FeloniousHam

I am confuse. I don't know how much Amazon cares about what's sold on their site (probably more than eBay?), but they have most liberal return policy on the internet, and from the one seller I've personally met, they're hard on vendors.

Bad products and services exists in all markets, choice is the cure.

Is it Amazon branded products your upset with? I guess don't buy them? I genuinely do not understand your argument.

@modeless is essentially arguing for self-insurance, which is perfectly sensible. You don't need insurance for things you can plan for, or have savings for (make sure you're analyzing your total financial tail risk).

Dental "insurance" is basically a savings plan with a negative return, considering the low lifetime maximums, and the fact that biannual cleanings aren't that expensive out of pocket. I have a $20k deductible (with lower premiums), and I'm coming out ahead. There's societal side benefit that paying with your own money makes you a more discriminating consumer.

The $50K is not outrageous, assuming you have the savings to cover it. You need insurance for the big things, which is basically anything more than a two-day stay in a hospital. The costs blow up from there.

And said greed (by both founder and shareholders) produced a company that so enriched them BY BEING FAVORED BY BILLIONS(!) of customers worldwide to provide access to range goods with a convenience, price, and speed experienced only by the wealthy just a few years earlier :).

Ugh, Capitalism.

Ambiguous antecedent. Which "this"?

I'm barely a whisper on the Internet, but let me repeat my own daily lived experience with FSD: it's amazing, useful, and a better driver than me 90% of the time. I use it every day on my commute, most days driveway to parking spot without intervention. It drove me 4 1/2 hours through Atlanta rush hour traffic, into the city, and to the hotel dropoff. When I have a drink after work, or tired from a long drive, I don't worry about a small drop in attention raising the chance of an accident.

It's not perfect, and probably oversold, but it's amazing and useful. You find within days of using it where your trust and comfort level are with the technology. When I get in a car without it (or worse, with a steering wheel and console covered in confusing buttons and dials!), I feel like I'm steering an Amish hay wagon.

nb. I subscribe to the service, I don't have an FSD investment to justify.

There was a time, probably before Reagan came to office, that the cutting/reforming taxes yielded positive returns. But fifty years on, the high-hanging fruit has all been picked. This is widely acknowledged by "true conservatives" (takes one to know one).

Everything goes to the debt, the only way out is through cuts to entitlements or broadly raising taxes, both deeply unpopular.

Ugh, capitalism

The superiority of democracy is not that it will produce the best leadership. It's that bad leaders can be removed by the governed.

I think you underestimate the influences on your own thinking. #renégirard

Just want to say thanks for a great app. It's one of my favorite tools, even though I don't get to use it that often.

I don't like tipping (in most cases) either, but who is greedy here? The owner, who is following social norms and separating the optional service charge from the cost of the food, or the server dependent on the tip for their wage?

No one, and I mean NO ONE who has driven 2 days with FSD has the misconception that a Tesla will drive itself under all conditions, 100% of the time. It _is_ "full self driving" in the sense that it fully, by itself, drives me to and from work everyday, to my child's school, to various events around town, _with minimal interventions_.

This is partly because a large portion of the Tesla buyers were more intentional in their purchase (doubly so if they bought FSD). Accidents happen, and FSD surely reduces the frequency, but a change in the marketing (or the NAME lol, the pearl clutching) would not make a gram of difference.

I'm not arguing whether fresh food tastes better or is healthier. What I want to see is evidence that "quality" food is (relatively) more expensive in the United States than it is anywhere else in the world. And then maybe some evidence that people buy junk food because "healthy food" is too expensive (my hungry teenager looks in the pantry and the refrigerator and says, "all we have is ingredients").

> but good quality food is expensive (in the US -- many other parts of the world have their quality food cheaper but I digress

Let's digress.

I read this frequently in various forms on this forum, and it's always "just so" justification. My own heuristic thought is that "low quality" food (high energy, long shelf-life processed foods) is very cheap because it is produced at scale and can be stored, while "high quality" (fresh products) is not cheap for the opposite reason.

The US has the cheapest food in the world [1]. Expensive food is expensive, but I would bet quality food is cheaper here than anywhere else. The "problem" is that when presented with a cheap, easy, tasty, high calorie food option against a relatively more expensive "quality" option, consumers choose the former because it's cheaper, easier, tastier, and provides more calories. I would bet this is even true when the absolute difference in price is small.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91208387/food-grocery-prices-us-...

Ah yes, the greedy sleazeballs. If you knew that the total cost of the meal would be the same, say $20 for the meal, does it to you matter if: 1) you pay $20 "no tip" and the owner pays non-tip minimum wage, or b) you pay $16.50 for the food and $3.50 separately to the server in the form of a tip ?

I'm proud of your decision to "opt out". I think the incremental improvements that have brought liberal democratic societies to a place of affluence unimaginable to my grandparents will be best sustained and advanced without your help.

I don't agree with the premise (data point: I grew up poor, with siblings), but certainly the inverse isn't true.

I liked Josh Barro's characterization of BlueSky: "Bluesky Isn't a Bubble. It's a Containment Dome."[0]

[0] https://www.joshbarro.com/p/bluesky-isnt-a-bubble-its-a-cont...

I got a bad of case of tennis elbow recently from over-exerting during a light set of pushups!

The joint stuff you have to think about, where it was barely a consideration when I was younger.

As I'm well past my mid-40s, so 100% :)

The best tech tool I've ever bought was a pair of dedicated computer glasses (focal length ~3ft) --for every computer I work at.

I like the US healthcare system? At least my on-the-ground, lived experience into middle age has been great. I've always had high-deductible insurance through my employer, never had a problem getting a specialist (even during the supposedly horrible HMO years) or special service, eg. MRI.

With an HSA, I'm basically self-insured for everything short of something catastrophic.

I don't know if I'm an outlier in this American Carnage, but with very few exceptions, this is the norm in my circles.

As a happy daily FSD user, I know a few happy Tesla owners who don't use FSD. Cost is a major factor, but risk aversion follows hard upon it.

They're all in tech somehow, for most it's skepticism about software quality for a complicated and critical system. For at least one, he thinks he's a better driver and likes driving anyways.

I got 3 months free when I bought the car new, canceled and reupped a few times, but have had the subscription since they lowered it to 99$. The HW3 definitely had more hitches (sudden breaking for roadside debris, weird adjustments turning into parking lots), but I got used to it. For the "less maintained" road (piles of brush/garbage/discards) on my commute, I kept my foot over the accelerator.

There were definitely regressions with my Model 3, though the issues and improvements were at the margin.

The HW4 I'm in now doesn't exhibit those issues and does Park to Park to and from, most days without any intervention.

Counterpoint: I had a Tesla with HW3 and FSD is absolutely a wonder and a delight (I now have a Tesla with HW4, and it's a noticeable improvement on my M3). It drives me through traffic on my commute everyday, in all kinds of weather, and is a better driver than me (say) 95% of the time.

As I frequently mention in these "sanity response" posts, it's not perfect. Sun in the camera will sometimes cause it to bail. Maybe once a day, I take over because I'm not sure of its decisions. I share the skepticism that the same FSD I'm using can be fully autonomous, but with deep, current map data like Waymo has, maybe they can pull it off.

I lurved my Miata, so much fun from so little hp, the best shifter in anything I've driven.

My one pedal drive Model 3 is also a blast, it handles like nothing I've ever driven. Not having to wait beat to get the engine in the powerband is amazing.

I sometimes miss the extra puzzle of shifting gears to keep the engine on the cam, but most days you're just rowing through gears on the commute home (which is now fairly stress-free thanks to FSD).

(I rode motorcycles exclusively for years before I got my first car, from an R69S to Yamaha 180 scooter and lots in between.)

I wonder how much of "markets adjust and other types of employment opportunities pop up" is just the aging out through retirement and death of the redundant workers.

Basically, the labor theory of Planck's principle: '"A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it", Planck once wrote.'

> ...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to drive 90 minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour before even getting in the vicinity of where you're going has a very real chilling effect on planning fun time.

1000%. I would complain about driving the 12 minutes just to get out of my subdivision (before moving into town). Just what you say, there's a "chilling effect" when everything you want to do is 30 mins away.

I've found Datagrip to be far and away the most impressive universal database tool. I feel like I've tried them all, and they all have a quality of having been developed by database people, rather than IDE designers. The depth of capability, extensibility, pace of improvement--I'm a very happy customer.

I don't want to poop on open source, but pgadmin and dbeaver and not even close to playing in the same league.

I work in Oracle and Datagrip saved my sanity.

The obvious answer: you can't. I work in constrained environment with an IT department that provides the hardware and (most of) the software I develop on. I agree with all the WSL cheering here, it integrates almost seamlessly.

But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).

I had exactly the same feeling with Speedscript: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript (typed in over hours by me and my brother :) )