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Comment Re: As someone who can afford a BMW (Score 1) 169

Any used vehicle will be more trouble than a new one no matter what the maker.

Sure, I'll grant that, in general.

But still, is it 50% more trouble, or 0.5% more trouble? The first should influence your buying decision, the second is a rounding error.

My current BMW has over 150,000 km on the clock and is now 8 years old. The only thing where it is noticeably different from when I bought it (used, at about 2 years old and 40,000 km) is that one rubber switch on the steering wheel is worn off and I'll ask to replace it the next time it goes in for maintenance.

Maybe I'm lucky. The point is: There are plenty of perfectly fine used cars out there. Many of which are no trouble for their owners.

Personally, my next car is likely to be another BMW, as soon as the dashboard designers get off drugs and put the display back into the dashboard instead of sticking it on top like a cheap after-market add-on.

Comment Re: As someone who can afford a BMW (Score 1) 169

But those aren't the ones being sold with subscriptions.

Two or three years from now, they will be ubiquitous on the used car market. A lot of cars go to the used market when a leasing contract ends.

have also heard you had better be a backyard mechanic if you get one because they are bound to have serious electrical problems at age

Never heard that and at least for both of mine it wasn't true.

Comment Re: As someone who can afford a BMW (Score 1) 169

They're not that expensive used. My 2nd car was a BMW - 11 years old but in excellent shape (and old gentleman owned it and basically drove it from his garage to his company garage twice a week or so). It cost 8000 Euros. I drove it for years and was very happy with it. Then I sold it for 4000 Euros.

Comment Re:hot in here (Score 1) 197

Word has it that both Tesla and SpaceX essentially have "Elon handlers" - people who know how to talk him out of or into things so he believes it was his idea.

Matches my own professional experience. I did the same to the head of HR for a couple years, though only now and then and not as a full-time job. It definitely is a very effective strategy.

And I think the crazy and the stupid come together. You often need five stupid ideas to get to the crazy-but-could-work one. The trick is in not implementing the stupid ones along the way.

Comment Re:Do their employees still need food stamps to li (Score 1) 55

Inflation is the drain on the nation. The reason for all of these 1 Trillion dollar companies is that there are all of these money created by the various governments and banks propped up by government entities, all of the bail outs, money printing, quantitative easing (money printing), etc., all of it is inflation, i.e. expansion of the money supply. Much of it is driven by the pathetically low interest rates, manipulated by the government over the last few decades (as the governments got off the gold), all of it means simply that prices for things (including stock valuations) go up, none of it is increase in any actual productivity, all of it is bad for the world and global economies no matter what the likes of Paul Krugmans and other Keynesian charlatans are telling you.

Basically a trillion dollars is not what it used to be, it used to be inconceivable, now it is just another Tuesday.

Comment hot in here (Score 5, Informative) 197

Musk said the least expensive way to do AI computation within two to three years will be in space.

Has someone told him about the heat problem in space? Vacuum is cold, but it's also a near perfect insulation. Getting rid of heat is a constant problem for space craft because there is no heat exchange and radiating it off is the only option you have and it's terribly inefficient. And last I checked, GPUs generate quite a bit of heat.

Comment Re:Content (Score 1) 137

This, more than any "but you can't see the difference anyways" comment is the core problem.

If there's no content, then there's no point in having an 8K TV.

Where high resolution makes sense is computer displays. I'm writhing this on a 5K display, and it lets me keep text at virtually any size readable. You rarely read double-page text content on a TV.

Comment Re:Telling police within a day has value ... (Score 2) 41

They love those hits. It gives them carte blanche to pull someone over search the car, search them, arrest them, etc.

Good point.

So here's my counter-offer: Instead of an Airtag, put a coupon for 20% off a box of donuts into the car. Make sure to let them know when you report the theft. Now they have double incentives.

Statistics 101 caveat, "all other things being equal". Unless you statistics are reporting on all the stolen cars reported via Air Tags its not relevant.

No, that was all cars stolen. The point was: Airtag or not, 85% of cars are eventually recovered anyways, and the ones that are not you would most likely not recover even with an Airtag. Or do you really think that the cops will unload and search a container ship because you say there's a ping on your FindMy app?

The reporting of its location reducing the likelihood of the bodyshop or container.

Why?

First, police have been repeatedly reported as being reluctant to go where owners tell them their hardware has reported in. We've had this with notebooks and smartphones. Second, you don't need Airtags to get location data. My current car is 7 or 8 years old and I can ask it for current location via an App, or make it flash its headlights or honk if I lost it in a huge parking lot. That's ten times more useful than an Airtag. But if thieves were even one bit professional, they of course know these things. They will disable them first. As for Airtags - they have this anti-stalking feature, so if the thief is driving around in your car for a bit, he'll be told that there's an unknown Airtag following him. At which point he'll stop, locate it and you can send the cops to an empty ditch at the side of the road.

Comment Re:Line was always silly for geometry and economic (Score 1) 56

That also raises the question of how big the "tunnel" for the train needs to be.

Two tracks for redundancy and to go both directions. Additional tracks for local trains or freight can go above or below, since we're building vertical anyways.

Then there's little point in having the train in the first place

Disagree. If you have on- and off-ramps, the engines don't have to be in the pods, they can be in the ramp. The main problem with any and all "pod travel" concepts is that instead of one huge engine in front of a train, you now have a hundred little engines. Which is not only less efficient, it's also a maintenance nightmare.

Of course it could be done, but it is not clear what the benefit of building it like that would be.

Along the outside wall you could have the largest graffiti ever. :-)

On a rotating space station though, You wouldn't really drop "down" like on Earth. You would "fall" in a curved path that should hit a wall instead of the "floor"

That's an interesting physics question. Over enough time (a couple years, say), would all the air inside the station spin along with it? My intuition says yes.

But we get away from the topic. It's been an interesting little discussion. Thanks.

Comment Re:Translation good enough (Score 2) 8

If AI translation is good enough ...

Pure AI isn't good enough, and that isn't what most people will submit.

AI makes mistakes and humans make mistakes, but they make different mistakes. Humans make grammar and word choice mistakes much more often than AI, while AI makes factual mistakes.

A researcher can run the original through an LLM to produce a well-written, grammatically correct translation. Then they read it and correct the factual errors. Researchers who can't write English well can usually still read it well enough to catch factual errors.

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