I planned on keeping my Wrangler for life when I ordered it, and so optioned it as mechanically simple as possible, including roll-down windows, manual trans, and no keyless entry. Stuff like this is, in part, why. Threw an aftermarket wireless CarPlay head unit in, and that is all the tech I need and more.
I bought my 2018 Wrangler with the same idea... keep it for life. That was also the last year they offered the "lifetime" warranty. Glad I went for that.
So far, the Jeep has been fairly reliable, with my issues being:
- Electric door locks and mirrors stopped working
- Radiator leaked
- CV Joints
The Lifetime Warranty has now broken even (~$2500).
Unfortunately, now my issue is rust, and the warranty doesn't cover that.
Rust. I live in the north half of Ohio, so my stuff gets bathed in salty brine for several months out of the year and rust is a real problem for me.
What I've found that works (for me):
For stuff that isn't yet rusted, Fluid Film. It's easy to buy (it's on the shelf even at Wal-Mart). It's made primarily from lanolin, which is a product of the wool industry and is how sheep stay dry. If I were Very Serious about it, I'd find a shop that would cover the whole bottom of the vehicle (and anything that can be reached through holes) in the stuff and pay them to get that done. (I buy it in spray cans; some shops buy it in 55 gallon drums.)
For stuff that is definitely already rusting, Corrosion-X. It's some kind of oily chemical soup that is supposed to prevent existing rust from getting worse, and also prevent new rust. One interesting feature is that it's available in 3 different viscosities; vaguely speaking, those viscosities are thin, medium, and elephant snot.
The thin one does a fantastic job of creeping around to cover even unseen surfaces, but it washes off the fastest. The thicker ones hang around longer and creep less. (Tradeoffs, I guess.)
I prefer Fluid Film just because it's more natural than some other things are and that makes me feel good in some way that I don't care to rationalize, but Fluid Film is not very good at recovering from existing rust.
Corrosion-X, though? I can get the thin version of that worked into the joint of a completely rusted-stuck pair of box-jointed pliers and have them working very well (and looking fairly decent, though not "new") in a few minutes with a shop rag. I've heard stories of it being used to hose down whole electrical rooms in ocean-going boats. It's amazing stuff. (And it's expensive.)
The practical downside is that these products all feel greasy, and they all turn black with enough time and enough miles. They're all ugly.
For visible painted body panels, the best way I know to deal with small spots of rust from rock chips and stuff is to go full-ass on it. Get the Dremel out, pick an appropriate abrasive stone, and start grinding those little pinholes out until there's nothing but clean, shiny metal surrounded by paint. And then: Fill in with touchup paint that matches the factory paint code. (It's never perfect, but it does get easier to do a job that looks better than little rust spots do with some practice...and the little spots then don't turn into big spots.)
There are many shops in the US which will apply Noxudol both underneath and inside body panels and frame rails with special 360 degree applicators. I believe it is a formula developed in Scandinavia.
All of my cars are sprayed with the stuff for over a decade with no other maintenance.
Perhaps, but: I don't want to deal with avoiding permanently-affixed overspray on parts that don't want to be coated.
I also don't want to work with fasteners that are coated in bedliner: I'm already not having a fun time of things when I'm crawling under an old car doing some manner of repair. I want every possible advantage while I'm down there, and a well-stuck layer of bedliner seems like a big disadvantage.
As a point of comparison, stuff like Fluid Film [and the others that have been mentioned] can be applied to just about anything under the car that's metal (including bendy things like springs), and can be scrubbed off sometime later if it accidentally gets on body-colored parts using just soap, water, and some elbow grease.
Fasteners that are both rust-free and oily usually come apart like a dream when the time comes, and oily coatings that stay goopy tend to self-heal after being abraded by whatever the tires might kick up from the road.
Fluid coatings seem like the right set of tradeoffs in this non-ideal world compared to something like bedliner.
They're not perfect, but nothing is.
(Ideally, I'd live in a place that doesn't require driving through brine... but my world isn't ideal.)
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["elephant snot"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
There was a car mechanic who lived next to where my dad grew up in rural Sweden. He spent enormous amounts of time on the cars he got in to fix and took out automatic locks and all electric wiring to the point of the car being basically invincible to time and very simple to repair again. Some cars he never managed to finish fixing and they were simply left forever in his front yard... My grandma drives a 25 y o Suzuki Alto that is basically this car. It even has the old school non powered steering. Runs great still, has no issues since she only drives in summer.
There is really something to be said for old mechanics and simple electric solutions.
These days _everything_ has an embedded microcontroller and a touchscreen. I'm more on the luddite edge myself...
If anyone is interested I can try to dig up an interview with the car mech on youtube (in swedish) :)
Just a roll of the dice at this point. The USG has basically mandated that all of your most private identity information be turned over to global bad actors via their AML/KYC regime.
As a motorcycle rider and someone who goes top-down in my Jeep all summer, the real-time incoming rain alerts of DS were freakishly accurate and I leaned on them constantly. Apple integrated the feature and they became comically inaccurate. (The opposite of an accurate rain forecast is not great.) After getting soaked one too many times, I finally got frustrated enough to chase down the best replacement. Don't love Carrot Weather near as much, but it is the best alternative I've found for heads up on incoming precipitation. Sigh. I still remember the days of getting a "moderate rain starting in 13 minutes" alert and hoping on the bike and zipping home in time. Don't know how they did it so well.
This was almost my experience exactly. I used DarkSky as a grad student with a twenty minute bike commute and responsibilities all over a large campus. Without fail, DarkSky kept me dry. (Or, at least allowed me to avoid the worst of it.)
As a fellow naked-Jeep-fan, I've been perplexed and depressed by Apple's handling of it. A couple of weeks ago, we had a thunderstorm roll through, which dropped the local temperature by ~15 degrees F, but my Apple devices kept insisting the current weather was 90º. Maddening.
It limited it-- DarkSky was on Android and iOS before Apple killed the service.
But IIRC, DarkSky stopped using phones altogether some time before Apple killed the service. I can't find a source on that given Apple also deleted DarkSky's blog, so, grain of salt.
>This assumes the court can even hear cases in a reasonable amount of time.
If it's a bandwidth issue, reducing the number of extra-judicial bureaucrats and upping the number of judiciary is pretty straightforward. Seems like a pretty simple rebalancing issue.
>Now it's, better hope you don't lose an injunction and you get a judge capable of understanding the technical reasons
Why would experts (like those that were informing executive agencies on their payroll) not be called here?
The judiciary depends on Congress for its funding, and is perennially underfunded. Arguably this suits the legislative branch because a clogged judicial pipeline encourages people to pursue legislative relief.
>A massive reason in this case is that congress are not matter experts,
Perhaps they should not be crafting new laws concerning things that they do not understand. If this results in fewer new laws, that may be better. If this also results in their having to spend more time doing homework on new urgent laws of greater importance, that may also be a good thing.
A return to the Constitutional prescription that Congress writes the laws, the Executive administers them, and the Courts interpret them certainly does not seem inappropriate, and discarding this framework in the name of arbitrary desired outcomes like EPA rulings feels off. If it's a bandwidth issue, maybe we should up the number of judiciary and lower the number of extra-judicial agency bureaucrats.
> Perhaps they should not be crafting new laws concerning things that they do not understand.
Which is why instead of crafting new laws concerning things they do not understand, they appoint agencies for the purpose of understanding the things and regulating them.
> If this results in fewer new laws, that may be better.
It certainly does if you don't like your patent medicines being regulated.
> If this also results in their having to spend more time doing homework on new urgent laws of greater importance, that may also be a good thing.
This ruling will do the exact opposite at best. Again, the point of federal agencies is to take on the burden of understanding and regulating specific domains. That way congress can work on the broad strokes and leave the details to expert they can consult.
> A return to the Constitutional prescription that Congress writes the laws, the Executive administers them, and the Courts interpret them certainly does not seem inappropriate
That is not what this ruling does. This ruling is a decision by the courts that policy is decided by the courts. Even though congress delegates to executive agencies for that exact purpose.
Literally the first test of the Chevron doctrine is "does the law already cover this specific issue". The second test is "is the agency allowed to interpret or regulate this issue under its statutes".
If the first is a yes, then the agency has no grounds to go against congress. If the second is a no, then the agency does not have standing. Otherwise, the courts defer to the agency as the agent of congress on the matter.
> If it's a bandwidth issue, maybe we should up the number of judiciary and lower the number of extra-judicial agency bureaucrats.
That does not follow, makes absolutely no sense, and would in fact do the exact opposite. Because under the completely wacky idea that agencies have no rulemaking or regulatory powers they would have to be staffed by 90% lawyers as they would have to bring everything to court.
Again, against the express purpose of their establishment and statutes.
1. ability to begin capturing 3d video for the devices of tomorrow to render is a sea change. I want as much as my video as possible to be captured this way, starting today. Can't reshoot the past
2. dedicated hardware button for programatic software execution is fantastic
3. wearable turning your fingers into a button allowing execution from simply moving your fingers is insanely cool
These three things alone are more exciting than anything I've seen in a while. All in all, great ideas that are absolutely pushing the envelope of how we interact with these devices. Love to see it.
Within the last decade, general-purpose zero-knowledge arguments have made the jump from theory to practice. This has opened new doors in the design of cryptographic systems, and generated additional insights into the power of IPs and arguments (zero-knowledge or otherwise). There are now no fewer than five promising approaches to designing efficient, general-purpose zero-knowledge arguments. This survey covers these approaches in a unified manner, emphasizing commonalities between them.
There's no question that physical controls for the most common tasks in a vehicle (there are actually very few) take less attention.
Additionally, it seems like one great promise of software in a vehicle would be to augment and improve upon that fact by design. But it's terribly obvious that this has not been a design goal ever. The goal has been to take the familiar UX of your phone and transfer it to your car so that the media component is immediately familiar (this is nice), but all the while we could have been making the act of driving safer too...
It feels like all of the reporting I've seen from experts (not just mainstream news outlets which are admittedly terrible)has indicated Covid-19's R0 is worse than influenza.
It would have been awfully nice if The WHO tossed us a citation on their claim that this is not the case. It was hard to read the entire piece with that unsupported claim hanging so heavily.
And the containment claim...again...would have loved for them to argue the case, because it is exceedingly easy to argue against the case.
For seasonal flu, you could think of it as being very low, because most people already have immunity. It's already endemic, so there isn't room for exponential growth.
For a new flu (like the 2008 swine flu) it is extremely high, which is why people barely did anything to contain it back then -- it was just impossible.
The problem is that “worse” can mean anything. It can be marginally worse without being a serious cause of concern or it can be really really bad.
That’s the beauty of journalism: being flexible with the truth. You can print end of the world headlines with the clean conscience that since it is technically worse, you are not pushing fake news. But that may still be a massively over exaggerated and misleading headline.
And I think that is what happening. I don’t see many people claiming it is no worse than the flu. I see people claiming it is marginally worse than the flu.
R0 is not the only factor in the spread of the disease. R0 is measure of how contagious a disease is, the average number of infections from each case. But other factors matter for the spread and for possibility of containment. For example, the incubation period matters for how fast it spreads, and asymptomatic transmission matters for can be contained.
"With influenza, people who are infected but not yet sick are major drivers of transmission, which does not appear to be the case for COVID-19."
It sounds like the big difference is that most of spread from COVID-19 is when people are sick. With lots of testing, can detect who is sick and isolate them. It also sounds like most of the spread is with close contacts and unlike flu, it is possible to map contacts and isolate them.
