But if it makes you feel safer, enjoy your bliss. I just hope for everyone’s sake you focus on steering the car to safety instead of pulling the parking brake if you ever lose control of a car.

If this is your version of “impersonal”, you need to recalibrate.

And no, I’m not wrong. Total brake failure still happens, and a separate system is still important.

Uhh, master cylinder failing would result in all brakes failing. Things these days are internally partitioned so that front and back are separated, and thus complete failure is unlikely, but still possible. It used to be all in one, and the e-brake is very, very important in vintage cars because of it. Less so now, but there was no good reason to change it besides manufacturing cost.

You’re making an awful lot of assumptions on my driving skill based on (checks notes) wanting a redundant system.

Yeah, it’s been pretty common the last few years. My wife’s 2021 Mini does it.

Yes, it is. The fact that it’s often considered a “parking” brake doesn’t change things.

If the hydraulic lines spring a leak or the master cylinder fails, the mechanical line from the e-brake is still functional.

That’s more a statement against car ownership in general. Repairs are going to happen. Making the e-brake into a switch that activates solenoids by way of a CAN bus to microcontrollers doesn’t change that. If anything, it’s likely even more expensive.

I just did this on my 2011 Miata. It has about 50k miles on it. Driven in Wisconsin, and while I’ve mostly kept it off winter roads, it’s inevitably going to have more corrosion than an equivalent car kept in a warmer/dryer climate.

$600 for the repair. Given how long it lasted, I don’t consider that too crazy.

Emergency brakes should be a handle that pulls a mechanical cable that directly actuates the rear brakes. Simple and reliable, like you would want in an emergency.

Maybe they should, like, not make them look like candy bags. Thanks, capitalism, for ruining weed before it’s 100% legal.

Ziploc, the OG name brand, seems about the same as ever. The trouble is in thousands of knockoffs for niche uses. They haven’t benefited from decades of tweaking the design to be strong enough, but not too strong, and easy to get back together.

Legal weed bags are the worst.

I’m pretty sure it’s AI generated. Hands don’t look crazy, but there’s still a plasticy look to everything, especially skin.

Ham radio. The license is now just a multiple choice quiz–no morse code needed. There are apps that go through the questions in a flashcard style, and if you go through that for 30 minutes a day for a month, you’ll pass no problem.

Entry level radios have gotten cheap, too. $25 Bafangs are the butt of jokes around ham radio, and yet everyone seems to have at least one. The older models had harmonic transmission issues that violated FCC requirements, but there’s newer ones that clean it up and cost about the same.

Just can’t get away from that Yahwist propaganda.

My response to the 10 fingers thing is that it’s easier to do certain calculations in your head. A lot of those calculations are larger than 10, anyway, so your fingers don’t help.

A third of 24 is 8. A third of 60 is 20. It becomes second nature after a while.

One place I used this a lot was 40k. In between rolls, I grouped my dice into sets of 4. When the next roll called for 12 dice, I quickly pick up 3 sets. If it’s 10, pick up two sets plus two dice from a third set. Made it really quick to count. At least for the base rolls, a lot of the stats in 40k tend to work in multiples of 4, so this worked out.

Not 0K water, and therefore, it’s hot.

Until you have a cat and learn the hard way to do the opposite.

Relatively speaking, perhaps. In practice, modern cars are pretty damn reliable, at least mechanically. Tons of cars end up in the junkyard with perfectly working engines.

I can’t seem to find the reference now, but there are some studies out there showing every single brand is more reliable now than the best brand 20 years ago.

It’s almost like forcing a majority of the population to drive a 2 ton vehicle at over 60mph was a bad idea that has no real fix. Maybe we should make some changes so cars aren’t the default mode of transportation anymore?

Probably fine. Nissan’s problem isn’t reliability so much as being boring and outdated.

There’s some EVs that are integrating the battery into the frame in order to save weight. And it does save weight, but there’s no way to replace the battery.

These aren’t in a lab. They’re being manufactured right now.

There’s a toxic positivity in battery tech news. So many things only end up being practical in a lab, but the news headlines sensationalizes every single one. Its led people to believe that no advancements are coming. But the truth is that batteries improve 5-8% in kwh/kg per year, and that compounds over time to some real gains.