But no one is investing billions into your dog’s shit, are they?

Idk… That might even out. During a 30 hr drive, I’d probably add on at least 8-9 hours for every 8-9 driven, because that’s as long as I can stand to drive at a stretch without needing to find a hotel to stop for the night. Driving for that long is goddamned miserable, and at least in a train you can book an overnight car to sleep in so that even when you sleep travel keeps happening.

Idk, maybe I’m totally off base and this is totally personal preference, but if I’m already driving that far, I’d rather just take the train to not have to worry about driving myself.

As an example of this, if I got a C on any report card/progress report, my parents would take my phone away for the following 9 weeks until the next one came out with better grades. As a kid with undiagnosed ADHD, that meant I had my phone taken away…a lot. As a result, I had no real friendships by the end of high school, and ate my lunch alone every day. If you couldn’t text people/connect on socials, then you never got included in plans or developed those relationships with anyone.

It was lonely, painful, and it fucking sucked. My parents were too wanna-be Boomer to give a shit or even ask. I don’t speak to them any more for that and other reasons.

So yeah, social media may suck, but cutting your child off from modern social circles is a much worse parenting choice. Ideally you’d keep an eye on their use and help them form a healthier relationship with it. But I understand parenting is hard, especially when both parents work full time jobs.

The problem is that even the fan speed settings/airflow settings are touch now, which require divided attention while driving to adjust. That defrost button turns the setting on full fucking blast, when most of the time there’s no call for that, so I have to look and find the fan speed part of the touch screen. Adjusting the temp is only one small part of climate control in the cab. Plus, if you start out your drive with the seat warmers on, but now they’re sweating you out while driving, you have to navigate into a separate menu via touch to turn them off.

Not to mention the never ending battle of adjusting the brightness via touch if it’s blinding my eyes while driving at night VS barely being visible during the day.

It’s all just so frustrating, and I wish there were at least options to take the damn thing out.

Cherish that Subaru, because it’s not that way in them anymore. At least, not in ours, which was purchased in 2021. Now hvac is all touch screen; it’s awful.

My exact reaction to Starfield. Will almost certainly be the same for ES6

Haha, “why so defensive”?

Right, but if the person I was talking originally to had said “I’m not from the US so I know nothing about it” it woulda been fine and I would have immediately apologized and we’d go from there. Having a nice chat.

That’s not what happened. Someone new chimed in with a pretty rude non-sequitur in the vein of ‘stupid Americans’. I don’t think I was particularly defensive or angry, but maybe it came off that way.

I definitely don’t? I was just providing my experience for the place I live. Obviously not all places are the south…? And good for you on your ‘more civilized place’, but we’re not talking about those areas.

Seems to me that, to solve rent crisis, Americans should just move into Europeans’ heads, since we seem to live there rent free already.

I’m not sure where you live, but living/growing up in the south… I can tell you that those beliefs run deep. Deep deep deep. Deeper than you can fix by just being pleasant to your neighbor.

If you try to talk to them with kindness and openness, they dig in their heels and start spewing fox news talking points like it’s the most obvious thing in the world (I’m pretty sure they like it so much because it confirms every awful belief they already had). Try to present different sources, they’re rejected as fake news. I’ve tried everything with people around here since before 2016 and nothing seems to help. Mostly I just keep to myself.

Living in the south, if you’re not indoctrinated, is very isolating. Even living in the cities doesn’t really help. You still need to dig deep and look carefully for people who don’t think you deserve fewer rights.

Edit: thinking about it more, I think the isolation is the point, and it’s how so many people in my state believe some of the same basic things when it comes to religion and politics. You learn pretty young around here that if you don’t get with the program, you’re not going to have many friends. If you didn’t go to church, especially, you lost out on most of the community’s socializing for the week. It feels very cliquey in the smaller towns especially, almost by design.

Super not enthused with how centrist this is. Comes off as more of the “can’t we all just get along and live in unity??” stuff people say, when really they mean “the left needs to chill and stop making everything a big deal.”

Kinda hard to just ‘get along’ when the other side is trying to destroy democracy and strip large portions of the population of their basic human rights.

Literally fucking every place now and I hate it. Ordering take out food that I am picking up myself? It’s “swipe your card here and it’s going to ask you a question”. Literally everywhere. Even places designed to be walk-up and get your food and leave, like a local smoothie place or something.

There is so much to unpack here holy moly. Ignoring the religious stuff, there are lots of alternatives to the things you’re listing, if you’re concerned. You say truth is bitter, but overlook some glaring ones provided by the modern era: vitamin supplements and alternative leather made from plants.

Those things might have been true when the monk spoke them, but time marches on and modern advancements leave some pieces of wisdom behind in the past.

Practice makes perfect :) If you’re sewing, try using a backstitch

But I don’t want YouTube Music. I want to watch quality videos without ads where my money benefits creators first, not a corporation first.

So by those metrics, Nebula is still a better bargain for me and a better place to spend my money.

Nebula has much cheaper pricing than YouTube, and gives creators much more control over their content. I’d rather give my money to them than a company that spends every waking moment thinking about how to screw me and its creators over.

Honestly I don’t know why you care so much. This isn’t debate class, I don’t really need to defend myself to some rando on the internet who decided to make a corporation their white-knight crusade for the day. I detailed an experience I had with the company a few years back. That’s it. I’m not going back to them, because like most streaming platforms I think they’re shite.

Idk why you’re coming at me, dude. Does Hulu pay your bills or something? Like I said, I’m just describing my experience, idk why you’re being a confrontational ass about it.

It’s not on all things, only some programs, but it was enough that it upset me because they were charging me for ‘ad free’ and didn’t even warn me that some things would have ads.

Yes it does, or it did when I was subscribed. It was usually on reality type shows like HGTV or other similar things. I also hated that it wouldn’t let me skip ads on things I had recorded on live TV. They also have had shitty no-account sharing policies since before Netflix enraged everyone with their plan for that. I remember them not letting me watch from my account because I wasn’t at my set home address.

Don’t know what to tell you. Their services were charging way too much to be limiting features like that, and I’m not going back. At least YouTube TV lets you skip ads in recorded programs.