them)?
That's weird about the handbook. You're exactly right: if you want to drive economically, the easiest thing to do is simply buy a newer car (and of course do things like not do full-throttle acceleration from stoplights, but that applies equally to all cars). Automatics in the last 5 years have surpassed manuals.
Have you ever seen what happens when you leave a bad apple in with a bunch of good apples? Very quickly, the entire bunch of apples is bad.
That's why we have the whole saying about "bad apples".
It utterly amazes me that people constantly use this "bad apples" expression without understanding this. Anyone who eats apples should have this basic understanding about bad apples.
Anyway, from what I can tell, whether cops are good or bad is basically department-wide: either a department has decent cops, or they're all horrible and complicit. It's exactly like the "bad apples" analogy, and it depends on the leadership of the department. Notice that it's usually the same departments that come up over and over in the news.
I agree with your sentiment about the relative differences between broken bones and head injuries, but this statement isn't completely correct: if you're an adult, a broken bone almost always leaves behind some kind of problem, usually at a minimum the tendency to have arthritis at the point of fracture later on. Broken bones don't heal perfectly, just like significant cuts will always leave a scar in your skin.
Hopefully medical technology will figure out soon how to fix this, and make it so we can regenerate like those animals that regrow tails and limbs, but not yet.
I had a friend in college who worked in a university lab testing bike helmets; this was 20 years ago now. They're only gotten better since then.
But it's true, bicycling helmets don't do much for protecting your face. But that's not what they're designed for; they're designed to reduce or prevent brain injuries from knocking your skull on the road or a curb. A full-face motorcycle helmet would be even better, but there's a tradeoff there in weight and ventilation (and cost), things that are more important to bicyclists than motorcyclists. Even a lot of motorcycle helmets aren't full-face and don't protect the face at all. But the idea with safety equipment isn't to completely eliminate all possible injury, it's to reduce risk to a reasonable degree; for the injuries you're likely to experience as a cyclist, a good cycling helmet is designed to protect against those. But it's not going to help keep a branch from poking your eye out on a backwoods trail.
Finally, the charge against bike helmets from all these anti-helmet people lately isn't that they don't help prevent injuries (they absolutely do), it's that they allegedly cause more accidents by making car drivers more reckless around cyclists. The claim has nothing to do with physics, and everything to do with psychology. Personally, I think it's a terrible argument to make, and if there's any truth to it, it simply shows that we absolutely need to mandate that cyclists are provided with physically separate roads from cars. Considering how dirt-cheap cycling trails are to build compared to car-roads, how much better for the environment cycling is than driving in cars, and how much public health would be improved by more cycling (which would reduce healthcare expenditures greatly, and also improve workplace productivity and reduce sick time, all important factors for good capitalists), there's simply no excuse for governments to not be buildings lots and lots of safe cycling paths and encouraging cycling.
How are they not better? I'm pretty sure European swords never had that neat feature of higher hardness at the blade than at the back side, giving the sword better strength while still staying sharp on the cutting edge.
Katanas are really different swords from medieval European swords, designed for an entirely different type of fighting. European swords are a product of the type of warfare they waged, which involved a lot of metal armor with knights. A katana wouldn't work too well here, so European swords are designed to crush armor and to be good at stabbing straight through the armor. Katanas were designed to use against unarmored or lightly-armored foes (I think Japanese samurai armor was basically leather), and are designed to be used in slashing motions more. I'd say that for their purpose and their style of fighting, katanas are definitely better. But against heavily armored opponents, they're just not the right weapon.
(Make sure to leave the country before the authorities figure out what happened.)
The other thing these dummies are forgetting to do, in their panic, is to simply turn off the engine.
Governments aren't exactly famous for being completely up-to-date on everything. The driving handbook you're complaining about was probably written 30 years ago... Back then, automatics really did suck badly.
With modern cars, automatics do get better fuel economy than manuals according to all the official fuel-economy tests I've seen. One big difference between the two that I've noticed is that in automatics, they tend to have taller gearing overall, and cruise at lower rpms (because of a taller final gear). This is most likely because it's so fast and easy for an automatic to downshift when it needs to, unlike a stick; this is especially important when using cruise control on the highway. The main problem with automatics (but not DSGs like VWs have) is the inefficiency of the torque converter. But modern automatics have worked around that really well with TCs that lock up and unlock very readily, so they're really not much different than a manual with its slipping clutch.
Luckily, here in the US, for all the things we do wrong with cars and drivers' licenses, there's no automatic restrictions I've ever heard about. I've heard of some states having such a thing on their licenses, but in reality I've never heard of them actually sticking that on someone's license if they took the driving test in an automatic. Almost anyone is allowed to jump in and drive a stick any time they want.
If you're single and really want to save space, you can get "long twin" mattresses, which is exactly half the size of a king mattress, and also the size of the foundation used under a king mattress (x2). But most single people these days just get a queen size, because it's long enough for most people while providing plenty of space to spread out, but also gives you sufficient space in case someone spends the night with you... Limiting yourself to a (long) twin size makes it rather difficult to have a guest for the evening unless you're really thin, which Americans generally aren't these days.
If I really want a sports car, I don't expect my fiance to buy it for me. If I want a cellphone, I don't expect my girlfriend to buy it for me and pay for the service.
I see this with basically everything I use and look at in life: there's always something that can be done better (or better for me at least). Things I'd like to change on my car, things I'd like to change on my house, etc. The problem is lack of time, and too-high barriers to entry. For instance, my car's pretty new and there's some things I wish I could change on it which are really just software, but it's all closed-source and proprietary and completely inaccessible so it'd be a giant project to reverse-engineer it to make even a simple modification. But with open-source software running on a PC, this is a golden opportunity to be able to jump in and learn how others did something, and be able to make your own changes with a relative minimum amount of time getting set up (i.e., not needing to do reverse-engineering). Even writing your own applications is pretty easy these days with Free/open-source compilers, toolkits, libraries, etc. You can do all kinds of things with Python, for instance, and all the tools you need (including the OS) are freely downloadable.
Or, we live in the simulation where the parameters were tweaked so that we were "lucky" and managed to survive this long. Other simulation runs didn't turn out so well for humans.
I get flak for this whenever this discussion comes up, but personally I have a side project business, and it's a sole proprietorship. I looked into incorporation but could not find a single positive attribute to it, for my situation. My situation is: 1) I'm the only person, and 2) I have zero debt involved with the business. So for me, there just isn't any good reason to incorporate; it would only increase my costs and force me to waste a bunch of time on extra paperwork for nothing.
All these people touting incorporation seem to have several assumptions, one being that you must necessarily go into debt to start a business (not true), and the other being that surely you must have employees or partners (also not true). Just look at some guy who starts a lawn-mowing business: if he buys his own mower out-of-pocket, and does all the work himself, what the heck does he need a corporation or LLC for?
Is this dehumanizing? Damn right it is. If you demand a dehumanized relationship, then of course it's dehumanizing. If you don't want to be dehumanized, then demand a relationship based on equality. I'm not going to treat a woman as an equal if she doesn't act like it, and instead demands to be treated as some kind of possession, which is the only reason there is to spend 3 month's salary on a stupid rock for her.
And yes, it absolutely IS a marker of unintelligence for her to not reject this idiotic tradition. What do you think of women who demand to have their or their daughters' genitals circumcized because of tradition? That's pretty stupid too. This is no different. Again, if you want to be treated as an intelligent person, then start acting like it. There is no rational basis for wanting a diamond ring worth 3 months' salary. And while I may not be perfect as far as rational preferences, I try damn hard to make sure I am rational and am not clinging onto stupid beliefs for no good reason. This also isn't to say that all traditions are stupid: for instance, I like the tradition of putting up a Christmas tree (which of course comes from Germanic pagan traditions). It looks nice, it's seasonal, it's fun putting up the ornaments with family, etc. And these days you can get artificial trees so you're not killing trees for the tradition (you can also get trees with intact root balls and then replant them after the holidays). But the important key here is cost versus benefit: holiday traditions are fun and a nice family practice, but they're also pretty cheap. Artificial trees and ornaments are not at all expensive these days, unless you're desperately poor.
Now, as for your comment about a ring being a burden, it damn well is a huge burden, for everyone. Did you forget the part about it having to be 3 months' salary? This isn't like a Christmas tree which is generally fixed-price, it scales to whatever your income is. Can you seriously afford to take 3 months of your salary, withdraw it as cash, and set it on fire? I don't know anyone who would do anything that stupid; if I'm going to lose 3 months' pay, I might as well just take a 3-month unpaid vacation instead of working my ass off for money when then gets wasted.
And no, a house downpayment is not a "needless extravagance"; that is an utterly stupid thing to claim. People need a place to live, and while you can debate things like rent vs. buy, real estate appreciation rates, and the current market conditions, in general, for middle-class people, home ownership in the US is a fairly stable store of value if you don't plan to move for a while, and owning your own home means you don't have to pay rent any more. If you don't like the mortgage example, change it to something else, like putting the money in the bank or a stable value fund in case you lose your job. Or into a good index fund, where it's most likely going to appreciate significantly over the years. There's plenty of places where you can invest 3 months' pay that are perfectly sensible and will give you a far better return than just lighting it on fire.
A woman who's really an equal partner would rather see her husband do something useful with that money, such as make a down payment on a house.
The whole concept of spending 2 months' salary on a diamond ring is the product of the most successful marketing campaign in history, by the deBeers company back in the first half of the 20th century. It is not something steeped in tradition (or at least nothing that goes back that far, or is the product of anything besides corporate marketing). So someone who insists on a real diamond ring is merely a dumb stooge who's easily swayed by advertising if you think about it.
That's one thing out of that marriage that didn't cost me much... (Actually, it was a very amicable divorce; marrying someone who isn't a selfish person fixated on superficial stuff like diamond rings is, I think, a good way to make sure that if the marriage does have to end, that it'll be as painless a transition as possible.)