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Comment Re:Saving? (Score 1) 56

If the vast majority of Americans lived frugally, saving some money for emergencies and investing most of the rest of their money in diversified stocks and bonds, spending only what they need to cover good medical care, healthy food and exercise opportunities, a sufficient but small house/apartment and transportation, and minimal luxuries....we would experience severe deflation and unemployment.

Really no. The wealthy get most of the money. The wealthy spend less of the money. When the poor get it, it's spent about five times before it comes to rest in a tax dodge. When the wealthy get it, it's spent only about twice. What we need is for the wealthy to spend money like they pretend they do, in order to create jobs like they pretend they do.

Comment Re:Will help Linux succeed? (Score 0) 59

And Microsoft themself is now acting to make that dependence on Windows go away, with web-based versions of their applications. I think they can see that Windows' time is limited. Maintaining an OS is a big thankless job that they don't need to do, and they're not any good at it so it's not like they deserve thanks anyway.

Comment Re:Is it a cool idea though? (Score 1) 227

by drinkypoo (#66246104) Attached to: The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans

even in trucking many new trucks are coming with automatic transmissions - likely with some sort of manual up/down in case you need to pick a better gear

They have been for decades really, it's just least common in OTR hauling because in that application the manual gearbox still has an efficiency advantage. They are probably most common for construction equipment because the automatic gearbox offers tangible advantages there. There's a promotional video from Allison which is pretty easy to find whose tagline is something like "continuous power" about how the benefits of their transmissions which are able to make shifts under full power, which is true; the heavy ones are full planetary gear designs and they are as convenient and reliable as the day is long. These gearboxes also don't conveniently feature more than six speeds, but on the plus side, Allison tends to give two overdrives on highway use transmissions.

The problem with consumer-level automatic transmissions continues to be reliability. A lot of the modern many-speed automatic transmissions have only a single-gear limp mode which is only suitable for getting them onto a trailer, where older transmissions often used to have two-speed limp mode, and some of the new transmissions cannot limp at all without a functioning TCM. I see that as a big drawback. Belt-driven CVTs are also infamously fragile, yet also dominant in low-end vehicles.

Comment Less precipitous yes, but... (Score 1) 227

by drinkypoo (#66246096) Attached to: The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans

Last year just 0.6% of new vehicles made for U.S. customers were stick shifts, reports the Washington Post, citing preliminary government data. [...] That's a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980 [...] Europe has seen a less dramatic decline in stick shifts, with manual transmissions dropping from 91 percent of car registrations in 2001 to 29 percent in 2024 among Europe's largest auto markets

Those time frames are sufficiently different that you really cannot draw any conclusions from them alone, but the writing is clearly on the wall for manual transmissions in Europe as well, they're just a bit behind the curve. ICEVs themselves are going away, and are likely to stop being sold sooner in Europe than the USA, so they may well catch up.

Comment Re:10x isn't fully realized. Because _I_ catch it. (Score 1) 118

As of know I'm basically being paid to tell robots what to do. And that's pretty much the definition of a post-scarcity utopia if you ask me.

Well, it isn't for a whole lot of reasons. Zeroth, "utopia" means nowhere and it's a thought experiment. First and foremost though, the "I" in "I'm" — utopia is supposed to be a type of society and not just a state of being for a single person. It's working for you now so you are happy now. But you being able to replace all those people now somehow hasn't made you wonder if you are going to be replaced.

Another reason which is (now that I make the comparison) actually equally important is that AI is based on unsustainable resource consumption, which means that it's fundamentally not post-scarcity.

Maybe you should ask an AI what some of these words you're using mean. It seems to be making you dumber already, though, so it would probably be healthier to look them up for yourself instead of asking a LLM and having it tell you that you are a very smart boy.

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