these days, its best to ignore almost all republicans. they are not on the same planet as the rest of us.

maybe once they shed their authoritarianism (good luck with that) they'll rejoin us on earth, but at the present time, they are the party of 'jewish space laser' belief systems.

you cannot take anyone from the R group seriously this year, last year and likely next year. its been a while since there was an honest R (liz cheney of all things, was one exception; and I'd never have thought I'd utter such words, but its true.)

trump is in huge trouble, the whole world knows it and the R's are running around trying to cover for their POWER base. that's what they will lose and they only have delay tactics and distraction tactics on their side.

pretty pathetic. it was never a great party but now, the world laughs at us (and we laugh at them).

once trump is imprisoned, we can begin to heal as a country. but not until then. he has done too much and needs to pay the price. it has to be a lesson so this shit does not happen again.

mod me down, republicans.

the R game is grift. they want power at any cost and they'll always beg for more money. its worse than absurd, at this point.

the 30% or so that are cult members are not salvageable. the independants are the ones who will decide the next election. so far, the behavior of the R party is not at all endearing to anyone who is not already a cult member and who has drank the koolaid.

you guys had many chances for an exit-ramp and you didn't take it. when are you going to finally decide to? at some point, its going to sink in.

as a software person (who is near retiring age), I can tell you that I've been out of work for long-ish periods of time and after a certain age, my salary slope (how fast I was going up) leveled out a lot and my choices were fewer. compare that to blue collar; they are never out of work if they are able to work (that's a big if, I guess). when I have tried calling for electrician or plumber or similar, its often a long wait and the fee is pretty high. these guys WORK for a living, but they are not as unstable as we white collar guys are.

up economy or down economy, you need your sink fixed and your roof fixed. and your car fixed. etc. that never goes away and those people are always working (if they choose to).

finally, it cannot be outsourced. you wont worry about some guy halfway around the world undercutting you. yeah, have some guy from china or india twist and solder that pipe in your house. go ahead and phone it in. telnet to my sink (maybe use ssh, if you can). I'd like to see it.

blue collar is far more stable work and sometimes it can be good income. remember, income is the area under the curve. with gaps, you lose area. software and 'thinking skills' people will have gaps in their income. 'workers' who are even halfway decent are always making income.

are already confused by regular reality. these are the fox viewers and they are fully detached. no need for AI, they think reality is 'fake news'.

imagine if you have actual thinking people that are fooled and start to think that actual reality is now fake.

when nothing is trustable, its like the earth moving below you (I have to imagine). this wont be something most people can re-educate themselves thru.

its the trickery and results of it that I worry about the most. yeah, there will be benefits with automation, but the risks fully outweigh what little boost we get by offloading stuff to smart machines.

there's just no way this can end well.

I'm old-ish so it will have limited effect on my life but on yours, if you are just starting out, I dont know what kind of employment there will be for most people, once a lot of the non-physical jobs are moved to automation.

american society, at least, cant fathom supporting its own people via 'socialism'. can you imagine if most people are now put out of jobs? where is there support supposed to come from?

going too fast technically and too slow socially.

yeah, that will end well.

I think this really may be our last century. mankind cant withstand this kind of stress. socially, it will destroy us.

a lot of republicans died. while in the beforetimes, I might have felt something for my 'fellow mankind', I learned the real truth.

each country showed they have about 1/3 deplorables. people that just wont help society and want to drag things backwards and ruin things for everyone.

once I learned that bit of wisdom, I had no problem with all the R's killing themselves. being afraid of masks and shots. LOL. literally.

we may have even narrowly won the election due to all the republican deaths.

I am thankful that so many bad people left the earth. but to be honest, still not enough have left. still more work to be done, corona! get back to work and finish the job, ok?

I'm coming up on my 4th year of owning a model 3. I can (pretty much) only supercharge; dont have a home garage and my work has charging - but I'm not working there anymore (oh well). so its SC for me or nothing.

luckily there is a huge bank of SCers at my local supermarket parking lot. works well. I can top off or even do a deep charge if I'm below 30% (rare) and take as long as I need to do food shopping. I have a safe (watched due to other owners sitting in their cars or going/coming often) area and I always know where to head when I carry my groceries to the car. I like that - always the same spot set (end of parking lot) so I never have to have those senior moments (where did I park?).

the SC network is the main thing about this car. the car is getting more and more ordinary but the charging network is still the best and nothing comes close.

I've encountered maybe 5 or 10 charger units that were down. that was over a nearly 4 year period. I say that's damned excellent. I was never not allowed to charge. might have to wait in line at some stations but never had all of them down. and with ccs, that happens more than it should.

I post there all the time because its not filled with right wing russians trying to skew the conversation and basically just ruin everything.

I rarely post here anymore because of the above. its no longer left leaning and no longer technnical. its just a green site that reminds me of the old slashdot. but this one and its userbase are not really my friends. all the ones I knew have moved on except for a few.

soylent > slash for as long as soylent has been around.

its all up and down. I say this as someone who has been in 2 car companies (bay area) and have seen enough to know what's wrong.

management knows nothing about silicon valley and yet most of them are here and hiring locals (or people who work and live here) but they show they have no clue about the engineering culture.

testing is mostly in name only. development is given to the cheapest newhires you can get and retain. no one knows linux (well) and no one knows much about networking. cars are all about linux and networking, in case you didn't know.

few know how to go beyond software and onto the hw side of things. signal integrity on cables and connectors, effect of heat and vibration, so much gets ignored or just not even known that it should be dealt with.

its really a wonder today's e-cars work at all. so many steps backward on each of the forward updates. and no one, NO ONE, gives an 'undo' method to revert bad or undesired fw. not a single one. (I've tried, I gave valid ideas on how to do it, no one wanted to even try).

I'm not going back to gas cars, myself, but the e-car world is all about low cost engineers and keeping costs down. its not about making engineering that humans rely on, rely their lives on. its sometimes about that, in some groups, but not in many of the sw guys in this field.

management does not know how to run the business well and the workers are not given training, and since you hire cheap, they dont have background for the jobs. they treat ECUs like desktop computers (almost; but systemd is ALL over the place in cars. drives me nuts.)

this is across all the companies, as my friends all tell me the same story.

one thing is worse: tesla. dont ever work for them and try to avoid buying and updating their products. that's all I'll say.

I am truly scared for what this level of faking is going to do to the entire world.

trust used to mean something. we are on a track where there is zero trust on anything, in the future. how can you live in a world like that?

I really do fear, massively, for what this could do.

and I'm old enough to know what we'll still go head-first into this.

this is probably the biggest lesson in 'because you can, does not mean you should'.

maybe the next generation will grow up with this and learn to deal with all the mistrust. but our current generation - not a lot will be able to just shrug off things they think are fake. just look at how many people *still* believe in a supreme being/god. no evidence but they still believe in it.

this will not end well for humanity. I truly hope we stop this but I know we wont ;(

I'm almost at the 4 yr mark on my model 3 (2019, bought a few months before the big shutdown in 2020). there's some front end issue or clunk but its not a showstopper and I've avoided having it dealt with for some specific reasons. I can have a link replaced when I need to. other than that, zero work on the car. no maint at all. I have not put lots of miles on the car, but it has been in use all these years (lots of sitting unused during the lockdown, though).

point is: if this was a gas car, there would be tuneups and filter changes and oil changes and parts changes. lots of trips to service places.

as much as I dont recommend tesla (as a company) and musk (as a person), my model 3 has been zero cost of ownership, other than electricity, for nearly 4 years. and for some employers, they even gave us free charging at work.

I'll never go back to a gas car again. just dont see the point, now that we have other options. life has been so much better NOT having been in the gas/oil world. no gas stations, no fillups that are smelly and expensive, and its been great.

popular electronics from the 70's and 80's was my reading material when I was growing up. the pcb prints could be cut out from the page and used for photo or hand drawn resist ink. then use that to tap drill center punch tools and then finally drill your board after you etch it. before people had easy access to photo copiers so that one magazine pcb art was your only one and you had to be careful with it.

there was typing code in, too; but using the photo pcb routing image to actually create boards, that was a really early memory.

QST had a 'learning to worth with ICs' series in 1976 or so and you ended up with a frequency counter/dvm from 7400 series chips. I made those boards and had that working. it was never lab grade but each board did teach you things.

I miss heathkit, too.

they need an audience and someone to taunt and to 'other'.

when its all just themselves, they are bored to tears.

they need people to bully around.

(pathetic, huh?)

talk about confusing terms!

I'm getting close to my 4 year mark on my model 3.

admittedly, I have very very low mileage. the lockdown and WFH helped that a lot.

still, it has been my daily driver (when I drive that day) for all that time.

total spent on maint: $0.00

seriously. not a single service call that I had to pay for. one service to fix a front end link that was a bad part from the start.

I dont recommend tesla, the brand, for lots of reasons, but as for an ev, I've never had a car that cost me zero dollars for upkeep, over a 4 yr period.

add in that when I worked at companies that had chargers, I could get free charging just for letting it sit there, at work, while I'm in meetings.

I'll never go back to an ice car if I can help it.

chinese networking gear.

good. they'll get what they deserve.

btw, how is that capacitor, ivan? leaking a bit? oh, my. shame.