They wouldn’t need to bother. High risk for relatively little benefit over him nominally being in the position.

If they are going to sideline him in practice, I’d expect more of a Dick Cheney. It’s not like he’s going to stand in the way as long as he gets personally enriched/protected.

While that may be a valid point to raise, in the context of this conversation, it’s of little consequence since both sides are fixated on the capital markets as a general indicator.

The data for “real world” finances correlate with the pandemic and the emergency work to vaguely prevent economic disaster has resulted in some longer term issues that continue to need work. Despite the problems, it’s likely better than the alternative, and in these specific terms both sides started and continued the strategy that got us here.

Now both candidates are mostly vaguely citing the need to do something about the cost of goods, housing, and healthcare, and Harris has been a little bit more concrete about what she claims to want to make happen specifically to improve that. Taking his words at face value, Trump wants to increase prices for now, assuming that a moving to a more nationalistic economy will work better. Short term is definitely higher cost of goods, and his long term is generally regarded as unrealistic, not a whole lot of data in modern economy to support nationalism over globalism as an economic principle.

I find it insane that with modern computing and displays, they still just render a vague check engine light despite being able to easily display the specifics.

They mostly didn’t have OSDs, they instead had indecipherable 7-segment and some fixed elements like ‘Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa’, with 2 or 3 buttons. The younger Gen-X/older Millennials got their reputation as ‘whiz kids’ in part by handling those interfaces on behalf of their mystified parents.

While true, I was thinking more about how the person you replying to probably was reacting to the trend of people talking about saving and waiting until they had a reasonable downpayment before they would consider entering the market, and how the market keeps running away from their downpayment savings.

The ‘never make a downpayment regardless of context’ would be bad advice, but I just presume there is a context in mind about not even having the downpayment to start with and being stuck on the rental treadmill as a result.

One, the volume knob is far quicker to respond than the usual ‘up/down’ slow volume adjustment on the wheel. The turn down the overly loud sound from the last driver immediately is nicer with a volume knob.

But with my car with hard A/C controls, I just reach down to the little ‘up/down’ toggle and tug it down a bit if I feel a little warm or bump it up a little if I feel too cold, or hit the big old button if I need to toggle it off to talk on speaker.

There are a fairly well known set of very common controls that will never be better and need an update. Coarse A/C adjustments, vent direction volume, and next-track are all no-brainers (unless you are Tesla…)

For example, here’s a layout that obviously has room and depends on touch for a lot of features, but preserves a reasonably sane set of audio and climate controls (and four miscellaneous functions)

With that you don’t look, you know pretty much immediately for the functions you would use.

There’s still plenty of room for touch/voice controls for those more nuanced/complicated things that don’t fit into button land well. Entering a navigation destination, managing any software updates, setting parameters like "should the car adjust cruise control based on speed limit signs, and if so, what adjustment to the limit should be applied?’

Particularly given the trend of ‘glue a tablet to the middle of the dashboard’. If you are going to do that anyway, bring up a modern successor to the DIN/Double DIN standard, where the mounting is standard and update to also include USB-C for standard power, audio, and data. Add some network profiles for standardized exchange of useful information (Car speedometer, car model, fuel/battery amount and efficiency profile, navigation information to drive dash/HUD, etc).

Generally speaking, one would have hoped for a better solution. To be fair though, we faced an unprecedented scenario in 2020, and for many of the indicators, the closest to precedent that we ever had was the Great Depression. So they did manage to dump truck enough money into the market to patch up the catastrophic drop of the stock market, and provide enough to keep the every day economy vaguely functional. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was still very ‘trickle down’ style and ended up with an enduring imbalance favoring those already wealthy rather than some alternative that might have left folks on a level playing field.

To the extent you are able to (particularly if trying to stay legal).

So for streaming content, much of that isn’t available to ‘buy’ at all. Even for the stuff you can “buy”, technically speaking in many jurisdictions it’s not legal to be able to rip your DVD or Blu Rays or remove DRM from a digital download.

For certain software, on-premise editions have been abolished or priced into the stratosphere because they don’t want that market to exist anymore. Some of that software has competent alternatives, but sometimes your choice is dictated by your clients and partners, and opting for a less compatible or merely perceived as less compatible option is a non starter. Even among on-premise editions, a lot of software vendors have switched to still having it by subscription as the only legal way to keep using it. Again, maybe for those software you can get away by breaking the law as a workaround, but legally…

This is of course assuming the conversation narrowly applies to software type things. Everyone is also rebranding ‘leasing’ as ‘as a service’ and are copying much of the software playbook, for the same reasons, including making purchase of equipment more expensive to steer people toward the ‘as a service’ revenue strategy.

Then going beyond the ‘tech’ industry, it’s getting really hard to buy a house rather than rent it from some company that has been pouring money into acquiring all the available real estate.

This presumes you can elect to either just spend the 100k now, that you may not have.

If you declare you want 100k, but let’s say that would take you 10 years (and the goalposts wil move). That’s likely 120 months of rent you will have to pay, so while you’ll end up saving on interest, you’ll more than lose out on rent.

Paying down aggressively and going with as big a down payment as you can reasonably afford makes sense. However waiting to save up for that downpayment may cost more in rental expenses than you’d save.

WFH is a logical thing to imagine, but there’s a simpler trend that can be seen by looking at two graphs:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

“Please don’t melt the economy” printing press fired up in 2020 and real estate investors seemed to get plenty of that cash. While inflation didn’t quite match the M2 injection, anything “investment” like saw that bump. The M2 injection was enough to save the stock market, but housing, which did not see the same crash as stocks, got the same boost.

This is why, more than ever, people see that individuals almost don’t get to participate and big companies are instead buying the stuff and maybe letting people rent them if they feel so inclined. The big companies got the boon of the M2 and most individuals got a modest bump by comparison.

Don’t know about them specifically, but it seems that more than anything real estate investors are just grabbing as many properties as they can find, whether they can get tenants or not. A house goes up for sale and it’s bought sight unseen by a company almost instantly.

So occasionally I look out of curiosity and the reason is pretty plain.

I look for houses for sale in a suburban area as public listings, and there’s like 1 within a few square miles of the area.

I switch over to renting, and there’s like 12 houses just like the one for sale available, all owned by companies. I also know a coule that aren’t listed that have no tenants, but are still owned by one of those companies. You can tell because those yards are now waist deep grasses (in an area where HOA throws a hissy fit if your yard looks just a smidge unkempt).

Don’t know why the companies find it more profitable to buy houses people aren’t looking to actually move into, at least at the rent they are willing to accept. If I fully understood why, it might just piss me off more. Like maybe the houses work better as a loan basis than other assets, so even empty and unused they are valuable as some sort of financial trick.

While true, I have been scratching my head wondering why this rash of ads is happening, why they are so intent on making sure everyone knows their election participation is available to all.

One possibility: if you sit it out, people will know and blame you if your candidate loses.

Another possibility: if you vote, and the “wrong” person wins, you’ll be suspected of voting for the “wrong” person.

I don’t know which they are going for, but it has tickled my “creepy” meter, and this was before I saw it associated specifically with Trump/Vance (the ads I’ve seen mention no candidate and just seems a vague go out and vote pitch)

Problem is the data is rigged. It’s road miles driven that autopilot deigned to activate for with cars that rarely need their friction brakes that are less than 10 years old versus total population of cars with more age and more brake wear and when autopilot says ‘nope, too dangerous for me’, the human still drives.

The other problem is people are thinking they can ignore their cars operation, because of all the rhetoric. A human might have still hit the deer, but he would have at least applied brakes.

Finally, we shouldn’t settle for ‘no worse than human’ when we have more advanced sensors available, and we should call out Tesla for explicitly declaring ‘vision only’ when we already know other sensors can see things cameras cannot.

People drive drunk, people drive while checking their phone,

And those people are breaking the law.

people panic and freeze

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone panic so much they just act as if they didn’t even hit a deer.

deers often just jump in front of you from out of nowhere.

In this case, the deer was just sitting there, so not applicable.

People hit fucking humans without braking because they’re not paying attention to what the fuck they’re doing!

If it was this much negligence, they’d be facing vehicular manslaughter charges.

But for some reason if it’s a car with assistance well now that’s scandalous!

It’s scandalous when a human does it too. We should do better than human anyway, and we can identify a number of deliberate decisions that exacerbate this problem that could be addressed, e.g. mitigation through LIDAR, which Tesla has famously rejected.

Drivers Ed does not however say to ignore the brakes, either trying to avoid a collision. Especially to ignore the brakes after having hit something.

Note that part of the discussion is we shouldn’t settle for human limitations when we don’t have to. Notably things like LIDAR are considered to give these systems superhuman vision. However, Tesla said ‘eyes are good enough for folks, so just cameras’.

The rest of the industry said LIDAR is important and focus on trying to make it more practical.

On the battery, they should have been able to do whatever they thought best in the battery management system, in that case.

Simple answer is easiest, that they are obsessed with the “clean” minimalist look and want to abolish every visible port and buttin they can.

Surprised though that the mouse didn’t do the magsafe thing.

Yeah, the era of the ‘genius computer wiz kid’ had a small percentage of people working significantly with computers, but they were very obvious. You either knew your way around the computer very well and used it heavily, or just didn’t use a computer if you could help it.

I remember growing up the other teens would hate being forced to use a computer to type up an assignment, and would ask “can’t I just hand write it?”. We are talking about a percent or two, even among the age group, that would seriously use computers.

Now every kid uses “computers” constantly, but their level of understanding is about the same as the folks that formerly just wouldn’t bother trying back when the computers demanded you fiddle with TSRs, config.sys, autexec.bat, jumpers, dip switches to get things just right, and just right from application to application (this application demands XMS, this other demands EMS). For most kids of the era, maybe they’d use a computer with a word processing application on it, and otherwise they would play with a game console, which was far less finicky.

Between computers and navigating the stupid interface of VCRs of the time, you had TV shows pick up on the whiz kid as a meme (Wesley Crusher in TNG, Lucas Wolenczak in SeaQuest, so many sitcoms of the time would have one…). However they weren’t the prolific folks. Most kids of the time didn’t have time for computers (which also commonly showed up in the sitcoms, the cool jock would have the nerd whiz kid pull some stuff for him, because he sure couldn’t be bothered to deal with computers).