This is pretty much dead on. I live in a rural part of the US and there are tons of old, worked-on trucks. The idea that there might be an all-electric f150 hanging out in 40 years is, frankly, laughable.
I know a lot of city kids think trucks are some obnoxious luxury good, but they're basically a functional requirement in most of the (very large) country.
Those census definitions are not good. I’m sure the place I went to high school is considered “city” by that definition, but the average HN poster would not recognize it as one, and there were lots of farm working trucks around.
It turns out that anecdotes don't constitute data. If the place you went to high school is considered "city" by the census definition, then I guarantee the majority of pickup trucks in the area were obnoxious luxury goods that never hauled a single thing to or from a farm.
> The idea that there might be an all-electric f150 hanging out in 40 years
I should hope there is. The battery is good for 400-500K miles. The first real maintenance (which is still just flushing the coolant) happens at 200K miles. These trucks will be easier to keep on the road than you think, they're dead simple.
> I know a lot of city kids think trucks are some obnoxious luxury good, but they're basically a functional requirement in most of the (very large) country.
A van is almost always a better choice if you're actually looking at functionality. Shielding from the elements is way more useful than some mythical ground clearance benefit that you will never use.
Sure, a very small number of people go offroad and need that clearance--however, the number is small relative to the number of people who could get away with a van.
> some mythical ground clearance benefit that you will never use
Spoken like someone who hasn't lived past the suburbs.
I needed some plumbing work done last winter and had to hire someone new because my preferred plumber couldn't access my road with his van.
The lack of AWD/4x4, lack of ground clearance, inability to tow are all massive drawbacks for several lines of business. Tonneau or hard covers and enclosed trailers take care of shielding from the elements just fine.
That's not past the suburbs, that's a ridiculous outlier. Congratulations, you live somewhere without paved roads, which puts you at what, 0.00001% of all Americans? That's your argument?
And now lets overlay the number of trucks vs population. Note where most of the total number of pickup trucks (not per capita--flat out total) are.
Hint: most of the trucks are NOT in the rural areas due to the fact that the rural areas, by definition, do not have that much population. Also, rural areas tend to have old beater cars because gas prices are an issue and pickup trucks generally get quite a bit worse gas mileage than a basic sedan.
The problem is that the vast majority of pickup trucks are, in fact, being sold in the suburbs which don't have any of the problems with having to go off of a road.
Maybe not where you live but there are many parts of the US where you really do want significant ground clearance regardless of vehicle type. The ubiquity of Subarus in several regions of the US isn't because people are fond of Subarus as an automotive brand.
High ground clearance isn't about "going offroad".
I live in a place where people drive either trucks or subarus. There are plenty of alternatives to subaru with high clearance (basically any small suv). People buy them because they work well in snow and well...everyone has them. Easy to sell, easy to get them worked on.
Packed gravel is not "offroad", it's just a normal, flat road. Snow makes no difference either, obviously. You'd need to have quite a lot of snowfall to make travel in a regular car hard to impossible.
>But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort
Perhaps you should try reading the article, because it doesnt say that. Its a 5 minute read, although perhaps you shouldn't bother because most others dont appear to have either.
Edit: actually, I daresay the contention of the article is the exact opposite: its likely that ledecky put in the least effort out of anyone.
> I don't think ive ever met a jazz lover I liked.
It can be a sub-type of zealot who self-installs opinions and parades them like secret knowledge or a grand epiphany. I know a guy whose entire jazz discourse is like this. It's remarkably similar to astrological codswallop or political zealotry.
We can dig the music and make the world a better place without being an ass about it.
I found this using my secret inside IT knowledge: searched "buy office perpetual" on the internet.
I know microsoft is the evil soulless megacorp on HN, but the least you could do is attack them for true things instead of totally made up, has-never-ever-been-true things.
I've never understood this argument. Dopaminergic and attention pathways/systems are under full assault from every angle, and parents give their 6 year olds phones, and people take a moral stance against... loot boxes?
Thats like taking a moral stance against flavors in alcohol. I kinda think youre missing the point.
> “It’s shocking to see people blocking traffic, taking possession of the public space without a permit, without warning, and then turning our streets, our parks, our public squares into places of worship,” said Roberge.
It is fucking insane that the response to people blocking traffic in prayer is to outlaw prayer.
Secularism is giving equal treatment to all religions; this isn't Secularism, this is a thinly veiled, fanatical, Crusade against religion.
Wouldn't this model price out poor people? Doesn't that mean the most vulnerable people cant afford the services when they need them most, ie max hot/cold?
Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the point of trying to optimize the utility.
It’s better to give welfare / benefits directly to help poor people in that situation, rather than fix prices to make energy appear artificially scarce during daylight and abundant at night.
A typical user still pays the same on average in a market.
Just they might pay more in some hours and less in others.
Some market systems have gotten bad press over huge bills (eg. Texas), but that only happens when only a small chunk of users participate in the market, whilst others are on fixed pricing and therefore don't care about usage.
When everyone participates, supply and demand make sure the price never goes super high, simply because there are enough people who will turn off stuff to save money.
> a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to TIME. "The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens
Omegalol. Cigarette maker introduces filter, cares about your health.
Cigarette makers were a dying cry of the old aristocracy. Silicon Valley is the rallying cry of the new aristocracy.
While I don’t quite believe they’ll achieve their Feudal dreams in the near-medium future. I do expect the US to transition to a much more explicitly an oligarchic republic as a large, with the pretense of “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” is largely pushed to the side.
Only solution seems to be to drop out of society to whatever degree possible.
The government and massive corporations being in bed with each other is nothing new. Different breed same species. Except tech execs think they're a lot smarter than they are.
It's nothing new, as it is essentially the only logical outcome of capitalism. It's not an aberration, it's an intended feature. Capital is power, and law and government is how that power is expressed and enacted over those without capital.
It's actually the logical outcome of any system with a consolidated monopoly on political power (the government). Blaming capitalism is ridiculous because alternative systems suffer from the exact same issue.
Sort of. Capitalism cannot exist without a monopoly of coercive state power backing it. So it makes sense to criticize it when that's what's actually happening. Other systems can work without coercive state power, are in fact intended to, and result in more freedom for the members of the resulting society, so I agree with your take on government generally.
Free trade and private property rights can exist without a monopoly on political power, but as with stuff like this I don't really know what's meant by "capitalism".
That being said I don't think at the present moment it's possible to have a society without some form of government, so then the question becomes "what do we do about it", and I think the answer is to limit the scope of political intervention and power as much as possible.
Cashless payments, always connected software and devices, and required app use for basic services like power, water, and heat as well as extreme data collection as it exists today makes dropping out of society more difficult than ever.
While his crimes were atrocious, Ted Kaczynski might be right in some ways. The industrial and technological revolutios have improved life dramatically for n many humans and we live in a tube of astonishing abundance, but at what cost?
the appetite of the rich always grows. the fast technological growth created more wealth than they could consume. once that runs out they'll take back what accidentally "trickled down"
most innovation since 2012 seems to be not in the technology, but the financial sector. not ways to create value, but to squeeze more from the same thing.
I know a lot of city kids think trucks are some obnoxious luxury good, but they're basically a functional requirement in most of the (very large) country.
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