For me personally, there has been a turning point in the last couple of years once I really accepted that the intended experience matters more than the actual physicality of a lot of these things and that authenticity is a lot more artificial and arbitrary than I used to give it credit for. I have been collecting and hoarding retro consoles and retro computers for over a decade. I would pay a lot of money to buy them, have them shipped to me, sometimes have to fix them, then pay a lot for extra equipment to make it more functional in this era, sometimes pay for flash carts or disk emulators and all for what? The C64 I played a bunch with trying to give it more modern capabilities, but in the end even that tends to require some degree of willful blindness; the wifi "adapters" I connected to the C64 were often computers of their own with much higher capabilities than the C64 itself.
And ultimately your Paralympics example is a great analog; we like to think that the two-legged guy with one leg tied is the only one with an artificial limitation, but the one-legged guy as well, in that at any point he could hop on to a (accessibility modified) motorcycle and easily beat the two legged guy. How realistic a recreation of running from Marathon to Athens in Ancient Greece is a modern marathon? The ancient greeks didn't have modern running shoes, energy gels, nipple guards... Why are we restricting motorcycles and not those then? How "realistic" is my "nostalgic experience" with an old computer? Even if I didn't "cheat" by connecting it to more modern equipment, and kept only to vintage accessories so as to not give it capabilities it didn't have back in the days, isn't it STILL cheating if I can access the wealth of ressources of the modern internet that people didn't have access to in the 80s? After all, a large part of the experience, perhaps the most important one!, back then was not so much the equipment people had but the way they had to discover how to use it, by trading floppies with people, going to computer stores, posting on BBSes. The equipment is secondary.
Once I accepted the arbitrary nature of those restrictions, I changed my way of indulging in retro computing/retro gaming nostalgia. I decided that original hardware is not what I really care about, but creating something that makes me feel like original hardware is actually what matters. I put my original hardware away and I'm building up my "retro setup" centered on a MiSTer that has the aesthetic appeal of of the late 80s early 90s, with modern amneties that I feel are not impeding on the feel and aesthetic.
pigeonburger
3d ago
Now, there's a lot of contempt for america in europe, but from what I've seen there's also admiration, especially among the working class. My wife and I went to New York last december and my Spanish in-laws were quite jealous. They wanted as keepsakes american one dollar bills and statue of liberty merch. I think that's because despite all they hear on the news, the US remains a place they admire. Maybe for the people who can afford to visit it, it has less cachet, but from other europeans I know that have visited, I still see that they, on some level, admire it. The USA they hate is a construct created by the news media (both theirs, and the US blue tribe media).
pigeonburger
4d ago
Easy to say when there aren't any concrete dollars on the table yet, and not necessarily a bad strategy to claim it if you want the offer to be as high as it possibly can if it comes. But not really indicative of a real preference, especially if, as you point out, their principles seem to be subordinate to their material conditions.
When the Greenlanders turn down a real (not a poll) direct payment of 200 000 american dollars per person to join the US (not to sell their land and leave, to join a wealthy country that will likely invest in building up their island!), I'll consider they've actually rejected it. And even then, it might be negociating for a higher number.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Fun fact: I am not, actually, American. I just recognize that there is still some vitality left in US, unlike Western Europe and the other Anglosphere countries, who have nothing to contribute and make every decision they can seemingly with the goal of smothering their economy, of replacing their culture and demography. Maybe it doesn't always do so in the wisest way, but the american beast still moves and thrash about. Western europe is inert, it hasn't moved in a long time. At this point we should really check for a pulse and just call it.
pigeonburger
5d ago
I think the point is to delegitimize the regime, he will declare soon who that "New Regime President" is and the hope is that iranians are going to go along with it.
pigeonburger
6d ago
It's okay, you're allowed to call them "clankers" here, yes, even with a hard R.
The main advantages to carmakers is that it's a lot easier to make and especially to scale across multiple products and that it's easier to make changes after production, etc, even if you don't add any new functions or telemetry vs, say, 90s cars.
For a car to drive smoothly requires a lot of things to happen just right at the right times, in the right way, like a complex ballet performance. You can get there with exquisitely engineered mechanical parts, electrical parts, electronics, discrete computers or centralized computers (and yeah in a physical way, computers are electronics which are electrical parts, but the degree of complexity and flexibility is different). Having mechanical parts do all of this complex ballet is possible, but difficult; tolerances have to be extremely precise, the materials quasi perfect... It's slightly easier to fudge some of the things with simple electrical parts. For instance, instead of smooth high quality gears and cranks just put an electric motor and limit switches to control a window (it's also easy to make a cheap, bad window crank tho). It's even easier to have electronics like purpose made chips do some of it instead; a servomotor doesn't need to have as much complexity built into it to avoid decapitating a child whose head was out of the window when it started closing. And a computer makes it all even easier, you can start producing the car first and worry about how much strength the motor for the windows are able to push after, and if a regulatory agency changes it (or if different jurisdictions have different limits) you can still use the same part and just change the programming.
The big change from the 90s and early 00s to now is that we're going from multiple discrete computers, which can be limited and hard to access, to less, but more powerful, central computers. That's easier for the dealership to access (according to the industry though, giving independant mechanics access will get women raped in parking garages*).
For consumers, there's some advantages. You can have "modes" that change the throttle response of the car, you can have simulated shifting on CVT transmissions, you can have more complex features for controls like locking window controls for the back row from the front row, more complex security and safety features, a mechnical or electrical car is trivial to hotwire. You can also have features like accident detection that can, on top of calling emergency services on your behalf in some of the more advanced cases, in simpler cases it could automatically unlock the door so it's easier to evacuate. The cases where the consumers are (rightly) complaining is when manufacturers, following Tesla's lead, are replacing physical controls that are easy to use without looking with modal touchscreens (which require more attention from the driver to use). Part of this from the manufacturer is because it's cheaper, part of it is because there's the impression that futuristic means clean means no buttons.
And then of course, they like getting their telemetry data.
*Sadly I can't find the actual ad anymore.
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