There was a time when everyone had common sense

Torpedo juice.

They drank anything that would get them intoxicated

If you want to get technical it was largely folks who were adults during the regan presidency who trump in.

Trump is a symptom of a disease that Reagan was the harbinger of. Without Reagan and all that followed after him, you do not get a Trump presidency.

My generation wasn't much of his support but great job with the "voters who voted against this are also to blame" bullshit!

If I’m not gonna quickly form an opinion on something I just saw for the first time and immediately proclaim it to millions of strangers in a way it can never be deleted, then what’s the point?

The Xbox 360 was designed to be as annoying to take apart as possible, possibly to hide the cheap components that lead to the red ring of death…

actually, this was probably to fit it into the very weird and particular form factor that microsoft wanted it to fit in.

The red ring of death issue was actually due to faulty chip manufacturing, rather than bad cooling, it was an inevitable flaw due to manufacturing defects, rather than design failures. The heating and cooling cycles just greatly exaggerated the effect of the problem, that's why it's so closely linked.

Also you could've mentioned the update fuses in the CPU, IIRC there are fuses that are blown when the system updates, to prevent you from going back, no matter what you do.

I mean I do agree with you. Planned obsolescence and whatnot is very real.

it's complicated, a good example, actually probably the ideal example, of planned obsolescence is airpods. Designed to not be repaired, thrown away, and then replaced.

It can also apply to things like "lifetime" designed products, you may design something to mechanically wear out, before it needs to be maintained, or perhaps, require no maintenance, until you need to replace it. It's harder to say whether this is strictly planned obsolescence, or just cost cutting engineering, which in the long run, probably doesn't change much.

i think the most semantically accurate version of this would be releasing a product that is 100% good, and then a year later releasing a product that is 200% good, surpassing and replacing the previous product entirely, removing the previous product from the product line up, and only supporting the most recent product. I.E. it's planned to become obsolete, shortly into the future.

Vehicles are also a weird market segment, they've gotten considerably more reliable since the early days of the automotive industry, they've gotten significantly more comfortable, they've gotten significantly more safe. They've also gotten several orders of magnitude more complicated since than as well. To deal with the aforementioned advances. Though there have been a lot of issues in recent manufacturing leading to parts that are just, bad.

You’re correct.

Also, cars became pointless after they removed distributors.

I mean, I could absolutely imagine someone doing this. They're probably a well meaning person, but probably not of great intelligence. They're driving through the desert one day, absolutely thirsty. They're desperate for a drink, about to pass out. Then they remember in their delerium - "Wait! There's some water in the car's battery! I could drink some of that and be fine! I'll just drain it while the car is running (so I don't have to restart it), keep the engine running, and be able to make it to the next town. My God, I'm a genius. I'm saved!" They then proceed, in the manner of unique creativity only the ignorant possess, to find a way to drain the fluid from the battery of a running car engine. And they have a big old swig of that battery water.

What would be required for this? All that it would take is for someone to just have very poor chemistry knowledge. Someone sees a fluid that looks like water, and they assume it's water. Maybe they figure a car battery works like a potato battery and there's just water in the cell. Even if the "water" is clearly foul, maybe someone would assume it's just dirty water, but still water. (As in, not an acid.)

Or, maybe they even know it's not something you should regularly drink. They know there's some fluid called "battery acid" in the battery. But they also know that soda is acidic, and that is safe to drink. So maybe battery acid is OK in small amounts? Just how strong does an acid have to be before you can't safely drink it? Maybe they could just try a small quantity, maybe about a spoonful? Surely that would be fine....

Those on the bottom 10% of the IQ distribution don't deserve to die. Those who failed high school chem don't deserve to drink battery acid.

When planning public health or public safety interventions, you have to balance between cost and effectiveness. For example, imagine some new car widget that will increase automobile safety. You're a regulator trying to decide whether to mandate them on all new vehicles. You run the numbers; you want to balance the increased vehicle price against the projected lives saved. You run the numbers and find that this will cost $1 billion per life saved. Probably not worth mandating them. It's not that those lives aren't worth saving, but there are more cost effective ways to save lives. We could tax everyone the same money they would spend buying these devices, and then use this money to expand Medicare eligibility. Or we could mandate some other vehicle safety device. The number of lives saved is always balanced against the cost of an intervention. The value of a life is infinite; the number of dollars available to save lives is finite.

But printing on a battery? The manufacturers already print a labels on them. It costs tiny fractions of a penny per battery to add the safety warnings. Even if it only prevents a handful of deaths or serious injuries over a decade, the cost is so low we might as well do it. There's something like 14 million new vehicles sold in the US each year. Imagine over ten years that's 140 million vehicles. Let's say it costs a penny to include a warning label on each battery. That's a cost of $1.4 million over an entire decade.

I would say in that case, if even a single life is spared over that decade, if only a single living person is saved from the reaper...Then it is worth it. Hell, that's probably even a fair amount to prevent a life-altering injury. If even one person per decade is stupid enough to drink battery acid, and this warning will prevent it, then it is worth doing!

As a whole, they def. do last longer. I can look on FB Marketplace right now and find cars that are in fairly good, operational condition with 250,000 miles. The issues you're talking about aren't the kind of major mechanical things that become improbably expensive to repair, e.g., a broken timing chain with high interference valves & cylinders. Although yeah, replacing a main wiring harness on a car is a PITA and very expensive unless you can find a functional used one on eBay.

Also, there's not great empirical evidence that the soy-based insulation is significantly worse than its petroleum based counterpart. There's a ton of anecdotal claims about it attracting rodents, but no direct evidence AFAIK. The class-action lawsuits over rodent damage have been dismissed. And, TBF, I've had older cars that had wiring chewed by mice. Part of the difference with newer cars seems to be that there's just more wiring packed into smaller areas, areas that look like great nests for rodents; you didn't see that kind of wiring density 20 years ago.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide

This is an established cool community ran resource for all kinds of schematics, repairs, and breakdowns of all kinds of devices for manufacturers that suck at telling you how to fix their stuff.

They where the same thing. That's the point.

It's time to resurrect the corolla in the backyard.

I mean, I'm pretty sure cars' lifespans have generally increased over the years, despite not being able to easily tweak valves or what have you. So many older cars don't have a 6th digit on the odometer because it was so common for a car to die after about 100,000 miles anyway. Now you might hit some issues, but that kind of mileage is basically your car's equivalent of a person's 40th birthday.

The keyword is right there: 97. Anything after ~2014 and it's a mess to find manuals, for older stuff i was able to easily find manuals and fix them no problem

You'd be surprised how hard it is to find manuals these days.

Manufacturers have taken to:

1. Not printing them at all
2. Hiding them behind paywalls with exorbitant prices

That comes out of the box with current versions of Windows. The era of Bullzip PDF Printer is gone.

The joke to counter "you can't even write cursive" and other boomer bs is "well at least I know how to print a PDF", alluding to the abysmal tech intuition of some boomers, usually those in controlling roles like managers or CEOs.

You kids these days and your Millennium Items, and your card games, and your loud music, and your hula hoops, and your hopscotch, and your dungarees, and your lollipops, and your Sony Playstations, and your voice-activated light switches, and your leather pants, and your artificial insemination...

The engines I've seen with hydraulic lifters do not have anything to adjust.

Unless you're talking about cleaning out the oil ports when they start to stick, but I wouldn't call that an adjustment.

Could you give an example? I'm curious

(Not a professional, just interested in cars)

I never met an engine.

Yeah, whatever we do differently now is because of new knowledge. Not because we're smarter. It's so annoying when conspiracy idiots say "how was this ancient primitive civilization able to build a pyramid, it must have been aliens" while the people back then were just as smart as we are now, but with less knowledge and technological advancements then we have today.

My previous comment is what I usually say to boomers who claim "the new generation is so dumb, they can't even use a rotary phone anymore" or anything like that. Yeah grandpa, because we have smartphones now. In ancient Rome they built massive aquaducts, I'd like to see you try building one, with a chisel, which still stands over 3000 years later. You're so dumb, you don't even know how to do that while ancient Romans built them all across Europe.

It's just grumpy old farts who are stuck in their midlife and now feel left behind and so much smarter and better than younger people while in reality being so extremity stubborn and ignorant.

The problem isn't the lawsuits it's the cost. Litigating anything is prohibitively expensive. Nobody but the rich and businesses can afford that so what you end up with is some huge percentage of cases being settled out of court without anyone (other than the parties involved) knowing about it.

It's a big reason why settlement figures and jury damage awards are rising... You have to pay for the lawyers!

...which is interesting because lawyer pay is actually dropping and has been for some time now. The biggest firms are collecting all the money and most of that is flowing to the top. So most lawyers are in the same boat as the rest of us where wages aren't keeping pace with inflation so they're getting poorer and poorer every year.

That's happening despite the fact that litigation costs are rising. Something is severely broken in regards to the economics of our criminal and civil justice system.

Only hearing about the crazy shit is the same reason Florida seems so crazy. "Sunshine Laws" in Florida mean arrest records are public information in Florida. A cottage industry has sprung up around scouring arrest records for ludicrous arrests or weird things that happened around them. It's not that Florida is any more crazy than the rest of the country. We just hang our dirty laundry in the front lawn for everyone to see. Don't believe that crazy ass shit isn't happening in your neck of the woods, too.

That said, Florida is kind of crazy, though. At least some of it is imported crazy from other areas, though.

The generation that fought fascism in the West is almost completely dead. And so, here we go again.

That seems like an even better reason not to call out the intelligence claims of others.

I see this sentiment a lot, but honestly I think it would actually do the reverse of what people suggest. "Common sense" isnt really some inherit knowledge that everyone not stupid knows, its actually just stuff that we expect everyone to have learned at some point, presumably in fairly early childhood. But learning stuff requires being taught, and its easy enough for something to just have never come up for someone when they were a kid, because there are so many things to know. Having an explicit warning somewhere is both another source of information in case someone just never got the memo and a prompt for someone unfamiliar with the danger, be it a kid or some ignorant adult, to potentially ask someone why that thing is dangerous. Obviously this is a bit of an extreme example since drinking unknown things is a foolish thing to do in general, but it makes more sense to just apply the labels when in doubt than spend effort making a judgement for every dangerous thing and potentially missing something. I'd bet that having warning labels on stuff actually slightly increases the amount of common sense in society.

Like taking off your shoes before entering someone's home. Why bring street dirt into a living space? Common sense in many asian countries, non-existant sense in the netherlands.

it will come eventually, it is quite literally, a matter of time.