You're clearly not talking about American cars. What's a 1-tonne Ford Escort? I did have a 1983 Dodge Ram D150 half-ton pickup truck with a Slant-6 and an A-833 manual transmission; that thing would get 25MPG and hold 75MPH all the way westbound across Michigan... of course, it took it a while to get to 75MPH, merging was just like driving a Peterbilt with a 53' trailer full of anvils. That exact same engine and a comparable transmission were available for the Dodge Trucks line from 1960 to 1987 and was renowned for durability and reliability.

The key point is that Americans typically don't want them. To this day, in Canada, gasoline is cheaper than water. I'm not sure if that's a statement about gas prices or a slam against the sort of fool who feels the need to buy their tapwater in PET bottles, but I digress. So people buy horsepower. People buy large vehicles based on truck platforms.

As CAFE forces vehicles to become more fuel efficient - without addressing the underlying consumer demand problem! - manufacturers are being forced to use smaller and smaller engines. This means adding turbochargers to cute little aluminum blocks, narrower cam lobes and variable displacement oil pumps and smaller oil control rings all to reduce the internal drag, and thinner oils which offer zero cushion on connecting rod bearings. All of this gets stuffed into a full-size pickup truck with a trailer hitch. They're intolerant of real-world conditions and use, and because of their complexity they're expensive to repair. These vehicles will not have a long lifespan - sure, you might get a good fleet average mileage, but if 50% of the vehicles don't make it to the 100,000 mile mark, they're getting replaced faster with all the environmental damage of producing and disposing of the vehicle.

Maximizing vehicle life is an important part of reducing the vehicle's overall environmental impact.

There's a great YouTube channel where the owner of a full-service used auto parts business takes apart modern engines and shows you what failed. No prior knowledge of engines is required to understand this. Some engines are spectacularly broken. And Eric talks about what will last, and what won't, with an entertaining sarcasm.

Recycling? The lead-acid primary battery gets removed, then the car gets crushed and shredded. Only the steel and the aluminum get recycled. Anyone who thinks that any other material in a car gets recycled in any quantity has never seen a car shredder in operation. ASR (Auto Shredder Residue) is a special waste stream now consisting mostly of mixed plastics, smashed safety glass, and the crap people leave in their cars when they junk them. All that plastic gets landfilled.

As I said https://slashdot.org/comments....
AFAIC ruzzia can and needs to go to hell. I hire people, I won't hire a ruzzian, the world needs to get its act together and start using space without them.

They are a scourge, always were, always will be. The American scientists, that passed information to the USSR about nuclear weapon design and manufacturing were not just traitors, they made a gigantic mistake, they truly made the world a much worse place to live. Preferably the soviets and by extension the Chinese and then the Iraqies, Iranians, North Koreans and who knows who else should not have nukes, at least not immediately after the Americans designed and built them.

Americans are exceptionally good at delivering innovation, but they are also exceptionally naive about the rest of the world. All Americans, their scientists incorrectly believe in basic good human nature, their politicians incorrectly believe that others are just like them and want to do business. Ha! Business is the last thing on the minds of foreign despots. The first thing is to make sure their population are controllable so that nothing can dethrone them, this means the status quo must be maintained, business does not help to maintain status quo, on the contrary, it may provide extra resources to the population. Once the population has more resources than the absolute minimum and once the population does not depend on the State to provide this bare minimum, once the population can provide for itself it starts demanding change and this is unaaceptable. The change is a political demand, population must be dependent and ready to die for a few scraps off the table of the rulers, business interferes with this. Americans think putin or whatever other dictator wants to do business, what a stupid notion.

American people believe they can just keep to themselves, nothing concerns them about the rest of the world, they do not need to try and control the outcomes. They are the naive wealthy mark, walking carelessly through a foreign open market, there are enough eyes on their pockets and there is a guy with a knife in a dark alley waiting for them specifically. This is a metaphore. Americans need to build alliances with the Europeans, not break them, they need to understand that ruzzians are not friends or business partners. They also need to understand that global caliphate is a real thing, it is the goal and if Americans care about their way of life even a little, Israel and Ukraine are their lines of defence right now and must be supported as if the war was already in the USA, bevause it is.

Americans are quite a bunch, land of the free, ha? Jay walking was invented and popularized in the States, in most other countries there are no such laws safe for a few. Germany, Singapore are very strict too but they are the exception, not the rule.

they only care about one kind of reputation - fear. This is what keeps them warm at night, the thought that the West is afraid of them, because it is definitely not gas that keeps them warm.

I know, it is true, the front lines have 50+ year olds, no doubt. Ukraine hasn't dipped into the pool yonger than 25 yet, this is the conscription age while orcs have sent 18 year olds to die for their tsar already. Ukraine also allowed 18 to 22 year old males to exit the country, over 45 thousand left to Poland. None of this changes what I said.

Read through the comments in that telegram post, the amount of denial is staggering, the amount of cheerful propaganda is even greater, but there were some worried notes gleaming through all that cheerleading, where someone hoped they would still have a job later on. Someone thinks that the things may not turn out so well, they think that out of all of the options they may end up with the option I listed as number one here https://slashdot.org/comments....

what I can tell you from the very tone of this cheerful post, they do not have all of the necessary components and it will not be simple at all. Obviously they will try to launch Proton in December as scheduled by trying to do it without the service cabin, there is maybe a way, a bunch of wooden planks and ropes, who knows. The number of ways this may end up disasterous for the launch are too many to be listed here.

competing with spaceX is tough indeed, how exactly would you propose the Chinese bill uncle Sam for billions, consistently launching empty oversized buckets that burn up while delivering a banana to the Indian ocean?

you understand that the war that was supposed to last for maybe a week or two is now closing on 4 years, right? That all of the western powers were absolutely certain that prior to 2022 ruzzia was a world level super power with the military that was somewhere in the top 2 or 3 maybe, right? That this supposed super power was stopped by a country with 1/3 to 1/4 of the population, with 1/28 of size, with no oil or gas mining to speak of. Today ruzzia is occupying significantly less territory than at the end of 2022 as well because Ukraine got some of the territory back, for example the city of Kherson and most of Kharkhiv region.

More than that, Ukraine was able to enter ruzzian territory for whatever purpose and was able to hold some of it for about 6 months.

Currently ruzzia is actually a much more dangerous enemy than it was in 2022 to the rest of Europe, it gained enough knowledge, learned new tactics and is capable of taking out any European army in a conventional fight, I am certain of it. Should Ukraine fail and fall, putin will attack Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and then will go further and nobody will stop him without nuclear weapons if the USA decides to retreat, the Europeans are not in a fighting mood and will not be dying for their homes, they will be enslaved by putin if nuclear weapons are not used, this is certain. Europe's best chance at preventing this is seriously helping Ukraine, at this point with some man power as well.

As to the story we are talking about, ruzzia does not have factory capacity to build a new 8U216 service cabin and this has nothing to do with 'brilliance of people they are attacking', you are not reading me correctly. I am saying they do not have the capacity, they do not have the resources to manufacture this cabin unless they actually stop the war, retreat and restart normal manufacturing. It is also unclear that this type of a cabin can be built at any of their plants, maybe at the Cherepovets metallurgical plant. There is a reason why the USSR was manufacturing this thing in Kramatorsk and it wasn't about brilliance, it was about capacity, ability to handle a task of this magnitude. What, do you think you can just turn any factory into something that can manufacture a structure of this size and complexity? You are the one living in a fantasy world.

I am typing this on my phone, while on a train from Kyiv to Lviv, laying down in the dark, I have all of the autocorrect functions disabled on the phone, one thing is hitting the wrong keys and still have a more or less recognizable word come out than having the word changed completely by the stupid autocomplete feature (dumb ass grandfather of whatever we call AI today). That is why the words are often scrambled.

no, the biggest reason is neither, it is the resentment, feeling that nobody actually cares about ruzzia and its role, its status, basically not being the big scary ruzzia, the bear that the ussr was. While their own lives are small, insignificant, unimportant, at least these russkies feel that this war puts ruzzia back at the global stage to be the center of attention. They first felt it back in 2014, when putin orchestrated taking of Crimea and part of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Now was the second wave of this, but it is coming to an end, cannot keep feeling this elation, while your "big and scary" army has been stuck taking yet another destroyed village who knows where in Ukraine. While this didn't matter much earlier, before they really felt it themselves, now they are starting to feel it slowly, as inflation keeps creeping up, their oil refineries and now shadow fleet tankers are getring hit. I was in Kiev for a week, the city lives mostly on generators, but people keep going. I saw drones and anti drone fire, anti missiles hitting ballistic and cruise missiles, flashes of explosions in the sky. The ruzzians are starting to see these as well. Their cities will be living in the dark this winter too, lets see what that does to their attitudes.

In any case, there is and was huge support for this war on their side because they felt pride and at the same time they did not feel the consequences. Lets see what happens to their pride when the consequences hit.

I will add that there is this concept of the "good ruzzians", some who live abroad and are vocal about hoping to see putin gone and a regime change. It still doesn't matter, they hope to see a different ruzzia restored, returned back to the world stage under a different umbrella, paying its debts and such. I do not accept any of it. ruzzia is a death zone, all of its culture is the real death cult with never ending imperial ambotions, it can change colors, it cannot chamge its nature. It needs to be taken apart and it will be, it is inevitable now. With muslims taking over moscow, Chinese taking over Siberia, Kazakhs have some claims, Finnish have a large territory to reclaim, Ukraine actually can claim quite a bit of land, in 10 years time we will see something else and it won't be ruzzia.

It is impossible to launch Soyuz/Proton rockets without this service cabin. The launchpad itself is a huge slob of armored concrete with a hole in the center, used to direct hot gases into a gigantic pit, ot takes a few years to dig out that pit and build the multistory tall launchpad. The service cabin is a multistory metal structire that provides access to set up various umbilicals and to set up the chemical matches, lit electrically, that are inserted into the rocket engines (yes, that is how they light up these types of engines, huge, many feet long, matches). The cabin then slides away into the wall and it is supposed to be fixed in place with some pins. They did not do it this time, so the engine exhaust pulled the cabin out of its niche and blew it out through the vent hole into the pit.

Ukraine did not fold to the threat of the USA stopping all support earlier this year, it will not stop to any of these threats now either, it is a non starter. Zelensky doesn't have the mandate from Ukrainians to this type of a "peace deal" just because USA may stop any support. Ukraine will endure wothout the USA support, just with more casualties.

there is no d8fference where it comes to ruzzians. Majority are pro putin there or they do not care, very few are truly against this or especially are vocal about it. I used to work with them back between 2009 and 2014 and supported the work I uaed to do for them umtil 2022. Then I saw what they really where, the young, the old, doesn't matter. A good test is to ask "whose is Crimea". At this point I decided that I am not a specialist in sorting through various types of shit, I wrote them all off.

ruzzia is "winning the war" in the same way that a cancer is "winning" by destroying the body where it resides. Nobody is winning anything yet. Ukraine is slowly losing territory, while trying to keep more soldiers alive, ruzzia is slowly losing its manpower by throwing more and more bodies, now without even basic body armor and helmets into the meatgrinder to be burned alive by the drones to gain a few hundred meters a of burned up, empty territory per day.

Without either side having air superiority both sides are doomed to continue the drudgery of slow attrition, Ukrainian territory vs orcs' lives. Neither is winning, both are losing something. In the long run, prolonged wars favour the defending side for various reasons, the occupiers are seeing worsening of their economic situation for no gain whatsoever. It is all a temporary high, that the ruzzian population was experiencing, following the occupation of Crimea and the start of this "special military operation" that was not supposed to last for more than a few weeks. Now putin cannot let go, this is not about the money or the economy for him, which is why all of this negotiation crap is nonsense doomed to failure. For putin a peace right now is just as dangerous as the defeat, in either case he will lose power. For him there are no options at all, only continuing a perpetual war, which is why the Americans and the West are so horribly wrong about him and his willingness to negotiate. He can only do one thing - keep the war going until the last orc and the last mercenary. If he takes Ukraine somehow, to use the newly occupied people to go to war against Poland, Lituania, Latvia, Estonia and later the rest. If he succeeds taking Ukraine, then he will not be stopped by any conventional Eiuropean force, nobody is willing to fight and die there.