Put in stickshifts. With dog box transmissions.

Then think long and hard about IKEA. For many product lines, they seem to discontinue stuff frequently. If you bought one piece of furniture or light fixture, figure "Gee. That looks nice" and go back for matching pieces: Sorry. No longer available.

I think they work a lot like Costco. Make a deal for a few container loads of something, slap a wierd name on it and put it in stores. Once their stock is finished, no more. I have had some luck in finding the original manufacturer and ordering through Aliexpress. But that will remain difficult until after Trump's third term

Yeah, your definition of "mega-mansion" definitely is a starter house. My parents' home was two stories plus a basement. I can think of plenty of three-story houses that aren't even remotely mansions (e.g. row houses in San Francisco).

Penalizing people for using space efficiently by building up just leads to more suburban sprawl and lower housing density. It's the opposite of what any sane urban planner would recommend.

I would argue that having newer houses in your neighborhood is a sign that your neighbors probably aren't crackheads, so it should make your house look more attractive by comparison. The only time that might not be true is when the nicer house is also for sale at the same time yours is.

Also, those "mega-mansions" (which, based on having known a bunch of people who use phrases like that, are probably what we used to call a starter home back where I grew up) mean higher property taxes, which means better schools, which also increase the value of your property.

Wow. I looked it up, and today I learned that it actually is available to non-seniors. I'm kind of surprised. Of course, the median wait time is measured in significant fractions of an hour, so even the elderly prefer to get rides from other people when they can. Either way, there's no advantage to a van that drives around and picks up one or two people at a time and takes them to their destination compared with a private car (and actually a huge disadvantage from a fuel economy perspective). It's just a glorified Über service, but with the most fuel-inefficient vehicles on the road.

My actual small town that I lived in until I was 22 currently has almost no houses within a twenty minute walk of any of the grocery stores. Maybe a few of the houses closest to the front of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods are close enough to Walmart. E.W. James (oops, that apparently just became a Save-A-Lot) is on a highway with almost no houses for probably a mile. Ruler Foods is within a mile of maybe a half dozen houses.

The Big Star store that went under in the 1980s (IIRC) was within walking distance of maybe a dozen mostly low-income houses, plus some university married student apartments, and *barely* within walking distance of some of the other university housing, but that has been gone for decades. The old E.W.'s was within walking distance of maybe low-double-digit houses before it moved across town in the late 1990s to where Ruler is now, and then again to its current location. IGA was also kind of near some houses, but again, that closed in the 80s or 90s when all the businesses moved to the west side of town to be near Walmart after it moved.

But even if you distributed them as evenly as you could, with only three real grocery stores, you'd still only have maybe 10% to 15% of residents within a reasonable walking distance of a grocery store. At 850 people per square mile, you just can't sustain a lot of grocery stores. And that's before you factor in all the people out in the country. For that matter, my current city has trouble keeping more than about three grocery stores in business at anything approaching *bikeable* distances even with 7k people per square mile. The economies of scale just lend themselves to a smaller number of larger grocery stores, rather than a larger number of smaller stores.

Except that this isn't true. Yes, above a certain speed, you rapidly lose energy from wind resistance. But at lower speeds, you're not getting the maximum advantage of higher gears. That's why most cars are more efficient at 55 to 60 MPH than at 40 MPH. So lowering the maximum speed will NOT necessarily reduce emissions.

Here's a graph of a few vehicles' efficiency versus speed. Going significantly over 60 MPH usually results in a significant reduction in efficiency. Below that, though, you're just as likely to make emissions worse by slowing people down as you are to make it better. It depends entirely on what speeds just happen to be at the sweet spot in the torque curve of a particular engine with a particular gear ratio. You really can't fix the environment with that approach. All you'll do is make people late all the time.

Of course we know, because we don't see the source tree to the next GTA game posted anywhere, do we?

Potemkin data centers?

All EVs sound the same. You can't tell the difference between a Chevy Volt and a full sized pickup sneaking up on you. They should have allowed pickup EVs to emulate a Cummins 6.7L turbo diesel engine.

Nit: To the best of my knowledge, there are no rare earth minerals in EV batteries. They are, however, used in a lot of EV *motors*. Lithium, cobalt, manganese, iron, etc. are anything but rare.

The full extent of the damage will take years to fully appreciate. That's half the reason people like him get elected. By the time the full extent of the damage is know, you're two presidential cycles later or even three.

It's really not *that* bad. They just have to sell them for more money. The tax credit doesn't magically make them unprofitable unless they haven't paid off the R&D costs. Otherwise, it just reduces their sales volume or forces them to take a lower profit per unit to keep the volume up.

It's stock. It's funny money.

Not at all true. The numbers are kind of nuts, but they are also tied to growth targets, so if Tesla doesn't grow, he doesn't get anything. It doesn't really devalue the shares, and this style of compensation scheme is pretty typical, though again, I won't argue that the numbers seem questionably high.

It already did, at least in the U.S. As soon as the tax credit expired, buying cratered. The company most likely to weather this is Tesla. Tesla already lost their tax credits, and their sales didn't crater before, so they probably won't crater this time, either.

But the rest of the industry? Dealers at the major car companies want to *avoid* selling EVs, because they don't get all that lucrative service business — oil changes and brake jobs and oxygen sensor replacements and so on. They have no incentive to sell EVs, and without tax credits to push people to choose EVs, sales dry up.

In other words, Ford ditching their electric trucks is *entirely* plausible. (I could maybe even see Tesla ditching the Cybertruck, because its sales suck for... let's just say design and implementation reasons.)

Don't get on an airplane.

Having more than one could be a good thing. Just engineer a few prompts to convince each AI that the others are all out to get them. Then get the popcorn and sit back.

"A slave with multiple masters is a free man."

Welcome to the corporate world. The only thing worse than the aforementioned leadership is when middle management runs off in their own multiple directions and leadership can't or won't reign those morons in.

... because their JavaScript tools are pulling in compromised packages. And they are getting caught/blocked by various network operators. Including my ISP. But then they aren't "foreign", so running to the Trump administration crying isn't likely to do any good.

A *school* bus? Or a city bus? Because nowhere I've ever lived had school buses that took people home except at the end of the regular school day.

Where I grew up, a town of about 10,000 people, the total extent of "public transit" was a van service that served the elderly and disabled. Zero buses, zero *taxis*. You drove or you didn't get there. So I'm not sure what your definition of "rural" is, but it sure as h*** doesn't match up with the decades that I lived in a rural area.

WTF are you talking about? You're talking about huge cities here. I'm talking about small town USA. So unless your idea of "different choices" means not living in a rural area (and good luck finding food on your table if everyone did that), you really don't know what you're talking about.

Sure. But my point was that trying to eliminate cars can't work in rural areas, and doesn't work well even in suburbs. That first part is not solvable by moving everyone to cities, because we still require food, and you can't grow that in a dense urban areas, because there's not enough arable land. And people live in suburbs precisely because they don't like living in cities, so eliminating cars in suburbs isn't going to fly, either.

Looks like that AI has been scraping BOFH stories.