You should read some memoires from higher-ups in the military instead of trying to lecture people about something you have no experience with. Military leaders will say they don't need more equipment, but politicians will spend a ton on it anyway because the equipment is built in their district. Military advice is often ignored by politicians in order to score political points, like when Obama ignored advice to increase military presence in Afghanistan to regain control, and instead let it drag on with insufficient resources, ensuring it was a waste of time and life.
Your example of military not advocating for increased use of itself is… Obama ignoring the military advocating for increased use of itself in Afghanistan?
I’ve read memoirs. Some interesting ones about the Vietnam war and how every military higher-up was champing at the bit to throw more troops into the meatgrinder.
My “experience with” this is watching the military incinerate orders of magnitude more taxes than I will pay in my entire life on useless bullshit as I walk past dozens of homeless people a day. Like that $80-150 million plane they threw in the drink just the other day. Real good stuff!
I think some of it is still relevant, like all the money being wasted buying unnecessary equipment during war time. From what I read in memoires written by generals that retired more recently, they probably wouldn't agree with the extreme isolationist policy that Smedley Butler advocates.
> The sort of person who has nothing better to spend an extra $600 on than a Peloton is the sort of person who wasn't eligible for the stimulus in the first place.
That's not true at all. The cutoff for a married couple to get stimulus checks was 150k combined per year, which is a lot of money in the majority of the country. I was making 135k, 40k more than the median income for my state, and my wife and I got thousands of dollars in stimulus money. We ended up each buying $1200 Herman-Miller office chairs since we were stuck at home on our computers all day.
yeah, a lot of "web3" really seems to boil down to "I'm the person all the money runs through now instead of the existing players, also everything has a few more extra layers of complexity and abstraction for no good reason".
I think NFTs are mostly a scam, but I could see people showing them off in some sort of centralized "gallery" type of game. It'd be like how people show off their islands in Animal Crossing, except you could show off the artwork and other things you collected. There's way too many hurdles to make it viable, but I can see a hypothetical way that people could show them off like real collectibles.
Another thing I thought would be useful in games, but unlikely to ever happen, is using NFTs to track ownership of in-game cosmetics. That way cosmetics you get from known e-sports pros could be worth more than cosmetics you purchased from whatever store, the same a pair of Michael Jordan's shoes he wore during a game is more of a collectible than buying the equivalent shoes from Footlocker.
At this point I think the cars are popular because it's considered a cool status symbol, not because it's any good. I've got a co-worker who bought a Tesla and kept having issues with it, but still bought a new Model S a couple of weeks ago. It's already having electrical issues and other false alarms popping up on the phone app. He still gushes about how Tesla's are great cars, and how Musk is a genious that is leading humanity into the future.
It honestly reminds me of when I was in Iraq in the early 2000s, and you'd see police chiefs and mayors with iphones. The phones didn't work on the cell network, but they were still highly sought after because it was an expensive piece of technology that almost nobody there could afford.
The quality isn't good, but the performance and features of the car are. We just got a Model Y Long Range in September, and have found it fantastic as a family vehicle. Handles far better and has considerably more storage than any comparably sized vehicle. Great acceleration even in the long-range. I could go for more physical controls for things like hvac, but the UI is still better than most other vehicles I've owned. Aside from the quality control issues, the cars are legitimately great.
Regarding quality control, we had one interior trim piece that was installed with the wrong pegs and so kept falling out - fixed by a mobile tech. It also had a small ding in the front fender, which Tesla had us take it to a local PDR shop to repair. That got it to about 95% - the spot is still technically possible to find, but you need to know where it was and carefully inspect from close range. Slightly irksome, but definitely wasn't worth trying to get the whole fender replaced.
Edit: For what it's worth I also own a 997.1 911 Turbo and a Honda S2000, so I'm far from just a Tesla/electric fan. In fact I really didn't want to want a Tesla as I'm no fan at all of the company for reasons like the OP. Tested all the competitors. But they're just legitimately good cars.
> In fact I really didn't want to want a Tesla as I'm no fan at all of the company for reasons like the OP. Tested all the competitors. But they're just legitimately good cars.
That's exactly where I am. I want to go electric. I didn't like Tesla/Musk for all the obvious reasons. I test drove every electric car I could get my hands on. I decided to test drive a Tesla just for completeness. They gave me a Model Y overnight. It was amazing. I ordered one. I hope it has all its parts. Seems like a coin flip. We'll see how I feel this time next year.
Yep, exactly the same here. Even more crazy for me actually since I'm on Vancouver Island, so if anything significant does go wrong with the thing it's at least an entire day shot taking it over to the mainland to be serviced. Can't believe I ended up ordering one, but I really like it! Fingers crossed.
They're very different experiences. My 911 does 0-60 in around 3.2s, whereas the Y is about 4.2s now that it has the optional acceleration boost. So the 911 still feels considerably faster when it's at the peak of the power curve with the turbos fully spooled. It's a lot more work to extract the power though: you've got to be high in the rev range, get the turbos spooled up, shift the gears yourself (it's a manual), etc. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: extracting the performance like that is fun.
But it's also fun to just mat the throttle at any moment and have the vehicle leap forward, which is the electric thing. Even with the long range, it feels like you can go from a near stop to significant speed instantaneously. (Although one downside of that is that it starts to feel slower in comparison as you build speed, whereas the 911 Turbo is the opposite.) Also the traction control system is fantastic. It doesn't have the handling of the 911 (or the S2000), but it does start and stop on a dime, even in the wet. So you can extract a lot of performance out of it, but you need to drive it differently to do so.
I've autocrossed all three cars and tracked the 911 and S2000; each requires a significantly different driving style to get the most out of it. The S is a momentum car with crazy cornering capability, so it's all early apexes and maintaining speed. The Model Y is the exact opposite. You basically want to drive in straight lines, shortest path. Brake hard in a straight line to bring the weight to the front, short, tight corner, then hammer the throttle and straighten out, and let the traction control send the torque where it can go. If you try to carry speed through the corner it'll just push (understeer). The Turbo is somewhere in-between. On a big track it's the fastest of the three, but on an autocross course the S2000 and probably even the Y, if the course is tight or it's wet, have it beat.
Thanks for the thoughtful overview from a real driver’s point of view.
Is Porsche electrifying their cars? Would you get an all electric 911? Do you think electric is the future or some hybrid approach with instant electric torque replacing turbo spooling downsides?
Porsche is planning to electrify all their models, yes. I expect the next generation 911 will be hybrid. Not sure if this is what you were saying, but hybrid powertrains can work well with turbos because the electric motors can fill in the torque gap while the turbos are spooling up.
In the short to medium term I definitely think we'll see a mix of hybrid and full electric in sports/super cars, because full electric still comes with a significant weight penalty, and the charging makes track driving difficult. I expect most standard passenger cars to go full electric pretty quickly though, and eventually all but low volume and special purpose vehicles will probably get there.
Actually, the comparison to early 2010s iPhones is quite apt...you have the staunch iPhone evangelist who pressures all their family and friends into getting one, the one who waits in the lines for product launches etc. And on the other end of the spectrum you have the Android or otherwise user who cannot possibly comprehend why a smartphone, especially one as [locked down / hard to repair / expensive / etc] would be a good purchase choice in anyone's eyes.
10 years later the iPhone is still around but its competitors have more or less died out or left the smartphone game. The only flagship Android manufacturers that compete at the same price points are Samsung and Google, and pretty much nobody else is making a smartphone that doesn't run Android.
yo, no offense, but how is this comparison even relevant, let alone apt? it made sense in the parent comment, but the way you’ve extended it seems to imply BMW went out of business or something. where are you going with this?
also, again no offense, but do you mean “pretty much nobody else is making a smartphone that doesn’t run Android”? because you started by talking about iPhones.
the first paragraph made sense, maybe you just need to clarify.
Forgetting the brands, the battle right now seems to be between ICE cars versus EV cars. I'm implying that EVs will win in the end regardless of any existing drawbacks.
> do you mean “pretty much nobody else"
Yes, thanks for catching that. That omission does make my sentence rather confusing, lol. I was trying to refer to all the other manufacturers with proprietary operating systems like Blackberry, Palm, Windows Phone, etc. that are no longer around.
And sure, none of these are as dangerous as a self driving car making the wrong move, but we can separate the context of what a phone or laptop is supposed to be good at vs. a car. For example, this brake pad issue is the Tesla equivalent to Antennagate, since nobody would expect to buy a new phone that sucks at making calls, just like nobody would expect to buy a new car that sucks at slowing down.
I'm still waiting for some scandal at the Watergate Hotel again, to see how many journalists demonstrate their total and complete ignorance of the history of their profession by referring to "Watergategate."
It wasn't even just that dealership, it was every Model 3 shipped during a certain time period. Back when it was happening, there were posts about it on the Tesla subreddit. Nobody was told their car wasn't going to have the features they paid for, and Tesla blamed it on the chip shortage and said they'd install the missing features once they had the supplies.
You would expect Tesla to make sure customers are well informed about certain features are missing, and being added when they become available. The missing USB was known (due to unavailability).
For missing brake pads, you hope q&a catches that, and some electronic alert shows up if brake pads are missing (or worn beyond being useful).
It would have taken you less time to throw the first sentence into Google and find the source than it would have taken you to write your snarky comment.
These would have been nice earlier. They've been out of stock for a long time, and I know people who had to use up their vacation days waiting for them to come back in stock because their employer wouldn't let them back in the office until they showed a negative test result.
If your employer is blocking you from coming back into the office due to health reasons, how can they mandate you use vacation days for it? Was the alternative to be without pay?
