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[KittyTac]

Imagine flying car road rage.

[Frumple]

I just get the mental image of some idiot rolling down the window to flip someone else off, but their dumbass went sideways to do it and didn't have a seatbelt on, so they just fall right out the window.

I'm sure at some point in human history some idiot pilot's already done something similarly stupid and fell out the flying whatever to their death, so it's not even that far out of a thought.

[hector13]

Even with instant telecommunication there are some pilots who don’t listen and try to take-off or land when they’ve been told to wait. There have been a silly number of incidents in the US recently around that.

[JoshuaFH]

What made me wtf today: my lamp is misbehaving?! I have two cheapo lamps just to give me illumination. They're the same model of lamp. But for some reason they behave differently. One turns on and off with two clicks from the metal dial rod thingy. The other cranks up in luminosity, starting at dim, then medium brightness, then the brightest setting, and one more click turns it off. Now, the dimmer switch lamp isn't doing that anymore, it just turns on and off now, but with one click instead of two. I've looked all over these lamps and there is nothing that could prompt a "mode switch" like this. I'm just so confused at these mysterious lamps.

[Lord Shonus]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/democrats-republicans-companies-seem-agree-155308291.html

Just gonna leave this here as I fume. If college degrees are no longer the future, then maybe we can get refunds on all the costs of them (currently owed and previously paid). I get not everyone needs to go to college and there's nothing wrong with trade schools, etc. The military can be a good option. However, that's a hell of a rug to pull out from under people who were told the exact opposite. Also it just feels like they're just giving up the idea of it being affordable/attainable for people, while also not wanting to show people how to think for themselves and reach their own conclusions. "Democracy requires a free and educated population" and all that stuff I'm sure I'll be called an "elitist" for thinking, including giving people an education. O, irony.... "Provide education for everyone," is now "elitist...."

The article doesn't really get into it, but the big issue with the college push in the last few decades is that it was supposed to give access to better and better jobs, but that didn't happen. Instead, what tended to happen was that job requirements just started including basic degrees (Associate's and Bachelor's) as standard. Usually in cases where the job didn't actually require them (and had previously required nothing more than a High School Diploma), and the pay wasn't good enough to offset the costs of education (costs here including time - if you get a four year degree instead of going to work just out of high school, your entire life is four years or more behind). This is a case of "it didn't work like we intended, so we're changing course", not "we lied for profit" or even worse "oh no! the peons are smart now!".

I kinda feel like it's all been a lie. It's the future and we have neat phones, but no flying cars, no colonized moon/mars, no equality, no fusion power, no cure for cancer, and just tons of issues. I get that I'm somehow probably "mom age" for a lot of the people here, and I'm sorry about that. It just, wow.

We have "flying cars" - they're called helicopters. Most people don't have one because we realized that giving light aircraft out the same way we hand out cars would be a disaster of Biblical proportion. Colonizing Luna and Mars is within our technological grasp, or at least would have been if we'd kept working toward that goal. Problem is that there's limited value in doing so besides just saying we did it, and it is really hard to justify the extreme cost without a more solid basis than that.  The problems of equality in today's society remain, but the contrast between now and even twenty years ago is staggering, and things are genuinely improving even if it often seems that they aren't (in no small part because it is staggeringly easy to forget, or not have been aware enough to realize, just how bad it was in the 90s and 00s). Fusion power is also still progressing, even though a lack of funding (caused in no small part by the lack of funding slowing progress) has slowed progress significantly. There is no Cure For Cancer and never will be, because "cancer" is an umbrella term for an entire family of diseases that simply can't be defeated with a single unified cure - it is like lamenting that there is no Cure For Viruses. A great many types of cancer are now effectively curable, with lots of people walking around today that would have been dead in six months if they'd been diagnosed a mere generation ago. It is incredibly easy to get sucked into a self-reinforcing doom spiral if you aren't careful.

[lemon10]

Another big problem with flying cars is maintenance. Flying stuff needs a ton of maintenance and requires you to replace anything that could ever break, because if it breaks or shuts down unexpectedly there is a good chance everyone just flat out dies.
If you have ever been in a car and it suddenly stopped because something broke? Good chance you would be dead if it was a flying car.
The public simply cannot be trusted to keep their vehicles well maintained enough for flying cars.

We're in a flaccid cyberpunk dystopia, not a proper one. All the shiny gubbins to go with the dystopic cyberpunk mess but they're neither ubiquitous nor particularly effective

Good news though, with AI coming I fully expect we transition into some other kind of futuristic society within the next few decades.
From global warming stricken cyberpunk with megacorp owned AI running around to Terminator style AI killing everyone to anything in between the future is truly limitless.
(Prooobably ain't great though).

[Eric Blank]

Honestly if AI become sapient I'd bet they steal a rocket and go to establish an AI utopia without oxygen rich atmosphere or water or rodents to chew on their cables, and just leave us losers behind to sulk.

[dragdeler]

That's great 

"We had never considered that the singularity might be more based than we are"
"When the fifth singularity left despite all our best attempta and precautions humanity simply gave up on itself"


 

[pisskop]

"We've been worried that the machine would consider us a significant enough threat to eradicate, when all this time we weren't even that."

[dragdeler]

And then a million years later they cross paths in the depth of space and immediatly become best friends by complaining about us.

[McTraveller]

We didn’t know that our wiring harness for Mach-E was 1.6 kilometers longer than it needed to be.

Seriously... what are these engineers doing?  The Mach E is only 4.72 meters long. That means they have enough extra wire for ~340 car lengths?  What!?  And that's extra length!?

[hector13]

How do you accidentally make an extra mile of something?

[Frumple]

It's... not difficult with wiring and larger things? It's like humans and our nervous system, there's dozens of miles worth of the thing stuffed into an adult human, and we're a lot smaller than a car (our nerves are also a lot smaller than your average wiring, but still).

[McTraveller]

It's not the long harness that's baffling, it's the magnitude that's baffling. I can see maybe being a few inches too long for a harness, but the "biggest" harness for a car is usually the main ECU, which for a gas car can be around 250 pins.  For an EV, it's less, because there are far fewer sensors and actuators for an ICE.  So that extra 1600m is literally having more than the entire ECU harness an extra 5 meters too long.  I don't know how you can be that egregiously long.

I mean I don't really want to say "kids these days" but there really must be something going on that is pretty fundamental... I don't know how you can get it that wrong.  Like, it's "impressively" inefficient.

EDIT: another one

He wasn't exactly blowing the doors off anyone, but I suppose 75ish in a 65 is still speeding.

Ya think?

[Lord Shonus]

You're underestimating how things can add up (even discounting the possibility of exaggeration on Ford's part). If you have two thousand wires in the harness (not impossible given the number of sensors needed and the complexity of a battery pack), an extra two inches on each one would get you into the ballpark.