Rants

My 2007 Subaru Outback is in the shop for service and I was lucky enough to be sent home with a loaner car, the 2020 Subaru Outback, for a couple days. I was excited to try out the car until I started the engine.

Before I rag on Subaru, I will say that they know how to physically put together a car extremely well. This 2020 Outback has a good looking interior which is assembled with skill. Nothing gives off that cheap/plastic-y look or feeling. There are no panel gaps or other signs of shortcuts during assembly. The door closing sound is one of the best I’ve ever heard. When driving down the road, I notice a significant improvement in sound isolation compared to my 2007 Outback. At speeds 25 mph and under, the sound of the car on the road is almost inaudible. In summary, Subaru knows a lot about assembling a car well. However, that’s the only good quality of the 2020 Outback.

When I started the car’s engine, the first thing I noticed was the horrible infotainment screen. It looks like it was designed 10 years ago. The physical screen looks bad, the UI on the screen looks bad, and interacting with the UI is even worse. Most of the time the screen does not register my finger presses. When it does, the screen reacts with the slowness of a hungover DMV worker. It is absolutely frustrating. I won’t go into the Maps feature on this screen, but you can trust me when I say that it could not be much worse.

While driving, every input feels like it’s on a poorly designed drive-by-wire system. The brake and gas pedals are extremely soft and do not feel like they are directly connected to the brakes or engine. The steering wheel does not feel like it is connected to the wheels either. Driving the car provides a ghostly, electrical feel instead of a connected, mechanical feel.

Once I got home, opened the trunk just to have a peek around and found that the tailgate is motorized. This kind of thing just kills me. It’s completely and wholly unnecessary. Having this feature on your car means that you waste gas lugging around 20-40 lbs of motors, metal, and hydraulics every where you go simply so that you won’t need to use the fraction of a percent of a Calorie opening the trunk with your own muscles. What a fucking waste of resources. Opening the trunk by myself is not a problem. Motorized trunks are the worst.

While my 2007 Subaru Outback is starting to show its age, I have zero interest whatsoever in purchasing a new car. Subaru has ruined the Outback, partially through bad design and partially through absurd government mandates such as the requirement for all vehicles to have an infotainment system in order to display the image from a reverse camera. I sure hope I do not need to purchase a new car for at least another 10 years. If I do, I can tell you right now that it sure as hell will not be a Subaru Outback.

If you think this COVID-19 situation is bad, just wait for the effects of climate change to kick in. Food is still accessible, services are still available, and the government is still working. Those three things will not be functioning when the effects of climate change come to bear.

Joe Biden is a scumbag politician. He is a soulless piece of shit who is completely disconnected with reality. He is Hilary with a penis. No, he’s worse than Hilary. At least Hilary was only racist, not both sexist and racist like Joe.

President Joe Biden would be a disaster for this country.

He will do nothing to mitigate the unfathomable ongoing disaster that is human-caused climate change. Joe Biden: “We cannot afford the Green New Deal!” Well fuck, Joe. Here’s reality: We either address the root of the problem now by taking the actions laid out in the GND or we are going to pay tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decades to deal with the coming symptoms while continuing to live with the root problem. That is not an exaggeration. Climate change is going to cost the United States tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decades and displace millions of citizens. And this is only considering the United States. When it comes to the impact of climate change on the rest of the world, tens of millions of people are going to be killed as a direct result of climate change over the next hundred years and the financial cost of these changes are going to total in an amount that makes the number ‘one trillion’ look small. The human brain cannot comprehend how absolutely world-changing the consequences of climate change are going to be. The last time we saw Earth’s temperature rise like this, more than 95% of life on Earth was extinguished. But the difference between then and now is that back then, the temperature took thousands of years to change. Humans are currently changing the temperature by the same degree, but on the scale of decades. At least 3/4 of all life on Earth will cease to exist in the next several hundred years if we do not address climate change immediately. We are sleep walking into oblivion and Joe Biden is the perfect person to ensure we continue that march.

Joe Biden will do absolutely nothing to fix our almost entirely broken criminal justice system.

He will do nothing to correct the judicial system’s radical swing to the right under Trump.

He will do nothing to fix or improve our crumbling national infrastructure system.

He will do nothing to expand mass transit in the major cities around the country.

He will continue the failed “War on Drugs”.

He will do nothing to curtail the 3/4 of a trillion dollars per year our nation wastes on the military. This is akin to spending 75% of your take home income on home insurance. It is ludicrous.

He will do absolutely nothing to fix the tremendous problem of wealth inequality, which has reached levels not seen since the 1920s.

He will do nothing to reign in the absurd profits that healthcare companies make, which is the reason why healthcare costs many times more in the U.S. than anywhere else on Earth.

He will do nothing to protect the environment from the rampant, ceaseless development that is capitalism.

He will do nothing to change gun laws or increase gun safety.

He will do nothing to reduce the burden of student loans or stop predatory for-profit education companies.

He will do nothing for women’s rights. I mean come on, have you watched Joe Biden speak during the Anita Hill hearings??? This guy is a male chauvinist to the bone.

He will do nothing to fix our broken tax system, a system in which it is so difficult to file your taxes that it cannot be done without the help of a professional or specially designed software. Nor will he fix the fact that wealthy people pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than poor people.

He will actively fight against any actions that might cause large corporations to begin paying their taxes, or any taxes at all. Joe Biden is a fucking capitalist with a capital C. He lives to make wealthy corporations more wealthy. We live in the golden age of corporate profits and Joe Biden will do nothing to change that situation.

Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate for President guarantees that we are going to see another 4 years of President Trump. Mark my words.

✓ Makes the U.S. Navy Blue Angels violate ethics rules by having them fly at his July 4th political campaign (July 4, 2019)

✓ Demands US military chiefs stand next to him at 4th of July parade (reported July 2, 2019)

✓ Uses his D-Day interview at cemetery commemorating fallen US soldiers to attack a Vietnam veteran (June 6, 2019)

✓ Starts his D-Day commemoration speech by attacking a private citizen (Bette Midler, of all people) (reported on June 4th, 2019)

✓ Made 2nd wife, Marla Maples, sign a prenup that would have cut off all child support if Tiffany joined the military (reported on June 4th, 2019)

✓ Turns away US military from his Memorial Day speech because they were from the destroyer USS John S. McCain (May 27, 2019)

✓ Orders the USS John ($7,740,521 from the NRA) McCain out of sight during his visit to Japan (May 15, 2019). The ship’s name was subsequently covered. (May 27, 2019)

✓ Pardons war criminals (May, 2019)

✓ Purges 200,000 veterans healthcare applications (due to known administrative errors within VA’s enrollment process and enrollment system) (reported on May 13, 2019)

✓ Deports spouse of fallen Army soldier killed in Afghanistan, leaving their daughter parentless (April 16, 2019)

✓ Complains a deceased war hero didn’t thank him for his funeral (March 20, 2019)

✓ Diverts military housing funds to pay for border wall (Feb 15, 2019)

✓ refuses to sign his party’s funding bill, which shuts down the government, and forces a branch of the military to go without pay (but his appointees got a $10,000 pay raise). This branch of military is forced to work without pay, otherwise they are AWOL (Dec 22, 2018 – Jan 25, 2019)

✓ doesn’t pay the Coast Guard, forcing service members to rely on food pantries (Jan 23, 2019)

✓ bans service members from serving based on gender identity (Jan 22, 2019)

✓ denies female troops access to birth control to limit sexual activity (on-going. Published Jan 18, 2019)

✓ tries to deport a marine vet who is a U.S.-born citizen (Jan 16, 2019)

✓ when a man was caught swindling veterans pensions for high-interest “cash advances,” Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined him $1. As a reminder, the Trump administration’s goal was to dismantle the CFPB, installing Mick Mulvaney as the director, who publicly stated the bureau should be disbanded. (Jan 26, 2019)

✓ calls a retired general a ‘dog’ with a ‘big, dumb mouth’ (Jan 1, 2019)

✓ increases privatization of the VA, leading to longer waits and higher taxpayer cost (2018)

✓ finally visited troops 2 years after taking office, but only after 154 vacation days at his properties (Dec 26, 2018)

✓ reveals covert Seal Team 5 deployment, including names and faces, on Twitter during visit to Iraq (Dec 26, 2018)

✓ lies to deployed troops that he gave them a 10% raise. He didn’t give them a 10% raise (Dec 26, 2018)

✓ fires service members living with HIV just before the 2018 holidays (Dec 19, 2018-present)

✓ gets three Mar-a-Lago guests to run the VA (unknown start – present, made well-known in 2018)

✓ calls troops on Thanksgiving and tells them he’s most thankful for himself (Thanksgiving, 2018)

✓ urges Florida to not count deployed military votes (Nov 12, 2018)

✓ cancels Arlington Cemetery visit on Veterans Day due to the rain (Nov 12, 2018)

✓ doesn’t visit US cemetery marking the end of WWI due to the rain (but other world leaders go anyway) (Nov 10, 2018)

✓ stops using troops as a political prop immediately after the election. However, troops remain in muddy camps on the border (Nov 7, 2018)

✓ uses troops as a political prop and sends troops on a phantom mission to the border and makes them miss Thanksgiving with their families (Oct-Dec, 2018)

✓ doesn’t pay veterans’ VA benefits (made public Oct 2018)

✓ doubled the rejection rate for veterans requesting family deportation protections (July 5, 2018)

✓ deports active-duty spouses (11,800 military families face this problem as of April 2018)

✓ forgets a fallen soldier’s name (below) during a call to his pregnant widow, then attacks her the next day (Oct 23-24, 2017)

✓ sends commandos into an ambush due to a lack of intel, and sends contractors to pick them up, resulting in a commando being left behind, tortured, and executed. (Trump approved the mission because Bannon told him Obama didn’t have the guts to do it) (Oct 4, 2017)

✓ blocks a veteran group on Twitter (June 2017)

✓ discharges active-duty immigrant troops with good records (2017-present)

✓ deports veterans (2017-present)

✓ says he knows more about ISIS than American generals (Oct 2016)

✓ says vets get PTSD because they aren’t strong (Oct 3, 2016) (note: yes, he said it’s ‘because they aren’t strong.’ He didn’t say it’s ‘because they’re weak.’ This distinction is important because of Snopes)

✓ accepts a Purple Heart from a fan at one of his rallies and says: “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” (Aug 2, 2016)

✓ attacks Gold Star families (2016-present. Myeshia Johnson–gold star widow, Khan family–gold star parents, etc)

✓ sends funds raised from a January 2016 veterans benefit to the Donald J Trump Foundation instead of veterans charities (the foundation has since been ordered shut because of fraud) (Jan, 2016)

✓ says he doesn’t consider POWs heroes because they were caught (July 18, 2015)

✓ says having unprotected sex was like Vietnam (1998)

✓ for a decade, sought to kick veterans off of Fifth Avenue because he found them unsightly nuisances outside of Trump Tower. “While disabled veterans should be given every opportunity to earn a living, is it fair to do so to the detriment of the city as a whole or its tax paying citizens and businesses?” – 1991

✓ dodges the draft 5 times

via Reddit

The music streaming service Spotify is terribly designed in a multitude of ways, but there is one aspect that is a special level of shitty:

The keyboard shortcut to put caret focus in the search field is Cmd/Ctrl-L.

Seriously… What. The. Fuck.

Meanwhile, the obvious and logical shortcut Cmd/Ctrl-F is mapped to the menu item Edit > Filter which has no function. You can slap Cmd-F on every page on Spotify and nothing will ever happen.