In high school, I was on the Academic Decathlon team. The book everyone was supposed to read for the literature portion was Frankenstein. I never read it, but at the regional competition I won the essay contest on the question of whether Frankenstein or his creation was the true monster.
I was really good at bullshitting my way through an essay.
These systems are meant to be used against you. Police will never volunteer information that helps you.
The crazy wasn’t the gas, it was the maintenance costs. Though the gas comparison you made is still ignoring the original point that renters cant use cheap electricity and are stuck paying just as much as gas users on public EVs that take 10 times longer to charge as filling up a tank assuming you don’t have to wait for a charger to become available.
And you’re also ignoring the expense of an electric car. As in, they’re super expensive to buy. I bought my used truck for 6 grand 15 years ago. I’d pay more than that in a single year on a car note for an electric car.
Electric cars make economic sense for people who are already economically privileged. You have to have the money to buy a new expensive car and own a house with a garage where you can install a fast charger.
11 grand a year is crazy numbers.
Believe it or not, not everybody lives in California. I live in Texas and bought gas here yesterday. Using that price at 35k you’re looking at like 6500 a year.
And maintenance on an ICE is super cheap if you just change the fucking oil. There’s a reason I have 565,000 miles on a single engine that still runs great. I spend about $200 a year on oil change supplies (changing oil is supe4 easy and you should neve4 pay someone to do it), and maybe another 50-100 for things like air filters. I buy used tires (shop I use buys tires from other tires shops when someone upgrades tires on new vehicles) every 2 years or so for about $200 for a full set. Other incidental maintenance like spark plugs, brake pads and AC compressors come along, but I’m still averaging around $500/year on maintenance because maintenance is cheap and easy to do yourself.
So all in I’m around 6k a year in running costs.
Oh - and I’m not spending another 7 or 8 grand a year on a car note on a car I can’t service myself.
That’s absolutely not true. The starter battery is lead-acid, but those don’t move the car.
A standard group 27 lead acid used just to start a car’s engine weighs like 70 pounds. One big enough to actually drive it any distance would weigh literal tons.
Our hybrids both having battery failures is personal experience, not Republican talking points.
But the great thing about hybrids is that they still work if the battery fails. And I can put enough fuel to drive 300 miles in at a gas station for the same price as paying for a level 3 charger that’ll take 10 times as long.
I would love to have an electric, but it doesn’t make sense for me or many others who rent when a hybrid is cheaper to buy, just as cheap to drive when you don’thave a hime charger, and doesn’t depend on a $15,000 part that can’t be serviced by the owner.
They are better if you own a house. Otherwise charging becomes a much larger issue. The cost of fast charging at a public charger isn’t any cheaper than filling a gas tank and takes a lot longer with fewer options.
I’m also worried about battery lifespan. My gamily has had 2 hybrids, and both became standard ICE cars because the batteries failed and cost more than the cars are worth to replace. I drive about 35,000 miles a year, and need something that will last. I bought a used 2005 F150 that now has almost 600,000 miles on it with the original engine, and if it does have a failire, I can buy a new engine for about $3500, whereas an EV battery costs 15-20 grand.
The thought behind “always shoot to kill if you draw” comes from 2 main places. One is a misunderstanding, and the other is sociopathic bullshit.
The first is that you should only draw on someone if you have already made the decision to use lethal force to defend yourself, which is absolutely correct. Drawing without intent to shoot the assailant is aggravated assault, not self-defense. And if you don’t intend to kill someone you shouldn’t be shooting them.
But that logic skips the part where situations can change rapidly. You can decide to use lethal force and change your mind before pulling the trigger.
The second place the mindset comes from is a legal liability standpoint. If you draw on them and don’t kill them, you may be prosecuted for aggravated assault. If you kill them you can claim you feared for your life, and they won’t be able to testify against you. That’s the sociopath version.
They’re still feeling the burn from when they tried entering the drone space. The GoPro Karma almost bankrupted them on its own, and marked the end of their perception as a quality brand. It was a disaster they never recovered financially or reputationally.
The concept was great. The gimbal and camera could actually be removed from the drone to use independently. People were excited for their entry into the space, and they built a TON of the drones.
But they were also missing features. They didn’t have an API for third-party integration and flight automation like DJI. They had no collision avoidance features, which had started to become standard in the market by the time the entered. Their battery life was pretty bad.
Oh - and upon release the drones constantly lost connection to GPS and would suddenly shut off mid-flight and fall out of the sky. The FAA actually advised all users to ground them.
They eventually recalled all of the Karma drones over safety concerns, took a huge stock hit, and went through a round of layoffs.
Saying Israel is evil isn’t antisemitism.
Blaming Jews for Israel’s sins is.
Asexual idiot in Texas, checking in.
I’ve heard that a million times and it’s wrong.
Yes, you are only supposed to draw when you’ve already made the determination that you have to use lethal force to protect yourself, but things can change.
I drew my gun one time. I was hiking in New Mexico by myself when I was attacked by a homeless Native American. I shoved him away and drew my pistol, and as soon as the gun came out he started running away.
I had drawn intending to fire, but when he instantly retreated, I decided not to shoot.
Employees quitting is the goal. If they get them to quit they don’t have to pay unemployment.
You don’t have to literally be the only business in the industry to have an effective monopoly.
In the US installation of cameras is actually pretty similar, but it’s a property thing more than a privacy thing.
For instance, Flock made a deal with a local HOA to install cameras, but the fence lines for the houses are at the property line, so where they’re wanting to place the cameras is in the public right-of-way. So they need to request a license to encroach into public property with private improvements.
However, cameras on private property facing public property are perfectly legal. And any private space visible from public property also has no “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Private property in public view not having an expectation of privacy sounds insane, but prohibiting recording of publicly-visible property essentially bans almost all outdoor recording of any kind because some private property is probably going to be somewhere in the frame.
If I take a selfie in the break room of my office (2nd floor), the background will include bits of dozens of private properties through the window.
But that actually wouldn’t meet the law. The law requires the printer to do the check.
Only if you want to use cloud printing. I print on my A1 using Orca all the time.
It’s also pretty much a technical impossibility if you know anything about 3D printers.
3D printers can’t read CAD. They aren’t fed STLs or any other kind of 3D model. They’re fed G-Code, which contains no geometrical details. It’s a list of instructions saying “turn these 4 motors this speed this for this amount of time while heating that part to this temperature and turning this other motor this speed, then heat this part while tunlrning that motor that fast…” with hundreds or thousands of instructions, and then new instructions for the next layer.
In order to print a model, you first have to run it through a program called a slicer that generates that G-code by slicing it into layers with instructions for how to move, heat and cool the nozzle, build plate, and chamber, feed the filament, etc.
The printers just follow those instructions with minimal on-board processing and zero information regarding the final model’s structure.
At what point does it become a hangar?
While I hate many things about printers, I’ll give them credit for being better than they were. Installing printer drivers a few years back was a fucking nightmare. Now most of the time I can just find the printer on the network and send it. No special software, no “Have Disc” menu headache. Shit just works.
There’s exceptions for stuff like plotters, but when a print job uses $40 of ink and paper I kinda want it to be a PITA so people don’t decide to just print out every map revision for every meeting when a pdf on the big screen does the job just fine.
And scanning still sucks. A lot. Like - a crazy amount. Why is scanning to a USB drive still the most convenient way to get a file larger than the email limit to my computer?