This seems dishonest, she couldn’t possibly think the administration is going to share more useful information here, and if they did it would have no value. These people were illegally sent to life in prison at a brutal torture camp with no charges or trial, at the expense of US taxpayers. There is no possible excuse or rationale that would make it anything but extremely illegal and unethical, and a betrayal of all of the values our country purports to stand for. It doesn’t matter what crimes someone is accused of or not.
I think you’re seeing malice where none exists, particularly in those VW examples. VWs have always required a lot of special tools to work on, but usually for good engineering reasons making things smaller, lighter, simpler, and easier to manufacture. They will happily sell the tools to the public, and for most VW models, a few hundred dollars worth of special tools is all you need for any DIY repair- I personally have accumulated pretty much every VW special tool for every model and year, and find the special tools tends to make them easier to work on for a home mechanic- less stripped bolts, etc. than other cars. A 12 point star on a brake caliper is really not a rare tool, and it is so much quicker and easier than trying to fit a huge socket in that awkward space.
If VW had been trying to make the mk3 engines bad for planned obsolescence, then why did the mk4 engines like the ALH TDI and the 1.8T earn reputations as some of the best engines made? VW had quality issues in the 90s that they later attacked and fixed, but it was just sloppy leadership and engineering, not a plan.
What engine exactly are you seeing broken cams on? My guess would be this is not VWs fault but a mechanic failing to keep track of the ordering and orientation of the cam bearing caps and swapping them around- they’re line bored and any modern engine will break the cam if you do this. I’ve seen it on a mk2 GTI.
I am not sure if you wanna go into discussing Diesel engines now, especially with all the engine software problems when it comes to AdBlue, and when it comes to Dieselgate, which, by decision of all involved courts, was malice.
While I agree that some models improved when it comes to performance (especially in the 1.8 - 2.0 Turbo range as that's the sweet spot when it comes to cc) and technical failures, I would still say that all newer models have more problems with software. So much that it's really not even necessary to create these problems even in regards to regulatory requirements or safety compliance.
Just thinking about the messy code that I've seen to pass ASIL-D requirements makes my skin boil.
> I am not sure if you wanna go into discussing Diesel engines now, especially with all the engine software problems when it comes to AdBlue, and when it comes to Dieselgate, which, by decision of all involved courts, was malice.
I mentioned the ALH TDI from the MKIV Golf/Jetta only, which is a legendary engine, with a ton of them having now reliably reached half a million miles with no major work required. This long predates the dieselgate cars, and adblue was never used on the 4 cylinder VW diesels anyways.
As an aside, yes dieselgate was intentionally criminal, but was sort of the opposite of a quality issue. VW couldn't figure out how to get their engines to work reliability and drive well with current technology at the time and still meet emissions requirements, so they cheated. They had to fix them (I own one) and they are still good, but not as good as they were before the fix- worse fuel economy, less reliable, excessive adblue consumption (in 6cyl models). The ethical thing to do would have been to pull all of the diesels from the market instead, which is what many of their competitors did at the time. Passenger car diesels in the USA are effectively dead because the emissions requirements render them less practical than gasoline cars.
VW had serious quality issues in the 90s that weren't strategic, but were actually causing their company to lose its reputation and nearly collapse. They turned it completely around when Ferdinand Piëch started running things- they were arguably making the highest quality cars at in the world any price point during his tenure as CEO. The quality of current VWs has now fallen back down again, even lower than the 90s cars unfortunately.
A lot of people are already vitamin D deficient and avoiding sun or using sunscreen more will make it worse. The health risks and consequences are much greater than that of sun exposure, which is likely why sun exposure decreases cancer risk and mortality rates substantially, despite the increased risk of skin cancer.
I have issues with low vitamin D and even really high supplement doses like 10,000iu/d do nothing at all- my level keeps dropping no matter how much I supplement. Sunlight brings it up quickly but not in the winter from Nov-Jan.
There are a few free apps that will teach it, I have used the “Advanced Buteyko” ios app.
If you demand extensive peer reviewed medical evidence of some specific quantified outcome before doing any activity in life you will miss quite a lot of valuable things that can’t be easily quantified or measured, or funded academically. There is however actually a lot of medical research on breathwork like this, they just will use the technical terms for what you are actually doing instead of a name like Buteyko.
I only did the basic free thing, and found it an interesting experience that calmed me down a lot. Personally I've moved on to other breathwork systems that I think accomplish the same things, but I like better- I practive several of Wim Hof's breathwork methods, as well as the breathwork training that freedivers use.
All of them involve intentionally and temporarily invoking hypercapnia (high CO2) and hypoxemia through slower breathing and/or breath holds.
Medical evidence costs money. What would look convincing costs sums few can pay. If you use only that medicine you basically use only Big Pharma. And they are set to produce only specific type of medicine: something you have to buy, preferably for life. A breathing technique is not like that so it will never amass that much "proof".
1. There are plenty of non-profitable non-financial things that do have scientific evidence backing them. Massage for example which can be performed by essentially anyone.
2. There needs to be some way to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Otherwise we all drown beneath the waves of lying charlatans. So how do we differentiate what works? "Evidence" seems like a reasonable criterion.
Evidence is an excellent criteria, but only if you look more broadly so you're not ignoring most of the actual evidence available to you. All you really need to try something personally is decide that the likely benefit, given the limited information you have, outweighs the likely risk.
If you're sufficiently convinced it's not dangerous or difficult, the reasonable standard of evidence for some possible benefit needed to consider trying it might become correspondingly low.
Scientific studies are strong evidence of something really narrowly specific that they tested like "does X cause Y," but most decisions in life need to be made from things like direct observation, and anecdotes, because the scientific studies rarely exist to provide the full picture, even a good study on "does X cause Y" might tell you absolutely nothing about if "X causes Z" even if Z is more important than Y.
If there is something like a breathwork technique developed by a long dead soviet physician that regular people all around the world have been using for 60+ years and consistently reporting that it offered them some tangible benefits and didn't harm them, this is evidence that it might be worth a try. With the Buteyko method, most of its strongest advocates I have personally heard of are long dead from normal old age, and never had any plausible financial or personal motive to promote it.
For things like breathwork, I usually do carefully and broadly look at things like personal reports from regular people, on e.g. forums that are unlikely to have any motive to lie. If there's a strong consistent pattern of some harm or benefit, that can be quite useful evidence, even without any formal studies.
> the lack of medical evidence tells us that this is in fact not a valuable thing
Except almost none of the most valuable things I've encountered in life had any convincing medical evidence I could find beforehand.
I am an academic scientist that designs and reviews studies all day long, so I am very steeped in the practicalities and limitations of biomedical research, and as such have completely lost any illusion that biomedical research is in a state where it can guide most of my personal decisions in a useful way- maybe it will be someday. There are many things I know about as a scientist, but can't get funding to study or publish on because the funding agencies don't care about them, and/or there are practical constraints that make it impractical to study.
If all of your personal decisions are guided by peer reviewed literature in it's current state, you'll probably be sicker, and have an empty dull life compared to someone that just uses common sense, tries things, and pays attention. I say this from having seen it happen many times in the biohacking community, the people most steeped in attempting to translate research into life decisions often died young, or even got to be one of the only modern people to experience diseases of malnutrition.
For one, you have to pretty much assume there is some specific benefit you can physically quantify, and that it will apply to almost everyone in your study population, both very unlikely to be true in cases like studying breathwork.
For example, I'm a person that tends to be pretty uptight and overstressed, what you might assume in scientific terms is "sympathetic activation"- and there is a lot of breathwork research showing that almost anything that has an extended exhale can shift you into parasympathetic activation, where you calm down and relax. There is lots of research on this, and it arguably covers Buteyko, but they won't use that term in the article title, because it's more general than just Buteyko alone.
Now, I don't need some peer reviewed study to just try Buteyko for a few minutes, and immediately feel calm and relaxed, and see that I can suddenly notice the colors around me, and feel joy, when I couldn't before. If a massive peer reviewed study proved to me that this does not happen to most, or even any other people except me, why would I care about that at all? Does it mean I shouldn't do it? What if I have a problem not enough of those people have to make it show up in the statistical analysis, or my body responds in a way most of theirs do not?
There are huge limits to how meaningfully you can generalize from scientific studies about populations of other people, to yourself. Moreover, you have to choose up front what outcomes or effects you will look at in a study, and if our biological understanding can't even guess at the outcome that would have been useful to look at, the study is doomed to miss everything.
Sit down, and try it- or don't, but don't assume you can learn ahead of time if it will be worthwhile or not for you personally by looking on Google Scholar.
Gun related deaths and homicide are big enough risk factors to be worth worrying about and mitigating as a parent, but school shootings in particular are so rare they are not a major safety concern for parents- gun accidents and homicide outside of school are much much bigger risks.
Literary trope? It’s not a trope, it Biblical. How many Kings in the Bible became afflicted with corruption and possession? It’s almost like God really wanted to make a point about great power.
It’s quite sporty to drive but has about twice the torque you can easily put down with energy efficient ev tires in a small light FWD car so you need to go easy if you want tires to last. Handles great also. Those might be low specs nowadays but were respected performance car specs not long ago, and roads haven’t changed any- plus those were big specs at redline in a combustion engine, feels like a heck of a lot more with the instant torque at any speed of an EV. It’s still way more power than you need, and more than enough to have fun. And I say that as a Porsche enthusiast that drives a lot of fast and sporty cars.
I'm not talking about specs on paper, I'm talking about the actual experience of driving it in the real world. As the saying goes, “people buy horsepower but drive torque.” Horsepower on an electric motor vehicle is often effectively a software setting based on what RPM or top speed they allow, and the eGolf is set with a low rev limiter/top speed from the factory probably to limit battery temps.
For example, in the eGolf you have a flat torque curve with 100% of the power available instantly at any speed, without shifting.
A basic crossover SUV with a 4 cylinder engine and slippy/slow responding automatic can easily have more horsepower, and a faster 0-60, but still feel gutless in normal driving compared to the e-Golf because you have very little torque at normal RPMs, and you need to rev the engine to the redline to actually use the horsepower, which typically involves a lot of lag time, and then a lot of jerking and noise in your typical basic low end car.
You could for example compare it to a Nissan Rogue from the same era, which has 170 horsepower. The Rogue sometimes feels scary slow like it can’t get out of its own way and has to be floored and ran to the redline to get it really moving, whereas with the eGolf it takes some finess to launch it smooth without wheelspin due to the instant on torque. Most people would be shocked to hear that the Rogue technically has a more powerful motor.
Consider that the ALH TDI Golf and Jetta (diesel) had literally only 90 horsepower also with a totally flat torque curve, way less than the e-Golf, and are also feel a lot more sporty than your typical 4 cylinder gasoline economy car, despite being radically slower on paper, or floored in a straight line drag race.
Extend this to other cars- take an early Porsche Boxster with only 200 horsepower, one of the best drivers cars in history, but on paper slower than a lot of low end economy cars nowadays. But the amazing handling, and wide torque band let it hang with a lot of supercars in a real world track race. It would literally lose a drag race against a modern low end economy car, yet it feels way faster and is way faster on say, a track with turns.
The eGolf isn't a sports car, but it will never feel like it's lacking in power for normal driving.
Too little torque for what? I grew up driving full sized trucks and vans that had only half the power of an eGolf in a much larger heavier vehicle yet can still keep up with modern freeway traffic.
Model 3 isn’t even in the same league for build quality, driving experience, or overall design and engineering. It has a more powerful drivetrain and larger battery because it came out years later, but the Golf is all around a great car in all of its forms, and the model 3 is just not. It’s not a crazy powerful car but its no dog- it has twice the power most people will ever want or need for regular driving.
If you actually thought you were arguing with a bot you wouldn’t bother replying. Most of those “slow” 70s cars with nowhere near the power of an eGolf could still leisurely cruise all day at over 100mph even up a grade, hit freeway speeds in a tiny fraction of the onramp, and keep up with freeway traffic towing a heavy trailer, for some reasonable context on what is actually needed and usable for transportation on public roads.
I feel I’m arguing with someone that has never actually driven a car, nor is able to have a civil disagreement like an adult. Your tone is simply not how we do things on HN.
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