Actually, crash test standards were cared about even then: many model year changes were for things like side impact beams and increased rollover protection, and the addition of items like ABS to prevent incidents in the first place. I have NO DOUBT a 1995 is less safe than a 2015, but I GREATLY doubt that per mile…

Electric, I’m right there with you. Hybrid...I don’t think the technology is worth paying for, but my weighting of these things is probably not the same as everyone else’s. :)

Take care of it, then! :) I think there’s a misguided perspective that a cheap old car has to be wildly unreliable, and it just ain’t so! In the last couple decades, I’ve been stranded a couple times, and that was always because I totally ignored a known issue. [”No, that u-joint will definitely last another—nope,…

Interesting. I’m hauling kids, and getting older, and I’ve never found a feature on a new car that was worth paying tens of thousands of dollars more for. I take care of my used cars - and I drive really awful used cars! - and they last a long, long time. I’ll bet I could keep a $2,300 car going for 20 years for a lot…

Absolutely! Although I’d rush to point out that almost every car I’ve owned has been north of 300,000 miles, and I’ve very rarely had anything like “a ton of maintenance issues,” because I [try to] buy smart [and mostly succeed].

You don’t have to be like me and buy absolute garbage. :) You can buy a very reliable used car for a much better cost/benefit ratio than a new car, and you’ll likely save on maintenance because you can do most of it yourself if you want.

But you don’t need a BRAND NEW car to get those things, either. Maybe a $2000 car isn’t for you: I get that! But your interior, again, isn’t ten times nicer in a new car, and your odds of death or injury aren’t ten times higher in the old car. Well, assuming you pick the right old car, of course!

Here’s my car-buying myth to bust: you deserve, and want, a brand new car. A brand-new Cherokee will set you back at least $20,000 (and a hell of a lot more with interest), but it won’t be ten times more reliable, ten times more fuel efficient, ten times more safe, or ten times more fun than a $2,000 Cherokee.

It’s our own prurience that has created this entire problem. Really hoping that what this will eventually do is make public restrooms all fully private, and unisex, with shared washing facilities. Everyone gets their own private stall, and everything else stops dividing the genders.

“Incredible” used to mean “unbelievable” until concept creep watered it down to mean “fantastic,” but I haven’t seen evidence to suggest unbelievability itself has been reduced as a result. The meanings of words are plastic (itself a word whose meaning has shifted); the absolutes of what those words represent are much…

Of the existing billion-dollar industries, women are in control of none of them. Could legal cannabis be the first?

To be fair, not all cruisers have tinted windows (almost none, where I am), and officers are often in their cruisers for many more hours than we are. Also, part of the “safety hazard” is that they can’t see into your car when approaching to see whether you’re pulling a shotgun out from between the seats; we already…

That’s very strange. I wonder how well this reconciles with studies that show speed itself is rarely a factor in collisions, but rather that differences in speed are typically the problem (i.e. going 70 doesn’t kill you, going 70 on a road with someone going 60 kills you). I’m not certain both of these findings can be…

And, if you’ll permit me this slight divergence: this isn’t just an abortion question, it’s a question that has many, many implications for other important legal issues. Who deserves legal protection, and why? Let’s say we decide the critical factor is self-awareness, and since a foetus isn’t self-aware, it doesn’t…

Well, there’s literally no other situation in which anyone is inside of someone else’s body! So we don’t have precedent to fall back on: thus, we have to fall back on first principles: what about life deserves legal protection? And I don’t have a problem with us saying that a foetus needs to be at some particular…

Sure, but that happens rather a lot, where the rights of one person have to be limited because of the rights of some other person. As a general case, that’s kind of what laws are. Almost all abortion laws respect some point at which the foetus gets rights that then conflict with the mother; unless you’re proposing…

As far as that goes, I do believe that any human’s right to what goes in and out of their body is not currently legally absolute; that’s not a gender issue, it’s how our current laws work. I’m absolutely open to the idea of giving humans back complete control of what goes into and out of their bodies, I’m just not…

If “undecided” means “decided” to you, there’s probably not a lot further we could go in the conversation anyway. Thank you, though!

I believe humans have the right to autonomy over their own bodies, but I also believe laws put limits on that autonomy; my purpose is to find the point at which that’s appropriate, and apply it to this situation. The things I find genuinely uncertain - what life is, when the law should protect it - remain so, and so…

But I haven’t made my choice: that’s the point. No one has yet convinced me that a foetus isn’t alive, just as no one has yet convinced me that a foetus isn’t alive. No one, in all the variety of conversations I’ve had on the topic, has been able to explain to me what “life” is, and where and when and why it deserves…