Cars have also gotten much bigger, generally speaking more reliable, and stuffed with extra technology, some of which makes the car safer than before. Little of that technology is really optional now in the EU but still adds to the price.

A cirrent polo is the same size as a mark two golf, a three series is same size as an old face series. Most could downsize and not notice.

New cars are purchased on the monthly cost than anything else where I am, with a balloon for the final payment. Manufacturers make money again on the same car at the second sale but can only do so if they protect the resale price, which means ever increasing sales prices.

I would stay near (ish) to Kyoto and just go one day, the National Museum in Kyoto is really good and you can see the rest of what you want to see quite quickly. It is about as commercialized as you can get for a town in Japan, its approaching Disney levels of parody.

Staying further away lowers the cost and as long as its on one of the direct train lines into Kyoto it doesnt take long to get there. There is a lot to do in daily travelable distance in the region that is a better use of your time.

The horse thing is even worse when you realise Musk was trying to offload the horses because they had relatively little value and it was costing him more to keep the horse than it was worth. He smushed a bunch of ranches together and he purchased a few of them lock, stock and barrel to get the deal done, this included some low value horses that he would have been stuck with costing him money.

How many times can he be retried for the same crime if the Jury does that? As I fully expect Trump to demand the DOJ keep doing it as many times as they can

You could get a provisional (learner) license and not bother learning to drive, doesn’t seem to be a popular choice despite I te it being £14 for ten years

Thats because they are without fail massive grifts ran by the IT firms.

UK already has an ID system that about half of all adults already own that is fully integrated and trusted by the police and other services, the driving license. It even operates at a profit.

It would be pretty damn cheap in comparison to implementing a new system to just require everybody who doesn’t have the driving license to get a special one thats a different colour and confers no driving privileges.

Of course that would be too simple and wouldn’t allow scum to skim huge sums of money so here we are…

Obviously I don’t actually want a mandatory ID but if we getting one then might as well make it cheap and already mostly implemented.

I would buy a feature phone today, preferably something eink, if it was painless to switch my SIM between it and my smart phone. Having to take the SIM out of one, put it in the other, then turn on the phone is not painless and they do not design the little draws to support thousands of open/closes against the contacts to read the SIM.

There are times I want the smart phone to have the SIM because I will want or need the extra functionality and if you just make the feature phone do everything then its just morphed into a smart phone with extra steps. I want the feature phone to be basic as I can get away with.

That said, I really want google wallet or similar that I can share between the two phones for my passes and tickets, audio streaming support, and maps. Something like a Hisense A9 would fit the bill but the temptation to add more apps than the basics would be too great, plus I still need a way to switch SIMs between the phones.

I cannot replace my smart phone, rather than supplement, with any feature phone because I use it for such a wide range of things. I can ssh from it to my home devices, I can manage my bank accounts, it tracks my health, it provides video and audio streaming on and offline, I can read and write documents/spreadsheets, plus anything you can do via a web browser.

What this chart is missing is the impact of the quality of the screen and the source material being played on it.

A shit screen is a shit screen, just like a badly filmed TV show from the 80s will look like crap on anything other than an old CRT.

People buying a 4k screen from Wallmart for $200 then wondering why they cant tell its any better than their old 1080p screen.

The problem with pushing up resolution is the cost to get a good set right now is so much its a niche within a niche of people who actually want it. Even a good 4k set with proper HDR support and big enough to make a different is expensive. Even when 8k moves away from early adopter markups its still going to be expensive, especially when compared to the tat you can by at the supermarket.

Does he put forward his case that he is the anti christ? As he sure comes across as someone who would want that. He has always felt like the sort of motherfucker who would read the Stand and identify with Randall Flagg

I would love to know how many owners actually ran out of fuel or near as damn did doing long high speed runs

That includes corners, which can be as low as 50kph, which will lower the average significantly over lap… Straight line they are approaching 340kph on the longest straights, but have hit nearly 380kph in recent history.

They would be a lot faster if they were allowed to tweak the gear ratios for each circuit rather than them being fixed for multiple circuits, and they didn’t have a fuel flow limit per lap. A twenty year old car nearly hit 400kph in non race spec.

Yeah it pushed me to finally put in an order, got to wait till December now as I’m in the third batch.

I wanted to wait till we had proof thst the graphics card would be updatable and a better one would be available as their AMD card is a bit too lightweight for me.

I would rather it had been a better AMD card, I have a 7900 xtx in my desktop, but i will take what I can get at this point, especially as I know I can upgrade later.

It is this exactly, and is the same problem film, tv, and music has. They are all populated by people who are good at becoming and staying at the exec level, not people who are good at whatever field they are working in. Often the really creative are difficult to work with, they do not make a “good fit” with other execs, particularly when they actually understand the medium.

Its the same group of people who are heavily invested in AI to replace creative people in these fields as they do not understand the difference between AI doing a passable copy of someone elses style and someone actually creative creating a new style or approach.

With CDs they were negatively impacted by the loudness war as it became much more widespread. Having to hunt around for the right recording, often the earlier ones, can be expensive. Normalisation of the recordings by streaming companies is just an awful idea as it doesn’t fix the bad parts of the mix just turns everything down.

I prefer SACDs to CDs, mostly because they tended to be mastered and mixed better than the CDs of the past two decades. The surround audio mixes are mostly just gimmicky, although they are a good fit for some records, but they almost always had a two channel mix that you could pick instead. The higher frequency range is mostly pointless.

But how do you pay the overseers to enforce it when money is no longer valid? And the overseers are bigger and tougher than your average billionaire?

Slavery only works when there is money to pay the overseers and a legal system to protect the owner class from being extorted by the overseers.

ICE is in a similar boat and they have to pay significant amounts to attract people to carry out ICE fascism.

Who is he going to staff it with? There is zero chance he will cook and clean for himself and he will need a substantial army to protect himself from the collapse of the human race.

If he goes with people how long before the security guards realise they can dump his scrawny ass off a cliff and have a better quality of life as money becomes irrelevant? If he goes with robots how long before they break beyond what they can self repair? If he goes with robots with human engineers, how long before the engineers realise the same thing as the security guards and program the robots to kill Bezos?

People are fed up with being broke and not able to afford the same things that they or their parents could afford even 20 years ago. Populists do not have to offer policies they can or event intend to implement so they can promise any old shit to the gullible who want change. Wrap that in a reassuring racist package: immigration is out of control, send back the small boats, etc. so that it doesn’t smell like communism (not that communism cant be racist) that people confuse even moderate socialist policies for due to decades of western propaganda.

Couple this with the Overton window being moved ever towards the right due to left and center left parties being captured by neoliberals who seek funding and patronage from the Rich, plus decades of the press putting pressure on any left wing policies by enforcing a double standard of left wing policies required to fully document how they will work and be funded, while right wing fantasy policies are waved through without any scrutiny from the majority of press.

Then the right deliberately break any essential service, under fund it and spend it elsewhere, making it time consuming and expensive to fix, leading them to point at their opponents being ineffective, and the press refuse to hold the right to account over this.

This has reduced any coupling between those left of the far right and the general population in terms of policies meeting the requirement. You can start to see why they are gaining ground.

Hes also exactly the type of person who this would cause a massive hissy fit over and demand immediate changes to Grok that would further stunt its working

Yeah that’s the point of the license from Ofcom, to approve the endpoint address used for the VPN. Most work places don’t use some random IP address but a small pool of known DNS entries for their endpoint. Just because you are using a VPN doesn’t mean nobody can see which endpoint you using.

It has always been the main aim of legislation like this to nobble VPNs, they just needed the “child” “violent pornography” etc. excuse to do so. UK government already monitors all of the internet traffic for the UK, except for MPs who are exempt, VPNs are a blocker for this.

Obviously, not even the UK government would expect a private VPN ban (work VPNs would likely need an Ofcom license) to stop everybody from using a VPN or suitable alternative, its not the aim. The aim is to stop the majority from doing so and criminalize the minority who do still bypass the block as it gives them the power to seize equipment, ask for your logins (its illegal punishable with jail time to not supply this in the UK), request ISP logs etc. to deep dive into your life.