Most of those cars were not so tall though, and you could see out of them. If there is a 7 year old standing in front of your 70's GM A-body you can see them.

Belt-lines in cars got really high because that is how you achieve that roll over safety rating.

As a driver I hate that every sedan and SUV has these super high belt lines and wide as my head A-pillars now. Every time I get in my 80s classic on the weekend it reminds me how much my visibility is in fact impaired in my daily.

Do and realistically am I much safer in my 2020's car - yes, do I also belive I am more likely to be involved in some for of accident because I can't see as much also yes.

Most common case country T intersection with yield on one road and no stops. (Probably the most dangerous type of intersection) There will be a 30 yard long space along the perpendicular road, that is a blind spot because of that thick pillar. Obviously that leads to the only safe driving practice being, be slow enough to come to a complete stop at the intersection until you are near enough to see completely down the road looking over your shoulder. Which by extension forces you to approach quite slowly or subject you and your passengers to uncomfortably short stops, should there be another vehicle approaching.

Meanwhile in the vintage car with A-pilars just bulky enough to hold up the roof, there basically isn't a blind spot large enough to conceal a vehicle or cyclist for any period of time, so they will be detected on the second look if not the first, and you able to see for miles down the perpendicular road over top of the soy beans..

Modern cars kind of suck for driving..

There are ethical questions here thought.

Some might argue that as the purchaser the vehicle owes its safety optimizations toward those owners/operators. You bought the machine the best product should do what you ostensibly would want it to, and that is safely transport you and yours wherever you are going.

Others might say we operate cars/trucks in public space some of which belonged to pedestrians first and buying a car does not confer upon you some right to impose safety risks on them.

I would argue that we are car-centric society. We have 100 years of social decisions that went for the automobile, the default policy position on subjects related to automobiles should go in favor of automobiles and their owners/users until we have had a broader debate on if the collective we "General Welfare" remember *want* a society/economy built less around the automobile.

No, it's not. Nice of you to cut away the part that already said so. It is HIGHLY relevant if something you purchased becomes unusable due to an action of the seller or not.

If you are new to this planet, this might be news to you, but otherwise: Yes, that is how commercial transactions work. You pay for something, you get to use it.

No, but it absolutely DOES give me not just the permission but the RIGHT to use the thing I paid for for its intended purpose and for any other purpose I see fit. First sale doctrine and so on.

That is correct. But the store could either sell the same game again (in your case where the buyer personally was banned for whatever) or demand a refund from the manufacturer as is common practice when defective goods are returned. Really, there's not much to figure out, this is already a solved problem.

Actually, that is exactly what it means.

Merriam-Webbster: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buy)

"to acquire possession, ownership, or rights to the use or services of by payment especially of money : purchase"

Seriously, why are you trying to defend an indefensible position ?

Some diseases do. Look at how many Native Americans died from their first exposure to various European diseases. That said, there are something like 160 strains of rhinovirus, so you're always getting different one each time you get sick, with no prior immunity, as far as I know, so for that specific variety, I'm pretty sure you are correct.

For a robust immune response, you'll generally want an attenuated virus, not a dead one. I mean, it doesn't matter much for something like flu, because it mutates so quickly that any immunity approaches zero after two or three years anyway, but for any vaccine that you want to actually last for decades, unless your exposure risk is low (e.g. polio in the western world), a live, weakened infection is probably a better option.

See above. The reason attenuated viruses are so much more effective is because they trigger multiple levels of immune response by infecting cells. Programming cells to create parts of real viruses differs only from attenuated vaccines mainly in that the resulting products do not then go on to infect more cells, and that the mRNA bits are usually time-bombed so that they stop producing those virus parts after a period of time, thus minimizing the rate of actual cell death.

But either way, the continued exposure over a longer duration, coupled with the involvement of cellular stress signals, help trigger both the innate and adaptive immune systems, resulting in a stronger immune response than if you just had bits of unexpected dead virus material floating around in isolation.

That's actually way more true with the dead virus vaccines you think are so great. For a classic example, the flu vaccine that caused a detectable uptick in narcolepsy (an autoimmune condition) in Europe, called Pandemrix, was an inactivated, adjuvanted vaccine. The adjuvant somehow triggered autoimmunity in some people. And the adjuvant was needed precisely because without that, the inactivated vaccine did not produce an adequate immune response.

IMO, the odds of an mRNA vaccine causing an autoimmune response are likely orders of magnitude less than an adjuvanted, attenuated vaccine doing so, because an adjuvant causes the immune system to pay more attention to whatever is nearby, including your own cells.

Not all of them. Some of them are independent research scientists, some of them immunologists working in the public sector or academia, etc. The percentage of professionals in this area who work for the vaccine companies is tiny compared with the percentage of independent researchers studying viruses and vaccines. That said, I'd trust even the research teams at the vaccine companies over some random person on YouTube or other Internet sites who shows no actual sign of understanding immunology, but bulls**ts just well enough people to convince a lot of other people who also don't understand it. And sadly, I've seen so much of that level of noise that I have a standing "No, I won't watch your YouTube video about medical subjects; if it were legitimate, it would have been published in a properly peer-reviewed journal" policy at this point. :-)

I mean sure, the folks without clean water might be less susceptible, but only because they're the ones still left who didn't die from it the first time.

Or Barbra Streisand's 1969 acceptance speech.

Imagine if the US the operated that way. The rest of the world would be writing in Cyrillic.

If you actually believe any of that I have bridge to sell you.

Collecting finger prints, logging serial numbers, and finally correlating any of that with other data sources means at the very least getting hold of the notes to make some comparisons. You are talking about a high friction high cost effort that generally speaking can only be employed against someone already being watched.

Digital currency on the other hand means we are few SQL joins from tracking any token thru the economy as far as one might wish, and just as easily from source to sink and sink to source. Going electronic changes EVERYTHING..

I overheard two idiots arguing in the park the other day. "You don't know where I live", I am maybe 30 feet away at the next picnic table thinking, "well you seem to know each others names so if you own your place and live in the county, he certainly does after a 5 min of GIS lookup, which he could do right here from a mobile". Sure if the name is real common like Joe Baker there might be 15 hits or so but then which one is convenient to the current local, probably narrows right down to 1.

Anything uniquely identifiable, and searchable electronically isn't anonymous. Privacy around a digital currency, any digital currency is likely to be a polite fiction at best if National banks even bother with that in the end.

Lets go with the UN number. There are 195 nations in the world. We can argue there are more but the odds of getting any good data out of the ones the UN does not even recognize are low.

A good deal of those, all EU members for example are shall we say less than independent in their ability to determine tax rates at least for certain types of taxes.

Check writing has been around in various forms as long as there has been banks, but as far as day to day transactions go, ie not weekly payroll and major purchases there has been any alternative to cash for very long. Diners Club in the 50s, but really it isn't until the 80s anyone could reasonably expect to use a credit card at certain types of establishments. It probably isn't until the middle 90s Joe Public could really anticipate a day out without using any cash if he did not wish to; and that still would limit his options.

All this in the USA. I'd be surprised if the US wasn't near to the vanguard when it came to reduction in the use of cash. Yes I know parts of Asia / India etc do literally every thing on mobiles and have for a while. My point here is this all brings us into the era of current political animals and current social expectations around tax rates and where those tolls are levied.

Considering all the other noise and confounding forces in tax policy, I don't think there is nearly enough data out there to draw any sort of meaningful insight as to cash use vs tax rates required.

Every digital cinema camera I've ever heard of has XLR inputs. So if you don't mind being tethered to the boom operator, you don't necessarily even need a field recorder. It all depends on what you're shooting and where and how.

But yeah, decent mics are cheap enough now that even low-end DSLRs have at least survivable mono audio.

There's where your mental model is just wrong. The game server is in the domain of the seller. Some hardware breaking due to wear & tear or abuse is NOT. That is an incredibly important legal distinction.

What EXACTLY do you mean with "the game shuts down"? That is the whole point. The game SERVERS shutting down is not the same as disabling the game. If it's an online-only game, there could still be OTHER servers, not run by the seller. Official or unofficial. That is the whole point of "stop killing games".

Again, this is relevant for online games only, and is not about the game at all, but about access to a specific community or server. Even if I am the biggest asshole on the planet and every ban was absolutely justified - why should I not be able to set up my own server, invite my equally assholish friends and play there? There is no reason to disable the GAME, only the access to a specific server. These can be two distinct things. You buy the game, but you subscribe to a server.

They shouldn't create the need to refund. You're making up a problem here. Every refund ever was done at the point of sale for the price you paid. That's why invoices and receipts exist.

But that's not what it says. Every shop ever treated games as a SALE. Steam doesn't label the button "buy" anymore, but most other shops still do, and even on Steam everything else is handled exactly like a sale of a product. Shopping cart and all.

Because they want to eat their cake and have it, too. I'm sure players would be more hesitant to part with 60 bucks if it clearly said: "temporary, revocable at any time for any reason, permission to play".

Not necessarily. Canvassing can also bring broader attention to something. For example, I'm hearing about this, and my politics don't align with his, but now I'm curious what the issue is about, and might actually pay attention to it.

At some point, it stops being a mob and starts being a vote. And while it makes sense to not allow people to drag random folks onto the platform just to vote your way, it doesn't make sense to limit voting on an important issue to the 0.1% of users who pay close enough attention to notice. So I can see both sides on this one.

Maybe the right thing to do is to require a certain level of activity to earn the right to vote, then dump the canvassing rules. That way, any canvassing would only serve to increase turnout, rather than truly padding the ballot box.