snooggums

Everyone else has great points about complexity, but there is an additional issue which is the constant desire for change keeping products from being refined and perfected.

Any product will have small changes that improve it, like reinforcing points of failure specific to that design. Let’s take a kitchen knife, the kind chefs use. Some manufacturers have the exact same model produced for decades, with ever so slight variations on angles, handles, and so on as they refined design. Now they are high quality if they keep the production going, and that is something that has no moving parts! These knives continue to sell because they are used constantly, can break or be damaged, and new restaurants open all the time requiring a constant supply of knives.

The home knife market does not have the same pressure for reliability because people don’t use them all day every day like a chef. Instead, companies are constantly changing designs to sell new versions to the same over saturated market that prizes form over function. They change the handles slightly, make a change to the blade, and sometimes these changes make the knife worse but they can slap a ‘new and improved’ sticker on the label as long as something changed.

The same thing happens with technology except complex systems have even more refinement needed while the companies are also trying to change things just to change them in the pursuit of the ‘new and improved’ market. Moving menus around, changing orders of things, making things look flashy are all side effects of tech being afraid of selling the same thing for an extended period of time because people want something new and shiny to replace what they had. Time and effort is spent on changing things, and it is hard to do bug fixes while also creating something new that might make a bunch of old bugs obsolete. Oh, and they will also be spending their time trying to patch critical vulnerabilities, because that might keep someone from buying their next thing.

So all the effort going into changing things, often making them worse if they happened to stumble into a useful design already, and they put all of their focus on that change and vulnerabilities so they don’t have time to fix usability issues or do the things that would make their product better because why bother as long as people are buying? Anything someone who is knowledgeable about being fixed is unlikely to be a priority because the regular user probably hasn’t even noticed and they are the ones who are going to buy the next version. That is why things like bluetooth continues to suck, because it works well enough to sell more things and doing it right would take more effort. The handy feature that you used to like being removed? They felt it needed to change just to change and whoever provided input or feedback came up with this instead.

Oh, and all of this was just talking about available time spent doing things but on top of that they want to spend as little as possible so they get the cheap parts that are made by companies who also make a product just good enough that they get more customers to buy their parts for as little cost to produce as possible.

TLDR: market pressures favor changing things constantly which introduces more design flaws and capitalist pressures focus on revising designs to sell more and security flaws so as long as it sells it doesn’t matter if it has shitty usability and minor flaws are never fixed

It’s a win-win situation!

Nah, he is just too incompetent to completely run it into the ground.

Unless tou know they are malicious narccisists, them attributing it to malice is the logical thing to do. Plus hate and pig-headedness are common movitators for malice…

Nice try, robot.

I drop off my kiddo in the morning because it is a 10 minute ride and is on my way to work while the bus is a 50 minute ride. She rides the bus home in the afternoon, because time is less of an issue.

All of the schools she has gone to have organized dropoff routes so everyone gets dropped off on the passenger side and it basicslly works like a drive through. Far safer than the convoluted mess that I got to watch as a bus rider when I was a kid.

Wish we had better public transportation so dedicated school buses were not so necessary.

The horrible trashy people also let their aggressive dogs out to roam unattended, leave unsecured firearms around the house, and other things that are not as frequently deadly, but just as stupid.

Fuck off Putin.

There is a launch pad thing using springs or compressed air to give them a boost or they wouldn’t go as far.

The explosion is just for sound, and it is funny if the timing is off.

Well, he is a Republican so that is a safe bet.

It isn’t shaming his son, it is shaming Mike Johnson for being creepy with his son.

NPCs and monsters automatically die at zero HP in DmD 5th and the editions prior that I was the DM for. There was a reminder that the DM could choose to let them go under, but the default was death on zero for non-player characters and monsters.

Just imagine tracking death saving throws for every NPC and weak monsters…

Yeah, but that would be treated like poison damage at a later time with a savings throw.

I mean, there is plenty of time to lick lips on the way to the hospital.

Honda is one automaker that has separate climate controls, and it is a great balance with things that are nice on a screen like navigation. Heck, even though the music is through the touchscreen it still has a volume knob to quickly adjust or turn off no matter what the screen is showing.

Still have them as paddles and buttons on my 2023 Honda. I don’t even need to look down and they work with gloves.

Heating and ac controls on the flatscreen eliminated a bunch of other carmakers from my poasible choices.

Silicon Valley, where scams go to get funded.

Americans love rules for everyone else, but not for themselves.

“It would be a bad look if we acknowledged Israel was committing genocide. By the way, don’t forget the unprecedented attack on October 7th!”

• Blinken

I’ll bet semi trailers contribute as well, it is rarely a single thing.