I assume everyone is owned by someone terrible, but the individual policies and changes are what drives me to swap.

I pay for things on sites processed by PayPal too, I just don’t have an account.

Just standard credit card processing for purchases and zelle or venmo for transfers.

Good thing I deleted my PayPal years ago over a previous TOS change.

And this is where you went? This is literally Reddit’s bias taken to the level of hyperbole. The extremism groupthink here is the primary reason it hasn’t and likely will never go mainstream.

I sold it for market value, it was a rare 6 speed one and since then manuals command an insane premium in some segments.

They’re a joke to all the manufacturers that went all in on EVs before the market fell out from under them.

Prices for even 200k mile used vehicles are skyrocketing and cheap new cars simply don’t exist. Yes, ICE is the majority of vehicles out there, especially in rural areas, but they are more expensive and less available than ever. 10 years ago I bought a 100k mile Volvo wagon for $10k, put 50k more miles on it then sold it for $5k; if I wanted to buy the exact same car back today with 250k miles i would need to pay $15k for it. As manufacturers shift to EVs that problem is only going to get worse.

There is a logical reason to be against forced adoption before the technology matures. For a lot of the country they are not a viable replacement for ICE yet. They’re improving, but not as fast as ICEs are being phased out and that leaves a lot of places where a dwindling used market will be the only option for many people.

It’s such a minor thing but fuck it’s annoying.

I have never listened to the radio in my car by choice. My phone is plugged in (currently Apple CarPlay but I used Android Auto with my last phone) but for simple play controls the buttons on the dash or steering wheel are still superior.

Maps make sense but having play controls for music as physical buttons is amazing. I have both a touch screen and physical volume/next/prev and I use the physical ones all the time. I actually like the sync system in my Focus other than the fact that when you start the car it tries to “resume” the first thing it can find and blasts loud AM static 75% of the time when I start the car. The controls are good though.

As someone who has traveled across many countries all over the world. Anytime it’s illegal to say “this country is a shithole” quite often that country is a shithole.

Songs and albums that I’ve listened to for years have disappeared from my Apple Music subscription. I swapped completely to a paid service and never looked back until they removed things I could listen to last month.

Yeah, I’m looking at some of the options. I like this speaker set so an option with an analogue jack and USB port for power seems the way to go. Whether I go for a Pi or just a simple Arduino board doesn’t matter to me. I think I’m going to be messing with code anyway to get the switch behavior I want since most existing MP3 options seem to be standard play/next/prev controlled with multiple momentary buttons vs a toggle. Even just toggle on to start the song each time will need a bit of customizing and at that point I might as well make it a bit more fancy with off being pause and then a timer for back on to be unpause if it’s a short period or play from the beginning if it’s been sitting for a few minutes.

It’s still a first dive into any of this for me, Pi or Arduino but with a bit of help pointing in the right direction none of it seems that hard. Just trying to figure out which hardware to go with and once I have it playing with it until I get what I want.

Yeah, I would rather do a Pi or Arduino and some coding. I was already planning on 3d printing an enclosure.

That looks perfect. Will I need a different board to wire the switch to and manage everything or will that basically be the full hardware other than the speaker and SD card?

Space: I was going to 3d print a box for it. The switch is 3x3” so I was thinking of approximately a 3x3x3 cube but slightly angling the panel back a bit to truncate the front corner would look nice. I have leeway to adjust the enclosure as needed since I’m developing and printing it myself. A single 2-3” diameter speaker would fit and I can adjust the enclosure around it and convert the mp3 to mono as needed.

Power: Power is flexible to whatever solution seems best. I envisioned it as a desk ornament so first thought was a USB jack on the back. Not 100% tied to that but figured it seemed the easiest. My goal was to have the switch play the music so long as the device has power available.

Budget: I was envisioning $50 or so for components but can be flexible within reason. The controller needs to run a few dozen lines of code and have enough memory for a single mp3 so I can’t imagine it will be that expensive.

Time: Not stuck on any specific timeline. The friend is visiting with the kid in 2 weeks which would seem doable if I don’t get distracted. If not his birthday is in April and even then I can send it whenever it’s done or I see them next. She’s going through a divorce with the pilot father so a positive gift tied to the father would be really nice for him to have, there’s a whole backstory there that isn’t worth getting into. In short, 2.5 weeks would be great but “when it’s done” is acceptable.

There’s a reason I specifically opened with how in CT it isn’t an issue before explaining that in the majority of the country (notice I said country vs the population) it still is. Like the CT governor you still seem to not quite grasp the reality of what it is like to live somewhere other than a built up urban area. There are no buses here, there are no trains here. If I wanted to rent a gas car, I need to drive 120 miles to the city because there isn’t a rental option in my town (which actually qualifies as a “city”. It’s an hour drive to the nearest movie theater. While NYC alone has more people than the entire state of OK, there are still millions of people living here that simply can’t get by with an EV for day to day lives, let alone if they want to make a trip by any transportation method. Add in the fact that even with current developments and proposals battery energy density is a hard limit of physics and chemistry, unless a completely new method of energy storage is invented it will always be 1/100th of what gasoline has meaning EVs will continue to be absurdly overweight. Don’t worry, I’m not in a rush to sell any of my ICE vehicles, at this point I might literally hold onto them forever because there isn’t a single car being made new right now that I like better than anything I currently own.

Where I used to live and work near Hartford range anxiety wouldn’t be an issue. Where I now live and work in Oklahoma it still is an extremely big issue. A friend in CO with an EV wanted to come visit but couldn’t make the drive in one day due to charging options. Hell, if I want to go on a 4 hour drive to Amarillo I need to carefully plan my fuel stops because there’s hundred mile stretches where I can’t even fill up my Ford Focus, let alone charge a Tesla. Range anxiety is a legitimate concern for much of the country.

I don’t get it, the title actually says what the point is… wtf is going on here. Shouldn’t it say “#1 pirated show of 2023 revealed!!!” or “NETFLIX BEATS OUT DISNEY WITH SURPRISE PIRACY RANKING!!”

It’s almost 2024, I didn’t think meaningful titles were allowed anymore.