Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.
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@Polygeekery said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Are you financing a vehicle that is well into the six figure department? Well, for starters, that is fucking retarded.
Not necessarily. At least in Europe. When you buy a car that expensive, you probably have a business, so you buy the car for the business rather than for yourself so you can write it off as expense. But the way tax law works, you can't write it off all in one go - you can only write off a portion each year until it fully depreciates. Because of that, many cars are bought lease-to-own, since while you pay a bit more overall, you can write off the full lease payment and also the money stays with you a bit longer, which you can reinvest in the meantime.
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@Gąska said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
When you buy a car that expensive, you probably have a business, so you buy the car for the business rather than for yourself so you can write it off as expense.
Note that if the business only gets value from this car by you using it to get to work this is maybe poor business, but decent tax evasion.
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@Carnage said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Gąska said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Got home from the dealer. A nice 3 hour drive, and I fell in love with this car. Adaptive CC is the best - most of the way I only touched the wheel and nothing else. The 11" screen is not as cool as I thought, since Android Auto is constrained to ~16:9 horizontal. And the best part - because of the impact my younger sister would have on insurance premium, I have a solid reason to never let her borrow it!
The only problem is volume control. The ingenius software developers of Subaru decided that everybody wants to adjust radio volume and navigation volume independently. So if you turn up radio, navigation becomes inaudible until you change it too, and if you turn dow radio, navigation becomes ear rape. Only a person who's never driven a car could come up with that. It seems to be a common problem in all Subarus since at least 2019.
Yeah, also phone has a separate volume control too. Or at least it had in my subs.
I always just turn off navigation audio, so it never bothered me but if you want it I can understand how annoying that could be.I never use navigation so it wouldn't bother me either.
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@Parody do you use paper maps or just memorize the routes before each trip?
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@dkf said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
If it
's not dominating the sonic landscape for at least a square mile, it's not worthy of the namehasn't caused the fenders to fall off, it's not loud enough (or so I guess by the racket they make).
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@HardwareGeek that's less a matter of volume and more of buying a 30 year old BMW.
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@Gąska said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Parody do you use paper maps or just memorize the routes before each trip?
99% of my driving is going to places I already know.
0.9% is to places in communities with which I am familiar and can get there with just the address or with simple directions from whoever I'm going to see.
0.1% I look up ahead of time to see how to get there, how much time it might take, where I need to park, etc. If I really need to I can pull up an address on Google Maps while in the car but it doesn't happen often.
I kept a laminated map of the metro area in my car before I had a smartphone.
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@Parody said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
kept a laminated map of the metro area in my car
Small city, large car, ?
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@Gribnit said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Parody said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
kept a laminated map of the metro area in my car
Small city, large car, ?
It folded out to...maybe Ledger size? (17"x11", same as a standard newspaper page but in landscape.) It was just an overview with insets for downtowns, IIRC.
My roommate, who had to drive all over town regularly, bought the spiral-bound detailed Atlases of the entire metro.
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@Parody said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Gribnit said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Parody said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
kept a laminated map of the metro area in my car
Small city, large car, ?
It folded out to...maybe Ledger size? (17"x11", same as a standard newspaper page but in landscape.)
Confirmed. Spider-monster. You'll not externally digest me today, sir!
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@Parody said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
My roommate, who had to drive all over town regularly, bought the spiral-bound detailed Atlases of the entire metro.
Please tell me it was before 2012.
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@Gąska said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Parody said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
My roommate, who had to drive all over town regularly, bought the spiral-bound detailed Atlases of the entire metro.
Please tell me it was before 2012.
I don't remember how long he kept using his last one. The last time I saw the one he was using it was filled with notes, sticky notes, and stuck-in papers that could be hard to transfer to a smartphone. I do know that they were late to smartphones since their main form of communication was Push-To-Talk.
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@Deadfast said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Let's !
Even though I agree with his argument, he's wrong when he says that in Europe a red tail light automatically means braking, since there are the regular night lights (and fog light) that are also red.
It's not entirely senseless ing either -- when you're following a car at night, you see their lights always on and any sudden brightening of this red light can only mean braking, so that works well. But when you suddenly come upon a car (e.g. in a sharp turn) at night, there is an ambiguity as to whether the red lights that you see are brakes or not. You can resolve this ambiguity with the 3rd brake light, of course, like he goes at length about in the video, but there is still some ambiguity that might take you a fraction of second to resolve. I'm guessing this is part of the reason why a 3rd brake light was added in the first place, without it the ambiguity would be total.
Another thing, he's mentioning the "broken light" icon on the dashboard. While I have indeed never seen that for brake lights (despite it being a good idea, and with modern cars with messages screens it wouldn't even require a specific icon like in his video, which would make it even easier to implement...), with turn signals there is always a similar feature present: when one signal is broken, the sound made by the indicator is twice (or more) as fast as normal. I think that was originally an accidental feature as the noise was simply the noise of the switch, and the twice-as-fast was just a consequence of drawing less current on the circuit, but now it's become an design feature (probably mandatory?). Does something similar happen on US cars that use the brake light for turn signals? I'm guessing not, otherwise he would have mentioned it but I don't know.
As for automatically turning lights at night, I think that's mandatory on recent European cars, although to check the full EU regulations (especially since I'd have to make sure it's referring to night light rather than day lights, which I think are also mandatory now, as they have been mandatory in some EU countries for years). Amusingly, while his point about not seeing old-style instrument panels when it gets dark is true, conversely modern instrument panels become darker when switching on night lights (in order to not blind you)!
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@Gąska said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Adaptive CC is the best
It definitely is. When my mom looked for a new car last year she wanted "stuff that makes driving easier" so I strongly steered her towards ACC even though few of the models she was looking at have it.
The only problem is volume control. The ingenius software developers of Subaru decided that everybody wants to adjust radio volume and navigation volume independently.
As said by others, I think that's a common feature on all cars. On mine I think media, navigation, traffic info (that cuts through media for alerts), parking system, phone... all have different volumes. It's both convenient (phone line is usually noisy so I need to have it rather loud, parking systems I'm usually already paying attention and it's a hugely annoying beeping sound so it can be pretty low) and inconvenient -- my own gripe is that I haven't found a place where I can see all sound settings so I have to wait until one system that makes sound turns on and then while it does the volume controls can change it, and if the sounds cuts out for some reason suddenly the controls are now operating on another setting.
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@remi said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
But when you suddenly come upon a car (e.g. in a sharp turn) at night, there is an ambiguity as to whether the red lights that you see are brakes or not.
It doesn't matter too much; you don't want to hit it anyway so you slow down while you work out what that car's speed and behaviour are.
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@dkf Of course, if you're driving safely you're always acting in a way that allows you to avoid accidents. But then if that was the case we wouldn't need quite a lof of the safety features of our cars. It's like saying ABS "doesn't matter too much" because you always keep proper distances with the car in front of you.
Also if what you said was true ("it doesn't matter") then the whole video that I commented upon would be wrong as orange (and separated) turn signals wouldn't matter either.
If you want me to build you a more complete scenario, imagine you're following a car on a winding country lane, at night. There is a turn that hides the car for a tiny moment and as you come round the corner you see it again. Now maybe you're used to the intensity of that car's tail light and can immediately tell whether it's braking or not, but maybe after that turn there is a street lamp and your perception of light intensity is messed up for a moment. So yes, it "doesn't matter too much" as you should always be careful etc., plus there is the 3rd light anyway, but most complicated sets of circumstances that cause an accident "don't matter too much" either if people are driving correctly, except they aren't, and those tiny things matter, and accidents happen. Which is why every safety feature matters.
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@remi said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Which is why every safety feature matters.
It does, but not as much as you would hope. Every active safety feature (ABS, AWD, Adaptive steering) causes drivers to take more risks, greatly reducing the net effects of those features.
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@Polygeekery said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Gribnit said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Well, to be fair, I don't think they were calculating it then either.
Fair enough, most people just built a box that would fit and did not care whether it was in any way optimal for the space or drivers.
Compared to "calculates bandpass something something" I find a more likely scenario to be "saws off end of exhaust pipe to make more noise".
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@Polygeekery said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Of course, now they come with really good stereos, so it is much less of a thing than it used to be.
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
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@robo2 said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@remi said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Which is why every safety feature matters.
It does, but not as much as you would hope. Every active safety feature (ABS, AWD, Adaptive steering) causes drivers to take more risks, greatly reducing the net effects of those features.
Which is why the number of deaths in car accidents steadily goes up year on year as all those features become commonplace, yes.
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@robo2 said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
greatly reducing the net effects of those
IIRC, the net reduction due to that effect is usually somewhere in the 20–25% range. Whether that counts as “greatly” is another matter.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Do you have an open standard for HD radio in the first place, or is it a mish-mash of proprietary specs? I can't say I'd blame car makers for not wanting to drain that swamp by themselves.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Polygeekery said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Of course, now they come with really good stereos, so it is much less of a thing than it used to be.
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Because everyone has a smartphone and nobody listens to the radio, so nobody misses it.
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Funny you mention that, because TIL about HD radio, and that my car has it, and that most radio stations in Chicago use it, and that it supports multiple channels on the same frequency.
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@dkf said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Do you have an open standard for HD radio in the first place, or is it a mish-mash of proprietary specs? I can't say I'd blame car makers for not wanting to drain that swamp by themselves.
I know that about 10 years ago I had no problem using it on the old car with a $50 aftermarket stereo.
I believe the new car has something like that, as the song titles come through, it just seems to be missing the subchannels.
Not that I care much, once I got Echo Auto, I never looked back (except in those rare instance where I don't have data service, or for some reason the connection to my phone is acting up).
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Almost no one listens to HD radio so why would they?
Careful when looking for statistics on the matter. The ones you see most commonly quoted are carefully crafted lying via statistics. For example:
"Three quarters of US radio listerners listen to stations that have HD radio."
Makes it seem like 3/4 of all radio listeners are listening to HD radio. Nope. They are listening to analog radio that has HD side channels that almost literally no one listens to.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Polygeekery said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Of course, now they come with really good stereos, so it is much less of a thing than it used to be.
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Because everyone has a smartphone and nobody listens to the radio, so nobody misses it.
I don't know about you, but my not so old cars don't really pair with my phone without echo auto. How do you guys do it?
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
I don't know about you, but my not so old cars don't really pair with my phone without echo auto. How do you guys do it?
is echo auto? I use . My older car, I used an aux cable.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dkf said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Do you have an open standard for HD radio in the first place, or is it a mish-mash of proprietary specs? I can't say I'd blame car makers for not wanting to drain that swamp by themselves.
I know that about 10 years ago I had no problem using it on the old car with a $50 aftermarket stereo.
I believe the new car has something like that, as the song titles come through, it just seems to be missing the subchannels.
Analog (non-HD) AM and FM radio stations broadcast that metadata in their analog feeds also. That's not HD Radio. HD Radio is a trade name for digitally broadcasted radio.
An HD Radio station can have up to four digital subchannels, but one of them has to be a simulcast of an analog feed broadcast from the same location.
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@error said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
I don't know about you, but my not so old cars don't really pair with my phone without echo auto. How do you guys do it?
is echo auto? I use . My older car, I used an aux cable.
Basically Alexa for your car. It uses bluetooth to pair with your phone and then bluetooth or aux cable to your car. With an Amazon Music subscription, the world is your oyster.
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This article quotes 14% of survey respondents as having said that they use HD radio. The survey members were selected from public radio station databases, so the general population would probably be a bit less than that.
I have connections to the c-levels at a major national radio and media company. Several years ago we were all having drinks at the CFO's house along with the CEO, CIO, etc. The CFO was about half popped and made a smartass remark:
"Hey, do you guys want to hear the most exclusive media broadcast in the entire Midwest?"
-tunes radio to one of their HD radio stations-
"I can almost guarantee you that we are the only people listening to this broadcast right now. We could broadcast hardcore porn soundtracks 24/7 and we would never get an FCC complaint because literally no one would ever hear it."
The CEO was less than thrilled with that statement as he had been championing HD radio for quite a while. Last I heard they still simulcasted on HD radio but they were mostly using the channels for site-to-site connections from studio to transmitter towers but were looking at switching back to whatever they used before because the FCC was going to start (or maybe increase?) the liscensing costs for HD radio transmissions. When we were at the CFO's house however many years ago the HD licenses were essentially free in order to improve adoption rates, which seems to have never happened.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
an Amazon Music subscription,
I switched to Spotify because the Amazon Music app was shit.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dkf said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Do you have an open standard for HD radio in the first place, or is it a mish-mash of proprietary specs? I can't say I'd blame car makers for not wanting to drain that swamp by themselves.
I know that about 10 years ago I had no problem using it on the old car with a $50 aftermarket stereo.
I believe the new car has something like that, as the song titles come through, it just seems to be missing the subchannels.
Analog (non-HD) AM and FM radio stations broadcast that metadata in their analog feeds also. That's not HD Radio. HD Radio is a trade name for digitally broadcasted radio.
How do you broadcast metadata with an analog feed? Is it like CC? do you have any info on how the technology works.
An HD Radio station can have up to four digital subchannels, but one of them has to be a simulcast of an analog feed broadcast from the same location.
Yes, and it was amazing. I think the Sirius and XM Radio's of the worlds are keeping it from being adopted.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Because everyone has a smartphone and nobody listens to the radio, so nobody misses it.
It has been so long since I have listened to broadcast radio in my vehicle that the last time I actually did turn it on most of my presets had been through a format change and I also quickly got very annoyed with all the goddamned commercials.
God I hate commercials.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
With an Amazon Music subscription,
the world is your oysteryour music listening experience is like an oyster that has been left in the sun for a few days.FTFY
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Polygeekery said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Of course, now they come with really good stereos, so it is much less of a thing than it used to be.
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Because everyone has a smartphone and nobody listens to the radio, so nobody misses it.
I don't know about you, but my not so old cars don't really pair with my phone without echo auto. How do you guys do it?
I use Android Auto. Before that I used Bluetooth.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Basically Alexa for your car
@error said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
I don't know about you, but my not so old cars don't really pair with my phone without echo auto. How do you guys do it?
is echo auto? I use . My older car, I used an aux cable.
I use a radio / CD player.
God damn I'm old.
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@dkf said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Do you have an open standard for HD radio in the first place, or is it a mish-mash of proprietary specs?
It is one standard set by one company with a stupid name (Xperi? Experi? Expery? I don't know, it was a dumb modern business name) that is a subsidiary of another larger company. It is nothing like the Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, whatever else was in the running at the time, sort of thing.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
How do you broadcast metadata with an analog feed? Is it like CC?
Basically, yes. But it is only sent at the beginning of a segment and then whatever text that was sent is displayed until it is replaced or told to blank. Or at least that is how I assume it works based upon times I have went through long tunnels at the times it would have changed text.
The technology you are looking for information on is RDS, Radio Data System.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dkf said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Do you have an open standard for HD radio in the first place, or is it a mish-mash of proprietary specs? I can't say I'd blame car makers for not wanting to drain that swamp by themselves.
I know that about 10 years ago I had no problem using it on the old car with a $50 aftermarket stereo.
I believe the new car has something like that, as the song titles come through, it just seems to be missing the subchannels.
Analog (non-HD) AM and FM radio stations broadcast that metadata in their analog feeds also. That's not HD Radio. HD Radio is a trade name for digitally broadcasted radio.
How do you broadcast metadata with an analog feed?
Supported by basically every car radio since 2000.
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@Gąska said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dkf said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
Do you have an open standard for HD radio in the first place, or is it a mish-mash of proprietary specs? I can't say I'd blame car makers for not wanting to drain that swamp by themselves.
I know that about 10 years ago I had no problem using it on the old car with a $50 aftermarket stereo.
I believe the new car has something like that, as the song titles come through, it just seems to be missing the subchannels.
Analog (non-HD) AM and FM radio stations broadcast that metadata in their analog feeds also. That's not HD Radio. HD Radio is a trade name for digitally broadcasted radio.
How do you broadcast metadata with an analog feed?
Supported by basically every car radio since 2000.
That explains it - my old car was 1996.
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@Parody said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
99% of my driving is going to places I already know.
I often use my phone even for that - because traffic here sucks so bad that I'm likely to be rerouted to an alternate path. Drivers here are assholes.
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@Parody said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
the spiral-bound detailed Atlases of the entire metro.
I gotta say, there is something really cool about just looking at big paper maps that phones/computers just can't match.
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@dcon an excuse to do nothing productive for 10 minutes at a time?
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@remi said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
I'm guessing this is part of the reason why a 3rd brake light was added in the first place, without it the ambiguity would be total.
Still doesn't help with those people who drive with the left foot on the brake and the right on the gas.
I've had people actually tell me that's the proper way. Oh, fuck no. I'd like to still be able to drive a manual transmission thankyouverymuch.
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@dangeRuss said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
@Polygeekery said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Of course, now they come with really good stereos, so it is much less of a thing than it used to be.
How the fuck is it that all these years later we still don't have HD radio standard on modern cars?
My 2015 Outback has it. At least I assume it does as an HD indicator appears on the console for those stations.
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What is even the value of HD radio?
I mean, HD video, it looks nicer on a large screen and TVs in particular have become huge since we have flat screens, so it makes sense to have HD TV broadcasts.
But radio? The only people who have a sound equipment where a "high definition" might make a difference are
gullible clownsaudiophiles and they probably don't listen to radio on their precious gold-plated whatever. And for the rest of the world, especially in cars, we'll never have an audio setup where it makes a difference.You also get digital sound instead of analog, which matters... how? Judging by how digital TV freeze when the quality is not good enough, I actually prefer an analog feed where a small drop in reception quality causes some snow on the screen rather than completely dropping everything. And that's even more true in a car where the reception quality is always subject to minute drops due to how much radio waves don't really like moving things and masses of metal disposed in regular patterns about everywhere around the cars.
So what is the killer-feature that makes HD radio such a good idea?
(well, since HD radio is not taking up at all, I'm thinking that there isn't such a killer feature, but maybe I'm wrong...)
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@remi I used to not care about radio quality either, but then I discovered AM is still a thing in USA and it sounds so bad I want to rip my ears off. The issue is, my grandparents only ever listen to AM radios (old immigration ) so I have no choice but to endure it from time to time.
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@dcon said in Buying a car, tell me what's wrong with me.:
Still doesn't help with those people who drive with the left foot on the brake and the right on the gas.
I've had people actually tell me that's the proper way.
It's certainly the proper way for a racing driver. But that's like saying that the proper way to walk in the street is to have a starting block at the exit of the building that you're leaving, there is little in common between doing a thing for sport and doing it for convenience.
Oh, fuck no.
My thinking exactly. I don't trust a casual driver (i.e. acting like an average driver, i.e. not really paying full attention to their driving) to not be totally retarded if they are driving like this.