I read everything put in front of me when I bought my car. Boy was the finance guy pissed, cause it took me like an hour, and he makes his living upselling add-ons and stuff.
I'm also a pretty fast reader, so it is pretty obvious that they absolutely expect you to not read whatever it is you are signing, because I assume that it would take most other people well over an hour to read.
You're my hero. That's what I wish I'd done the last time I bought a new car from a dealership. They knew I was coming in to buy that day and could have given me the paperwork on the warranties etc to review, but instead decided to spring it on me just when I thought I was about to walk off with the car.
They also asked me to sign a form that said "I have inspected the car" before I'd seen it at all. Sickens me.
I did the same and do it every time. I know their job is actually just to sell warranties and after-market products and the paperwork is a side-job, but I just can't spend $20-30k+ and sign a bunch of papers without reading them and taking some time.
Each of these places have their own branded contracts and similar, but unique documents that look like they typed up and copied some word document they wrote 7 years ago and have never re-printed.
And the descriptions they give are usually a couple works... This one is a power of attorney, it lets us handle title work for your car on your behalf. I had my title in-hand and signed it over to them, so I was really confused why that was necessary among several other things.
> I had my title in-hand and signed it over to them, so I was really confused why that was necessary among several other things.
They file the paperwork with the state.
If possession of the title printout was sufficient to legally take possession of someone's car, that would open the door to a lot of easy car thefts.
My understanding is that the "finance guys" who offer these extended warranties and what not make the most and easiest money. At least when I did this last time at a dealership, they were flaunting the most wealth (expensive shirt/watch).
Same when I was closing on a house. Yes, it may be routine to you, Mr. Title Company person who sees these 23 times a week, but this is a pretty major endeavor I'm entering into and I'd kind of like to know what I'm getting into.
I did the same and spent 45 minutes enjoying explaining the time value of money and opportunity costs when they were trying to upsell me. I also googled the prices on the hood rock cover undercoat and pre paid maintenance plan.y favorite was the panicked look when he said that the warranty was void if the oil was changed outside the dealer and I informed him that was illegal in the whole us. Eventually he just gave up and sold me the car when the manager was trying to get the room for another sale.
I enjoyed putting the warranty In terms of a bet. Would you spend $5k on a lottery ticket that had payout capped at $25k? No. Then why are you trying to sell me a 3rd party warranty?
I enjoyed the whole process. I set aside a whole day for it.
The best part was when my credit card didn't run for some reason and I didn't have the full payment :)
I took mine home on my first car. Found out they hadn't sent it through Honda finance like was discussed for 3.5% but a local bank at close to 19.5%...they were upset the next day...then really upset with the approval from Honda. I was a young freshly graduated college student whom they thought apparently couldn't read.
I did the same for my current car. I noted to the lady that I'd ticked the "don't spam me" checkbox at the bottom and she admitted that she hadn't even noticed it was there. :P
Well recent studies have actually found that women have a different catabolism than men. Women also switch to catabolism while they still have glycogen remaining in their muscles, meaning they don't build up as much lactic acid.
This flies in the face of conventional wisdom because all of the original studies were only done on men.
Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if women do have a harder time losing weight than men, but I know that a woman's body reacts to starvation differently. That may play a role.
There is a massive need for "foundational" studies to be redone with women. The assumption that men and women have the same metabolism has been shown to be wrong, and it has a lot of broad and overarching implications, especially in the field of medicine.
There's actually very substantial differences in the metabolism inside of muscles for men and women. Nobody realized this because literally every study that created baselines for what was going on inside the muscles in relation to the metabolites that ended up in the blood was done with men. So when women were later included in studies they just used the blood workup or VO2 to estimate energy expenditure and the like, and it turns out those are nearly completely wrong.
Long story short, women switch to catabolism way earlier than men, while they still have glycogen inside their muscles. Men don't switch to catabolism until after they are completely out of glycogen and are creating fucktons of lactic acid. Since your muscles run on glycogen, and lactic acid is not a great thing to have kicking around, women actually appear to have a better metabolism for endurance.
Unfortunately a lot of doctors and researchers are men, and are extremely dismissive of the idea that there is any reason to actually study women, instead inventing behavioral reasons for why you don't always get the same results for men and women in studies.
I think the fact that you are willing to chalk up the fact that women are winning these races on occasion to there not being enough elite runners has signs of a similar chauvanism.
(This is mostly off the top of my head, but I have a degree in biology and I have studied metabolism fairly extensively)
That's an unreasonable thing to do, especially since it was less an ad hominem attack than it was pointing out the fallacy at the root of your misunderstanding. They were doing you a favor. But mostly because, "I will take this one line from your statement, to show that you were arguing in bad faith, and use it to nullify the rest of what you said," is... very obviously a rhetorical tactic, rather than a substantive counterargument.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, the claim that women beat men occasionally because of a small sample size is chauvinistic, regardless of whether or not it was intended to be.
Unlike other events, where strength is a limiting factor (for instance, sprint speed is limited by muscle mass), there isn't much of a reason to believe that women would be worse at distance running.
For instance, the same line of logic would be 100% chauvinistic if someone said "The best engineer in this field is a woman, but it's a narrow field, I assume the sample size is very small."
People used to make very similar claims about the inferior mental capacity of women as they do about physical performance now. Yes, men outperform women in feats of strength, however, in many sporting disciplines the fact that men continue to outperform women is most likely due to the fact that men are generally encouraged to participate in sport to a greater degree than women, and sporting communities are more welcoming to men.
The author of the comment I replied to has no basis for his claim that the sample size accounts for the women winning beyond a feeling that men are superior athletes in all ways. That is chauvinism, and if that claim makes you feel uncomfortable or angry, perhaps you should reflect on why that is.
No, what that person said was not chauvinistic. You're just trying very hard to imply it that way and your horrendous smugness about it isn't helping.
Especially when you're backing them up with ridiculously biased assumptions (which aren't supported by the science): "In many sporting disciplines the fact that men continue to outperform women is most likely due to the fact that men are generally encouraged to participate in sport to a greater degree than women"
I'm sure the reason Serena Williams can barely compete with a fringe male pro is because society is mean to her.
You're trying extremely hard to avoid scientific realities and scolding anyone who acknowledges them as "chauvinist". Your method of argument is everything that's wrong with societal discourse in 2019.
>I think the fact that you are willing to chalk up the fact that women are winning these races on occasion to there not being enough elite runners has signs of a similar chauvanism.
Or maybe it has to do with the fact that men drastically outperform women in almost any other physical trial, and this therefore has the markings of a statistical anomaly? What's with this desperation to explain away any differences with accusations of sexism?
What's next? Chauvanism is the reason we believe that men can lift heavier weights than women?
Men generally have the potential to be stronger than women, yes, but in general men are only stronger than women and larger than women, neither of which is particularly meaningful in endurance racing.
I replied to the comment above you in greater depth, but basically endurance appears to be something that women have the potential to be better at than men. If this strikes you as wrong, well, it's probably because it challenges your conception of male superiority rather than because of any innate advantage that men actually have.
> If this strikes you as wrong, well, it's probably because it challenges your conception of male superiority rather than because of any innate advantage that men actually have.
It challenges all the data that so far have supported that men dominate in endurance too.
Stop injecting bigotry into everything. This axe to grind of yours is the very same that is infesting and ruining academia and industry.
My conception of physical male superiority stems from the inarguable fact that in almost every physical test men have been shown to unquestionably dominate. There's a reason sports are segregated. Your ideal world of equality does not exist; this bias is based in reality. Am I saying it's impossible in this case that women may actually be better suited for ultra endurance? No, but it's unlikely because the data isn't there, not because of your sexism Boogeyman man. I don't appreciate being slandered without substantiation either.
Edit: to summarize, extraordinary facts require extraordinary evidence, of which you currently have non, only plausible speculation. This has absolutely nothing to do with chauvinism, and, frankly, your reverse bias is dangerous.
This is exactly the problem. Since running naturally normalizes for body weight, going by your "stronger and larger", we would expect men to be significantly slower. At any endurance event, starting at a mile. But the evidence isn't there.
Based on the views you have espoused here, I would not call you a leftist commie. It sounds like freedom of speech is your number 1 concern, which would be in character for someone with views that could be considered alt-right. Maybe you are a libertarian, which could otherwise be referred to as an anarch-capatalist, but libertarianism is in no way a leftist movement.
While South Park and Eminem both 'triggered' a lot of people because of their use of obscenity, neither is leftist in any way, shape or form. South Park regularly attacks anyone who tries to change society, which is in no way a leftist mindset. As for Eminem, I can't think of a single example of left-leaning thought in any of them outside of freedom of speech.
In general I think you'd have a very hard time making the claim that the overton window is sliding to the left. Maybe the overton window is moving to the left for gender identity and sexual expression, but that is about it. The right has succeeded in moving the overton window substantially in their favor in most social and economic programs.
Leftists aren't actually oppressing anybody. We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards). Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.
Well, that's certainly not true. They are absolutely oppressing people. They may be oppressing people that you or even I think ought be oppressed, but that doesn't mean they're not doing it.
> We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards).
That's true around economic issues. It's not so true around identity politics. The political climate around those issues in the US is very much left of center.
> Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.
That kind of depends on what exactly you mean by that. Naming and shaming individuals for social transgressions based on hearsay seems pretty oppressive to me.
I live in a house with steam heat. Steam systems often get converted to hot water, but in general I have a few observations related to radiated heat.
1) Steam and other radiant systems don't deal with temperature setbacks well. They take FOREVER to warm up a house after a set back, so don't bother with a deep setback overnight, and if you are gonna turn down the heat because you are going to be gone for a while, expect your house to be cold for a couple of hours while it warms back up, or expect your heat to overshoot by 5-10 degrees.
2) Radiant heat seems to work well in the temperature range it is designed for, but outside of that range you get strong temperature gradients in rooms. Unless you have a fan in each room, expect the ceiling to be substantially warmer than the floor. I have 12 foot ceilings, and the ceiling can be 15 - 20 degrees warmer.
3) I personally prefer forced air with my allergies than radiant heat, because you can upgrade a forced-air system to use better filters, which basically gives you a filter for your entire house. Radiators are a pain in the ass to keep clean, and the air often seems to go stale over time. I have fairly bad indoor allergies and it just feels like over winter the house just fills with allergens.
4) On the same note, you can't get whole-house humidifiers with steam heat, nor can you easily add air conditioning.
5) Steam isn't THAT quiet. An improperly tuned system will bang (which shouldn't count against steam, because that's the fault of whoever is maintaining the system), one-pipe systems (which are common in Chicago) hiss when they are heating up, the valves sputter as they die, and when the system cools back down there is a loud inrush of air. Two pipe systems make noise as they heat up and joints flex, and the valves also make little clicking sounds.
Hot water can get bubbles in it and make wooshing sounds, but that's generally a sign of bad maintenance.
The sound of air blowing bothers me less in general than one off sounds that occur with steam and hot water though, and unless you don't mind the aforementioned temperature gradients you'll need to have a fan running anyways.
6) It's much much easier to find people who know how to work on forced air in the US. Replacement parts are easier to find, and forced air is usually more efficient.
One big benefit to steam is that old systems were massively oversized for the houses they are in. My house had absolutely NO problem getting up to temp during the week we had below zero temps. It was running a lot though, and the leaking shutoff valves and blurbling air vents were starting to drive me nuts, so I shut off the heat for a couple of hours on the coldest day (which got down to -40 or so) to do repairs. It got down to about 40 degrees inside before I turned the heat back on, and once it was back on it got up to 70 or so no problem. I know a lot of people who had more modern systems that struggled to maintain 40 or 50 degrees.
Side note: If anyone has a steam heat system in their home, I would highly recommend picking up The Lost Art of Steam Heating by Dan Holohan. As I mentioned, it's hard to find a real steam heating expert nowadays, most of the time you'll just get plumbers who are moonlighting. While steam heat involves plugging pipes together, there are a lot more things to take into account other than whether pipe A and pipe B are connected.
> you can upgrade a forced-air system to use better filters, which basically gives you a filter for your entire house.
This is a reason I really like our forced air system (New England house from the 50s): it can circulate and filter the air even without heating or cooling it. I have it run hourly for part of the day and it does wonders to keep the air fresh (i.e. we really notice when the system is off for some reason).
> They take FOREVER to warm up a house after a set back, so don't bother with a deep setback overnight
This is incredibly true in intermittently occupied areas. Just heating the air is one thing. Heating everything around it just to get warm is another.
If you're in a private/semi-private office 9-5, having your own heater or window A/C gives you a lot of control and is incredibly efficient since you can turn it on/off with your work hours.
It will cycle a lot because the envelope doesn't change temperature much (eventually heating/cooling the air), but you reduce consumption a lot by not getting to the point of majorly heating/cooling the envelope, just the air (which is what matters unless a mattress is involved).
Yeah, exactly. I like to have it relatively cold at night, so with forced air I set the heat to come on about 15-20 minutes before I want to get out of bed, and turn off 15 minutes after I leave for the day.
With radiant heat, if I want it to be 55 while I'm sleeping, and 70 when I leave my bed, my heat will come on 2 hours before I'm going to get up, and the temperature will slowly increase over that time, leading to it being far too warm about an hour before I intend to get up. The heater turns off as the house gets up to temp, but the radiators thermal mass is such that they are still quite hot when I leave for the day, in effect heating the house long after I've left.
Furthermore, it's basically impossible to have zone heat with one-pipe systems, and it's much more difficult with two pipe systems. (This is less of a problem with hot water though).
With forced air, you can install active vents fairly easily, and while you still can't cut off TOO many of the vents at once, lest you cause too much back-pressure in the system, it is fairly easy to heat one side of your house or one floor of your house.
On top of all that, steam doesn't handle short-cycling well, so you have to accept a wider swing in temp than you do with forced air.
Significantly overshooting the temp is something you can avoid. The thermostat needs more information, but predicting the temperature in 10 minutes if the heat is turned off now is not that complex.
Then you can have fully functioning heat even when the power is out, because the steam does not need either a blower or a circulator pump to circulate, and the thermocouple provides the electricity to operate the thermostat and the gas valve.
Even without a millivolt system, a small UPS can run the little low voltage transformer a long time, while it would take an impractical amount of battery (which will crap out in only 3-4 years) to run a blower or circulator for any length of time.
Your points are all valid, and frankly outweigh this one except maybe at a vacation/camp house or something way out where the electric is bad, but this is something nothing else can claim.
It is pretty nice that when the ice storm pulls the power lines down, and, because it's an ice storm and it affected entire states all at the same time, your power may stay down for days, and does so coincidentally in the winter...your heat just keeps working even if nothing else does, and indefinitely not just until a 45 minute ups runs out.
Also... everyone with steam, replace your pressurtrol with a vaporstat and run your system at much lower pressure than it's probably set at. 1/2 psi per floor not counting basement, at most.
> They take FOREVER to warm up a house after a set back, so don't bother with a deep setback overnight
Steam and other radiant systems don't deal with temperature setbacks well. In the UK and Ireland people perform a deep setback (on their hot water system) overnight then usually just accept that the house will be cold in the mornings.
I used to be annoyed by red light cameras because they triggered on "safe" infractions, like right turns on red. Over the past few years I've changed my mind, because I've almost been hit as a pedestrian and on my bike by people sliding through intersections, to the point where I've physically prevented myself from being hit by pushing off the car a couple times.
Right on red is awesome as a driver, but it makes roads really dangerous for other road users. I think bad intersection design is partly to blame for perceived "frivolous" red light tickets, but at the same time I think that drivers really should come to a complete stop before the line (and before the crosswalk if there is one) before deciding if a right turn on red is safe or practicable. If people can't even be bothered to stop for a right turn on red then it's probably better to ban them outright.
Also, I've seen enough people run red lights 2-3 seconds after the light changes that I want red light cameras at every intersection anyways. It might be 1 in every 250 people who gets dinged for the right turn on red ticket, but that's stupidly dangerous.
If a fix is needed, increase the fine for blowing the light, scale it based on the time the light had been red (so you don't excessively punish people who got caught in the zone of indecision), and reduce the fine for rolling through a right on red.
Do you always look both ways before entering the street? I always try to do that, both because that's what I was taught to do as a child, and because it seems like the best way to ensure my safety when walking. The only times as a pedestrian when I've been nearly hit by a car is when I've failed to do that.
Here are 2 scenarios that might explain OP's point of view.
You are walking up to an intersection and the crosswalk sign is green. You look right and across the intersection all the traffic is stopped. You look left and there is a car coming, but it is clearly slowing down for the red light. You step into the intersection, but the car doesn't actually stop. They turn right at the intersection. You have to jump away. The problem here is not that you didn't look, but that you misinterpreted what the car was doing. It would be best to wait until all approaching cars are actually stopped before entering the intersection, but next time you are crossing a street I challenge you to see if you always do that. It's surprisingly uncommon because the car is "obviously" stopping.
The second is more of a clear cut problem. Bicycles often travel at speeds much faster than people expect. It's not unusual for a road bike to be going over 30 km/h (just under 20 mph). Cars should wait for you to clear the intersection, but often they aren't looking for bikes and will make a right hand turn, cutting off the cyclist. It happened to me many times in Canada. I'm very happy that the turn-on-red rule is not allowed in Japan where I live now.
California has a little-known law that tries to protect bicyclists from the "right hook" accident you mention. If there is a bike lane, drivers are required to merge into the bike lane before turning right, instead of turning from the car lane and cutting across the bike lane.
This is why bike lane stripes have a dotted section when approaching an intersection, to give drivers a hint about what they are supposed to do. Unfortunately, only a minority of drivers understand and follow the hint.
I wouldn't be surprised if the actual reason was they are capturing extra sales from people who bought something, liked it a lot, and then bought another to give to their kids or for their second home. My mom buys me random chotchkies all the time after she bought them and liked them, and if my parents were well off I could easily see her buying me a vacuum or a new mattress after she got herself one.
For 99% of people that probably doesn't happen, but the people with the money to do that probably spend a TON of money, so they are worth targeting with ads.
I suspect adtech industry would shrink down half its size if it could accurately attribute sales to ads. It sometimes smells as if it was standard practice to convince the client (intentionally, or unintentionally by also convincing yourself) that correlation is causation and therefore their success is attributed to ad spending.
The new engine is more powerful, and at high angles of attack the nacelles also generate lift. The added power, along with the greater displacement from the center of lift/drag causes the plane to pitch up more easily, and the lift from the nacelle causes the controls to get lighter as you approach stall speed.
The FAA requires the controls to get heavier as you approach a stall. MCAS was primarily designed to address this flaw, which is why the added lift from the nacelles is an issue.
I think that the author is mistaking the fact that trimming the plane forward means that more force is required to pull back on the yoke for the plane actively pushing the yoke forward.
Yeah, maybe also some Boeing/Airbus confusion. The author doesn't seem to understand the extent to which the 737 cockpit is mechanical, with cables running to control surfaces. It's an important point because it likely explains why the Ethiopian pilots were unable to regain control after disabling electric trim, becoming overpowered by aerodynamic load on the stabilizer.
I'm also a pretty fast reader, so it is pretty obvious that they absolutely expect you to not read whatever it is you are signing, because I assume that it would take most other people well over an hour to read.