boonhet @ boonhet @lemm.ee

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2,096

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2 yr. ago

We just got this rule in Estonia too this year. Cash payment, round to nearest 5 cents, card payment, still exact number.

It's not bad financial advice either. You can get a free roof over your head if you get caught!

Though I hear being in prison in the US is expensive in its own right... Maybe not great after all

On a sidenote, don’t let anyone tell you european EVs are somehow worse than chinese (they are not). They’re just more expensive due to a fortunate lack of slavery, and generally higher standards of everything in the production chain compared to China.

You forget the lovely government subsidies of key industries in China, they subsidize goods for EXPORT. It's why BYD can sell such high quality cars at such low prices.

I'm still rooting for European EVs, but ffs, Mercedes has completely ruined their exterior designs (interior is subjective - personally I don't like so much screen real estate in a car interior, but other than that they still look nice inside), same for BMW. Audi has apparently somehow stayed just as unreliable with their EVs as their ICEs were. Volvo has the EX90 (bigger than I need and quite expensive) and the EX40 and 30 (both too small), but I did just learn that they're going to start making an ES90, which is more my size. I'd prefer a wagon of course, we'll see if they make an EV90 soon, but for now the ES90 is something to consider.

Edit: As much as I hate the front fascia, the i4 might be the car I should be looking at. I prefer lightly used to brand new and their prices are at a nice level now. Equipment is nice too.

Only if it's a diesel. Most older gasoline engines don't dirty the oil like this.

Yes, because the people getting cars on payments have tons of cash lying around.

People who have money, lease. That allows you to exit quickly, and interest rates are cheap, you don't have to tie up your own liquidity.

People who have less money, but are sensible with it, pay cash. That allows you to never be stuck with a car payment you can't afford, and you get to keep your car if something bad happens to your finances.

People who don't have money, or have some money and want to live like they have more of it, get car loans. Unfortunately, some people can't avoid them because they truly don't have even the "50% less" lying around. Car loans are predatory, particularly in the US it seems, and these will fuck you up, causing a cycle where once you've paid off your car, it's not got much life left, or at least, you'd need a slightly larger emergency repair budget lying around, so people tend to get newer cars on new loans.

If the car has a turbo and direct injection and you go by oil color, you barely get off the driveway before having to change it. Oil goes black in under 100 miles. Doesn't mean it stops lubricating, these cars specify oils that technically can do 30k+ miles in some cases and then have you changing the oil at ~15k miles. I still keep around 6-10k myself (10-15k km really, but I be using miles for your benefit here).

Of course, I don't use cheap or low quality oils. I keep to Motul most of the time.

EVs have to be legislated into being the only choice anyway. There's no way around it, they're unfortunately inferior for a lot of people's use cases still. We've grown accustomed to the energy density of fossil fuels and being able to keep cars running out of warranty. A quick look at the replacement battery cost of an original Audi E-Tron will reveal that at this point, EVs are expensive paper weights once out of warranty.

If you have the stricter training and policing, you still can improve safety by introducing speed limits.

What is going to be the excuse for keeping the stricter training and near authoritarian policing if there are speed limits? Nearly no other country is this anal about who can and can't drive on their roads. Maybe Singapore, since they require you to be a millionaire to even get a car.

Ah yes, learn Zangendeutsch for make benefit homeland

I think everyone wants to make good software, except upper level management that only cares about the money. But in some companies, your boss or your boss's boss has some kind of feature roadmap and they get their asses chewed off if that is not met.

I honestly think most people WANT to do good work. But ain't nobody going to work overtime to deliver a better product with unreasonable timelines. Not unless there's a heavy stock option plan and you're in a startup where your input actually changes things.

To your edit: that's one of top 3 reasons I moved to iOS and while there are annoyances, overall I've been happy with it for 3 years. Not suggesting everyone should switch but if you're tired of tinkering, it's a good option.

When possible, use open source software that isn't developed by commercial entities (yes that also disqualifies all real browsers available - maybe Ladybird will be different? But then the specs themselves for the web are so bloated it takes too long to implement them and you have to cut corners).

Thing with for-profit development is that micro-optimizations don't make fiscal sense. Say it takes 10 seconds for an API call. That's too long if it's supposed to be an interactive website! You spend 4 hours getting 9 seconds off by improving multiple problematic methods. Now the next 900 milliseconds? Maybe that'll take you 10 hours. Fun? Absolutely, I live for that shit. But in most commercial environments this would be considered a waste of time because I could spend it doing something more impactful.

And anything being twice as fast or memory efficient is usually not noticeable. If you're going to optimize something, it should be at least an order of magnitude. Therefore everything but low hanging fruits often gets ignored. Usually it's a case of reconsidering your data structures to be able to use better algorithms, or reconsidering the business requirements to get rid of some processing that could be avoided. The former requires architectural insight not every developer has, plus agreement among devs. The latter may require outright navigating office politics to get product team to drop some low business impact feature requirement that has high impact on performance.

I think you're only supposed to add up the agree and disagree, and the strongly and somewhat are subcategories that are shown separately of the main categories.

Bad data representation, but not outright lying here. Where the lie comes in is that you had to be a Trump supporter to even vote. It's based on CPAC attenders, aka politically active MAGAs. The 1% that disagree he's doing a great job probably want him to be doing more of his bs.

The emissions part I'll have to agree on, but safety? Germany is literally among the safest nations to drive in. There's not much lower you can go.

As ICE vehicles get phased out, people will naturally start driving fast less often. EVs force you to stop for much longer when you run out of charge. Driving 2x as fast means making 4x as many stops and the stops aren't 3 minutes with an EV.

Yeah but then what's the point of visiting Germany as a tourist slash petrolhead?

Jokes aside, I'm of the opinion that existing freedoms are generally best left alone. Besides, Germany has a lower rate than Estonia and we have much lower speed limits. 120 on newly built separated highways in the summer (actually these might have 120 with good conditions in winter too - they have digital signage), 110 on old separated highways and in October or so, they go and collect all the 110 signs and replace them with 100... And up to 90 everywhere else.

There's a good chance the limitless autobahn is actually part of what makes German numbers so good. It just requires stricter training and policing, stricter TÜV and for people to always check their mirrors before switching lanes. And just good lane discipline in general. You don't get that in a lot of Europe. People switch lanes whenever because they're going 10 over the speed limit and can't possibly imagine someone else is going faster than them, potentially very close behind, in the other lane.

PS: traffic fun fact: Did you know that in Latvia, a two lane undivided highway has up to four active lanes? There's the law abiding citizen lanes (known as shoulders in the west) and the BMW/Audi lanes in the middle, marked by the white lines.

You can pry my monster ultra from my cold dead hands at the ripe old age of 30.

They're so well regulated that they can safely drive on roads with no speed limit, whereas the US for example has pretty low limits and multiple times the fatal crashes (proportionally to population)

... It's because he's black, isn't it?

It was FAANG long ago, it's MANGA now, except even that ignores the fact that Google has Alphabet for a while now. MANAA?

Have you tried drowning your sorrows with a good pilsner?