That’s a good point.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I would imagine that in Japan the issue of loneliness cuts very deep due to the cultural and societal norms. I would also think that if you were to keep all those same norms but introduce in the car dependent design and infrastructure of the US then the problem would get even worse, no?

I think the best thing I ever did was learn on a 250cc. It’s way harder to wreck your day or get yourself killed when you inevitably grab a bit too much throttle as a complete newbie. I would even encourage people to learn on a 125cc or even 50cc. The basics are the basics and you can pick those up on a bike with less than 10hp just as easily if not more easily than a bike with 100+hp.

It would be amazing to see government mandated limiters in cars, in general, and not just for learners.

I know that a lot of people don’t agree with that but the public has proved they are incapable of driving within reasonable limits. No one needs a car that can go the speeds that cars are capable of going. It’s totally possible to setup a system that enforces the limit only on public roads so that people could still take their cars to the track. We very much have the technology.

It blows my mind that the general public is completely accepting of things like smartphone OSes that can spy on their every move and log their every detail yet if you mention limiters on cars all of the sudden they become staunch advocates for personal freedoms. The hypocrisy blows my mind.

It’s ridiculous enough that we’re switching to electric cars with 0-100kph under 7 seconds and no one bats an eye…

This is a good point.

Nobody seems to care at all about acceleration even though it can be just as dangerous as sheer speed in the hands of most drivers.

I’m not entirely sure about AMD but NVIDIA certainly seems keen on the AI market to the point that they don’t really care about the consumer gaming market anymore.

To be honest I stopped following PC hardware altogether because things were so stagnant

That’s exactly what happened to me as well.

It’s not exciting at all to pay attention to mediocre launches of expensive products. The GPU in my gaming PC is several generations old at this point but I don’t really care. There are still plenty of good games that will run fine on it and I’m just going to hold tight. There are games that I still have yet to purchase that will run fine on my hardware. I’m not going to give my money to terribly optimized games or games that require high-end hardware.

The more expensive PC gaming becomes the more high-end hardware doesn’t really matter. I think developers and publishers know that they need to target the average consumer because they need to sell volume on these games. If the average gamer is playing on older and/or lower end hardware then they need to service that market. There aren’t enough 4090 buyers to sell the volume they need to make money. Hell, at these prices I’m not sure there are even enough 4070 or even 4060 level buyers to do that. Tons of people lost interest and aren’t buying into this even if you still see posts online of people purchasing new GPUs.

I waited out the crypto market and I don’t have problems waiting longer.