I was with you up to this point. There's almost never a good reason to finance a car (plus most exceptions involve having enough money banked that you could buy it outright if necessary), and a decent new car should still run you under 20k. If you can't save up enough for that in a few years, then learn some basic maintenance skills and buy a used one. A lot of cars depreciate several thousand dollars after just a year or two.

It's all a matter of optimizing your financial decisions. If you want to drive around in a $90k BMW X5 because it makes you feel important, you'll either have to be rich or make sacrifices elsewhere. If you don't want to make sacrifices elsewhere and aren't rich, then I'd highly recommend a few year old used Hundai Elantra, Ford Focus, or Mazda 3. If you want sporty, a super nice used miata can be had for under 10k (one with paint damage and the like can be had for 4k)

Whether or not it's an ultralight is defined by weight and capabilities, not visual features.

English to Spanish is very similar. I knew a guy who worked as a cook with all hispanic kitchen staff. He knew no spanish and they knew zero english, but they were able to understand each other well enough by him speaking english with a strong spanish accent and them speaking spanish with as much english accent as they could muster.

These things are still relatively rare, expensive, and nowhere near the level of completeness that most clickbait articles breathlessly written by a reporter with no technical knowledge would imply.

These are all things that people (especially reporters selling headlines) want very badly, but not necessarily things that will ever be able to become practical enough to make it out of R&D and into common use.

I haven't finished it yet, but so far it makes sense to me. They're basically the logical extrapolation if you take monks out of the middle ages and point their enthusiasm at knowledge instead of religion. Presumably it remained because of tradition and also wanting to only attract smart people who were serious about the pursuit of knowledge for knowledges sake without getting caught up in the specifics of implementation.

A system like that would also have a stabilizing influence on the planet. Remove the smart and curious from the general population (and genepool) and let them pursue knowledge in a way that won't take a destructive outlet (e.g. designing weapons for an unstable dictator). Leave the sheeple who are content to take soma and maintain the status quo as long as they're entertained.

I was as well, to the point I nearly shut it off and started looking for how to return it. I think it's a combination of the weird voice for the character talking, strange terms, and lack of context as to what's going on. Once I got a feel for what was actually happening it improved by several orders of magnitude. (I think the narrator toned down his voice acting a bit by then as well).

I hope it doesn't get edited. I enjoy the tangents and showing off of research (though I'll agree that the baroque cycle overdid it a bit). That's what makes his writing unique compared to other authors in those genres.

In my opinion the tangents were what made the books awesome. I particularly loved Tourings bike chain timing in Cryptonomicon, followed closely by relating the crew served machine gun to sawmill machinery. The bit where they come up with a complex algorithm to divvy up inherited goods on a 2d graph and use time on a supercomputer to calculate who gets what was also pretty good, though not technically a tangent.

If you liked snow crash and diamond age, you'll probably like anathem.

I've been listening to anathem on audible and enjoying it greatly. I've actually started leaving for work during rush hour, since it means I get to listen for an extra 30 minutes in order to arrive at work 5 minutes sooner. win-win.

I've been listening to anathem on audible during my commute. I'm about halfway through and so far I'd put it up there with Snow Crash and Diamond Age (though I don't recommend it if you're not the sort of person who can intuitively guess the approximate meaning of a new word).

I loved those parts when he goes off on a long nerdy tangent like that.

252mph in a straight line. Unless they're drag racing or on a course with lots of long straightways where that speed is actually obtainable, I'd imagine the low end torque from the electric car will probably help keep the average speeds pretty close.

You missed the point I was making. Yes there's a loss in one field (e.g. automotive assembly lines). But as a result of automated assembly lines, there are gains in other fields (e.g. Anything having to do with supporting the infrastructure that makes cars and car manufacturing possible).

Yes, that's a good distinction and actually what I had meant to say. I had assembly lines and factory work in mind while I was typing the comment.