Well yeah, JD is great. He did things like… Gang up on Zelensky, so he’s got the general Maga crowd s vote and he killed the pope, so now he’s got the entire non-catholic Christian vote. Pretty solid.

Small federal government where they’re winning, states rights where they’re losing

And as old as 2010 for me

Maybe it’s the emojiis. It’s hard to tell if they’re sarcastic or the author genuinely thinks ❤️📈🏆

I don’t see all that much overlap between sovcit and conservatives, but I do see significant overlap between sovcit and libertarians. Confederate conservatives are more about freedom-for-me, not-for-nonwhite-nonchristians. Of the libertarians I’ve come across, most just seem mad about the system at large and believe there should be a whole lot less regulation. Meanwhile, sovcit feels more like a cult. It finds fringe society members and bands them together in libertarian-plus mindsets. It’s rooted in conspiracy theories and is somewhere in the flat earth realm of groupings.

“Thank God”

Yep, living extremely lavishly and boisterous lay proclaiming your prayers are exactly what this god wants. He’s rooting for your sports team, too. Yours specifically. The superbowl is a big deal to him.

Sure, maybe I could see a good ol boy forgetting the difference between Japanese pickups such as a Titan and Tacoma (assuming they had the same cab/bed size configuration), but it’s fucking embarrassing to confuse a proper pickup with a crossover-missing-some-roof such as a Honda Ridgeline. The original Ridgeline did NOT have a normal bed shape.

The slow, painful death of technological privacy - brought not by war, not by scarcity, but by convenience of another app that saves you 3 clicks per transaction paired with the forced usage of certain functions within an existing environment

I didn’t know they were illegal to use as a human. I use them often to tack on a related sentence fragment when a technical description is getting too long for the common smartphone user - at least, what I perceive to be too long

Chad walks into a committee meeting to explain why we should end the production of our copper familiar. “LOOK AT THIS PENNY GRAPH, every time I do it makes me laugh”

Smaller EV pickups would probably work well as the Range used to and the Maverick is currently. Economic haulers of miscellaneous bullshit. All my local NAPAs have phased out Colorados for Mavericks. Many pest control trucks are also Mavericks here now, too. These compact rummage haulers have historically been more of a local vehicle rather than a long distance traveler. I assume the problem is that the monetary cost of EV tech and the space required for batteries is better blended into larger vehicles. F150s were already hovering around 60kUSD average with a range of like 45-110. So, for now, as evidenced by the general lack of even gas compact pickups, ev pickups are large.

As a compromise of cost, limited bullshit hauling needs, and range for a “do it all” commuter, the Maverick hybrid may very well be in my near future. I don’t actually have much range anxiety because I know the most my commuter must do is 45 miles/day, but I’m trying to not rely on my spouse’s car for every potential trip. The Maverick seems like it has just enough utility without penalizing me for it. What I need most at this point is ease of transport of 4ft wide and/or 8ft long wood, which is not really feasible in a typical hatch or suv. Maverick owners boast about that capability, even coming from Rangers and such

You add a good point that explains a difference I didn’t exactly consider. I talked about how pedestrian-hostile US cities are but never really considered why European cities are friendlier. Duh, the cities largely existed before the cars did. Horses and carriages aren’t far off in size, but their speed is a fraction of the automobile. Funny, because I’m well aware that European cars are tiny because they have to take roads originally sized to beasts’ asses while Americans can make u-turns on the average suburban stroad

So you like stereotyping?

I love rail. I work with rail. I don’t believe the USA is a candidate for the passenger rail system we’re picturing. Metro rail already exists in population centers with respectable, local capability. NYC, Boston, DC, Chicago, SF/Oakland, Philadelphia, LA, and Atlanta have some pretty healthy stats from their systems. So why can’t they be connected? Because the USA is huge, relatively speaking, and quite empty. Look at a population density map and you’ll see a small drop off moving west as you cross the Mississippi River and a huge drop off after the Missouri. It doesn’t come back in meaningful numbers until the pacific coast. It’s a sizable issue to make sensible routes that effectively cater to very, very spread out city hubs. Lemmy skews towards coastal residency, I bet, from a combo of sociopolitical demographic and, more importantly, the fact that most of the US population lives near the coast. If you’ve ever tried driving across the country, it sucks. There’s neat mountain chains that diversify the topography and ecology, but it’s vastly, widely flat and barren.

“But Japan does it” look at the rail map. It’s much easier to have a central route with many spurs due to the shape.

“OK so Europe then”. Not really. The dreamy European rail network is very heavily biased towards the western half - not unlike how the US network biases the Eastern 1/3.

“But there’s so many accounts of great rail travel, both in US antiquity and modern Europe”. Confirmation bias. How often do you hear someone complain they took an inter national trip and couldn’t find a train? Compare to how often a person reports their great train trip. The trips are great because in a train-based trip, you go where the trains go. This does not speak for the trainless European citizens. This does not speak for the pre-interstate US citizens that had no other choice than to travel by train.

I’m not saying the US rail system is great without need for improvement. It could absolutely be better. Other modes of public transportation are also pretty derelict here. But a system that can’t handle the “last mile” is not going to be effective. Adding onto the issue of bad transportation options outside the Amtrak station in the middle of a city, local infrastructure is typically hostile to non-car travelers. Highways intersecting cultural centers, sidewalks being rare, and spaced-out businesses make walking incredibly unfeasible in a majority of US cities. We can sit and blame the auto industry for lobbying various things in favor of the car, but we can’t immediately undo that. We also can’t change the fact that the big cities are still so far apart.

Look up whatever attractions you want to see and see how many hours of driving they are apart. Even on the dense side, NYC is 4 hours’ drive from DC or Boston. An improved Northeast Corridor (which is home to the upcoming Acela 2/Avelia pictured above) still would only cover 450 miles of a narrow population cluster. The current Acela covers that in 7 hours at best from a mixture of older track, tighter curves, and, of course, stopping to let people go other places. Driving is about 8 hours. From there, though, there’s still the other 3000 miles between NY and LA. So what is really expected of a cross-country rail network? It’s really not surprising that air travel beats it with speed (and the same inconveniences at the destination) and that driving beats it with flexibility (with about the same time requirement but less infrastructure cost).

Aside from that, Amtrak is continuously struggling against freight lines. Amtrak’s cross country capability largely comes from borrowing freight track rather than having dedicated lines. So while freight keeps playing games to steal extra track time, remember that freight is fighting a shitty battle against trucks. Trucks do a better job of fast delivery simply because they drive to the destination. Much less logistics surrounding transfers. Amazon taught us we can have it tomorrow and now it’s expected across all levels of trade. So sure, it’s easy to say build a new track, but that’s a huge, huge cost to fix some train cancelations.

Anyway, I was able to witness the Avelia do speed testing. It’s fuckin cool. Alstom/Bombardier of French TGV fame is behind Acela and Avelia, along with so much more of the US passenger market.

I bet C will stay forever because some successful marketing campaign convinced people it’s a natural remedy against all types of colds and flu, despite being worthless for that cause. Science ain’t got nothing on a good commercial.

:)

But also :(

The Trojan horse was a great gift, a great gift for beautiful people. But the people giving the gift were beautiful too. Great folks on both sides. I mean just look at it, the horse, look at it, it’s got wood, and it’s so tall. I was there, people were telling me, Mr Trump, look, look Mr Trump, that horse is so beautiful. It was so beautiful, people were crying. Sobbing. Thanking me. They had never seen such a beautiful horse. Have you ever seen such a beautiful horse? I thought of seabiscuit. I love seabiscuit. They tell me it’s such a beautiful movie. But you know what I say? See biscuit, eat biscuit. What a lovely biscuit.

Could it be as simble as the inconvenience of sharing a plane that Biden once sat in?

Look under any RWD IRS passenger vehicle and you’ll find nearly every single example uses CV axles, not u-joints. U-joints have famously irregular speed variation as the angles change in steady rotation, so the constant velocity joint is far more common for the half axles

I don’t know what’s more appalling, the number of antivax nurses or the number of people who reference their antivax nurse friends as authoritative sources. They are not doctors. They are not pathologisists. They are not immunologists, biologists, chemists, neurologists, or any other relevant ologists you can think of.

I don’t trust the Jiffy Lube oil change tech to diagnose my car’s power loss, but I guarantee they’ll have some anecdotal ideas because they “hear” about things all the time. I don’t trust an experienced mechanic to give a proper statement on reliability, either, because a mechanic will only see cars when they’re broken, biasing the sample.

So how do nurses become the voice of fact on this? I mean, I know why. It’s confirmation bias. This is more me screaming into the void, fuckin why?