Yes, braking less quickly can be a plus. That switch has nothing to do with the brake pedal: it changes what happens when you let go of the throttle. An ICE car will slow down using the resistance of the engine (engine braking). With an electric car, you can simulate this by switching the motor to generator mode.

Some people like to be able to coast with no engine braking, others want to be able to do one-pedal driving where letting go of the throttle will rapidly slow the car down, even to a standstill. And some people like to switch between the two depending on road conditions.

It's possible my number is from before 2020 and the global supply chain disruption.

You underestimate the economies of scale. Shipping one t-shirt from China to the USA (as part of a bulk shipment, not as an individual package) costs one cent.

It's much more sinister than that: it's a Grue Jay.

Libris is a Dutch umbrella site for independent bookshops, with a similar arrangement: One webshop that allows you to link purchases to your local shop so that's where the profit goes. Order books online for pickup at the local shop. And ebooks, again with profit going to the local shop. Their catalog is large enough that I can avoid Amazon entirely.

Absurd acceleration is a side-effect of wanting to do as much of the braking as possible with the electric motor. Because braking often happens at much greater decelerations than 60-0 mph in ten seconds, this means you end up with a motor that is much more powerful than you need on the acceleration side of things.

Action #1 when I get a new phone is to stick it into a sturdy case. I'm not going to risk damaging a $500 device.

They can barely make a phone at that price point.

Based on the trains I see in American TV shows, the impopularity of trains in the US is caused by train drivers leaning on their 'wake the dead' horn for 30 seconds for every railroad crossing. I wouldn't want to live anywhere near train tracks with that racket.

3 MPG? That may be true for a 1970s American bus with a Detroit two-stroke coupled to a slushbox, but not for a modern bus.
A modern diesel bus gets about 9 mpg (Mercedes Citaro). A diesel hybrid reduces that by 10%. And cities are introducing electric buses now.

you mean, "coding in Perl".

Many, many docking stations don't have enough ports either. I know because I just tried to purchase one and couldn't find any that had enough ports and less than 10% "DOA and/or killed my computer" ratings on Amazon.

I've found Buzzword Bingo cards an effective tool to get the message across.

What we have is not "a la carte" in any way, shape or form. We've just swapped cable packages for streaming services, both with a high ratio of 'crap I'm not interested in':'stuff I want to see'.

AFAIK Apple was the only one to try a la carte, where you'd pay for an individual movie or series. That didn't work out well because the price of one series was the same as what Netflix was charging for one month of access to their entire catalog.

how do we disable this garbage?