Personally I think the legal drinking age should be 18. I started drinking when I was 18, but didn't learn to do so responsibly until I was doing it in public. A bartender can refuse to serve, or call you a cab. Not that they always will, but I think it is advantageous to have at least one adult around keeping an eye on things. Sure there are plenty of irresponsible bartenders, but my experience says it's better than nothing.
This. There is a term for failing to look where you want to go, the result of which is going where you are looking: target fixation. It's a frequent cause of motorcycle crashes, and I see it quite a bit at the track. A rider gets scared, and starts to look at something off track - the grass, a rock, etc. Panic sets in, they are unable to avert their gaze and are drawn, as if by magnetism, into the very thing they would most like to avoid.
Another variation of "look where you want to go" is "look through the crash". If a couple of people get tangled up in front of you, don't watch the crash! You'll likely join it. Look through the crash, to where you want to go.
For sure. I ride a 2000 CBR929RR. 150 horsepower, only weights ~ 435 lbs, and it's fuel injected. Sure, a brand new CBR1000RR has ~40 more HP and is 2 lbs lighter, but 150 is still ridiculous for a street bike. I can't get to the top of first gear at a legal speed anywhere in the state (Road America aside), and wouldn't anyway because you can't keep the front wheel on the ground at WOT passed 8-9k RPM. The only thing I'm really missing out on are the fancy electronics like traction and wheelie control, but who wants those anyway?
It isn't necessarily a trivial problem to solve either. Retrofitting a touch interface on to a game designed to be played with physical buttons doesn't always work out well.
I especially like this when I'm riding a motorcycle behind them. Nothing like people casually tossing flaming projectiles at you while you're on your way to work.
I had some contact with the unschooling movement while growing up, and came away with some interesting conclusions. It isn't uncommon when a kid stops going to school, for them to basically mope around and play video games and not do anything for some period of time - weeks or months. But after a while they do get bored, and start to get interested in learning about and doing things.
I think people intrinsically want to be active and have projects and learn and create. BUT you have to detox from living such a structured life, and that's a process that takes time. It's no surprise to me that people who have gone to school or daycare since before they can remember, then had to work full-time after that, don't really know what to do with themselves when they have a few days or a week off, or that they spend that time in ways that appear to be wasted. You need to recover from having someone else tell you what to do all the time. Sadly not everyone does.
Supporting your third paragraph, I had some contact with the unschooling movement while growing up. The experience is typically that kids will do nothing for a while. Maybe quite a while. But then they get bored, and start to pursue things they find interesting. Art, music, literature, science, programming. You sort of need to detox from living under a very defined structure before you learn to self direct and spend time doing things you enjoy. It also seems possible that this transition could become more difficult as people age. Intuitively that makes sense to me, and might partially explain why some adults have a hard time transitioning into retirement.
I think "Slower traffic keep right" is part of the problem, nobody wants to think of themselves as "slower". The signs should read "Left lane for passing only" or similar.
Also, I pass people on the right all the time, but I blame them for it. :-) If people don't want to be passed on the right, they shouldn't drive on the left. Simple enough.
Strangely more people seem to know about this than about only using the left lanes to pass. I have seen several people get worked up about being passed on the right, to which my response is "why were you driving on the left"? They don't realize that the slower vehicle chooses the overtaking lane - whichever lane they aren't occupying. In my opinion it's down to the signage: "SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT". Nobody wants to think of themselves as slower. Should say "LEFT LANE FOR PASSING ONLY".
I'll offer what might be an uncommon perspective on 70k cars. I used to have a 2nd gen Toyota MR2. Great car. Vibrant community, guys developing and selling alternator brackets to shave off a few pounds of weight, there were meet ups, etc. I eventually sold mine, miss it, and still see a few around. In the four years the 2nd gen was available in the U.S. (91-95), Toyota sold a grand total 20k. 70k may not be a lot compared to the overall market, but it's nothing to sneeze at.
I have a similar problem. It bothers me a bit that I'm not amazing at any single thing, but not nearly as much as it bothers me that there are things I can't do well. I have this strange belief that I should be at least competent at every skill there is. (I blame my dad for this, by the way. He is good at everything. :-) )
I do this too, a habit picked up when my kids were little and I didn't want to wake them up with loud movies. I'm surprised now, when I turn captions off, how much harder I have to concentrate on what I'm watching in order to keep track of what's going on.
I'm convinced that the ability to shop for and purchase auto insurance online is the best thing (for consumers) to happen to the industry in a long time. Better rates, better claims processing, better customer service.
They do pretty well if you keep both the carts and the console clean. I have an original that works as well as it did when it was new. You had to blow on the games then too. :-) (By keep them clean I mean that you have to actively clean them periodically.)
My feeling is that since PBS is largely funded by taxes and donations, all their content should be available freely just about anywhere. They really ought to publish directly to YouTube as well.
Which is too bad, because sliding doors are one of their best features. As a parent, I've taken to parking next to minivans at the grocery store and whatnot, because I know how careful kids typically are when opening doors. Sliding doors = no dings.
I once worked for some people with a similar belief system to that above. A big part of it was that there were only two powers in the world - Christ & God vs. Satan. ANY power that was not explicitly that of Christ was implicitly the devil, regardless of how good it sounded. Harry Potter for example, was clearly an agent of Satan.
I'm in a similar boat, I paid cash for a 2003 Mazda hatch with a manual. When I bought it I did the math, and figured that compared to the lease payment and insurance on a new Mazda I would break even in 10 months. I've been driving it for over two years. :-) Why would I want a new car? Then I'd just have to worry about scratching the paint, or even (heaven forbid) drive it nicely. Ug. However, I will say that a Model 3 is the one new car I might consider.
I found the bit about looking down at the console in the ship to be interesting. I had a bit of a similar experience after playing racing games for years, then finally getting on the track in real life on a motorcycle. In a racing game you can pretty easily keep an eye on the speedometer to set corner entry speeds, etc. In real life you simply do not have time to take your eyes off the track and look down at the speedometer. You have to do it by feel. It's a very important skill for real life racers, and something you could never develop to any accuracy from a tv screen - a sense of your actual speed.
I came here to say this as well. I admit it, I like to drive hard on occasion. But does the fact that I know the limits of my car's abilities make me a more dangerous driver? Maybe. But I could also cruise ever so gently through a red light, mow down pedestrians at 10 mph under the limit, or smoothly swing wide across the center line into oncoming traffic. Are we tracking things that make dangerous drivers, or tracking things that are easy to track?
No racing for me yet, but I have a track day tomorrow. The level of concentration required is astounding. I still remember being amazed at the difference between my first and second track days. How much more I could SEE after I started to relax, and the tunnel vision faded away. :-)
A human driver can certainly can be careless or dangerous, but in my experience this is not how blame is assigned in the case of a collision. It is assigned based a failure to conform to very specific rules of the road - operating left of center (or right, depending on the country), failure to yield, etc. Human factors are taken into consideration, but there is certainly an existing framework for assigning responsibility that appears to be quite compatible with autonomous operators. I would suggest that the shared responsibility case would be the same as it is today - when both operators are in violation.
I continue to be confused about how nuclear can be considered better / cheaper / cleaner without factoring the cost of storing the waste for 10,000 years. We seem to struggle with unintended consequences of waste management on the decade scale, let alone several millennia.
Indeed, it was common for a USB-to-proprietary cable to be sold separately for at an additional charge. Now phone manufacturers are forced to resort to software to make it difficult to move data between phones and desktops. ;-)