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Comment Re:Old car for the win (Score 1) 35

KISS is dead.

Yeah so are the people who applied it. Died in a car accident easily preventable by advanced intelligent driving systems.

I'm all for an anti-tracking rant, but the reality is simple cars are the most dangerous. There's a reason it's effectively mandatory to have forward facing range finding systems in all cars in Europe these days along with the computers that are able to process that data.

And it's a stick shift.

Uah, that sounds needlessly complex. You have a gearbox? Why not just have a motor spin the wheels directly like a modern Hyundai? Next you're going to tell me your car has an engine with 2000 parts instead of a simple rotating coil sitting withing a couple of magnets.

Comment Re:Doesn't pass the smell test (Score 1) 66

Err ... no. 6-8% since Brexit isn't some unrealistic booming in the slightest. It's a fraction of a percentage higher than what it currently is year on year, and well within the margin of error for variance between countries on any given year. It's also far smaller than the actual predicted impact Brexit would have.

There's a reason why the UK's economic growth started trailing the rest of the EU right around 2016, and I wouldn't call the EU "booming". The point is that it had a negative impact, reversing those numbers don't make something booming.

Comment Re:Depends on what you value (Score 1) 66

The classic one is the "bendy banana" rule, which governs the acceptable ripeness of bananas sold there.

See even there you're not even correct in what the rules are, and that's the problem. Most of the discourse is disconnected from reality.

In reality, no banana of any shape was ever "unacceptable" for sale. The ruling was that bananas grown from within the EU (Spain, France and Portugal) needed to apply the same classification and labelling rules and bananas from outside the EU which means the only practical difference is that a straight banana from Spain will have "Class 2" written next to the label in size 4 font, as it sits next to other straight bananas imported from other countries.

Most of what is said about the EU is fucking stupid.

That said some things actually are fucking stupid. There's a lovely collective facepalm right now as Virgin Gin isn't allowed to be called Gin anymore because the regulations governing alcohol say to be called Gin it has to have certain ingredients in it. That kind of thing is stupid. No government is immune from that.

Comment Re:Thanks for the research data (Score 2) 66

Thankfully most of the crap the US is doing can be rolled back by the next president. If president A can wave his hand one direction, president B can wave it the other way. Most of Trumps crap is temporary. Brexit, on the other hand

A wind farm under construction and sanctioned by the previous administration has been put on hold by the current one saddling one international company with $6.4bn in debt. The flip-flopping of policies is almost worse than just sticking with bad policies for any investment that is looking to extend for longer than an election cycle.

I've posted this before, but the company I work for has cancelled major investment in construction projects in the USA including not just green energy projects, but traditional energy projects as well. The USA now sits on our projects risk register along side unstable shitholes like Libya. We are now far more comfortable investing in Iraq than the USA. No really, let that sink in. It'll take a decade or more for this opinion to change.

Comment Re:Brexit was not about economics (Score 1) 66

Brexit was thinly disguised racism.

That's horseshit. The reality is Brexit is the same as every political movement to the direction of those who make false promises based on lies. The issue is, most of the time the people pushing those lies are racists themselves.

Half of the population of the UK don't want to kick coloured people out, they want better lives, and are too dumb to realise that what they voted for was a lie. This is the downside of a discourse that is centered around the heart vs the brain.

Heart: Your life sucks, it's all these foreigner's faults, Brexit is the solution that will make your life better.
Brain: Brexit won't make your life better, actually we don't know what it will do, it's uncharted waters.

Those were the two campaigns. Which statement evokes any kind of emotional response from you? The one that says your life will be better with this one neat trick, or the one that says this may be a bad idea?

Comment Re:I think it's pretty simple (Score 1) 28

Absolutely, they may post about it on Facebook while a camera points at their face, why should they care about the TV?

The reality is that most people simply consider it a downgrade. Why fix a camera used only for communication into the living room when you already have one in your hand which is portable.

Comment Re:Surprising! (Score 1) 28

Did you type this on your phone with the camera pointed at your face? The real reason is, we don't need it. The same reason I don't have a webcam on my home PC despite video calling family members weekly, I don't need it, I already have it in my hand, and I can get up and walk around with that one.

Comment Re:What problem is this solving? (Score 1) 85

What am I missing here?

The percentage of idiots in the population hasn't changed, but the percentage of cars that enable the idiots to do truly dangerous things has. That's the problem being solved. Virtually all EVs have insane acceleration, which means half of new cars in China go into the hands of a group which statistically contains a lot of morons.

Some countries have recognised the fact that people are untrustworthy idiots and do things like limit the power to weight ratio of the driving license in some conditions. E.g. In Queensland Australia P-platers (first 3 years of driving) are limited to vehicles of 130kW/t precisely because cars with high acceleration are dangerous in the hands of idiots.

Much like the people who think turning ESC off is cool there's a reason cars legally need to "forget" this setting between drives.

Comment Re:I've got a much better idea (Score 1) 85

No one is being punished here. There's no practical reason any car on the road needs to accelerate faster than this *EVER* (and most cars on the road aren't even capable of this acceleration). And if you do feel the need to take your car to the race track (where you should be rather than on a public road when you want to let loose) you can disable this limit with a button press.

Car performance should be geofenced to areas where people can kill themselves in without affecting anyone else. There's too many morons on the road, like the kind who feel it's a punishment to not be able to accelerate in ridiculous ways while being a hazard to fellow road users.

Comment Re:What about top speed? (Score 0) 85

Then these people shouldn't be driving.

You're confusing people and robots. You may be a robot, but people will statistically make mistakes all the time. This includes unintended operation of something (e.g. pressing the wrong button). Statistically for any given action you will fuck it up once every 10 years. Some people more often, but virtually no one less often.

Comment Re:It's a micropurse. (Score 1) 81

with bad economic sense.

Much like the blonds carrying their designer dogs in their Gucci handbags it may indicate that someone has immaculate economic sense. I mean you'd have to have played the game correctly to be able to blow money on such a pointless fashion accessory, or a handbag, or an iPhone sock.

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