bluGill

California has done enough to kill that proejct even without Elon/Trump. For the amount of time and money invested they should be operating the entire line from San Diego to Oregon as of a few years ago.

As an American I’ve never heard of a place so dangerous that things get stolen from the back at a traffic light. I know carpenters who leave all their tools in the back when they go to bed and never have a problem. Maybe you need to clean up the crime problem in your country. There are pros and cons to a van vs truck. That you come in on one side does not make the other side wrong, it just means you have lack of vision to understand theirs.

Have you ever tried to rent a truck? I know many people who tried and discovered the place was all out that day. Then when you find one read the fine print - often you cannot haul your fridge in one. Mean while because I own my truck it is there when I need to do something, no thinking required.

A small block V8 weights 680lbs. While there are larger engines, that is still a big engine, most cars have much lighter engines. Transmissions have some weight too, So do electric motors.

Vehicles are expensive. Having one for each need is expensive. Renting is expensive (and renting typically comes with no using it as a truck restrictions). If you need a bed for 2% of trips it is often far cheap to own and drive a truck for everything. Particularly if you can use the bike for a lot of trips that makes just owning a truck for everything compelling if you must have a car.

A station wagon would be nice to see as well for a family hauler.

Kohls doesn’t have it always on sale. They carefully rotate stock each week to half their stuff is up front and on sale, while the other half is in the back at normal prices. The staff will direct you awat from the normal priced stuff - they don’t want anyone to pay the normal price, they just need to have it as normal price once in a while so they can claim to have a sale. (they fear if you buy the normal price you will be mad enough to not come back and repeat sales are worth more than one full price transaction)

Even in iowa you see them all over. There are so many drivers any car make other than the most exclusive will be seen soon if you fixate on it (read look).

Stastics show tesla is a tiny brand by market share. However they are wer the only ev brand until reciently so people focus on them.

I always use myself as the center of the universe. The earth moves very erratically. Calculating the position of Mars rovers is really interesting.

It takes a lot of thought and research to come up with a good opinion on some subjects. Some subjects are easy because of values, but you need a lot of study to understand other subjects.

You need to have an opinion on things you don’t understand. There are people for and against vaccines - this is a very complex subject and both sides have what sounds like science behind them, and both also have real medical doctors. You are affected though so you better get to the bottom of it as both sides will tell you the wrong choice is a disaster.

Liberals were against vaccines long before conservatives were. It was never mainstream, but it was getting there.

What other side? Sure there are always a few rational people. However the vast majority choose a side and then blindly oppose anything the other side says/does. When their side happens to have critical thinking on their side they are for that, but that isn’t a factor in why they choose something.

Trying to convince yourself otherwise proves that you are ignoring the issues on your own side. If you really were a rational thinker you would have to choose your side separately for every single issue - nobody has time for that which in turn means you sometimes rely on someone who turns out to be irrational but because they have proved rational in other areas you trust them here too.

Water will kill you if you don’t use it with care, but everybody older than a baby uses it despite clear science on how deadly it is.

The relevant question is can we mitigate risk enough.

Cool build, but a little reading in how mills and lathes are made would result in a much better machine. The Gingery machine shop series is cheap and good to read even if you don’t want to pour aluminum - his machines also make some bad compromises, but the books also inform you of things that would make you do machines like this different if you knew them.

I don’t know why frito-lay doesn’t print metric only labels in the us for that matter.

US engineers would thank you - we only work in metric units anyway.

The other way too. Nobody has made a SAE bearing since like the 1950s. You will see bearings that are a somewhat odd size in metric, but they picked nearest measure to the SAE value asked for and then rounded to metric to not be as odd.

Toyota has always been metric only in the US. Once in a while a “shade tree” mechanic will fit a SAE bolt/nut to hold something in, but the cars didn’t come from Japan with anything SAE, and when they built factories in the US they didn’t design anything for SAE.

No auto manufacture in the world designs a new part with SAE parts, and they haven’t since 1980 or before. There are still a lot of things like alternators that haven’t got the case changed since they were designed in the 1960s that have SAE parts, but anything newer is all metric. Once in a while they put a oil plug in with a SAE bolt head, but the threads likely metric.

Every mechanic who doesn’t specialize in antiques uses their metric tools more than the SAE. Those who work on US cars still have the SAE tools, but they don’t get much use.

I’ve worked for both over the years. Small companies have their own downsides. There is no clear winner. People complain all the time, so if you have never worked at a large company you have no clue what it is really like. Sure there are things not to like, but there are also things to like.

Works for a small company. If everyone in a large company is allowed the same leeway nothing could ever ship - while no one person (except a few incompetent that get fired eventually) makes too many mistakes, the combination of all of them mean the system is always horribly broken.

Of course 50% of my job is just getting simple changes though which is annoying - but more than once that process has meant I didn’t break everything.

The only good part is there would be a long line out the door and we could get a table for 6 with no waiting. Even though only 25% of tables were non-smoking, that section was empty which made it great for kids as nobody cared how out of line we got.