boonhet @ boonhet @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Yeah it's certainly easier to pronounce than Xäa12 would be. But I mean if the muskmelon is just picking pronunciations he likes for letters, it can be absolutely anything. Maybe it's actually Shanty

Yeah, the problem in the US for an example is nationalism, not patriotism. True patriots would be fuming at what's going on. It's the nationalists that cheer on.

You forgot AMD there. Intel alone would be super easy to avoid. But AMD is also based in the US. You kinda need either AMD or Intel if you want to own a useful computer. Or there's Apple Silicon, but that's still American. Qualcomm laptop offerings are not that great yet and guess what, it's also an American company.

This is all a lot harder to boycott than Coca Cola, Nike, etc. I can just buy local soft drinks and Adidas shoes. In fact I currently own Adidas shoes (I'm the kinda guy who buys one pair of shoes, wears the everloving fuck out of them, then buys another pair and the old pair gets used in the garage afterwards) and my clothes already come from European owned brands (that are probably made in Bangladesh or something, I don't buy a lot of expensive clothes). UPS and FedEx aren't hard to avoid either. Most of my shit gets delivered via Omniva, DHL or Itella.

The x86-64 CPU monopoly that the US has might honestly be the hardest American thing to avoid. The cloud monopoly is even bigger and we all tend to interact with it in one way or another, but most of us could host our own shit on Hetzner or OVH if needed, so at least no need to directly give them money.

I'm, despite being European, pro-American. It's just that what America has become disappoints me much like it disappoints most Americans. I'm not pro this America.

The government has always been responsible for some shady shit, but for a long time there, the US stood for diversity, not against it. Yes it took a long time for certain types of people to receive equal rights, but that was unfortunately the same pretty much everywhere else too. Big American metropolitan cities are huge melting pots of culture though. Go walk around NYC, it's awesome once you get far enough from Wall Street. I do hope I can one day still go to San Francisco as well, but despite being a white cishet male, I don't intend to visit the US unless the current admin is replaced with a sane one.

I'm holding out some hope for GTA VI still. Reason being, while Cyberpunk promised to be super duper everything interconnected magic programming to follow an absolutely awesome but technologically realistic game (Witcher 3), I haven't seen hype like that for GTA VI. The expectation is to get a well polished freeroam game with lots of fun toys to play around with, a story that's hopefully long enough to be worth the game's price, and a new Online mode that gets updates over time. Basically GTA V with a new city and a more polished game overall, but no exponential leaps - despite the fact that the budget is much larger than Cyberpunk.

But I mean MudRunner is also awesome. Couldn't get into Death Stranding myself, just wasn't feeling it. Should pick up Art of Rally soon. Tons of great AA and indie games out there if GTA VI flops indeed.

Yeah, they crave electrolytes not ketamine

According to Wikipedia there are 4 pronunciations in Norwegian alone, none of which are "ash".

I initially thought it was pretty much like ä, but apparently that's only one of the possible pronunciations.

I understand some of it tbh. Not the cars. A car is one and done, you manufacture it and you don't NEED to spend much more after the fact to keep the happy new owner happy. There's no way servers cost as much to run as they want for their cloud services (e.g remote start via app, unlock via app, etc). Sure there are R&D costs and they're pretty big, but those usually end when a model comes out, so you can divide it by total cars sold to get how much it is per one car. Before Tesla, cars didn't really get software updates unless there were major issues.

But I'm starting to understand why the software industry adopted the service model. Having worked for multiple companies doing B2B SaaS... The customers just keep asking for new things. Does a meal planning app need to be a subscription service? Probably not. But anything that keeps on adding new features costs a lot of money. Software engineers aren't cheap.

Of course my view may be skewed because it's B2B, not software anyone would just download off an app store or website. At my different jobs we've had billion dollar companies come and say "we love what you're doing, we want to keep using it, but you have to do X, Y and Z or our workflow just won't work and we can't use it efficiently".

Also in the world of consumer facing software, nobody wants a big upfront payment, but people are more willing to stomach a small monthly subscription. We could do away with proprietary software altogether, but oftentimes what happens with open source software is that due to lack of funding, devs don't have enough time to work on things, and they lag behind proprietary offerings. Large software suites like Adobe Premiere are never "finished" and thus neither are the open source alternatives. But Adobe has a ton more engineering resources to throw at improving their product than most open source projects.

TL;DR: Software engineering is expensive. People working open source projects are often doing it in their spare time after the work that actually pays their bills. If you want free and open source software to be competitive to paid subscription software, you gotta set up recurring donations and convince other people to do the same. At least it'll be forkable, voluntary and democratic, unlike with proprietary software companies.

Humans also operate on "camera vision" only in that we see visible light and that's it. Adding lidar to the system should improve performance over human capability, but camera vision with good enough software (and this is way easier said than done) ought to be able to match human capability. Whether Tesla's is good enough in FSD mode I have no idea because I have no intention to ever buy one and testing this in a rental is uh... risky, given that they tend to have onboard cameras.

Of course, if Tesla's "FSD" branded driver assist suite is actually good enough to beat this test, I reckon Tesla would be quick to prove it to save their own reputation. It's not that hard to reproduce.

Ioniq 5 starts at 54k after the government rebate here. We have this thing called VAT/sales tax which is not included in US prices usually, but is nearly always included in prices here.

German cars in the US aren't actually too bad to own, FCPEuro gives you lifetime warranty on everything, including brake pads and engine oil. Yes, you can send them back your old oil after buying new oil and you get the money back. The catch is that it only works if the car hasn't changed owners in the meantime. But you'll need to do your own labor, otherwise it's not going to be cost effective owning an older German car. The key is to buy a model that is known for its' longevity and ease of repairs and a good healthy DIY community.

As for tech - sure, you won't get Android Auto or Apple Carplay on most 10 year old cars. But all the latest and greatest safety systems started appearing in normal people cars around 10-15 years ago, and in heavily depreciated German nearly 20 years ago. Add the fact that crash safety pretty much linearly scales by the area under the car (literally width * length), an aging luxury car is actually about as safe as a new economy car, because while you're more likely to get in an accident if you're on your phone, you're also more likely to survive an accident once you are in one.

Look at this data, both the newish models via the dropdowns, and the PDF for the models around 2008 model year. You'll see that the 2006-2009 E-Class (really, it came out in 2002 or 2003) at least in its days was safer than most new mid-size vehicles are now. Usually you'll never see any Mercedes or Volvo near the deadliest cars, but you'll see some Hyundais, Kias, and of course smaller models from the American marques as well.

This is not safety ratings in the traditional sense, this is driver deaths per million miles driven. It's great because it includes both the likelihood of crashing and the likelihood of surviving a crash combined into one number. Downside is that it does include driving habits as part of it too. BMWs naturally get more deaths than Mercs because the owners are more likely to drive like shitheads.

I watched some Tesla-sympathetic youtuber for balance and here are the key points brought up:

1. He had a death grip on the wheel (because y'know, he knew he was going to crash). Exerting enough force over time on the steering wheel disables autopilot, because the system assumes you want to manually override what it's doing.
2. FSD apparently is much more capable, but this Tesla only had the common AutoPilot turned on. Despite having FSD available (Mark apparently claimed he didn't know he could turn it on without adding a destination)
3. Mark might have some sort of sponsorship deal with the LIDAR company featured in the video, which is why LIDAR was shown in a much better light (e.g it was shown stopping for a dummy behind the water spray, but in reality a LIDAR based system would just brake for the water spray itself)

Now all of those might be true, but you're also correct in that the emergency braking system should be operational even when AP is disabled. Unless the system malfunctioned (just having a dirty camera is enough). I know my Subaru throws out the adaptive cruise ALL the time. Stupid camera based system. You'd think it's better off because the cameras are at the top of the windshield, compared to most cars front grille mounted radars, but nah, it just keeps turning off.

2028 might be the only time to even consider a dark skinned woman tbh. People wouldn't have voted for Obama if they hadn't been fed up with Bush's bullshit war (which Obama then of course did almost nothing to pull out of). If the American people are EVER going to vote for AOC it'll be because the economy is shit from an old white man fucking everything up for everyone.

Yeah, what the hell is a florida ounce anyway?

I personally wouldn't touch an used EV with a ten foot pole. I've repaired everything on my older Mercedes, Audis and BMW and with the exception of some idiotic things Audi does, it's all simple to DIY, or not that much money at an independent shop (NOT a dealer - those guys charge 3-4x the hourly rate of smaller shops and always upsell you to replace more parts), but the Mach-E's battery will cost 37k USD to replace according to the Mach E forum. So you can't really own it past its 8 year/100k mile battery warranty, unless you want to be potentially be left holding the bag on a repair that costs more than the car itself. I considered a used Audi E-tron for a while due to the depreciation, but the battery pack goes 12k USED on Ebay. Getaudiparts.com lists 4KE915910BB at 34k. And it's an American site so it doesn't even include VAT, which in my country is 22%, soon to be 24%. I'd honestly rather get my hands oily once or twice a year than risk being left holding that particular bag.

Switching to euros now for used car pricing because that's what we use here and it's easier for me to compare car prices locally:

The 50k price diff is accurate for new BEVs vs old ICEs. I can have a 1 year old Mustang Mach E with dealer advertisement stickers (yuck) on it for 56k, or I can get a used Mercedes for anything between 1k (immediately needs repairs) to 6k (for a clean one) to win by 50k. Over the next 5 years the Mercedes might require 3-5k worth of repairs with below average luck, just oil changes with really good luck, or be totaled and need to be replaced with really bad luck, in which case you can buy a new one and still come out ahead. At the same time, over the next 5 years, the Mach E will almost certainly lose 20-30k in value. Similarly, a new Hyundai Ioniq 5 is over 50k. I did test drive it when it came out and while it was definitely quicker than my diesel 2003 E-Class I had at the time, but it didn't feel anywhere near as nice to drive other than the whole acceleration thing. Because it's a Hyundai, it's not supposed to feel nice. It's supposed to get you from A to B for cheap.

There was a guy once on a forum who bought a damn V12 biturbo S-Class, ran it for a year or 2, sold it, and ended up realizing that the repairs, maintenance and depreciation cost him about the same as depreciation on a brand new Honda Civic in the same time frame. I can guess which one is a nicer car to drive.

I'm all for people switching to BEVs, but you certainly need to be leasing/buying them new unless you're happy working on a high voltage battery system to replace individual cells, or live near somewhere who does. I don't know of such a shop in my country. So regarding cost, old ICEs will always beat brand new BEVs, until battery replacements get cheap enough (at which point BEVs will stop depreciating as horribly as they do and the total cost of ownership over 4-5 years for a brand new BEV won't be as bad anymore).

I get that in the US, German cars are made by, maintained by, and driven by Americans so they tend to fall apart, but they're not really as unreliable as you make it out to be. My W211 E-class when sold, must've had about 700k km on it (it was rewound by someone so it only had 380k km on it when I got it, but there were modules that still reported the original mileage), still ran like new except for the steering gear which was an issue I had to pay several hundred euros for. I think it was around 400. My friend's W124 also had over 600k km, but as it's a much older model and had survived salted roads for several decades, it started developing too much rust. Of course, no contemporary Ford or Toyota survives here either, so you can't really blame the Germans here, everyone made cars that rusted back then. There are tons of million kilometer Mercedes taxis out there, including newer, supposedly less durable, models. BMW has also gotten their shit together. While the M57 was absolutely bulletproof, the N57 and N47 were utter shit as far as longevity goes. I've heard fringe tales of crankshaft damage at just 300k km and valvetrain issues were fairly common. Fortunately, the B57 engine is super solid. So is the B58 if you can't get a diesel. The best engine Toyota will sell you in one of their cars right now is the BMW B58 engine. Closest thing to a modern day 2JZ I know of.

So I mean sure, get a BEV. If you're getting brand new, it's definitely the better choice for the environment and potentially running costs compared to a brand new ICE. But you will NOT be saving money over time compared to a used car, even a luxury one, provided you get something sensible. If you don't feel comfortable owning a used German car, Lexus used to make pretty solid cars two decades ago that go for dirt cheap now, don't get a lot of issues, and will still be much cheaper to run than a BEV because of the depreciation on the BEV (if new) or the battery replacement cost (if not new). They also made pretty good cars a decade ago, but since they're not ticking time bombs like a BEV out of battery warranty, they haven't depreciated enough yet.

I mean in terms of total cost of ownership you'll still win with the 20 year old Mercedes purely because the maintenance and repairs won't make up for a 50k price difference, nor do they have much left to depreciate.

But I also understand the desire to have a car with which you know exactly how much it'll cost you over the next year.

I mean anyone who labels themselves as top talent or alpha or whatever, is generally full of it if you ask me.

The only 90s and early 00s Toyota products with Toyota badges I see on the road are Land Cruisers because those are the only ones worth enough to repair the rust to make them pass inspection. Mid 00s onwards is a bit better and Lexus models get treated nicer, so you still see an old one every few months.

The Highlander and RX don't even offer a diesel option... What a joke. Perfect platform for a 4 or 6 cylinder (for the RX variant) diesel. There's no way they're getting 60+ mpg on the highway unless you're talking about plug-in hybrids, which only get that when actually charged - which most users unfortunately do not. Plus if you have to charge on long trips to get good fuel economy, why not just get a BEV?

Also half the models you listed are either discontinued altogether or no longer sold in Europe. Toyota doesn't want you to have a Camry or a GS anymore. And I mean the GS was a damn solid car in the late 90s and early 00s when it got the 2jz engine. I can't speak for third and fourth gen personally as I have no experience. But at thus point they've been discontinued for years, you're supposed to go buy a crossover instead. Or the ES, which seems like a downgrade. The CT is a small hatchback, not a wagon. It's nowhere near the same practicality. It's also discontinued. The SC is a pretty cool car... But discontinued for a decade and a half now.

Apparently the Camry is back on the menu though - it had diappeared from Toyota Estonia's website for a while and I just assumed they'd dropped that in Europe too. The only remaining wagon, though, is the Corolla which again isn't competitive with European offerings in terms of cargo space. It IS significantly cheaper than a 5 series or E class wagon but then if you need to haul anything you need to rent a trailer, which is a hassle. I've owned 5 or 6 wagons at this point, ranging from Passat to E class to Outback... And I've filled the trunks on all of them.

With the Highlander no longer available, the only Toyota badged vehicle that would fit my regular cargo requirements is the ugly ass new Land Cruiser 250 (as opposed to the 300 which I think looks great) and the only Lexus badged ones would be the RX or LM. But I don't need an SUV so I don't want to pay the SUV premium. Plus to get decent fuel economy in the RX, I'd have to opt for the plugin hybrid for an extra 20k??? And the trunk is still nowhere near as big as in the E-class wagon somehow.

I'm sorry, but Toyota has lost the plot. They just ignore entire market segments thinking everyone is happy with a crossover. They just don't want me to buy a new car from them and the models they do have are so reliable because their engine tech is 2 decades old, not because Toyota has great engineering.

If that's true, that is very horribly engineered. 500-1000 watts holy shit

You can get adaptive cruise control as far back as the 1998 Mercedes S-class. Though that model has a lot of issues. Get 2005+ for nightvision and other cool toys plus better reliability.

A 2025 Hyundai is not going to offer you significantly better safety than that, if it's truly safety you're after. Definitely not some small CUV that fits entirely in the the front crumple zone of the S. You're right about maintenance though. Just lease something new and let the second or third owner worry about the consequences of modern maintenance schedules. Or like you said, get an EV and sell it before the battery warranty is out. It's not like you're actually going to be able to affect an entire industry by holding out on buying new lol. Just don't be left holding the bag on the repair costs of modern cars.

I'm sorry, I don't want to buy a brand new car from 2005.

Jokes aside, what's the point of a new Toyota? You'll have a reliable car but use way more fuel than a German diesel wagon or sedan, in the age of super high fuel prices. Toyota of course barely even makes wagons or sedans anymore. They discontinued the Avensis, brought in the Camry and now it's pretty much "buy a C-HR or RAV4 lol". Toyota's only EV so far came way too late and offers way too little to be compelling compared to what the Koreans are doing. The Koreans can't make an ICE for shit but they do know how to make a decent EV.

The only decent cars they make now are the BMW Supra and the NotOnMyContinent Land Cruiser 300. And I guess the RAV4 PHEV but that costs so much you might as well just get A BMW X5.