Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

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@ThanosReXXX @Eel Nah, my gaming PC knowledge is a decade out of date more or less, as all the PC gaming enthusiasts like to point out "it's so much different now, everything is so plug and play and doesn't go obsolete the moment you buy it". They may be right, but I'm used to the nightmares of the past so much that it's hard to leave that behind.

It's not that I don't build machines from time to time but they're more on the business front - production workstations and servers and the like, so it's not quite "gaming" grade (which also skews my price perception because everyone tells me you can build gaming rigs so "cheap" these days, and I'm used to pricing for only SLC SSDs, ECC memory, etc needed in mission critical business environments....which is all $$$

@Heavyarms55 Restarting regularly isn't "important" - it used to be important back when windows was really really (really) broken. Good OSes can run years without restarting and be just fine. Modern windows isn't close to the "good" OSes, but it should be able to survive quite some time without reboots. The whole automatic reboot/patch system is just depressing....it's like 1998 on a timer.

And yeah, agreed about the dystopian issues. The other thing I find remarkable is the 1984 way we resolve problems by changing the definition so that it's no longer a problem. Case in point the recent "surge" in employment that wiped away so much of the unemployment caused by the shutdowns. Things still continue to close left and right, but unemployment is just no longer a problem because we had the biggest single month hiring spree ever! Even the economists are shocked and didn't expect that level of recovery! What recovery? Things are still closing and other things tell us most of the jobs, and especially the lower level jobs are gone and never coming back....... So how did they fix that? Everyone driving 5 hours a week for Instacart, using their own car and gas for minimum wage, and likely making $-0.50 per hour by the time all is said and done with wear and tear and gas, and still couldn't afford to pay their bills, have healthcare, or really eat..........now count as employed! Funny how the problem goes away if you define it away! Everything is fine now! Everyone works at least an hour and makes all of a buck a month....go back to your yacht, the worries are over.

And back on the public transit issue, the stigma is probably the bigger issue. You hear the "people don't like to depend on others here, people like doing things for themself" mantra all the time. No they don't. Everyone hires everyone to do services for them. Society broke down when people couldn't pay landscaper to do their lawns, nannies to raise their kids, housekeepers to maintain their houses, and waiters to bring them their meals, and beauticians to groom their nails and hair. Americans haven't cared about self sufficiency in decades and eagerly trade all self sufficiency for convenience at every last opportunity. But suddenly with transit they care about self sufficiency rather than paying someone else to do it? Huh? Bull.

It's largely about impatience. Americans hate waiting. For anything. Ever. At all. I want it RIGHT NOW. They get in their car RIGHT NOW, they go directly where they're going RIGHT NOW, and they don't wait in traffic, they speed, get into the shoulder and bypass the entire line of traffic for 3/4 mile, they get into the oncoming lane and zip around cars. Nothing's gonna' slow them down, because they have their freedom, and the rules never catch anyone! The world exists for ME and I'll get whatever I want however I want! If they followed the rules, it would be rather inconvenient. But nobody follows rules here. Rules are suggestions. Suggestions for people who aren't me.

Trains and buses involve waiting and lines, and schedules. Ain't got time for that.

And yeah, beyond that is the stigma factor. Or rather, the classist factor. Luxury cars are for the luxurious. Regular cars became a symbol of the middle class (once upon a time such a thing existed, it's true! There used to be a broad swath of people between Senior Corporate Vice President of International Expansion, and the overnight "sanitation professional" and instacart driver.) Transit....is for the poor. And America truly hates the poor. Failures. The genetically inferior. The worthless. Some like to make it a race issue "white people hate all other people".....but they pretend it's a race issue to camouflage the real issue: All people hate anyone economically beneath their own position. Though when you look at the status of transit here......there's some truth to that. When it was designated as "for the poor" it became "for the poor". And it acts accordingly. In public transit here are the poor, the insane, the drunk, the strung out, "not quite right", disproportionately represented. Urine, discarded diapers filled with feces, disposed food containers are littered all about most transit vehicles here. You're not going to find that in most other industrial countries. Transit tends to pass through some of the gangland ghettos regularly, and some of the lines have been infamous for being grounds for gang/turf wars and the like. Back in the 70's one of the rail lines was famous for people ending up dead or beaten to a pulp for being on it....that's improved somewhat now with new security measures, but that's not a stigma that goes away easy and, really it's only somewhat improved. Those areas it passes through look more like you'd picture in Somalia or...well, Brazil. So when any bus or train is automatically the atmosphere of the dankest ghettos...people aren't exactly enthusiastic for it. But on the other hand people seem to miss the ridiculous death rate on the roads. But they don't need to worry about that because that's those OTHER people that aren't good at it. I'M perfect....I'll be fine.

Thus why I think automated cars are MUCH more likely to be the next step instead of transit. Transit is dead in this country, nothing was going to revive it before, and after this plague, nothing will revive it ever. It's not ever going to happen.

And yet the roads are so congested they make no sense anymore either. Out in Michigan maybe it's one thing...but with the density on the coasts here? Places that took 15 minutes to get to 30 years ago now take 45 min to an hour spent in constant frustration and dodging ever more tightly packed spaces of moving cars. They made the roads accomodate more cars in the past few hears? How? They didn't build new roads....they took the same 2 lane road and repainted the lines to make it 3 lanes where the cars just barely scrape past each other with zero wobble room.....at "55mph" which means most of them are going 70+ if it's open but that's rare because normally it moves at 15 with backups through 3 lights of permagridlock.

Just in the past 10 years the number of cars have tripled here. I thought it was bad before...now it's an unrelenting torment. And if you're not someone that's comfortable with it that's an hour spent with your pulse pounding high adrenaline, hyperventilating. By the time you get there and back you're utterly broken. And then you have to do it again. Until that gets replaced by something, as far as I'm concerned, I'm not actually alive...this isn't life....it's a daily repeating nightmare that never ends.

Still I'm counting on China leading the way here with automation. We do whatever China does at this point, and they've put all their chips in that basket...redesigning the cities to accommodate it (no parking lots...at all!) And with the surge in car use post COVID, you know China will accelerate the change to automation now out of necessity (and agenda advancement)....so what they do....we follow in too. So maybe it will happen soon. Add in the boom in delivery demand and the absurd price of it..... maybe it will accelerate. Sure it'll be another 30M jobs gone. But they can wash windows at recharge stations for 3 hours a week for $9 an hour.....then we'll have 100% employment again!

Speaking of....no, the pool money won't work either. Politicians, the people drawn to it, easily find the people that want to pay them to do a thing...and the people that want to pay can more easily find them. This is of course where the original idea of the US system made sense. Instead of trying to find a way to prevent politicians from becoming corrupt, it assumes that politicians are always corrupt and created the idea of bottle necking them within themselves so their self ambition will prevent them from doing anything as they fight each other unless it's something so commonly agreed apon they approve it. Congress is SUPPOSED to be stalled by design to curb politicians.

What went wrong was the creation of the two party system that it's simply two behemoth organizations splitting that political power rather than numerous politicians. Individual politicans don't matter...they're just employees of the party. And when business got so big it owned the parties....it owned policy as well. Meaning two parties are really just one party....or rather, two fronts working for the same bosses.

The only way to fix it is to destroy it and rebuild it from scratch. Which....is what the whole point of the outcome of the last election was....a wrecking ball sent to destroy it who inexplicably tried to fix it instead. So even that failed. Though more to the point, part of the stupidity there is assuming the executive branch wields any kind of actual power or matters very much at all. It doesn't. Nor was it even designed to. It's a figurehead and an administrator, and a diplomat, and a safety pin on the legislative, and nothing more. The legislative has the actual power....and nobody pays attention to them beyond the fact that every survey indicates that far more people hate them than even the president....that's the one thing the American public agrees on. EVERYONE hate's congress, no matter what party leads it. Which is funny because congress is the actual government......The 3 branches are co-equal but only the legislative has the real governing role. So everyone agrees on at least that....but everyone agrees for conflicting reasons...