I wouldn't go that far. It was a technological research project. The failure was not recognizing it wasn't ready for commercial release.

Yes it makes use of the thumbwheels, but that's missing the point. You have to go to the touch screen first before being able to do ANY of that. Sure, it's fine once you're in that mode for the scrollwheels, but getting there is completely obnoxious when you're also trying to drive.

Go to the screen...menu -> controls -> mirror icon. Adjust one. Fumble with screen to select the other mirror, adjust.

On my Mazda3 and every other car I've owned it's a selector switch and a joystick on the door. Very intuitive and within easy reach without ever looking at it. They've been that way since the 80s when power mirrors came to the masses. My '85 Celica had the same setup.

AC? If it's not in the little controls in the bottom corner you have to flip-up the larger control screen, and do weird pinchy things with your fingers to adjust the vents, looking at the screen while driving. Fumble for the fan speed at the bottom of the screen. Try to slide around to adjust the temperature at the bottom of the screen.

Compare to conventional car with knobs where you can take one glance at where your hand is going and do it by feel.

There are reasons why certain things are the way they are. It's because a company spent a LOT of time doing ergonomic studies and trials. I hate it when people throw out all that work in lieu of something else just because it's different, without a lot of thought and study first. It's putting the cart before the horse.

"OK, what would you do if you couldn't have any buttons, how could you make it suck less?" I feel they're working backwards from 'terrible' to 'only mostly terrible'. Not much of an improvement.

She wanted it, and she actually likes it. I found it ridiculous when I drove it, but she likes all the creature comforts. More power to her, I just avoid it. I think I'm a more of a driver-centric experience sort of person. She likes all the bling and frilly features and does not drive as much as I do.

One of the things I loved about the pine phone was the ability to boot from sd card. For something like foreign travel the ability to swap cards and boot a whole different image would be perfect.

Because they're idiot followers and they were awed by an RDF

Yeah but just for protection from the cops

Yes of course it is a police state, but yes of course it's stupid to pretend you don't live in one when you do

You never could. Parents do their kids' homework all the time, or siblings, or friends. Ideally, teachers should give a large pile of optional homework. State right up front that although they will grade it, it will not count towards your final grade, and the grade on each homework paper will be given as a percentage of the problems attempted, not of the total set of problems. So if you do five problems and get them all right, you get 100, and if you do 50 problems and get most of them right, you get 90. At that point, the purpose of homework is primarily to help the students learn, rather than being primarily a way to evaluate the students. Give some participation points for doing some of the homework, but not based on correctness.

This has three benefits. First, the smart kids who understand the material quickly will do just enough to make sure they understand it and then will stop wasting their time, but will still have feedback on the work that they did do. Second, the teachers won't have to grade as much work from students who don't really need that much extra work. Third, no at-home cheating, whether by technology or by other people will distort their grades.

Obviously this doesn't work for everything — essays, for example — but for general homework, it's a big win.

You can certainly do that along with what I suggested, though I'm not sure how much difference it will make in the grand scheme of things.

Agreed.

If only voters would get this worked up about corruption.

People are also ignoring the benefits. Data centers don't bring a lot of jobs after construction is complete, but they can generate a lot of tax revenues for counties and cities. Huge amounts of money that can be a real game-changer for the local budgets, and could be very beneficial for the locals. By itself that's not a reason to accept them, but it should be part of the overall calculation, and the net cost/benefit of the projects should be reasonably and fairly evaluated, and negotiated.

But this isn't what's happening.

The thumb wheels on the steering wheel do that. You do have to use the touch screen to put it in "mirror adjust" mode, but really that's something you only do once. Set up your driver profile, set your mirrors, then the car just always changes them to your settings.

I find the auto wiper works pretty well... it is important to keep the windshield fairly clean, but I like to do that anyway.

Yeah, the Model 3/Y handles are weird. The S/X handles are pretty nice. In theory the fact that they're motorized could make them a maintenance problem. In practice, little electric motors are extremely reliable. There was a problem with the wiring harness getting fatigued and breaking about 10 years ago, but that's been fixed.

Those are also on the thumb wheels on the steering wheel.

Before I came up with my current system I spent a lot of time looking into actuators for windows. They exist but they're expensive, often bulky and look like a lot of work to install and maintain. Then it occurred to me that I already have a whole-house fan (HVAC system)... if I could just get it to draw from outside rather than from the air returns. That part woks great and I think it does give me a pretty good single point of control. The only problem is that the house is pretty tight so I also needed a way to create some negative pressure, hence the laundry room to attic fan. I think that's still my airflow bottleneck.

As for whether I've crunched the numbers.... no, I haven't. And since I installed solar last year it maybe doesn't even matter any more? Throughout most of the summer I'm actually giving away nearly a MWh per month of electricity even after running house, A/C, car, steam shower, etc. So it's really more of a game to me than a serious attempt to save money. That said, I do watch my energy consumption closely (game, right?) and running the fans consumes maybe 400W. Overnight that's about 3.2 kWh. Meanwhile, my AC draws 4 kW, so if my AC kicks on for 45 minutes it consumes as much as the passive system does all night. And for that, the passive system cools the house by ~10F degrees while the AC will cool it by about 2F, which would indicate 5X efficiency improvement. But even that doesn't fully capture it, because the AC will cool the *air* by 2F while the passive system will cool the house and also much of the thermal mass, so it's actually moving quite a bit more heat out than the thermostat temperatures would indicate.

So, yeah, an order of magnitude more efficient seems about right. When outside air cools down at night!

I've also been thinking about building something for my shop. It's an uninsulated pole barn (30' wide x 40' long x 25' high) which gets quite hot in the summer and quite cold in the winter. I think some automated fans to exploit day/night temperature variations could probably move the average interior temperature several degrees closer to comfortable, year round. Even better if I insulate it.

On the other hand, the fraud losses are a lot lower, and as far as I know the transaction fee is the same, and the credit card company pays the 0.15% fee out of their cut. So while it theoretically *could* eventually drive up the rate in the future, I don't think that's happening currently.

Oh and one more thing. Walmart could pull a "Winco Foods" and not accept Credit Card payments at all. In my area there's a Winco Foods about 30 miles from where I live. They only take debit cards, not credit cards. They do beat Walmart's prices so whenever I'm nearby, I take advantage of that.

Yes they could, but they'd lose out on a lot of money. Winco foods likely saw their average receipt size and realized most of their patrons could either do debit or cash. Being a grocery store, cash is likely a viable option if you're not doing big shopping trips and spending $20-40 a trip, and more for debit.

Walmart however does sell more expensive stuff that most people will not have cash for which can be expensive. Think video game consoles, TVs, etc. Limiting yourself to debit and cast would make those transactions very annoying.

It's why Costco always retains a credit card option - because they know cash and debit only get you so far. (And because debit protections are worse, I refuse to use debit, so it'll be cash only).

Most of the developed world has lower homicide rates than the US, and has had for a long time.