dion_starfire

joined 1 year ago
[–] dion_starfire@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The "hand them what they ask for" is important in Texas. It used to be legal to refuse to present ID unless you were being detained. As of the 1st, that's now a crime.

[–] dion_starfire@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I knew someone with a newer model (2019 I think?) Honda Fit with the emergency braking feature. It did absolutely nothing to prevent them from running into the back end of a pickup truck that swung out in front of them and slammed on the brakes. Literally it didn't engage at all.

Also, the interior room on the Fit is terrible post-2013 due to some design changes. My 2010 Fit was a TARDIS - a 6', 400lb guy could ride (or drive) it comfortably. That same guy riding in the 2019 model was cramped as a passenger. We didn't try asking him to drive, after seeing how he fit as a passenger.

[–] dion_starfire@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

Because the way voting works in the US is based on assumptions from the days when getting all the votes together to tally them would have been a logistical nightmare. Instead of counting everyone's vote individually, the map is divided into regions. Each region tallies up their votes, and then one single vote is counted for that entire region based on the majority vote from that region. Those regional votes are tallied, and the majority winner of the regions gets the win. By drawing the regions correctly (a process called gerrymandering), you can put the majority of one party's voters into a small handful of regions, so all of them only count as a handful of regional votes while making sure the rest of the regions are drawn to give the other party a 51%+ majority. As a result, it's possible to have a candidate that would garner less than 50% of the individual votes win a landslide of over 75% of the regional votes.

[–] dion_starfire@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

EPA regulations are designed to encourage better gas mileage, but they are based on vehicle size. So instead of making more fuel efficient engines, auto makers realized they could just make bigger trucks with the same shitty engines to meet the guidelines.

[–] dion_starfire@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

At least with that example, the products are related. Amazon lets sellers replace listings with completely different items - new name, picture, and description. So you'll find a scam 64GB USB drive that's pretending to be 1TB with hundreds of positive reviews, but when you read those reviews, you realize they're for the plastic fidget toy that shared the item number previously.