I don't know if the forward blind zones are getting worse; those seem pretty similar to me. But I know absolutely for certain that the blind zones behind the vehicle are much, much larger and worse than they were 25 or 30 years ago. It's the difference between "maybe if a subcompact car matches my speed precisely and gets into exactly the wrong spot behind me in the next lane over, I won't be able to see it in my mirror" in the nineties, versus "Oh, there was an eighteen-wheeler passing another eighteen-wheeler back there, and an SUV was weaving around trying to get past them? How was I supposed to know, when it was all behind me?" The rear windows on a lot of cars these days, look like a portal on a ship's lower decks. It's absurd.

I'm extremely sympathetic. People should not be so insensitive as to mistake her for a bot, how dare they. What, just because she's doing a bot's job, and doing it badly? That's profiling. She deserves better. Even a bot deserves better treatment than that.

What? No, no, I would never. I have no idea what sarcasm even is, how would I possibly engage in it? Don't be ridiculous.

Eh. I'm pretty sure you have to already be pretty severely reality-challenged to even seriously *consider* taking medical advice, or any kind of critical life advice, from a chatbot. I mean, if you are on the fence about whether to order olives on the pizza or not, and you let Magic 8-ball decide, that's one thing. The decision is expected to have relatively minimal consequences, so it probably isn't a very big deal one way or the other. Letting Magic 8-ball, or ChatGPT, or anything along those lines, decide whether you should or should not take psycho-active meds, is entirely another level of YOLO. Either you're thinking "This may go horribly wrong but so what who cares", which is grossly irresponsible (what are you, nine years old?), or else you've genuinely got yourself convinced that life is so meaningless that decisions like that don't matter, which is, if anything, worse. Either way, I don't think Magic 8-ball, or ChatGPT, or that Kirkegaard text you read, or whatever, is at the root of the problem. Turn your brain on, think stuff through, and take responsibility for your actions, and you'll be completely safe from these kinds of ridiculous influences.

"I was born here." -- Henry Cho (who was raised in the US South by Korean parents), on why he became a comedian rather than a doctor or lawyer or whatnot.

Eh, and I suppose you think most of those 36% will get real engineering jobs when they graduate?

Because that is really, really not the direction things seem to be going in China at the moment. Most of them are going to be lucky to get a 996 job on a factory floor.

More to the point, cargo-ship fires are an inherently self-limiting phenomenon, because the economic costs involved (and the manner in which those costs are born) generally motivates people to work to avoid them. I'm not saying they don't have any environmental impact at all, but it's always going to be a relatively limited impact, compared to the amount of economic activity.

Do container ships full of EVs have on average a larger impact per-vehicle than ones full of ICEs and the associated tankers full of petroleum? I honestly have no idea, but I'm certain it doesn't matter, because the cargo-ship fires are not the bulk of the impact that cars and such have on the environment in any case. The construction of the *roads* that the cars drive on, has a larger impact on the environment, than cargo ship fires from transporting the vehicles overseas, and the construction of the roads is a small fraction of the total impact the vehicles have.

No, what I *want* is pre-chatGPT Google. It was at least two orders of magnitude better than any search engine that exists today.

Well, what I *really* want is LCARS, but that's a pipe dream.

Eh, I still consider Vista to be the second-best Microsoft OS, just behind Seven. Not sure what is in third place, maybe Win2K? Or XP, but only if it has the service packs because it was lousy without them.

I want the sound the 20MB hard drive on my old ITT XTRA (an 8086 PC clone) made when the system booted up and started to load DOS.

That stuff's not even the most pressing problem with YouTube's content censorship. The larger issue is that content that directly crosses the CCP's party line, keeps getting flagged in all kinds of objectively counterfactual ways. Nobody with more than a couple hundred subscribers can talk about the history or culture of Tibet, for example, without running afoul of this.

Eh. The people who actually like Google's horrible AI-generated garbage, were already using Google anyway. No change there.

Whereas, I have entirely *stopped* using Google's main site, and my usage of Wikipedia has increased, because I'm now using it (plus the browser's in-page search feature) for quick lookup of things that, six months ago, I could more quickly find on Google, but now I can't. Other things I find using ddg or startpage, and still others I now have to resort to older, pre-internet methods, like manually punching a bunch of individually-looked-up numbers into spreadsheets in order to calculate what I actually want to know, like it's 1992, because nobody who still indexes most of the internet, can figure out how to do decent relevancy ranking.

I do still use some of Google's other sites, e.g., Google Maps. Though who knows how long that will continue to be useful, given the direction the company is heading.

Well, like I said, appearance isn't the most important thing; in the movies, Herbie doesn't even always have his standard paint job. Sometimes he's (visually) just a plain VW bug. It's what he does, that's important.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that most houses these days don't have peeling lead paint, like basically all of them did in the seventies.

In literary terms, Herbie is absolutely a character, but I'm not sure why anybody would set about to make real-world replica versions of him. All of his distinctive characteristics (that make him different from an ordinary, non-sapient Volkswagon Beetle, a model of car that was chosen for the films specifically because it was extremely common), are either so cartoonish as to be impractical to replicate in a real car (like the ability to be sawed completely in half and continue to operate as normal) or concern the car's behavior, rather than its physical characteristics. (And it's not enough to make the car drive itself. You have to make it have consistently smarter ideas about where to drive, than the person behind the wheel; and it has to go markedly faster than any other car in its immediate vicinity.) Several of the movies do feature a version of Herbie with some distinctive markings painted on (particularly, the number 53 in a circle), but these markings (and his paint job in general) are not consistent across all the movies and so really cannot be regarded as a core aspect of Herbie's identity. When he's an old secondhand car with a standard-but-weathered paint job, he's still very much Herbie.

The issue is that people are chucking the small coins (pennies, nickels, dimes) into jars and drawers and whatnot, figuring "I'll get around to taking them to the bank someday", but their value is so small that said getting around to it is never a very high priority. Jar's full? Start another. So the quantity of out-of-circulation coins keeps growing, and the treasury has to keep minting more of the things, and it's not worth it.

Pennies also get used in those penny-masher things at tourist attractions, stamping them with the name of the site to make cheap souvenirs. (Not one-cent cheap; the masher machine takes multiple quarters. But it's still cheaper than anything in the gift shop.) If the penny is discontinued, the tourist sites can "solve" this "problem" by adding a vending machine that sells blanks, perhaps for fifty cents apiece or, if they're really smart, three for a dollar (which would encourage people to put more quarters into the masher machine, because it's probably not worth it to save the extra blanks for next year's vacation, for most people).