Yup, a bigger issue for old cars trying to pass emissions is that with prices of precious metals, a worn out catalytic converter (diagnostic code P0420 ) means that most of them are mechanically totaled in California, New York, Colorado since they require either OEM or CARB approved replacements.
Yeah, if it's worth more than 4k registered, it'll either be fixed or shipped. California gives you $1200 to junk it, people will come pick it up for $1500 and a lot of times you'll see it pop back up in state because they illegally resuscitated it with a defouler, a used/EPA cat and put it back into circulation.
My experience with my Volvo EX30 has been the complete opposite. Although the false positives have gone down with software updates, it's still wrong so often I turn it off every time it bothers me. Due to some other regulation, this setting is unfortunately not remembered. That means every time I get in the car, I have to spend time going trough the settings to disable it, often while already driving. Seems like a great idea.
The biggest false positives involve singing or talking being mis-interpreted for yawning. Which then triggers a notification and a noise telling me "maybe it's time for a beak", which makes me look at the screen in the center console, which then triggers a second notification telling me to "please look at the road".
I'm not sure it's actual regulations, but the Euro NCAP safety tests requiring all these "features" (like not remembering when you turn them off) to get a max score.
Impossible to measure, many other uncontrolled variables - esp. significant improvements to infrastructure in Europe, and regulations. Take NL, where a crash involving a pedestrian or a cyclist effectively forces the driver to prove their innocence. I can walk across a Dutch town blindfolded with the biggest risk to my wellbeing being cyclists (well, and the canals). I'd guess the impact of those intervention dwarfs the "i will beep at you until i make you deaf if you don't put your seatbelt over your grocery bag" innovations.
I grew up in/with cars which would score 0 (more like -3 to -5) and made it to adulthood, so I have a feeling that these features are not strictly neccesary.
At the same time what if it saves at least one life a year? (same goes for riding with/without helmets)
Everyone dies eventually, so that means very little by itself. Did they die young? How much younger than their peers? Did they gain enough enjoyment from drinking and smoking to offset the fewer years of life (subjective, of course, but important to consider)?
Every intervention has a cost. Not all results will be worth the cost we pay for them. I think we are well past the point in Western society where we are giving up too much in order for too small a return, personally. With cars, but also just in general, people have lost the ability to do cost-benefit analysis and act as though every safety improvement is an unalloyed good. But they aren't, and I think that this thinking is making all of our lives significantly worse.
Given that its society that invests in them during development and has to pick them up when they're broken its only fair to also nudge towards a preemptive solution. The economics of people dying needlessly in their 20s is worth the intervention.
I have an EX30 in Australia and it's been excellent in regards to its driver attention system. Never had any false alerts. If anything it's not accurate enough as when I look away it sometimes doesn't warn me! Crazy how we can have such different experiences in the same vehicle, presumably with the same software.
My wife's Volvo XC40 Recharge is the first Volvo we've ever had, and it's certainly the last I'll ever have (can't speak for her). The software is so flaky. The map screen on the dash doesn't load sometimes, the side mirrors don't tilt down (which they are set to do) when reversing half the time, and every so often the sound completely stops working in the car without a hard reboot of the info system. To make matters worse, it turns out that car operation signals (like turn signal clicks) play through the stereo, so when that happens you are driving without important audio cues because they were too damn cheap to put electronic clickers in the dash.
It's probably the worst car I've ever owned, worse even than cars I got for way cheaper than the $50-60k they wanted for this thing. Never again, fuck Volvo.
Sounds about right for Volvo, sadly. I’ve owned four over the years, all great, but my most recent one has such dogshit software that I’ll never buy another Volvo.
The EU has laws for that and countries with communal bins are doing just fine.
Communal bins are even better for sorting trash as you can easily have seven different types* next to each other. Nobody wants seven personal bins in their yard.
GDPR could have been great, if it was actually enforced in the way it was intended. Cookie banners and dark patterns are not actually allowed, but without enforcement, it's basically meaningless.
IMO the biggest issue is that the member states are individually required to set up agencies to police this. This makes perfect sense for local companies, but is meaningless against large entities that operate across the entire EU.
Large entities (companies right?) take that very serious. Its the other way around, small companies might not be aware of.
Nonetheless, i have seen in a very small company that we changed the behaviour of a camera which then only turned on when the action expected it and not before.
And in a very big company you alway have to fullfill it as a product standard.
You can report issues to your local watchdog. That takes quite some time, given the large amount of companies that do not follow the law, but it is enforced
GDPR fixes at least some actors. There is no solution for all actors especially bad ones. But many big actors will take steps to be in compliance. Which is lot more actors than without such regulation. Perfect being enemy of better.
And at least now developers can have reasonable reason to ask do we actually need to store this or do we want to store it. Before that would have been stonewalled.
Almost all EU credit cards are automatic debit at the end of the month, i.e. carrying over balance is not even possible. You will simply be over-drafted on the linked debit account and charged a fee + steep interest if you spend more then you have. Typically until the overdraft is resolved, no further debit card payments can be made.
The only reasons to use a CC in EU are:
- online payments where CC is the only accepted form of payment
- delay payments until after receiving wage
- hotels, car rentals, and other places that lock an amount on your card
- extra insurance provided by some more premium cards (VISA Gold etc)
Ever since 3-D Secure (2FA for CC transactions, beyond the CCV code), you have been liable for any transaction that was validated by it. Your bank may still do a chargeback as a courtesy, but that's not guaranteed.
A bit off topic, but changing your name when getting married is so strange to me.
It is not at all common where I live (Belgium), in fact I don't think I personally know a single person who did.
Different cultures, different traditions. Personally I think it's a beautiful symbol of unity for one person to take the other's name (though I'm neutral as to which party should change their name, and I was perfectly willing to take my wife's name if she had wanted that), but of course that's the culture I was born into so it seems normal to me.
Not only is it strange, it’s obviously very sexist in practice. In majority of the cases, it’s always the woman who changes her last name. The husband gets to keep his. I still find it very strange and shocking that powerful women with successful careers in modern society still keep changing their names after getting married.
By such a definition any tradition related to gender would be sexist. The tradition is that the wife will change her name. This tradition is why it makes up the majority of cases.
No, any tradition that favors one gender over the other is sexist. Which is absolutely the case with the tradition of women taking their husband's family name when they get married.
Not really - this “tradition” as you call it obviously started back in the day when women did not have equal rights in society and only the husband’s lineage mattered.
How do you propose fixing that? Let the kids take both parents last names? In few generations you end with kids having their entire family tree as their last name! It might even make marrying within the tribe attractive again to keep last name single word!
First there’s absolutely no real reason for a spouse to change their name just because they got married.
You can do hyphenated last names for a kid and let the kids decide what names they want to carry forward for the next generation. Or they can make up their own. The point is it’s up to them and they can choose whatever they want and not be coerced to do something because of some tradition that is rooted in sexism.
Come on man, I think it's safe to say a tradition that favor's men over women is reasonably sexist, especially given the time the tradition established women were property.
I don't think Belgium's feelings will get hurt, besides wait until you learn about all the other things that Leopold II did.
I changed my name to my wife's name when we got married. Where I live, everyone can choose if they want to keep their name or change it to either ones. So its a free choice.
AND: Hope gmail will rollout this feature asap, so I can FINALLY adjust my email address too.
let motherLastName = "Carter Hughes"
let fatherLastName = "Miller Thompson"
let childLastName = "Miller Carter"
let childFullName = "Jean Paul Miller Carter"
Or so that is how it works in many countries around the world.
You might ask, —“Why does the father’s last name go first and the mother’s second?”— That’s an old tradition, and it can change whenever enough people in our society agree. As it stands, the father’s family name tends to persist down the family tree, while the mother’s family name often disappears in each generation.
Or so that is how it works in many countries around the world.
You should have given a more complete example, where the parents themselves have long names to demonstrate that something does have to get dropped when you have children.
It hails from when family lines were important, and you can practically only have one line reflected in a name. Unsurprisingly, most societies considered the male's name to be the dominate lineage of interest, although that doesn't hold true 100% of the time.
> you can practically only have one line reflected in a name
Not true at all. You can trivially have two family names in a full legal name. In fact many cultures do exactly that to this day.
Also worth noting that the male's name being preferentially propagated makes a lot of sense in a society where the best off frequently inherited their vocation from their fathers.
> Just because there is an alternative doesn't mean society will adjust.
"It isn't practical to do" and "society at large didn't go this direction" are very different statements.
Hyphenation is two names in a trench coat. Maintaining two names indefinitely works just fine as long as you discard rather than endlessly compound. Presumably the only requirement is that it be straightforward to trace any given lineage.
The traditional approach is for women to keep their maternal name and discard their paternal name on marriage while men do the opposite. But of course any scheme could work, up to and including each person arbitrarily choosing which name to discard (not sure how they decide on ordering in that case).
Another historical approach is the Foo Barson, Baz Fooson (Barson) approach. That scheme treats the male and female lines as being entirely separate so it doesn't quite match what you're after but it was quite practical.
Preserving more than one lineage and providing a cohesive family name isn't practically easy, and society did not go that direction, and that likely isn't a coincidence.
Discarding names doesn't preserve lineage. If you need a book to trace the names, then the point of using a name for lineage has failed.
> The traditional approach is for women to keep their maternal name and discard their paternal name on marriage while men do the opposite
It sounds like this scheme is "men keep one name lineage, women keep another".
Which, IMO, has the practical drawback of not identifying the current family unit. Lineage was important, but so was gathering all folks together into a household. When taxes, religious ceremony, etc. occurred, there was one household name on the roster responsible. This was particularly important in societies where men held certain rights for the household.
