Join the club.

Dude has a history of acting bipolar.

From “don’t be evil” to “be as evil as possible”

Yeah, them and Datsun. Super reliable cars when US manufacturers were ugly slow tanks that wouldn’t make it 80,000 miles.

The compact cars probably being the Fiesta and the Focus. The Fiesta is almost a perfect vehicle. Small but comfy for four decent sized occupants. Great gas mileage. Super reliable motor (I have one with 219,000 miles that’s never even needed a tune-up yet–5 speed manual). They put ultra shitty automatic transmissions in them that failed after 35,000 miles so all the good was nullified by that boneheaded decision. Of course you always run the risk of being turned into a grease pancake by bro-dozers all day every day when driving a car in the US.

P.S. Actually the average american would be benefited from that

Ford has been busy corporate decisioning itself into irrelevance for decades now. The only reason Ford is even still around is the F series.

They went through a period in the 90s where they had a huge leap in quality and almost matched Japanese imports of the time. I’d say GM is the only one who’s drivetrain quality is still on any comparable level with Asian imports. Ford gets some parts really right but then their beancounters make really dumb cuts to critical components that make many of their vehicles near lemons. I can’t think of a worse car manufacturer in the world right now than Stellantis, and they aren’t an American company anyway.

That is certainly their wet dream, now that they can’t easily just move their manufacturing to China and reap all of the benefits like they could 70s - 90s.

Let them burn.

Hmm I have daydreamed about this scenario. I didn’t realize it was a thing. Thanks, I’ll check into it, though I wouldn’t doubt if it’s not a thing in my dystopian red flyover state.

Edit: Yeah, you have to be the registered owner of 25 or more vehicles to qualify for self insurance in my state. So, dealers and rich people only, unfortunately.

Oh I’m aware of the potential pitfalls but it’s something I’m willing to risk to stick it to insurance. I wouldn’t even carry it if it wasn’t required by law. I have the funds to cover what they would cover.

Hey AI helped me stick it to the insurance man the other day. I was futzing around with coverage amounts on one of the major insurance companies websites pre-renewal to try to get the best rate and it spit up a NaN renewal amount for our most expensive vehicle. It let me go through with the renewal less that $700 and now says I’m paid in full for the six month period. It’s been days now with no follow-up . . . I’m pretty sure AI snuck that one through for me.

and 20% in a couple. That’s pretty massive considering we’re talking about the exact same hardware.

SteamOS massively beats Windows

The mods there were crap back in the day. Keep them on reddit.

For her to say teachers have zero blame is a bit disingenuous. School age kids spend about as much waking time in school with their teachers as they do at home with their parents. In some cases more. Society as a whole is to blame for these changes. The ‘zombie youth’ phenomenon probably has some upsides as well. I can speak to the experience of a young male pre-internet and say with authority that ages 10-20 were hard, hard years for most adolescent males of that era. Having an escape and feelings of apathy might be better than what they would be feeling and getting up to otherwise.

Also, smart kids will still learn, they’ll just learn about things that interest them and at an accelerated pace compared to ‘back in the day’.

Well, looks like my decision to stick with Kodi and never bother with Plex is about to pay dividends.

If you just need voice comms and basic chat mumble/murmur has worked great for me for ages.

Definitely true in my experience. Having all sorts of problems in Librewolf and Firefox whereas Vivaldi will play the videos no problem. I found a reddit thread of others having the same experience since August.

They’re also sabotaging Youtube in all variants of Firefox for the past 6-8 weeks.