I have the perfect story for this.

About a decade ago I attended a week-long reliability training held by ASQ (the American Society for Quality). One day heading back to my hotel room I shared an elevator with the then-president-chairman of ASQ.

He was chatting about airliner safety, and how the engineers would do things like test/measure/calculate to find the necessary thickness of a part, and then just triple it for safety because they could. He said he'd never hesitate to ride a commercial airliner.

He then said he would never ride in a helicopter as long as he lived, lol.

It's fun to imagine an opposite world where everybody has EVs and other more efficient forms of transit, and then industry wants to introduce ICE vehicles to the market.

You fill it with flammable liquid poison and it shoots gaseous poison out the back while it's running, and nobody can refuel at home, and it's immensely more mechanically complex, but at least it's quick to fill with fuel at the fuel store! Just try not to inhale the poisonous explosive fumes or spill the poisonous volatile liquid on yourself while you do it.

Price aside, as somebody who has gotten pretty good at ignoring my old normal slab smart phone, this might only make sense for nostalgia and conversation starter reasons.

Now if I could force this thing upon other people in my life who cannot separate their eyes from their doom-screen, we'd be on to something!

I have experienced the reality behind this comment so deeply in the past year.

I have been building a lot of stuff recently, and in 2026 alone I have made several large Home Depot lumber runs.

It's always me in my old shorts & t-shirt, loading like 2 dozen 2x4s or 4x4s or plywood into either my little mazda3 sedan or the family SUV my wife drives that has a mix of "cute" and "sassy feminist" stickers all over the back. All around me are trumpy-looking chuds in their pristine business casual work clothes carrying a single little bag or mailbox post to their also-pristine emotional support trucks.

And I'm not faulting them generally for clean clothes and nice cars. I'm a software engineer with a desk job, and I am way overdue for a fun new car that won't even fit lumber. But I am way way way over the stupid culture in this country where having a good job makes one a valid human and having a big vroom vroom truck makes one a legit rugged big strong boy.

This feels like a game of, all together now, "Which Evil Is It??"

Is it because they are abusive pedophiles who want fodder for their kind, or is it because they are evil capitalists who want fodder for their factories?

Por que no los dos, am I right?

Wait, have we just been living inside the worst possible Star Trek episode this whole time?

I could see a legal-ish argument that Level 2 systems with a human accountable should do what the human instructs it to do, and that level 3+ systems with the machine and its creators accountable will strictly follow the law when it is able to.

But I could also see more practical safety arguments that when surrounded by traffic the autonomous vehicle should be able to at least match the speed of traffic in the slow lane, otherwise it creates a hazard. Then I'd look forward to the videos of people tricking the cat into driving 3x the speed limit through a school zone.

I'm gonna guess that most F-150 drivers don't even know that microplastics exist and don't give a shit about pollution.

But also, you can still make the biogas trucks worse if you make them even heavier than they already are.

I react to cilantro roughly like Dracula reacts to the midday sun, and ranch dressing tastes good to me.

My eyes almost rolled all the way out of my head reading this article. The dude is from IRAN, and this blindsided them.

To be clear, it sounds like this dude is a loving family man and member of the community, and he did not deserve this. And even if he was a scumbag, we don't use secret police to deal with scumbags.

But sometimes it hurts to have the depth of some people's oblivious ignorance revealed so starkly. Some other comments have already pointed out the stupid "golly I think there might be bad people on the left AND the right!" conclusion at the end of the article. But here's another gem from in the middle:

“My husband himself, even being from Iran, supported Trump, his immigration policies, and understood he was trying to protect the American people and was praying he helped free the Iranian people,” Gardner told Newsweek.

These people look at an elderly hateful narcissist of a grifter and parasite, and hear his messages of hate and division and exclusion, and apparently the image formed in their dusty brains is Captain Fucking Planet!

Premeditated whataboutism. Because that’s a great use of resources to benefit the country.

Hello, friends in civilized lands, especially those of you who work at financial institutions...

Some of us in the states are excited to watch you do some damage to the entrenched middlemen that have been skimming from all of us for so long. Please do consider letting us sign up for the new stuff. Our money is still worth something, for now!

Notice the implied and unquestioned assumption that “life goals” means accumulating resources and not building relationships or contributing to society. In fact, it’s expected that personal relationships and societal responsibilities shall be neglected in the quest for resources.

Too bad there had to be an argument or disagreement…

…about whether the victim(s) crying over their dead dog in front of their burned down house deserved to live?

I wonder what the chances are that the fire, the dog skull, and the murder were all the same shithead.

Wow, this is really impressive y'all!

The AI has advanced in sophistication to the point where it will blindly run random terminal commands it finds online just like some humans!

I wonder if it knows how to remove the french language package.

I am reminded of that quote along the lines of “it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” I did everything right, and had a more than adequate emergency fund.

But then my house vaporized that emergency fund… and only then did COVID happen and I lost my job twice. So that’s roughly three “holy shit thank god we saved for a rainy day” events in three years.

I’m sure I will be in “just save money” mode some day in the future. Lots of shit left to clean up right now though.

you're not gonna believe this...

It amuses me to no end how here on Lemmy, with our concentration of computer nerd types, absolutely HATES touch screens in cars.

But to be fair, I think everybody who reviews cars says they hate them too.

Invasion of privacy is a very big deal to our legal system when it is the rich peoples’ big number papers.

OR, they’ve already been through therapy and found some decent medication, and are keenly aware that personally enjoyable hobbies are an essential part of self care.

Not that I know anything about that.

• throws food into back yard koi pond *