You're clearly not talking about American cars. What's a 1-tonne Ford Escort? I did have a 1983 Dodge Ram D150 half-ton pickup truck with a Slant-6 and an A-833 manual transmission; that thing would get 25MPG and hold 75MPH all the way westbound across Michigan... of course, it took it a while to get to 75MPH, merging was just like driving a Peterbilt with a 53' trailer full of anvils. That exact same engine and a comparable transmission were available for the Dodge Trucks line from 1960 to 1987 and was renowned for durability and reliability.

The key point is that Americans typically don't want them. To this day, in Canada, gasoline is cheaper than water. I'm not sure if that's a statement about gas prices or a slam against the sort of fool who feels the need to buy their tapwater in PET bottles, but I digress. So people buy horsepower. People buy large vehicles based on truck platforms.

As CAFE forces vehicles to become more fuel efficient - without addressing the underlying consumer demand problem! - manufacturers are being forced to use smaller and smaller engines. This means adding turbochargers to cute little aluminum blocks, narrower cam lobes and variable displacement oil pumps and smaller oil control rings all to reduce the internal drag, and thinner oils which offer zero cushion on connecting rod bearings. All of this gets stuffed into a full-size pickup truck with a trailer hitch. They're intolerant of real-world conditions and use, and because of their complexity they're expensive to repair. These vehicles will not have a long lifespan - sure, you might get a good fleet average mileage, but if 50% of the vehicles don't make it to the 100,000 mile mark, they're getting replaced faster with all the environmental damage of producing and disposing of the vehicle.

Maximizing vehicle life is an important part of reducing the vehicle's overall environmental impact.

There's a great YouTube channel where the owner of a full-service used auto parts business takes apart modern engines and shows you what failed. No prior knowledge of engines is required to understand this. Some engines are spectacularly broken. And Eric talks about what will last, and what won't, with an entertaining sarcasm.

Recycling? The lead-acid primary battery gets removed, then the car gets crushed and shredded. Only the steel and the aluminum get recycled. Anyone who thinks that any other material in a car gets recycled in any quantity has never seen a car shredder in operation. ASR (Auto Shredder Residue) is a special waste stream now consisting mostly of mixed plastics, smashed safety glass, and the crap people leave in their cars when they junk them. All that plastic gets landfilled.

Look, I know which video I watched.

Are they going to tell me how many times I watched it?

Google's motto was once: Don't be evil

YouTube's motto is now: Don't be honest

That's what LibreOffice is for.

Nobody asked for this but legions of YT creators have been screaming for fairer moderation and an appeals process that works. Even more YT viewers have been asking for an end to the relentless onslaught of crappy AI-generated scam ads for obviously bogus "7 second health hacks", fake AC units, ridiculously ineffective heaters, pressure-washers, robot dogs that are just stuffed animals, etc, etc. Don't even get me started on AI-slop.

Last time I complained about a scam ad, @teamyoutube told me just to block it. Yeah, that's right, if I don't want to watch these obviously fake scam ads it's up to *me* to block them. But if I use an ad-blocker -- oh no, that's not allowed!

It seems that YT spends far too much time working on the "nice to haves" and nowhere near enough working on the "need to haves".

The future of user-generated VOD is not YouTube. Big changes are coming to that part of the market quite soon, lead by open-source software that supports self-hosting along with multiple access and monetization portals. Stay tuned, this will be big and YouTube will regret its infatuation with AI, short-form content and repurposed video from other media.

I would have thought by now, after 40 years of computerization, that there would be some robust Asian language fonts available in the public domain or perhaps licensed through government agencies to promote their use.

All the way back in the 1980s, I was involved in a Japanese/Chinese/English photo-typesetter project using what I believe were freely available font sets.

Seems like the Japanese game companies should switch to Google or MS fonts. $20K/year in Japan is someone's salary.

The Chinese learn fast and iterate frequently. Likely their future launches will be more robust.

I wonder if they'll discover bulletin board systems (BBS) like we used to use before the internet was even a thing.

Seems to me there might be a proliferation of such systems appearing in Oz. I wonder if they could even "import" content from other mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube etc like FidoNet used to do with usenet postings. Now *that* would be interesting.

Hey... come to think of it, let's just revive usenet and be done with it!

There's no actual way to know if a game was made with AI or not.

I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

I have a bunch of old data stored on Kodak Gold CDRs from the 1990s. Kodak claimed 100 year archive life -- although I guess this was just a "best guess" based on accelerated aging tests.

Perhaps I should check them and make sure that bit-rot hasn't set in.

Otherwise I don't bother with backups, they're far too stressful. I mean... if you're backing stuff up you've got to choose the right media, keep a copy off-site and have a restore strategy in place. If you don't backup then none of this is a worry any more. I'm sure AI will fix everything if I get a hardware failure, corruption or malware on my active storage media.

Carpe diem solves everything!

If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.

BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.

Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?

Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.

With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.

There's nothing like a good smack to the beitzim to stop a would-be rapist. And there's nothing like biting someone if it's all the leverage you have.

Remember, this is not a video game or a sanctioned fight in a boxing ring. This is your life versus the life of a terrorist or other attacker. Kill or be killed. Learn to fight.

> by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.

wtf?

My workplace allows browsing outside of the Intranet with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, maybe others... basically anything but Edge.