This is getting a ton of hate here, but I think it feels like a pretty reasonably balanced response to competing concerns: protecting literally billions of non-tech-savvy users from potentially malicious social-engineering attacks while allowing devs and tech-savvy a path to bypass that protection if they’re sure they want to.

What concrete change to the policy would be a strict Pareto improvement keeping just those two concerns in mind?

I'm pretty surprised at the amount of hate here. All the "just build it ourselves!" and "Google wants your data", and almost no top-level comments even discussing the difficulty of dealing with malware and social engineering.

There are at least three moral arguments that can be made:

- Google, as a capitalist company, is ignoring the privacy and FOSS implications, and is guilty of screwing the customer due to greed

- Regular, non-tech folks are constantly being robbed of their privacy, money, and/or identity through malware and social engineering attacks, and Google is guilty of not doing enough to protect them

- Enabling malware delivery and use props up criminals and known bad actors (e.g., north korean), and by not stopping this Google is guilty of supporting these bad actors

I'm not seeing either of those last two points being made strongly. Maybe it's just not the target audience — people here aren't as likely to be scammed, and few of us are regularly thinking about north korea — but I'd expect to see more consideration for the costs of inaction here.

It’s pretty common for techies to overestimate how widely their opinions and desires are shared. If you think a good chunk of the population wants to sideload apps, then this feels like an attack. But it’s really just a decision not to cater to a tiny fraction of the market. It’s the same thing in discussions about headphone jacks or small phones. People act like it’s nefarious, when really it’s just that their desire for those things is pretty uncommon.

Personally I think there should be a lot more work done on how to secure arbitrary apps from arbitrary sources so that they are unable to hurt people, rather than focusing so much on on preventing random apps from being installed in the first place. This would help the average person as well, since these walled gardens still make mistakes. But it’s not realistic to put a box in everyone’s pockets that’s three taps away from sending all their money to some dude in Laos.

There are many cases where swerving will avoid an accident that braking cannot and cars unexpectedly pulling out from the side are often among these. It’s not a majority, but it’s not at all rare.

Firstly, I love levels and thanks for it.

That said, in general for any given comp package, I’d want the lowest possible level I could take and get that package. That gives more upward runway.

The regulation is at least partially informed by physics though.

Braking distances, road damage (scales with the fourth power of axle weight), bridge limits, etc.

If the limit could safely and appropriately be 49 tons for diesel trucks right now, it probably would be.

Isn't "able to sell them at higher prices" a consequence of and an indicator of the demand by buyers?

Surely, if buyers didn't want these vehicles, makers couldn't sell them at high prices, right?

That's where advertising comes in..

Which is...?

Inflation! Just use the money printer to print more money! Subsidy checks for everyone! Unexpected bonus checks for military personnel, brand new accounts for children with money that needs to be invested in an approved stock market index fund, throwing even more money at DHS and the DoD budgets!

How will we pay for it? Debt or printing money!

Agree that SMD hand assembly is easier than it looks, at least down to 0603 imperial. If I can wait the week for boards to arrive, I’ll often skip the breadboard step and go straight to a proto PCB, especially since most parts aren’t available in throughhole without waiting on dev boards anyway.

When you hand someone a board with 0603s on it that you hand-assembled, it seems like magic to people who stop to think about it.

When you're regularly dealing with 01005's, getting to work with an 0603 feels like a luxury.

I tune my resistors by whittling away at the PCB traces you insensitive clod.

You joke, but embedded passives are a thing!

As are laser-trimmed precision resistors...

The latter is a pretty good path towards making the former happen.

I’m not sure what your point is.

Edit: and if you’re unclear on my point, which I assume you are given you think that some rudimentary math invalidates my comment, the point was that a salary does not result in happiness, having money does, a high salary is the thing required to achieve it.

I started mentoring an FRC (high school robotics contest, not battle bots, about 110# mostly custom robots playing a 3v3 game) team 2 years ago and it’s really been enjoyable and rewarding to see the students grow in their capabilities and to have a competitive framework, a timeline, budget and time pressure, and then a break from the insanity when the season is over.

Many, many teams need technical mentors and I really look forward to each season. Not 100% if I’ll continue once my kids graduate, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

What credentials? Just bring your enthusiasm and learn along with the high schoolers.

I literally never mentioned my credentials and did say that I mentored. Did you respond to the wrong post, perhaps?

I think he means advice to the OP, and your credentials is your experience with students. Nothing wrong with a nice personal story like you posted though, imo.

Someone asked for help and they just talked about themselves. It's fine to do and lead into something like what he learned from that experience and how that might be helpful to the OP but without that advice it is just them talking about themselves. It's just... weird...

Ok. I did miss the line where I specifically give advice to OP that they also consider becoming a mentor to a local FRC team as a way for them to begin to learn about robotics.

I thought that I left the dots close enough for people/OP to draw the line, but it seems I missed the mark; good feedback on my lack of clarity; thanks!

I think I wouldn't infer that because I personally wouldn't feel comfortable teaching a bunch of kids how to do something that I didn't know how to do myself. To me it seemed like you were almost suggesting they join a high school team but that didn't feel right either.

And sorry, I was in a snarky mood last night

I’d much rather punch myself in the face every morning than open a retail operation in retirement.

The only people I've ever met who dreamed of retiring to run a retail operation were those who have never worked retail a day in their life - they imagine it to be like a sitcom or something.