Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

On a other note, I think it would be a hard sell to sell a Chinese car in the West. People still think their quality sucks and frankly the Chinese suck at branding. Chery and Geely simply doesn't sounds like anything other than a small Yugo style mystery metal car.
I'd still doubt their reliability even if these cars pass the basic safety ratings. The fact you'd also need to rely directly on a Chinese company for repairs is also awful.
 
I'd still doubt their reliability even if these cars pass the basic safety ratings. The fact you'd also need to rely directly on a Chinese company for repairs is also awful.
Umm.. so what you're saying is, you're concerned about whether your local mechanic will be able to get replacement parts... replacement parts produced in China?
 
Umm.. so what you're saying is, you're concerned about whether your local mechanic will be able to get replacement parts... replacement parts produced in China?
That's a good observation but the r&d for a lot of Euro, American, and Japanese cars usually happens in house and held to a much higher degree than their Chinese engineered counterparts. While assembly plants for VW and BMW exist in China, the overall moncoque design, choice of materials, grade of steel etc used for key chassis members and stuff like that is decided by the main engineering teams.

Replacement parts from China aren't necessarily bad either. If the factory producing them is held to those stringent standards, it's not a problem. I currently have Chinesium control arms on my car as a test to see how well they perform and last.
 
Umm.. so what you're saying is, you're concerned about whether your local mechanic will be able to get replacement parts... replacement parts produced in China?
The point is you'd have to rely on directly communicating with a Chinese company on a Chinese product entirely designed in China. At least with the current scheme there's a middleman or alternative avenues for parts.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Falcos_Commisar
The point is you'd have to rely on directly communicating with a Chinese company on a Chinese product entirely designed in China. At least with the current scheme there's a middleman or alternative avenues for parts.
Ah? So, at present, when you're buying parts manufactured in China for non-Chinese vehicles, you have no choice but to directly buy from that company? Noone would.... just stock parts made in China?
 
Ah? So, at present, when you're buying parts manufactured in China for non-Chinese vehicles, you have no choice but to directly buy from that company? Noone would.... just stock parts made in China?
The point is there's at least some oversight. All based in China? Who's going to make sure anything's reliable?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Falcos_Commisar
By safety alone most Chinese manufacturers are going to be barred probably for decades. Their cars actually just completely accordion during crash tests. Or at least used to.
I'm entirely okay with excluding chink garbage. It's bad enough they've taken over the cheap consumer junk department but if an mp3 player just bricks one day, no big deal. I don't want to die because some chink piece of shit car fell apart on the highway and threw a wheel into my head.
Ah? So, at present, when you're buying parts manufactured in China for non-Chinese vehicles, you have no choice but to directly buy from that company? Noone would.... just stock parts made in China?
Anyone who has bought stuff from China knows their companies rip you off and withhold payment until they actually deliver according to spec, which they'll do if forced to. They almost invariably try to rip you off at least once first though.
 
In general it is amusing to look back to those early 90s presentations and shows talking about the Internet. The Information Super Highway! So much optimism, gone all to waste because ads make money and people only care about shiny multimedia content and convenience.


Feel old yet?

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
(WATCH: YouTube's 50 Best Videos)

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
(PHOTOS: The History of the Computer)

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
(LIST: 50 Best Websites 2013)

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

MORE: TIME's 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg
Jesus @Blamo why don't you just come on by the spot and cut my heart out with a grapefruit knife.


Now I'm all melancholy.
 
Some claims of crash test safety improving but I have to wonder if it's Chinese manufacturers just giving a 'perfect' version to crash testers and making crap for most of the market.
That's absolutely what they'll do. It's standard practice for any Chinese business that's producing something for a foreign market to produce a passably decent product initially (just enough to satisfy the naïve foreign business owners or regulators), then cut as many corners as possible once the order's locked in. Expect a low-end car that will pass muster with the regulators but then is mysteriously a colossal piece of shit once in the hands of consumers that bears only a superficial resemblance to the unit(s) proffered for testing.

On a other note, I think it would be a hard sell to sell a Chinese car in the West. People still think their quality sucks and frankly the Chinese suck at branding.
Good. Their quality does suck. Consistently. And they don't give a shit. If you buy their 2022 Piece of Shit(tm) and it bursts into flames when you tap another car's bumper at 1mph and kills your whole family, what are you gonna do, fly across the pond and confront them about it on their home turf under the ever-watchful eye of a vicious communist government and equally vicious society surrounding it?
 
Just get an old V8 Oldsmobile if safety is your concern. The engine block on that fucker could be used as a breach tool.
You have to be a bit careful with the older cars, the engine was most likely slide into the passenger part instead of under it. Crumble zones are not a bad idea in general, just they went totally overboard.
Jesus @Blamo why don't you just come on by the spot and cut my heart out with a grapefruit knife.


Now I'm all melancholy.
I heal my soul with old tech shows and videos about them. If you want something interesting look up "The Computer Chronicles" on YouTube or Archive.org. It was a tech show that run from the 1980s to the early 2000s. They basically were talking about the Amiga, Internet etc when they came out. Also it is an era of tech being people being is suits and trying to sell you a better spreadsheet software.
 
Last edited:
You have to be a bit careful with the older cars, the engine was most likely slide into the passenger part instead of under it. Crumble zones are not a bad idea in general, just they went totally overboard.
My friend drove a similar car and took it through a brick wall. The car definitely won.
I don't know about you, but I can't push one of those more than about 5mph.
Well yeah, you have to drive it recklessly for the breach tactic skill to activate.
 
Microtransactions, loot boxes and such are the fucking worst, and ruin a large chunk of modern games for me because they use that business model. It used to be that you only had to buy (or steal) the game once, then the in-game currency is earned in-game. Now they want you to spend another 99 real cents every 5 minutes to get energy or gold or ammo or whatever. I don't mind paying ~$10-$20 every now and again for a good DLC, but if a game has a pay to win system (or even pay to get an unfair advantage system) I uninstall it immediately. The only tolerable form of this is non-functional cosmetics that look cool but don't affect gameplay.
 
Microtransactions, loot boxes and such are the fucking worst, and ruin a large chunk of modern games for me because they use that business model. It used to be that you only had to buy (or steal) the game once, then the in-game currency is earned in-game. Now they want you to spend another 99 real cents every 5 minutes to get energy or gold or ammo or whatever. I don't mind paying ~$10-$20 every now and again for a good DLC, but if a game has a pay to win system (or even pay to get an unfair advantage system) I uninstall it immediately. The only tolerable form of this is non-functional cosmetics that look cool but don't affect gameplay.
Actually, the horse armor DLC was the foot in the door, that was tolerated and things got worse. Businesses always probe first lightly, then just double down until it doesn't work or get resistance. But games offered none, now the new generation of kids got used to freemium practices in full priced games. It's ogre.

Edit: no, I don't care that the publishers/devs need the money, as a consoomer it's not my business to care about that.
 
Actually, the horse armor DLC was the foot in the door, that was tolerated and things got worse. Businesses always probe first lightly, then just double down until it doesn't work or get resistance. But games offered none, now the new generation of kids got used to freemium practices in full priced games. It's ogre.

Edit: no, I don't care that the publishers/devs need the money, as a consoomer it's not my business to care about that.
Me neither. If they have enough money to develop and publish a triple A game, they have enough money for me to torrent it.
 
Back