Well that's why I use the word "eventually"; it may take a generation.

However, for this anti-vax stuff, this movement did not exist before about 10 or 15 years ago or so. Anyone who's 40+ should well remember a time when there was no such concern about vaccines, and it was entirely routine for everyone to get their vaccines (except a few religious nuts). So it doesn't seem quite right to me to ascribe this to the phenomenon you mention, since many (most?) anti-vax people actually grew up in a time before this hysteria erupted.

In fact, there's a lot of hysteria going on these days which largely older people are buying into, which was not such a big concern years ago: illegal immigration, the idea that Obama is going to declare martial law and make himself dictator, etc.

I think you're misunderstanding. His car does not have any volume or tuning knobs, it's just a touchscreen. That's how all Ford cars with "MyFordTouch" systems are now. He was complaining about this, because his old car had regular knobs which as you point out can be operated almost instinctively without looking at them. So I was asking him why he bought the car when it has such a horrible mis-feature.

Personally, I will not buy a Ford, or any other car, which is like this. I don't care how good the rest of the car is, this makes it completely unusable and downright dangerous to operate in fact. I think they should even be banned as road hazards.

The problem here isn't the "new kids", it's the company for buying into crappy "solutions" which are proprietary and keep the IT department stuck supporting them for years or decades. For instance, look at Rational ClearCase. It's a complete piece of shit compared to modern DVCS systems like git or mercurial; it's slow as hell, requires full-time administrators to keep it running, and is a PITA to use, and lacks all kinds of modern features such as atomic commits. Maybe in 1989 it was pretty cool, but so were patent leather jackets. So why do companies still keep paying millions of dollars for this POS? Because management is stupid and believes the marketing BS from IBM/Rational, and also probably because they've based all their development on it and are afraid of change (even though CC is so shitty it's costing them dearly in development time because it's such a PITA to use).

If companies worked harder to keep themselves independent and not reliant on proprietary products that only aim to lock them in, they wouldn't have this problem so much.

With political things, yes, that's definitely true. However with scientific things it's not; there's real science (which is falsifiable and evidence-based), and there's bullshit and pseudoscience and religion. Of course, it's possible to BS people with "science" by presenting false evidence, covering up key evidence, etc., but if you teach people the scientific method (instead of teaching them to believe in BS like homeopathy for instance, or in Creationism which isn't science) eventually the truth will come out and people will believe the correct things once the evidence is presented and understood.

That must be a recent development; the Audis I was looking at about 3 years ago had some horrible, clunky nav system.

Yes, hence my contention that that is not "education", but "indoctrination".

Huge "herds" is what gives us civilization and technology. If you don't like these things, feel free to throw away your computer and shut off your electricity and go live off-the-grid in rural Alaska, trying to survive by killing a few squirrels here and there.

Private schools don't have to worry about a). A private business is allowed to discriminate against customers in any way it pleases, as long as it doesn't discriminate based on a "protected class": race and sex mainly. A lawsuit alleging discrimination by anti-vaxxers would be thrown out of court immediately I think.

It's public schools that have to worry more about this stuff, since people can make the case that public education is supposed to be universal, and public schools can't just arbitrarily exclude kids it doesn't like for some reason. If a private school wants to exclude kids who are too dumb (don't score well on a standardized test), or are too short, they're totally allowed to do that. In fact, there aren't many private schools who take in special-needs children. Public schools can't easily exclude anyone.

I could be wrong, but I believe that if you're taught things which are totally wrong and contrary to what actual learned people teach, that doesn't count as "education".

No, I haven't seen anything of the sort. I've only seen the all-touchscreen idiocy from Ford (and its other monikers Lincoln and Mercury); the other carmakers seem to have somewhat-intelligent people working for them who move the most-used functions to actual buttons and knobs, even if there is a touchscreen there.

Actually, I believe Hyundai might have some models with the all-touchscreen idiocy, but still, 2 carmakers does not equal "all".

Yep, I've tried out Audis with knobs and buttons for the navigation, but those suck actually. They're much clumsier to use than a touchscreen, since you have to fumble around with a big knob just to select each letter for the name of your destination; it's completely stupid. Knobs for HVAC and radio controls (the often-used ones, like volume, etc.) are very sensible; knobs to type in letters is asinine.

However, ALL car navigation systems are idiotic, because they're all 5 years behind the times by the time they make it to market; smartphone navigation apps are far more advanced, and always will be. It's even more idiotic that the carmakers actually expect people to pay for map updates, instead of just updating the maps continuously for free like Google Maps. They should just give up on putting navigation in cars altogether, and instead make it so my phone can work with the car's screen. Then I can use whatever navigation app I want, and not be stuck with some old piece of crap software that was only current when the car was under development.

Have you been car shopping lately? Find a car that meets all of your non-electric criteria that still has physical buttons.

Actually, yes, I have. The Volvo V70 is pretty nice and has physical buttons (along with a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff), so does the Mazda 3, even a Dodge Charger rental I drove a few years ago was like that, having a touchscreen for lesser-used stuff and physical buttons for the commonly-used stuff. It's a good balance; the touchscreen gives you the ability to have a lot of functionality for when you need it, but putting all the commonly-used stuff on physical buttons avoids the UI nightmare of having to fiddle with a touchscreen while driving just to turn the fan speed down.

Even today, there are military patrolling Grand Central and Penn Stations in New York City on a daily basis.

Yep, I've seen (and talked to) them too. Technically, they're National Guardsmen called up by the state governor (which is why the Posse Comitatus Act doesn't apply) (also note that the NY state governor is a Democrat), but still that's military.

However, every time I bring this up on an internet forum some moron says that I'm making it up.

Fusion owner here with the "my ford touch" sync system + touch sensitive climate/media controls on the console. Having to take your eyes off the road to make sure you're touching the right 1x1 inch area on the screen, or small indentation seems silly.

Every car I've had prior had physical buttons for these things that after about a week of owning the car could be operated completely by touch alone.

So why'd you buy it then?

There's two things you need to take into account here with that "desktop" usage:
1) Much of that is actually laptops, not desktops. Laptops can't be oriented into picture mode.
2) Much of it is corporate desktops, where people are surfing from work.