Maybe. I keep hearing that yet all I've seen are teens that would have been legal in several US states. Given they did not correctly redact the PDF's perhaps there will be some hints to actual children having been involved.
This is my theory as well. A google search for the late prof's name returns a .ir website at the top of the result for some reason. It's a tragic loss for the world and his loved ones as are the victims of the brown incident.
I want a BYD that costs less than a 2000 Camry did brand new in 2000.
EVs are inherently pretty simple machines. All the complexity is in the battery, and China’s crushing everyone at battery tech. It’s not even close. It’s like a human trying to beat a polar bear in hand to hand combat.
They really need to deregulate the auto industry and let us buy the Yugos with a Jetsons battery. America is a poor country now. Nobody can afford used cars in this economy, never mind new ones.
Ford announced the Maverick, it got so much excitement that it sold out and dealerships sold for over MSRP. So in their infinite wisdom they... didn't make more mid range trucks. Ill never understand these guys.
I was interested in this truck when it came out. My in laws purchased one and queued a second one up to have two reliable (new is reliable to them) in their retirement years. The price was good, its a smaller compact truck and very good on utility. The second generation of them - the price went up, and some of the value in what the truck was vanished. Its also years behind on production. Ford doesn't seem to want to sell these.
If Chevy came out with a competitive S10 Electric style truck, I'd consider it as well.
The Mavs have been caught up on orders for a while now. I got one in the spring and pretty much any trim/colour/option package was in stock locally at mildly below msrp.
The idea is that you make more profit selling 50,000 cheap trucks and 50,000 expensive trucks than just 100,000 cheap trucks. When you can fool a largely innumerate populace into 84-month loans with "cheap" monthly payments, overpriced vehicles are the way to go.
All US automakers are doing the same thing. There's gentle up-marketing collusion.
The issue at root is that auto demand is a finite, population-based amount. Automakers are all pretty good at margin and manufacturing cost control.
So that leaves the only independent variable that can influence revenue and profits as {average sold vehicle price}.
New entrants face a scale issue: it's difficult to compete with the larger manufacturers' production costs with orders of magnitude less sales volume.
Which is why you historically only saw state-sponsored new manufacturers break into the market (read: Japan, Korea, China).
Electrification turned some of this on its head, but not completely. GM, Ford, et al. can still build just enough mid-market electrics to spoil others volumes, without attempting to build something really good and cannibalizing their own luxury vehicles.
Price conscious consumers have been out of the "New" car market for a very long time. New cars have a massive premium that never makes sense.
Instead of buying a brand new Geo Metro like you would in the 90s, you just buy a used Corolla or Civic. You end up with a better car and it lasts longer anyway.
That means the majority of the "New" car market has already decided price isn't that important.
Which is why the "average" new car price is $50k and people are signing up for 80 month loans on trucks.
I paid $24k for my maverick. There were tons of dealers who had marked it up to the low 30’s and told me I’d never get one for MSRP. I said, “I guess I’ll wait.” I had to wait a whole 2 weeks.
The EV pickup obsession is so bizarre. Even moreso than the gas pickup obsession. The obvious next step was to take their brilliant EV Transit and scale up production. You don’t have to convince truck bros. There’s no cultural hang-ups. No issues with towing. Just make a nice cargo van with 120v hookups for $50k that’s easy to drive in the city and easy to convert into a camper. Could’ve built three vans with the lithium it took to build these obscenities.
And you know, I’m already compromising here, because it really ought to be a wagon instead of a van, if Detroit had any brains left.
Can’t wait until someone figures out how to smuggle those $15k BYDs in from Mexico. The North American car market needs to be disrupted badly. By China, not by some meme stock.
I used to frequent a wonderful Ace Hardware with some regularity.
The old lady that always seemed to be behind the register eventually started greeting me by name when I walked in. (I don't recall ever giving her my name; maybe she remembered seeing on a credit card or something.)
After the pleasantries (which didn't seem fake at all), one of the greybeards present would appoint themselves as my personal shopper. I'd go down my list of demands that was only vaguely sorted by department: "One M8x1.25x80mm all-thread stainless Philips screw, a 16x20 furnace filter, a box of #8x3/4 sheet metal screws, and uh... what do you have for can openers?"
And then we'd make a lap or two of the store to get these things, and I'd pay and GTFO.
Purely anecdotal as well but it really feels like a quantity over quality thing between the two. It takes significantly longer to find someone in orange, but they’re as helpful as I can reasonably expect. Whereas Lowe’s employees tend to be both useless and annoying.
It varies a lot by store. I’ve been to HDs where they’re all useless, and others where there’s a good number of knowledgeable DIYers working there.
I think a lot of people just expect too much from a big box store employee making $17/hr… You go to HD because you have an easy job and you’re as cheap as their MBAs. If you need help, go to a supply house or an Ace Hardware or something.
Fully this. Every Ace or Do It Best I've been to in Washington has had at least one Rugged Grandpa ™ on staff who could have given me a PhD-level essay on whatever I asked them about; at Home Depot I'm lucky if the folks there have any idea what an impact-rated bit is or why I specifically need one and NO please stop trying to sell me this other crap if you're sold out of the impact bits, they are NOT the same!
(It gets worse the further from the power tools section you get, I find. I had to explain the difference between a three-prong and four-prong 240V plug once at HD and promptly told my friend to stop asking the staff for "help" finding things.)
> It gets worse the further from the power tools section you get, I find. I had to explain the difference between a three-prong and four-prong 240V plug once at HD and promptly told my friend to stop asking the staff for "help" finding things.
The best feature of Home Depot is order pickup. No need to explain to someone that some appliances use both 120V for control power and 240V power for the motor or heating element; or that you’re installing a receptacle to backfeed a 120/240V panel with a 120/240V generator and therefore you need a 4-wire NEMA 14 series receptacle with a neutral conductor, you just buy one and pick it up from a locker. It’s made buying things from Home Depot tolerable for me, I’m used to buying material from supply houses where the folks are knowledgeable, I know that’s not the case at HD so I don’t even bother asking.
I like Haskell, but I never want to work with Haskellers, ever again. I’ll do personal / solo Haskell projects. But never professionally on a team. Haskellers are not team players.
Rustaceans should really take Haskell as a cautionary tale. It doesn’t matter how good your tech is, if your community is actively hostile to newcomers, if you try to haze every newcomer by making them recite your favorite monad definition before giving them the time of day.
Rustaceans are already working their way onto my shitlist for proliferating X years’ Rust experience all over the place. And no, that’s not HR’s fault. HR has no idea what Rust is. It’s rustaceans corrupting the hiring process to reward their fellow cultists.
It’s idiotic to be so insular and so tribalistic, if you want to increase adoption of your favorite language. Programming languages are like natural languages. The more people that use them, the more valuable it is to speak it. Imagine if someone tried to get you to learn mandarin by shitting on your native language. You catch a lot more flies with honey than vinegar.
I’d rather be stuck in JS hell forever, than have to deal with such toxic, dramatic, dogmatic people. And I really dislike writing JavaScript… but the community and ecosystem around the language are way more important than the syntax and semantics. You want the engineers and builders to vastly outnumber the radioactive PL theorists.
That's a rather drastic generalization! As a counterpoint I've worked on professional teams with, what, 20 or 30 different Haskellers over the years and the number of "toxic, dramatic, dogmatic people" in that set is zero (or one if I really stretch the definition, and then only dogmatic, not toxic or dramatic). None were poor at their jobs, and the proportion of truly excellent software engineers with deep capability in the hard and soft skills needed to get code shipped was far greater than 50%.
That said, if toxic behavior occurs it can be more visible in smaller communities, just by how the numbers work out, so I don't doubt you've had a hard time interacting with some Haskellers, and I sympathize with you. Please point me to any toxic behavior you see in the public Haskell community and I'll do my best to address it with whatever authority I have.
0.27% + credit card interchange fees feels more than fair to me. Apple should be thanking their lucky stars that the court isn’t forcing them to spin off the App Store business and pay back every stolen cent from their criminal bundling scheme. This makes IE + Windows look so innocent in comparison. Hardware manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to mandate a monopoly on software distribution. Full stop.
Probably a lot of CSAM, if the Mossad blackmail op theory of Epstein is true.
reply