The newer controls are more affordable. In the case of the non-button "buttons" a chip and some megaohm resistors and a piece of plastic with some labels screen printed on it replace a whole bunch of custom-designed injection-molded buttons with special labels which have to be applied with sub-millimeter accuracy, and switches for them which have to be able to survive hundreds of thousands of cycles in an extreme temperature environment. Only in the most basic vehicles which still have manual climate controls, if such a thing even exists any more, are the buttons potentially cheaper because they are attached directly to functions.

I had an A8 Quattro. It was a fairly marvelous driving machine when it was working well enough for that, but it was a horribly overcomplicated rolling nightmare when it comes to system design. It had a vacuum system about as stupid as the one on the infamous 300ZX TT and the electrical system had a truly peerless level of unneeded complexity designed apparently only to make the vehicle easier to assemble. There was a sealed-ish plastic "e-box" containing the principal control units and a bunch of junction plugs which then connected through to a related box inside in the center console, into which interior harness components would plug. This is unnecessary and only adds a lot of cost and points of failure. Put the fucking computers inside the cabin where they belong (because as hostile as environment as it can be, it's still less so than the engine bay) and you don't need any of this bullshit. Even Nissan got (and gets) that one right.

The Germans know how to make an amazing vehicle, but they are today apparently uninterested in making it reliable. Maybe Porsche is better, I can't speak to that brand.

Yes, you need the windows to do that to get a good seal when the doors are frameless. It is not strictly necessary, but it reduces wind noise.

People only think there's something special about BMW or Mercedes because they have not worked on cars. Once you have worked on a couple dozen different vehicles and gotten to know how they are put together you realize there is nothing at all special about modern BMWs or Mercedes compared to other modern cars. After the Lexus LS ate their luxury car lunch they all have been relentless cost cutters, but even before that they were starting to worsen the value proposition and depend on their logos and interiors to sell cars. The interiors matter, but if the underpinnings aren't as special as they are, they also aren't sufficient.

The Japanese figured out much better ways to design and build cars than the Germans, and it has showed since the nineties, and it still shows today. German cars are overwrought, with unnecessary complexities in basic components like electrical harnesses which cause more problems than they're worth, instead of overbuilt like they were in the 80s. This isn't even so much about mass because the W126 wasn't very heavy at all, it's about design iteration and spending money perfecting parts and systems. They don't even care about mass any more except for the most special or most budget cars, everything else is now heavy AF.

German cars aren't special since the nineties. The last time they overbuilt them was in the eighties. The W126 Mercedes was the last great S class. The W140 was a rolling electrical failure. Well, sometimes it rolled anyway. BMW followed exactly the same trajectory. They had to learn to complete with the Japanese after the LS.

Electronics are not necessarily required. You're discounting the many recalls for ICE vehicles that resulted from leaked fuel or other flammable liquids combined with hot exhaust manifolds or other ignition sources.

And each time it was clearly the wrong one.

Taxes do not depress the economy. They only are an issue when you have a kekistocracy like we do right now so that a massively disproportionate amount of the value of your taxpayer dollars is going to a handful of psychopathic billionaire Epstein Island attendees.

But otherwise no that's not how that works. You still need roads and schools and police and fire departments and you need regulations to make sure that the shit people sell you is safe because it won't be if they don't face consequences for selling you unsafe shit and you need research done that takes decades to pay off that no large corporation is going to pay for.

You also need social systems that prevent people who are unfit for work from becoming desperate and violent.

And finally you're stuck with the government whether you like it or not because if you don't create one and fund it then the billionaires will making you pay for it and then they'll take everything from you which is what they're in the process of doing right now. I mean for fuck sakes just go look into how SpaceX is basically a scam to steal all of our retirement savings...

You are thinking and acting like a 12-year-old and it needs to stop. If you're on this site you're smarter than that. You need to stop indulging yourself.

You would have a point. But they are so you don't. They will rule that the Federal regulations override state making it all legal and then we're just stuck with legalized gambling everywhere because we elected a corrupt asshole multiple times for some god-awful reason and they kept getting supreme Court Justice seats.

This last time we fucked up so bad I don't think there's any coming back from it. I'm happy to be proven wrong but the shit's about to hit the fan in so many ways and there's fuck all we can do about it. It's not like I can wave a magic wand and give everybody in the country a hundred IQ points.

Maybe even 2 years. I mean if you're in the Grand theft Auto then yeah that's fine but everybody who isn't this game is going to choke the life out of the industry. I think it's budget is over 2 billion. I don't even know what the hell you do with that. But whatever the case it means that for at least the next year or so it's going to be basically impossible to get anyone to play anything else in the larger game industry. The same thing happened when Skyrim really took off. There was a period of time where it kind of just choked the life out of the industry but that one was only about three or four months.

For billionaires. Meanwhile you and I got about 25 bucks a month but thanks to Trump's tax cuts for billionaires and the big beautiful bill for billionaires he has raised the national debt by 25%. Think about that a quarter of the debt is because of trump.

We elected the king of debt to be president because he promised to reduce that and we elected a billionaire rapist pedophile because he promised to protect us.

Honestly at this point if I wasn't being dragged down with the rest of them I would be happy to see these fuckers who voted for Trump get what they deserve. The better half of me knows that stupid people don't deserve to be taken advantage of but fucking Christ there should be limits to stupid. Like some practical limit to how stupid you are.

That's not having more computer, that's having more computers. DCs are concentrations of power, it doesn't matter how many computers are in them really but we have to organize the logic into many computers because otherwise interconnection becomes unmanageably expensive. Drones inherently depend on many distributed computers, but none of them have to be very powerful. The more processing power you have the more fancy tricks they can do, but drones are inevitably energy-limited and therefore have limited loiter capability, so the types of tricks you will want them to play are also limited.

Yeah, it's called fast fashion.

How do you know he doesn't also say things about those, coward?

Not that I'm terribly fond of China what would it be a dictatorship and all but it is annoying how the Epstein class is busy trying to make me angry at them for no particularly good reason. They're all good reasons to be upset with the Chinese government what would the human rights violations and all but now this is bullshit.

I guess it is true that the exact wording of the amendment says that states can be as restrictive as they want on alcohol, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can be more lenient than the feds.

Trump is demented. That's a different disability.

While he was never a good legal businessman, he seems to have been a capable gangster. But now he's lost most of his marbles, and the rest are rolling away rapidly.

Demonstrate that they're being enforced before claiming they're enforceable.