Agree in part, and disagree in part. A popular "strong man" competition is to pull a train car, of course the rolling friction of steel wheels on steel rails is low, hence railroad's efficiency advantage in the first place. Quite frankly a Fiat 500 could pull the space shuttle or a 727, particularly if it was only one time, on flat ground. Heck PEOPLE can pull a plane. So these sort of events really don't speak to the durability of a truck.

At the same time, these vehicles often go 250,000 miles without major maintenance in construction fleet duty being hammerer every day. They are very well, if not over engineered, and incredibility capable vehicles.

I'm not sure where the AC lives, but in the US a standard drivers licenses works for any combination of truck and trailer under 26,000 lbs in all 50 states, provided it's for personal use and not for hire. For hire 10,000 lbs is typically the first graduation to the next class of license. Heck, in some states you can drive an 80,000 lbs semi for personal use on a regular license!

I hate to reply to my own post, but I appear to be modded "Insightful". The correct mod selection was "Funny".

*sigh*

Agreed.

I'd really like to see an sTec enterprise grade drive tested. It will be over the price point, but probably not by all that much and I suspect will perform great.

When they first came out, that was true:

• F-150 == 1/2 ton
• F-250 == 3/4 ton
• F-350 == 1 ton

(And for my fine foreign friends, that's US ton, 2,000 lb, or 907 kg.)

However, that is no longer true, and the wide variety of sub models makes it even more complicated. Here's a payload capacity chart for the 2014 F-150.

The lowest is an SVT Raptor with only 980 lb payload capacity, while the highest is a staggering 3,120 lb for a regular cab, 4x2 with the heavy duty payload package and a v8 engine! That's a 1.5 ton capacity!

F-250's and F-350's have similar ranges.

A 2 week minimum turnaround? Who's crappy service are you using?

AppleCare has fixed many a Mac problems in

I hate to reply to an AC, but I hate wrong information more.

Multiple stories corroborate that the actual number potentially losing healthcare is one million, not the five million the AC suggested. These are policies that don't meet the ACA's minimum coverage levels, and thus are no longer allowed to be offered.

This has been a point pounded hard by those on the right ("If you like your plan you can keep it" was a lie!), wanting to point to people losing insurance. The left's typical response is that the plans are junk plans, and folks are better off being forced to get a real plan. Since those arguments are all over the web, I'm going to skip past them. Visit Google News to find them if you have missed out.

As is often the case, reality isn't simple enough to be captured in a sound byte. The law had a provision to grandfather old plans:

What insurers have done is made sure no pre-2010 plan stayed in effect (yes, they cancel millions of plans every year), and for the few that have they have made sure the co-pays, deductibles, and coverage have changed significantly. Why would they do that? Well there are a about 4 million people on junk plans. How bad are these plans?

Get in a car wreck, no coverage. Get cancer, no coverage. Need a wart removed, no coverage. Break your arm, no coverage. Yeah. That bad. But they have one thing going for them, they are cheap. $79/month if you don't understand what you're (not) getting seems pretty cheap compared to hundreds of dollars for real insurance. In plain, simple terms these people were going to get a price hike. Now, you're an executive at a health insurance provider faced with the prospect that 4 million people are going to get letters saying "Your $79/month policy is going away, we'd like to offer you a $450/month policy, but it covers a lot more!" Yeah, that's going to lead to lots of bad press on the evening news.

But the way ACA was written had a convenient out. Make sure the law forced the cancellation of the plans, and then flip the narrative to say the government is canceling your plan. It should be no surprise that it took insurance executives about a nanosecond to figure this out and set the wheels in motion. Just make sure no plan qualified or could be grandfathered in.

Now that the Scooby Doo "how did they do it" moment is over, there is one bit left to tidy up. The savvy reader will notice 1 million Californians had their policy cancelled, but only around 150,000 have signed up on the California Exchange. Doesn't that mean that there are still about 850,000 less people with insurance? No.

You see, the only people forced to use the Government Exchanges are those who want a subsidy from the Government. Anyone else can still buy insurance directly (except for Washington DC and Vermont). Most of the people who are getting cancellation notices find in the same envelope a number of health plans they can purchase that do qualify, and some of them simply sign up. At this moment there is no reliable reporting on how many people have signed up privately. There's even a chance that some of these people are missing out on subsidies they could have if they went to an exchange, but are instead simply signing back up with the insurer who cancelled them!

The sprint of the left's argument that "you can keep your plan" was bunk. People on junk insurance neither had health insurance nor where they paying into the system. Those plans aways had to go from the start, and so the talking point was dead wrong. However the right's talking point that more people are going without insurance is equally bunk. While there are not precise numbers yet, all indicators point to a fairly substantial increase in the number of people with insurance, and the number of people paying into the system. Amazingly over time that should lower the costs to everyone, as costs are distributed more evenly. It will likely take 10 years or more for that to really happen though, so we won't know for some time.

I've had the unpleasant opportunities to watch a number of relatives and neighbors spend their last months tortured by the medical profession. I really can't find a more appropriate word, even though everyone involved means well. It is hard for both families and medical providers to assert that sometimes the best thing that can be done is nothing.

Assisted suicide is only part of the issue, but perhaps it is where the conversation needs to begin. It is an option exercised millions of times each day on every animal except Humans as being more humane. However the conversation needs to continue from that point. I think of my 90 year old neighbor who had cancer. A type that if he was 30 surgery and treatment would have cured. One doctor wanted to operate, the other did not saying he would not make it. The family, ever hopeful, pushed for the surgery. What transpired after that was 5 weeks of torture. He did not do well in the surgery. Doped up in a hospital bed his wounds became infected, requiring another surgery. That necessitated a feeding tube, which then due to his poor condition also was infected. Finally after 5 weeks he was barely well enough to go home with 24x7 nurse care where he was able to somewhat peacefully pass away a few days later. The options here were all bleak, spend 3-4 months dying of painful cancer. Spend 5 weeks in the hospital undergoing multiple surgeries, doped up beyond belief. Assisted suicide, at the right time, might have been a good option. I have no idea what bills the family was left with as a result of all of this treatment, but I bet they added further pain after the fact.

End of life care is not a simple decision. Everyone involved, patient, family, doctors needs to realize we can't extend life forever. They need to realize that sometimes doing nothing is a better option than doing something, or that sometimes the something to do is to go ahead and choose to end life on the patients terms.

While for me this is 99.99% a moral and ethical issue, it is also a cost issue. For many patients more money is spent on their final month of medical care than in their entire life, because of these sort of heroic measures that lead to tragic outcomes. Fortunately I don't think saving money needs to be the primary concern here, but rather it can be a happy accident of doing the morally right thing.

There is ample evidence that Tesla's are keeping too much of their internal electronics fully powered when sitting there doing nothing, and it's wasting a lot of electricity. The prime evidence is the early cars that put everything to sleep and didn't have the power drain problem, but did have a host of waking from sleep problems.

However, the actual power figurers this guy has collected are extremely dubious due to poor measuring methodology. He has the car set to only do an 80% charge, leaves it unplugged, and then tracks the charge to top it off. Well, it's not actually possible to precisely measure "80%" on a battery, and so the charger is going to fire up at a relatively high level and watch the battery come up, and an algorithm is going to make a decision based on the voltage rise where 80% is located. This will depend on temperature for sure, but also a ton of random factors.

The much more accurate measurement would be to charge the car to 100% and let it float off for at least 1-2 days so the pack is stabilized at full charge, and then leave it plugged in and measure the power draw of the charger over 2-3 days. That graph should show the draw of just the active electronics over time pretty accurately.

To be even more accurate, the Telsa has a twin-battery system. The main pack that supplies the juice to drive the car also drives a DC-DC converter that charges an ordinary car battery that runs a 12v system. It's my understanding that 99.99% of the electronics are on that 12v system. Installing a DC Amp meter between the main pack and the 12v battery would allow tracking the draw of just the 12v system after all chargers and other things that lose power, and show only the vampire draw of the electronics that aren't shut down.

Tax revenues are always a percentage of GDP. Because of that, GDP is absolutely relevant.

In a nation that is not tied to a monitory standard (like gold), the government controls the inflation rate. Thus the rate of inflation and the rate of GDP growth are not the same.

Reducing packet loss is not always a good thing. Packet loss is mechanism that an IP network uses to indicate a lack of capacity somewhere in the system. BufferBloat is one attempt to eliminate packet loss with very bad consequences, never throw packets away by queueing them for a very long time. Pacing can be the opposite side of that coin, send packets so slowly loss never occurs, but that also means the transfer happens very slowly.

When many TCP connections are multiplexed onto a single link the maximum aggregate throughput is achieved with 3-5% packet loss. Less and there are idle points on the line, more and there is self synchronizing congestion collapse.

What's really amusing here is the notion that pacing is the fix for BufferBloat. That's sort of the two wrongs make a right theory; break per link queueing with BufferBloat and then break senders by making them all painfully slow.

This is not the answer.

Please try again. This time plot revenue and spending as a percentage of GDP. I'll save you some time, go here to see it.

You are correct that spending is up, even as a percentage of GDP. The budget should be reviewed, as some of the causes are cyclical (the recession) and will "self solve" as the economy improves, while others are structural issues, like devoting an ever larger chunk of the budget to military and war expenditures over the past decade.

But it's just as important to realize that as a percentage of GDP revenue is down. Those tax cuts mean the government is taking in a smaller percentage of economic output. So when inflation drives up the cost of guns/tanks/healthcare/office space/contractors for the government there isn't a corresponding increase in revenue to off set it, because we've chosen to end taxes on a number of things that get inflated (like the wealthiest 1%'s salaries).

Your bottom line is wrong. Revenue is up in dollar amount, but down as a percentage of the economy. Spending is up by both measures. Revenue has not kept pace with economic growth. To solve the debt and deficits we must both lower spending and raise tax revenue, ideally by closing loopholes and credits, rather than raising the marginal rates.