I've been saying to my mum, 89, to delay replacing her Jazz till they have a suitable self driving car but it's taking longer than I thought. She still drives ok thankfully.
I have the 2013 Fit (Jazz) and it refuses to die. Still runs like the day I bought it despite 200k miles. It looks like hot garbage because the paint is burning off in the sun, but it's still perfect somehow.
My main goal is to teach my parents how to use Uber/Lyft.
Tesla FSD is currently very good, and I think _on average_ is better than the typical driver (no distractions, no substances, no fatigue, 360 deg vision, faster reaction time). Granted, that isn’t helpful if you hit an edge case.
Motorola seems to HATE updating their operating systems. They only support their phone OS for the minimum possible time. Moving to an open source platform makes way too much sense for them. This is one of the few ideas that might make me go back to buying Motorola products after dumping them for a Pixel.
The question is, will my work apps be able to run on GrapheneOS? I'm really excited to find out.
It depends entirely on the organization. The ones my corp runs have security policies which may or may not like Graphene. I've been thinking about making a phone dedicated to work and then keeping a separate personal phone.
They are mostly just taking advice from lobbyists who know very well what they are trying to do. A lot of bills are written by the lobbyists themselves. This is why it is so important to donate to causes like the EFF and ACLU. They are often the only other voice in the room.
Even if he never finishes, just watching Martin learn and grow as a builder is entertaining as heck. Sounds like he's got his head on straight for the next marble machine!
Those are fuel canisters for a white gas stove. Pretty common below freezing because standard butane ones don't work well in the cold without a special fuel mixture. Although they make stoves that you can turn the canister over and it heats the liquid to produce gas; the white gas ones are easier to find fuel for in weird places and will burn gasoline in an emergency.
This is pretty normal on YouTube. YT added a feature to try different titles and thumbnails and provides analytics for each one to see what the engagement looks like.
I suspect that this has more to do with Ukraine than it does the USA. Russia seemed like one of those plastic owls to fend off birds then suddenly turned its head and ate one.
You can retire whenever you want. The government decides when to start funding it.
As for why - the same reason why they get to decide what side of the road you drive on and what laws you follow. They rule the patch of land you were born on, and if you don't like it you can either participate in the system (assuming it's a democracy) or leave.
The real question is not why the government gets to set the retirement age. Of course it gets to set it IF it's involved in paying for people's retirements!
The real question is why governments insist on euphemistic names ("forced savings") that imply the opposite of the reality of the programs. And why people put up with such financial repression schemes. The answer to the first question is to keep people from being too upset too suddenly, too many all at once. The answer to the latter is that the people usually don't get a say in these things.
For Singapore this program probably makes a great deal of sense since Singapore is singularly vulnerable given its location in the world. To build what they did they probably needed these sorts of policies. I suspect most Singaporeans don't mind all that much, though I don't know. We would very much mind this sort of thing here in the U.S. though!
It definitely answers why. You are asking for an appeal to some moral justification. But there isn't one, and it doesn't matter. That's the whole point of "might makes right".
CPF makes a moral justification by arguing it is a "savings and pension plan" under the auspices of a moral justification of helping citizens set aside their own money. The very first thing you are greeted with on their website is that it's savings and an overview represents it as "setting aside" your own funds.
The government makes a moral justification of a savings plan but then when we dig down to it it's all ether and really just a scheme for bond rate arbitrage for the government.
The point isn't that might makes right is false, it's that the moral justification is a facade.
The government doesn’t set the retirement age. You can retire whenever you want. There are no laws against a 50 year old retiring and living off his own savings, nor against a 70 year old continuing to work.
There is a minimum age to collect old age benefits from the government. The justification for that should be obvious.
The choice between working and starving to death is not a choice. If your savings have been taken by the government, then you don't have a choice.
The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so. Then steal whatever they have left with medical bills and price hikes on necessities.
> The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so.
Actually, the justification is to prevent old people from having to work. Retirement didn't really exist until the creation of pension systems in the late 19th century, and the modern social security system was a poverty alleviation measure introduced in the 1930s. Hell, social security was initially resented by older workers because of the cover it gave employers for firing them for being too old.
Social security was sold to the populace for purposes of voting as "insurance." Lawmakers straight up admitted they purposefully wrote the law in a confusing way[] -- resulting in evasion of democratic scrutiny and the scrutiny of the constitution. Then they briefly switched to not calling it insurance just for the purpose of scrutiny of the courts.
Social Security constitutionality was ruled on just months after the 'switch in time that saved 9' associated with a threatening to pack the courts and evade the checks and balances built into our "democracy." They ruled it was covered under 'general welfare' in a way that was totally historically inaccurate.
Furthermore, FDR and congress purposefully had it packaged in an omnibus style bill to evade democratic scrutiny over the individual portions, by purposefully torpedoing other aid to needy individuals if SS didn't pass, so that lawmakers wouldn't be able to vote on democratic view of SS but rather being damned in a catch-22 where they'd be accused of not helping out the needy in other ways.
Basically the whole thing was designed to not only evade democracy but also the constitution.
[] Recollections of the New Deal, by Thomas H. Eliot, pp. 102-115 (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1991).
But the CPF isn't represented as benefits from the government. It's represented and claimed to be your own savings that you have set aside. At gamed bond rates where the government skims off the top.
To make an overly dramatic analogy, if you were kidnapped and asked why the kidnapper was able to hold you against your will, the answer is because they've chained you up and they have the gun, and so on. That's literally the answer to why. The fact that what they're doing is morally wrong is completely irrelevant.
Like I said, they don't. You can retire today. They decide when you get access to a national retirement plan. Citizens of the country vote for that plan and how it is implemented.
I personally could retire today. Most people can't. There is no referendum I remember where we decided to raise the retirement age. It seems like our government just kind of decided to do so.
Couldn’t you say the same thing about social security or pensions? There is a lot of economic forces that direct people to work until a certain age, the government controlling a benefit is only one of them. As to why, you’ll need to dissect representative democracies in Singapore’s case.
It doesn't (you can retire early), but it does decide part of what you will need to be saving and how.
And the reason it decides that, apart from "because it can", is because many societies have seen what happens when it's left to individuals to take care of this, and they fuck it up in massive numbers, and the outcome of that then fucks up society.
It is really easy to "Fuck it up" when greedy assholes jack up the price of necessities like food, shelter, and medical care. 66% of bankruptcies are due to medical costs. We should just socialize necessities like food, shelter, and medical care so there is no chance of "Fucking it up." That would cover the possibility of disability as well.
It sounds to me like we have built a system to exploit people as much as possible. Treating them like farm animals.
>We should just socialize necessities like food, shelter, and medical care so there is no chance of "Fucking it up."
How does socializing work if there are insufficient workers relative to non workers? I.e. the supply of food/shelter/medical care is insufficient to meet the demand?
Why would there be insufficient workers relative to non-workers? Socializing health care, shelter, and food does not lead to a worker shortage. In fact, having a healthier and taken care of population leads to prosperity in general. In addition, it leads to reduced costs. Countries with socialized medicine pay a fraction of what America does for better health outcomes.
Yes let’s have “5 Year Plans” with centralized control instead of the free market, what could possibly go wrong? If only we had a large country that tried that and failed miserably to see what could go wrong.
We don't have the free market. We've never had the free market. Every economy has always been under some degree of regulation and centralized control simply by virtue of existing within the context of a society and government that enforces laws and levies taxes.
The government has never controlled the means of production for the most part except for “natural monopolies” like utilities, cable etc where everyone should be served and it doesn’t make sense to try to have two companies building out infrastructure
They don't need to control the means of production. Simply provide minimum necessary housing, nutrition, and medical care. No one should starve to death, die of preventable illness because they can't afford care, or end up homeless in the United States. It's degrading to the basic dignity of our country.
Or, hear me out, we could socialize health care and tax the rich rapists that are currently running the country to end poverty in the richest country in the world.
The government decides when we can retire and they help us out. You can stop working today if you want, Government shouldn't pay you for it for no reason. Your duty as a citizen is to work and build your nation, eventually the government pays back that service with benefits.
This isn't something the government gives you. It is something they have confiscated and held on to.
> Your duty as a citizen is to work and build your nation
What about the duty of the trust fund babies and idle wealthy? What about the duty of the capital owners? Why is the retirement age going up instead of down as productivity increases?
Not for the majority of retirement savings in the US, where Social Security makes up only about 25%.
In the case of 401(k)s/DC plans and private pensions/DB plans, the government allowed savings without "confiscation," i.e. immediate taxation. They gave us the benefit of deferred taxation if you wait until retirement age.
They get Social Security and Medicare, which while insufficient for many these days is a lot more than they would have gotten 100 years ago.
No one is going to argue that the system is perfect or can't be improved. Good people get screwed over all the time and always will, the most we can try to do is minimize that population.
because lifespans are increasing much more, people are outliving what they used to and are using a lot more money in retirement than they used to. Old people used to sit in houses and watch grandkids, now they're flying to foreign countries for fun.
These days I wonder about that duty I have. It sure felt obligatory some time ago. I thought of myself as a patriot and that the rule of law was something we we should be proud of. A country whose own anthem spoke of "liberty and justice for all".
The current trajectory makes my question a lot of things, including this whole "government pays back that service with benefits" as it will be some time before I ever see a penny of SSI.
A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.
A lot of that here in the US is because we've lost the will to participate in the systems that establish these things. We leave that to other people, and those other people represent our interests poorly. The people in a democracy take a really long time to effect change. It can be a life's work for some people. But the premise is that if we can find common ground we can eventually see some of our ideas take shape. That does still work here, but we have to actually have real conversations with each other that respect each others' differences to get anywhere.
After a bit it just comes down to motivation. Who wants to win more: 1. Someone who has everyone's best interests at heart so is unwilling to really run against anyone and is trying to balance out support for multiple conflicting groups all while learning the landscape and job or 2. Someone who knows they can use the position to get tens of millions of dollars, and are supported by a few large groups similarly motivated? This is how you get people like Va Lecia Adams Kellum and Karen Bass.
> A lot of our taxes in this country seem like a giant waste or are grossly inefficient at best.
It's our duty to elect people who use tax dollars wisely and to vote out officials who neglect their responsibility to the people and use tax money to enrich themselves and anyone else willing to bribe them. Our government is filled with grifters because we've failed to hold them meaningfully accountable for robbing us and failing to provide the benefits we're funding.
Many of the grifters in government have been working hard to make it difficult to hold them accountable. They disenfranchise voters, they keep us afraid and our futures uncertain, they collude against efforts to reform the system they've established for their own benefit.
Government was never going to just let us have "liberty and justice for all" the job was always on "we the people" to insist on it. We can't just pay taxes and expect everything to work out. We have to use the democracy we have to force the government to work for us and not just for themselves. If we've reached a point where that's no longer possible then it's our duty to "refresh the tree of liberty" until we have a government that works for us.
Psychologically the deterioration of we the people's power happens at an even more basic level when children are taught to resolve their conflicts by seeking out an adult.
I wouldn't mind taxes if everyone paid their fair share and it went to improving the lives of everyone instead of the wealthy few. We live in the most productive times per capita that have ever existed. Why do we need to scrimp and save to buy food while the number of billionaires continues to climb?
There is no "we" and has never been. Anybody who talks to you about "we" or "us" or your "duty" is just seeking to exploit you, hoping that you're dumb enough to fall for it.
There is in fact a we. It's just not based on race, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, or sexuality. "We" are the ones who create and work for a living instead of living off the backs of others. "They" are immensely wealthy oligarchs that exploit us using their ownership of land, buildings, communication networks and machines we need to survive.
I live off your back yet am nowhere close to immensely wealthy. I know it's en-vogue to hate on shiny billionaires but reality is a lot less glamorous. It's just lazy gov workers not getting much done, then hiring more people to try to cover their work. By the millions.
Haha and yours sounds like the lies spread by communists/unions/etc attempting to wrest power from anyone who has it now. Your view leaves a lot of gaps. My view is easily verifiable by almost anyone working (barely) and getting paid by taxes. Or second and third parties getting that sweet, easy gov $$. It's also inclusive of your billionaires- many get money from the gov or gov policies too.
Your media platforms may be owned by the shiny billionaires, but the laws they adhere to are created and enforced by mobs of average 10-4 workers.
This question cannot be asked in good faith on a user board. It requires an 800 pages book on politics, history, philosophy, economics to be properly answerered and it would barely scratch the surface.
You might as well ask similar questions about most basic laws and concepts behind how western societies work.
We should each ask ourselves such questions and review our view on them from time to time during our life because they're important, but mostly by doing our own research and self study. But asking point-blank strangers such a vague question is putting an unfair burden on them.
There's maybe a few hundred people worldwide who could casually drop a proper answer to your question while casually browsing hn.
I believe it'd be more fair to start answering your own question to show how far you are in your intellectual journey on that topic.
My own answer is this. We have created a system of exploitation where we extract value from people's labor and transfer it to an oligarchicy that is slowly increasing in power. Governments are captured by that ruling class and are unwilling to do anything that threatens them. In addition, they are slowly reducing the rights and social mobility of the middle and lower class in order to expand the power and capital of the oligarchy.
Any money that is possessed by the working classes is then taxed in the form of increased living expenses or directly by the government until they can barely afford the necessities that allow them to continue working. Once they are no longer able to do so, they are discarded and allowed to die of preventable illness, starvation, drug use or exposure.
Social security is an entitlement. They have taken money from your paycheck to fund it. In fact, they have taken more from your paycheck than they will pay back to you in order to pay for an aging population. The extra goes to bonds which the government then uses to reduce inflation when they decide to invade random countries or bail out a bank.
Now, why does the government get to decide when I retire with my own money?
Generally about 1 accident per 217k miles. Which still means that Tesla is having accidents at a 4x rate. However, there may be underreporting and that could be the source of the difference. Also, the safety drivers may have prevented a lot of accidents too.
Large fleet operators tend to self insure rather than having traditional auto insurance for what it's worth.
If you have a large fleet, say getting in 5-10 accidents a year, you can't buy a policy that's going to consistently pay out more than the premium, at least not one that the insurance company will be willing to renew. So economically it makes sense to set that money aside and pay out directly, perhaps covering disastrous losses with some kind of policy.
Always comes up but think it's worth repeating: if he's not there the stock will take a massive haircut and no Tesla investor wants that regardless of whether it would improve Tesla's car sales or its self-driving. Elon is the stock price for the most part. And just to muse on the current reason, it's not Optimus or self driving, but an eventual merger with SpaceX. My very-not-hot take is that they'll merge within months of the SpaceX IPO. A lot of folks say it ain't happening, but I think that's entirely dependent on how well Elon and Trump are getting along at the moment the merger is proposed (i.e., whether Trump gives his blessing in advance of any announcement).
Tesla's only chance at this point is government money. Consumers just aren't buying. It doesn't help that Elon was heavily involved with Epstein and is constantly spouting white nationalist propaganda on X. This is on top of his gaffe with "My Heart Goes Out to You". Only a certain type of consumer is going to buy from a company like that.
What form would those funds take? I would agree that the government could pull one lever that would cause Tesla's sales to spike and that would be reintroducing the ev credit. To really juice them they'd have to reintroduce and increase it. I don't think there's another lever they have at their disposal that would do anything material. The government buying a bunch of vehicles for a single or multiple departments wouldn't move the needle. Basically you have to incentivize the masses to purchase. Of course none of that would happen with the current admin and congress. EV's are anathema to the platform.
As an aside, the situation at Tesla sure is getting stranger. I don't know if it was yesterday or earlier in the week, but Elon saying that at least one Cybercab will be sold to a "consumer" before the end of '26 for under $30k makes no sense (yeah yeah promises promises). But wasn't the idea that Tesla would control the fleet? Why would they sell a person a Cybercab to operate as a taxi? That would mean that there's profit to be had by that buyer and so why the heck wouldn't Tesla just keep that profit for itself and run the entire operation? Some kind of balance sheet gimmick? Offloading the insurance risk to someone else?
Maybe someone reading this long-ass reply will clue me in. And I get it the majority of the folks these days think it's all vaporware, but doesn't the vaporware at least have to make some sense?
There are a couple different schemes that are used to distribute taxpayer money to cronies. The most common are defense contracts for stuff like the proverbial $1000 hammers and such. There are also infrastructure deals, energy deals, subsidies, and bailouts. I know Musk was pushing for defense contracts earlier but they mostly fell through.
> That would mean that there's profit to be had by that buyer and so why the heck wouldn't Tesla just keep that profit for itself and run the entire operation?
I suspect this is because they have less confidence in the ability of the cab to pay for itself and would rather offload that financial risk on the buyer.
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