I am convinced that nobody in the Trump administration has any understanding of economics whatsoever. It’s like their entire understanding of prosperity comes from watching mob movies.

Must be embarrassing as fuck to be an American.

It is. The most annoying thing, socially speaking, is that the ones who should feel most embarrassed absolutely are not.

Ok, maybe, I’d be interested in seeing a source on this

It’s really easy to find if you actually wanted to verify, rather than just disingenuously cast doubt. Planet Money has done podcasts episodes on it.

Not at all accurate

Entirely accurate. We were the manufacturing center for much of the world until Europe was able to build back, which was badly hampered by foolish austerity measures. This is literally the reason why America had such a phenomenal post-war boom and an explosion of the middle class.

but America isn’t less prosperous now. That prosperity has just been consolidated to the top 1%

Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with the loss of manufacturing jobs, disappearing union representation, and subsequent devaluation of labor?

You’re identifying symptoms, not causes. Write less and read more.

So, uh, remind me again what happens when I go around corners?

You finish the corner and go back to driving straight, which is how the vast, vast majority of your driving miles are covered.

Mismatched tire diameters significantly increase wear on your differential(s). If you have a limited-slip system of any kind, you’re likely to destroy it shockingly quickly.

If you’re driving half a mile to work through residential and business districts, it’s not that big of a deal. If your commuting on the freeway, you’re going to significantly increase wear.

AWD systems can and do get used offroad pretty often. They’re not quite as good as 4WD in some specific situations

The moment that you have one wheel spinning with AWD, you are stuck. One wheel in the air due to a heavily rutted fire road? Stuck. One wheel on wet ice on the road? Stuck.

AWD is great for transient traction conditions, like roads that are partially snowy with patches of exposed asphalt.

AWD systems use a viscous clutch

In my experience, that’s rare. Most AWD systems that I’ve seen use an open differential with no viscous coupler or locker of any kind. The '94 - '97 Toyota Land Cruiser (w/ ABS) in the US market used a viscous coupler, and Toyota called it “full-time 4wd”. It also locked the transfer case in low range. To my knowledge, this was a really unusual configuration. They discontinued the viscous coupler after that, instead switching to their ATRAC traction management that used individual application of brakes to prevent wheel spin. Most of the Jeep SUVs in the last ~30 years, to my knowledge, used an entirely open center differential in AWD models.

It seems like modern, CUV AWD systems are usually FWD with computer controlled engagement of rear tires.

I bought a set of five Nokian all-weather light truck tires on closeout at Walmart for under $300. A set of more desirable all-terrains would have run me $1k and are probably now around $1500. The tires have been great.

Pay attention to the brand and reviews, not the store.

Alternate take: he could be a really shrewd buyer and good at selling privately.

Probably not, but it’s possible. I knew a guy whose hobby was entirely cars. Shopping for them, going through financing details, and sometimes buying them. He’d bolt on some mods and seemed to have a knack for finding buyers. He’d sometimes sell for more than the total amount he’d put into the vehicle.

He had almost no real understanding of cars. At most, he could do an oil change and slap on a K&N filter. But goddamn did that guy ever understand how to manipulate financing to his advantage.

While I definitely agree that the wealthy should be paying more in taxes, this isn’t an especially accurate take.

1. There were way more deductions available. Basically, nobody ever paid any taxes at such a high rate.

2. The primary reason for the post-war “golden age” that MAGA waxes nostalgia about is because almost the entire manufacturing sector of most European countries was wiped out. By comparison, the US was almost fully intact, and had a massive new base of workers trained in manufacturing. We went from a nation of farmers to a nation of city-dwelling industrialists almost overnight.

I don’t see how we could ever get back to the 50s - 60s era of growth and security again, but overhauling taxation and more union representation could probably at least wind us back a few decades.

Yeah, I enjoyed the movie and thought it was a pretty decent adaptation, but it’s still an adaptation of a hard sci-fi book for general audiences. The start of the book, where he’s coming up with ways to figure out where he is, using Newtonian physics and common objects, was a ton of fun for nerds like me, but would be boring af for regular audiences.

It reminds me a bit of Contact. The book is amazing. Sagan explains how one might communicate with an alien intelligence, starting from the basics of detecting signals, to communicating basic logic and mathematics, to communicating engineering diagrams. Pretty much none of that was covered in the movie, but it was still a good adaptation.

Great news, but what’s with that absolute serial killer smile in the main photo?

“My wife took so many pies to the face, when she stepped on the bathroom scale it screamed!”

A friend of mine was shocked when I offhandedly mentioned The Rock’s likely steroid budget. “You think he uses steroids?!” she asked. This was during his monstrous peak years.

I’m also reminded of the reddit story where a guy’s girlfriend or wife suggested that he go to the gym to get into slightly better shape. Nothing excessive, “maybe like Jason Momoa in Aquaman.”

If you watch the movie, you’ll see his abdominal muscles as he’s breathing heavily. Not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that his physique is a bit more impressive than what a single photo might indicate. Definitely not the modern, roided-up action star physique. I wonder if he was even getting pumped before shooting, like modern actors do.

Some other examples are Christopher Reeve as Superman, Tom Selleck as Magnum PI, and Erik Estrada as Ponch in CHiPs. All were seen as strong, fit leading men in the late 70s and early 80s. Schwarzenegger is probably the main reason that roided-up physiques became so mainstream, along with WWF/WWE. Both exploded in popularity around the early 80s.

Not only that, but when the main character wakes up at the start of the book, he is baffled as to why he’s so muscular. I guess the problem with the movie is that he wasn’t visibly skinnier during the classroom flashback scenes.

Users have been complaining about every piece of software forever.

Not really. People stood in lines for Windows 95. I don’t think I ever heard a complaint specifically about that OS. 2000 brought the 95 interface to the NT kernel. XP got mild criticism for looking childish, but people liked it as a stability improvement from 95 and 98.

Vista was the first Microsoft OS that saw a lot of backlash. It was more secure, but ran slowly on anything that wasn’t very new hardware. 7 was widely enjoyed, 8 was mixed (very tolerable with something like ClassicShell), 10 was beloved, and 11 is widely hated for a huge variety of reasons.

Can you find someone with a complaint about any of these OSes? Sure, but that’s meaningless. The fact is that MS has released both beloved and hated OSes, and Vista is the only one to receive as much hate as 11.

It absolutely blows my mind that no world leader has taken the opportunity, during one of these photo sessions, to simply punch the orange idiot right in the nose. I can think of no human being more in need of such a tune-up.

Narrow shoulders, wide hips, and short pants. Weird choices.

I long for the Model T era, back when people knew to hold cameras level.

The average office worker has a good chance of a complete meltdown if an icon on their desktop is moved. Government and business are not going to move to Linux on the desktop.

I fully recognize the absurdity of this, particularly in an era when a huge number of office jobs are basically just interacting with a web browser. I’ve just spent enough time writing software for “regular folks” to see why it’s not going to happen.