I have to say - it's VERY depressing reading that and comparing President Eisenhower's thoughtful words with the bile, bombast, and often even absolute hatred that's regularly spewed by the current occupant of that office.

Not sure you quite get how dopamine works.

Heh. You reminded me that something I ordered got mis-delivered to some random unknown house, and since they don't provide delivery coordinates, there's no way to know where. So thanks for reminding me that I needed to reorder and reach out to Amazon Custom Service for a refund on that. :-)

This matches with my experience. Amazon has a wider selection than Walmart, but often slightly worse prices.

And yeah, Amazon's search engine is absolute trash, designed to promote what will make Amazon the most money over what you're asking for. Alexa shopping (on Amazon's website) is often better, and doing a Google search with site:Amazon.com is also often better. As another poster pointed out, odds are the seller on Amazon was just buying it at Walmart and selling it on Amazon at a markup. :-/

They didn't. The GP is very, very incorrect.

When a remote operator takes control of the vehicle, you'll know it, because it will mean that the vehicle has already been stuck for a minute or so without being able to figure out how to proceed, and will be sitting there for additional minutes while the remote operator looks at camera/LIDAR data and draws a proposed path through the problem area on a map.

It is not physically possible, for any amount of money, to do what the GP is claiming. Sending a signal over a cellular network from the Bay Area to the Philippines and back takes a quarter of a second on average. That's up to a 33% increase in response time compared with a driver in the vehicle. If you tried to fake self-driving with a remote operator in that way, they would crash into things constantly.

Even if the remote operator were in the same city, the latency spikes would still likely cause the cars to crash into things constantly.

LEO satellites also won't work, because these things mostly run in cities, where tall buildings would block the signals, so again, the cars would crash into things constantly.

Maybe if you had a dedicated cellular network running in parallel with the public one on a private frequency band AND dedicated trunk lines to a control center, you might be able to get something that worked most of the time, but at a cost that would be mind-blowing.

Maybe we'll get lucky and that'll make Sam Altman's head explode!

That's simplistic. I like the flavor of coffee... but sometimes I like the flavor when it's combined with cream.

I mean when someone cooks a stew, do you tell them they wouldn't have to make stew if they just bought higher-quality carrots?

I finally dropped service a couple of years ago because the service had crept up to something like $70 a month for a basic landline phone with Caller ID. I kind of feel like they're laughing all the way to the bank either way.

Of wine? ;-)

Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor. It could well be the case that narrowing blood vessels causes blood to flow more rapidly through them, increasing its ability to wear away plaques that are attached to the walls of arteries, or that the flexing associated with the constriction and later relaxation helps these plaques break away in microscopic amounts rather than building up where they become a clog risk.

"Hell yeah, a credit card!" - people I don't get

Your "medicine" isn't allowed to taste good, after all.

Nonsense, I have it on good authority (from a Very Stable Genius) that this is the most transparent administration EVAR!!

This "change of direction" probably has more to do with Trump and Co. being able to wet their beaks.

AliExpress and Amazon are both cesspools, where thousands of sellers sell identical or nearly identical products under different brand names with different markup. And most of the products are trash.

Case in point, I bought a bunch of metric bolts and nuts at Amazon, and they wouldn't screw onto each other. They would get to some random point and the nuts would stop turning. Sometimes it was half an inch up, sometimes it was two inches up, but the failure rate was something like 40% and I budgeted for 20%. I ended up buying a tap and die set and rethreading all the bolts. It actually would have been cheaper to buy the bolts in 5-packs from Lowe's. (On the other hand, if it happens again, I don't have to buy the tap and die set again, so I guess that's a "win".)

I've reached a point where about one in five Amazon products results in a return, because the quality is so poor, the descriptions are inadequate, etc. I buy enough stuff that they tolerate my return rate, but it's a huge hassle that I wish I didn't have to deal with. If I want a high risk of fixer-upper hardware, I'd rather buy from AliExpress for half the price and wait a week. :-/

Oh, thanks. I misread per hour as per day. But at 5 miles per hour, you won't get 40 miles per day. IIRC, the full-sun-equivalent hours in the U.S. varies from about 2.5 to about 6 or so. You won't get the equivalent of eight hours of sun unless you're smack in the middle of the Mojave desert with no mountains nearby on a dry day. So depending on where you are, you will get anywhere from 12.5 miles per day to 30 miles per day.