I have one. I hated the stock skin. I like having the apps I use regularly groups together by purpose on my home screen so I can get to them quickly. I immediately re-skinned it.

I wouldn’t say justified, buuuuuuuuuut where else could he have gone? China is about the only other possibility.

To be clear, I think he should be pardoned, and thing USA-Patriot act should be overturned.

I’m more of an ð-head.

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

I fail to see any downside to this.

Yeah, we’re doing the same in the US… :(

The essential problem is that the people working now are paying for the people that are retired. It would make more sense for the gov’t to have taxed the people prior to their retirement, and have invested those taxes, so that in their retirement they would be getting out what they had previously paid in. And switching over to a system like that would require double taxation on the population now, which will make such a proposal very unopopular.

But if your retired population is growing, and you have fewer people working, then you either need to increase the retirement age–so that more people are paying into the system–or increase the taxation overall. If I recall correctly, Denmark has been seeing a negative population growth; that’s a real problem for retirement schemes that rely on current taxes paying for retirees.

Is this fair to people that have been working in trades and have beaten up their body for 40 years? No. Likewise, it’s not really fair to people that have working in white-collar jobs that may still be more than capable of excelling at their job, and still want to work. (My dad had mandatory retirement at 72 due to company policy; he immediately got re-hired as an on-site consultant, and has been doing that for over a decade.)

EDIT - this is a huge problem in the US. The social security taxes now on working people are immediately paid out to retirees. SS benefits go up to account for inflation, but the amount coming in is decreasing because population growth has slowed. Without major reforms, social security in the US won’t be solvent by the time I retire, IF I ever retire.

Which “legal experts” are claiming Trump could be facing prison? If they actually have JDs, they should be disbarred for incompetence.

SCOTUS has already ruled on this; the president has very, very broad immunity from any criminal prosecution. The case was dropped in Florida because his stealing highly classified documents was an “official action”; if that can be handwaved away, then so can defrauding the country with a shitcoin pump-and-dump.

I would love to see a complete remake of Daggerfall with the same randomly generated dungeons; I’m not sure that the random landscape and dungeon generation would work with the way games are programmed now though.

Come to think of it, re-doing Morrowind, Arena, Battlespire, and Redquard would be neat, too.

Okay, so low beam should always be on. High beam should only be on when switched on.

The position lights

Can’t be that. I’ve replaced one of the turn indicators; it’s only two wires, and neither of them are the same color as the position indicator. In the wiring diagram, the position light is not going to the the turn signal. And, most important, the position light wire is only going to the headlight assembly. I had thought that there was only a single bulb in each side of the headlight, but maybe there’s another one…? It’s not really something that can be disassembled, aside from changing out the bulb.

there’s a catalog with dimensions in it

Good deal; I can check that pretty easily.

My experience certainly does.

I’ve worked with some really great people. But maybe 1 in 5 or so was a loudmouthed shitbag, and when you called them on being shitty, they either threatened you, or acted like it was all a joke or a big misunderstanding, and you were at fault for being upset, etc. I can’t guarantee that the shitty people I’ve known have harassed women, but the probability seems high.

a) I’m not sure about trusting second hand parts

It’s pretty much plug n’ play for wiring harneses. If you are placing the replacement while removing the original one, it’s hard to go wrong. The wiring harness that I bought for my CBR was a little wonky; the service manual covers 2007-2012, but they made some very minor changes for '11-'12. One of those changes was moving a single pin where the harness connects to the ECU. The result was that I had an engine code–knock sensor malfunction–and I had to re-pin that single wire. It was a bit of a pain in the ass. It was annoying mostly because the person that sold it didn’t realize that there was a difference.

Lots of 2nd hand motorcycle parts are just fine. Things that are damaged in crashes are usually catastrophically damaged.

multi-part disassembly and - more critically - correct reassembly challenges me.

That’s fair. I’m in the process of trying to turn a naked sport bike into a cafe racer, and just to change the headlight assembly, I need to remove the wheel and then the fork. It should be a 10 minute job, but instead it’s several hours. When I was checking valve clearances on my CBR, I ended up having to nearly remove the engine to get to the cam shafts. I hadn’t thought I was particularly mechanically inclined, but I guess I kind of am?

They’re usually not too bad, if you get a working one off eBay. Buying a new loom from the manufacturer? Yeah, that’s a few grand.

At a certain point, it ends up feeling easier to just replace the whole damn wiring harness.

I enjoy working on engines when it’s not urgent, and it’s fairly low stakes if things take 5x as long as I plan, or I need more parts than I thought. OTOH, it’s incredibly stressful when my motorcycle throws an engine code that tells me there’s an electrical fault, and I know that I’m going go end up needing to tear it down, go through the wiring loom, and not be able to ride for a few weeks when the weather is finally getting really nice.

Unless you know how to remap a car and have a car with plenty of power reserve.

Right, that’s my point though. With my '84 Chevy Monte Carlo SS, I could drop a new engine in (started with a 305, ended with a 400 short block), do a high-flow dual carb intake, get a couple Edelbrock carbs, buy some headers, straight pipes and a glasspack muffler, and get a ton more power. (And also much, much worse fuel economy.) Now you not only need to understand wrenching, you also have to have the software and knowledge to entirely re-map the fuel, since it’s all computerized.

And while you are technically correct that you can get tons more power out of a lot of mostly stock engines, that does sharply reduce your engine lifespan. Of course, that’s always been the case, but it used to be that you could fairly easily get your block bored and sleeved to have larger pistons (“there’s no replacement for displacement”), but generally engines are running with much less material now. Oh, and they’re aluminum rather than iron, so often you’re going to have to send your block off to a specialist to get the cylinder bores coated for longevity. (I think my Honda CBR600RR had alusil or nikasil plating in the cylinders? I’m not sure now.)

I’m really, really not nostalgic for those days; yeah, hot rods are kind of neat, and it’s fun being able to do your own mechanical work, but cars now are so much more efficient, more powerful, and last 3-4x as long as cars from the 60s through early 80s.

Encapsulation, yeah. That’s usually what they do now, since encapsulation is usually cheaper, and generally less disruptive.

I did in Chicago. And I absolutely would again, because it makes my house much less likely to burn down from e.g. an electrical fire.

I quit smoking a decade ago; my risk of lung cancer was–is–far, far higher from smoking than it ever would have been from living in a house with asbestos insulation in the walls and around pipes.

I understand it as a hobby/passion, even though the old cars are far less efficient, die sooner, and are less safe than now. The only way they were better, IMO, was that they were less complicated, and thus easier to wrench on. It’s significantly harder to build hot rods or street racing cars now than the way you could in the 80s and earlier.

I’m still in favor of asbestos. It’s an amazing material for preventing fires AS LONG AS you never disturb it. The people that were most at risk of cancers were the people involved in the mining, manufacturing, and installation of asbestos products, but once the asbestos-containing products were installed, they were almost entirely safe for the occupants of the building. You could, in theory, largely mitigate the risks to the miners, manufacturers, and installers, but that is… Well, expensive. And people have a really bad tendency to ignore health and safety warnings when they’re inconvenient. You see the same issue with quartz countertops; they’re known to cause silicosis in people that are doing the cutting unless they do wet cutting for everything, and wear PPE, but a lot of people don’t, because wet-cutting is messy and slow, and PPE is hot and uncomfortable.

There was a big movement in the late 90s to remove asbestos from old buildings; the current advice is to encapsulate it, and leave it in place.

The lead was a lubricant, and old engines ran better, and longer, on leaded gas.

There were two issues. First, tetraethyl lead increased the effective octane level. That, in turn, reduced the probability of pre-ignition, e.g., the fuel-air mixture igniting before the compression cycle was completed. Higher octane allows for higher compression, which is more efficient. The other issue was the valves specifically; the lead provided a ‘cushion’ between the valves and the valve seats, which minimized valve wear.

The octane issue is easily solved by both better refining or by adding alcohol. It was known that you could add alcohol to gas to improve octane rating even when TEL was first added, but TEL could be patented, and alcohol couldn’t. The valve issue has largely been solved by better metallurgy and manufacturing.

The one are where it hasn’t been solved is small aircraft. Some small planes still use leaded gas, and it’s mostly for the octane boost. TEL can give them a better octane rating than alcohol or better refinement can, which allows them to operate at much high compression. Take that away, and the engines are too underpowered to keep the plane in the air. Over 150,000 small airplanes still use leaded AvGas; thankfully, newer turboprop planes and all jet planes mostly use Jet A or Jet B fuel, which is closer to kerosene.

In theory, I think that you could convert older cars to run on unleaded fuels, but you would need new parts rather than OEM.