I would trust motors over an engine any day. Look at the contraption that is an ICE: You have fuel-, oil-, and air-delivery systems... you have ignition systems... you have mechanical parts violently changing directions thousands of times per minute...
A motor is metal spinning in a magnetic field, powered by chemical reactions in a battery.
On a side note: Why are there almost no VIEWERS for Markdown? Every project has a readme.md, which everyone ends up reading in a text viewer with all the formatting markers all over the place. WTF?
That's... a bit of a weird thing to say. For one thing, this idea that our "American values" are so superior to everything else is an insult to a large part of the rest of the world that also has values that we'd consider positive and good. They didn't come by those values "because America" (ok, maybe a few did here and there, but that's far from universal).
For another thing, what "traditional" American values are you referring to, in particular? Slavery? Racism? Institutionalized oppression? Police brutality? The military-industrial complex? The prison-industrial complex -- the fact that we have such a high percentage of our population incarcerated? Our legally-enshrined puritanical fear of victimless "crimes" like smoking a plant? The disenfranchisement of the poor? Income and wealth inequality? The continued weakening of labor movements? A small but loud and influential contingent of religious nuts who seem to believe that their god should be calling the shots in our legal system (hypocritically many of the same people who have wrung their hands over "Sharia law")?
Sure, I'm focusing on the negative here, and as much as I'm a bit cynical these days, there is plenty of good to come out of our country, even today. But this whole "wave the flag", "everyone should be more like us" stuff is pretty gross and short-sighted. The better values "dying" of late bit may be true (or not, I don't know anymore), but also overlooks a lot of bad stuff that has been in our national DNA for centuries.
First of all, I never said American values are superior. So you've started your homily on a false premise.
Furthermore, most of your gripes SUPPORT my point, except of course for the tired catch-alls of "slavery" and "racism." As for the rest of what you cite (mass incarceration, worker oppression, the "religious" oppressing others): THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
Then of course there's democracy, and the alleged "resilience" of the American people. What a joke. Voting rights are being rolled back across "red" states nationwide. And "we" once rebuilt destroyed cities like Chicago and San Francisco in a few years... but it took over a decade to replace TWO buildings in New York after 9/11. And what have we built since?
If you want to roll out time-honored issues, how about abortion? Now a significant portion of the USA wants to (and has been given the go-ahead to) use women as baby farms. Even IRELAND abolished this disgusting regime.
Anyway, instead of a strawman, just create your own original post.
This is a confusion of cause and effect. The current crisis you are seeing is in part caused by this very same baked-in self-congratulatory mindset that permeates many American institutions and demographics
I'm going to write one about the idiocy of the "flat" design fad. I wonder how people of 1900 would have felt about having to experimentally poke at things that looked like plain labels or placards, or decorative swatches of paint, to operate a machine.
"Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it."
I guess flat design can be tied back into that tension/mixed metaphor between electromechanical and print analogs - it's based on a decision to lean towards the print side of things. Actually the designers of early-ish influential "flat" designed systems such as Windows Phone 7 were quite self-conscious about this, e.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20120322023540/http://mkruzenisk... (from 2011)
Thanks for the reply and that link. That article is replete with pretty bogus assertions, even for its time. Print is not all that informative for interactive presentations, aside from general principles of good layout with whitespace and appropriate visual emphasis. The article does indeed mention those, but goes on and on about print without saying what it has to do with buttons you need to press or values you need to adjust.
The article also treats all physical-control analogies as bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather" textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two-pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons that instantly told you
A. This is a button.
B. The button is "pressed."
At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the real world. In the real world (even one full of touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you press on something malleable it will deform, and the light and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been pressed.
This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be) learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means ON! Brown means OFF!
There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out" unavailable functions is the best example I can think of. But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's ineffective (or less effective).
A motor is metal spinning in a magnetic field, powered by chemical reactions in a battery.
Which seems more likely to fail?