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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Hard of hearing also. It’s so frustrating that text signs that list announcements are so rare.

    Captions on television/movies and games are commonplace, but in the real world, very few places care.

    Might be because I’m in a red state for a few more years due to family; blue states likely tend to be more aware of issues like ours.

    I did see written callouts of upcoming tram stops once, but I can’t recall which airport. It may have been ORD.








  • It was bad, yes. Not debating that, and I’m glad that the design was changed and existing owners could get the shifter replaced at no cost to them.

    However, it’s frustrating to see that people so often ignore recalls and then are injured or killed in a way that would have been avoided had they done the free recall. I usually feel sad when I think of deaths like that because the death is just so final and was easy to avoid.

    People have recently died to exploding airbag inflators, even though the Takata recall has been in the news for years, and even if a vehicle has had multiple owners, the publicity means that chances are that the current owner has seen at least a headline about it. Yet clearly people aren’t getting the recall work done, and they’re dying because of it.

    Is it a hassle to take a car in for repair? Yep. Had to have mine serviced due to a recall for something that hadn’t manifested on my car in my own use. But given that the alternative could have been very bad (the car’s software was updated to ensure that it would shift into park more reliably when there was a rollaway risk, if the driver didn’t do so manually), I dealt with having a loaner for a day when the update took longer than expected.

    Designers sometimes make bad choices. Regulations are written in blood, it’s said, because it’s often tragedy that leads to changes. But I don’t think it very likely that shifters like that will make it past design reviews again. It’ll be some other bad decision that causes the next big recall.







  • This is typical in forensics. No one cannot make a definitive claim yet until a lab examines everything that’s been recovered. Most likely, that is what’s been found, yes, but confirming it takes time.

    It’s also why you may hear a technician say that a sample is “consistent with” something (say, a person) when it is not possible to confirm where it came from.

    Until relatively recently, a hair with no root was just about impossible to match to a single person, so that was a common example of that phrasing. Now, in some cases, it’s possible to get DNA from the strand.