dsfyu404ed

Gas cars got fast out of nowhere because it moves units and CAD changed everything for engine design.

Gas cars got fast because sufficiently high quality computer control matured to the point where making a high power for its size/weight engine that both met emissions standards and reliability expectations and did so at a reasonable price point was doable.

The ability to actually build the hardware has preceded the ability to run it in a reliable and emissions compatible manner ever since we've had emissions rules. Having better FEA software so some engineer could shave a gram off a piston, get his bonus for achieving his KPI and ensure half a million engines start knocking at 120k on the dot was never the bottleneck.

Education won't fix broken incentives namely a lack of consequences for bad behavior. If anything shrinking the pool will only worsen it.

I appreciate the gesture but let's be real here. It's not like the requirement ever mattered. Just like a white house internship, nobody was getting a job as a congressional staffer without a recommendation from someone worth listening to.

Ideologues everywhere use statistics as a pretext for their lies. Water is wet. More breaking news at 11.

Your line of reasoning reeks of Europe worship with a token exception for obfuscation purposes. There are tons and tons of people who live in places like Boston and SF and Chicago without cars and do not feel any worse off for doing so. I used to be one of them. I would go so far as to say these people can enjoy all the opportunities of city life. Are they a majority? Probably not. But that's mostly a figment of how these cities absorbed their urbanized suburbs in the 20th century.

Living without a car in those cities is severely limiting; I tried to do that in two of those and felt it was very difficult to buy groceries and get to work quickly and do easy recreation things on the weekend.

So now we're just splitting subjective standard of living hairs? I think we can all agree that living car free in Manhattan is fine and living car free in nowhere Idaho is not but drawing a line in the middle always just turns into a dumb circle jerk.

It's not even practical to stay out late in many of those cities.

That's mostly because people who think they know how other people should live don't want the bars open all night and in cases where that's not politically possible to just decree they screw with other things they can effect like public transit schedules.

I think what you mean to say is that there are few "medium" cities in the US where "techie and richer" people elect to voluntarily live without a car.

You absolutely can live without a car in a lot of these cities but if and only if you want to bike. If you want to ride a lot of public transit it's gonna suck.

What you can't do is do it in a trendy way that "befits your tax bracket" so to speak and prevents the white collar types from looking at you like you're inferior when you bike lock your cargo bike to the lamp post beside the liquor store.

As for bigger cities, you absolutely can live without a car in Boston, DC, SF, Atlanta, Chicago, and the list goes on but toward the bottom it's gonna require more biking and less public transit.

Are they measuring "reading ability for the real world" or are we talking "analyze any interpret fiction literature" type reading skills? Serious question. Because I feel like "real world reading" stopped after about 8th, maybe 9th grade and everything else was just fluff.

That's just a textbook appeal to emotion.

Most of their calls are mundane stuff. And they leave a pretty decently wide path of destruction in doing that. We're talking like mundane situations where there is no urgency and no need to tear shit up in the interest of time.

I once arrived to a minor rollover after the cops but before fire. Nobody injured. Occupant trapped because she was a large lady and couldn't release her seatbelt upside down and was having difficulty unlocking the car because side curtain airbags.

I offered to flip the car and treat it like a lockout. "Customer" was fine with it. Cop was iffy. FD showed up, didn't want to hear it, broke the window, unlocked the car, opened the door, cut her belt rather than release it and dropped her on her face and then had difficulty getting her out. Now I get that they have "procedures" but this seems like a forest for the trees situation.

Or they'll show up, shut down two lanes for a minor fire on the shoulder and not move the trucks until the car is loaded on a tow truck and gone. Supposedly it's to keep them safe from being hit by traffic. Meanwhile here I am not blocking traffic to recover shit that broke down.

Sure, they'll save a life if the situation presents itself but they sure don't care about being tidy about it.

Anyone talking up firefighters like this clearly hasn't been around them much.

They're boys with toys that they don't frequently get to use and they work for the government. Follow the incentives. They'll do their jobs but they don't give a lot of fucks about things like "unnecessary property damage" and "other people's financial well being" and anything else not written in their KPIs.

I used to drive tow truck. I can't count the number of cars they totaled peeling the roof off (granted some were totaled anyway) because that was easy and cutting a door off was hard. And don't get me started on them and their stupid stands they use to prop shit up in the most questionable of ways...

Skateboard and fire extinguisher.

I'm rate limited for not towing the line so I wasn't gonna burn a reply on it. The LCS is basically the Navy's Orion but worse. Like Orion it's congressionally mandated garbage. Unlike Orion the Navy DGAF about it, put no effort into making it workable. So of course it's spec'd out poorly (no ASW) and has a ton of teething problems (gearbox, hull structure). It was a B rate project nobody really cared about from the get go. No wonder it flopped. Nobody cared to make sure it didn't.

Maybe this will finally be the boondoggle that closes the base that for the past 20yr has done nothing other than get used as a bargaining chip to get the vote of MA legislators in budget negotiations.

The problem with answering these questions is that they're always being circled by reflective vest wearing and clipboard toting vultures and you'll wind up fighting with them if you try and give a real answer.

Most folks on HN realize that "the military", in the sense of "the current general and admirals", have damn little influence over these outsourcing, single-sourcing, etc. decisions. That is mostly controlled by Congress,

I think your claim is way to optimistic in light of the fact there are other people claiming that the LCS boondoggle is the fault of faulty procurement and not Congress.

You build bike infrastructure in the places where you want more of them, not the places where you have more of them. Or as we say in the active transportation advocacy business, they didn’t count swimmers to decide to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

These sorts of statements are analogous to the median vs mean slight of hand (aka lying) that people routinely employ to intentionally mislead.

At the very best it's "not the whole truth". To just build stuff and have it be used to a useful degree you need latent demand for transportation of all forms. These assumptions are generally questionably optimistic or untrue outside of urban areas (like real ones, not the census definition).

A bike lane to a strip mall off the highway that has nothing else immediately around it does nobody any good. Slap up a bus stop. Even if the bus service is crappy it will still benefit somebody.

I assume they're talking about trace amounts being used in primers and detonators.

I get that this sort of headline makes for a great circle jerk but let's be real here, the military isn't as stupid as HN likes to imply. Rife with perverse incentives that keep things from being done ideally? Yes, but not stupid. The military is also rife with ass-covering careerists so if some nobody on HN can think of a way they can do it better then someone in the system has almost certainly thought about it and looked into it and sent out an email letting everybody know about it. The fact that they're only buying something from one of their suppliers doesn't mean they can't get it from another with less lead time than their stockpile. This goes for a whole class of products. Typically if you are a contractor or a sub contractor and you are the only source for a unique product that can't easily be substituted you're required to provide a sufficient technical data package such that someone else could make the same stuff. If this factory was really a serious priority it would a) be redundant b) be fixed already. Because some careerist would have sniffed out the brownie points and then made sure it got done and that they got credit. It's also possible that there's internal politics involved and letting it turn into a dumpster fire is being done on purpose in order to make the situation get remediated in a specific way.

You can put duct tape over your federally mandated backup camera display if you really believe they're so distracting that they cause you to run over more people in reverse.

But maybe you should just stay off the road instead, so you have less blood on your own hands.

Tape won't undo all the other changes to cars that OEMs engaged in once they were required to have a screen.

Congratulations. Your pet regulatory change has reduced back over deaths by under a hundred a year. In a vacuum with spherical cow that's great but reality isn't a vacuum with spherical cows. And now that you've put this hardware in cars and engineers have taken advantage of it you've increased back out accidents and merging accidents (both are inversely correlated with rear visibility) and you've made many of the critical 2nd order functions of operating a car less intuitive and more distracting to use. You've but you don't care about that because the metric you were gaming (back over deaths) is marginally improved. And when called out by people who want to look at the big picture you respond with insults. Screw you and the safety vest you rode in on.

The whole reporting rate thing is mostly irrelevant IMO. It's the relative rate of property crime vs violent crime that matters. Violent crime is not generally directed at a broad of a cross section of the population like property crime is. Violent crime is dominated by people settling disputes that can't be settled in court. To your average techie who'd never think about rounding up a couple buddies and home invading the dude that sold them cut drugs SF's relatively high property crime rate makes it "feel rough" even if the violent crime rate isn't that remarkable.

with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays

That's likely because there's huge overlap between "climate shock video" and "video from decades past when big industry was visibly polluting things in the west" and "video filtered to look like it is from decades past". Basically you're pattern matching on the second order visual cues. A video of a pit mine full of modern equipment taken with a modern camera in 1080p or better wouldn't look the same so you wouldn't mentally bucket it the same way.

Yes. I am. That guy (and everyone else involved) probably has ten times blood on his hands as a result of "wE doN't need TO CarE aBOUT REaR vIsIBILITY BeCaUsE we have a BACKup CaMERa" engineering and touch screen distractions than he's saved by getting backup cameras put in things.

Backup cameras are the unholy trinity of upper middle class moral panic and shirking of responsibility, government Doing Something (TM) and people's inability to accept small but concentrated bad things versus large diffuse and hard to measure bad things.

Few that wouldn't have been saved by Suburbans and Excursions going out of vogue with the upper middle class in favor of 4Runner, Pilots and a myriad of crossovers.

Touch screens are great for stuff that needs to be cleaned though so ER doctors are probably stuck with them.

It won't just be cheaper entertainment. It'll be cheaper "literally every video content that includes humans".

I suspect this will result in an increased production value or quality of the lower tiers the same way that cheap camera/mic hardware and good/cheap software upped the production value of your average hobbyist tier youtube channel.

Bullshit. Straight bullshit. Stop it.

Short of maybe, maybe, landing a fully laden C5 on everglade highway or redefining landing to include crashes where the tires happen to be the first bit to crash you are going to have a hell of a time displacing the road bed a meaningful amount with an aircraft without destroying the aircraft. They are simply not strong. They have to be light enough to fly you know.

Never-mind the fact that they used to fly these things off of dirt strips...

At best you might displace the asphalt a little and leave some ruts behind you. Remember, these are vehicles on pneumatic tires. Their point loads aren't high enough to really cut through pavement. All you can do it smoosh it out of the way. And the road bend was made of gravel of particular size and roughness and then gone over with compacting equipment to prevent exactly that from happening, albeit over time.

This is exactly the kind of thing a lien is perfect for.

Slap a lien on it with a reasonable interest rate and call it good. Sales have to be registered publicly so it's not like it's hard to collect.

This is misleading. Road weight limits are for wear and tear reasons, not safety.

The actual "failure" loads are orders (yes, plural) of magnitude higher and most failures aren't the kind of catastrophic thing that people on the internet typically try and imply unless you get really unlucky and your mountainside shelf road turns into a landslide. Failure usually means you park a heavy object somewhere and come back hours/days/weeks/months later and find that it sank or slid slowly downhill in that time.

This. Even if dealers don't "go away" as many want the shift to a "put in your order" model over 2020-2022 definitely gave OEMs a lot more visibility into what people want vs what dealers want to stock their lots with. See for example the success of the Maverick and the jump in manual transmission take rate.

The demographics who both buy new cars and buy EV in 2016-present wouldn't be caught dead buying something from GM. No wonder it went over about as well as the Subaru Baja.

Slap a Toyota or maybe Honda badge on the grill and the Bolt/Volt would have flown off the shelves.