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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think you need to go back to middle school science to understand the importance of sample size. With a sample size of 1, it is not possible to isolate variables and determine a correlation, let alone causality. Was the driver under the influence of any substances? Was this on a section of road or intersection that was poorly designed or maintained? Were any parts of the bus or bike poorly designed or malfunctioning? And while I hate to blame victims, if the goal is to understand what happened and prevent future incidents, we need to understand the victim’s behavior and how that may have contributed as well. What a case study, particularly an individual death or injury CAN tell us is that we need to further study the situation to learn how it happened and how to prevent or mitigate it in the future.

    And of course, I mentioned several other personal vehicles as options. Over 40k people die each year in the US alone from all motor vehicle collisions- we should also be looking at legislation to sedans, vans, busses, motorcycles, roads, and everything else safer. However, compared to busses personal vehicles are WAY more dangerous. To the point where it’s kind of silly to even display this data in a bar chart.

    Here is a study looking at a larger sample size. Trucks and SUV’s are more likely to strike pedestrians and more likely to be fatal.

    Or are you suggesting we should do nothing? Just accept the fact that manufacturers are allowed to design and market death traps, and individuals are allowed to rampage through the streets as they please? Maybe we should remove seatbelt requirements too while we are at it?


  • Why do they need to do it “better”, and how are we defining “better”?

    Those vehicles are all much better at not running over pedestrians. They get better fuel mileage when not towing things, which is the vast majority of the time. They fit into parking spots better. We could go on and on arguing the pros and cons of these classes of vehicles and how good or bad they are at different things. And then we can dive further into specific models and how electric trucks might get better mileage or how kei trucks are much closer to vans than modern American trucks. Or even how small pickup trucks used to exist in America and we’re mostly fine. Or we could look at things like how all the biggest logistics companies in the world have put billions of dollars into developing their own vehicles and none of them have landed on pickup trucks.

    Honestly I don’t really care how good a vehicle is at towing or hauling stuff. If it cannot do so without losing a ridiculous risk to pedestrians and property it shouldn’t exist. There are tons of products that have been banned despite being very effective at what they were designed to do because they also happened to be good at killing people.



  • The short answer is: the industrial revolution.

    Prior to the industrial revolution, labor was mostly agricultural, which meant hours varied based on the season, weather, daylight, and vibes. The rise of factories led to factory owner attempts to control their workers more. Better technology for mass-producing clocks meant factories had them and used them against workers, including having clocks that purposefully tracked time incorrectly in order to make workers work longer. it was just one more tool for capitalists to use to exploit labor. The concept of a “company clock” or being “on the clock” came from this. Prior to this, workers were paid for production, not time.

    Historia Civilis has a great video on it. Which is a very strange outlier as there is nothing else remotely like this on the rest of the channel.


  • You and I remember the press for the Wii very, very differently. Just look at the Wikipedia article listing all the awards it won before or around it’s launch. Game Critics, Spike TV, Golden Joystick, Popular Science, IGN, GameSpot, the Guardian, and much more. including awards and praise for the innovative controls.

    Was there negativity? Sure, but it was a miniscule minority. The kind of thing only an extremely defensive Nintendo fan would notice. The Wii sold out instantly and was impossible to find for the first year or two, similar the PS5 except without the excuse of a global pandemic disrupting supply chains.

    It’s not some anti-Nintendo bias. The press was pretty mixed on the Xbox One for example, with some outlets pointing out it was a bit overpriced, and of course the whole debacle about being always-online and the Kinect being mandatory caused a lot of backlash. The PS3 was seen as overpriced at launch and got a 6/10 from IGN.

    And another important factor is that conditions change after launch. (The 360 probably would have had worse reviews if the press knew about the red ring of death before launch. The PS3 saw price reductions and eventually outsold the 360 despite having a worse launch. The 3DS floundered for its first few months until Nintendo dropped the price.

    The press is neither monolithic nor perfect. I guarantee you can find some outlet somewhere with the exact take you are looking for, but to just dismiss the entire industry because you don’t agree with most of them on the Switch 2 seems like coping.









  • I keep seeing this point repeated on the internet, that Harris’s campaign tried so hard to appeal to conservative voters.

    How? What platform did she run on to do so? Did she run on banning abortion fully? Outlawing trans people? Giving billionaires tax breaks? Rolling out environmental regulations? Disemopwering unions? Granting ICE more power? Starting a trade war? Privatizing the post office? Repealing the ACA?

    She accepted the support of some of the old traditional Republicans like Liz Cheney who has already been essentially kicked out of the GOP. They ran some attack ads pointing out how ridiculous, theatrical, and hateful MAGA is to try to win over some Republican voters who just want lower income tax. It seems as though the media has run with that, both at the time and retroactively, to paint Kamala Harris as being a fascist?



  • Well there’s the issue of defining things and crossing up a bunch of language, trying to smash multiple different points together.

    The headline of the original post suggests concern that Joe Biden is basically the same as a Republican. In order to identify whether that is true or not, you need tofirst define what a Republican is and compare that against what the Biden administration actually did (executive orders, appointments, legislation supported and passed, regulatory changes, etc). Accounting, of course, for the checks and balances of the US Federal Government. So for example, Biden forgave hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt, but the conservative (Republican-appointed) Supreme Court shot most of that down. There were limits on what they could pass through Congress without a supermajority. This is even easier to do today because we have several months of Republican government to compare against and the changes are really obvious. You canook at the creation and catastrophic consequences of DOGE, or the foreign policy changes that have abandoned Ukraine and worsened the Palestinian genocide (the handling of Israel is probably my biggest criticism of Biden and Harris, but Trump has been far worse). Tons of government agencies are being refunded, there is a “war on woke”. Critical infrastructure that keeps our food and water supplies safe are being abandoned. The EPA has been gutted. The IRS has been gutted and is essentially being forced to stop auditing the wealthy and focus on the poor instead. ICE is being weaponized against unions, trans people are being pushed out of the military, US citizens are being illegally detained and sent to El Salvador, the Secretary of Health is an anti-vaxxer who wants to create an autism registry, tarrif nonsense is destroying US trade, and I’m still waiting for the price of eggs to go back down. Claiming Biden is a Republican is only possible if you completely ignored both Biden and Republicans.

    The blurb under the headline is almost completely irrelevant to all of that. It’s starting to get to what the article is really about: individuals who self-identity as Centrist or Moderate whose values are truly conservative and often align heavily with the Republican party. Especially with regards to online dating. This is nothing new - it’s a phenomenon almost as old as online dating, and may date back to printed personal ads or older (though much better data exists for online dating). Conservative men know that their mispgying views don’t make them popular with women, so they are trying to hide that. These people don’t have much to do with Democrats or Biden whatsoever.

    And then in your response, you lost a picture-of-a-tweet claiming that “Democrats spent 4 years desperately trying to get “moderate” Republicans to break from Trump”. First of all, with no source- this is just whoever owns that account saying shit. But if you stop to think about it- there were a ton of “traditional”, non-MAGA Republicans disillusioned with their party going after Trump all the way back in 2016. Most of them have already broken from Trump after historically voting for people like Bush and Romney. It would have been foolish to ignore that contingent of people, so the Democrats were absolutely correct in running attack ads against Trump and his followers in red states trying to win those votes.

    If the Dems had changed their policies to be more conservative and attract those voters, that would garner some heavy criticism from me. But they didn’t. The only policy I can think of that I would criticize them for is their support of Israel, which is moreso because of their wealthy donors who want to do business there than any courtship of Republicans.

    If you look at what he accomplished, or if you’re lazy and just want to look at an outlet that evaluates presidents for you, there’s pretty much unanimous agreement that Biden was the furthest-left president since FDR. Harris ran on a platform of essentially continuing that. And progressives chose to stay home on election day rather than vote for someone who isn’t 100% in agreement with them on everything. And that’s how you get fascism.



  • If you are a professional who is installing insulation all the time? You absolutely need that mask.

    If you’re a flipper who buys a new house every year or two and usually replaces the insulation? You should wear a mask.

    A homeowner who installs it once, maybe twice in their lifetime? Eh. A lot of PPE mandates are about doing it often and professionally where you can get a lot of exposure. Or if you already are at risk. If you have respiratory issues then if course you should wear a mask. If you have healthy lungs and plan to do this task just once in your lifetime, just having decent ventilation and not shoving your face in it is fine.

    I’d wear gloves, but more because the rafters probably have splinters and rusted old nails or staples or whatever. The skin irritation from fiberglass lasts like a day or two and doesn’t have any long-term impacts, but I also find gloves aren’t as inconvenient as masks.

    Eye protection is a must. I don’t mess with that.

    Or you can just pay the extra money for Rock Wool and get all the other benefits that come with that too.


  • I would normally agree with the general sentiment that the POTUS gets both too much value and too much credit for the economy, and that particularly early in a term we are usually still seeing the results of older policy.

    Except that in Trump’s case he has spent the first 100 days in office implementing policies with nearly universal agreement that there will be an immediate negative impact. Drastic, nonsensical EO’s like mandating commerical truck drivers speak English. The tarrif nonsense. Threatening global war with the talk of annexing Greenland, Canada, and Mexico. Etc.


  • Oh yes I was not commenting on any of that. Data privacy and the reliability of computer hardware and software over time are separate issues.

    I was just speaking from the basic-level user experience of operating a vehicle- touch screens are terrible. Pretty much everything you want to do in a car should have 3 requirements:

    1. Keep your eyes on the road. Controls need to be in consistent locations and have some other way of communicating what they are and what their status is non-visually. Dials, knobs, buttons that lock in-or-out, switches, levers, sliders. Anything close together needs to be differentiated- buttons with different textures, shapes, or resistance for example. This is very difficult and almost antithetical to touchscreens. The strength of the touchscreens is their flexibility- they can have deep menus that re-use a small amount of space efficiently, but the trade-off is that they need the user’s vision to work.

    2. Non-visual feedback to the user for their activation. Touch screens CAN do this with haptics and sounds. And there are physical inputs where this can be a problem, like regular buttons or knobs with uniform shapes. Levers, sliders, switches, and dials have this as inherent properties

    3. Response time. Touch screens on vehicles are usually underpowered and seem to take seconds to register an input, then apply it. If the music changes and is suddenly way too loud, it’s annoying to be subjected to that for 5 seconds while navigating the touch screen and waiting for it to work, in contrast to a regular old volume potentiometer that operates basically instantly. Really any music or audio controls can get really annoying with delay, though I’ll admit those are a luxury. Things like the lights are not.

    4. Not a requirement, but cars should be judged on whether these things FEEL good. Touch screens have improved slightly over time with better materials and haptics, but that only applies to higher-end ones and still isn’t great. Cheap physical inputs can suck too, though they are usually still better than touch screens.